by Lou Cadle
She gave a quick feel over Benjamin’s form, to make sure he was securely strapped on, make sure he was still breathing, and then she took off again, facing forward now, speeding as fast as she could over the newly-fallen snow. The weight of Benjamin on the bag was surely erasing her tracks. The snowfall would finish the job, she thought, covering the track of the bag being pulled along.
She had no idea how long it took her to get back to the bridge. It seemed like an hour, at least.
She wondered when they’d change guard shifts back at the camp. She had no doubt whenever the next one awoke they’d search everywhere for her, day or night.
Across the bridge, she slowed and began picking her way more carefully, counting her steps, making precise right angle turns. Benjamin’s weight made that a challenge, but she wrestled him around at the turns and kept on track. She turned down the final street—she hoped—and followed it to the end.
Her foot slammed against the concrete traffic barrier. She groped forward and felt the end of it. A few steps to the left, and she would have missed it altogether in the dark.
Using her last match, she found the entrance to the tunnel. She pulled the sleeping bag over, getting Benjamin to the entrance, and then crawled in before him. She pulled him until her butt hit the sled. She crawled back and stopped up the entrance until it was just large enough to let some fresh air in. She wriggled out of her pack, took Benjamin’s sleeping bag from the sled and put it down, got herself onto it and pulled him under the sled, banging her head a couple times in the process. She slithered out and groped for the extra blanket that she’d left ready at the top of the sled’s load. She crawled into his bag and piled the extra blanket over them both.
Her rifle she kept loaded, ready just beside her left arm, pointed out the tunnel.
What she’d give for some light now. But they had no more matches, no lighter, and she hadn’t even thought to look for any at the Walmart. She’d have to wait for dawn to see what she was doing. Until then, she couldn’t do much more for Benjamin—just keep him warm.
She lay down beside him. Until she knew his injuries, she was afraid to put any weight on him, so she didn’t wrap herself around him. But she got right up against him, molding her body to the side of his. He was terribly cold.
“You’re safe,” she whispered to him. “It’s okay. I’ve got you, and you’re going to be fine.” She wondered if he could hear her.
She hoped she was telling him the truth.
Chapter 16
“Coral?”
She opened her eyes to blackness. Her back was cold, her front warm.
“Coral?”
She snapped fully awake. “Benjamin?”
His voice was rough and slurred. He said, “You all right?”
For a moment, she couldn’t answer. As beat up as he was, he was asking if she was all right? She forced a breath past the emotions that tightened her throat. “I’m terrific. How badly are you hurt?”
“I’ll live.” It was closer to “Ah wivv,” but she could understand him.
His poor face. She hoped his jaw wasn’t broken. “Don’t try to talk. When it’s light, I’ll look at you, take care of your injuries.” She wanted to ask, what had they done to him? Could he feel any broken bones? But the answers would be useless in the dark and might only make him feel worse. “Do you need anything right now? Water? Food?”
“How’d they get you?”
It took her a minute to understand his confusion. “No, Benjamin, I got you. You’re free. We’re both free. Hidden. Safely away from them. Everything’s going to be okay now.”
He mumbled something she couldn’t understand then took a deep breath and relaxed. For a second, she feared he had just died, but then she felt his body move with his next inhalation, and she realized he had fallen back asleep. Good. The less he had to be awake, the less pain he’d be feeling.
She didn’t let herself go back to sleep. She was tired, but she needed to be awake at dawn. She thought it was nearly that now. There was much to do.
The instant she saw a smudge of brightness at the tunnel’s opening, she eased herself away from him and wormed to the opening, pushing snow aside to take a look out.
It was still snowing, a light snow. Good. She wished it would come down harder, but she’d take any amount of snow. Just so there was enough to disguise their tracks.
She listened, and looked, and when she saw and heard no one, widened the opening just enough to pop her head up and check her trail in the snow. In the dim light of dawn, she couldn’t make out her path in, but more light might reveal it to a searching eye. After debating, she decided to stay where she was. She’d do more harm than good crawling around out there, making more tracks.
She thought again about all the people in the world who didn’t survive The Event who had been better suited for this—this guerilla warfare thinking—and felt frustrated with the large blank spaces in her brain in this area. She was muddling through, and so far, her muddling had gotten Benjamin free. She crawled back and lay back beside him, keeping him warm.
Would those people be out, looking by now? Yes. She knew they would.
As the day brightened by increments, she crawled up to the entrance to check a few times, but she never saw a sign that anyone had been close. Not a track. Not a noise.
Benjamin had fallen asleep again, but he woke midmorning. “I gotta pee.”
Now that he mentioned it, she did too. “We can’t leave,” she said. “Not yet.”
They managed, with a bit of crawling about, to get it done away from their bed, and Coral was grateful that the cold weather was keeping the scent down.
“I need to see your face better,” she said, when she crawled back to him.
“I can sit up.”
“No. Don’t move any more than you have to. I’ll pull you toward the light.”
“No, I can—” he struggled up, banged his head on the snow roof, and collapsed back down.
“Humor me,” she said. She pulled him, on the bag, back up toward the entrance, until there was enough light coming in so that she could assess the damage. She grimaced when she saw his face. It was swollen, bruised, misshapen, with two cuts that had bled and crusted over. Who knows what other damage was hidden under his beard.
“Not very pretty, huh?”
“You’re stunning,” she said.
He laughed then said, “Ow. Shit, woman, don’t make me laugh. That hurt.”
“And I had a comedy routine all ready for you.”
“I’ll listen to it later.” He probed at his face. “Nose is broken for sure. Maybe my cheekbone.” He was talking, moving, making sense. He knew who she was. All of that was good news. “My father used to tell a joke,” he said.
Coral crawled past him to get to the supplies from the sled. She found the first aid kit where she’d stashed it near the top, and hauled it back into the light, opening it. She stuck the packet of antiseptic wipes between her thighs to get them warm. “Tell me the joke,” she said.
“He’d ask, ‘Is your face hurting you?’ If you said yeah, he’d say, ‘That’s good, cause it’s killing me!”
She shook her head. “You fell for it more than once?”
“You didn’t really have to answer for him to go on and finish the joke.”
“Must have been great for your self-esteem growing up.”
He shot her a look. “I’m sorry, nurse, but I think you accidentally sent me to the psychiatric department. I need emergency medicine.”
“In my opinion, you need the psychiatric department, too.”
He laughed again. “Goddamn it, quit that! Fuck, it hurts.”
“Yeah, but it’s killing me,” she said. Then she whipped out a wipe, and said, “This’ll stop your laughing.” She pressed the cloth to his face and wiped away the ash and dirt. “It’ll get worse before it gets better,” she promised, pulling out a second wipe. She scrubbed gently at the dried blood at the side of his lip and on his cheek until th
e scabs came off. Fresh blood oozed out. She pressed gauze on the cuts until it stopped. Then she took a tube of antiseptic cream and dabbed the cuts.
He hissed once, but mostly took the treatment stoically, Benjamin style.
“Wiggle your jaw,” she said. He did, slowly. “Is that broken?”
“Nah.”
“Your nose definitely is.” She closed the bottle and got out a couple bandage strips to put on his worst cuts.
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” He reached up and touched his nose, gingerly.
“Where else do you hurt?”
He hesitated.
“Tell me, dammit, or I’ll start telling you jokes.”
He smiled, then winced at the movement.
“See? Now cooperate.”
“My side.” He pointed to his left.
She moved around and worked his jacket open, then eased his sweater up. There was a flannel shirt, too, which she unbuttoned, and thermal undershirt, which she pushed carefully up. She unbuttoned his jeans and tugged them down a few inches.
He hissed again in pain.
“Where does it hurt?” she asked, and he touched the bottom of his rib cage. She pressed gently, feeling around the curve of the ribs. When he flinched, she felt bad for him, but she kept her hands moving, feeling for damage. “If it’s broken, it’s not bad. It’s not displaced that I can feel. At least there’s no bone sticking out of you.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else to do. Should we wrap it somehow?”
“No,” he said. “So, you think I’ll live, doc?”
“Wannbe doc, at best. If I haven’t screwed up too badly in getting us hidden, you’ll live. If I have screwed up, and they find us here, we’ll both die.” She rearranged his clothes with care, getting him covered against the cold. “But it’ll be entirely my fault.”
“How’s that?”
She tossed the sleeping bag back over him. “I have no idea if I hid us well enough.”
“I trust that you did,” he said.
“I got us into this in the first place.”
“How do you figure?”
She wormed her way past him again to reach her backpack. She got out her bottle of pills and pulled out two of the pain pills with codeine, offering them and a bottle of water. Not many pain pills left now.
When he took them without protest, she knew how badly he must be hurting. He swallowed them and handed her back the water.
“There’s only two more doses left, and then we’re down to ibuprofen, and not much of that. Let me know when you want any of it,” she said. She repacked the first aid kit, put it back onto the sled, then pulled him back into the darker part of the tunnel and got him settled again. “There’s my rifle next to your right arm,” she said. “Can you reach it?”
His arm went out and he groped for the rifle. “Is it loaded?”
“I found ammunition at the Walmart. There’s plenty now, a few dozen rounds. You’ll have to check to see if I loaded it right, but I think I did.”
“You’re a marvel,” he said.
“Huh.” She felt like a fumbling incompetent who had had more than her share of luck this past eighteen hours. “I’m no soldier.”
“You somehow get me out of the hands of a half dozen people who want to kill me, you find ammunition for the rifles, you find us a place to hide. What more do you expect of yourself?”
She didn’t answer.
“Talk to me,” he said.
She took a breath. Instead of answering his question, she blurted out something else that had been weighing on her mind. “I hate those men for what they did to you. I don’t think I’ve ever hated like this in my life. It scares me.”
He nodded. “You know, those men were doing what they thought they had to.”
Her jaw dropped. “You don’t hate them?”
“I don’t much like them.” He was tilting his head back to look at her. “Damn it, come over here where I can see your face a little.”
She scooted forward and looked at him.
“You want to hear a good-news/bad-news joke?”
“Sure,” she said.
“The good news is, everyone is doing the best he can. The guy who did this to me, me, you. Everyone.”
She had a hard time buying that.
“Wanna hear the bad news?”
“Go on,” she said.
“The bad news is, everyone is doing the best he can.” He reached up, curled his fingers in invitation, and she gave him her hand. “Sucky as that is, whatever you get out of someone, it’s the best he can manage.” He squeezed her hand, then drew it down to his chest, resting their twined hands there. “That also means, you can forgive yourself for doing the best you can.”
“But it’s my fault you got hurt.” She told him about suspecting the Walmart grocery section had been picked over before. “I should have told you immediately.”
“We knew there might be other people around before that. Did you punch me in the face? Did you kick me in the side?”
She winced at the memory of slitting the boy’s throat. Now she knew she was capable of that—or of worse. “I made a bad decision by not getting you immediately when I suspected someone else was using the store. And it was me who pushed us to get to a city, to find civilization, to find other people. It was stupid of me, naïve.”
“It was hopeful. It still is. And you didn’t make me do anything I wasn’t willing to do,” he said. “You couldn’t.”
They lay quietly, side by side. Soon, she could feel the tension in his body ease as he felt the drugs kick in. “Don’t let me sleep,” he said. “I want to do my share of being the lookout.”
“Okay,” she lied. Sleep would be the best thing for him. She lay still, her hand resting in his. When she felt it relax, heard his breathing slow to sleep’s rhythm, she slid her hand away. She was tired too, but she wanted to stay awake and keep watch through the tunnel’s entrance. Tonight, when dark hid them, she’d let herself sleep.
And then…?
They’d keep hiding, right here. And eat the canned food on the sled.
And in a few days, when the hunt for them had been abandoned, they’d move on, out of this town. And see what the rest of the world had for them.
The End
Gray II and Gray III continue the tale.
Also by Lou Cadle:
Erupt
Quake
Storm (April 2016)
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
