The Shadow Men by Christopher Golden

Author:Christopher Golden
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2011-06-27T22:00:00+00:00

There were three bodies laid on the pavement outside a collapsed seafood restaurant on Dorchester Avenue. They were lined up as if sleeping side by side, but as they closed on the corpses, Jim saw blood. Before today the only dead body he had ever seen was his mother in the funeral home.

As he approached the bodies, Trix grabbed his shoulder. “Jim?”

“There’s something about …,” he started, trailing off as they drew closer. One body was covered in a thin net curtain, blurring its features and molding to its skin with blood. For a moment he’d feared it was one of them. “Maybe the ghost guys are already ahead of us,” he said.

“There’s nothing we can do about that,” Trix said. “Here.” She moved past the bodies and through the restaurant’s collapsed façade. Rooting around in the rubble, she pulled out two bottles of water and handed one to Jim.

“That’s looting,” he said.

“Yeah.” She blinked at him a couple of times, then pulled a five-dollar note from her back pocket. She used a small chunk of broken brick to weight it down on the sidewalk before the slumped restaurant. For some reason, that brought tears to Jim’s eyes.

“We’ve got to run,” he said. “We can’t let anything distract us. Anything like that.” He gestured over his shoulder back the way they’d come. Those women are the same person, he thought, and he could only think of what would become of Jenny if she met herself. The results could be devastating. What would that do to a person?

Tonight in this city, it must be happening all over.

“How far to Sally Bennet’s?” she asked.

“Not far. Across the bridge over the train tracks, under the highway overpass, then a couple of blocks. Not sure how far up Harrison she lives …”

“Let’s go, then.” And they went.

The sights Jim saw that day he knew would stay with him for the rest of his life. There were the stunned people wandering the streets, so many of them that he wondered whether there had been some sort of gas leak that had numbed them all to what had happened. Some of them were crying silently, and others seemed to be attempting to go about their nighttime business, skirting fallen walls or bodies in the street as if they were minor inconveniences. The sight of ruined buildings went from overwhelming to almost unnoticed, and even the structures that were so obviously out of place soon failed to move him. Maybe it was because he was out of place here himself. But the suffering people—the wounded, the bereaved, the confused, and the many bodies he saw in the shadows of ruins or laid out in the street—never failed to touch him. Humanity tonight was suffering more than an earthquake, and he had no idea how they would deal with what was to come. The two blond women could not stare at each other forever.

The sounds of the damaged city pressed in as they ran. Shouting and screaming, the

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