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SHE TURNED AWAY FROM the burned settlement and back to the stream. She still hoped to locate food, survivors, working radios or cell phones, though she now suspected she would have to find a sizeable town to find any of that.
A few hours later, a light breeze began blowing at her back. Soon after, she came to another metal barrier and another small road, one that ran perpendicular away from the stream. She hesitated, afraid of finding more bones, but she knew she had to go on and try to find food, fuel, living people. She turned to the road.
Coral followed it up a hill. In minutes, it brought her to within sight of another chimney, a hundred yards or so off the roadway. She made her way toward the burned-out house.
The foundation was for a small house, no more than a cabin, nestled between thick trunks of burned trees. It had probably been a peaceful place to live once. Now it was a ruin. Coral walked around the foundation, unwilling to dig in the ashes lest she find more human remains. If there were signs anything had survived, she’d dig for cans of food, but it looked like total destruction again.
She saw something move out of the corner of her eye. A dozen paces away, a light-colored scrap of something stirred as the wind picked up.
Coral walked to it, cupping her hands around her eyes to protect them from the swirling ash.
It was fabric, a flag. White cotton tied around an unburned bit of dowel, with something written on it in red, the color shocking among a world of black and gray.
She bent down to take hold of the flag to read it. The dowel was a wooden kitchen spoon.
“Kirk,” the flag said. Nothing more.
Coral looked all around, looking for any possible sign of human activity. Obviously, someone had put it here after the fire had swept through. But where was that person now?
She began to search for any sign of a human presence, walking a slow spiral out from the flag, looking closely at the ground, hoping to see some slight indentations in the ash that suggested footprints. But rain and wind had removed any trace of tracks, if there had been any. After long minutes of careful searching for the sign of a person, she gave up and went back to the flag itself.
“Hello?” she called. Her voice was rough with disuse. She peeled the bandana off her face and called again, louder. She turned to face the opposite direction. “Anyone out there?”
She stopped and listened, hoping for an answer, desperate for the sound of another human voice, but there wasn’t any. Not even the stream’s trickle could be heard from here. No bird sang. Nothing broke the silence.
Her eyes slid to the ground by her feet, looking at the place where the spoon had been half-buried in ash. She shrugged her pack off, kneeled and slipped her mask back in place then began digging in the ash around the flag.
Under the layer of ash and darker fire soot, there was a rigid surface, cool to her fingertips. Coral brushed at it, uncovering a slab of concrete. She continued sweeping off the surface and found metal. It was like a manhole cover—but square—set in a border of more concrete, the metal sunken neatly into a recess.
Her fingers slid around the edges of the central slab, seeking a handhold. They found an indentation, and Coral scrambled around to get a better angle. She got a grip and heaved up the concrete plate. It stuck at first, then eased up four, five inches. Falling from her grasp, it hit the concrete with a hollow ring.
The slab sat askew of its opening, leaving a narrow triangle of empty space. Faint yellow light spilled out of the opening, as did a foul odor. Coral recoiled from the smell and then forced herself closer again. “Hello?” she called down.
No answer.
Shoving the cover aside, she looked into the opening and saw, below her, an underground shelter, a tornado shelter, maybe. There was a cot down there and on the cot, a body, either a very slight adult or a pre-teen kid.
The smell was coming from that. The person was at least a few days dead.
“Ah, man,” she said. But she knew she had to go down there, no matter what it smelled like. If there were a radio, or food, or a camp stove, she had to find it.
Gagging at the stench, she let herself down into the hole on a rickety ladder positioned under it. The smell was even worse inside. It’d drift out the opening eventually, but for now, it was horrid. First thing, she tossed a blanket over the body, which, though she tried not to see it, seemed to be that of a 12- or 13-year-old boy.
Don’t think about it.
There was a pile of blankets on the floor, a couple folding camp chairs, and some rickety shelves. A five-gallon white plastic pail on the floor, when she popped it open, ended up being a slops jar. She covered it quickly and pulled her shirt up over her face, trying to block the bouquet of awful smells of the place.
There was some food. Three cans of tuna and some fruits and vegetables. Grabbing three cans, she went to the opening and tossed them outside. The second can rolled back, and she caught it and tossed it out again. She got three more cans and threw those up and out. And then she quickly climbed the ladder and walked away until she could bear to breathe again. The smells clung faintly to her—rotting flesh and sewage.
It was only then that she let the thought of the kid dying there, alone, waiting for Kirk, whoever that was, hit her full force. She sat on the ashy ground and cried. She cried for him, dying alone of who knew what, surely afraid. She cried for his family. She cried for all the other dead ones, their bones buried in the ash.
Mostly, though she was ashamed of the self-pity, she cried for herself.
If she were the only person left on the earth, she wouldn’t want to live.
Finally, she forced herself to stop. Tears weren’t helping. Thinking of death wasn’t helping her. Surely somewhere, a dozen or a hundred miles from here, people were alive. They had to be. Had to be.
Then why haven’t you seen or heard an airplane, or a helicopter, looking for survivors?
“As a pleasant conversationalist, you suck,” she said to the interior voice.
She shook herself, got up, and gathered her cans. She hiked down to the river again and set up camp there. She’d wait a couple days for the storm shelter to air out, then go back and look more carefully, scavenging whatever food was left and whatever supplies might help her survive.
The difference between a diet of only fish and fish plus the food from the cans was astonishing. She attended to the taste of the canned food as she had never before. She had grabbed canned corn, peas, and peaches in a syrup that was so sweet it brought more tears to her eyes. It was wonderful. There was a can of beef stew for supper that night and a can of chili with beans for supper another night. The last can was dog food. The picture on the can looked like beef stew, as well. She set it aside, knowing she’d be eating it soon.
Along with the fish she was catching regularly now, she was the least hungry she’d been since The Event. The chili had about 440 calories for the can. Seeing that made her try and figure out how many calories she was consuming. Say, 250 average for each fish, none of which had been very large. Six fish a day would keep her alive, though when she was hiking, twice that number would be better.
She wasn’t catching twelve fish most days.
The calories in the vegetables and fruit were negligible, but they provided vitamins she wasn’t getting with the fish and blessed relief from the tedious taste of raw fish over and over.
Forty-eight hours after she’d found the storm shelter, she hiked back to it and took her emptied daypack down to gather supplies. The smell was only marginally better. Part of her wanted to haul the body up and give it a decent burial. But she knew that was an urge she’d have to resist. She’d probably never get the smell off her.
There weren’t many supplies. There was an old first-aid guide, pages wrinkled with water damage, and a small hatchet, which she gladly took, despite the weight of it. There was no radio. The light had been coming from a battery lantern, but not an LED. It was old and heavy, and the beam was really dim, so the batteries must be low. Still, she stared at it for a full minute before deciding the weight wasn’t worth it.
There were another eleven cans of food. She packed those all away in her pack. The only blanket was over the body, so she didn’t want it. But there was a thin roll of garbage bags in a corner, which she grabbed. And a half a roll of toilet paper. She put the daypack on and climbed back out.
As she pulled the metal cover back over the opening, she realized she was sealing the boy into his tomb, and she stood over it for a moment, trying to think of something to say. The only words that came to her were “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
She hiked back down to the river and spent another night at that camp, inventorying her food and washing her clothes and hair, trying to get the smell of death off her. The following morning, she hiked downriver again.
* * *
DEATH SEEMED TO HAUNT Coral after that.
The following day, at a shallow turn in the stream, Coral came upon a pile of dead fish, spilled onto the bank. They were larger than what she had been catching. The reek coming off them told her they had been here for a while. Holding her breath against the smell, she moved toward them to take a look.
A few flies buzzed around, not nearly as many as there should be. Swatting at them, she came closer. The fish on top were pockmarked. With what, she couldn’t say. She saw no insects. Maybe it was a disease? Bones showed through the disappearing flesh. With the toe of her boot, she kicked one free of the bed of ash. The ones underneath had spots on their skin, but not the pits of decay. Death had faded their skin colors from orange to gray.
Though she backed away quickly and gave the fish carcasses a wide berth after that, she imagined that she was smelling rotting fish for the rest of the day. Before she stopped to fish at dusk, she hesitated. If some disease had killed the rotting fish, any she caught could be diseased too. It might kill her to eat them.
But it hadn’t yet. She had only enough canned food to last a couple days, if she tried to live off only that. Starvation would definitely kill her, and so far the trout had done her little harm. Once again, she baited her hook and cast her line.
* * *
THE MORNING AFTER FINDING the dead fish, she woke wondering what day it was. She had entirely lost count. Two weeks since the world changed? A little more? Past mid-June, at any rate. If “June” meant anything any more. Day names and the concept of weeks were human inventions, useless, really. Without culture only seasons mattered, the solstices and equinoxes. The moon was invisible beyond the filthy night air, so months had become meaningless, for now. She was nearing summer solstice, she realized, and maybe right on it.
Rain began to fall again as she lay thinking. She wriggled out of her bag and snapped it to shake off the excess dust that fell on her in the night. Quickly she rolled it up, shoving it into her pack and out of the fall of thin mud.
After some unsuccessful fishing, Coral started walking again. Thoughts of her loneliness weighed her down along with the heavy pack, but she figured with the rain, she might as well be miserable walking in the storm as miserable sitting and waiting it out.
It was slow going, though, with her vision hampered by the dirty rain. After several minutes of walking, she sat down to rest, her hair and clothes filthy and plastered to her skin. She had an urge to bellow, to throw things and roar out her frustration at the disgusting rain. The urge grew and the scream bubbled inside her, feeling like it would force itself through her lips. She pressed her lips together and clamped them down with her teeth.
I may finally be going nuts.
What was sanity, anyway? Once, it seemed to be polite people walking down paved sidewalks. A mental picture of Coral herself sitting down on a sofa at the cafe with the student paper, drinking coffee out of a mug, thanking a waitress.
Which was a strange thought, because she didn’t read newspapers often and actually hated the taste of coffee. The picture stuck in her head, though, a portrait of normalcy that she longed to step into and inhabit.
She forced aside her self-pity. The sooner she got going, the sooner she would come to a real town. Maybe there’d be people there. Food, shelter. News about what had happened, what The Event really was.
The rain pounded down on her all morning as she walked. She stopped to fish mid-morning and managed to catch a pair of small fish, which she ate raw once again, trying not to think about possible diseases. She had a small can of deviled ham along with it, 360 much-needed calories. Through the afternoon, she trudged on through mud, a slippery wet mess of it.
The land along the stream rose steadily to her right until it was higher than her head. She came to a muddy flow crossing her path, feeding into the larger stream. To her right it cut through the bank at a low place. As she watched, a man-sized clump of earth peeled off the bank and joined the mudflow. Coral was in no mood to wade through that.
As she turned to search for a way up the bank, another bit of ground gave way under the mudflow. The mud gushed suddenly, the flow widening.
She backed away from it. The mudflow no longer looked merely unappealing. It looked dangerous. She turned away. A noise made her turn. More of the bank was peeling away and into the stream. She scrambled backward, away from the unstable ground.
Back upstream, she felt rock underfoot and felt immediately safer. She paused and scanned the bank, looking for a solid place to climb.
Without warning, a burned out tree crashed down mere yards ahead of her. It hit the stream with a crack. Blackened wood burst off it. Coral flinched back from the shrapnel.
The tree made a dam, and the river rose behind it. She had to get up out of the streambed, away from the danger of mudslides and flash floods.
The bank was almost vertical here but less than twice her height. Reaching her hands up, she sought for a hold, a solid buried rock, anything to give her purchase. Dirt peeled away under her fingers.
Muddy water from the river overspilled the banks and licked at her heels. Coral stripped off her pack and untied the hatchet from it. She swung it overhead, sinking the sharp metal blade into the face of the bank. Reaching up, she shoved her fingers into the gap she had made and pulled down, testing her weight. She cut a second gouge in the dirt as high as she could reach and quickly lashed the hatchet back onto her pack. Hoisting the heavy pack again, she used the two holes as handholds, pulling herself up off the flooding ground. Her feet scrambled for purchase, pressing over and over again without finding a solid hold.
The muddy stream kept spilling over its banks, creeping up her ankles. She had to get higher. Finally, her right foot found something solid and she pressed into it, finding a precarious balance. Pulling her left hand out and reaching up, she groped until she found the face of a large rock. Her fingers stretched for the top of it and she hauled herself up another foot. She hung onto the rock for dear life and tried to find another foothold higher up. Her left foot skittered across the face of the muddy cliff, unable to find purchase.
The weight of the pack tugged at her, wanting to peel her off the bank. She leaned in, the cliff face wet and gritty under her cheek. Her foot found something—maybe a tree root—and she eased some of her weight onto it. She reached with her right hand, looking for another hold. She found a bundle of light roots. Scratching at them furiously, she revealed more, and thicker ones.
Another bit of bank to her left, closer now, tumbled into the mudflow.
She grabbed the roots, expecting them to yank out of the cliff face at any moment, and pulled herself up again, another several inches. The roots held firm. When she looked up, dirt skittered down into her mouth. She shook her head and spit. She kept going. Moving one limb at a time, scrabbling for holds, she made it almost to the top of the bank.
The dirt there crumbled under her touch. She kept at it, grabbing, digging, pushing, until she had a solid grip with one hand on a bit of buried rock. A final scuttling push with her leg, and both hands were anchored on the rock. She hauled herself up with brute strength, kicking at the dirt to help propel herself forward. Her shoulder and back muscles burned as she pulled not only her own weight but also the weight of the pack. Finally, her hips cleared the lip and she let herself rest for a moment.
She was up. She forced herself onto her feet. Her fingers stung where she’d torn a couple of fingernails. Her arms felt numb, as if they had been drained of blood. Shaking them out, she stumbled forward, away from the dangerously unstable bank.
Even though she was safe for the moment, she kept walking away until she was a couple hundred yards away from the stream, on a rock outcrop. Then she collapsed and curled into a ball, holding herself together against limbs shaking from exhaustion.
* * *
WHEN SHE HAD RECOVERED, she sat up. She couldn’t leave the stream entirely. It was her food supply and her water supply. Keeping it far on her left, she rearranged her backpack and trudged on through the rain.
A parked car appeared in the distance. Coral hurried forward to it. The paint was gone from the car, a window was missing, but it was still potential shelter from the rain. She could use a place to sit and rest. Then a second car, facing toward the first car, appeared out of the ashen air a ways beyond the first.
She realized she had come to a road, a well-traveled one. The two cars were on the road facing each other as if about to pass in opposite directions. They had been frozen here in time. The fire or the searing heat had stopped them—or maybe something else. Wasn’t that something that happened in a nuclear attack?
She wondered again if she were walking in a world of fallout, if all her efforts would come to nothing when she collapsed with radiation sickness, her hair falling out, her skin covered with ulcerated sores. But she had no such sores, not even the hint of them. She felt physically fine. Except for being underfed, and tired, and lonely, and sad, she was okay.
The road was banked slightly, falling away to either side. Some of the ash had been washed away by the rain. On the road’s surface was a layer of tiny round pebbles, covering the original road surface. She picked one up and looked at it. It was smooth, a tiny pellet. She dug down and found an asphalt road surface. There had to be tens of thousands of the pebbles spread over the road’s surface. Like the ash, but bigger. She hadn’t noticed any before. So why were they collected here? Weird.
She crossed the swatch of pellets, approached the nearer car, and peered inside an open window. The seats were burned down to bits of metal, and ash had accumulated on the floors. No one was in there. Coral pulled her head out of the window and looked up the road.
She began to walk along the edge of it. Something small and brown stuck out of the gray ash just ahead. Coral walked up to it, studying it. A series of bumps in graduated sizes peeped out from the ash.
She came closer, and realized she was looking at a set of toes.
