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SHE SPED HER STEPS, but the train was a long way off, and a path had to be broken through the snow. Her legs were throbbing and she was panting through her mask when she finally arrived at the front of the train. It was at least thirty cars long. Please, please, let there be something edible in there. They still had fish on hand, but they’d been living on too few calories for too long.
At the first train car, she climbed up the back and peered between metal slats. Cars, new sedans. She let her eyes adjust to the darkness and finally made out a Ford logo. She doubted any of the cars would work, any more than any other car did, and she had no idea where their keys might be. Surely they didn’t leave them hanging in the ignitions for thieves to use.
“Thieves like me,” she muttered, as she climbed down. There was a heavy padlock securing the doors to the car carrier.
She checked every train car that she could see into. A third of them were empty. Several in a row held scrap metal, which Benjamin would like pawing through, were he here. Some flatcars had held something that had burned beyond recognition, except she could still see it had been flat rectangles. Maybe drywall? Something like that.
To her amazement, none of the cars had locks except for the car carrier. She wondered how they prevented theft from trains.
One open car had huge cable spools on it. The electrical cable was really thick, maybe for industrial use, and the insulation was intact. Off the top of her head, she couldn’t think of a use for it now, but there must be one.
There were a dozen double-stacked container cars next. Metal bracing ran over the ends of both containers. She studied it for several minutes before she realized it wasn’t a way to lock them, but a way to secure the top one to the bottom one so it didn’t fall off. Two containers had padlocks, visible from the ground, but when she climbed up, she saw the others were secured only by a narrow strip of aluminum, no heavier than a soda can. She bent the first back and forth a few times, and in snapped in two. Not much of a deterrent to a thief, was it? She wondered why they’d bothered with any sort of closure at all.
One by one, she opened the containers and examined the contents. There were a lot of paper products, now charred or burnt to ash. One container had ink pens, maybe once mounted to cardboard, now all melted together. Another had held a load of those Fischer-Price popcorn push mower toys for little kids, now also fused together from the heat. There was a container with nothing but ceramic refrigerator magnets. A magnet or two would be useful, surely.
She had closed the container doors as she went along but she left the magnet container open, so she didn’t lose track of it among the other containers.
She had nearly given up hope of finding food when she climbed on the last car of containers and broke the seal. She slid the latch up, yanked the door open, and was looking at charred cardboard boxes. She swept her glove over the front of the nearest one, and the cardboard disintegrated, leaving a stack of naked cans. They were the right size for food. Her heart sped.
Could she yank one from the middle without bringing the whole stack down on her? She shifted to the corner of the container, ready to jump off onto the snow bank below if the cans all tumbled out. She had to take off a glove to wiggle her fingers in the tiny space but finally got her fingertips around one can and sharply yanked it out of there. The stack of cans stayed put, undisturbed by her small theft. Her only injury was a broken fingernail.
Coral pulled out her pocket knife, flicked open the can opener, and cut part way around the can until she could bend the top back. Inside was a thin layer of congealed, frozen fat. She scraped it off with a fingernail and saw a familiar thin noodle.
“Oh god,” she said. She had in front of her a whole container of soup. Beef noodle or chicken noodle. Right now, frozen solid, but with a charcoal fire, edible condensed soups. She laughed, the sound echoing off the metal of the stacked containers. She almost kissed the can before she thought better of putting her wet lips onto frozen metal.
Staring up, she counted cans, did some rough measuring, and multiplied. The first layer she could see, maybe eight feet square, was probably twenty-four cans tall, thirty-six wide. And the container had to be at least...what? Thirty feet long, or maybe forty. She glanced down at the can to check its size. The container had to be over a hundred layers of cans deep, at least.
She was so excited she couldn’t multiply all those numbers. So she estimated. Call it thirty by thirty by a hundred cans of soup.
Almost 100,000 cans of soup. Could that be right? She closed her eyes and imagined a piece of paper, did the arithmetic again. She had been right.
Holy shit.
She was grinning so hard, her cheeks were starting to hurt. She wondered how many calories in a can. Lots of water there, so probably not much. Call it 200 calories. Call their real needs, sitting still in this kind of cold, 3,000 calories, and hauling the sled, 4,000 for her or 5,000 for him, calorie levels they had not come anywhere near for weeks now. And 100,000 cans times 200 calories would be? Her mind reeled at the numbers. Two million—no, twenty million calories in this one container. Divide by 4,000 calories.
5000 days of food for one person. 2500 days for two. Could that be right? She did the figures again, eyes closed, trying to see them as written out on paper. She thought it was right. Hell, if she was off by a factor of ten, it would still be 250 days’ worth of food. And if the container stacked on top of this one was the same, it was even more than that.
But the food would also lock them to this remote place. They couldn’t haul more than 50 or 100 cans on top of the regular weight of their gear. The thought she’d been hanging on to, of getting to Boise, maybe finding something there, was easier to let go of than she thought it would be. There was food here. That was all that mattered.
They would have to find a place to live within a half-mile. And a water source as close as possible. Especially with all the salt in soup, definitely they needed a good water source. And they needed a fuel source. Cans of frozen-solid soup wouldn’t do them any good at all. It needed defrosting.
She left the container door open and tossed the open can of soup down into the snow, then dropped to the ground.
There was no hurry. But she was so hungry. The can of soup tormented her. There was no way to eat it right now; it was solid ice. She had to have a fire. She walked the length of the rail car. There were four containers, identical ones, sitting on this one car. What if all four had soup in them? She laughed, a crazy sound splitting the silence of the still world around her.
Coral collapsed onto the ground and wrapped her arms around herself, shaking from excitement and fatigue and cold in equal measures. Damn it, they had food! Praise all the gods and the Campbell Soup Company—or whatever company had shipped the soup.
It took a good long while for her to get control of herself. She kept glancing up at the container doors to reassure herself she hadn’t been hallucinating. But the neat rows and columns of cans were still there, more and more revealed as a light wind pushed off the charred remains of the boxes.
Finally, the cold had seeped into her and made her stiffen up, and she realized she had to get moving again or risk frostbite. In fact, her butt was numb already. That’d be a horrible site to have to perform self-surgery on, wouldn’t it? She brushed herself off, tucked the open soup can into the outer pocket of her pack, and shouldered the pack.
If she only counted one container of soup cans, the food problem was solved for months. She would look into the rest of the containers in a moment. If there was more food, great. If not, they’d still be fine. She might get tired of eating ten cans of the same soup every day, but to have food she didn’t have to work to catch? It was a luxury she though she might never see again.
She walked to the end of the train, where there was an engine rather than a caboose. She studied it for a moment and thought it had been pushing the train, not pulling it, so the train had been headed west, probably to Boise. She climbed up the engine and found an unlocked door.
Inside, there was a control panel, electronic, and totally dead, of course. And a bunch of big machinery with levers. A couple plastic seats, not too badly charred. She sat down on one and pulled off her pack. She pulled out a fish fillet, still frozen, and chewed on it. Fish again, but maybe her last one for a long while. Ice crystals popped under her teeth. She held the bite of fish in her mouth until it defrosted, then swallowed. A shiver ran through her as the cold fish met her warm insides.
As she ate, her eyes roamed around the place. She spied a metal box on the floor between two built-in machines. After she’d finished the fish, she kneeled in front of the box, found its latches, and opened it.
It was full of tools. Most were familiar—big wrenches, long screwdrivers, and a pry bar. But some were mystery tools to her. Maybe Benjamin would know what they were.
Sometimes, she wondered why he needed her at all. If she were him, she might dump her. She didn’t have half the skills he had. She thought, and not for the first time, it might have been easier for him simply to kill her and have her for stew for a week.
But as little as she did know about Benjamin’s past, or his opinions, or his favorite books or movies or color, or even if he’d ever been married or not, she did think she knew his core character. She could trust him. She wasn’t in his menu plans, any more than he was in hers.
And now there was plenty of food for them both. If it didn’t make them sick—and she was confident, after eating the canned food from the Walmart, that it wouldn’t—they had more food than they’d know what to do with.
Part of her wanted to go running back toward the sled to share the news. But getting there early wouldn’t get Benjamin there any sooner. Keep to the plan, girl. This soup isn’t going to wander off in the next fifteen hours. In fact, no one seemed to have come upon the train in the months since the world changed. The intact metal seals on all the cars attested to that. There was no road next to the tracks. She supposed the remoteness—or the absence of survivors in this area—had made it difficult to find.
She spent the rest of the afternoon opening up the last of the containers in the train. The one car was the only one with food, but all four containers on that car had soup, apparently one variety to a container. The labels were gone, but she peeled back a lid of one can each and thought they were probably chicken noodle, plain chicken broth, tomato, and cream of mushroom. Not much protein, and not very calorie-dense, but man.... It was food, and beyond that, a small variety of food. The tomato soup had much-needed vitamins. It’d be awfully nice to find a container full of evaporated milk, too, turn the cream of mushroom into something actually creamy.
She had to smile at herself for that. What greed! No, forget the milk. This was enough. She was grateful for it.
When she was done exploring the train, she still had some daylight remaining to spend scavenging for charcoaled wood under the snow. She spared a thought for the railroad ties as potential fuel, but they were treated with something, right? They stank, certainly. Might give off toxic chemical fumes. She stuck to hunting for burned tree trunks under the snow. She finally uncovered a fat stump that looked to have fuel potential left in it. With her knife, she dug into the stump until she had a pile of tiny pieces of half-burned wood gathered into a pile, then struck her pocket knife’s magnesium fire-starter, and she soon had a small fire smoldering. She finished opening the four cans of soup, set them around the stump to heat, and began to dig herself a snow cave. By the time she was smoothing out the inside ceiling of the cave, she could smell the warming soup.
When she returned to the fire, the soup had mostly defrosted, though it wasn’t nearly as warm as body temperature. Close enough, though. It was edible. One by one she ate the cans, salty and thick and cold. She didn’t try to stop herself from moaning in pleasure at the flavors.
The next morning she woke terribly thirsty. Snow converted to water at a poor ratio, she knew from experience. Their two-quart pot packed with snow yielded less than a cup of water that still had to be filtered of the ash. Lakes were a much better source of water.
She finished the water she had on hand, dug into the stump to find more burnable wood, set another fire, and packed all the empty soup cans with snow to melt. Returning to the container car, she pulled down two cans each of every soup, loaded them into her backpack, and waited for the fire to melt the snow in the cans. She drank all the water, smothered the fire with snow, and turned west again, to meet back up with Benjamin.
He was waiting for her, having pulled the sled out and gotten it ready for travel. She wanted to surprise him by whipping out the soup, but she couldn’t stop herself from smiling long before she reached him.
He read her face right. “You found something,” he said.
Wordlessly, she took her pack off and extracted a can. She handed it to him.
He hefted it. “What is it?”
“Soup.” She pulled out all the other cans and lined them up on the snow. “A half a million cans of soup.”
“A half a—? Holy shit,” he breathed. “And no one else has found it?”
“Not a sign anyone has seen it but me.”
He gave her a rare smile. “Good job!”
“No, dumb luck,” she admitted.
“Good dumb luck, then.” He thumped her on the shoulder. “I had been getting worried about food.”
“We still have things to worry about—like finding a water source close to the food. And shelter. There aren’t buildings nearby, and the land is flat, so we aren’t going to find a convenient cave.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“Want me to start a fire so you can eat some right now?”
“No, I’ll eat the rest of the fish while we pull. Or while I pull. I want you to come behind and brush out the tracks. No way do I want to risk someone else finding this food, so take your time about it, particularly right here where the tracks cross the road.”
He pulled the sled, and she walked backward behind, working at erasing their tracks, first with sweeping her boots over them, then by wiping over the area with her spread-out sleeping bag, weighted with a tool box. For the first half-mile or so, she was very careful, and Benjamin stopped twice to come back and help. After that, he agreed that it was okay to be less thorough, and they moved faster. Another decent snow, and no one would be able to tell they had ever been here. The food would be theirs.
They made it back to the train in late afternoon. She pointed out the car of magnets to him and then took him back to the car with the four containers loaded with soup. She opened a door to reveal the grid of cans. He stood looking up at it in awe for long moments. Then he said, “I feel almost like crying.”
She knew what he meant. The relief of having food was overwhelming. She let him have a moment of respectful silence with the cans, then she said, “Maybe you can hunt fuel, add the charcoal to the fire from this morning and warm us up some soup. I can expand the snow cave to fit two. It kept me warm enough last night.”
“Deal,” he said.
“Before we go to bed, I want to show you the train engine.”
“And tomorrow, first thing,” he said, “we need to start hunting for water and a better shelter.”
* * *
OVER THE NEXT WEEK, they worked at establishing a temporary camp. They considered piling snow up around an empty freight car and making that home, but Benjamin finally rejected the idea, pointing out that in case someone else did find the train, he’d rather be more than a rifle shot away, at least until he could see what sort of forces they were up against.
Melting snow to drink was a never-ending chore. It took six days for them to find a narrow stream, entirely frozen over, to supply them with easier water than melted snow.
When they had melted the first batch of stream water, they found it nearly as ash-filled as the snow and had to filter it through cotton. Not for the first time, Coral regretted not taking along a pillowcase, which would have been perfect for the job.
“It’s not an ideal spot,” said Benjamin. “I want to find something better.”
“The stream is a good distance from the train. Should we be looking for someplace to live halfway between?”
“No, let’s stay closer to the train. I know that means it’ll take a half a day to haul the sled out and back to load with ice. But we’ll stow our gear and keep the sled empty, so we can haul enough to last us several days.”
“In a pinch, we can supplement it with snow melt.”
“I’m more concerned about a fuel source now. Too damn bad there’s not a tank of propane on this train.” He stared into the distance, the way he did whenever he was trying to work out a particularly difficult problem. “Not that we have a stove, anyway. But fuel is now our number one priority.”
They had learned a lot from living in the snow cave for the week. Their body heat kept it surprisingly comfortable. Not warm, but definitely above freezing. They kept the day’s supply of soup nearly blocking the entrance overnight, and their body heat helped melt the soup into slush, so it took less time to heat their breakfast. At some point every day, one or the other of them worked at smoothing the walls of the ice cave so that the water from the melting snow would drip along the rounded walls rather than directly onto them. Still, Coral was woken more than once by a cold drip on her face.
Coral had fun cooking at first, putting all the different sorts of soup together, and mixing them with the remaining fish and meat they had. The tomato soup turned the fish—a taste she had grown bored with weeks ago—into a pleasant chowder. Rabbit and cream of mushroom wasn’t half-bad, either..
“This is damned good. You should write a survival cookbook.”
She snorted. “On what?” Paper was as much a thing of the past as buttonhooks and Model T’s.
They worked hard every day, and though they were eating three times a day, she wasn’t having to loosen her belt quite yet. Her hip bones and clavicles still stuck out. Between the cold their bodies had to fight and the calories burned with labor, it was hard to get ahead of the energy equation. Even disguised by his beard, Benjamin looked gaunt, and she had no doubt she did, too, though in a world without mirrors, she was spared the sight. If they weren’t engaged in an endless hunt for fuel, they might have more time left to spare for hunting or fishing to augment the soup calories—not that they’d run across a body of water large enough to have fish.
And that was the other worrisome thing: the temperature kept dropping. It was too big a project to wash clothes right now, though she supposed she’d have to do it eventually. In the cold weather, it wasn’t as if they could smell each other’s stink very often—only at night, in the snow cave, when their body heat was reflected back, and the cave grew warmer as the night passed. She didn’t want to think about trying to wash the sleeping bags in this sort of weather. It’d take a week for the bags to dry, and they couldn’t afford to be without them for a single hour of the night. She bathed by dipping the corner of a cloth in cold water and scrubbing herself inside her clothes.
As they worked or ate together, she asked Benjamin technical questions, starting with the generators they had found. Did they run on gas or diesel fuel? How had gas stations stored diesel? How could they pump it out without electricity? If you ran across a different sort of fuel, could you convert the generator to use another fuel? Could you convert a car engine to use a different fuel? Did he think the cars were repairable, or not? If you had an intact concrete building, and fuel, and one of those generators, how could you make heat from that? How would you vent the fumes from it? How did furnaces work before The Event? How had train engines driven the train?
He answered what he could, sometimes stopping to draw a diagram in the snow to explain. When he didn’t know—and she appreciated this most of all—he admitted his ignorance. Over the days of her barrage of questions, she felt as if she was slowly tearing down the wall of her ignorance about the technologies she had taken for granted her whole life.
She had been a typical member of technological society, giving such matters not a moment’s thought. You turn on a faucet, safe water comes out. You feel cold, you nudge up a thermostat and warm air blows from a grate.
She was unwilling to remain ignorant a moment longer. It made her feel less useless to gather up this knowledge. She wasn’t sure she could apply most of what she learned any time soon, but there might come a day. She might not have been prepared well for The Event, but she would be better prepared for whatever happened next.
One afternoon, as they hauled charcoaled wood back to their campsite, he said, “You’re like a little kid, with all these questions.”
“Am I irritating you? Boring you?”
“No,” he said. “Reassuring me.”
“How’s that?”
“You seem to have given up on the idea that somewhere out there, the old world still exists, and all we have to do is walk up and find it and you’ll have cell phones and lattes.”
She threw a quick glance back at him. She was in harness, and he was pushing the sled. She turned to face front again and walked for a while without responding. That was one good thing about his taciturnity. You had all the time you wanted to think through what you wanted to say next. “I still hope there’s something like that out there. But no, I don’t expect it any more. Someplace warmer than this would suit me. But it’d take a sure promise of warmth or shelter or an intact and lawful city to make me leave this food source any time soon.”
He grunted.
She chose to read it as approval.
That night, she made “everything” soup: all four cans defrosted, stirred together, mixed with two cans of defrosted water. They each needed one pot.
“It takes so long,” she said, as she set up the second batch in the cooking pots.
“I know. Coral, I appreciate your doing the bulk of the cooking.”
“It’s easy work. You don’t have to know anything to heat frozen water.”
“And you can keep up your practice on the bow while you wait for things to heat.”
“That, too.” They hadn’t run across any more unburned wood to make new arrows, though. All the wood she had gathered for arrows had come from underwater—at lakes or deep rivers. She was going through the train cars again every day when she had time, trying to work out some way of making more arrows from anything she found—melted plastic strips, thin metal rods—but so far, nothing else had worked for arrows. She did find a can of grease in the train engine that melted by the fire into a sticky material and allowed her to secure her metal arrowheads and fletch her arrows with strips of rabbit fur. After several experiments in fletching, she achieved more stability in the flight, and that meant she could hit a target from a few feet further away. Problem was, the grease wasn’t all that reliable. If it contacted her body, it was too warm, and the stuff melted. If it grew too cold, the strips of fur cracked off when she jostled them. It was better than nothing, but she needed real glue.
And she needed needles. Their few changes of clothes they had were ripping and fraying, Benjamin’s sleeping bag had developed a tear, and she couldn’t do anything to repair it. Her only pair of underwear was in a sad state and soon would be fit only for a rag.
Another week passed, and another, without them finding a better home site. Benjamin grew fretful about the danger of being near the food and exposed to attack.
She didn’t want to be ungrateful for the carload of food, but she began to tire of soup three times a day. Apparently, so did Benjamin, for one morning he said, “I’m going to go north of the stream and try to find game again. See you before nightfall.” He took with him the only slip of frozen fish they had left, hardly enough to flavor a soup, and definitely not enough for a full day’s hunting. That was one problem with frozen soup cans—it wasn’t travel food.
She didn’t bother to tell him to keep his eyes open for wood for arrows, or for a fuel source, or for a better place to sleep, because he knew what they needed as well as she did. She simply said, “Good hunting,” and went back to her own work.
She banked the fire and ringed it with soup cans, the tops pierced to allow steam to escape, and gathered up the ice-chopping tools, including the giant wrench they’d taken from the train engine. She put herself into harness and pulled the empty sled to the stream, making good time.
The little stream had quit running entirely. The world was freezing solid around them. She studied the next intact section of ice, looking for any cracks she could use as a place to begin to pry out chunks of ice. There were none, so she took out her hatchet, reversed it so the flat side would hit the ice, and swung it overhead. It pinged off the ice. She struck again, closer to the edge, and a crack appeared. She banged away at it with the big wrench from the train until she could force the pry bar into the crack. She shoved it into place and put her body weight behind it. A snap, and she had broken off a chunk of ice twice the size of her head. She hauled it to the sled. They needed two gallons a day. The chunk was nearly that. She also wanted to wash herself today, and her underwear, T-shirt, and—if she could stand the cold of the process—hair, so she needed an extra couple gallons for that.
She worked for an hour at getting enough ice to last a few days, and it took another hour to pull the load of ice back to the campsite. First thing after slipping from the harness, she tested all the soup cans for temperature and rotated them 180 degrees. Then she set the biggest pot on the fire and filled it with ice to melt.
Her sliver of soap was long gone, so when the water was warm, she washed with ash. They filtered the water after they heated it, if they meant to drink or eat it, and they had a sizeable mound of ash piled up that had been filtered out of the water, a dark gray color, sharp little pieces. It hurt to rub it into her cold skin, but she figured it was sloughing off dead skin and stripping away some of her rancid body oil. That was as close to clean as she could get.
Shivering in the cold as she put her sweaters back on, she chickened out on washing her entire head of hair, but she did take the strip of it closest to her face, about an inch wide, and washed that. She combed it out, wrapped a scarf around her head and face, and soon her body heat had warmed the wet hair. By morning, it’d be dry—and a little crusty from the ash drying in it, but that’d comb out eventually.
Her mind flashed back to a neighbor in her dorm, a super-girlie-girl type, who squealed with dismay if she ran out of the right kind of overpriced hair product or moisturizing cream, and panicked when she could only find brown mascara when she wanted black. She wondered how women like that had adjusted to this new world. No blow-driers. Wearing the same shirt for a month. Not being able to ever really bathe—not immersion in a shower or tub, certainly—and living with grease and dirt and hairy legs. They had probably all died from emotional shock.
Of course, such types probably had no survival skills, either. They’d have cringed away from touching worms to bait hooks, so they wouldn’t have had even her modest talent at fishing. And, so as not to be sexist about her sneering, she imagined male Wall Street stockbrokers, too, in five-thousand dollar suits, thumbing their smart phones, also with no survival skills. She remembered the old world, where women would have turned away from an average-looking guy like Benjamin whose idea of fashion was no doubt choosing between his red and his blue flannel shirt in the morning, whose annual income probably didn’t exceed the Wall Street guy’s annual wine bill. But now, Benjamin was the catch of the century.
What if another woman appeared, saw what a catch he was, and lured him away with sex? She’d like to think a man-woman friendship could survive the arrival of a love interest, and back at the U of M, six months ago, it definitely could’ve...but in this new, more primitive world, it probably wouldn’t. She might have to fight to keep him on her team.
She realized she’d been sitting still for too long, thinking about this imaginary stuff. There was work to do in the real world. She shook off the speculations and spread her clean clothes out to dry.
* * *
BENJAMIN RETURNED FROM his hunting trip empty-handed. “Not a single track out there,” he said. “I think we need to be close to a lake to find game.”
“What about when the lakes freeze all the way across?”
“Animals find a way. Antelope, elk, they can punch through a coating of ice with a hoof. Smaller animals might come in after them. They might know where a hot spring is, but hot springs tend to have minerals you and I don’t want to drink unless it’s our last choice. If they can dig down to plants, plants have water in them. And they release some water as they burn stored fat.”
“I hope they have stored fat.”
“Hmm. Animals find a way in normal years, I should say. Any big animals that survived might have a hard time this year.”
“I wish you could find one. Even if you failed to shoot it, I’d feel better to know a deer or antelope or moose had survived.”
“No, I wouldn’t miss that shot,” he said. His face was grim.
And he continued to be in a grim mood for the next day. “We have to find a better campsite,” he finally said, “before we get caught by someone else. I feel exposed here.”
“You really think there are other people wandering around?”
“Yes. And I don’t think that by this point any of them will be nice. If a stranger without a gun wandered up, would you want to invite them to share our food?”
“I would,” she said. “One pleasant stranger? A half a million cans of soup? Sure.”
“Those cans won’t last forever.”
“Near enough,” she said. “I hate that it locks us to this one place, but better that than starving to death.”
“I don’t think you’re going to be seeing one friendly stranger. He’d be dead by now, probably done in by his friendliness. We have to get ourselves hidden,” he said, sitting down to start his ritual of cleaning the rifle.
She didn’t argue. She wanted there to be nice people, but she knew that he was probably right.
So for the next two days, they debated where to move to. He said that, instead of digging another snow cave, they might try to construct an igloo instead. But they found an area where the drifts were nice and deep, well over 15 feet, and they decided that was their new home. They still hadn’t found an endless source of fuel and would have to range out to find some every day, but that would have been true of any site they chose. This place was farther from the train.
“From now on, we don’t start digging for charcoal until we’ve gotten out of sight of our new place and walked another fifteen minutes or more from there. We’ll be leaving enough signs of how to find us anyway—let’s try to minimize those.”
“Agreed,” she said.
“And we need to be more careful about tramping down a clear path back to the train and the water source. I want us to take a different route every time we go, and an indirect one. We’ll keep the tracks shallow that way, and let the snow fill them in entirely before we go back to that route. Cross over the train tracks sometimes and wander south of them, then circle back, so they won’t know which side of the tracks to start looking on.”
“I’m not convinced there are people out there wandering about.” Surely anyone with an ounce of sense had found a place to hide out from the bitter cold by now.
“Every time I move a particular way and feel a twinge in my ribs, I’m reminded that we’d best be prepared for them, whoever they are.”
She hadn’t known that he still hurt from the beating he’d taken. She felt a twinge herself—one of guilt at not being able to do any more for his injuries than she had. His nose had a permanent bump now, and there was a thin scar across his upper lip, both signs of the encounter with the Walmart people. “Okay,” she said, feeling chastened—but not by him, by her own guilt.
They dug their new snow cave in an area of deep drifts, behind what must have been a slight ridge in the land beneath. They improved it well beyond her first one, having learned lessons from mistakes they’d made with the first. The entrance they dug downward into the snow, and they built the tunnel with a few more feet of length. After they’d patted the ceiling into a firm curve, they scraped shallow grooves into it, running from the apex down the sides, parallel and every six inches or so, trying to encourage melt water to drip along those.
He insisted on building a second cave for their sled and gear. “The garage,” they called it. They piled their goods on the ground at the back of the garage, keeping metal tools from directly contacting the snow, trying to slow the inevitable rusting process. They kept an emergency supply of soup cans back there, too, ready to be loaded up quickly if need be. The sled they kept in the front half of the garage, empty, ready to haul either cans from the train or ice from the stream.
It began to snow hard the day after the garage was done, and they stayed mostly in the snow cave, riding out the storm. By the end of the day, the snow was falling thick and fast. When they went out to use the latrine, they kept hold of their nylon rope, tied to a metal rod from the train, thrust deeply into packed-down snow at the cave’s entrance, so as not to lose their way in the swirling snow. They tucked cans of soup and water bottles around their sleeping bags so they were mostly melted by body heat and ate the soup cold and undiluted.
For three days, the snow fell thickly. The second day, the wind blew harder, bringing whiteout conditions to the world outside. Stuck in the snow cave, they played twenty questions and “the farmer’s cat” and any other talking games they could dredge from their memories. She tried to ask him about his past, but he wasn’t interested in having that conversation. It was dark inside, except for faint light at the tunnel’s entrance, and every trip outside the world felt painfully bright, making her squint, though she knew it wasn’t really bright out there at all, between the snow clouds and the ash still blocking the sun.
They were about three-quarters through their water supply when the winds died down. The next time Coral went outside, she didn’t have to use the rope to keep from losing her way. But it was bitterly cold out there. She could see all around her fresh—though gray—snow. Six to eight inches of it had done its job of hiding them from any prying eyes. Their original campsite would be buried, too.
By the time she was done at the latrine, her nose and toes and fingers and butt felt numb from the cold. When she returned to the snow cave, she said, “I hope this isn’t a permanent temp drop. It’ll freeze your nuts off out there.”
“Huh. In that case, maybe you should do all the outside work.”
“Seriously, we need to be really careful about frostbite. There’s nothing I can do for gangrene.”
“You have a hatchet.”
It took her a second to realize what he meant. “No way am I chopping my own toes off.”
“You’ll damn well chop mine off if it’s the difference between dead and alive.”
She could see doing that all too clearly in her mind’s eye. “Let’s be careful so I don’t have to, okay?” It seemed more likely amputation wouldn’t help, and she’d be digging a grave for him, or vice versa.
They lived there for six weeks. It grew colder, and colder still, and finding fuel continued to be a daily struggle. Every three days, one of them went for water, having to pull the sled further away along the stream bed to chop ice. Every five days, they both took a trip to retrieve as many cans of soup as they could haul on the sled.
More and more, they grew weary of each other’s company and sometimes bad tempered. When Benjamin lost it, it manifested as a deeper and deeper silence, which only broke after he took a day to go hunting, though he found no game. When Coral was the one who began to snap at him over nothing, he also took a day to go hunting. Sometimes, though neither was angry, there was simply nothing to say to each other for many hours.
When he was gone, Coral began to talk aloud to herself, not caring if it was a security danger or a sign of insanity. She told her own life story to herself. She talked about her favorite meals, her favorite movies, the best parties she’d ever been to. She daydreamed of the medical practice she’d been planning one day, an independent small family practice clinic, two doctors, a PA, a nurse, a receptionist, all of them kind and dedicated to care, not to profit. She mentally decorated the place, with chairs and wallpaper and a play area for the kids.
Frostbite was a constant danger. She couldn’t sit still and cook but had to put the pot on the fire then return immediately to the relative warmth of the snow cave, which was too small for two people to stay in 24/7 without going nuts. She suggested enlarging it, but he pointed out that if they did, it wouldn’t stay as warm. What they had here was a form of cabin fever, and she dreamed of running across a cache of paperback books and a lantern in the ruins of a house somewhere, or anything to break the tedium of hiding out in the snow cave and staring at the light at the entrance. Every day, she practiced with bow and arrows, but not for long, as the cold drove her back inside.
The taste of their limited varieties of soup had long since grown boring. She wasn’t achingly hungry any longer, but neither of them put on much weight either.
Coral hated herself for it, but she felt an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness. She wasn’t developing her mind. She wasn’t developing her social skills. The only thing she was getting better at was her archery skills. She wondered if prison felt like this.
The best that could be said was that they were surviving. She wondered, and more with every passing day, if that were enough for her. When the thought passed through her mind, she knew that she wasn’t ready, not today, to wander naked into the snow and let the cold kill her, but as she imagined ten years of living right here, off the train car of soup, or even one more year, she could see that death might seem more and more attractive an option.
And then, as she figured it must be approaching Halloween, the ennui evaporated.
Benjamin had been out on an ice run for more than an hour, and Coral was warming her lunch when she heard a noise in the distance. For a moment, she didn’t recognize it. A buzz, growing slowly louder. Then she realized: it was the sound of an engine, a truck engine.
