The Land of the Shadow (19 page)

“You folks local?” he asked before taking a large gulp.

“Traveling,” Justin said. “And your group?”

“Traveling as well,” Marcus said. He took off his cap to wipe the back of his hand over his forehead before putting it back on. “We’ve been looking for a suitable home, someplace we can settle and start our own community.”

Justin felt his eyes narrow and he forced them open again. “How many are you?”

“How many are you?” Marcus retorted.

Justin gave him a small smile.

“I get it,” Marcus said. “I can tell from your gear you’re not far from home, and you want to protect that home from a group of strangers who might not have the best of intentions, right?”

“And our intentions are in question, too, aren’t they?” Pearl asked.

Marcus’s smile was patronizing. “Could be.”

Good. He was underestimating them. Justin hoped to keep it that way.

“Here’s something I’m wondering,” Pearl said. “Where are the women? The only women I’ve seen have been—” She glanced at the door through which the Infected had passed but didn’t say the word dancing on the tip of her tongue.

“We call ’em
burn-outs
,” Marcus said, picking at a hangnail.

“Why do you have them chained together and guarded?” Pearl asked. Her face was impassive, but her voice had a sharp edge to it. Justin nudged her knee with his own, an action he doubted went unnoticed, though he tried to cover it up by shifting his position in the chair.

“So they don’t wander off,” Marcus replied. “We’d spend half of our time rounding them up again if we didn’t tie ’em together.”

“They aren’t free to leave?”

Marcus gave a small shake of his head. “They don’t have enough sense to make that choice.”

“What are you doing with them?”

“They help us. They can do simple tasks if they have careful supervision. They earn their keep just like the rest of us, and we take care of them.”

“They’re slaves.” She said it flatly, keeping her temper in check, but the words fell like bricks between them.

“And what are you doing for the ones you encounter?” Marcus asked. “Do you take them in when you pass by? Or do you leave them on their own to starve, or to wander into danger because no one is watching out for them?”

Slavery as philanthropy. After all Justin had seen in his life, nothing should surprise him, but human beings seemed to be a Marianas Trench of depravity. He thought of the women among the group of “burn-outs,” and his gorge rose as their bruised limbs and tangled hair took on a more sinister meaning. He and Carly had encountered a similar situation on their journey south, and it had been very difficult for her to turn away and do nothing.

Pearl had opened her mouth to respond, but Justin rose to his feet and she kept silent. “If you’re traveling through, I expect you’ll be moving on soon.”

Marcus stood as well. “We might yet do a bit of scouting in this region. See what’s available.”

“Not much,” Justin said. “We’ve been scouting, too, and it’s mostly cleaned out. Perhaps you’d have more luck farther south.”

Marcus grinned, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Thanks for the suggestion.” He stuck out his hand. “Until we meet again. Good luck.”

“Yeah, you, too.”

Justin and Pearl followed the main street out of town, in a different direction from whence they’d come. Justin didn’t think it would matter. Marcus would likely have someone tail them, but this direction had more hills and curves to help them lose their shadow.

Pearl had her fists and jaws clenched. She didn’t speak until they were a block or two away. Then the words burst from her as though she couldn’t hold them back.

“That’s disgusting! Jesus, Justin! I want to—”

Her words cut off as a small group of men rounded the corner from an alley only a half dozen yards away. They flanked a wagon pulled by four burn-outs, stumbling over the rough pavement, their eyes dull and blank. One of the guards carried a long stick in his hand and wore a black nylon jacket with the sleeves torn off. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Justin.

Still gaping at Justin, he shoved one of the slaves pulling the wagon, which had stopped when the rest of the group had. The man shuffled forward obediently, the others trudging along with him.

“Hello,” Justin said. “Viper, wasn’t it?”

One of his companions snorted. “
Viper
?”

“That’s the name he gave us, anyway,” Justin said.

“We just call ’im Billy.” The man behind him punched Billy in the arm and laughed. Billy’s face turned scarlet, and his eyes flashed with heat as the other man asked, “How do you two know each other?”

“I’ll let Billy explain,” Justin said. He eyed Billy’s jacket, and his fists clenched when he saw the snag near the side seam. “You’ve got a tear on the side, there.” The memory of the black nylon thread he’d pulled from the fence stung Justin like a wasp.

Billy’s shoulders jerked, but he didn’t say anything.

Rage burned in Justin’s gut, but he forced himself to consider the odds. He and Pearl were badly outnumbered at the moment and on unfamiliar turf. As much as he might want to kill the little bastard where he stood, he would have to bide his time.

“Take care.” Justin nodded to the others and set off down the road, his pace a bit quicker than before.

“Shit,” he muttered, once they were out of earshot.

“Who was he?” Pearl kept her voice low, though they couldn’t be overheard at this distance.

Justin changed their course to cut over a low hill beside the road. “He came to Colby in the spring. He had a woman with him then. Her name was Megan.” She’d been thin, with haunted eyes, he remembered. “Carly and I spent just a few hours with him, but we both knew we didn’t want him in our community. Nothing but trouble. Carly offered to let Megan stay, but she left with him.” He hadn’t agreed with Carly’s decision to offer, but he’d known Megan wouldn’t accept. She had been too afraid. An asshole he might have been, but Justin knew “Viper” was the only constant Megan had had in this fucked-up world.

As they rounded a curve, Justin looked back at the town. He wondered where Megan was now. She could be out on another work crew, but Justin didn’t think so.

“So, he knows where Colby is.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t tell her about the thread on the fence. Not yet. He had to sort this out in his own head before he said anything. And right now, he was too angry to think clearly.

“Which is why we’re now headed back to the wagon instead of trying to disguise our trail.” Pearl had to trot to keep up with Justin’s strides.

“No point.”

“Shit.” Pearl shifted her rifle from one shoulder to the other. “Batten down the hatches.”

Justin didn’t reply, but that was what he was thinking, too. There was no doubt Marcus and his group would make their way to Colby, sooner rather than later. And what his intentions would be, Justin couldn’t be sure.

He was half-tempted to leave Pearl and Kaden behind to drive the wagon home while he cut across the land on foot. He could make it back within a few hours on his own, instead of having to stop for the night when it grew too dark to safely drive Shadowfax and arriving sometime the next afternoon.

“Carly’s going to go apeshit when she hears about the slaves,” Pearl said.

Justin rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe this is a detail Carly doesn’t need to hear about.”

Pearl gave him an indignant glare. “You can’t keep something like this from her.”

“She can’t do anything about it, unless she wants us to declare all-out war against Marcus’s group. While I don’t object on general principle, I do object to anything that endangers my wife or my little girl.”

“Carly isn’t a kid you need to protect from the truth, Justin.”

“I know that. I also know she’ll agonize over something she can’t change. She’ll feel like she has to do something, and I know Carly. She wouldn’t let something like this go. She’d want to parlay, or maybe even do something as crazy as try to rescue them.”

Pearl muttered something.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“
Really
. What?”

“I said, ‘Maybe we should.’ ”

Justin rubbed the back of his neck again. “And do what, Pearl? Let them go? Leave them to wander in the wasteland?”

She stopped in her tracks. “You think Marcus was
right
?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. But he was right in one respect. We can’t claim moral superiority in leaving them to die in the desert of the apocalypse because they have nothing to contribute.”

“But they can contribute! Marcus has shown—”

“Yes, if we chain them to keep them from wandering away from a task.”

She shook her head. “There has to be a happy medium. What if—what if a baby was born in our community who had disabilities?”

“That would be different,” Justin said. “We’d always have a home for one of our own, even if they couldn’t contribute. I mean, Jesus, Pearl, we aren’t planning on throwing out people when they become elderly or ill. But I can’t ask our community to take in twenty people who can’t contribute when—”

“When
what
?”

His voice was low. “When we can barely feed the ones we have.”

She digested this in silence for a moment before starting to walk again. “That bad?”

“Yeah. Getting to that point.” As observant as she was, he was surprised she didn’t know already. “None of our projects have panned out. The chickens, the fish pond . . .” Now that the words were coming, they poured out of him in a steady stream, and he felt a strange sort of relief in releasing them. “Not even the farming, not when we’re putting more labor and calories into it than we’re getting out. Maybe with the new tractor . . . I don’t know. That’s why we came on this journey, looking for seed, for animal feed.”

“Damn,” she said, her voice soft. “I wish like hell I had a solution to offer you, Justin.”

“I do, too.” Justin gave her a brief smile.

Chapter Eight

Carly spent the afternoon harvesting hay with Stan. She was grateful for his help, though she argued he should be doing his other work. The horses were her responsibility. She didn’t feel right about making others help her. Still, when she’d gone out to the alfalfa field a few days ago with a sharpened scythe, ready to start cutting, she found it had already been cut for her. She’d stood there in the road and cried, not just because she was so grateful to her anonymous friend, but because to her it meant there were others who felt the horses weren’t a drain on the community.

They should have settled in an area where there was a large Amish community, Carly thought. Then they would have had all the horse-drawn farm equipment they could ever need. Carly had rigged up a hay rake of sorts, bending metal rods and attaching them to a central axle. Storm pulled it around the field for her, though she still wasn’t quite comfortable with a harness yet. Carly walked along beside her, soothing her as they went. The rake was a very light load, and Carly thought it was a good idea to get the filly used to work as soon as possible so she’d be prepared to pull a plow and wagon when she was older.

The rake collected the dried hay into piles, which Carly piled on a tarp and dragged to the stacks. Sam loped along beside her, and Carly envisioned making some sort of harness so he could function as a sled dog. She wondered if he’d do it and decided it was worth consideration. She tucked it away in that corner of her mind of things to do and figure out. It was a spot that was overflowing.

They didn’t have a baler, so Carly was making haystacks, using the memory of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books as her guide. She could remember seeing the Garth Williams charcoal drawings of Laura stamping down the hay in the circular pattern while Pa forked out more to her.

It was hot, miserable work, and Carly was soon soaked with sweat. At some point during the afternoon, Miz Marson sent little Madison Laker to bring Carly a homemade sports drink. She still wasn’t fond of the taste, but it made her feel better. As she drank, Madison told her how she and Veronica had a plan to move a deer stand to a tree by the swamp and fish, safe from the alligators. She and Veronica were becoming fast friends, something that made Carly happy. The kids needed some sense of normalcy, some relationships within the community. Carly wished they could have a school set up for them, but right now they needed everyone to work, gather food, wash clothing. The list went on and on.