Shadows Have Gone (28 page)

“Why?”

“I’ll see it. We were trained to look for things like that. Most people wouldn’t notice it, but I will. And I’ll be able to tell how fresh it is. I can follow your trail this way. It’s almost like leaving a message in invisible ink.”

She zig-zagged through the woods, cutting notches, trying to cover a wide path where he might see one of them but keeping an eye on the position of the stars as she walked. Due south. Toward home. It wouldn’t be long, she told herself. Maybe tomorrow evening. She was bad at estimating distances, but surely she’d be able to cover it in a day. No more than twenty-four hours, certainly.

And hopefully she’d intercept Justin before he walked into their trap. She told herself he was too smart for that. He would see this one coming a mile away. He’d know why they had taken her, and he’d know . . . he’d expect her to escape, right? He’d be looking for these signs, and she would be able to find him before—

The first thing she needed to do was determine her direction. She spun in a slow circle, looking up at the night sky until she located the Big Dipper and followed the star at the tip of the cup straight up to find Polaris, the North Star.

“Right there. Do you see it?” Justin pointed. “It’s the bright star at the end of the Little Dipper. That’s the Pole Star. It’s always located north. More or less, anyway—a few degrees off, here and there. But if you head toward it, it will always point you roughly north and you can orient yourself that way, with the east on your right and the west on your left.”

Carly’s attention was fixed on the sky above, and so she didn’t notice the obstacle at her feet. She tripped and went sprawling in the dried leaves on the ground. Sam was instantly at her side, bumping her with his nose, urging her to get up again.

“I’m okay,” she told him. She braced her hands on the ground and that’s when she saw what she had tripped over—a leg bone, still clad in tattered jeans.

She let out a short cry of horror before she could stop herself and scrambled back. The leg was attached to a desiccated body lying at the base of a tree. Scraps of skin and hair still clung to the skull peeking from leaves.

Carly couldn’t know if this person was a victim of the Infection, or the horrors that had occurred in the aftermath. It could have been a traveler who fell afoul of the predators who had roamed this area.

Just a body, wearing jeans and the remains of a pink sweater. One of the nameless millions who had died since that spring two years ago.

Carly pressed a hand over her mouth and forced herself to take deep breaths to calm her racing heart. Just a body. She had seen many of those. But after everything she’d been though tonight, it threatened to shatter her composure and let loose all of those emotions she kept telling herself she’d deal with later.

Despite the deep breaths, she felt her breath hitching and her hands tremble. She buried her face in them for a moment.

“Okay, it’s awful, but I’m still here,” Carly whispered. She said it again and felt a little stronger.

She whispered it a few more times and let her mind drift back into the memory of that night Justin had shown her how to find her way by the stars.

Carly was sitting on a little stone ledge at the end of a bridge. She leaned back, bracing herself on her hands, and stared at the sky, memorizing the pattern. “Afraid I’ll get lost?” she asked.

He shrugged. “You never know. We could get separated, or you could get turned around and not be able to find your way back to camp in the dark.”

“Turned around?” she repeated with a grin. She loved to tease him about his Midwestern way of phrasing things, which struck her as quaint, on occasion.

He nodded. And then he thrust his arms out and sang it loudly. “
Turn around
 . . .”

“Oh no! No more eighties love ballads.”

“
Turn around
,” he sang again, throwing his head back as he belted it out.

“Stop!” Carly cried, but she was laughing so hard she could barely get the words out.

Justin threw himself into the song with gusto, bellowing it out into the stillness of the woods around them. The nearby crickets stopped chirping, transfixed by horror, no doubt. The louder and more animated he got, the harder Carly laughed, until tears streamed down her cheeks and she had to clutch her sides.

But then she lost her balance because she had rocked backward, and she tumbled off the ledge with a startled cry. She thudded down to the sloping bank below and rolled down the short incline to land with an awkward splash in the cold water of the creek.

“Carly!” Justin shouted, and he ran after her, sliding down the bank and almost landing in the water himself. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She spit water out and tried to push herself up, but her hand punched through the surface into a cold, pulpy, squishy—

Carly screamed and recoiled, jerking her hand back, out of the abdomen of the corpse lying beside her, its head tilted back, empty eye sockets staring up into the moonlight. Green and putrid, it had blended in with the foliage. Carly screamed again in horror and disgust as Justin pulled her up the bank. Her hand was covered in—

Oh God.

She rolled over onto her side and vomited. And then she cried, great heaving sobs that shook her whole body.

“Shh. Shh.” Justin rocked her, but Carly writhed out of his arms, trying to wipe her hand on the grass, frantic to rid it of the feeling and the smell. She gagged between sobs.

“I’ve got you, Carly. I’ve got you.” Justin pulled her tight against his body, holding her immobile. “Look at me. Carly, look at me.” He kept repeating it until her frantic, horror-blinded eyes met his. “Look at me, honey.”

Her gaze caught on his, and she froze. His eyes, as dark as obsidian. How could such a hard color be so soft? Her breath hitched, but not from her crying.

“Keep looking at me, bright eyes. Nothing matters right now except for you and me.” His lips were only an inch or so from hers, and she felt his warm breath against her cheek. His voice rumbled in their closely pressed chests. “It’s all right, Carly. I’ve got you. I’ve got you, and I won’t ever let you go.”

His eyes were so warm, so kind, so gentle. She was transfixed by them. She felt her heartbeat accelerate, and as close as they were, he had to feel it. He brushed a lock of her hair back from her temple. “I’ve got you.”

Yes, you do
, she thought. She wanted to snuggle against him, but he drew away and helped her to her feet. He led her upstream to a little pool of water, cool and serene in the moonlight. Carly plunged in her arm and scrubbed it with sand until Justin returned from the camp with a bar of soap, and when that still didn’t make her feel clean, despite the vigorous scrubbing, Carly stripped down and plunged into the waist-deep pool, sinking into it, and scrubbed herself all over, until her skin was pink.

She rose from the water, somewhat more coherent. Justin wasn’t nearby. She felt herself flush as she realized she had stripped down right in front of him without a thought. Justin had left her alone, but she knew he would be nearby, protecting her, even as he gave her privacy.

He had piled a few towels and some clean clothes for her on a dry rock by the bank. She dressed but left her wet hair wrapped in one of the towels as she headed back to where he was waiting for her at their camp. He had a fire going and had made a pot of coffee, for which she was very grateful. Carly was shivering, though it wasn’t from the cold bath in the pool.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She took the cup from him and sipped. Even the rich aroma was comforting.

He scooted his chair close to hers and put an arm around her shoulders. “Why are you sorry?”

“Because I’m such . . . I’m so weak. I shouldn’t have freaked out like that.” Carly stared down into the cup. She must have seemed almost comical to him, shrieking and waving her arms like that. Going into hysterics until he had to use his own body like a straightjacket.

“Carly, I don’t hold that against you. I think most people would have had a similar reaction to what just happened.”

“Not you, though,” she said. “Bodies don’t seem to bother you.”

“Not as much,” he replied.

“Why is that? Have you . . . have you seen a lot of them? Bodies, I mean.”

“I was in a war zone. You see a lot of bodies. You see a lot of horrible things, some things worse than death.”

“What’s worse than death?” Her mind flashed back to that green and gray corpse rotting into the river bank, and she couldn’t think of a more awful sight.

“Sometimes it’s living with the things you’ve seen.” Justin shook his head. “Come here.”

He unwound the towel from her head and shook her hair free. He rummaged in her bag until he found her hair bush and sat down behind her. She felt his fingers brush the back of her neck as he gathered her hair into one hand. He carefully worked out the tangles in the ends before he started at the crown of her head ran the brush through her hair in slow, long, soothing strokes. Carly closed her eyes and felt her stiff muscles slowly begin to melt with relaxation as the sensation lulled her. He brushed her hair until it dried, running the soft waves through his hands.

“You want me to braid it for you?” he asked, and his voice was a little gruffer than usual.

“You can braid?”

He laughed. “Among my many talents, yes.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

He wove her hair into a smooth, snug braid and then used one of her diminishing store of hair ties to fasten the bottom. She tugged it over her shoulder to admire it. “Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

“Justin, how do you live with the things you see? Every time I let my mind drift, it returns to that woman’s body down there.”

“Carly, I don’t know how to answer that. Not for you. Only what I did. I just . . . accepted it. Accepted the horror of it. Accepted what I had to do. Part of the struggle is in refusing to accept there can be such awful things in the world. Well, there are. Just when you think you’ve seen the worst, the world proves you wrong. Once you’re able to get past that, you can stare it in the face and say, Okay, this is awful, but I’m still here. And I’m strong enough to move on
.
You are, too, even if you don’t know it yet.”

“Okay, it’s awful, but I’m still here,” she said aloud. It was a mantra for everything that had happened in the last two years. A horrifying reality she had to look at and not flinch away from. A horrifying reality that couldn’t break her down, because she was still here, still fighting.

She had faced far worse than Lewis, and by God, she wouldn’t let him defeat her either.

Carly glanced at the nameless body again, then she straightened her shoulders and moved on.

Carly sighted her way from tree to tree to make sure she traveled in a straight line. Sam trotted beside her in lupine predator mode, his head hung low as he sniffed the ground, pausing occasionally to toss his head back and catch the scents on the breeze. He stepped in front of Carly and stopped, his hair bristling. He didn’t growl, but his posture was enough to tell her he had spotted something.

Carly crouched low and made her way through the underbrush. The brush became weeds and gravel as they came closer to the edge of the road.

A man dressed in fatigues sat there, his hands behind his back, apparently bound to the guardrail. Carly’s suspicions shot up like blazing fireworks. Was this some sort of trap they’d set up, knowing her compassion for people in trouble? But if that was the case, why would they dress him in fatigues? Why not dress him as a traveler or put one of the female troops out there? It made no sense.

But then again, nothing about this whole situation made sense.

She stood and stepped out onto the crumbling blacktop, Sam beside her. He gazed at the man curiously, his head tilted to the side. Carly took a few cautious steps forward, her hand on the scissors in her pocket.

“Hey!” the man called as soon as he spotted her. “Hey, lady! Help me, please!”

He was a young fellow, barely out of his teens by her estimation, with some wispy stubble above his lip that was trying to be a mustache. A bottle of water with a straw in it sat helpfully on a box within reach of his outstretched neck. Carly smiled at the sight, because she could think of only one person who would do something like that.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

He rubbed his sweaty cheek against his shoulder. “Lady, it’s been a hell of a night, so if you could just untie me, I’d appreciate it.”

“Maybe. Depends on your story.”

“First, I get carjacked by this dude in black. Came out of nowhere as I was slowing down to make a turn. Yanked the door open and pulled me out. Before I knew it, I was face down on the pavement and he had me tied up. He took all my stuff out of the jeep and piled it up here, beside me.”

“What did the guy look like?”

“I didn’t see too much of him, really. Black eyes, dark hair.”

“Did he have a gold ring with a strange symbol?”