Gray (Book 1) (8 page)

She tripped over the edge of a rock, falling to her face, and the jar to her head made her vision go dark. It cleared and she lay there facedown, catching her breath, with the heavy pack pressing her down.

She spit out a mouthful of ash before attacking the climb again, going slower, taking care not to trip. Finally, she clambered on hands and knees over the lip of the slope and onto flatter land. Ahead of her, the land still rose, but more gradually. She walked to the edge of the rocky patch and stopped.

Coral had no idea where she was and no idea where she was headed. The river had been food and sustenance for her, but right now, it also represented danger. If the man could follow her or had confederates, she had to get away from the town and its roads. She had to leave the river behind for now and lose herself.

She’d have to leave tracks now. It was a risk, but so was staying put.

Before much more time had passed, she was stumbling from exhaustion. Her vision refused to stay clear for more than a few seconds at a time. Finally, her disorientation was so complete that she wasn’t even sure she was headed away from the river any more. Her ears rang and she could feel her heartbeat as a painful thump in her temples.

When she came to a fallen tree, she didn’t see a branch in her way until the last second. Even then, her foggy brain would not take the instruction to step over it. She tripped, fell forward, and the world went dark.

Unconscious, she still had dreams, dreams of being mauled, dragged down into the man’s dark tunnel, of the black cloud rising in the east and the world going dark. The cloud rose over and over in her mind, a horrible loop she couldn’t stop, until she wanted to scream.

* * *

When light hit her eyes, Coral was without her pack, lying on something soft. Trying to move brought pain and dizziness. She fell back.

“You awake?”

At the sound of the voice, she forced her eyes open. A man’s face hovered over her, unfocused features with a dark beard and moustache.

Recoiling, Coral tried to scream. All she could manage was a helpless moan.

“Shh, it’s okay,” came the voice again.

Coral tried to bring the face into focus. The man she saw was bigger than the one she had fought, this voice pitched lower, and with no edge of insanity. “You’re not him,” she whispered.

“Who?”

Trying to say it wasn’t important to answer, she shook her head. Mistake. Nausea rose in her. “I’m sick,” she said.

“You have a concussion, I think.”

Yes, of course, that made sense.

“I don’t think your skull is broken, but you really took a solid hit,” the man said.

“Two,” she said, before she could consider the wisdom of telling him anything. Her voice came from an odd distance and seemed not to be her own.

“One bad one, at least,” he said. “It’s not bleeding any more.” His gaze moved over her head.

She started to reach up and feel the sore spot but remembered how horrible that had felt the last time she touched it. Her hand dropped back to her side, touched a rough cover, a wool blanket, maybe. She looked beyond the man to see walls, and overhead, a ceiling. She realized the light here was artificial light, a lamp. Its light had woken her. “Where I am?”

“In my house,” he said. “Such as it is.”

She couldn’t focus long on his words. She knew there were a hundred answers more she needed. She couldn’t trust the situation she found herself in, not until she knew who he was and what he wanted. Before she could formulate an intelligent strategy for getting those, her voice spoke again, again, as if from another source not herself: “You going to hurt me?”

“Hurt you? I—” He looked again at her scalp. “So someone did that to you?”

She bit her lower lip, bringing her wayward mouth under control. She shouldn’t tell him any more than she had to. As far as she knew, he was in league with her first attacker.

“I thought you maybe just fell, cracked your head on a rock,” he said.

Coral suddenly realized she was lying under a thin blanket in her underwear. “You undressed me?” The idea appalled her.

“You were a mess,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Blood on your shirt. Puke. Damp jeans. Filthy.”

She barely listened. Coral knew she was in no shape for another wrestling match. If this one was going to rape her or kill her, she’d have to suffer whatever indignities he had planned. Images of the worst possibilities swam into her head, making her stomach clench. Torture. Anal rape. Body parts cut off for food. Being burned alive.

She stared at the man, trying to judge him through her mental fog. She saw a tall man, broad-shouldered, the beard, brown eyes, and a full head of wavy hair. He wasn’t as young as she, and maybe as old as forty. As for his intention toward her, she could read nothing in his face.

Patiently, the man watched her studying him until she looked away, embarrassed. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “Just rest.”

Her body yearned to take that advice, but she didn’t want to fall asleep with him in the room. She watched him warily as he got up and puttered around in the room. She couldn’t see what he was doing and feared he’d turn around with a gun or knife.

But all he did was spend a few minutes fiddling with something she couldn’t see. Then he gave her a final glance and walked to the door. “Rest,” he said again, and he left the room. The lamp he left on, turned down to dim.

Though she tried to stay awake, exhaustion overcame her again. She drifted into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

She woke again at the touch of his hand. He was nudging her shoulder, saying something. She opened her eyes, and pain in her head rushed forward like an avalanche. “Oh fuck,” she moaned. She gritted her teeth against the pain, but that just made it worse.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“My head.” She closed her eyes again. Shutting out the light helped a little, but the pain was still crushing. She could feel a tear slip out of the corner of her eye—it hurt that badly.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything for it,” he said.

“Aspirin in my pack.” She opened one eye halfway. “I still have my pack?”

“Yeah. It’s right outside, in the hall.”

She let her eye close again and listened to him leave the room, come back in. Every sound set up clanging echoes in her head.

“Where is the aspirin?” he said.

“Main compartment. Way down at the bottom, there’s a plastic box. First aid.”

In a moment, he said, “I have the box. Where’s the aspirin?”

“Prescription bottle inside,” she said. She held her hand out and he opened it then handed over the pill bottle. The label didn’t match what she had inside: a couple pills of wide-spectrum antibiotics. Ibuprofen. A dozen 222’s from her last trip up into Canada, mild doses of codeine with aspirin, over-the-counter drugs up there. She pulled out two of those and popped them in her mouth. Then she looked around for water, realized she didn’t have any, and swallowed them dry. Gah. They felt stuck halfway down. “Water?” she croaked.

He handed her a liter bottle of water from her pack, clear water on top, sludge on the bottom.

“Thanks,” she said, taking a tentative sip. The head-injury nausea didn’t return, so she took a bigger gulp, washing the pills down. She felt them move each centimeter, then they were down, moving into her stomach.

“Feeling better?”

“Yeah,” she lied. “How long…?”

“Have you been here? A day, or a bit more.”

“Asleep?”

“I kept waking you up every few hours, don’t you remember?”

“Nuh-uh.” She wished the pills would take effect faster. Talking hurt her head. Moving hurt her head. Even thinking hurt her head.

“I remember you’re supposed to do that for concussion patients.” He shrugged. “Don’t know why, though.”

To check for coma, to determine if there is brain swelling and bleeding, she thought, though what you could do about a severe brain injury in the middle of nowhere, without an MRI and surgical theatre nearby, she couldn’t imagine. She wondered if her brain had been damaged. No, if she could remember that much information about brain trauma and its treatment, she probably just had a concussion. Damn, though, her head hurt.

She focused again on the man. “You took care of me.” Without raping me or having me for dinner, she thought.

He nodded.

“Thank you.”

“Well,” he began, then shrugged, letting the rest of his thought go unsaid. He sat still for a minute then said, “You hungry yet?”

“No.” She should be, but she wasn’t, the nausea too near a memory.

“Let me know when you are.”

“You have your own food?”

“A little. Venison I shot a couple weeks back.”

She was surprised. “There are animals still alive out there?” She hadn’t seen any, nor track nor scat, and she had thought maybe they all got killed in the fire. Maybe they were drifting back from wherever they’d run to.

“One was, anyway. Haven’t seen any other game for ten days.”

The first molecules of the drug began to hit her bloodstream. She felt a slight easing of tension she hadn’t known she had carried, an automatic struggle in her neck and face and shoulders against the pain. One day soon, she might regret not having those pills, might wish she had saved them if something worse happened to her. But for now, she blessed their power. She took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. When she opened her eyes, he was watching her with an odd expression. “What?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. He shook his head and stood up. “You need a toilet?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, realizing she really, really did.

“Can you walk at all?”

“I can try.” Better than the alternative. Clutching the bedclothes to her, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood, with him hovering just a few inches away, hand out, ready to steady her if she needed it. Standing seemed to ease the pain in her head a little more. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll just get dressed. Alone, if you don’t mind.” She waited nervously for him to back off. Was there going to be a payment exacted for his help?

He left, shutting the door quietly, and Coral found the turtleneck in her pack, put that on, and felt better. She looked around herself. There was the bed she’d been on, a table, a chair. The floor was carpeted. She wondered how the place had survived the fire. She saw her jeans and other clothes piled in a corner. He was right, they were disgustingly dirty. She dug out the sweatpants, which were dirty, too, but at least not stained with puke. She found him waiting halfway down a dim hallway.

He led her up a flight of stairs, where an open door at the top let in some daylight. At the top of the stairs, he pulled up a bandana mask like hers, against the ash in the air. She realized she had been in a basement of a house, and as they reached the upper levels she saw the familiar fire damage. The roof was gone and the floors were coated with mud. No furnishings remained up here. The scorched walls still stood, but the outside openings for doors and windows yawned open.

“It’s colder outside,” she said.

“Yep,” he said. He guided her outside and away from the house to a pit toilet, recently dug. There was no building around it, no toilet seat. He pointed to a metal bucket filled with ash. “When you’re done, just pour some ash onto it. Don’t skimp. There’s plenty more where that came from.” The small joke made her fear of him ease.

He returned to the house and left her some privacy. The latrine was free from odors, tidily made with broad flat rocks circling the opening. It seemed downright civilized after long days of digging cat holes in the wilderness.

When she was done, she saw a dark mound in the near distance and walked over to it. Charred bits of furniture, wet cushions, chunks of wood, bits of metal, and other debris from the house had been piled together, roughly organized by material, all of it smelling of soot. Behind that was a burned pickup truck, doors removed and leaning against its sides. He’d been busy.

When she got back inside, she took a closer look around. The walls were different, not drywall or plaster but…what? He came from behind an interior wall. “Is this adobe?” she asked him, stroking the rough texture of the wall. Tiny cracks, shaped like spider webs, were visible from close up.

“Similar. It’s layers of clay, inside and out, packed over straw bales. Steel rebars inside the straw for structure, starting with rebar set into a concrete foundation.”

Oddly, she thought of the three little pigs. The straw house wasn’t supposed to stand, but this one had outlasted the fire when frame houses hadn’t. “Why didn’t it burn?”

“The roof did, and the doors and window framing. Most of the flooring and furniture up here got burned or badly charred. But mud doesn’t burn, and the wall surfaces are basically mud. With no trees right next to the house, the fire moved by fast.”

“You survived here?”

“Barely,” he said, looking grim. He didn’t offer more detail and she didn’t ask.

Asking seemed rude somehow. She blinked at that, at her invention of new social rules for the new world. Or maybe they were the same old rules but seemed alien in such a new context. “I’m sorry,” she said, reminded of the polite thing to do. “I never asked your name. I’m Coral.”

“Benjamin,” he said.

“You prefer Ben?”

“Nope,” he said, “not particularly.”

“Benjamin, then,” she said. “Thank you again for helping me. Where’d you find me?”

“You hungry yet?” he asked instead of answering her. “I could use some food.” He led her to one side of the main level. A refrigerator and stove remained in a kitchen, soot-streaked but intact. A central island with granite countertops had been reconstructed since the fire, with a fieldstone base. The countertop was whole and scrubbed clean. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a hunk of meat. Ribs were visible along one side of it.

“You have electricity?” she asked.

“Nah,” he said. “I keep it in here to keep the bears from smelling it.”

She glanced outside. “There are bears around here?”

He shrugged. “There were a month ago. I haven’t seen any lately.” He squinted at her. “You not from around here?”

She shook her head.

Pointing out the window, he said, “Grizzlies don’t come closer than about two hundred miles that way. Black bears all over Idaho, though. They’re not as aggressive, usually.” He used the countertop to cut a fist-sized chunk from the meat. “But with so little food for them out there, I can guess how they’d act if they found mine.” He replaced the meat in the refrigerator. “Though if I were a bear, I’d have left and found better pickings somewhere else.”

He looked a little ursine himself, a big man with dark hair on his wrists and knuckles, a patch of dark hair peeking out from an undershirt he wore beneath a faded green flannel shirt. Coral thought he had been much bigger still once, though she couldn’t put her finger on why she thought so. Maybe it was the way he moved, as if he was used to carrying more weight.

“Eat downstairs or outside?” he asked.

“There’s no ash downstairs.”

“I probably swallowed a peck of it so far,” he said.

They went back down to the bedroom she had been in and he sat on the chair while Coral sat at the edge of the bed and watched him use a pocket knife to cut a thin slice of the venison. “How old did you say that meat was?” she asked.