Gray (Book 2) by Lou Cadle Page A

car was balanced on a point no bigger round than her fist. Coral split her attention between the challenge of braking the sled on the slope so it didn’t run over Benjamin, and keeping her eye on the precarious stone pillar as she passed it, hoping that the weight of snow would not send it tumbling onto both of them.
    They clambered over a crest in the rocks and camped on a narrow ledge eight feet below it. The next day, climbing on down, they found themselves in a deep ravine, hunting for the creek they hoped would be here.
    “I hope this isn’t a box canyon,” said Benjamin. He was at the front of the sled and in harness. He insisted on taking more than his share of time in harness now that his ribs were healed.
    “Maybe we should leave the supplies right here and hunt for water on foot,” she said. Her arms were bruised from wrestling the sled around the rocks, and every muscle burned. She could do without fighting the sled’s weight for a time.
    But Benjamin shook his head. “This is a deceptive landscape,” he said, “and there’s a chance of avalanche. We’d be in real trouble if the sled got buried while we were away from it. I don’t think we should move far away from it—or from each other.”
    So it’d be better if the two of them were buried along with the sled? She kept herself from saying that aloud, knowing her exhaustion was making her short-tempered. “I’m done in,” she confessed. “I don’t know how long I can work like this on so little food.”
    “Then we’d better move now, rather than in two days, when the soup runs out and we have no energy left at all.” He faced forward and began pulling again.
    Within moments, they were hauling the sled by force over another jagged patch of rock. When they were done, they both sat, catching their breath. Coral glared at the sled and, for a moment, hated the thing. “Maybe we should have stayed at the house, took our chances there,” she said. “Or found a place in American Falls. Or surrendered to the Army.”
    “Maybe we should have. But we didn’t, and this is where we are now.”
    “But—”
    “Don’t. I hate that.”
    “Hate what?”
    “That should-have, could-have, would-have shit. If only I would have done that other thing, then life would have turned out like this, whine whine whine. I played poker for a while with a guy who talked like that, would count a dozen cards backwards after a hand was over, ask for the deck, look at the next five cards, then he’d announce, ‘if you two would have dropped out and I would have stayed and drawn to the inside straight, then I would have won.’ It was all I could do not to smack him. What a bunch of bullshit.”
    She stood again, trying not to feel hurt by his words, and prepared to push the sled. She looked up, only to see him watching her, making no effort to move on. She waited, knowing more was coming.
    “Listen,” he said, his voice gentler now. “I try to think of it this way. There is no past. There is no future. There is only this moment. It doesn’t matter how we got to this moment. We’re here now. We’ve made the best decisions we could, and we made them together. Now we deal with today, and with whatever shit today brings us, the best we can.”
    The words made her feel no better, but she knew she had to stop dumping her worries and regrets on him. He was just as tired and hungry as she, and pulling more than his share. She had to quit speaking her every thought aloud. She had learned a lot from Benjamin over the past few months. It wouldn’t hurt her to learn how to shut up more often from him, too.
    Back in the old world, she had learned that venting emotions was a good thing. Maybe, but even if it had been true back then, things were different now. It did no good to natter on about hunger or exhaustion. It just made her notice them more.
    It took them nearly a full day to climb back out of the canyon, without finding a source of water, and when they were up to