Gray (Book 2) by Lou Cadle Page B

the next ridge, they were too exhausted to do any more that day. They set up camp early and hunted for fuel for a fire. That night, they finished the soup.
    The next morning, they woke to no new snow. Skies were still gray with ash, but they agreed it might be a bit clearer than it had been a month ago—or maybe he was humoring her when he agreed. Benjamin left her and the sled in the overhang of a cliff while he searched for signs of game, promising to come back by midday. Unwilling to wait uselessly, Coral unpacked her bow and arrows and headed the opposite direction, stopping every so often to make sure that she could still see her own footprints. They would guide her back to the sled.
    She recited to herself everything Benjamin had taught her about hunting. The first problem was to find any sign of an animal, few of which had survived the fire, the long heat, or the weeks since without green stuff to eat. Hunting, he had told her, was a game of patience. You walked quietly when you had to move, you stayed relaxed but alert, and you stood still until fate granted you your rare chance at a shot. When it did, you tried not to mess it up.
    No sign of animals showed in the snow around her, neither track nor scat. She decided to turn back at a large boulder she could see up ahead. But when she reached it, she spied, filled in part way with a dusting of snow, tracks.
    Human tracks. And not hers or Benjamin’s.

Chapter 6
    The snow softening the edges of the tracks told her it had been at least a day since someone had walked here. Yet she remained quiet for a long time, straining to listen for voices or movement. She heard nothing.
    As she looked more closely at the prints, she realized that she was seeing more than one set. And one of them was small—a very small woman’s or a child’s, and she thought the latter.
    So not the military guys. And they were so many miles distant from the train now, she couldn’t imagine that it was them anyway. If they had figured out the existence of Benjamin and Coral, and even if they had tracked them for a while, what was the point of chasing them this far? The train car of soup was theirs now. They had won, and without a fight. It made no sense to spend a week hunting her down.
    She could think of one reason they might, though. She’d die fighting before she’d let herself be used that way.
    She retraced her own steps, moving quickly but quietly and returning to the sled in a fraction of the time it had taken her to come this far. She wanted to get back to Benjamin and tell him. She debated following his tracks out, but decided against it, in case he was having luck on the hunt. They needed food as much as they needed to follow up on the signs of people. This time, she wasn’t going  scouting herself and risk having to hide without sufficient warmth again. She’d wait for him…and for the rifle.
    As the light began to dim, he returned, his lack of success written on his face.
    She waited until he was a dozen yards away to speak in a low voice. “I found tracks. People tracks.”
    He stopped. “Where? How many?”
    “Two or three, one maybe a kid’s. They’re a day old at least.” She pointed in the direction. “We should check it out. Together.”
    He looked toward her but his eyes lost focus. She could see him working it through. “It’s a risk,” he finally said.
    “And a risk to stay in the area tonight if there are others around.”
    He rubbed his beard, frosted now with a thin coating of ice. “Track them? Or go on? What do you think? Any chance at all it was the guys you saw at the train?”
    “No. I don’t know they ever discovered there was someone spying on them.” She considered their options. “You find any food?”
    “No,” he said.
    “These people might have food.”
    His eyebrow twitched. “Which they would defend. Or they might see us as food.”
    “I’d be damned stringy at this point,” she said.
    “I’d take a stringy buck right now. Food