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“Why do I feel guilty?” She asked Benjamin, as they hurried under darkening skies back to the apartment.
“For not telling them sooner?”
“Yeah. I shouldn’t, and yet I do.”
“You’re getting acclimated. You’re starting to see them as your tribe, and feel a responsibility toward them.”
“No. You’re my tribe,” she said.
They walked in silence. Coral thought back to the Army guys—or fake Army guys, whichever they were. “I don’t think I can remember anything other than what I told them.”
“No?”
“But I have to go there tomorrow anyway.”
“Yep.”
“I don’t like getting...” she was going to say “yanked around,” but that was an exaggeration. She thought it through as they turned up the walk for Doug and Abigail’s place. “The thing is, I’m used to running my own life. You and me, we have this nice democracy of two. I’ve fallen out of the habit of taking orders.”
He held the door open for her.
“I don’t want to take orders.”
“If we stayed, we’d have to. Many times. And they might be the wrong orders.”
The hallway was so dim she couldn’t see him. She held on to his jacket to stop him. “I liked being on our own.”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Yes. But we’re here now.”
A door behind her opened up, and a neighbor said, “Oh, it’s you two. I was waiting for a friend.”
“Sorry,” said Coral. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.” She also didn’t mean to be overheard. “Good night,” she said, and nudged Benjamin on down the hallway.
In the apartment, Doug was sitting by the window with a book, taking advantage of the last of the daylight. He looked up when they entered. “How’d it go?”
“Fine,” said Benjamin.
“You in trouble with the boss man?”
“Not much,” said Coral. “We have to go back tomorrow.”
“So tell me what you told him.”
Coral saw no reason not to, so she gave a brief account of the guys in the Humvee again, and of the identification of the rifles they carried. “I didn’t know I remembered that much, not until I started focusing on drawing it.”
“Memory is a funny thing,” Doug said. “Sometimes, it’s all there, stored, but you don’t realize it’s there. Other times, it doesn’t get stored, or it gets mixed up with something else.”
“I don’t think I mixed this up,” said Coral. “Though that’s what a person who had remembered wrong would say too.”
“Eyewitness accounts, notoriously unreliable,” said Doug, cheerfully.
“Then I hope I didn’t make the Army guys up entirely. Because then Benjamin and I left years’ worth of food for no good reason.”
“There’s food here.”
“Is there?” said Coral. “Tonight’s dinner seemed pretty thin. Feeding three hundred people twice a day, that’s going to take a lot of stores.”
“There’s still food out there,” said Doug. “Plenty of food. We just have to find it.”
Doug only visited “out there” a couple times each month. She’d been living out there and knew the impossibility of finding meaningful amounts of food in home sites. “Problem is,” she said, “by this point, to dig out one house’s canned food—even if you were sure it was there in the first place—would burn almost as many calories as you’d get back in food. Maybe not four months ago, but with the snow this deep, that’s the equation.”
“We probably haven’t found everything in town, either.”
Benjamin said, “Where’d the MREs come from?”
“Across the river, on the north side, there’s a military storage facility.”
“Huh,” said Benjamin. “Lots of supplies there?”
“Not a lot. Some survived. Some were ruined.”
Benjamin might be wondering about weapons or ammunition, though she was focused on food. “I wonder if you’re ever going to get that rifle back,” she said to him.
“Levi isn’t quick to trust,” Doug said.
“No,” said Benjamin.
“And he’s something of a control freak,” Doug said. “And Parnell isn’t much better.”
Abigail came out of the bathroom, slipping into her jacket. “Doug,” she said, a warning in her voice.
“We’re among friends, Ab,” he said.
Even though she could barely see her in the fading light, Coral thought Abigail looked worried—her tense posture alone communicated that. Coral said, “Look. Levi and I aren’t each other’s biggest fans. I won’t repeat anything you say.” She put a smile into her voice. “Who do I have to talk to other than Benjamin anyway?”
“You’re a nice person. You’ll be making friends,” said Abigail.
Coral didn’t think she would be, even if they found food and she stayed. She had no interest in doing so, and her role as doctor put a formal distance between her and other people.
As she and Benjamin climbed into their bed, she felt drained. Not physically drained, but drained by people and the stress of living here. It wasn’t only that she mistrusted the city dwellers. It was constant human contact. It was schooling her expression every minute of every day. It was feeling caged. It was the loss of self-determination and freedom.
“How did I ever function in the real world before?” she asked aloud.
Benjamin said, “What?”
“Oh, nothing. I was thinking about how three hundred people are overwhelming me. How did I live on a campus of 45,000 people?”
“Don’t know,” he said sleepily.
“Sorry. I’ll shut up now.”
Benjamin was asleep in seconds, but Coral stayed up for a couple hours, trying to figure out this new person she had become. It had been happening all along, but not until she was here had the contrast of new Coral in the old world made it clear to her. Even if this place had no ugly underbelly, even if these people were basically good—or as good as people can be—and even if it was sustainable for months more, she wouldn’t fit in. Not any longer.
Every cell in her body wanted to be gone. She wanted her freedom. She wanted silence and solitude. She wanted to be sitting by a lake and catching her and Benjamin’s food for the day.
It hadn’t seemed like much fun while it was happening. It was a cold battle for survival. But now it seemed idyllic to think back on. A week ago, she had been weak, recovering from nearly starving to death, cold, trying to treat Benjamin’s infection with no supplies, and worried that she might lose him.
Even then, she had been happier than she was right now.
