Page 70 of Ash Fall

Sorensen looks at me for a second, then at my grandfather, and something in his face breaks before going resolved.

"You ever heard of Delford?"

He nods slowly. "Small town west of Brooks? About a thousand people, right?"

"Twelve hundred." He corrects him and pauses to swallow roughly. "There's nothing there now. Not a foundation, not a fence post, not a piece of gravel. The whole town is prairie grass, like it was never built."

The rest of the story comes out in pieces, some from Sorensen and some from Tanner. He walks over from the trucks with a cigarette behind his ear and doesn't offer to shake anyone's hand. His crew had been ten kilometers east of the town filling potholes when the ground rippled under them hard enough to knock his men off their feet. When they drove back into town to check on things, there was no town. Sorensen had been on the road from Red Deer with his sister after a doctor's appointment, and he came over the last rise with the grain elevator gone from the skyline.

"We spent three days out there," he tells us. "Walking the grid, looking for anything…anybody. We found a handful of people." He shakes his head. "Everybody else is just gone. Wives, kids, families just gone."

Sorensen keeps going with a weary sigh. "We thought about going to Calgary, but the radio was still working then, and every station we could pick up was talking about fires and looting and riots in the cities, so we figured that was out. South seemed like the best bet. Lethbridge maybe."

"You can't go south." Gramps tells him in a grave tone. "Not now."

"Well, we can't stay here." Clayton throws up his hands.

"No. But the whole reason we're on this road is what's coming up out of the south." He looks over the group in front of him, the tired faces and the kids holding onto sleeves, and I can see he doesn’t want to give these people even worse news than they’ve already faced. "You hear anything about Yellowstone on the radio before it died?"

Sorensen's face goes still. Marlene's hands tighten around her bible.

"Some," Tanner says cautiously. "A lot of it sounded like a rumor and hysteria."

"It wasn’t. Yellowstone erupted, and another super volcano in New Zealand followed it. There's an ash cloud coming this way that's going to cover everything on this continent, and when it gets here everything will be choked by it. You go south, you're driving straight into it."

I watch it hit them. Clayton doesn't argue, which tells me he'd already been afraid of exactly this. The kid in the baseball cap, who's been hanging at the edge of the road crew with his hands shoved in the pocket of his hoodie, looks like he wants to cry. Behind them a woman with a toddler on her hip turns and walks back toward the bus without a word.

"How long?" Sorensen asks.

"A day? Maybe less. It depends on the wind."

Sorensen finally shakes his head, and everything that made him the mayor goes out of his shoulders at once. "Then I don't know what we're going to do. I honestly don't. I don't know how any of us are supposed to survive this."

Marlene puts a hand on his arm. "The Lord didn't spare us on that highway to let us choke to death on ash, Clayton."

He pats her hand without looking at her.

Tanner lifts his chin toward the trailers behind us. "Where are you headed?"

I don't want to say the mine. That isn't information I'm giving to strangers. Instead, I just say, "The Drumheller area."

Tanner shrugs one shoulder. "That's as good a direction as any. Mind if we tag along?"

"That's not really..." I start.

Gramps talks right over me. "What have you got for skills in this group? Any tradesmen?"

Sorensen sees the opening my grandfather is giving him and answers. "Two carpenters. One of them framed half the houses in Delford. Andrea over there is a nurse, worked emerg in Strathmore for six years. Tanner's crew can run anything with an engine and fix most of it, and Lyle there's a mechanic. Cody's the kid in the hat. He was Tanner's summer hire." He pauses. "I was an electrical engineer for twenty years in the oil patch before I got into politics. Instrumentation and power systems, mostly. The rest are just good people who lost everything they had and need somewhere safe to recover and start rebuilding."

Gramps nods slowly, and I know that look. He's taking inventory.

I should be doing the same thing, but I keep getting pulled in two directions. Torrin has moved up on my left, and he's frowning. His eyes keep moving over the road crew, then the bus, then back to Tanner, and every time they come back the frown gets a little deeper.

The other thing I notice comes a beat later, and it takes me a second to understand what I'm not seeing. Mars's shadows are gone. The kid in the ball cap has drifted a few feet closer to the trucks, and Marlene's eyes are on the same spot mine are, but Mars himself doesn't look worried. He has the look of a man who decided the people in front of him aren't a threat and let his guard down accordingly.

I don't know Mars well enough anymore to be sure that's what happened, but I trust the instinct. He's been wound tighter than any of us for the last day, and he wouldn't let go of it for nothing.

Gramps goes to say something else, but I put a hand on his arm and pre-empt him.