Gray (Book 1) (12 page)

The hunger was ravenous, and painful, and it nagged at her mind every waking moment now. If she woke up in the middle of the night, it kept her from falling back asleep for hours. She hadn’t discussed it with Benjamin, though—surely he felt the same, and talking about it wasn’t going to make them feel any better.

While she watched the propped-up rod, sending out positive and welcoming thoughts to any fish swimming by, she worked on making arrows for her bow. Again, the trial and error method led her to make better arrows each time. She felt less impatient than she had about the bow. It’s not as if she had any appointments to keep. May as well try and enjoy the process of learning something new. At least it kept her partly distracted from the gnawing hunger.

Experiments on flaking rocks into arrowheads failed completely. She knew nothing about flintknapping, and the instructions in her hunting pamphlet were too brief to be useful. It also said that sharpening an arrow and heating the wooden point to cure it would make a reliable weapon for small game. For now, she stuck to wood points sharpened on rocks, telling herself that if she needed to, she could try again to make arrowheads. Without game to hunt, this was all an academic exercise anyway.

As she fished and worked on her arrows, snow continued to fall all day, and the warm spell that had melted the first snowfalls every day did not recur. Coral worried less about how cold she felt at night, even sleeping in all the clothes she owned, and more about losing her way back to the house as the snow, for the first time, covered her tracks. The snow accumulated not in beautiful white mounds, but in a lumpy gray blanket. Once the snow stopped, it turned darker as more ash settled on it. Maybe that meant the air was slowly clearing, but the world below was getting more and more gray. At points, there were drifts of fallen ash three feet deep. How much more could there be up there
to
fall?

Benjamin had found her a string to try as a bowstring, and she strung her lesser bow and tried to learn to fire an arrow. She was so bad at first, she was glad no one was around to witness the comedy. Laughing at herself was one thing—and she did laugh at herself—but she was grateful she didn’t have an audience.

Finally, after a long while of working at it, trying little adjustments, failing, adjusting again, she was able to fire an arrow in the general direction she was aiming. As she got better, she narrowed her targets to specific clumps of burned bushes. By the end of the day, she was hitting within a few inches of where she aimed—if, that is, she was using her very best arrows. She gathered up every arrow she shot, but some had broken when they hit the ground.

She changed her fishing spot every few hours, stopping as soon as she caught sight of the bridge to town, then heading back upstream. Benjamin might have said the town was clear, but it was still a place of fear for her. Finally, she found a spot where fish began to bite, and she fished until they quit, eating the five tiny trout she’d managed to find, but still not feeling nearly full enough, and having nothing to take back with her.

The next day, she set about learning the ways of the better bow. The last morning, she skipped breakfast, saving the few small fish she caught with worms to bring back to the house, along with all the bones from the previous day’s catch. If Benjamin was there, she’d make fish stew and give most of it to him. If he wasn’t there, at least she would have enough to see her through one more hungry day.

Food was on her mind all day long, a thought simmering and nagging at her. The hunger poked her in the gut all the time.

When she hiked back to the house, after only one bad moment where she feared she was lost, Benjamin wasn’t home yet. She took the last hours of daylight to wash clothes. In the hall closet, she found a stack of towels and wore two of those as shirt and sarong, her wool sweater over both, while she scrubbed all her clothing in the downstairs bathtub. Shivering from the cold, she hung them to dry and wrapped herself in the blanket from her bed. It still wasn’t warm enough, so she climbed into her sleeping bag and put the blanket and the dry towels from the linen closet over herself. It took all evening to get warm enough to quit shivering and fall asleep.

By the end of the next afternoon, her clothes were barely damp, but she put them back on anyway, staying wrapped in the blanket, hoping her body heat would finish drying the clothes.

Benjamin came back at last light. He looked unhappy. “Nothing,” he said. “I couldn’t find a thing.”

“There’s fish stew. You have it. You must be starved.” She had gone without food all day.

“I’m hungry. Sure you don’t want some of it?”

“No, you go on. It’s in the covered pot on the kitchen counter. At least the cold weather means the food won’t go bad.”

At the end of the meal, which he ate in silence, she brought up the topic she knew they were both thinking about. “What are we going to do for food?”

“I don’t know.”

“We should leave, go someplace where there is food.”

“Where would that be?”

“We should check everything in Mill Creek, all the ruins. Maybe there are cans of food.”

“I looked around in the stores when I was there, the gas stations, the convenience store, places like that. I know the town, so I knew where to look. I even looked in a couple of the less-destroyed houses. Didn’t find a thing.”

“Damn.”

“Where’d you get those cans of vegetables?”

Coral took told him about the storm shelter and the supplies, but not about the kid’s body. “I took all the food there was, I’m afraid. So I’m not a killer, like you worried, or a cannibal. But I admit that I’m a thief.”

Benjamin studied her for a long time before answering. Finally, he said, “I was never saying that you did anything wrong in Mill Creek. Staying alive is never wrong.”

She wasn’t sure that was a philosophy she agreed with, not even now, but she let that thought pass. She knew he was offering her an olive branch, asking her to forget his suspicions. She accepted it for what it was. Holding his gaze, she nodded. Strain showed around his eyes. “You must be tired,” she said.

He nodded.

“Go on down, then. Sleep. There’s nothing much to clean up here, anyway.”

He eased himself up and left the kitchen. Coral sat alone staring out the window until the light was nearly leeched from the sky. Then she went to bed, too.

* * *

The next morning, the temperature hovered around freezing, even downstairs. It was still better sleeping down there than on the ground, where gusts of wind would make her miserable, but Coral was worried about the falling temperatures. If this was the height of summer, what would November or January be like? Benjamin was exhausted from his trip, but soon, today, they needed to have a discussion about what to do next.

After more lonely days fishing and working on her bows and arrows, she knew she didn’t want to be alone. She would leave alone, if he refused to go, but she didn’t want to. She wanted him to come with her.

She went outside with her bow and arrow, shooting at targets she had built from burned debris she had hauled out of the junk pile, anything soft enough to shoot at without destroying the arrows in the process. The best of her arrows, the ones that flew straight and true, she was growing emotionally attached to, as odd as that would have seemed to the old Coral, the pre-Event Coral. A good arrow was more useful than a smart phone now, that was for sure.

Benjamin came out well after sunrise and observed her practice, saying nothing. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, trying to read his mind. Was he impressed, entertained, disgusted? With Benjamin, it was hard to tell. His expression gave away little.

She shot her last arrow. With a soft
whop
, it stuck in the target, leaving a tight group of five arrows with others scattered to the outside. Not bad for a beginner. She walked over to gather her arrows, stacking them in her hand then checking them for damage.

“What are we going to do about the cold?” she asked, turning to Benjamin.

“Nothing
to
do,” he said.

“I mean, to stay warm. And what about food?”

Slowly, he shook his head. “I’m not sure.”

That surprised her. Somehow, she had come to believe he’d have a creative solution for every problem. Wordlessly, she started shooting another round of arrows at her target.

He broke the silence. “You think you could shoot an animal with those?”

“That’s the idea,” she said, fitting another arrow to the bowstring. “If I ever see an animal again.”

He watched as she shot her last arrows. Then he said, “I’m thinking we should leave.”

Shocked, she turned to him. “What?”

“I gave it a lot of thought while I was gone. We should leave, like you said. Go west, drop some in elevation, hope for warmer weather. Hope for more surviving animals.”

“Do you think there are any game animals left to the west?”

He held his palms up, dropped them. “Honestly, I don’t know. We could be walking away from our only safe shelter. We could be walking into some worse death than starvation.”

She touched her flat belly, aware, as always, of the hollowness inside. “Starvation sounds like about the worst I can imagine.”

“You realize, don’t you…” His voice trailed off.

“What?”

“You realize we are going to die.”

She notched an arrow, turning away. “Everyone does, sooner or later.”

“Sooner,” he said. “I think for us, it’s going to be sooner.” His voice was gentle.

She released the arrow then turned to face him. “We can’t just give up.”

“No,” he said. “But the world is dying around us. Species are going to become extinct. Humans may well be one of them.”

“Well, good morning Mr. Sunshine,” she said.

He barked a surprised laugh. The smile faded from his face. “Ignoring the facts isn’t going to help.”

“I’m not ignoring the facts! I wanted to go before this, if you remember.”

His mouth stiffened, and she was sorry she hadn’t kept her mouth shut. “I didn’t want to leave the water supply and shelter, is all. But I was mistaken. We should have gone ten days ago. Happy?”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean ....” She had been relying, maybe too much, on his steadiness. Without him ever saying a word, without bragging or making promises, he had exuded a certainty that every challenge could be met, that everything was under control. His quiet strength had shored up her own, and she didn’t like losing it to this fatalism. “So we’re going together?”

“Yes. It’ll take a day or two to prepare, but I think we should go as soon as we can.”

Coral was relieved she was moving on and that Benjamin had agreed to go with her. Two would be safer than one, alone. She trotted upstairs the next morning, ready to make plans and get moving. “Where do you think we should go? West? Or is south better?”

“South is too mountainous, and it gets dryer and dryer the further you go. We have to stay close to water. And our best chance of finding manufactured food is going to be in cities. Still, we need to not just skip into big cities without knowing what’s there.”

Like I did, you mean.
“So where are we going? I don’t know Idaho well at all. I’ll rely on you for a direction, a destination.”

“The way I see it,” Benjamin said, scratching his beard as he thought, “there are two choices. We can go mostly north, toward Pocatello, cautiously check for canned food there, and go over and catch the Snake River from there. Or we can head west now and cut northwest to the Snake, avoiding the city. The problem with that is there are a couple lines of mountains to cross to the west. The weather could be a problem, and if it snows too much, and we’re up high, we could regret that decision.”

She nodded. “Will it be warmer as we go west?”

“When we get down into the Snake river valley, a little. But to get out of the cold, we might have to go to the ocean, then turn south hundreds of miles.”

“How long will that take, do you think, to walk all the way to the Pacific?” She hoped that wouldn’t be necessary.

“I don’t know. To Boise, it’s going to take us maybe three months, at a guess. To the ocean, six months or a year beyond that. That’s assuming we can find food.”

“Why so long? I can walk twenty miles a day.”

“You were doing that much getting here from the cave?”

She didn’t want to think about that, but she had to be realistic. She felt herself sag with disappointment. “No. More like five on a good day, taking time to fish. And if there’s no food, I don’t know if I could do even that much.”

“And we’ll have a big load to haul. Over rocky mountain ridges, sometimes. With snow on the ground to wade through on the flats. And, like you say, we’ll have to stop to fish and hunt, probably every day. It could be we don’t average more than two or three miles a day for awhile.”

The optimism she’d felt upon waking was nearly drained away now. “If we can even find anything to hunt.”

“If we find plentiful food anywhere close to home, I’m going to turn around and come right back. You’d be wise to come with me. There’s shelter here, living space underground, and that’ll help us survive the cold. If not, we’ll have to move on every day and hope we can find enough food to keep on our feet.”

Coral didn’t like the idea of coming back here, not at all. To do what? Live here until spring and clear skies, not seeing another person, her family not knowing if she was dead or alive? If there were any way to move forward, she would. “Can we get going tomorrow?”

“No way. First of all, we need to gear up, figure out what we need.”

“I don’t know if I can carry much more than I walked in here with. And you don’t have a good pack, do you?”

“Won’t need packs,” he said. “I’ll make a sled, so we can pull the load over the snow.”

“And if the snow melts?” There were only four or five inches on the ground. One warm day would take care of that.

“That’s not going to happen.” He seemed certain of it.

* * *

Benjamin ‘s room stood at the other end of the hall downstairs. He led her there to start scavenging.

“Was this the owner’s bedroom?” she asked.

“No, that was upstairs. These down here were for me and guests. Here, let me show you this. Go through the closet and see what fits you. Remember, if you’re wearing layers, it’s okay if it’s a bit too big. Then start pulling everything else out of the closet in your room while I’m outside. Get it spread out, look through it, see what looks useful to you. Don’t hesitate about digging through this—I’m not worried about my privacy, at this point. While you do that, I’m going to go start work on building the sled. Let me know when you’re done.”

When he left, Coral pulled out all the clothes and laid them out on the bed. The clothes were all too big for her, but she left the warmer stuff piled on the bed for Benjamin to choose from.

In her room, there were two thick sweaters on the closet shelf. She held their softness to her face. They felt and looked expensive and smelled vaguely of an unfamiliar men’s cologne. The owner’s, she supposed. She looked in vain for a parka or gloves, and she finally decided that either there never were any, or they had been stored upstairs and destroyed in the fire. She held the sweaters up to herself. Big on her, probably a bit small on Benjamin. She’d use both of them.

She found a pair of leather pants, maybe for riding a motorcycle, obviously too small for Benjamin. She’d ask if she could cannibalize them for gloves for them both, that is, if she could figure out how to hand-stitch leather gloves. It wasn’t only that she knew almost nothing about sewing—though she didn’t know anything beyond repairing a hem—but that she didn’t see any needles and thread, much less the sturdier needles she imagined she’d need to push through two layers of leather. Her one thin needle in her film-canister survival kit would not do the trick. And lining—wouldn’t that be the thing to do, to make the gloves a size too large and line them with absorbent material? Maybe mittens would be better than gloves. They’d sure be easier to cut and sew.

A pair of terry bathrobes would be useful for something, padding or towels, though they had been baked to brittleness by the days of heat. A leather belt hung on a hook in the back of her closet. That’d be surely be useful, if only to hold something down on the sled.

A box on the closet’s floor yielded pens, pencils, paper, stapler, and other office supplies. She’d have wanted these under normal circumstances, but they’d not be worth hauling on her back, or even on a sled. She found an open packet of utility knife blades among them. There were four left. She could lash those to the tips of her arrows, if Benjamin didn’t have a more important use for them. She shoved the package in her pocket so she wouldn’t lose track of it.

Benjamin’s bed had a quilt on it and a wool blanket. He’d want those. She went through the hall closet, which held towels and a pair of spare pillows. She put the pillows on the floor and studied them. Whatever they were stuffed with had survived the heat without melting. The pillows could provide insulation for clothing or a sleeping bag. Maybe she could make one for Benjamin by doubling the quilt and sewing up the sides. That much sewing, a straight seam, she thought she could handle.

Finally, she had several dozen items she thought were useful piled next to the stairs, including some small-enough jeans and t-shirts for her. The rest of the clothes, Benjamin could look at for himself to see which he wanted. She supposed one change of clothes would be all the weight she’d want to carry. She was already wearing her jeans over her sweats.

As to everything she’d spread out on the bed, she wasn’t sure if it could be used or not. She was out of her league here. She had packed for five-day camping trips before, but never for months in the wild. She’d wait to talk her ideas over with him. Two minds applied to any of these problems had to be better than her one mind.

She went up to see what Benjamin was up to, and if she could help.

* * *

In the end, it took five days to get ready. Every day Coral had to stop in the early afternoon and go fishing. Benjamin insisted that they needed all the food they could find right now and her making that effort was worth their delaying departure. It was important to eat, she knew, even though she only caught six fish over the five days, and two of those were tiny. She found more grubs among the rocks and brought them back, too. They made soup every day, all of it tossed into water and heated with scavenged charcoal, but the few calories the food provided did little to replenish her energy. Like an appetizer, the fish-grub soup stimulated her appetite more than sated it.

The little bit of dried venison—both dried and frozen, now that the temperatures were steadily below freezing—that was left would have to feed them the first day on the road, Benjamin said, and they’d be burning a lot of calories being out in the cold temperatures, pulling a loaded sled like dogs.

It snowed three times during their preparations. The snow accumulated to more than a foot deep.

She was helping him build a box for tools the last afternoon when she said, “The whole time we’ve been doing this, I’ve been thinking about the way people lived before. The Indians. Or not just them, but everyone, if you go back far enough. All this stuff takes forever. Fishing. Building stuff. Sewing clothes. Washing by hand.”

“Yup.” He rubbed his beard. “Bet they didn’t have a lot of time for getting depressed.”

She wondered if that were so. “Not existential angst nor ennui nor any of those 20
th
century diseases.”

“Or old age complaints,” he added. “Hard to have old age complaints when you don’t live to old age.”

“Now there’s a cheerful thought,” she said.

“I’d be an old man to those people. Damned old, in fact.”

“And I’ve have six kids by now.”

“Or be dead of trying. Childbirth can be a dangerous thing without drugs and surgery.”

She thought about that life for a while in silence. “I wonder if they actually tried for children. Some women must have never wanted any kids, but what could they do?”

“People always want kids.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t?” He sounded as if he’d never heard of such a thing.

“A lot of women I know don’t want kids. Besides, I half-raised my little brother the last few years. I did my bit as a mother already.”

“I bet you don’t want kids because of the world you lived in. College and career and all that. In a subsistence life, you’d want them.”

Coral didn’t think so. It seemed to her that subsistence living required fewer children, not more. She certainly wasn’t yearning for any now.

* * *

Finally, they were packed and ready to go. The sled was cobbled together of spare parts, cannibalized furniture, and metal brackets pounded into runners and sharpened with a file—her shoulders still felt the strain of that work. The runners were screwed to the bottom of a platform. That was surrounded by metal rails, including two in back he’d pounded into curved handles. Supplies were piled on top and covered with a blanket. It was all lashed together with electrical cabling he’d ripped out of the downstairs walls.

“I’m impressed,” Coral said, looking at the loaded sled. She was telling the truth. Engineering had never been one of her talents, and she was always amazed to find people who could figure out at a glance how things worked. The sled wouldn’t win any beauty competitions, but it was sturdy and functional, and he’d done it all with hand tools.

He was appreciative of her own efforts, particularly the sewing. She had to admit, his new sleeping bag made of his quilt and pillow stuffing turned out well. Lined, padded, and cozy, it wouldn’t be the match of her own down bag, but it wouldn’t be far inferior to it, either. The leather mittens she had made them were less beautiful. Her one needle had bent several times by the time the first one was done, and guiding it through the layers of tough material from then on was no easy task. She had muddled through anyway. By the end, the magnetized needle wasn’t going to be able to function as an emergency compass or even much of a needle any more. But their hands would be protected from the cold and from frostbite. Without hospitals, frostbite could kill.

But she kept the dulled, bent needle—she didn’t want to have to do any surgery that involved stitching, but she might have to, and this was all she had. She’d be on the lookout for another needle.

Benjamin’s plan was to strike north until they caught the line of a highway, move west parallel but out of sight of it until it ended, then keep moving west, at least until they crossed the interstate highway. “It’s not worth making plans beyond that. We don’t know yet how food will go. Or if we’ll find any at all. We could be dead in two weeks of starvation.”

“Or maybe we will find food, along with other people,” Coral said.

“We don’t know what they’ll be like if we do find some,” he said.

“Can’t you spare a little optimism?” she said.

“One of us has to be a realist,” he answered.