The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  She notches an arrow, but before she can rise from her crouch and take aim, she hears the snap of string, the shriek of a broadhead cutting the air. York. There is a sound like a fist smacking a palm. The deer jackknifes and falls and stumbles upright again. It starts toward them, then rears back and darts into the woods. Its back leg drags. An arrow spikes from its hip.

  They listen to it crashing off into the distance. Then she turns to York. His face is too long and too thin, and his chin juts at an angle, as if someone stepped on his head when he was a soft-skulled baby. No one has shaved since they left the Sanctuary—their water too precious—and his upper lip is wisped by a mustache and his sideburns have extended into a failure of a beard. He is grinning. She is not.

  “I got him!”

  “You got her.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Whether we’ll ever find her is another story.”

  He flinches when she starts toward him. She marks out an invisible square on his chest. “Kill zone,” she says and then stabs a finger between his ribs.

  “But it was still a pretty good shot, right?”

  “It wasn’t terrible.”

  They follow the blood trail for a half mile. A puddle among the pine needles. A smear along a tree trunk. What looks like a poisonous spattering of red berries on a bush. Occasionally the grass crushes down where the deer rests. She tells her brother he must have hit something vital.

  Far enough from the river, the world dries up again. The grass yellows. The trees lose their leaves. Dust rises with every step and seems to give off its own light and heat when they breathe it into their lungs. They step out of the trees and onto what was once a driveway. Weeds have pushed their way through the fractured asphalt that runs up a hill to a three-story Victorian perched atop a rise. Its siding is gray, the paint long ago flaked away. A section of its peaked roof has collapsed. The wraparound porch is sunken and shot through with grass. The balusters, split or missing altogether, make the railing appear like a rotten mouth.

  They find the deer halfway up the porch, laid out like a sacrifice. The front door is missing altogether. The surrounding trim is splintered away as if clawed apart. Her eyes stay on the door, the black rectangle of it, a space that swallows all light. So she does not notice—not until York says, “What is that?”—the white ball bulging from the deer’s flank.

  At first she believes it to be a swollen strip of intestine that has somehow escaped the gash. But it is not. It is moving, pulsing, tumorous. Tiny claws hold it in place near the arrow’s shaft. There is the faint noise of sucking, lapping.

  Too late, she says, “Don’t touch it.”

  York has already reached out a boot—and toes the thing softly. Its mouth peels away from the wound and it raises its head to observe them. An albino bat with blind white eyes. It has the look of a shaved kitten. A beard of blood rims its mouth. She remembers what Lewis said about radiation, about mutational genesis. She remembers what Gawea wrote about goblins.

  The bat lowers its head again, but before it can drink, York kicks it. It smacks the railing and issues a sharp cry. When it falls to the ground, they lose sight of it among the weeds but hear it rustling and scrabbling beneath the porch.

  Normally she would gut the deer where it lies, but not today. She heaves the deer onto York’s back, and then, as he buckles beneath the weight of it, they escape to the woods.

  She might be imagining it, but she believes she hears something behind her, a shifting of air, as if the house were drawing in its breath.

  Chapter 16

  PIMPTON LIVES NEAR the Dome in a building called the manor. He shares it with the other council members, along with the chair of the farming bureau, the chair of waste management, the chair of finance, and all other elected or appointed officials. Like the Dome, like the museum, their building stands apart from the rest of the Sanctuary, with its marble floors and high, airy ceilings and dark-wooded wainscoting. Paintings hang from the walls. A swing-shift deputy remains stationed at the entrance.

  Pimpton’s is a second-story apartment. One flight of stairs is enough to exhaust him. He leans hard on his cane and the handrail. He fumbles with his key, his fingernails long and his knuckles twisted with arthritis. Once he pushes inside, he calls for his wife, but she doesn’t answer, maybe out with a friend, shopping the bazaar.

  The room is dark except for a square of light. The window is open, allowing in the heat of the day. He mumbles a string of obscenities, caning his way across the room to pull it shut, draw the curtains, bringing a cool shadow to the sitting area.

  Then he collapses into his reading chair. Something bulges at his back, a decorative pillow that he spends a minute fussing with, renegotiating onto his lap. He folds his hands over it. His chair faces the window and he stares at the line of sunlight burning between the curtains. It grows narrower as his eyelids sag. He can feel sleep pulling at him, almost there. What never comes to him at night always finds him easily during the day. A sudden, pressing exhaustion. He will take a little nap. He always feels better after a little nap. An escape from the heat. An escape from the troubles the Sanctuary faces and the cruel idiocy of Thomas, who seems less a man and more a boy clutching a wooden sword and pretending his power. He must be punished. He must be put in his place. And he will be, once the next election cycles through, but that is a long ways off, longer than Pimpton may live. His eyes ache. His knees ache. His back aches. A nap will be good medicine for what ails him. Yes, a nap is just what he needs. The darkness takes him like a flung blanket.

  He can’t be sure how long he sleeps, maybe an hour, maybe a minute, but he feels that disoriented dream-tug when he wakes, the edges of the world slippery. He could so easily close his eyes again, but he knows something must have woken him. He calls out for his wife and receives no answer. She is hard of hearing, so he repeats himself, louder this time. With some difficulty, he rocks forward in his chair and twists around, looking behind him.

  The living room is shadowy enough that he at first does not recognize the darkness beside him as a man—as Rickett Slade—until the sheriff says, “This will only take a minute,” lifting the decorative pillow from his lap and pressing it to his face.

  Chapter 17

  DANGER SEEMS far away from this bend in the river. Lewis bathes until his toes and fingers wrinkle. He drinks until his stomach aches. The horses splash along the banks and feast on grass, and when Lewis walks past his own mount, she whickers and nuzzles his neck and stares at him with her soft black eyes and he pets her and can’t help but smile.

  The doctor takes a knife and hacks down some leafy willow branches and hands them out for everyone to swing over their shoulders to warn away the mosquitoes and deerflies. The earth has greened and blued. Water unspools beside them, the river ever widening. Flowers bloom in explosions of color that match the feeling inside them all. Gawea helps them forage, showing them what to look for—strawberries and raspberries and blueberries and gooseberries—until their fingers and lips are stained, the flavors impossibly good. They eat bird eggs, sorrel leaves, basswood leaves, oyster mushrooms, currants, clover, worms, grubs. If things are this good now, their mood seems to say, how much better might they be in Oregon? It is unimaginable.

  They dig a hole and surround it with stones and fill it with a pyramid of wood and the fire snaps and pops and sends sparks swirling up to join the stars beginning to burn in the iron-colored sky. They eat the venison cut into chops and steaks. York takes a flask of tequila from his saddlebag and says he wasn’t planning on sharing, but what the hell—it feels right—it feels like one of those nights.

  “You’ve been hiding that all this time?” Clark says. Her mouth quavers as if eager to accept the flask.

  “There’s water in the world, after all,” he says. “So let’s drink!”

  They pass around the flask and shudder and hoot at the taste. All except Clark. She takes it and stares at it a long time. Her mouth goes damp. Her teeth click together. He
r throat feels as though it is widening to accommodate whatever she might pour down it. The coldness of its metal like a gun in her hand.

  Then she shakes her head—hard—and hands the flask to Gawea. “Take a taste for me,” she says. “A lot of tastes.”

  The girl no longer wears bandages, her neck healed, scarred an angry red. Still she doesn’t talk. Clark bothers her as often as possible, no longer believing in the injury, believing instead that the girl is holding back, hiding something from them. It is more than her silence. It is her distance, the thin thread that binds her to them. She rarely engages, often staring off into the distance as if listening to instructions only she can hear. And her looks—eyes black, face dead—indicate her utter indifference, which seems at odds with her mission. Clark forces the flask on her now and hopes the liquor might loosen her, surprise a word out of her.

  But Gawea only takes a nip and then cringes and trembles. She passes the flask to York, who throws back his head and guzzles. York, York, everyone keeps saying his name, York. They smack him on the side of his head and thank him for the booze and the meat and he grins around a handful of flank steak.

  The flask circles the fire twice and then twice again and York’s voice grows louder and louder and soon he wobbles upright and tells them to make way, make room, he wants to show them something. This is his standard over the past few weeks—teasing, joking, storytelling—always trying to distract or surprise them with a laugh. He is known for his mouth. He claims to have bedded more than five hundred women, and every woman seems to have something strange or ridiculous about her. This one had nipples so long and rigid a bird might have roosted on them. Another used her teeth so generously when fellating him—he pronounced it filleting—that he rolled out of bed the next morning circumcised.

  He brings a hand to his stomach, feigning stomach cramps. His tongue peeks between his lips. He begins to dry heave. Out of his mouth—one, two, three—come yellow agates. He bulges his eyes in mock surprise. He tosses one of the stones up and catches it. Then tosses another, and soon he is juggling them in wider and wider arcs. Two he lets fall into his pants pocket—but the third he launches at his sister.

  It whizzes through the air. If her reflexes were not as sharp as they are, the rock would strike her square in the forehead. But her hand rises up to snatch it. There is a smack. Everyone goes quiet for a moment. Everyone expects her to scold her brother, maybe hurl the rock back his way.

  But the river has mellowed her. She slowly brings the rock to her temple and makes a doink sound and crosses her eyes and slumps backward in a mock faint. Everyone applauds.

  The flask passes around the fire a few times more, and their words begin to tumble freely, their faces flushed, numbed. A pitch pocket pops. Frogs chirp. The river hushes. A chittering comes from the sky—followed by the shaky nickering of a horse. Someone claps a hand and crushes a mosquito. Then York clears his throat and announces that he has to take a leak so bad that the river will rise five feet in the next five minutes.

  They hear the chittering sound again, what could be mistaken for a high-pitched giggling. York is a few yards from the fire now, and he spins around to say he hopes nobody misses him when he’s gone. It is then, with his smile a white crescent and his body ghosting into the dark, that a shadow comes alive behind him. And though everyone laughs at first, thinking that this is another trick of his, thinking that his screams might be an act, this is not the case.

  Something has him. Something is dragging him away. What it is, Lewis cannot see, his night vision blurred from all his time staring at the fire. Now the horses are screaming along with York. Lewis can hear their hooves kicking, as they rear back against the harnesses that bind them to the trees.

  Lewis has had too much to drink. He cannot process what is happening. He studies Clark’s face to see if he ought to be scared. She already has her revolver out. A muscle ripples along her cheek. She is standing—she is running—the gun’s metal dancing with orange light thrown by the fire. Reed does the same. So does Gawea. The doctor lifts a rifle to her shoulder and swings in an unsteady circle. No one shoots. They don’t know what to shoot at.

  There is a piercing scream—inhuman—and York races out of the dark. Claw marks run across his face. In his hand he carries a bloodied knife. He throws aside his packs until he finds his holster and belts it around his waist. “Move,” he tells Lewis. “Move, move, move, or you’re dead.”

  Lewis is unarmed. He never keeps a weapon ready, not like the others. But he manages to force his brain into action. There is no moon. They need light. They need to shove back the night. His eyes fall to the nearby pile of wood. He tries to run and trips. He scrambles on hands and knees. The first gunshot sounds. The horses keep screaming—a sound like metal dragged across metal—though their screams seem fewer now. Lewis grabs what wood he can, feeding the fire three split logs, a branch full of dead pine needles. The flames rise with a crackling flash. The shadows retreat between the trees. And in the light cast by the fire he sees the bats.

  Their skin is as white as moonlight. Some are the size of boys, some the size of men. One is splayed across the back of a rearing horse, its wings wrapped around its sides like some veined shell. It opens up the horse’s neck and nuzzles into the arterial spray. Another horse beside it has fallen and gone still, though its neck remains raised, held in place by the reins knotted around a tree branch. Two bats feed on it.

  Reed fires his revolvers until they are empty. He continues to snap the triggers until a bat swoops down and he strikes it in the face and then commences tapping out the spent brass, thumbing fresh bullets into the cylinder.

  A sudden wind knocks Lewis sideways. He ducks down and cannot help but scream when he sees what displaces the air. The sky above is swirling with bats, too many to count, their winged shapes like pale mouths blotting out the stars.

  York takes a knee and fires a round into the sky. From the barrel comes a yellow shout of light. One of the bats screeches and wheels and drops heavily. He aims again, ready to fire, when a bat swoops down from behind, knocking away his gun and pressing him flat against the ground.

  Lewis starts toward him—ready to do what, he doesn’t know. But another bat drops from the sky, landing in a crouch before him. Slowly it rises into a standing position, taller than he. Its legs are stunted and the steps it takes small. Its eyes are as large as a baby’s skull, white and broken along the edges by bright red capillaries. Its mouth is open, and its teeth, sharply pointed, are the color of bone. White downy hair runs down its chest to its belly. It opens its wings like a cloak. He dodges right and the bat follows him, stepping now in front of the fire, the red glow of it filtering through the skin of its wings and highlighting the thin bones and the filamented veins within. It starts toward him.

  Lewis makes his hands into fists, ready to fight, when the bat swings a wing. A wind comes rolling off it that scatters grit and momentarily blinds him. The horses have gone quiet, but gunshots continue to thunder all around him. He swings his hands blindly. Something hooks into his mouth, a claw that reaches down his throat. He gags, but the bile doesn’t get a chance to rise before his head is yoked aside, the meat of his neck exposed. He can feel its breath as it draws closer. So hot his hair goes damp.

  A gun claps beside him. His right ear goes deaf except for a shrill ring. There comes a spray of blood. Not his own. He opens his eyes in time to see the bat slump to the ground.

  Gawea does not give him the chance to say thank you. She shoves a shotgun into his arms. Then she races off in the direction of the horses.

  Lewis remembers York and finds him gone—and he calls for Clark and gets no answer. There is nothing left to do but chamber a round and empty it into the belly of the bat that spirals above him.

  They do not kill all the bats, though they try. The air shakes with gunfire. And then either enough of them die or enough of them eat their fill, because their shapes become less frequent in the sky.

  When the red lig
ht of dawn comes, they clean the camp. They drag the bats onto the fire. There is nothing to be done for the horses. Lewis crouches over Donkey and runs a hand through her clotted mane and closes his eyes and apologizes for every time he cursed her obstinacy and slowness.

  Clark is gone. They have lost her. Truly lost her, her body nowhere to be found. Whether alive or dead, they don’t know for certain, but how can it be any other way than dead?

  Lewis does not sit so much as collapse onto the stump of a tree. Out of habit he puts his hands to his sides as if to drag forward his chair to his desk, and for a moment he imagines himself there, in his office, happily creaking open a book to study. But only for a moment. The image begins to dissolve even as it takes form. He is surrounded not by his library but by death. He sits not in his chair but on a stump. Beneath him are hundreds of rings, like the whorls of a thumb pad, some of them fat, some thin, the last of them barely traceable. If someone should happen upon his corpse later, like a dry, gray stick half-buried in sand, he wonders if she might snap it over her knee and find inside a similar story. He has doomed himself, agreeing to this journey, and his last moments, these moments, would be his thinnest, his thirstiest.

  He takes a sniff from his silver tin. And then another.

  The fire is still burning. It crisps the carcasses stacked upon it. Those of the bats, twenty of them killed altogether. Their hair smokes. Their wings burn like paper. Everyone asks Lewis what they are. Bats. That’s what they are. What else is he supposed to say? “Ask her,” he says.