Gray (Book 1) (2 page)

If they ever did.

There was no sense in being frustrated at what was beyond her control, she knew, but she was frustrated anyway. Her mind raced in circles, her muscles twitched with a desire to get out of here, to do
something
.

She racked her mind for something else useful to do. An inventory. First, she’d get a candle lit so she could conserve the batteries of the flashlight.

In the dim light of a single votive candle, she unpacked and laid her supplies neatly around her. She had a ground cloth rolled inside her sleeping bag. She had two bandanas, one from the frame pack and the dirty one hanging around her neck, plus a hand towel. She had food she’d just grabbed, and a stale energy bar from the frame pack. A half-eaten hazelnut-chocolate bar from the daypack completed her larder. She’d make the food last, eating no more than half of it today, just in case whatever this was didn’t go away for a couple days.

The water could become a problem. She had a small bottle in an outside pouch of the frame pack with a few inches of stale water, left over from her last hike. The two liters of water she had just put in the daypack, the milk she had grabbed with a quart and a half left, and that was all. If she had to stay here more than three days, she was in trouble. In fact, she’d die without water. There was a tank of it in the motor home, 20 gallons or so, she thought, depending on how much she’d used since she last filled it three days ago. If she had to, she’d go out and get more from the tank. But not right now, while she could still see the occasional orange flash of burning rocks out there.

In addition to the t-shirt and jeans she was wearing, there was a sweater and a thin turtleneck in the frame pack, and the sweatshirt tied around her waist. The frame pack also held one spare pair each of wool and cotton socks, as well as a smashed ball cap. She put the cap on and donned the sweatshirt, to conserve her body heat in the cool cave air.

The Swiss army knife and a small homemade first aid kit were of no use right now—but they might be later. She felt pleased with her own organized nature, which her last boyfriend used to make fun of, joking about in his good moods, in his bad moods calling her anally retentive. That desire for order also had led to her keeping her frame pack packed all the time. Now she felt an echo of “I told you so” pleasure. The knife held two blades and several gadgets, including a magnesium fire starter and a can opener. She had a coil of red paracord, maybe 30 feet long. The candles and matches she had brought would be useful, though she had no idea how long one candle would last. Not very long, she imagined.

The spare pair of dollar-store sunglasses would do her no good at all in here. Her day pack held her film-canister survival kit: utility knife blade, a fishhook and a neat coil of monofilament line knotted to a small screw eye, five wax-covered matches, and a magnetized sewing needle. It was exactly what some article she had read had said to pack in such a kit. How any of it could help her survive in this hole in the mountain, she couldn’t say.

She was surprised to find, at the bottom of her frame pack, her smallest fishing tackle box, which she must have left in there just a few days back, when she’d hiked up to a mountain lake in the Tetons for an overnight hike. Nothing in there would be of use right now, either. And the tiny paperback field guide to the stars she had tucked in the frame pack’s outside pocket, in case she was camping out and wanted to know the name of the constellations overhead, seemed utterly superfluous. Who knew when the stars would be visible again?

Never.
The word floated out of the back of her mind, but she refused to dwell on it.

In the daypack, she had a small notebook and pencil stub, and a piece of chalk she sometimes used to mark trees on unfamiliar trails. From the big pack, a sliver of low-phosphate soap, wrapped in lavender-colored tissue paper. A roll of biodegradable toilet paper without its cardboard tube, smashed flat and stored in a zippered bag. A packet of a dozen antibacterial baby wipes. A tube of combination sunscreen and insect repellant lotion on a nylon rope necklace. A trial-size container of bath powder. Lip balm. That was all.

She set about re-packing, taking her time, filling the daypack with the food and extra candles—what she’d need today—and the frame pack with everything else, making a mental note of where she put each item so that she could find it all in the dark if need be.

She couldn’t be sure whether or not she’d be left alone in the dark for hours or days. Just in case, she’d conserve her light. She blew the candle out and sat down to wait in the dark.

A few hours later—or it felt like a few hours, though she had no way of being sure—Coral had no new information and no new theories. Fear had given way to acceptance of her situation, and soon that gave way to boredom.
So the world is ending, and I’m bored—that’s really weird, don’t you think?

The cave’s mouth was no brighter. If anything, the light outside had faded. She flicked on her flashlight and made her way in that direction. The smell of smoke grew stronger. The air heated, too, until she wanted to strip off the sweatshirt.

Just inside the cave’s entrance, she stopped. She smelled wood smoke, pungent and unmistakable. The hair on the back of her neck rose in an animal response to fire. She couldn’t see any flames, but out there somewhere, the vast forest was afire.

Her hands and face began to feel tacky with her perspiration from the heat, more than from fear—though she was afraid, terribly so, at some primal level. Her body wanted her to flee, just as those deer had done back at the beginning, but it was far too late now. Coral retreated from the heat and backed up to her packs again.

As the day passed, her spot in the cave grew warmer. More smoke drifted into the cave’s entrance until her eyes begin to water from it. She gathered up her packs and sleeping bag and moved deeper into the cave. When she could no longer smell smoke, and when the chill of the air seeped through her clothing once again, she stopped. Then she settled down against the wall, sitting on her sleeping bag.

The cave’s entrance was a couple hundred feet away now but illuminated nothing. The dark began to cling to her like a tangible thing.

Her mind drifted to the last human conversations she had had. A chat about weather and nothing of note with a convenience store clerk. Her weekly phone call to her big brother, who was worried about her being alone, a woman without a gun in the woods. A phone call to her grandmother to wish her happy birthday. She wondered how her family was, if they were watching the TV back in Ohio about—well, about whatever this event was—and going crazy from worry.

Long hours passed. Without her cell phone or watch, she had no idea how many. As the world outside did not change for the good, she decided to limit herself to drinking only the few inches of water that remained in the old bottle of water. Eventually, hunger came, gnawing at her belly. For a time, she resisted it. When her hunger had turned instead to weakness and a pounding in her head, she ate a dinner of half of the milk, the stale energy bar, and the apple, eating every bit of that but the seeds and stem. The milk slaked the thirst that had been building all day.

She bedded down early for the night—at least it felt as if it weren’t yet sundown, though she couldn’t be certain of time by looking at the dark cave entrance. She should have grabbed her phone just for the clock function.

She wriggled around, trying to find a comfortable position. The duff-covered ground of a forest had never been this hard. Within minutes, her hipbones felt bruised by the rock floor. She turned again, trying to find a more comfortable position, finally settling for flat on her back.

She lay there and let her mind drift. She remembered being a child, playing tag with her younger brother Blayne, hunting Easter eggs, playing the complicated make-believe games she loved inventing for the neighborhood kids. Memories of kids she hadn’t thought about in years came rushing forward, and memories of her parents, tinged, as always, with grief. Losing herself in the better memories, she was able to fall asleep.

* * *

A flicker of orange light registered through her closed eyelids. She turned away from it and felt the unyielding rock beneath her body, pressing painfully at her hipbone again. The pain woke her fully. She sat up, disoriented; then she remembered where she was.

The orange light was coming from the cave’s entrance, not the streaks of falling rock from earlier, but a steady glow. Fire had reached trees outside. The cave had grown warmer, and in her sleep she had shoved down the bag to her waist.

There was no dense smoke in her part of the cave but she could vaguely smell the fire. And the heat!—she had no idea how much heat a wildfire could generate, but it must be a lot to reach in and heat the protected space this far inside the cave.

Damn, but it was heating up quickly. She would have to move back farther still. She got up and lit the candle and left it by her camp as a marker, along with all her things, while she went exploring. The flashlight illuminated the floor before her feet in a white oval as she made her way deeper into the womb of the cave. Soon, the floor itself was no longer broad and smooth but was rising at the edges in jagged bulges of rock.

She stopped there. Turning around, she stared back the way she had come. The cave’s entrance was still visible, a fuzzy orange glow far away, maybe as much as a quarter-mile away. In the other direction, the cave narrowed, the ceiling dropping down as the floor rose. She was deep inside a long arm of a cavern carved out so very long ago by water.

As she stood still, the cold began to seep into her bones. Inside this part of the cave, she was buried under the side of a mountain, insulated from the air outside by a good stretch of rock. The sense of the weight of the rock overhead made her pull her head into her shoulders, like a turtle.

She felt cornered in here by the fire. And what if the heat reached the back of the cave, too? Would she run out of space, not be able to escape being roasted?

Don’t borrow trouble, she told her herself, repeating one of her grandmother’s favorite sayings. In two trips, she moved her gear back into the cave to the last flat stretch of floor and settled down again for what remained of the night—or what felt like night. Maybe, just maybe, she’d wake to a bright dawn.

* * *

When Coral woke again, there was still no light. Her body insisted it was morning. Far under the mountain, of course it was dark, as she expected. But in the distance, far beyond her feet where she hoped to see the light of day shining from the cave’s mouth, there was nothing but more darkness. No light of a forest fire remained. The blackness enfolded her in its dark arms.

Fending off a primal fear of the dark, she fumbled for the flashlight, happy when her fingers found the cylinder on top of her pack. She turned it on, feeling a wash of relief at having light. It was cool back here, still; she had that to be grateful for. She walked back toward the entrance with a plan to pee outside, but the heat grew and grew with every step. Not far from her original camp, there was an impenetrable wall of heat. The air where she stood was stifling, dry and oppressive. She was quick about relieving herself there, but before she was done, sweat was running down her neck and spine in irritating drops. She wanted to look outside, see if her motor home was a burned-out shell or not, but she could not tolerate this pitiless heat for one second longer.

As she walked back in the cave to her campsite, she thought about how dependent she had become on the television and radio and her computer. At home, or in her dorm room, if a thunderstorm broke, she could turn on the weather station to see how bad it was going to be and how long it would last, timing a dash to the library between lines of squall on the radar. If a jet plane crashed halfway around the world, a dozen news stations would spend the next twenty-four hours telling her the few known facts and their inaccurate speculations about the crash’s causes over and over again. If she had a wireless signal, she was connected. If the electricity went out, she could phone the power company and hear how long she’d have to wait for lights to return.

But here, she was utterly alone with her ignorance. In the dark, probably miles away from the nearest person, with no radio, television, Internet, or telephone, she had no idea what was going on out there. Had a volcano erupted? Was there some freak gigantic firestorm? Or had something else happened that she hadn’t yet begun to guess?

In one part of her mind, she was being rational and trying to work out what had happened. In another part of her mind, primitive fear was clamoring to take over. Because whatever was happening out there, it was clearly bad—very bad. An irrational animal inside her brain clamored to be let out, to run in fear, to make mewling noises.

Coral refused to let it win. Mindless panic would not help her, and it wouldn’t help the world outside. So she simply would not—could not—allow it out.

* * *

The fear she could fight off, but as the day wore on, she felt more and more caged. Despite the drama and mystery of the events outside, the boredom of her confinement threatened to drive her mad—that is, until she remembered the little star guide she had kept in her frame pack. She lit a candle and flipped through the book. It was worth burning a half-inch of candle to be distracted by reading for an hour or two. What she’d give for an e-reader right now, charged up to max and loaded with hundreds of books. She vowed to buy herself one at the end of the summer, when she was flush from her summer job’s pay.

She flipped to the star guide’s table of contents. Two chapter titles,
Comets
and
Asteroids
, leapt off the page. What if that’s what had happened? An asteroid impact? She flipped straight to those sections and read.

Such an event, most scientists thought, had killed the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago—and impacts before then had also killed millions of species at a time. The book said little more than the basic facts, so Coral dredged from her memory all that she knew. What was happening right now in the world outside only partly matched what she could remember of what she had read or seen on TV. She thought the scientists said that massive earthquakes would be triggered by the impact of a massive object, and yet she hadn’t felt any tremors. And she certainly hadn’t seen a bright fireball streaking across the sky before the black cloud began to rise.

Also, she remembered that what happened next, if the impact was great enough, was something like a nuclear winter, a terrible drop in worldwide temperatures. It was stiflingly hot outside, not cold. So all the details didn’t fit. Still, it was another possibility to add to her useless theorizing.

Like a nuclear winter: the phrase echoed in her mind. What about a nuclear war? Not some minor power like Pakistan or North Korea dropping its few bombs on a neighbor, but an all-out nuclear holocaust with bombs dropped everywhere, even in the middle of rural southern Wyoming or Northern Colorado—her best guess as to where that initial boiling black cloud may have had its origins. But who had the bombs and missiles enough to do that? She thought only Russia did. She couldn’t remember anything on the news about some new flare-up in war or diplomacy there. And the black cloud looked nothing like the films she’d seen of mushroom clouds.

Still, if it were that, a total nuclear war, then hiding in this cave would not save her from the radiation for long, that much she did know. She’d die anyway, and her survival efforts here would come to nothing. But if it were a nuclear holocaust, why would the air be black with gunk? No, that theory didn’t make any sense, either.

Holding on to the theories, as inadequate as they seemed, was some sort of comfort. Massive new volcano…nuclear holocaust…asteroid impact...crazy big wildfire. It could be any of those, or perhaps something she hadn’t yet guessed. She wondered, whatever it was, how wide the devastation was, wondered how many other people had survived, were sitting just as she was, wondering what the hell was going on. Was her family worried for her? Or had the thing, whatever it was, stretched all the way to Ohio to get them, too? How many had died? How many would?

The cave might be a cage, it might be boring to sit alone in it for hours upon hours, but it was, she knew, also keeping her alive.

* * *

All the second day, the searing heat continued outside. On the morning of the third day, or what she counted that after she had slept another long while, she resolved to suffer through the heat and go outside, forcing her feet along no matter what. She tried to do just this, but it was impossible to get as far as a hundred feet from the cave’s entrance. Within seconds of trying to push through the wall of heat, her skin felt scorched and her throat and lungs felt flayed. Her eyes burned to painful dryness. She retreated back into the cave’s recesses, frustrated that she could not overpower the heat with the force of her will.

She was starting to worry about water, too. The milk was gone now, and she was out of all but half of the last bottle of water, despite taking only the smallest sips yesterday. And she was hungry. The hunger twisted her belly, but the thirst was maddening. The thought of water nagged at her every waking moment. She fantasized about juice, soda, and tall glasses of iced tea with lemon twists along the rim, condensation beading on the glass. The image of a clear, cool waterfall began to haunt her thoughts.

She used a full candle that day, burning it until it had turned to liquid and letting it burn until the liquid wax had burned entirely away, reading every word of the one book she had. When the day’s candle sputtered out and the star book was tucked away again, she spent more time remembering.

She remembered her father leaving her mother once, then coming back less than a month later. Remembered her little brother coming to her, bruised and miserable, after an encounter with a bully. Remembered her big brother, James, getting arrested for drunk driving when he was 16 and the family arguments about that. Remembered the last time she saw her grandmother, who had given her “mad” money for this trip. She thought of the old woman’s independence and spunk, which Coral hoped she had inherited.