The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  * * *

  The police headquarters is a rectangular, gray-stoned building with courtrooms in its upper stories and windowless holding cells in its basement. Thomas pushes through the entry, into a shadowy, squared-off room with the seal of St. Louis on the floor, benches along the walls, and a desk manned by a deputy. Slade leans over the deputy and jabs his finger at a map of the Sanctuary.

  Thomas overhears the word mutiny and clears his throat and the two men raise their eyes to consider him.

  “You told me an hour,” Slade says.

  “It turns out I didn’t need that long.”

  Everything will be all right. He has every confidence that he can manage a situation only temporarily out of his control. On the walk here he could feel his thoughts sticking, clumping, like dust on a wet eye.

  Now Slade tells him, “You should have requested an escort.”

  “I can’t walk around my own city?”

  “No, you can’t. There are plenty who would like to kill you.”

  “I want you to take me below.”

  “Below?”

  “I want you to take me to see Jon Colter.”

  His lips might thin. The skin might tighten around his eyes. Otherwise, Slade’s face is as hard and featureless as the stone blocks stacked into walls around them. “I’ll get the keys.”

  There is a wind turbine located on top of the building, and the lights pulse on and off at a steady rhythm, so that after a while you get used to the passing darkness, as if a great eye were opening and closing. Slade does not bother to fetch a lantern, so every few paces they pause and wait for the lights to brighten again.

  When Slade keys open the door at the top of the stairs, the smell comes rushing out and nearly knocks Thomas back. It is almost tactile, something that grows hair and pisses and shits, something that can crawl down your throat and claw out your insides. He brings a hand to his nose so suddenly he slaps himself. His eyes film over with tears.

  Slade says nothing, but his mouth horns at one corner, the beginning of a smile. He leads Thomas down the stairs. With each step his boots thump and his keys rattle, but over the top of this Thomas can hear something else. The sound of many people breathing, like an uncertain wind. A voice muttering. A moan that goes on so long it becomes a wretched song.

  At the bottom of the stairs, before a caged door, the lights fade and black out and they wait there for a few long seconds. The noises grow louder. Thomas can hear feet padding against concrete. Hands gripping bars and rattling them. A stream of urine splattering the bottom of a bucket. Whispers.

  The lightbulb above them sizzles to life. Slade unlocks the door and the two of them pass through and it shuts behind them with a clank. To their right reaches a cinder-block wall—and to their left, ten cells, their bars a chipped white. Several of the men are naked. Their hair is long and matted. The ones who are white are as white as grubs from lack of sun. Some of them crouch in a corner; some lie on their cots and observe the visitors with craned necks. Others press their faces between the bars, like this man, who looks like a skull with slimy hair and who hisses and spits until Slade slams a baton against his hand and sends him whimpering to the floor.

  There are only two lights socketed into the length of the room. They dim and die just as Thomas and Slade reach the final cell. In the bewildering darkness Thomas tries to remember how close he stands to the bars and wonders how far a man might reach. He can hear someone, in the near distance, breathing. He imagines fingers ghosting through the air, grabbing hold of his neck.

  He waits, and he waits, what feels like an interminable length, and just as he is about to call out a question to Slade and ask if something is wrong, a surge of light brightens the air. He blinks until he finds his focus.

  The man at first appears like some shadow that clings to the cell. He stands with his back to them. He has been imprisoned here as long as Thomas has been mayor, a year now, but confinement has not softened him. One of his arms is raised and his back and shoulders jump with muscle. He is short but square, built like a blunt weapon. His attention is focused on the wall, which he has sketched over, made into a mural. In his fingers he pinches a piece of metal, maybe a nail, and he uses this to scratch the concrete. There are many-headed beasts battling men with swords, naked bodies twined together in lust or combat, severed heads trailing ropes of blood, skeletons dancing, every inch of wall etched into some curious detail. The floor, too, has been sketched over. And small bits of stone carved into what look like trolls, fauns, beasts.

  “Turn around,” Thomas says.

  The man adds some flourish, a horn on a head. “There.” He drops his hands to his hips and turns to face them. The light is faint, making every line on his body stand out with shadow. The muscles rippling across his stomach. The scars, too. There are many of those. He appears like several bodies stitched together, many membranes of skin pulled taut and discolored, the most noticeable of them across his face. The left side of it has been torn away, one eye like a white egg deep in a nest of scars. His ear merely a hole, the hair around it gone and the skin a mottled gray. His teeth reach across his cheek, so that half his face appears always gathered up in a grin.

  “You’ve been busy,” Thomas says.

  “Have to find a way to pass the time. Otherwise, a man’s likely to go crazy.” His voice sounds rough-edged, rusted out. “You’ve come to say you’re sorry?” His permanent half smile makes it difficult to tell whether he’s joking.

  “I’ve come to offer you your freedom,” he says to Colter, first in darkness and then in light, as the lights sizzle off and on. “And ask for your help.”

  Colter’s tongue worms along his bottom lip. “Why would I want to help you?”

  “Because this”—Thomas steps close enough to the cell to knock the bars with an open hand—“is your alternative.” The clang of metal shakes the air.

  Colter runs a finger along his arm, tracing the purple ridge of a scar. “What about my wolves?”

  “Still alive. Still scaring children. We’ve kept them at the zoo.”

  “All of us in cages, eh?”

  “Not anymore. Not if you bring me back some heads.”

  The lights crackle off again, and in the dark the men keep their silence. Several seconds later, there is a sputtering hum and the air goes from black to gray to yellow, and Thomas sees that Colter has crept closer, to the very edge of the cell, his fingers curling around the bars to either side of his ruined face when he says, “Let me out then. Let me out and bring me my wolves.”

  Part II

  The Forbidden Zone was once a paradise. Your breed made a desert of it, ages ago.

  —Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes

  Chapter 9

  LEWIS WAS SUPPOSED to be her supervisor, her teacher, though often their roles seemed reversed. Ella did as he asked, but with some complaint or revision. They had a set of rules between them. She did as she was told—she looked to him for guidance and instruction—but so did she point out his every failing. He did not like his schedule disrupted. He suffered always from headaches and moodiness. He grew peevish and short when he couldn’t find what he was looking for, and on and on. He was a difficult person, she told him often, and he did not deny it.

  Together they discovered his dead mother. The way he held her, with his arm behind her back, made her body arch as if she were a torture victim suffering some unimaginable pain. When Ella touched him on the elbow, when she told him to set his mother down, he let out a guttural cry but otherwise said nothing and did as he was told. She then took his clammy hand and dragged him down to her height and kissed his cheek.

  She doesn’t know he is gone, not for sure, until the deputies come looking for him. He has been missing all day. She has never known him to break his routine, but figures, with the recent death of his mother, he may have earned an excuse. After the deputies rip through his office and bedroom, after they knock down bookshelves and turn over his bed, they drag Ella to a mediev
al display, a room full of lances and flails and tapestries, where Rickett Slade is waiting for her.

  Of course she has seen him before, dropped her eyes when they passed in the street, but they have never spoken. He sits in a massive gold-trimmed throne. He barely fits, the arms of it biting into the sides of his belly. Across his thighs rests a baseball bat—her bat, the only weapon she keeps in her quarters, with the word Peacemaker burned by a magnifying glass across its cracked, wooden length. On the floor, tossed aside, lies the sign she wrote in careful calligraphy, Please do not sit on the display.

  “Can’t you read?” she says.

  He may smile or he may frown; it is difficult to tell. His face is pocked with acne scars, each of them carrying a small shadow. He motions with the bat, across the room, indicating where she arranged a Judas chair opposite the throne. The same sign rests on its spiked seat. “Please,” he says, “let’s both be where we’re not supposed to be.”

  A deputy—a woman with her head shaved except for a rat-tail braid—grabs her by the wrist and Ella shakes her off and says, “Don’t you touch me.” She approaches the chair and lowers herself gently onto it. She has done so before, when no one was looking, and knows the points on the seat and back and arms dull enough to be tolerable for a short period of time. “Now is when I tell you I don’t know anything and you choose not to believe me.”

  This time he does smile, she is almost certain. A hint of teeth beneath his upper lip. “Lewis didn’t tell you.”

  “No, he didn’t tell me.”

  “And how does that make you feel?”

  “Mad. I’m mad.” And she is. She is trembling with anger. “And though I’m sure these feelings will pass, right now, frankly, I hate him.”

  “How old are you, girl?”

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “And you’re going to take care of this museum all on your own?”

  She stiffens then. She knows what she looks like to him, a plain-faced girl with short hair the color of old straw. She looks like someone barely worth talking to, someone your eyes pass right over. She isn’t going to let him dismiss her. “There’s no one else who can do it, is there? And he didn’t leave me much choice, did he? That’s typical. He’s the most arrogant, inconsiderate man in the whole world.” She doesn’t realize she is yelling until she finishes.

  “We could always burn the place down.”

  She can feel the seat digging into her now, hot points of pressure. “Go ahead. Enjoy policing the riots that follow. This place is holier than any church. The Sanctuary’s only escape.”

  “Not the only escape. Your friend Lewis found some other way.” The sensation of his eyes on her is like two hands pushing her around. “We found a radio in his office. Isn’t that what it was? A radio?”

  “It doesn’t work.”

  “You aren’t using it to communicate with him?”

  “It doesn’t work, so no, I am not.”

  He shrugs. “Well, I smashed it to pieces anyway.” He holds up the bat, swinging it one way, then the other, like a metronome. “This yours?”

  “You know it is. You found it in my quarters.”

  “You keep it because you’re scared.”

  “I’m not scared. I’m a realist. Sometimes you have to hurt other people before they hurt you.”

  He rolls forward, extracting himself from the throne. It groans in relief. He crosses the room and stands before her until he fills up her entire field of vision. He reaches out a hand. “I’m not supposed to believe you.” Her entire head seems to fit into his palm. “But I do.”

  There is a tug—followed by a sting—behind her ear. When he pulls his hand away, he pinches a clump of her hair between his fingers. He tucks it into his pocket. Then departs the room, flanked by his deputies. He speaks without turning to address her. “If you find anything, if he left anything, you tell me.”

  “I don’t know what good it would do you.”

  “Let me decide that.” He drops the bat when he exits the room, and the rattling echo of it seems to linger in the air a long time.

  Later, she finds the note. There was a stack of paper squared neatly on his desk. Now the sheets lie scattered like dead leaves around the office. She traces her fingers along each one and brings them to her nose to smell. Finally she finds what she is looking for, the faint texturing and lemon scent. She lights a candle and holds the paper a few inches above the flame, and within seconds the letters begin to darken and shape into words.

  Ella—

  By now you know that I am gone. Check my office window nightly for the owl. Of course you will take care of the museum, and I’m certain you will do a fine job. Be sure to destroy this letter and deny ever having received it.

  Lewis

  No apology. No well wishes. No promise to return for her. No explanation beyond what she heard from the deputies. She lowers the note onto the candle and drops it to the stone floor and watches it flame and blacken upon itself. She walks through the museum then, every room of every floor. She has to see for herself that she is alone. She finally comes to a stop in the rotunda, where she throws back her head and yells at the starry mural above, “You son of a bitch!” The words clap back at her, her voice a dozen times angry. “You son of a bitch, why didn’t you take me with you!”

  * * *

  Slade lives in the prison. Wood rots. Plastic cracks. Cement crumbles. But stone and iron last. And that is what the prison is made of, stone and iron. It is a place of security, a place he can hide things away.

  The door is dented steel with a line of rust running like a tear trail from the lock. It groans when he closes it. The room is windowless. Electricity courses through the walls, drawn from the creaking rotor of a wind turbine on the roof, but he keeps no bulb in the ceiling fixture. He lights a linseed oil lamp instead. He likes the room dark, likes the sun shuttered away. Outside he feels exposed, the sun’s eye and their eyes always on him. Here he feels safe, nested.

  The lamp’s light makes the mannequins seem to move. There are five of them, collected from a department store with birds roosting in the rafters. Some are missing arms. Their plastic skin, a cancerous shade of yellow, has cracked through the eyes, the mouth, along the neck and belly, their bodies webbed with fissures, some gaping.

  They wear clothes, torn and stained. A leather necklace, weighted with a stone, rounds one of their necks. Earrings dangle from another, unevenly, hooked through the cracks in the plastic. He painted four of their faces. Red smears across their mouths. Blue or green or brown pools in their eye sockets. A black smudge of mole. A dusting of freckles. There is a tooth, a canine, embedded in one of the mannequin mouths. Fingernails. All of them have hair, chunks small and large.

  “Hello, pretties,” he says.

  His bed is pressed up against the wall, a knot of blankets over a metal frame. In the center of the room is a chair, a metal chair with leather straps looping from each of its arms. The seat and the legs and the floor beneath are stained a rusty red, a skirt of dried blood. A table reaches along the wall, and above it a pegboard carrying coils of wire, barbed metal instruments.

  He goes there now and grabs a ceramic pot of glue. He approaches the only naked mannequin. To bring their faces together he must crouch. They are similarly ruined, his by acne scars, hers by clefts brought on by heat and time. He breathes out of his mouth. He opens the pot of glue and daubs some across the crown of the mannequin’s head. Then he reaches into his pocket and removes the clump of straw-colored hair and mashes it into the glue.

  The mannequin wobbles a few seconds before going still.

  “You’re a fierce one,” he says. “I like that.”

  Chapter 10

  WEEKS PASS, and the six of them chase their way west. There are mountains in the distance, Clark knows. The mountains she has dreamed of all her life. She still cannot see them, but Lewis promises they are there, as they move across Missouri, where the dead forests give way to windbeaten yellowed grass that cooks d
own to sand.

  Her entire life she has spent looking at the same thing—the same ruined buildings, the same defeated faces—and now everything new strikes her as particularly vivid, almost painterly. The heat shimmering in the distance so that the world appears through warped glass. The white snakes of dust that come squiggling out beneath the horses’ hooves with every step.

  She is impervious to the heat. And though her body aches for water, she is less thirsty every day for a pint or a tumbler. Maybe because she knows there is no tavern around the corner. Or maybe because her body needs so many other things. Or maybe because her mind is so distracted and hopped-up with constant adrenaline. But probably it is because of her brother. He is the real reason.

  She has always felt protective of him, never more than now. People talk about her arrogance. People talk about her recklessness. She and York share the same blood and the same qualities, his exacerbated by the teenage belief that his story is more important than any other, that his body is indestructible, that guts matter more than brains, that his cock is the compass point worth following.

  She keeps her eyes on him constantly, watching with a mixture of affection and annoyance and obligation. He might look like a man, taller and broader than she, but younger, younger by a decade, an almost unfathomable amount of time, and not to be mistaken for mature. Since he was nine, she has shielded him, nursed him when sick, comforted him when scared, punished any bullies who taunted him, made sure he was properly fed and dressed. For five years, he slept in her bunk while she slept on the floor. Other than drinking spirits, and ranging beyond the wall, he has been her main interest. She doesn’t want children—who would want to bring something so delicate into this punitive world?—but she has one. He is hers. In the same manner that parents view a child as their body’s extension, the closest they come to reincarnation, she wants his life to be better than hers. That’s the promise that waits for him, that waits for them all, on the horizon.