The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  Among the stone columns stand a dozen or so bodies—whether men or women, he doesn’t know. They surround him, he discovers when he spins in a circle, all of them wearing black sacks over their faces.

  “Go ahead. What do you want?”

  When one of them speaks, he can tell the voice is a put-on, roughened to sound deeper than it is. “What do you know about Oregon?”

  He checks his sleeve to make sure the letter is still there. “Oregon.” Until now, he has never said the word aloud, though he has read it countless times on maps, in books, and only minutes before in the letter. He feels as if someone has reached into his head and stolen what preoccupies him. He tries to keep his voice as calm as possible, but still it quivers. “Why do you want to know about Oregon?”

  “Do you know the way there?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I know maps. I know paper. But that’s not the same as—”

  “You want to leave this place, don’t you, Meriwether?”

  That voice. Husked over, but familiar. He stares at the black sack. Holes have been cut into it for the mouth and eyes. He wonders if he can recognize someone by the eyes alone. The figure retreats a step.

  Lewis says, “What do you know about—”

  “You want to. Who wouldn’t want to? You’ve always dreamed about leaving this place. That’s why you bury your face in books and maps. You like to imagine that there might be more to life than this. You aren’t alone. We feel the same. We want you to take us beyond the wall. We want you to help us find the way to Oregon.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “We need your help.”

  “I am needed here.”

  “We need you.”

  “I am needed here.”

  “By your mayor or your mother?”

  “I am needed here.” He feels something rising inside him—boiling, spilling over. If it was a taste, it would be bile. If it had a color, it would be red. “Don’t make me upset. I’m getting upset.”

  The ceiling seems to lower and the stone pillars to crowd around him like bars. The masked figures sneak closer, knot around him. His breath is whistling through his bared teeth. He is blinking back tears. He imagines that beneath their clothes are bones, that they are a horde of skeletons beckoning him into an open grave.

  “Or what?” the voice says. “You’ll call for help? No one can hear you. We are asking you nicely. But we don’t have to ask you at all. We can make you—”

  He tries not to let happen what happens next, but he cannot stop himself. His hands rise, unbidden, as if separate from him. Something takes form on his mouth, not words but sounds no one else would recognize, long vowels and flat, hard consonants uttered with speed and volume unlike him.

  He feels a woof inside him, as fire makes when it finds a pocket of oxygen, and he can feel a heat in his hands. He hurls it—he does not know a better way to describe it than this, as if the heat were a heavy ball—at the figure across from him. The room brightens. The figure flies backward, as if dragged by an invisible wire, until stopped by a stone pillar. He cannot be sure over the thunder of his own voice, but he believes he hears a woman screaming.

  She—yes, it is a she—writhes against the column and cries out, tells him to stop, calls him by name. “No, Lewis! Stop!” But he does not. He is outside himself, taken over by some current he only moderately understands. When he breathes, it is with a concussion of heat, and when he sees, it is through a scrim of hot, floating sparks, as if he is burning up inside. Her feet rise off the ground—she is suspended in the air—her arms lashing as if she might cast off whatever grips her. Her mask peels away from her face, and he sees then the copper-colored hair, sees the face twisted in pain. Clark.

  He goes silent and drops his hands, and in doing so releases her. She falls heavily to the floor, a knot of limbs. She coughs and gasps for air.

  Lewis feels a sudden exhaustion, as if all the energy in his body is spiraling down some pipe, and he knows he must escape this place before he collapses himself.

  He looks at the masked figures around him to see if they will test him. But they are retreating, clutching and tripping over each other, falling back onto the bikes, bringing down a shelf of stuffed animals, and so he brushes past them contemptuously.

  Chapter 4

  THERE HAS ALWAYS been something different about Lewis.

  When they were children, playing the drum game, Thomas could not understand how Lewis so expertly pursued him, despite his blindfold, always stepping around holes or over piles of excrement, climbing ladders, navigating alleyways, so that sometimes he was accused of cheating, peeking. But he wasn’t. He just had a way, if he concentrated deeply, of seeing without his eyes.

  There were other things, too. The way he occasionally dreamed things before they happened—a conversation, a dropped dish, an illness. The way he sometimes saw colors around people, like windblown shawls, green, red, purple, the occasional black. When he told his mother this, she would silence him, put a finger to his lips, telling him the fevers were to blame, telling him not to say anything to anyone else. Especially his father.

  His father did not have time for him, but when he did—when his eyes seemed by accident to settle on him—they inevitably narrowed. If crying, Lewis needed to toughen up. If struggling with a stuck door, he needed to thicken out. If reading books, he needed to get outside and express interest in the things other boys his age cared about—fistfights, slingshots, hunting rats, chasing girls, building things. Lewis wasn’t leadership material, his father said. He wasn’t someone others wished to be.

  Lewis could endure his teasing and scolding, but not the hate, not the biting spittle-flecked words when his father discovered what he was capable of. There was the time, when he was seven, he could turn the pages of a book or nudge a bird off a high ledge or roll a ball by merely sweeping his hand through the air, for which his father kept him locked in his room for days. There was the time, when he was nine, he built a mechanical beetle that helicoptered its wings and flew a fifteen-foot circle before returning to his hand, after which his father crushed it beneath his heel. There was the time, when he was twelve, that he told his father not to ride in a parade because something bad would happen; and then something bad did happen when an assassin’s arrow took him in the shoulder: his father came home not to thank Lewis but to slap him so hard he left a red and then purple and then yellow slash across his face.

  Lewis spent so much of his time in the Dome’s library, climbing ladders, pulling books off shelves to study. He loved novels like Peter Pan, Lord of the Flies, The Wizard of Oz, stories about escape, about worlds within worlds. And he loved histories as well, pretending himself back in time, learning the mechanics of how people and their countries had risen and fallen so many times before. But he favored science, especially physics, the motion and energy of the world.

  He likes things that are quantifiable, that can be labeled and understood logically. This is why he was drawn to a book called The Evolutionary Ladder. He found it in the Dome’s library and it concerned the next big step, what might happen to humans in the coming centuries. It spoke at length about a film and comic book character named Tony Stark, who developed a robotic suit that made him into the hero Iron Man. The suit was the equivalent of an exoskeleton, something that offered a shell of defense while also enhancing strength and speed, allowing Stark to hurl cars or punch through walls or blast through the sky with rocket boosters. For years, the army had been chasing something similar, an enhancing armor. Though their version—at the time only a prototype in a lab—did not make a soldier super. It made him more efficient, able to do better the things he already did, like carry gear weighing more than one hundred pounds and decrease musculoskeletal injuries. It wasn’t about rocket boosters. It was about basic augmentation. As if hurrying along evolution to suit the soldiers’ tasks. There were other examples. Such as a hundred-thousand-dollar battery-powered exoskeleton that helped a man, paralyzed below the waist, w
alk again—and even finish a marathon, though it took him twenty hours. And a technology—called electroencephalography, built into a pair of goggles—that could sense signals in the brain associated with the unconscious recognition of danger, a threat-warning system that would blend mind with machine to enhance defensive response.

  “You don’t need much of an imagination,” the author wrote, “to see that humans will continue to adapt to these technologies by developing ever-more sophisticated means of neurological control. The day will then inevitably come when some people have the ability to control such machinery with only their thoughts. The mind becomes a muscle, able to wirelessly interface with objects separate from the body. This is our next leap as humans,” the book concluded, “so that several centuries from now the seeming magic of telekinetics will be reality.”

  Sometimes that made a kind of sense to him. When he felt a headache coming on and a crack reached suddenly across a window. When he took a breath and a candle across the room snuffed out. When he snapped his fingers and a pencil rolled off a desk. Maybe his mind was like the world: sometimes certain things came together by chance and by fate—like the sparking of electrons, the merging of species, the mutation of a virus—and modified the rules.

  The thought frightens more than excites him. One day, when he was a teenager, after a group of boys teased him, shoved him around, he came home with a split lip and a pouched blue-black eye and a poisonous sense of self-loathing. One of his cats happened to rub between his legs and then hissed and backed into a corner and curled up on itself and died. He did not understand then what he was capable of. He still isn’t sure.

  Anger—or any heightened emotion—seems to key a lock, help him into a hallway full of dark happenings. So he tries to keep his temper muted. He tries to keep his emotions as gray and blank as stone. He tries to focus his energies on more practical matters, managing the museum, studying history, tinkering with his inventions. But he has been having dreams lately—dreams about an old man with long white hair and a warm whispering voice, dreams about pressing his hand to sand and green grass growing in the shape of it, dreams about blowing fire from his lungs like a dragon, dreams about splitting open trees and even mountains by concentrating hard enough, dreams about, no other word for it, magic. The old man spoke to him in his dreams. He wanted Lewis to stop hiding from himself, embrace the strengths he kept contained. And while these dreams at first made him uneasy, he has come to find them weirdly comforting, as if someone out there regarded him with a paternal kindness, wished him well.

  Ever since his hands burned and he hurled Clark—the room brightening with the expended energy—his body has felt achy, his mind slow, as if hungover. He wishes it was all a dream, but he knows better. He still feels in a dream now, as he stands in the museum’s Sun Room, the largest of its galleries, a high-ceilinged space with tall, rounded windows running the length of it. He is holding the rib of a stegosaurus in his hand, the long, sharp curve of it like a yellowed scimitar. He rotates the exhibits every month. The Rise of Egypt. The Fall of Rome. The Space Race. The Great American West. For the past two days—with the help of Ella, his aide—he has been building dioramas, bolting together bones, hanging posters, readying one of their most popular displays, When Dinosaurs Ruled.

  Whenever people walk through the museum to study their enormous skulls, their spiked teeth, their rib cages like baskets big enough for several men to fit inside, they seem in disbelief that something so fierce and powerful could be wiped out so easily. From there, he knows, it doesn’t take much imagination to recognize that at any moment something can come blazing out of the sky and change everything.

  He hears a voice, Ella’s. She is saying his name as if it were a curse. She stands on a stool and wrenches a bolt into place that will secure a section of vertebrae. “You aren’t listening to me?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “I’ve asked three times whether this stage will be labeled Cretaceous or Jurassic.”

  He rubs a hand across his face. “I’m not myself.”

  “If you would simply sleep, like a normal person would, like I tell you to regularly, maybe this wouldn’t be an issue.” When she speaks, she punctuates her sentences with the wrench, jabbing it in the air as if to knock him about with it.

  “You’re right.”

  “Eight hours. That’s what I get. And I feel great.” She brings the wrench to her temple. “My mind is sharp. My body is healthy. Unlike yours.”

  “Yes. I’ll try that. Eight hours.”

  The museum is a sacred space, a cathedral sought out in dark times. People hush their voices and remove their hats when they walk through it. They close their eyes and lower their heads before the exhibits. Lewis knows he makes people uncomfortable, just as people make him uncomfortable, so he remains hidden away in his study during their open hours. Ella has become the public face of the museum. She watches over it, answers any questions people might have when they retreat here. The space is shadowy and cool, orderly and manicured, full of polished treasures. It is everything the Sanctuary is not. Its celebration of the long, difficult novel of humanity, the individual stories that make up the larger story of civilization, gives people hope, purpose. Others have endured and so will they.

  But today it is empty, because everyone is at the stadium.

  Lewis told Thomas not to do it, begged him not to sentence the girl to a public death, and on what grounds? Terrorism. That was what Thomas told everyone. Two decades ago two rangers had gone missing, believed dead, though in fact they had abandoned the Sanctuary. Somehow, all this time, they managed to survive on their own. This girl, their daughter, had come hoping to lure others out, to breach the wall and risk all their lives. It was an act of terrorism. She was a terrorist.

  Lewis said, “Everyone will recognize that as a lie.”

  “Fear beats logic every time,” Thomas said. “You’ll see. Everyone will be screaming for her blood.”

  “She’s a child.”

  “What’s the average life-span around here? Thirty? Forty? She’s practically middle-aged.”

  This was yesterday in the Dome, where they met in a first-floor sitting room. Thomas lounged in a wingback chair while Lewis stood. He refused the offer of a seat, refused a plate of spiced grasshoppers, refused even a smoke. “Let me speak to her. Please.”

  Thomas wore snakeskin boots and fondled a thin wooden pipe. He tamped a pinch of tobacco and sparked a match and brought the flame to the bowl and puffed until it glowed orange and smoke tusked from his nose. “How does this have anything to do with you?”

  “If there are indeed outlying communities, we need to reach out to them.”

  Thomas made an encompassing gesture with the pipe. “Do you know what has kept people alive all these years? They believe. They believe in the wall.” His voice was quiet, but Lewis knew this was how he yelled. Smoke swirled like a storm taking form. “What you’re talking about would threaten everything we’ve built here.”

  “Their faith has already evaporated like all the water in the world.”

  “The rains will come. They always do.”

  They always had—this was true. But it had been so long, months now, that rain felt like a barely remembered dream, the same as his election promises. More than a year ago, when he took office, he promised he would rebuild the crumbling sections of the city. He would rid crime from the Fourth Ward. He would expand the gardens. He would drill a new well and repair those broken. He would make every citizen live up to their potential, live their best life, evolve, whatever that meant, and so on, none of it true. And with the wells failing and the storage tanks emptying, the weather felt like a punishment, like a reprimand for his election, the round reaches of the sky a magnifying lens that sharpened the sun that would crisp them to death.

  For a moment Lewis considered telling Thomas about the letter, sharing its secrets, but only for a moment. In case Clark should actually make good on her promise and depart the Sanctuary, Thomas
should know as little as possible about where she is headed. “I would like to speak to her. Before you do what you’re planning to do.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” He sucked at the pipe and it sizzled with his breath. “But. If you give me what I’ve been asking for, if you give me my guns, I’ll consider letting you speak to her.”

  “No.”

  Thomas rose from his chair then. Even in his boots, he was a head shorter than Lewis. But somehow he made himself seem bigger, in the way of a petulant child, his pale face growing red as he approached Lewis. He held out his pipe like a weapon and Lewis backed away until he could retreat no farther. Thomas leaned in so that his smoking breath made a hot wind on Lewis’s face and he choked on the taste. “Do you know what I can do to you? I can do anything I want to you.”

  “You’re threatening me again?”

  “I’m telling you the way things are, old friend.”

  * * *

  The streets are empty except for dogs lounging in shadows, dust devils that die as they take shape. The wind carries the creak of the turbines and the distant cheers and whistles from the stadium. In an alleyway a figure appears—a woman dressed in the black uniform of the deputies—surveying the street before darting across it like the shadow of a crow. It takes only a moment for her—her face obscured by a black hat and neckerchief—to scale the wall of the museum and slip through an open window.

  She pauses in the half-light, her eyes adjusting, taking in her surroundings, an interactive exhibit featuring the games of another era. There are chess- and checkerboards, tables strewn with playing cards and a jigsaw puzzle that comes together into a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, bins full of balls and bats and racquets and mallets, game consoles with slits in their sides and wires tentacling out of them.

  She slips out of the room and into a hallway festooned with suits of armor from various ages and regions, some clad in reeds, others in metal, before climbing the stairs, fast but not so fast as to clomp her boots or whine a floorboard, every step a whisper. She glances over her shoulder often and sticks to the shadows.