Road Out of Winter Read online

  In an endless winter, she carries seeds of hope

  Wylodine comes from a world of paranoia and poverty—her family grows marijuana illegally, and life has always been a battle. Now she’s been left behind to tend the crop alone. Then spring doesn’t return for the second year in a row, bringing unprecedented extreme winter.

  With grow lights stashed in her truck and a pouch of precious seeds, she begins a journey, determined to start over away from Appalachian Ohio. But the icy roads and strangers hidden in the hills are treacherous. After a harrowing encounter with a violent cult, Wylodine and her small group of exiles become a target for its volatile leader. Because she has the most valuable skill in the climate chaos: she can make things grow.

  With the gripping suspense of The Road and the lyricism of Station Eleven, Stine’s vision is of a changing world where an unexpected hero searches for a place hope might take root.

  Praise for Road Out of Winter by Alison Stine

  “A closely observed, evocative portrayal of place in a time of extreme duress. A warning about who we become and who we want to be in an uncertain future. Beautifully written and essential.”

  —Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation

  “Stark, dark and strangely urgent, this is a book that grabs you on the first page and doesn’t let go. Alison Stine is a master at the craft. She takes us on a wild ride inside a future that feels all too real, with characters we care about, and a story that we start wishing will never end.”

  —Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Butterfly Girl

  “Like The Road infused with feminist grit, Alison Stine’s Road Out of Winter focuses on the true seeds of hope during a climate apocalypse: the things that nurture both our bodies and our souls. A startling and intimate look at what happens when our planet turns against us.”

  —Mike Chen, author of A Beginning at the End

  Road Out of Winter

  Alison Stine

  For Henry

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

  1

  I used to have dreams that Lobo would be arrested. The sheriff and his deputies would roll up the drive, bouncing on the gravel, but coming fast, too fast to be stopped, too fast for Lobo to get away through the fields. Or maybe Lobo would be asleep, and they would surprise him, his eyes red, slit like taillights. My mama and I would weep with joy as they led him off. The deputies would wrap us in blankets, swept in their blue lights. We were innocent, weren’t we? Just at the wrong place at the wrong time, all the time, involved with the wrong man—and we didn’t know, my mama didn’t know, the extent.

  But that wasn’t true, not even close.

  * * *

  I sold the weed at a gas station called Crossroads to a boy who delivered meals for shut-ins. Brown paper bags filled the back of his station wagon, the tops rolled over like his mama made him lunch. I supposed he could keep the bags straight. That was the arrangement Lobo had made years ago, that was the arrangement I kept. I left things uncomplicated. I didn’t know where the weed went after the boy with the station wagon, where the boy sold it or for how much. I took the money he gave me and buried most of it in the yard.

  After his station wagon bumped back onto the rural route, I went inside the store. There was a counter in the back, a row of cracked plastic tables and chairs that smelled like ketchup: a full menu, breakfast through dinner. They sold a lot of egg sandwiches at Crossroads to frackers, men on their way out to work sites. It was a good place to meet; Lisbeth would come this far. I ordered three cheeseburgers, fries, and coffee, and sat down.

  She was on time. She wore gray sweatpants under her long denim skirt, and not just because of the cold. “You reek, Wil,” she said, sliding onto the chair across from me.

  “Lobo says that’s the smell of money,” I said.

  “My mama says money smells like dirty hands.”

  The food arrived, delivered by a waitress I didn’t know. Crinkling red-and-white paper in baskets. I slid two of the burgers over to Lisbeth. The Church forbade pants on women, and short hair, and alcohol. But meat was okay. Lisbeth hunched over a burger, eating with both hands, her braid slipping over her shoulder.

  “Heard from them at all?” she asked.

  “Not lately.”

  “You think he would let her write you? Call?”

  “She doesn’t have her own phone,” I said.

  Lisbeth licked ketchup off her thumb. The fries were already getting cold. How About Somethin’ Homemade? read the chalkboard below the menu. I watched the waitress write the dinner specials in handwriting small and careful as my mama’s.

  “Hot chocolate?” I read to Lisbeth. “It’s June.”

  “It’s freezing,” she said.

  And it was, still. Steam webbed the windows. There was no sign of spring in the lung-colored fields, bordered by trees as spindly as a bread line. We were past forsythia time, past when the squirrels should have been rooting around in the trees for sap.

  “What time is it now?” Lisbeth asked.

  I showed her my phone, and she swallowed the last of her burger.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Already?”

  “Choir rehearsal.” She took a gulp of coffee. Caffeine was frowned upon by The Church, though not, I thought, exclusively forbidden. “I gave all the seniors’ solos, and they’re terrified. They need help. Don’t forget. Noon tomorrow.”

  The Church was strange—strange enough to whisper about. But The Church had a great choir; she had learned so much. They had helped her get her job at the high school, directing the chorus, not easy for a woman without a degree. Also, her folks loved The Church. She couldn’t leave, she said.

  “What’s at noon?” I asked.

  She paused long enough to tilt her head at me. “Wylodine, really? Graduation. Remember? The kids are singing?”

  “I don’t want to go back there.”

  “You promised. Take a shower if you been working so my folks don’t lose their minds.”

  “If they haven’t figured it out by now, they’re never going to know,” I said, but Lisbeth was already shrugging on her coat. Then she was gone, through the jangling door, long braid and layers flapping. In the parking lot, a truck refused to start, balking in the cold.

  I ordered hot chocolate. I was careful to take small bills from my wallet when I went back up to the counter. Most of the roll of cash from the paper bag boy was stuffed in a Pepsi can back on the floor of the truck. Lobo, who owned the truck, had never been neat, and drink cans, leaves, and empty Copenhagen tins littered the cab. Though the mud on the floor mats had hardened and caked like makeup, though Lobo and Mama had been gone a year now, I hadn’t bothered cleaning out the truck. Not yet.

  The top of the Pepsi can was ripped partially off, and it was dry inside: plenty of room for a wad of cash. I had pushed down the top to hide the money, avoiding the razor-sharp edge. Lobo had taught me well.

  I took the hot chocolate to go.

  * * *

  In the morning, I rose early and alone, got the stove going, pulled on my boots to hike up the hill to the big house. I swept the basement room. I checked the supp
lies. I checked the cistern for clogs. The creek rode up the sides of the driveway. Ice floated in the water, brown as tea.

  No green leaves had appeared on the trees. No buds. My breath hung in the air, a web I walked through. My boots didn’t sink in the mud back to my own house in the lower field; my footprints were still frozen from a year ago. Last year’s walking had made ridges as stiff as craters on the moon. At the door to my tiny house, I knocked the frost from my boots, and yanked them off, but kept my warm coveralls on. I lit the small stove, listening to the whoosh of the flame. The water for coffee ticked in the pot.

  I checked the time on the clock above the sink, a freebie from Radiator Palace.

  “Fuck,” I said aloud to no one.

  * * *

  Before the cold came, my mama and I used to fake-lock the driveway gate, looping the chain but not fastening the padlock, so it only looked locked to outsiders, in case Lobo was late and had forgotten his keys again. If he could just push on it to get it open, instead of kicking it in, or throwing his whole body against it, or yelling so loud we would hear from the farmhouse, that would help, some nights. He might not be as angry when he made it up the drive, frustrated at the world, looking to blame someone. But Lobo was gone. Those nights were over. I locked the gate for real, and headed down the roads into town.

  High school graduation was a big deal, to have made it that far in this small town—little more than a holler, really, a dip between foothills—where no one would check up on you, no one would notice if you made it to class or not. And where there was always the pull of other work, work that would pay you, that seemed to matter more.

  Lisbeth had given all the graduating seniors solos. I wished she had given herself one. How long since I had heard her sing?

  The high school looked the same. It had only been four years since I had walked the halls myself, head down, not wanting anyone to stop and ask me for anything. People still asked, of course. Could I get them something, did I have anything, would I bring it to this party? In four years, people might have gone to college, gone away. But that was what people in other places did, not here.

  Appalachian Ohio, the heart of nothing at all.

  It was illegal, so Mama shielded me. But she loved Lobo, or thought she did, so we’d moved out onto the property to be with him. We had our own place, a tiny shack in a field away from the main house where all the plants were: a safeguard in case the sheriff came. The sheriff never came. A small, narrow house, built on a trailer, it had a skinny kitchen with a gas-powered fridge and a propane stove, a woodstove for heat, a ladder that led to a loft. By the time I was fifteen, the shack was my place, and I slept alone there every night; Mama had moved into the farmhouse. She said it was because the tiny house was cramped for two people—but I knew the real reason: she had chosen him over me.

  By the time I was eighteen, I was working alongside Mama and Lobo. They didn’t pay me, and I had small, fast hands.

  When they left a year ago to make a go of it in California, the farm in Ohio became mine, mine alone—at least, mine alone to manage. I had talked about classes at community college, but who had the money, who had the time, there were chores. What would I do with a degree, except farm? There was a harvest to get in, there was trimming and weighing. There was work in the way of any plans. Money to be made.

  At the high school, I parked in the senior lot out of habit. The football field looked dead, brown and tufted. The air cut my lungs, cold but with an undercurrent of wood smoke, as I joined the trudging crowd.

  They were holding this thing outside.

  Nobody had dressed up—only warmly. My Carhartts wouldn’t have looked out of place, though I had changed into clean jeans before leaving the farm, washed my hair under the faucet, scrubbing at the plant scent, heady and woodsy, that clung to my skin. The smell wouldn’t come off. I kept a vial of lavender oil on the windowsill to douse myself for days like this. I had dragged a comb through my hair, teeth snagging on stems, put on sneakers in place of my mud-gummed boots. Lisbeth didn’t like it if I looked too country; her folks didn’t like it.

  But we all were country, even those of us living in duplexes and houses, like Lisbeth’s, with garages and green lawns. Black rat snakes still found the cracks in cinder-block foundations and slithered into kitchens, box elder bugs still hatched in the sills. In spring, even driveways in town could lose their ends in the rising, brown waters of floods. At least in the springs we used to have.

  I felt lighter, less encumbered, without the heavy coveralls, but the chill found its way into my joints. My wet hair crackled around my ears. In the field beyond the high school, the graduates shivered in their thin robes.

  Generation to generation, nothing really changed. I knew these kids. They fetched water from springs, were familiar with stalling the electric company. But how many of them had grown up with a handgun duct-taped beneath the dining room table and canisters of money buried in the yard? How many of them slept in the woods some nights? It was safer than being too near the farmhouse with the raving men: customers, friends of Lobo’s, who had brought pills or mushrooms; safer than my house with its thin, bum door. How many of these kids ate deer meat for months straight because that was how the hunters bartered for their weed?

  I saw Lisbeth’s folks. “You couldn’t find a dress?” Lisbeth’s mama said. Her lips pressed together until they disappeared.

  Her parents looked like two pillars in church clothes, clean and pale. They thought my mama was a drunk. I had heard them whispering about it, years ago. And that Lobo was a saint for taking us in. It was safer to let them think that than to know the truth: we were all growers.

  My jeans were clean. I swept a hand around my hair and felt no leaves. I sat down next to Lisbeth’s folks. We faced the stage, a platform shrouded in mist.

  “They always have this outside,” Lisbeth’s daddy was saying. “They did last year, even though...”

  He didn’t finish. It had no name.

  Last year had been a late spring, the slightest thaw, and the coldest summer. It had snowed in September. And kept on snowing. This year, more For Sale signs had appeared in the windows of shops in town. More of the windows of houses were dark or broken: dingy, one-or two-roomed shacks. Plastic sheeting ballooned out of doorways, porches sagged into rot. Every house still occupied had a fire going, smoke chugging from the chimney. There were no children playing in the yards. On my drive to the high school, I had passed another gas station that had wrapped its pumps in tarps, yet another farm with chains across its driveway and a house that looked cold and empty, a greenhouse with windows smashed. Farms were taking the cold the hardest.

  Ushers from the student council had wiped the folding chairs with towels, so the seats weren’t damp, but a chill began to seep into my shoes from the ground. I wished I had worn my boots.

  “Here, honey.” Lisbeth’s mama pulled two flat, foil-wrapped packages from her purse.

  I slipped the hand warmers into my coat pockets, and my fingers closed around them, cracking them.

  The choir had prepared for cold. They wore scarves and hats. Some of the girls had fur muffs, maybe from rabbits their daddies had shot. When the singers assembled on the front of the stage, they looked like something out of Charles Dickens, a band of winter ragamuffins. I was almost surprised when they didn’t sing a Christmas carol.

  Lisbeth had a great voice: high and true. When Lisbeth sang, people would sit up. People would pay attention. Being part of The Church meant she had to wear shirts that covered her shoulders and arms. It meant that I had never gone over to her house on Saturday night—she had services early the next morning. It meant that we had to meet places in secret like Crossroads.

  She never drove out to the farm; she couldn’t be caught around that stuff; she shouldn’t be caught around me. They prayed before meals at households in The Church. What Lisbeth believed herself didn’t seem to ma
tter. Singing was the reason she stayed, she said. They taught her other things she couldn’t seem to unlearn: marriage was coming. Jesus was coming in a fireball that would divide the Earth into the good and the lost. She would have to decide. She would have to be ready to go with Him. She wore sensible shoes, kept her hair long. She was always waiting for men.

  I didn’t know the song they performed at what would be the last graduation ceremony, the final graduating class; the last time the platform groaned under the risers; the last time the wind tried but could not unsettle the principal’s hair, buzzed short on his flat head. The school building behind us was already freezing, empty as a factory. I only listened to Lisbeth’s voice, clear and strong alongside the choir, guiding them, blending, but sometimes rising above them.

  By the time the principal’s send-off to the class rolled around, a few families had left, back to their trucks. The speeches had been interminable in the cold. The sky looked gunmetal gray, a color that seemed familiar but also wrong. The wrong time of year for it.

  The principal said, “Go forth. Go forth and don’t just plant seeds of change. Let yourself take root.”

  What was he saying, who was he talking about or to? Go where? Do what? There were more eighteen-year-old local girls in jail than there were in town. I knew if I lingered at the reception in the gym, which I wasn’t planning to—red punch that stained, dead boys staring out at me from photographs in the trophy case—some of the new graduates would ask me for work. Or weed.

  The principal had a white jutted jaw, a way of droning on. And in the middle of his speech, it began to snow.

  The crowd murmured. The principal broke off midword. Whatever he had to say, he would never finish it. Some of the seniors stuck out their tongues or turned up their palms to catch the snow, like children.

  Snow in June. It was thrilling for a second, before we thought about it. From her seat onstage with the choir, Lisbeth and I exchanged a glance. No spring again. No spring this year.