The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  “Of course I will.”

  “But,” she says and taps his chest with a finger. “But.” If something goes wrong—if the people there prove hostile—he should find a way to gift this box to them and then ride as fast and as far as he can. It will wipe the area clean, and in another year, maybe two, they can return there and make it their own.

  “What’s inside it?”

  She presses it into his open hands. “The end of one world, the beginning of another.”

  Chapter 8

  AFTER LEWIS LEADS Clark into the basement, after he shares with her his store of arms and willingness to accompany them, he shows her the grate in the floor, the black square with a rusted ladder and cold, stale breath puffing from it. “We can use the tunnels to escape,” he says. “No one knows about them.”

  She snorts a laugh and he asks her what’s so funny.

  “You. You’re always convinced you know more than everybody else. Where do you think I sent my brother and the girl? There’s more than one unsealed grate in this city.”

  She tells him the plan then. Now that Lewis is in, there will be six of them altogether. This past week, they’ve been humping supplies through the tunnels, secreting them in a building more than a mile beyond the wall. Matches, flour, knives, lanterns, needles, thread, bedrolls, hardtack, jerky, dried fruit, but mostly water, canteens and leather sacks sloshed full of water. And now they will add guns. The revolvers and rifles from the museum’s hidden arsenal.

  The tunnels cannot accommodate their horses, and on foot they will not make it far—even if they escape pursuit. Summer is here. The burning face of the sun seems closer every day. By midmorning it hurts to breathe, like sucking on a pipe lit with dust. They will need horses—at least twelve of them, six for riders, the others to rotate out and carry supplies—and they will need to ride hard, before their water runs out, hopefully finding a more forgiving place.

  “We leave tomorrow morning. Be ready.”

  Lewis packs and unpacks and packs again. He paces his office and rubs his hands together with a dry, papery whisper. He does not know how to occupy himself, how to channel his excitement, near giddiness, such an unfamiliar feeling. So he tinkers. He loves to build things, puzzling together gears, soldering wires, fitting joints, creating something mobile and useful out of the scraps of a broken world. A clock that spins with the cycles of the moon. A sturdy set of glasses, each side hinged with a dozen lenses that fold up and down to magnify or telescope. A repurposed coffeemaker that sucks moisture from the air and pools it into a cup for drinking. For the past week, he has been building what he will never finish. A short-wave radio. He gathers parts, mostly from the bazaar, picking out tubes to clean, wires to thread. Knobs. Diodes. Switches. Capacitors. All of them cracked, decayed. He corded the radio into the outlet the other day and the thing popped and fuzzed with static, then grew suddenly hot, several of the tubes exploding in a glass shower. So he began again.

  He imagines spinning the dial, for days, weeks, maybe months, finally coming across a voice. Maybe the voice would speak English, maybe not, someone hoping to be heard, no different from the transmissions fired into space so long ago. He would speak into the microphone, saying, Hello? Can you hear me? and the voice would go silent for a moment before calling back to him excitedly, manically.

  The unfinished radio sits on his desk now. He fastens the antenna mast to the cabinet just as Ella enters the room without knocking.

  “What is that?”

  “A radio.”

  “What use is a radio?”

  “What use is anything in this museum?”

  “I’m calling it a night. What do you want me to do tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow.” He hands her a sheet of paper with a long list of errands, all of them outside. He needs her gone.

  “This is going to take forever.”

  “Yes.”

  She starts for the door and he calls after her, “Oh, and Ella—”

  “What?”

  He opens his mouth. There is so much to say. Come tomorrow, he knows she will feel betrayed, and he worries about leaving her—worries what will happen once Thomas learns of his escape—but he cannot leave his life’s work unattended. For all her annoying qualities, he recognizes her as a fierce, clever girl. She will care for the museum and, if need be, fight for it should anyone try to shut its doors, salvage its materials.

  She folds the sheet and then folds it again before giving up on him, vanishing down the hall. “Good-bye,” he calls after her.

  * * *

  Every morning, the gates open and a ranging party of eleven sentinels rides into the Dead Lands, the last among them seated on the back end of a Ford F-150 cut in half, retaining only its bed and rear wheels, two horses drawing it forward. They arrange their route in advance, working in a wider and wider radius of the wall since so much has already been scavenged. Sometimes they harvest whatever they happen upon—these are called opportunity strikes—as they work their way methodically through cars, homes, businesses, ripping open drawers, closets, cupboards, taking a hammer to a wall and wrenching out its guts. And sometimes, on targeted missions, the city engineers put in orders for copper, steel, wiring, wood, tires, brick, and when they return to the Sanctuary, the bed of the F-150 is heaped with rattling goods.

  But not today.

  Reed is already waiting at the gates. Clark nudges her horse forward, drawing up next to him. He will not look at her. His eyes are trained on the gates before them. She can see a forked vein throbbing in his forehead. She can hear the other horses falling into place behind them, the creak of leather, the rusty moan of the truck bed. She wonders if he feels as she does now, her stomach a roiling pit, as if she is at once starved and ready to throw up. There is no going back. They are leaving—they are leaving everything and everyone they know—and they can return only if they want their heads decorating pikes.

  A slump-shouldered guard tromps toward them. He fights a yawn, barely awake. His hand rattles a set of keys, the keys for the lock, the lock meant to keep people in more than keep the world out. He fumbles them and the keys fall between his feet, like a brass insect that might scurry away. Clark resists the impulse to loosen her foot from her stirrup and kick him in the head.

  “You ready?” she says to Reed.

  A thought seems to pass his face. What is it? The way his jaw tightens, the way his eyes flit sideways to briefly acknowledge her, she thinks it might be hesitation. She hopes not. The others will look to him as an example. Any weakness on his part will be contagious. She feels the very opposite of indecision—a wild, desperate propulsion that makes it nearly impossible to steady her horse, keep from charging forward.

  The sentry scoops up the keys and shakes them until he finds the one he wants. He scrapes it into the lock, twists it sideways. There is a click. He then, with the help of another, hefts the bar bracing the two massive doors. They moan under its weight, staggering to the edge of the doorway, where they drop it with a clang.

  The sentry then brings to his lips a bone whistle—and blows—signaling their departure.

  She tries to concentrate on anything else. Something tangible. Something to distract her from what they are about to do. The crow’s feather caught in her horse’s mane. The bluebottle fly that orbits her head. The thin crack of sunlight running down the middle of the gate, splitting open now to accommodate their horses as they spur forward.

  * * *

  Clark chooses a Kwik Trip gas station as their meeting place. The pumps are strangled by brittle brown vines. A skeleton in a leather jacket sits at the wheel of a van parked out front. The trees surrounding it are thickly spiderwebbed, like sick clouds that might rain the bones and shrouded bundles tangled up in them. The convenience store was long ago raided, the shelves empty of anything but dust. The glass doors remain intact, though scoured and filmed by wind.

  They stack their supplies in the entryway—weapons and food and clothes—bunched into piles to load onto eac
h horse. Lewis waits with three others. The first, a doctor with a pruned face and long gray curiously knotted hair. She accompanied him through the sewers with a lantern and a brittle map. She pinches a pipe between her lips. In one breast pocket she carries sulfur-tipped matches and in the other tobacco. The pads of her fingers are stained the same yellow as her teeth. Her words carry smoke when she tells Lewis how Clark came to her, just as she came to him, and told her the way it would be. “There’s no denying her. She’s a force.”

  “But why you?”

  “I suppose we can rule out physical strength, so that leaves me to guess you all might need a little mothering along with your medicine. Far as I can tell, that’s what’s brought her back to my office again and again these past few years. A little mothering.”

  “And you’re willing to say good-bye to everything you know to serve as our wet nurse?”

  “I’m a doctor. And you won’t be sucking on my tit; that’s for sure. There’s nothing for me here. Nothing for any of us. Anything is better than nothing.”

  The second man Lewis knows, but not well. York, the street performer, Clark’s half brother. They nod at each other in greeting but don’t offer a hand. He sits on the counter with his legs swinging and his mouth crooked into a smile. Lewis has always considered him a fool. This has something to do with his appearance—with his brightly dyed clothes and the triangular sideburns carved onto his cheeks—but more so his behavior, his voice always loud, his manner always theatrical, everything out of his mouth seeming to twist into a joke.

  And then there is the girl, Gawea. The mere thought of her seems to weigh down the pocket where Lewis keeps the letter. Since it came into his possession, he has read and reread it. The one addressed, impossibly, to him. He doesn’t know how to explain it any better than he can explain the curious energy that sometimes possesses him. Maybe he will begin by describing his own disbelief. How, when he first picked the letter up, he thought he misread its script. He tried to untangle the letters and weave them into other names, but they kept coming back to his own.

  To Lewis Meriwether—

  That is how the letter opened. He sees its contents everywhere: written in pitted concrete, in beetle-bitten bark. A centipede tracks a sentence in the sand. Smoke from a chimney wisps into words.

  Your dreams are true. You are not alone. I don’t mean there are others alive. There are, of course, but you have always guessed that to be the case. I mean there are others like you—gifted, special—including the girl I have sent to you, Gawea. She will guide you in more ways than one. Come west. I insist.

  Aran Burr

  He asks where Gawea is and York throws up a hand, his thumb indicating the square of space behind the counter. Lewis slowly approaches. He does not know what to expect from her, what she might look like or how she might greet him. She does not appear in a shaft of sunlight. She does not levitate several feet off the ground. She does not shout out his name. When he rounds the counter, he finds her lying on the floor, curled up in a nest of blankets, asleep. She is just a girl, not much older than Ella. Her skin is tanned and drawn tight over her bones, offset by the white bandages that wrap her wounds. Her black hair falls over her cheek like a tattered wing.

  “Leave her alone,” York says. “She needs her rest.”

  At that her eyes snap open. They seem at odds with the daylight. Their blackness reflects his looming figure, as if he were an amorphous pupil floating in them. He takes his hands out of his pockets and then puts them back in and says, at a stutter, “I’m the one you’re looking for.”

  * * *

  When Clark exercises, jacking out push-ups or lunging to the floor, rather than rushing through fifty reps, she focuses on intervals of five. It cures her of her impatience and makes the overall sum seem more manageable. For this reason she keeps her eyes on the Witness Tree. It is like some giant bony hand escaping the underworld, its bare branches reaching up to claw the sky. She rides toward it, and only it, knowing if she thinks only about the horizon, about the many months and thousands of miles that lie ahead of her, she may go mad with impatience. One step at a time. She will focus on a tree, then a building, then a hill, maybe a mountain, whatever increments might draw her forward.

  But first, the Witness Tree. This, she knows, is where she will lose sight of the wall and the wall of her. And now, with one last dig of her heels, she hurries past it, and the dark-eyed buildings pinch around her. She slows her horse, and the others match her speed, clopping over broken bits of asphalt, threading around cars, kicking through tongues of sand, trotting down tree-lined avenues with the branches knit loosely overhead and the sunlight falling through them to brighten the ground like shards of glass.

  They make their way through a business district and enter a neighborhood of ruined bungalows corralled by chain-link fences clotted with leaves and needles and rust. Today they are supposed to return with screws and nails and lumber, two-by-fours and two-by-sixes especially. She can hear the cart twenty yards behind her, bouncing along and rattling with hammers and saws and screwdrivers and crowbars. With these tools they check decks and porches for treated cedar or polyethylene, tear open drywall for the studs hidden beneath, coffined all this time, only some of them free from rot by weather or termites. But not today.

  To their right, the houses fall away into a park whose lush green lawn long ago gave way to patches of yellowy cheatgrass. A rag-tangled body with a thatch of hair still clinging to its skull lies on a bench and gapes at them. A plastic slide has faded from red to a faint pink, cracked like a dried-up tongue. The jungle gym is hairy with weeds. A flower-patterned bike lies abandoned, half-buried in the dirt.

  She leads her horse into the park and the others follow. She knows what she needs to do, but for the moment she can only stare at the jungle gym and imagine this as a place where children once played.

  A voice calls behind her. “Is something the matter?” When she doesn’t answer, the voice calls out again, “What are we doing?”

  She hopes they won’t fight back. She wants them to make their way home safely, to tell everyone what has happened, to spread the dream of their mission and the promise of their return—before Thomas can warp Clark into a traitor. She plans to cuff their ankles and wrists, to steal their horses. They are only a little more than a mile from the wall and should be able to hop or crawl home before dark. Unless something—spiders or snakes or worse—finds them.

  Clark swings her horse around and nods at Reed. The two of them separate from the nine, their horses slowly retreating. Reed withdraws two revolvers. She does the same. Their hands shake. The nine rangers—two women, the rest of them men—stare at the sunlight gleaming from the gunmetal and then settle their gaze on Reed.

  “It’s time for us to say good-bye,” he says.

  * * *

  Gawea might smile at Lewis, but her face has a woodenness that makes it difficult to read. She stands. She walks toward him and he can’t help but take a step back. A bloodied bandage scarves her neck. She motions to it, excusing her lack of voice. He is more than a foot taller than she, but there is something about her that makes them seem the same height.

  She reaches out both her hands, one of them bandaged, the wrappings looping her palm and binding her wrist. It takes him a moment to realize he should respond in kind. He is not used to touching others, not to embrace, not to shake hands, not even to brush up against on the street. It’s more than the intimacy—it’s the sense of getting rubbed away. But in this case, when his hands fall into hers, he does not feel drained so much as he feels charged, fuller. More confident and excited than ever about what might lie ahead.

  “It’s true? It’s really true? You’re going to take us—you’re going to take me to him?”

  She nods.

  “Why?”

  Again she motions to her neck. Then she brings a finger to the counter and cuts through the thick dust, writing out: U R THE NEXT.

  “I am the next? What does that mean?”
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  Gawea is about to write something more when the doctor says, “Think I hear something.” The sun is reaching higher—the windows are beginning to glow—and the doctor leans into the glass with pipe smoke coiled around her, her stare fixed on the road.

  Something scuttles by the glass doors. A shadow falls across the floor, just for an instant, as if the sun blinked. Lewis cannot distinguish a shape. It is too fast, moving at a blur, and the doctor is standing in the way of it. “There’s something out there,” she says, taking several steps back.

  A rasping sound comes from the wall, as if something is trying to claw its way inside.

  “Arm yourself,” Lewis says, and they each snatch up a rifle. The doctor and York hold theirs awkwardly, studying them, rearranging their grips.

  Lewis has never fired a weapon, but he has studied them, cleaned them, broken them down and built them back up, and he models for them now: finger off the trigger, palm beneath the forestock, butt against the shoulder.

  A long silence gives way to a thundering, the swelling sound of horse hooves headed their way. “They’re coming,” York says, and all of their attention now swings toward readying their supplies.

  They have organized a different pile for every horse, each containing clothes, food, canteens, knives, matches, ammunition, rifles rolled into blankets. Lewis’s pile, at the end, rises taller than the others, a tidy pyramid built from a compass, many maps, his owl, three silver canisters packed with his medicine, quills and ink and a blank calfskin journal kept shut by a long bicuspid braided through an eyehole loop.

  Clark and Reed appear in a storm of dust and dismount and yell at everyone to hurry, move their asses, and Lewis finds his thoughts twined up and his body startled out of his control. The doors are swinging open and closed, open and closed, with rusty shrieks. Everyone is racing back and forth, scooping up their gear, yelling—yelling at him, he realizes—and only then does he rush forward and stumble and knock his pile in many directions.