The Land of the Shadow (7 page)

She kept talking until they reached the yard, but the last word stuck in her throat.

Kaden had put Dagny’s playpen on the porch while he worked to turn the scraps from canning into the compost pile in its bin beside the woodshed. So intent was he on his digging that he hadn’t noticed anything amiss.

There was a huge alligator on the lawn, less than a dozen yards from her baby.

A jagged scream of horror ripped from Carly’s throat, and she tore across the lawn, her only thought to get to Dagny. Sam was faster. He bolted like a gray streak of lightning from her side and charged at the gator, snarling and snapping. From the corner of her eye, she saw Kaden look and begin to run, too, the hoe clutched in his hand.

As they ran toward it, it drove the beast forward. Straight toward the baby who obliviously clacked her plastic keys.

Justin was in the barn when he heard Carly scream, and the sound of it almost stopped his heart. It was a sound of sheer terror, a sound that could only mean . . .

He didn’t finish the thought. His brain clicked into action mode, based on training and instinct, pushing his own fear aside.

Justin jumped to snatch the pump-action shotgun mounted on pegs above the door and ran harder than he’d ever run in his life, pumping the weapon to chamber a round. He prayed as he ran. He didn’t know to whom he was praying, nor for what, but he prayed just the same.

Rounding the corner of the house, he saw Kaden and Carly running toward a goddamn
big
alligator in the front yard. Sam darted around its sides, snapping.

Justin caught up to Kaden just as the beast decided that Carly’s direction was a better avenue of escape than the path blocked by the snarling wolf and the two running men. It charged right at her, its mouth wide, tail thrashing in its wake. Carly jumped for the porch, clutching at the post, her foot braced on the rail. Kaden charged up the steps and swept Dagny up into his arms, flinging open the screen door to scramble inside the house.

Dagny yelled something that sounded like, “No, kay!” as the keys tumbled from her hand to clatter on the floorboards. Justin heard her wail as the screen door slammed behind Kaden. But she was safe, and that was what mattered at the moment. Carly still clung to the porch rail, her eyes wide.
Safe, too
, Justin noted, as his mind switched over to seek-and-destroy mode.

The alligator kept running across the lawn and straight into the cornfield, surprisingly fast for such a large, awkward creature.

“Not the corn!” Justin swung wide to try to drive the reptile toward the road instead, but the alligator saw safety and concealment in the thick patch of tall green stalks. It charged into the patch, clearing a three-foot-wide path of broken stalks with every swipe of its thrashing tail.

A flash of movement from the left caught Justin’s eye, and Pearl jumped in front of the alligator with a shout, waving her arms to prevent it from charging deeper into the field. The gator hissed at her and brandished its gaping maw, but began to back away.

More people from the town, who had been drawn by Carly’s scream, ran across the lawn toward the corn patch. The confused alligator found himself surrounded, and he turned, crushing more stalks. Justin swore.

He caught Pearl’s eye and didn’t even need to tell her what he needed. She shouted and feigned a lunge to get the gator’s attention, and it swung around to hiss at her.

He darted to the gator’s side and aimed the shotgun at the back of its head. “Clear!”

“No, Justin!” Carly shouted. “Don’t!”

Justin groaned. His wife, the animal lover. Was she going to say something like,
He can’t help he’s an alligator
, and insist Justin transport the thing back to the swamp? He was already picturing wrapping the beast’s jaws with duct tape or something to avoid losing a goddamn hand in the process when she reached his side.

Instead, she pulled out the .45 she wore at her hip and blasted the gator three times in the head. It slumped to the ground, dead as Caesar.

“I didn’t want you to use the shotgun and tear up the hide,” Carly said.

God, he loved her. He felt a grin stretch his cheeks.

She turned toward the house but called over her shoulder to the staring townspeople as she ran to check on her baby. “We have meat.”

Chapter Three

After he hung the beast in a tree in the yard to drain, Justin checked on Dagny again, even though he knew she was all right. Kaden was still in the house with her, seated on the sofa with his head in his hands while Dagny busied herself at her play table, happily trying to hammer a square block into a star-shaped hole.

Justin crouched down beside her, and she grinned before extending the block. Justin dropped it through the proper hole, and she blinked at him in solemn awe before picking up the block and examining it as though she were trying to determine why it had behaved differently in his hands. Justin kissed her on the top of the head and stood. Kaden still hadn’t moved.

Justin sat on the edge of the coffee table. “Do you have something you want to say?”

Kaden looked up at him, his face pale. “God, Justin, I’m so . . .” Kaden rubbed the back of his neck, a mannerism he’d picked up from Justin. “I know ‘sorry’ sounds so lame. I almost let your kid get eaten by an alligator.”

“I’m not angry at you, Kaden,” Justin said, and Kaden’s head jerked toward him in surprise.

“I thought the porch was safe! I thought it would be cooler for her while I took the garbage out. I swear—it was just a few seconds.”

“Nowhere is safe these days,” Justin said. “And a few seconds is all it takes. When she was first starting to crawl, I put her down on the floor in the bedroom and turned around to get a fresh T-shirt out of the drawer. I turned back and she was at the top of the stairs. Nearly had a heart attack.” He stood and laid a hand on Kaden’s shoulder. “I think some kind of scare happens to everyone in a family with a small child at some point. If we’re smart, we learn from it. Okay?”

“Yeah, I learned,” Kaden said, his tone low and fervent.
 
“Justin, I promise—”

“Don’t promise. Show me.”

“I will.”

Justin considered for a moment. “You know, Kaden, no one expects you to be perfect. Back when I was in foster care, there was this kid I knew who almost ran himself ragged trying to always be perfect. He freaked out if he made the smallest mistake, even something like leaving his jacket in the kitchen instead of hanging it up. Kid was always as jittery as a cat at a dog show, and he probably would have ended up having himself a heart attack at thirty-five. But one day, his foster mother sat him down and said mistakes are part of life. They’re how we learn. And she told him that loving someone meant you didn’t stop just because they messed up. That’s part of being a family. Family means you forgive each other and move on as you grow together.”

He stopped for a moment and met Kaden’s eyes. “We’re always going to be family, okay? I want you to know that. God knows Carly and I understand mistakes, because we make our share of them. So I want you to stop being so hard on yourself, okay?”

Kaden nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

Justin gave him a small smile. “And stop saying that so much.”

“Okay. I’m—” Kaden bit his lip.

Justin grinned and gave him a light knock on the shoulder as he headed to the front door.

“Are you going to cut up the gator now?”

“No, I’m going to go check the fence line. Please watch Dagny.”

“I will. I won’t ever let her out of my sight again.”

Justin headed out into the yard where he spotted Carly standing on a footstool, debating with Miz Marson where to cut into the gator’s hide. She’d already been inside the house twice more herself, unable to fight the compulsion to make sure their baby was safe. He wondered if she’d given Kaden any reproving looks, but that really wasn’t her style. She knew as well as he did Kaden would take this hard without any chastisement on their part.

“I say go between the shoulders,” he said.

“Have you ever had occasion to skin an alligator?” Carly turned and gave him a quick kiss.

“Can’t say that I have, but we can’t use this ridged area for leather.”

“Belly would be easier,” Miz Marson said.

“Yes, but I want to have an intact hide, and as Justin said, we can’t use the back. We’d have to cut it into two strips.”

Miz Marson shrugged. “You could try two methods, then.”

Justin approved of Carly’s decision to try to revive the old-fashioned skills of leatherworking. They had discussed it before, but this was the first time they’d caught a creature large enough to attempt it. After all, the leather they had today wouldn’t last forever, and it would be best to learn it now, while they still had the luxury of time for trial and error. But he wasn’t sure if an alligator hide was ideal for the first try.

Carly chose a spot between the first and second row of scales and cut down into the skin.

“Ugh!” She grimaced at the milky-white lining below. “God, it’s like dissecting the alien in
Independence Day.
”

Justin grinned and kissed her before heading back toward the barn. Sam got up from where he’d been resting beneath the shade of a bush. There was a subtle shift in his posture as he fell in beside Justin. He wasn’t in the “happy, harmless doggy” demeanor he displayed while following Carly around town. He was in lupine-hunter mode, his head dropped low, slinking along with minimal noise, his amber eyes intense. He sniffed at the grass, but if he discovered anything interesting, he didn’t indicate it to the man at his side.

“Hold up, Justin!”

Justin looked back over his shoulder and saw Stan jog across the yard to catch up to him. Sam’s tail smacked into Justin’s leg as he wagged it, slipping back into “happy doggy” stance. His tongue even lolled out the side of his mouth. Justin smothered a grin. The wolf’s intelligence was eerie sometimes. Stan had always been a little afraid of Sam, and it seemed Sam was trying to make himself appear as harmless as possible. Stan gave Sam a timid pat, and Sam licked his hand before going back to his search, intent on sniffing the grass.

“Can I walk with you? I need to talk to you about something.” Stan glanced around, as though to make sure no one else was within earshot.

Great
, Justin thought. Those words never preceded happy news. “What is it?” he asked, heading down over the lawn toward the lower-lying land edging the swamp.

Stan followed, picking his path with care, but his foot managed to find the only root sticking up out of the ground and he pinwheeled his arms to keep his balance. Justin stepped over to help, but Stan recovered on his own.

“I’ve been doing the math,” he said. “I’m an accountant, after all, and that’s what we do best.” Stan gave a humorless laugh.

Justin didn’t reply.

“We’re not going to make it.”

Justin nodded. “I know.”

“When I looked at the caloric output of our fields divided per person, and then at the necessary calories required given the increased physical activ—what do you mean,
you know
?”

“I’ve done the math, too, Stan.”

They reached the fence line. The swamp lay still in the heat of the late afternoon, except for the dragonflies darting over the water. A few birds trilled in the cypress trees, accompanied by the occasional croak of a frog. Justin scanned the muddy banks, looking for tracks.