by Lou Cadle
“So tell me the other half.”
“No. The other half is yours. A story about whoever hit you in the head. The story about what you were running away from. It’s time to tell me. Did you turn on a partner? Or kill someone for their food?”
“I—” She was so stunned, she couldn’t formulate a full thought for a moment. “Wait. You think I’m dangerous?”
His face was stony.
“Then why did you just hand me the rifle? If I were dangerous, I’d just shoot you right now.”
“I unloaded it. You were down to one round anyway.” He reached into his shirt pocket and held up a bullet, then tucked it back in the pocket.
“I didn’t even know that. No, forget that. If you thought I was a killer, then why did you take me in? I could have stabbed you in your sleep at any point.”
“I kept my door locked until I got hurt on the roof and needed your help. And I was watching you pretty closely even then.”
She was incredulous. It was impossible to imagine herself as a violent person, as a threat. “You really think I’m going to hurt you?”
He shook his head. “You still haven’t told me what happened. And when I left today, well…I realized I needed to know. That I deserved to know.”
She shook her head, dazed. “I’ve been half afraid of you all along. And now you tell me that you didn’t trust me either.” Looking at the rifle, she suddenly felt repelled by it. She set it down. Then she turned and walked out of the kitchen, back down the stairs. She didn’t know what to think.
Or she did know what to think. Maybe it was wrong not to tell all that had happened in Mill Creek, but he had been wrong to keep his finding the rifle a secret from her. That seemed downright weird to her. She didn’t understand it, and she was frightened by it. She didn’t understand Benjamin…and she had the sense she might not have understood him before The Event, either. What kind of man was he?
She turned on the lantern again. In its dim silver glow, she could see the few of her belongings not packed away. It would be best to shove them into her pack and leave. Food or no food, clear destination or not. Benjamin was freaking her out.
Benjamin’s voice came from the doorway, simultaneously with the door latch clicking open. “I want to know.”
“Know what?”
“What happened. Who gave you that crack on the head. What you’re afraid of telling.”
“I think I should just go.”
“You owe me the story first.”
That made her look at his face. Nothing in his posture was friendly, and his expression was not one that inspired the sharing of confidences. Her first urge was to refuse.
But maybe she did owe him. He had taken her in, shared his venison, given her a safe place to sleep, given her a break from walking.
“Okay,” she said. She stared at the open doorway instead of him. “I was attacked. In Mill Creek.”
“By someone you knew? Your boyfriend or something?”
“No, no, a total stranger. I don’t know what the hell was wrong with him. He was violent. Crazy.”
“Go on.”
She closed her eyes and forced herself to speak past the knot of nausea the memory still gave her. “He was going to rape me, I think. Maybe kill me, maybe eat me. I don’t know. He came out of nowhere. I managed to fight him off. That’s it. It’s not much of a story. But it’s the only one I’ve got.” She had to sit down on the bed.
“How’d you get away?”
“I fought back. I had some luck. Got the rifle away from him. Knocked him out. Ran.” She tried to keep the images from crystallizing in her mind. They came anyway, in short bursts: a flash of his sour smell, a whiff of his awful breath, the memory of the feel of the ash under her hands as she scrambled on the ground, the muffled thump when she kicked him. The memory made her feel sick and shaky.
“You didn’t start it, then? Attack him?”
She shook her head. “What have I done to make you think such a thing of me? I don’t even understand such behavior. I’ve never been around violent people, not ever. Why the hell did he attack me?” Tears built behind her eyes, and she let her head fall to her chest, not wanting to expose the weakness of the threatening tears. She retied her boots, though they didn’t need it. It kept him from seeing what she was feeling. Benjamin said nothing. When she had herself under control, she glanced up at him, dry-eyed. “Why are people like that?”
“Some people are just assholes. Evil.” There was no sympathy on his face.
“That’s a hell of a philosophy.”
“It’s a hell of a truth,” he said. “You’re lucky you lived so long without having to know it until now.”
Like he knew what her life had been like. She thought about spitting out some of the painful details to him but she repressed the urge. Let him think she lived in some sort of suburban bliss all her life, SUV heaven, if he wanted. What did she care what he thought of her? She said, “There’s always a reason people do what they do.”
“No there isn’t.”
“Of course there is. Child molesters only molest because they themselves were victimized, and—”
“That is such a bunch of pop psychology bullshit. They have a choice. They make an evil one.”
Why couldn’t she make him understand? “There has to be an explanation.”
“No there doesn’t. A lot of stuff, it just is.”
“If violence in people just is, then I’m not safe. Not anywhere. Not out there. Not with you, either.”
His jaw worked, but he said nothing for long minutes. “You’re safe with me. You should know that by now.”
She didn’t feel safe. She felt cornered, and angry, and inexplicably ashamed. “You satisfied with my story?” she asked him. “Think I’m telling the truth, or am I just another evil stranger?”
“I think you’re telling the truth. But I wish you would have from the first.”
“So I’m supposed to trust you even though you don’t trust me.”
“Do you trust me?”
“No.” Not now, she didn’t. Three hours ago, yes, she had.
“That doesn’t make any sense. If I were a bad guy, why would I have taken you back here? You were unconscious for hours. I could have robbed you and left you where you were. Tied you to the bed right here and had my way with you. I didn’t do any of that.”
“You also didn’t tell me about the rifle. Where was it?”
“I had it stashed in the ruins of a neighbor’s house.”
“Maybe you’re right about me. I might have killed him.” She wasn’t sure how to feel about that. With so few people left, it seemed every one should be precious. Even the crazy and dangerous ones.
“You don’t know if you killed him?”
“I hope I didn’t.” She shook her head. “And sometimes, I hope I did, too. It’s an awful goddamn way to feel, but sometimes I can’t help it.”
“He might be dead by now without your killing him. He might have starved. Or run into someone meaner than himself.”
“You say that, and for a second I think ‘good.’ I hate that feeling. I’m not that kind of person.”
Benjamin sighed. “It’s hard to know what kind of person you are when the rules change on you. Any of us could do almost anything under the right circumstances. And the rules have changed, Coral. Changed completely. Make no mistake.”
She pulled her pack over and began to pack her things. He watched her without comment. Only when the pack was filled again and zipped tightly did she speak again. “That’s why I need to get away from here. I have to get back to a city. I want to get to where people haven’t changed. I want normal, polite people who are decent to each other.”
“Haven’t I been decent?”
“I thought so, until today. Are you asking me to trust you again?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think you can ask for trust. I think you can only earn it, wait for it.”
They stared at each other for a long time. Fi
nally, he cleared his throat. “I’m going hunting. I’ll be gone at least overnight.”
She nodded.
“Will you be here when I get back?”
“Do you want me to be?”
He reached up and rubbed his neck. He took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. “Yes.” Without another word, he went back upstairs.
Chapter 11
She sat on the bed for a long time, her backpack leaning up against her legs, not knowing what to do, feeling confused and angry and guilty all at once and not understanding any of those feelings. Finally, she went back upstairs and looked cautiously around. Benjamin was gone. The attacker’s rifle was still sitting where she had left it, on the kitchen counter. The bullet that he had shown her was sitting alongside.
It was something. Not an apology, but a sign of his trust. At least he didn’t seem to think she’d trail after him and shoot him in the back.
She was more confused than ever. If he stuck to his plan, she had at least a day to decide what to do. If she left, she’d do it at first light and avoid talking to him again. Leave a note of thanks and good wishes.
And hope there’d be fish enough in the streams to fuel her journey.
Coral decided she needed to take charge of herself. She loaded the single bullet into the rifle—it took her fifteen minutes to feel confident she’d done it right, though she was less confident she could hit an elephant at twenty paces—and she hiked out to fish. She spent the rest of the day trying to catch fish but caught only a pair of tiny trout by late afternoon. Discouraged, she walked back to the house and made herself a spare meal, leaving the last strip of the venison alone. That was his.
The next morning, she woke to find a thin layer of dirty gray snow on the ground.
It couldn’t be later than July 15, she didn’t think they were at much over 4,000 feet of elevation, and yet it was snowing. For the first time she worried about how she’d keep warm this winter.
What if she decided to stay? Burning through the charcoaled wood, like that she and Benjamin had been using for cooking fires, keeping a fire going all night, they’d be lucky to find three weeks’ worth of fuel within a half-day’s walk of the house. The basement and beds and blankets would keep her warmer than striking out alone and sleeping on the bare ground.
Was it possible to heat any part of the house? How? Burn a bunch of wood in a pile on the middle of the hallway floor? That wouldn’t work. Maybe Benjamin could build a hearth or something, but she would be afraid of doing it alone and burning down what was left of the house. If only they could scavenge a wood-burning stove. Iron should have survived the wildfire. But why was she thinking about fuel for the house? She wanted to leave, right? How would she stay warm on the trail? That was the right question. How could she get food?
All the work required to survive was exhausting her. Even the thought required was draining. She wanted civilization again, central heating and thermostats, running water. Most of all, she wanted plentiful food, set out nicely in grocery store aisles. No, strike that—most of all, she wanted to hear her brothers’ voices, Grandma’s, too. Then plentiful food. Her wish for plenty of clean water had been answered when she’d ended up here, in the house with the cistern. If she left, she’d lose that again.
She worked all morning around the house and barn, sweeping up ash, scavenging metal, and about noon, she packed for the day, left a note for Benjamin that she’d be back in a day or two, and hiked out again. She went back toward Mill Creek but stayed far upstream of the town, trying fishing with the eggs, then all the lures she had. Few fish bit. By the end of the day, she had caught only three, and they were small. She ate them and bedded down for the night by the stream.
In between attempts at fishing the next day, she looked along the banks of the river for live trees. While she didn’t find any, some brush that had been partly in the high water was intact. With her knife, she cut several branches, the straightest she could find.
Napping by the river at lunch, feeling wiped out from the lack of calories, she admitted that she missed the soft bed at night. A couple weeks in it had spoiled her, and nights on the hard ground left her sore and grouchy.
Part of the pain came from how thin she was getting. She had started the trip as an average-sized woman, but now she was skinny as a fashion model. Her hip bones and clavicles and even her vertebrae processes stuck out, and when she lay on the ground, the lack of padding made every one of those protrusions hurt. When she realized that the ash probably cushioned her better than solid earth would, she wondered how skinny people had suffered so, for so many eons. Maybe they never lay on floors or the bare ground. Maybe cave people had made mattresses.
She realized anyone living in similar circumstances who had started out underweight back in June was probably dead now, their bodies wasted away to nothing. Too bad she hadn’t started out fat. Fat people would probably survive off their stores a few weeks longer than she would.
The next morning she put her line in the water, jammed her rod in between two rocks and worked on making a bow while waiting for a bite. Using the branches she’d taken from under the stream’s surface, she followed along her pamphlet’s instructions and worked at making the simplest bow illustrated. Her first attempts were disasters. The wood broke. It didn’t bend the right way. Her knife bit too far in when trying to cut a notch. Yet each failure taught her something. Coral re-read the directions, some of which made no sense at first. She found the meanings only through trial and error. She had to laugh—or snort in amusement—at the instruction “don’t expose the new bow to sunlight.” As if there were a chance of that! The air was still gray, every minute of every day. Sunlight was nothing but a fading memory, like hot chocolate, and potato chips, and burgers—Coral, stop that.
Eventually, she grasped the instruction to scrape away at the bow ends and not whittle. The next time she had a piece of wood shaped pretty close to the illustration, she tried flexing it like a bow, and the thing snapped. Curing the bow with rendered animal fat, as her instructions said, was impossible, but when Coral finally found a tiny trout nibbling on her bait, she passed up eating its skin, hungry as she was. She made yet another bow and sat in the dim light rubbing the slender wood with the trout skin until her forearms ached and the skin was tattered to bits.
After another night on the ground, she woke thinking about the bow from the instant she was conscious. She might have even dreamed about it. The bowstring had her stumped. Her paracord, even stripped down to its thinnest strand, was far too fat. Maybe she’d find something better back at the house. She fished all day, caught only two, and finished a second bow, even better than the first, with two trout skins to rub along it.
Late in the afternoon, she walked back to the house. She had no fish to bring with her, and hunger was gnawing at her belly. She’d have to beg food of Benjamin, if he was willing to give her any. If he had even found any.
She also had two bows she thought might work for small game, if she ever found some, and if she was able to learn to make arrows, find enough straight wood for them, find a bowstring, and learn to shoot accurately. That was a lot of ifs. She could shoot fish, too, if she found water clear and shallow enough to let her see them. Maybe Benjamin knew archery and could give her pointers.
She still wasn’t sure what to do—stay, or go? Without food, she couldn’t walk to California or Boise or even Twin Falls. Without food, she’d die. If she were to starve, she didn’t want to die alone. If she died first, maybe Benjamin could live off her body. If he died first…well, she didn’t want to think about that. But she knew that he’d tell her to be practical. Like him.
But when she came to the house, Benjamin wasn’t there yet. Her note was right where she had left it.
Coral went to bed feeling anxious about Benjamin’s absence. If he was hurt somewhere, even just his back again, she didn’t have the first idea of where to look for him. Both of them were entirely on their own, and more vulnerable for that. She felt the
force of the vulnerability.
She had seen two people since The Event—three, if you counted the dead boy in the storm shelter. One had been crazy and one—Benjamin—wasn’t perfect. But he wasn’t dead or crazy, which put him a good distance ahead of the others.
She realized she wasn’t angry at him any more. Or guilty. Or frightened. She was only worried.
He was a hard man to figure out, a brittle man sometimes, a pessimist where she was by nature an optimist, and yet he had helped her when he didn’t need to. In her old life, in the real world, she’d never have become friends with someone like this. In the old world, she tended to like Green and the most liberal Democrat candidates—Benjamin was surely a Republican. That almost made her laugh, how stupid and useless such ideas were now, how all the energy put into such arguments had been entirely a waste, a silly game people had played.
But Benjamin was solid. And he had skills—survival skills. She couldn’t have figured out how to build a ladder or roof a house on her own. She might be able to dress game safely, for she had excelled at dissection in biology. But she didn’t know how to hunt. There’d be worse partners in survival than Benjamin.
In this new world, under the dirty gray skies, Benjamin was also the only friend she had.
The next morning, she woke to another snowfall. It came down steadily as she hiked back to Mill Creek, rifle in hand, hoping for better fishing but fearing strangers. The waters were flowing slowly now and the level of the stream was falling as snow accumulated rather than melted to feed the rivers.
There wasn’t a nibble on her line all day. She didn’t want to go back to the house and the last of the venison. It wasn’t hers to eat.
Growing more desperate, she knew from her little survival guide that there was another food option: insects. She began to hunt for them at the edges of the stream as she let her fishing line dangle untended. She turned over rocks and found a few lethargic grubs. She dug past the layers of snow and ash and into the ground below, uncovering a few earthworms, marginally less disgusting than grubs somehow and far bigger.