The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  At the end of the tunnel a light awaits him—a light that brightens and blackens, brightens and blackens, like a great eye opening and closing. He fears the eye. It makes his breath come faster and yet he can never seem to get enough, as if his chest is leaking, pierced.

  And then he is there, at the end, with the eye before him, burning from the top of a lighthouse with the great gray span of the ocean frothing and booming beyond it.

  Part IV

  Whilst I viewed those mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the—heretofore conceived—boundless Missouri. But when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific Ocean, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and the party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them. But, as I have always held it little short of criminality to anticipate evils, I will allow it to be a good, comfortable road until I am compelled to believe otherwise.

  —The Journals of Lewis and Clark

  Chapter 41

  TWO WOMEN. Sisters. The Field sisters. Old enough to thread their hair with gray, but how old exactly, they don’t know. They don’t keep a calendar. They keep their hair short, a shaggy cut. Their faces and shoulders are broad. One of them has a mole on her upper lip, and the other doesn’t, and one of them stands six feet tall, the other a little less, but otherwise they could be the same person. Maybe this is why they don’t talk very often. What use are words when you can communicate with a narrow-eyed glance, a pointed finger, a pat on the back.

  They go still when asleep. Otherwise, they move quickly and efficiently, when digging clams, when robbing birds’ nests of eggs, when cooking and eating, when mending clothes, when scavenging houses and stores. Right now, in a half-moon bay walled in by cliffs, one of them splits logs with a maul while the other digs a wide, shallow crater in the sand. The ax chucks the wood that is piled into the crater and then set aflame. When it burns, they look to the sky, worried who might see the smoke, comforted by the long-hanging clouds. They stir the fire with a length of rebar, then rake it down to coals and let it cool and collect the charcoal.

  They already have the rest of what they need. First the potassium nitrate, deposits of bat guano they scraped from caves and attics. They soaked the gray mud of it in water for a day and then collected the crystals. And then the sulfur they salvaged from the cobwebbed shell of an ag store.

  They merge and screen and granulate the ingredients and fill up ten ten-gallon drums that weigh several hundred pounds each. The sisters manage to roll them and heft them into the back of a pickup truck that has been welded and patched with sheets of metal so many times that it appears like many vehicles clapped together. The bed sags with the weight. The tires’ tubes are full of salt water. The engine runs poorly but runs all the same, rebuilt to process biodiesel, the algae the sisters harvest. The key cranks and the engine bellows and lopes and settles into a steady chug punctuated by the occasional rattling pop.

  They keep it in first gear. The speedometer is broken, but their speed couldn’t be more than five miles per hour. The pickup breaks down twice on the way to Youngs Bay, and they spend an hour, then another hour, fixing it. One of them hunches over the engine block while the other surveys the road in either direction with a rifle ready.

  The road is more an impression than a reality. A place where trees aren’t. The asphalt has ground down to gravel. They drive around the occasional fallen limb and rockslide, but mostly the way is clear.

  The Warrenton-Astoria Highway reaches across the bay. It is passable but crumbling in sections, the steel caging within visible like bones peeking out of a melting snowdrift. The sisters park and unload the drums and roll them down the bridge and situate them at ten-foot intervals. They are made from a thick plastic that has aged gray. This matches the color of the bridge, camouflages the barrels, makes them appear like short pillars. Their fuses are made from fabric, glue, and oxidizing agents decanted from old weed killer. The sisters run a long web of them that wind together into one thick rope.

  They drive the pickup back down the road and next to a tumbledown building and throw clumps of moss on it along with a few sticks. Then they hike back to the bay wearing backpacks and carrying rifles. They lead the thick coil of fuse into the woods and park themselves on a log with a clear view of the bridge. They unzip their backpacks and withdraw binoculars and oil and rags and books and dried fish and berries and nuts and canteens of water. They eat. They wait.

  Across the bay, the city of Astoria. A vast hive. Some fifty thousand live there. Chimney smoke dirties the air. If it was night, its hills would glow with lamplight.

  Six hours pass. Seagulls screech. Waves lap. Wind hushes. The rain comes steadily here, rarely pausing for more than an hour. And the ocean breathes its salt into the air. Even the buttons on their jackets and jeans rust. So they take good care of their rifles, breaking them apart now to wipe down everything, the receiver, the barrel, the magazine, and then they dampen a rag with oil and wipe the parts down again and fit it all back together. They reload. They lever a round. They set the safety. They lay the rifles beside them in easy reach.

  They read in shifts, one of them turning pages while the other peers through binoculars. Then, from across the bay, a caravan starts across the bridge. It is a long train of cows harnessed to empty wheeled cages. Metal clanks. Hooves clop. Leather and rope creak. Their approach will take a good five minutes.

  The sisters have paced out the fuse and calculated how quickly it will burn down. One of the sisters holds up a hand, as if to say, Steady, steady, steady, while the other readies her matches. Then the hand drops, chopping the air. One match sparks and dies in the wind. Another splinters in half. The third one sputters out against the fuse. The fourth catches.

  A long, spitting snake works its way toward the bridge, sizzling its way through underbrush, around trees, across gravel, splitting up and following the ten threads, rising into the barrels. The caravan is nearly upon them and the sisters can see the man at the front of the column standing up in his carriage, pulling back on his reins. But it is too late.

  The sisters see the explosion before they hear it. An overlapping series of bright orange flashes surrounded by black roiling smoke run through with chunks of concrete and animal. The bridge drops and rises and expands all at once. The sound thumps the sisters, makes the trees around them shake and drop their leaves. The water in the bay dimples with the debris hailing down.

  The sisters remove their hands from their ears. They do not smile or raise their fists in celebration. They simply watch with composed but satisfied expressions as a burning man crawls a few paces and goes still, as smoke stains the air, as a forty-foot section of the bridge collapses into the bay and sends a wave rolling to the shore.

  Then they collect their things and zip their backpacks and shoulder their rifles and hold hands when they hike back to their pickup.

  Chapter 42

  LEWIS MARCHES steadily west through a world laced and spired with ice. The wind never stops and the snow lashes his eyes and scrapes them red. He lost his hair to the lightning. It grew back as white and bristled as the hoarfrost along the riverbanks.

  When he first left the Sanctuary, he wondered more than once what the hell he was doing. He buried that question long ago, but it has been replaced by another. How the hell is he going to do it? If he is to survive, if he is to traverse this unforgiving place and avoid threats human and animal and elemental, if he is to arrive in a wondrous American landscape, a new Eden, he will be more than a long way geographically from his old self in St. Louis. He will be a new person entirely. This drives him through the snow. The green promise of a better place, the whispered promise of a better self in the voice of Aran Burr.

  Lewis wishes he could simply sweep a hand and knock a hundred pounds of snow this way, another hundred pounds that way, as if he were the wind itself. But whatever
powers he possesses are limited, accidental, uncontrolled, as if he were a toddler finding his legs or forming his mouth around a word for the first time. He does not understand what he can do, only yearn and puzzle over whatever happy accidents he produces.

  Colter and Gawea hike beside him. They wear snowshoes. Their pants stiffen and fringe white and beneath them their legs feel separate, leaden and thudding with every step, so that sometimes they feel they are clopping along on their hipbones. They do not complain. They do not speak at all.

  As far as he can remember, the last time he said anything might have been back in Bismarck, when he told the doctor to rest, and once rested, to watch after Clark. “She’s not well. She’s going to need you.”

  He kneeled next to the doctor’s cot. She had lost a lot of blood, grown anemic. But she had stubbornly risen back to health, just as Lewis had risen from the smoldering crater in the parking lot, weakened but determined. The silver hair spiraled around her head like roots without purchase. She fumbled for his hand and found it and squeezed it. Her voice came out as if through a filter of sand. “I wasn’t so sure before, but I’m certain of it now. You’re the best of men.”

  “Most would call me horrible, I think.”

  “It’s the world that’s horrible. But you’ll finish what we started?”

  “Yes.”

  She ran a thumb along the ridgeline of his knuckles as if imagining the landscape he must yet navigate. “You’re carrying everyone’s dreams with you.”

  Lewis was never one to smile, but he smiled for her then. “We’ll see each other down the trail.”

  “We will indeed.”

  That seems so long ago, what must be weeks, though he can’t be sure, having lost track of time. That is easy to do when everything seems the same. The sky is gray ceilinged, absent of sun and moon and stars, lit by the oil fires that make the air taste like ashes, that make him cough up black slugs every morning.

  Sometimes, when he is trudging along, he believes he sees others around him. He believes he is walking with the dead. His mother wisps in and out of sight. Reed coughs up bullets. His horse—rotted down entirely to bone—gallops along with a clatter. A decapitated York juggles three of his heads. And not just them, but others, too, the shades of people driving roads and walking sidewalks and hanging laundry, as if history were a nightmare he can’t escape. Their footsteps match his, so that he feels like he is traveling with them, for all of them.

  This is not the first time this reach of country has been void of human life. Everything rises and falls, everything cycles, and maybe he will play some small role in the next rotation. He hopes so. How else can he justify pressing on except by imagining himself a seed in the wind, a hero in a song?

  They would be lost if not for the river, which grows narrower by the day as they approach its headwaters. Now and then something distinguishes the featureless landscape. A windbreak of trees next to a farm. A cluster of bushes or bunches of wild grass that—frosted with ice—look like white antlers breaking from the ground. A town where they find a house to hunker down, escape the wind.

  It is a squat brick home, the gutters wearing glassy fangs of ice. Gawea stomps on a wooden chair to make kindling. Colter shudders with the cold that possesses him. His skin flares pink with white spots. His fingers might be made of wood, stiff and curled, and he shoves them in his armpit to heat.

  There was a time when Lewis always felt cold. But now, even when surrounded by snow, he feels warm, as if he carries a torch inside him. He can start a fire with his hands. He grips the wood until it combusts. The process feels a little like blowing out a hard breath until your chest hitches and your lungs have nearly collapsed. This is the only time he feels chilled, when the energy he expels leaves him temporarily empty, husked. He owns fire but fire owns him. They share a dangerous dominion.

  Colter holds out his hand to the fire, trying to warm it, and then just as quickly uses it to shield his face as a dark cluster of bats escapes the chimney and fills the room in a twittering rush before breaking apart, escaping to the far corners of the house.

  Gawea kicks apart another chair and adds it to the fire, then drags in some wood from outside and adds it, too, and before long the chimney is whistling from the draw. Several bricks fall on the flames and knock embers on the floor. The blankets crack like glass when Colter stomps on them and lays them by the fire to thaw, and they give off wisps of vapor.

  “Where are we again?” Colter says.

  “Still in North Dakota,” Gawea says.

  “I wouldn’t wish North Dakota on anyone.”

  In the kitchen Lewis digs through the cupboards and pulls out a dried bundle of noodles, as brittle as straw. He fills a pot with snow to melt. He looks out the window and sees, still hanging from a pole, the tatters of an American flag, nothing but barely colored threads.

  At night they are a small cave of light in a never-ending darkness. That is when the noises begin. In uneven waves, the wind howls and moans and mutters, the nightmare sounds of a zoo on fire. Gawea sleeps without any seeming trouble, but Colter wraps a blanket around his head to muffle the sound. Lewis tries to sleep but cannot. The night shrieks. It pleads and threatens and whines.

  When he does dream, he dreams of terror. Clark waits for him outside, her face transformed into a wolf’s. A lighthouse flares and profiles the figure of Burr standing before it. A lump swells painfully along Lewis’s rib cage. He lances it open and finds an eyeball blinking redly at him.

  He is awake long before dawn. He watches the fires pluming out in the darkness. He misses the stars he hasn’t seen in such a long time. They remain hidden—along with the moon, the sun—behind the suffocating mantle of clouds. He thinks of them now, thinks about how, just out of sight, all that light is streaming down, light that has traveled millions of years, billions of miles—for what? For nothing, all that time and distance sponged away. He worries that is what is happening to them, to the group of people that set out from the Sanctuary, all the energy that made them press across what felt like an interminable nothing, now dissipating, in danger of being lost altogether.

  He kneels by the fireplace and unsleeves his journal from the oilcloth that surrounds it. It feels warm in his hands, as if blood courses through it. He fingers through its pages, with a bird-wing flutter. Here is a song York sang around a campfire. Here is a mixture of several herbs the doctor told him would heal an infection. Here is a sketch of the river alleying through the woods. And another of a mutated squirrel. And another of an unusually large and spotted egg, something waiting to be born.

  And another of Clark atop her horse, profiled against the sun. He has left her behind, but in a way he feels he still follows her. He closes the journal with a sense of loss and longing.

  They travel farther and farther still, into eastern Montana, where the oil fires cease and the snow thins and gives way to browned grass and sagebrush. In the distance rises the massive spine of the mountains. Their footsteps cut across the grass, the frozen ground, with a shredding sound.

  “What were you thinking, Colter?” Lewis says.

  “You mean when I was running naked across that field of ice from a group of madwomen who wanted to stick me full of arrows?”

  “I actually meant why did you come with me?”

  “What was the alternative? Stay behind in the iciest asshole of the world? Besides, you’re such good company. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Lewis stops. “Really. I want to know.”

  “Oh, we’re getting all shitty and serious, are we?” Colter pulls down his scarf and reveals his scarred face. He studies Lewis a long time before saying, “I said before, I thought of your father as if he were my own father. I meant that. I guess that makes you a kind of brother. However you want to think about it, we’re in common cause. We’re both serving something bigger. That’s what I used to think about the Sanctuary. That’s what I think now. You feel the same, don’t you?”

  “I do.” Le
wis trudges forward again and Colter matches his pace. “I wouldn’t be able to do it without you.”

  “Not going to argue with you on that one.”

  They are so thin the veins stand out from their skin like wires. They kill pheasant, grouse, possum, rabbits, rats, sheep, coyote, deer, antelope, some mutated and some with cancers blooming like mushrooms inside them. Though Lewis has no appetite, every nerve in his body frayed by exhaustion, he forces himself to eat.

  Colter believes they are being followed. It is hard to tell, with the wind searing and his eyes welling with tears and blown snow obscuring the air. In a bare passage of land, nothing but bunchgrass, they walk for several miles, making sure there is nothing around they might mistake for a person, and then they spin around. Nothing. “I swear,” Colter says. “The hair on the back of my neck swears.”

  Lewis knows whom it is Colter senses, the same man he feels tugging them forward. The man in white. Aran Burr. In Lewis’s dreams, he dropped a stone and the stone fell. And then the stone rose. The stone flew from the ground and snapped into his palm, caged by his fingers, as if he possessed his own gravity. That is how Burr feels to Lewis: gravitational. There was a time in his life when he saw his father everywhere—on a stage before a crowd of people, in a painting in a hallway, at the head of a long table—and even when he didn’t see him, he thought of him, anticipating his command or disapproval, straighten your posture this and get your head out of a book that. And now, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot remember his father’s face. It has been replaced by Burr’s. He sees him in the snow and in the clouds and in any mirrored surface. Burr visits him when he sleeps. He holds out a hand, beckoning him, and Lewis feels a pull—he feels as the stone must.