The Land of the Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

of them survived.”
    “We have two.” Kaden handed his bag off to Justin to load. “The other is a little filly about a year old.”
    The woman nodded. “I thought it looked like she was nursing.”
    Observant, too. Another point in her favor.
    Kaden grinned. “Well, we’re trying to break Storm of that habit, but she disagrees with us that it’s time. We’ve even tried keeping ’em in separate pastures, but Storm actually sticks her head through the fence to nurse and Shadowfax lets her.”
    “Why don’t you let her wean naturally?”
    Kaden explained that Shadowfax didn’t need to waste the calories nursing a filly that was old enough to eat on her own, while Justin hauled out the rest of the feed.
    He shifted the load around to balance it a little better as he did the math in his head to figure out how long the bags of feed would last. Shadowfax was working, pulling plows and wagons for them, so she needed about six pounds of horse feed per day. Storm could have survived just on forage since she wasn’t expending as much energy, but she wouldn’t stop nursing, absorbing precious calories from her mother.
    “They’re not mine,” Kaden was saying. “They belong to Justin’s wife, Carly.”
    “He’s not your dad?” the woman asked, glancing at Justin, and a hint of surprise colored her tone.
    Kaden fell silent, unable or unwilling to speak of his parents.
    “I am now,” Justin said. He climbed up into the wagon seat, and Kaden joined him, his shotgun laid across his knees. He clucked to Shadowfax and she ambled forward.
    “Well, goodbye, then,” Kaden called and gave the woman a little wave. “Good luck.”
    Out of the corner of his eye, Justin saw her wave. He could still feel her watching them as they rounded the corner and went up the ramp to the highway.
    “She seemed nice,” Kaden said. “After she wasn’t pointing a gun at our heads, I mean.”
    “Yeah.”
    “You think she’s all alone?”
    Justin nodded. “Did you see that pack she was carrying? A hell of a load for one person. So she’s either alone or with someone who won’t carry half the load—which is probably worse than being alone, if you think about it.”
    “Alone for two years.” Kaden sounded horrified by the prospect. Justin considered telling him that if he hadn’t found Carly, he probably would have still been alone himself.
    Would Kaden have even recognized Carly if he could have met her as Justin had when he found her in that apartment complex in Juneau? Still numbed with shock, Carly hadn’t even been willing to accept the world had permanently changed when he met her. She’d had her love for animals, her compassion, and her stubborn insistence they were going to rebuild society into something even better than it had been before, but over the last year, she had uncovered the talents Justin had seen hidden beneath the surface.
    Sometimes, a person didn’t know the strengths they had until life gave them no choice but to use them.
    The sun hung low in the sky when they neared Colby. In front of them was the bridge that spanned over the swamp. On the other side of it was the wall of stacked metal shipping containers that made up the front of the fence around town. Between the containers was a retractable door. The watchers on top of the Wall waved and shouted down to lift the gate as the wagon began to approach.
    Kaden lifted his shotgun. The small spit of land at the end of the bridge was a favorite place for the alligators to sun themselves. Justin thought of them as the watchdogs, for certainly many a traveler had thought twice about walking through the silent, reptilian gauntlet to approach Colby. None of the alligators had ever tried charging a traveler yet, but Justin figured it was just a matter of time. They were on the edge of starvation because the Infection had decimated many of the small mammal species on which they fed. He could only surmise they had survived this long off fish in the swamp, but