“No, wait!” Ory cried as the man broke into a full sprint for him. The trees howled, branches creaking as they stretched. The shotgun! he thought. “Stop!” The shadowless did not stop. Ory jammed the cartridges. Come on. “Stop!” Come ON! The break action snapped shut. Shells clicked into place. The shadowless raised the table leg and lunged.
When the man landed, a few feet behind where he had originally taken off, he stayed standing for a moment. The bang echoed into silence as they both waited. Him to find out if Ory had missed, Ory to find out what the gun now did at all.
Then he fell.
Ory ran to him and stared. His chest was split open, two sides parted like clouds in the sky. Inside, it wasn’t red, but dark, deep blue, and churning. There was a bang again from inside, and live white tendrils snapped, lightning snaking out from inside, electrocuting in agonizing bursts.
“Oh my God,” Ory said.
“Thunderstorm,” the shadowless whispered between jolts. His eyes kept track of Ory’s shadow as it breathed in time with his body, trembling over the dirt. He watched it as closely as he watched Ory, as if he wasn’t quite sure which one of them was in control, and which one of them had done it. His eyes were amber pools, flecked with gold in the deepest parts that glittered when the current went through them. Around them, the trees hushed, as if alive, as if afraid. Or perhaps in mourning. If the fragment of the woman who had once been the shadowless’s wife still remembered anything at all.
Ory couldn’t leave him like that, to suffer for who knew how long, but he was too scared to use the gun again. His hands scrambled at his belt for the knife.
I’M STILL HERE, ORY. I’M STILL ALIVE. I STILL REMEMBER.
I’m in Oakton now. I walked all night—by dawn, I’d made it to the Chain Bridge Road exit under the I-66 West.
It’s very quiet in this neighborhood, but the townhouses are so lovely. The kind I always wished we might have one day. I imagine that before the world ended, there were kids riding their bicycles up and down the clean, smooth asphalt, and mothers standing in clusters on their front lawns with strollers, checking their ornate wrought-iron mailboxes, planting tulips along the borders of their driveways. It was that kind of place. I mean, I even saw one lone bicycle on a later street, mournfully pedaling itself in slow, lost circles, waiting for its child to come back. It looked so sad, Ory.
Just west of that was a high school. Oakton High School, judging from the part of the sign that was still upright. I know schools aren’t the best places to scout alone—too many hallways and rooms, too many places for others to be hiding. But I was exhausted and wanted to get out of the damp dawn. I crossed the overgrown football field and found myself standing in the middle of the campus.
Someone had definitely lived here once. Many someones. There were the remains of their abandoned camp everywhere: discarded scraps of clothing; piles of trash, neatly pushed into corners; scuff marks on the concrete like something heavy had been dragged back and forth, maybe a table or chairs. Some classroom doors were barricaded; some were removed from their hinges to allow sun and moonlight into the small rooms. Windows had rudimentary dressings over them.
That’s when I saw the drawings.
It hadn’t been a shadowed survivors’ camp, I realized as I walked around in the silence. It had been a camp of shadowless. Perhaps they started together, as friends or family, and then all slowly forgot, or perhaps they all gathered together once they lost their shadows and found comfort and protection in numbers. One of them had been a very gifted artist. A man, I think, because in all the drawings the same person appears, a pale shape with short light hair and two dots of blue for eyes. I think he was drawing himself.
There was no writing in most of the signs, not like the rules you and I made in our shelter. These were signs made of images, carefully rendered in a set of permanent markers or paint. Almost all the colors were there—black, blue, red, green, purple, orange, and brown. The pictures were everywhere, next to every little thing that might be confusing to someone who no longer remembered what it was. There were pictures to describe how to light a fire, how to extinguish it, never to touch it; what a sweater or scarf or jacket was for when it was cold; that people with shadows could be dangerous to those without. I stood in front of the wall where that one had been drawn for a long time, staring at each careful line of that warning. It was painted near the entrance to the school, where they would see it every time they went to the gate to investigate a sound.