Gray (Book 2) (5 page)

“Not unless you learn to tap maple trees and make your own.”

“
What
maples trees?” she asked.

“Good point. I guess honey bees are all gone, too.”

“I assume somewhere on the planet there are some,” she said wistfully. She hadn’t seen a leaf or pine needle in ten weeks. Some days, dizzy with hunger, she entertained the thought that she might have imagined them.

Benjamin drew her a rough map of the state in the ash. “We’ll have to lose the Snake River to get to where I’m thinking of. But there are more lakes and reservoirs up there, and other, smaller rivers.”

“Sure,” she said.

“You know, there’s the rail line not too far north of here, too. I think when we find it, we should take a couple days to follow it.”

“Which direction?”

“Both. When we cross it, let’s split up, and you go east, and I’ll go west. If we’ve found nothing by the end of the first day, camp, and then retrace our steps and meet back up.”

“Okay,” she said. If they didn’t find anything, they’d have lost two days and gone through more of their slim food stores. It was a risk. But everything was a risk now. Every step she took, she might fall and break a leg, and that might mean death in this new, bleak world. “Let’s give the train tracks a try.”

* * *

They cut north along the line of a highway, as near as they could keep to it now that its surface was hidden beneath the gray snow. When they came to the rail line on a bitterly cold mid-morning, they hid the sled in a low spot next to the tracks and covered it lightly with snow. Coral carried her good pack, Benjamin her day pack. She took the bow and arrows and her hatchet, as well as her pocket knife, and he took the rifle and the new, bigger knife. They both took their sleeping bags. The plan was, walk until dark, build a snow cave, sleep, and turn around in the morning to meet back here at the sled about midday tomorrow.

For long miles, Coral walked along the straight track. The snow had mounded over each rail, so there was a shallow central u-shaped ditch to walk along. On either side, the ground sloped away from the embankment the rails were built on. It was impossible to get lost.

And it was a relief to walk without pulling or pushing the heavy sled. For the first few hours, it was almost pleasant, like taking a hike in the dead of winter.

It reminded her of that weekend when she had tried cross-country skiing—Coral stopped in her tracks at the memory and smacked herself on the forehead. Why hadn’t they thought of trying to make skis for themselves? They could have done it way back at the start, when there was lumber to take from the house, and Benjamin had access to more tools. He probably could have planed floorboards into the right shape. She was trying to work out in her mind how skis were shaped, and how they might make them now with the few tools on hand, and how it would change the way the sled pulled, and she had been lost in thoughts of skis while walking for quite a while, when she realized she could see, in the distance, a train.

She sped her steps, but the train was a long way off, and a path had to be broken through the snow. Her legs were throbbing and she was panting through her mask when she finally arrived at the front of the train. It was at least thirty cars long.
Please, please, let there be something edible in there
. They still had fish on hand, but they’d been living on too few calories for too long.

At the first train car, she climbed up the back and peered between metal slats. Cars, new sedans. She let her eyes adjust to the darkness and finally made out a Ford logo. She doubted any of the cars would work, any more than any other car did, and she had no idea where their keys might be. Surely they didn’t leave them hanging in the ignitions for thieves to use.

“Thieves like me,” she muttered, as she climbed down. There was a heavy padlock securing the doors to the car carrier.

She checked every train car that she could see into. A third of them were empty. Several in a row held scrap metal, which Benjamin would like pawing through, were he here. Some flatcars had held something that had burned beyond recognition, except she could still see it had been flat rectangles. Maybe drywall? Something like that.

To her amazement, none of the cars had locks except for the car carrier. She wondered how they prevented theft from trains.

One open car had huge cable spools on it. The electrical cable was really thick, maybe for industrial use, and the insulation was intact. Off the top of her head, she couldn’t think of a use for it now, but there must be one.

There were a dozen double-stacked container cars next. Metal bracing ran over the ends of both containers. She studied it for several minutes before she realized it wasn’t a way to lock them, but a way to secure the top one to the bottom one so it didn’t fall off. Two containers had padlocks, visible from the ground, but when she climbed up, she saw the others were secured only by a narrow strip of aluminum, no heavier than a soda can. She bent the first back and forth a few times, and in snapped in two. Not much of a deterrent to a thief, was it? She wondered why they’d bothered with any sort of closure at all.

One by one, she opened the containers and examined the contents. There were a lot of paper products, now charred or burnt to ash. One container had ink pens, maybe once mounted to cardboard, now all melted together. Another had held a load of those Fischer-Price popcorn push mower toys for little kids, now also fused together from the heat. There was a container with nothing but ceramic refrigerator magnets. A magnet or two would be useful, surely.

She had closed the container doors as she went along but the left the magnet container open, so she didn’t lose track of it among the other containers.

She had nearly given up hope of finding food when she climbed on the last car of containers and broke the seal. She slid the latch up, yanked the door open, and was looking at charred cardboard boxes. She swept her glove over the front of the nearest one, and the cardboard disintegrated, leaving a stack of naked cans. They were the right size for food. Her heart sped.

Could she yank one from the middle without bringing the whole stack down on her? She shifted to the corner of the container, ready to jump off onto the snow bank below if the cans all tumbled out. She had to take off a glove to wiggle her fingers in the tiny space but finally got her fingertips around one can and sharply yanked it out of there. The stack of cans stayed put, undisturbed by her small theft. Her only injury was a broken fingernail.

Coral pulled out her pocket knife, flicked open the can opener, and cut part way around the can until she could bend the top back. Inside was a thin layer of congealed, frozen fat. She scraped it off with a fingernail and saw a familiar thin noodle.

“Oh god,” she said. She had in front of her a whole container of soup. Beef noodle or chicken noodle. Right now, frozen solid, but with a charcoal fire, edible condensed soups. She laughed, the sound echoing off the metal of the stacked containers. She almost kissed the can before she thought better of putting her wet lips onto frozen metal.

Staring up, she counted cans, did some rough measuring, and multiplied. The first layer she could see, maybe eight feet square, was probably twenty-four cans tall, thirty-six wide. And the container had to be at least...what? Thirty feet long, or maybe forty. She glanced down at the can to check its size. The container had to be over a hundred layers of cans deep, at least.

She was so excited she couldn’t multiply all those numbers. So she estimated. Call it thirty by thirty by a hundred cans of soup.

Almost 100,000 cans of soup. Could that be right? She closed her eyes and imagined a piece of paper, did the arithmetic again. She had been right.

Holy shit.

She was grinning so hard, her cheeks were starting to hurt. She wondered how many calories in a can. Lots of water there, so probably not much. Call it 200 calories. Call their real needs, sitting still in this kind of cold, 3,000 calories, and hauling the sled, 4,000 for her or 5,000 for him, calorie levels they had not come anywhere near for weeks now. And 100,000 cans times 200 calories would be? Her mind reeled at the numbers. Two million—no, twenty million calories in this one container. Divide by 4,000 calories.

5000 days of food for one person. 2500 days for two. Could that be right? She did the figures again, eyes closed, trying to see them as written out on paper. She thought it was right. Hell, if she was off by a factor of ten, it would still be 250 days’ worth of food. And if the container stacked on top of this one was the same, it was even more than that.

But the food would also lock them to this remote place. They couldn’t haul more than 50 or 100 cans on top of the regular weight of their gear. The thought she’d been hanging on to, of getting to Boise, maybe finding something there, was easier to let go of than she thought it would be. There was
food
here. That was all that mattered.

They would have to find a place to live within a half-mile. And a water source as close as possible. Especially with all the salt in soup, definitely they needed a good water source. And they needed a fuel source. Cans of frozen-solid soup wouldn’t do them any good at all. It needed defrosting.

She left the container door open and tossed the open can of soup down into the snow, then dropped to the ground.

There was no hurry. But she was so hungry. The can of soup tormented her. There was no way to eat it right now; it was solid ice. She had to have a fire. She walked the length of the rail car. There were four containers, identical ones, sitting on this one car. What if all four had soup in them? She laughed, a crazy sound splitting the silence of the still world around her.

Coral collapsed onto the ground and wrapped her arms around herself, shaking from excitement and fatigue and cold in equal measures. Damn it, they had food! Praise all the gods and the Campbell Soup Company—or whatever company had shipped the soup.

It took a good long while for her to get control of herself. She kept glancing up at the container doors to reassure herself she hadn’t been hallucinating. But the neat rows and columns of cans were still there, more and more revealed as a light wind pushed off the charred remains of the boxes.

Finally, the cold had seeped into her and made her stiffen up, and she realized she had to get moving again or risk frostbite. In fact, her butt was numb already. That’d be a horrible site to have to perform self-surgery on, wouldn’t it? She brushed herself off, tucked the open soup can into the outer pocket of her pack, and shouldered the pack.

If she only counted one container of soup cans, the food problem was solved for months. She would look into the rest of the containers in a moment. If there was more food, great. If not, they’d still be fine. She might get tired of eating ten cans of the same soup every day, but to have food she didn’t have to work to catch? It was a luxury she though she might never see again.

She walked to the end of the train, where there was an engine rather than a caboose. She studied it for a moment and thought it had been pushing the train, not pulling it, so the train had been headed west, probably to Boise. She climbed up the engine and found an unlocked door.

Inside, there was a control panel, electronic, and totally dead, of course. And a bunch of big machinery with levers. A couple plastic seats, not too badly charred. She sat down on one and pulled off her pack. She pulled out a fish fillet, still frozen, and chewed on it. Fish again, but maybe her last one for a long while. Ice crystals popped under her teeth. She held the bite of fish in her mouth until it defrosted, then swallowed. A shiver ran through her as the cold fish met her warm insides.

As she ate, her eyes roamed around the place. She spied a metal box on the floor between two built-in machines. After she’d finished the fish, she kneeled in front of the box, found its latches, and opened it.

It was full of tools. Most were familiar—big wrenches, long screwdrivers, and a pry bar. But some were mystery tools to her. Maybe Benjamin would know what they were.

Sometimes, she wondered why he needed her at all. If she were him, she might dump her. She didn’t have half the skills he had. She thought, and not for the first time, it might have been easier for him simply to kill her and have her for stew for a week.

But as little as she did know about Benjamin’s past, or his opinions, or his favorite books or movies or color, or even if he’d ever been married or not, she did think she knew his core character. She could trust him. She wasn’t in his menu plans, any more than he was in hers.

And now there was plenty of food for them both. If it didn’t make them sick—and she was confident, after eating the canned food from the Walmart, that it wouldn’t—they had more food than they’d know what to do with.

Part of her wanted to go running back toward the sled to share the news. But getting there early wouldn’t get Benjamin there any sooner.
Keep to the plan, girl. This soup isn’t going to wander off in the next fifteen hours.
In fact, no one seemed to have come upon the train in the months since the world changed. The intact metal seals on all the cars attested to that. There was no road next to the tracks. She supposed the remoteness—or the absence of survivors in this area—had made it difficult to find.

She spent the rest of the afternoon opening up the last of the containers in the train. The one car was the only one with food, but all four containers on that car had soup, apparently one variety to a container. The labels were gone, but she peeled back a lid of one can each and thought they were probably chicken noodle, plain chicken broth, tomato, and cream of mushroom. Not much protein, and not very calorie-dense, but man.... It was food, and beyond that, a small variety of food. The tomato soup had much-needed vitamins. It’d be awfully nice to find a container full of evaporated milk, too, turn the cream of mushroom into something actually creamy.

She had to smile at herself for that. What greed! No, forget the milk. This was enough. She was grateful for it.

When she was done exploring the train, she still had some daylight remaining to spend scavenging for charcoaled wood under the snow. She spared a thought for the railroad ties as potential fuel, but they were treated with something, right? They stank, certainly. Might give off toxic chemical fumes. She stuck to hunting for burned tree trunks under the snow. She finally uncovered a fat stump that looked to have fuel potential left in it. With her knife, she dug into the stump until she had a pile of tiny pieces of half-burned wood gathered into a pile, then struck her pocket knife’s magnesium fire-starter, and she soon had a small fire smoldering. She finished opening the four cans of soup, set them around the stump to heat, and began to dig herself a snow cave. By the time she was smoothing out the inside ceiling of the cave, she could smell the warming soup.

When she returned to the fire, the soup had mostly defrosted, though it wasn’t nearly as warm as body temperature. Close enough, though. It was edible. One by one she ate the cans, salty and thick and cold. She didn’t try to stop herself from moaning in pleasure at the flavors.

The next morning she woke terribly thirsty. Snow converted to water at a poor ratio, she knew from experience. Their two-quart pot packed with snow yielded less than a cup of water that still had to be filtered of the ash. Lakes were a much better source of water.

She finished the water she had on hand, dug into the stump to find more burnable wood, set another fire, and packed all the empty soup cans with snow to melt. Returning to the container car, she pulled down two cans each of every soup, loaded them into her backpack, and waited for the fire to melt the snow in the cans. She drank all the water, smothered the fire with snow, and turned west again, to meet back up with Benjamin.

He was waiting for her, having pulled the sled out and gotten it ready for travel. She wanted to surprise him by whipping out the soup, but she couldn’t stop herself from smiling long before she reached him.

He read her face right. “You found something,” he said.

Wordlessly, she took her pack off and extracted a can. She handed it to him.

He hefted it. “What is it?”

“Soup.” She pulled out all the other cans and lined them up on the snow. “A half a million cans of soup.”

“A half a—? Holy shit,” he breathed. “And no one else has found it?”

“Not a sign anyone has seen it but me.”