Coral thought they should be looking for a chance to escape, despite the stranger’s access to a variety of food. Still, she wondered, not for the first time, what she might be willing to do—to sacrifice—in exchange for one of these meal packets twice a day. Not the use of her sex organs. Not Benjamin’s well-being. But anything else might be negotiable.
It was a terrible thing to know about yourself.
If all they needed was for her to do first aid on a few people back at their camp, she could manage that. If they expected her to be able to do surgery or set a compound fracture, her inexperience would be glaringly obvious. And then what? In the new world, your value to a group had to be weighed against your cost to the food supply. There was no room any longer for carrying dead weight. If you were dead weight, you were just dead.
Kathy collected the empty food bags. Benjamin stopped her from taking the fish heads and bones away as garbage. “It’s good for soup,” he pointed out.
“Not much meat left on them,” said Jamie.
“More than we had for many a day,” said Benjamin. “If you don’t want them, we’ll take them back.”
There was an awkward silence, and Jamie handed the trimmings of the fish to Benjamin. There were fish bones from yesterday stored in one of the burlap bags, and he added these to those.
Martin said, “So how are we going to sleep? Six in the tent will be crowded.”
Benjamin said, “We dig a snow cave every night. It won’t take long to do it again.”
“We need to talk about this,” said Jamie, and not to Coral and Benjamin. “If they stay, we need to set a guard.”
Martin stayed at the fire to keep an eye on the two of them while the other three moved away into the darkness. Coral heard the murmur of their voices but couldn’t make out any words.
They came back and Kathy announced their decision. Everyone would sleep in the one tent, and no guard would be needed. Jamie escorted Coral and Benjamin to the latrine, and then they were put in the center of the tent, with a box of four people around them, and the rifles stowed out of their reach.
It was crowded, and strangely humid with all the exhalations of six people, but not nearly as warm as a snow cave. She and Benjamin, surrounded as they were, were probably the warmest of the group, but she was uncomfortably cold. Benjamin tried to keep his bad arm out of everyone’s way, but she heard him bite off a pained noise when it was jostled as everyone tried to settle in to a more comfortable position.
The scents of unfamiliar people were disturbing, triggering some animal sense of danger that kept her from drifting off to sleep despite being exhausted. She was the last of them to fall asleep, and as she did, she worried what tomorrow would bring. The worry tainted her dreams, and she woke up twice in the night with pounding heart and the bitter taste of fear in her mouth.
In the morning she and Benjamin shared their second MRE—too salty and too sweet, by turns—and drank a hot drink each, sharing the one tin cup they had. Benjamin wanted his with sugar, and when he was done with the cup, she tried the cocoa mix. It was bitter—rancid, she thought—but she gulped it down anyway.
Again, there was a meeting about them, but as it was after sunrise, the strangers sent the two of them several yards off and had the discussion around the fire. She and Benjamin weren’t near their supplies, so they weren’t going to run with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
“Do you think they’re deciding whether to kill us or not?” Coral asked Benjamin, speaking barely above a whisper.
“I think they would have already, had that been their plan,” he said.
“And not wasted food on us first,” she said.
“I suspect they’re debating whether to let us go or take us to their home base.”
“Do you think they’ll give us a choice?”
“That, I can’t say. What I can say is this. Without the rifle, we don’t stand a chance of surviving out here alone.” He glanced over at the others. “Not for long.”
She put her back to them. “They won’t hand it back loaded and turn their backs.”
“No,” he said. “By the way. You and I—we’re married?”
She felt herself blushing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to discuss it with you, and it was the best I could do at the moment. The thought was, I won’t let another group of crazies separate us.”
“I’m not complaining. It was quick thinking. But I am a little amused.”
“Maybe I should learn your last name. And your middle name. And birthday. And parents’ names. In case they quiz me, it seems like stuff a wife would know.”
He shook his head. “They won’t ask.” He tugged her jacket so he could look right at her. “They want you, not me.”
“I hope not for what the Seed wanted me for.”
“No. They want a doctor, that’s obvious. There must be a lot of them.”
“I’m not a doctor,” she said.
“You’ll do until a better one comes along.”
“I’m terrified they’ll ask me to—I don’t know. Take out an appendix. Deliver a baby.”
“You could do either.”
She took an involuntary step back. “I could not!”
“Shh. Better you than no one. You’re still thinking old-world.”
She still shook her head. “I’d kill someone by operating on them.”
“Do you know where the appendix is?”
“Well, sure,” she said, pointing to her own.
“You’re way ahead of most of us, then.”
“But still,” she said. And then she snorted a laugh at her next thought, which she shared with him. “I thought, but I could lose my right to be licensed!”
“Yep, see? Old-world thinking.”
“It is. But I don’t want to kill anyone. I wouldn’t even want to kill one of the cultists through medical malpractice. That’s just wrong.”
“You’ll do your best for these people. If you want to help them, that is”
Coral tried to imagine cutting open an abdomen. Clamping off blood vessels. Administering anesthesia. Without the right tools and a competent assistant, no, she couldn’t. Wouldn’t. But if there were a fully-stocked operating suite, and drugs, and a nurse…? Maybe. And what if it were Benjamin, with an appendix ready to burst? Would she risk killing him on the table to keep him from dying anyway?
She’d rather not have to make that choice. But there were a lot of choices she’d been forced to make this past six months that she’d never imagined herself making. Leaving bodies unburied. Killing. Stripping the dismembered bodies of people she’d murdered.
She glanced over her shoulder at the four strangers. “So you think if we are given a choice, we should go with them?”
“We were damn close to dying a few days ago. I think we have to see what their set-up is. They have food. Maybe they have a lot more at their home base. Maybe they have antibiotics.”
She hated that he was right. She liked being with the one person she knew she could trust—trusted enough to tell him the shameful truth right now: “Other people scare me.”
“For good reason,” Benjamin said. “But if it’s something we can get out of—either from their telling us we can leave, or being able to sneak away eventually once their guard is down—we should see what they have. Maybe we can gear up better before we leave. They might have construction materials, enough to let us build another sled.”
Her heart lifted at the thought. “That’d be something to take a risk for. But I can’t see them giving away anything they could use.”
“You could ask for it as salary.”
“Salary?”
“Why not? Compensation for your work. Who knows how badly they want you. It won’t hurt to negotiate for pay.”
She was trying to get her mind around the idea that she might be worth something to these people, that she might be able to barter goods from them for her services. “I’d probably be of more use fishing for them.”
“Yup, you’re a double threat,” he agreed. “Whereas I’m not that useful.”
“They don’t know you yet,” she said. “You’re incredibly useful. It’s hard to imagine anyone who would be more so in these circumstances.”
“They wouldn’t think that. For now, I’m just the guy who comes with the doctor.” That didn’t seem to bother him.
“That’s right,” she said. “You are. If they want me, we’re a package deal. If they don’t want me—” She stopped herself. She was going to say, “We’re still a package deal,” but she didn’t have the right to choose for him.
“We’re a team,” he reassured her, as Martin called them back to the smoldering fire.
Kathy spoke for the group. “We can’t tell you everything. We can’t make an offer to you. But I know Levi—he’s in charge—will want to talk to you both. I think he will invite you in. You don’t seem crazy, and you have important skills.”
Coral said, “What if we don’t want to come with you?”
“Then you don’t stay with us. That simple.”
“And our—Benjamin’s—rifle? My knife? The hatchet? You’ll return those?”
There was a hesitation at that. “Yes,” Kathy finally said. “Not right away, but eventually.”
Coral thought the men looked unhappy at that, but none of them challenged the statement.
“Can we talk about it? The two of us, I mean? Before we decide?”
“We have exploring to do today, so you have the day. You’ll have plenty of chances to discuss it.”
“Can I go fishing today?” Coral said.
“I wanted you to come with me and Martin. There are some things I want you to look at.”
“What kind of things?”
Jamie spoke up. “Supplies we found yesterday. We can’t carry everything, and maybe you can tell us what’s most useful.”
It took her a second to understand why they’d want her to be the one to decide. “Medical supplies, you mean?”
“Right,” he said. “Doug and I are going to keep on exploring new sites for food.” He glanced at Benjamin. “You can come with us.”
“No,” said Coral. “He and I stay together. Nothing else is an option.”
Jamie looked doubtful—or suspicious—at that, but Doug was nodding. “I get that.”
Kathy decided quickly. “Okay. He can come. The four of us will go back to that barn, and you two keep on checking for houses to the south. We’ll meet up back here for supper.”
Jamie said, “Don’t be so late this time.”
“We won’t,” Kathy said. “Unless we run across another couple of stragglers out there.” She turned to Coral. “Can you guys empty out those sacks of yours and bring them along? It’ll be good to have something else to carry supplies with.”
Coral didn’t like that at all. What little they had, she didn’t want to let out of her grasp. But she couldn’t have it both ways. She needed to decide: trust these people—at least for a while—or part ways now.
That they were willing to let her leave made her, paradoxically, more willing to stay and see what the strangers’ situation was. “What do you think?” she asked Benjamin.
“Seems fine to me. If we decide to leave later, we’ll pack our own stuff back up, right?” Benjamin looked at Kathy.
“Sure.”
The answer seemed too quick. Coral still didn’t trust that promise. But a week ago, she had been about to starve to death. If the strangers had food, she’d be willing to join forces with them—temporarily.
She’d be watching them, though, and on her guard today, and she’d make sure that Benjamin and she were ready to flee at a moment’s notice, when they all arrived wherever they were going tomorrow. She wasn’t going to let herself be isolated or locked up again.
She hoped that she wouldn’t find herself trapped.
Kathy and Martin led them to the remains of a farm. They had found a concrete bunker, or a crawl space, they theorized, that had been under a barn. Some supplies had survived the fire. Most paper and plastic coverings had been burned away, but there were plenty of tools. One of the first things Coral saw was a large stainless tube, perfect for making a syringe to irrigate Benjamin’s arm. She grabbed it. Weren’t the remnants of civilization amazing?
“How’d you find this place?” she asked Kathy.
“We’re systematically searching the countryside. The supplies we had at first are getting low. We’ve nearly cleared the area around us. And there are things we never had in the first place that we’d love to find out here.”
Benjamin said, “Like a doctor.”
“Yes,” said Kathy. “We have a medic, but she has a limited range of knowledge.”
“I’m not a licensed doctor yet,” said Coral.
“I appreciate your making that clear,” said Kathy.
Martin said, “You see anything you can use?”
“Yes.” The equipment must have been on shelves that collapsed, for there was a hodgepodge of it scattered over the concrete floor. Some of it had been pulled out of the snow already. There were scorched leather straps, useless, and a large metal tong that she picked up and opened and closed, like the world’s biggest salad tongs.
Martin said, “For birthing calves or lambs, I think.” He mimed pulling a calf out of its mother.
They’d dug through some of this, but other items must still be buried under the ash and snow. “We need to excavate, first of all,” she said, “then decide what’s most important.”
It took them a couple hours to clean the snow off the floor and find and line up the remaining equipment. Some was ruined by the fire, including some melted plastic syringes she would have loved to have had. But there were needles—a little large-bore for human comfort, but if the only other choice was no needle at all, this would certainly do. “That’ll leave a bruise,” she muttered, turning one over.
They had unearthed a galvanized tub, and she laid the needle in there. “Any more needles you see, put them in there, too.”
She found an unbroken bottle of lidocaine, the name etched into the glass, which was better than gold. The horrible image she’d been holding at the back of her mind of trying to remove an appendix without any anesthetic faded. This wasn’t general anesthesia, but it was something. Maybe enough to keep a surgery patient from lurching while she had a knife moving in his abdomen.
Another glass bottle held bright blue chunks, the size of rock salt. The label was intact but scorched, and as she turned it this way and that, she could make out small print: CuSO4. “Copper sulf…” she said, and thought it through, deciding on “…sulfate. I’m not sure what it’s for. Funguses, maybe?”
Martin said, “Sure, farm animals get fungal infections, like on their hooves.”
“We’ll take it, then.” She hoped it wouldn’t do anyone any harm if she tried to use it to treat athlete’s foot or a similar condition. She racked her brain, trying to remember from high school chemistry what other uses there might be for it, but she drew a blank. “It sure looks like it could dye something nicely.” It was as bright a color as she’d seen in months.
Kathy said, “We’re not at that point of recovery, I’m afraid. What we manufacture doesn’t get decorated. And we don’t make all that much. Not enough raw materials.”
Martin said, “The optimists will like it. Make them think of a time when they can dye fabric or wool again.”
Benjamin said, “You’re not one of the optimists, I take it?”
“We seem to be losing ground so far. I’m hopeful most days—but I admit there’s no real reason to be.”
“Food is becoming our real problem,” said Kathy. “We’re in strict rationing, and we haven’t seen any game in months now.”
“I haven’t, either,” said Benjamin. “Remember the rabbit stew, Coral?” He sighed with the memory.
She nodded but kept her focus on the supplies. A brown glass bottle had a label with the word “injection” still readable, and underneath that, “for,” but the rest of the label had flaked off. Coral unscrewed the cap and sniffed cautiously. “Gah,” she said, recapping it. “That has to be vitamins of some sort. You can smell the B’s.” They had a distinctive odor, rich and yeasty.
“I guess that’s useful,” said Kathy. “Or will be, as our food supply dwindles.”
Not really. No vitamin solution could replace calories. “I’d have no idea how much to inject.” Vitamin B deficiency—what were the signs of that? She couldn’t recall. It wasn’t scurvy or rickets—those were C and D deficiencies. She wondered if the solution was edible. One drop in everyone’s food? If she were going to experiment with such things, it should be on herself first. It wasn’t fair to ask others to be her guinea pigs.
The impossibility of faking the doctor role momentarily overwhelmed her. What the hell was she doing here, trying to pretend to be something she was not?
The vitamins had started her thinking of food again. She said, “If you’re running out of food, how can you feed the two of us?”
“It’s not that bad yet. We’ll find a way,” said Kathy, her tone soothing. “For my part, it’s worth giving up a plate of food every month to have medical care for all of us.”
“How many of you are there?” asked Coral.
Martin said, “We’d rather not say—not yet. Not until you meet with our leader.”
“Okay,” said Coral. “I understand. But tell me if I’m taking too much or not enough here, would you?”
Kathy said, “It’s not too much, I assure you. Nothing would be too much.”
So there were a number of them. More than the cult. Harder to get away from. A hundred? A thousand? How the hell could you manage to feed a thousand people for over six months? You couldn’t. This was a world in which a small band—or two people—had a better chance of surviving than a large group.
A plastic crate that had been fused to the concrete held more glass bottles. They clanked together as she pulled out one after another. Only the labels on the center two were readable. Biomycin. Twelve bottles in all. Her heart lifted. “I think this is an antibiotic.”
“Really?”
She read aloud from the label. “Not for human use.”
Benjamin said, “Do you think that’s true? Or important?”
“I think that in our current state, it’d be worth the risk to try it anyway. It could be that it isn’t manufactured to the same standards of purity as human antibiotics.” She finished reading the label. “It’s IM—intramuscular, injected. It’s important to find a syringe. Even if only one survived, I could reuse it, many times.”
They all went through the rest of the barn, and it was Kathy who found one thing that wasn’t exactly a syringe but might be adapted. There were fittings that had melted, but the central cylinder was intact. Coral thought it might be made of nylon, which seemed to survive the heat better than most plastics. It had once been clear and had turned cloudy in the heat, was all. It didn’t have a needle attached but a thick metal tube that ended in a bulb, though the bulb was made of rubber and flaked away as she examined it.
Martin said, “I think that’s for giving them stuff by mouth. You know, like liquid vitamins or drugs.”
She looked up at him. “Did you grow up on a ranch?”
“No, but an uncle of mine lived on one. That was when I was a kid, and I went there a couple of summers. I don’t remember much, though, and I might not be remembering right. Sorry.”
“I think we can use this for our syringe. If we find some rubber, or cork, or some way to attach those needles to it, I could possibly give people shots. Do you guys have any alcohol back—back wherever you live? Either rubbing alcohol or booze. For a disinfectant, so this can be reused?”
“A little,” said Kathy. “It’s all in the clinic, under lock and key.”
“Good,” said Coral.
“We talked once about distilling more from table scraps, but no one organized it. And now there aren’t table scraps.”
Too bad they hadn’t managed their resources better. She could make this work anyway, figure out how to rig this thing out for human shots. Then the lidocaine and animal antibiotics could be used in emergencies. It’d have to be a life-threatening situation for her to use them, a last ditch effort to keep someone alive.
She had a weird flash, a surrealistic moment, picturing what she was thinking of doing. It was like playing doctor with a toy stethoscope, but for real, and for keeps. She didn’t know these people, she didn’t like these people, she didn’t owe them one damned thing. But something inside her was saying,
loudly
, “First, do no harm.” She believed in the concept. Let her not do any harm—at least not to people not trying to do her any. But attack her and Benjamin, and her ethics changed.
After an hour of picking through the items arrayed on the floor, she was done culling the useful bits. She stood, stretched, and heard her knee joints pop. She rubbed some warmth back into them, did a couple of squats to limber up, and said, “Let’s get this stuff into the sacks, okay? Benjamin?”
“Will do,” he said, and he started to transfer what she’d picked out as useful from the galvanized tub to the burlap sacks. “What about all these glass bottles? We can’t toss them in together.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We need something to pack around them.”
“You know,” said Kathy, “we might find something at the house.”
“There’s a house?” Coral asked, looking around.
“A basement, at least,” said Kathy. “We already checked it for food, but it might have something we passed over as trash that we can use to cushion these supplies with.”
“I’ll go look,” said Martin.
“I’ll go with you,” said Benjamin. Kathy had knelt to help him pack the bag and he stood and left her to that task.
Coral didn’t want him to leave, not even for a minute, but he had been leaving her sight while she fished the past few days. Biting her lip, she watched him go.
“You must be really in love,” said Kathy.
“What?” She turned back to the other woman.
“It’s the way you look at him.” She sounded wistful.
“Ah,” said Coral. That look was terror at losing him, not romance. “Yeah,” is what she said. “He’s my world, pretty much. I’ve lost so much. I don’t want to lose him.”
“That’s nice,” said Kathy, “to have someone like that.”
It was true she didn’t want to lose Benjamin, and if the rest was a lie, it was a necessary one. Still, a twinge of guilt bothered her, a hangover from the way she had been raised.
It’s the new morality, not the old
, she reminded herself.
If a lie keeps you alive, tell it. Tell it a thousand times if it’s working.
The men returned with painter’s tarps, scorched and dry, but better than nothing. Kathy took out Coral’s knife and cut them into strips. The four of them wrapped all the glass bottles carefully in the tarp strips, and when the burlap sacks were loaded with the wrapped bottles, they were full to the top.
“Where will our stuff fit now?” asked Coral.
“We always come out hunting for supplies with room in our packs” said Martin. “And then we eat part of what’s in there and empty them more before we turn for home. We’ll redistribute this stuff back at the camp.”
They spent the rest of the day hunting in the area for more supplies, and for more burned-out outbuildings, and then for neighboring homes, but they found nothing. The snow was so deep by this point, there was no easy way to find home sites. Mailboxes no longer marked properties. Even a rail line would be hard to pick out now, under all the snow.
They hiked back to the camp in plenty of time to light a fire. The other two men rejoined them, and soon the strangers were playfully arguing over MRE choices. Coral said, “We’re fine with whatever you guys don’t want.” She hoped they were being included in the plan to share out the food.
After an awkward silence had passed, Martin said, “Buzzkill.”
“Sorry,” Coral said. She wasn’t sorry, really, but she remembered that was the right sort of thing to say to people.
“How’s spinach pasta?” said Martin, holding up a plastic bag.
“Sounds—” she started, and stopped herself. She was going to say, “Sounds like the last spinach pasta I’ll probably ever eat,” but that was the wrong thing to say to this group, too. They were steeped in normalcy. They might be running low on food, but they were nowhere near as hungry as she’d been. She revised her answer. “Sounds very healthy,” she said and tried to give them all a friendly smile.
But she was out of practice at that, too.