Shadows Have Gone (6 page)

“Rest in peace,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry this happened to you. I wish we could have . . . I’m just very sorry. Justice was done, so I hope your spirits can now rest.”

She dropped the photo into the growing flame and watched it blacken and disappear in a curl of ash. No one would ever know these people’s names. That bothered her. They had once mattered—had laughed and cried and been loved. And now not only their lives had been stolen but their identities were gone, as well. They would be erased from the earth, as though they had never existed.

There weren’t words for that. “I’m just so sorry.”

Sam came up beside her and butted his head into her hand. She rubbed his ears, comforted by the small gesture.

Pearl walked into the garage, carrying a teddy bear. Her other hand held pictures and letters she had picked up from the parking lot, and one by one, she dropped them into the flames. When they were gone, she picked up the bear. The flames sparkled against its plastic eyes. Pearl straightened the little bow tie it wore and then dropped it into the fire. She looked back out at the blue sky, her lips parting as though she were going to say something, but at last, she shook her head and walked out, her boot heels clomping against the concrete floor.

The flames were higher now. The fire was strong. Carly felt the heat of it against her cheeks, drying the tears. Justin put his arms around her shoulders and led her away, out into the sunshine and fresh air.

She saw that Stan had used the time to empty some of the sturdier wagons, and while a small part of Carly always objected, practicality had to trump sentimentality in this new world. Those wagons could be useful back in Colby. They drew them away and left the black smoke billowing into the summer sky.

They collected the bodies of Marcus’s men. Carly tried not to think about it as they lifted the bodies first into a wheelbarrow and then into the house they had chosen for the purpose. These were lives, too. Lives that had ended in sudden violence. Lives that were wasted when these men chose to be predators instead of rebuilding the ruined world.

It was still a sorrowful task. Carly hadn’t ordered the attack on Marcus’s men lightly or taken any pleasure from their deaths. She had taken their lives to prevent more deaths and the damage that might happen to her fledgling community. She still felt it was the right decision, but the burden of each life she had taken weighed on her conscience. Perhaps it should.

When they had finished, they scouted around the town, checking the houses for anything useful and loading what they found into Shadowfax’s wagon. There wasn’t much. Marcus and his men had been preying on people since the Crisis but had little to show for it. They hadn’t been the type to try to build up stores and manage their resources wisely. They glutted when they had a stolen bounty, then starved until they could steal some more. Marcus had also kept tight control over the guns, so most of them had burned in the fires they’d set the night of the attack.

There was one happy discovery in an old convenience store, hidden away in a supply closet that had been overlooked by looters. Justin opened the closet after clearing away the collection of mop and broom handles that had obscured it, and Carly squealed with delight at what was revealed.

“Toilet paper!” Several cases of it, stacked on the floor, still sealed in its plastic.

There wasn’t much of it left in this part of the country. Every roll was precious and was highly valued as a trade item. Both of them felt a little more cheerful as they carried the cases to the wagon.

They collected Marcus’s body last because it was laying on the other side of the destroyed bridge, outside of town. Carly didn’t say anything as she grabbed the heels of his boots and prepared to lift him into the wheelbarrow.

Justin eyed Marcus’s torso. “Small-arms fire.” His eyes snapped to the pistol on Carly’s hip. “You?”

“Yeah.” Marcus had abandoned his men in the fight and tried to escape, the coward. It still made her angry when she thought of it.

He stroked her cheek with the tips of his fingers, careful not to cause any hurt. “This?”

She nodded.

Justin grabbed Marcus’s body by the shoulders and flung it into the wheelbarrow. “Tell me the truth—how close did I come to losing you?”

Carly shrugged. “Not at all. I kicked his ass.” It was only a white lie, she reasoned. He didn’t need to know about the desperate tussle for the gun on the ground. She had won. That was all that mattered.

Justin gave her a small smile. “This is one of those things we’re not going to talk about, hmm?”

Carly nodded without looking at him.

She heard him expel a slow breath. “Okay.”

The small house they had chosen for Marcus and his men was set apart from other buildings by a wide expanse of lawn, and after stripping the house of anything useful, they piled the bodies inside. Both of them were repelled by the idea of polluting the victims’ pyre with the remains of their killers.

Carly jumped when she heard a crash.

“It’s just Pearl breaking the windows so the fire gets better air flow,” Justin said.

“Perhaps with a little more vigor than necessary,” Stan said as he came to join them.

Pearl made her way through the tall grass that surrounded the house. She slung a thick tree branch toward the patio door, and the glass crazed into a web of cracks. Pearl let out a small sound and swept up the club. She swung it like a major-league batter, slamming the end against the fractured panel. Pebbles of glass clattered across the floor at her feet as she swung again and again until the frame was empty and she was panting from the effort. Satisfied, she dropped the club and waded through the grass to meet up with Carly, Justin, and Stan.

“Okay?” Stan said.

Pearl had a bandana tied around her wrist. She used it to wipe the back of her forehead. “Yeah. Fine. We doing this thing?”

“Yeah.” Justin crouched down and opened the cooler Stan had placed there earlier. Inside were glass bottles, each with a scrap of cloth stuffed into the neck. They contained his homemade Napalm cocktail, extras he had made for the battle that hadn’t been needed but now came in handy.

Justin passed them out and gave his Zippo a flick. In unison, they tipped their bottles toward the flame until the rags caught.

“Throw fast,” Justin said and hurled his bottle. It sailed through the broken patio door, and the sound of the bottle breaking was nearly lost in the
whoomp
of the fire exploding as it hit the air.

Carly threw her bottle, aiming for one of the windows. It hit the edge and shattered, spraying fire across the side of the house and the interior. Stan’s bottle went through the same window, and the orange glow in the interior intensified.

“More?” Stan asked. “It looks like it’s caught.”

Justin nodded. “Might as well. Can’t take ’em home and store ’em.”

Pearl was already lighting another. She hurled it with deadly accuracy through the opening.

“Don’t throw too hard,” Justin said. “You don’t want to shatter it in your hand.”

But Pearl wasn’t really listening. She continued to light and throw until all the bottles were gone. She was breathing hard when she hurled the last one against the side of the house. It wasn’t as flammable as the interior, but the bottle made a very satisfying splatter of flames against the siding.

They watched in silence for a few moments as the fire grew, casting a steady glow through the broken windows until the flames enveloped the first floor, curling out of the windows to reach for the eaves. The curtains at the sliding glass door caught, billowing out over the patio in a short-lived sheet of flame.

“Should we say anything?” Carly asked.

“Anything I would say would be pretty rude,” Justin replied. “At executions, they used to say, ‘God have mercy on your soul,’ but I have trouble asking for mercy for them, when they never had any mercy on their victims.”

Carly thought of the Infected Marcus’s group had kept as slaves, abused in every fashion imaginable, then left to die of starvation when they were no longer useful. She didn’t think she could ask for mercy for Marcus and his men, either. “But they were human beings.”

“Which is why I didn’t toss them in the trash pile like they did with their victims,” Justin said. “I’ll admit, my instinct is to lay them out in the dirt and let the animals savage their corpses and let the sun bleach their blighted bones. But we’re giving them this small decency of a cremation. Let Kaden build his cairn for his friend so he’ll be remembered for generations to come. And let the wind scatter these assholes’ ashes to oblivion.”

Carly took his arm, and they turned their backs on the blazing house. It was over. The threat to their little community was gone. Carly expected to feel a rush of relief, but there was nothing. She looked over at Pearl, who was watching the house burn, her eyes narrowed and her lips pinched together as if she were trying to hold back words of her own.

Carly tapped her arm, and Pearl blinked rapidly. “Let’s go help Kaden.”

“Yeah, okay,” Pearl said. She glanced once back at the house, and some of that burning anger faded from her eyes. She followed Carly, Justin, and Stan out of the little town and through the creek. They climbed the hill to the cairn.

Kaden had already finished. He was placing the last of the stones on the mound as they approached. It was impressive, as he’d hoped. He’d used loose chunks of black asphalt from the destroyed bridge to make a rough cross shape on the top.

Kaden’s hands were scratched and blistered, and his face looked sunburnt, but he had a look of satisfaction. He’d done well by his friend. Carly put an arm around his waist and hugged him. He’d been their son for less than a year, but she took pride in helping to shape him into the man he was becoming.

They stood in silence for a few moments by Kross’s cairn. It was perched at the pinnacle of the hill, like the tomb of a king of old. The wind set the long grasses swaying around them, and the birds in the trees trilled their songs, oblivious to the chaos of man below.

“My mom died first,” Kaden said, his eyes focused on the cairn.

Carly sucked in a soft breath and glanced around. Pearl and Stan seemed frozen in place, their eyes wide but fixed on the cairn, as though afraid looking at Kaden would interrupt his words. It was the first time any of them had ever heard him mention his family. Even when he used to wake screaming from nightmares, he wouldn’t talk about it.

“When the Infection came to Colby, she didn’t want to go to the church with everyone else. My mom was into that natural medicine stuff. She didn’t really trust doctors and what she called ‘Big Pharma.’ So she didn't want to go to the church and get pumped full of a bunch of drugs by people who didn’t really know what they were doing. No offense.”

“None taken,” said Justin.

“My dad wasn’t into it like she was, but he loved her, you know? He saw to it us kids got what we needed to be able to go to school, but other than that, we did things the way my mom preferred. When the Infection came, she wanted to stay home and take her natural stuff, but Dad was worried about my brother and me.”

Carly raised a hand to cover her lips. She didn’t want to interrupt his narrative, but she couldn't hide her surprise. She hadn’t known Kaden had a brother. But he rarely spoke about his life Before. In his way, he was almost as secretive as Justin.

“I’ve thought about it a lot over the last year. I think my dad knew. He knew what was going to happen, so when she wanted to stay home . . . if it was going to happen, he wanted her to be where she was happy. None of it was going to help anyway.”

Carly knew what he meant. Even as she and Justin had distributed the antivirals from their drug stash, they knew it was futile. Doctors all over the country had desperately tried anything they could think of to fight it, and nothing had worked.
 

“It all happened so fast. Mom got sick . . .
bad
sick. It was like she was fine one minute, and then suddenly, she was sweating and red and throwing up and . . . we knew. Dad started getting sick almost immediately, too. He told us to go to our rooms, but we could hear Mom getting sick, and then he joined in. It was awful listening to that, knowing we couldn’t do anything to help.

“My brother’s room was right beside mine, and there was a register on the floor we could talk through. We always did that when we were little kids, staying up late to talk, or when we’d been sent to our rooms for misbehaving. Both of us lay there on the floor, whispering to each other now and then. We didn’t say much, but it was sort of comforting to know he was right there.

“Dad and Mom were getting worse, fast, but me and my brother were okay. Since Mom didn’t want to go to the church, Dad decided he was going to put himself and Mom out in the garage, isolate themselves, and hope my brother and I didn’t get it, too.”

“He made me promise,
promise
, I wouldn’t let them back inside, no matter what.” Kaden looked up at Justin. “Not an ordinary promise, like ‘I promise I’ll mow the lawn.’ But a
real
promise. You know what I mean?”

Justin nodded.

“I kept that promise. Even when . . .” Kaden took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. They were shiny when he opened them again. “We had seen on the news how the Infection made people crazy. Sometimes, even gentle, sweet people could get violent or do crazy stuff because they just weren’t . . . right. You know what I’m talking about. I’m sure you saw it, too.”