Gray (Book 2) Read Online Free

least.” He took off the daypack and unloaded the wood.
    “Great. I have water clearing.”
    “We’ll have rabbit stew.”
    “We can add a couple of mystery veggie cans to it.”
    “Sounds good.
    “I’ll get the fire started.”
    In a half-hour, she had a small fire going and decanted clear water into the biggest pot they carried, added a pinch of the dwindling supply of salt and opened another can with no label. It was peaches, so she set it aside to have as dessert and tried a second can—peas and pearl onions, much better for stew. She stuck her finger in the icy liquid and tasted it. It had salt, better still. The liquid from the can she poured in the pot, along with most of the onions. She’d add the rest of the veggies when the rabbit had cooked partly through. She had at least an hour until that happened, she thought. Maybe two.
    It was a good thing her grandmother was into cooking from scratch. Coral had learned enough from her to manage the survival cooking. She knew people at school who thought all food came from plastic trays or drive-through bags.
    When Benjamin was done cleaning up, he asked for her pocket knife. “To sharpen.”
    He sat down to hone all the knives and the hatchet, too. She returned to fishing, using the gut bait, and was rewarded soon with a bass. Not a tiny one, either—it was three inches longer than her hand. She stuck it on a stringer, jammed that into the ground, and put more bait on her hook. It took a half-hour, but she caught a second fish, nearly as big. She hadn’t seen fish this big in a long while, since before The Event.
    She retrieved her sharpened pocketknife from Benjamin, cleaned both the fish quickly, and set them both by the coals to cook. It’d be great to eat cooked fish rather than raw tomorrow. It’d freeze equally well raw or cooked. She stirred the rabbit stew, decided the meat needed another half hour, and returned to fishing. As she was ready to quit for the day, a third fish struck her line, but it was clever and unhooked itself with a twist and a splash.
    The sound was loud enough to attract Benjamin’s attention. “Feast or famine,” he said. “And I’m done with the sharpening.”
    She tested the edge of the big knife she’d taken from Walmart. Dangerously sharp—she’d have to remember that. “Thanks,” she said, still feeling regret for the lost fish—but not the despair she would have felt over it just a week ago, but a smaller twinge. They had fresh food for the day, some canned food left, and a promise of more fish to come. She said to Benjamin, “I buried the fish heads with the rabbit heart in the snow. We can have those tomorrow as soup.”
    “If I can find more fuel.”
    “At least fish is edible raw. Though I’d rather have them cooked.”
    “I think I should take an overnight trip up north, see if there are more rabbits.”
    “We can go together.”
    “No. You’re catching fish here now. Stick with it.”
    “True, but it’ll still be here in a couple days, and they might be biting better elsewhere.”
    He thought it over. “Okay. Give me tomorrow to check things out on my own, find the ideal spot for the next camp, make sure there are no human tracks up that direction.” He unconsciously drew his hand over his sore ribs.
    She wished he were healing faster, but she supposed the chronic undereating would make all their injuries heal slowly. Their bodies had eaten through all their fat stores and, for every day they had insufficient calories, they would be breaking down bones and organs and healthy muscle to keep them alive. Injuries were only going to be more and more stressful.
    “As least we aren’t going to be catching head colds or the flu this winter,” she said.
    “What?”
    “I was thinking. It’s a silver lining in the cloud of all this death. Diseases will have a hard time staying alive. Not enough hosts to move them along.”
    “Huh,” he said.
    The rabbit stew turned out great. The onions from the can