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SHE SPUN AROUND ON her butt. There was a pair of animals, digging at the place the organ meats and fish heads were buried. Those scraps were going to be a much-needed meal for her and Benjamin. She scrambled over to the snowman, picked up her bow and stood to face the animals.
She fit an arrow to the string and inched forward, toward the digging...coyotes? No, dogs. Regular house pets, one maybe part German Shepherd, his looks not far from a coyote’s, and the other smaller and not an identifiable breed. Both were terribly thin. They didn’t look up, but their growling intensified as she took a half dozen paces toward them.
She whistled and said something cooing and gentle, the way she’d talk to any dog, pre-Event.
The Shepherd mix whirled away from the other and showed its teeth at her, growling fiercely. The other continued digging, found food, threw its head back, and swallowed.
The growling dog feinted a charge at her, then turned around and snapped at its partner, who lifted its head for a second and growled, too—not at Coral, but at the other dog.
These weren’t nice puppies, but hungry animals. Dangerous animals. Predators. Desperate competitors for the little food there was left in the world. “Hey,” she yelled. “Get away from that.” She strode forward another two big steps. Instead of cowering and backing off, the lead dog, the Shepherd, leapt at her.
Coral lifted her booted foot and kicked at the dog. She registered the sight of its jaws closing around her lower leg before she felt anything. Jerking her leg back, she yelled, “No!”
The dog paid no attention to her voice but lost its grasp as she yanked her leg to the side. Coral felt, as if from a distance, pain in her calf and shin. She staggered back and the dog growled again, crouching for another leap. Having no other choice, she lifted her bow and nocked the arrow. She let it fly.
The arrow hit the dog’s forehead and bounced off the bony skull. Still, the arrow’s impact made it hesitate. Coral reached for another arrow and set it to the bowstring. She backed up a stride and shot again, aiming for the animal’s chest.
This time, the arrow bit and stuck. The dog gave a sharp yelp of pain.
Coral nocked another arrow and once again aimed for the dog’s chest. It turned from her as she let fly, so she caught it in the flank instead.
She grabbed a fourth arrow and aimed at the other dog, who looked at her but still gnawed at the fish head. The arrow flew true. She hit it square in the eye. It yelped and dropped its meal, pawing at the wood shaft protruding from its eye. She yelled again, an inarticulate sound, as savage as the dogs’.
The dogs backed from her but would not turn and run. They must be starved, willing to risk more pain or death to get to the buried meal, scanty as it was. She felt a flash of sympathy for them, but pushed it from her mind.
The first dog began circling wide, trying to get around her as the second dog lumbered forward. They were using pack techniques on her now. She was a threat to their food. As she spun to keep the first dog in front of her, she set another arrow to her string. She was down to the all-wood arrows now. She shot the first dog again. The arrow hit it in the hip, and it stumbled. The second dog stood its ground, protecting its meal.
Coral sprinted up to the first as it turned to bite at the arrow and kicked it, hard. She felt a rib snap under her foot. She kicked again, then danced back from the reach of its snapping jaws. She had only a few arrows left. Again, she turned and shot at the second dog, missing this time barely an inch over its head. The arrow’s passage made the dog drop to its belly.
She heard a pained noise from the shepherd, clearly the alpha dog, and glanced back at it. It was struggling to its feet, leaning against a boulder that stuck a foot above the snow to help itself rise.
Hardening her will and her heart, she shot it again and then a quick second time, burying two more arrows into its heaving side. Blood stained the snow around the dog. It turned to bite pitifully at an embedded arrow. She leapt forward and kicked again, this time at the dog’s head. Her boot connected with a resounding crack and a force she felt all the way up to her hip joint.
The dog stopped moving, dazed. She stepped around it and grabbed its lower legs. With the strength fueled by the adrenaline that pumped through her body, she lifted the dog by its legs. She swept it behind her, then whipped it overhead. The weight of its body swung up, then swooped down, accelerating. She aimed the dog’s head at the tip of rock protruding from the snow, but missed. She hauled it up again, panting with the effort, trying to keep a half-eye on the other animal, too.
This time, as the weight of the dog accelerated downward, its head found the rock. A sickening crunch, and she felt it go limp. She turned from it and grabbed her last arrow. The other dog was backing away from her.
“Get out!” she screamed at it. This was her last arrow. And she really didn’t want to kill the second dog. She felt bad enough about the first one. She screamed again, high and loud, a wordless threat.
The second dog turned and ran, limping.
Coral waited until it disappeared, then another few minutes to make sure it wasn’t coming back for her, and she let her arms droop. She sagged. Her legs refused to hold her up any longer, and she fell to her knees. The bow and last arrow fell from her hands, now trembling from the excess of adrenaline.
What had she turned into? Killing some poor starving pup for a few bones. She covered her face with her hands, moaning from the sorrow of it.
She thought she had understood how the world had changed. But new experiences kept slamming her with this new, awful reality. They were only dogs. But they were the enemy, too.
After several seconds of kneeling there, she roused herself. She had to make sure this dog was really dead. She approached the body. Five arrows protruded from it, two snapped off short. Blood matted its fur. The skull was dented. She reached into its rough fur and felt its chest. No heartbeat. The heat of life still poured from it, but it was dead.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She stroked the soft fur on its lopsided skull. “I bet you were a good dog once. Before.”
Before The Event, she meant, before civilization had ended, making men and dogs into something they hadn’t been—or into something she hadn’t wanted to see that they always were, just beneath civilization’s thin veneer.
And now the dog was food, wasn’t it? It’d keep her and Benjamin alive a few extra days. She’d have to explain why she drove off the other dog, another three days’ meals wasted. There was no rational excuse for that. She’d have to apologize for letting it go, and accept her partner’s disapproval.
Coral pulled herself together. She wiped at her numb face with her gloves, then checked the sled. The gear there was undisturbed. The animals had been drawn to the smell of the soup maybe, or to the buried meat, or were prowling a regular territory when they happened upon the camp.
After tending to her bite wound, she hunted down her arrows. She found the few she’d missed with, then went back to the dead dog and tugged at all of the arrows’ shafts. Two of the arrows had been screw-tipped ones, but the tips didn’t come out. She’d have to hunt for the screws inside the dog when she dressed it. Two shafts had been bitten through by the dog or broken off as he rolled.
She’d need to find more wood for new arrows. It was a rare commodity, and if she was going to destroy half her arrows every time she killed something, she needed to work harder at making arrows from here on out.
Pulling her knife from her pocket, she flipped it open. She tugged the dog away from the rock, got to her knees, tossed off her gloves, and began to dress the animal, trying to mimic what she’d seen Benjamin do to the rabbit. She forced the biggest knife blade, very sharp now, into the skin and began tugging at it. It didn’t come off like the rabbit’s had. She had to saw at it. Her lower lip began to hurt and she realized she was biting into it.
Taking a deep, shaky breath, she forced herself to become methodical, mechanical. This was a game animal, and she had to dress it. It was meat. It needed cleaning and freezing. It would help keep them alive. Not a pet—just meat.
When she had the belly split open, she pulled out the intestines, separating them into edible and not. That is how Benjamin found her, minutes later, bent over the split carcass of a dog, contemplating the twists of the bowels. She heard Benjamin trot up, breathing hard, knowing him from the sound of that, but she did not look immediately at him.
He said nothing. A moment later, he knelt beside her. She couldn’t look at him but could feel him staring at her.
“I can do this, kiddo,” he said.
She tried to say she could do it, but she couldn’t force a word past her tight throat. Feeling stupid and inept and childish, she left him to it.
The buried rabbit organs were gone, along with one fish head. The other was mangled, dropped by one of the dogs after he’d chomped on it. She buried it again, in a fresh spot; it would still make a pot of soup. One dog had gotten a meal. The other had become a meal. The new way of the world.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, CORAL ATE the rest of the rabbit soup. She let Benjamin cook the dog’s liver and eat that. She made herself sit across from him but didn’t watch him bite into it.
“You’ll have to eat this meat,” he said.
She tried to speak, but her voice still wouldn’t come easily. Clearing her throat, she forced herself to say something. “I can’t. Not today.”
“You going to be able to eat it tomorrow?”
“Yeah. When I’m hungry enough.”
“You are hungry enough, Coral. We’re both chronically underfed, and it’s red meat, which we both need.”
“I know that.”
“This wasn’t a family dog, anyway. It was probably a farm dog. Probably slept outside. They raise those dogs to barely tolerate human presence outside the family.”
She looked down, and only then she saw that blood still splattered her jeans. “I want to change clothes.” She stood.
“You’ll eat breakfast tomorrow?”
“I’ll eat breakfast,” she promised.
She walked behind him to change clothes at the sled. She used the rest of the evening light to wash her jeans of the dog’s blood, heating lake water first, then sluicing the thick material in and out of a cooking pot. It was full dark by the time she had wrung the jeans out and laid them out to dry on the snow.
After leaving the dying fire, she joined Benjamin, who had already crawled into their makeshift bedroom under the sled. The air inside there was close and warm. His breathing told her he was wide awake.
She crawled into her bag, turned her back to him and tried to relax.
“You want to talk about it?” His voice was soft.
“No.”
“I heard you screaming—lucky I hadn’t gone far. I ran back as fast as I could.”
They lay in silence. She could feel him waiting for her to say more. “I had to kill it.”
“That’s right. There was nothing else you could do.”
“Even if it hadn’t attacked me, I should have killed it anyway. And the other one, if I’d been able. We need the food. I’m sorry I let the other go.”
“No reason to be. You did good,” he said.
The kindness in his voice was going to turn the lump in her throat to tears. She felt ashamed at her weakness and wondered about her sanity. She’d killed a man—maybe two, if the guy back at Mill Creek had died of the blows to his head. She had seen mummified bodies, frozen bodies, and charred human bones. And yet it was the death of a dog that undid her. “You must be sick of putting up with me. I’m no good at this. You must think of me as a horrible burden.”
“I think you’re a trooper,” he said.
“Thanks,” she whispered. The images of death spun through her mind, the dog laid open, the teenaged boy she’d killed, the first human bone she’d pulled from the ash, the kid dead in the storm cellar, smelling of rot, the dead dog again. And that wasn’t a fraction of the deaths that had come since the Event. There were millions more, just as dead, just as sad. Maybe everyone she had ever loved. She couldn’t stop a sound of misery.
They almost never touched each other, but Benjamin put a tentative hand on her back. She let the tears come, but she bit her lips against making any noise. It was only an animal, she told herself.
Just food. Just food. Just food. She kept saying it to herself until she fell asleep.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, AS she checked the dog meat to make sure it was freezing okay under the snow, she could feel him watching her, but she didn’t turn to look back. She was embarrassed she had cried last night.
“I’ll go hunt up north again,” he said. “I may be gone overnight, if you don’t mind.”
“You want to wait for fish to take with you?”
“No. I’ll take a can of something, and some of the new meat.”
She appreciated that he was trying to be kind by not naming it. “Here. Take my knife.”
“You need it.”
“I’ll keep the hunting knife. The army knife has the can opener. If you take a can, you’ll need it.” She plucked it out, turned, and tossed it over to him.
He caught it. “You okay?”
“I will be.” She finally met his eyes. “If you see any good wood for arrows, bring me back some, would you? Straight wood. Crack one in half, and if it’s hollow, it’s no good.”
“Will do,” he said, giving her a small smile. With that, he was gone.
* * *
BENJAMIN HUNTED DAILY for the following two weeks while she fished and made more arrows. She pulled out the bow-making instructions for the first time in many weeks, and noticed something she hadn’t before. You could tip arrows with bones. Small fish bones were sharp, though not very heavy. She carefully stripped ligaments from the raw dog meat and tried binding fish bones to arrows with that. After a few flights through the air, the ligaments began to unwind.
She tried to puzzle it out. If she dipped the binding in water and let it freeze, would that work? Or mess up the arrow’s balance? As she re-read the instructions through the perspective of her additional experience with the bow, she realized she could improve her older arrows with more work, too. She hadn’t dried the wood as long as she was supposed to. Any wood they found from now on, she’d lash to the sled and let dry for two weeks before turning it into arrows. As she studied the illustrations, inspiration struck her. In lieu of feathers at the back to fletch an arrow, she could try thin strips of rabbit pelt. But again, she needed some way to keep them on.
She tried to imagine what a row of glue options might look like at a Walmart. Her memory had them all in plastic, and most plastics had melted, so that was no good. The heat might have hardened the glue inside anyway. She needed, instead, something in a metal can, the bigger a can the better. Roofing tar, maybe? Something in the paint aisle? Paint itself? She didn’t need something labeled “glue,” necessarily, but something sticky that had survived the high heat. She added it to her mental wish list. Needles, glue, monofilament line, lures, bullets.
And food, always food.
She had eaten some of the dog meat, trying it first while Benjamin was off hunting, cooking it over a small fire. If she vomited it up, she didn’t want Benjamin to witness it. But it stayed down. The trick was not to think about the source of the meat—or to think at all. Chew, swallow, repeat. Her stomach didn’t know dog from cow.
And it wouldn’t know human from pig, either. She hoped her hunger would never come to that.
They moved camp to the north, set up a new camp, and then a week later followed the lake to the west. Finally, they followed its western shore to the south for a third campsite.
They made it all the way around the lake without seeing anyone else—or the second dog, or much beyond three more rabbits and a marmot Benjamin shot. Alone one day, Coral saw a rabbit digging for food and got a shot off at it with an arrow, but it was a long way off, and her aim was off as well. The rabbit skedaddled, and she never had another chance at one. On the northern shore, they found enough submerged brush wood that had survived the fires for her to replenish her arrow supply.
Every day was much the same. Benjamin left to hunt and find fuel. She stayed with the sled, fished, made arrows, practiced with her bow, cleaned fish, ranged out to find what firewood or charcoal or arrow wood that she could, and she built a fire at mid-afternoon. If Benjamin came back, there was sometimes fresh meat to cook. If he didn’t, she made fish head and canned vegetable soup for supper and saved most of the fillets for when they ate together, or for Benjamin to carry with him.
The fish continued to bite on her lures or gut bait most days. She and Benjamin were feeding themselves, but not making enough headway in increasing their food stores. By the time they reached the southwestern edge of the reservoir, the last of the canned vegetables and fruit had been eaten. They had four cans of high-fat meat put aside for emergencies—that is, for worse emergencies than the constant emergency that was their hungry life in the new gray world.
“This is not going to work. I’d hoped we might be able to stay here,” Benjamin said, upon coming back one afternoon with nothing to show for a full day of hunting.
“Temperature is still dropping.” She didn’t want to think of trying to sleep under the sled if it were ten or twenty degrees colder than this.
He knew what she meant. “We could turn that silo on the east shore into a house. If we found a cast iron stove somewhere, put it on the sled, pulled it over, and heated the building at night—maybe only to freezing, but better than outside would be. That’s only if we could find enough wood to feed it, which we can’t. We’d need six months worth, at least two cords. If there’s not much food now around the reservoir now, there’ll be less when fall comes. So it won’t work.”
“I keep forgetting it’s not autumn yet.” Coral swept her hand around, pointing at the snowy landscape. Three to four feet of snow had accumulated, all of it light gray with ash it had pulled from the air as it fell. It was past mid-August and the air still wasn’t washed clean of the ash. She wondered if it ever would be, at least during her lifetime. Would she live to feel the sun shining down on her upturned face?
Benjamin’s voice cut into the thought. “We should keep moving west. We need to get as low in elevation as we can before winter arrives.”
“Maybe we’ll find someplace to stay over the winter. Another Walmart, one without anyone competing for the food. Or maybe there are concrete buildings in Boise, with basements.”
“Maybe,” he said. “It’ll take a while to get that far, though. I don’t think we’ll hit Boise any time soon.”
The next day, they packed to leave the reservoir for good. They traveled along the river, north of the interstate, walking to the west. When the river curved south and met the highway again, they slowed down to hunt through the skeletons of big trucks on the highway. They had learned passenger cars yielded nothing to help them survive, but they held out hope that one tractor-trailer stuck on the road would be full of canned food.
A few of the trailers were padlocked. Sometimes, they could break through the trailer’s side anyway, where it had been scorched by the fire. Half of the trailers they could get into were empty. In the others, they found mostly melted plastic, sometimes a carbonized load of paper, and sometimes items that had been useful once but were meaningless relics now, like half-melted computer printers.
Their best finds weren’t useful to them now, but could be useful one day to someone who had the means to drag the items away. There was a load of pipes, and there was one two-trailer load that carried two huge generators, nearly the size of compact cars.
“800 KVA,” she read aloud off the side. “What’s that?”
“Kilovolt amps, I think.”
She’d never fully grasped electricity in physics in high school. It all seemed like some form of magic, really, and she had never heard of that measurement. “I guess someone would really want these.”
“If they still work. And if a person could find a source of diesel, or manufacture one somehow.”
She put her shoulder against one. The straps holding it down had dried in the long heat and had broken with one sharp tug. But the big generator didn’t budge.
He laughed. “It’s gotta weigh five tons.”
“Yeah? I’ve gotten stronger pulling the sled, but probably not that strong.”
They left the generators for someone with the means to move them.
When they did find food, it wasn’t edible. There was a truckload of wrapped hamburger tubes. The boxes they were in had disintegrated, the burger had cooked, and the plastic had melted on to it. Before the freeze, it had gone bad, though because of the low temperature now, she had to get right up to it and sniff to detect the odor of burned and rotted meat.
Anything in refrigerated trucks had long since spoiled and was frozen solid now. Anything in paper had cooked and then gone bad. What they needed were cans, and ones without pop-tops. The cans from the Walmart had tasted hardly any different than normal. A little more metallic, maybe, a little softer in texture, but since they tossed a lot of it into soups, that didn’t matter. Poptop cans had exploded in the heat.
But luck wasn’t with them. They didn’t find a single truck of usable canned food.
Soon, the river and interstate parted ways again. They stuck with the river, which grew wider every few days. It provided them with a few small trout, but they were eating up the store of small-game meat he’d hunted around the reservoir. The hunger never abated. For maybe a half-hour after a meal, she didn’t feel desperately hungry. The other twenty-three hours every day, she was.
Hunger was a strange thing, when it was this constant. It kept her thinking of food all day, and those thoughts reminded her again of how hungry she was. She learned the various faces of hunger. There was the burning sort of hunger, the cramping in her belly, and sometimes, when the sensations coming from her belly had stopped, there was the dizziness if she stood up too quickly, followed by a couple minutes of trembling weakness.
The weather grew colder and colder as August wore on. They kept saying they’d pick a date and start keeping track, but they kept forgetting to do it, busy with the details of surviving, or numbed by hunger and exhaustion. The longer they were without calendars and clocks, the more days that passed, the less it seemed to matter. One day, they’d started calling the current time “August.” Any day now, one of them would say “September,” and they’d agree that’s what it was.
When the sun was visible again, they’d be able to measure its angle and know the solstices. But the sun wasn’t coming back anytime soon. It might as well be a rumor as real.
One night over an ice-cold supper of raw fish, she said, “I’d be going back to college about now, I think.”
“You miss it?”
“I miss everything,” she said. “My brothers and grandmother most of all. I wonder, are they out there worrying about me? Or are they dead, too?” It was the first time she had spoken the thought aloud without choking up. She felt a twinge of emotion at it. They were so far away, and there was no way to get to them. They belonged to another life now. The chances she’d ever see them again, even if they were alive? She knew they were vanishingly small. She asked Benjamin, “Isn’t there anyone you miss?”
“Not like that. I left my family a while ago.”
“Willing to talk about it?”
“Not at length. It’s a dull story anyway.” He bounced a water bottle against the toe of his boot to crack the ice in it and took a drink. “Religious differences, mostly.”
“I see.” Though she didn’t. Most people were the same religion and many had the same commitment to it as their folks—in her case, that meant not religious at all. But she didn’t pry further.
“More fish?” He held out half a trout.
“I’m fine.” A polite lie. She knew from her studies that chronic undereating was very bad for them both. Her heart was accumulating damage. Other organs. The brain.
She didn’t want to think about that, so she latched on to another topic to talk about. “I don’t get why the land here is so empty. Either the fire really hit it hard, or it didn’t have trees before The Event, either.”
“Ranch land, probably,” he said. “Trees were all cut long ago. Good place to bury nuclear missile silos, too.”
“If there were any, they didn’t get hit by any bombs that I can see. I still wonder if it was nukes,” she said.
“I don’t, at least not about that. It wasn’t a war.”
“So what was it?”
“I don’t know, and I really don’t care—not like you seem to. Maybe my crazy religious relatives were right all along, and it was the wrath of God—or of some god, slapping an angry palm down over some slight of humanity’s—or maybe not people, maybe mule deer did something wrong, and bam, a god’s angry palm. Or it’s some new super-weapon. Or an accident at one of those advanced physics labs. Something we can’t even imagine.”
“You just did.” She smiled. “Imagine them.”
He gave her a half-smile that faded fast. “I did. So something weirder than that. It might be something no one left alive can guess.”
Coral didn’t understand entirely why she wanted to know...but she did want to know. Maybe she needed someone to blame.
* * *
THE RIVER THEY WERE following soon widened and became a lake, not nearly as big as the American Falls Reservoir, but big enough that the far shore was invisible in the ash. They spent another two weeks circling this lake, though the hunting and fishing were not as good as back at American Falls.
“Still, it’s better than the river. I think we should try to stick to lakes if we can,” Benjamin said, when they had built up a cache of 20 frozen fish and two rabbits to carry with them on the next leg of the journey.
“You want to try and stay here through the winter?” He carried a mental image of Idaho and its roads in his head. He had the better survival skills, though she was slowly catching up. She’d be a fool not to listen to him. And she wasn’t a fool.
“We can’t stay for long. There’s nowhere to shelter, no building, no cave, and it’ll get too damned cold, and soon. But if we could find a lake that still had fish once a week, hop from lake to lake, we could survive, barely. I had hoped the river would give us more fish as we went west, but it seems to be producing less.”
In the remains of a cinder-block building by the lake, they found an empty vending machine, the glass missing.
Coral sighed at the sight. “Too bad. I’ll probably never have a candy bar again.”
“Not unless you learn to tap maple trees and make your own.”
“What maples trees?” she asked.
“Good point. I guess honey bees are all gone, too.”
“I assume somewhere on the planet there are some,” she said wistfully. She hadn’t seen a leaf or pine needle in ten weeks. Some days, dizzy with hunger, she entertained the thought that she might have imagined them.
Benjamin drew her a rough map of the state in the ash. “We’ll have to lose the Snake River to get to where I’m thinking of. But there are more lakes and reservoirs up there, and other, smaller rivers.”
“Sure,” she said.
“You know, there’s the rail line not too far north of here, too. I think when we find it, we should take a couple days to follow it.”
“Which direction?”
“Both. When we cross it, let’s split up, and you go east, and I’ll go west. If we’ve found nothing by the end of the first day, camp, and then retrace our steps and meet back up.”
“Okay,” she said. If they didn’t find anything, they’d have lost two days and gone through more of their slim food stores. It was a risk. But everything was a risk now. Every step she took, she might fall and break a leg, and that might mean death in this new, bleak world. “Let’s give the train tracks a try.”
* * *
THEY CUT NORTH ALONG the line of a highway, as near as they could keep to it now that its surface was hidden beneath the gray snow. When they came to the rail line on a bitterly cold mid-morning, they hid the sled in a low spot next to the tracks and covered it lightly with snow. Coral carried her good pack, Benjamin her day pack. She took the bow and arrows and her hatchet, as well as her pocket knife, and he took the rifle and the new, bigger knife. They both took their sleeping bags. The plan was, walk until dark, build a snow cave, sleep, and turn around in the morning to meet back here at the sled about midday tomorrow.
For long miles, Coral walked along the straight track. The snow had mounded over each rail, so there was a shallow central u-shaped ditch to walk along. On either side, the ground sloped away from the embankment the rails were built on. It was impossible to get lost.
And it was a relief to walk without pulling or pushing the heavy sled. For the first few hours, it was almost pleasant, like taking a hike in the dead of winter.
It reminded her of that weekend when she had tried cross-country skiing—Coral stopped in her tracks at the memory and smacked herself on the forehead. Why hadn’t they thought of trying to make skis for themselves? They could have done it way back at the start, when there was lumber to take from the house, and Benjamin had access to more tools. He probably could have planed floorboards into the right shape. She was trying to work out in her mind how skis were shaped, and how they might make them now with the few tools on hand, and how it would change the way the sled pulled, and she had been lost in thoughts of skis while walking for quite a while, when she realized she could see, in the distance, a train.
