Read Online Gray (Book 3) by Lou Cadle - Free Book Online

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.

Chapter 7
     
    The next day after another MRE breakfast, they left the area. For her and Benjamin, the morning meal had been chicken a la king, crackers, stale fruitcake for dessert, with a piece of gum so dry and hard that she could have used it to tip an arrow. They marched northwest with the four strangers. For once, Coral was certain of her direction, for Doug had a compass that he kept consulting.
    When she asked Kathy about the compass, the other woman said, “It’s our only one. We pass it between groups.”
    Coral knew better than to ask for more information about their supplies yet, or their organization, but the woman’s brief explanation must mean that they had three or more groups of explorers, going out to hunt for food and useful equipment. They would have begun nearer home and cleaned out everything within a day’s hike before ranging out farther. How far they walked back to their home would give her a hint of how desperate they were for food.
    As the day wore on, she grew weary. It wasn’t only the chronic hunger, it was reluctance to be embroiled in another bad situation—to be trapped and powerless—that made her legs unwilling