Poison Coast

Chapter 1: The Dead Shore

The Pacific had turned the color of pewter.

Not the silver-blue pewter of old jewelry, but the dull, oxidized kind—flat and lifeless, the surface broken only by weak swells that barely had the energy to collapse against the shore. Five years of fallout had done that. Five years of isotopes settling through the water column, of contaminated rivers feeding the ocean their slow poison. The kelp forests that once swayed in emerald curtains beneath the surface were gone. The tide pools that had teemed with anemones and hermit crabs were scoured clean, their basins filled with gray silt.

Anya Trager walked the shoreline with her boots crunching on ash-crusted sand, her pack riding high on her shoulders, her eyes scanning the terrain the way they always did—methodically, sector by sector, the way the Forest Service had trained her a lifetime ago. Left to right, near to far, ground to horizon. She didn't think about the scanning anymore. It was reflex, like breathing, like the way her hand drifted to the hatchet on her belt whenever she heard a sound she couldn't immediately identify.

She was thirty-four years old. She looked older. Everyone did now, the ones who were left. The sun hit differently through the thinned atmosphere, and the stress of perpetual survival carved lines into faces the way water carved canyons—slowly, then all at once. Her dark hair was hacked short at the jawline, practical and uneven, and her skin had the weathered bronze of someone who lived entirely outdoors. She was lean in a way that had nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with caloric deficit.

The coastal village appeared around a headland—or what was left of it. A dozen structures, most of them collapsed. The ones still standing had lost their roofs to the firestorms that had swept through in the first year, when the thermal pulses from the nearest detonation—Portland, sixty miles inland—had ignited everything that could burn. Now the buildings were just shells, their window frames empty, their interiors gutted and colonized by gray mold.

Anya paused at the edge of the village and listened. This was ritual. You always stopped. You always listened. You catalogued the sounds: wind through broken structures (present), surf against rock (present), birdsong (absent—always absent on the coast now), human activity (absent). Only when she was satisfied did she move forward.

She'd been through villages like this dozens of times. They were picked clean, usually. Anything useful—canned food, medical supplies, tools, clothing, batteries—had been scavenged in the first two years. But sometimes you found things in the walls. People had hidden supplies in wall cavities and crawl spaces, and not all of them had lived long enough to retrieve what they'd stashed. Anya had found a sealed jar of peanut butter inside a wall in Astoria four months ago, and she still thought about it with something close to reverence.

She worked through the first three buildings systematically, prying open cabinets, checking behind drywall, testing floorboards for hollows. Nothing. The fourth building had been a small grocery store, its shelves bare, its coolers rusted open and empty. She was about to leave when she heard it.

A sound. Rhythmic. Faint.

She froze with one hand on the door frame, her head tilted, her breathing shallow. The sound was coming from the waterfront, maybe two hundred yards away. It was a tapping—metal on metal, irregular but repeating, as if someone were striking the same surface over and over in a pattern that was almost, but not quite, random.

Her hand found the hatchet. She eased out of the grocery store and moved along the back of the buildings, staying low, using the structures as cover. At the edge of the village, the land dropped away to a rocky beach, and there, canted at a thirty-degree angle on the rocks, was a fishing trawler.

It was a commercial vessel, maybe sixty feet, its hull streaked with rust and crusted with dead barnacles. The wheelhouse windows were shattered. The name on the stern was half-obscured by grime, but she could make out the letters: NORA'S—something. NORA'S PROMISE, maybe, or NORA'S PRIDE. It didn't matter. What mattered was the sound, which was coming from inside the hull.

Anya circled the trawler at a distance, studying it from multiple angles. No movement visible through the broken windows. No gear on the deck that suggested recent occupation. But the sound continued—tap, tap, tap-tap, tap—and now she could hear something else beneath it. A whimper. High-pitched. Small.

She climbed the rocks to the hull and found a gap where a section of plating had been peeled back, either by impact or by someone with tools. She crouched at the opening and let her eyes adjust to the darkness inside.

The smell hit her first. Urine. Rot. The sour, ketotic smell of a body consuming itself.

Then she saw him.

A boy. Small—impossibly small, it seemed, curled in the corner of what had been the trawler's fish hold. He was wrapped in a filthy blanket, and in one hand he held a rusted bolt, which he was tapping against a pipe fitting in the wall. Tap, tap, tap-tap, tap. His eyes were enormous in his wasted face, and when they found Anya's shape in the gap, the tapping stopped and his whole body went rigid.

He didn't scream. He didn't speak. He just stared at her with an expression that Anya recognized from the early days of the aftermath, when she'd seen it on the faces of people in the refugee columns—an expression beyond fear, beyond despair, existing in some territory of the mind where language had ceased to function.

Anya held very still.

"Hey," she said. Her voice was rough from disuse. She hadn't spoken aloud in—how long? Weeks, at least. "Hey. I'm not going to hurt you."

The boy didn't move. His fingers were still wrapped around the bolt, knuckles white.

Anya lowered herself slowly to a sitting position outside the gap, making herself smaller, less threatening. She shrugged off her pack and opened the top flap, moving deliberately so the boy could see every motion. She pulled out a strip of dried kelp—one of her precious few remaining pieces—and held it out toward the gap.

"You hungry?"

Nothing. Then the smallest possible nod.

Anya placed the kelp on the metal lip of the gap and withdrew her hand. She waited. A full minute passed. Then the boy uncoiled from his corner with a movement that was more animal than human—a scuttle, low and quick—and snatched the kelp. He retreated to his corner and ate it in three bites, barely chewing, his throat working convulsively.

Anya watched him eat and felt something shift in her chest, a tectonic movement in a landscape she'd thought was permanently frozen.

No, she told herself. No.

She'd made the vow fourteen months ago, kneeling in a ditch beside a logging road, holding the hand of a woman named Petra—no, not Petra, she corrected herself, her name had been different, her name had been—

Daniela. Her name had been Daniela.

Daniela, who had been forty-one and funny and resourceful and who had taught Anya to play chess using pebbles on a scratched grid, and who had started losing her hair in clumps three weeks before the end, and whose gums had bled black, and who had looked up at Anya from the ditch with eyes that were already filming over and said, "Don't stay. Keep moving."

Anya had kept moving. And she had made the vow: no more. No more attachments. No more learning someone's name, their habits, the sound of their laugh, only to watch them die in a ditch or a ruin or a field. The world was a machine for taking things away, and the only defense was to stop giving it ammunition.

The boy finished the kelp and looked at her. His lips moved, but no sound came out.

"More?" Anya asked.

He nodded.

She gave him another strip, and this time he ate more slowly, his jaw working mechanically, his eyes never leaving her face. He was eight, she guessed. Maybe seven. It was hard to tell with malnourishment—it stunted growth, made children look simultaneously older and younger than they were. His hair was matted and dark. His skin was pale beneath the grime, with a grayish undertone that worried her.

"What's your name?" she asked.

Nothing. Just those enormous eyes.

"I'm Anya," she said. "I'm not going to hurt you. Can you tell me your name?"

The boy's mouth opened, closed, opened again. A sound emerged—not a word, just a breath with shape to it, a ghost of speech.

"That's okay," Anya said. "You don't have to talk. Are you hurt? Can you show me if you're hurt?"

The boy pulled the blanket tighter around himself and shook his head.

"Are you alone? Is there anyone else here?"

A long pause. Then another head shake, this one slower, weighted with something Anya couldn't name.

"Okay," Anya said. "Okay."

She sat outside the gap for another twenty minutes, talking softly about nothing—the weather, the tide, the way the clouds looked—just letting the boy hear a human voice that wasn't threatening him. Eventually his grip on the bolt loosened, and his eyelids began to droop, and his head tilted against the pipe fitting, and he slept.

Anya looked at him sleeping and thought: I'll find someone. There are settlements south of here. Someone will take him. A week, maybe less. I'll get him fed and walking, and then I'll find someone.

She climbed into the trawler through the gap, moving as quietly as she knew how, which was very quietly indeed. She unrolled her sleeping pad near the boy but not too near, and she draped her own thermal blanket over him—the good one, the reflective one that actually held heat—and she lay down on the cold metal deck and stared at the rusted ceiling and listened to the boy's breathing and the distant, exhausted sound of the ocean.

A week, she told herself. That's all.

She closed her eyes and did not sleep for a long time.