The Land of the Shadow

by Lissa Bryan

  “I know.” Justin looked up at her and they locked eyes for a moment. “But we’ve got to try.”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Jason said. “The damn retard attacked me. Let it die.”

  Carly glared at him. “He’s not an it.”

  “Jason, shut up,” Justin said. He took the needle Stacy handed him and prepared to insert it into the man’s torso when the man suddenly jerked, every muscle tensed and shaking for a long, endless moment. Then, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, he collapsed to the ground with horrible, utter stillness.

  “He’s dead,” Mindy said unnecessarily.

  Justin swore again. He glanced down at his wrist as though looking for a watch and rubbed the back of his hand over his forehead, leaving a bright smear of blood in its wake.

  Carly drew her hands back, coated with red. She swallowed again and looked around, unsure of what to do. Stacy thrust a towel into her line of sight, and Carly took it with gratitude, wiping off as much of the blood as she could.

  Justin turned his head to look up at Jason, who stepped back because of something he saw in Justin’s eyes. “What?”

  “They attacked you?” Justin asked.

  “Yeah. I had no choice.”

  Justin’s eyes narrowed a little. “There were at least thirty seconds between the shots. Where were you standing?”

  “Here.” But he didn’t look at Justin as he said it.

  Justin snorted. “No, you weren’t. I’ve seen close-range rifle wounds, and these aren’t close-range rifle wounds. You were at least a dozen yards away.”

  Jason took another step back. His gaze flicked around to each of their faces. “So, I stepped back a few feet. I tried to get away from them. They—they attacked me.”

  “Really?” Justin’s voice was mild, but Carly knew how lethal that tone could be. “But you don’t have any wounds.”

  “I didn’t let it get that far,” Jason shouted. “What the hell is this? Law & Order? They were retards!”

  “Stop calling them that!” The explosion of words made Carly start coughing again.

  “I think everyone just needs to calm down,” Mindy said, rising to her feet. “Jason, just take a breath and tell us what happened.”

  Jason spun on his heel and retreated a few paces away, staring out over the field with his back to them. He turned back, raking his hand through his hair until it stood out in crazy spikes.

  “I was out here, checking to see if we should cut within the next couple of days or wait a little while longer. I didn’t even hear the first one come up. He grabbed me and I shoved him off.”

  “Grabbed you how?” Carly asked.

  “Grabbed me, grabbed me.” Jason tossed his hands in exasperation. “You know, put his arms around me. I pushed him away and ran back a few steps, but he came at me again. I pointed my rifle at him, but the ret—the guy … kept coming. So, I shot him.”

  “And this one?”

  “He came runnin’ up behind the other, straight for me, yelling gibberish.”

  Carly didn’t say anything. She looked over at the other dead man. Jason’s bullet had caught him on the side of his head, tearing away a chunk of his skull. His light blue eyes stared up at the sky, as blank as a doll.

  “He was gonna attack me!”

  Justin stood. “Help me carry them back to town.”

  Jason grimaced. “Why? Let’s just bury ’em and be done with it.”

  Justin picked up the man with the chest wound and slung him over his shoulder.

  “Need help?” Carly asked.

  “Nah, I got him.” Justin headed back through the field, keeping to the path they had already trampled through the grain.

  Carly picked up the hands of the other dead man. She looked up at Jason. “Can you get his feet?”

  “Why?” Jason said again. “What for?”

  Justin glanced back over his shoulder. “I want to do an autopsy.”

  “I’ve got to echo Jason here,” Carly said, watching as Justin cut away the clothing of the man with the chest wound. “Why are we doing this? We know what killed them.”

  “I want to see if the Infection leaves any physical traces,” Justin said. “Something biological that explains why they’re permanently damaged by it.” He glanced up at Carly. “You sure you want to stick around for this?”

  Stacy pulled down her surgical mask. “Maybe you shouldn’t, Carly.”

  Carly shook her head. “I’m okay. I want to know this, too.” An image flashed through her mind of her father, his face twisted with hate as he screamed at her in Arabic. She shook her head as though to clear it and helped with the set up.

  They pushed together two tables to make one large surface and covered it with a plastic picnic tablecloth, the only thing they had on hand that was large enough and impermeable to liquid. It struck an incongruous, cheerful note with its red and white checks.

  Carly glanced around at the shelves while Justin cut into the man’s chest, trying to keep her breathing calm and even. Not just to quell her churning stomach, but to try to hold back the coughs she felt ticking her throat. She hoped it was just allergies and she wasn’t coming down with a cold or had lingering problems caused by smoke inhalation.

  Stacy and Mindy’s clinic was well stocked. The storage room they were using as an impromptu morgue was the one they used for drug storage. Metal shelves lined the walls, crammed with boxes and bottles sorted by group. Carly noticed the antibiotic and antiviral shelves were almost bare.

  Justin did a cursory check of the man’s internal organs. He’d already said he didn’t expect to find much of interest in “the thoracic region.” Still, he thought they ought to check if there were any visible abnormalities that deserved closer attention, particularly in the lungs. Stacy made notes as he announced his findings. Except for the very low level of body fat, everything looked normal enough to the naked eye.

  Carly let out a slow breath when that part was finished, proud that she had only had to look away a few times during the procedure. She didn’t think she’d ever be comfortable with blood and guts—certainly not as comfortable as Justin, who seemed untroubled at shifting intestines around in his gloved hands as he looked over a liver—but she was a lot better than she used to be. She remembered the first time she’d skinned an animal, a raccoon Sam had brought his “pack” to eat, and how horrified she had been. She never could have imagined herself sitting here, watching this. It seemed neither could Justin or Stacy, given their concern for her.

  “All right.” Justin donned a face shield. He glanced over at Carly to see how she was doing, and she nodded. There was a high-pitched whirr as he turned on the saw. Outside, she could hear the hum of the generator. It was also powering the lights Justin had positioned around the table.

  “Got it,” Justin said. Carly grimaced at the squelching sound and kept her eyes on the desks, but Justin’s reflection moved in the window as he took off the top of the skull. A scalpel gleamed in his hand.

  “Holy shit,” Justin breathed at the same time Mindy said, “Oh, wow!”

  “We’ll have to confirm it by checking the other one.”

  Carly walked to the table, peering around Justin’s shoulder at the gray-pink globe revealed by the missing top half of the man’s skull. She had only ever seen a few drawings of human brains and had just a general sense of their anatomy, but even she could see there was something very wrong.

  There were holes throughout the surface and portions of it were darkened, like a bruised apple forgotten in a bowl. Justin took a probe and examined one of the lesions, using a hand mirror to direct light down into the cavity.

  “The frontal lobe is riddled with them,” he said “Big enough to be noticeable by the untrained eye.”

  “You think the Infection did this?” Carly said.

  “I’d say it’s a definite possibility.” Justin looked over at the other body, lying on a wheeled gurney, its head wrapped in a tarp. “I’ll have to check the other body’s brai
n—what’s left of it.”

  “This looks a lot like the damage caused by bacterial or pneumococcal meningitis,” Stacy said.

  Justin shook his head. “My knowledge of brain pathology is minimal. All I know is what a normal brain looks like, and this doesn’t look normal at all. It looks like a dart board, and that has to be the cause of their loss of cognitive function.” He carried the saw over to the other man. Carly didn’t go over to watch, but from what they said, the second man had the same markings on his brain.

  “I want to take some slides,” Stacy said.

  Justin glanced over at Carly. “Do what you need to. Carly and I are going to take a break.”

  They stripped off their gloves and gowns and headed outside of the clinic, across the parking lot to the town commons. The crickets were singing in the humid darkness, and without any light pollution, the stars above were brilliant against the cloudless sky. Carly sat down on the nearest bench, beneath the weeping willow. Justin followed her and dropped down onto the bench with a tired sigh.

  “It’s been two years,” Carly said. “If he was going to get any better, he would have already, wouldn’t he?”

  “The brain is a remarkable organ. It can sometimes … rewire itself around damage, but it can’t heal injuries like that.”

  She was silent, staring off into the distance.

  “Does it make you feel any better, knowing they wouldn’t have gotten better?” Justin wasn’t speaking of the men in the clinic, and she knew it.

  “Is there anything … if they’d had skilled therapy, maybe?”

  “Carly, the Infection more or less ate his brain. They’re not going to get better.” He said the last sentence with firm emphasis, holding her eyes as he spoke.

  Carly shook her head. “I just … I really don’t know what to think.”

  “What are we going to do about Jason?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “I don’t know whether or not to call it self-defense. If we were in the old days, he’d be sitting in front of a grand jury.”

  Carly rubbed her forehead, trying to soothe its dull ache. They’d discussed crime and punishment before, but the discussion had been centered around theft, not murder.

  They had no jail. They had no police. No court system. Carly pictured an Old West-style court, with a grim-faced jury and a gallows in the common.

  “I don’t think Jason is a danger to the community, and that’s what we have to consider first and foremost.”

  “But, Justin, we also have to consider the fact these are human beings he killed. We can’t just dismiss it. Should we put this question before the town?”

  “I can tell you right now what they’re going to say, Carly. You know how most people feel about the Infected. They’re afraid of them.”

  Carly rubbed her temples. “That doesn’t make them lesser, nor does fear make killing them okay, either.”

  “Not everyone sees it that way. You know this is a new world. You’re trying to recreate the world of Before, but in some respects, you can’t, Carly. The old ways are dead. The only law and order is what we create. Justice has to be determined based on our new circumstances.”

  “I know that, Justin. I’m not blind to the fact everything has changed. But there are some fundamentals I think we should continue. It’s why we’re here. It’s why we’ve chosen the people we have, because they all wanted to embrace those basic principles.” She thought again of Jason and shook her head. “At least, I thought we did.”

  “Fundamentals are still ideas. Ideas grow and change based on their circumstances. That’s why the founding fathers wrote into the Constitution a way to change it. Because they knew the system they invented might not work in the future, so it would need to be altered as times changed. If we’re going to create a government—I mean, a real government, as opposed to the two of us more or less running the show—it will have to be a system of laws based on the environment around us.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” Carly said. “Some of the ethical principles I have … they’re strong in me. How can I create a system outside of what I believe to be true and right? There are some things I can’t change. To me, they’re immutable right-and-wrong, no matter what else may have changed.”

  “Can you say an absolute, like killing is always wrong?” Justin’s voice was mild.

  “No …” She realized what he meant. There wasn’t a way to put those absolutes into words without a lot of complicated explanations and exceptions that could never cover every circumstance. That’s why the laws Before were thousands of pages long, and still situations had cropped up that weren’t addressed within its pages and stirred fierce debate.

  “But we can’t just ignore this,” she said, but it sounded weak to her own ears.

  “How do you want to punish him, Carly? It’s not a hanging offense, right? If we’re not going to kill him for it, do you want to expel him? No? If not, we don’t have a jail where we can have him serve out a sentence. And what benefit would that have for our community, anyway, to have a productive citizen sitting idle, a burden on our resources? Community service? He does that anyway. So, what would you have us do?”

  “I don’t know!” she shouted. She wasn’t angry at him. She was angry at the situation, at her own impotence. “But it’s not something where you can just say don’t do it again and pretend that takes care of matters.”

  Justin gazed at her for a moment. “I think it comes down to whether he’s a threat to our community or an asset.”

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

  “And if he’s an asset, do we want him to go on being an asset, or do we want to insist on an archaic definition of crime, with which our own community is unlikely to agree? It’s your decision, Carly. You know I’ll back your play. If you feel strongly about it—that he shouldn’t be among us any longer—I’ll support you. But you need to understand that there are likely to be consequences in the community for that decision.”

  “No,” Carly said. “No, I can’t say …”

  Justin nodded.

  They fell silent for a moment, and Carly’s mind drifted back to the two men lying dead inside. “It’s a miracle those two survived on their own this long.”

  “What if they didn’t?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if they were with Marcus’s group?”

  Carly widened her eyes. “And they escaped, hoping for help from us?”

  “No, Carly,” Justin said. He turned to her and took one of her hands in his own, his eyes locked on hers for emphasis. “They may have … wandered away somehow, but they weren’t coming for help. They don’t have that cognitive power. They may have seen another person and traveled toward them by instinct, but they don’t seem to be aware of their situation enough to know they need help. Or maybe they were released near us as a test or distraction. Whatever the circumstance, they didn’t have any ability to make conscious decisions.”

  “You can’t decide that,” Carly said. “You can’t say every single one of them is affected in the same way. Not on the basis of two autopsies.”

  “Have you ever met one that was just mildly affected?” Justin asked.

  Carly took a deep breath. “No. No, I haven’t. But that doesn’t mean—”

  Justin closed his eyes. “Honey, I love your optimism, I do. But just like you expect to find another dog or another cow based on the fact there’s one … being unable prove a negative doesn’t equal a positive.”

  Carly dropped her head into her hands. “My father,” she said.

  “He wouldn’t have gotten better,” Justin said. “And, Carly … he could have been one of these burn-outs, wandering the wasteland. Starving, alone, helpless.”

  She rejected that image out of hand, unable to stand the thought of it, of her dad as one of these pathetic, terrible wrecks of a human being. For the first time, she was glad he was dead, that he had died quick and clean, rather than this slow and awful liv
ing death. She wasn’t quite sure she was going to be able to release the lingering guilt she still had over being the cause of that death, accidental though it was, but it was something that deserved greater thought.

  “Think about your own experience for a moment, Carly. Most of the survivors have had an encounter like yours. Can you honestly blame Jason for being quick on the trigger if he thought they were coming at him?”

  “The black cowboy says you’re the seventh.”

  Carly felt tears sting her eyes. “No,” she whispered. The word hurt, and she started coughing again, but it was a word that had to be said. Because she had no other answer.

  Near where the church had once been there was a thin red-willow sapling, a ring of rocks around its base. Justin didn’t know why he’d placed them there, since no one mowed the grass except the horses.

  It was planted to mark the spot of a grave, but no one else knew that. He hadn’t put Tom and Cynthia in the mass grave with the other townsfolk. He still couldn’t have explained why he’d buried them apart from the others, or why he felt this need to stop and visit them every now and then to tell them how their town fared.

  The grass was still damp from the early morning rain, and moisture soaked through the knees of his jeans as Justin began to clear away the weeds over the single grave. He’d buried them together, Tom’s arms around his wife. He’d seen something of himself in Tom, in the way he’d looked at Cynthia, and he hoped he and Carly would be the same way in their elder years, sitting on the porch together, teasing and nagging each other, watching the other with that shining light of love and happiness in their eyes.

  And then he’d killed them.

  No, that wasn’t exactly true. He was no more to blame for it than Carly, or Stan and Mindy. It would have happened at some point. The town of Colby couldn’t have held off meeting with Outsiders forever.

  Justin still hadn’t fully replenished the stock of antiviral drugs they’d used to try to save the townsfolk. He’d known, even as he cracked open safety seals and distributed the pills and shots, that it was no use. Hospitals all over the country had tried the same thing, had used every medicine and technique they could think of as they desperately tried to halt the pandemic. But he had to try. When he’d seen the guilt in his wife’s eyes and felt its echoes in his own heart, he’d known he had to try. They had brought Death with them, a silent member of their little group.