Page 24 of Ash Fall

"What about the house?" I already know the answer from the way her eyes soften before I finish, and I hate it. "Are you telling us we can't stay here?"

She looks at Luna when she answers, and I've never heard her voice come out so gently. "No, baby, we can't. I'm so sorry, but no regular structure is going to survive this. We need somewhere big enough for all of us plus at least twenty more, because we're not the only people worth saving. Somewhere with room to grow food when the sun can't do it for us. And it needs to be strong enough to carry the weight of that ash as it builds, month after month, without so much as groaning."

"So preferably underground," Torrin says. His voice is still wrecked, but his eyes are sharp again.

Gigi nods, and Mars leans forward with his forearms on the table. "What about heading into the mountains? There are cave systems out that way we could try to make work."

"Um, the mountains are a bad idea!" Reid flinches so hard his chair scrapes, and his head starts shaking before the words even get out, curls flying. "Like, a genuinely terrible idea. I know for a fact there's at least one very angry dragon flying around out there right now."

The whole table stops and stares at him in absolute silence. Reid looks around at all of us, lifts his shoulders, and gives us an expression that says, I know, right?

I scrub both hands down my face and leave them there for a second. We've had a cracked moon, magic, soldiers, a super volcano, and now dragons on top of the whole pile. The weariness rolls over me all at once, heavy enough that my bones feel it. How much more is going to get thrown at this family before somebody cracks straight down the middle? I pull a breath in through my nose, slow, the way Gramps taught me when the tractor wouldn't start and swearing at it stopped helping. Work the problem in front of you.

"What about a mine?" I put it out there as the thought forms. "The one I work at up north has drifts running deep into rock that are dry and stable. Ash could pile up there for years and never touch us."

"A mine is exactly the right idea, and that one is exactly the wrong mine." Gigi's nod turns into a frustrated headshake halfway through. "It's too far. I’m sure you know from your travels the roads aren't good, and we don't have the time to get stuck in a traffic jam."

"How long do we have?" Kara asks quietly.

"That depends entirely on the wind." Gigi's fingers find the cigarette again and roll it, back and forth. "The high cloud from an eruption that size spreads no matter what, but the ash fall follows the weather. If the westerlies hold, the worst of it blows east across the plains first, and we get two days, maybe three, before it circles back to us and the sky here starts coming down. Should the wind swing out of the south instead, we could be seeing it in hours. I'd plan for two days and pray for three, but I wouldn’t plan for more."

Jules shoots to his feet so fast his chair rocks. "I got it!" He plants both hands on the table, looking around at all of us with his eyes blazing. "The Harlow Mine. That old coal mine out in the badlands past Drumheller, the historic site, the one every school in this province has been busing kids to for field trips. Think about it! The whole thing is dug straight into that big rock wall of the coulee. There's no roof to cave in because the roof is the actual earth."

"The staging garage." I say, seeing it as soon as he says the name, the school trip, the guide's voice bouncing around that enormous dim space. "That indoor bay where they parked the haul equipment. The floor in there is the size of a football field, easy, and it's all inside the rock."

"There's a whole office section too," Reid adds, sitting up straighter. "Offices and meeting rooms, remember? Wasn't there a cafeteria? Maybe some of that space would be usable too."

He still looks rattled, but he's leaning in with the rest of us now.

"A coal mine." Kara presses two fingers to her temple. "A school district looked at a hole full of coal dust and decided that was an appropriate day out for children. I was away at school when the rest of you went, and I have never once regretted going to the Louvre in Paris for a school field trip until this exact moment."

"There’s tunnels going back farther than the tours ever took anybody, garage space for every vehicle we own plus so much more space to set up a grow area and rooms we can turn into living spaces" Jules is talking with his hands now, the plan building in the air in front of him. "It's defensible, it's dry, and it's dug into a cliff face that's been standing there for seventy-five million years."

"Power and water?" I ask because a shelter without either one is just a cave with furniture. "What's it running on?"

"That's the best part, and I only remember it because the tour guide would not shut up about it." Jules rolls his eyes. "They retrofitted the whole site with a geothermal plant, some pilot project that has deep loops running down into the rock. The guy droned on for ten minutes that the site runs completely off grid, heat and power both. And the water comes from its own small water treatment plant for the geothermal loops and to protect the equipment."

He drops back into his chair, digs his phone out of his pocket, and starts tapping at it with pure muscle memory. I watch the exact moment he remembers, his thumb slowing, his jaw going tight. Then he tosses the dead thing onto the table with a clatter of disgust.

"You know what, I'm just going to say it. We got the wrong apocalypse." He glares at the phone. "If the machines had risen up instead, at least I could ask ChatGPT how to survive in a fucking mine. Instead, I'm working off memories of a field trip where my main concern was how soon we got back on the bus." His eyes come up and find mine across the table. "It's what, like two and a half, three hours from here?"

"Yeah, it’s about that." Pushing back from the table, I get my feet under me. "I need to go see Gramps. He needs to hear all of this, and I'm not leaving him out there alone on that farm while the sky falls."

"He already knows, Gage." Gigi holds up a hand, and I stop halfway out of my chair. "Your grandfather and I have been talking since this whole thing started. I told him what I was afraid was coming, and he's been putting a relocation plan together on his end ever since, animals and seed stock and feed. We just didn't know where we'd be taking it all, or if we'd truly have to go." A small, dry smile bends her mouth. "Now we do, and he's going to be insufferably pleased that his hoarding finally paid off."

That pulls the first relaxed breath from me since the ground moved. Of course, the two of them have been three steps ahead of the rest of us. They always are.

"Alright, first things first." Gigi pushes to her feet and claps her hands once, and the general takes over from the grandmother. "All of you road warriors are getting cleaned up before you touch another thing. Five-minute showers so everyone can get one with hot water. Then pack your personal things, one bag of needs and one bag of wants, no more. Luna and I spent the last week stocking supplies and putting up food, so all of that needs to get loaded into the motorhome and the Escalade tonight." Her teeth catch her bottom lip. "I don't know if the Jeep is still sitting where I left it when the soldiers took me. We should go find out. We're going to need every set of wheels we can fuel."

My eyes find Luna across the table, the way they always do, and she's already looking back at me, tired and scared but still somehow steady. I make a vow that no matter what happens next, no matter what this broken world decides to throw at us, I will spend everything I have making sure she survives it. I'll do it for all of them, every person at this table, but her most of all, because I could live through losing almost anything but without her, I wouldn't want to.

Chapter 10 - Luna

Chairs start scraping back from the table all around me, and my stomach clenches with panic. Once we leave the table we'll be packing and hauling and driving – maybe for days, and there are questions that I've been carrying since the basement. Some of them have been waiting a week. A few of them have been waiting two years, but those ones can keep.

"Wait, hold on a second!" I call out. Every face turns toward me, and I have to fight the urge to shrink down in my seat. "I know we have a lot to do to get ready to leave, but can we take a few minutes to catch up with each other on everything that's happened? We're about to climb into vehicles and drive into an ash cloud together, and half of us don't even know what the other half can do."

Nobody sits back down faster than Reid, bless him, and the rest follow. Suddenly all of that attention is pointed at me and my nerves go tight. My eyes travel around the table, my whole world gathered in one ring of tired faces, and I make myself ask the first question on the list.