The Land of the Shadow Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  The Land of the Shadow

  By

  Lissa Bryan

  First published by The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2014

  Copyright © Lissa Bryan, 2014

  The right of Lissa Bryan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All characters and events in this Book – even those sharing the same name as (or based on) real people – are entirely fictional. No person, brand, or corporation mentioned in this Book should be taken to have endorsed this Book nor should the events surrounding them be considered in any way factual.

  This Book is a work of fiction and should be read as such.

  The Writer’s Coffee Shop

  (Australia) PO Box 447 Cherrybrook NSW 2126

  (USA) PO Box 2116 Waxahachie TX 75168

  Paperback ISBN-978-1-61213-264-8

  E-book ISBN-978-1-61213-265-5

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the US Congress Library.

  Cover Images: © depositphotos.com zajac, © depositphotos.com SolominViktor, © depositphotos.com / kyslynskyy

  Cover Design: Jada D’Lee

  www.thewriterscoffeeshop.com/lbryan

  Dedication

  Dedicated to my True Love, as always …

  “Then shouldering their burdens, they set off, seeking a path that would bring them over the grey hills of the Emyn Muil, and down into the Land of the Shadow.”

  – J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

  “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.”

  – Isaiah 9:1-2

  Chapter One

  It was a while before Carly realized the reporter was dying.

  Since the beginning of the crisis, Troy Cramer had been indefatigable. He stayed on the air for inhumanly long stretches, reporting on the rising death toll, the new outbreaks in different cities, the steady collapse of society. His voice grew hoarse as he spoke over images of riots, of uncontrolled wildfires, of hospitals filled with the dead and dying.

  Grainy video … there was a rumor the CDC had a cure but were reserving it for the politicians and the rich. A mob gathered around the organization’s headquarters, waving signs that ranged from pleas to condemnation. Fury and desperation painted the pale, sweat-slicked faces in the crowd. Bodies pushed against the barricades. The camera panned up, and Carly saw ghostly outlines behind the glass of the second-floor window—terrified researchers watching as the teeming crowd demanded something they did not have. The crowd surged past the barricade like water breaking through a dam. The camera shook as the person filming was swept into the mob. Faint screams of those in front, crushed against the doors by the unstoppable wave. A crash and a roar as the doors gave way. The camera tumbled to the ground, and the screen went black.

  Though thousands were dying around them every day, Troy Cramer became oddly fixated on this video, trying to find out if the videographer had been injured, just as Carly worried about those frightened people she had seen through the window of the CDC.

  Video of the president, his face tense and hollow-eyed as he pleaded for calm and for people to obey the quarantine, but no one did. There were too many people desperate to reach family members, people who needed to fill their empty cupboards, and people who wanted to flee the cities for areas rumored to be uninfected. The roads were clogged with the cars of those who had the same idea. Many died in their vehicles waiting for accidents or traffic jams to clear.

  Another grainy image showed a man, delirious with fever, who shattered a window on the side of a hospital when he could not get close to the entrance. He climbed right over the patient in the bed beside the window and others swarmed in after him. But even inside, they would find no succor. The doctors and nurses themselves were Infected, unable to care for anyone, so overwhelmed by the massive numbers, they couldn’t move the bodies before the next victims died.

  There was no cure. Despite the rumors and the CDC’s promises they were working on it and would have an effective antiviral drug soon, the Infected were doomed.

  Troy Cramer knew it. When he realized he had the Infection, he told his audience he would try to stay on the air as long as possible. Even as his voice grew more hoarse and raspy between coughs, and he had to duck below the desk when he retched, he stayed at his post, bringing them new video, new reports, death tolls … until Troy was the last man standing. The other channels had ceased broadcasting.

  Troy ran the news desk alone. He didn’t know how to switch to video feeds, so it was just one solitary camera rolling as he described what was going on outside. He held up his iPad screen to try to show the videos streaming in from viewers, although those became fewer as the days passed.

  As Troy grew sicker, his words became disjointed, rambling. Sometimes he cried, and Carly cried with him. Small patches of his orange-beige makeup clung to his pallid and sweaty skin, skin that became a horrible red as his fever rose.

  One morning, Carly woke to find him slumped over his desk, and she cried out in distress. As though he had heard her, he lifted his head, with great effort, to whisper a few words. His eyes, glassy with exhaustion and fever, gleamed as he stared into the camera. “I’m still here. Still here.” He let out a convulsive cough and crumpled the news bulletins still clutched in his hand.

  Carly pressed her hand to the television screen. “Still here,” she said. Troy had been with them through the whole Crisis, and Carly would not abandon him now, even if he never knew it. She would be with him until the end. Whatever the end might be. She kept hoping someone had called an ambulance for him and a well-groomed news anchor would slip into his chair after the paramedics came to take him away, and tell everyone the Crisis was beginning to diminish as a new vaccine was distributed. It was a silly, futile hope, but she held it in a tiny corner of her heart just the same.

  While he was still alive, still with her, there was a chance this could all be made right again. “Still here,” she whispered. She sat by the television and listened to the gurgle of his labored breathing until the power went off and the screen went dark.

  She hadn’t felt so alone when Troy was on the air. She was left to face the ugly reality that her parents—

  Carly jerked out of sleep when the rooster crowed right below their open window. Her heart pounded, and she had to blink several times before the fog cleared from her mind. It was still dark outside.

  Beside her, Justin groaned. He rolled over and rubbed a hand over his face. “Someday I’m going to kill that damned bird,” he muttered. “Slowly.”

  “What time is it?”

  “At least two hours until sunrise.” Justin snuggled against her back. “Go back to sleep.”

  Across the hall, Dagny let out a little cry, a
nd then waited for a moment to see if it would summon her parents. Carly and Justin both held their breaths. Sometimes Dagny would fall right back to sleep, but not this time. The stillness was broken by an insistent wail.

  “Ma-ma-maaaa!”

  Justin sighed as he rolled over and swung his legs off the edge of the bed. Carly sat up, pushing her tumbled hair out of her face.

  “I’ve got it,” Justin said. “Go back to bed, honey.”

  “Can’t. I’m awake now.” She pushed aside the mosquito netting and shuffled over to pick up her robe. “I’ll start breakfast.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Justin said. He stretched and gave a soft groan. “I’d kill for a cup of coffee.” He headed into the hallway toward their daughter’s room, and Carly heard Dagny’s delighted cry.

  “Da-da!”

  Carly shook her head. He tried to skip breakfast every morning. She knew he was trying to conserve food, but he worked too hard to miss a meal.

  Sam stood and wagged his tail as Carly rounded the foot of the bed. He followed her down the stairs, his nails clicking on the wood. She opened the kitchen door to let him out while she checked the wood-burning stove. The fire had burned itself down to orange cinders, and Carly swore under her breath as she realized she’d forgotten to stoke it again. As hot as it was, and as much as she hated having it going round the clock, they needed it to boil their drinking water and to keep it ready for cooking.

  She missed the large stove they’d had in the house in North Dakota. This one was much smaller, with just two small burners on top and a tiny oven on the left side, barely large enough for a loaf of bread. But it was all Justin had been able to find after scouring the surrounding area. Perhaps he’d find a better one someday on his scouting trips further afield.

  When they’d first come to Colby a year earlier, the range in the house had been running on natural gas, but it stopped working a few months after they’d moved in. Justin supposed the appliances had been using the natural gas left in the lines after the automatic shutoffs engaged when the pumps stopped running. It might be possible to get the pumps operational again with the generators they were working on, but that was far in the future.

  Carly fed in the kindling and coaxed the cinders into a blaze by adding a bit of sawdust collected from Justin’s woodworking shop in the garage. Shutting the door made a louder clatter than she expected, and she winced, hoping it hadn’t woken Kaden. At least he was finally sleeping well.

  During the first few days after the Infection had swept through town and carried off everyone but Kaden Weaver, Old Miz Marson, and a little girl named Madison Laker, Kaden had begun having nightmares. Terrible ones he wouldn’t talk about but woke him shouting, waking everyone in the Marson house. Carly sent Justin to talk to him, thinking that if anyone knew about nightmares, it was Justin. Kaden wouldn’t talk about it, though, so Justin talked and Kaden listened. Whatever was said must have made an impression because a week later, Kaden showed up on Carly and Justin’s front porch with his belongings and asked if he could stay.

  As far as Carly knew, Kaden had never revealed what his nightmares were about. When he woke screaming, Justin would join him on the screened-in sleeping porch attached to Kaden’s room, and there the two of them would sit, waiting for the sun to rise. The nightmares gradually faded away, but Kaden stayed, finding in Justin something between a big brother and father figure. And that was how Justin and Carly found themselves the parents of a fifteen-year-old boy.

  Carly went into the pantry and moved aside the hidden panel on the floor. She reached into the cavity and pulled out a metal can, eying it speculatively. Justin had found a stash of it in an abandoned restaurant. It was probably the last coffee in this part of the country. She gnawed her lip for a moment and then went back out into the kitchen. It didn’t have the easy pull-tab seal like coffee from the grocery store, so she went searching through the drawers for the can opener. She hadn’t used it in a long while because canned food was so uncommon these days.

  The restaurant had yielded little else in the way of food, though they now had an industrial-sized vat of ketchup. When she had questioned Justin’s reason for taking it, he had simply shrugged and said, “It’s calories.” She had hoped he wasn’t envisioning a future where that was all they’d have to eat.

  There it is! The opener was hiding in the back of the drawer under an oven mitt. She attached it to the lid of the can but jumped when Justin’s voice sounded behind her.

  “Carly, what are you doing?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. He wore a ratty old T-shirt and sweats cut off into shorts. His dark-brown hair stood in wild spikes all over his head, and he hadn’t shaved yet, but when he smiled at her, it almost made her heart stop.

  “Making you that cup of coffee,” she said and suddenly felt a little awkward about it, despite her good intentions.

  “No, honey, but thank you.” He took the can from her hands and set it down on the counter. “We agreed this was too valuable to use.”

  “I know, but—”

  He lifted her chin with his fingers until she was looking up into his dark eyes, a brown so dark they looked black in most lights. “You remember how upset people were when we didn’t share it?”

  Carly nodded.

  “We made the decision to save it for trade. Not so we could take it for ourselves. That’s not fair, nor is it honorable.”

  She felt embarrassed now, but she had wanted to do something for him, something nice, a little indulgence in a life that had very few of them. “Leadership should have some privileges, Justin. You work so hard for this community. We wouldn’t even have this can if it wasn’t for your scouting.”

  He smiled. “I understand your motivations, but leadership is also responsibility, you know? We should be trusted to keep our word.”

  “You’re right.” Carly sighed and took the can back to its hiding place. Chicory it was, then.

  She grimaced at the jar as she carried it back to the stove. Mindy had been wrong when she said it was a good substitute for coffee. Still, so many things had changed in the two years since the Crisis that they all tried to retain these small rituals of life, and Carly supposed chicory was better than nothing.

  She had one ear trained on the upstairs, listening for sounds from either Dagny or Kaden, but heard nothing.

  “Did Dagny go back to sleep?”

  “She was out before I even finished changing her.” Justin gave that soft, goofy smile his daughter inspired, and it always made Carly smile, too, even on the darkest of days.

  They drank a cup of chicory together at the table, Carly stealing a few minutes to read and Justin going over some plans that had been drawn up for irrigating a new field. She loved these quiet times in the mornings, before the world broke in with its problems and questions and tugged them off in different directions for the day.

  As the sun’s first rays scorched the horizon, promising another sweltering day, Carly checked breakfast and then got ready for the morning’s chores. She shoved her feet into her boots, picked up her basket, and headed outside, reciting her morning prayer: Please, please let there be eggs.

  The chicken coop was beside the barn. It was portable, so they moved it about once a week to give the chickens fresh grass to peck at in their little fenced-in yard. It was too dangerous to let them roam free during the day.

  The chickens swarmed around her legs when she entered, eager for their breakfast. She filled the feeder and then ducked inside the attached hut while they were distracted.

  Inside, there were a few feet of floor space, covered with sawdust, and a row of ten boxes lined with straw. Carly crouched and peeked into each one and gave a sigh to find two eggs in one of them. She transferred the eggs to the basket with care. Six hens and only two eggs to show for it.

  The last box in the row was occupied by what Old Miz Marson called a “broody” hen. The hen had a clutch of four eggs, and the quick candling Miz Marson had performed when the hen left the
nest to eat one morning indicated the eggs might be fertile. They hoped so. Each attempt at hatching chicks had met with failure. All they could do was pray this time it would work. Carly leaned over to check on her and frowned. The box was empty and the clutch of eggs lay bare.

  Carly turned back to the chickens around the feeder. She counted five hens and the rooster. She peered around the confines of the coop, but there weren’t places for the missing hen to hide. Where could she be? Carly laid a hand atop the eggs. They were cool to the touch. She closed her eyes.

  Latching the door of the coop behind her, Carly headed back to the house, pausing at the threshold. “Justin?”

  He was at the stove, stirring the oatmeal. “Yeah?”

  “The broody hen is missing.”

  He frowned. “What do you mean, missing?”

  Carly gave an impatient huff. “Missing, missing. As in no longer present.”

  “Are you sure?” Justin moved the pot off the burner and donned a pair of ancient sneakers.

  “Pretty sure. There aren’t any places in there for her to hide.” She swallowed. “And the eggs were cold.”

  “Dammit.” Justin raked a hand through his hair. “No feathers, no blood?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  From under the table, Sam emerged, shaking his gray coat as if shedding the remnants of sleep. He yawned, his huge, lupine teeth gleaming with inherent menace, but wagged his tail and licked Carly’s hand as he followed them outside. He sniffed at the ground with interest, and Carly wished he could tell them what he detected.

  Justin looked around while she waited outside the coop. His jaw had a grim set as he emerged.

  “Gone?” she asked.

  “Gone.” Justin glanced around the yard, but there was no way for the chicken to have escaped the coop, even if she had decided to abandon her nest.