Gray (Book 2) (12 page)

“We’re leaving, Benjamin,” said Coral, loudly.

He glanced at her then at Calex, and he shook his head. Well screw him and screw all of them. She didn’t want a bunch of crazy people talking about underwear and mandatory dresses without so much as a “hey, how are you, how’s it been going these past awful months”—and she knew that what she’d seen so far wasn’t the tip of the iceberg of craziness here. If she acted as if it were her right to leave—and it was!—she might be able to bull her way past them, rifle or no rifle. A voice inside was telling her that she wasn’t being rational, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. This place felt bad, these people scared her, and fear was driving her past sensible behavior.

A blond man dropped her hatchet—
hers
!—back onto the sled and strode over to her.

She stood her ground and stared defiantly at him as he approached, pointing at the sled. “That’s
my
ha—”

His hand came around so fast, she barely caught sight of it as a blur. His palm connected with her cheek, and she staggered. She felt her jacket being pulled as she was yanked forward. He held on to her jacket while he hit her on the other side of the face with the back of his hand.

The one called Alva made a sound of protest.

She had never been slapped before. It didn’t just sting—it hurt! And her brains felt rattled. Tears blurred her vision. “Screw you,” she snarled at the blond man.

And then he hit her again, with a fist to the mouth, and her knees gave out. She sat down. The world swam. The outer edges of her vision blurred, disappeared, and the black collapsed. Everything turned to darkness.

* * *

She woke in the same cabin as before, lying on a cot, her own sleeping bag covering her. The girl Polly was sitting on another cot, sewing. Coral tried to sit up, and her vision swam. She dropped back down and shut her eyes. Her second concussion in four months, possibly—and that couldn’t be good. She was going to end up with that, oh, whadyacallit. That she couldn’t remember the name was a bad sign, and might mean she actually did have the.... Thing. Condition. Concussion-something. Damn, what was the name of it?

The girl, breaking into her thoughts, said, “I’ll get Brother Tithing now.”

Coral could hear her get up and push through the blanket doorway with a whisper of cloth. She really did not want to open her eyes, but she forced herself to ease one set of eyelids apart. She was alone in the cabin. She struggled halfway up, but the dizziness came back. She wasn’t going to be running away in the next few minutes.

Closing her eyes again, she pushed herself up quickly and sagged back against the wall, her feet hanging off the middle of the cot. The world was still spinning, despite that her eyes were closed. Her feet were cold. Her boots had been removed again. She pulled her legs back into a lotus position and pulled her bag up around her neck against the cold. Against her back, the cold of the bumpy stones leached into her.

She might not be in any shape to run right this moment, but she needed to make a plan to escape as soon as she could.

First, she needed to know, where were they keeping Benjamin? Under guard? Tied up? Or what? She opened one eye again, and the room was no longer spinning, so she risked opening the second. Everything looked strange, like she was looking through a wide-angle camera lens. Her head was well and truly messed up.

A different man brushed through the door. That made five men she knew about in the group, and every one counted was worse and worse news for her and Benjamin, especially if they had a rifle for every one. This one was fairly tall, with narrow shoulders, thinning hair, and a shaved face. He was the only beardless man she’d seen since The Event…not that she’d seen many men at all.

“I’m sorry about Pratt,” he said.

“Who’s Pratt? Who are
you
?” Coral said. “And what is this place?”

“It’s the farm,” he said. “I’m Tithing. And Brother Pratt is the gentleman who hit you. I apologize for him, and he’ll apologize himself later today.”

“Uhuh,” she said. “That’s okay. I don’t need an apology. Only my—and my friend’s—freedom.”

He spread his arms and inclined his head. “You have it.”

“Great.” She pushed to the front of the cot, but he bent and his hand stopped her.

“You should rest for a bit first. You’re free to go, but the things you had on the sled, those are now ours, I’m afraid. As is the sled, your man’s rifle, the fishing gear—he said that was yours?”

She nodded.

“I think you might find it difficult to survive out there without all of your things.” His expression was sympathetic. “You look like you had a difficult time even
with
all of it.”

Coral said nothing.

“We’re willing to feed you and clothe you—”

“I
have
clothes.”

He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “And help you prepare.”

For what? Being cooked for dinner?

“You can certainly go if you’d like, but first, I’d like the chance to know if you are of the chosen or not.”

She really did not want to hear a religious lecture right now, not on top of everything else. “I doubt it.”

He held a finger up. “You might be but not yet know it. I’m experienced in this. It has been given me to know these things. Let me decide.”

“And you’ll be testing me somehow to decide?”

“In a sense,” he said, with a smile. It looked sincere, his face a mask of kindness.

Coral didn’t trust it one little bit. A pleasant mask could hide an evil heart. “Does this testing involve torture or rape?”

He physically recoiled from her, and his simper was replaced by a look of distaste that she thought was spontaneous—and real. “No, no. Nothing like that.”

“So it’s about punching me when I disagree with you or refuse to put on a dress. Are those parts of your test?”

“I’m sorry about Pratt, truly sorry. I don’t hold with corporal punishment, but Pratt has problems controlling his temper. I’ve told him, you can’t possibly be ready until that’s under control, and the time is growing short, but still he struggles. I only hope....” He trailed off. “But that’s not important to you. I wanted to welcome you to the farm and tell you that you’ll be safe, and fed, and ask you if you needed anything.”

“My gear and Benjamin, and not getting shot in the back as I leave. That’s all I need. Unless you can throw in some food, too.”

He gave her another practiced smile and stood. “I’ll see you at dinner, then. Tomorrow, you’ll be given a work assignment. But today, you should rest. You look like you need a good nap. I’ll have Brynn fetch you your own cot before night, but for now, you can rest where you are.”

In a moment, he had moved quietly out the door, and Coral was left staring after him, sniffing the air, trying to figure out what she was smelling. Then it hit her—the scent of aftershave. What a strange thing to take time to do in the new world, to shave and put on cologne.

A farm, he had said? Yeah, right. What was this place really, and who were these people? Like some kind of weird offshoot simple-living Christians, like Amish with a bad attitude?

She leaned to the side and patted her jeans pocket. The knife was still there. While she was alone, and in case she couldn’t keep from surrendering her jeans, she should hide it. Shedding the sleeping bag, she climbed off the cot and dropped to her knees, looking beneath it at the construction of the thing. There was a place down by the foot of it where a bracket attached to metal tubing. She tucked her knife in there, climbed back up, and lay back, dragging the bag back over her.

She wanted to lie there and make an escape plan, but she was bone-tired. The cot was the softest bed she’d felt since Benjamin’s house. Before she could make any plan at all, it lulled her to sleep.

* * *

“Wake up,” a reedy voice said.

Coral opened her eyes, disoriented at first by the stone walls and wooden roof overhead. Then she remembered: capture, concussion, cabin.

“It’s time to make dinner.” It was the girl Polly.

“Bathroom,” she croaked.

“Brynn says to show you, then to the kitchen with you.” She pointed. “Your boots are by the door. And your coat.”

Coral struggled out of her stupor, sat up, and was relieved to find that she wasn’t dizzy now. She stood, put on her boots and jacket, and waited for the girl to push through the door. Coral followed her.

The girl took her down a long path of trampled snow to an outhouse, an actual wooden structure. “Where’d you get the wood?” Had the cabin had wood flooring? She realized it had. “It’s a lot of wood.”

“We had it,” the girl said. “Hurry. You don’t want to get Brynn mad.”

Coral used the outhouse. There was a stack of brown paper towels for toilet paper, a luxury she hadn’t had for months. The girl led her back and to the biggest of the cabins. Unlike the women’s cabin, this one had an actual door, with hinges, and two windows, shuttered.

Where had they gotten all these supplies? How had they survived the fire and heat? She thumped on the door as she went through it. No scorching, and it felt solid. There was a knob with a keyhole. Surely it had to have been built after the fires. She eased the door back open and looked at the strike plate. It all looked so normal. And normal—the normal of the old world—was bizarre, now.

Inside, there was a dining table with seven seats around it—a couple folding metal chairs, one wooden chair, and the rest wooden crates. There was a narrow folding metal table pushed against one wall. An interior door opposite that Polly pulled open, motioning Coral ahead of her.

Coral walked over, still looking around, keeping an eye out for rifles or other potential weapons. She stepped through the door, saw Brynn working at a counter with another woman, and came to a shocked halt when she saw what was visible in a room, or more of an alcove, behind them. On the far wall, there was a metal desk holding a radio—an old-fashioned short-wave radio, she realized, like she’d seen in old movies, a black boxy microphone attached with to it by a spiral cord.

“Does it work?” she asked, pointing to it. It was modern technology, communication, contact with the outside world. Perhaps she could find out about her home town, and about what happened back in June. The longing to know if her family was all okay returned to her in a rush.

Brynn said, “Never mind that. Get over here and wash these potatoes.”

Another wave of wonder swept over her as she looked to the counter, a normal counter with a normal sink. Actual potatoes were lined up next to the sink—not canned ones, brown potatoes in their skins—laid out in a beautiful row. Twenty or so of them.

“How’d—”

“There’s a pitcher of water right there,” said Brynn. “Use it sparingly. But get ‘em clean. And wash your hands first.” She motioned with her elbow to a bottle on the sink.

Coral stepped forward, noticing the other woman watching her out of the corner of her eye, and looked at the bottle. It was disinfecting hand wash, the kind you rub in and let evaporate. She cleaned her hands and then hefted the pitcher. In the sink was a metal bowl. She poured a couple inches of water in and took a potato, dipped it in, and, seeing no scrub brush, used her fingertips to scrub off the dirt. She was moving in a sort of hypnotic state, she realized, caused by the scene of old normalcy around her.

The other woman—slight, dark-haired, maybe in her thirties—was opening cans of green beans and corn and stirring them into a salad. There was a plastic bottle of salad dressing on the counter, the white mayonnaise-substitute stuff. Brynn was cutting some thin carrots—more fresh veggies!—into chunks and dumping the cut pieces into another metal bowl. A smaller pile of parsnips sat to the side. Polly was taking a stack of plates and walked them through the door, no doubt to set the table.

It all felt surrealistic, dream-like, impossible. Coral washed another potato and set it aside. Soon, the water grew dirty. “Do I dump it down the sink? Like normal?”

“Outside.” said Brynn, and the unnamed woman took the bowl away to dump the water. “And move faster. I’m ready for the potatoes.”

Coral shook her daze off and started washing the potatoes faster after that. As fast as she finished one, Brynn cut it smartly into neat slices, dumped those on top of the cut carrots, and held her hand out for the next. Coral could barely keep up with her through the potatoes and parsnips. When Brynn had filled one bowl with cut vegetables, she efficiently pared the last parsnips, scraped the last of the vegetables into a second bowl and told Coral to follow her outside.

Yet another woman was standing at the barbecue pit. She nodded in greeting at Coral as she moved back. A cast iron pot was on the boil and a smaller, covered one was nestled down into red coals. Brynn dumped her bowl of veggies into the water and held her hand out for Coral’s. Coral handed it over as she made eye contact with the other woman—maybe in her early twenties, petite, with a clean white mask on her face. Coral realized her own bandana had slipped down over her neck, pulled it up over her mouth and nose and said, “I’m Coral.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m Mondra.” Her eyes were pale blue and watery. She was smiling beneath her mask and Coral managed to smile back.