Gray (Book 2)

by Cadle, Lou

  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.”

  He gave her a rare smile. “Good job!”

  “No, dumb luck,” she admitted.

  “Good dumb luck, then.” He thumped her on the shoulder. “I had been getting worried about food.”

  “We still have things to worry about—like finding a water source close to the food. And shelter. There aren’t buildings nearby, and the land is flat, so we aren’t going to find a convenient cave.”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  “Want me to start a fire so you can eat some right now?”

  “No, I’ll eat the rest of the fish while we pull. Or while I pull. I want you to come behind and brush out the tracks. No way do I want to risk someone else finding this food, so take your time about it, particularly right here where the tracks cross the road.”

  He pulled the sled, and she walked backward behind, working at erasing their tracks, first with sweeping her boots over them, then by wiping over the area with her spread-out sleeping bag, weighted with a tool box. For the first half-mile or so, she was very careful, and Benjamin stopped twice to come back and help. After that, he agreed that it was okay to be less thorough, and they moved faster. Another decent snow, and no one would be able to tell they had ever been here. The food would be theirs.

  They made it back to the train in late afternoon. She pointed out the car of magnets to him and then took him back to the car with the four containers loaded with soup. She opened a door to reveal the grid of cans. He stood looking up at it in awe for long moments. Then he said, “I feel almost like crying.”

  She knew what he meant. The relief of having food was overwhelming. She let him have a moment of respectful silence with the cans, then she said, “Maybe you can hunt fuel, add the charcoal to the fire from this morning and warm us up some soup. I can expand the snow cave to fit two. It kept me warm enough last night.”

  “Deal,” he said.

  “Before we go to bed, I want to show you the train engine.”

  “And tomorrow, first thing,” he said, “we need to start hunting for water and a better shelter.”

  *

  Over the next week, they worked at establishing a temporary camp. They considered piling snow up around an empty freight car and making tha
t home, but Benjamin finally rejected the idea, pointing out that in case someone else did find the train, he’d rather be more than a rifle shot away, at least until he could see what sort of forces they were up against.

  Melting snow to drink was a never-ending chore. It took six days for them to find a narrow stream, entirely frozen over, to supply them with easier water than melted snow.

  When they had melted the first batch of stream water, they found it nearly as ash-filled as the snow and had to filter it through cotton. Not for the first time, Coral regretted not taking along a pillowcase, which would have been perfect for the job.

  “It’s not an ideal spot,” said Benjamin. “I want to find something better.”

  “The stream is a good distance from the train. Should we be looking for someplace to live halfway between?”

  “No, let’s stay closer to the train. I know that means it’ll take a half a day to haul the sled out and back to load with ice. But we’ll stow our gear and keep the sled empty, so we can haul enough to last us several days.”

  “In a pinch, we can supplement it with snow melt.”

  “I’m more concerned about a fuel source now. Too damn bad there’s not a tank of propane on this train.” He stared into the distance, the way he did whenever he was trying to work out a particularly difficult problem. “Not that we have a stove, anyway. But fuel is now our number one priority.”

  They had learned a lot from living in the snow cave for the week. Their body heat kept it surprisingly comfortable. Not warm, but definitely above freezing. They kept the day’s supply of soup nearly blocking the entrance overnight, and their body heat helped melt the soup into slush, so it took less time to heat their breakfast. At some point every day, one or the other of them worked at smoothing the walls of the ice cave so that the water from the melting snow would drip along the rounded walls rather than directly onto them. Still, Coral was woken more than once by a cold drip on her face.

  Coral had fun cooking at first, putting all the different sorts of soup together, and mixing them with the remaining fish and meat they had. The tomato soup turned the fish—a taste she had grown bored with weeks ago—into a pleasant chowder. Rabbit and cream of mushroom wasn’t half-bad, either..

  “This is damned good. You should write a survival cookbook.”

  She snorted. “On what?” Paper was as much a thing of the past as buttonhooks and Model T’s.

  They worked hard every day, and though they were eating three times a day, she wasn’t having to loosen her belt quite yet. Her hip bones and clavicles still stuck out. Between the cold their bodies had to fight and the calories burned with labor, it was hard to get ahead of the energy equation. Even disguised by his beard, Benjamin looked gaunt, and she had no doubt she did, too, though in a world without mirrors, she was spared the sight. If they weren’t engaged in an endless hunt for fuel, they might have more time left to spare for hunting or fishing to augment the soup calories—not that they’d run across a body of water large enough to have fish.

  And that was the other worrisome thing: the temperature kept dropping. It was too big a project to wash clothes right now, though she supposed she’d have to do it eventually. In the cold weather, it wasn’t as if they could smell each other’s stink very often—only at night, in the snow cave, when their body heat was reflected back, and the cave grew warmer as the night passed. She didn’t want to think about trying to wash the sleeping bags in this sort of weather. It’d take a week for the bags to dry, and they couldn’t afford to be without them for a single hour of the night. She bathed by dipping the corner of a cloth in cold water and scrubbing herself inside her clothes.

  As they worked or ate together, she asked Benjamin technical questions, starting with the generators they had found. Did they run on gas or diesel fuel? How had gas stations stored diesel? How could they pump it out without electricity? If you ran across a different sort of fuel, could you convert the generator to use another fuel? Could you convert a car engine to use a different fuel? Did he think the cars were repairable, or not? If you had an intact concrete building, and fuel, and one of those generators, how could you make heat from that? How would you vent the fumes from it? How did furnaces work before The Event? How had train engines driven the train?

  He answered what he could, sometimes stopping to draw a diagram in the snow to explain. When he didn’t know—and she appreciated this most of all—he admitted his ignorance. Over the days of her barrage of questions, she felt as if she was slowly tearing down the wall of her ignorance about the technologies she had taken for granted her whole life.

  She had been a typical member of technological society, giving such matters not a moment’s thought. You turn on a faucet, safe water comes out. You feel cold, you nudge up a thermostat and warm air blows from a grate.

  She was unwilling to remain ignorant a moment longer. It made her feel less useless to gather up this knowledge. She wasn’t sure she could apply most of what she learned any time soon, but there might come a day. She might not have been prepared well for The Event, but she would be better prepared for whatever happened next.

  One afternoon, as they hauled charcoaled wood back to their campsite, he said, “You’re like a little kid, with all these questions.”

  “Am I irritating you? Boring you?”

  “No,” he said. “Reassuring me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You seem to have given up on the idea that somewhere out there, the old world still exists, and all we have to do is walk up and find it and you’ll have cell phones and lattes.”

  She threw a quick glance back at him. She was in harness, and he was pushing the sled. She turned to face front again and walked for a while without responding. That was one good thing about his taciturnity. You had all the time you wanted to think through what you wanted to say next. “I still hope there’s something like that out there. But no, I don’t expect it any more. Someplace warmer than this would suit me. But it’d take a sure promise of warmth or shelter or an intact and lawful city to make me leave this food source any time soon.”

  He grunted.

  She chose to read it as approval.

  That night, she made “everything” soup: all four cans defrosted, stirred together, mixed with two cans of defrosted water. They each needed one pot.

  “It takes so long,” she said, as she set up the second batch in the cooking pots.

  “I know. Coral, I appreciate your doing the bulk of the cooking.”

  “It’s easy work. You don’t have to know anything to heat frozen water.”

  “And you can keep up your practice on the bow while you wait for things to heat.”

  “That, too.” They hadn’t run across any more unburned wood to make new arrows, though. All the wood she had gathered for arrows had come from underwater—at lakes or deep rivers. She was going through the train cars again every day when she had time, trying to work out some way of making more arrows from anything she found—melted plastic strips, thin metal rods—but so far, nothing else had worked for arrows. She did find a can of grease in the train engine that melted by the fire into a sticky material and allowed her to secure her metal arrowheads and fletch her arrows with strips of rabbit fur. After several experiments in fletching, she achieved more stability in the flight, and that meant she could hit a target from a few feet further away. Problem was, the grease wasn’t all that reliable. If it contacted her body, it was too warm, and the stuff melted. If it grew too cold, the strips of fur cracked off when she jostled them. It was better than nothing, but she needed real glue.

  And she needed needles. Their few changes of clothes they had were ripping and fraying, Benjamin’s sleeping bag had developed a tear, and she couldn’t do anything to repair it. Her only pair of underwear was in a sad state and soon would be fit only for a rag.

  Another week passed, and another, without them finding a better home site. Benjamin grew fretful about the danger of being near the food and exposed to at
tack.

  She didn’t want to be ungrateful for the carload of food, but she began to tire of soup three times a day. Apparently, so did Benjamin, for one morning he said, “I’m going to go north of the stream and try to find game again. See you before nightfall.” He took with him the only slip of frozen fish they had left, hardly enough to flavor a soup, and definitely not enough for a full day’s hunting. That was one problem with frozen soup cans—it wasn’t travel food.

  She didn’t bother to tell him to keep his eyes open for wood for arrows, or for a fuel source, or for a better place to sleep, because he knew what they needed as well as she did. She simply said, “Good hunting,” and went back to her own work.

  She banked the fire and ringed it with soup cans, the tops pierced to allow steam to escape, and gathered up the ice-chopping tools, including the giant wrench they’d taken from the train engine. She put herself into harness and pulled the empty sled to the stream, making good time.

  The little stream had quit running entirely. The world was freezing solid around them. She studied the next intact section of ice, looking for any cracks she could use as a place to begin to pry out chunks of ice. There were none, so she took out her hatchet, reversed it so the flat side would hit the ice, and swung it overhead. It pinged off the ice. She struck again, closer to the edge, and a crack appeared. She banged away at it with the big wrench from the train until she could force the pry bar into the crack. She shoved it into place and put her body weight behind it. A snap, and she had broken off a chunk of ice twice the size of her head. She hauled it to the sled. They needed two gallons a day. The chunk was nearly that. She also wanted to wash herself today, and her underwear, T-shirt, and—if she could stand the cold of the process—hair, so she needed an extra couple gallons for that.

  She worked for an hour at getting enough ice to last a few days, and it took another hour to pull the load of ice back to the campsite. First thing after slipping from the harness, she tested all the soup cans for temperature and rotated them 180 degrees. Then she set the biggest pot on the fire and filled it with ice to melt.