The Land of the Shadow

by Lissa Bryan

  “It’s not much, but it’s yours if you want it,” Carly said. “There’s other stuff at the furniture store if you want to change any—”

  “This is fine.” Pearl ran her fingers over the flowered upholstery of the sofa. “It reminds me of my mom’s furniture.”

  Her voice contained the same wistful sadness as Carly’s did when she spoke of her family. Carly’s throat tightened.

  “My mom had green and white gingham.” She had lain on that couch while she watched the world fall apart. Carly took a deep breath and forced herself back to the present. “If you need anything, don’t be shy about asking, okay?”

  “Thanks, Carly. I’m sorry I’ve been so suspicious. This place just seems to be too good to be true, you know? I keep expecting to open a door and find your Soylent Green factory.”

  Carly nodded, though she had no idea what Pearl was talking about with the reference. She’d have to ask Justin later. But she understood what Pearl meant about it feeling too good to be true after being out in the wasteland. She’d had the same feeling when they’d first come to Colby and found it a still-functioning town, societal structure intact, shops still open. Mindy had been so freaked out by it, she’d refused to even go to the town meeting.

  “Have a good night,” Carly said. She turned to go and stopped in the doorway for a moment. “Pearl? I’m glad you’re here.”

  Pearl gave Carly a smile and dropped her pack on the floor with a thump, a sound that rang with a note of finality. “I’m glad I’m here, too.”

  Chapter Four

  Justin spent the night in his favorite tree—an ancient oak, with wide, comfortable limbs that were perfectly positioned to keep an eye on the house and to be able to scan the fence line through a night scope—but the intruder had not returned.

  The whole town was on a state of high alert, the Watch patrols increased. At one point, he saw their newest resident ostensibly on an evening stroll, but he could see even at this distance that she was checking out the place. He grinned. Pearl was going to fit in better than she thought, but he wanted to have a talk with her.

  His chance came when Pearl showed up for his class the next evening. It was a practical lesson in which he showed the students how to mix and use a homemade version of napalm, a simple mixture that clung to surfaces as it burned. The store mannequins he’d set up in a parking lot were blazing at the end of the night, and he warned the young men, all of whom had an excited, speculative gleam in their eyes, that he’d make them very sorry if he heard of them experimenting at home with it. The last thing they needed was a fire in town. One of his students, Kross, had proven himself very adept at explosives, but Justin didn’t want the kid screwing around and blowing himself up. Kross’s eyes sparkled with excitement, and a bit of a flush had crept up under his dark honey-colored skin. He lingered after class and suggested other mixtures, and Justin enjoyed explaining what wouldn’t work and why. A creative mind was always a pleasure.

  Afterward, Justin didn’t head home, and Pearl showed no surprise when she answered her door. “You and I need to have a talk,” he said.

  She nodded. “I thought you would want to.”

  She gestured at the porch swing, and they both took a seat, their feet coming to a natural rhythm of pushing the swing in a gentle glide. They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the crickets and the creaking song of the frogs in the swamp.

  “But this isn’t the usual getting-to-know-you chat,” she said, a small smile tugging at her lips. “You’re not the type to come over for small talk and a cup of coffee.”

  “No.” Justin rubbed the back of his neck. “And I don’t want you to feel like this is an interrogation, but you can imagine I’d want to know people in the community where my wife and baby are living.”

  Pearl’s smile widened. “You love them, don’t you? I wouldn’t have pegged you as the lovey-dovey sort, but it’s all over your face when you look at them.”

  “They’re everything to me. This community is for them. It’s what Carly wanted to have for our daughter, and so we worked to create it. So Dagny could grow up in a ‘normal’ world.”

  “I can almost hear the quotation marks in your voice.”

  He shrugged. “This is Carly’s vision of the new America. She’s convinced it’s what we’re supposed to do, and so I’m going to help her.”

  “But you’re not convinced?”

  Justin shrugged again. “I don’t know if I’m much of a believer in that fate stuff. Carly’s not religious, but she has this notion that we’ve been led by something to this place, and to this position as its leaders. And she’s so damn convinced of it, she almost makes me a believer. We’re partners, and partners work as a team, so I’m going to do whatever it takes to build this place into the vision she has. That includes picking the right people for it.”

  Justin gave Pearl an assessing look and was pleased to see she didn’t fold under it and look away. He didn’t mince words. “I’ve got an impression of you as someone strong and capable.”

  She gave a small laugh. “I wasn’t always.”

  He snorted. “Who the fuck was? Everyone who survived this shit had to change, and fast. Those that didn’t are now bones beside the highway. But I think you’ve got the steel inside you. The steel that makes you a survivor. And I think you’ve got a sense of honor or ethics—whatever you want to call it. I just need to feel you out a little more before I feel entirely comfortable.”

  Pearl gave him an assessing look of her own. “Let me ask you this—why didn’t you bring Carly for this?”

  He gave a small, rueful smile. “Because it would be like this afternoon when you came over to the house to help with the soapmaking. You girls would chat and laugh and tell each other stories, and I’d probably learn the name of your first boyfriend and how many siblings you once had. Maybe pick up a few clues here and there, but … Carly gets to know people in her own way. Don’t get me wrong—she’s got good instincts of her own, and she picks up far more than you’d realize. But I don’t want to be subtle and deduce the way you think from the anecdotes you tell. I want to be direct. And I think you do, too. What I want to know is who you are now.”

  She nodded. “I can understand that.”

  “Carly told me you were from Los Angeles.”

  It was a moment before Pearl answered. “Yeah.”

  “If it was anything like Chicago, you had a hell of a time getting out.” Justin had brought a lamp with him, but he decided against using it. Let her have the comforting cover of darkness. “One of our Watchers, Grady, was from Chicago. He told me a little about it. I don’t think he wants to talk about it any more than you seem to want to.”

  “There’s a lot of things I don’t want to talk about,” Pearl said, and her voice was as blunt as a dropped stone. “Justin, listen, I know you need to do this—”

  “I have a lot I don’t want to talk about, either.” Justin considered for a moment and decided it might make her more comfortable if he jumped in first. “I’ll tell you something. I used to be in a military unit. A shadow unit, one not even acknowledged by the American government to exist. The kind that gets the jobs they didn’t want to give to anyone working under their name.” Justin turned to Pearl, and she met his eyes, glittering in the low light. “So, yeah, I know about not wanting to talk.”

  He sat back. “The Unit is what taught me survival skills. Not just about weapons, but how to find food, emergency medicine so we could treat each other in the field, even how to build some simple shit so we could survive if help was a long time coming. I learned a lot and, unfortunately, had to end up using a lot of it.”

  A few fireflies drifted into the yard and began sending one another their flashing messages. “But it taught me some other things. Things I wasn’t expecting. Loyalty. Honor. Friendship. That was my first real understanding of community, what I experienced in the Unit. We were dependent on each other, and that built strong bonds. I see what Carly is trying to build here, but�
��”

  He rubbed a hand over his face. “I was in the foster care system as a kid. That can kinda skew your definition of what a family is. I guess I never felt that … togetherness … until I was in the Unit. Lewis—he was our commander, or one of them, anyway—he wasn’t much of a father figure, but I suppose I may have thought of him that way.”

  “Lewis? One name, like Madonna or Adele?”

  “Kirgan Lewis,” Justin said with a chuckle. “But most of the time we just called him Lewis. He didn’t encourage familiarity. He was a cold bastard, but one of the smartest men I’ve ever known.” Justin heard Lewis’s voice in his mind, hitting on every one of Justin’s weak points and why he could never reach his full potential as a soldier: “Your emotions, Justin. Your greatest weakness.”

  “I guess I was seeking connection, though I didn’t realize it at the time.” Justin shook his head. “I dunno. But if I was, I was seeking it in the wrong place. We were encouraged to have honor and loyalty, but not emotional connections. He always said emotions make you weak, make you unable to make clear decisions, make you unable to do what you have to do to accomplish the mission.” Justin’s fingers trailed up to touch the tattoo over his heart, hidden under his T-shirt. “In the end, Lewis was right. My emotions led to some bad decisions. A decision that—”

  He stopped and looked over at her and cleared his throat. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, I know what it’s like to carry those burdens, memories you don’t want to share. So, I’m not going to ask you about that. I’m going to ask you to tell me what you can.”

  He could hear her breathing in the stillness. She began to speak. Her words slowly wove a story around him in the darkness, which he could see as clearly as if it were a movie unfolding before his eyes. The darkened porch and the sounds of the southern spring night vanished, and he was right there with her.

  Pearl tried to leave LA while the Infection was still raging. Something had happened right before she packed up to go, something she said she did not want to discuss, but she realized was the reason why she hadn’t been thinking clearly at the time. If she had, she never would have attempted to take the freeway. LA was world famous for its traffic jams on ordinary weekdays. On that day, it seemed all three million residents were trying to leave the city at once.

  She managed to merge into traffic from the ramp, but moved just a mile or two before coming to a dead halt, idling with thousands of other cars, packed bumper to bumper.

  Hours ticked by. Pearl tried to use her phone to check her e-mail, but her Internet connection still wasn’t working, and every number she called returned the fast beeps of a disconnected line. She sighed and gave up, then tried to read a novel to pass the time, but her mind drifted and she couldn’t follow the plot.

  She turned off the ignition to conserve gas and keep her engine from overheating. She rolled down her windows and missed the air conditioner as soon as she did, because the heat was oppressive without a breeze to stir the sweltering air. The car ticked as it cooled, adding to the background noise of frustrated shouts and the occasional indignant blare of a horn.

  Pearl watched through her windshield, tapping her idle fingers on the wheel until a group of people walked by her open window. She blinked at them in surprise, unused to seeing pedestrians on the freeway.

  With a start she realized it was late afternoon, and it would be dark soon. But traffic hadn’t moved an inch. More people walked by. A family passed her, the parents loaded down with bags and bundles. Even the kids carried overstuffed packs, their shoulders pulled back by the weight.

  They weren’t alone. More families, couples, single people—moving faster than the groups—the elderly, the ill-prepared. Women in heels limped by. A middle-aged man and a teenaged boy supported an Infected woman on their joined hands, both of their faces red from the effort, but not as red as she, covered in sweat and twitching. Pearl recoiled by instinct, her hand going up to cover her mouth and nose as if she could block the germs. She’d been exposed twice already, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

  She looked around, noting the many hoods raised in the universal signal for help, as though AAA would come by, or perhaps a friendly police officer who would call for a tow truck. How many cars ahead of her were in the same condition? Was this was why traffic wasn’t moving? Why it would never move? Pearl felt foolish for taking so long to realize it.

  She gazed around the interior of her car. She needed to gather her supplies and start walking herself. All the things she’d brought … it looked like she was planning to move into a college dorm room instead of fleeing for her very survival. She couldn’t carry all this and couldn’t imagine why she’d brought much of it in the first place.

  She had a backpack. She reduced her things down to what would fit inside. A few changes of clothes, the small bit of canned food she’d been able to buy at the grocery store, some bottles of water. Pearl flipped down her visor and a picture fluttered down into her lap. Herself, her sister and mother at the beach, all of them laughing, the sun gleaming on their shoulders. Pearl slipped the picture into her pocket as she slid from the car.

  Pearl gave the car a pat on the hood as she walked away. She’d liked that car, a symbol of her success. It seemed she had said goodbye to a lot of things over the last few days, and now she was abandoning the few possessions she had taken when she fled home. Things that would now sit forever in her car—a shiny, motionless time capsule on the I-10.

  She set off walking, glad of the sturdy shoes and comfortable clothing she’d worn. Pearl wove between cars, waiting for groups to pass through the gaps, avoiding those on bicycles or motorcycles. In places, it was so crowded, she had to wait until a large group had threaded through a narrow opening, slow going for some of those who were ill or elderly.

  Impatient, she thought she could move faster by herself on the surface streets. She took the next exit, pitying the people who still sat in their cars, staring ahead and waiting for the traffic to move. They would get it, eventually, just like she had. Or maybe they were Infected and would sit there until the illness carried them away.

  Troubled by that thought, she quickened her pace down to the street. What she saw when she reached the bottom of the ramp made her freeze in place and stare around her in shock.

  A car was burning beside the sidewalk, and the flames sparkled on the broken glass of the shop window that littered the sidewalk. It crunched beneath her shoes as she passed. An Apple store, from the sleek and modern look of it, but all of the tables inside had been turned over and the walls were bare of merchandise. Empty white boxes littered the floor like drifts of snow.

  Every shop along the street seemed to have gotten the same treatment. Halfway down the street, a pharmacy was in the process of being pillaged. It was a frantic, frenetic crowd that swarmed through the windows and fought amongst themselves for boxes and bottles. Drug users, she guessed, unable to get their regular supplies due to the Infection, desperate for a fix. But it could also be people hoping the pharmacy carried something that might cure their loved ones of the Infection. Whatever the motive behind it, the desperation made for a vicious tumult amid the shelves. Someone screamed in pain, and she quickened her steps, swinging her path wide out into the street to stay far away from that group. Just keep moving east, she told herself. Head east and don’t stop.

  An envelope blew across the asphalt and bumped into her foot. Pearl gaped at the post office on the corner, which had been gutted, every window broken out, and the interior in shambles. Its flag had been taken down and sent back up the pole upside down, the international distress signal.

  It didn’t seem possible that things had fallen apart so fast. For a moment, she just gazed around her in dazed disbelief, wondering if she’d somehow stumbled onto a movie set, because none of it made sense. She recalled what she had seen the day before at the grocery store, when the patrons had swarmed out the front after someone broke the plate glass window, as though a signal had been given that the normal rules
of society no longer applied. That memory had the hazy feel of a half-remembered dream and she—

  Her head turned at a loud bang and the sound of raucous laughter. A large group of men rounded the corner in front of her—a very large group. One of them swung a bat and smashed out back window of a car parked beside the curb, and the group cheered.

  They spotted her and a few of them hooted, shouting lewd comments. They surged toward her with hateful glee stretching their faces in ugly grins, and Pearl didn’t stick around to see what would happen next. She turned and ran back the way she’d come, running harder than she’d ever run in her life, her heart pounding from the exertion and fear.

  The fight in the pharmacy had turned into a wide-scale brawl, and the shouts from inside drowned out the catcalls behind her. A shot rang out and someone screamed, followed by a second blast of gunfire. Pearl ducked but didn’t slow down. Her bag slid off her shoulder and took her purse with it. She tried to catch them, but they fell from her arm faster than she could grab the straps. She didn’t dare slow to pick them up. The shouts and pounding footsteps behind her sounded too close …

  She ran past the exit ramp and down the street. At the corner, she spotted a subway station and ran toward it, down the stairs, only to find the bottom blocked by a gate. She looked back up toward the top of the stairs, but she could still hear them as they shouted directions to one another as they searched to see which direction she had gone.

  The bottom corner of the gate was loose. Pearl crouched down and tugged it aside, just enough to squeeze through her head and one shoulder. She pushed and gasped as a sharp piece of metal sliced into her arm. It was too small; she wasn’t going to fit.

  A shout echoed from above, and Pearl decided she was going to fit if she had to leave half her skin behind. She pushed and rammed, panting and cursing, trying to crush her body down to a smaller size. She had a horrible moment of desperation when she almost surrendered in despair. She’d never make it. And then the gate gave just a tiny fraction of an inch, just enough to let her pull herself through.