The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  Then she sees the man chained to the whipping post, the third in as many weeks, and her annoyance gives way to guilt-tinged sadness. He is bearded, shirtless, the skin of his belly and back a grub white compared to the tanned darkness of his face. Already he is pinkening under the sun, burning. He does not weep, not yet, but looks warily about him. He stands on an elevated platform, his wrists bound by two short chains anchored to a metal post. A voice calls out then, a voice she recognizes. She elbows through the crowd until she can see him. Slade.

  He and his deputies, dressed in black, are like walking shadows. He steps onto the edge of the platform and surveys the crowd and tells them about the man. At a bar the other night he sang a song about the mayor. “A profane song. A mocking song. Remember, friends, there is always someone listening. There is always someone watching. You are never alone here. What you tell one person you tell forty thousand. Now this man says he is sorry about his little song. He says he meant it only for fun, not as an act of civil disobedience. And for now he has our mercy.”

  In Slade’s hand, a coiled whip. He opens his grip so that its length unravels. He shakes his wrist one way, then the other, making it dance, its tip a fanged barb. He takes a few steps back, gauging the distance between him and the man. Then draws back his arm and casts the whip forward. It seems to pause a moment in a dark parabola—before sinking, darting in to strike. The crack gets mixed up with the scream. The man falls into the pole, hugging it. A winged flap of skin opens across his back. From it blood sleeves.

  The whip lashes again and again and again. Eventually flesh gives way to the white nubs of vertebrae. Slade loops the whip in his hand and once again surveys the crowd. His eyes are lost to piggish folds of flesh that turn down their corners, but Ella feels certain his gaze follows her when she hurries away, back to the museum.

  This would be a good time to have parents. Someone to turn to in a bad time, ask for help, a hug, a meal. Though Lewis would never think of himself in this way, he was her guardian, the one who years ago snuck up beside her in the west wing and startled her when he said, “You’re under this roof more than anyone but me.”

  Vagrant children were as common as rats, and she was one of them, living in the Fourth Ward, in the pantry of the kitchen of a brothel. She came to the museum nearly every day—it was her way of forgetting. She could think of nothing to say to Lewis in response except, “I’m sorry.”

  His hands were behind his back, the posture of a scholar. “You should be,” he said, looming over her. “You haven’t earned your rent.”

  She flinched when his hands shot from behind his back—she thought he would strike her. But he held a feather duster. He shoved it into her chest, with a puff of motes, and told her to get to work immediately.

  She did, and since then she has never really stopped working. She feared him at first. The thin-lipped expression. The words fired from his mouth like poison-tipped darts. The impossible mechanics of the owl and other inventions he sometimes tested out: a steam-powered bicycle, a lantern that never extinguished, a multi-lens set of glasses that could alternately study the moon or an amoeba. But then she discovered how frail and incompetent he was in human affairs, and in that recognition of weakness she gained power over him.

  In most matters she bullies him into getting her way. Lewis has given her a roof, a purpose, an education, but she would never describe him as a giving person, not someone to ever touch her gently on the shoulder or offer a kind word. But in this particular matter he would have helped her, he would have protected her, if only he were here.

  She tries not to think about Slade, but even with the door shut, she can’t shake the feeling he pursues her. His eyes are like hands that touch her all over. She tries to concentrate instead on the small things. She has to eat. She has to sweep and dust and polish. She has to escort four pods of children through the museum exhibits. She has to finish the display cards for the dinosaur collection. She has to check the windowsill outside Lewis’s office to see if his owl might perch there. Sometimes, when she works a rag into a stubborn smear of tarnish, when she stomps a scuttling cockroach—the world crushes down to a steel breastplate, a stone square, a task, and she gratefully forgets where and who she is. Then the quiet comes. The moments she can’t fill with anything but her thoughts. Night is the worst. She sleeps at the museum, and when she lies in bed, no matter how hard she tries to concentrate, something shadows her, paces the perimeter of her mind.

  Tonight—with prayers on her lips and the image of the whipped man’s back redly staining her mind—she spends hours staring at the ceiling and noting the clicks and hums of the museum, wondering what they belong to and whether she ought to investigate. Then she hears something she can’t ignore. What sounds like singing.

  She keeps the bat—the baseball bat Slade played with—by her bed. She carries it with her to the top of the staircase. She leans over the railing and looks down into the dark, and sure enough, a voice spirals faintly toward her. She descends the stairs.

  The various hallways and chambers offer noises that are distant and vague and melt into other sounds, the sounds of the nighttime city. Moonlight streams through the windows, and the shadows crisscross the floor. It isn’t until she pads all the way down the stairs, creeping into the basement, that she can make out the words to the song—“Yesterday,” the Beatles—belted out, full throated, by some phantom tenor.

  She snatches a lantern off a hook and lets out the wick and continues into the dark with a shroud of light to guide her. The voice grows louder and louder—until she enters the storage room, where the voice goes suddenly quiet, as if someone dragged a needle off a record.

  She pauses among the heaps of boxes, her ears pricked to pick up every sound. The wick of her lantern sputters. A cobweb seems to breathe. There is a breeze. The air moves down here, drawn to some source. She navigates her way through the shadowed maze until she comes upon a clearing where the ground slopes toward a grate.

  Her eyes are immediately drawn there because the grate is glowing, like the door of an oven. She can hear something moving beneath it, breathing and clambering upward. She sets down her lantern in order to grip her bat better.

  Then the gate lifts, the rusty maw of it moaning outward, and something is rising from below, what appears to be a glowing ghost. She screams and so does the ghost, their voices pitched high.

  She sees then his face—the face of a boy—colored orange and warped by shadows thrown by his own lantern. But only for a moment, as he jerks away from her and loses his purchase and drops back into the hole from which he climbed. The grate clangs behind him, shaking the air and nearly masking the noise of his body thudding, the lantern shattering.

  She creeps to the edge of the grate. Fifteen feet below, in the dying light of his lantern, he lies on his side, beetled by a backpack. She calls out to him—“What are you doing sneaking around down here?”—but he doesn’t answer, biting back a scream.

  Only then does she notice the bone showing whitely through the meat of his forearm.

  Chapter 12

  FOR A LONG TIME, they stand on a bluff looking out at the blackened fangs of high-rises and broken-backed bridges and the shadows that cling to walls even in full sun. The air smells like burned plastic. They can see two craters, each a half mile wide, from which everything seems to lean.

  “This is from a missile?” Lewis says.

  Paper is precious, so Gawea writes in the sand with a stick. Yes.

  “Do you know of many other cities in the same condition?”

  Many.

  Right then, Clark remembers the bullet her brother shot into the sand and tries to imagine the size and sound of what caused this, tries to imagine the windows shattering and roofs peeling upward, the people who barely had a chance to scream before their hair caught fire and their skin crisped and ashed off their bones. Closing her eyes doesn’t help. She still sees the city: the afterimage of the sun shining off mangled metal and molten puddles of gl
ass making blue and white networks on her eyelids.

  “Are we in danger?”

  Gawea writes: Maybe. Goblins. Moov on.

  “Goblins? What do you mean by goblins?”

  She underlines Moov on with the stick.

  They lead the horses down the bluff and into a neighborhood where the houses are husks and the trees nothing but charcoaled sticks that smear their flanks blackly when they ride past. They pass a mailbox that has lost all its letters but one, Z.

  Something skitters out of the underbrush. Something they see only briefly and cannot identify. York says it looks a little like a human head covered in bristly fur. They see other things too. White ants. A two-headed squirrel. Mutations.

  Goblins, Gawea writes again in the sand. Soon after that they pass a trampled circle of grass splashed with blood.

  Lewis tells them how radiation will cling to the place for thousands of years, so they give the city wide berth, arcing away from the river for fifty miles or so before returning to it.

  That night, around the campfire, everyone is jittery, hollow eyed, ready to curl up in a ball or walk into the woods and offer themselves up to whatever might prey on them. At least then the pain will end. It doesn’t help matters when Reed asks, “What do you miss?” He is looking at everyone, his sunburned face peeling so badly that the firelight playing off it makes him appear aflame, burning alive. “About the Sanctuary. I mean, you have to miss something.”

  Clark says, “I don’t know if that’s the kind of conversation we should be having.”

  “Why not? What’s wrong with missing something?”

  “We don’t need to be looking back at a time like this.”

  He pokes the fire with a stick and a spiral of embers rises in the air. It seems that no one will respond until Lewis says, “I miss my books. My desk. Stillness. Aloneness.” He opens his silver tin and scoops out a sniff from it.

  “Me,” York says, “I miss the ladies and the laughter.” He smiles and bobs his eyebrows. “What about you, Reed? Since you asked, what do you miss?”

  “Oh, I just miss certain people, I guess.”

  “Like who?”

  Reed glances at Clark and then away. “Just the people who used to fill my days.”

  York says, “Gawea? You miss anybody back home? Anybody special waiting there for you?”

  She shakes her head, no.

  “Well, that’s good. Because I’m all the man you need.”

  She does not respond except to stare into the fire.

  The doctor smiles warmly at Clark. “I don’t miss a thing. Anything is better than that place. I couldn’t be happier than where I am right now.” A lie, of course. But a good one, a necessary one. They need lies like it to get them through the months ahead.

  “Me too,” Clark says.

  York blows on the fire, makes it bend and snap. “Are we really going back? Like, at the end of all this? We’re not really going to hump all the way back, are we?”

  “Of course we are,” Reed says, and then, with his voice lowered, “Aren’t we?”

  But no one answers.

  Clark wakes to the smell of smoke. She is already hot. And terribly thirsty, her mouth like sandpaper. Her head aches from dehydration and the fuzzy memory of yesterday’s long ride. She rolls into a seated position and swigs from her canteen, its water somehow seeming warmer than the air.

  They are north of St. Joseph, and though the sun has not yet risen, the sky has lightened enough for Clark to see Reed. They spent the night beneath an open-air shelter in a park, and he sits on a splintery picnic table with a revolver split open. He dampens a rag with oil and drags it through the barrel.

  “What are you doing up?” she says.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “You like your new toy?” she says, and he looks at her but does not say anything. Half-moons of fatigue bruise the flesh beneath his eyes. His lips are chapped and cracked. His peeling sunburn makes him look like he’s falling apart. He appears old, ugly. They all do, she knows. The doctor has been fretting over them, asking them to take foul-tasting supplements from a dropper. She says it will keep them healthy, strong, but they look and feel the opposite. These days, conversation comes less and less frequently, as if they are rationing their voices, too. When they do speak, the words flash like impatient weapons.

  She is as guilty as any of them—especially with her brother, whose every decision she sometimes feels compelled to question. When he drinks too much water, when he builds too big a fire, when he stands too near a cliff’s edge or walks too quickly into an abandoned house, as if there is nothing to fear in the world. She often cuffs him, berates him, can’t stop herself from pointing out his idiot mistakes. He fights back, cursing her, raising a hand as if to slap her. “You’re making me look like a fool.”

  “You’re making yourself look like a fool.”

  “Treat me like a man, Clark.”

  “Act like one.” Here she lowered her voice and jutted a chin in the direction of the girl. “And don’t get too attached to her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I see the way you look at her. Keep your guard up. We still don’t know if we can trust her.”

  Even the horses seem angry. One dropped dead from exhaustion. The others droop their heads and hood their eyes. Some of them limp with split hooves. Yesterday, when Lewis spurred his horse, it swung back its head and bit his calf.

  Dawn steals across the sky and suffuses everything with a faint orange light. In the center of the shelter is a short-walled fire pit with a round grate that pipes into a chimney. Smoke eases from the grate, bending with the breeze, twisting toward her, acrid with the smell of rotten wood. She stands upright and presses her hands into her back, nudging her spine until it click-click-clicks into place with a sound like dry timber. “I suppose we better get moving.”

  Reed snaps the revolver together. “Suppose we better. Our big hurry to nowhere awaits us.”

  “Do you have a problem? Something you want to say?”

  He won’t meet her stare, so she breaks away and calls out to everyone, telling them to move, get their asses up. A few of them groan and roll over. Ever since Kansas City, everyone has been quiet, slow, as if the lingering poison of the place infected them all. It is harder to believe in humanity surviving, she supposes, when you see how it is capable of destroying itself.

  She walks from bedroll to bedroll, kicking Lewis, pulling her brother’s hair, saying, “Up, up, up, up”—and they yawn and stretch and rub their hands across their faces. Somebody says, “What’s the point?” and when she says, “Who said that?” there is no answer except her nickering horse.

  She fills a nose bag and fits it into place, and while the horse eats noisily she studies the brightening sky. At first she doesn’t recognize the cloud. It isn’t much—seen through the trees, a white wisp hanging in the air like a shed feather—and her eyes initially sweep past it. Then she nearly cries aloud. It has been so long. Seeing the cloud is like sitting in a bar and hearing the band strike up a song she knows but forgot existed.

  Reed stands with his gun ready. “What?”

  The shelter is located next to a wall of trees at the bottom of the sloping hill she races up now. She can hear panicked voices behind her and ignores them. She trips twice in her rush, but she does not pause, not until she reaches the top, where she turns to take in the view.

  For so long she has seen the sun rise into a cloudless sky, it is difficult to imagine it any other way. Cerulean. That’s the description Lewis used for it the other day. A word that sounds cruel to her.

  “Look,” she says. “Everyone, come up here and look.”

  They stagger from beneath the shelter, up the hill, staring at her and then at the sky. What she initially saw—that white wisp—was only the beginning, the first tentacles of a roiling bank of clouds stacked up on the horizon.

  Chapter 13

  WHEN CLARK ROUSES them from sleep, when she calls them up
the hill, when they look to the sky and see the clouds piled up like tangled gray scarves, the others cry out with delight—at the promise of shade, of moisture—but Lewis goes silent because he sees something else. He sees the man. The man in white. Aran Burr. He takes up half the sky. His hair is wild, windblown. His eyes and mouth are lit with balls of lightning. His hands—with torn gray fingers—reach for him, beckoning.

  He haunts Lewis. Whether he is asleep or awake, Burr is there, at every turn, summoning him. His skin is so pale Lewis can see the veins marbling greenly beneath it. His knuckles are cubed with arthritis. His mouth is a hole that holds a shadow when he whispers his name, “Lewis.” Isn’t that what he should expect, with his brain drying like a nut from lack of water, with the heat warping the air and the sun heliographing off broken nests of glass? A mirage? But he doesn’t see water and he doesn’t see his office, the two things he longs for most. He sees Burr.

  Lewis was, in his previous capacity, not a teacher but an educator. A curator of stories meant to help people better understand their lives. The museum might make them feel a little richer or entertained or wistful. Or it might make them feel like an irrelevant bit of debris caught up in the cyclonic rotation of history. He didn’t particularly care. He just wanted to be sure they knew this wasn’t it—the Sanctuary was not the world and human history was a long gauntlet of troubles and triumphs they might learn from, aspire to.

  But that life is far behind him now. He no longer frames his thoughts around nurturing others, but on feeding himself, gobbling up everything he encounters. There is nothing in this new America not worth learning. He is the student. A disciple. He bothers Gawea whenever he can, but even if she wasn’t temporarily mute from her injury, he suspects she would give him only so much. There is a notable reluctance whenever someone approaches her with a question.