She had to stop in less than an hour. He fed her another couple ounces of raw perch. When she had gathered her strength she was able to go on again.
Instead of the two hours he had estimated, it took more than twice that time to get back to the place where Benjamin had fished and spent the night. Their gear was in his snow cave, and he pulled out the fishing rod and handed it over. “Back to the expert,” he said.
“What’d you use to catch the perch?” she said.
“It’s still on there.”
It was a plastic minnow, the simplest of lures, silver with a hint of orange paint on its belly.
He took her to the same spot as he had used and smashed through the accumulated ice of a day with the handle of the hatchet. He left her with the fish fillet, too. “Eat some every hour or so.”
She nodded.
He turned to leave.
“Benjamin?”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
He shook his head at her, as if thanks were beside the point, and he went off to hunt for game and fuel.
Ice fishing felt different than it had been two months ago. Either the temperature had dropped significantly, or her emaciated body was worse at fighting off the chill, but she was
cold
.
Benjamin had passed from sight, and she was about to put the pole down and take a short walk to warm herself, when she felt a tickle at the line.
Something down there, some creature of the cold water, was nudging the minnow. Involuntarily, her hands tightened, and that must have twitched the lure, for it got hit,
hard.
If she had any line, it’d be singing out. As it was, she was in a fast fight for the precious length of line, the lure, and the fish. She couldn’t afford to lose any of them.
She lurched to her feet, braced herself, and pulled, hard and steady. The fish resisted for a heartbeat and then flopped out onto the ice. It tried to flop back in, and she gave a hard flick of her wrist, sending it skating six feet away from the hole.
It was a decent-sized one, over a pound. Yellow perch, its color still bright despite the ashen skies. And it was still flopping around so much, it had a chance of finding the hole again and getting away. She took out her pocket knife and thumbed out the long blade, then plunged the steel tip into its head, over its eye. It took a few seconds for the perch to understand it was dead, but finally it quit twitching.
She picked it up, worked the lure from its mouth, and kissed it right on the mouth, out of love and gratitude. She and Benjamin could live for another day.
It would barely keep them alive another few hours. Better would be to catch three this size every day. Triple that for a week to start to make up for the week without food.
There was a lot more work for her to do here. She hoped there were fifty hungry perch down there. Coral sat and got back to it.
When Benjamin returned a couple hours later, she could see he was carrying one of the duffle bags, and that something was in it. Food? Fuel? Either would be wonderful.
He dropped it at their campsite and made his way to her, taking care to walk quietly as he approached the hole in the ice. When he caught sight of the two fish she had caught by then, he nodded his approval. “Want me to clean them?”
She matched his quiet tone. “Thanks, yeah. Did you find game?”
“No, but I found charcoal. I think I might be able to find you some wood, at the water’s edge, for using your torture device.”
“Syringe,” she said dryly.
“Sure,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
She handed over her pocket knife so he could clean the fish. “Maybe I should look at your arm now.”
“Tomorrow is soon enough.”
“You’re not feverish, are you?”
He shook his head. “Hungry.”
“Start supper without me if you want.”
Without answering, he grabbed the two fish and carried them to their campsite.
At dusk she got another brief nibble, but nothing more than that. While she could still see Benjamin in the gloom, she gathered up her gear and walked over, stiff from sitting for so long and numb from the cold. He had cooked one fish over a small charcoal fire, and they ate it. Then they crawled into the snow cave and fell asleep to the familiar sound of each other’s breathing.
For four days, they stayed in place and fell back into their familiar routine. Benjamin’s arm continued to be hot and tender. It didn’t seem to get worse, but it was getting no better.
Every morning they ate raw fish, and every day while she fished, Benjamin explored. At night they lit a small fire and made soup of the bones and heads, adding fish flesh if they had extra. The second day he returned with some willow and other branches from bushes, hacked from the ice at the water’s edge. They had their soup early that night, and she defrosted the branches by the small fire. The months in the water and ice had done the wood no good. She wouldn’t know if the willow would be strong enough for arrows for several more days of drying it. And without a bow, it seemed senseless to carry it with her, though she probably would, in case fate should bring her some bow-making material. At worst, it could be used for kindling.
The hollow branches were in even worse shape than the willow. She laid them out carefully by the fire, but not too near, turning them every fifteen minutes. As they dried, they felt terribly fragile under her fingers. One crumbled the instant she picked it up.
The following day—a good fishing day, with five fish in all, four perch and a trout—she spent more time with the wood he’d found her, matching up sizes of hollow and solid wood. She thought that she might be able to form a syringe using one of the bigger hollow pieces, and then carving a willow branch to use as a plunger. If she could get a tight enough fit, she might be able to work up decent water pressure. If she got too tight a fit, she’d tear right through the more fragile hollow tube.
She’d give a lot for a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Benjamin’s arm wasn’t healing like it should. Last night, it had seemed a little hotter, a little redder. It worried her.
He took her ministrations stoically this night.
“I’m still working on the syringe, to try and clean that out.”
“Maybe you should leave it alone.”
“Maybe I should,” she said, probing at the edges again. No pus leaked out—that was good. “I might screw it up more. But there’s something in there, some little core of infected tissue, I think. If I could get that out, now that we’re getting some nutrition it should heal pretty quickly on its own.”
“If you’re so bent on cleaning it out, you could cut into it.”
“I could. I could boil my knife for a half hour and dig around in there. But I could hit a nerve. And your brachial artery is in there, too.” She scooted away.
“I like when you talk doctor-ese.”
She laughed. “I’m all talk, I’m afraid.”
He rolled his sleeve back down. “No, I’m complaining, but you’re doing good.”
“If there’s a town near here—”
“Must be. All this water, something would have sprung up around it years ago.”
“—then it’s worth digging down into anything that looks like a building. If I could find rubbing alcohol, or even booze-alcohol.”
“Or antibiotics.”
Coral puffed out a frustrated breath. “Chances of that are slim. Damn plastic bottles all melted. It’d have to be stored in a deep basement, ideally in glass. Was any pill still stored in glass in the 21st century? Even then, I’m not sure it’d be safe to take, not after all the heat.”
“Maybe we can find moldy bread. That’s penicillin, right?”
“Can mold grow in sub-zero weather?” She shook her head. “Not that I know what to do with moldy bread anyway, how to turn that into penicillin that could cure an infection.”
“Maybe a person can just eat the mold.”
“Gah,” she said, her neck glands spasming at the thought.
“I wouldn’t mind some bread, moldy or not,” he said wistfully.
“Oh now. It can’t beat fish head soup.”
“Hmm. Speaking of which, is it ready?”
“Yeah. Let’s eat before it gets too dark.”
The next day while fishing, she took all the surviving branches, both the hollow and solid ones, with her, and she spent the day fashioning a syringe, depending on a bobber to signal her about fish strikes.
Using her pocketknife, she whittled away at a short solid stem until it barely fit in the end of a hollow stem. She doused them both with near-freezing water to lubricate them, and pushed slowly. The hollow stem split. Taking it apart with care, she tried to see where the problem had developed. Water was already freezing onto the split branch. Maybe warmer water would make a difference—and she’d have to boil water before irrigating Benjamin’s wound to sterilize it anyway. She planned on the water being body temperature for the debriding.
Coral set to work on another plunger, using a larger branch this time and whittling it down to near perfect roundness before trying to make it fit. She used her drinking water, warmed against her skin, sprinkled some down the hollow, and tried to suck water from her bottle up into her homemade syringe. It started to work, and then her plunger stuck.
Darned thing was swelling from the warmer water.
She capped her bottle and shoved it back up her sweater and stared at the pile of sticks, trying to work it out. So maybe, you get it wet fifteen minutes before, let both swell, and then new water can’t make it swell any worse? But would both swell the same amount? Wouldn’t the tube get more fragile, the more saturated it was?
Damn.
She spent all day at it, experimenting, failing, but getting closer to a working device as the day wore on, feeling like some medieval inventor, trying to make a stupidly simple machine work. In fact, that’s really what she was. With the exception of a few surviving items from the technological age—like her boots, looking sadder every day—they were sliding from the jet age back to the stone age. They’d slid past medieval some time ago.
By late afternoon, she thought she had a syringe that would work—once. She figured she’d get five to ten minutes with it, and then the tube would disintegrate. Maybe it would be enough time.
Or maybe it’d drive the infection deeper and kill Benjamin.
She hated having this responsibility. When planning for a career as a doctor, she’d never really considered having life and death powers over other people. Or if she had considered it, maybe she’d even felt a thrill at the idea. Saving a life—that’s a godlike power. It had sounded great.
But losing the life of someone you cared for, and depended on, and would risk your own life to save? That was a terrible, awesome power no sane person would want. She would just as soon hand it off to someone else. Better yet, she’d rather hand it off to a well-equipped hospital and a team of eight skilled professionals.
The world was, however, what the world was. And she was as close to a doctor as Benjamin would likely ever find.
Fishing was done for the day. One fish had snatched at a lure while she devised her debriding syringe. She couldn’t claim to have caught it, exactly—it caught itself. But still, it was enough for one person’s food for one day. They had a couple extra fillets from the last two days, and some heads and bones, so they’d be okay for the next two meals.
Back at the campsite, she pulled out her makeshift pot, the doubled aluminum cake pans stolen from the cultists, now with a pair of heat-hardened willow branch handles woven through the top inch of the sides. She gathered the charcoal and kindling—all the broken reeds and branches—and lit it with her magnesium fire-starter. While she waited for water to boil, she took what water bottles they had and filled them from her fishing hole. It was almost clear water, now that the ash had fallen to the lake bottom and the ice protected the water from accumulating more every day.
When the water was at a healthy boil, she shook the pan, getting boiling water into every corner. She took out the last shirt Benjamin had worn and the bandages she’d made from one of the dead cultist’s torn shirts and poured the water over them. She filled the pan again, and when the cloth had cooled so that she could barely stand to touch it with her bare hands, wrung the hot water from the shirt and bandage. Soap would be so much better to clean them and her hands, but boiling water, poured over them a few times, would have to do.
Benjamin returned a couple hours before dusk. The bandages she had dried out near the fire, on rocks she had sterilized with more boiling water. When she saw him, she nudged the water closer to the smoldering fire.
“Operation time, huh?” he said, dumping the bag of the charcoal he’d collected that day.
“Sorry.”
“I trust you.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Shirt off, huh?”
“Not until I’ve boiled and cooled this water. Don’t want you freezing to death before I can—” She’d almost said “kill you myself,” but realized just in time this was not the time to make jokes. “Get ready,” she finished. While the water cooled, he paced along the lake’s edge. When she was ready for him, she called him over.
“Let’s get it done, then,” he said.