The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  Simon wants to stay. He wants to fight. But his father pushes him and he stumbles away from the altar just as something humpbacked and four legged creeps into the square. The moon has sunk from sight, the night now lit by stars alone, and he cannot make out anything more than that: a hunched darkness, as if the night has congealed into a figure.

  “Go!” his father says, and Simon finally listens, hurrying away as a second and then third creature join the first.

  “Here I am!” his father is yelling. “Over here!” Rattling the chains and whooping, making as much noise as possible to distract from Simon’s escape.

  The yelling soon gives way to screaming. Simon runs. He cannot stop the tears that make the spaces between stars blur and the sky appear to gloss over with a phantasm.

  Chapter 2

  THIS MORNING, as the sun rises and reddens the world so that it appears it might catch flame, Clark stands at her sentry post atop the wall. Around it reaches a burn zone of some seventy yards. Beyond this grows a forest with many broken buildings rising from it, black-windowed, leaning messes of skeletal steel and shattered stone. The remains of the St. Louis Arch, collapsed in the middle, appear like a ragged set of mandibles rising out of the earth. In the near distance, where once the Mississippi flowed, stretches a blond wash of sand.

  Somewhere out there, hidden from view, hide yammering sand wolves, cat-size spiders, droves of javelinas with tusks longer than her fingers. These are the dangers that find those chained to the altar. Twenty minutes ago, the deputies departed the Sanctuary—and they return now with a stretcher bearing the body of a man. The man from last night’s death parade. His face is unrecognizable, hidden beneath a seething mask of flies. His body is shredded or chewed to bone in most places. His belly is split open and his entrails dangle from him like red ropes.

  For as long as she can remember, this has been the punishment doled out to those who committed rape or murder. But now they have a new mayor. And with a new mayor come new policies. He has made it treason to complain about the rations, to so much as speak ill of his administration. He wants them to know his ears are always listening, his eyes always watching. Now this body, this so-called traitor, will be paraded through the streets, an example for everyone. These are difficult times, with their water running dry, and difficult times call for unforgiving measures. Everyone has a job, the mayor says. That job is to serve the Sanctuary. They are all part of the same organism, and if anyone does anything to threaten it, they will be excised like the melanomas that stain the skin of so many.

  The gates open and close behind the deputies. Clark walks to the edge of the wall and balances precipitously there. She imagines what it would feel like to slip, to fall, the wind roaring in her ears, the ground rushing toward her face. Join the fate of the man. He, after all, believed what she believes. He said aloud the same things she keeps caged inside her. For her to call this place home—to feel not sheltered but imprisoned—and do nothing? It’s too much.

  That’s why last night, after the death parade, she drank herself into oblivion. She tried to hurry past the bar. Then she heard the laughter spilling out of it, and she paused in the wedge of lamplight that fell from its doorway into the street. She could see, through the rib-cage doors, beyond the swell of bodies, a man onstage plucking a guitar and stomping his foot and singing “Paint It Black”—and she gave in to the excuse that she would stop in for one good song, one strong drink. She had promised she wouldn’t, but her mood was foul and the night was hot and she was so thirsty.

  Her name is Wilhelmina, a family name, a name she despises, a weak, perfumed, lacy thing she can tolerate only if shortened to Mina. But mostly she goes by her last name, Clark. Depending on the light, her hair appears red or blond, same as the sand. With a knotted strip of leather she keeps it tied back into a short tail. Her face is hawkish, her eyes always narrowed and her mouth always tightened as if tied at the corners by knots.

  Though the bars serve other liquor—gin, vodka, whatever else is in the well, some hooch that goes down like snake venom—people drink mostly whiskey and mescal and sotol and tequila, and that was what she was drinking last night, tequila. The liquor was distilled in better times, when water ran more freely, aged now to potency and costing too much coin. The floor was wood shavings, the stools were old tires, and the ceiling scrap metal welded carelessly so that through its many holes she could see the stars spinning above like the ringworms in her glass.

  People hurled feathered darts. They huddled together in card games with mismatched decks. They played pool with leather-tipped steel rods and rocks ground and polished into balls. The warmth of the liquor raced to her fingertips, pulsed at her temples, and before long she was burning inside like the cigarillo pinched between her lips, burning like the candle she held her elbow over too long on a bet, burning like the pain in her hand when she broke the nose of the bartender who asked her to leave, told her she had had enough.

  She had had enough all right. This morning she can feel her heartbeat in her forehead, like a door slammed over and over again. She wears a wide-rimmed hat and shaded goggles, but still the sun seems too bright when she stares off into the ruined wilderness that reaches to the horizon, where sometimes she believes mountains are visible, though no one else will say so. They claim she is seeing what she wants to see. They claim it is a mirage, a trembling image brought on by the heat, like some hellish counterpart to her wall, spiny and manned by the spirits of dead giants.

  She takes a pull of her canteen to try to fight the cottonmouth, but her body barely lets her swallow. The wind gusts. It sighs. It whistles through the many hollows of the wall in which swallows and wasps nest. It carries sand in it that stings skin and eats holes in cloth and dulls the edge of a blade. It nearly knocks her from the edge, and she wobbles back onto the landing.

  The Sanctuary reaches across a mile in some places, a half mile in others. The wall is not a circle or a square—it is shapeless, an improvisation that became a permanent corral. She is a sentinel. She rotates in her duties, either scavenging outside the wall as a ranger or patrolling its perimeter on sentry. Every sentry is assigned a two-hundred-yard section of the wall marked by iron braziers filled with wood with torches lit beside them. If any threat emerges from the forest, whether man or beast, they are to hurl the torch upon the brazier as a flaming alarm.

  Her uniform is not the night black of the deputies, but gray and brown, as though mended from stone and wood. Her job is to stare out at a fractal landscape of umber and dust and ruins, guarding against whatever awaits them in the Dead Lands. She does not answer to the sheriff. She does not serve as an enforcer. She does not hurt others, only protects. But still, her job feels like a betrayal of conscience, since she patrols the very wall she believes they need to escape, no matter the risk. Better to seek out life than wait for death in this dried-out fishbowl. She used to loudly debate this with others at the bars; these days, sharing such an opinion will only get her killed. But she is right. She knows she is right.

  There were eight wells in the Sanctuary, all of them broad-mouthed pipes with metal ladders built down their throats. Three of them have collapsed, their casing pinched off and deemed impossible to repair due to some shifting beneath the earth. Another has gone dry. The remaining four are guarded by deputies who regulate the long lines, the people who come dragging jugs for their daily ration. A wind turbine lifts the water and shoots it from a spigot. The motor sits directly over the well, grinding away and dusting the water with rust and turning the impellers that reach deep into the aquifer beneath them.

  The water used to come in a mineraly gush. These days the spigots dribble and sputter. The mayor says he is meeting with workmen who might worm their way down and extend the pipes, dig deeper, find the cold, good water that must be waiting to be tapped beneath their feet.

  People are worried. Buckets and barrels and leather bags hang from every corner of the city to capture any rainwater—and a network of canals funnel w
ater and sewage to their meager crops—but the clouds have not gathered and burst in more than three months, the standard of the past few years, the stretches between downpours longer and longer. People boil their urine for drinking water. They sleep below tarps that gather moisture from their breathing and channel it into a pot. They ration out the stores they keep in buckets and barrels. They drink the blood of bats and rats and birds. This is not a sustainable existence—the Sanctuary slowly knuckling in on itself like a dried date.

  Below, Clark can hear the sentinels gathering into a ranging party. The stamping and snorting of horses, the creaking of leather, the clinking of spurs, the shifting of arrows in their quivers.

  The sun rises high enough to crest the wall, and in a rush last night’s shadows retreat and the windows flash and the canals brighten into many diamond points. The sun, the cruel orange eye that cooks the sweat from their skin and the water from the ground and the clouds from the sky. The temperature in the Sanctuary immediately spikes fifteen degrees. The space beneath the gates, though, remains a pocket of shadow, and it is here that the riders gather.

  The bone whistle sounds, the gates groan open, and the rangers ride out two horses abreast. They all wear hats to battle the sun and neckerchiefs to battle the dust. At their lead is Reed, the chief of the sentinels. Even from here she can see the long black braid twisting down his back like a shorn noose. She wills him to turn in his saddle and look for her, but he does not. She imagines she can feel his disappointment radiating off him. Earlier, when she stumbled out of her quarters and reported to the stables, he took her face in his hands and shook his head and told her to climb the wall. She was in no shape to ride, still drunk from the night before.

  A great wing of dust rises behind them—and the wind carries it toward her, the grit pattering her clothes, biting her face when she watches them depart. It will be another week, she’s guessing, before he allows her to rotate back from sentry to ranger. He disapproves of her drinking not only because of the hazard to her body, the interference with her duties, but because he cannot risk her speaking loosely to others. The risk is too great—given their plans. She doesn’t know when they will leave, where they will go, or how they will get there, but she will not die here. She will escape.

  She understands why Reed punishes her, but she hates him for it. Because she hates the wall. She prefers to move, to escape. Ride at a gallop with the reins wrapped around her fist and the wind knocking her hair. Fire a whistling arrow into a buck’s breast. Collect jackrabbits and coyotes from her many traps. Fill satchels with juniper berries for the distilleries. Salvage steel and copper from buildings as dark as tombs. Kick through the skeletons that lie everywhere and rip the drawers out of dressers, pull open cabinets, upend toolboxes, dig through closets. By comparison the wall is stillness…the wall is control…the wall is imprisonment—that she finds maddening.

  There is much she finds maddening. As a child she bit her grandfather when he wouldn’t give her another one of the salted nuts they ate for dessert. After being teased and tripped by a group of boys, she picked up a fist-sized stone and knocked the teeth from one of them. She kicked the leg of a table and sent supper crashing to the floor. She dropped a beetle in her baby brother York’s mouth when, as an infant, he wouldn’t stop crying. Not much has changed. Her whole life she has been told this is her greatest weakness, her inability to control herself. She tries. But whenever she is provoked, like a bees’ nest disturbed, something swarms out of her, something out of her control, making her capable of anything. Of escaping this place.

  An hour later she remains so deadened by her hangover, so caught up in her thoughts, she does not notice the panicked voices or the smoke billowing from a torchlit brazier until it has risen so high that it occludes the sun.

  * * *

  People wear hoods or hats with squared tops and crisp round rims, but Lewis has never paid any attention to what might be fashionable. His keeps the sun out of his eyes—that’s all that matters. Its rim is floppy and its peak high and its color a speckled gray. He wears a long duster of the same color. Its many pockets hold many things. It billows around him and makes him appear like a wraith.

  People make way for him and turn to watch him in his passing. He knows their nicknames for him: the gray man, the freak, the magician. He hears them whispering now, just as he hears them whispering in the museum. They say he once turned a crying baby into a croaking toad. They say his heart is made of cogs and wheels and his veins run black with oil, the same as his mechanical owl. They say he creeps around the Sanctuary at night, crawling through windows and approaching bedsides and experimenting on people when they are sleeping, dosing them up with potions, cutting them open and sewing them back up with invisible thread. Sometimes parents say, to naughty children, you better be good or the gray man will steal you away and stuff you full of sawdust and make you into an exhibit in his museum.

  He walks among them now, and they startle away from his figure. “Look,” they say. “There he is.” Horses snort. Carts rattle. Men shout. Forges glow. Swallows twitter. Meat sizzles over cooking stoves. Dust flurries like snow. He shades his eyes with his hand and looks up only briefly at the smoke rising from the wall. A black cloud of it roils, as threatening as a thunderhead, backlit by the sun.

  Then he pulls his hat brim low, his gaze once again downcast as he approaches a narrow concrete building tucked into a street of narrow concrete buildings. The sign over the door reads YIN’S DRY CLEANING, but it has been splashed with black paint and a hand-carved wooden sign next to it reads APOTHECARY.

  Apothecaries, tinkers, blacksmiths, seers. Old words, old ways. So much about the world has reverted, so that it is not so much the future people once imagined, but a history that already happened, this time like a time long ago. Lewis read a story once about the birth of a baby who looked like an old man, with silver hair and wrinkled skin and eyes fogged by cataracts. As the years passed, his appearance grew younger, and by the end of his life he was a drooling infant barely able to care for himself. In this way Lewis sometimes feels they have as a society cycled back without the hope of moving forward again.

  A bell jangles when he walks inside. The shop is dimly lit with candles and the linoleum floor has been worn down to pitted concrete. The man behind the counter has skin as brown as bark. His shoulders are thin and bony and from them rise a head topped by a thinning crown of gray woolly hair. This is Oman. He does not fear Lewis, not like the others. They deal with each other regularly and have developed not a rapport, but a comfortable business relationship. Behind Oman rises a wall full of cubbies and shelving units. A snake is curled up in a jar full of foggy green liquid. In another bottle float black eggs. In another, hairless mice. There are hundreds of baskets, brightly colored vials, bottles. Spiders spin webs in glass cages. Herbs hang from the ceiling like roots from the roof of a cave.

  Oman has the habit of chewing the leaves of a smoke bush. They have stained his teeth a tarry black. “How is she?” he asks.

  “She is the same.”

  The counter is made of Formica curled up at the edges. Oman sets a mortar and pestle upon it and grinds up a combination of herbs. Then he removes a blue bottle from a shelf and takes a dropper to it and squirts out several ounces of the medicine and stirs the herbs into a paste that he stores in a small yellow vial once meant for pills, the remains of some prescription still smeared across it.

  “And how are you?”

  If Lewis was the type to share, the type who offloaded all his aches and worries and displeasures onto others, then he might complain about the dreams that bother him nightly. In them he sees a man. An old man. His veins are as stiff and pronounced as roots. He is so ancient he cannot walk without the help of a cane made from a twisted length of wood, cannot eat unless his food has been mashed up. His face is never clear, always blurred or hidden by the long white hair that rings his bald, spotted head. Sometimes he sees the man waiting by a window. Sometimes he sees the man sittin
g in a library. Last night, the man stood by a river, all his attention focused on an eddy, the sort of deep black pool where a fat fish might surface. Lewis feared the man might fall when he waded into the water up to his knees. With his cane he stirred the eddy until a whirlpool formed. In the dark funnel the man saw a familiar face and whispered a name, Lewisssss.

  But he says nothing to Oman. He only takes the vial on the counter and secrets it up his sleeve—then in its place sets a square silver canister.

  “More?”

  “Yes.”

  “You look tired.”

  “Double the order for this week.” He clatters out a pile of coins, nickels worn down to silver discs that bear the faintest ghost of Jefferson’s profile. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, the occasional half or silver dollar, all smoothed like stones in a river. This is their currency.

  “Double it?” Oman collects the coins and pulls down a wide-mouthed bottle full of white powder. He pulls off the lid and scoops four generous spoonfuls into the silver canister. “You are tired.”

  “Not tired enough. Do you have anything for sleep?”

  “I’ve some opiates that—”

  “No. No dreams. No hallucinations. I just want to put my head down and for there to be nothing.”

  “Of course.”

  Lewis keeps one of his fingernails long, his pinky. He digs it into the pile of powder and lifts it to his nose. Snorts. A shudder goes through his body. His eyes tremble closed—then snap open a second later when the door jangles and a blade of sunlight falls across the floor.

  A woman with a shaved head and black uniform clomps into the shop. A deputy. She has heavy-lidded eyes and a nose with a raised worm of a scar at its bridge. “Lewis Meriwether,” she says.

  Lewis sniffs, wipes his nostril clean with a knuckle. “What?”