Gray (Book 2)

by Cadle, Lou

  Her sliver of soap was long gone, so when the water was warm, she washed with ash. They filtered the water after they heated it, if they meant to drink or eat it, and they had a sizeable mound of ash piled up that had been filtered out of the water, a dark gray color, sharp little pieces. It hurt to rub it into her cold skin, but she figured it was sloughing off dead skin and stripping away some of her rancid body oil. That was as close to clean as she could get.

  Shivering in the cold as she put her sweaters back on, she chickened out on washing her entire head of hair, but she did take the strip of it closest to her face, about an inch wide, and washed that. She combed it out, wrapped a scarf around her head and face, and soon her body heat had warmed the wet hair. By morning, it’d be dry—and a little crusty from the ash drying in it, but that’d comb out eventually.

  Her mind flashed back to a neighbor in her dorm, a super-girlie-girl type, who squealed with dismay if she ran out of the right kind of overpriced hair product or moisturizing cream, and panicked when she could only find brown mascara when she wanted black. She wondered how women like that had adjusted to this new world. No blow-driers. Wearing the same shirt for a month. Not being able to ever really bathe—not immersion in a shower or tub, certainly—and living with grease and dirt and hairy legs. They had probably all died from emotional shock.

  Of course, such types probably had no survival skills, either. They’d have cringed away from touching worms to bait hooks, so they wouldn’t have had even her modest talent at fishing. And, so as not to be sexist about her sneering, she imagined male Wall Street stockbrokers, too, in five-thousand dollar suits, thumbing their smart phones, also with no survival skills. She remembered the old world, where women would have turned away from an average-looking guy like Benjamin whose idea of fashion was no doubt choosing between his red and his blue flannel shirt in the morning, whose annual income probably didn’t exceed the Wall Street guy’s annual wine bill. But now, Benjamin was the catch of the century.

  What if another woman appeared, saw what a catch he was, and lured him away with sex? She’d like to think a man-woman friendship could survive the arrival of a love interest, and back at the U of M, six months ago, it definitely could’ve…but she thought that in this new, more primitive world, it probably wouldn’t. She might have to fight to keep him on her team.

  She realized she’d been sitting still for too long, thinking about this imaginary stuff. There was work to do in the real world. She shook off the speculations and spread her clean clothes out to dry.

  *

  Benjamin returned from his hunting trip empty-handed. “Not a single track out there,” he said. “I think we need to be close to a lake to find game.”

  “What about when the lakes freeze all the way across?”

  “Animals find a way. Antelope, elk, they can punch through a coating of ice with a hoof. Smaller animals might come in after them. They might know where a hot spring is, but hot springs tend to have minerals you and I don’t want to drink unless it’s our last choice. If they can dig down to plants, plants have water in them. And they release some water as they burn stored fat.”

  “I hope they have stored fat.”

  “Hmm. Animals find a way in normal years, I should say. Any big animals that survived might have a hard time this year.”

  “I wish you could find one. Even if you failed to shoot it, I’d feel better to know a deer or antelope or moose had survived.”

  “No, I wouldn’t miss that shot,” he said. His face was grim.

  And he continued to be in a grim mood for the next day. “We have to find a better campsite,” he finally said, “before we get caught by someone else. I feel exposed here.”

  “You really think there are other people wandering around?”

  “Yes. And I don’t think that by this point any of them will be nice. If a stranger without a gun wandered up, would you want to invite them to share our food?”

  “I would,” she said. “One pleasant stranger? A half a million cans of soup? Sure.”

  “Those cans won’t last forever.”

  “Near enough,” she said. “I hate that it locks us to this one place, but better that than starving to death.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to be seeing one friendly stranger. He’d be dead by now, probably done in by his friendliness. We have to get ourselves hidden,” he said, sitting down to start his ritual of cleaning the rifle.

  She didn’t argue. She wanted there to be nice people, but she knew that he was probably right.

  So for the next two days, they debated where to move to. He said that, instead of digging another snow cave, they might try to construct an igloo instead. But they found an area where the drifts were nice and deep, well over 15 feet, and they decided that was their new home. They still hadn’t found an endless source of fuel and would have to range out to find some every day, but that would have been true of any site they chose. This place was farther from the train.

  “From now on, we don’t start digging for charcoal until we’ve gotten out of sight of our new place and walked another fifteen minutes or more from there. We’ll be leaving enough signs of how to find us anyway—let’s try to minimize those.”

  “Agreed,” she said.

  “And we need to be more careful about tramping down a clear path back to the train and the water source. I want us to take a different route every time we go, and an indirect one. We’ll keep the tracks shallow that way, and let the snow fill them in entirely before we go back to that route. Cross over the train tracks sometimes and wander south of them, then circle back, so they won’t know which side of the tracks to start looking on.”

  “I’m not convinced there are people out there wandering about.” Surely anyone with an ounce of sense had found a place to hide out from the bitter cold by now.

  “Every time I move a particular way and feel a twinge in my ribs, I’m reminded that we’d best be prepared for them, whoever they are.”

  She hadn’t known that he still hurt from the beating he’d taken. She felt a twinge herself—one of guilt at not being able to do any more for his injuries than she had. His nose had a permanent bump now, and there was a thin scar across his upper lip, both signs of the encounter with the Walmart people. “Okay,” she said, feeling chastened—but not by him, by her own guilt.

  They dug their new snow cave in an area of deep drifts, behind what must have been a slight ridge in the land beneath. They improved it well beyond her first one, having learned lessons from mistakes they’d made with the first. The entrance they dug downward into the snow, and they built the tunnel with a few more feet of length. After they’d patted the ceiling into a firm curve, they scraped shallow grooves into it, running from the apex down the sides, parallel and every six inches or so, trying to encourage melt water to drip along those.

  He insisted on building a second cave for their sled and gear. “The garage,” they called it. They piled their goods on the ground at the back of the garage, keeping metal tools from directly contacting the snow, trying to slow the inevitable rusting process. They kept an emergency supply of soup cans back there, too, ready to be loaded up quickly if need be. The sled they kept in the front half of the garage, empty, ready to haul either cans from the train or ice from the stream.

  It began to snow hard the day after the garage was done, and they stayed mostly in the snow cave, riding out the storm. By the end of the day, the snow was falling thick and fast. When they went out to use the latrine, they kept hold of their nylon rope, tied to a metal rod from the train, thrust deeply into packed-down snow at the cave’s entrance, so as not to lose their way in the swirling snow. They tucked cans of soup and water bottles around their sleeping bags so they were mostly melted by body heat and ate the soup cold and undiluted.

  For three days, the snow fell thickly. The second day, the wind blew harder, bringing whiteout conditions to the world outside. Stuck in the snow cave, they played twenty questions and “the farmer
’s cat” and any other talking games they could dredge from their memories. She tried to ask him about his past, but he wasn’t interested in having that conversation. It was dark inside, except for faint light at the tunnel’s entrance, and every trip outside the world felt painfully bright, making her squint, though she knew it wasn’t really bright out there at all, between the snow clouds and the ash still blocking the sun.

  They were about three-quarters through their water supply when the winds died down. The next time Coral went outside, she didn’t have to use the rope to keep from losing her way. But it was bitterly cold out there. She could see all around her fresh—though gray—snow. Six to eight inches of it had done its job of hiding them from any prying eyes. Their original campsite would be buried, too.

  By the time she was done at the latrine, her nose and toes and fingers and butt felt numb from the cold. When she returned to the snow cave, she said, “I hope this isn’t a permanent temp drop. It’ll freeze your nuts off out there.”

  “Huh. In that case, maybe you should do all the outside work.”

  “Seriously, we need to be really careful about frostbite. There’s nothing I can do for gangrene.”

  “You have a hatchet.”

  It took her a second to realize what he meant. “No way am I chopping my own toes off.”

  “You’ll damn well chop mine off if it’s the difference between dead and alive.”

  She could see doing that all too clearly in her mind’s eye. “Let’s be careful so I don’t have to, okay?” She thought it would be far more likely amputation wouldn’t help, and she’d be digging a grave for him, or vice versa.

  They lived there for six weeks. It grew colder, and colder still, and finding fuel continued to be a daily struggle. Every three days, one of them went for water, having to pull the sled further away along the stream bed to chop ice. Every five days, they both took a trip to retrieve as many cans of soup as they could haul on the sled.

  More and more, they grew weary of each other’s company and sometimes bad tempered. When Benjamin lost it, it manifested as a deeper and deeper silence, which only broke after he took a day to go hunting, though he found no game. When Coral was the one who began to snap at him over nothing, he also took a day to go hunting. Sometimes, though neither was angry, there was simply nothing to say to each other for many hours.

  When he was gone, Coral began to talk aloud to herself, not caring if it was a security danger or a sign of insanity. She told her own life story to herself. She talked about her favorite meals, her favorite movies, the best parties she’d ever been to. She daydreamed of the medical practice she’d been planning one day, an independent small family practice clinic, two doctors, a PA, a nurse, a receptionist, all of them kind and dedicated to care, not to profit. She mentally decorated the place, with chairs and wallpaper and a play area for the kids.

  Frostbite was a constant danger. She couldn’t sit still and cook but had to put the pot on the fire then return immediately to the relative warmth of the snow cave, which was too small for two people to stay in 24/7 without going nuts. She suggested enlarging it, but he pointed out that if they did, it wouldn’t stay as warm. What they had here, she thought, was a form of cabin fever, and she dreamed of running across a cache of paperback books and a lantern in the ruins of a house somewhere, or anything to break the tedium of hiding out in the snow cave and staring at the light at the entrance. Every day, she practiced with bow and arrows, but not for long, as the cold drove her back inside.

  The taste of their limited varieties of soup had long since grown boring. She wasn’t achingly hungry any longer, but neither of them put on much weight either.

  Coral hated herself for it, but she felt an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness. She wasn’t developing her mind. She wasn’t developing her social skills. The only thing she was getting better at was her archery skills. She wondered if prison felt like this.

  The best that could be said was that they were surviving. She wondered, and more with every passing day, if that were enough for her. When the thought passed through her mind, she knew that she wasn’t ready, not today, to wander naked into the snow and let the cold kill her, but as she imagined ten years of living right here, off the train car of soup, or even one more year, she could see that death might seem more and more attractive an option.

  And then, as she figured it must be approaching Halloween, the ennui evaporated.

  Benjamin had been out on an ice run for more than an hour, and Coral was warming her lunch when she heard a noise in the distance. For a moment, she didn’t recognize it. A buzz, growing slowly louder. Then she realized: it was the sound of an engine, a truck engine.

  Chapter 4

  Her heart leapt painfully in her chest. Someone’s vehicle had survived? This changed everything. She stood and turned toward the sound like a lizard turning toward the morning sun. Part of her wanted to go running toward it, whooping with glee.

  But the part of her that had learned cruel lessons since The Event kept her still. She turned her head this way and that, trying to figure out from the sound how far it was away and which way it was heading.

  The noise grew louder. And it came from the southwest of here, so maybe it was following the train tracks. Or it could be cutting cross country, maybe following a compass heading east.

  Her mind spun for a second, then locked onto a thought. I should get ready to haul ass out of here if need be. So first, load the supplies back onto the sled and— No. Damn. Benjamin has the sled.

  At least if this were danger headed her way, he was well away from it. As for her? Defense first.

  She kicked snow over her fire, killing the small wisp of smoke rising from it. She gathered up the soup cans, barely warm to the touch, and carried them into the snow cave. Coming back out, she looked around, trying to see the camp with new eyes. A well-worn path went from snow cave to latrine. She kicked more snow around that. For several minutes, she pushed snow into the latrine, and then she went back to the fire and did the same, until the dark circle of the cooking pit was light gray again with fluffy, ash-colored snow. In the garage she retrieved her bow and arrows, and she scraped snow around the entrance, trying her best to disguise the line of the entrance tunnel, leaving an opening no wider than her hips.

  When she was done, she turned toward the snow cave, stopping at the last second to look back at the garage. It was still a suspicious hump, but it could be something natural. From a distance, someone might think nothing of it.

  Had it snowed since the last time they did a food run? She thought it had. She hoped so. Otherwise, a careful tracker could follow their circuitous trail back here from the train tracks.

  After the camp was taken care of, she had to decide what to do next. She could run, follow Benjamin’s trail up to the water, and hide out with him. It’s what he might want.

  But no. The most useful thing she could do would be to go toward the engine noise, to reconnoiter. It might take her a while. She retrieved and quickly downed the defrosted cans of soup, washing them down with water.

  Then she wriggled back into the garage and groped around in the dark until she found her backpack. She wanted camouflage. She had a towel, dingy gray by now, close enough to the color of the snow. Pack, water bottle, bow and arrow. Did she need anything else?

  She couldn’t think of a thing. What she’d give for a pair of binoculars.

  She retrieved the smallest two bottles of water, put them in her pack next to her body, tossed in a couple frozen cans of soup, just in case, tied the towel around her head like a shawl, tucked the ends into her sweater and jacket, and put the pack on her back.

  She was kicking more snow over the tunnel into the snow cave when the sound of the truck engine cut out.

  Whirling, she stared to the south. She should have been paying better attention. Where had they stopped? She had to see who it was before they moved—or left entirely. A hopeful thought struck her. Maybe it was a rescue vehicle. Police. Fire
. Maybe the Red Cross. Could something like that still exist?

  A new sense of urgency pushed her into action. She jogged west, parallel to the train track, but still well out of sight of it. She kept her head low, running stooped through pristine snow. She was leaving a trail any idiot could follow. No help for that.

  After what she judged to be a half-mile, she turned left, south toward the tracks. The train itself would be somewhat east of her now, the state road they’d come north on still a good ways to the west.

  It must be a cloud-free day above the swath of gray ash that filled the air. Visibility was as good as it ever was. But she still couldn’t see as far as a half-mile in any direction. She climbed a slight rise and stared to the south, trying to see any hint of movement, any dark patch against the light gray snow.

  There was nothing. She headed south, but carefully, scanning the horizon all the while.

  Should she spend time scrubbing out her tracks?

  No. No time to waste. She had a terrible fear whoever it was would disappear. They might be enemies. But they might not be, and letting an opportunity to join forces with someone with a working vehicle? And maybe more resources than that? She’d never forgive herself for missing such a chance.

  Still, she felt more frightened of them than not. Hope was fine, but it was no reason to get stupid. The instant she spotted the line of the train tracks, she dropped to hands and knees and began to crawl.

  It took forever to reach the rail line.

  When she did, she saw not a truck, not people, but the tracks of the vehicle, in the ditch on the north side of the tracks.

  They were odd tracks, not at all normal tire marks, thicker. Within each were three lines paralleling the line of travel. Within each of those, there were perpendicular marks, straight, and not like the normal zig-zag of tire treads. And the tracks were deep. It must be a very heavy truck.