The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  Lewis’s shoulders and elbows ache, but he would happily paddle a thousand years before he took another step. He prefers the canoes even to horses. Their speed might be slower, but their passage is so smooth, unlike the rocking jolt of his saddle that every day threatened to knock his bones from their sockets. Sometimes he cannot help but marvel at the novelty of it all. He is traveling by canoe. There is enough water in the world, more than he ever dreamed he would see, to accommodate a canoe. Water dribbles from his paddle. Water runs between his fingers when he dips a hand into the river and cups it to his mouth. Water dimples and splashes when a frog leaps off a rock or when a trout jumps in a rainbowed flash to seize a dragonfly. If he narrows his eyes until the world fuzzes over, he can almost forget what they have left, where they are going, but then, in the river, he will see Aran Burr. Swimming alongside the canoe. Wearing a flowing white robe and a necklace of black stones. He calls Lewis’s name, drawing out the s in the swishing pull of his paddle.

  Once a day, he sends off the owl, and as its flights grow shorter and shorter, so does time seem to stretch longer. An hour could be a day, a day a year. So different, he thinks, from his time at the Sanctuary, when time slipped like sand between his fingers, one day blurring into the next. There, nothing was new, nothing at stake. Every day, he saw the same people wandering the same streets under the same sun. But out here, in the Dead Lands, everything is new, everything a threat, forcing him to notice—every sun-sparkled wave on the river, every shadow sleeving the shore—and the more you notice, the fuller time becomes, and the fuller time becomes, the more it drags. Even the light seems to fall more slowly between the branches.

  When the owl returns to him, only thirty minutes after it departs, he yells out to Clark, telling her Colter is close. The time has come. They must find a place to make a stand.

  Clouds boil ahead, grumbling with distant thunder and darkening a third of the sky. Rain trails from them like skirts of gray muslin. Lightning jags. The air shudders when thunder calls.

  They paddle toward it in silence, and the gray-black clouds violently expand, as if rooted in a volcano, an eruption carrying ash and fire. This is not a sky for big, hopeful dreams like theirs. This is a sky for nightmares.

  A hundred yards ahead, between two rushing threads of water, rises an island. They will go there, Clark says. And as long as they need to wait for Colter, an hour or a day or more, the surrounding river will stand guard, serving as their moat.

  The rain begins before they arrive, as hot as the sun’s tears. Instantly they are soaked. For a moment they can’t help but laugh at the novelty of it. Rain. Not a passing shower, but a deluge, the air so packed with water they might well have upended, sunk into the river. They pause their paddling and hold up their hands and open their mouths until their laughing feels like drowning. They can barely keep their eyes open against the lashing rain, can barely see the island they paddle toward, and by the time they arrive, the canoes have filled with enough rain to slosh around their ankles.

  Chapter 28

  THE ISLAND IS thickly wooded and a half mile long, shaped like an arrowhead, the current sharpening its tip, carrying silt downstream to deposit at its bottom. In some places it is edged by steep clay banks with roots spilling from them. In others, by stony beaches littered with logs.

  The storm has paused but not passed. They are temporarily caught in some rift. Rain no longer drums the overturned canoes. The wind, once so powerful that it snapped several trees in half, has hushed. But the sky looks like spilled ink and thunder mutters all around them. Lightning blinks so often they feel caught in some seizure.

  They stagger their positions along the western bank of the island, hiding behind trees, their rifles bristling like branches. They don’t know where Colter will appear, or if he will appear at all. York says maybe he won’t, maybe he’ll keep searching the shore for some sign of them, trudging past them in the dark. Why search this island of all places?

  Lewis cuts him short with a no, and when they look to him for an answer, he says a dog’s nose, a wolf’s nose, is a hundred thousand times more powerful than man’s. “I realize it’s hard to imagine, because we can only perceive so much of the world, but try to envision a bright yellow fog streaming from this place. That’s how obvious we are to them.”

  The veil of night overtakes the sky. Fireflies emerge, thousands of them. The air is so dark, palpably so, that they can see the shape of the shore by the insects’ winking constellation.

  Above Clark, the clouds are high, churning in a black circle, while up the river the clouds seem so low their bellies graze the treetops. Lightning flashes and seems to crack the sky, while to either side of them, the shorelines wink and swirl with the yellow light of fireflies.

  One hour becomes two becomes three. They do their best to keep their eyes sharp, but time dulls their focus. If anybody sees anything, they are supposed to whistle—two short high bursts followed by a long low note—but with the night birds beginning to call, everything sounds like a beckoning.

  Clark is curled behind a stump with her rifle resting on top. Every few minutes one of her legs goes numb, and she shifts her body until the leg prickles back to life, and by then the other is cramping. She studies the shore, the lightning bugs sparkling there, the tufts of grass and thin-angled maze of branches beneath the green awning of leaves.

  Clark can hear the rain coming again, the hiss of it not far off.

  She looks to her right and thinks she can make out the silhouette of her brother leaning against a tree—and she looks to her left and sees a spark of red, the lit bowl of the doctor’s pipe, pulsing as she takes long drags off it. A soft breeze blows and the trees sway and the leaves shake and her eyes sweep up and down the shore until they settle on something.

  It appears like a man, a naked man with a long, pointed face, clambering along on all fours. Another appears beside it, both of them trotting back and forth, dipping and raising their heads to test the air. Sand wolves. She might be able to hear them muttering, a soft, high-throated barking that reveals their excitement.

  The rain begins again. Thousands of drops dimple the water, making mouths that seem to open hungrily for them. In that instant all the lightning bugs go dark.

  Then comes Colter. Barely visible, on his horse, he moves from the forest to the grassy embankment.

  Her veins constrict. Her pulse slams. She has seen the wolves before, on the few occasions she visited the zoo, a fly-filled, horseshoe-shaped collection of cages with games and candy carts at the center. Monkeys meticulously picked fleas from each other and ate them. A snake as wide as a man’s thigh coiled in the shade of a rock pile. And the wolves prowled constantly across the heaps of concrete that decorated their cage, every now and then gnawing on a log or shredding a tire with their claws or crashing against the bars and snarling when someone drew too near.

  Now lightning flashes and arrests a clear picture of them huddled beneath their master, freed from their cages to bite and slash as they please. She cannot see their eyes, but she feels them, like black stones that weigh upon her own.

  Colter digs in his heels and the horse starts down the embankment, into the river, where the water splashes around its haunches as it lurches toward the island. The wolves follow to either side, bobbing in the frothing wake of the horse.

  A whistle sounds to her left, then another to her right, then another and another, the whole shoreline sounding the alarm at once, and only then does she bring her lips together and blow, the whistle failing on her dry lips. She chambers a round into the rifle and snaps off the safety and does her best to draw a bead on the wolves and then Colter, not sure what to shoot first, the brain or the muscle it commands. The water is first knee-deep, then rises to the horse’s breast; then only its head can be seen, with a white lapel of foam around it.

  Their plan had been to gather together, to assemble and strike, but the alarm sounded too late and now it is unclear where Colter might come to shore, so they
can only settle behind their stations and ready their weapons.

  The rain stings like hurled pebbles. Lightning arrows and thunder mutters. It is followed by a volley of gunshots cracking all around her. At first they fire off hesitantly, then one bullet, one bullet, one bullet, becomes a swarm ripping the air. Colter does not stop. The water suds and pops around him with shots that miss their mark. She would have waited longer—waited until the bullet was sure to find an eye socket or open mouth—but the noise of gunfire is contagious. She pulls the trigger. There is a snap. And nothing more. A dead bullet. She ejects and chambers another. She pulls the trigger, and again, nothing. Colter is no more than twenty yards away and seems to be targeting her, the dark section of shore where no gunfire flashes.

  Lightning flares again. She flinches at the thunder that follows. There is a moment of pause, when everyone reloads. It is then she notices her rifle is glowing. Blue light dances along its edges, outlining the shape of it, as if it were inhabited by some spirit. She drops it. The hair all over her body prickles and stands on end. She smells something like melting plastic. She looks to either side of her—ready to call out for help—when she sees Lewis stepping from his hiding place and approaching the river.

  She can hear Colter now. He is yelling at them, saying something she can’t quite make out, his words lost to thunder.

  Lewis now appears almost phosphorescent, haloed in blue crackling light, as if costumed in lightning bugs. He moves as if in a dream. The sky flashes with a speed that matches the pulse inside her—and then coalesces into a stream of lightning. The clouds seem to split open and pour down blue jagged light that takes hold of Lewis. He shudders in his place as the electricity courses through him. Then he swings up his arms as if to hurl something heavy.

  A white-hot beam blasts from his hands, dazzling its way across the river’s surface. Millions of raindrops catch the light and seem to pause in their descent. The electricity channels into the wolves—and then Colter—and for a moment Clark believes she can see their bones glow beneath their skin.

  She opens her mouth to scream, but her voice is stolen away by the eruption of thunder seeming to escape it.

  Part III

  While there’s life there’s hope.

  —J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

  Chapter 29

  NORTH DAKOTA CONTAINS one of the richest oil fields in the world—estimated at one time as 503 billion barrels deep—and there are thousands and thousands of gas and oil wells there among the derricks and refineries and pipelines, the herds of snow-humped trailers and clusters of water trucks, the power transmission towers, the radio towers, the wind turbines, the natural gas pumping stations, the oil-loading train yards full of black tankers.

  Once the wells were abandoned, the emergency generators kicked on, but after two weeks they ran out of diesel. High pressures matched against high temperatures resulted in explosions resulted in fires. There was no one to man the water sprayers, no one to cap the wellheads. The relief valves only fed the flames that could not be stopped, that will never stop. North Dakota will burn forever.

  The air is thick with carbon, with dioxins and furans and lead and mercury and chromium. There is no night here, the horizon lit by flares, snapping pennants of colors red and white and blue. They flame against a black sky made blacker by the rank, sooty smoke.

  This makes for a kind of nuclear winter, Lewis tells them.

  The cold begins soon after they cross the state line. The wind skins the leaves from the trees. The river crusts over with ice and they abandon their canoes. The cattails shatter like stems of glass. Icicles hang from the trees, like the claws of dragons that might perch there. Snow falls. Sometimes thickly, sometimes in sputtery bursts. But the snow is not as they imagined, not the bright white frosting they have seen in cracked paintings and faded postcards. It is gray, ashen. It smears muddily against their skin. When they open their mouths and let the flakes fall on their tongues, the taste is as bitter as that of a chewed willow stick.

  * * *

  Colter lost his left arm at the elbow. The doctor sliced away the charred remains and treated the injury with yarrow leaves and snowberries mashed to a cream. From logs she kicked conk fungus, what look like the plates on a dinosaur’s back, and ground them into a powder and stirred them into water and made him drink and fight the possibility of infection.

  He smelled like seared meat, burned cinnamon. His hair crisped away in places. His clothes scorched. But he is alive. His horse and the wolves were not so lucky. The lightning soaked into them and funneled through their bones and seized their hearts with an electric fist. Colter does not remember much of that night, only strobe-like flashes, and not much of the days that followed either.

  They thought he was here to punish them. To cut off their heads and make a garland of them to bring back to the Sanctuary. They were right. That’s what the mayor asked him to do. But he does not serve Thomas Lancer. He serves the Meriwether family. He made a mistake when he broke the old man’s arm. The worst mistake of his life, it turns out. And the old man, damn him and bless him, clapped him away in a cell—the same way a father paddles a bottom and sends his son to his room to consider his bad behavior. Colter has had a long time to think about this. If the surgery hadn’t given the old man an infection, and if the infection hadn’t caused a heart attack, and if the heart attack hadn’t killed him, everything would be different, all would be forgiven. Colter has no doubt. He would have been released from his cell, humbled, forgiven, a prodigal son. That is how Colter thinks of himself, as a son, which makes Lewis his weakling brother—but a brother all the same.

  For too long he has let hate and hurt take hold of his heart. If there were a word that captured dreams of bodies set aflame, glass smashed into open eyes, blades drawn slowly across genitals, then that would be the name of the demon that so often possessed him. He is here to seek atonement. He is here to serve the son of the one he served before. He shouldn’t have come in the night and he shouldn’t have come in the storm, but his eagerness for reunion was such that he could not stop himself once close.

  “Hold your fire!” That was what he tried to yell to them that night. “I’m here for you.” It was hard to say then and harder to say now that his wolves are dead and his arm ruined, but he says it all the same: “I’m here to help.”

  At first they don’t believe him, and at night they tie his wrist to his thigh and his ankle to a tree. Every now and then Clark will wander over and stand beside him with a gun dangling from her hand. She watches him curiously, as he alternates between sweating and shivering. “I could put a bullet in your head and no one would complain.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Because you want to join us?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re a long way from earning our trust.”

  “And you’re a long fucking way from mine.”

  “Language like that isn’t going to help.”

  He doesn’t hold back. That’s not his way. Prison won’t stop him, the desert won’t stop him, lightning won’t stop him, and neither will she, no matter if there’s a gun in her hand. “You listen. You listen good. You might think you’ve got a dick, though you’re a woman and one I’d like to lay, and you might think you’re stronger than me, but that won’t last and I’ll be strong again, and you might think you can tell me what to do, but you can’t, because I came here for Lewis and not for some red-haired, hatchet-faced bitch to tell me my business when my business is my own. I’m here to help and that’s the short and the tall and slow and the fast of it.”

  She points her revolver at him, twists it one way, then the other, and makes a soft explosion with her lips. Then she drops her arm and says, “I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

  “Guess we will.”

  At first they carry him in a thick plastic utility sled, maybe two feet deep, once used to haul gear for ice fishing. They take turns dragging him, and Colter uses the front lip as a backrest, so th
at everybody else looks forward while he looks back.

  The doctor bandages his stump. Twice a day, when she unwraps it and cleans it, the blackened flesh sputters and crackles and he cries out for her to help, to make it stop, in a voice he doesn’t recognize as his own for its jerky neediness.

  Afterward he raises his head to swallow from the canteen she brings to his lips. The water dribbles down his chin as the tears dribble from his eyes. “What the hell did Lewis do to me and how the hell is it possible? I don’t understand, and don’t tell me you do either.”

  “We don’t.”

  “You don’t know that and you don’t know this. You don’t know how far we have to travel and you don’t know what lies ahead and you don’t know why a man can piss lightning. I go away for a year and nobody knows one fucking thing.”

  “Are you always so angry?”

  “Who’s angry? I’ve got no arm and my wolves are dead and it’s so cold my dick has curled up inside me so that it looks like I’ve got a second belly button between my legs. This is me in a good mood.”

  She gives him a mirthless grin, the best bedside manner she can manage. “I’m going to ask you something and I want you to tell me the truth. Did you come here to hurt us?”

  “No.” It is the truth. “No, I don’t want that at all.”

  She wraps the bandage tight and offers it a gentle pat. “I believe you.”

  And maybe she does and maybe she says something to Lewis, because Colter wakes the next morning to find him standing nearby. His long, thin figure towers over him, like one more tree in the dim-lit forest. He has been avoiding Colter, and maybe that has something to do with guilt or maybe that has something to do with fear, since back in the day, on more than one occasion, Colter crushed him against a wall and made him eat dirt and told him to stop being such a book-eating puss.