The Land of the Shadow (32 page)

He held out a hand, and Pearl took it. For a long moment, she looked as though she was searching for words, but then she clucked to Shadowfax, heading out into the bright summer sunlight.

Chapter Twelve

That afternoon, Justin faced what appeared to be a wide-spread conspiracy. Stacy came over with Michael and Veronica in tow and said she’d come to give him some “respite,” and then Grady, Stan, and the Reverend all arrived ten minutes later with problems that absolutely needed his immediate attention. From the looks on their faces, they were willing to exert force if need be. It seemed everyone had decided Justin must get out of the house, even if just for a few minutes.

Stan wanted him to look at a fish caught from the pond and decide if he thought the algae infection was completely gone, and Grady insisted he needed to know where the rest of the trees had to be felled to complete the swamp perimeter. Justin felt anger stir and nearly exerted some force himself, but he knew they thought they were doing this for his own good.

Carly was coming down from one of her fevers, and she’d have a few good days now. He wondered if they’d timed it to coincide with the least dangerous time for her, and decided they probably had. With Stacy there, Carly was in the best hands other than his own, and she swore she would send Veronica running to get him if there was any change in Carly’s condition. He surrendered with as much good grace as he could muster and followed them out the door.

As Justin told Carly later, Mark had refused to babysit the kids, which was why Stacy had brought them along. When Justin departed, Veronica was sent out to weed Carly’s garden, and Michael was settled on the chair in the corner of Carly’s bedroom with his sketch pad.

The boy was a gifted artist, though no one knew what his sketches meant. A woman’s face. A man’s hand, curled limply. A shadowy room with a figure by the window. A door with a hand curved around the edge above the knob. A linoleum floor with a spill of dark liquid covering the lower edge of the image. Innocuous images, but disturbing.

In the midafternoon, Carly fell asleep and began to toss and mumble from a nightmare. Stacy told her afterward that she had risen to check Carly’s temperature and realized she’d left her medical kit in the kitchen. She headed upstairs.

Carly half-woke and sat up in bed with a gasp. “Mom, the spiders!”

Michael’s head jerked toward her and his eyes bulged. His sketchbook tumbled from his fingers, and he stared at Carly as she fell back to the pillows, muttering.

He jumped to his feet and darted across the room.

Carly saw him coming through the fog of sleep, his face twisted into an expression similar to the one her father had worn that terrible day. And like her father, Michael wrapped his hands around her throat. Squeezing. She couldn’t breathe.

Carly clawed at his hands, but she couldn’t break his grip. The fog grew heavier. She tried to kick him, but her legs were covered by the blankets and she was too weak to toss them off.

“Carly!” Veronica screamed.
Where did she come from?

Veronica lunged and grabbed him around the waist, hauling back with all her strength. Michael was pulled away, his arms scrabbling at the air as he tried to reach Carly.

Carly sucked in a whoop of air that burned like fire. She coughed, hard, sucking in painful breaths between them.

Michael slammed his elbow back into Veronica’s ribs, and she let out a cry of pain but didn’t let go. Their feet tangled together and they fell to the floor. Veronica held on for dear life, wrapping one leg across Michael’s.

“She’ll kill us!” Michael screamed. “Let me go!”

Veronica was so surprised, she almost released him.

“She’ll kill us! She’ll kill us!”

Veronica was strong, but Michael was hard to hold. She lost her grip and had to grab him again, letting out a screech of pain when he bit into her arm. “Michael, stop!”

“What in the world?” Stacy appeared at the doorway and rushed inside. She pulled Michael from Veronica’s grasp. “Veronica—”

“Wait, Stacy, no!”

Michael, freed from Veronica’s grasp, pawed at the pouch Stacy wore on her hip and pulled out the .22 pistol. Stacy screamed his name and tackled him. Michael held it out at arm’s length, kicking at Stacy as she tried to reach for it.

Carly stared at the end of the barrel.
Justin, I love you
. She drew in a last breath.

Michael pulled the trigger and she heard a dry click.

The breath whooshed out of her, and she coughed as he clicked it again and again. When it dawned on him that no bullets were emerging, he looked at the gun in his hand with a puzzled expression, turning it left and right.

Veronica stumbled to her feet and kicked the gun out of Michael’s hand. He snarled—actually snarled—and tried to claw his way across the carpet toward it with Stacy hanging on to his legs. He writhed, trying to dislodge her, his eyes fastened on the gun.

“She’ll kill us!” He turned to Stacy and drove his fist down into her nose. She let out a startled scream and recoiled. He snatched at the gun.

Veronica sent out a kick that caught him across the jaw. He flopped over from the force of the blow and collapsed to the carpet, and Veronica pounced on his back to make sure he wouldn’t get up again. Stacy ran over to Carly, who was still gasping in ragged whoops. She poured Carly a glass of water and helped support her so Carly could slurp at it.

Veronica yanked the belt off Carly’s robe and used it to tie Michael’s hands behind his back. Carly warned her not to make it too tight, wincing as she spoke through her burning throat. Veronica stared at her like Carly was insane.

“Thank God he didn’t crush your windpipe,” Stacy said. “Are you okay?”

Was she serious? Carly almost laughed but just nodded.

Stacy stood and walked over to where Michael lay. Veronica had used one of Justin’s leather belts to bind his feet. Michael had recovered somewhat and was muttering over and over. “. . . kill us all. Kill us all. Kill us all.”

“What a way to find out he can talk. Michael? Michael, can you hear me?”

He glanced at her but dropped his gaze as he struggled against his bonds. “Kill us all . . .”

Stacy knelt and gripped him by the shoulders. “Michael! Answer me.”

“She’ll kill us.”

“Carly? Why do you think she’ll hurt us?”

It was a moment before he answered, and the strain in his voice made it sound like he was pulling the words from deep inside him, pulling them with great effort. “She’s Infected! She’s one of them! She’ll kill us! She’s one of the monsters.”

Stacy’s voice gentled. “Michael, she’s not Infected. She has malaria.”

“Look at her! She’s one of them. Kill her!” Like a wall had collapsed or a veil had been rent, he began to sob, great wracking sobs that shook his entire frame.

Justin arrived just a few minutes later, his dark eyes sharp as obsidian with that lethal gleam. Mindy joined them, since Stacy wanted to go with Michael. Justin examined Carly’s throat right after Mindy did. Carly insisted she was fine, just a little sore, but she knew he wouldn’t believe it until he checked it himself. After he was finished, he didn’t look reassured. He looked pissed off.

“Justin, please don’t hurt Michael. He’s just a little boy.”

“A little boy who tried to kill my wife.
 
Carly, if that gun had been
 
loaded—”

“He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Bullshit.”

“What I mean is that fear overtook his reason. We don’t know what kind of trauma he’s been through. Where is he, anyway?”

Mindy was the one who answered. “Mark’s keeping him under house arrest at his place. He’s not saying much, but he is still verbal. He refuses to talk about what happened with you or why he reacted like that.”

“Don’t push him. He could retreat back into silence.” Carly laid a hand on Justin’s arm.

Justin rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re pretty generous in your concern for someone who tried to kill you.”

Carly plucked at the blanket. “It’s not his fault. I know that. What are we going to do with him? How do we punish a child for doing something he couldn’t help? He’s just a kid—”

“Carly, he’s not . . . normal.”

Carly rubbed her temples. “None of us are. Every one of us who lived through this is fucked up. We’ve all gone through trauma, and it’s going to come out one way or the other. We’ve been numb. We’ve been stoic. We’ve done what we have to do to survive, and we’ve buried it down, deep inside. None of us have dealt with it. We can’t. There’s only so much a human can take at one time. No matter how deep we bury it, it still clings to our minds, still takes up part of our mind’s power, so none of us can say we make fully rational decisions. We’re all walking wounded, all of us carrying these scars, and none of us able to heal. Not now. Not yet. Maybe never.”

With every word, her voice grew raspier, but Carly couldn’t stop. She had to finish it, to get out the words that were burning in her mind. “We live in this little bubble we’ve created. That I’ve created. I was attracted to this place that seemed untouched by the hellfire that burned through our world. But we brought the hellfire with us. I was determined to rebuild it, but what I was doing was pretending, Justin. Building a place where we could all pretend that ‘normal’ still existed. Like kids in a tree house. You knew that.”

Justin took her hand. “I wanted it to work for you, Carly.”

She took a deep breath and a sip of water from the glass on the nightstand to soothe her aching throat. “For me?”

He gave a small smile. “I never much cared for ‘normal.’ ”

Carly traced the pattern on the bedcover with her finger. “I wanted Dagny to know about the Crisis as something that happened to us, something that was part of our history, but not something that was part of her experience. I didn’t want to pass the trauma on to her generation. And I thought her children would learn about it in school in the distant, academic sense of history. Because their world would be safe and normal again. Maybe not outside the Walls, but in here, it would be America again. In here would be schools and shops and church on Sundays. In here, we would be safe to pretend.”

Mindy poured Carly another glass of water. “It wasn’t all pretend, Carly. We’ve built a solid community. But it’s not America in here. It’s Colby. America doesn’t exist anymore, but
Colby
does.”

Carly gave Mindy a small smile. “Thank you. But right now, it feels like a blanket fort.”