Free Gray (Book 1) by Lou Cadle

a moment.
    She was up. She forced herself onto her feet. Her fingers stung where she’d torn a couple of fingernails. Her arms felt numb, as if they had been drained of blood. Shaking them out, she stumbled forward, away from the dangerously unstable bank.
    Even though she was safe for the moment, she kept walking away until she was a couple hundred yards away from the stream, on a rock outcrop. Then she collapsed and curled into a ball, holding herself together against limbs shaking from exhaustion.
    * * *
    When she had recovered, she sat up. She couldn’t leave the stream entirely. It was her food supply and her water supply. Keeping it far on her left, she rearranged her backpack and trudged on through the rain.
    A parked car appeared in the distance. Coral hurried forward to it. The paint was gone from the car, a window was missing, but it was still potential shelter from the rain. She could use a place to sit and rest. Then a second car, facing towards the first car, appeared out of the ashen air a ways beyond the first.
    She realized she had come to a road, a well-traveled one. The two cars were on the road facing each other as if about to pass in opposite directions. They had been frozen here in time. The fire or the searing heat had stopped them—or maybe something else. Wasn’t that something that happened in a nuclear attack?
    She wondered again if she were walking in a world of fallout, if all her efforts would come to nothing when she collapsed with radiation sickness, her hair falling out, her skin covered with ulcerated sores. But she had no such sores, not even the hint of them. She felt physically fine. Except for being underfed, and tired, and lonely, and sad, she was okay.
    The road was banked slightly, falling away to either side. Some of the ash had been washed away by the rain. On the road’s surface was a layer of tiny round pebbles, covering the original road surface. She picked one up and looked at it. It was smooth, a tiny pellet. She dug down and found an asphalt road surface. There had to be tens of thousands of the pebbles spread over the road’s surface. Like the ash, but bigger. She hadn’t noticed any before. So why were they collected here? Weird.
    She crossed the swatch of pellets, approached the nearer car, and peered inside an open window. The seats were burned down to bits of metal, and ash had accumulated on the floors. No one was in there. Coral pulled her head out of the window and looked up the road.
    She began to walk along the edge of it. Something small and brown stuck out of the gray ash just ahead. Coral walked up to it, studying it. A series of bumps in graduated sizes peeped out from the ash.
    She came closer, and realized she was looking at a set of toes.

Chapter 6
    Brown, wrinkled, thin skin covered them. She bent down and begun brushing the ash away, taking care not to touch the body. Horrified, but needing to see more, she kept digging until she had revealed a human leg, obviously attached to more. This one had not been burned. There was no black on it, no blistered skin, no missing flesh.
    It was more like a mummy. Or, no, it was like one of those bodies scientists had found buried in ice or peat bogs, shriveled, the skin colored mahogany. She didn’t know what color the person had been before, but in Idaho, odds were, the skin had originally been pale. She wondered how the change had happened. Had the heat done this? Or being packed in ash?
    Add these to the hundreds of questions she had no way of answering.
    How she longed for experts to explain everything to her. A year at university and four years at a good public high school had spoiled her. Everything she wondered about had an explanation there. Courses, professors, libraries, computers could answer most of her other questions in moments. Her curiosity had been an asset in school. But now, on her own, in this bizarrely changed world, her ignorance was a weakness and her curiosity seemed to magnify that