The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  “Please. You’re not fool enough to believe in what people say about him. Lewis, the eater of children, the binder of spells, the freak in the dark tower.”

  “I might be.”

  She runs a hand along his beard, then pinches a whisker and rips it out. He flinches and she shoves him aside and walks to the table at the center of the room. “So you’re suggesting that we uproot, say good-bye to all we have built here, on the word of one girl?”

  “If it’s true—if what she says is true—the country there is rich.”

  “If it’s true.”

  “Is there any future here? Really?” Her back is to him, but she can hear him slide closer to her, can feel his breath at her neck. “What does your husband say?”

  “Do we really need to talk about him?” She picks up a dagger—black handle, black blade—and runs her finger along its edge. “He says it’s not true. Of course he says that. And he says—even if any of it is true—no good can come of it and we must put it behind us. The more people know, the less sure they will be of everything. That’s what he says.”

  “Look at it this way. Even if we stay here, this is a chance to trade, to open lines of communication. To unite. Maybe even make a kind of country?”

  “How patriotic of you.” She turns around and prods his belt with the knife. “The other possibility is that this is all a pipe dream.”

  “I’d like to think it’s true. We’ve got to believe in something.”

  She drops the dagger on the table and reaches her hands around his neck, massages him until his head lolls with her fingertips. “Relax,” she whispers. “Relax.”

  His eyes shutter closed with her rubbing. “This could be a chance for us to start over too.”

  Her tongue darts from her mouth and wets her lips. “Enough talking.” She releases him and turns around and lifts up her dress until it bunches around her waist and leans over the table stacked with steel. “Hurry up and take me.”

  * * *

  The black-clad figure races the streets, cutting through alleys, breathing in panicked gulps, before finally collapsing in a shadowed alley. The neckerchief peels away to reveal a face—Clark’s—just in time for her to vomit freely.

  She throws her hat aside. Her hair has come loose from her ponytail. Her stomach clenches and empties. With a line of spit hanging from her lips, she cries out with inarticulate shame and fury. Out of the cracks come several scuttling beetles, joined by a black-winged butterfly, to drink from the mess she has left for them.

  She roughs her mouth across her wrist. There was a time when she found herself often in this position, hunched over, her throat surging, yesterday’s meal flecking her lips and a bottleful of tequila puddling the ground between her feet. She couldn’t stop herself. One drink always became ten drinks—and she would end every night swinging a fist or falling into bed with someone she couldn’t remember in the morning. She didn’t have any sort of excuse. Drinking was a way to antidote the boredom, the sense of purposelessness. Drinking was a way to numb the anger she always felt coiling inside her. Maybe. But in the end she believed it came down to the sort of person she was—a woman of great appetites.

  Soon she will leave this place. And when she leaves, she will have escaped her old self, the old Clark. She will be able—they all will be able—to begin again. Lewis’s mother is dead, but she was already dead, a ruined vessel no different from the city presently rotting around her. Clark was doing her a favor; she was doing Lewis a favor. I am trying, she thinks. I am trying to make things better, trying to help. But she knows that the murder—no, the death; that’s a better way to think of it—the death of the old woman will weigh on her chest like a cold stone.

  For the moment, though, she need only worry about Lewis. More than once in her life she has witnessed the unexplainable. A storm of dead crows raining from the sky. A plant, like a long green finger, that came twisting out of the ground when she spilled water from her canteen. The man with the parasite that grew so massive inside him that his belly distended and shifted as if from some alien pregnancy. The seers in the market who could read your past and future in your palm, in tea leaves, in the squiggly purple guts of rats. But never anything like the other night.

  People have always spoken of Lewis as if he were and were not human. He has always struck her as a kind of weak phantom, a shade of a man, but it was not until he hurled her back against the pillar, not until she suffered against what felt like a giant, fiery pair of hands, that she understood what he was capable of and why they needed him on their side more than ever.

  She knows—everyone knows—of his difficult history with the mayor. She knows about Thomas badgering him for guns and black powder. She came to the museum costumed as a deputy and made certain the owl observed her clearly. She is counting on his mutiny. But if Lewis discovers it was her—and who knows what he can see—then she knows her guilt over smothering an old woman will be the least of her troubles.

  She rises to her feet and spits and takes a deep, calming breath. Over the years she has found ways to keep her temper in check. To breathe in through her nose, out through her mouth. To sketch out words on her palm with a fingernail: hate, mad, fuck, die. This helps settle her now—to loosen her coiled sense of confusion and loathing—as she races through the maze of streets.

  She needs to hurry. If everything has gone according to plan, if her brother has done as she asked him to do, then they won’t have much time.

  * * *

  When York first climbs the gallows and swings from its noose, he uses a razor tucked in his palm to thin the rope to a few threads. Then the deputies march across the field, dragging the girl between them, and York descends the steps and momentarily loses his focus. In part it is her eyes, like polished balls of obsidian, but more than that it is her. The oval cut of her face, the regal way she holds her head. In her own way, she is beautiful. He stares at her dumbly until they march her up the thirteen steps of the gallows. Then he shakes off his trance and positions himself below, waiting for the trapdoor to open.

  In his head he has rehearsed their escape so many times that it already seems a reality. There are four tunnels in the stadium, each as black as a skull’s sockets. Down one of them waits the mass of caterers and musicians who will take to the field following the execution. Down another tunnel huddle a few deputies, though most of them patrol the bleachers. The other two tunnels are unoccupied, the corridors to the south side of the stadium strewn with sand and half-collapsed. York has scouted them, picked the lock of a side door, stowed weapons and clothes in a nearby alley. The streets will be empty when he and the girl race to meet Clark.

  But that’s not what happens.

  The deputies fit the noose around her neck, and she looks to the sky as if in prayer. Her black eyes reflect the white-blue expanse swarming with vultures. Her body goes rigid, and York hears something then, though he cannot place the sound so much as he can feel the attendant shiver, the air like struck tin.

  Vultures always swoop over the Sanctuary, but they come together now by the hundreds, more and more of them drawn from rooftops and thermals, coalescing into a spinning black funnel with the gallows as its axis. The crowd follows her gaze upward. They murmur and shrink in their seats as if they can sense what’s coming. And then it comes.

  The cyclone collapses and all at once the vultures fall on the stadium. They are a terrible rain, but not the one everyone has been praying for. Big balls of air come rolling off their long-fingered wings, making a wind strong enough to raise dust devils all over the field. People squint their eyes and throw up their hands and cry out in voices that match the scratchy timbre of the vultures. Some of the birds land on shoulders and some of them swing by as if on wires. Their claws slash; their bald red heads dart in for a bite.

  Four of them dive the gallows. Their wings are as wide as a man is tall, and so black that the sunlit air seems striped by midnight. The deputies do not have time to reach for their machetes. They barely ha
ve time to hold up their hands. One of the men reels back and falls from the ten-foot platform. The ground meets his back with a meaty thud that knocks the air from his lungs and leaves him momentarily paralyzed, too stunned to lift his arms and ward off the vulture that swoops onto his chest.

  The other deputy—with a vulture pinned to his shoulder, his face cowled by its wings—falls onto the lever that opens the trapdoor. By this time, York has ducked beneath the platform, out of the sun, into shadow, away from the birds that sweep and dagger the air. So when the trapdoor swings open, when a square of light appears above him, when a body tumbles through it, when the noose catches and snaps, he throws out his arms and snatches her from the air.

  They don’t have time to pause, but for a moment his body stiffens, arrested by the sight of her in his arms. Her expression is flat and her eyes give him nothing back, not hate or gratitude or fear, so he feels compelled to say something. “Hi.” And then, “I’m here to help.”

  Something softens in her face and he feels relieved, as if from the pressure of a knife. She might fit easily into his arms, but she could hurt him if she wanted to. Impossible as it may seem, she is responsible for the vultures. He doesn’t know how he knows this, but he does, and he accepts it with the awe of a child who watches a magician spit fire and spring bouquets from ears.

  The crowd is still screaming and the vultures are still plunging when he puts her down and she slips the noose off her neck and grabs his hand and runs for the south tunnel. He finds himself hurrying after her, even though he is the one who should be yelling, Follow me!

  Chapter 6

  MOST OF THE sentinels live in a stucco building with shuttered windows next to the stables. There is a kitchen and latrine and common room on the ground floor, apartments on the upper three levels. Clark keys open her door and can barely shove her way inside, the floor so cluttered with rank piles of clothes and the named and unnamed objects she has salvaged from the Dead Lands. A broken blue mug. A golf club. A faded red can of Coca-Cola. A typewriter with rows of gleaming yellow teeth. A snow globe with a white-bearded, red-suited Santa inside it.

  As soon as she closes the door behind her, she begins to strip, tearing off the deputy’s uniform and stuffing it beneath her bed. On the wall hangs a cracked mirror, mossy and veined with age, and she studies her reflection in it, her body pale, her face and hands rough and sunburned.

  Then she picks up some clothes from the floor and smells them before pulling them on.

  Her brother is safe, the girl is safe—for now. Deputies will gather. They will march the streets and knock on doors and overturn closets and pantries and basements and attics, and they will make black Xs on a map for the places they have already visited. Not only will the mayor appear a fool for losing the girl; he will appear a cruel god for upending every drawer in the Sanctuary in pursuit of her. Clark will be questioned once—within the next hour or so, she guesses—and Reed will vouch for her and her loyal service as a sentinel. A few days later, when the deputies seek her out again, she won’t be around for them to find.

  Her mind vibrates; her guts feel feathery. She makes her hands into fists and presses them to her eyes. She could use a drink. Terribly. A few weeks ago, she promised Reed she would stop. Just like that. Like a door had closed, bolted. She relapsed once, the other day, after the death parade. She does get quivery when she passes a bar, when she sees people drinking or smells liquor on their breath, but the real trouble comes at night.

  She dreams of drinking. Glass after glass. Gallons of whatever is being poured. Bathing herself in it. And when she drinks in her dreams, her knees do not wobble. Her words do not slur. Instead she is happy, unafraid. This feeling—a good feeling, warm and expansive—carries over when she wakes, feeling drunken, the world slippery around the edges, and sometimes it is an hour and two cups of tea later before she can shake it.

  Now, as she lies back on her bunk, staring at the ceiling, her mind is drifting, her hand is reaching for a bottle that isn’t there.

  When the door opens and Reed steps through it, she rushes out of bed and takes the back of his head and shoves her face against his and drinks deeply of him until he pushes her back with a confused laugh. “Okay,” he says, “okay. I assume this means everything worked out? They’re safe?”

  “They’re safe.” She still holds him by the head, his braid wrapped in her fist. “You smell funny.”

  “And you taste like bile. Want to trade more love poems?”

  “You do. You smell.” Her eyes sparkle angrily. “You smell like some flower.”

  “Forget about it. I sat next to some reeking woman at the stadium.”

  “What woman? Her? You said you were done with—”

  “I said forget about it.” He pushes her hair back from her forehead and kisses it. “What happened with Lewis?”

  She releases him then and falls back into bed and forces her head into the pillow as if to suffocate the words, “It’s done. She’s dead.”

  * * *

  Lewis is not the only body in his bedchamber, but he is very much alone. He kneels over his mother in much the same posture as the one who murdered her. Her face is a ghastly rictus of pain. He draws back the sheet to reveal the slim length of her, like a bundle of sticks. He does not cry—he cannot remember the last time he cried; he doesn’t know if he is capable of it—but he embraces her, drawing her body toward him so that it arches, her head lolling painfully back. He holds her like this for a long time. And while he holds her, the night gathers outside and deputies shout in the streets and the room flickers with light as the owl projects over and over again the grainy image of the deputy smothering her.

  * * *

  As expected, the deputies come for Clark. They ask about her brother and she says, “Half brother.” They ask if she has seen him, and she says, “I throw him some coin if I see him performing, but we don’t talk much, not anymore.” She denies any knowledge of his whereabouts, expresses her disgust and astonishment, and says she will be the first to let them know if he comes crawling to her. Then she excuses herself. “I have to work.”

  She paces the wall all through the night as a sentry and now it is dawn and her eyes buzz with exhaustion and with the competing thoughts that bump around inside her head like bees in a jar: the possibility that she may escape, the possibility that she may not, that she may spend the rest of her life caught in this globe, like the one she salvaged from the Dead Lands, with sand instead of snow churning through it.

  She tries to concentrate on her hands and feet, finding a good grip on the ladder, the strips of rebar cemented into the wall, but even now her mind wanders, her hands curling around metal in much the same way they curled around the corners of the pillow pressed down on the old woman’s gaping face.

  The sky is pinkening, the first bell ringing, the Sanctuary coming alive around her when she drops onto the roof of an ancient school bus, then its hood, then the ground. A halo of dust rises around her. The faded, sandblasted black letters of ST. LOUIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS still reach the bus’s length, but it has no wheels, the undercarriage sunken into the dirt like a wallowing beast. Its occupants stir awake. They tear aside the rags hanging in the windows and curse her for waking them. In response, she fights a yawn.

  There are many farms in the Sanctuary, all of them guarded and gated off, and though she isn’t supposed to, she cuts through one of them now, climbing and jumping the iron-spiked fence, hurrying her way home. One of the sewage canals is diverted through the quarter acre, its many small channels oozing and buzzing with flies. She tromps past a raised box of sweet potatoes, another clustered with beans, another spiked with corn, others with barley, wheat. The dirt is dusted with bone meal and moistened with sewage, some cocktail of nitrogen and phosphate to increase yields.

  Several gardeners wander around, irrigating and harvesting. One of them asks if she thinks she can do whatever she wants and she says, “Pretty much,” before climbing the fence and dropping down on the o
ther side.

  She walks down a tight, shadowy street, so tired that at first she isn’t sure she hears what she thinks she hears—a whisper—her name. But when she turns, she sees the man standing twenty yards behind her. The wind tunnels through this cement corridor and knocks his gray duster back to reveal the thinness of his figure. Lewis.

  He is far enough away, and the wind gusting enough, that she cannot be certain how his whisper carried so far, as if he tossed his voice like a ball through the air. “Come.”

  She feels her face redden with a rush of blood, her guilt announcing itself. She cannot find her voice at first but manages to strangle out a question, “What do you want?”

  He says nothing, only stares at her with those cold blue eyes, before turning, his duster snapping grayly behind him like a spectral hand beckoning her.

  She follows him, not knowing what he knows, not wanting to know. Everything hangs in the balance, as if poised at the edge of a great chasm, and she feels at once ebullient and fearful. She does not notice the street unscrolling beneath her feet—until she finds herself in Old Town and climbing the steps of the museum. They seem to shake, but it is she; she is shaking.

  He does not hold the door for her and he does not pause once they enter, but continues forward without looking back, gliding through the entry with the golden compass emblazoned on the floor and continuing to a circular stone staircase that from the landing seems to wind down into tighter and tighter circles, like the inside of a shell.

  “Where is the girl?” he says.

  “Safe.”

  “There are only so many places to hide.”

  “They won’t find her. I can promise you that.”

  “People are saying she called the birds down from the sky.”

  “That’s what they’re saying.”

  “I need to talk to her.”

  “Only one way that’s happening.”

  They descend three stories. At every landing, there is a doorway, and beside every doorway a lantern. By the time they enter the basement, shadow overpopulates light. Lewis tries a switch, but the bulb above them explodes with a spray of sparks. So he unhooks the entryway lantern and holds it ahead of him as he walks. She follows in her own private darkness while ahead he seems to float in a sputtering orange light that reveals the half-seen shapes of their surroundings—hallways that elbow into rooms full of shrouded paintings, glass-cased moths with eyes patterned on their wings, a harp with cobwebbed strings, a dust-clotted tiger with a raised paw and a snarl frozen on its face—stacked high all around them, sometimes with only a narrow corridor between. She rams her knee into a crate and six cockroaches come scuttling out from beneath it.