Gray (Book 3) Read online

  “We’re headed home?” she asked Abigail.

  “Yeah, light’s fading.” The woman studied her. “You look done in.” She sounded disappointed.

  “I’m sorry, yeah. Been a long and stressful day, and a week ago, I was literally starving to death.”

  “I hadn’t thought. You’ll have to tell me more about how it has been for you,” Abigail said.

  Coral wasn’t sure how much she wanted anyone to know about her. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

  “Or the day after. I’m sure you’ll be busy at the clinic tomorrow.”

  “We need to pick up our dirty clothes,” Benjamin reminded them.

  Doug volunteered to get them, and to take care of the bath water. They waited in the warm hallway, watching the last of the diners add their dirty dishes to the table, and soon Doug came back with their stuff bundled in the damp towels.

  Coral was wiped out by the time they returned to Doug and Abigail’s apartment. The apartment was freezing, but when she and Benjamin were shown a futon in a private bedroom, there were plenty of blankets and comforters piled on it. As she fell down the long tunnel to sleep, she reminded herself to thank Abigail for arranging for that, too.

  Chapter 10

  At breakfast in the dining hall the next morning, Kathy came to their table to speak with them. “I wanted you to know, Coral, I’ve collected all the medical supplies from our packs and taken them over to the clinic, except for what you three have with you. Benjamin, while she’s at the clinic, you need to talk with Parnell and Levi, and they’ll give you a work assignment.”

  Benjamin and Coral exchanged a look. She didn’t want the two of them to be separated and he knew that. But this place obviously wasn’t like the cult. It was saner, and safer, if appearances could be trusted. Benjamin waited for her to protest, and when she didn’t, said, “Okay.”

  What else could they do? If they were going to stay here—even for a week, to get some easy food—they’d have to go along with whatever they were told. Coral would work for them at their clinic, and Benjamin would take whatever assignment he were given. They’d get some calories, and his arm would have a chance to heal.

  “I need to look at your arm,” Coral said. “To make sure it’s healing.” She glanced at Kathy. “Can he come by this morning and get it checked?”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine if he does,” she said. She seemed casual about it.

  “Okay,” he said, and when he looked at Coral, she knew he was reassuring her that he’d be okay. She wished she felt that certain.

  Doug said, “How’s your niece doing, Kathy?”

  “Good, thanks.” She turned back to Benjamin. “How are you two settling in?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Let me know if you want anything. I live in New Hope. Anyone can tell you where it is.”

  Benjamin nodded.

  “See you soon,” Kathy said. She stopped to exchange a few words with someone else at another table and then left.

  “What does everybody do all day?” Coral asked.

  Abigail answered. “Assignments depend on what we’re good at. Kathy is on the perimeter most days. There’s a guard posted night and day. I do mending three days a week at the laundry, morning kitchen clean-up duty five days, and local scavenging other times, though there’s not much of that left to do.” She indicated two of their table mates. “Beth there scavenges locally, and Eric works shoveling snow.”

  Doug said, “My favorite job—though I don’t get to do it but once a week—is poring over the books, trying to find information in them that we can use.”

  Abigail said, “You like reading.”

  He smiled at her. “True. And sitting in the library is more comfortable than going out on supply hunts.”

  “Why do they have you do that?” Coral asked. He seemed like more of an intellectual, not a warrior. Too trusting to deal with strangers. She wouldn’t have assigned him that duty.

  “I shoot well enough.”

  “More like perfectly,” said Abigail. “He shot skeet for years as a kid and won a bunch of competitions. And he’s young and fit. And he seems to tolerate the cold better than some.”

  “Yeah. Not very susceptible to frostbite, it seems,” Doug said. “Who knew some people were better at that than others?”

  They finished eating, a sort of porridge with scraps of canned meat and fruit in it, along with some triangles of flatbread. The food was served family style. Through some agreement that must have been worked out weeks before, a woman at the other end of the table got the scooped-out bowl last and used her flatbread to scrape it. Last night it had been someone else who scraped the bowls. Coral wondered if she and Benjamin would get in on the rotation of that. She’d try to remember and ask Doug or Abigail before dinner tonight. Every calorie mattered, and based on these two meals, it seemed the Boise survivors were making do on perhaps fourteen hundred calories a day. Yes, it was far better than what she had been eating these past two weeks, but it wasn’t enough. Not when it was well below freezing outdoors and in that apartment.

  Doug left to gather the rest of the medical supplies from the apartment, promising to deliver them to the clinic, and Abigail walked the two of them around the campus area, pointing out where the various people they had met lived, and where the laundry and other facilities were. She walked them up to the Boise River, where Doug was going to be doing sentry duty, and they saw Martin doing the same thing a couple blocks down. He gave them a casual salute.

  Abigail took them to behind the destroyed student union building, to where the clinic was. That building was newer than most left standing, made of brick and glass, but it had lost a lot of the glass. Abigail led them inside and through a hallway to a waiting room. The subfloor was bare, with scorch marks streaking it. One intact window with a thin sheet draped over the glass gave illumination to the room. A metal desk bell sat on a counter. Abigail hit the bell.

  The ding of it brought a woman out. She was middle-aged, short, wearing a sweater, and still had some meat on her bones, unlike most of them. Coral suspected she’d been pretty heavy when this all began. There was sagging skin around her chin and neck that hinted at the rapid weight loss.

  Abigail said, “This is our nurse, Edith Pope. Coral, our new doctor. Her husband, Benjamin.”

  Coral started at the word “husband.” She’d have to school herself to quit doing that. “I’m not really a doctor,” said Coral, offering her hand.

  “I’m not really a nurse,” said Edith, agreeably.

  “Benjamin has to get to the library to talk to Parnell, and I have to hurry back to the kitchen to do dishes,” said Abigail. “So I’ll leave you two to get acquainted.”

  Benjamin raised a hand in farewell, and the two of them went out the door, leaving Coral feeling anxious. She hoped she and Benjamin weren’t making a mistake, letting themselves be separated like this. Everything looked so normal here, organized, the people comfortable and sane…but she still didn’t trust it. As she heard the footsteps fade down the hall, she felt as if she were losing a piece of herself.

  Let this not be a mistake.

  “So, welcome,” said Edith.

  “I want to clarify. I’m in training to be a doctor. That’s the best I can claim,” said Coral.

  “I was a dental hygienist.”

  “Tough courses to do that, right?”

  “Academically, no different than RN coursework. With an extra course on facial nerves.”

  “How long did you do it? Work, I mean?”

  Edith said, “Eighteen years, off and on, with time off for kids.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “None, now.”

  Coral felt bad for asking. It had been automatic, the thing you said to people who mentioned children. In the new normal, she’d have to learn not to ask. “I’m sorry.” How awful it must be to lose your children. It was bad enough thinking her brothers and grandmother were likely gone. It had to be ten times worse to have your
children die.

  “Thank you. They were at a summer school program when it happened. I was in a parking garage downtown, and this guy—Burt, he’s still with us—led us down into a basement in the next building. There was water in pipes that we managed to drain to drink. But no food. It got hot. Surviving was a close thing.”

  Coral tried to imagine being trapped in that situation, worrying about your children, not being able to run to them. As she had done in the cave, no doubt the people had tried to open the door to leave, only to be greeted by flesh-searing heat. They had to have hated themselves for not being able to fight their way through it to their loved ones. There were no words of comfort to be said to the woman to ease the guilt and the horror. It would haunt her forever.

  “Anyway,” Edith said, briskly. “We open for business in a half hour.”

  “You’re open every day?”

  “Not Sundays. I’ve been here seven hours a day, six days a week, except two days I thought I was coming down with a cold and didn’t want to spread it. It’ll be good to get a little break, now that you’re here.”

  “Wow. That’s a lot of work. How many people come in every day?”

  “A dozen most days, usually accidents, scrapes, sprains. When a number of people get sick—and that’s happened twice—there are two or three times that many. And there’s the occasional emergency.”

  “What’s the worst you had to deal with?”

  “Someone fell through the ice, scavenging. It was back when the ice was just getting thick on the rivers, and she hit a thin spot. It took several minutes for anyone to know she was missing. She got stuck on something, so they were able to pull her up. They brought her here. I did chest compressions for nearly an hour, and I tried to warm her.” She shook her head. “There have been others I couldn’t save, but that was the worst. It’s one that sticks with me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Another set of skilled hands probably wouldn’t have saved her either, but I’ll be glad to have them for the next emergency.” She sighed. “And I lost one of the militia—really good hunter, too—to complications of frostbite. It was long. It was ugly. A surgeon might have saved him.”

  “It must have been awful.”

  She said, “Anyway. I was going through this new stuff we got when you arrived. You were part of finding all that?”

  “I was. I picked through what they’d found out there, in a collapsed barn.”

  Edith picked up one of the glass bottles. “Antibiotics—that’s a good find.”

  “Sheep antibiotics, I think. I hope they won’t kill a person.”

  “Only if they’re allergic anyway, I’d imagine.”

  “Do you know who is allergic to what? With a couple hundred people, have you started keeping files on everyone?”

  Edith nodded. “We don’t have much paper, but I have a system that uses old library catalog cards they found in basement storage. I write small, on the back of them, and only the crucial bits. I’ll show it to you in a minute. First, I want to get you acclimated.”

  She showed her the clinic, which had once been a good size but now was mostly shut off. There was an exam table in one room, the vinyl covering scorched and one edge covered with duct tape, but she flipped a clean sheet onto it, and it made the room look almost normal. The other room had metal folding chairs, and another wood stove that put out enough heat that Edith was able to work in a light sweater. Coral took her jacket off, and Edith hung the jacket on a hook behind the door.

  What instruments and equipment there were had been lined up neatly in metal cabinets. Bandages were cotton scraps of cloth, with a very few packages of gauze and tape. A few medicines remained—two glass bottles of mercurochrome that looked to be twenty years old, the medicines Kathy’s group had brought back, and a smattering of other drugs. A few partial blister packs looked like they’d been donated from what people might have had on them, in purse or pocket, when the Event happened. She flipped them over to read and found Tylenol, antihistamines, acid reducer, anti-diarrhea meds, and two over-the-counter sleep aids.

  It wasn’t a lot for three hundred people, but it was something. There was no stethoscope, and no way to measure blood pressure, but there was an otoscope. “From a vet’s office,” said Edith.

  “We have more animal supplies than human.”

  “The otoscope works the same on either. And vet’s offices seem to be more likely to be in concrete buildings, as it happens, which means a few things survived there.” She pulled a white jacket off the back of a chair. “May as well put this on, make it official. Doctor—what was your last name?”

  “I’m not comfortable being called Doctor. Or anything like that. Just Coral, please.”

  Edith frowned. “You know, these people have been without a doctor for seven months now. They’re going to be relieved there is one. I get what you’re saying—you aren’t fully trained, or licensed, or maybe feeling ready to do the job. But it isn’t about your comfort or discomfort. It’s about theirs. And I believe that healing can happen when people believe in it. They’ll believe in your treatments if they believe in you.”

  “Dear God,” said Coral. She was so not ready for this.

  “How about Doc Coral, split the difference? It’ll seem like you’re trying to be friendly to the kids, that way.”

  “I suppose,” said Coral. “But I’m sure you know more than I do about practical medicine. The hands-on, for sure. Eighteen years, versus my few weeks?” She shook her head. “No contest.”

  “Still, you should take the lead. They know me. They know what I was before. You don’t have that baggage. They’ll believe in you if you believe in you.”

  “And what if I don’t know something and you do know it?”

  “I’ll be there with you, unless we’re treating multiple injuries from an accident or the like. Look at me from time to time. I’ll give you a high sign if you’re saying something I disagree with. At worst, I’ll say I need help getting something from the other room, and we’ll both go and talk.”

  “Great,” Coral said, meaning the opposite.

  “You can read my face fine, I bet. You can read a yes or a no on it, I’m sure. Like what am I thinking right now?”

  Coral looked at the woman. Her eyes were closely set, her nose turned up, her chin receding. Her expression was easy to read. “Exasperated, impatient, thinking I’m more trouble than I’m worth?”

  Edith laughed. “Not quite that bad. I bet you’re going to be worth the trouble. Listen to the patients. Listen, administer first aid, and at the worst, emergency care. It isn’t as if they’re going to sue you for malpractice.”

  “Why? Didn’t any lawyers survive?”

  “Not any who will admit to it,” said Edith.

  Coral liked the woman. She was straight-talking, and Coral had no doubt she’d be doing the bulk of the medicine here. She took the white coat, put it on—it was about two sizes too large—and said, “Okay. If I don’t look like a little kid playing doctor for Halloween, I’m ready.”

  Good thing she was. The bell on the front desk rang the instant she said that.

  Chapter 11

  It was a busy day. Mostly, people were coming by to meet her. What surprised her was that a half-dozen people came who were clearly neurotic, either hypochondriacs or hypochondriacs by proxy about their children, or hoping to hear they had some dramatic ailment when all they had was hunger or a hangnail. Coral dispensed no medicines, gave little advice, and took her cues from Edith on how to treat each person. She tried to act like every doctor she’d ever seen as a patient.

  Edith had been right about what to do. Mostly, she listened. And over the course of the day, she felt more and more impatient with the whining ones. What she wanted to say was, “Have you looked outside lately? Do you not see that people have far bigger problems than imaginary mold allergies?” As the day wore on and she became hungrier and weaker, it was harder to control her impulse to snap at them, and she deferred to Edith
more and more. The other woman seemed to have unlimited patience for the nonsense.

  Toward the end of the day, she saw a pair of six-year-old twins for minor scrapes, and that was fun. One had fallen hard enough to scrape his knee through his jeans and the other had purposefully scraped himself in solidarity with his twin. Coral tried to be serious when she explained that they didn’t have many bandages left, and there were other ways to be a good brother. It was a good moment, near to what she’d always dreamed of when she had imagined being in family practice one day.

  She smiled at the mother as she was bundling the twins up to leave. “They’re adorable.”

  “Adorable to visit, maybe,” said the mother. Then she glanced at Edith, and a guilty look came over her face. Her children had survived, and others had not.

  When she was gone, Coral asked Edith, “Is it hard for you? Dealing with the children?”

  “No, not at all. With this few of us left, it feels a little like the children are communal property, in a way. We’re all pitching in together to get them through it. So it’s like being an aunt to them all.” She gave a sad smile. “I miss my kids something awful. But the world is what it is. We have to make the best of it.”

  At the end of the day, when she thought she could summon not one more smile, the bell rang again. Edith went to greet the patient, and she brought back Benjamin.

  “You hurt?” Coral said.

  “Not in any new way. Parnell told me to get my arm checked out before the clinic closed. I’m just following orders.”

  Coral realized she’d barely spared a thought for him all day. Being busy was no excuse. She had to remember what was important. Playing doctor for a bunch of strangers was not. Benjamin—he was what mattered.

  “Is it bad?” she asked. She meant Parnell, and his orders, not the arm.

  His eyes darted to Edith. “No, not bad. I’m used to doing what I want, when I want.”

  “Except when I boss you around.”

  He gave her his half-grin. “Except for that.”

  “At least I have a chance to treat this in decent conditions, now. Take your shirt off, please.”