Gray (Book 1) (9 page)

He chewed awhile, 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 she thought that 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, anyone could have come along and found her. Benjamin had.

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.

Coral did not know what was wrong with her. A month ago she had trusted nearly anything another person said, wanting to believe the best of people, but her sense of security was shaken now. It wasn’t just the memory of the attack that made her mistrust Benjamin; it was that the world had changed in an instant, even it had taken her awhile to realize how completely. The blue sky had disappeared, maybe forever, the grass and trees had disappeared, and summer rains had turned into cold mud storms. The reliable landscape had become an alien world, and no old rules could be counted on.

It was dizzying, like reinventing herself from the ground up. No longer Coral the sister, the granddaughter, the pre-med student, the Midwesterner, she was someone new—something new that she couldn’t even put a name to.

She thought about that while she went through her pack again, reorganizing it, making a mental list of what she needed to clean or replace when she could. After a couple hours, she went upstairs and said a cautious hello to Benjamin.

He continued their conversation of earlier, as if no time had passed. “Was the rifle with your gear?”

“I thought so.”

He looked guileless. The wave of her mistrust receded a fraction. No doubt she was being paranoid. She had to have dropped the rifle somewhere. Coral remembered holding it as she hurried out of the town and across the bridge. After that, she didn’t remember anything very clearly. She should have lashed it onto her pack, like the hatchet. “I’ll go look for it later,” she said.

He said nothing.

Midday, they shared a meal of leftover cold stew. No matter what sort of person he was otherwise, he was decent enough to share his venison, and she was acutely aware that she couldn’t continue to take his food indefinitely. Who knew when he would find more.

“I’m going to try and catch some fish,” she said, after they were done eating. She’d bring him back enough food to repay these meals. And then she could leave, without guilt, if she wanted to.

She was afraid of encountering the man from town, but if she stayed far upstream from the bridge, she thought she’d be safe. The ash in the air was a pain in the ass in a dozen ways, but at least it kept her invisible. You had to get pretty close to someone to be certain they were even there.

“You mean to go where, exactly?”

“Back toward the town—Mill Creek. The stream along there has fed me for more than a week.”

“You have other choices,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Did he have more food hoarded?

“I mean, there’s a closer stream. There’s three of them that feed into the lake.”

“There’s a lake near here?” Maybe deeper water meant more fish.

“Yeah,” he said, pointing. “Over that way a dozen miles. Here.” He picked up a bent nail and smoothed a place in the fallen ash, then he started to draw a map, starting by tracing something the shape of a human ear. “This is the lake. And Mill Creek is here, the river itself, I mean.” He drew a line then poked at a spot right by it. “That’s the town of Mill Creek. There’s a ridge here, then a valley with another creek.” He drew a line roughly parallel to the first. “We’re here,” he said, poking the nail nearer to that line. “And then over that way a third creek, the smallest.” He drew a final line. “Why walk all the way down to Mill Creek when you can stay closer?”

Coral looked at the map. “Is this to scale?”

“Pretty near.”

She had come further from the town than she had thought. Or Benjamin had dragged her further than she had imagined. “Are there fish in this closer creek?”

“No idea,” he said. “But we have the venison for another day.”

“I’d like to try fishing the nearer stream. I have the gear. And I want to replace what I’ve eaten of yours.”

“You don’t owe me,” he said.

“I do. We can’t live forever on the rest of that deer. Just get me pointed in the right direction.”

“Downhill along the road will get you there.” He studied her face. “You want me to come along and show you?”

“No,” she said. “You look busy.” As for possible dangers out there, she’d be on guard listening and watching as she had not before. No one would get the jump on her from now on, she promised herself that.

At his insistence, she took a small slice of dried venison with her. She packed, leaving nothing behind. He glanced at the full pack and raised his eyebrows but didn’t comment.

“I’ll be back by nightfall,” she said. “Unless something goes wrong. Tomorrow, for sure.”

He nodded.

She followed his directions to the stream. Several times she turned around and looked at where she had been, so that she wouldn’t get lost on her way back. The soot-streaked walls of the house faded away from sight quickly. She picked out landmarks—a bare gray face of rock, a snag that looked like a face—and memorized them. At a couple points, she stopped and dug a big arrow in the fallen ash with the toe of her boot. She’d erase them on her way back. No reason to advertise the location of Benjamin’s house.

The stream was further than she expected, and a little clearer of mud than Mill Creek had been. She found a flat rock next to the water and stripped down to her underwear. She pulled all her dirty clothes out of her pack. The bloodstain on her shirt stopped her short, sent a chill through her. The memory of the attack tried to force itself to the front of her mind, but she thrust it back. Scrubbing hard at the clothes with her sliver of hand soap, she made progress against the blood and dirt. Not as clean as a commercial washer would get them, but clean enough. At least they didn’t smell bad after the final rinse.

She moved upstream of where she had washed, hooked the clean clothes on a couple skeletal nubs that had once been branches of trees, and settled down bare-legged to fish, catching three trout before they quit biting. She tied her damp clothes to the pack’s straps and pulled on the damp jeans before wandering downstream, tossing her line in periodically. The fourth time she stopped and cast the line, a fish hit quickly and its cousins came to the bait soon after. She caught thirteen in all before they quit biting, sixteen in all for the day’s work.

By the time she made her way back to the house, she was weary and her head was beginning to throb again. Benjamin cooked up a third of the trout and they ate them in silence. She was too tired to make conversation, and he seemed comfortable with silence.

The next morning, she woke feeling physically better. Her head was still tender to the touch, but the headache had gone, she hoped for good this time. She found Benjamin working at scavenging more debris.

“Can I help?”

“Sure. This was a barn. My workshop was in here. A lot of metal survived the fire. Be on the lookout for any parts of tools, screws, or nails, hinges, bolts, anything like that”

They dug in the ash together in silence.

When he uncovered a pile of rib bones, she recoiled, worrying he had found a dead person, but he said, “Lizzy, a goat. She was a good old thing, too. Dumb but kindhearted.”

His tone was matter of fact, and Coral wondered again what kind of man he was. Had he seen the animal as a pet, did he grieve her death? She couldn’t think of how to ask such a question of this reticent man. He could work for hours without speaking, while she had to bite her tongue to keep from chattering nonsense at him.

“I really appreciate your helping me out,” she said. He gave a sharp nod and continued combing through the piles of ash. She cleared her throat. “But I think I should be going pretty soon. I need to find—well, you know. Civilization. A phone, to call my family.”

One eyebrow twitched.

“What?” she said, but he didn’t answer.

A few minutes later, he picked up a bit of twisted metal and turned it around, examining it, before dropping it into the pile of potentially useful trash. “I wonder if I can ask you for something first.”

“What’s that?” She could hear the suspicion in her own voice.

He didn’t notice it, or if he did, he didn’t comment on it. “I mean to re-roof over the kitchen. Every time it rains, there’s a new mess to clean up.”

“I don’t know anything about putting on roofs.”

“It ain’t rocket science,” he said. “All you need are working eyes and arms.”

“What are you going to use?” She didn’t see piles of shingles around, that was for sure.

He scratched his beard, then turned around and looked at the house. Coral turned her eyes in the same direction. “Here’s the theory of roofing this place. The straw bales go up to there, the framing and the ends of the rebars are up there.” He pointed up to the top of the walls. “Roof has to be tied into the bar system, or it’d go flying away. The framing over the kitchen is fire-damaged, so we’ll have to put up new rafters.”

“Okay,” she said. “But what are you going to put up there, as the roof?”

“There aren’t trees, so I can’t make shake, even now that your hatchet would let me. I’ve found lumber in a neighbor’s crawl space that’s solid enough for the framing, but there’s no thatching to be had.”

“So what can you do?”

“The downstairs carpets made it through without much damage. I’m thinking it’d be a better roof than nothing.”

“You’re going to put a carpet on the roof?” She cocked her head, trying to imagine that.

“It’s what I have.”

“Won’t the rain just come through it?”

“One rug is wool, so it can repel some water. And at least it will filter out the ash. I care less if there’s water dripping through than if I have to clean mud every two days, or spit grit out of my food.”

“Sure, I can see that.” If she stayed and helped him do that, she’d feel she had paid off her debt to him. “How long, do you think? To do it?”

“Two or three days. I have to work on making the ladder a bit first. That’ll take me a couple hours. Why, you in a hurry to be someplace?”

“I’m in a hurry to be
any
place. I want a town. Pocatello. Boise. Whatever I can find. And people who know what’s going on. A way to contact my family. Or get back east somehow.”

He frowned but offered no comment. In a moment, he stood. “I’d appreciate your help on the roof, at any rate.”

“Okay,” she said. “Happy to help.”

The next day’s work on the roof was, as promised, not complicated, just labor intensive and more than a little nerve-wracking. Coral had never been particularly afraid of heights, but it was unnerving crawling around on the edges of the house frame, seeing the kitchen appliances from such a strange vantage point. The top of the fridge needed cleaning. Trying to balance the weight of supplies he handed her did not help her feel more secure. At first, she held on with hands and thighs, crawling slowly every time Benjamin directed her to move, clinging so tightly with her legs that her thighs began to tremble.

Yet he never complained, waiting patiently for her to find her balance and move along. The second day, she went fishing again, and he wasn’t able to accomplish much by himself. By the beginning of the third day of work, they had a frame of scavenged lumber and were ready to haul up the carpet. She was moving around with more ease, walking across the beams without a wobble. It was a good thing she was, too, because that carpet was damned heavy. It took them half the morning to get it hauled up to the main beam and secured temporarily. Despite the cool air, she was sweating hard by the time they had it in place.

Coral stood at the peak of the roof and used a rock to pound a nail through the carpet and into a rafter. With a smile of pleasure at a job done right, she looked up and saw Benjamin at the edge of the roof, sitting with one leg stuck out, not moving an inch. She pulled the nails she was holding out of her mouth and called down to him, “What, you having a brilliant inspiration, there?”

He said nothing.

“Benjamin?”

“Give me a second.” His voice was strained.

She tucked the nails back in her jeans pocket. “What’s wrong?”

“Twinge in my back. I’ll be okay in a second.”

“I’m coming down there,” she said.

“No! Don’t let go of that carpet. You have to get it tacked up there, or the next gust of wind will pull it down and we’ll have to haul it up again.”

“But you’re hurt.”

“I’m fine. Had this before. It’ll ease up.”

She wasn’t so sure. He seemed frozen in place and his shoulders were hunched in pain. But he was right, she couldn’t just let the carpet roll back down to the ground. It had taken too much effort to get it up here. Quickly, she crawled along, pounding salvaged nails into the beam, tacking the center of the carpet in place. Benjamin still hadn’t moved. “Okay, that’s enough,” she said “I’m coming down there to you.”

“No, finish up,” he said.

“There’s no wind to speak of. That rug is not going anywhere in the next ten minutes,” she answered. “I’m going to help you down before you fall off.”

“I’m not going to fall,” he said.

She walked over to where he still sat in the same position. “What can I do for you?”

He snapped, “You can get back up there and nail down the roof.”

“God, you’re a bad patient.”

He sucked in a breath, gritting his teeth against the pain.