Shadows Have Gone (5 page)

Lying dead and still, Kross looked younger than his seventeen years. His face was slack and pale, his lips a bluish-gray. His eyes were half open, dull in the low light. Justin walked over and reached into his pocket before he crouched down beside Kaden. He closed Kross’s eyes and laid a coin over each one. Kaden touched one of the coins.

“They’ll keep popping open if you don’t leave those there,” Justin said. “We don’t have undertakers to fix these things anymore, so we have to do things the old-fashioned way. Coins were usually the way they did it back in the old days.”

“They pay the Ferryman,” Kaden said.

Justin shook his head, not understanding.

“In the olden days, they used to put the coins there so the dead person would have money to pay the Ferryman to take them across the River Styx into the afterlife.”

“He’s already earned his passage,” Justin said in a gruff voice. “Let’s take him home.” He reached down to lift the body in his arms.

“No. I don’t want to take him back and put him in some anonymous cemetery. I want to do it here.” Kaden turned his head and looked up at Justin. “Here, where he fell. I want to do it on that hill over there.” He pointed to a small rise that looked out over the town of Clayton and the bridge Kross had destroyed.

“I heard what you said to him about the bridge. You said that was the one thing you had to make sure you accomplished. You said if we didn’t win, if we didn’t do anything else, we had to take out that bridge to warn travelers and keep them out of Clayton. Well, he did that. He accomplished that most important mission. He’s a hero.”

“He is.” Justin’s voice was gruff as he gazed toward the hill for a long moment.

“I want to build him a cairn,” Kaden said. “I’ve been reading, and there was this book that said back in ancient times, they used to build these big rock piles over someone’s grave, and they lasted for thousands of years. When someone passed by, they would know someone important was buried there. Someone of legend. Someone who should be remembered. Travelers would sometimes add a rock as they passed, even if they didn’t know the person, just as a mark of respect. I don’t know if anyone would think to do that kind of thing today, but the cairn will stand there as a memorial forever.”

“What about a funeral service with the rest of the town?”

Kaden shook his head. “I don’t think he’d want that. If they want to have some kind of memorial service or whatever later on . . . or they can come here and leave a stone when they want to. But I think Kross would prefer it this way, with just us.”

Justin took a shovel from the wagon. “He’ll be remembered.”

They walked as a group to the top of the hill Kaden had selected. Stan and Justin stomped shovels into the ground and dug out the first clods of earth. They dug the grave in silent tandem while Kaden lugged rocks from the creek bed, piling them up beside the hole. Carly and Pearl helped him, lugging stones one by one up the side of the hill to drop on the pile.

Carly stooped down to pick up a chunk of concrete and turned it in her hands for a moment. Was it fitting that the bridge he’d destroyed should be part of his tomb? Kaden answered that for her when he hefted a chunk of it himself and headed back up the hill, his breath coming in labored huffs. Carly followed him and laid her chunk on the pile.

“You’re staring at me,” Kaden said as he dropped his burden and turned back to her.

“I don’t mean to.” Carly whisked her hands against one another to remove the bits of gravel stuck to her palms. “You worry me.”

Kaden nodded. “I know. I’ll try not to.” He gave her a little smile and headed back toward the creek bed.
 

Carly glanced up at Justin. He paused with his shovel stuck into the earth and wiped a hand over the back of his forehead. He gave her a little shrug, and she knew he was saying they would
just have to wait and see
.

And that’s all they could do. Wait and see how Kaden handled it.

When the grave was deep enough, they all gathered around to see the tarp-wrapped body lowered in. Carly wished she’d thought to bring the Reverend, but they hadn’t expected Kaden to want his friend buried where he fell.

They were all silent for a moment, wondering what to say. Justin cleared his throat, but before he could speak, Kaden stepped forward.

“This isn’t . . . I guess this isn’t a funeral speech, but I brought this from home and I wanted to read it.” He had retrieved his bag from the wagon and out of it he drew a battered paperback.
Beowulf
, Carly noted with a blink of surprise. She knew Kaden was a widely varied reader, but that one surprised her.

Kaden opened it to where a sticky note marked a page. “This is . . . this is what I want to say for Kross.

“ ‘
You have won renown: you are known to all men

far and near, now and forever.

Your sway is wide as the wind's home,

as the sea around cliffs.
’ ”
 

He closed the book and repeated one line. “ ‘Wide as the wind’s home.’ ”

“ ‘Wide as the wind’s home,’ ” Carly echoed.

Pearl, Stan, and Justin said it, too, as though it were a prayer. And maybe it was. Justin lifted the shovel and laid the first scoop of earth on the body, followed by another, until it was done and there was a low mound of raw earth.
Such a small spot to contain all that was a life
, Carly thought.

Kaden placed the first of his stones on the dirt, then piled on all the ones he had collected. As soon as he depleted the pile, he took one of the wheelbarrows and went down to the creek and began to fill it with rocks.

“Think we should help him?” Carly asked.

Justin considered. “Let him do it for a while. He wants to. It will help him—help him feel like he did something meaningful for his friend. You and I have our own work to do.”

Stan had been waiting for them. He stood behind them, shuffling his feet a little. He opened his mouth once to speak and then closed it before lifting his hat to rake his hand through his hair. He replaced it with a small sigh and then said, “I found something you all need to see.”

“What is it?” Pearl stepped over, and Carly saw how her brows crunched together in concern for Stan’s obvious distress.

Stan seemed to search for words, but they eluded him. He shook his head and gestured for them to follow. “I found it this morning, after you left. I wanted to wait until we had . . . until we had taken care of Kross, but I want you to see it.”

They smelled it down the block. Carly grimaced with disgust, and her hand came up to cover her nose by instinct. Pearl held a bandana to her nose.

Carly looked over at Stan, and he nodded. “That’s what alerted me, too. I followed my nose because I thought I ought to at least know what it was.”

It was a KwikOil automotive garage, half grown-over with vines. Its plate-glass front window lay in pebbles on the sidewalk out front, and there was a burned-out car nearby, its doors open, trunk and hood lifted, the scorched metal now red-brown with rust.

In the parking lot behind the station were wagons and hand carts, the kind travelers used to haul their gear. Most of them had been cobbled together with whatever materials people could find—mismatched bicycle wheels and sheets of plywood—and were small and light enough to be pulled by one person or hauled behind a bicycle.

Boxes and suitcases littered the ground around them, clothes, pictures, and other debris lying where they had been tossed after a careless pilfering.

One of the bay doors of the garage had been partially lifted, high enough to walk under without ducking. The hand Carly still held over her nose did not block the powerful stench. She motioned to Sam to stay outside and he lay down in the shade of one of the wagons, tilting his head back to sniff at the air. He made a soft sound, halfway between a whine and a rumble.

One peek into the car-repair bays was enough for Carly. Marcus and his men had dumped the bodies in there. Tangled limbs and bloated flesh in various stages of decomposition. That single glance would be enough to haunt her dreams. She stepped outside into the fresher air and waited for Justin to reemerge. He had a stronger stomach for that kind of thing. Pearl followed her out, her face set and stony, anger blazing in her eyes. She said nothing, turning her back on the garage and staring out across the parking lot, her arms crossed over her stomach.

“The travelers?” Carly asked Stan, and he nodded.

Marcus’s crew had taken out bridges in the surrounding area to force travelers through Clayton, where his crew lay in wait. Justin had tried placing warning signs before travelers could reach this area, but Marcus’s men had always found them and tore them down as quickly as Justin could put them up. The signs had no doubt diverted quite a few people before they could fall into the trap, but it seemed Marcus’s group had still found victims. The only consolation Carly had was knowing they wouldn’t get any more.

“It seems they brought them here with the wagons and then killed them before looting what they had. Kept the empty wagons and the stench of the bodies away from anyone approaching the town, I suppose. It looks like most of them were stabbed, from what I could tell. I don’t know gunshot wounds the way Justin does, but I could at least determine that they hadn’t been shot. They were stabbed and thrown into those pits. There are bloody handprints on the walls, like people tried to climb out. Left to bleed out on those piles.” Stan swore, and his burning eyes met with Carly’s. “I’m sorry I was angry with you. I was angry we had brought Kross into this, but now I see I was angry at the wrong people.”

“I didn’t blame you for being angry, you know.” Carly gave him a wobbly smile. “I knew you had to be angry at someone.”

“Thanks, Carly.” He gave her an awkward one-armed hug and then went back inside the garage. She heard him call Justin’s name and the murmur of a conversation in low voices, but she was looking at the wagons.

“What’s Justin doing?” Carly asked Stan when he exited the garage. He rubbed his nose as if to rid it of the foul odor.

“Breaking open the waste oil drums. There were a few down there along the walls.” Pearl hadn’t even looked in their direction, but it seemed she understood Justin’s plan. Carly saw her wipe her eyes with a quick, hard dash of her fingers, and she looked away, giving Pearl a moment to compose herself.

She understood why Justin would be opening the drums. The fire would have to be very hot to consume all the remains, and the cinderblock and concrete building itself wasn’t combustible. They needed fuel, and the oil was the best source of it right now.

So many fires they’d had to light.

Carly looked over at the wagons and saw a picture lying on the pavement of a smiling trio of young women around a birthday cake. A pang of hurt made her bite her lip. A flash of movement from the corner of her eye—Justin in the shop, tossing tires from the rack down into the pit.

Carly took a deep breath and walked into the garage, hurrying through the front of the building where she found the business office. The glass door had been shattered, and she ducked through the frame into the waiting room. The counter had a plastic sign advertising a sale price on oil changes. She stared at the date printed on the fading red paper for a moment. 2012. Two years ago, when the world had been an entirely different place.

It had been an election year, and Justin had once speculated that was the reason the government had been so reluctant to impose and enforce the quarantine that would have been necessary to stop the rapid spread of the Infection. But maybe they had known from the beginning that it was already too late.

Carly had watched the world die on cable news, lying on her sofa, numb with shock after the death of her parents. It had all happened so fast. One city after another posting unbelievable death tolls, the disjointed video coverage, and then, one by one, the stations falling off the air as no one was left to run them.

Justin had found Carly a few months later, still in a state of shock. Taking care of Sam had been the only thing that kept her going then. Thousands of miles they had traveled until they found a little town untouched by the Infection, a tiny island of normalcy in the wasteland, and Carly’s heart had bloomed with hope, just as it had when she’d seen that army truck.

They hadn’t counted on the fact they were carriers, Typhoid Marys who brought the Infection with them when they were welcomed into Colby. The virus lived in them, and it had mutated. More communicable, faster. Perhaps less lethal, since there had been three survivors—Kaden, Miz Marson, and Madison Laker. Of the three, Miz Marson was the only one who knew for certain she’d gotten a flu shot that year—the flu shot that gave them the side effect of immunity from the virus.

Carly shook her head and pulled her eyes away from the calendar. It was pointless to dwell on these things. She had work to do, and she needed to keep her thoughts focused on building a better future, not on the past.

Behind the counter, there was a printer attached to a ream of accordion folded receipt paper. She gathered it up and stepped back into the automotive bay where Justin had finished. She took out her Zippo and lit the corner of the stack of paper, fanning it so it would catch easier. When it was fully blazing, she dropped the burning paper into the pit below.