The Land of the Shadow

by Lissa Bryan

  Cool air rushed by her cheeks. She landed hard, hitting him awkwardly and knocking him off his feet.

  “Are you okay?” Carly asked. She was lying on his chest, looking right down into his face. She rolled off and he let out a little grunt.

  “Yeah. Fine.” His voice was a little strained.

  “Thank you.”

  He sounded amused. “Any time.”

  Sweet relief poured through her, and she collapsed back to the grass for just a moment, pressing her shaking hands over her face. Her insides felt tremulous and electric with adrenaline.

  Rolling over, Carly unbundled Dagny, who was still squalling. She prodded her baby all over, checked her pupils, and threaded her fingers through Dagny’s braided hair, feeling for bumps. Carly let out a little cry of relief that was almost a whimper to find her child unharmed. She clutched Dagny to her chest, rocking her. Grady had untied Sam, and the wolf limped over to Carly and gave the side of her face a lick. She put an arm around his shoulders. He sat so close to her, their sides were touching. He was trembling, too.

  “I can’t be sure, but I think one of his ribs is hurt,” Grady said.

  “You’ll be okay, you’ll be okay,” Carly murmured to him, as though she could verbalize it into truth.

  “Yeah, it’s not that bad,” Grady said. He crouched down beside her. “He ain’t bleedin’, from what I could tell. Maybe just a crack.”

  Carly knew he was lying from his rapid blinks. He knew no such thing—he was trying to make her feel better because there was nothing she could do if Sam was hurt. Carly nodded, as if she believed him, but she bet he knew she was lying, too.

  A loud roar made them both jump, and Carly looked up to see the second floor cave in. Flames sheathed the collapsing walls while black smoke and red-hot ash billowed through the open windows on the floor below. The heat of it reddened her cheeks, and she and Grady moved farther back from the blaze.

  She heard shouts as people rushed into the yard, those who had seen the fire or smelled the smoke. Someone pulled the chicken coop away from the back of the house, which was as yet unburned. The birds squawked in alarm and fluttered around, bashing into the wire of the sides of the coop. Carly rubbed her temples and thought, No eggs tomorrow. She almost laughed at how ridiculous she was being. What did it even matter, really? She was fooling herself that the chickens would ever be a viable source of food. She was fooling herself about a lot of things.

  Despair washed over her, and she sank down to the earth, too stunned to cry. Everything she and Justin had was gone.

  There was no way of extinguishing the blaze without hoses, and even if they had them, the irrigation system didn’t provide much pressure. At best, they might have been able to keep it from spreading if there had been any nearby houses. Still, Carly was pleased to see so many of the townspeople had come carrying buckets through the large lawn around the Connell house, something they had discussed in a town meeting a few months ago.

  Mindy and Stan headed up the pack, both of them haphazardly dressed and red-faced from the run over. Mindy wore a T-shirt over her pajama top and carried a mop bucket in one hand, with an armful of medical supplies in the other. She looked relieved to see they wouldn’t be needed. Stan had on a pair of athletic shorts, his feet stuffed in unlaced hiking boots.

  Stacy ran past them, both arms weighted down with large tool boxes she used as emergency medical kits. She was wearing scrubs, rumpled as though she’d slept in them, and her hair was a tangled wad from where it had partially fallen from the pinned up-do she had worn it in yesterday.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked, dropping to her knees in front of Carly and laying her medical kits on the ground beside her. “The baby?”

  Carly tried to collect her thoughts. “I think we’re fine, but please check Dagny.” Mindy reached them and dropped down on the other side of Carly, grabbing her in a hard hug.

  “Are you okay?”

  Carly didn’t know how to answer that. “Sure.”

  Stacy took the sheet Dagny had been wrapped in and laid it on the ground. Dagny hid her face against Carly’s chest and had to be peeled away to be examined, because she refused to cooperate. Her shrieks of distress as Stacy checked her over made Carly want to cry, too. Carly tried to calm her, but Mindy was checking her, listening to Carly breathe through her stethoscope.

  “Sam got the worst of it, I think.” Carly said after Stacy finished and Dagny was back in her arms, hiccupping from the force of her sobs. “I tried to slow him down, but he had a pretty hard drop.”

  Stacy glanced back and gnawed her lip. “I can look at him, Carly, but I’m not sure—”

  “Please, just do what you can.”

  Sam didn’t want anyone touching him. He let out a whine that turned into a soft, high-pitched growl—as though he knew he wasn’t allowed to growl outright but wanted to make his displeasure known.

  “Sam!” Carly said, and her sharp tone made him duck his head a little as his ears flattened. “She’s just trying to help.” She scooted over closer to him and rubbed his ears as Stacy continued her examination.

  Sam whined again when Stacy prodded his ribs, but it was a soft, breathy sound, one Carly knew he couldn’t help. She murmured to him and he buried his face against her neck.

  “I don’t think they’re broken,” Stacy said. “I don’t feel any fractures. Maybe we can just bind them up, like we’d do with a human case.”

  “Sure.”

  Mindy took Dagny’s sheet and clipped it with scissors from Stacy’s kit, then tore it into wide strips. She helped Stacy wrap it around the wolf’s torso, though he gave that soft whine all the while.

  After that, there was nothing to do but watch as the house burned down to cinders. It reminded Carly, horribly, of watching the burning church after the Infection had swept through the little town. She looked away from the fire and laid her cheek against the top of Dagny’s head. Mindy put an arm around her shoulders.

  “Come on, Carly. We’ll take you home with us.” Stan took her arm to help her to her feet. Carly was surprised at how wobbly her knees felt.

  “I can’t leave … Storm, Hamburgers, and the chickens …”

  Stan sighed. “All right. We’ll stay here with you, then. We can camp out in the barn.”

  The Davises offered pillows and blankets, and about half a dozen women said they would bring clothing. When they did, it was enough to restart the wardrobe of the whole family. Jason brought battery-powered lamps so they wouldn’t have to risk an oil lamp, and joked he was glad she’d had him save the batteries. Someone found a car seat that would work as a bed for Dagny for the night. People kept streaming in and out of the barn, going back to their houses to get things they thought she would need. Food was piled up beside one of the empty stalls, Mason jars and precious saving-it-for-a-special-occasion tin cans of food from Before.

  Their generosity was so great, Carly didn’t know what she was going to do with all of the gifts, but she accepted everything with a smile and a warm thank-you. It was how people showed their affection after a disaster, and she could always redistribute them to those in need later.

  Miz Marson thought of a water bowl for Sam, and donated one of her precious pain pills for him. She held up the tablet. “Ironically enough, Justin found these in a vet’s office,” she said. “I remembered him telling me about it.”

  Carly was touched to the point where she had to blink back tears. She knew how much Miz Marson’s arthritis pained her, but the old lady saved the medicine for the worst days, the ones on which she could barely move.

  “He’ll sleep better,” Miz Marson said. “He needs to rest to heal.” She moved toward Sam and Carly darted forward.

  “You’d better let me do that,” she said.

  Miz Marson looked over at Sam, who had his head lowered as he stared up at her, his amber eyes glittering in the low light. “Yeah, maybe I better.”

  Carly took the pill and petted Sam for a moment before she took his lower j
aw in her hand. Sam let out a soft rumble that turned into a low whine when she said his name. She locked eyes with Sam’s and held his gaze for a moment, waiting. It didn’t take long before he licked her chin, and Carly patted him before she used her thumb to push open his jaw. She shoved the pill onto the back of his tongue as quickly as she could and then released him. Sam huffed and shook his head, but he nuzzled against her for a moment. Carly stood and saw a few people staring.

  Miz Marson shook her head. “Still don’t know how you do that.”

  Carly gave a little shrug. “I’m his alpha. He’s always respected that.”

  Carly and Dagny’s bed was made up in the hayloft. Sam would have to stay on the bottom floor. She felt bad about that, given the trauma he’d been through, but people were insistent she make her bed where it was soft and comfortable. Sam would be all right, they said, and, indeed, he made his way into Storm’s stall and lay down in the corner.

  Grady brought her a pistol and hung its holster on a peg on the stall wall. Carly realized with a sudden jolt that the store of weapons in the house had been destroyed along with everything else. A cold chill swept over her. She might mourn the loss of the paper ornaments Justin made for their first Christmas, her Lord of the Rings DVD, and the other little beloved artifacts of their lives, but the loss of the weapons was a blow for their entire community.

  “How did you notice the fire before everyone else? Were you on patrol?”

  Grady pitched his voice low as to avoid being overheard. “I was. I was actually coming to see you. The fence was cut again. Same place. Justin was right. He came in through the same blasted spot.”

  Carly rubbed the back of her hand over her numb lips. “You don’t think—”

  Grady hesitated. “It’s a big coincidence, if not.”

  Miz Marson began to shoo away the crowd, her demeanor kind but firm, saying Carly needed to get some sleep. Stan and Mindy spread out their bedding on the other side of the hayloft while Carly called her goodbyes with false cheer.

  “I’ll be outside,” Grady said. “You don’t have to worry, Carly. We’ll keep watch over you ’til Justin is back.”

  “I’d rather you kept watch over the hole in the fence.”

  “We have been. He came in right as the shift was changing over. But it won’t be hard to identify him once we catch him. Justin laid some traps, and it looks like he—”

  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.”