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THE PROMISE OF FOOD brought her to her feet. “Where?”
“This way.”
She followed him along the line of the rock wall, happy to leave the bodies and their mysteries behind. The ground underfoot rose slightly. Benjamin stopped at a fissure in the rock wall. “Watch your step,” he said, and he squeezed into the fissure, barely making it through.
Coral followed, bracing her gloved hand on one wall and looking at his back. The space ahead widened beyond Benjamin. She followed him into a dim recess, so shallow it was hard to think of it as a cave.
Benjamin stopped a dozen feet ahead of her on the snow-free floor and squatted down in shadow. “Look. They were living here.”
She walked close to him and bent forward. As her eyes adjusted, she saw there was a hollow in the ground, maybe two feet in diameter, eight inches deep, and inside the hollow was a small store of supplies. A couple dirty blankets, two forks and a dinner knife, and a filthy chunk of something that Benjamin pulled out.
“Isn’t it great?” he said, staring at the dirty thing like it was gold.
“Uh, maybe. What is it?”
He turned it over. “Look, it’s the leg of something. Lamb, I think.”
“It looks pretty bad.”
“That’s only the outside bit. It’ll clean up pretty. And if we cook it, even the ugly bits will keep us alive.”
“It must have been keeping them alive.”
He nodded.
“Then I’m even more confused. They had food for at least two more days, and a couple blankets. They had survived. Why did they kill themselves and their kids now?”
He shrugged. “Maybe they could only take so much.”
“Isn’t suicide some kind of sin?”
“Don’t try and be so logical,” he said.
She made a sound of exasperation. “Excuse me for having a brain.”
He leveled a look at her.
“Sorry. I’m upset. Those kids. Their skinny little bodies. Thinking they didn’t chose death for themselves. I want to live. I don’t get why someone else wouldn’t want to. Especially not if murdering a child was part of the deal. They aren’t even my kids, and I’d have fought to keep them alive.” She shook her head, trying to push her vision of their last moments out of her mind. “Anything else here we want?”
“Nothing I want except the blankets, but I’ll check the man’s pockets. I brought you here so you could look through their stuff, too.” He pushed past her and through the fissure, back into the outside world.
She felt a twinge of guilt for pawing through the sparse belongings of the dead people, as if she was violating their privacy, but it wasn’t the first time since the disaster she’d scavenged from the dead, and she knew it wouldn’t be her last. There was, under the blankets, a filthy rag doll, no bigger than her hand, which had to be the little girl’s. It looked like something from the 18th century, rags tied together at neck and the other joints, with a face drawn on with charcoal, smeared badly now. It was too damned sad to dwell on.
When she had checked the gear and picked out the few things that might be worth something in trade, should they ever find safe people to trade with, she backed out of the space and retraced her steps, aiming for Benjamin. He was stooped over the bodies. He had opened the man’s clothes to the skin. He stood, shaking his head. “Nothing.”
“Do you want me to check the woman?”
“I will. She can’t be offended by it now.” When he finished with his search of the children’s clothes, too, he turned to her. “We could dress these bodies, too. For food. They’ve been kept cold. Might be safe to eat.”
“I know.” She shook her head. “But I just can’t. I’m sorry. I know it’s illogical, but I don’t think I could gag it down.” Especially not the children.
“We may regret not taking the meat.”
“Depending on what they died of, we might not want to eat them.”
“True. It could have been drugs, or poison.”
“Which means we definitely shouldn’t eat them.” She had a horrible thought. “What if that chunk of lamb is what they poisoned?”
“I guess it’s possible.” He thought about it. “But how would they get poison—say, rat poison they’d found—into it? I didn’t see a syringe in their gear or an empty bottle. Were it me killing myself that way, I’d have taken the drug or poison straight. Or mixed it into a stew, maybe, dissolving it in the water, to get the kids to eat it.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t eat much of that leg of meat anyway. Only one of us should, and eat a very tiny bit, and see if we get sick.”
“I’ll do it.”
“Stop being noble. It’s pissing me off. I’ll do it.”
“Don’t be—”
“I couldn’t survive without you,” she interrupted him. “You could survive without me. Be logical. The one of us most expendable should be the one to take the risk.”
They held each other’s eyes. “You’re not expendable,” he finally said, “And don’t even think it again, that you are. We’ll take the chance together.” His tone said they were done arguing it. “Let’s get away from here.”
Back at the sled, she was able to sit and rest again. She needed it. She was worn out from the lack of food. Benjamin brushed off a rock, sat down and carved away at the meat. The foot end of the animal stuck in the air and wiggled as he worked, a horrible sort of dance. He handed her a thin strip of the raw frozen meat, no more than a half an ounce, and she took it into her mouth. Slowly the meat melted from the warmth of her mouth. She pulled it from her mouth, bit off half, chewed it up some, and swallowed with equal parts trepidation and relief. The two of them sat together, eating their tiny portions of meat without words.
She imagined they both were thinking about poison, and about how it might feel to die of it.
After a minute, as she could feel the food hitting her stomach, she said, “I’m still hungry. Worse hungry, in fact.”
“I know. I am too. But let’s keep to the plan. See if this makes us sick. If we’re not puking in an hour or two, we can have more.”
They sat in silence for a few more minutes and then Coral said, “If we only had a Scrabble game.”
“A perfect way to spend the time waiting for poison to take effect,” he said.
“Yeah, I think I read that on their website.”
They fell back into silence. Every few minutes, one of them would make another lame joke, whistling past the graveyard.
Eventually, she stood up and rubbed warmth into her stiff arms. “I think an hour has passed.”
“We’ll give it a little more time.”
“I don’t feel in the least nauseated. Only hungry.”
“I’m not sick, either.”
“Then let’s move,” said Coral. “I don’t want to stay here waiting.”
He stood, stretching himself cautiously at first, as if he expected the movement to make him ill, then with more assurance. “Yeah. Let’s look again to see if the dead family had any fuel, first.”
“I didn’t notice any.”
“Let’s look again, outside that cave, dig around for a few minutes in the snow. We can pull the sled over there. Fill the water bottles at the spring, too.”
Coral stowed her pack and got into harness while Benjamin lashed the meat to the top of the load. As soon as he said, “okay,” she took off, feeling the familiar jerk as the slack in the harness was taken up and the sled refused, for a moment, to move. Benjamin gave it a sharp push, and the runners sliced through the snow. She dug in, feeling the familiar burn in her thighs, and hauled.
They returned to the shallow cave and hunted around but found no wood. “Let’s go on,” said Coral.
“There’s the cave.”
“From how it felt in there, I think the snow caves we dig are warmer.”
“True. If we’re poisoned, won’t the work of hauling make the poison act faster?”
“And that’s a bad thing how?” she asked.
He shrugged, and they moved on.
The rocks on their right loomed high, and she followed a rift in the snow toward lower ground, skirting the rockiest patches. Though direction was hard to tell precisely, she thought their path was taking them south of west right now.
Benjamin was thinking along the same lines. “We need to cross over that ridgeline as soon as we can. Get going west again.”
The whole rest of the day, temperatures dropped perceptibly. She could feel ice forming on her nose. She traded places with Benjamin. Snow began to fall, and they stopped for the day. Coral dug another snow cave for the night while Benjamin carved away at the hard-frozen meat. They were both feeling fine—or at least not poisoned. The meat, they were confident, was safe.
They sat together and ate raw meat, with more urgency than before. They were both still terribly hungry, and Coral didn’t doubt she had burned off ten times the calories she’d take in from the chunk of cold meat in her hand. Nevertheless, they rationed the meat by silent agreement. When they stowed away the rest, she felt marginally better than she had that morning, not quite as weak or dizzy. Benjamin took a handful of snow and scrubbed at the animal blood in his beard.
“I read in school,” she said to Benjamin as he settled down beside her for the night, “that human teeth have evolved over the last ten thousand years.”
“They have? Sounds fast, for evolution.”
“Yeah, they used to be sharper, more designed for meat eating, when we lived as hunters. According to one theorist, grain agriculture has made us evolve to this.” She tapped her own front teeth, the flat surfaces of them, though he couldn’t see her in the dark.
“I guess we’ll evolve back now.”
“Eventually. Another ten thousand years of this life, and we will.”
“Doubt we’ll make it that long.”
“Not you and me, at any rate.”
“Not humanity at all,” he said.
Coral snorted. “I believe that you enjoy your pessimism.”
“No,” he said, his voice barely audible. “No, I really don’t.” He sounded sad.
Lying awake as his breathing turned to gentle snores, Coral fancied she could feel the calories from the meat actually fueling her cells, molecules whizzing along and muscle cells making a faint happy hum as they snatched bits of nourishment to try and rebuild themselves after the day’s haul. She fell asleep to the imaginary sounds of her own metabolism.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING AFTER another meal of definitely-not-poisoned frozen meat, she pulled again. When they traded places at noon, pushing it up over rocky patches felt easier. The high-quality protein was doing her some good, though the calories were still far below her needs.
That afternoon, they pulled up well before dark and dined on more frozen lamb, if indeed lamb was what it was. Coral chewed while she thought with hope of reaching the next valley, finding wood, building a fire and roasting the rest, making soup of the bones and tendons. If another can of peas and pearl onions suddenly appeared out of thin air, she wouldn’t say no to that, either.
The next day, they took their time over their breakfast of frozen raw meat. Benjamin said, “We could rest a whole day if you want. Look for water, look for food, look for fuel, dig for worms.”
“We can try for a couple hours, maybe,” she said. Coral’s thoughts drifted away from the raw meat in her mouth. She imagined selecting from a cart of gooey, rich desserts at a fancy restaurant as a waiter pushed up a wheeled cart of them. She was in a skirt and heels. Nylons swished as she crossed her legs under the table. The waiter had on a sharp black jacket and bowed slightly as he stopped the dessert cart in front of her. Her food fantasy was interrupted by Benjamin’s voice. The fudge torte she had been about to point to evaporated from her mind.
“I was raised religious, you know.”
Cautiously, not wanting to startle him back into his normal silence, she said only, “You mentioned.”
“Yeah. Fire and brimstone. Lots of quoting Revelation, which is how I knew it immediately. By the time I was thirteen or so, I was sick of it.”
He was staring off into the distance. The silence grew until she thought that was all she was going to hear. Then he continued. “That was my first life. My second was being a hellion. Biker, carouser, drunk, all that.”
She was incredulous. “You? Like a Hell’s Angel biker?”
“Not quite. Though I did get beat up in a biker bar once.” He kept staring off, as if watching a movie screen. Maybe his memories were playing on it.
She wondered what memories he might be seeing, and said, “You seem so...I don’t know. Solid. Reliable. Not a drunk, certainly.”
“I haven’t had a drink for seven years.”
“That’s good.”
“Won’t ever be tempted again, I guess. Not now.”
“Then there’s a silver lining to all this.”
A ghost of a smile appeared on his face.
He never ever volunteered information about himself. Now that she had a little, she wanted more. “So you were an alcoholic,” she said.
“Still am, technically. As an active drinker, though, I was bad. A mean drunk.” He didn’t sound particularly repentant or ashamed, just matter-of-fact.
After another few minutes of watching him stare off at memories, she said, “You just never know about people, do you?”
“No,” he agreed. “You don’t.”
Silence drifted over them once again, until Coral’s curiosity made her speak. “Did you go to AA?”
“First time, I was sent by a judge after I totalled my bike. It didn’t take that time.”
“Did it take? Ever?”
“Later. That was my third life. Religious childhood, hellion in my 20’s, totally into recovery soon after age 30.” He shrugged. “Except the higher power part wasn’t something I entirely bought. I believed in a higher power for recovery, but I believe that was—still believe it is—me. Like my better self—that’s my higher power. I just need to listen to that voice.” He said, musing, to himself, “And after the fire, a still small voice.”
“I guess you have to be ready for it—recovery, I mean.”
He made a sound of agreement.
“My mother drank some.”
“She in AA?”
“Never that I know of. She wasn’t drunk every day or anything. She drank on weekends, but sometimes to excess. She’d go months without, then go back to it when she was stressed.” Images of her mother stumbling into her childhood bedroom, breathing liquor breath on her in bed, came to her.
“You pissed at her for that?”
Slowly, Coral shook her head. “Not any more. Maybe as a kid, it bothered me every once in a while. But not since she died.”
“That’s the only sure cure for boozing.”
Coral laughed, but stopped herself. “I’m horrible laughing at that.”
“You’re not horrible.” he said. “And it was my joke, anyway, so blame me.” He sighed deeply. “We need to move on. I have a rough idea of where we are, and there’s a good-sized reservoir up ahead, worth hunting for. I’d like to find it before this food is gone.”
She might be able to catch fish again. “Then we should get going,” she said, forcing herself to her feet.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER, THE bone was all that was left of the meat, but Benjamin had finally spotted the reservoir he’d been trying to find by zigzagging through the countryside. “If this is Magic Reservoir,” he said, “there are two more off the highway north of here. Due west from here, along a road, and I think they’re spaced about 40 miles apart. If this isn’t Magic, it’s one of the others. It’ll be good for us, as long as we can find fish or game.”
They could do 40 miles in a week, even taking into account the rolling hills they’d been moving through. “You have a good visual memory.”
“I loved maps as a kid, loved tracing them. Idaho’s is pretty firmly stuck in my mind’s eye.”
This reservoir was a much smaller body of water than American Falls, and the weather was much colder now. Ice had formed well out from the shores. They found a likely cove, and he told her to chop at the ice next to the shore while he worked at breaking it further out.
She dug out the hatchet, tested the edge, and said, “You’ll have to sharpen it again after this, I imagine.”
“Yup,” he said, and he began heaving head-sized rocks out onto the ice, trying to crack through without putting himself onto thin ice and risking falling in.
“We’re putting the fish down,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “But offer them food, I expect they’ll come back for you. Tomorrow, for sure.”
“I don’t have real food for them. Just fake food.” She banged away at the ice.
“Catch one with a lure, you’ll have fish guts for bait.”
They were both talking optimistically, as if there were fish in there. Her angling knowledge may have improved as she grew used to the new climate and situation, but fewer fish were around to be caught. She wondered if any would last the whole winter. And winter was here, and likely to be here for at least six months more. It must be into November by now. The next chance of a thaw was surely six months away. “You going hunting?”
“For game and wood both. We’re back into good forest land here, I think, so there’s a chance of finding sizable charcoal.”
It took them about an hour to clear out a good sized hole in the ice for fishing. She wondered how long it would stay clear before it iced over again. While the fish were settling down from the disturbance, she went fishing for melted water instead, tying plastic jugs partly filled with snow, for weight, to her line and casting out, jerking them around until they fell over and let water in, and reeling them back to the thicker, safe ice where she stood.
Benjamin took the rifle to hunt. While he was gone, Coral practiced her archery skills again until the light began to fade. She let the fishing line dangle, and she caught one—a new species of fish for them, a flat perch. She cleaned it, chopped the guts, rolled that into balls and set them out in a line on the snow to freeze. She wished she had corn meal or flour to stick it all together—but the chances of seeing grain any time soon—or maybe ever again—were remote. The frozen gut balls would disintegrate in the water as they melted, but that might pull the fish toward the hook as well. Maybe tomorrow would be better fishing, with that to help her.
Benjamin returned at last light with fuel. Eating weak fish soup in the light of the coals, she said, “No offense, but this is getting boring.”
“What is?”
“Doing the same damned things every day. We walk. We hunt. We fish. We eat and talk about hunting and fishing. We sleep.”
“Barely enough eating to survive.”
“I know. But maybe we could—I don’t know. Invent a saga to tell the other, or sing musical numbers from Broadway shows, or make a rabbit-pelt drum.”
“No drums. Noise carries. Especially over water.”
He was right. “I wish I would stumble on an intact library. A basement of a library with books. And then we can read aloud at the end of the day.”
“Pretty heavy to lug books around.”
She’d be willing to shoulder the weight of a couple of thick novels. “I’m spoiled, I guess.”
“I want my MTV?”
“Not MTV. But I’d kill for a DVD player and a stack of—hell, almost anything. Silent movies, if you’re worried about noise. Or a Kindle loaded with books. Or an iPod, earbuds, and a thousand songs.”
“I’d rather have a Nintendo,” he said. “I remember when the Play Station first came out.”
“Man, you are old.”
“Thanks, brat. I suppose you’re Wii generation.”
“My brothers more than me. I’m really not much of a gamer.”
“We could play tic-tac-toe in the snow.”
“Too simple. And it seems we’re always busy when it’s daylight.”
“We can play games while we hike,” he said. “Like twenty questions again, quietly—something like that.”
“If we have the breath for it. You know, I used to read or play games or listen to music to fill the hours, when I didn’t need to study or work. Now, there’s plenty of stuff to do to fill the hours. But I miss entertainment, especially after we eat supper.” She let out a frustrated breath. “It’s such a different world.”
“It is that.”
They said nothing more as they put out the fire, and soon they crawled into the snow cave to sleep.
The strangers arrived in the morning.
