The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  His expression is arranged in a sleepy smile, as if he is living some dream he knew would come true, unaware or uncaring of any danger. This isn’t a mission to him; it’s an adventure, an entertainment. “Why are you always so serious?” he says to her one day, and she says, “Because everything is at stake, even if you don’t realize it.” When he fires an arrow into a quail and a feather catches the corner of his mouth, Clark tenderly plucks it from his lips. And when he rides beside Gawea or tries to share a canteen with her or juggles stones to entertain her, Clark worries.

  Clark does and does not trust Gawea. In part it is the silence, her throat punctured and infected and slow to heal. When she tries to make words, her voice rasps like a rust-deadened hinge, and when she writes, the words come slowly in a mess of bird-scratch letters. Lewis asks who is Aran Burr and she writes, Leeder. Teecher. Lewis asks whom he leads and she says, Everyone, and Lewis asks if he is like a mayor or a governor and she hesitates before writing, Mostly. Lewis asks if she made the birds fall from the sky, if she made them attack the stadium and aid in her escape, and she writes, Did not maek. Her bandaged hand, her dominant hand, clumsily grips the pen and scratches out each letter: Asked.

  “You asked?”

  She underlines the word: Asked.

  One morning, Clark wakes to find Gawea standing at the edge of their camp, a single moth dancing above her. Clark closes her eyes, eking out another minute of sleep, and when she opens them again finds dozens of moths now swirling around Gawea, dirtying the air. The girl does not often smile but she is smiling then, with her hands outstretched and moths balanced on her fingertips. Clark sits up in her bedroll and says, “Hey,” and Gawea drops her smile and her arms and the moths flutter off like a blown cloud of ashes.

  She did this alone. That’s what Clark has to keep reminding herself. That’s what makes the distance seem bridgeable, possible, even when they come to the Nebraska border, where the bluffs drop into plains that roll on and on, the color of aged parchment, like one of Lewis’s maps forever unscrolled. The girl came all this way without anyone. The balls on her.

  “How much longer?” Clark asks her. “When does this end? You said it would end.”

  It ends, she writes.

  “But when?”

  Weeks.

  “How many?”

  Gawea shrugs.

  Their water halves, and halves again, and their mouths go to cotton from rationing. At some farms they find iron pumps tapped into deep wells. Besides ceramics, which have the same basic composition as fossils, nothing has lasted like iron. Gates and pans and pipes like this one. The metal was once red, but except for a few specks, the paint is chipped from it. The handle juts out like a one-armed man trying to keep his balance. They take turns priming the arm, and when they first call up the water, it sometimes carries rust and muck for an hour before running clear.

  They follow the girl and she follows the river, the Missouri River. “Do you really trust her?” Reed says, and Clark says, “I trust that she knows how to survive out here, but for now, that’s all.” They ride through crumbling towns and cities, everything a splintered mess, and they ride through the empty spaces between them. They ride around trees that fell years ago and trees that fell last week, through fences, onto houses and cars, across streets. Trees on top of trees on top of trees. They ride past leaning electrical poles with their snapped and frayed wires. They ride past roads buckled to pieces, crumbled to gravel. They ride past the litter of ripped balloons, shriveled condoms, six-pack rings, diapers, and chip bags and Ziploc bags and grocery bags, plastic bags, so many of them, that flutter from bushes and trees and gutters and fences like ruined egg sacs.

  At one point, York says, “God, would you look at all this dead shit.” There isn’t much more to say than that.

  The wind creaks and knocks things over with a crash so that the world seems to be muttering about them in their passing. And everywhere—in windows, doorways, the knots of trees—there is the sense of eyes watching.

  Coyotes yip and howl at night. Snakes rattle their tails and startle the horses. They surprise a huddle of javelinas, the big bristly pigs snorting and squealing, rushing toward them and hoofing up a big cloud of dust and swinging their tusks from side to side, and Clark drops two of them with arrows before the drove escapes.

  They need to be able to protect themselves, but none of them know how to use the guns they carry. When Reed asks if the ammunition will even fire, Lewis says there is only one way to find out. He says the desert climate is to their advantage, the dryness a preservative. That’s why archaeologists, he tells them, pulled scrolls thousands of years old out of Egyptian tombs. “It would take moisture to neutralize the powder or primer,” he says, and because the bullets have been stored in ammo boxes—in a relatively cool, intensely dry basement—they should ignite.

  The bullets rattle when they finger open the .357 boxes. Their metal has oxidized, giving them a slight green crust, but otherwise they have not visibly degraded. The cartridges for the .30-06 rifles appear much the same. And though some of the shotgun shells are a loss, their plastic cracked and spilling buckshot, most seem serviceable.

  That morning, everyone sits in a half circle and Lewis stands before them holding a revolver. The sky, still pinpricked with stars, pinkens behind him. He has to hold the weapon with two hands, its weight too great for his thin arms. He lectures everyone first on the mechanics. He thumbs the safety on and off, swings out the cylinder and spins it. The hammer cocks and releases. He goes on for some time about the double-action mechanism, about safety concerns, about how to break down the weapon, clean it with a brush and rag and oil, when York says, “Shut up already and let me try.”

  The others whistle and clap when he jumps up and smacks the dust from his rear and snatches the revolver Lewis reaches to him, grip first.

  York smiles for his audience. He shoves the gun in his belt, crabs out his arms, then draws and pops an imaginary round at each of them. He spins the gun on his finger—then loses his grip and it thuds to the ground.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Clark says, “you idiot.”

  He slides the bullets into their chambers, then slams the cylinder home as if he has done so a thousand times before, his hands moving with a magician’s adeptness. “What should I aim at?”

  The doctor is smoking her pipe, blowing smoke rings. “The moon,” she says.

  “Yeah, the moon,” Reed says. “Blast it out of the sky.”

  The sun is rising and the moon is sinking out of sight, its crescent like a clean slash. York spreads his legs and raises his arms and draws a bead on it. He holds his breath, then compresses the trigger. The hammer falls with a sharp click.

  Nothing.

  He lets out his breath. “Broke.” His stance relaxes and the revolver droops to the ground. He snaps the trigger twice more, and then again, and a round blasts from the chamber with a sound and force greater than any of them has experienced before. The dirt kicks up a fist-sized crater beside his foot. The gunshot thunders. He whoops and drops the gun and runs a few paces from it before saying, “Shit! Fuck! Damn!”

  Everyone ducks down, their hands clapped over their ears or eyes. Now their shocked expressions give way to laughter. The deep-bellied kind. When York dances over to Gawea and says, “What do you think of that? I shot the moon for you, baby!” even she smiles and brings her hands together twice in mock applause.

  It feels strange, almost dangerous, for them to be laughing, and, as if in agreement, they all stop and look over their shoulders as if they might be punished for a moment of levity.

  * * *

  Gawea wonders if she will have to kill them.

  She could do it without any trouble. One by one, a snake curled in a boot, a centipede coaxed into an ear, a few days or weeks between them so as not to arouse suspicion. Or all at once—slit their throats or call down the birds when they are sleeping—but that would be less than ideal. Lewis would know. He would hate her and distr
ust her and resist her. She has no doubt she could overcome him. He seems so frail, like a bundle of sticks, but it is easier to lead than to drag. She cannot understand why Burr wants him, cannot understand why he refers to Lewis as “the next.” But it is not her job to defy or question. It is her job to deliver, as if he were a parcel. She will deliver Lewis, and then Burr will make good on his promise. Everyone else is expendable.

  It hurts to swallow. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to turn her neck one way but not the other. Sometimes she wakes up to a line of ants trundling up her shoulder to taste the wound. It feels like a hot stone is lodged there, as if she could nudge it loose with a cough or a finger. But if she does cough—if she sucks in a lungful of dust or woodsmoke—something bursts and blood or pus fills her hand.

  If she really tried, if she kept her voice a whisper, she could probably talk. But she won’t. This way—with the doctor treating her for a slight fever and wrapping her scabbed-over wounds with bandages—she remains the victim instead of a threat. She is the one hurt, not the one who would hurt. They have so many questions, but her answers can only be few when scratched out on paper or in the sand, agonizingly slow.

  Burr warned her. He said that Gawea might face resistance. He said that Lewis would not come alone. He said that others would want to chase what she promised—water, civilization—and she would do well to treat them not as an impediment but as a tool. They might slow her down, but so might they prove useful, offering protection and even camaraderie, neither of which she felt she needed. She can protect herself, and she prefers to be alone. She has always been alone, even in the company of others. She is alone now, though they do their best to engage her. It’s the questions that bother her, the constant questions. Some of them logistical: “How many people live in this town you mention, Astoria?” “How about in Oregon?” “In the Pacific Northwest, in the country?” “How does your money work?” “Does everyone speak the same language?” “Where will we live?” “What do people eat?” And some of them poetic: “Will you tell me about the mountains?” “What songs do people sing?” “What does the ocean smell like?” “What does fish taste like?”

  And then there is the boy, York, always goofing for her, trying to catch her eye. He rode past her while doing a handstand on his saddle. He juggled three knives along with a chop carved from a javelina’s rump and by the time he finished, it was carved into bite-size pieces that fell neatly on a plate. Sometimes she can’t help herself. Sometimes she snorts a laugh. And when she does, he is only encouraged, saying, “Oh! Look, everyone! Of all the unknown wonders in this new America, I am most in awe of this: our girl actually smiled!”

  They watch her. They are suspicious of her, she knows, but they are more suspicious of the world. She tries to keep as still and silent as possible, and then their attention is drawn to a groaning wind turbine, a dead forest, strange splay-toed tracks, a deer carcass opened up and scattered into a thirty-foot orbit.

  And they are suspicious of each other, too. They seem wary of Lewis. And they seem worried about the doctor, whether she can keep up. And they seem disturbed by the fact that Reed is fucking Clark. Sometimes this happens quietly, deep in the night, with sighs, shifting fabric, the moist meeting of mouths, and sometimes more obviously, during the day, in an outbuilding within earshot of the group. They are not in love. That is clear. They don’t stare at each other fondly, hold hands, rub each other’s shoulders or feet. The sex seems almost accidentally cathartic, like someone picking up a stone to exercise with or stumbling across a flower to sniff. Clark constantly questions and belittles Reed, and he testily responds that he knows what he is doing and will she lay off already? But they are united, even if only physically, and that alignment makes people nervous. A joining of power, a sharing of secrets.

  It could be Gawea won’t have to kill them. It could be they’ll be killed all on their own, maybe by each other.

  * * *

  Wherever they stay the night, they raid the area for supplies. One time, inside a steel-roofed log home, they find a table still set for dinner and pajamas laid out on the beds, but no bodies anywhere, as though the people who once lived there dissolved into dust. Another time, they find a television in the corner of the living room, the glass knocked from it, the electronic guts ripped out and replaced by dolls and action figures arranged in a still life. Clark stares at it for a long while, as if expecting them to animate and entertain her, but they remain still, entombed in their dark box, and she can’t help but think maybe this is the world, no matter where or how far they ride.

  “I thought we would have found something by now,” Reed says and kicks the television, and a few of the dolls fall over.

  “Like what?” Clark says.

  “Something better.”

  She reaches into the broken television and rearranges the fallen figures. “We’ll find it.”

  “Will we?”

  “I don’t want to hear questions like that. Neither does anybody else. Okay? We need hope right now, not doubt.”

  There is a cocoon of soiled blankets on the floor and the back porch is full of garbage—canned food and cereal boxes with their tops torn open. Lewis asks, “Does someone live here?” and Clark says, “I don’t see how that’s possible,” but then they find a plastic mop bucket splattered with shit that still smells and they go silent for a long minute before Lewis asks if they should press on and stay somewhere else. But they have already unsaddled and brushed down their horses, and the sun has set, and the night is so monstrously dark, its star-sprinkled blackness absent of any moon.

  They sleep instead in the cavernous pole barn, which stinks of hydraulic oil, and Clark volunteers to take the first watch. She pinches her thigh, slaps her cheek lightly, takes deep breaths, but their days are so long and she can’t keep from falling asleep. She wakes hours later. The moon has risen and its light streams in the window and gives the floor a glow, as if a sheet of fog lowered while they slept. She studies the space around her. A snowmobile with a tarp thrown over it, a four-wheeler with sunken tires still caked with mud, a Farmall tractor, a manure spreader, a planter, a combine the size of a dragon, and finally a grain truck with tires as tall as she.

  She knows something must have woken her and she listens to the breathing all around her until she discerns a noise different from the rest, a damp smacking, like a foot working its way out of mud. She unholsters her revolver and approaches the barn door and cracks it open and finds one of their horses dead and a bent-backed wild-haired figure lowered over it, ripping into it, feasting. She fires at him, once, twice, three times, until Reed grabs her and says, “Enough. He’s dead.”

  He lies on his back, staring at the sky. The man who arranged toys in a dead television is the same man driven wild enough by hunger to bring down a horse. His hair is dreaded with grime and his beard clotted with blood, making him look more beast than man. But underneath all that, he is just like them. She wonders how far away they all are from crossing that line.

  They were on alert when they first departed the Sanctuary, glancing constantly over their shoulders, keeping their fires small at night, sending the owl into the sky to track what lies before and behind them, but they have grown lazy in their habits. Tonight they slept deeply and foolishly and encountered their first realized danger. And it is her fault. She should have stayed awake. She should have taken better care of them—she is responsible for them—and instead of a horse next time it might be her brother.

  They bleed the horse and bottle the blood. They butcher the carcass and cook and salt the meat and ride away from the farm in an arrowhead formation, with Gawea at the point. The air is so hot and brittle, it seems, with every breath, they risk the danger of shattering. The sun rises behind them and their shadows lead the way west, one fewer than before.

  Chapter 11

  EVERYONE CALLS IT the news. The windowless wall, several stories high, next to each of the Sanctuary’s wells. It is the obligation of every citizen to check the n
ews daily. Whatever they need to know—about an execution, rationing, construction, whatever—is painted there, over a whitewashed background, in giant dripping black letters. For those who can’t read, a town crier wanders the streets at dawn, noon, sundown, to shout the same.

  Ella stands in a long line with an empty jug. So long that she reads the news a dozen times or more. NEW CURFEW. HOME BY NIGHTFALL. ENFORCED.

  With no explanation as to why. There never is. Why is irrelevant, Ella knows, to the servant. Why shine shoes, why wash windows, why sweep floors or polish silver or wind clocks? Because someone more powerful than you demands it, and if they tell you to eat shit or crawl on all fours like a dog, you’ll do that too. Because if you don’t, they can hurt you or take away what’s most precious to you, food, water, home, family.

  The people around her mutter their theories and complain about the unfairness and malicious idiocy of it all, but they do so quietly enough that they are not overheard by the deputies who wander up and down the line. Ella grinds her teeth, grinds down what she wants to yell at them all. It’s Lewis’s fault. If they’re looking for a why, there it is. Him. Damn him. He is the reason for the curfew. He is the reason Slade nearly tossed her in a cell. He is the reason she alone is responsible for a museum that feels suddenly like a shed chitinous husk. She can’t not be angry. She hates everyone, and everything is awful. The sun burns down and the wind gusts and the rotor on the turbine spins and eventually she finds herself at the spigot, filling her jug with water so murky she can’t see through it.

  She lugs the water, leaning into its weight, shifting it from one hand to the other. She crosses a stone bridge over a mud-slick sewage canal. She waves her free hand at the blue-black flies that swarm there. They get caught in her hair and crawl on her skin and follow her for a block, and their buzzing matches the noise of the crowd gathered near the museum. She curses the flies and she curses the people, all of them in her way, a bother.