The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  He finds the police station empty, even the cells beneath. A desk overturned. A door ripped from its hinges. The occasional body slumped in a corner or sprawled on the floor with a knee bent strangely. When he calls out, his voice swirls down the hallways like water down a drain. The noise continues to rage outside, and he hurries to the dark nook in the basement he calls home.

  He latches shut the door and leans his forehead against it and feels some sense of peace cooling him. He has separated himself, shuttered away the sun and the noise, in what feels an impenetrable nest. He rattles the dangling chains and makes music of them. He walks among his mannequins, his favorites, reassured by their company. Here he remains powerful. He strokes an arm, grazes a cheek, before finding his bed.

  He sits at its edge, crushing the mattress with his weight. The metal frame protests and his sigh sounds similar—when it rises into a shriek. Because of the pain at his ankles. First one, then the other. A sharp slice followed by a hot flood of blood.

  He tries to stand but cannot. His legs won’t work. He tumbles to the floor and barely throws out his hands in time to catch himself. He crabs his way forward, escaping whatever has injured him. He twists around to see her sliding from beneath the bed and then standing still among his mannequins, shoulder to shoulder with her own.

  She is here. She is his at last. His Ella. His fierce, beautiful girl.

  She tosses aside the scalpel, one of his own tools, used to slash and sever his tendons.

  He smiles—he cannot help himself—but she does not smile back. Her face is grim when she hefts the baseball bat, testing its weight, knotting her fingers around the grip. “Remember what you taught me about terror?” she says. “You were wrong. Love wins.”

  Chapter 62

  WHEN THE SISTERS show Lewis their stores of black powder, he knows what to do. He kisses his owl before sending it to the skies one last time.

  So many minutes later, he feels something shift. Like a lantern extinguished or a vise released in his mind. And he senses it is done. Burr is dead. He wonders how many others suddenly feel the same, how strong and wide the grip of this one man. Lewis understands that once the queen bee of a hive dies, there is another to take her place, but for now he has done what he can. He has bet on humanity.

  This is why he walks to a cliff overlooking the place where the river meets the ocean. He watches the currents mash together, a foamy roiling. Waves boom and turn over endlessly. The wind bites him with sand and dampens him with salt spray. He reaches into his pocket and removes the coffin-shaped box and opens it and fingers out the vial and grips it in his palm. He cannot help but hesitate, debate whether he should open it up, snort its contents, make himself into a human missile and take out the rest of the human population. Destroy what destroys.

  Isn’t the world better off without people? There is a balance—trees make a mess that fire cleans; rain extinguishes fire and swells green shoots from the ground; a deer eats the grass, then dies and rots into the dirt from which trees grow to make a mess—a balance that everything but man and virus acknowledge.

  Then he hears some laughter in the distance, Clark delighting in something small, maybe a joke told or a grasshopper caught in her hair or the sun slanting through the clouds. That is all the convincing he needs. A hard woman giving herself up to joy. For a long time Lewis has felt overwhelmed by immensity—the measurable immensity of time and distance, as he rode and hiked and paddled so many thousands of miles over hundreds of days, and the incalculable immensity that can exist between people who betray or grieve or hate each other. And when he considers all the places he has traveled and dangers surmounted and people encountered and words written over the past few months, he feels overcome, vertiginous, swept away. It is the laughter that brings him back, makes him feel anchored. He is connected to Gawea, just as he is connected to Clark, a kind of family, the beginning of the community and renewal he imagined he might find here all along. There is hope after all. Life might be a catastrophe, but it is a beautiful catastrophe.

  He cocks his arm and pitches the vial out. Once exposed to the air, the virus should expire within minutes. Far below, it bursts on some rocks, a glassy dust that sparkles. The river dimples and swallows its remains, one more pollutant.

  “What was that?” A voice behind him, Clark’s.

  “The end of the world.”

  They walk back together. The sun hangs over the ocean and the moon hangs over the coastal mountains, as if in an uneasy truce. In the cracked parking lot of the sewage-treatment facility, the sisters stand beside their idling truck, the doors of it open. They heft something from the rear cab, what turns out to be a shortwave radio, and plunk it on the front seat and plug it into the cigarette lighter. It sparks out a puff of smoke they wave away.

  One of them settles into the seat beside the radio and aims the antenna at the sky and fiddles with the frequency and begins a transmission. “Sam and Olivia Field sending report. Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Over.”

  The other leans one arm against the open door, turning when she notices Lewis leaning in to watch them.

  “Moon’s out,” she says. “She’s trying for a moon bounce.”

  “Sam and Olivia Field sending report. Is anyone there? I repeat, is anyone there? Over.”

  Lewis has been awake for two days. He feels too numb and exhausted to talk, to process what he sees. He can manage a small question, “Which one of you is Olivia?”

  She stabs her chest with a thumb. “That’s me.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have asked you that before.”

  She shrugs.

  “It’s a pretty name.”

  Sam speaks into the radio again, waits, hears no response except the pop and buzz of static.

  The wind rises and Lewis wavers where he stands. “I don’t understand. Who is she speaking to?”

  “Boss.”

  “Who—who do you work for?”

  “The government. We work for the government.” She says this as though she is talking about what they should expect for weather or what they might cook for dinner.

  “What?” Lewis gives a short laugh. “What government?”

  “The American government.”

  He looks at her a moment to see if she is joking. The flat expression on her face tells him she is not.

  “You never asked,” she says and uncrosses her arms and peels back one of her sleeves to reveal on her biceps a tattoo—an American flag inked in black.

  Epilogue

  WASHINGTON, D.C., is a swamp. The streets are sluggish rivers, the buildings mossy canyons, negotiated by rafts and canoes and johnboats. Mosquitoes dirty the air with their humming swarms. Through the muck walk egrets on stilted legs. Alligators laze on the steps of the Smithsonian. The monument is a broken fang rising from a lake. The rafters and arches of every memorial are busy with the nests of thrashers and waxwings. The dome of the Capitol has cracked open like a hatched egg. Everything smells of crushed earthworms. Night is falling. Balls of blue fire burn, pockets of swamp gas begin to glow. So do the lamplit windows of the White House, though it is hardly white, vined and ridden with algae and bearded with moss. A turbine spins on its roof. Its blades groan up to speed as the wind rises.

  Thunder mutters. A storm is coming. A storm is always coming, with hurricanes whirling off the Atlantic every other week. Rain speckles the water, then thickens, lashing at the windows. In one of them, a man looks up, though he can see nothing but his reflection. A black face against a black window. His beard, gouged by a meaty scar, is beginning to gray. He is shirtless and has a bit of a paunch, noticeable only when he is sitting. But his chest and shoulders are round with muscle. Sweat beads on his skin, drips down his back like the rain down the window.

  This is a bedroom that doubles as an office. A four-poster bed rises beside the wooden desk where he sits in an orange circle of light thrown by a lamp. There is an inkpot, a pile of paper, books, a shortwave radio. He fiddles wi
th the knobs, scratching through frequencies, settling now and then on voices that sometimes speak English and sometimes languages he does not recognize. He needs no translator to recognize the occasional panic and anger in their words.

  There is a knock at the door, and when he does not respond to it, another knock follows, and when he does not respond to this, the door opens. A face peeks through, brown skinned, bald headed. Monroe, his valet. He wears a pocketed vest over a collared shirt. “Mr. President?”

  He does not turn. His naked back carries an American flag tattoo across its shoulders. It is inked in black and broken by wormy scars.

  “They’re waiting for you, sir.”

  The door closes. He continues to listen for another minute, channeling between silence and voices. Lightning forks the sky outside, and the thunder that follows shakes the windows and fuzzes the radio. He snaps off the volume and rises from his desk and pulls on a shirt and begins to button it.

  The room is walled with bookshelves and anchored by a long table made from rough-hewn pine. Around it sits his Cabinet, a small, bug-eyed woman, a man with a tumor bulging redly from his neck, a brown-bearded man missing a thumb, and a black woman with a gray nimbus of hair. They stand when he enters and then tuck their bodies back into their chairs when he motions for them to sit. He takes a chair at the head of the table and it groans beneath his weight.

  An enormous map sits at the center of the table. It has been torn into many pieces and fitted together again to create a warped representation of the country. Water stained. Rimed with mold. The Midwest and Southwest are shaded a poisonous yellow. The Plains white. The Northwest green. The South, ranging from Texas to North Carolina, a watery blue. So many sections are surrounded by red circles indicating an uninhabitable blast zone, the biggest of them corralling the entire East Coast.

  They motion to the map when they speak, talking about hazards and possibilities, a railroad line reconstructed here, a community built around a coal mine there. There are black Xs and red Xs sketched throughout the West, and there are skulls drawn on several states in the South, and the Cabinet members stab their fingers at these when they talk about rising threats.

  All this time, the man they call president says nothing, his posture stiff and his hands balled on the table before him. His eyes flit from speaker to speaker, the only indication he is listening. There is one window with a crack running across it that weeps rain. Every now and then it goes blue-white with lightning. The room shivers with thunder and the lights sputter on and off.

  The room goes quiet when something crashes in the hallway. Voices call out. There is a hurried knock at the door that does not wait for an invitation. Monroe enters backward, nearly falling. He is being kicked at by a hooded figure braced by two guards. A voice—a woman’s voice—curses them, says she’ll stomp their mouths, make a necklace of their teeth. Four more guards follow, clutching two other hooded figures, though these stand quietly and make no move against them.

  Monroe brushes off his vest and says, “We found them outside.” He begins to say something more, but thunder crashes and steals away his words.

  The guards pull off their hoods. The woman, Clark, wears her red hair short around her ears. She looks wildly around the room and tries to rip her arms away from the guards, but they only grip her more tightly. Gawea regards them with black eyes that reflect the astonished expressions of those in the room. Lewis is white haired and clean-shaven, and though he keeps his eyes steady on the president, he tells Clark to settle down and says in a cool voice that they mean no harm and need not be detained.

  One of the guards says, “This is what they had on them.” He clunks onto the table three holstered belts, each carrying two long-nosed revolvers. Then three more rifles. “And this.” A metallic bird, golden and no bigger than an infant, built in the shape of an eagle. He sets it on its side and it does not move, except for an aperture widening in one of its glass eyes.

  Monroe stands by the president now. He leans in and speaks at a whisper everyone can hear, “They said you would want to see them. They said they came a long way to speak to you.”

  The president rises from his chair. He walks slowly, his footsteps thudding, and as he does the windows again blaze with lightning followed instantly by thunder. He does not keep his distance but stops within arm’s reach of Lewis, who asks, “Are you President Jefferson?”

  His voice is like a rockslide. “What do you want?”

  Outside the thunder crashes again. Lewis opens his hands and wires of electricity dance between his fingers. When he speaks, Clark and Gawea speak with him, their voices the same. “We’re here to help.”

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my agent, Katherine Fausset, for her wisdom and friendship and muscle and savvy. Thanks, too, to the rest of the gang at Curtis Brown, especially Holly Frederick.

  I am eternally grateful to Helen Atsma at Grand Central and Oliver Johnson at Hodder. Due to their editorial vision and encouragement, this novel transformed dramatically from first to final draft. Thank you for riding into battle with me again.

  Thanks to Sonya Cheuse, the best publicist in the biz, and everyone else at Hachette (in the US and UK) who make publishing a book so much fun: Brian McLendon, Allyson Rudolph, Jamie Raab, Marissa Sangiacomo, Kerry Hood, Anne Perry.

  A short section of this novel originally appeared in Ploughshares—thanks for the showcase.

  Thanks to William Souder, Dan Hernandez, Jeremy Solin, for their help with environmental research. And I’m indebted to books like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us for helping me understand the science of the apocalypse. The Kingkiller Chronicle series by Patrick Rothfuss made me fall in love with fantasy again, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for that and for his intricate magic systems, which influenced my own clumsy attempts at spell­binding.

  And finally, thanks to my wife for her unending love and patience and good-heartedness and support.

  About the Author

  BENJAMIN PERCY has won a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a contributing editor at Esquire and the author of two other novels, Red Moon (also available from Grand Central Publishing) and The Wilding, as well as two short story collections, Refresh, Refresh, and The Language of Elk (available as an e-book from Grand Central Publishing). He lives in Minnesota with his family. For more information, you can visit www.BenjaminPercy.com.

  Questions for Discussion

  In what ways is the Sanctuary a shelter? A prison? In times of crisis, are governments ever justified in setting curfews or limiting travel by citizens? Why or why not?

  Would you have joined Clark, Lewis, and the others on their journey? Why do you think the doctor went? Why do you think Danica stayed?

  While THE DEAD LANDS takes place in a postapocalyptic world, the names of some of the characters—and the journeys they undertake—hearken back to the historical roots of the United States of America. Did this novel give you a new appreciation for the journey undertaken by the real Lewis and Clark? What personality traits help explorers—real or fictional—push through their arduous quests?

  Ella is frequently frustrated by Lewis’s imperious attitude toward her, yet she’s loyal and devoted throughout the book. Why do you think she continues to follow his orders?

  In what ways does the futuristic wasteland of THE DEAD LANDS draw from contemporary fears and current events? Do you think our planet is in danger of experiencing environmental devastation at this extreme level? What places have experienced environmental disaster on a smaller scale?

  Why do you think Cyrus, who is the very picture of virility and strength at the beginning of the book, is so undone by the journey west? How does the journey change the other characters?

  Is Clark a good sister to York? Is Lewis a good caretaker for Ella? What does it mean to you to feel responsible for someone?

  In chapter 43, Ella says “Terror might make someone kil
l, but love will make someone die.” Do you agree?

  Even though the United States, as we know it, has been fractured past recognition for most of their lives, the characters in THE DEAD LANDS maintain a strong sense of American nationalism. Why do you think that is? Do you believe the people of any country would rally around a national identity in a post-disaster world, or is there something distinctly American about this response?

  How would you categorize THE DEAD LANDS—is it a horror novel? A Western? Literary fiction? If you believe, like Clark does, that “the world has not destroyed itself. The world has always been destroying itself, a perpetual apocalypse,” then what kind of story is THE DEAD LANDS?

  Characters throughout THE DEAD LANDS read books, and the novel itself opens with a reminder that “stories are in conversation with other stories.” What stories is THE DEAD LANDS talking to? Why might the author have chosen to open the book with that particular quote?

  A Conversation with Benjamin Percy

  You’ve spoken before about the cultural influences on your writing. What books inspired THE DEAD LANDS? Did any movies or non-written stories guide your writing?

  The list is long. For starters, I’ve always been interested in fishbowl scenarios. Stephen King plays with them often—in Under the Dome, The Mist, The Langoliers, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile. An invisible dome appears over a town, a mist full of monsters oozes across the world, a caged door rattles shut and a key turns. The characters are trapped, the pressure is on, and certain traits end up magnified by the stress of the situation. Lust, love, courage, murderous rage, loyalty, religious fanaticism—they all heighten and come crashing together in one wild social experiment.