The Land of the Shadow (5 page)

Kaden fell silent, unable or unwilling to speak of his parents.

“I am now,” Justin said. He climbed up into the wagon seat, and Kaden joined him, his shotgun laid across his knees. He clucked to Shadowfax and she ambled forward.

“Well, goodbye, then,” Kaden called and gave the woman a little wave. “Good luck.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Justin saw her wave. He could still feel her watching them as they rounded the corner and went up the ramp to the highway.

“She seemed nice,” Kaden said. “After she wasn’t pointing a gun at our heads, I mean.”

“Yeah.”

“You think she’s all alone?”

Justin nodded. “Did you see that pack she was carrying? A hell of a load for one person. So she’s either alone or with someone who won’t carry half the load—which is probably worse than being alone, if you think about it.”

“Alone for two years.” Kaden sounded horrified by the prospect. Justin considered telling him that if he hadn’t found Carly, he probably would have still been alone himself.

Would Kaden have even recognized Carly if he could have met her as Justin had when he found her in that apartment complex in Juneau? Still numbed with shock, Carly hadn’t even been willing to accept the world had permanently changed when he met her. She’d had her love for animals, her compassion, and her stubborn insistence they were going to rebuild society into something even better than it had been before, but over the last year, she had uncovered the talents Justin had seen hidden beneath the surface.

Sometimes, a person didn’t know the strengths they had until life gave them no choice but to use them.

The sun hung low in the sky when they neared Colby. In front of them was the bridge that spanned over the swamp. On the other side of it was the wall of stacked metal shipping containers that made up the front of the fence around town. Between the containers was a retractable door. The watchers on top of the Wall waved and shouted down to lift the gate as the wagon began to approach.

Kaden lifted his shotgun. The small spit of land at the end of the bridge was a favorite place for the alligators to sun themselves. Justin thought of them as the watchdogs, for certainly many a traveler had thought twice about walking through the silent, reptilian gauntlet to approach Colby. None of the alligators had ever tried charging a traveler yet, but Justin figured it was just a matter of time. They were on the edge of starvation because the Infection had decimated many of the small mammal species on which they fed. He could only surmise they had survived this long off fish in the swamp, but those stocks had to be getting low at this point.

He called back over his shoulder. “Want a ride?”

Kaden frowned. “Who are—”

The woman from Brownsville stepped out of the tree line, eyeing the row of alligators. She took a seat on the end of the wagon, and Justin clucked to Shadowfax to get her moving again. “I’m just looking to trade,” she said.

“Sure,” Justin replied, but he was already considering which of the empty houses might be best suited to her.

One thing that had remained consistent since the fall of civilization was that if visitors were coming, it would be on a day the house was a disaster.

Carly and Miz Marson were still washing dishes and cleaning up the canning mess when Justin got home, bringing with him an Outsider. The guys set to unloading the wagon, which left Carly to make the acquaintance of the newcomer on her own. All Justin said before he headed out to the barn was that the woman’s name was Pearl. Carly washed her hands and took off her apron, feeling frazzled and mussed and in no mood for socializing, but she smiled as pleasantly as she was able and said hello to the woman as she finished up.

“Sorry to leave you in the lurch,” Carly murmured to Miz Marson.

The old lady shrugged. “Kaden will help.”

Carly grinned. “If you don’t mind having to go behind him and clean again.” If Kaden wasn’t such an excellent shot, Carly would suspect his eyesight was bad, since he somehow failed to notice he left half the dirt behind.

Pearl stood near the open door of the pantry, staring at the rows of jars with something akin to awe. She was tall and slender, close to the point of being underfed, but her spare form was toned with muscle, like a ballerina. Her onyx hair was woven into tiny braids and twisted up into a bun, emphasizing the graceful arch of her neck, and she had the smoothest, most blemish-free skin Carly had ever seen. It was a warm, light brown without so much as a freckle to mar its perfection.

No one should look that good after an apocalypse
, Carly thought sourly. Her own skin was flushed and blotchy from the heat of the kitchen, and her hair was hanging in a tangle of sweat-soaked frizz. She tried to smooth it a bit as she approached the newcomer but knew it was futile.

“You’ve got a nice store of food,” Pearl said. “It’s been a long while since I’ve seen so much in one place.”

Carly smiled. “Thanks. We’ve been working hard.”

Pearl cocked her head. “Is it just me, or is everything in alphabetical order?”

Carly flushed a little and didn’t answer that. “Come with me and I’ll show you around a bit.” Sam, lying beside Dagny’s playpen, rose to trot after them, and Pearl jumped a little at the sight of him.

“Is that a . . .”

“A wolf, yeah, but he’s very well-behaved. Sam, this is Pearl.”

Sam sniffed the hand the woman tentatively extended and then turned away, apparently uninterested. A good sign, Carly thought, because Sam tended to get tense around those he found suspicious and drop his head to stare at them with menacing amber eyes.

“Did you have him Before?” Pearl asked as they stepped off the porch.

“No, I found him as a puppy afterward. He looked just like a dog when he was little. I didn’t know he was a wolf until later.”

“Just like the horses.”

“No,” Carly deadpanned. “I knew those were horses.”

Pearl shot her a startled look as if she wasn’t used to hearing jokes or she wasn’t sure if Carly was serious, but laughed after Carly gave her a grin. “I meant you found them, too. That’s what your . . . um . . . Kaden said.”

“You can call him my son. Pretty much everyone does, but I’ve got to admit it’s kind of strange being mom to someone when you’re not even ten years older.”

Pearl nodded.

Carly scratched a mosquito bite. “You’ll see a lot of families like that here. There weren’t a lot of blood families that survived intact. Stan and Mindy are the only people I know who were married Before, and I think that’s because they got their flu shot on the same day.”

Pearl stopped in her tracks. “Flu shot? What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s my theory, anyway. Almost every survivor I’ve met says they got a flu shot the year of the Crisis. A lot of people don’t remember who made theirs, but the ones who do say they came from the Cederna company.”

Pearl was blinking fast, like she was trying to collect her thoughts for questions but couldn’t think what to ask first.

Carly answered the most obvious one without waiting for it to be asked. “We don’t think it was intentional. It seems like they didn’t know, and . . . well . . . even if they had figured out the shots were giving immunity, the Crisis happened so fast, it wouldn’t have made any difference.” Some of the big cities had been virtually wiped out in just a few days, from what Troy Cramer had said on the news.

“Yeah, I suppose not.” But Pearl looked troubled.

“Where are you from?” Carly asked to change the subject.

“I’m originally from the Midwest, but was living in Los Angeles.”

Carly winced. Some of the others had told her harrowing tales of getting out of the big cities when the Crisis struck. None of them had an easy time of it. “What brought you this way?”

“I had an aunt who lived in Blanchard,” Pearl said. She pronounced
aunt
as
ahhnt
, the first person Carly ever met who did that. “I came here because I had to see if she . . . I had to know.”

“Did you find out? One way or the other?”

Pearl didn’t look at her. “Yeah. I found out.”

Carly gave her a small sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry.” She considered saying something about how Pearl was at least fortunate in knowing what had become of her loved ones when so many others would never know, but thought the better of it.

The residential street emptied onto the town common. There were a handful of children playing on the grass in front of a park bench where Mrs. Davis watched them. It was a task at which she excelled.

“More kids than I expected,” Pearl said. “Who’s the lady watching them?”

“That’s Mrs. Davis. She’s the Reverend’s wife.”

“You have a preacher?”

Carly nodded. “Church services on Sunday, too, if you’re interested.”

Pearl hesitated. “I’m not really religious.”

“I’m not either.” Carly shrugged. She was careful to appear casual, because she didn’t want Pearl to fear there was anything pushy about that aspect of their community. “Totally optional. Justin and I met the Davises on the road. The Reverend is the one who performed our wedding, actually. He and Mrs. Davis ended up down here, too, and we asked him to join the community.”

“Did you and Justin have the baby before you came here?”

Carly nodded. Dagny had been the reason why the isolated people of Colby thought it was “safe” to let their little band of travelers inside, but she didn’t want to say that.

“She’s the only baby I’ve seen since the Crisis.”

“She’s the first one,” Carly said. But she couldn’t be the only one. She couldn’t be. They wouldn’t have survived this long if there was no hope for the future. That was what Carly kept telling herself, hoping she’d soon be proven right. “Maybe the Infection messed with our bodies, sort of stunned our systems for a while. We’re all carriers, even if it doesn’t make us sick.”

“Carriers?”

“We learned that the hard way.” Carly licked her lips. “We’re all Infected, though it doesn’t make us sick. Like Typhoid Mary. We can Infect people who haven’t been exposed.”

“I didn’t know there was anyone who hadn’t been exposed. How did they avoid it?”

Carly rubbed her forehead, partly as a way to break off eye contact. Her throat had tightened and it was hard to keep her voice even. “The people here . . . they had isolated themselves. They sealed off the town and didn’t let anyone in. Until us.”

Pearl didn’t ask, and Carly was grateful.

The kids had noticed them. They all turned to gape at the newcomer, their eyes wide. Mrs. Davis gathered them all to her and they looked away, abashed as she told them it wasn’t nice to stare.

“They’re not used to seeing Outsiders,” Carly said.

Pearl chuckled. “No kidding.”

Carly led her to the courthouse, a stone edifice but one so small it looked more like a mausoleum than a seat of government. It was a bit cooler inside the shadowed interior. Carly bent and retrieved an oil lamp, which she lit with the Zippo she carried in her pocket. The lamp’s warm yellow glow revealed the plain wood-paneled hallway.

On the left side of the hall was a courtroom and on the right, an office that had once been used for the town’s administration. There was a pile of desks and computers stacked in the far corner of the room. Kaden had offered to carry the computers down to the basement, but Carly was afraid the dampness would damage them. She felt a sort of obligation to preserve as many records of the past as possible, even if they were currently worthless. So they were stacked over in a corner until she decided what to do with them.

She sat down at the desk she’d taken for her own and pulled out a metal box with a flip-top lid. Sam lay down beside her desk, pillowing his muzzle on his paws. “I’m just going to take some info from you, okay?”

“What for?”

“I keep track of all of the new residents, their skills and talents, that sort of thing.”

Pearl shifted on her feet and held up her hand in a halting gesture. “I’m not sure I’m staying, Carly.”

Carly arched a brow. “Oh? You’ve got a lot of choices of decent communities to consider?”

Pearl laughed. “Okay, you’ve got me there. But the thing is . . . I don’t really know you guys or how things are run around here. I’m not sure—I’m just not sure, that’s all.”