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Coral thought they should be looking for a chance to escape, despite the stranger’s access to a variety of food. Still, she wondered, not for the first time, what she might be willing to do—to sacrifice—in exchange for one of these meal packets twice a day. Not the use of her sex organs. Not Benjamin’s well-being. But anything else might be negotiable.
It was a terrible thing to know about yourself.
If all they needed was for her to do first aid on a few people back at their camp, she could manage that. If they expected her to be able to do surgery or set a compound fracture, her inexperience would be glaringly obvious. And then what? In the new world, your value to a group had to be weighed against your cost to the food supply. There was no room any longer for carrying dead weight. If you were dead weight, you were just dead.
Kathy collected the empty food bags. Benjamin stopped her from taking the fish heads and bones away as garbage. “It’s good for soup,” he pointed out.
“Not much meat left on them,” said Jamie.
“More than we had for many a day,” said Benjamin. “If you don’t want them, we’ll take them back.”
There was an awkward silence, and Jamie handed the trimmings of the fish to Benjamin. There were fish bones from yesterday stored in one of the burlap bags, and he added these to those.
Martin said, “So how are we going to sleep? Six in the tent will be crowded.”
Benjamin said, “We dig a snow cave every night. It won’t take long to do it again.”
“We need to talk about this,” said Jamie, and not to Coral and Benjamin. “If they stay, we need to set a guard.”
Martin stayed at the fire to keep an eye on the two of them while the other three moved away into the darkness. Coral heard the murmur of their voices but couldn’t make out any words.
They came back and Kathy announced their decision. Everyone would sleep in the one tent, and no guard would be needed. Jamie escorted Coral and Benjamin to the latrine, and then they were put in the center of the tent, with a box of four people around them, and the rifles stowed out of their reach.
It was crowded, and strangely humid with all the exhalations of six people, but not nearly as warm as a snow cave. She and Benjamin, surrounded as they were, were probably the warmest of the group, but she was uncomfortably cold. Benjamin tried to keep his bad arm out of everyone’s way, but she heard him bite off a pained noise when it was jostled as everyone tried to settle in to a more comfortable position.
The scents of unfamiliar people were disturbing, triggering some animal sense of danger that kept her from drifting off to sleep despite being exhausted. She was the last of them to fall asleep, and as she did, she worried what tomorrow would bring. The worry tainted her dreams, and she woke up twice in the night with pounding heart and the bitter taste of fear in her mouth.
* * *
IN THE MORNING SHE and Benjamin shared their second MRE—too salty and too sweet, by turns—and drank a hot drink each, sharing the one tin cup they had. Benjamin wanted his with sugar, and when he was done with the cup, she tried the cocoa mix. It was bitter—rancid, maybe—but she gulped it down anyway.
Again, there was a meeting about them, but as it was after sunrise, the strangers sent the two of them several yards off and had the discussion around the fire. She and Benjamin weren’t near their supplies, so they weren’t going to run with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
“Do you think they’re deciding whether to kill us or not?” Coral asked Benjamin, speaking barely above a whisper.
“I think they would have already, had that been their plan,” he said.
“And not wasted food on us first,” she said.
“I suspect they’re debating whether to let us go or take us to their home base.”
“Do you think they’ll give us a choice?”
“That, I can’t say. What I can say is this. Without the rifle, we don’t stand a chance of surviving out here alone.” He glanced over at the others. “Not for long.”
She put her back to them. “They won’t hand it back loaded and turn their backs.”
“No,” he said. “By the way. You and I—we’re married?”
She felt herself blushing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to discuss it with you, and it was the best I could do at the moment. The thought was, I won’t let another group of crazies separate us.”
“I’m not complaining. It was quick thinking. But I am a little amused.”
“Maybe I should learn your last name. And your middle name. And birthday. And parents’ names. In case they quiz me, it seems like stuff a wife would know.”
He shook his head. “They won’t ask.” He tugged her jacket so he could look right at her. “They want you, not me.”
“I hope not for what the Seed wanted me for.”
“No. They want a doctor, that’s obvious. There must be a lot of them.”
“I’m not a doctor,” she said.
“You’ll do until a better one comes along.”
“I’m terrified they’ll ask me to—I don’t know. Take out an appendix. Deliver a baby.”
“You could do either.”
She took an involuntary step back. “I could not!”
“Shh. Better you than no one. You’re still thinking old-world.”
She still shook her head. “I’d kill someone by operating on them.”
“Do you know where the appendix is?”
“Well, sure,” she said, pointing to her own.
“You’re way ahead of most of us, then.”
“But still,” she said. And then she snorted a laugh at her next thought, which she shared with him. “I thought, but I could lose my right to be licensed!”
“Yep, see? Old-world thinking.”
“It is. But I don’t want to kill anyone. I wouldn’t even want to kill one of the cultists through medical malpractice. That’s just wrong.”
“You’ll do your best for these people. If you want to help them, that is”
Coral tried to imagine cutting open an abdomen. Clamping off blood vessels. Administering anesthesia. Without the right tools and a competent assistant, no, she couldn’t. Wouldn’t. But if there were a fully-stocked operating suite, and drugs, and a nurse...? Maybe. And what if it were Benjamin, with an appendix ready to burst? Would she risk killing him on the table to keep him from dying anyway?
She’d rather not have to make that choice. But there were a lot of choices she’d been forced to make this past six months that she’d never imagined herself making. Leaving bodies unburied. Killing. Stripping the dismembered bodies of people she’d murdered.
She glanced over her shoulder at the four strangers. “So you think if we are given a choice, we should go with them?”
“We were damn close to dying a few days ago. I think we have to see what their set-up is. They have food. Maybe they have a lot more at their home base. Maybe they have antibiotics.”
She hated that he was right. She liked being with the one person she knew she could trust—trusted enough to tell him the shameful truth right now: “Other people scare me.”
“For good reason,” Benjamin said. “But if it’s something we can get out of—either from their telling us we can leave, or being able to sneak away eventually once their guard is down—we should see what they have. Maybe we can gear up better before we leave. They might have construction materials, enough to let us build another sled.”
Her heart lifted at the thought. “That’d be something to take a risk for. But I can’t see them giving away anything they could use.”
“You could ask for it as salary.”
“Salary?”
“Why not? Compensation for your work. Who knows how badly they want you. It won’t hurt to negotiate for pay.”
She was trying to get her mind around the idea that she might be worth something to these people, that she might be able to barter goods from them for her services. “I’d probably be of more use fishing for them.”
“Yup, you’re a double threat,” he agreed. “Whereas I’m not that useful.”
“They don’t know you yet,” she said. “You’re incredibly useful. It’s hard to imagine anyone who would be more so in these circumstances.”
“They wouldn’t think that. For now, I’m just the guy who comes with the doctor.” That didn’t seem to bother him.
“That’s right,” she said. “You are. If they want me, we’re a package deal. If they don’t want me—” She stopped herself. She was going to say, “We’re still a package deal,” but she didn’t have the right to choose for him.
“We’re a team,” he reassured her, as Martin called them back to the smoldering fire.
Kathy spoke for the group. “We can’t tell you everything. We can’t make an offer to you. But I know Levi—he’s in charge—will want to talk to you both. I think he will invite you in. You don’t seem crazy, and you have important skills.”
Coral said, “What if we don’t want to come with you?”
“Then you don’t stay with us. That simple.”
“And our—Benjamin’s—rifle? My knife? The hatchet? You’ll return those?”
There was a hesitation at that. “Yes,” Kathy finally said. “Not right away, but eventually.”
Coral thought the men looked unhappy at that, but none of them challenged the statement.
“Can we talk about it? The two of us, I mean? Before we decide?”
“We have exploring to do today, so you have the day. You’ll have plenty of chances to discuss it.”
“Can I go fishing today?” Coral said.
“I wanted you to come with me and Martin. There are some things I want you to look at.”
“What kind of things?”
Jamie spoke up. “Supplies we found yesterday. We can’t carry everything, and maybe you can tell us what’s most useful.”
It took her a second to understand why they’d want her to be the one to decide. “Medical supplies, you mean?”
“Right,” he said. “Doug and I are going to keep on exploring new sites for food.” He glanced at Benjamin. “You can come with us.”
“No,” said Coral. “He and I stay together. Nothing else is an option.”
Jamie looked doubtful—or suspicious—at that, but Doug was nodding. “I get that.”
Kathy decided quickly. “Okay. He can come. The four of us will go back to that barn, and you two keep on checking for houses to the south. We’ll meet up back here for supper.”
Jamie said, “Don’t be so late this time.”
“We won’t,” Kathy said. “Unless we run across another couple of stragglers out there.” She turned to Coral. “Can you guys empty out those sacks of yours and bring them along? It’ll be good to have something else to carry supplies with.”
Coral didn’t like that at all. What little they had, she didn’t want to let out of her grasp. But she couldn’t have it both ways. She needed to decide: trust these people—at least for a while—or part ways now.
That they were willing to let her leave made her, paradoxically, more willing to stay and see what the strangers’ situation was. “What do you think?” she asked Benjamin.
“Seems fine to me. If we decide to leave later, we’ll pack our own stuff back up, right?” Benjamin looked at Kathy.
“Sure.”
The answer seemed too quick. Coral still didn’t trust that promise. But a week ago, she had been about to starve to death. If the strangers had food, she’d be willing to join forces with them—temporarily.
She’d be watching them, though, and on her guard today, and she’d make sure that Benjamin and she were ready to flee at a moment’s notice, when they all arrived wherever they were going tomorrow. She wasn’t going to let herself be isolated or locked up again.
She hoped that she wouldn’t find herself trapped.
