Gray (Book 2)

by Cadle, Lou

  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.”

  “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.

  Be
njamin 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 midmorning, 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.

  Chapter 3

  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 on
e 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.