Valley of Shadows by E. E. Trueblood

Author:E. E. Trueblood [Trueblood, E. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-17T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

That night the two groups of travelers decided it was in their mutual interest to set up camp together on the rocks, meaning that Allison bullied him to agree while he was still coming down from that panic attack, that, and Jack couldn’t take the tears in Alex’s eyes when he told them they had to leave. In the short time they were together, Alex and Emmett had become fast friends, probably because they both seemed mentally the same age. It wasn’t a hard conclusion to come to when he saw them both seriously daring each other to lick the hawk feathers in Emmett’s feather collection.

“Is he seriously always this weird?” he asked Allison.

“You didn’t have to grow up with him,” she answered vaguely.

The kid ended up drifting off to sleep just minutes after they had shared a supper of canned tomatoes, courtesy of Allison and Emmett, cooked over the fire their tin of sardines, which was actually the best meal he’d had in a while.

“So, Lewiston is infested, Spokane and Moscow are a bust, and trust me, you don’t want to head back where we just came from. What’s left?” Jack asked, sitting cross-legged beside Allison and Emmett while he watched the fire dance.

“You have to go back, I’ve been dreaming about a lakeside cabin, it doesn’t feel far from where you were,” she said.

“Right, so you want me to believe your psychic vision and take the kid back into the town with the cannibal hillbillies, makes sense,” he mocked. “I think we’ll take our chances on the road.

“I’ve seen your supplies, you’d never make it,” she said bluntly.

“We, Alex and I, are not going back to that town. Even if there is some kind of magical vacation home at the lake that hasn’t been looted or isn’t full of corpses, I think you missed the part when I said there were actual cannibals back there.”

“So, you’re saying you are familiar with the lake?” she asked.

“Of course, I know where the lake is, everyone who’s ever even been in this county knows where the lake is, that doesn’t mean we’re going.”

“You will die, Alex will die,” she said, “there’s nothing for at least two hundred miles, just wilderness and infested towns.”

He stayed stubbornly silent. Emmett drew circles in the dirt with the end of a stick, glancing uneasily between his sister and the stranger she knew so well in her dreams.

“What about the coast?” Emmett suggested.

Allison still stared Jack down resolutely, “no, Em, Jack’s from Portland, that’s only about an hour away, isn’t it? If he came all the way here instead, it was for a reason.”

Before his mom did what she did, they thought about going there. Seafood, temperate weather, boats for the taking with their owner’s dead, but they weren’t the only ones that thought so. Jammed highway, traffic piled up so bad families left their cars and tried to walk it. The infection burned through them like they were doused in gasoline. Bodies layered up

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