The Land of the Shadow

by Lissa Bryan

  “Shit,” the kid whispered, looking around at the carnage. He turned around to face Carly and stared at her with something like horrified awe. She ignored him.

  They followed the short distance of the road to the courthouse. It was where Carly had suspected they were going but had hoped … she shook her head. She wasn’t sure what she had hoped anymore, but she should have known by now not to yearn for fairy-tale endings in this harsh new world.

  “Sit.” Justin stopped and lowered the kid to the ground beside the fire hydrant. “If you’re smart, you’ll be here when we come back.”

  The kid didn’t reply. He just stared at the ground.

  “If he’s still there when we come out, we might have something to work with,” Justin murmured to Carly as they walked away.

  He paused on the steps but motioned her forward. Carly felt like the heroine in a horror movie, every instinct inside her screaming, Don’t go in there! even as her feet drew her closer to the door. Carly opened it and then gagged at the stench that billowed out. She retreated, a hand held over her nose, trying not to vomit.

  Carly forced herself to step back inside, holding the cuff of her shirt over her nose. Her eyes adjusted to the dimness inside, and she wished they hadn’t. What she saw would stay with her for the rest of her life.

  The room was caked with filth, like the floor of an untended barn. A cage of sorts had been constructed from what appeared to be a cattle gate across one corner of the room, though the people behind it seemed in no condition to try to escape. A few pallet beds were scattered here and there, but most of the occupants of the room lay on the floor. They were little more than moving skeletons, their dull eyes uninterested in new arrivals. A few were ambulatory, but the majority could not get up. Against the wall was a pile of bodies, discarded like broken toys, sprawled in the heap where they’d been tossed.

  How long had they been there? How long had the survivors been locked in here? Carly saw no evidence of food or water, not even a bucket for a toilet. Her eyes stung with tears. She felt someone’s hands on her shoulder, and she turned to see Justin standing behind her. His gaze was not on the terrible scene before them but on her, and they were full of sorrow.

  “They didn’t need them anymore. They were gearing up for battle,” Justin said.

  “So they just locked them in here with no food or water … no bathroom … no … nothing?”

  He nodded.

  For a moment, she wished Marcus were alive so she could kill him again. Her hands clenched in fists, but she forced them to loosen.

  Carly stepped closer to the nearest person, a man lying nude on the floor. She crouched down to touch his forehead and his eyes opened, making her jump, but those eyes were what stopped her from retreating. They were soft brown, a familiar shape she saw in the mirror every morning. He had her father’s eyes. The similarity was so strong, it made her heart ache. But just like her father, there was no clarity, no reason within those eyes. A husk, a hull, a zombie. The person he had once been no longer existed.

  “The dead know confusion,” Anne Rice had once written, and it was an idea that had terrified Carly, but she knew now it was far worse to experience it while living.

  She turned to Justin, and he had pity in his eyes—not pity for the poor, wreckage of humans they saw around them, but pity for her.

  She was wrong. This wasn’t slavery. This was something worse. Something … abominable. Slavery was taking cognizant human beings and forcing them into servitude. This was taking people at their weakest possible point and exploiting them in the ugliest fashion possible. Marcus and his men had stripped these people of their humanity, destroyed whatever was left.

  All along, she had hoped, deep within her, that at this moment she would be able to set them free. It had been the only thing she could hope for, the only outcome that seemed tolerable, but she now knew it was an impossibility. Even if they could nurse them back to health, the Infected couldn’t care for themselves. Not with the countryside picked clean of processed food they could eat from a can or bag. Not without clean water or ways to protect themselves. The climate here was kind—they wouldn’t freeze. But they would starve. Leaving them—abandoning them—wasn’t an option.

  She looked down into the man’s eyes, into eyes like her father’s. There had been no hope for him. She knew that now. He would never again be the man with whom she watched The Lord of the Rings. She could not leave her father to wander the wasteland. Nor anyone’s father.

  Carly looked up at Justin, unable to speak, but she thought he knew.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked. His voice was soft, but it still hurt. It wasn’t a question she wanted asked. It wasn’t a question she wanted to answer, but she didn’t have a choice.

  “I know what I have to do, but I don’t want to do it.”

  “Should we take a vote?” He indicated the small band of Colby’s defenders outside.

  She hesitated.

  Justin gave her a small smile. “Still want democracy?”

  Carly closed her eyes. Guilt washed through her because it felt like cheating. It felt like she was diluting the responsibility by spreading it to her friends. “No.”

  Justin pulled her into his arms. Beneath her ear, she heard the strong, steady thump of his heart. “I’ll do it.”

  She drew back and shook her head. She couldn’t pass this off on him, though a small part of her might be tempted.

  She took a deep breath. “Together.”

  His eyes were full of love, the deep compassion of his strong heart. “Together.”

  Carly headed to the open doorway. She gazed around at the faces of her friends—no, her family now. Mindy was crying, and Pearl had an arm around Stacy’s shaking shoulders. They knew.

  “I’m going to—I’m going to take care of them,” Carly said. She caught Stan’s eye, and he gave her a small nod, pulling Mindy into his arms as she let out a shuddering sob.

  “Stacy, give me your bag.”

  Stacy had tears running down her cheeks, but she did as Carly ordered. Carly opened it and searched until she found what she needed. She took out the little bottles of sterile water while Justin opened the pill bottles. He helped her pull apart the capsules and mix the powders together before pouring them into the bottle. He shook it until the powder was dissolved and then filled two syringes with the mixture.

  “Intramuscular,” he said. “It’s strong enough that you don’t have to hit a vein.”

  She nodded without replying.

  He kissed her, a light brush of his lips over hers.

  The sun was coming up when they emerged from the courthouse. The cool, clean breeze chilled the dampness on her cheeks. Carly made it to the bottom of the steps and then turned the corner to a soft patch of grass. She fell to her knees and vomited, heaved until the muscles of her stomach ached.

  Justin knelt beside her and held her against his side to keep her upright. When she had finished, he helped her to her feet and accepted the bottle of water Mindy brought over. She swished her mouth out, turning away to spit.

  “None of them moved,” she said. “None of them cried out.”

  “They didn’t know, Carly.”

  “I can’t decide if that’s worse or better.”

  Carly looked over and saw Pearl sitting on the curb. She looked up and met Carly’s eyes for a moment and then dropped her gaze. She lowered her head and stared down at the ground. Her tiny braids had come loose from her bun and hung down beside her cheeks like streaks of obsidian tears.

  Carly sat down on the curb beside her. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for this.”

  “No,” Pearl said with such force that Carly’s head jerked up to stare at her. “This is something that’s been turning over in my head … and I have to tell you. I don’t want to tell you, but I think I have to. Justin, did you ever tell Carly my story about the eyeless man in the subway tunnels beneath LA?”

  Justin shook his head. “I reckoned
that was between you and me.”

  Pearl took a deep breath. “You can fill her in with the rest of it later, but the important part is that when I was leaving LA, I was terrified by an Infected man in the subway tunnels. It was—” She closed her eyes for a moment. “It was mostly my own mind, but I was terrified. Almost insane myself with fear. And I … I have to tell you something. I lied to you, Justin. The man in the tunnel, the one with no eyes? I told you he walked away. But he didn’t. I killed him.”

  Justin nodded. He didn’t seem surprised. Either he had suspected it all along, or he didn’t think it changed anything.

  “I wasn’t sure—I’ve never told anyone that. I didn’t know how it would be taken. I was afraid if I told you, it might mean you wouldn’t think I was fit to be a part of this community. Because, in the end, he wasn’t really a deadly threat to me. It was my own fear. It was like … he was like my own fear, embodied.” Pearl looked down at her hands and clenched them, almost convulsively.

  “I killed him because I was mad with fear. I felt guilty about that for a very long time. Until this moment, to tell you the truth. But I don’t feel that way now, because I see what I did was actually a mercy. Otherwise, he simply would have wandered the tunnels until he fell and hit his head or collapsed and starved. What would have happened if he made it back to the station and was found by that mob that chased me? Would they have tormented him or tortured him? Would they have done something to him like these horrible people here?” Pearl looked back at the courthouse and shook her head. She turned back to Carly, and her dark eyes glistened. “You shouldn’t feel guilty either, Carly. You didn’t kill them. The Infection killed them long ago.”

  Carly didn’t know if she could accept that yet, but it was a start. She stood and offered her hand to Pearl. Pearl took it, and Carly helped to haul her to her feet. She held on to it for a moment longer and held Pearl’s gaze.

  “Thank you,” she said, and she meant far more than Pearl’s words or the events of this long, dark night.

  Pearl nodded and, to Carly’s surprise, pulled her into a swift, hard hug.

  They walked down the silent street, past the bodies littering the pavement. There would be cleanup. They would have to return to salvage, to bury the bodies and collect the weapons and supplies. To burn the courthouse as they had burned the church in Colby and cleanse that blighted spot from the earth … but that would all come later.

  A new day had arrived. A new beginning. The road stretched before them, long and winding, likely to take them in directions she never expected.

  They were battle-weary and grieved, but hopeful just the same. Carly saw it in the small smiles they exchanged as they set off on the road that would take them home, out of the land of the shadow.

  They had only gone a few hundred yards when all of them stopped to stare at each other, surprised and bewildered by a sound they had not heard in over two years. The sound of an automobile engine.

  An army truck crested the hill.

  Finis

  Thank you for your purchase. Please long onto Amazon.com or Goodreads.com and leave a review for this title. We would love to hear from you.

  About the Author

  Lissa Bryan is an astronaut, renowned Kabuki actress, Olympic pole vault gold medalist, Iron Chef champion, and scientist who recently discovered the cure for athlete’s foot … though only in her head. Real life isn’t so interesting, which is why she spends most of her time writing.

  She is the author of three other novels, Ghostwriter, The End of All Things, and Under These Restless Skies.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my editor, Christine Diane, who made this a much better book. I’m also grateful to my pre-reader, Jess Molly Brown, who has an invaluable talent for “nit-picking.”

  Thanks also to Gene Doucette and Karin Hoyle Ballstadt, who helped me find just the right title for this book. Karin’s encyclopedic knowledge of The Lord of the Rings came in especially handy!