Gray (Book 1) by Cadle Lou

Author:Cadle, Lou [Cadle, Lou]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic
Publisher: Cadle-Sparks Books
Published: 2015-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

It was more like four days before Benjamin could move around again without wincing. Coral spent the mornings fishing and the afternoons digging through the burned out barn, looking for bits of tools and hardware. Each morning at the stream yielded fewer fish. Was she fishing out the stream that quickly, were they getting wise to her, or was something else going on, some weather or biological issue, killing more fish? She might go back to Mill Creek and try that river again.

Another reason for worry was the weather. Every morning it was cooler. Frost began to appear, and with the ash filtering the sunlight, it took hours to burn off. Inside at night, her bedroom was growing colder, too, and climbing out from under the blanket every morning took a real act of will. She had washed out her sleeping bag in the stream, and when it had fully dried—it was taking forever—she’d pile it over her, too. Each day warmed slightly, but even at the peak of sunlight, the air was still autumn-crisp.

And it was early July. They had both lost track of the date, but they agreed on that.

With little else to do at the house but check on a grumpy Benjamin, one evening Coral kept the lantern on and went through her back pack and reorganized. When she saw the pamphlet on survival skills, she pulled it out and read it through, paying close attention to the hunting section. If the fish stopped biting, she needed a second way to get food.

She thought she might be able to manage to build bird snares—but there wasn’t anything like grass or young willow to make a snare out of any more, and no birds to catch even if she had a snare. She also thought she could make a fishing spear from the directions, but since she had her rod and reel, that would be redundant. Pit traps looked like hard work but within her range of abilities, should game ever become plentiful again. Making a bow and arrows looked far more difficult. Not that there was a lot of ash wood left to choose from, and not that she’d know an ash from a willow without leaves to tell her. But there might be some sort of wood that had survived underwater in the stream that would work.

But were there any animals left to hunt? She hadn’t seen a track or scat or heard a noise that hinted at animal life surviving The Event. Still, she thought it was a good idea to make a bow. Maybe the animals she’d need to hunt were humans, like the guy in town. Not to eat—she wasn’t ready to dwell on that possibility—but to defend herself against.

One afternoon, trying to distract Benjamin from his pain, she brought up the disaster again and asked what he thought had happened.

“It was a single event, for sure,” Benjamin said. “Odds are, a volcano wouldn’t just erupt once without warning. They would have known it was coming, or at least might come.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.