The Land of the Shadow (28 page)

“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 living 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.

The few survivors were those who’d taken a flu shot that year. Except for Kaden. He didn’t think he’d had one. He told Justin that one evening as they mucked out the barn. Kaden’s mother had distrusted vaccinations and got the bare minimum necessary to enroll her son in public school. From the strain in the boy’s voice, Justin knew it troubled him. He didn’t want to be the one who shot down Carly’s theory, the single theory they had for why they had survived and others had not.

But did one exception mean there was some natural immunity to the Infection? Justin had thought there must be—among animals, for certain. No virus was one hundred percent lethal. It could be damn close if it was engineered for lethality, as he suspected the Infection was, but viruses mutated as they spread.

The Infection still lived in the survivors, though it hadn’t managed to attack the brain tissue. Somehow, their bodies kept it in check. Would it someday mutate again and overcome their defenses? It was a thought Justin didn’t like to consider. He could do nothing about it, helpless in the face of something more powerful than himself, something he could not fight with his guns or a knife, something he could not outwit or outwait.

When it hit the townsfolk here, it had been hard and fast. Andrea, Tom and Cynthia’s daughter, had died a little more than twenty-four hours after Justin and Carly’s little band came through the gate. A shy, sweet girl who had given them a pitcher of lemonade and a smile—and then had died a day later.

He looked down at the grave. “I think you’d be proud of what we’ve done here.” He plucked a dandelion sprig and tossed it away. “Carly wants to rebuild what you had here. It’s not really possible, because everyone that’s here now is a survivor, someone who went through hell before they came to our gates. It changes a person. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. Things get burned away by the fire. All the excess—down to the bare bones sometimes. What you keep depends on what you think is most important to you.

“Anyway, Carly’s done a damn good job of building a community. Not just people who live together in the same area, but a real
community
. I haven’t seen something like this since I was in the Unit. I let her take care of all that social shit, because I’m not really good at it.

“I just wish . . .” Justin picked a piece of grass and turned it in his fingers. “I don’t know what we’re doing wrong with the farming, but the crop yields are small. Seems like we’re getting less each time we harvest instead of more. I’d hoped by now we’d be building up a good stock of food.

“It’s been a good season. Plenty of rain, and if not, we’ve got the irrigation system set up. Mostly sunny days. The birds were bad last year. We had to have the kids act as living scarecrows, running up the rows to frighten them away. I think I told you about that. All of nature is out of whack right now because of the die-offs. Big gaps in the food chain, predators not keeping things in check . . .

“The Swintons left last night.” Justin plucked another blade of grass and turned it in his hands. Carly had found the note on the porch this morning when she went to get the eggs. She’d brought it to him with tears on her cheeks.

“I expected some would leave,” he had said to her as he folded his arms around her. The Swintons were recent arrivals, a family of a woman and two husbands. He remembered the awkward concern in their eyes when Erica had introduced them. They wondered if they’d be rejected, but Justin and Carly didn’t care about people’s love lives. They cared about their skills and willingness to contribute.

Justin nudged one of the rocks to more perfectly align with the others. “Their note said they just couldn’t stand the thought of living under siege.”

“I thought they were here because they believed in what we were doing,” Carly had said, and her voice had been strained from suppressed tears.

“They did, Carly. They were here because they wanted to be part of a peaceful community, a new America. But they weren’t prepared to go to war for it.”

“I don’t think anyone is, really.”

But they had to be. This wasn’t a world for pacifists. If the Swintons weren’t prepared to defend what was theirs, they wouldn’t last long in the wasteland. Any place worth staying would have to be defended at some point.

The residents of Colby were more prepared than Carly thought. Most of them had to do it before and would do it again. He met with them alone and in groups, and he could see it in their eyes. They had enjoyed the illusion of normalcy inside Colby’s walls, but they knew what was outside, and they knew this day would come.

They were helping him prepare, moving obstacles to create bottlenecks and choke points, entrenched fallback positions, sniper posts, and strategically placed cover. If the town was to be a battlefield, Justin would have it designed to be as beneficial to their side as possible.

He looked down at the silent spot of earth and stood. “I’ll figure out something.” He scratched his head and stared off at the horizon. “I always do.”

Chapter Eleven

Justin dreamed he was in Lewis’s office
.

His hands trembled as he folded the map and slipped it into his pack. Lewis watched him with icy, dispassionate eyes. It was so quiet, Justin could hear the buzzing of the electric wall clock above Lewis’s desk.

“Twenty percent,” Lewis said. “I give it a twenty percent chance you’ll all make it back. Ten percent chance you’ll accomplish the mission and all get back in one piece.”

“I know,” Justin said. “But we have to try. We can’t just—” He took a deep breath. “We have to try.”

“This is foolhardy.” Lewis stood and walked to the window. “I could order you not to go.”

“Yeah, you could. But you won’t.”

Lewis turned and gave him a small smile. “No, I won’t. But I already regret losing some damn fine men to this madness. Have you told them?”

“I did.” Justin slung the pack over his shoulder. “They all still want to go.”

Lewis said something, but Justin wasn’t paying attention. He had spotted something he’d never remembered seeing until now.

The men in the Unit were specially trained in observation. One never knew when a seemingly inconsequential detail would be the key to everything. Lewis drilled them on it, asking the color of the stone in a lady’s ring after they’d passed her in the hall, the number of books on a shelf in one of the simulated houses on the training grounds. They all had a heightened retention of detail, even if they weren’t aware they were collecting the data.

What Justin remembered now in his dream was the picture on top of Lewis’s filing cabinet. A picture of a smiling man with brown eyes. Carly’s eyes
.

Justin’s puzzlement turned into conscious thought, and he woke, sitting up in the darkness.
 

He swung his legs off the side of the bed, propping his elbows on his knees. Was it truly a memory, or something his dreaming mind had created? If it was a real memory, why would Lewis have a picture of Carl Daniels in his office? Lewis hadn’t even displayed a picture of his own wife.