The Land of the Shadow

by Lissa Bryan

  Justin ignored that and turned back to the short, stocky fellow. “You the leader?”

  “It ain’t like that,” the man replied. “We’re all equals here.”

  Yeah, right. “No leader at all?”

  Shorty shifted on his feet. “Well, yeah. But he ain’t here.”

  “I see. I’m Justin, by the way.”

  Shorty stuck out his hand. “Max.”

  “Nice to meet you, Max. This is—”

  “Can I offer you a drink?” Max said before Justin could introduce Pearl.

  “Yeah, sure.” Justin watched as Max fished around in the plastic Coleman cooler behind the lawn chairs and fished out a can of diet soda. It came out dripping water, cool to the touch. Justin offered it to Pearl, who politely declined, before he opened it and took a sip. “Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem. Have a seat.” Max gestured to the lawn chairs.

  Smart of him. Justin and Pearl would have to take their rifles from their shoulders and most people would lean them against the chair. Justin didn’t give a damn if he looked rude. He laid the rifle across his thigh and draped his hand near the trigger, just to make the point. Pearl followed suit, laying hers at an angle across her legs and tapping her fingers on the stock.

  “You from around here, Justin?” Max asked.

  “Sort of.” Justin took a sip of his soda. He hated this diet shit. He saw movement from the corner of his eye and noticed that some of the Lawn Chair Gang had edged their way around behind him. He beckoned them back. “Why don’t you guys come around and join the conversation?”

  He glanced back at Max, who gave the men a tiny nod. They obeyed, shuffling around to stand on the opposite side of the chair circle, behind Max. Pearl shoved her chair back at an angle, watching the street behind them without any effort at subtlety.

  “You don’t look like you’re on a long trip, or else you travel mighty light.” Max nodded his head toward Pearl’s pack.

  “Well, you know what they say about possessions weighing you down,” Pearl said.

  Max didn’t acknowledge her statement. “You stayin’ nearby?”

  Justin took a sip of his soda and looked down to cover the flash of anger in his eyes. He needed to find out as much as he could before he lost his temper and shot these assholes on general principle. He didn’t know if they were treating Pearl like this because she was a woman or because she was black, but at this moment, he didn’t much care about the whys of the situation.

  “We’re staying around. What about you boys? Where are you staying?”

  “Here, for now,” Max said. “Sort of just … checking out our territory.”

  Justin didn’t take the bait. “Will your leader be back soon? I’d like to meet him.”

  “I think that’s a good idea. He’ll want to meet you, too. I’m sure he’ll have lots of questions. Is it just the two of you?”

  Justin gave him a small smile. “You laying out place settings for dinner?”

  Max laughed. “Just curious, I suppose. You two … together?”

  Pearl snorted. “I’m not available.”

  Max stared at Justin.

  “You heard her,” Justin said.

  Max’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t respond.

  Justin sipped his soda again, keeping his face blank. Lewis had taught him that trick. People had a tendency to read their own anxieties into an expressionless face. Just like an uncomfortable silence, it made the nervous and weak-willed rush to fill it, often with the very thing they didn’t want to say.

  Max wasn’t weak willed, but he wasn’t much of a poker player, either. He kept flicking his gaze toward the road. He shifted his weight, making the lawn chair creak as he drummed his fingers on the plastic arm, the tempo increasing with every passing moment. He opened his mouth to speak, and Justin would have bet something interesting was going to come out of it, but then he surged out of his chair, relief washing across his features.

  “Marcus is back!”

  “Who’s Marcus?” Justin asked, rising to his own feet. He held his rifle with seeming casualness, his hand gripped around the narrow section of the butt. He could hear a metallic rattling sound coming closer, perhaps the sound of wheels on pavement.

  “You wanted to meet our leader,” Blondie said. He had a plastic grin plastered on his face again, the kind of grin someone might use when forced to hand a trophy to a team who’d just beaten their own in the final game of a championship.

  Pearl edged over to stand beside Justin, and he could see her scanning the surrounding buildings with sharp and watchful eyes, just as a large group of people rounded the corner.

  A small contingent of men with shotguns in hand guarded a column of ragged, filthy people shuffling along. The clanking they had heard was not wheels, but the rhythmic sound of chains being dragged with each step the group took. Men and women, some barely out of their teens and a few that had gray strands in their snarled hair. Their clothing was tattered, haphazardly worn, some of it inside out or backwards. One man wore only a pair of sweatpants, torn open down the leg, which flapped around his calf as he shuffled forward. They were bound together, tied to the person in front with what looked like zip ties attached to a collection of bicycle cables and dog chains. Bruises and abrasions marred their skin, and every one of them was thin to the point of emaciation.

  Justin was surprised to see their faces were blank, the telltale look of the Infected who had survived the virus but were left with minds burned away by the high fever. Justin and Carly had encountered some of them in their travels. For the most part, they were harmless but helpless. Some could be violent, and they all had a tale of a terrible encounter, but those incidents were becoming infrequent. Few of the Infected had survived this long. This was more than Justin had seen in over a year. He counted twenty as the group passed by them.

  Pearl made a small sound, and Justin noticed her hand tighten on the stock of her rifle until her knuckles blanched.

  Two of the men led the group up the stairs of the building behind them and through the double doors. They remained outside, like guards. Though Justin watched, he saw no movement in any of the windows. He wondered how many more people were in there.

  One of the men separated himself off from the group and waited until the columns had passed before he came forward, a curious tilt to his head but a smile on his face. “Hey there! I’m Marcus.”

  He was tall, taller even than Justin who topped out at 6’4”, but unlike Justin, he was lanky and spare, which made his arms and legs look bizarrely long. His hair was pale blond where it stuck out from under his baseball cap, and his eyes were ice blue, crinkled at the corners with thin lines. His pale blond eyebrows and lashes disappeared against his tanned skin.

  Justin said hello and gave his name. Marcus stuck out his hand, and Justin shook it, a gesture that seemed anachronistic in this new world. Marcus glanced over at Pearl, whose face was as impassive as a stone angel.

  “And who might this be?” He smiled at Pearl, and she returned it with a brief smile that looked more like a grimace.

  “I’m Pearl.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Marcus offered his hand to her as well, and Pearl shook it politely.

  Marcus gestured for them to sit again and took a seat across from them. He leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees as he fished out a soda from the cooler.

  “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.