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She walked the perimeter and met some more people as she did. She shook hands, and smiled, and pretended to be a woman being integrated willingly into a new community. Benjamin was nowhere to be seen, but Martin was on patrol and she spent five minutes talking to him.
When a woman came to relieve him, Martin and she walked together to the dining halls. He told her Benjamin had gone to help Kathy with something north of town, so the niggling worry that had been bothering Coral about being separated from Benjamin was eased a fraction.
She and Benjamin had more to discuss tonight. When he came in to the dining room, just as the bowls were being served to the tables, she felt enormous relief. He sat next to her, and she grabbed his hand under the table and held tight to it. He glanced at her in concern.
“I’m good,” she said. “Just missed you.”
They held each other’s glance for a moment, and he nodded. Both knew they had things to discuss when they were alone.
Coral turned to the table and saw Abigail beaming at her. “What?” she said.
“You two are cute together,” said Abigail.
“Um, thanks?” said Coral.
Benjamin was spooning food into a shallow bowl. “Soup looks thin tonight.”
Coral took her turn with the serving bowl. It did look watery.
“We need to step up scavenging,” said Doug. “Unless we want to take another step down in calories.”
Abigail said, “Don’t you go volunteering for any extra trips, Doug.”
“I hope he’ll add more teams, actually. Benjamin is new, so that helps. And if you ask me, he could take a few off guard duty too. We haven’t seen a stranger—except for these two—in months.” He blew on a spoonful of soup and ate it. “If I’m asked to go, of course I’ll go. We all need the food.”
The table talked about scavenging for the rest of the meal, and where there might be more food. Coral hesitated to volunteer the information, but she finally decided it couldn’t hurt, so she told the story of the train of soup cans.
The table grew hushed as she explained how they had explored the train tracks until she’d lucked upon a full car of food, four containers, packed with canned soup. “It would have been years worth of food for the two of us. For this group?” She did some quick calculating. “Still a month’s worth, even if you didn’t have anything else.”
“How far away is it?” It was a voice from another table, a middle-aged man Coral hadn’t met.
The whole room had grown silent and was listening. “I’m not sure. Maybe two hundred miles away?”
“About that,” said Benjamin. “But it’s not there any more. I’d bank on it.”
Abigail said, “Why not?”
Coral answered. “There was an Army group. Or a false army, maybe.” Coral explained how they’d lost the food—or abandoned it to a superior force.
“Where were they based?” said the same man.
“No idea,” said Benjamin.
“They came from the east. From this direction,” said Coral. “You’ve never seen them? Run into a sign of them at all?”
Murmurs of denial came from every corner of the room. She had the attention of three dozen people.
A woman at another table said, “Have you told Levi about this? Parnell?”
Coral shook her head.
Benjamin said, “I told them we’ve run into several groups of people, none you’d care to stumble across alone.”
Coral felt strangely defensive. “Levi didn’t seem interested in asking me about who we’d met.”
“That makes no sense,” Doug said. “Of course he’d want to know about potential allies—or enemies.”
“I’d want to know,” said Beth, across Coral’s table. “Should we be worried?”
“You should go to Levi right now,” another said. “I don’t like this.”
“If you haven’t run into them in seven months, and if we haven’t again, I don’t see the hurry,” Coral said.
“I’d better go find Parnell,” said Doug, getting to his feet.
“Finish your soup,” Abigail said.
“No, you can finish mine, hon,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
If Coral was going to get dragged off for another meeting, she was going to finish her soup too. She bent to the task, spooning up every drop, and then using a bare finger to scrape out the rest of the bowl.
Benjamin was eating quickly too, a frown on his face. Was he upset with her?
“Should I not have told them?” she said to him, trying to speak for his ears only.
“I don’t see as it matters one way or the other.”
“They seem angry at me.”
“They’re afraid,” Benjamin said.
She leaned forward and whispered, “I guess I shouldn’t mention the Humvees at this point.”
“Not here.”
Parnell came into the room, seeming irritated. “What’s all this?”
“We were telling stories about scavenging food,” said Coral, still feeling defensive. “People freaked out when we mentioned losing some to these military guys.”
Benjamin said, “But they may not have been real military.”
“Where was this?”
“North of Twin Falls a ways,” Benjamin said.
“So Sun Valley?”
“Maybe,” said Benjamin. “If you have a map with railroads marked, I might be able to pinpoint it.”
Parnell blew out a breath and his tension eased a notch. “That’s a long ways.”
“There’s an Air Force Base at Mountain Home,” said the man at the next table.
“It wasn’t Air Force,” Coral said. “Army. Stenciled all over their stuff.” She didn’t want to discuss it here. The crowd and its emotions were making her nervous. “Do you want us to talk to Levi about it?” She pushed back from the table.
“How long ago was this?” Parnell asked.
“Gosh. Six weeks?” Coral looked to Benjamin.
“Something like that,” he said, watching Parnell.
“The two of you come with me,” he said. “Everybody else, stay calm. You heard them. This was all more than a month ago and miles away. There’s nothing urgent about this news.” He said to Doug in a low voice, “Try to keep everyone calm,” and then he made eye contact with Coral and jerked his head toward the door.
When they were outside, he said, “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”
“You didn’t ask,” said Coral. “Sorry I’m not a mind-reader.”
“You know we care about our defenses.”
“I was thinking of the people who actually hurt me out there. I nearly forget the ones I managed to avoid.”
“Huh,” said Parnell. In silence, he marched them to a building Coral had never been in. The interior was dark. He flipped on a flashlight and led them down two corridors and to an apartment door, which he knocked on with the butt of the flashlight.
A female voice called “Who is it?”
“Parnell. I need to see Levi.” When the door opened a crack, he said, “Wait” to the two of them and slipped inside.
Coral reached for Benjamin’s gloved hand and held on to it. “Why do I feel like I’ve been sent to the principal’s office?”
“Because you have been?”
“You’re here too.”
“Bad companions,” he said mournfully. “My mother always told me to look out for them.”
She laughed, despite her nervousness. “Is there any reason not to tell him the truth about this?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“I wish we had more time to—” and then the door opened and she shut up.
Parnell waved them in. Inside, it was so warm, Coral unzipped her jacket immediately. A stove in the corner was pumping out heat. On the edge of it was a shiny teapot. The place was full of furniture—good furniture, stuffed, soft, or real wood. It was likely the best of the best they’d scavenged over months. Two oil lamps lit the room. It would have been a modest place a year ago. Today it was the height of luxury.
A woman in a silk kimono was walking through a door back into a bedroom, and a second later Levi came out of it, securing a tie on a plush robe.
Coral understood why Benjamin had been troubled by this place. It was too much. Too much heat, filled with too much stuff, and too different from the way Abigail and Doug had to live.
Levi sat in a recliner and made himself comfortable. Coral could see a peek of hairy shins and moved her eyes until she was looking at his face. He had the shadow of a new beard. His hair was mussed. “You have a story to tell?” He addressed the question to Benjamin.
Coral spoke before Benjamin could. “It’s my story. Benjamin only knows it secondhand. Or rather, he only knows the important part of it secondhand.”
“Go on then,” Levi said.
Coral quickly detailed the finding of the soup and the day she’d heard the engine.
That popped Levi out of his reclined position. “They had working trucks?”
“A Hummer,” she said. “Stenciled with US Army.”
“How?” Levi looked at Parnell. “How could those be working?”
“We can ask Findlay.”
Levi waved a dismissal of that idea. “He wouldn’t know more than you or I.” He peered intently at Coral. “You’re sure it was a Humvee? Gas engine?”
“I assume gas, but it could have been diesel. You have a pencil, paper?” said Coral. When Parnell brought her one, she took it to the coffee table and knelt in front of it. She drew a rough sketch of the vehicle, and then one of the tread marks in the snow. She handed it to Parnell.
“Yup, a Hummer. Tracks are right.” He handed the paper to Levi.
Levi looked at it and then up to her. “You’re not lying about this?”
Coral threw her hands up at that. “Why would I be lying? What’s in it for me?”
“I don’t know.” He looked to Benjamin. “You can confirm this?”
“I saw none of it. But I saw her when she told me about it. She was afraid. And there was no reason to lie to me about it—their arrival there cost us easy food. Literally a ton of food.”
Levi narrowed his eyes. “Why did you give it up so easily, then? How many of them, just two?”
“Two reasons,” Coral said. “What they said about whores—slaves, really, and I didn’t want to become one. And their really big guns against my homemade bow.”
He held out the paper. “Can you draw those guns?”
She took the paper back. She was a passable artist in bio class, but technical drawings like this were not her forte. She tried to remember everything she could about the rifles. She had thought they were automatic, weapons of war. What had made her think that? No idea. “Benjamin,” she said.
He came and squatted down beside her. “Yeah?”
“When you had the 30-06, the scope was about here?” She drew a basic rifle shape and sketched it in.
“Right.”
“Mounted right to the gun, like right to the body of it?”
“Like this.” He took the pencil and sketched in a couple lines.
“There was more space on the army guys’. Like this.” Taking the pencil back, she drew an oval at the top, and put a rectangle on top of it to indicate the scope.
“Okay, sure. That’s probably a handle there. Anything else different?”
“There was bumpy stuff here, at the front. And it wasn’t wood.” She sketched the front in and thought about it. “I only got a glimpse, but I think it was fatter back here—the stock, is that the word?” She’d picked up some information from him when they’d had a pair of rifles and he was teaching her to shoot, but she was still shaky on the terminology of guns.
She started anew, a neater drawing. “The whole thing seemed like metal, or at least it was a gunmetal gray.” She tried to remember the trigger, the magazine. “No, sorry. I didn’t get a good look at anything on the bottom side.” She looked at Benjamin, who was watching her draw. “Do you recognize it?”
He nodded and took the paper and passed it to Parnell. Parnell glanced at it and passed it on to Levi. “Looks like an M16, standard military issue. Eight hundred rounds a minute. You can get a head shot at fifteen hundred yards with one, if you know what you’re doing.”
“And I think we can assume they know what they’re doing.” Levi looked over to Coral. “This was how long ago?”
“We’re thinking maybe six weeks? Could be seven.”
“You can show us where?”
Benjamin said, “If you have an Idaho map with rail lines on it, I could get you real close.”
Levi said, “I don’t have one here.”
“At the office,” Parnell said.
“Is it worth worrying about tonight?” Levi asked him.
A slow shake of the head from Parnell. “If they aren’t at our doorstep now, it’s unlikely they’ll be here before tomorrow.”
“Still, we should try to figure this out quickly. Where they are. Why they haven’t come this way, toward the biggest city around. That’s where I’d be headed.” He frowned at Coral. “Is there anything else you’ve been keeping from us like this?”
“I wasn’t keeping anything from you. It hadn’t come up. There was also a small group, armed, dangerous, like six people, back in—” she looked at Benjamin, forgetting the name of the place.
“American Falls,” he said. He shook his head dismissively. “You should worry more about the cult. They’re closer, and they’re armed.”
“But you said they were busy preparing for their alien masters or somesuch,” Levi said.
“That’s right.”
“They’re nothing,” said Levi. “But an army. The Army. That’s another kettle of fish.” He looked again at Coral’s drawings. “You two, be in the library, at dawn. We may need to ask you more questions.”
“What about—?” began Coral.
“This takes precedence over the clinic,” Levi said, anticipating her question.
Poor Edith. At this rate, she was never going to be able to take a day off.
“How’s the light right now?” Levi asked Parnell.
Parnell went to the window and moved back a heavy drape. “Still light.”
“Get on home, then. And I’m glad you told us this. Better late than never, I suppose,” Levi said.
Coral said nothing. She was done defending herself. These people had no idea what it had been like out there, how one dangerous group had supplanted the next in her mind. Each day’s troubles were troubles enough, and dwelling on the past was worse than useless. Levi looked like he had no worse problems than deciding which comfortable chair to pick to rest his butt in every night.
