Gray (Book 1) (6 page)

Back upstream, she felt rock underfoot and felt immediately safer. She paused and scanned the bank, looking for a solid place to climb.

Without warning, a burned out tree crashed down mere yards ahead of her. It hit the stream with a crack. Blackened wood burst off it. Coral flinched back from the shrapnel.

The tree made a dam, and the river rose behind it. She had to get up out of the streambed, away from the danger of mudslides and flash floods.

The bank was almost vertical here but less than twice her height. Reaching her hands up, she sought for a hold, a solid buried rock, anything to give her purchase. Dirt peeled away under her fingers.

Muddy water from the river overspilled the banks and licked at her heels. Coral stripped off her pack and untied the hatchet from it. She swung it overhead, sinking the sharp metal blade into the face of the bank. Reaching up, she shoved her fingers into the gap she had made and pulled down, testing her weight. She cut a second gouge in the dirt as high as she could reach and quickly lashed the hatchet back onto her pack. Hoisting the heavy pack again, she used the two holes as handholds, pulling herself up off the flooding ground. Her feet scrambled for purchase, pressing over and over again without finding a solid hold.

The muddy stream kept spilling over its banks, creeping up her ankles. She had to get higher. Finally, her right foot found something solid and she pressed into it, finding a precarious balance. Pulling her left hand out and reaching up, she groped until she found the face of a large rock. Her fingers stretched for the top of it and she hauled herself up another foot. She hung onto the rock for dear life and tried to find another foothold higher up. Her left foot skittered across the face of the muddy cliff, unable to find purchase.

The weight of the pack tugged at her, wanting to peel her off the bank. She leaned in, the cliff face wet and gritty under her cheek. Her foot found something—maybe a tree root—and she eased some of her weight onto it. She reached with her right hand, looking for another hold. She found a bundle of light roots. Scratching at them furiously, she revealed more, and thicker ones.

Another bit of bank to her left, closer now, tumbled into the mudflow.

She grabbed the roots, expecting them to yank out of the cliff face at any moment, and pulled herself up again, another several inches. The roots held firm. When she looked up, dirt skittered down into her mouth. She shook her head and spit. She kept going. Moving one limb at a time, scrabbling for holds, she made it almost to the top of the bank.

The dirt there crumbled under her touch. She kept at it, grabbing, digging, pushing, until she had a solid grip with one hand on a bit of buried rock. A final scuttling push with her leg, and both hands were anchored on the rock. She hauled herself up with brute strength, kicking at the dirt to help propel herself forward. Her shoulder and back muscles burned as she pulled not only her own weight but also the weight of the pack. Finally, her hips cleared the lip and she let herself rest for a moment.

She was up. She forced herself onto her feet. Her fingers stung where she’d torn a couple of fingernails. Her arms felt numb, as if they had been drained of blood. Shaking them out, she stumbled forward, away from the dangerously unstable bank.

Even though she was safe for the moment, she kept walking away until she was a couple hundred yards away from the stream, on a rock outcrop. Then she collapsed and curled into a ball, holding herself together against limbs shaking from exhaustion.

* * *

When she had recovered, she sat up. She couldn’t leave the stream entirely. It was her food supply and her water supply. Keeping it far on her left, she rearranged her backpack and trudged on through the rain.

A parked car appeared in the distance. Coral hurried forward to it. The paint was gone from the car, a window was missing, but it was still potential shelter from the rain. She could use a place to sit and rest. Then a second car, facing towards the first car, appeared out of the ashen air a ways beyond the first.

She realized she had come to a road, a well-traveled one. The two cars were on the road facing each other as if about to pass in opposite directions. They had been frozen here in time. The fire or the searing heat had stopped them—or maybe something else. Wasn’t that something that happened in a nuclear attack?

She wondered again if she were walking in a world of fallout, if all her efforts would come to nothing when she collapsed with radiation sickness, her hair falling out, her skin covered with ulcerated sores. But she had no such sores, not even the hint of them. She felt physically fine. Except for being underfed, and tired, and lonely, and sad, she was okay.

The road was banked slightly, falling away to either side. Some of the ash had been washed away by the rain. On the road’s surface was a layer of tiny round pebbles, covering the original road surface. She picked one up and looked at it. It was smooth, a tiny pellet. She dug down and found an asphalt road surface. There had to be tens of thousands of the pebbles spread over the road’s surface. Like the ash, but bigger. She hadn’t noticed any before. So why were they collected here? Weird.

She crossed the swatch of pellets, approached the nearer car, and peered inside an open window. The seats were burned down to bits of metal, and ash had accumulated on the floors. No one was in there. Coral pulled her head out of the window and looked up the road.

She began to walk along the edge of it. Something small and brown stuck out of the gray ash just ahead. Coral walked up to it, studying it. A series of bumps in graduated sizes peeped out from the ash.

She came closer, and realized she was looking at a set of toes.

Brown, wrinkled, thin skin covered them. She bent down and begun brushing the ash away, taking care not to touch the body. Horrified, but needing to see more, she kept digging until she had revealed a human leg, obviously attached to more. This one had not been burned. There was no black on it, no blistered skin, no missing flesh.

It was more like a mummy. Or, no, it was like one of those bodies scientists had found buried in ice or peat bogs, shriveled, the skin colored mahogany. She didn’t know what color the person had been before, but in Idaho, odds were, the skin had originally been pale. She wondered how the change had happened. Had the heat done this? Or being packed in ash?

Add these to the hundreds of questions she had no way of answering.

How she longed for experts to explain everything to her. A year at university and four years at a good public high school had spoiled her. Everything she wondered about had an explanation there. Courses, professors, libraries, computers could answer most of her other questions in moments. Her curiosity had been an asset in school. But now, on her own, in this bizarrely changed world, her ignorance was a weakness and her curiosity seemed to magnify that weakness. It did her more harm than good.

She passed more cars. Some has desiccated bodies in them. None had intact seats to serve as a bed for her, so she trudged on. Finally, the rain ended. She marched down the line of the road until the light began to fade. She stopped at a big pickup truck with plenty of space beneath. She crawled under it and popped open a can of tuna fish in oil, eating the fish and drinking the oil, scraping every drop of oil out with her finger. Huddled under the shelter, she fell asleep.

That night, her sleep was broken by nightmares. Every time she tried to wake herself, she felt as if she were swimming up through mud, and before she could reach the surface of wakefulness, sleep pulled her down again like an anchor, into the sludge of another bad dream.

One dream was like a secret agent movie. In it, she was a World War II spy who had volunteered to smuggle a backpack full of raw liver across England. She arrived via train at an underground station and climbed stairs to the surface. There, people dressed in period clothes and hats hurried by her. From out of an alleyway, a gang of feral cats leapt on her, trying to get to the liver. Coral fought them off, but her blouse was shredded by their claws. It fell from her in tatters, leaving her naked. Passersby glared out of the corner of their eyes at her bare breasts but no one confronted her or offered to help.

When the morning came, her muscles ached. Mud was caked on her face and arms, and her eyes felt painfully dry, as if they had been sandblasted during her sleep. Mercifully, the rain hadn’t started up again. She forced herself up.

Midday, she reached a metal sign that, while scorched, offered her up the name of the town: Mill Creek. Her heart buoyed by hope, hope of food, hope of shelter, hope of human company, she went on.

Occasionally a highway sign still stood, giving speed limits that no longer applied. Coral moved through the ghost world, her shoulders stinging under the backpack straps. She ignored the pain and moved on, hoping to come to a thriving town and so to an end to her journey—or at least a comfortable rest stop before she moved on.

Other buildings appeared out of the ashen air, some burned to the ground and others, those made of brick, stone, or concrete, partly standing. Some had burned husks of cars in front. The fire had swept through everything, shacks and mansions, BMWs and flimsy Korean compacts, with impartiality, a purely egalitarian force.

Yet nowhere did she see signs of living people—not a boot track, not a sound of voice or motor or a distant hammer striking a nail. It was as if some strange alien wave had come and plucked away every human being, leaving a scene that seemed every bit as unreal as an abandoned sci-fi movie set. She wondered if there were groups of people nearby, huddled in some burned-out building or camped somewhere well off the road. It was possible she would pass within a half-mile of survivors and never see them through the thick air. The thought sickened her, that she might come that close and miss them.

On the other hand, maybe she wanted to miss them. She thought of zombie apocalypse movies and how civilization decayed so quickly, leaving cannibals and violent madmen. The thought almost made her turn around and leave the town. But she had to try. She had to go forward.

The truth was, she was lonely. And without people, she thought her sanity would soon slip away. She needed people, needed at least one living person to link her to the old life, to the old reality she had known and so taken for granted. Someone to talk with, to laugh with, to share a scanty meal with. She’d trade half her food for one evening’s company.

She began looking inside the larger buildings’ ruins, hunting for canned food, but her luck didn’t lead her to a supermarket.

Night fell before Coral came to the center of town. She bedded down for the night next to the blackened shell of a brick house and slept fitfully.

* * *

Within an hour of setting out the next morning, Coral arrived in the downtown of Mill Creek. The highway widened to accommodate angled parking on both sides. The fire had hit here, too, but had done a less thorough job of destruction than it had in the outskirts of town. Shells of brick buildings stood, missing roofs. Wind had stirred the fallen ash, which now lay like dunes, drifting many inches high against remaining brick and stone walls and blown away altogether in the center of the street.

The tallest building in downtown looked to be only two stories high. Too little remained for Coral to identify all the buildings’ functions. Buildings with empty square holes where display glass had been, surely. Clothing stores? Something else? If she couldn’t find a person, she’d scavenge all these buildings, hoping for more food, or a fresh change of clothes, or any remaining supplies that could help her survive another day.

In an small open square, a bronze statue stood, showing a man with a pick over his shoulder, leading a horse. She made her way over to it, climbed up the base, and looked around. This must have been a happy little community at one time, a mining community in the past, if the statue was to be believed. Now, it was empty of life. She wondered if someone could have survived in a mine, as she had in the cave. She’d go hunt in mines, if she had any idea where they might be.

The disappointment of finding no one here at the town’s center felt like a cold stake in her heart. She had so hoped for an intact community, a few of the refinements of civilization. But she had found only a ghost town.

Taking off her pack, she sunk down and sat next to the statue. What now? For a few moments, she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t work past her broken illusion that this town might be the end of her journey.

She braced herself and forced her mind to get back on track. She’d have to have water, so for now, she’d stick to the water source, the river. After that, she’d want to make her way to a bigger city. Pocatello was closest, she thought, north or northwest of here. She wished she had a paper map and a compass.

And if there was no one there, she’d go west along the interstate highway, I-80-something, as she recalled. By Boise, she’d surely be out of the destruction. Long before Boise, she’d surely find other survivors who had banded together. If she had to go as far as Boise, at the rate she was hiking, it would take her months to get there.

But what other choice had she? None. She had to aim for bigger cities. Pocatello would be first, if she could find it.

Today, there was nothing else to do but hunt for food and supplies in the ruins of this town. Maybe something had survived. Coral began to quarter the town’s central streets, taking the main crossroad down to the stream—more of a river now, where a two-lane concrete and steel bridge spanned the waterway. She turned back toward town, zigzagging to a new street, making her way back to the main drag as she tried to identify what the stores had been. Residential streets without sidewalks near the river gave way to streets with sidewalks. A couple blocks of businesses stretched beyond the main street. Even some of the brick houses might be worth searching. Canned food might have survived the fire and days of heat.

At the fourth street she tried, a block away from the main street, a half wall remained on one corner, built right next to the sidewalk. Maybe a little grocery store, maybe a Laundromat. Hoping for a grocery store and some intact cans, she leaned over the remaining wall, looking inside at the debris. All she could see was ash lying in drifts, hiding indistinct shapes.

She was about to step over the wall to hunt through the ash when she was yanked backward by her hair.