Gray (Book 2) (3 page)

His voice was reasonable, patient. “The person with a rifle should do most of the reconnoitering. If you want, you can take the rifle and check out the silo.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Okay, you do it, and I’ll fish. And I’ll baby-sit the rabbit.”

“Pretty easy babysitting. It’s not going anywhere.” He adjusted the rifle on his shoulder and said, “See you in an hour or so.”

She took her arrows back out and fiddled with them while she waited.

Benjamin returned in good time. “Lucked out,” he called.

Her heart lifted. “There’s food there?”

“No, but I found some charcoaled wood. Enough to cook the rabbit, at least.” He took off the daypack and unloaded the wood.

“Great. I have water clearing.”

“We’ll have rabbit stew.”

“We can add a couple of mystery veggie cans to it.”

“Sounds good.

“I’ll get the fire started.”

In a half-hour, she had a small fire going and decanted clear water into the biggest pot they carried, added a pinch of the dwindling supply of salt and opened another can with no label. It was peaches, so she set it aside to have as dessert and tried a second can—peas and pearl onions, much better for stew. She stuck her finger in the icy liquid and tasted it. It had salt, better still. The liquid from the can she poured in the pot, along with most of the onions. She’d add the rest of the veggies when the rabbit had cooked partly through. She had at least an hour until that happened, she thought. Maybe two.

It was a good thing her grandmother was into cooking from scratch. Coral had learned enough from her to manage the survival cooking. She knew people at school who thought all food came from plastic trays or drive-through bags.

When Benjamin was done cleaning up, he asked for her pocket knife. “To sharpen.”

He sat down to hone all the knives and the hatchet, too. She returned to fishing, using the gut bait, and was rewarded soon with a bass. Not a tiny one, either—it was three inches longer than her hand. She stuck it on a stringer, jammed that into the ground, and put more bait on her hook. It took a half-hour, but she caught a second fish, nearly as big. She hadn’t seen fish this big in a long while, since before The Event.

She retrieved her sharpened pocketknife from Benjamin, cleaned both the fish quickly, and set them both by the coals to cook. It’d be great to eat cooked fish rather than raw tomorrow. It’d freeze equally well raw or cooked. She stirred the rabbit stew, decided the meat needed another half hour, and returned to fishing. As she was ready to quit for the day, a third fish struck her line, but it was clever and unhooked itself with a twist and a splash.

The sound was loud enough to attract Benjamin’s attention. “Feast or famine,” he said. “And I’m done with the sharpening.”

She tested the edge of the big knife she’d taken from Walmart. Dangerously sharp—she’d have to remember that. “Thanks,” she said, still feeling regret for the lost fish—but not the despair she would have felt over it just a week ago, but a smaller twinge. They had fresh food for the day, some canned food left, and a promise of more fish to come. She said to Benjamin, “I buried the fish heads with the rabbit heart in the snow. We can have those tomorrow as soup.”

“If I can find more fuel.”

“At least fish is edible raw. Though I’d rather have them cooked.”

“I think I should take an overnight trip up north, see if there are more rabbits.”

“We can go together.”

“No. You’re catching fish here now. Stick with it.”

“True, but it’ll still be here in a couple days, and they might be biting better elsewhere.”

He thought it over. “Okay. Give me tomorrow to check things out on my own, find the ideal spot for the next camp, make sure there are no human tracks up that direction.” He unconsciously drew his hand over his sore ribs.

She wished he were healing faster, but she supposed the chronic undereating would make all their injuries heal slowly. Their bodies had eaten through all their fat stores and, for every day they had insufficient calories, they would be breaking down bones and organs and healthy muscle to keep them alive. Injuries were only going to be more and more stressful.

“As least we aren’t going to be catching head colds or the flu this winter,” she said.

“What?”

“I was thinking. It’s a silver lining in the cloud of all this death. Diseases will have a hard time staying alive. Not enough hosts to move them along.”

“Huh,” he said.

The rabbit stew turned out great. The onions from the can made the broth richer-tasting. She could have eaten twice what she did but, without discussing it, they stopped halfway through the pot.

Benjamin left at dawn, taking the cooked fish with him to eat while he was hunting.

She felt a twinge as he disappeared. She’d come to a point where she’d rather not have him out of her sight for long. Whatever hesitation she’d felt about him back at his house, when they’d argued over her rifle, had entirely disappeared since the incident at the Walmart. He was her partner, something akin to her wolf pack, now. They might skirmish over alpha position now and again, but they had become a good team.

It made her nervous when he took the rifle away, too. She didn’t want to have to confront an aggressive group of survivors without one close at hand. Never bring a novice’s homemade bow and arrow to a gunfight, as they said—or someone should have said at some point in history. But that was the situation she was in whenever Benjamin left her to hunt.

Coral was left with cold rabbit stew for the day’s eating. The weather was cold enough that thick ice had formed on its surface overnight.

She cracked the ice and had a few spoonfuls of cold stew. Setting up water bottles to clear was next. The weather continued to get colder daily, and if it dropped much more, the water bottles would freeze before the ash could precipitate out. She’d have to sit with the bottles between her thighs, she supposed, while she fished.

She started her work day by tipping arrows with screws she had grabbed at the Walmart. Soon she realized that she should have gotten tiny nails instead; those, she could have pushed through the wood. The screws were as thick as the arrows and needed to be tied on. She couldn’t afford any monofilament for the job. Her paracord would be too thick. Finally, she sliced through the thread at the hem of her jeans and worked out the length of it.

After she had four arrows tipped, she set up a snowman target and practiced her marksmanship with both sorts of arrows: plain wood and metal-tipped. After watching the new arrows’ wobbly flight, she took off the tips and reattached them. Another round of target practice, and they still weren’t right. She tried again.

Finally, she put two together with screw tips, balanced so that they worked okay. The flight still had a wobble she didn’t like, but they did fly further than the wood-only arrows. It must be the extra weight. After another half-hour of practice with them, she leaned her bow and arrows against the snowman and sat down to start the day’s fishing.

Not much later, Coral’s animal sense told her something was wrong, but not what. Hair rose on the back of her neck.

Though there wasn’t any sound, somehow she knew that someone was watching her.

She spun around on her butt. There was a pair of animals, digging at the place the organ meats and fish heads were buried. Those scraps were going to be a much-needed meal for her and Benjamin. She scrambled over to the snowman, picked up her bow and stood to face the animals.

She fit an arrow to the string and inched forward, toward the digging…coyotes? No, dogs. Regular house pets, one maybe part German Shepherd, his looks not far from a coyote’s, and the other smaller and not an identifiable breed. Both were terribly thin. They didn’t look up, but their growling intensified as she took a half dozen paces toward them.

She whistled and said something cooing and gentle, the way she’d talk to any dog, pre-Event.

The Shepherd mix whirled away from the other and showed its teeth at her, growling fiercely. The other continued digging, found food, threw its head back, and swallowed.

The growling dog feinted a charge at her, then turned around and snapped at its partner, who lifted its head for a second and growled, too—not at Coral, but at the other dog.

These weren’t nice puppies, but hungry animals. Dangerous animals. Predators. Desperate competitors for the little food there was left in the world. “Hey,” she yelled. “Get away from that.” She strode forward another two big steps. Instead of cowering and backing off, the lead dog, the Shepherd, leapt at her.

Coral lifted her booted foot and kicked at the dog. She registered the sight of its jaws closing around her lower leg before she felt anything. Jerking her leg back, she yelled, “No!”

The dog paid no attention to her voice but lost its grasp as she yanked her leg to the side. Coral felt, as if from a distance, pain in her calf and shin. She staggered back and the dog growled again, crouching for another leap. Having no other choice, she lifted her bow and nocked the arrow. She let it fly.

The arrow hit the dog’s forehead and bounced off the bony skull. Still, the arrow’s impact made it hesitate. Coral reached for another arrow and set it to the bowstring. She backed up a stride and shot again, aiming for the animal’s chest.

This time, the arrow bit and stuck. The dog gave a sharp yelp of pain.

Coral nocked another arrow and once again aimed for the dog’s chest. It turned from her as she let fly, so she caught it in the flank instead.

She grabbed a fourth arrow and aimed at the other dog, who looked at her but still gnawed at the fish head. The arrow flew true. She hit it square in the eye. It yelped and dropped its meal, pawing at the wood shaft protruding from its eye. She yelled again, an inarticulate sound, as savage as the dogs’.

The dogs backed from her but would not turn and run. They must be starved, willing to risk more pain or death to get to the buried meal, scanty as it was. She felt a flash of sympathy for them, but pushed it from her mind.

The first dog began circling wide, trying to get around her as the second dog lumbered forward. They were using pack techniques on her now. She was a threat to their food. As she spun to keep the first dog in front of her, she set another arrow to her string. She was down to the all-wood arrows now. She shot the first dog again. The arrow hit it in the hip, and it stumbled. The second dog stood its ground,  protecting its meal.

Coral sprinted up to the first as it turned to bite at the arrow and kicked it, hard. She felt a rib snap under her foot. She kicked again, then danced back from the reach of its snapping jaws. She had only a few arrows left. Again, she turned and shot at the second dog, missing this time barely an inch over its head. The arrow’s passage made the dog drop to its belly.

She heard a pained noise from the shepherd, clearly the alpha dog, and glanced back at it. It was struggling to its feet, leaning against a boulder that stuck a foot above the snow to help itself rise.

Hardening her will and her heart, she shot it again and then a quick second time, burying two more arrows into its heaving side. Blood stained the snow around the dog. It turned to bite pitifully at an embedded arrow. She leapt forward and kicked again, this time at the dog’s head. Her boot connected with a resounding crack and a force she felt all the way up to her hip joint.

The dog stopped moving, dazed. She stepped around it and grabbed its lower legs. With the strength fueled by the adrenaline that pumped through her body, she lifted the dog by its legs. She swept it behind her, then whipped it overhead. The weight of its body swung up, then swooped down, accelerating. She aimed the dog’s head at the tip of rock protruding from the snow, but missed. She hauled it up again, panting with the effort, trying to keep a half-eye on the other animal, too.

This time, as the weight of the dog accelerated downward, its head found the rock. A sickening crunch, and she felt it go limp. She turned from it and grabbed her last arrow. The other dog was backing away from her.

“Get out!” she screamed at it. This was her last arrow. And she really didn’t want to kill the second dog. She felt bad enough about the first one. She screamed again, high and loud, a wordless threat.

The second dog turned and ran, limping.

Coral waited until it disappeared, then another few minutes to make sure it wasn’t coming back for her, and she let her arms droop. She sagged. Her legs refused to hold her up any longer, and she fell to her knees. The bow and last arrow fell from her hands, now trembling from the excess of adrenaline.

What had she turned into? Killing some poor starving pup for a few bones. She covered her face with her hands, moaning from the sorrow of it.

She thought she had understood how the world had changed. But new experiences kept slamming her with this new, awful reality. They were only dogs. But they were the enemy, too.

After several seconds of kneeling there, she roused herself. She had to make sure this dog was really dead. She approached the body. Five arrows protruded from it, two snapped off short. Blood matted its fur. The skull was dented. She reached into its rough fur and felt its chest. No heartbeat. The heat of life still poured from it, but it was dead.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She stroked the soft fur on its lopsided skull. “I bet you were a good dog once. Before.”

Before The Event, she meant, before civilization had ended, making men and dogs into something they hadn’t been—or into something she hadn’t wanted to see that they always were, just beneath civilization’s thin veneer.

And now the dog was food, wasn’t it? It’d keep her and Benjamin alive a few extra days. She’d have to explain why she drove off the other dog, another three days’ meals wasted. There was no rational excuse for that. She’d have to apologize for letting it go, and accept her partner’s disapproval.

Coral pulled herself together. She wiped at her numb face with her gloves, then checked the sled. The gear there was undisturbed. The animals had been drawn to the smell of the soup maybe, or to the buried meat, or were prowling a regular territory when they happened upon the camp.

After tending to her bite wound, she hunted down her arrows. She found the few she’d missed with, then went back to the dead dog and tugged at all of the arrows’ shafts. Two of the arrows had been screw-tipped ones, she thought, but the tips didn’t come out. She’d have to hunt for the screws inside the dog when she dressed it. Two shafts had been bitten through by the dog or broken off as he rolled.

She’d need to find more wood for new arrows. It was a rare commodity, and if she was going to destroy half her arrows every time she killed something, she needed to work harder at making arrows from here on out.

Pulling her knife from her pocket, she flipped it open. She tugged the dog away from the rock, got to her knees, tossed off her gloves, and began to dress the animal, trying to mimic what she’d seen Benjamin do to the rabbit. She forced the biggest knife blade, very sharp now, into the skin and began tugging at it. It didn’t come off like the rabbit’s had. She had to saw at it. Her lower lip began to hurt and she realized she was biting into it.

Taking a deep, shaky breath, she forced herself to become methodical, mechanical. This was a game animal, and she had to dress it. It was meat. It needed cleaning and freezing. It would help keep them alive. Not a pet—just meat.

When she had the belly split open, she pulled out the intestines, separating them into edible and not. That is how Benjamin found her, minutes later, bent over the split carcass of a dog, contemplating the twists of the bowels. She heard Benjamin trot up, breathing hard, knowing him from the sound of that, but she did not look immediately at him.

He said nothing. A moment later, he knelt beside her. She couldn’t look at him but could feel him staring at her.

“I can do this, kiddo,” he said.

She tried to say she could do it, but she couldn’t force a word past her tight throat. Feeling stupid and inept and childish, she left him to it.

The buried rabbit organs were gone, along with one fish head. The other was mangled, dropped by one of the dogs after he’d chomped on it. She buried it again, in a fresh spot; it would still make a pot of soup. One dog had gotten a meal. The other had become a meal. The new way of the world.

* * *

That night, Coral ate the rest of the rabbit soup. She let Benjamin cook the dog’s liver and eat that. She made herself sit across from him but didn’t watch him bite into it.

“You’ll have to eat this meat,” he said.

She tried to speak, but her voice still wouldn’t come easily. Clearing her throat, she forced herself to say something. “I can’t. Not today.”

“You going to be able to eat it tomorrow?”

“Yeah. When I’m hungry enough.”

“You are hungry enough, Coral. We’re both chronically underfed, and it’s red meat, which we both need.”

“I know that.”

“This wasn’t a family dog, anyway. It was probably a farm dog. Probably slept outside. They raise those dogs to barely tolerate human presence outside the family.”

She looked down, and only then she saw that blood still splattered her jeans. “I want to change clothes.” She stood.

“You’ll eat breakfast tomorrow?”

“I’ll eat breakfast,” she promised.

She walked behind him to change clothes at the sled. She used the rest of the evening light to wash her jeans of the dog’s blood, heating lake water first, then sluicing the thick material in and out of a cooking pot. It was full dark by the time she had wrung the jeans out and laid them out to dry on the snow.

After leaving the dying fire, she joined Benjamin, who had already crawled into their makeshift bedroom under the sled. The air inside there was close and warm. His breathing told her he was wide awake.

She crawled into her bag, turned her back to him and tried to relax.

“You want to talk about it?” His voice was soft.

“No.”

“I heard you screaming—lucky I hadn’t gone far. I ran back as fast as I could.”

They lay in silence. She could feel him waiting for her to say more. “I had to kill it.”

“That’s right. There was nothing else you could do.”

“Even if it hadn’t attacked me, I should have killed it anyway. And the other one, if I’d been able. We need the food. I’m sorry I let the other go.”

“No reason to be. You did good,” he said.

The kindness in his voice was going to turn the lump in her throat to tears. She felt ashamed at her weakness and wondered about her sanity. She’d killed a man—maybe two, if the guy back at Mill Creek had died of the blows to his head. She had seen mummified bodies, frozen bodies, and charred human bones. And yet it was the death of a dog that undid her. “You must be sick of putting up with me. I’m no good at this. You must think of me as a horrible burden.”

“I think you’re a trooper,” he said.

“Thanks,” she whispered. The images of death spun through her mind, the dog laid open, the teenaged boy she’d killed, the first human bone she’d pulled from the ash, the kid dead in the storm cellar, smelling of rot, the dead dog again. And that wasn’t a fraction of the deaths that had come since the Event. There were millions more, just as dead, just as sad. Maybe everyone she had ever loved. She couldn’t stop a sound of misery.

They almost never touched each other, but Benjamin put a tentative hand on her back. She let the tears come, but she bit her lips against making any noise. It was only an animal, she told herself.

Just food. Just food. Just food. She kept saying it to herself until she fell asleep.

* * *

The next morning, as she checked the dog meat to make sure it was freezing okay under the snow, she could feel him watching her, but she didn’t turn to look back. She was embarrassed she had cried last night.

“I’ll go hunt up north again,” he said. “I may be gone overnight, if you don’t mind.”

“You want to wait for fish to take with you?”

“No. I’ll take a can of something, and some of the new meat.”

She appreciated that he was trying to be kind by not naming it. “Here. Take my knife.”

“You need it.”

“I’ll keep the hunting knife. The army knife has the can opener. If you take a can, you’ll need it.” She plucked it out, turned, and tossed it over to him.

He caught it. “You okay?”