Gray (Book 2) (10 page)

She was a biologist at heart and believed in the methods of science, and she knew that organized religion had historically been and still was mostly the enemy of science. Maybe there was a God, or several, and maybe not, but her feeling was that no religion had come close to an accurate understanding of such a being. No religion had really gotten the origins of the solar system right, or the size of the planet, or its age. It was hard for her to trust anyone who was that wrong about such basic facts.

These people could kill themselves after painting the rocks with ancient words, but nothing magical was going to happen to them next, Coral believed, no matter how hard they had wished otherwise. Nothing good was happening to them now, and nothing bad. No blessed city. No hot desert waste or flaming pit. They were just dead. Dead and, except for some meat and bones, gone.

“Coral.” Benjamin was saying her name for the second time, she realized.

She had been lost in her thoughts. “What?” she said.

“Stay focused. Wait right here. I want to look around, make sure there aren’t any others nearby.”

Coral watched him work his way along the rock wall, then she looked again at the bodies. She reminded herself she’d have been studying cadavers in med school in four years, if the world hadn’t changed a few months back. She knelt in the snow and began a closer examination.

As she pushed up the man’s sleeves, she saw he had cut his wrists the wrong way—crosswise—and bled, but then he had rolled his sleeve back down over the wounds. There was dried blood on his shirt. The wounds themselves showed signs of beginning to knit back up. Not the cause of death, then, and she’d guess they came at least an hour or two antemortem. She looked up at the words on the rock wall again. Could he have cut himself to get ink, in effect, to write those words? She thought it likely.

She checked the children’s forearms, too, but they weren’t cut. She saw no bullet wounds on their heads, no blood seeping through clothes on their chests or stomachs. She rolled one halfway over and let it settle back on its back. There wasn’t blood underneath the bodies, and she didn’t see a gun by either of the adults. She loosened the boy’s jacket and checked his neck, looking for bruising. It didn’t seem he’d be strangled, either.

How had they died, then? Poison? Suffocation? There was no way to know. She moved away from the bodies and sat on a rock to wait for Benjamin to come back, scanning around herself but not expecting to see anyone else.

When he did return, he came at a trot.

“You won’t believe it,” he said, puffing, speaking at a normal level again.

“What?”

“I found food. No other people, and no new tracks coming or going from the area. But food.”

The promise of food brought her to her feet. “Where?”

“This way.”

She followed him along the line of the rock wall, happy to leave the bodies and their mysteries behind. The ground underfoot rose slightly. Benjamin stopped at a fissure in the rock wall. “Watch your step,” he said, and he squeezed into the fissure, barely making it through.

Coral followed, bracing her gloved hand on one wall and looking at his back. The space ahead widened beyond Benjamin. She followed him into a dim recess, so shallow it was hard to think of it as a cave.

Benjamin stopped a dozen feet ahead of her on the snow-free floor and squatted down in shadow. “Look. They were living here.”

She walked close to him and bent forward. As her eyes adjusted, she saw there was a hollow in the ground, maybe two feet in diameter, eight inches deep, and inside the hollow was a small store of supplies. A couple dirty blankets, two forks and a dinner knife, and a filthy chunk of something that Benjamin pulled out.

“Isn’t it great?” he said, staring at the dirty thing like it was gold.

“Uh, maybe. What is it?”

He turned it over. “Look, it’s the leg of something. Lamb, I think.”

“It looks pretty bad.”

“That’s only the outside bit. It’ll clean up pretty. And if we cook it, even the ugly bits will keep us alive.”

“It must have been keeping them alive.”

He nodded.

“Then I’m even more confused. They had food for at least two more days, and a couple blankets. They had survived. Why did they kill themselves and their kids now?”

He shrugged. “Maybe they could only take so much.”

“Isn’t suicide some kind of sin?”

“Don’t try and be so logical,” he said.

She made a sound of exasperation. “Excuse me for having a brain.”

He leveled a look at her.

“Sorry. I’m upset. Those kids. Their skinny little bodies. Thinking they didn’t chose death for themselves. I want to live. I don’t get why someone else wouldn’t want to. Especially not if murdering a child was part of the deal. They aren’t even my kids, and I’d have fought to keep them alive.” She shook her head, trying to push her vision of their last moments out of her mind. “Anything else here we want?”

“Nothing I want except the blankets, but I’ll check the man’s pockets. I brought you here so you could look through their stuff, too.” He pushed past her and through the fissure, back into the outside world.

She felt a twinge of guilt for pawing through the sparse belongings of the dead people, as if she was violating their privacy, but it wasn’t the first time since the disaster she’d scavenged from the dead, and she knew it wouldn’t be her last. There was, under the blankets, a filthy rag doll, no bigger than her hand, which had to be the little girl’s. It looked like something from the 18th century, rags tied together at neck and the other joints, with a face drawn on with charcoal, smeared badly now. It was too damned sad to dwell on.

When she had checked the gear and picked out the few things that might be worth something in trade, should they ever find safe people to trade with, she backed out of the space and retraced her steps, aiming for Benjamin. He was stooped over the bodies. He had opened the man’s clothes to the skin. He stood, shaking his head. “Nothing.”

“Do you want me to check the woman?”

“I will. She can’t be offended by it now.” When he finished with his search of the children’s clothes, too, he turned to her. “We could dress these bodies, too. For food. They’ve been kept cold. Might be safe to eat.”

“I know.” She shook her head. “But I just can’t. I’m sorry. I know it’s illogical, but I don’t think I could gag it down.” Especially not the children.

“We may regret not taking the meat.”

“Depending on what they died of, we might not want to eat them.”

“True. It could have been drugs, or poison.”

“Which means we definitely shouldn’t eat them.” She had a horrible thought. “What if that chunk of lamb is what they poisoned?”

“I guess it’s possible.” He thought about it. “But how would they get poison—say, rat poison they’d found—into it? I didn’t see a syringe in their gear or an empty bottle. Were it me killing myself that way, I’d have taken the drug or poison straight. Or mixed it into a stew, maybe, dissolving it in the water, to get the kids to eat it.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t eat much of that leg of meat anyway. Only one of us should, and eat a very tiny bit, and see if we get sick.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Stop being noble. It’s pissing me off. I’ll do it.”

“Don’t be—”

“I couldn’t survive without you,” she interrupted him. “You could survive without me. Be logical. The one of us most expendable should be the one to take the risk.”

They held each other’s eyes. “You’re not expendable,” he finally said, “And don’t even think it again, that you are. We’ll take the chance together.” His tone said they were done arguing it. “Let’s get away from here.”

Back at the sled, she was able to sit and rest again. She needed it. She was worn out from the lack of food. Benjamin brushed off a rock, sat down and carved away at the meat. The foot end of the animal stuck in the air and wiggled as he worked, a horrible sort of dance. He handed her a thin strip of the raw frozen meat, no more than a half an ounce, and she took it into her mouth. Slowly the meat melted from the warmth of her mouth. She pulled it from her mouth, bit off half, chewed it up some, and swallowed with equal parts trepidation and relief. The two of them sat together, eating their tiny portions of meat without words.

She imagined they both were thinking about poison, and about how it might feel to die of it.

After a minute, as she could feel the food hitting her stomach, she said, “I’m still hungry. Worse hungry, in fact.”

“I know. I am too. But let’s keep to the plan. See if this makes us sick. If we’re not puking in an hour or two, we can have more.”

They sat in silence for a few more minutes and then Coral said, “If we only had a Scrabble game.”

“A perfect way to spend the time waiting for poison to take effect,” he said.

“Yeah, I think I read that on their website.”

They fell back into silence. Every few minutes, one of them would make another lame joke, whistling past the graveyard.

Eventually, she stood up and rubbed warmth into her stiff arms. “I think an hour has passed.”

“We’ll give it a little more time.”

“I don’t feel in the least nauseated. Only hungry.”

“I’m not sick, either.”

“Then let’s move,” said Coral. “I don’t want to stay here waiting.”

He stood, stretching himself cautiously at first, as if he expected the movement to make him ill, then with more assurance. “Yeah. Let’s look again to see if the dead family had any fuel, first.”

“I didn’t notice any.”

“Let’s look again, outside that cave, dig around for a few minutes in the snow. We can pull the sled over there. Fill the water bottles at the spring, too.”

Coral stowed her pack and got into harness while Benjamin lashed the meat to the top of the load. As soon as he said, “okay,” she took off, feeling the familiar jerk as the slack in the harness was taken up and the sled refused, for a moment, to move. Benjamin gave it a sharp push, and the runners sliced through the snow. She dug in, feeling the familiar burn in her thighs, and hauled.

They returned to the shallow cave and hunted around but found no wood. “Let’s go on,” said Coral.

“There’s the cave.”

“From how it felt in there, I think the snow caves we dig are warmer.”

“True. If we’re poisoned, won’t the work of hauling make the poison act faster?”

“And that’s a bad thing how?” she asked.

He shrugged, and they moved on.

The rocks on their right loomed high, and she followed a rift in the snow toward lower ground, skirting the rockiest patches. Though direction was hard to tell precisely, she thought their path was taking them south of west right now.

Benjamin was thinking along the same lines. “We need to cross over that ridgeline as soon as we can. Get going west again.”

The whole rest of the day, temperatures dropped perceptibly. She could feel ice forming on her nose. She traded places with Benjamin. Snow began to fall, and they stopped for the day. Coral dug another snow cave for the night while Benjamin carved away at the hard-frozen meat. They were both feeling fine—or at least not poisoned. The meat, they were confident, was safe.

They sat together and ate raw meat, with more urgency than before. They were both still terribly hungry, and Coral didn’t doubt she had burned off ten times the calories she’d take in from the chunk of cold meat in her hand. Nevertheless, they rationed the meat by silent agreement. When they stowed away the rest, she felt marginally better than she had that morning, not quite as weak or dizzy. Benjamin took a handful of snow and scrubbed at the animal blood in his beard.

“I read in school,” she said to Benjamin as he settled down beside her for the night, “that human teeth have evolved over the last ten thousand years.”

“They have? Sounds fast, for evolution.”

“Yeah, they used to be sharper, more designed for meat eating, when we lived as hunters. According to one theorist, grain agriculture has made us evolve to this.” She tapped her own front teeth, the flat surfaces of them, though he couldn’t see her in the dark.

“I guess we’ll evolve back now.”

“Eventually. Another ten thousand years of this life, and we will.”

“Doubt we’ll make it that long.”

“Not you and me, at any rate.”

“Not humanity at all,” he said.

Coral snorted. “I believe that you enjoy your pessimism.”

“No,” he said, his voice barely audible. “No, I really don’t.” He sounded sad.

Lying awake as his breathing turned to gentle snores, Coral fancied she could feel the calories from the meat actually fueling her cells, molecules whizzing along and muscle cells making a faint happy hum as they snatched bits of nourishment to try and rebuild themselves after the day’s haul. She fell asleep to the imaginary sounds of her own metabolism.

* * *

The next morning after another meal of definitely-not-poisoned frozen meat, she pulled again. When they traded places at noon, pushing it up over rocky patches felt easier. The high-quality protein was doing her some good, she thought, though the calories were still far below her needs.

That afternoon, they pulled up well before dark and dined on more frozen lamb, if indeed lamb was what it was. Coral chewed while she thought with hope of reaching the next valley, finding wood, building a fire and roasting the rest, making soup of the bones and tendons. If another can of peas and pearl onions suddenly appeared out of thin air, she wouldn’t say no to that, either.

The next day, they took their time over their breakfast of frozen raw meat. Benjamin said, “We could rest a whole day if you want. Look for water, look for food, look for fuel, dig for worms.”

“We can try for a couple hours, maybe,” she said. Coral’s thoughts drifted away from the raw meat in her mouth. She imagined selecting from a cart of gooey, rich desserts at a fancy restaurant as a waiter pushed up a wheeled cart of them. She was in a skirt and heels. Nylons swished as she crossed her legs under the table. The waiter had on a sharp black jacket and bowed slightly as he stopped the dessert cart in front of her. Her food fantasy was interrupted by Benjamin’s voice. The fudge torte she had been about to point to evaporated from her mind.

“I was raised religious, you know.”

Cautiously, not wanting to startle him back into his normal silence, she said only, “You mentioned.”

“Yeah. Fire and brimstone. Lots of quoting Revelation, which is how I knew it immediately. By the time I was thirteen or so, I was sick of it.”

He was staring off into the distance. The silence grew until she thought that was all she was going to hear. Then he continued. “That was my first life. My second was being a hellion. Biker, carouser, drunk, all that.”

She was incredulous. “You? Like a Hell’s Angel biker?”

“Not quite. Though I did get beat up in a biker bar once.” He kept staring off, as if watching a movie screen. Maybe his memories were playing on it.

She wondered what memories he might be seeing, and said, “You seem so…I don’t know. Solid. Reliable. Not a drunk, certainly.”

“I haven’t had a drink for seven years.”

“That’s good.”

“Won’t ever be tempted again, I guess. Not now.”

“Then there’s a silver lining to all this.”

A ghost of a smile appeared on his face.

He never ever volunteered information about himself. Now that she had a little, she wanted more. “So you were an alcoholic,” she said.

“Still am, technically. As an active drinker, though, I was bad. A mean drunk.” He didn’t sound particularly repentant or ashamed, just matter-of-fact.

After another few minutes of watching him stare off at memories, she said, “You just never know about people, do you?”