Deep Shadows (12 page)

As Shelby pushed her way through, she heard a woman say, “He has a gun. You'd all better stay back.”

Max was standing in front of Rodney Tull. Nineteen years old with greasy hair and large gauges in his ears, he wore a black T-shirt and dirty jeans.

“Lower the gun, son.” Max had his hands raised in a gesture of surrender.

Patrick was on the ground providing first aid to a middle-aged woman. Shelby's mind flashed back to the evening before and the attempted hijacking—Max trying to help the guy and Patrick pointing a gun at his head. It was as if the same scene was playing out in front of her eyes, only this time it was Abney people. Patrick was still helping the woman on the ground, but he wouldn't stay there for long. His gaze kept returning to Rodney.

“Lower the gun,” Max repeated.

“Not until he gives me the car keys.”

“I won't,” Mr. Evans said. “The car is not yours.”

“Give me the keys!”

Mr. Evans shook the keys at him. “You think this will fix your life? Grow up, son. Take responsibility—”

Rodney fired three times, and the impact of bullets hitting his chest lifted Mr. Evans off the ground and sent him crashing backward. Those who had been watching began to scream, fighting to put distance between themselves and the desperate kid. Max turned toward the old man and was kneeling down to help him when Rodney scooped up the keys and jumped into the automobile.

Shelby started to run after him, but the car peeled away from the curb.

Patrick's attention remained focused on the woman, who sobbed uncontrollably. Blood seeped through the makeshift bandage on her arm. Max whispered something to the old man, attempting to calm him.

Bianca clung to Shelby's hand, holding her back from danger. But there wasn't anything to fear. Not anymore. Tires squealing, Rodney was already turning toward Main Street. Headed where? What would possess him to kill someone for an automobile?

Shelby made out Mr. Evans's words: “Wasn't his car.” When he coughed, she saw blood staining his lips.

“Try to stay quiet.” Max glanced up at Patrick. “Two chest wounds.”

Max pulled off his shirt, using it to stanch the bleeding. Mr. Evans, whom she had talked to only hours before, lay motionless, staring up at the sky.

“Mr. Evans.” She pulled away from Bianca and dropped to the ground beside Max.

“Someone go for help,” Bianca cried. She hurried over to a teenager who was gawking at the scene. “Go. Go now!”

“Where?”

“To the library. EMS personnel are stationed there.
Rápidamente
. Go!” She gave the boy a shove.

He turned, stumbled, and then took off running toward the library.

Shelby glanced back down at Mr. Evans. This couldn't be happening. It wasn't possible. People murdered in broad daylight? On her street? By their neighbor?

“Help is on the way.” She clasped the old man's hand, her heart slamming against her chest, her mind trying to make sense of the growing puddle of blood beneath him.

Mr. Evans smiled once, a small trembling thing, and then he glanced over her shoulder, sighed, and stopped breathing.

“No. No, no, no, no—”

“He didn't have a chance.” Patrick reached up and closed Mr. Evans's eyes. “The kid was standing so close. The bullets literally tore a hole in his chest.”

Shelby wanted to argue with Patrick, but she could only cling to her neighbor's hand, silently begging him to open his eyes. Some of the crowd had returned. They clustered together, crying and weeping. The woman who had been injured was groaning—whether from shock or pain, Shelby couldn't tell.

She didn't let go of Mr. Evans's hand until someone brought a bedsheet, and Max helped Patrick cover him.

Max glanced at her and asked in a low voice, “Are you okay?”

She nodded, swiping at her nose with the back of her hand, willing her tears to stop. Everything they'd seen in the last several hours had seemed like television. But the moment that she held Mr. Evans's hand and watched the light ebb from his eyes, she'd known that it was real. This was their new life, whether they were prepared for it or not.

Shelby had always been an adamant believer in the American dream, but in that second, two hundred years of social history was erased. Suddenly she was an immigrant, in a new and dangerous land, and she would need to find a way to protect herself, her friends, and the son who meant everything to her. She would need to find a way to survive.

S
IXTEEN

M
ax and Patrick both stood and scanned the crowd.

“Did anyone see how this started?”

“I was sitting on my porch.” A young woman with a child on her hip stepped forward. She'd moved to the neighborhood recently, and Shelby couldn't remember her name.

“Mr. Evans came out and said he was going to see if his car would start. When it did, he turned off the ignition and got out. That was when Rodney walked up and pulled a gun.”

Mrs. Stinson, elderly and somewhat crippled, hobbled forward, pushing her walker between the onlookers and staring mournfully down at her neighbor.

“Did you see anything?” Max asked her.

She nodded, crossed herself, and said, “You all know I live next door. I heard them speaking, but it happened so quickly. I picked up my phone to dial 9-1-1, but by the time I remembered the phone didn't work… by then you were here, trying to talk him out of his mad scheme.”

“Why would he do it?” Shelby asked, her voice trembling.

“That boy has been in trouble quite often the last few years. His mother—I don't think she's around much. Haven't seen her at all since the aurora started.” Her hand, shaking and spotted with age, waved toward Harold Evans's corpse. “Stubborn old fool. Why didn't he hand over the keys? It was only a car, hardly worth his life.”

An ambulance and a police cruiser soon arrived, and Max and Patrick explained all they had seen and learned from the witnesses. Shelby stood
next to Bianca, watching the EMS personnel load Harold's body into the ambulance. They also provided triage to the woman who had been injured. The first shot had grazed her arm.

“I'll have someone drive me to the hospital,” she assured the paramedic, now calmer, though her hands were still shaking. “You take Mr. Evans.”

Shelby and Bianca were talking to the neighbors, well out of earshot when the officer said to Max, “This is the second one today.”

“Murder?”

“No. Carjacking. The first was a middle-aged man passing through town. When he ran out of gas and found out he couldn't buy any, he pulled a gun on a woman who had also stopped for fuel. Apparently she had half a tank and was hoping to top it off. The perp left his car, the fuel gauge on
E
.”

“Was she hurt?”

“No. She grabbed her purse from the front seat and told him he could have the car.” The officer shook his head. “I never thought I'd see the day.”

As the officer walked over to the young mother and old woman to take down their statements, Max wondered what the point was. The perpetrators of these crimes were long gone. What was the police department supposed to do? Chase them and use up what little fuel they had? Call ahead and warn the next town? The first would have been foolhardy, and the second impossible.

Together Bianca, Shelby, Max, and Patrick walked back to her house.

“Are you okay, Shelby?” Bianca reached for her hand.

“It's a terrible thing to witness,” Patrick said.

Like Max, his hands were stained with blood, but it was Shelby that Max was worried about. Patrick had seen combat—he would mentally and emotionally adjust to what had just happened. Though Bianca seemed shaken, she'd taken the events of the last hour in stride. Perhaps her mind was still on her parents. Shelby, on the other hand, was trying to hide a tremor in her right arm. She kept glancing around as if expecting a killer to jump out of the bushes.

“How did you know what to do?” Bianca asked.

“Medic training when I was in the army. Yesterday I would have told you I couldn't remember a bit of it, but I guess a part of you never forgets.”

“Can you give me and Shelby a minute?” Max asked.

Shelby handed her keys to Bianca, who unlocked the front door.

Bianca again hugged her friend, and then she followed Patrick back into the house.

Shelby didn't resist, though sometimes Max wondered if she avoided being alone with him. He knew that she cared for him. They had been best friends since both were old enough to ride a bike. What he didn't know was whether her reticence was due to feelings she didn't want to admit, or whether she actually preferred being alone. The uncertainty kept Max at a distance, but not today, not after what had just happened.

Shelby sat down on the porch step. “Please don't lecture me.”

“Why would I do that?” Max sat next to her, shoulder to shoulder. As he glanced out at the street, it seemed to him that if he were patient and looked hard enough, he would see the younger versions of Shelby and himself riding bicycles on a June afternoon. “What would I lecture you about, Shelby?”

“You'll tell me that this is our new life.”

“It is.”

“And that I need to toughen up.” Her voice faltered on a sob. She pulled in a deep breath. “Remind me that ultimately God is in control.”

Max did none of those things. He just sat beside her and allowed her to rest, to tune in to the birds that still sang in the bushes and the breeze that rustled the leaves of the red oak tree in the front yard.

“Mr. Evans always brought me a jar full of those small red cherries.” Shelby stared at her hands. “He claimed they'd be good with ice cream.”

“They were from his backyard. I didn't realize you could even grow cherries in Texas.”

“Small and tart.”

“Barely worth messing with by the time you removed the seeds.”

“But we did it every year—because Mr. Evans always brought a jarful, and he always looked so pleased about them.” Then Shelby did something Max couldn't have imagined her doing even twenty-four hours before. She leaned her head on his shoulder.

Max placed an arm around her and again simply waited.

That was one thing Max was good at—waiting.

“Carter's at work?” she asked.

“For his full shift.”

“Do you think… Is he safe there?”

“I think the Market is probably one of the safest places in town. By the time I left, the mayor had stationed a patrolman out front, and people were queuing up for their turn to shop.”

Shelby nodded, again swiped at her nose, and then sat up—straight and tall, shoulders squared, as if to convince Max that she could handle whatever came at them next.

S
EVENTEEN

C
arter had seen all kinds of crazy before, or at least he thought he had.

But as he took his lunch break and let his mind run back over the morning, he decided they had entered a whole new realm of insanity.

People trying to purchase twelve bags of dog food. Henry had added to the list of rules, “Only two of any item,” and then he had restocked ten of the bags.

Max buying beans and peanut butter and a large sack of potatoes, even though his pantry was completely full. Carter knew because he'd looked in it when he was filling containers up with water.

An old gentlemen who was nearly toothless dropping ten different packages of candy bars on the conveyor belt at Carter's register. “We can grow taters and corn, but these… I believe we're going to miss the sweets.”

It had all creeped him out. He still couldn't grasp that this might be it, that possibly they would have to live without the conveniences of modern life.

No Internet?

No phones?

No electricity or toilets?

No, he didn't believe it. How did people survive without those things? Sure, he'd watched the zombie apocalypse and natural disaster shows, but those were products of an overactive imagination. They were entertaining because they hadn't happened, couldn't happen, and wouldn't happen. His generation was so far ahead of his mom's that it almost embarrassed him. It wasn't that older people were slow at learning certain
things, like how to Skype. It was that the entire digital world was foreign to them.

For people Carter's age, computing was natural—more natural than learning to ride a bike. With 3D printers, they could produce prosthetics for missing body parts. He knew a boy at school who had a 3D-printed hand, yet the kid had beaten him at Ping-Pong. They could clone animals and even create hybrid animals. They could grow crops in the desert and design auto-piloted cars. His generation was only limited by what they couldn't imagine.

Which was why he was convinced there was a way around this, or through it. He refused to believe that they were stuck in the Dark Ages.