The Land of the Shadow (22 page)

Carly grimaced. “You know, I think I’d rather not know that one. Why would he go back to the same hole when he could just cut another one?”

Grady hesitated until Carly pressed him. “It looks like he may have been watchin’ us for a while. Knows our patterns. Like I said, he came through the hole during the shift change, when everybody heads back to the Gate to report and get their orders.”

“Could he just have gotten lucky?”

“As I said, it’d be a big coincidence. There’s just about a ten-minute gap. The odds of him hitting that ten-minute window randomly . . . I just can’t see it. But don’t worry. We’ve changed it up now. Staggered it out so there’s always someone. I’m real sorry about all this.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Grady gave a humorless laugh. “We’ll have to wait and see if Justin feels the same way once he hears his wife and baby almost got roasted on my watch.”

“Justin’s not unreasonable,” Carly said.

“We’ll see. I imagine he won’t be the only one chewing me out.”

Carly rolled her eyes. “The same people who thought Justin was going overboard by creating the Watch in the first place? The ones who told him he was being paranoid and he’d seen
Bad Max
too many times?”

“
Mad Max
.” Grady corrected her.

“Oh? Sorry. I never saw it. Anyway, they’re the ones who got mad and said Justin was wasting everyone’s time by having guys patrol the perimeter in the first place. They can’t now get upset that someone slipped in through the cracks.”

Grady gave a soft chuckle. “All right. Good night, Carly. I’ll talk to you again in the morning if we’ve learned anything new.”

She went over to sit down on her bed and saw a gray head of hair appear at the top of the ladder.

Carly jumped up to help Miz Marson up the final rungs. “You shouldn’t have climbed—”

“I’m fine,” Miz Marson said. She followed Carly back to her makeshift bed and watched as Carly sat down, pulling her knees up to her chest.

“Finally hit you, did it?”

Carly nodded. “It’s all . . . everything’s gone.”

“It is.” Miz Marson lowered herself down to sit beside Carly on the edge of the quilt. “I could say something about how you got out with what mattered, because you’re all safe. But I know that really wouldn’t make you feel better.”

“Maybe this
wasn’t
what we were supposed to do,” Carly said. She plucked at a loose string on the quilt. “It just seems like one thing after another. We can’t get ahead. And now this.”

Miz Marson gave her a small smile. “No one told you it was gonna be easy.”

Carly didn’t reply. She tugged on that loose thread and snapped her hand away in alarm when she realized it was unraveling a seam.

Miz Marson regarded her for a moment and rubbed her chin. “Let me tell you a story. When I was young, my mother and father moved us out to Oklahoma. Took us a week to get there in my father’s old farm truck, everything we owned, piled high in the back. My mama was from fine people back East, and I can remember her cryin’ at having to leave behind her family heirlooms, but my daddy thought the cheap farmland would be the making of our family fortune. He somehow got it in his head that God wanted us to move out there, that it was our destiny.” She gave a soft laugh and a shake of her head before she continued. “Have you ever read about the Dust Bowl?”

“Some.” Carly’s mind was whirling. That had happened back in the 1930s, as she recalled, which meant Miz Marson had to be in her late eighties at least. That was hard to believe.

“I was six,” Miz Marson said. “But I remember that long, hot journey—no air conditioning in cars back then—and then trying to make that little farmhouse into a home while my daddy worked the farm with my brothers. That was during the Depression, so times were hard, but we were tough. We adapted. We were frugal. And, for a time, it looked like my daddy’s dream was going to come true.

“Then the drought came, a long merciless drought that withered crops and livestock alike. The farmers had stripped away the sod that held the soil in place. In the drought, the soil in the fields dried up like powdered sugar, and the winds came to sweep it away. The dust storms blotted out the sun and piled dunes against buildings and fences, only to be swept up and dropped again in some other spot, an ever-changing landscape built by stinging winds. I’ll never forget—’til my dying day—seeing that big, black cloud rolling toward us, like Judgment Day. They called it Black Sunday, but it was really two days. Two days where the sun never shone and it was dark as night, while the winds outside howled like a madman.

“We had to be careful not to touch each other. The dust particles built up a static, you see, and if you touched someone else, you got a nasty shock. And the spiders! Dear God, every spider in the country tried to take shelter in that house with us. That storm was the only time I ever saw my daddy cry.” For a long moment, she stared into the distance, and Carly thought she was done speaking and tried to think of a response, tried to see what Miz Marson wanted her to gather from the grim tale. But Miz Marson blinked and resumed speaking.

“It was like the Ten Plagues of Egypt. The drought, the dust, the insects . . . the rabbits bred out of control because the farmers had killed off most of the coyotes and wolves.” She pronounced
coyotes
like
ki-yotes.
Carly could picture it, a desert of dust, the rabbits devouring any shoot of green that struggled up from the parched soil.

“Too many of them even before the drought, and now they were starving. Everything was starving. The cattle—I remember seeing them at the pasture gate, skeletal, pathetic things, mooing in hunger, but we had no hay or corn to give them. Couldn’t buy hay for any amount of money, not that we had any to spend.

“Right when my daddy had made up his mind to shoot them all to spare them the misery, the government finally stepped in. They bought up my daddy’s livestock and slaughtered them. They weren’t fit for eating, anyway, but they gave Daddy a fair price for them, more than he would have gotten if he’d taken the bony things to the stockyard auctions. It allowed him to hang on for a few more years. He was always hoping the next year’s crop would be better. And things did get a little better. The WPA came in and planted trees, built windbreaks that kept down the dust. But the rains still didn’t come.”

Miz Marson shook her head. “Mama couldn’t take it anymore. One day, I came home from school and she wasn’t there, nor any of her clothes. All there was of her was a note on the table. It was in cursive and I couldn’t read it. Daddy never did tell me what it said, just that Mama was gone and we’d have to get on without her. Even then, he refused to give up on his destiny.

“A lesser man might have taken it as a sign to give up. Many did, pulling up stakes and heading off to California, or scattered to the four winds, looking for work. There were abandoned farms everywhere. A bit like now, actually. Sort of . . .
empty
.” She waved her hands, unable to find the word for which she was seeking.

“Eventually, the drought ended. It took ten years, but the rains came back. And when they came back, he was ready for it. The local bank manager knew my father and his tenacity and was willing to extend him loans for improvements and acquiring more land. That was Daddy—always threw himself in head first. Where others were plodding along cautiously, lest the next year be bad again, he was pushing further every year. By the time I was grown, he had a nice little spread and was comfortable. Broke his heart when my own husband wanted to pull up stakes and head for a new opportunity down here, but he understood. If anyone could, he would.”

Miz Marson stared off into the gloom, her expression almost brooding, but after a moment, she shook herself. “What I’m trying to say, Carly, is that you never know when the rains are gonna come. If you give up, you won’t be here to see them when they do. I don’t know if my father was right about it being his fate or destiny or what God wanted him to do. He ended up a church elder in our little community, was generous and kindly to his neighbors and always willing to lend a helping hand. Not a bad fate, but not one of legend. I don’t know . . . maybe he was a side character in a more important story. Maybe he had to be there to help someone else and keep them from giving in to despair. Maybe you’re the same, setting the stage for someone else’s play, but however you want to look at it, you just have to have faith the rains will come.”

To Carly’s surprise, Miz Marson kissed her cheek before saying, “Now, get some rest. We have a lot of work to do in the morning.” She climbed back down the ladder, and Carly heard her talking to Sam before she shut the barn door behind herself.

“Quite a story,” Stan said, his voice soft in the dimness.

Carly had forgotten Stan and Mindy were there.

“What did you think, Carly?” Mindy asked.

There was a small window at the back of the haymow. If Carly went back there, she’d be able to look out at the smoking ruins of her house. “I think I’m going to wait for the rain.”

Chapter Nine

Carly was in the train station again. She stepped through the doorway with slow, reluctant steps, because she knew she had been here before. Something bad had happened, but as hard as she tried to remember what it had been, the memory dangled just out of reach, like a word that danced on the tip of her tongue but just wouldn’t come to mind.

The air was hot and stuffy and smelled of dust. The floor felt spongy beneath her feet, and it creaked with every step. She didn’t want to go through the door in front of her, but every step propelled her inexorably toward it. Her hand reached for the knob, and it was cold as ice beneath her palm.

A shaky breath rattled from her as she pushed open the door. The hinges screeched loud enough that she might have jumped, but her feet seemed to have sunk down into that spongy floor. She looked down to see the top of her flower-decorated sandals disappearing beneath the floorboards.

There was a sound and Carly’s head jerked up. In front of her was an office covered in a thick blanket of dust. A computer screen flickered, green and black, and she thought of how long it had been since she’d seen a computer monitor like that—

“The black cowboy says you’re the seventh.”

Carly tried to scream, but all that came out was a choked moan. He was there. The man she’d shot. She remembered now, now that it was too late. Plump and friendly-looking, the man could have been a bank manager or an elementary school principal in his former life, but now he was someone else. Someone with hateful glee shining in his eyes as he swung a board at her head.

She ducked but could not run. Her feet were sunk into the thick pudding of the floorboards and Carly couldn’t free them. On his chest, she saw the three red blossoms her bullets had made, but she didn’t have a gun this time. But he still had the board, and he was ready to swing.

“Carly?”

Carly bolted upright, sucking in a gasping breath and began coughing again when the air caught in her throat. Her hand sought out Dagny and found empty space where the car seat had rested. That woke her fully, and she found Justin seated beside her on the makeshift bed. She tried to calm her breathing as she took stock of her surroundings and remembered how she came to be here.

“Dagny?”

“I’ve got her,” Mindy called. Mindy and Stan were seated over against the back wall of the hayloft, and Dagny was on Stan’s lap plucking at his shirt buttons. Pearl sat on the edge of the haymow beside the ladder. Kaden was below, unhooking Shadowfax from the wagon. He waved up at her and Carly waved back, still a little dazed. She must have been deeply asleep not to have awoken when they drove that rattling thing inside.

Carly hugged Justin tight. “I’m glad you’re home. I hoped you wouldn’t freak out when you saw the house—”

He kissed her, cutting off her words, and it was a moment before they came up for air. He pushed the tumbled hair out of her face, tucking it behind her ear. “I probably would have, but Grady caught me at the gate. First thing he said was, ‘Now, Justin, the most important thing is that Carly and Dagny are okay.’ ”

She smiled. “What was the second thing he said?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t stick around to listen.” He pulled her against him and shuddered. “Jesus, Carly—”

“Grady was right. The important thing is everyone’s okay.”

“Sounds like it was a damned close call.”