The Land of the Shadow

by Lissa Bryan

  “Find anything good?” Jason asked.

  “Just some comfrey and sassafras,” Laura said, lifting her dark ponytail to fan the back of her neck.

  “You didn’t go near the swamp, did you?”

  Laura didn’t answer, dropping her hair and shifting the basket from one arm to the other.

  “Laura, come on, we talked about this. The alligators—”

  Carly stepped back with a little wave of her hand. “I should be going. Miz Marson is helping me can today.”

  Laura and Jason both said goodbye, and Carly darted around the house just as Jason started in about the alligators again. She heard enough of that from Justin. It was one of the reasons why he and some of the other residents had worked so long to put up the fence that circumnavigated the island. Prior to their efforts, the Wall had consisted of stacked shipping crates that barricaded just the roads in and out of town. Every inch of Colby was now encircled by a combination of chain link—provided by the prison where Jason had worked and the athletic field behind the elementary school—and wooden privacy fences they had taken from yards. Everyone felt a little safer having it up, and not just from alligators. The swamp was a natural barrier to the outside world, but the fence provided a bit of additional protection.

  Carly wiped the sweat from her face and headed back to the house. The heat seemed to shimmer up from the sidewalk in lazy, humid waves, and the air felt like soup. Alaskan summers could get warm, but this was something entirely different. This felt like living in a sauna, and unlike back home, before the Crisis, there was no relief to be had by stepping into an air-conditioned building. She thought of David and Bryce’s solar powered fan, but as hot and humid as the air was, she wasn’t sure it would help.

  Stepping inside the house, she sighed. The stove was like a blast furnace. She went over and checked Dagny first, who was curled up, asleep, in the playpen. Her skin felt damp but not overheated. Carly wished there were somewhere cooler she could move her, but she was paranoid about letting the baby out of her sight without another trusted adult watching her.

  Miz Marson was still peeling tomatoes while the pressure cooker ticked and hissed on the stove. Carly picked up the knife and began chopping.

  “You fixing on having another one?”

  Carly stopped in mid-slice. She’d never get used to Miz Marson’s abrupt questions. “Another baby? Uh … no, not really.” It didn’t seem wise with basic survival still in question.

  “You on the pill?”

  With anyone else, Carly would have gotten prickly about the personal nature of this line of questioning, but Miz Marson had become something of a cross between a grandmother and a friend. “No, I can’t take it.”

  “Brought you something.” Miz Marson reached into her apron pocket and produced a plastic baggie filled with what looked like little kernels of cracked black pepper.

  “What is it?”

  “Queen Anne’s Lace seed,” Miz Marson said. “My own mama took it back in the day before you could buy the pill. Swore by it.”

  Carly chuckled. “She had you, didn’t she?”

  “She ran out.” Miz Marson shrugged.

  Carly picked up the baggie, studying the seeds inside as Miz Marson explained how to take them. “Better than nothing,” she added.

  “We … we’re not … doing nothing,” Carly mumbled. She had wondered what they were going to do in the future. While she and Justin might have been the only couple using condoms, since everyone else seemed to be infertile, they would run out of them at some point. And within a couple of years, the existing ones would be expired.

  “Yeah, but that’s not foolproof, is it?” Miz Marson nodded at Dagny.

  Carly’s face was flushed, but she hoped Miz Marson would think it was from the heat. She said a polite thank you, although unsure if she was going to use the seeds. Perhaps she should run it by Laura and Stacy first.

  She hated to bother Stacy, whose stress was so bad, she told Carly she was losing hair. Stacy had been a nurse before the Crisis, and as the only person besides Justin with any medical training, she was now acting as the town’s doctor. She studied the medical textbooks Justin had picked up when Carly was pregnant with a sort of frantic fervor. So far, she had just had to stitch up a cut and set a broken finger, but there were inevitably going to be more challenges down the road. She had set up a clinic in the former dentist’s office where Mindy, once a dental hygienist, had found herself also promoted to doctor. Both were scared to death they would hurt someone, reduced by the available technology to practicing medicine as it was in the late nineteenth century.

  As Carly had learned, responsibility could be a terrible thing.

  Chapter Two

  The wagon rattled over a patch of rough asphalt. Justin was continually amazed at how fast things fell apart without regular maintenance. Grass and weeds pushed through the cracks of the pavement and spilled over the shoulder, creeping across the asphalt.

  Beside him, Kaden was riding shotgun—literally. He had a pump-action twelve gauge sitting across his lap while he surveyed the landscape with his keen eyes. His posture was alert but not tense, Justin noted with approval. The kid was a natural.

  Hiding a smile, Justin remembered the dismay on Kaden’s face the first day he had come to Justin’s class, expecting to shoot at targets or make improvised explosives. Instead, each student found a disassembled handgun on their desk, and they spent the first couple of weeks learning how to assemble, clean, care for, and augment various firearms.

  The class had been Carly’s idea. He hadn’t liked it, hadn’t thought anyone would be interested, and he figured once she saw the signup sheet remained empty, she’d give up on it. He had been surprised.

  There were twenty-seven residents of their little town now, all carefully screened before admission. Like Carly and Justin, most were “family” groups that had assembled themselves after the Crisis. Perhaps it was Carly’s influence, but Justin now saw the ability to value love as a measure of a person’s character. The emotional baggage he had avoided in his former life created stability, and the responsibility of love grounded a person in a way nothing else could. In the Unit, he’d been taught to value independence, creating no ties and being loyal based on an oath, but love was a force more powerful than anything he’d encountered. And a strong foundation for a community.

  Over time, Justin ended up with twenty members of their community, ranging in age from fifteen—the youngest he would accept—to forty-five, in the class he had first told Carly he wanted to call “Shooting & Blowing Shit Up.” And then he enjoyed watching her face as she struggled to decide if he was serious.

  When his students were tasked with reassembling guns over and over again until they could have done it in their sleep, he suspected he would lose some of them. Then he thought it would be during the lessons in basic chemistry. Justin didn’t know the letters and digits that made up the chemicals’ written compositions due to his dyslexia, so his first class on this subject had been damn near embarrassing. He had pretty much resigned himself to having to admit it during the next session, but to his surprise, Kaden came in prepared, hopping up to write the chemical formulas on the board as though Justin had assigned him the task.

  No doubt about it, the kid was handy. But Justin also knew they needed to have a talk soon because Kaden displayed some of the behaviors Justin had seen in his fellow foster kids. He was trying to make himself perfect and indispensable. Justin wasn’t sure if words alone would assure Kaden that he didn’t have to worry about whether Justin and Carly would keep him, but he knew the kind of stress attempting to be flawless could put on a kid.

  They arrived at Brownsville before noon, the small town lying still and silent under the hot sunshine. This was the last nearby town they hadn’t scouted. Justin initially hadn’t seen the point in bothering, because it was bisected by two major highways and would have been picked clean by travelers. But then he had seen an old advertisement for a garden center pinned u
p in Colby’s town hall one day, which had piqued his interest.

  The first building they came to was a small grocery, not much larger than a convenience store, but Justin stopped the wagon anyway. Since they were already here, they would do a thorough search, just in case previous scavengers had missed anything. Kaden kept a tight grip on his shotgun, but his breathing was steady, his eyes sharp.

  The glass panels in the doors had been broken and the empty metal frames hung crookedly on their hinges. Justin led the way inside, picking his path with care through the debris, his steps measured and silent. Kaden followed close behind, stepping in the same spots as Justin.

  Justin paused for a moment, listening to the silence. The store was mostly bare, as he had expected, the empty shelves stretching off into the gloom. They passed the greeting card aisle. The shelves were tipped over, and the cards lay scattered across the tile like ghostly leaves. One on top had a heart, and he picked it up but found he could not read the curly font. He tucked it in his back pocket, thinking Carly might like it—girls found that shit romantic—but he’d have to have Kaden read it to him to make sure it said something nice.

  He spotted a few things here and there, a dented can rolled under the edge of a shelf, a box peeking from beneath a display case. He made a note of them but continued on his silent path.

  He went to turn a corner, and that was when he saw it: a fresh footprint in some spilled flour from a broken bag on the shelf, brilliant white against the dirty tile. He signaled to Kaden to back up and pulled one of his sidearms at the same time the woman darted around the corner, a pistol in each hand, aimed right at his and Kaden’s heads.

  Kaden had the shotgun pointed at her chest, and Justin didn’t drop his weapon. A standoff.

  She glanced back and forth between them. “Leave now, and nobody has to get hurt.”

  “No one has to get hurt anyway,” Justin answered. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

  “Get out of here and you won’t have any.”

  “Who are you?”

  She didn’t reply.

  Justin slowly lowered his gun to his side. He turned to Kaden and nudged the barrel of the shotgun toward the ceiling. Kaden clearly thought he was nuts but Justin’s instinct proved correct when the woman lowered her own guns. She took a couple of steps back, out of arm’s reach, as she did so. She kept her hands at hip level, though, ready to raise in an instant if the need arose.

  “I’m Justin. This is Kaden. We’re just scouting for supplies.”

  The woman thought about it for a moment before she responded. “Pearl.”

  “What are you doing here, Pearl?”

  “This is my town. I live here.”

  Justin snorted. “Bullshit.”

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you.” The woman’s dark eyes narrowed. “I was here first. Get out.”

  “How did you know?” Kaden asked Justin, as though he couldn’t hold it in a moment longer.

  “Her shoes.” Justin holstered his gun. “See how worn they are? Those shoes have seen a lot of miles. They wouldn’t be so worn down if she lived here.” He nodded to the woman. “We’ll go. You can have what’s here. Take care.”

  He led Kaden from the store and took hold of Shadowfax’s bridle, clucking to her as they started off down the street.

  Kaden glanced back over his shoulder. “She’s watching us.”

  “I know.”

  They spent the afternoon gathering what supplies they found from the various stores, packs of batteries, tools, a few medical supplies, and bits of food. There wasn’t much of the latter two to be found, even in places most scavengers didn’t think to look, like offices.

  As Justin had expected, the woman shadowed them all day, watching as they loaded the wagon with their finds. Kaden whispered he was surprised she hadn’t tried to snatch anything from the wagon while they were inside the buildings, but Justin wasn’t. She didn’t seem like the type.

  The gardening store turned out to be a gold mine. Not only was he able to get a large supply of vegetable seeds, but they also had a big stock of sulfur and nitrate fertilizer. Finding materials for explosives always made him cheerful.

  He sent Kaden to check out the farm supply store next door, and Kaden came back disappointed to report that all of the oats and corn had been taken. Justin sighed inwardly but just nodded. He’d been hoping for some seed corn. He cursed the seed manufacturers for making corn crops sterile, requiring seed for each year’s planting. They would have to save most of the oats they harvested this year for the next planting and he’d have to recalculate their food supplies based on it. Fortunately, Kaden reported spotting some bags of horse feed that would enable them to last a little while longer without having to dip into their corn to feed Shadowfax and Storm.

  They emerged from the farm supply store to find the woman petting Shadowfax. Kaden froze in his tracks, but Justin kept going, around the back of the wagon to drop in the bags he was carrying.

  “Her name is Shadowfax,” Kaden said.

  “She’s beautiful,” the woman murmured. “I haven’t seen a horse in so long. I didn’t think any of them survived.”

  “We have two.” Kaden handed his bag off to Justin to load. “The other is a little filly about a year old.”

  The woman nodded. “I thought it looked like she was nursing.”

  Observant, too. Another point in her favor.

  Kaden grinned. “Well, we’re trying to break Storm of that habit, but she disagrees with us that it’s time. We’ve even tried keeping ’em in separate pastures, but Storm actually sticks her head through the fence to nurse and Shadowfax lets her.”

  “Why don’t you let her wean naturally?”

  Kaden explained that Shadowfax didn’t need to waste the calories nursing a filly that was old enough to eat on her own, while Justin hauled out the rest of the feed.

  He shifted the load around to balance it a little better as he did the math in his head to figure out how long the bags of feed would last. Shadowfax was working, pulling plows and wagons for them, so she needed about six pounds of horse feed per day. Storm could have survived just on forage since she wasn’t expending as much energy, but she wouldn’t stop nursing, absorbing precious calories from her mother.

  “They’re not mine,” Kaden was saying. “They belong to Justin’s wife, Carly.”

  “He’s not your dad?” the woman asked, glancing at Justin, and a hint of surprise colored her tone.

  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.