Gray (Book 2) (8 page)

“As long as he leaves Lupe alone.”

“You got her again in the lottery for tonight?”

“And only second. Not bad, huh?”

“You must have some way of fixing the draw, man.”

The other man laughed. “It’s fate.”

“I only had her once, but it was after Evans. She wasn’t hardly any use at all. All bloody and crying and shit.”

“He’s an ass. No finesse with women. Hell, paying for it is probably the only way he ever got it before.”

“We already lost one because of him. I don’t see why the captain doesn’t take him out of the rotation.”

“She killed herself. You can’t blame Evans. The girl had no survival instinct.”

“There’s no reason to use ‘em up. It’s wasteful.”

“There’s more where those came from.”

“I wonder, man. We haven’t seen any survivors for almost a month.”

“They’re out there. Like whoever opened up this train car.”

“We should find them,” said Kentucky.

Coral’s throat closed tight. Don’t start looking now, please.

“When we come back tomorrow.” His voice was fading. “We’ll bring…” and the voices faded as they moved back toward the train engine.

Her throat dry with fear, she crawled back, moving stiffly on cold arms and legs. She remembered thinking, not too long ago, that she might be willing to whore herself for food or warmth—and she knew now that she had been very, very wrong. Every cell in her body told her that she wasn’t willing to do any such thing.

Move,
now
.

She slithered back out from under the train car, crawled back one more car, then two, then three and again, the drift between the two cars was low enough that she could stuff herself under the third car back. She wanted to actually see the guys, if she could, and understand what sort of enemy she was dealing with.

She crawled into this indentation and began to toss handfuls of snow back out, widening the space. She worked as fast as she could, but her limbs responded sluggishly to her commands. She hoped that her extremities would come back alive—at least enough to get her back to the snow cave and Benjamin.

As she burrowed closer to the north side of the train car, she began to dig more slowly. Punching a fist through while they were looking back this way was the last thing she wanted to do. What she wanted was enough space to peek her head out, or half her head, just one eye’s worth. She stopped and patted snow into five small bricks, ready to pile them up to block the spyhole she planned on making. She pushed more snow away, packing it to the sides and overhead, leaving herself enough room to turn around and scuttle out quickly, if need be.

After building a ledge to pile the bricks on, she carefully carved away more snow right above it, at head height. The daylight was visible through the thin crust of remaining snow now. She held her breath and listened. The voices weren’t audible. Either they were still down at the engine, or they were closer but weren’t talking.

Do it.

She punched her glove through the remaining snow and pushed one side of her head through, blinking away the snow that trickled down.

The first thing she saw was the vehicle—not a truck, she could see now. It was a Hummer, in camouflage, with U.S. ARMY stenciled on it. The men were nowhere near it. She risked pushing her head out a few inches more and looked up the length of the train, then back down it. They were nowhere to be seen. She pulled her head back. Her heart was pounding hard again, her throat dry, her jaw clenched against the fear.

The world had changed. It didn’t matter if they were military, or regular guys who had stolen an Army vehicle. Either way, they were enemies, not potential friends. Simultaneously with her having the thought, a man in a wool coat and fatigue pants backed down from the engine. A massive weapon was slung over his shoulder, the kind of big rifle they’d use in wars.

They had prisoners, including, it seemed women used as whores, and a working vehicle, and big weapons. She knew enough.

She piled her bricks up over the hole she had made, hoping the disturbance to the snow wasn’t glaringly obvious from the outside. Maybe they wouldn’t come back this way at all. If they drove fast past the spot, they’d probably not glance this far down to see the irregularity in the drift.

And in a moment, she was going to be gone anyway. She turned herself around, crawled back out into the diffuse daylight on the opposite side of the train, and crawled as fast as she could along the path she had made earlier. Every couple of train cars she paused, glancing back and listening for sounds of pursuit. There were none.

She passed the car carrier at the end of the train and, now that there wasn’t the bulk of the train to block her from view, made sure to keep her head low. Could she have tucked it in like a turtle’s, she would have. The awkward posture forced her to move more slowly. Twice, she rolled over to ease a cramp and to look past her boots, down the line of the train, hoping that the far end of the train had faded from view in the ash-filled air. The third time she let herself look, it had.

She stood on numb legs and stamped them on the ground, hoping to force some blood back into them. It did nothing to help. She staggered along on the dead things, passing over the rail line, right over her previous tracks. She wanted to run north immediately, but it was worth the delay, she thought, to spend five minutes trying to disguise her tracks right here, where they could see them from their vehicle if they drove it back this way.

The thought of the working Humvee engine bugged her. How the hell did they get that thing to run? No other car in Idaho was working, but that was?

On hands and knees again, she swept her arms over her boot prints, backing up, sweeping out more and more, and wishing she had a blanket to speed the process.

She erased her tracks for ten yards, then twenty, swinging her stiff arms like clubs. By the time she figured she had the length of a football field smoothed over, she stood again, checked to the east to make sure she still couldn’t see them. She turned and began to run the best she could on numbed legs. It was more of a stumble than a run.

She had gone no more than another quarter of a mile, and her legs had begun to tingle and prick with new blood flow, when she heard the Humvee’s engine.

It was coming this way.

If only she’d gotten another quarter-mile away, or back to the ridge. She could see it ahead of her, but there was no way she could reach it in time.

Dig in
.

She fell to her stomach and burrowed into the snow, arms scrabbling, as fast as she could make the numb things move. She crawled forward a foot and kept digging, making a trench for her body. The engine noise increased, and she lay flat, rolling to her back, pressing herself down, hearing a crack as either her bow or an arrow snapped beneath her. A worry for later. She flung snow over her the dark line of her jeans legs, and then, as the engine noise reached a higher pitch, lay still, hardly daring to breathe.

The engine noise hesitated, and her heart leapt into her throat. She pushed her head down and closed her eyes, like a little kid. If I can’t see them....

The engine noise changed again, moving up in pitch and, as they passed her position and drove on to the west, back down in pitch. The world grew quieter.

She waited until the motor sound faded away entirely, and then she counted “one-one-thousand, two one-thousand” up through two hundred seconds more. Her head came up and she looked back toward the rail line. Nothing. The scene was entirely quiet. There was no sign that anyone had been there.

No sign at all that her life had just changed again.

She leapt up and began running. Twice she fell before she hit the ridge, her legs burning now as they came back alive. She ran over the ridge and felt marginally safer. As fast as she could, she ran back along her own track, terribly obvious to her. If they had seen her—or it—they’d have been able to come up on Benjamin, too, catching him unaware, after capturing or shooting or raping or running over her.

If only they’d been good guys. A wave of anger at herself swept through her. “Quit being such a goddamned infant, Coral,” she muttered. “It isn’t that world anymore.” There were exactly two nice guys remaining that she could be sure of—herself and Benjamin. She had to get that through her thick head.

She wondered where the Army guys were going. They had prisoners. How many? What if they had a lot of friends? A whole Army base of them? All of them with working vehicles and automatic rifles? Or tanks or grenades or rocket launchers? Most of them interested in replacing the poor worn-out Lupe with fresh meat—with Coral.

She and Benjamin would have to move, fast and far.

But when she came to camp, he wasn’t there yet.

She made herself calm down and think. If Benjamin had found animal tracks, he might have detoured. Or he might be avoiding the forced company of the camp. Either way, surely he was headed back by now.

It didn’t make sense to chase after him. She surely could do something useful here to prepare for his return. But what? She couldn’t load the sled. It wasn’t here.

But she could scrub out more of her tracks from today, starting here, and moving out from there, so that if they found her track, they could follow it a while, but then not know which way she had turned. And get the supplies outside ready to load on the sled.

Tracks first. Now she could use her sleeping bag for that. She retrieved it from the snow cave, loaded it with cans of soup, as many as she could drag, and went out along her tracks, out until they turned south. She was getting pretty good at this. If they saw even a dusting of snow tonight, she thought very few people could follow the signs she had left.

Back at the camp, she spared a moment of worry for Benjamin. The day was wearing on. She’d hoped he’d be back in time for them to put several miles between them and the train before nightfall. She opened up the garage again and began pulling out supplies, piling them up on the snow, trying to remember the order of packing from before. They’d been stationary for long enough, she’d nearly forgotten what constant travel had been like.

And constant, gnawing hunger. She winced at the thought of losing the container car of soup.

They had set aside a hundred cans of it as their emergency supply. That and the couple dozen they had inside the snow cave entrance were all the food they had now. It would feed them for maybe ten lean days. And it’d be damned heavy to haul at first. Not that she saw they had any other choice.

The cans had been such easy food. From now on, it would have to be ice fishing, hunting, and more hungry days.

That reminded her to check on her bow. She had dumped her pack off by the fire ring. She pulled out her bow and arrows, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw her good bow was still intact. It had been an arrow that had cracked when she had rolled on them—bad enough, but not a disaster. She still had her back-up bow, if the good one was ruined, but she could only shoot half the distance with it.

Both were utterly useless against a bunch of army guys with high-powered rifles.

“C’mon Benjamin,” she muttered. “Get back here!”

Once she had all the goods from the garage piled up, she crawled into the snow cave. First, she took the soup cans from the end of the tunnel and piled them next to the other supplies. Then she rolled up his sleeping bag, and hers, and tossed them both on the stack of soup cans. Finally she gathered the pots, utensils, and water bottles from around the fire. Rearranging the pile of goods to make packing the sled more efficient, she decided that was the end of what she could do.

He still wasn’t back, and there was nothing more she could think of to prepare for leaving. She grabbed her sleeping bag, and a can of the still-defrosted soup, and took them back into the snow cave. At least she could get warmer again while she was waiting. Her legs and arms were still numb enough to worry her. She crawled into her bag, ate cold soup, and spent a half hour rubbing her legs together and her arms against her sides, trying to create more heat through friction. Slowly, she began to warm up, until only her toes were numb.

She crawled into the patch of light near the tunnel entrance, pulled off her boots and socks and examined all her toes. They were awfully pale, but she didn’t think she’d lose any. The weather was getting colder all the time. She was going to have to be more careful about frostbite. So was Benjamin.

Damn. Where was he?

He walked up, appearing from the ashen air when there were only a couple hours of light left, pulling the sled. She was, irrationally, angry from worrying and knew it showed in her voice.

“Where have you been?” she demanded.

At nearly the same instant, he said, “What’s wrong?” He pointed to all the piled-up supplies.

“I’ve been so freaked,” she said. “There are guys.”

His eyes darted around.

“At the train, I mean. Army guys. They have a working vehicle. And really big guns.”

He processed this for a second. “Okay, tell it from the beginning.”

“I think we should pack the sled while I talk.”

“Did they see you? Know we’re here?”

“No. But they might find my trail.”

“Not at night they won’t,” he said.

“I think we should go now. Get as far away as possible.”

“How many?”

“Just two. But there are more somewhere else—and they were headed back to them. And they have prisoners. I don’t want to become another.”

“Okay. Let’s load ‘er up.” Unceremoniously, he twisted the sled and dumped off the ice he had spent the day collecting.

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You stayed out of sight, gave us a chance. That’s all we need.”

“Do you think I should have tried to make contact with them?”

He stopped what he was doing to look at her. “Do you think you should have?”

“No.” She told him what she had overheard. “It was more than the concept of them having prisoners, or whores, or prisoners used that way. More than the guns. I can’t tell you why, but I had a bad feeling from the start, and everything I heard them say made the feeling worse.”

“I’m glad you trusted it,” he said. “Hand me the tool box, would you?”

They loaded the sled, but it took too long. They were losing light by the time they were done. “Should we stay here until morning?” she said.

“No. You’re right about putting distance between us. We can make the stream bed tonight, at least.”

“You need food first,” she said.

“I can do without.”

“If the cans from the snow cave are still defrosted, you may as well fuel up now, while it’s edible. It might be a while before we can risk a fire.”

“Right. See if you can find them.” The cans were piled up, covered, and secured with the nylon rope, and she had to untie that to get to them. With her right glove off, she touched every one, found some less cold to the touch, and shook each it to see if it felt like liquid or solid ice. She tossed two cans to the side. Then she rebuilt the load. “These are still liquid, I think.” She opened the cans for him.

He finished getting the harness set up. “It’s going to be damn heavy.”

She handed him the soup. “I’ll pull.”

“Either way, doesn’t matter. It’ll take us both everything we have to get it going. But we can’t leave the last of the food behind.” He tilted his head back and upended the first can over his mouth.

“I know. I’m sorry we’ve lost the rest of it.”

“Eat.” He scraped out the first can with his fingers and tossed it aside. “And quit being sorry.”

“I ate, Benjamin. I feel like I brought it on us somehow. If I wouldn’t have noticed the engine sound, gone to see them, we could be blissfully unaware, eating hot food, settling down to sleep in our well-built cave.”

“You know you’re being absurd, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.” She stared at the loaded sled, feeling hopeless.

“Coral. Look at me. Did you do anything wrong?”

She met his eyes. “Not that I can think of. But I probably did screw up somehow.”

“I doubt it, but let’s try and figure out if you did. Tell me again everything that happened, in detail, while we pull.”

“Where are we going? Tomorrow, I mean.”

“Due north. I want to aim toward the edge of the mountains. If we have hills and big boulders, we have more places to hide. If we’re crazy lucky, we might find a cave. Easier to defend that.”

“We can’t move as quickly in that kind of terrain.”

“Right now, hiding is the priority.”

“And water.”

“And water,” he agreed. “We need to find a lake. The bigger, the better. More chance there’ll be liquid water under the surface of ice, so we won’t have to stop to build a fire to melt drinking water.”

“You know where any lakes are?”

“Not exactly. But there are some up there, among the foothills. Reservoirs and natural lakes, both.”

He tossed the last empty can aside and kicked some snow over it. “I’m ready.”

“Then let’s do it.”

She stood behind the sled and threw her body weight into getting it started. She heard Benjamin grunt with the effort of pulling, and at first, she was afraid they weren’t going to get it to budge. It had never been this heavy before. After another few minutes of digging in and pushing, she felt the sled finally give under her pressure, and they began to move off.

* * *

By the end of the first full day, they were exhausted, hungry, and still afraid of what might be coming up behind them. When they came across a patch of downed big trees, they stopped. While he dug another snow cave, she set a small fire and melted drinking water and soup, six cans each, eaten straight out of the cans. She then slept like the dead.

Snow fell the following day. They pulled almost without rest, not bothering to eat mid-day. At the end of the day, they dug another snow cave and were so exhausted they fell to sleep without bothering to hunt for fuel. The next day, they packed soup cans in their pockets, defrosting them with body heat, and ate as they moved.

The third day after fleeing their camp, soon after midday, the wind picked up until it hurt to be in it, swirling snow around that quickly turned her cheeks and exposed forehead raw. They dug a snow cave immediately to protect themselves from the biting wind. Both of them were so exhausted, they dozed off and on for the rest of the day and still slept the night through. The sled was barely visible behind a snow drift.

The good news was, the wind had erased all signs of their passage, as well. There had never been any sign of pursuit, but now it seemed unlikely that the army guys could find them.

They found fuel and stayed in place that day and a second night, resting from the hard work of pulling so much weight so quickly, on so little food.

In the morning, the wind had died down to nothing. They ate, they drank, and Coral put on the harness to start the day’s pull.

Moving through the increasingly rocky terrain was harder, and slower, just as she’d predicted. They came upon a frozen stream and stopped there for two nights, taking time to gather wood, eat their way through half of their soup cans, and drink their fill of water. By the time they were ready to move on, Coral had lost all track of time, but Benjamin said they should call it Halloween, “for shits and giggles.”

She said, “Days are getting shorter. When I think about how cold it is already, giggling isn’t what I feel like doing.”

“No,” he agreed, “it’s not funny at all.”

They were not lucking into finding game, nor any sign of a lake or reservoir. Benjamin promised that the next stream they found, they’d follow downhill, for it might lead to one. They both felt sure they’d eluded the Army guys, but if they only had done so to freeze or starve to death, it didn’t feel like much of a victory.

All in all, though, she thought starving to death in the snow might be a better end than being systematically raped by a bunch of strange men.

* * *

One long and tiring day, with only a few cans of food left, they climbed to the slopes of the next ridge, hoping to see water, but when they descended they found themselves struggling down a dangerously steep slope, studded with giant towers of sculptured rock, some with tiny wasp waists above which were balanced boulders that must have weighed well over a ton. One the size of a compact car was balanced on a point no bigger round than her fist. Coral split her attention between the challenge of braking the sled on the slope so it didn’t run over Benjamin, and keeping her eye on the precarious stone pillar as she passed it, hoping that the weight of snow would not send it tumbling onto both of them.

They clambered over a crest in the rocks and camped on a narrow ledge eight feet below it. The next day, climbing on down, they found themselves in a deep ravine, hunting for the creek they hoped would be here.

“I hope this isn’t a box canyon,” said Benjamin. He was at the front of the sled and in harness. He insisted on taking more than his share of time in harness now that his ribs were healed.

“Maybe we should leave the supplies right here and hunt for water on foot,” she said. Her arms were bruised from wrestling the sled around the rocks, and every muscle burned. She could do without fighting the sled’s weight for a time.

But Benjamin shook his head. “This is a deceptive landscape,” he said, “and there’s a chance of avalanche. We’d be in real trouble if the sled got buried while we were away from it. I don’t think we should move far away from it—or from each other.”

So it’d be better if the two of them were buried along with the sled? She kept herself from saying that aloud, knowing her exhaustion was making her short-tempered. “I’m done in,” she confessed. “I don’t know how long I can work like this on so little food.”

“Then we’d better move now, rather than in two days, when the soup runs out and we have no energy left at all.” He faced forward and began pulling again.