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BY THE TIME THEY WERE ready to set out in the morning, more fresh snow had fallen.
“It’s good for us,” said Benjamin, who put on the harness and began to haul the loaded sled.
Coral wasn’t so sure. “Walking in this stuff is hard work.”
She turned her back to look at the house one last time. A layer of snow pressed down on their carpet roof. She smiled as she remembered the day of nailing down the carpet, up there alone, her fear of heights conquered by necessity. Now snowdrifts climbed halfway up the remains of the walls. She wondered if the house would become entirely covered by the end of winter, looking only like another rise in the hillside beneath its snowy blanket.
In her darkest moments, she wondered if winter would ever end. Maybe this was the start of a new ice age.
A twinge of regret surprised her as she turned her back on the house for the last time. It had been her home for a month. She wondered how Benjamin felt. He hadn’t expressed regret at any point. He had just done the five days of preparation in a businesslike way. Now he didn’t turn to look back at the house once. Not a sentimental man.
They moved west at first, heading uphill, Benjamin donning the harness and pulling from the front, and her staying behind, pushing at the weight of it when he needed her to. She had to wrestle the runners over obstacles from time to time, and each attempt left her panting far more than she thought she should.
When they switched out jobs, Coral found out that breaking a trail in the gray snow was just as labor-intensive. Walking was awkward, as each booted step sunk below the new snow’s surface and had to be yanked back out. She apologized for needing to stop so often—but she did need to, to catch her breath.
“It’s the chronic lack of food on top of the cold,” he said. “My heart is tripping in my chest too.”
Breathing had not been easy for Coral since the ash had first filled the sky. Now she was wrestling with a sled that weighed ten times as much as the gear she had been carrying in her pack. This was a new level of effort. She sucked air through her mask, and twice she nearly blacked out and had to kneel and wait it out until the world swam into focus again.
Benjamin never complained, not at pulling, or pushing, or her need to rest. She bit back her complaints and tried to match his stoicism.
She pulled until she wanted to stop, until her shoulders and back ached from the harness and the cold gritty air stung her lungs with each gasp. Then she pulled some more, forcing herself beyond the point at which she swore she couldn’t go a step more. If you keep pushing yourself, Coral, you can accomplish far more than you think you can. Benjamin was the one who called a halt and made them switch jobs again.
“We’ll have easier going on the flats, like along the highways,” he said.
“What about on real mountains?”
“We’ll aim for passes, but it won’t be easy. Still, it’s going to be easier pulling a sled than packing it on our backs.”
“We will have to unload and pack it all over streams, I guess.”
“At the rate the temperature’s dropping, they’ll be frozen over before too long. We’ll pull it right over thick ice. Soon enough, we’ll be wanting to see running water, having to chip through ice to get to some, or find fuel to melt snow for drinking water.” His brows drew together in worry. “I wonder how cold it’s going to get. And how fast.”
When the light of the first day began to wane, they came to a new stream. Coral pulled out her fishing gear. While she fished without success, Benjamin dug for grubs. That’s what they ended up eating, handfuls of raw grubs, saving the bit of venison for breakfast.
The next morning, after another fruitless hour of fishing, they ate half of the venison that was left, barely two stringy, dry mouthfuls each.
Pulling the sled kept her warm that morning, and that was the only bit of praise she had for the work. As the ground rose, it grew rockier, and the sled runners started hitting rocks. Some boulders were invisible beneath the snow, yet the weight of the sled was enough to run it into obstacles that were just out of sight under the surface.
Benjamin was pulling again, she pushing, when the runner got caught between two hidden rocks. Coral had to haul back on the sled to free it and then wrestle it aside as Benjamin pulled it around the obstruction. He stopped and looked at the runners. “I’m going to have to straighten this one out,” he said.
They had to unload part of the sled to get to the box of tools he’d packed. Coral was amazed at Benjamin’s calm. She wanted to curse—throwing things about might feel good too—but his placid acceptance of the setback kept her under control too.
Finally. Benjamin was done hammering out the runner. They loaded the sled again, continuing their trudge along the course up the stream. Finally, he pointed to a “good enough” place to cross the now-shallow stream. Together, they lifted up the front of the sled to get it over a scattering of rocks on the bank. They pulled it over the muddy stream bed and up onto the opposite bank. Again, Benjamin stooped to examine the runners. Coral thought she would scream this time if they had to unload the sled again. But he said, “They’re fine,” and they were able to move on to the north after refilling all the water bottles, leaving this stream behind.
They crossed a new stream mid-afternoon, then backtracked to the east, following the stream downhill as it grew wider. Coral dropped her fishing line in again. This time, she was rewarded with two trout.
They each ate a raw fish that night, still saving the little bit of venison that remained. Her hunger at the end of the meal sent a chill of worry through Coral. Burning off this many calories, they were going to have to find themselves a more plentiful source of food soon. The cold alone was taxing their metabolisms more than they could afford. Her rope belt needed retying again, tighter than it needed to be just a week ago. She was thinner than she’d ever been, and when it wasn’t a matter of fashion, it wasn’t in any way good news. Calories were survival. Her own flesh was survival. And she wanted more of it to live off of.
They stopped at noon the next day. Finding food was more important than making another mile, he said, and she didn’t disagree. Coral fished the stream while Benjamin went off with his rifle and hunted for animal tracks. The first bite of a fish on her line sent relief coursing through her like a drug. They would have food, for another meal, at least. This stream was kinder to her than the last one had been. She caught six fish, one a decent sized rainbow. As she gutted the fish, she found her hands shaky with relief—or desperate hunger—and was glad Benjamin wasn’t there to see her weakness. Truth was, she was terrified all the time of dying, now that the possibility was so real. So near.
“I’m starving to death” wasn’t some exaggerated phrase she used before sitting down to a big family meal or a pizza with friends. It was the literal truth. These fish would stave off that fate for another day.
When the dim light was failing, Benjamin returned empty-handed. Seeing the fish piled on the snowy bank, he leaned down to squeeze her shoulder, in praise or thanks. Then he sat alongside her and cleaned his rifle before wrapping it back up and stowing it at the top their gear.
Sitting and fishing had been a cold job. Sitting and eating in the encroaching dark was colder still. She finally felt warm enough only when she had been wrapped securely in her sleeping bag for nearly an hour. Benjamin snored softly next to her. They were sleeping every night tucked under the loaded sled, snow piled up into a windbreak along three sides, for protection from the cold.
They kept going. Day after day they made their slow way. One day, without any food, not even grubs or worms, they built a fire with the little bit of wood they’d gathered along the way and made soup of the last leathery piece of venison. Over the course of a week, Coral would say there was maybe fifteen minutes when she wasn’t hungry—painfully hungry, and acutely aware of it.
They found the line of the state road and finally turned toward Pocatello, hungry, exhausted, and speaking little.
Benjamin decided to keep the road just within sight. “They’d have to chase us farther this way.”
She wasn’t sure who “they” were—there were still no signs of living people. As weak as she felt, “they” would be able to catch her with little effort. But as far as she knew, the two of them were the only people alive in the whole state of Idaho.
The road grew broader. Once again, they began to see an occasional car or truck pulled off or stalled in the center of the roadway.
“Where are the bodies?” she asked, as they left the sled behind a hillock and walked toward a spot where a pair of SUVs were angled off the road and abandoned. He didn’t answer. When they got there, she kicked around the edges of the cars and found no sign of bodies or bones. “Did they see the fire coming and just run in a panic?” she asked.
“You mean, turn off their cars and run from a wildfire on foot instead of driving away?”
She shook her head. “No, I know, that doesn’t make any sense at all.” Walking to the door of the nearer car, she pulled it open. It was unlocked. Nothing useful was inside. “Maybe one person would do something so irrational, but this is the hundredth car I’ve seen like this.”
“It has to be mechanical. The cars all died. Like you said yours did.”
“From what?”
He shrugged. “I guess the ash fall would eventually clog the air intake and stop them...but I don’t think that’s what happened. Whatever happened, I think it was sudden. Instantaneous.”
“That argues for an EMP, right? Like nuclear war, or a terrorist attack or something.” She opened a rear door and looked inside at the burned interior. The chances of finding canned food in a car were remote, but she had to look.
He was shaking his head when she turned back to him. “It has been weeks. We’d know if it were nukes. We’d have lost our hair and have sores and be bleeding and bruised all over, I think.”
She closed the car door again, then wondered why she had bothered—old habits, she supposed. “Where did they all go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think they’re all dead? Burned up to nothing?”
“I think it might be better if they are.”
She wished he’d let up on the pessimism. “You mean, if they were alive, they’d be dangerous to us.”
“I think you and I have found each other, and we’re not violent or crazy, and we were both damned lucky for that. I’m not counting on any more luck from here on out.”
“I think I might have gone crazy if I hadn’t found someone to talk to,” she said.
As the next crossroads neared, he said, “Let’s detour down this side road and see if we can find any canned food in the ruins of houses or gas stations.”
“I don’t see any ruins of anything.”
“It was a pretty sizeable road. There has to be something. A ranch house or a gas station or something.”
They hunted down it all afternoon, both ways, finding some signs of burned homes but no food.
“We should get back to the stream. It still has fish in it,” she said.
“I’d give anything for some fruits or vegetables. Or baked beans. Or, hell, Spam. And I hate Spam.”
“Please, don’t.” Naming specific foods made it harder to bear the hunger.
They returned to the sled and aimed back for the stream, at this point a mile or so from the road. She caught enough fish to keep them alive, if barely, but none to take with them when they had to leave the stream to aim for Pocatello.
“Or we can stay with the water instead,” Benjamin said.
“I’d rather head toward town.”
He sighed. “I guess we need to try. But we need to be careful. I think we should approach at dawn, if we can, and then hurry back out before anyone sees us.”
She agreed. And for three days, they circled the town and did just that, darting in and scouting, rummaging through ruins, looking for food, and darting back out to the hidden sled before the day had grown very bright. They both carried rifles, and Coral carried her bow and arrows slung across her back, as well. They found plenty of human bones, but no living people. The second morning, they found a few cans of food in one burned out brick house, food that kept them on their feet for another day.
Benjamin shocked her by cracking open a human bone. “No marrow. Otherwise, I’d suggest we make soup of them,” he said. “But without marrow, there’d be no calories, I imagine.”
“I’m not quite ready for eating human bones,” Coral said. But I’m getting close.
The fourth morning, both dizzy and weak with hunger, they finally had good luck.
Rounding a bend while Benjamin dawdled behind her, digging in the debris of what had been a gas station for useful items, she saw in the distance a large parking lot with over a hundred snow-splashed mounds, cars and pick-up trucks parked in neat rows. Behind it was the shell of a large building, still standing. As they neared, she could see the building was streaked with black and white, pitted concrete marked with fire and ice. She called for Benjamin.
“A factory?” he wondered aloud.
“I think,” she said, “I think maybe it’s a Walmart.”
He barked a laugh. “You’re right. So, Coral, you wanted civilization. Here it is. It’s the very definition of it.”
She had never thought of Walmart as the height of civilization, but in fact, that’s just what it was. A gathering of goods from all over the world, competently made, stacked in neat rows. People politely queuing up to buy them. Paper money, a symbol of work done elsewhere. Trade, order, rules, and exchange of money for goods: that was civilization. How she missed it.
“Someone else may be in there,” Benjamin said. “Let’s be careful.”
A pick-up truck with oversized tires at the edge of the parking lot provided the perfect hiding place for reconnoitering. They dug out enough snow to crawl underneath.
“We’ll stay here a couple hours. Just in case.”
Coral almost moaned with frustration. She wanted to get inside. She wanted to eat. But she did what Benjamin asked.
They watched the building’s entrance all morning. Nothing moved outside, and Coral was willing not to move either. It had been too long without sufficient food, and she was starting to have thoughts of just lying down and letting death come to her. Here, under the truck, might be as good a place as any to die.
But that’d be stupid, with the possibility of food so close by.
“I’m going to go around back,” said Benjamin, startling her out of a doze. “You stay here.”
“K,” she said, trying to wake up. She pushed her rifle out ahead of her, ready to shoot her one bullet if need be. It struck her that there could be ammunition in the building too. If there was, she’d have all the bullets she needed. But what she wanted even more was food.
Benjamin came back, using exactly the path he had used, backing up the last twenty yards, brushing the snow to disguise his footprints.
He crawled in next to her. “Let’s give it a try.”
“I was thinking maybe there were more bullets for my rifle in there.”
“It was my first thought.”
“Mine was food,” she said.
“That too. We’ll be careful. And why don’t you leave your rifle here?”
“Why?”
“Just in case something goes wrong in there. I’d like to have one weapon stashed elsewhere. Take your bow and arrows along.”
She hoped she wouldn’t have to use them to shoot people. She doubted she could hit a moving target yet. She hadn’t been practicing much while they’d been pulling the sled. From now on, she’d try and remember to get a few shots in every day.
If there was a “from now on” to be had. There had better be food in that store.
At the front doors, the glass had melted, not into a puddle, but into sagging freeform art sculptures, tinted a light green, decorated with black scorch marks. A couple panes had fallen out. If she had an Internet connection, she could look up how hot the firestorm had to be to melt this kind of glass. Damn hot, she was sure. The building—concrete—was still standing, mostly unhurt by the fire.
Benjamin spoke softly to her. “Keep low. Once inside, stay back to back, and keep a sharp eye out.”
He was right. If the two of them saw the potential value in the Walmart, so would any other survivors still in the area.
There were no other tracks leading in, so no one had come in this way for at least a day. That was a small comfort.
At the entrance, Benjamin leaned inside, and she could hear him hold his breath while he listened. As she strained to listen, she could hear the whisper of snow sliding down a surface. Nothing more. Some of the ceiling inside had collapsed, illuminating sections of the store. Other parts of the store were shrouded in darkness. Gray snow was visible under those roof holes, covering shelving and floors.
Benjamin stepped into the entryway. She followed him through and into the bizarre landscape of the store. It was both familiar and unfamiliar, the aisles and stacks rendered surrealistic by the catastrophe. Some shelves were down, products scattered out from the fall. Rather than the blackened streaks of an active fire, she saw the stranger signs of ambient heat that had reshaped household objects. They passed a display of what she thought were CDs, or maybe DVD jewel boxes, no longer neat rectangles but akin to drooping Dali clocks.
“The heat,” he said, his voice just above a whisper.
Coral nodded. The fire had done its work in here, even without the flames reaching inside. She whispered back. “How hot do you think it was?” she asked.
“A few hundred, I’m sure. Maybe worse.”
Days of it. She remembered trying to get out of the cave, that wall of searing heat. “It’s a miracle you made it.”
He leaned closer “I made it the same way you did. Insulation of being underground and, for me, the tank of water for extra insulation.”
If you had to be underground to survive, then damned few people would have. She tried to think of who else has been so lucky. Again, she wondered how far the fire had gone. What if it did stretch ocean to ocean? There might only be a few thousand people left in North America. “We were awfully lucky.”
“Smart and lucky, both.”
She stared around herself. “Well,” she finally said, “CDs wouldn’t have done us any good, anyway.” But her hopes of an intact cache of limitless goods evaporated. They’d have to explore every aisle to see if anything at all was left that they could use.
Though they took care to keep their voices quiet, they seemed to be alone. At least, no one jumped out shouting at them and waving a gun. She wasn’t sure what was worse, the fear of attack by crazed strangers, or the fear there were no more strangers left alive, anywhere.
The two of them walked into a patch of diffuse light, a missing chunk of roof letting in the dim daylight. A metal beam crossed their path that had knocked down shelving to one side. Snow had fallen through the breach. No human tracks. No animal tracks.
“No one has been here lately,” she said. “Not since the last snowfall.”
“I don’t want to stay long.” They continued quartering the main aisles, until Benjamin was confident they were alone. “Let’s divide up and work quickly,” he said. “We can always come back another day. I’ll start in sporting goods—ammo for the rifles, more fishing gear so we can both fish, and knives. And then I’ll go to hardware. You look to see if any food made it through.” He took off down a side aisle while Coral aimed toward the grocery section.
She couldn’t help but stop here and there to stare at the sights. Stacks of cardboard boxes had been turned to gray ash where they sat. She approached one shelf and could still read the brands of tissues—the words “Kleenex” and “Puffs” still visible on the sides in shades of gray. When she reached out to touch one, it disintegrated under her touch into blackened flakes. The cascade of tissue ash created a domino effect, boxes disintegrating before her eyes, one after the next, a ghostly apparition.
She soon wished her mind had not come up with that thought. It was far too easy to imagine ghosts, faint outlines of people pushing carts through the aisles, clerks in their blue uniform shirts pushing carts of supplies, the loudspeaker playing Musak and ads. Crying babies. Old people riding in electric carts.
The eerie vision was broken by a practical thought. Old people took lots of medicine. There would be a pharmacy nearby. She detoured away from the food aisles and made her way to the front of the building where the pharmacy was most likely to be—weren’t they usually on exterior walls? She had passed it before she recognized a open half-wall must have been it.
She stepped over a pile of ceiling rubble and into the dim space. There were two bodies here, their flesh shriveled by the heat—or by time, maybe. She stepped over them. Metal shelves held bottles—or what had once been medicine bottles, in most cases. The melting that she had seen on the CDs had also hit here, making rows of medicine containers sag. On one high shelf, some glass bottles had exploded, leaving a few jagged bases stuck to the shelves. In a closed cabinet, she found a few intact plastic bottles whose labels had flaked off. She picked one up and tried to open it but the cap-locking mechanism was frozen in place. She drew her knife out of her pocket, hacking her way into the bottle. A mass of melted capsules lay in the bottom—useless now. Frustrated, she tossed the bottle down.
Coral realized that if any drugs had survived intact, the heat would have gotten to them anyway. Days of heat hot enough to melt a CD jewel box or a store window were also hot enough to render drugs useless—or to turn them into something too dangerous to swallow. She wondered if she should chance taking any drug she found now. Her mind sped through a list of useful drugs—painkillers, antibiotics. If she ever decided to have sex again, birth control pills—pregnancy in these circumstances would be a terrible idea. Condoms would have probably melted too.
It would have been good to have enough drugs to kill herself painlessly. There might come a time when death would be preferable to any alternative she or Benjamin might have left to them. An open fracture, an infection, no way to get it treated, a bear attack, a broken back...it’d be better to end it quickly than be ground down over awful days by the pain and disease.
But the comfort of a good death, as well as the comfort of painkillers or antibiotics, all those were lost to her.
The food aisles were next. In the first row, an empty wall of shelves held nothing but melted soda pop bottles stuck in a dried pool of ash-coated syrup. Opposite them were cans of the same, some burst at the seams, but a few still intact. Coral rooted through shelves searching for the intact ones. Empty calories—the phrase leapt to mind. Hell, they could use some “empty” calories. Calories were life. When she found intact cans of diet drink, she rolled her eyes at them and shoved them aside. She cracked open a real root beer, smelled it, and took a sip. Metallic root beer—not a beverage choice she’d have made in the old days. It was food, though, and she kept drinking, her mouth puckering at the sweetness after so many weeks without that taste. If this can didn’t kill her, she’d pick up a six-pack on the way out. They could drink it before they hiked back to the sled. Heavy stuff, but calorie-dense, and as good as water for hydration.
She left the soda for now and explored the next aisle. Until today, she hadn’t realized how many foods were packaged in plastic. Among the melted puddles of plastic and food, she was unable to identify contents. Down that same aisle, she found a few cans of food.
It had been picked over. Either it was the day before restocking day at Walmart when The Event had come, or someone might have been here after the fire but long before today. Probably the latter.
She thought about running to find Benjamin to tell him but stopped herself. She wasn’t sure, after all, and he knew as well as she did that it was dangerous being here, that others might have passed through. First, she’d reconnoiter and pile up supplies at the end of every aisle so they could grab them quickly.
What was here in this next aisle? Spam. She’d never had it before, but she welcomed it now. Little sausages—perfect. Tuna and tuna-shaped cans, which might also be salmon or chicken. Though she’d never thought about it before, she realized almost all the cans of meat had labels printed right into the metal, which she could still read, while veggies had paper labels. She piled up a bunch of these small cans at the end of the aisle.
Though the labels on the next aisle were charred, she could still read a few of them, just as she had been able to read the tissue boxes before they disintegrated. All veggies. But when she touched the cans, the labels flaked off, and she was back to having mystery foods. That there were vegetables was good news after a month of an all-meat diet.
For now, she passed over the cans with bulging seams. Her next criterion had to be judging calories against weight. The fatty meat was good—decent calories and protein for not much weight. The vegetables and fruit were useful for nutrients—but bad on weight, packed with water. Still, it was sterile water, and grit-free, good to have to drink when they next moved away from a water source. Over half of the fruits had been packaged in plastic. She recognized cans of tomato sauce only by their proximity to browned remains of pasta. She found soup—again noticing that the few cans of stock had information printed right onto the metal where the soup cans had paper labels. Who had decided that was the way to label things? Yet the unspoken law reigned through every brand.
At the ends of aisles, short stacks of cans continued to accumulate her choices. She worried what sort of weight could they pull? How much space was on the sled? Enough for thirty cans, forty? A hundred? Maybe she could convince Benjamin to move into the Walmart for a few days while they re-fed.
She rejected the soup—too much water weight. She prioritized the meat, picked a dozen cans of vegetables, two of tomato sauce, five of fruits. She would have picked ones with pop-top rings, but all those had burst in the heat. She still had her knife with the can opener, though. They could get into the cans.
The rest of the food she left for the next trip, or the next. The fifty cans she pulled to the center of the side aisle would see them through—what?—a week of survival levels of eating, three days of the sort of eating they should be doing.
Standing there, examining her choices, she realized she had just become a looter. The automatic fear of the wrath of the Walmart Corporation swept through her, and she shook her head, amused at the feeling. She wondered if Benjamin would see the humor in it too. He didn’t have a great sense of humor.
Where was he? Leaving her collection of cans at the end of the aisles, she made her way toward the back of the store, where she guessed hardware might be. The front door let in some light, but it faded as she turned a corner.
Then she heard the voices.
