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SHE SAT ON THE BED for a long time, her backpack leaning up against her legs, not knowing what to do, feeling confused and angry and guilty all at once and not understanding any of those feelings. Finally, she went back upstairs and looked cautiously around. Benjamin was gone. The attacker’s rifle was still sitting where she had left it, on the kitchen counter. The bullet that he had shown her was sitting alongside.
It was something. Not an apology, but a sign of his trust. At least he didn’t seem to think she’d trail after him and shoot him in the back.
She was more confused than ever. If he stuck to his plan, she had at least a day to decide what to do. If she left, she’d do it at first light and avoid talking to him again. Leave a note of thanks and good wishes.
And hope there’d be fish enough in the streams to fuel her journey.
Coral decided she needed to take charge of herself. She loaded the single bullet into the rifle—it took her fifteen minutes to feel confident she’d done it right, though she was less confident she could hit an elephant at twenty paces—and she hiked out to fish. She spent the rest of the day trying to catch fish but caught only a pair of tiny trout by late afternoon. Discouraged, she walked back to the house and made herself a spare meal, leaving the last strip of the venison alone. That was his.
The next morning, she woke to find a thin layer of dirty gray snow on the ground.
It couldn’t be later than July 15, she didn’t think they were at much over 4,000 feet of elevation, and yet it was snowing. For the first time she worried about how she’d keep warm this winter.
What if she decided to stay? Burning through the charcoaled wood, like that she and Benjamin had been using for cooking fires, keeping a fire going all night, they’d be lucky to find three weeks’ worth of fuel within a half-day’s walk of the house. The basement and beds and blankets would keep her warmer than striking out alone and sleeping on the bare ground.
Was it possible to heat any part of the house? How? Burn a bunch of wood in a pile on the middle of the hallway floor? That wouldn’t work. Maybe Benjamin could build a hearth or something, but she would be afraid of doing it alone and burning down what was left of the house. If only they could scavenge a wood-burning stove. Iron should have survived the wildfire. But why was she thinking about fuel for the house? She wanted to leave, right? How would she stay warm on the trail? That was the right question. How could she get food?
All the work required to survive was exhausting her. Even the thought required was draining. She wanted civilization again, central heating and thermostats, running water. Most of all, she wanted plentiful food, set out nicely in grocery store aisles. No, strike that—most of all, she wanted to hear her brothers’ voices, Grandma’s too. Then plentiful food. Her wish for plenty of clean water had been answered when she’d ended up here, in the house with the cistern. If she left, she’d lose that again.
She worked all morning around the house and barn, sweeping up ash, scavenging metal, and about noon, she packed for the day, left a note for Benjamin that she’d be back in a day or two, and hiked out again. She went back toward Mill Creek but stayed far upstream of the town, trying fishing with the eggs, then all the lures she had. Few fish bit. By the end of the day, she had caught only three, and they were small. She ate them and bedded down for the night by the stream.
In between attempts at fishing the next day, she looked along the banks of the river for live trees. While she didn’t find any, some brush that had been partly in the high water was intact. With her knife, she cut several branches, the straightest she could find.
Napping by the river at lunch, feeling wiped out from the lack of calories, she admitted that she missed the soft bed at night. A couple weeks in it had spoiled her, and nights on the hard ground left her sore and grouchy.
Part of the pain came from how thin she was getting. She had started the trip as an average-sized woman, but now she was skinny as a fashion model. Her hip bones and clavicles and even her vertebrae processes stuck out, and when she lay on the ground, the lack of padding made every one of those protrusions hurt. When she realized that the ash probably cushioned her better than solid earth would, she wondered how skinny people had suffered so, for so many eons. Maybe they never lay on floors or the bare ground. Maybe cave people had made mattresses.
She realized anyone living in similar circumstances who had started out underweight back in June was probably dead now, their bodies wasted away to nothing. Too bad she hadn’t started out fat. Fat people would probably survive off their stores a few weeks longer than she would.
The next morning she put her line in the water, jammed her rod in between two rocks and worked on making a bow while waiting for a bite. Using the branches she’d taken from under the stream’s surface, she followed along her pamphlet’s instructions and worked at making the simplest bow illustrated. Her first attempts were disasters. The wood broke. It didn’t bend the right way. Her knife bit too far in when trying to cut a notch. Yet each failure taught her something. Coral re-read the directions, some of which made no sense at first. She found the meanings only through trial and error. She had to laugh—or snort in amusement—at the instruction “don’t expose the new bow to sunlight.” As if there were a chance of that! The air was still gray, every minute of every day. Sunlight was nothing but a fading memory, like hot chocolate, and potato chips, and burgers—Coral, stop that.
Eventually, she grasped the instruction to scrape away at the bow ends and not whittle. The next time she had a piece of wood shaped pretty close to the illustration, she tried flexing it like a bow, and the thing snapped. Curing the bow with rendered animal fat, as her instructions said, was impossible, but when Coral finally found a tiny trout nibbling on her bait, she passed up eating its skin, hungry as she was. She made yet another bow and sat in the dim light rubbing the slender wood with the trout skin until her forearms ached and the skin was tattered to bits.
After another night on the ground, she woke thinking about the bow from the instant she was conscious. She might have even dreamed about it. The bowstring had her stumped. Her paracord, even stripped down to its thinnest strand, was far too fat. Maybe she’d find something better back at the house. She fished all day, caught only two, and finished a second bow, even better than the first, with two trout skins to rub along it.
Late in the afternoon, she walked back to the house. She had no fish to bring with her, and hunger was gnawing at her belly. She’d have to beg food of Benjamin, if he was willing to give her any. If he had even found any.
She also had two bows that might work for small game, if she ever found some, and if she was able to learn to make arrows, find enough straight wood for them, find a bowstring, and learn to shoot accurately. That was a lot of “ifs.” She could shoot fish too, if she found water clear and shallow enough to let her see them. Maybe Benjamin knew archery and could give her pointers.
She still wasn’t sure what to do—stay, or go? Without food, she couldn’t walk to California or Boise or even Twin Falls. Without food, she’d die. If she were to starve, she didn’t want to die alone. If she died first, maybe Benjamin could live off her body. If he died first...well, she didn’t want to think about that. But she knew that he’d tell her to be practical. Like him.
But when she came to the house, Benjamin wasn’t there yet. Her note was right where she had left it.
Coral went to bed feeling anxious about Benjamin’s absence. If he was hurt somewhere, even just his back again, she didn’t have the first idea of where to look for him. Both of them were entirely on their own, and more vulnerable for that. She felt the force of the vulnerability.
She had seen two people since The Event—three, if you counted the dead boy in the storm shelter. One had been crazy and one—Benjamin—wasn’t perfect. But he wasn’t dead or crazy, which put him a good distance ahead of the others.
She realized she wasn’t angry at him any more. Or guilty. Or frightened. She was only worried.
He was a hard man to figure out, a brittle man sometimes, a pessimist where she was by nature an optimist, and yet he had helped her when he didn’t need to. In her old life, in the real world, she’d never have become friends with someone like this. In the old world, she tended to like Green and the most liberal Democrat candidates—Benjamin was surely a Republican. That almost made her laugh, how stupid and useless such ideas were now, how all the energy put into such arguments had been entirely a waste, a silly game people had played.
But Benjamin was solid. And he had skills—survival skills. She couldn’t have figured out how to build a ladder or roof a house on her own. She might be able to dress game safely, for she had excelled at dissection in biology. But she didn’t know how to hunt. There’d be worse partners in survival than Benjamin.
In this new world, under the dirty gray skies, Benjamin was also the only friend she had.
The next morning, she woke to another snowfall. It came down steadily as she hiked back to Mill Creek, rifle in hand, hoping for better fishing but fearing strangers. The waters were flowing slowly now and the level of the stream was falling as snow accumulated rather than melted to feed the rivers.
There wasn’t a nibble on her line all day. She didn’t want to go back to the house and the last of the venison. It wasn’t hers to eat.
Growing more desperate, she knew from her little survival guide that there was another food option: insects. She began to hunt for them at the edges of the stream as she let her fishing line dangle untended. She turned over rocks and found a few lethargic grubs. She dug past the layers of snow and ash and into the ground below, uncovering a few earthworms, marginally less disgusting than grubs somehow and far bigger.
A couple she tried as bait, but when still no fish touched the line, she bagged the rest of the worms. Her pamphlet had said to cook them. The grubs, it said, were fine raw. She held her breath and swallowed one, gagging. Chewing it was beyond her. Maybe in a week of eating bugs, she’d be able to bring herself to chew them and find their taste and texture a delight. Not today. At least neither worms nor grubs had lots of long legs. She didn’t know if she could force little wiggling legs down her throat.
The rest of the day while the line sat in the water, terribly still, she dug for worms and swallowed grubs.
When she returned to the house, she walked into the kitchen. Benjamin was there, standing at the sink, washing his hands from a metal pitcher.
He turned. A look of relief passed over his face before he schooled it again into his usual flat expression.
Coral was relieved to see him too, but he probably didn’t want to hear that. “I’ve done awful at fishing,” she said. “I hope you’ve done better than me.”
He leaned against the counter and looked at her. “This is not the time to be a picky eater.”
What could be worse than worms? “I can manage,” she assured him.
“I got two snakes, almost a dozen frogs, and some snails.”
“Okay. Good. I have some worms, only a cup or so of them. I think we can eat them if we cook them.” She thought for a moment. “Don’t the French think snails and frogs are a delicacy? And I hear snake tastes just like chicken.”
“You hungry enough, you’ll like them better than steak.”
“I’m hungry enough,” she promised him. “Thank you for finding them.”
“It’s only a day’s worth of food, maybe a day and a half. I ate some of what I caught. Had to. I’ll need to go out again tomorrow. Which creek did you fish?”
“Both.”
“That’s good. There’s no one left alive there,” he said
“Where?”
“In Mill Creek. This morning, I went there and looked for that guy who attacked you—or for anyone else.”
Her throat felt suddenly dry. “Nobody was there?”
“Not a soul.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, not even a sign anyone had been there recently. No footprints.”
“Did you see any animal tracks?”
“Nothing beyond those of what I caught. Nothing large. No human tracks, either.”
They ate the snakes and worms for supper. The snakes were a little chewy, but a pleasant taste change from the fish and venison and far superior, Coral thought, to the worms. Still, a snake per person per meal, even if they could find that many every day, wasn’t nearly enough to fill their empty bellies.
The next morning she asked him to show her how to shoot her rifle. He showed her how to clean it first. Then how to load and unload. And he showed her on his too. Then he took her one bullet, held it up, and said, “We have to find you more ammo.”
He made her dry-fire the rifle. She aimed and pointed and pulled the trigger hundreds of times, not knowing if it’d help when push came to shove, when her life was at stake. But at least after that day, the weapon was more familiar to her. After a dinner of frogs and snails, Benjamin said he was going to leave again the next morning to hunt, try the next valley over.
As soon as he was gone, with her daypack on his back, she packed for overnight again, re-loaded the one bullet, and hiked back to Mill Creek, making her way downstream toward the town. She still kept only ahead of her own food needs, catching a few tiny fish that she ate raw. She sucked the bones until they were clean, but this time she kept all the bones to take back and make stock of. It’d be something—almost no calories, but warm and fishy tasting—and it might convince them they were eating real food.
The hunger was ravenous, and painful, and it nagged at her mind every waking moment now. If she woke up in the middle of the night, it kept her from falling back asleep for hours. She hadn’t discussed it with Benjamin, though—surely he felt the same, and talking about it wasn’t going to make them feel any better.
While she watched the propped-up rod, sending out positive and welcoming thoughts to any fish swimming by, she worked on making arrows for her bow. Again, the trial and error method led her to make better arrows each time. She felt less impatient than she had about the bow. It’s not as if she had any appointments to keep. May as well try and enjoy the process of learning something new. At least it kept her partly distracted from the gnawing hunger.
Experiments on flaking rocks into arrowheads failed completely. She knew nothing about flintknapping, and the instructions in her hunting pamphlet were too brief to be useful. It also said that sharpening an arrow and heating the wooden point to cure it would make a reliable weapon for small game. For now, she stuck to wood points sharpened on rocks, telling herself that if she needed to, she could try again to make arrowheads. Without game to hunt, this was all an academic exercise anyway.
As she fished and worked on her arrows, snow continued to fall all day, and the warm spell that had melted the first snowfalls every day did not recur. Coral worried less about how cold she felt at night, even sleeping in all the clothes she owned, and more about losing her way back to the house as the snow, for the first time, covered her tracks. The snow accumulated not in beautiful white mounds, but in a lumpy gray blanket. Once the snow stopped, it turned darker as more ash settled on it. Maybe that meant the air was slowly clearing, but the world below was getting more and more gray. At points, there were drifts of fallen ash three feet deep. How much more could there be up there to fall?
Benjamin had found her a string to try as a bowstring, and she strung her lesser bow and tried to learn to fire an arrow. She was so bad at first, she was glad no one was around to witness the comedy. Laughing at herself was one thing—and she did laugh at herself—but she was grateful she didn’t have an audience.
Finally, after a long while of working at it, trying little adjustments, failing, adjusting again, she was able to fire an arrow in the general direction she was aiming. As she got better, she narrowed her targets to specific clumps of burned bushes. By the end of the day, she was hitting within a few inches of where she aimed—if, that is, she was using her very best arrows. She gathered up every arrow she shot, but some had broken when they hit the ground.
She changed her fishing spot every few hours, stopping as soon as she caught sight of the bridge to town, then heading back upstream. Benjamin might have said the town was clear, but it was still a place of fear for her. Finally, she found a spot where fish began to bite, and she fished until they quit, eating the five tiny trout she’d managed to find, but still not feeling nearly full enough, and having nothing to take back with her.
The next day, she set about learning the ways of the better bow. The last morning, she skipped breakfast, saving the few small fish she caught with worms to bring back to the house, along with all the bones from the previous day’s catch. If Benjamin was there, she’d make fish stew and give most of it to him. If he wasn’t there, at least she would have enough to see her through one more hungry day.
Food was on her mind all day long, a thought simmering and nagging at her. The hunger poked her in the gut all the time.
When she hiked back to the house, after only one bad moment where she feared she was lost, Benjamin wasn’t home yet. She took the last hours of daylight to wash clothes. In the hall closet, she found a stack of towels and wore two of those as shirt and sarong, her wool sweater over both, while she scrubbed all her clothing in the downstairs bathtub. Shivering from the cold, she hung them to dry and wrapped herself in the blanket from her bed. It still wasn’t warm enough, so she climbed into her sleeping bag and put the blanket and the dry towels from the linen closet over herself. It took all evening to get warm enough to quit shivering and fall asleep.
By the end of the next afternoon, her clothes were barely damp, but she put them back on anyway, staying wrapped in the blanket, hoping her body heat would finish drying the clothes.
Benjamin came back at last light. He looked unhappy. “Nothing,” he said. “I couldn’t find a thing.”
“There’s fish stew. You have it. You must be starved.” She had gone without food all day.
“I’m hungry. Sure you don’t want some of it?”
“No, you go on. It’s in the covered pot on the kitchen counter. At least the cold weather means the food won’t go bad.”
At the end of the meal, which he ate in silence, she brought up the topic she knew they were both thinking about. “What are we going to do for food?”
“I don’t know.”
“We should leave, go someplace where there is food.”
“Where would that be?”
“We should check everything in Mill Creek, all the ruins. Maybe there are cans of food.”
“I looked around in the stores when I was there, the gas stations, the convenience store, places like that. I know the town, so I knew where to look. I even looked in a couple of the less-destroyed houses. Didn’t find a thing.”
“Damn.”
“Where’d you get those cans of vegetables?”
Coral took told him about the storm shelter and the supplies, but not about the kid’s body. “I took all the food there was, I’m afraid. So I’m not a killer, like you worried, or a cannibal. But I admit that I’m a thief.”
Benjamin studied her for a long time before answering. Finally, he said, “I was never saying that you did anything wrong in Mill Creek. Staying alive is never wrong.”
She wasn’t sure that was a philosophy she agreed with, not even now, but she let that thought pass. She knew he was offering her an olive branch, asking her to forget his suspicions. She accepted it for what it was. Holding his gaze, she nodded. Strain showed around his eyes. “You must be tired,” she said.
He nodded.
“Go on down, then. Sleep. There’s nothing much to clean up here, anyway.”
He eased himself up and left the kitchen. Coral sat alone staring out the window until the light was nearly leached from the sky. Then she went to bed too.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, THE temperature hovered around freezing, even downstairs. It was still better sleeping down there than on the ground, where gusts of wind would make her miserable, but Coral was worried about the falling temperatures. If this was the height of summer, what would November or January be like? Benjamin was exhausted from his trip, but soon, today, they needed to have a discussion about what to do next.
After more lonely days fishing and working on her bows and arrows, she knew she didn’t want to be alone. She would leave alone, if he refused to go, but she didn’t want to. She wanted him to come with her.
She went outside with her bow and arrow, shooting at targets she had built from burned debris she had hauled out of the junk pile, anything soft enough to shoot at without destroying the arrows in the process. The best of her arrows, the ones that flew straight and true, she was growing emotionally attached to, as odd as that would have seemed to the old Coral, the pre-Event Coral. A good arrow was more useful than a smart phone now, that was for sure.
Benjamin came out well after sunrise and observed her practice, saying nothing. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, trying to read his mind. Was he impressed, entertained, disgusted? With Benjamin, it was hard to tell. His expression gave away little.
She shot her last arrow. With a soft whop, it stuck in the target, leaving a tight group of five arrows with others scattered to the outside. Not bad for a beginner. She walked over to gather her arrows, stacking them in her hand then checking them for damage.
“What are we going to do about the cold?” she asked, turning to Benjamin.
“Nothing to do,” he said.
“I mean, to stay warm. And what about food?”
Slowly, he shook his head. “I’m not sure.”
That surprised her. Somehow, she had come to believe he’d have a creative solution for every problem. Wordlessly, she started shooting another round of arrows at her target.
He broke the silence. “You think you could shoot an animal with those?”
“That’s the idea,” she said, fitting another arrow to the bowstring. “If I ever see an animal again.”
He watched as she shot her last arrows. Then he said, “I’m thinking we should leave.”
Shocked, she turned to him. “What?”
“I gave it a lot of thought while I was gone. We should leave, like you said. Go west, drop some in elevation, hope for warmer weather. Hope for more surviving animals.”
“Do you think there are any game animals left to the west?”
He held his palms up, dropped them. “Honestly, I don’t know. We could be walking away from our only safe shelter. We could be walking into some worse death than starvation.”
She touched her flat belly, aware, as always, of the hollowness inside. “Starvation sounds like about the worst I can imagine.”
“You realize, don’t you...” His voice trailed off.
“What?”
“You realize we are going to die.”
She notched an arrow, turning away. “Everyone does, sooner or later.”
“Sooner,” he said. “I think for us, it’s going to be sooner.” His voice was gentle.
She released the arrow then turned to face him. “We can’t just give up.”
“No,” he said. “But the world is dying around us. Species are going to become extinct. Humans may well be one of them.”
“Well, good morning Mr. Sunshine,” she said.
He barked a surprised laugh. The smile faded from his face. “Ignoring the facts isn’t going to help.”
“I’m not ignoring the facts! I wanted to go before this, if you remember.”
His mouth stiffened, and she was sorry she hadn’t kept her mouth shut. “I didn’t want to leave the water supply and shelter, is all. But I was mistaken. We should have gone ten days ago. Happy?”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean ....” She had been relying, maybe too much, on his steadiness. Without him ever saying a word, without bragging or making promises, he had exuded a certainty that every challenge could be met, that everything was under control. His quiet strength had shored up her own, and she didn’t like losing it to this fatalism. “So we’re going together?”
“Yes. It’ll take a day or two to prepare, but I think we should go as soon as we can.”
