Shadows Have Gone (37 page)

Stan’s head fell back to his pillow. He licked his lips. “Water.”

Stacy retrieved the cup from the table beside him but had to grip it with both hands to keep from spilling it. She sat down beside him and lifted his head to sip. Carly didn’t hear what Stacy said to him, but she heard Stan’s anguished moan. She looked back down at the bundle in her lap and wept.

It was Stan who told Mindy when she fought her way out of the fever to lucidity, and he held her as she wailed in anguish. Carly couldn’t bear it, especially with Dagny still hovering on the edge. She held her own baby as she heard Mindy’s rending sobs, and prayed, though she no longer had faith anyone was listening. What had it all been for if their children couldn’t survive?

“Ma?” Dagny whispered.

Carly’s startled gaze dropped down to her. Dagny was looking up at her, dazed but aware. Carly slipped a hand to the side of her neck, and an explosion of sound, half-sob, half-laugh, left her when she found Dagny a little cooler. She bent over the baby in her lap and wept—wept nearly as hard as Mindy was doing on the other side of the room, but for a far different reason.

Days passed. Some lingered in the illness longer than others, but slowly, it became clear that their fevers had not been high enough to kill or to burn their minds away. Soon most of the patients were sitting up, sipping the soup Veronica was making by the vat. Two of Carly’s chickens had been sacrificed for soup, but she couldn’t regret that, not if it helped her friends to heal.

And Dagny. Tears of joy leaked every time Carly saw her baby, who was getting healthier by the hour. Sam had come over to sniff her and wagged his tail at Carly as though to say,
See, she’s fine. No reason to be sad
. And then Dagny had reached out to yank his ear.

Had that been just a day ago, or had it been a week? Carly wasn’t sure. As she got sicker, her mind numbed, and she couldn’t seem to keep track of time. She tried to focus on being strong for Mindy. It helped some with her own grief, pushing it aside to try to support her friend, who might be getting better in a physical sense but was shredded by the loss of her daughter.

Carly helped Mindy dress Claire’s tiny body in what Mindy said had been the baby’s favorite dress, the one with the red flower applique. She had a matching headband. Carly’s hands shook—and not just from her illness—as she nudged it into place on the baby’s little head.

Stan brought the coffin he had chosen, a wooden chest made for some other purpose, but fine and smooth. Claire was laid inside, carefully padded by soft blankets. It was Mindy who closed the lid, after gazing down at her baby for a long moment.

“I don’t have a picture of her,” she said.

Carly tried to hold Mindy as she sobbed, but Carly’s coughing was so violent that Pearl drew her away and urged her to lie down for a while before the funeral. From her cot, she saw Mindy and Stan, wrapped in each other’s arms. Each of them was desperate to give comfort to the other but had nothing to give.

Shadowfax drew them all in the wagon to the cemetery for Claire’s funeral—all that were mobile, anyway. The day was cool, but Carly had to blink the sweat out of her eyes. Waves of nausea swelled in her, and she took deep breaths to try to hold it back. She had to do this for her friend. Mindy could barely stand. Stan had to support her through the short service as the tiny wooden chest was lowered into the ground.

“You okay?” Pearl asked Carly.

Carly nodded, but her head wobbled on her shoulders.

She was wearing a sweater and a thick winter coat, but she still shook. She’d never felt so cold, not even when she’d been a child and had plunged through some thin ice into an Alaskan creek. This went beyond the bone-deep chill of malaria. Her muscles felt like they had iced over and would crack at any moment under the stress of her violent shivers.

The nausea she’d been fighting overwhelmed her. She tried to stagger away from the line of tombstones, feeling awful for doing so during the service. She only made it a few paces before she had to bend over. She lost her balance and toppled forward. She felt her head crack against the side of a tombstone, but there was little pain—only the taste of blood in her mouth and that awful, bitter cold.

Carly could hear something . . . it was like the volume of a television slowly being turned up.

Sam was snarling. Carly managed to turn her head and saw his paws braced on either side of her head. He was standing over her, crouched low in a defensive posture.

Stan stepped cautiously toward them, and Sam’s snarl got louder. Stan . . . oh, yes, the funeral.

Mindy grabbed his arm. “No, Stan!”

Carly tried to speak, but all that came out was a soft moan.

Pearl glanced from Stan to the wolf. “Maybe you should listen to her.”

Stan ignored them. He took a slow step forward. “Sam, stop. Listen to me.” His voice was low but firm. He took another step toward them.

Sam rumbled.

Carly tried to speak, but she couldn’t make her mouth work. Her hands flopped uselessly, like landed fish. Her vision greyed, and when it finally cleared again, Stan was closer, but he had crouched down low to the ground, almost squatting. He had his head lowered, but his eyes were firm on Sam’s. “I’m taking her, buddy. I don’t think you’ll bite me. I hope not. You know me, Sam. We’re friends, remember?”

Sam rumbled again, but this time, it ended on a whine. He lowered his head and bumped Carly with his nose and shifted from paw to paw. He backed up a step as Stan came closer.

“Goooood boy,” Stan murmured. “Good boy, Sam. You’re protecting your Carly. I know. It’s okay. Just be good. Good boy.”

Sam gave a soft huff and another whine, but he backed away as Stan slowly slipped an arm below Carly’s shoulders and scooped her up. She was glad of the warmth of Stan’s body against her own.

Stan hurried toward the wagon and laid Carly in the back. “She’s burning up,” he said.

Carly didn’t remember the trip back. She just knew she was lying in a cot and the cool towel Pearl was laying on her forehead was awful. She tried to bat it away, but her hand fell back to the bed. Stacy’s face entered her field of vision, and she heard her say something to Pearl, but the words didn’t seem to make sense.

Justin’s ghost lay with her on the cot. Carly couldn’t touch him. Her fingers passed right through his image. He smiled at her, and she could look into his beautiful dark eyes and feel the love he had for her one last time.

“I’m so proud of you,” he said.

“Why?”

“You don’t even realize it, do you? You never have reason to fear again, because you’ve faced the absolute worst that can happen to you and still survived. That’s the fire and steel in you, Carly, the unbreakable will that made me know you would make it.”

“I don’t want to make it.” She could admit that now. “I lost you, and Dagny is all I have left. If I lost her . . .”

“You would go on,” Justin said. “You know you would. You would survive. It would tear your heart to shreds, but you would survive. You faced the worst that can happen to you. The shadows have gone.”

“The shadows have gone,” she repeated.

“She’s delirious,” Pearl said. Her face hovered over Carly, bone thin with dark circles beneath her eyes.

Stacy appeared beside her. “I’ll get the willow bark tea.”

Pearl backed away, and Carly grabbed her arm. “I know what you meant. It was burned away in the subway.”

Pearl didn’t seem to understand what Carly was saying, but she couldn’t find words to explain it. “Okay, Carly. Shh. Lie back down.”

When had she sat up? Carly sagged back to the pillows. “I can stand alone. I don’t want to. But I can.”

“Of course you can.” Pearl laid a damp cloth on Carly’s forehead. “You always could.”

“Justin . . .”

“I know.” Pearl’s eyes swam with tears. “I know.”

“He was here.” Carly looked around.

“He’ll always be with you.”

“He died trying to save us from this. He died for nothing.”

“No!” Pearl grasped Carly’s shoulders and gave her a little shake. “Never think that. Maybe what he had was worse. We’ll never know. He was trying to save you. Trying to save all of us. He did what he thought was right.”
 

He had tried to stop it, as Craig had told her. In the end, he hadn’t succeeded. The virus had indeed mutated. This time to be more communicable, but not as deadly . . . or their immune systems had managed to beat it back after a struggle. Carly didn’t know how to explain it. The blood Stacy had taken for future study might tell them something.

“I’m going to die anyway.”

“No you’re not. No one has died. We’re getting better.”

Pearl didn’t know how close to the edge she was, though. She could feel it. Close now, a soft, drugging abyss. She was on a slippery edge, clinging with her very fingertips. And that soft darkness seemed so sweet . . . so inviting.

But Carly dug in her grip on life tighter. She’d once said she had to keep going for Sam and then later for her family and for Justin. What if she didn’t have them? If she didn’t have something or someone to be her reason to go on?

She had to accept she had been strong enough to survive all along, even when she had said it was for someone else.

She must have slept again, because when she opened her eyes, she saw her daughter’s face. Dagny’s cheeks were hollow and pale, and her neck was still swollen, but she was alive and bright-eyed, giving Carly a gap-toothed grin. A sob broke from Carly, a sob of sweet relief and joy that came out as a trembling explosion of sound that couldn’t be called a word, but it was a song of gratitude from the depths of her soul. Dagny was well.

Carly pulled her close and planted kisses all over her forehead and cheeks, laughing and crying as she did.

“Mommy ’kay?” said Dagny, and placed a hand against her cheek.

Carly gave her a smile, though her heart was so sore that it was a physical pain, like a lead lump in her chest. “Love you, Daggers,” she said, using Justin’s nickname for her.

“Daddy?” Dagny looked around as though expecting her father to appear on command.

“No daddy,” Carly said and shook her head.

Dagny frowned, but of course, she thought this was a temporary problem, and Carly had no way of explaining it to her. She had no way of explaining it to herself right then, either.

She began to shake, trying to hold back the sobs. Dagny patted away tears that were no longer happy.

“I’ll take her,” Stacy murmured. Dagny was drawn away, and suddenly Pearl was there. Carly saw from the helpless sorrow in Pearl’s eyes that she wished there were something she could do—
anything
that she could do—but there wasn’t. Carly wanted to thank her, but she could only sob.

In the end, Pearl simply held Carly while she wept.

Justin woke.

His cheek was pressed against the concrete floor, and he blinked a couple of times before he raised his head.

Not dead?

He didn’t understand.

He spotted the grenade lying beside his limply curled hand and held his breath. Perhaps he’d woken just as he dropped it.

5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

Nothing.

He counted again, staring at it, willing it to go off and be done with it.

Nothing.

Why wasn’t he dead? If not from the blast, from the Infection? He felt better, actually. He didn’t feel that bone-deep chill, and his body was no longer drenched with sweat. He felt like he had a bad flu.

This made no sense. No one survived the Infection, not with their mind intact, anyway. If he wasn’t dead, he should be insane.

But he wasn’t. He had all his memories. He could remember his name, rank, and serial number. He said them aloud. His voice sounded like he’d swallowed rocks, but it was intelligible.

“Carly,” he said.

But even if he had survived the Infection, why hadn’t he died in the explosion?

He turned to stare at the grenade in disbelief.

A dud.

A fucking
dud
, and he wasn’t dead.

This was impossible. His eyes moved over to Lewis’s body. Lewis would say the mathematical probability of a grenade being a dud was only one or two percent, though probably exacerbated by improper storage conditions over the last two years . . .