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“SHH, IT’S OKAY,” CAME the voice again.
Coral tried to bring the face into focus. The man she saw was bigger than the one she had fought, this voice pitched lower, and with no edge of insanity. “You’re not him,” she whispered.
“Who?”
Trying to say it wasn’t important to answer, she shook her head. Mistake. Nausea rose in her. “I’m sick,” she said.
“You have a concussion, I think.”
Yes, of course, that made sense.
“I don’t think your skull is broken, but you really took a solid hit,” the man said.
“Two,” she said, before she could consider the wisdom of telling him anything. Her voice came from an odd distance and seemed not to be her own.
“One bad one, at least,” he said. “It’s not bleeding any more.” His gaze moved over her head.
She started to reach up and feel the sore spot but remembered how horrible that had felt the last time she touched it. Her hand dropped back to her side, touched a rough cover, a wool blanket, maybe. She looked beyond the man to see walls, and overhead, a ceiling. She realized the light here was artificial light, a lamp. Its light had woken her. “Where I am?”
“In my house,” he said. “Such as it is.”
She couldn’t focus long on his words. She knew there were a hundred answers more she needed. She couldn’t trust the situation she found herself in, not until she knew who he was and what he wanted. Before she could formulate an intelligent strategy for getting those, her voice spoke again, again, as if from another source not herself: “You going to hurt me?”
“Hurt you? I—” He looked again at her scalp. “So someone did that to you?”
She bit her lower lip, bringing her wayward mouth under control. She shouldn’t tell him any more than she had to. As far as she knew, he was in league with her first attacker.
“I thought you maybe just fell, cracked your head on a rock,” he said.
Coral suddenly realized she was lying under a thin blanket in her underwear. “You undressed me?” The idea appalled her.
“You were a mess,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Blood on your shirt. Puke. Damp jeans. Filthy.”
She barely listened. Coral knew she was in no shape for another wrestling match. If this one was going to rape her or kill her, she’d have to suffer whatever indignities he had planned. Images of the worst possibilities swam into her head, making her stomach clench. Torture. Anal rape. Body parts cut off for food. Being burned alive.
She stared at the man, trying to judge him through her mental fog. She saw a tall man, broad-shouldered, the beard, brown eyes, and a full head of wavy hair. He wasn’t as young as she, and maybe as old as forty. As for his intention toward her, she could read nothing in his face.
Patiently, the man watched her studying him until she looked away, embarrassed. “You’re going to be okay,” he said. “Just rest.”
Her body yearned to take that advice, but she didn’t want to fall asleep with him in the room. She watched him warily as he got up and puttered around in the room. She couldn’t see what he was doing and feared he’d turn around with a gun or knife.
But all he did was spend a few minutes fiddling with something she couldn’t see. Then he gave her a final glance and walked to the door. “Rest,” he said again, and he left the room. The lamp he left on, turned down to dim.
Though she tried to stay awake, exhaustion overcame her again. She drifted into a dreamless sleep.
* * *
SHE WOKE AGAIN AT THE touch of his hand. He was nudging her shoulder, saying something. She opened her eyes, and pain in her head rushed forward like an avalanche. “Oh fuck,” she moaned. She gritted her teeth against the pain, but that just made it worse.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“My head.” She closed her eyes again. Shutting out the light helped a little, but the pain was still crushing. She could feel a tear slip out of the corner of her eye—it hurt that badly.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything for it,” he said.
“Aspirin in my pack.” She opened one eye halfway. “I still have my pack?”
“Yeah. It’s right outside, in the hall.”
She let her eye close again and listened to him leave the room, come back in. Every sound set up clanging echoes in her head.
“Where is the aspirin?” he said.
“Main compartment. Way down at the bottom, there’s a plastic box. First aid.”
In a moment, he said, “I have the box. Where’s the aspirin?”
“Prescription bottle inside,” she said. She held her hand out and he opened it then handed over the pill bottle. The label didn’t match what she had inside: a couple pills of wide-spectrum antibiotics. Ibuprofen. A dozen 222’s from her last trip up into Canada, mild doses of codeine with aspirin, over-the-counter drugs up there. She pulled out two of those and popped them in her mouth. Then she looked around for water, realized she didn’t have any, and swallowed them dry. Gah. They felt stuck halfway down. “Water?” she croaked.
He handed her a liter bottle of water from her pack, clear water on top, sludge on the bottom.
“Thanks,” she said, taking a tentative sip. The head-injury nausea didn’t return, so she took a bigger gulp, washing the pills down. She felt them move each centimeter, then they were down, moving into her stomach.
“Feeling better?”
“Yeah,” she lied. “How long...?”
“Have you been here? A day, or a bit more.”
“Asleep?”
“I kept waking you up every few hours, don’t you remember?”
“Nuh-uh.” She wished the pills would take effect faster. Talking hurt her head. Moving hurt her head. Even thinking hurt her head.
“I remember you’re supposed to do that for concussion patients.” He shrugged. “Don’t know why, though.”
To check for coma, to determine if there is brain swelling and bleeding. Though what you could do about a severe brain injury in the middle of nowhere, without an MRI and surgical theatre nearby, she couldn’t imagine. She wondered if her brain had been damaged. No, if she could remember that much information about brain trauma and its treatment, she probably just had a concussion. Damn, though, her head hurt.
She focused again on the man. “You took care of me.” Without raping me or having me for dinner, she did not say aloud.
He nodded.
“Thank you.”
“Well,” he began, then shrugged, letting the rest of his thought go unsaid. He sat still for a minute then said, “You hungry yet?”
“No.” She should be, but she wasn’t, the nausea too near a memory.
“Let me know when you are.”
“You have your own food?”
“A little. Venison I shot a couple weeks back.”
She was surprised. “There are animals still alive out there?” She hadn’t seen any, nor track nor scat, and she had thought maybe they all got killed in the fire. Maybe they were drifting back from wherever they’d run to.
“One was, anyway. Haven’t seen any other game for ten days.”
The first molecules of the drug began to hit her bloodstream. She felt a slight easing of tension she hadn’t known she had carried, an automatic struggle in her neck and face and shoulders against the pain. One day soon, she might regret not having those pills, might wish she had saved them if something worse happened to her. But for now, she blessed their power. She took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. When she opened her eyes, he was watching her with an odd expression. “What?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. He shook his head and stood up. “You need a toilet?”
“Oh yeah,” she said, realizing she really, really did.
“Can you walk at all?”
“I can try.” Better than the alternative. Clutching the bedclothes to her, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood, with him hovering just a few inches away, hand out, ready to steady her if she needed it. Standing seemed to ease the pain in her head a little more. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll just get dressed. Alone, if you don’t mind.” She waited nervously for him to back off. Was there going to be a payment exacted for his help?
He left, shutting the door quietly, and Coral found the turtleneck in her pack, put that on, and felt better. She looked around herself. There was the bed she’d been on, a table, a chair. The floor was carpeted. She wondered how the place had survived the fire. She saw her jeans and other clothes piled in a corner. He was right, they were disgustingly dirty. She dug out the sweatpants, which were dirty too, but at least not stained with puke. She found him waiting halfway down a dim hallway.
He led her up a flight of stairs, where an open door at the top let in some daylight. At the top of the stairs, he pulled up a bandana mask like hers, against the ash in the air. She realized she had been in a basement of a house, and as they reached the upper levels she saw the familiar fire damage. The roof was gone and the floors were coated with mud. No furnishings remained up here. The scorched walls still stood, but the outside openings for doors and windows yawned open.
“It’s colder outside,” she said.
“Yep,” he said. He guided her outside and away from the house to a pit toilet, recently dug. There was no building around it, no toilet seat. He pointed to a metal bucket filled with ash. “When you’re done, just pour some ash onto it. Don’t skimp. There’s plenty more where that came from.” The small joke made her fear of him ease.
He returned to the house and left her some privacy. The latrine was free from odors, tidily made with broad flat rocks circling the opening. It seemed downright civilized after long days of digging cat holes in the wilderness.
When she was done, she saw a dark mound in the near distance and walked over to it. Charred bits of furniture, wet cushions, chunks of wood, bits of metal, and other debris from the house had been piled together, roughly organized by material, all of it smelling of soot. Behind that was a burned pickup truck, doors removed and leaning against its sides. He’d been busy.
When she got back inside, she took a closer look around. The walls were different, not drywall or plaster but...what? He came from behind an interior wall. “Is this adobe?” she asked him, stroking the rough texture of the wall. Tiny cracks, shaped like spider webs, were visible from close up.
“Similar. It’s layers of clay, inside and out, packed over straw bales. Steel rebars inside the straw for structure, starting with rebar set into a concrete foundation.”
Oddly, she thought of the three little pigs. The straw house wasn’t supposed to stand, but this one had outlasted the fire when frame houses hadn’t. “Why didn’t it burn?”
“The roof did, and the doors and window framing. Most of the flooring and furniture up here got burned or badly charred. But mud doesn’t burn, and the wall surfaces are basically mud. With no trees right next to the house, the fire moved by fast.”
“You survived here?”
“Barely,” he said, looking grim. He didn’t offer more detail and she didn’t ask.
Asking seemed rude somehow. She blinked at that, at her invention of new social rules for the new world. Or maybe they were the same old rules but seemed alien in such a new context. “I’m sorry,” she said, reminded of the polite thing to do. “I never asked your name. I’m Coral.”
“Benjamin,” he said.
“You prefer Ben?”
“Nope,” he said, “not particularly.”
“Benjamin, then,” she said. “Thank you again for helping me. Where’d you find me?”
“You hungry yet?” he asked instead of answering her. “I could use some food.” He led her to one side of the main level. A refrigerator and stove remained in a kitchen, soot-streaked but intact. A central island with granite countertops had been reconstructed since the fire, with a fieldstone base. The countertop was whole and scrubbed clean. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a hunk of meat. Ribs were visible along one side of it.
“You have electricity?” she asked.
“Nah,” he said. “I keep it in here to keep the bears from smelling it.”
She glanced outside. “There are bears around here?”
He shrugged. “There were a month ago. I haven’t seen any lately.” He squinted at her. “You not from around here?”
She shook her head.
Pointing out the window, he said, “Grizzlies don’t come closer than about two hundred miles that way. Black bears all over Idaho, though. They’re not as aggressive, usually.” He used the countertop to cut a fist-sized chunk from the meat. “But with so little food for them out there, I can guess how they’d act if they found mine.” He replaced the meat in the refrigerator. “Though if I were a bear, I’d have left and found better pickings somewhere else.”
He looked a little ursine himself, a big man with dark hair on his wrists and knuckles, a patch of dark hair peeking out from an undershirt he wore beneath a faded green flannel shirt. Coral thought he had been much bigger still once, though she couldn’t put her finger on why she thought so. Maybe it was the way he moved, as if he was used to carrying more weight.
“Eat downstairs or outside?” he asked.
“There’s no ash downstairs.”
“I probably swallowed a peck of it so far,” he said.
They went back down to the bedroom she had been in and he sat on the chair while Coral sat at the edge of the bed and watched him use a pocket knife to cut a thin slice of the venison. “How old did you say that meat was?” she asked.
He chewed a while, swallowed, and said, “Two weeks. It’s dried through, almost jerky now.” He cut a slice and offered it to her on the tip of his knife. “Sure you don’t want any?”
She put her hand out and accepted a slice. She bit off a corner of it. It was tough. After she had chewed a long while and swallowed, she asked again, “So where did you find me?”
“Down the hill a ways. I was hunting—I do most days, even though I only found the one doe early on—and yesterday I came across you.”
Coral thought how easily he could have passed her by...or how easily someone else could have found her. Her attacker. A different violent person. Or a hungry bear. She had been at the mercy of chance. She still was. “You carried me back here?”
“Pulled you.” He took another bite and went through the chewing and swallowing routine again. Meat this tough made for a slow dinnertime conversation. She took another bite too, as the first wasn’t threatening to come back up. “It’s quite a ways. I left you, came back here, got a blanket, rigged a travois. Got you settled in here then went back for your pack later.” He got up. “Hang on.”
He stepped out of the room and Coral heard water splashing. She was curious but sat and waited for him, looking down and registering the worn blanket that covered the bed. It looked antique, the color muted.
Benjamin came back with a metal bowl of clear water and sat again. “I thought by the time I got you back with the travois that you might still die,” he continued. “But you’re tougher than you look.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Thanks? She watched as he made his way through his meal. After the third thin slice of meat, she refused more.
He was nearly done eating when he said, “Wish there was something other than the venison.”
“I have some salt,” she said. “Didn’t you see it in the pack?”
“I didn’t look through your stuff—wasn’t going to unless you didn’t live,” he said. “But salt? Really?” His tone was wistful.
“If you had fuel, we could at least make a stew. Maybe soften it up some.”
“All right!” he said, smiling for the first time. The corner of one of his incisors was chipped. “There’s enough wood yet, here and there. Made into charcoal, some of it.”
“And there’s trout in the river,” she said. “Just small ones now, though.” She told him about the piles of larger fish she had seen, dead on the banks.
He nodded at her description. “I saw some of that too. Fish are sensitive to water temperatures. That week of heat had to kill thousands of them. I bet all the big fish are gone from Idaho now.”
“I guess I was lucky to catch any.” Her headache felt distant now and she felt a little high from the codeine. Funny drug, codeine. It didn’t really erase the pain—just made her high enough to forget about hurting for a few minutes at a time. “A lot of my surviving has been dumb luck. I had a dozen chances to die this past month.” She watched him finish the last of the venison. “You probably saved me this time.”
“I doubt it,” he said. “You would have woken up out there too.”
“Maybe,” she said, still thinking of the man in town. She might have woken only to live through to a terrible end at his hands.
While her attacker had been unable to follow her path along the river, she also felt a new and acute sense of her vulnerability that she hadn’t felt a few days ago. Lying on the ground, unconscious, she could have been found by anyone. Benjamin had been the one.
So far, he seemed okay, but she couldn’t know that for sure. She had learned the lesson in caution. There was an outside chance he was fattening her up to eat her. She felt torn between gratitude for his hauling her into his home and sharing his blankets, and her automatic fear of him. He hadn’t stolen her gear—hadn’t even looked inside her pack, if he could be believed. He hadn’t taken advantage of her hours of unconsciousness in any way that was obvious. But she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d eventually demand repayment of her...or if he’d suddenly change, become aggressive and violent like the man in town. Didn’t they say serial killers always seem nice at first?
Who was there, after all, to stop any one person from hurting someone less powerful in this empty, lawless world? Nothing but a person’s own conscience, a person’s core character. Until she knew more about Benjamin’s, she had to keep a close eye on him.
He stood, unaware of her speculations about him, and stretched. “I’m going to go out, look around some more. I’ve been hunting through neighbors’ yards. I kick up ash and hope to find some sort of roots left in a garden. Or tools or anything useful that survived the fire.” He wiped his knife on the tail of his shirt and tucked it back in his pocket. “Why don’t you rest?”
“I’ll help you,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not fine. Get some more sleep if you can, or just lie in bed. Let yourself mend. There’ll still be plenty of work to do tomorrow.” He pointed to the lantern. “Turn it off, please, if you can stand the dark.”
She looked at it closely for the first time. “That’s not kerosene.”
“It’s solar. Probably doesn’t have many hours left in it, so use it as little as possible.” He showed her the dial that dimmed it.
Coral wanted to argue with him about coming along, to get up and be of some use, and to keep an eye on him, but she realized that she was still shaky and weak. Maybe if she could sleep, the headache would go away on its own. She’d feel safer in here with the door closed, against everyone, including him. Maybe it locked.
Illogically, she felt a stab of guilt as she turned the lock. He had been nothing but nice to her. She knew it might not be fair to mistrust him, but she couldn’t stop herself from feeling as she did. She had been a naive fool before, just wandering along hoping for the best. The lesson in mistrust had been learned in town, and just in time to save her.
* * *
CORAL TURNED OFF THE lantern and fell into an anxious doze, punctuated by codeine-weird dream fragments. Off and on, she woke, startled at some imagined noise, half-expecting to see Benjamin looming over her, ready to do her harm. But each time, she was alone, in a soft bed, quiet and safe. Finally, after she realized he hadn’t come back to sex-crime her yet, she let go and fell into a deeper sleep.
When she woke, her headache was nearly gone. Only a ghost of it remained, more like a hangover of pain rather than pain itself. She scrubbed at her face and sat up. She was outside the covers. She fumbled the lantern onto dim then went to the door.
Night had fallen while she slept. The hallway was dark, lit by the faint silvery lantern light spilling out of her room. “Benjamin?” she called softly. No one answered. She went back to get the lantern and carried it with her. Halfway down the short hallway there was a bathroom. At the other end was a closed door. Opposite the bathroom door were the stairs up to the ground floor.
She went upstairs. The dimmest of lights, flickering orange, shone through a doorway. She made her way toward it, navigating slowly through the unfamiliar rooms.
She found the light—a small fire—and Benjamin outdoors, sitting by it. She realized his eyes were closed and he didn’t see her. When she cleared her throat, his eyes popped open.
“You’re up,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You look better.”
“I feel better,” she said. “Much.”
“Hungry yet?”
“Yeah,” she said, surprised. “I am.” Her stomach clenched at the thought of food. “Starved.” An exaggerated claim back when she used it in her old life, but here it was the truth.
“Would you mind sharing your salt? I have stew simmering.”
Going back downstairs, she retrieved the salt and the last two cans of vegetables from her pack—one can lima beans and the other mixed peas and carrots—and brought them back.
He squatted over the fire, stirring a cast iron pot with a long metal fork. She handed him the bag of salt. He poured some in, stirred. He took the fork out and let a few drops of the broth drip onto the back of his hand. His eyes closed as he licked it off. “Man, that tastes good.” He hefted the salt, testing its weight. “Quite a bit of it.” Looking up at her, he said, “you mind if I put in more?”
“You’re the cook,” she said. “Go for it.”
He let another bit of salt trickle into the pot, then closed the container and handed it back to her.
She got out her knife and used the can opener attachment to work most of the way around the cans of veggies. She bent the lids back and handed them over.
He poured them in. “A half hour more, and it’ll be perfect. We can eat a couple-three days off this.”
Her stomach was rumbling at the smell of the stew. “Find anything else to eat at the neighbors’ houses?”
“No, and I doubt I will,” he said. “At first, that first week after the fire, I thought I knew where there had been a patch of biscuit root growing, but I’ve not been able to find it. It’s out there somewhere, though.”
She shivered. “Hey, what happened to the weather? Is it getting colder?”
“Yeah, it is,” he agreed. “The last three days, the temps have dropped a lot.”
“I wonder why.”
“I imagine the sun can’t get through this crap in the air,” he said. “I can’t recharge the solar lantern with that amount of light, either, so enjoy it while it’s still working. I think the temps are likely to keep dropping too.”
In silence, they watched the fire. He dished up two bowls—metal pie pans, to be accurate— and they shared a meal of venison stew, their masks shoved down to their necks while they ate. The meat was still a little tough, but it was food. She ate, grateful to have anything, happy to have a spoon and fork to use again, not worrying for the moment about accepting the gift of meat or what it might cost her later on.
* * *
NO PRICE WAS EXACTED that night. She went to bed alone and locked the door again.
The next morning, Coral spent time looking through her pack. The fishing gear and hatchet were lashed to it. Her sweater was there, and she put it on over the turtleneck. She’d have to wash her clothes the first chance she got, or find more. There was no rifle. Maybe she’d dropped it by the river, or among the stones on her climb away from the river. She couldn’t remember the trip away from town at all clearly.
She found Benjamin outside at his organized collection of debris, holding up some stray bit of what may have once been furniture and studying it. “Morning,” she said.
“Hey,” he answered. “How are you feeling?”
“Good, really.” She cleared her throat. “Have you seen the rifle I had?”
“A rifle?” He dropped the bit of junk, stood, and looked at her. “What kind?”
She hesitated. “I don’t really know.” When he said nothing more, she turned away. She felt his eyes on her as she walked back inside, and it troubled her. When she got to “her” room, she shut the door and felt a little better.
