Gray (Book 2) (4 page)

“I will be.” She finally met his eyes. “If you see any good wood for arrows, bring me back some, would you? Straight wood. Crack one in half, and if it’s hollow, it’s no good.”

“Will do,” he said, giving her a small smile. With that, he was gone.

* * *

Benjamin hunted daily for the following two weeks while she fished and made more arrows. She pulled out the bow-making instructions for the first time in many weeks, and noticed something she hadn’t before. You could tip arrows with bones. Small fish bones were sharp, though not very heavy. She carefully stripped ligaments from the raw dog meat and tried binding fish bones to arrows with that. After a few flights through the air, the ligaments began to unwind.

She tried to puzzle it out. If she dipped the binding in water and let it freeze, would that work? Or mess up the arrow’s balance? As she re-read the instructions through the perspective of her additional experience with the bow, she realized she could improve her older arrows with more work, too. She hadn’t dried the wood as long as she was supposed to. Any wood they found from now on, she’d lash to the sled and let dry for two weeks before turning it into arrows. As she studied the illustrations, inspiration struck her. In lieu of feathers at the back to fletch an arrow, she could try thin strips of rabbit pelt. But again, she needed some way to keep them on.

She tried to imagine what a row of glue options might look like at a Walmart. Her memory had them all in plastic, and most plastics had melted, so that was no good. The heat might have hardened the glue inside anyway. She needed, instead, something in a metal can, the bigger a can the better. Roofing tar, maybe? Something in the paint aisle? Paint itself? She didn’t need something labeled “glue,” necessarily, but something sticky that had survived the high heat. She added it to her mental wish list. Needles, glue, monofilament line, lures, bullets.

And food, always food.

She had eaten some of the dog meat, trying it first while Benjamin was off hunting, cooking it over a small fire. If she vomited it up, she didn’t want Benjamin to witness it. But it stayed down. The trick was not to think about the source of the meat—or to think at all. Chew, swallow, repeat. Her stomach didn’t know dog from cow.

And it wouldn’t know human from pig, either. She hoped her hunger would never come to that.

They moved camp to the north, set up a new camp, and then a week later followed the lake to the west. Finally, they followed its western shore to the south for a third campsite.

They made it all the way around the lake without seeing anyone else—or the second dog, or much beyond three more rabbits and a marmot Benjamin shot. Alone one day, Coral saw a rabbit digging for food and got a shot off at it with an arrow, but it was a long way off, and her aim was off as well. The rabbit skedaddled, and she never had another chance at one. On the northern shore, they found enough submerged brush wood that had survived the fires for her to replenish her arrow supply.

Every day was much the same. Benjamin left to hunt and find fuel. She stayed with the sled, fished, made arrows, practiced with her bow, cleaned fish, ranged out to find what firewood or charcoal or arrow wood that she could, and she built a fire at mid-afternoon. If Benjamin came back, there was sometimes fresh meat to cook. If he didn’t, she made fish head and canned vegetable soup for supper and saved most of the fillets for when they ate together, or for Benjamin to carry with him.

The fish continued to bite on her lures or gut bait most days. She and Benjamin were feeding themselves, but not making enough headway in increasing their food stores. By the time they reached the southwestern edge of the reservoir, the last of the canned vegetables and fruit had been eaten. They had four cans of high-fat meat put aside for emergencies—that is, for worse emergencies than the constant emergency that was their hungry life in the new gray world.

“This is not going to work. I’d hoped we might be able to stay here,” Benjamin said, upon coming back one afternoon with nothing to show for a full day of hunting.

“Temperature is still dropping.” She didn’t want to think of trying to sleep under the sled if it were ten or twenty degrees colder than this.

He knew what she meant. “We could turn that silo on the east shore into a house. If we found a cast iron stove somewhere, put it on the sled, pulled it over, and heated the building at night—maybe only to freezing, but better than outside would be. That’s only if we could find enough wood to feed it, which we can’t. We’d need six months worth, at least two cords. If there’s not much food now around the reservoir now, there’ll be less when fall comes. So it won’t work.”

“I keep forgetting it’s not autumn yet.” Coral swept her hand around, pointing at the snowy landscape. Three to four feet of snow had accumulated, all of it light gray with ash it had pulled from the air as it fell. It was past mid-August and the air still wasn’t washed clean of the ash. She wondered if it ever would be, at least during her lifetime. Would she live to feel the sun shining down on her upturned face?

Benjamin’s voice cut into the thought. “We should keep moving west. We need to get as low in elevation as we can before winter arrives.”

“Maybe we’ll find someplace to stay over the winter. Another Walmart, one without anyone competing for the food. Or maybe there are concrete buildings in Boise, with basements.”

“Maybe,” he said. “It’ll take a while to get that far, though. I don’t think we’ll hit Boise any time soon.”

The next day, they packed to leave the reservoir for good. They traveled along the river, north of the interstate, walking to the west. When the river curved south and met the highway again, they slowed down to hunt through the skeletons of big trucks on the highway. They had learned passenger cars yielded nothing to help them survive, but they held out hope that one tractor-trailer stuck on the road would be full of canned food.

A few of the trailers were padlocked. Sometimes, they could break through the trailer’s side anyway, where it had been scorched by the fire. Half of the trailers they could get into were empty. In the others, they found mostly melted plastic, sometimes a carbonized load of paper, and sometimes items that had been useful once but were meaningless relics now, like half-melted computer printers.

Their best finds weren’t useful to them now, but could be useful one day to someone who had the means to drag the items away. There was a load of pipes, and there was one two-trailer load that carried two huge generators, nearly the size of compact cars.

“800 KVA,” she read aloud off the side. “What’s that?”

“Kilovolt amps, I think.”

She’d never fully grasped electricity in physics in high school. It all seemed like some form of magic, really, and she had never heard of that measurement. “I guess someone would really want these.”

“If they still work. And if a person could find a source of diesel, or manufacture one somehow.”

She put her shoulder against one. The straps holding it down had dried in the long heat and had broken with one sharp tug. But the big generator didn’t budge.

He laughed. “It’s gotta weigh five tons.”

“Yeah? I’ve gotten stronger pulling the sled, but probably not that strong.”

They left the generators for someone with the means to move them.

When they did find food, it wasn’t edible. There was a truckload of wrapped hamburger tubes. The boxes they were in had disintegrated, the burger had cooked, and the plastic had melted on to it. Before the freeze, it had gone bad, though because of the low temperature now, she had to get right up to it and sniff to detect the odor of burned and rotted meat.

Anything in refrigerated trucks had long since spoiled and was frozen solid now. Anything in paper had cooked and then gone bad. What they needed were cans, and ones without pop-tops. The cans from the Walmart had tasted hardly any different than normal. A little more metallic, maybe, a little softer in texture, but since they tossed a lot of it into soups, that didn’t matter. Poptop cans had exploded in the heat.

But luck wasn’t with them. They didn’t find a single truck of usable canned food.

Soon, the river and interstate parted ways again. They stuck with the river, which grew wider every few days. It provided them with a few small trout, but they were eating up the store of small-game meat he’d hunted around the reservoir. The hunger never abated. For maybe a half-hour after a meal, she didn’t feel desperately hungry. The other twenty-three hours every day, she was.

Hunger was a strange thing, when it was this constant. It kept her thinking of food all day, and those thoughts reminded her again of how hungry she was. She learned the various faces of hunger. There was the burning sort of hunger, the cramping in her belly, and sometimes, when the sensations coming from her belly had stopped, there was the dizziness if she stood up too quickly, followed by a couple minutes of trembling weakness.

The weather grew colder and colder as August wore on. They kept saying they’d pick a date and start keeping track, but they kept forgetting to do it, busy with the details of surviving, or numbed by hunger and exhaustion. The longer they were without calendars and clocks, the more days that passed, the less it seemed to matter. One day, they’d started calling the current time “August.” Any day now, one of them would say “September,” and they’d agree that’s what it was.

When the sun was visible again, they’d be able to measure its angle and know the solstices. But the sun wasn’t coming back anytime soon. It might as well be a rumor as real.

One night over an ice-cold supper of raw fish, she said, “I’d be going back to college about now, I think.”

“You miss it?”

“I miss everything,” she said. “My brothers and grandmother most of all. I wonder, are they out there worrying about me? Or are they dead, too?” It was the first time she had spoken the thought aloud without choking up. She felt a twinge of emotion at it. They were so far away, and there was no way to get to them. They belonged to another life now. The chances she’d ever see them again, even if they were alive? She knew they were vanishingly small. She asked Benjamin, “Isn’t there anyone you miss?”

“Not like that. I left my family a while ago.”

“Willing to talk about it?”

“Not at length. It’s a dull story anyway.” He bounced a water bottle against the toe of his boot to crack the ice in it and took a drink. “Religious differences, mostly.”

“I see.” Though she didn’t. Most people were the same religion and many had the same commitment to it as their folks—in her case, that meant not religious at all. But she didn’t pry further.

“More fish?” He held out half a trout.

“I’m fine.” A polite lie. She knew from her studies that chronic undereating was very bad for them both. Her heart was accumulating damage. Other organs. The brain.

She didn’t want to think about that, so she latched on to another topic to talk about. “I don’t get why the land here is so empty. Either the fire really hit it hard, or it didn’t have trees before The Event, either.”

“Ranch land, probably,” he said. “Trees were all cut long ago. Good place to bury nuclear missile silos, too.”

“If there were any, they didn’t get hit by any bombs that I can see. I still wonder if it was nukes,” she said.

“I don’t, at least not about that. It wasn’t a war.”

“So what was it?”

“I don’t know, and I really don’t care—not like you seem to. Maybe my crazy religious relatives were right all along, and it was the wrath of God—or of some god, slapping an angry palm down over some slight of humanity’s—or maybe not people, maybe mule deer did something wrong, and bam, a god’s angry palm. Or it’s some new super-weapon. Or an accident at one of those advanced physics labs. Something we can’t even imagine.”

“You just did.” She smiled. “Imagine them.”

He gave her a half-smile that faded fast. “I did. So something weirder than that. It might be something no one left alive can guess.”

Coral didn’t understand entirely why she wanted to know...but she did want to know. Maybe she needed someone to blame.

* * *

The river they were following soon widened and became a lake, not nearly as big as the American Falls Reservoir, but big enough that the far shore was invisible in the ash. They spent another two weeks circling this lake, though the hunting and fishing were not as good as back at American Falls.

“Still, it’s better than the river. I think we should try to stick to lakes if we can,” Benjamin said, when they had built up a cache of 20 frozen fish and two rabbits to carry with them on the next leg of the journey.

“You want to try and stay here through the winter?” He carried a mental image of Idaho and its roads in his head. He had the better survival skills, though she was slowly catching up. She’d be a fool not to listen to him. And she wasn’t a fool.

“We can’t stay for long. There’s nowhere to shelter, no building, no cave, and it’ll get too damned cold, and soon. But if we could find a lake that still had fish once a week, hop from lake to lake, we could survive, barely. I had hoped the river would give us more fish as we went west, but it seems to be producing less.”

In the remains of a cinder-block building by the lake, they found an empty vending machine, the glass missing.

Coral sighed at the sight. “Too bad. I’ll probably never have a candy bar again.”