The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  Everyone is waiting for him, their horses snorting and spinning in circles. He processes his surroundings in flashes—Reed staring back the way they came; York smiling down at him and saying, “So this is the way it’s going to be?”; Clark jabbing her finger at an empty mount and telling him to move.

  The horse—a roan with a gray muzzle and dark-socked legs—shifts away from him when he tries to fill her saddlebags. He chases her one way, then the other, slowly sorting his gear, wasting more minutes and earning the curses of the other riders. When he tries to foot his weight into a stirrup, he grabs hold of the reins and the horse rears and begins to clop slantingly away from him. “No,” he cries. “No. Stop.”

  He is about to ask for help when he notices Clark go rigid in her saddle. Everyone has fallen silent, their eyes on something behind Lewis.

  He knows he will not like what he sees. And he is right. A huddle of spiders slink toward them. A dozen of them. As big as dogs. They scuttle from behind the gas station, over and around the pumps, all of them long legged and big butted and spiked with tiny blond hairs. Their many eyes gleam like gems. Their mandibles dangle from their snouts like deadly mustaches.

  They pause at the pumps, ten yards away, rasping their mandibles, stuttering their legs. The horses snort and whinny. They stomp their hooves, fighting the commands of their riders. Then, from around the side of the gas station, comes a spider larger than the rest. First there are only legs. They move with a hypnotic needling, like the whirring of a magician’s fingers before revealing some horror. Then its segmented body, a hairy fist of a face. Some of the eyes appear blinded, scarred through with what look like slash marks. It reaches one leg forward and pauses it in the air, as if to point.

  The other spiders start toward them.

  Reed lifts his revolver and Clark says, “No! The sound will carry to the Sanctuary.”

  She spurs her horse toward Lewis, and he finds himself frozen in their shadow. She raises a hand. He wonders at first if she is going to strike him. Instead she gathers his reins into her fist, steadying the roan. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He doesn’t like how high his voice sounds when he says, “I’m not used to moving so quickly!”

  He can hear the patter of the spiders’ many legs closing in on him like a dry rain.

  Her eyes flash between him and the spiders and the road ahead. Then she grabs him by the arm and helps him onto her own horse and tells him to lasso his arms around her waist and hold on for his very life.

  * * *

  Thomas receives the news in the atrium. This is a vast, high-walled garden built onto the Dome. Flowers spring brightly from pots and hanging baskets. Water drips from them like tears. Paths made from paver stones run between boxed beds crammed with potatoes, onions, corn, squash, beans, sunflowers. Some have, some have not. Thomas is happy to have. All those who have—among them the council members—have certain things available to them that others do not, including access to the atrium and a seemingly depthless access to water. Or that’s how it feels to Thomas anyway.

  The ceiling is netted with wire mesh to contain the dozens of birds that nest in the colored boxes that stand on poles. Three peacocks roam about, their feathers a ghostly white and their eyes so red they do not look like eyes at all but the beaded blood that wells from blinded sockets. When they walk, their claws scratch the paver stones and their necks dodge forward and back. Every now and then they stiffen their bodies and fill the atrium with a banshee cry. Thomas likes to take his meals here, at an ironwork table, with the peacocks strutting and the songbirds whistling and flitting around him.

  His wife sits across from him. Her hair is pulled back into a braid, making her face appear even more pointed than usual. Despite the heat, Danica wears a thin, open-throated sweater. Her plate remains full. She never eats much—but at a standard meal she will at least prod at her salad. Her chair is angled away from him. She sits so still that a yellow-breasted bird lands on her plate and pecks at the pile of grasshoppers braised with vinaigrette.

  He peels a shriveled orange and eats it in three chunks and spits the seeds onto the ground. “Something is bothering you.”

  “No.”

  “You’re just not hungry?”

  “I’m just not hungry.”

  “Ah.”

  The door to the kitchen swings open and Rickett Slade ducks through it and marches toward them without pausing to request an audience. A peacock stands on the path before him. At his approach, it unfurls its tail into a fan with a steely rattle of feathers. Slade does not pause. It appears he will crush it, or kick it aside, but at the last moment it skitters to make way for him.

  Thomas dabs a napkin at the corner of his mouth. “What?”

  Slade towers over them. The breath whistles from his nose. “Two rangers are unaccounted for, among them their captain.”

  “Unaccounted for?”

  “Gone. Missing.”

  “Well, what do you think has happened to them?”

  “They have left.”

  His hand crushes the napkin. “The Sanctuary?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean to tell me that they have left the Sanctuary and deliberately not returned?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because the sentinels they held at gunpoint told me.”

  “Guns? Gunpoint? Who has guns to point? What are you talking about?”

  “They do. We assume they are somehow in league with the girl.”

  Thomas absently wipes his mouth. “This is a little hard to take.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Of course there is.”

  “Your friend, the curator, Meriwether. He is also unaccounted for.”

  “Impossible.”

  The bird remains at his wife’s place setting. Its claws scratch the plate. Its head darts and its beak pecks at a grasshopper, punching holes in the body, mangling it beyond recognition. She will not look at him, her face as blank as the pale sky above. She seems to be holding her breath. So does the world. Everything motionless except the bird as it tears patches in the grasshopper.

  Thomas clears his throat and straightens his posture and wipes the crumbs from his lap, and in a voice that sounds far too calm to be his own, he tells Slade thank you. He tells him to leave. He tells him to return in an hour. By that time he will have made a decision. In the meantime he needs to think.

  Slade’s eyes flit to Danica before he departs the atrium.

  When the door closes, Thomas lunges across the table and brings his hand down on the bird. Its wings snap open, but he strikes it before it can take flight. It has grown lazy, living in the atrium, imbued with a false sense of safety. He catches and breaks its left wing. The plate shatters. His palm bleeds. The bird calls out, then flutters off the edge of the table and flops on the ground, where he pursues it, stomping once, twice, until its body stills and smears. Blood bursts from its beak.

  She will not look at him, not even when he says, “What do you know of this?”

  “Nothing.”

  He grabs her by the arm. The sweater is thick enough that he cannot feel her, one more thing coming between them. “I know you’ve been fucking him.”

  “That’s how this marriage works, isn’t it? We fuck other people.”

  He yanks her from the chair. It overturns with a clatter and her body spills to the ground. She gives him a baleful stare. Her hair has come loose from its braid in white filaments. Thomas says, “You share a bed with someone, you share secrets. What did he tell you?”

  Her eyes shine with tears. “I said I know nothing.”

  He stares at her—and she stares back, her eyes too white around the edges and her teeth bared. He grabs her by the throat with one hand and with the other scoops up the dead bird and mashes it into her mouth. That is how he leaves her, gagging out its broken body, scraping feathers from her tongue.

  * * *

  Lewis clutches Clark and keeps h
is eyes on the surrounding city, certain that at any second, more spiders will drop from trees, wolves will explode from doorways, snakes will twist from porches and pursue them.

  He has read about Chernobyl. He knows, in the years that followed the nuclear meltdown, in the two thousand square miles surrounding the power plant, biodiversity exploded. Radiation can result in a kind of accelerated evolution, mutagenesis. Many of the mutations die out. Some are merely deformed. But others grow stronger, accommodating the harsh conditions. After World War II, mutagenic breeding in plants resulted in strange colors, better taste, tougher hulls, but also in disease- and cold-resistant strains of everything from rice to wheat to sunflowers to cocoa to pears that became a sizable portion of harvested crops. Useful mutants.

  He knows that the world has become a furnace. St. Louis was not hit by nukes, but the radiation sloshes through the air and soaks the ground and will linger for centuries, cesium 137 and strontium 90 serving as a different kind of vitamin for animals and insects. This is why wolves are hairless and spiders oversized. This is why some people are misshapen with tumors, born with withered limbs and milky, blind eyes and veins that seem to grow on the outside of their skin. And maybe—maybe—this is why he is the way he is. A mutant. Another example of the world moving on. But he is not alone. He has the girl now, Gawea. She did not call him a freak. She called him the next. They are the next.

  They ride. Sometimes they gallop and sometimes they canter, but for half a day, they do not stop. They take to the roads when the roads permit, but more often the asphalt is buckled, riven. So they ride through yards and over collapsed fences. They dart through the dried maze of Forest Park. They follow ditches. They chase the shoulders of highways. Stalks of mullein thwap and stain the horses’ breasts yellow. Dried brush claws at their flanks. Sand and cinders kick up in clouds and muddy their eyelashes. They tie handkerchiefs around their mouths to breathe. In the sand, every hoofprint leaves a clear impression, their granular passage there for any to follow, on occasion zigzagging, but otherwise unfurling west. They cannot hope for rain, but with time the wind should chase away some of their tracks.

  Already they have gone farther than Clark has been before. They do not speak. The wind whisks dust off branches and it falls through their translucent shadows. With every clopping step, the air seems to vibrate. At strange noises before and behind them they pause and pet their snorting horses and try to shush them so that they might listen better.

  When Clark hesitates, reining her horse one way, then another, confused about their direction, the girl waves them forward and digs in her heels and takes the lead. Clark and Reed make eyes—a question crushed into their stare—and then follow her.

  They leave behind the city, the suburbs, and break away from the freeway to follow the cracked clay of the Missouri River. Here, in a silver pocket of shade beneath a bridge, they finally pause for water. Their horses foam with sweat. Their legs tremble and jump. They aren’t breathing so much as heaving. Lewis feels as though he is riding even after he dismounts from Clark’s horse, the ground seeming to rock, as if he is in two worlds at once.

  York guzzles at a canteen, and Clark twists her brother’s ear and drops him to his knees. “Only a taste, you idiot,” she says.

  The dry riverbed looks like the passage of an enormous snake, the stones running along its bottom like shed scales. A gabled house sits on a bluff overlooking it. The windows are broken, but curtains still hang from them. Their tattered forms move with the wind, rising and falling, so that it looks like there might be bodies in there still breathing. In a way, this is their great gamble—that out here, in the Dead Lands, there is yet life.

  Gawea sits in the shade with her hand pressed to her throat. The doctor approaches her, asking if she’s all right, asking to check her bandages, and though the girl tries to wave her off, she eventually relents to the doctor’s fussing. The doctor makes a tsk sound at the dust-caked wounds beneath and digs around in her satchel for cleansing alcohol and fresh dressing. And she hands out to the rest of them a dented can of ointment and tells them to smear it anywhere they feel blisters rising. “You need to tell me where it hurts,” she says. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Lewis leans his weight on one leg, then the other. The insides of his thighs burn. The muscles at the small of his back have gathered into a fist. His center sloshes. He opens his silver tin and fills his fingernail twice, snorting and sneezing and shivering with fresh energy.

  He does not complain—but his expression is plain for any to read—because Clark approaches him and speaks with the steady, placating voice you would use on an aggrieved child. “No whining.”

  “I haven’t said a word.”

  “This is only the beginning.”

  “I understand that.”

  “From now on, you ride your own horse.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “Come here.”

  She seizes the reins of the roan he earlier had not been able to mount, and she leads it toward him. Its sweat smells of sweet, scorched paper. Black jelly runs from one of its eyes. Its mane is clumped and wet, its coat spotted with burrs. It breathes with an asthmatic wheeze. “Why did you give me this horse?” he says. “It’s obviously a terrible horse.”

  “It’s a fine horse. But it’s our oldest. And tamest. Tame seems to suit you.”

  Clark digs into a satchel and scoops out a handful of dried corn. She indicates that Lewis should take it from her, and he does, with two hands brought together to make a bowl. The horse sniffs. Its lips curl back to reveal teeth that look more like broken shells. Its long pink tongue, filmed over white, works every last crumb from his hands.

  When it finishes, it raises its muzzle to sniff him. He raises a hand, too fast, and it flinches. He says, “Sorry, sorry.” This time he draws his hand slowly toward its neck, and the horse lets him. There is hair and there is skin and there is muscle, not a trace of cushioning fat. The neck ripples under his hand.

  “Does he have a name?”

  “He’s a she,” Clark says. “We call her Donkey.”

  Minutes later, when they straddle their horses and chase their shadows west, Lewis falls immediately to the rear of the company and chokes on the dust they kick up.

  They ride on—into what was once a pasture or a field, now a flat stretch of land remarkable only for the scalloped texture and pink color, a vast nothing. That is how he quantifies these sand flats and bone-dry canyons and skeletal forests and sunken-roofed towns—as nothing. All these years, all those books—he has built kingdoms in his skull. The world within him is full. The world without, empty.

  They come upon a town and ride through an amusement park, through the mouth of an enormous clown, through an alley of rotten stuffed animals and a dunk tank full of sand, past the rusted remains of Tilt-A-Whirls and roller coasters and drop towers and Gravitrons, past a carousel whose fiberglass horses have faded and cracked like the wings of dead butterflies.

  It is then, as the Ferris wheel looms before them like a mechanical moon, that Lewis believes he sees a man. A man in white. He sits in one of the Ferris wheel cars, near the top, appearing at first a blaze of light, what must be the sun on metal, but no, from the rocking back of the horse, if Lewis concentrates, he can make out pieces of the man—hair blown about his face in smoky tendrils, a silver ring on a hand raised in greeting, a ragged robe like a dove’s torn wing. Lewis’s lungs constrict and can’t find enough air. Every hair on his body goes erect. The air seems to shimmer. He knows the man. He phantoms through Lewis’s dreams, always far away, always beckoning. And now the man has a name, Aran Burr.

  Then the fairground barns close around Lewis, and he is traveling down a shadowy chute between them, the smell of cattle and hogs somehow still in the air. Every few minutes, the others are in the habit of turning in their saddles to check on him, dawdling their horses to make up for the sometimes thirty, sometimes seventy yards he trails behind. Now he slows more than ever, so enchanted by th
e sight of the man that he might turn around to assure himself he was real, when Clark drops back to pace him. She wears a neckerchief over her nose. It is damp in the shape of her mouth. He can barely hear her voice over the roaring wind and the pounding hooves. She is asking if he is okay.

  “I thought I saw someone.”

  She pulls down the neckerchief. Loose strands of her hair catch in her mouth and she spits them out. “You didn’t see anyone.”

  “I swear I did.”

  “You didn’t. Now, come on.”

  They reach the edge of town, but before they head into the open country, they ride through a dozen pyramids, each one a heap of blackened bones, what must be hundreds of bodies, heaved here and splashed with gasoline and lit with a match in the hope that fire might stop the flu.

  They ride through cars whose tires have rotted away like black socks. They ride by school buses full of skeletons. They ride past fallen barns bordered by silos that look like the missiles that once fell from the sky. They ride past what were once fields, now sandy barrens interrupted by dead cattle, their ribbed impressions like roots or tubers that failed to take purchase.

  There is no trail to follow so they make their own. They ride in fear of what lies before them and what lies behind. They ride in pain, but they know pain already or they would not have come, so they ride through the pain in the hope that it will one day lessen. And when night comes, they ride still, following the stars, trying not to worry about what might await them in the dark. They ride through the night. Lewis wakes with a start when his horse lurches beneath him, sliding down a steep grade, and he wakes again in time to jerk his head away from a branch clawing toward him like a hand. Only when dawn breaks behind them and the sun rolls across the empty blue bowl of the sky and chases the shadows to the corners of the earth and glares furiously down at them do they stop to rest, at last.