Gray (Book 1) (10 page)

“Benjamin, relax.”

He grumbled something.

She crawled around him, got to the ladder he’d made, then pulled it over so that it was right at his feet. “Can you move at all?” she asked.

“I can move,” he growled. But he didn’t.

She got behind him and braced his back, pivoting him around on his butt. If he could move just a little, change positions, the spasm might let go of him.

“Jeez,” he breathed. Then, “okay, okay, I can move now.” He bent his leg and began to shift himself around, very slowly.

She stayed right by him, holding on to the top of the ladder with one hand, ready to help him if he froze up again. Slowly, he got himself onto the ladder and backed down. “Don’t get on the ladder with me. I don’t trust the integrity of it that much.”

“Great time to mention it.” She watched him all the way to the ground. “Go lie down,” she told him. “Take care of that back.”

“I’m fine,” he lied. “You know what to do up there?”

“Pound nails.”

“Start in the middle. Keep it flat.”

“I know, you told me already. Go lie down.” she said. “And relax, would you?”

“I’ll be right here.”

“Go inside,” she said. “I’ve got this covered.” Then she heard what she’d said. “Ha, covered! A roofing joke.”

He shook his head at her.

She waved at him, scrambled back up and went on with her work. It began to rain on her, a light rain that came and went, but she kept going, tacking the carpet down all the way around. It covered little more than the kitchen, but he said that’s the only room he’d be using upstairs anyway. There was still an open space between walls and roof, but it’d let some light in, even if it did let some ash drift inside, too.

The sky grew darker as she finished up. She couldn’t tell if the clouds up there were tall, dangerous thunderheads or not. They were just vague darker patches in the ashen sky. When would the sky clear of the ash and soot? It seemed it never would.

Climbing down from the roof, she felt almost cheerful, pleased at getting the project completed. She went inside to check on Benjamin, aiming for the stairway down. His voice from nearby stopped her.

He was lying on the floor in the kitchen, looking up at the new roof. “Any problems?” he asked.

“You look like crap,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“I meant, you look like you feel like crap. It wasn’t a fashion critique or anything.”

He closed his eyes. “It looks good. The roof.”

“You aren’t looking at it,” she pointed out.

“You’re an irritating person, you know that?”

“Yes. You’re welcome.”

He opened his eyes. “Sorry. You did a great job up there. Thank you.”

“I know you’re in a lousy mood because you’re in pain.”

“It’s not pain. I’m just a little stiff.”

“No wonder, lying on the floor. Why aren’t you in bed?”

“The floor is hard. It feels better.”

“Okay.” She walked over and squatted down by his side. “Can I get you anything? Water, blanket? I have a few ibuprofen in my pack. And something a little stronger.”

“I hate taking pills.”

“Suit yourself,” she said, standing up. She had never understood people who wanted to avoid taking drugs for pain. That’s what they were there for. Suffering was senseless, in her opinion. She turned to leave him alone.

His voice stopped her. “Maybe one favor.”

“What?”

“Water. You can get some out of the tap downstairs.”

“I can?” She went downstairs. A metal cup stood on the counter there. Sure enough, when she turned the tap, water came out. She ran back up with a full cup. “Where’s that water coming from? Is it safe?”

“You’ve been drinking it all along,” he said, taking a sip. “Yeah, it’s safe, and cleaner than any water you’re likely to find in a river. There’s a well, too, but the pump for that’s electric and I haven’t looked at changing it over yet. This is coming from a cistern.”

“A cistern?”

“An underground water storage tank.” He shifted himself on the floor, winced, then settled back down and went on, “When the heat came, and then the fires, I stayed there, in a space between it and the basement wall.”

“So you were down there for how long?”

“Four days. Insulated by the tank, I was cool enough to survive the big heat. I was able to get to the drain for water to drink, too.”

“You’re lucky it was there.” She had always lived in a city where water magically appeared at her taps, and she couldn’t have told its source.

“The guy who owns the house, he’s rich and an eco freak. So the house is straw bale, and partly earth sheltered.”

“Earth sheltered?” She frowned. “You mean, the basement where I’ve been sleeping.”

“Yeah.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “It’s the protection of being underground that saved most of the furnishings down there, and the carpet. The house had solar panels and the cistern and a wind generator, too. The cistern was meant to supply the gardens during the dry months. It was sustainable housing, all self-contained, but I don’t think he ever thought he’d need it.” He grimaced. “Not like this. There may even be a little charge left in the batteries.”

“You mean you have electricity?” Electricity sounded like some form of magic, from a far-off realm. She supposed that’s what it was. “That we can use?”

“In theory. But I haven’t been able to make the water pump or anything else work with it, not even the lights, and they’re LED and take almost no juice at all. Could be there’s a break in a line I haven’t found yet. There’s no lines feeding them juice any more—and nothing to feed them with anyway. The wind generator is down, and the cabling is all destroyed. The solar panels—well, if they hadn’t been screwed up, there’s no sun anyway.”

She thought over all he had just said. “So this isn’t your house? Then why are you here?”

“I’m the caretaker. Guy who owns it is a TV producer in Hollywood. He has—had—four or five houses all over the place, Aspen, Mendocino coast, France, and here, that I know of. Came here to this one maybe twice a year, three times.” He colored faintly, embarrassed by some part of this. “The whole rest of the time, I had the run of the place.”

She couldn’t imagine such a prosperous life, so much money that you could own a house and hardly ever use it. If her parents hadn’t died and left a little insurance money, she couldn’t have even gone to college. She still had to work summers to pay for books and food. She understood working class. She definitely did not understand rich. “Did you like the guy?”

“He’s okay. But I can stand anyone for a couple weeks a year.”

Coral wondered what would happen when her couple weeks were up—would he begin to hate her? It didn’t matter, really, because she wanted to get going again long before that happened. “You’ve had this before—this back thing?” she asked him.

“Yeah.”

“And how long does it last, usually?”

“Couple days is all.”

Coral wondered if he was telling her the truth or if this was stoicism or optimism operating. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t leave him alone in this condition—not after he’d helped her when she had been hurt. She’d have to stay here for a little while longer, fish to feed him, and make sure he was okay. Finding civilization would have to wait once again.

It was more like four days before Benjamin could move around again without wincing. Coral spent the mornings fishing and the afternoons digging through the burned out barn, looking for bits of tools and hardware. Each morning at the stream yielded fewer fish. Was she fishing out the stream that quickly, were they getting wise to her, or was something else going on, some weather or biological issue, killing more fish? She might go back to Mill Creek and try that river again.

Another reason for worry was the weather. Every morning it was cooler. Frost began to appear, and with the ash filtering the sunlight, it took hours to burn off. Inside at night, her bedroom was growing colder, too, and climbing out from under the blanket every morning took a real act of will. She had washed out her sleeping bag in the stream, and when it had fully dried—it was taking forever—she’d pile it over her, too. Each day warmed slightly, but even at the peak of sunlight, the air was still autumn-crisp.

And it was early July. They had both lost track of the date, but they agreed on that.

With little else to do at the house but check on a grumpy Benjamin, one evening Coral kept the lantern on and went through her back pack and reorganized. When she saw the pamphlet on survival skills, she pulled it out and read it through, paying close attention to the hunting section. If the fish stopped biting, she needed a second way to get food.

She thought she might be able to manage to build bird snares—but there wasn’t anything like grass or young willow to make a snare out of any more, and no birds to catch even if she had a snare. She also thought she could make a fishing spear from the directions, but since she had her rod and reel, that would be redundant. Pit traps looked like hard work but within her range of abilities, should game ever become plentiful again. Making a bow and arrows looked far more difficult. Not that there was a lot of ash wood left to choose from, and not that she’d know an ash from a willow without leaves to tell her. But there might be some sort of wood that had survived underwater in the stream that would work.

But were there any animals left to hunt? She hadn’t seen a track or scat or heard a noise that hinted at animal life surviving The Event. Still, she thought it was a good idea to make a bow. Maybe the animals she’d need to hunt were humans, like the guy in town. Not to eat—she wasn’t ready to dwell on that possibility—but to defend herself against.

One afternoon, trying to distract Benjamin from his pain, she brought up the disaster again and asked what he thought had happened.

“It was a single event, for sure,” Benjamin said. “Odds are, a volcano wouldn’t just erupt once without warning. They would have known it was coming, or at least might come. Then there’d be waves of eruptions, maybe changes in the ash levels from day to day. But what we had was one thing. One event. Everything else followed. It must be an impact.”

“But if it’s an asteroid or comet or something, wouldn’t they have known that was coming, too?” she asked. “Wouldn’t there have been some news?”

“Even if they did know, why would they warn anyone? Was there anything that could have been done about it if you’d known?”

“People would want to know,” she said. “I wanted to know.” Maybe she would have gotten back to Ohio if she had a warning. Or had a wild weekend of sex with a stranger. Or tried LSD or heroin to see what they were like. Something. She would have done
something
differently if she had been warned the world were about to end.

“Let’s say someone in the government knew only a day before. They’d have no reason to announce it and every reason to keep it secret from the public. People would have gone nuts. Riots, hoarding, clogging highways and airports, looting, and crimes worse than that. If you’ll never serve jail time, why not kill your boss or ex-wife, or rape, or burn? Not everyone, but some people would have. No one could have run from the thing, so what’d be the point of telling them it was coming?”

“Scientists would have known, though. Probably even amateur astronomers. With the internet, wouldn’t everyone have soon known?”

He shrugged. “Maybe no one saw it coming. Or maybe only a handful did, and quietly left their jobs and took their own families to a safe place.”

“What safe place?”

“You made it in a cave. Maybe a cave, or subway tunnel, or sub-basement to a skyscraper.”

“I guess.”

“Or maybe it was something else entirely, and not an impact at all.” He shrugged.

“You don’t seem to care.”

“I don’t. The what or how doesn’t matter. We have to live with the result.”

“Why don’t the cars work?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” Benjamin seemed to take this uncertainty with equanimity, too.

She did not. Coral wanted to know. She
needed
to know what had happened. One day, she promised herself, she’d find out.

By the fourth day after the roof was up, Benjamin was able to get up and down stairs, bend over and walk without pain.

She waited until their evening meal to bring up the subject. “I’m wondering if it’s about time for me to take off,” she said.

He said nothing for a time, just kept on chewing. Finally, he said, “You have somewhere else to go?”

“I want to get back to civilization, you know, to call relatives and friends. I want real roofs made of something that isn’t carpet, and grocery stores that will take my debit card. And I want to know what happened.”

“What makes you think there’s a civilization to get back to?”

“We survived The Event. Others must have, too. Somewhere, farther away from where it happened, a lot more people must have. Boise. Maybe I’d have to go as far as California. Somewhere things are going to be better.”

“And maybe not.” His face was grim.

She felt a chill, from more than the cold air. She was counting on there being a normal world out there. “You don’t think so? Really and truly?”

“I don’t know what to think.” Putting down his plate, he leaned back onto his elbows. “I don’t know how to find out, either. If we were just dealing with a wildfire, we’d wait until it burned past, and soon there’d be planes overhead or trucks coming up the road. But nothing could fly in this dust and neither of us has seen even one working car, right?”

“But there have to be people. Somewhere, they have to be out there.”

He shrugged and went back to eating.

She looked up at the dim gray sky. “How far do you think it goes?”

“The ash? I think it might go all the way around the planet.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really. This long after whatever it was that happened, wouldn’t air currents have spread the stuff all over? They did after Krakatoa, I think. I suspect that at least the whole northern hemisphere looks just like that. Maybe Australia is clear. But you sure ain’t gonna be walking there.”

Even Boise sounded an impossible distance away. If he was right, she’d have to go where? South America? At maybe 5 or 10 miles a day, even if she could find food the whole route? That’d be years of travel. “How far do you think the fire burned?”

“Maybe straight through to the coast. Both coasts.”

She shook her head, unable to grasp the idea of a fire that big. “Surely not.” That’d mean her family was in trouble, or dead. She refused to accept that.

“I’m certain it wasn’t small, or limited, or something you’re going to hike out of any time soon. There’s just no way to know for sure.”

“Except to go look. You could come, if you want.”

He said nothing to that, and they finished their meal in silence. Coral was in bed when a knock came at the door.

“Come in,” she said. She had quit locking it every night. She trusted him.

Benjamin entered, carrying a candle. He blew it out when he came into the dim light of the lantern—really dim, by now, as the charge was nearly spent. “I want to say something before you decide to go.”

She sat up. “Okay.”

“You’re having problems finding fish. What if that doesn’t change? What are you going to do about food if you go walking off alone?”

“What are
you
going to do about it here?”

“At least I have a rifle. I can hunt.”

“Yeah, if you can find something to hunt.”

“Yeah.” He leaned against the doorjamb and lowered the candle to the floor, leaving his face in shadow. “Before you leave, let me spend a couple days at hunting. And if I find a big mammal, we’ll dry some meat and you’ll at least have something to carry along.”

“What if you don’t find anything?”

“Then we’ll both have problems worse than we have now, and we’ll know that’s so. We’ll deal with them when we need to.” He stood in the shadow. “Will you wait for me to hunt?”

Coral was anxious to get going, but she knew he was right about provisions. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

The next morning, Benjamin gathered gear for a hunting trip.

“You sure your back can take this?” she asked.

“I’m better. As long as I don’t bend over and try to lift something.”

“What if you shoot a big animal? Won’t you have to lift it?”

“I should have such problems,” he said. “If I need help carrying meat, I’ll come back and get you. But I can’t imagine there’s any large game left. What the hell would they have eaten for the past few weeks?”

Good question. With nothing green on the ground, with not a single leaf on a tree, all the grazing animals would surely have starved by now. “Maybe you’ll find something on its last legs.”

He looked doubtful. “I’m going around the lake. I haven’t been there since the first week after. I’m hoping any animals will be drawn to its water. If I’m lucky, maybe there’ll be a bear doing some fishing.”

“A bear? Be careful,” she said. She realized there was something else she wanted to warn him about. “Stay away from Mill Creek, too.”

He looked up from his packing. “Why’s that?”

She cleared her throat. Maybe she should have told him days ago. “There was this guy.” Her tongue went leaden. She had a hard time making herself speak again. She didn’t want to think about it. “Just stay away from there, okay?”

He stared at her for a long time. “That’s it? You’re not going to tell me anything more?”

She shook her head. “Just be careful. Of people.”

“I’m always careful,” he said.

“Good.”

Minutes later, he was gone, disappearing into the gray air. Coral was left alone. As the minutes wore on, she regretted not forcing herself to tell him more about the attack on her. He needed to know why to stay away from Mill Creek. She resolved to tell him when he came back, no matter how painful it was to remember.

She didn’t have to wait days to do it. No more than an hour had passed when she heard him calling her name.

Coral trotted upstairs. Benjamin was outside the burned out back door. He moved into the kitchen, leaned against the counter, and folded his arms.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Did you hurt your back again?”

He reached onto the counter, picked up his rifle, and extended his arm, offering it.

She didn’t reach out to take it. “What do you want me to do with that? You need it to hunt.”

“Look at it.”

Reaching her hands out, she accepted the rifle, then looked at it. She knew very little about guns, hadn’t had an interest in hunting, though her brother had offered to teach her. She shook her head and offered him the rifle back.

He didn’t take it. “That’s not mine.”

Perplexed, Coral shook her head. Then she understood. “It’s the one I had?” She looked at it more closely. “You finally found it. Good.”

He frowned. “I didn’t
finally
find it.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“I found it when I found you.”

“But why—?” She shook her head, trying to clear it. “I’m not getting this at all. You found the rifle and then lied to me and said you hadn’t?”

“
I
lied to
you
.” His voice was flat, but there was anger etched in the lines around his mouth.

“Are you pissed at me?” Coral clutched the rifle to her chest. “I should be pissed off at you!”

“And why’s that?”

“No, I should be afraid of you. I
am
afraid of you. What is going on here?”

“You tell me.”

Coral backed up a step, ready to turn and run if she needed to. “You found the rifle, you hid it from me, and you lied to me about finding it. Right so far?”

“I didn’t lie, actually, if you remember. I just didn’t answer your question. That’s half the story.”

“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?”