Gray (Book 1) (3 page)

She wondered what her grandmother would do right now. Coral could use a healthy transfusion of the old woman’s toughness.

Whatever had happened outside, her grandmother would feel lucky to have survived it. Coral was lucky, she knew, not to be at ground zero of The Event, wherever and whatever that might be. She also had been fortunate to have decided to grab the food and backpacks when she could, because she sure couldn’t get out there now to gather supplies. But now her luck seemed to be running out along with the water.

She napped again and woke a short time later. At the end of what she was guessing was the third day, she was out of food, and the level of the last half-bottle of water sank lower and lower, despite her trying to resist drinking. The cave, which had at first been her luck, her sanctuary, could easily turn into her grave.

* * *

The fourth day in the cave, she woke to the reality of less than an inch of water in her bottle and no food. She took just enough water to wet her dry and cracked lips and held it in her mouth as long as she could before swallowing. Her throat still felt shriveled, her gums tacky. The cells of her body were all clamoring for moisture. Soon, she knew from her physiology studies, systems would begin to falter. In another day or two, they would shut down. A week without water was the most she thought an unmoving person had ever survived, but she’d be in bad shape by tomorrow, she thought, disoriented and incapable of saving herself.

She had to find more water
now
, and there were only two possibilities: brave the heat outside for a mad dash and find the motor home water tanks intact, or find water somewhere in this cave. Somewhere, there might be a water source. Water certainly carved out the cave in the past, but all the surfaces she had touched were dry now.

She’d never be more alert or energetic than she was today. The time to do it was right this minute. Again, she tried to leave the cave, and again, was met by a wall of heat too powerful to cross. So she’d have to find water here, in the cave.

Back at her packs, Coral loaded her pockets with her knife and a bandana. She wished for a headlamp so her hands were free, but she had only the flashlight.

She took cautious steps into the uneven floor of the deepest part of the cave. As the footing got worse, she braced her left hand against the wall. The rock was rough there, too, porous and full of tiny sharp edges. Bits of it flaked off, leaving her palm gritty.

She lurched and fell to one knee. Her hand scraped down the wall as she fell. She fought to keep the flashlight raised and safe from the rocks. Falling to both knees, she decided to stay there. She shuffled forward on two knees and a hand, but even through her jeans, the rocks bit into her. She kept on, inching forward, shining the light around the walls and ceiling, hoping to see the glint of water.

The ceiling was closing in now, as the cave narrowed and all the walls became a rough cylinder barely larger than Coral herself. The walls remained dry.

Her space to navigate shrunk. She dropped to her belly. Her shoulders scraped the rock, her skin felt the sharp rocks poking at her, but she kept going, pushing herself along with her toes. Her hands groped ahead, hoping to feel moisture. Water was life, right now, and well worth a few—or even a few dozen—scrapes.

The tiny space spooked her. She could feel her heart thudding in her chest, harder than the physical effort warranted. Her dry throat felt painfully swollen, painfully dry, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from compulsive swallowing.

The space kept shrinking until she was worming her way along a tunnel barely larger than her body. She seemed to be ascending steadily. Suddenly she realized that the flashlight was illuminating a different sort of rock just ahead—smooth rock a darker color than the rough bits. She felt the rock beneath her move. It was loose here, like gravel—very
sharp
gravel.

Reaching forward, she felt the rocks ahead. Still no moisture, not anywhere. She held her breath and listened hard, hoping to hear a trickle of water. But there was no sound except the deep rapid thump of her own heartbeat. She sniffed, hoping to somehow smell water, but she smelled only a faint metallic smell. The hole ahead was too small now to push through. The last thing she needed was to get wedged in there.

Maybe with the rock beneath her being loose, she could widen the hole. She wriggled her hand down until she could fish the bandana out of her pocket. Wrapping it around her left hand as padding, she began to dig one handed, pushing the loose rocks back behind her hips and kicking other rocks away with her feet. She made slow progress, but she kept at it, an inefficient mole.

Suddenly, she heard a snap, her hips slipped backwards several inches, and a pile of rubble came skittering down into the hole ahead. Fast as she could, she wormed her way back, her sweatshirt riding up as she went, leaving her belly exposed to the rough rocks. More rocks fell in front of her head, bouncing back toward her. The flashlight went out as she lost hold of it.

She scooted back faster, feeling her hips catch in a narrow space. Her hands scrambled for purchase, for some way to push herself back through the obstruction. She felt true panic rising, heard herself whimper. The sound of falling rocks got louder.

She was on the edge of panic when the sound of the rockslide stopped.

She took deep breaths, trying to slow her racing heart. She was lucky the rock fall hadn’t buried her entirely. Worse, her light was gone. With great care, she felt around in the darkness for the flashlight. The last thing she wanted to do was start up the rockslide again, but without light, she had even more problems.

For long minutes she patted the ground around her, searching for the familiar cylinder shape. She pressed her palm systematically into the newly fallen rock, hoping to feel the flashlight poking up through it. Stretching as far as she could, she went over the area twice, blindly feeling. She started again, trying to be more thorough, feeling every square inch of rock. Nothing.

She couldn’t risk more digging. She really could bury herself alive.

Coral wormed backwards until she could get on hands and knees again, and then she groped until she found the left wall and turned around, standing. Feeling her way along the wall in the blackness, it took her a long while, nearly an hour, she thought, to get back to her sleeping bag. The whole time, moving blindly, she fought back her fear, a fear of the dark that was childish, she kept telling herself, but that got no better for her knowing it. When her shin finally touched on the folds of the sleeping bag, she let out a long, shuddering sigh of relief.

She fumbled for a candle and lit it, then went back to the rock fall again, using the candle for illumination. As she wormed her way forward through the tunnel, every ping of sliding rock froze her. But she went on anyway, inching forward, hunting for the damned flashlight.

She must have spent another hour looking, burning the candle nearly through, but she finally had to admit that the flashlight was gone, buried under rock, or rolled away somewhere that she couldn’t see. Frustrated, disheartened, she returned to her gear and took another precious sip of water.

She had to have more water to live. But she was stuck in the cave with only a few more scant mouthfuls. And there was nothing she could do about it. As she thought that, the candle guttered out and died.

* * *

Over the rest of the day, Coral lay in the dark and thought of water every moment. She dreamt about water that night. She woke the next day and upended both water bottles and the milk bottle, getting no more than a half-dozen drops. As she swallowed them, she knew it might be the last drink she ever had. At least she was no longer hungry, though that was small comfort in face of the burning thirst.

That morning, she burned her last candle. As it sputtered out, she knew she was going to be left alone in the dark, with not even the little star guide to distract her from her fears.

At the last flicker of light disappeared, Coral felt bereft, as if she’d lost a friend. Every abandonment of her life added together was not as bad as this. With one exception: the death of her parents. She closed her eyes and rested her head on her knees, trying to talk herself out of despair. There was no logical reason she shouldn’t despair, but she knew that to give into it would mean her certain death.

As long as you’re breathing, she told herself sternly, there’s hope. She raised her head again and opened her eyes.

And saw light. Literally a light at the end of the tunnel.

No, the light wasn’t daylight, at least not daylight as she had once known it. But the cave’s entrance was visible, for the first time in four—or was it five?—days.

Shakily, Coral stood. Everything hurt—her scraped knees and belly, her muscles, her joints, but most of all her parched mouth and throat. She fumbled in her gear, found the bandana, and tied it over her face. All her other supplies she let stay where they were in the depths of the cave.

As she made her way to the entrance, the air around her grew hotter. She passed her original campsite, smelling now of her own waste, and she moved cautiously toward the dim daylight. The air continued to warm. Two days ago, though, it had scalded her lungs by this point, had been impossible to step into. Those oven-like temperatures had abated. Now the air at the entrance to the cave was only miserably hot, hotter than the worst summer day she’d ever known. But it wasn’t killing hot—she hoped.

For the first time in five days, she stepped over the threshold. She was free again. The relief, the sense of escaping prison, or her grave, made her lightheaded. The air was still thick with dirt or ash or soot, but the particles seemed smaller now. Maybe the big stuff had all fallen to the ground over the days. The forest smelled like the inside of a fire pit the day after a barbeque.

Two stumbling steps later, her brother’s motor home became visible through the gloom as a vague shape, a blur emerging out of the gray. It’s still there, she thought, with hope—not exploded, not burned to the ground. Her feet moved over a thick cushion of fallen ash.

The urge to cough pressed at her chest. She resisted it as she made her way around the motor home to the driver’s door. As she approached it, she saw the side of the motor home was blasted clean of paint, scarred with streaks of black soot. The tires were all flat. She pulled the door open and crawled inside. Motes of dust danced in the dim light. Most of the windows were shattered, crazed safety glass still in place in the frames. The fire had not reached inside. Under a layer of dust, the table and countertops were still standing.

Shuffling along, she found her way to the kitchen area. She steadied herself at the sink and turned on the tap. A whisper of sound came from the faucet, but no water came out. She opened both taps full blast. Still nothing.

The thirst, so close to being slaked, was now a powerful animal urge. She went to the bathroom and tried the tap there. Nothing. The shower. Nothing. She could hear the water pump running, low and slow, driven by a dying battery, but nothing was coming out of the taps.

She yanked opened the refrigerator. She groped inside and found, warm to the touch, round objects. She pulled one out and squinted to make out the label. A jar of pickle relish, worse than nothing, with all that salt. She rooted in the refrigerator again. This time, she struck gold. A glass bottle of orange juice at the back, unopened. It was warm to the touch. With shaking hands, she opened it.

The juice stung her cracked lips. The liquid was as hot as fresh coffee. She gulped anyway. The glands behind her ears spasmed at the sweet taste. After a few swallows, she forced herself to put down the bottle. She didn’t want to make herself vomit up the precious liquid. Carefully, she screwed the cap back on and set the bottle on the countertop.

She probed into the refrigerator again. In a vegetable drawer, she found a can of white soda, straining at its seams, but still intact. These two finds were enough, enough liquid to save her, to rehydrate her and get her through one more day, she thought. She set the can next to her juice, then took another sip of the hot juice.

In the kitchen cabinets, she scored more finds. Bags of pasta and peanuts had been baked to brown bits, useless. But hidden behind those, there was a can of peaches, packed in pear juice, and two cans of green beans. Nothing else had survived. A bottle of canola oil had melted into an abstract sculpture and the cabinet’s bottom was sticky with the dried oil.

She pulled down the three cans of food and set them on the counter, lined up with the two drinks from the refrigerator. Each addition to her collection was a treasure. Such simple things, bits of uninteresting food she had taken for granted not ten days ago. Water she would have dumped out of the vegetable cans now was more valuable to her than a wallet full of hundred-dollar bills.

Another sip of orange juice. Sweat popped out on her face, as if her sweat glands had just now remembered how to work.

She had no way of knowing the temperature, but it had to be well over 100 degrees. If she stayed here, she and the air were going to battle for her body’s moisture—and the hot air would win. She had to get back into the cave’s cool air as soon as possible. More exploring could wait another day, and maybe the outside temperature would cool more by then. She gathered up her cans and carried them out.

As she returned to the darkness of the cave, she felt a resistance to going back inside. She wanted to be free of this place. She wanted to find other survivors, to discover what had happened, to take a shower, to get to a limitless water source. She wanted to call her family and best friends, let them know she was okay.

And she wanted to know what the hell had happened.

But all that had to wait until more immediate needs had been met. It was cooler at the rear of the cave, and the air was free of dust. Here she had to stay, for at least a little while longer.

As she drank her way through the bottle of juice, her head began to clear. The clearer her mind got, the more she understood how foggy her thinking had been the last twenty-four hours. She had been lucky to have survived that time with nothing worse than a few scrapes and a lost flashlight.

She ate a can of green beans and fell, still hungry, into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

The next day, the outside temperature had dropped. She wanted to move back into the motor home. But without water, it was useless to stay here. She’d have to pack up and walk out. Maybe she’d find a forest ranger, or a sheriff, or someone in charge who could help her.

The clothes closet held more unpleasant surprises. Her cotton shirts were yellowed, baked from the heat. A thin woven shirt broke like a cracker when she touched it. A nylon jacket hadn’t melted, but the material of the zipper and threads had turned brittle. Plastic bottles with shampoo in the bathroom had melted. At least she knew that the severity of the heat hadn’t been in her imagination. It had to have been damned hot to melt plastic and turn cotton so brittle. And all the laminates on the table and counters had peeled up, the heat too much for the glue holding it there.

In a pile of clothes in a cupboard, she found a set of sweats at the bottom that hadn’t been too awfully damaged by the heat. She changed. She still stank, but at least the clothes were clean.

She had to consolidate everything into the one frame backpack, paying attention to weight. Weak from lack of food, she wouldn’t be able to carry much—not for long. Her knife stayed, along with her sleeping bag and other standard camping supplies. She had been wearing her boots, but her running shoes seemed okay, too, except for the laces, which she could replace with unbraided paracord, so she decided they were worth the weight. What if her boots got soaked? If she had backup shoes, she could still hike. Her daypack she emptied, filled with dirty clothes, and shoved down into the bigger pack. Maybe she’d eventually get a chance to wash them.

She considered each item carefully before allowing it to stay. She had a rod and reel in storage, and she decided to take it and the tackle box that she’d had with her in the cave. The monofilament line had melted on the reel in the motor home, but she had the short length in the emergency kit that had been with her. She simply didn’t know how long she would be on her feet, or how far she was from the nearest town and the nearest food. But if she could find a stream or lake, she’d have water, and she might find fish. That chance made the weight of the fishing gear worth carrying.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have a camp stove—with the motor home’s propane oven, she hadn’t needed to bring one. Since she didn’t have anything to cook, she supposed it didn’t matter. She packed her empty water bottles and tied the empty juice bottle and empty milk carton onto the outside of her pack. If she found water, with all these empty containers, she could carry plenty with her.

Her cell phone wouldn’t even turn on. The heat must have fried something important there, too, so she left it behind.

Breakfast before leaving was the can of peaches. She might as well eat them now as carry the weight. She tidied up the ruined RV before she left, throwing away the can and closing cabinets and closet doors, thinking as she did it that it was a ridiculous gesture. This might be the last she ever saw of the place. Her brother wouldn’t be able to go hunting in it any more, that was for sure. The thought made her feel guilty. He had loved this thing. Despite the cracked windows, she locked the place as she left, though there was nothing in there to steal.

In the parking area, she tried on the pack—maybe forty pounds, at a guess—and walked back and forth with it on. She shrugged out of it and rearranged some gear to balance it more comfortably. The fishing pole, disassembled, she lashed to the outside of the pack. She wore her bandana mask, to filter out as much dust as possible. The air was still thick with it. The outside temperature might be around 90, 95 degrees. Hot, but not unbearable.

In the other outside net pouch of the backpack was the small water bottle—all the liquid she had. Instead of water, it held the juice from the peach can. She was still thirsty, but she would ration it, no more than a half today. If she couldn’t find water today, she’d drink what was left tomorrow. She might be able to hike a third day without water. Then, if she hadn’t found another water source, she would start to get spacey again. Without water, in five days, in this heat, surely she’d be dead.

In the dim light, the gravel road was barely visible. Two columns of skeleton trees flanked it. As she moved between the trees, she could see they were all scorched by the fire. Not a leaf or needle remained. Smaller trees and brush were consumed entirely, leaving only the frames of the largest bushes standing, and the trees, giant black toothpicks with a few short branches poking out like spines.

On the main road, she turned left, continuing down the hill in the same direction she had been traveling when all this started, not even a full week ago. Behind her, it was thirty miles to the nearest town. She hoped in the other direction she’d find a stream, a house, a town, a gas station, or a rescue vehicle.

Under her feet, the road was covered with a thick layer of ash. Her boots shushed in it like in fine powder snow, sinking down in it to the laces. She wiggled her feet experimentally and found herself sinking lower. There had to be four or five inches of it on the ground.

It was slow going, hiking through it. Coral walked through a still, dim landscape of an ashen roadway that passed through a dead forest of black skeleton trees. No animal noises, no car noises, no sound at all pierced the thick air. She was used to silence from backcountry packing, but this was eerie, this padded silence. It seemed like some empty vision of the afterlife that nomadic desert dwellers might have invented, a limbo for lost souls.

When she got to the bottom of the long hill, before the next one started to rise, she left the roadway, making her way to the lowest point between the two hills, the place where water might be. She hunted for a creek, a stream, or any trickle of water. Despite spending what seemed a full hour at the search, she found no trace of moisture. If she could tell how the land sloped away to one direction or the other from here, she would have followed the slope down, but without clear skies and light to reveal distant trees, it was impossible for her to guess how the land changed further than a dozen feet away.

She made her way back to the roadway and trudged on. Within steps, she had to stop. Her heart was pounding and her breath was coming in gasps, pulling fine silt through her mask. She thought she couldn’t have lost that much fitness in just a few days, but this climb was far harder than she had anticipated. She wondered what sort of elevation she was at—probably something like 5000 feet. Still, she had been hiking in high country for over a week. She was fit, young, and strong.

But then again, she was hungry, thirsty, and worried, and she was breathing dust through a makeshift mask. Irritated at having to make the adjustment, she lowered her expectations of her drained body. At this rate, in two days, she’d only cover a dozen miles before thirst stopped her. Maybe she’d get twenty miles before thirst killed her.

She had to find water—or help—soon.

She started off again, slower, taking the sort of short steps she’d normally take only on a much steeper grade. Each footfall she moved only a couple inches ahead. After two hundred paces, she had to stop to catch her breath, even at this turtle’s pace. She took the pack off and sat, waiting until her breathing had slowed to normal. She looked at the water bottle but refused herself its relief. Next stop, she’d allow herself a scant mouthful.

The next stage was no easier. You’d think it would get easier, she kept telling herself. The straps of the heavy pack dug into her shoulders. She kept her pace slow, but still it was as hard a hike as she’d ever taken. In the hot air, pulling herself up this hill, she was sweating and resented it, resented the loss of water from a body already too dehydrated.

It seemed to take hours to reach the top of the next long rise. It probably wasn’t hours, but having no way to check a clock, she couldn’t be sure. No car passed her during the time she walked. No tire tracks showed...if cars could even drive on the fallen ash, which she doubted. The ash in the air would surely clog up something in a car’s mechanical system, wouldn’t it?