by Lou Cadle
Once she had caught her breath, she pulled herself hand over hand along the tree toward the bank. Her feet hit solid surface again and she was able to stand. Mud still poured from the sky as she made her way to the shore. She reached solid ground and yanked her mask off then washed it in the stream and wrung it dry. She had no idea where her pack was. The rain came down harder.
She hung her head, letting the rain pound the back of her head. There was no protection from it, nowhere to run. All she could do was stand there and take it. “Shit,” she said. Then louder: “shit, shit shit shit SHIT!”
Yelling didn’t stop the mud from falling, but it made her feel a little better. Keeping her head down, spitting out bits of grit, she hiked back upstream until she found her pack. She sat next to it, pulling her jacket over her head as an umbrella, and waited out the miserable storm.
*
The next morning, she woke to dry skies and cooler air. The ash still filled the air, but she thought she could see a few yards further across the stream. Maybe the rain would be worth enduring, if it could wash the ash out of the air.
And if the airborne ash was getting thinner, that meant that whatever had caused it was over, right? Whatever The Event had been, it wasn’t ongoing, putting more of this stuff—whatever it was—into the air.
The stream ran high and muddy. She cast her line and was surprised to get a bite almost immediately. Again, she caught fish enough for that day’s meals. Raw trout was becoming tedious, grateful as she was for it. She wished she could find vegetables or fruit. If only she could find one little bit of land that had been saved from the fire, one intact house with food, or even a cache of firewood so she could cook the fish.
But she wouldn’t find it sitting still. She ate her raw fish breakfast, packed up the rest, and then moved on again, trusting she’d find another fishing spot tomorrow or the day after.
*
The next day, she came to a road. She would have passed it right by, not recognizing it as road, except that at the stream’s edge there was a metal barrier meant to keep cars from driving into the stream at a curve in the road. That led her to the road.
She followed it away from the stream and walked straight ahead, trying to keep to the road by aiming at the space between the tree skeletons.
Within yards, she came to a crossroad, a patch of gravel visible under the ash at a high spot on the road. The gravel road led to her left, paralleling the stream, the gravel itself turned into a pockmarked gray corridor by the thick layer of ubiquitous ash. Ahead, the main road jogged away from the stream.
Not far from the intersection lay a dead mailbox, one of the large metal boxes with several locked slots in a grid, meant for more than a single household. Its metal post was twisted and bent. The boxes sagged to the ground. Scorch marks fanned across the surfaces. She poked at its ruin with her toe. The thin metal crumbled beneath her boot like eggshell. Anything that had been in it was ash now.
Leaving the fallen mailboxes, she continued along the road, looking for some sign of the houses she now knew had to be here. In a few minutes, the curve of what was once a driveway appeared on her left, and she followed it back.
A concrete corner of the foundation told her where the house must have stood. A low pile of ash sat where the house had once been. There was far less left of the house than seemed possible, only a couple of cracked foundation walls, some curls of metal poking out of the ash pile and a gray mound carved with runoff from the rainstorm. That was all she could see as a sign that human beings had once lived here. She made her way to the wreck of a house and stirred through the ash with her boots, but she only raised more dust. Still, she hunted awhile, hoping for cans of food—but nothing like that had survived the fire. Coughing, backing away from the ruin, she felt a wave of pity for the homeowner. She hoped the house’s residents had evacuated before the fire reached them.
But to where? Nothing she had seen so far suggested there was someplace to run to. Certainly not anywhere nearby.
She walked down the little road until it seemed to end, spotting nine burned house sites along the way. Not a single house had survived. Some were left with only the square of the foundation. Two chimneys stood among the ruins. A waist-high pile of blackened fieldstone was the most intact bit of construction she found. A few house sites had a burned-out truck or car, only the metal shell remaining. The completeness of the devastation was shocking.
She wondered about the people who had lived here, those folks who had stopped by the mailbox to get their mail on the way home. Were they year-round residents or was this a summer cottage community? They had enjoyed good fishing right outside their back doors. She imagined children playing tag in the yards, grandmothers shelling peas on porches, young men and women raising hands to each other in greeting as they drove the gravel path back home. Unless they had evacuated before the fire got here, nothing was left of those lives now.
She came to the end of the little neighborhood, and of the gravel road. Turning around, she began to systematically search the rubble more carefully on her way back.
In the second house’s ruins, a short metal rod stuck out of the ashes of the house. She picked it up and used it to stir in the ashes. By this time, she didn’t really expect to find anything.
Her metal rod contacted some solid object deep in the ash. Reaching down, she groped around and found something round. Pulling it out, she stared at it for a second before she saw what it was.
A charred femur.
She dropped the bone as if it were still on fire. Then she forced herself to bend down and pick it up again. Yes, it had to be a human femur. She had taken anatomy just this spring, and the test on bones had been in mid-February. She recognized the smooth round head of the bone, the point of the greater trochanter. The tip of the distal end had been partly burned away, but she could still see the patellar surface and the dip of the intercondylar notch. There was no flesh left on it. She laid the bone carefully on the ash.
She didn’t want to stir in the ash again. If she did, she wondered if she would find the other femur, the pelvis, a skull and teeth. Maybe more. Maybe child-sized bones. No. Don’t even think about that.
Coral wondered why this person hadn’t gotten out. Had the femur’s owner stayed with the house to safeguard its contents? Had he been overtaken by the fire with no warning? Or maybe he had been injured and couldn’t get out, like an old man in a walker. Involuntarily, Coral shuddered. If that were so, she hoped the bone’s owner had been unconscious when the end came. The idea of someone having to watch helplessly as a firestorm swept over him—it was too awful to consider.
But everything she had seen was all too awful to consider. It was real, nevertheless. Death was all around her. If she stirred enough ashes, she feared she would see even more signs of it.
She wondered why she had survived. She was no more deserving of life than the person whose bone lay there, and surely less deserving than many others who had died. It seemed such a random gift, her survival. Had she not been able to get into the cave in those first seconds, she’d be dead, maybe of ash inhalation, maybe of the heat, maybe of the flames. Had the heat lasted for ten days instead of four, she’d be dead. Had she not kept her backpack ready to go, dead. Had she not found the stream, dead. Had she not found some fish, she’d be on her way to dead. At every turn, the most reasonable fate for her seemed to be death.
That she had escaped that fate was humbling. All she could do to honor the gift of her life was to go on, one foot in front of the next, trying to survive until she found her way back.
Chapter 5
She turned away from the burned settlement and back to the stream. She still hoped to locate food, survivors, working radios or cell phones, though she now suspected she would have to find a sizeable town to find any of that.
A few hours later, a light breeze began blowing at her back. Soon after, she came to another metal barrier and another small road, one that ran perpendicular away from the stream. She
hesitated, afraid of finding more bones, but she knew she had to go on and try to find food, fuel, living people. She turned to the road.
Coral followed it up a hill. In minutes, it brought her to within sight of another chimney, a hundred yards or so off the roadway. She made her way toward the burned-out house.
The foundation was for a small house, no more than a cabin, nestled between thick trunks of burned trees. It had probably been a peaceful place to live once. Now it was a ruin. Coral walked around the foundation, unwilling to dig in the ashes lest she find more human remains. If there were signs anything had survived, she’d dig for cans of food, but it looked like total destruction again.
She saw something move out of the corner of her eye. A dozen paces away, a light-colored scrap of something stirred as the wind picked up.
Coral walked to it, cupping her hands around her eyes to protect them from the swirling ash.
It was fabric, a flag. White cotton tied around an unburned bit of dowel, with something written on it in red, the color shocking among a world of black and gray.
She bent down to take hold of the flag to read it. The dowel was a wooden kitchen spoon.
“Kirk,” the flag said. Nothing more.
Coral looked all around, looking for any possible sign of human activity. Obviously, someone had put it here after the fire had swept through. But where was that person now?
She began to search for any sign of a human presence, walking a slow spiral out from the flag, looking closely at the ground, hoping to see some slight indentations in the ash that suggested footprints. But rain and wind had removed any trace of tracks, if there had been any. After long minutes of careful searching for the sign of a person, she gave up and went back to the flag itself.
“Hello?” she called. Her voice was rough with disuse. She peeled the bandana off her face and called again, louder. She turned to face the opposite direction. “Anyone out there?”
She stopped and listened, hoping for an answer, desperate for the sound of another human voice, but there wasn’t any. Not even the stream’s trickle could be heard from here. No bird sang. Nothing broke the silence.
Her eyes slid to the ground by her feet, looking at the place where the spoon had been half-buried in ash. She shrugged her pack off, kneeled and slipped her mask back in place then began digging in the ash around the flag.
Under the layer of ash and darker fire soot, there was a rigid surface, cool to her fingertips. Coral brushed at it, uncovering a slab of concrete. She continued sweeping off the surface and found metal. It was like a manhole cover—but square—set in a border of more concrete, the metal sunken neatly into a recess.
Her fingers slid around the edges of the central slab, seeking a handhold. They found an indentation, and Coral scrambled around to get a better angle. She got a grip and heaved up the concrete plate. It stuck at first, then eased up four, five inches. Falling from her grasp, it hit the concrete with a hollow ring.
The slab sat askew of its opening, leaving a narrow triangle of empty space. Faint yellow light spilled out of the opening, as did a foul odor. Coral recoiled from the smell and then forced herself closer again. “Hello?” she called down.
No answer.
Shoving the cover aside, she looked into the opening and saw, below her, an underground shelter, a tornado shelter, maybe. There was a cot down there and on the cot, a body, either a very slight adult or a pre-teen kid.
The smell was coming from that. The person was at least a few days dead.
“Ah, man,” she said. But she knew she had to go down there, no matter what it smelled like. If there were a radio, or food, or a camp stove, she had to find it.
Gagging at the stench, she let herself down into the hole on a rickety ladder positioned under it. The smell was even worse inside. It’d drift out the opening eventually, but for now, it was horrid. First thing, she tossed a blanket over the body, which, though she tried not to see it, seemed to be that of a 12-or 13-year-old boy.
Don’t think about it.
There was a pile of blankets on the floor, a couple folding camp chairs, and some rickety shelves. A five-gallon white plastic pail on the floor, when she popped it open, ended up being a slops jar. She covered it quickly and pulled her shirt up over her face, trying to block the bouquet of awful smells of the place.
There was some food. Three cans of tuna and some fruits and vegetables. Grabbing three cans, she went to the opening and tossed them outside. The second can rolled back, and she caught it and tossed it out again. She got three more cans and threw those up and out. And then she quickly climbed the ladder and walked away until she could bear to breathe again. The smells clung faintly to her—rotting flesh and sewage.
It was only then that she let the thought of the kid dying there, alone, waiting for Kirk, whoever that was, hit her full force. She sat on the ashy ground and cried. She cried for him, dying alone of who knew what, surely afraid. She cried for his family. She cried for all the other dead ones, their bones buried in the ash.
Mostly, though she was ashamed of the self-pity, she cried for herself.
If she were the only person left on the earth, she wouldn’t want to live.
Finally, she forced herself to stop. Tears weren’t helping. Thinking of death wasn’t helping her. Surely somewhere, a dozen or a hundred miles from here, people were alive. They had to be. Had to be.
Then why haven’t you seen or heard an airplane, or a helicopter, looking for survivors?
“As a pleasant conversationalist, you suck,” she said to the interior voice.
She shook herself, got up, and gathered her cans. She hiked down to the river again and set up camp there. She’d wait a couple days for the storm shelter to air out, then go back and look more carefully, scavenging whatever food was left and whatever supplies might help her survive.
The difference between a diet of only fish and fish plus the food from the cans was astonishing. She attended to the taste of the canned food as she had never before. She had grabbed canned corn, peas, and peaches in a syrup that was so sweet it brought more tears to her eyes. It was wonderful. There was a can of beef stew for supper that night and a can of chili with beans for supper another night. The last can was dog food. The picture on the can looked like beef stew, as well. She set it aside, knowing she’d be eating it soon.
Along with the fish she was catching regularly now, she was the least hungry she’d been since The Event. The chili had about 440 calories for the can. Seeing that made her try and figure out how many calories she was consuming. Say, 250 average for each fish, none of which had been very large. Six fish a day would keep her alive, though when she was hiking, twice that number would be better.
She wasn’t catching twelve fish most days.
The calories in the vegetables and fruit were negligible, but they provided vitamins she wasn’t getting with the fish and blessed relief from the tedious taste of raw fish over and over.
Forty-eight hours after she’d found the storm shelter, she hiked back to it and took her emptied daypack down to gather supplies. The smell was only marginally better. Part of her wanted to haul the body up and give it a decent burial. But she knew that was an urge she’d have to resist. She’d probably never get the smell off her.
There weren’t many supplies. There was an old first-aid guide, pages wrinkled with water damage, and a small hatchet, which she gladly took, despite the weight of it. There was no radio. The light had been coming from a battery lantern, but not an LED. It was old and heavy, and the beam was really dim, so the batteries must be low. Still, she stared at it for a full minute before deciding the weight wasn’t worth it.
There were another eleven cans of food. She packed those all away in her pack. The only blanket was over the body, so she didn’t want it. But there was a thin roll of garbage bags in a corner, which she grabbed. And a half a roll of toilet paper. She put the daypack on and climbed back out.
As she pulled the metal cover back over the
opening, she realized she was sealing the boy into his tomb, and she stood over it for a moment, trying to think of something to say. The only words that came to her were “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
She hiked back down to the river and spent another night at that camp, inventorying her food and washing her clothes and hair, trying to get the smell of death off her. The following morning, she hiked downriver again.
*
Death seemed to haunt Coral after that.
The following day, at a shallow turn in the stream, Coral came upon a pile of dead fish, spilled onto the bank. They were larger than what she had been catching. The reek coming off them told her they had been here for a while. Holding her breath against the smell, she moved toward them to take a look.
A few flies buzzed around, not nearly as many as there should be. Swatting at them, she came closer. The fish on top were pockmarked. With what, she couldn’t say. She saw no insects. Maybe it was a disease? Bones showed through the disappearing flesh. With the toe of her boot, she kicked one free of the bed of ash. The ones underneath had spots on their skin, but not the pits of decay. Death had faded their skin colors from orange to gray.
Though she backed away quickly and gave the fish carcasses a wide berth after that, she imagined the smell of rotting fish for the rest of the day. Before she stopped to fish at dusk, she hesitated. If some disease had killed the fish, any she ate could be diseased, too. It might kill her.
But it hadn’t yet. She had only enough canned food to last a couple days, if she tried to live off only that. Starvation would definitely kill her, and so far the trout had done her little harm. Once again, she baited her hook and cast her line.
*
The morning after finding the dead fish, she woke wondering what day it was. She had entirely lost count. Two weeks since the world changed? A little more? Past mid-June, at any rate. If “June” meant anything any more. Day names and the concept of weeks were human inventions, useless, really. Without culture only seasons mattered, the solstices and equinoxes. The moon was invisible beyond the filthy night air, so months had become meaningless, for now. She was nearing summer solstice, she realized, and maybe right on it.