Gray (Book 3) Read online

  She’d give a lot for a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Benjamin’s arm wasn’t healing like it should. Last night, it had seemed a little hotter, a little redder. It worried her.

  He took her ministrations stoically this night.

  “I’m still working on the syringe, to try and clean that out.”

  “Maybe you should leave it alone.”

  “Maybe I should,” she said, probing at the edges again. No pus leaked out—that was good. “I might screw it up more. But there’s something in there, some little core of infected tissue, I think. If I could get that out, now that we’re getting some nutrition it should heal pretty quickly on its own.”

  “If you’re so bent on cleaning it out, you could cut into it.”

  “I could. I could boil my knife for a half hour and dig around in there. But I could hit a nerve. And your brachial artery is in there, too.” She scooted away.

  “I like when you talk doctor-ese.”

  She laughed. “I’m all talk, I’m afraid.”

  He rolled his sleeve back down. “No, I’m complaining, but you’re doing good.”

  “If there’s a town near here—”

  “Must be. All this water, something would have sprung up around it years ago.”

  “—then it’s worth digging down into anything that looks like a building. If I could find rubbing alcohol, or even booze-alcohol.”

  “Or antibiotics.”

  Coral puffed out a frustrated breath. “Chances of that are slim. Damn plastic bottles all melted. It’d have to be stored in a deep basement, ideally in glass. Was any pill still stored in glass in the 21st century? Even then, I’m not sure it’d be safe to take, not after all the heat.”

  “Maybe we can find moldy bread. That’s penicillin, right?”

  “Can mold grow in sub-zero weather?” She shook her head. “Not that I know what to do with moldy bread anyway, how to turn that into penicillin that could cure an infection.”

  “Maybe a person can just eat the mold.”

  “Gah,” she said, her neck glands spasming at the thought.

  “I wouldn’t mind some bread, moldy or not,” he said wistfully.

  “Oh now. It can’t beat fish head soup.”

  “Hmm. Speaking of which, is it ready?”

  “Yeah. Let’s eat before it gets too dark.”

  The next day while fishing, she took all the surviving branches, both the hollow and solid ones, with her, and she spent the day fashioning a syringe, depending on a bobber to signal her about fish strikes.

  Using her pocketknife, she whittled away at a short solid stem until it barely fit in the end of a hollow stem. She doused them both with near-freezing water to lubricate them, and pushed slowly. The hollow stem split. Taking it apart with care, she tried to see where the problem had developed. Water was already freezing onto the split branch. Maybe warmer water would make a difference—and she’d have to boil water before irrigating Benjamin’s wound to sterilize it anyway. She planned on the water being body temperature for the debriding.

  Coral set to work on another plunger, using a larger branch this time and whittling it down to near perfect roundness before trying to make it fit. She used her drinking water, warmed against her skin, sprinkled some down the hollow, and tried to suck water from her bottle up into her homemade syringe. It started to work, and then her plunger stuck.

  Darned thing was swelling from the warmer water.

  She capped her bottle and shoved it back up her sweater and stared at the pile of sticks, trying to work it out. So maybe, you get it wet fifteen minutes before, let both swell, and then new water can’t make it swell any worse? But would both swell the same amount? Wouldn’t the tube get more fragile, the more saturated it was?

  Damn.

  She spent all day at it, experimenting, failing, but getting closer to a working device as the day wore on, feeling like some medieval inventor, trying to make a stupidly simple machine work. In fact, that’s really what she was. With the exception of a few surviving items from the technological age—like her boots, looking sadder every day—they were sliding from the jet age back to the stone age. They’d slid past medieval some time ago.

  By late afternoon, she thought she had a syringe that would work—once. She figured she’d get five to ten minutes with it, and then the tube would disintegrate. Maybe it would be enough time.

  Or maybe it’d drive the infection deeper and kill Benjamin.

  She hated having this responsibility. When planning for a career as a doctor, she’d never really considered having life and death powers over other people. Or if she had considered it, maybe she’d even felt a thrill at the idea. Saving a life—that’s a godlike power. It had sounded great.

  But losing the life of someone you cared for, and depended on, and would risk your own life to save? That was a terrible, awesome power no sane person would want. She would just as soon hand it off to someone else. Better yet, she’d rather hand it off to a well-equipped hospital and a team of eight skilled professionals.

  The world was, however, what the world was. And she was as close to a doctor as Benjamin would likely ever find.

  Fishing was done for the day. One fish had snatched at a lure while she devised her debriding syringe. She couldn’t claim to have caught it, exactly—it caught itself. But still, it was enough for one person’s food for one day. They had a couple extra fillets from the last two days, and some heads and bones, so they’d be okay for the next two meals.

  Back at the campsite, she pulled out her makeshift pot, the doubled aluminum cake pans stolen from the cultists, now with a pair of heat-hardened willow branch handles woven through the top inch of the sides. She gathered the charcoal and kindling—all the broken reeds and branches—and lit it with her magnesium fire-starter. While she waited for water to boil, she took what water bottles they had and filled them from her fishing hole. It was almost clear water, now that the ash had fallen to the lake bottom and the ice protected the water from accumulating more every day.

  When the water was at a healthy boil, she shook the pan, getting boiling water into every corner. She took out the last shirt Benjamin had worn and the bandages she’d made from one of the dead cultist’s torn shirts and poured the water over them. She filled the pan again, and when the cloth had cooled so that she could barely stand to touch it with her bare hands, wrung the hot water from the shirt and bandage. Soap would be so much better to clean them and her hands, but boiling water, poured over them a few times, would have to do.

  Benjamin returned a couple hours before dusk. The bandages she had dried out near the fire, on rocks she had sterilized with more boiling water. When she saw him, she nudged the water closer to the smoldering fire.

  “Operation time, huh?” he said, dumping the bag of the charcoal he’d collected that day.

  “Sorry.”

  “I trust you.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Shirt off, huh?”

  “Not until I’ve boiled and cooled this water. Don’t want you freezing to death before I can—” She’d almost said “kill you myself,” but realized just in time this was not the time to make jokes. “Get ready,” she finished. While the water cooled, he paced along the lake’s edge. When she was ready for him, she called him over.

  “Let’s get it done, then,” he said.

  “You must have a good immune system,” she said, looking at the wound again. “It’s worse every day, but it could have gone bad much faster.”

  “I guess I get sick less often than most. I thought it was because I was a hermit and wasn’t catching germs from anyone else.”

  She lined up her equipment. “Yeah, we people are filthy creatures.” She wished for a nurse, to talk and distract him. But she was all there was. “Tell me something while I do this.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Anything. A happy memory from childhood. A story. About your favorite motorbike.” She dipped up some water and washed her hands again.
It was body temp. “Go on, talk.”

  “I remember the first time I rode on a motorcycle.”

  “Tell me that.” She prodded at his wound with a knife blade, as sterile as she could make it under the circumstances. She scraped off the scab that had formed over the exit wound.

  His breath caught, and thin blood trickled from the hole. The wound looked like a little flat volcano, with the skin at the edges raised, and the center part a bloody, pulpy crater. She tuned out his words and focused on the job at hand. Loading her syringe carefully, she brought it to the wound and pressed the plunger.

  The stream that came out was thin and not as forceful as she’d hoped. She’d have to be less delicate when she pressed the plunger—but that would tear up the device sooner. Well, screw it. She could build another tomorrow if she failed today.

  She loaded the syringe again, heard Benjamin say, “But I didn’t really have a good grasp on left and right yet,” and she tuned him back out. She held the tube steady and slid the plunger as quickly as she could. The stream was much stronger. Water spurted into the center of the blood “volcano” and what dripped back out was red. A clot of thickened blood tumbled from the hole, and blood began to flow more freely after it.

  She glanced up at Benjamin’s face. His eyes were closed and his head turned away. She cradled his arm and steadied it to get a better look. “And of course I fell,” he was saying.

  And then another voice came, from behind her. “Don’t move. And don’t go for that rifle.”

  Chapter 3

  Aw shit, Coral thought as she turned her head to look behind her. There were two of them, a man and a woman. He had a rifle in his hands and she had a handgun in a holster. Her jacket was open showing it, and her hand rested on the butt, but she hadn’t drawn it. Yet.

  “I’m in the middle of something,” Coral said, surprised at how calm her voice was. Benjamin’s muscles were tensed under her hand.

  “We see that,” said the woman. “You a doctor?”

  “Something like that,” Benjamin said.

  The woman moved closer. The man said, his tone tense, “Kathy. Be careful.”

  “I’m careful,” she said. She stopped six feet away and bent to look at Benjamin’s arm. “That’s a bullet wound?”

  “Rifle,” said Benjamin. “Maybe from that one there.” He jerked his head toward his own rifle.

  The man spoke. “You don’t know?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  Coral said, “We were escaping this crazy cult. They almost caught us. The gun was theirs.”

  The woman nodded. She was a tiny thing, only five feet tall, if that. “There’s been some of that, I know. Cults.”

  Coral began to think she might not be shot in the next few minutes. The woman seemed normal, as much as any human being she’d run into—at least since she’d met Benjamin half a year earlier. “Can I finish what I’m doing here?” she said.

  “Okay,” said the woman. Kathy.

  “Don’t make any sudden moves,” said the man.

  Coral turned back to the syringe and loaded it up again. Once again, she shot it into the wound. Another clot was dislodged, and blood flowed quickly, dark and normal looking. “Looking better,” she said to Benjamin.

  He was watching the people with the guns, and Coral knew he wanted to do something about it, could feel the bottled energy in his quivering arm, could almost smell the controlled anger coming off him. “One more time,” she said. If he was going to do something brave and crazy, she was giving him a time frame for it.

  She loaded the syringe again and irrigated the wound one more time. Benjamin stayed where he was. Without turning to look at the strangers, she said, “You guys wouldn’t have a sterile bandage on you, would you?”

  “Not here,” Kathy said, as the man said. “No.”

  Coral sensed them engaging in some sort of non-verbal communication back there. They were deciding about her and Benjamin. Trust us? Kill us? Coral didn’t know what their options were, but whatever they decided was beyond her control. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to sound sane and calm and friendly for now. She could always escalate to violence later—and if Benjamin did, she would join him. “Okay, so I’m reaching for these bandages on that rock there. Don’t be alarmed.” She took one of the clean strips of bandage and dabbed at the blood running down Benjamin’s arm. Going for a second bandage, this one still slightly damp, she tied it around the wound. She felt him flinch. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Does it feel better or worse now?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You’ll have to put on your old shirt for now. I don’t think the other is dry yet.”

  “Wait,” said the man. “Kathy, check him for weapons.”

  “I have a pocket knife, right there on the rock,” said Coral, figuring they’d already seen it. Her pointing it out would make her seem less a threat.

  Kathy circled the two of them, always leaving a clear shot for the man, and picked up Benjamin’s shirt, checking the pockets. She patted his jacket, too, and had him turn out his jeans pockets, then motioned Coral to stand.

  “Slowly,” said the man.

  Coral stood, her arms well out, and let the woman pat her down. Benjamin was still seated, pulling on his shirt and buttoning it.

  “Where’s your gear?” said the man.

  Benjamin said, “We don’t have much.”

  “I asked where it is,” said the man.

  Coral looked at him. “I’m Coral. That’s Benjamin. I know Kathy. What’s your name, though?”

  It took him a few seconds, but he finally said, “Martin.” He was younger than the woman, Coral thought, and despite a thick blond beard, looked no older than Coral herself.

  “Martin,” she acknowledged, as Kathy completed her pat-down and moved out of reach. “Well, Martin, we’ve lost gear twice. I’m sure you know this, but there are some dangerous people out there.”

  “We know it.”

  “I’m sure you’ve lost gear, too.”

  He shook his head.

  Why not? She tried to figure out a way to weasel more information from him, but she was trying to think of too much at once. Benjamin’s arm. Escaping another bad situation before it got worse. Where the rifle was. Where the hatchet was. What Benjamin was about to do, and what she should do to the woman if Benjamin made a move for the man. Go for her gun? Grab her to use as a shield?

  Kathy picked up their rifle and deftly unloaded it, tucking the ammo in her pocket.

  Another rifle lost. Coral was tired of this. She was tired of fighting other people. She was tired of the struggle to keep what was hers. And she was underfed and physically tired. “Look,” she said. “If you take my fishing gear, too—pitiful as it is—we’re going to die. We’re damned close to it now. So if you plan to do that, just put a bullet in my brain now, would you?”

  The woman shook her head. “We’re not going to kill you.”

  “Nor will I be used as a whore,” said Coral.

  Kathy’s eyebrows shot up, as if she’d never heard of such a thing. “We wouldn’t do that, either.”

  “Huh,” Coral said, making her skepticism clear in her tone.

  “We’re—” Kathy looked at Martin. “We’ll talk about it later. We need to get going, Martin. Light’s fading.”

  “Yeah,” Martin said. “Where’s your other gear? You need to bring it along.”

  Benjamin was thinking over the situation, weighing his chances. Coral could almost read his mind as he decided there was nothing to do but go along with these people. “In there,” he finally said, nodding his head toward entrance to the snow cave. He was cradling his bad arm by the elbow.

  While Kathy crawled into the snow cave and began pitching their gear out, Coral exchanged a look with Benjamin. He shrugged.

  “I know,” she said, agreeing that for now, their best option was to cooperate. “Is your arm that bad?”

  “It’s fine,” he said, letting it drop to his side, but slowly. Sh
e could tell it was tender.

  She turned to Martin. “Can I make him a sling with that shirt hanging over there?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She had to tie the shirt around herself first to figure out how to convert it to a sling, and then, with another nod of permission from Martin, she went to Benjamin and slipped it around his neck.

  “I don’t need it,” he grumbled.

  “I know,” she said, but she kept adjusting the sling for his height. “There. Try walking a few steps.”

  Martin’s rifle, which had sagged, came back up.

  Grimacing, Benjamin walked a few steps, turned around, and walked back. “It’s fine, but—”

  “I know. You don’t need it,” said Coral. “So you’ll humor me by wearing it, so I don’t throw a tantrum.”

  That earned her half a smile. It made her feel better, despite the situation they were in with these strangers.

  She looked at Martin. “Can I roll up my sleeping bag, or are you going to take that away from me, too?” Kathy had already pocketed her knife.

  “Shake it out first, so I can see if there’s anything hidden in there.”

  Coral did as he said and then rolled up her bag and tied it snugly. She slung it over her shoulders. “I assume you’re taking us somewhere.” Their compound or lair or whatever. Another trap?

  Kathy emerged from the snow cave, pushing the last of their gear ahead of her and holding to their hatchet. “Burlap sacks, huh? Go on and pack them.”

  “I had a nice backpack, once,” said Coral. “The cultists did something with it.”

  “When you say cult, are you talking polygamous Mormons or…?” Kathy said.

  “They weren’t polygamous, and they weren’t Mormons, unless I’m very confused about what that is,” said Coral. And that was possible. She’d never met a Mormon before, as far as she knew. “This was some weird UFO end-of-the-world thing. Totally crazy, no offense if that’s your deal, too.”