THE SHADOW OVER VINLAND sample: “Under the Overlords”

During second watch of the night, we saw the first other scavengers we’d run across in probably a month. I didn’t know if that meant survivors were getting really thin on the ground (although it’s not like they were going to increase) or if we’d wandered into a burnt-over area. To look at, this town wasn’t any worse than what we’d been scraping our way through—vitrified glass and brick, ash drifted every­where, precious few canned goods to be found.

We had holed up on the second level of a still-standing parking structure. I’d found those to be pretty stable, com­paratively, and the second level was a good trade-off be­tween the ash in drifts down below and the crumbling con­crete up above. Jimsy and me were on watch; everyone else was sacked out, bushed from the day’s walk. Jimsy snapped his fingers softly and pointed out toward his right. That felt like northwest to me, but nobody had seen the sun in for­ever, so who knows?

I crept over to his position and watched. In the gray murk of the night, a handful of figures picked their way through the rubble, trying to maintain cover behind half-walls and rusted-out vehicles. They had no idea they were being watched. That’s what comes with trying to move at night.

Jimsy’s hand patted his rifle. “I could smoke ’em right now,” he breathed. Jimsy wasn’t a sociopath, he just used to be a hunter way back when, and he missed the stalking part. Or maybe he was a sociopath; we’d kind of lost the baseline on that.

“Live and let live,” I whispered back. The figures were nothing but black shadows in the night, invisible when not moving. I counted seven shapes creeping along from vague­ly west to vaguely north-northeast by my arbitrary internal compass. Unless we did something to attract their attention, they would be far enough away by morning that they’d be no danger when our little clan rose and shone.

I looked back to where seventeen people were wrapped in sleeping bags and darkness. A headcount of nineteen; that was getting up there. Too many belly buttons in one place, maybe.

I clapped Jimsy on the shoulder and moved back to my corner, leaving him to watch the other scavengers move be­yond sight.

***

The day didn’t “dawn” so much as “ooze” into the sky. The bloated clouds that hadn’t broken since the overlords came gradually let a bit of gray light diffuse through their mottled cover to illuminate the shades of gray and black on the ground.

Lori helped me divvy out the canned goods for breakfast. Lori and her daughter Sula had only joined us a couple of weeks before. She said they had been alone, just the two of them, for at least six months before coming with us. That was pretty impressive. Most people I’d encountered who’d been alone or in twos and threes ended up completely feral. But Lori and Sula were impressively resilient.

Sula was thirteen. Hadn’t started her period yet; I hadn’t asked, but you can tell from the things people scavenge. It was getting close to time for a talk with both of them. I was no pedo, so I wasn’t saying it had to be me, but the only way the human race would survive is if we had babies as early as we could.

After we had passed out all the cans for breakfast, I opened mine. Most of the labels were long gone, so the big­gest thrill of our day was seeing what we ended up with. Roz had called it the “tin-can lottery.”

Roz was dead.

So I ate my french-cut green beans and didn’t call it any­thing.

I told everyone about the scavengers we had seen in the night. Since they had come through from somewhere on our west—nobody took exception to my compass directions—and moved on to the north-east, we shouldn’t run into them if we moved generally north-west. Obviously, survivors weren’t necessarily dangerous—every one of our nineteen faces had been a stranger at one point, and we got along pretty well—but we’d all had the bad kind of experiences, too, and we didn’t want to risk a confrontation.

We also didn’t want to take on any more bodies into our family. But I didn’t say that.

After we ate, we spread the cans randomly around the parking garage so no one coming across them would realize that a bunch of people with food had been here and maybe start following our trail. Then we shouldered our packs and headed out.

I let Kella take the lead, pointing us down intersections and silently indicating who should check out what. Jimsy and I took the right-hand perimeter; Neal and Pat took the left. Everyone else poked into the collapsed and crushed remains of old buildings, checking for overlooked canned food and other necessities. With the parking garage right there, I figured this area was sort of downtown-ish, and the buildings had been offices and lunch spots. If we were lucky, we’d discover enough of a restaurant to paw through the storeroom amid all the ash. We were pretty well stocked for food right at that moment, but nineteen mouths meant a minimum of thirty-eights cans consumed per day, plus any drinkables we could find.

Jimsy walked ahead of me, rifle in the crook of his arm. His attention cycled through a pattern: the street in front of Kella’s position, then everyone in the middle checking out ruins, then the street behind us, then the sky, then back to the street in front. The sky was showing some activity; lumps of cloud rubbed sluggishly against each other like an upset stomach grumbling. Maybe it was nothing, but maybe it was something. We were always cautious—hell, we were always extra-cautious—but this was a day to be super-extra-cautious.

“Jose.” Jimsy cocked his head to draw me over to him. When our heads were two feet apart, he whispered, “We’re getting too big.”

…

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