The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  Dawn comes. There is a soft knock. The knob rattles. She hurries from her chair and yanks open the door and hisses, “Where have you been?” Her eyes take a moment to adjust to the light, blinking through a red haze, and then she makes sense of what she sees: Simon standing before a hooded figure.

  “What’s this?” Ella says, her whole body suddenly numb. “What’s happened?”

  Simon drops his eyes and lifts his shoulders in a shrug. Ella looks to the figure for answers. The hood holds a shadow, the face lost to it. “I’m supposed to just let you in?” Ella says, and Simon says, “Do it, please,” and she steps aside to accommodate them, then checks the alley before closing and bolting the door.

  She doesn’t know what to do. She alternately wants to smack Simon and smash him into her chest as if to smother him with her heart. But before she can act on either impulse, the figure pulls back her hood, revealing the white-blond hair and sharply cut face of Danica Lancer.

  There is a held breath of a moment before Danica says, “Let’s sit down, everyone.”

  They gather at a table in the corner of the kitchen. Simon and Ella sit on one side and Danica on the other. “We certainly have a lot to talk about.” She looks at them and talks to them as a mother would her disobedient children. Ella knows that Danica wants them to feel that way, as children, because children do as they are told. Lewis would do the same to Ella and she would not tolerate it then and she will not tolerate it now. She crosses her arms and pinches her mouth into a frown.

  Danica says, “No one knows I am here, and no one will know I was here, so long as we all understand each other.”

  The second bell is ringing. The day is brightening, beginning to heat up. Sweat dots their temples. Danica reaches below the table then and withdraws a black dagger like a nightmarish piece of cutlery. “You must realize how complicated this situation is.”

  Ella has a biting way of speaking when she says, “I realize that very well, thank you.”

  “I am grateful to you for delivering the letter, but I am worried about you too.” Danica runs the blade along her arm, tracing its bare length, pausing a moment in the pale hollow of her elbow, continuing to the snaked veins of her wrists, across her palm, to the very tip of her middle finger, where she scrapes away some sand embedded beneath the nail. “You know things about me you shouldn’t. You know things about me that could get me killed.”

  “We’re even, then,” Ella says. “You know things about us could do the same.”

  Danica’s eyes narrow. Ella knows what’s going on behind them. Danica believes, as a rule, women want to be her, and because they cannot, they choose to hate her. She knows Ella hates her and hate is a great motivator for foolish behavior. Ella tries to release some of her hate by turning to Simon and saying, “You said you could be quiet as a cat. You said you could sneak in and out of there like a shadow.”

  He wilts with every word, his posture conveying his apology.

  Danica says, “Where do we go from here, children?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The boy says Lewis asked you to spread news of their success.”

  Ella stabs Simon with her elbow. “Are you an idiot? Do you want to die? Why did you tell her that?”

  He does not respond except to shrink even further into his chair and look at her sidelong.

  “He had a blade on him. He didn’t have much of a choice.” Danica twirls the dagger in her palm, spinning it like a clock dial. She wants them to look at it, to acknowledge the power and the slicing threat of it, but Ella refuses, keeping her gaze steady.

  Danica says, “In these desperate times, it’s hard to know how people will respond to that kind of information. If they learned that there was water—if they knew the expedition had traveled safely to it—they might do nothing. Or they might do something. Something dramatic. Fiery.”

  Ella shifts in her seat but keeps her face flat with seeming dis­interest. “Fiery?”

  “Would you like to start a fire? I think we can help each other start a fire. This city is dry enough that it should burn right up.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand, dear?”

  “Your husband is the mayor. Why would you want to threaten his power?”

  She slams the dagger into the table, where it hums upright like an exclamation mark. “Because I hate him.”

  Chapter 34

  IT HAS BEEN a long time since Lewis saw the moon. How long, he doesn’t know, because its cratered face is his clock and calendar. Ever since they crossed into North Dakota, ever since the oil-black clouds thickened, they have been cut off from its rhythms, lost in time. The new moon is when it is darkest, when its surface is shadowed. In myth, in folklore, in witchcraft, it is associated with death. Since they are living in a world absent light, they are living in a permanent new moon. They are living with death, Reed’s.

  The ground is frozen, so they don’t bother to bury the body except with a gray mound of snow. No one utters any words—except for Lewis, who says they ought to carry on. He believes they are a half day’s hike from Bismarck. “That’s something to look forward to, isn’t it?” He is not the type to utter hopeful phrases, but Clark has gone silent and he feels the need to serve as her mouthpiece, lift their spirits and pressure them onward.

  They trudge on and they can see so little, with the snow ripping up and down, left and right, a swirling vertiginous gray-black blur. And they can hear even less, with the wind gusting and the snow making a constant patter against their hoods and hats.

  Finally they decide to stop and build a shelter, an igloo. When they shove and pack the snow, it molds nicely to their liking. They build it up into head-high walls, making a half circle that connects to the downed tree. Enough room for all of them, but barely. They use the branches as rafters. And hack down more to drape over the open sections of ceiling so that they can shingle it with snow.

  For ventilation, they punch a hole in the center of the ceiling and six more in the walls, each of them small enough to fit a fist through. The air grows instantly warm from their breathing and the small fire. The walls go blue and slick, melting and freezing into a lacquer. In the dim light, they strip off their hats and mittens and scarves. One by one, they curl up their bodies and shut their eyes, exhausted by the cold. The doctor takes the first watch.

  * * *

  She leans against the wall and warms up with her pipe. She lights it, and then dozes off, and lights the bowl again. She has seated herself next to one of the ventilation holes. Now and then she rises to her knees and peers out of it but sees only a thick veil of snow.

  She plops down and studies Clark. Her eyes shudder and her body twitches. Even when dreaming, she cannot stay still. The doctor wishes she could get closer. Comb her fingers through that red hair, over and over, to clear away the burrs and tangles, to massage her scalp, to help calm her. She is so tense, like a body stiffening with death, and the doctor understands why. Clark is the reason they have made it this far, and if they make it any farther, it will be because of her. She, the dear girl, feels responsible for them all. And that responsibility must be sickening. Maybe she’ll do better now that Reed is gone, as if he were an excised tumor, a lanced boil. Maybe they’ll all do better now. But for the moment the poor dear is sick with guilt. There was a time when she shared a bed with Reed, and the memory of that connection must be poisoning her now. But she’ll get over it. She’ll heal.

  The doctor lights her pipe again and fills her mouth with smoke. When she exhales, she realizes her smoke is twinned by a cloud of steam above her head. As she breathes out, it breathes in, the gusts storming together near the ventilation hole. By the time she realizes what is happening, it is too late.

  To either side of her, arms stab through the walls, arms bristling with coarse white hair. She begins a scream that is cut short when the arms wrap around her chest and drag her back and leave a rough cavity in the wall through which snowflake
s quietly tumble.

  * * *

  Clark rises on one elbow, still somewhere between waking and dreaming, still seeing Reed, the hopeless look on his face when the gun kicked and the brains coughed out the back of his skull. By the time she realizes what has happened and screams at everyone to arm themselves, it is too late—the walls of the shelter are already crashing inward.

  For a moment a storm of snow obscures the air, buries their bodies. She thrashes her way out in time to see the doctor dragged by the long gray rope of her hair. What has her, Clark cannot say, but there are many of them.

  They are huge and white, ghostly in the snow except for their red tongues and red eyes that appear like flames crushed into tiny caves. Bears, she realizes, loping and bounding in all different directions. Humpbacked, spade faced, their fat trembling beneath their shaggy white coats.

  One dodges toward them. York digs in the snow, unearths a shotgun, fires from the hip, and sends the bear careening into a tree. It bellows, collapses into a heap.

  He empties a shell, loads the breech, fires again, this time in the direction of the doctor. The bear opens its jaws, releases her ponytail, flinching back and whimpering in pain from the wound brightening its shoulder. Then it bolts for the woods. Clark counts four others. Their white hair silvered with snow. Their teeth like the shards of a kicked ice puddle.

  One of them approaches York from behind and knocks him facefirst into the snow, and then turns to face Gawea. She tries to fire a shotgun but finds it jammed with snow and uses it instead as a club. Another bear has the doctor by the forearm, its teeth clamped down, its head shaking back and forth as if to tear her arm from its socket. And another slashes and lunges at Lewis and Colter, who have not grabbed their weapons in time and now swing sticks and fists.

  And the last, creeping toward them, keeps an arm tucked protectively against its chest. Clark sees it is missing a paw—severed, a red nub not fully healed—and remembers her trap in the woods, the scream in the night.

  Now she is the one screaming. Screaming until she doesn’t have any breath. Screaming her brother’s name. Because he lies there, knocked out, half-sunk in a snowbank. He shudders awake only when the bear mashes its mouth into his belly. He throws back his head in a silent cry and grabs its ears and pulls as if to draw the creature more fully inside him.

  Then the bear vises its jaws around his shoulder and lumbers toward the woods, dragging him there and leaving behind a bright red runner of blood.

  Her feet cannot kick fast enough as she pursues them.

  * * *

  Whether it is a knee or a branch or the stock of a rifle, Lewis doesn’t know, but when the shelter collapses and the bears attack, something strikes his temple and slows his mind, muddies his vision. He wobbles when he stands beside Colter. He grips a stick in his hands and swings it wildly when any of the bears draw near. All this seems to happen outside him. His head throbs. His legs feel glass stemmed. Distantly, he hears Clark screaming—and then sees her running for the woods, disappearing between the trees.

  He stares after her, lowers his stick, and at that moment a bear darts forward and knocks him flat. Its weight sinks him into the snow, empties his lungs. He cannot draw a breath. Above him black clouds roil, his vision of them eclipsed by the triangular snout of the thing. It leans in, blasts him with its hot, carrion-reeking breath. He can see down the tunnel of its throat, the place he will soon travel, the last of this journey.

  He closes his eyes, waiting for the worst. But the worst doesn’t come. He hears a guttural roar that heightens into a shriek. Then the bear’s head thuds into his breast. Its body slumps onto him. He pokes at it, shoves at it. He can barely breathe. It does not move—not until Lewis arcs his back, painfully, rolls its three hundred pounds off him.

  His mind is still struggling to keep up. He didn’t hear a gunshot. Colter must have stabbed or struck it dead. However it happened, he is saved for now. He takes a deep, aching breath. Blood flows to places pinched off. He struggles to sit up. “Thank you,” he says to Colter and Colter says, “Don’t thank me.”

  That’s when Lewis sees—in the slack face of the bear—a fletched arrow buried in its eye with blood jellying around it.

  Colter remains stiffly where he stands, as if the wind has frozen him in place, and it is only then Lewis follows his gaze.

  The snow has stopped. He can see now what they could not before. They stand on the outskirts of Bismarck. Only thirty yards away, ice-mantled houses cluster together, the beginnings of a lost neighborhood. In the distance he spies two collapsed sections of freeway—and beyond them, still soaring over the river, a rusted bridge.

  Strangers surround them. Whether men or women, he cannot tell, not at first. They wear stitched gray furs, maybe made from rabbits, coyotes. Their faces are hidden beneath scarves and goggles. Their hands are the only part of them exposed—in order to better grip their bowstrings.

  The bears lie in dead heaps, blotched with blood and quilled by arrows.

  Lewis counts ten strangers, standing beside trees and snow-shrouded bushes, crouched next to cars, motionless. For a moment there is no noise except the wind hissing and their bowstrings creaking.

  Chapter 35

  ELLA DOESN’T TRUST Danica, but you can’t trust a dagger either. You can use it skillfully, keep its point and edge away from your skin, or you can be harmed by it. So she’ll do as Danica requested, as Lewis requested. She’ll make some noise.

  They leave when darkness cloaks the city, when curfew begins and everyone settles into sleep. They wear black pants, black shirts, mash spit and charcoal into a paste and smear their faces and hands, working together. Ella isn’t letting Simon out of her sight, not after what happened last time. She’s not as careless as Lewis. She won’t abandon those closest to her.

  “Worried about me, are you?” Simon says. “I like that.”

  “I just don’t want you to screw things up again.”

  The streets are dark and dead. They slide from alleyways to doorways, moving as quietly as they can from every pool and wedge of shadow. The moonlight feels like a spotlight. Their skin bristles with fear and excitement. They go still whenever they hear a noise—a rat scurrying, a snore spiraling from an open window—and then move on.

  When the city council wishes to share some announcement—about the curfew, rations, a death march—they paint it in black capital letters across the windowless wall that rises beside each of the Sanctuary’s wells. Simon and Ella will do the same. They will write the news.

  They make the paint out of chalk, linseed oil, glue, beets. They carry it in canteens stashed in backpacks with pans and brushes. They have enough for only one well. And they do not have time to whitewash the current notice, wait for it to dry, before slopping out their own message. The beets stain their paint red: the color of anger, the color of danger, the color of the fire Danica said she wanted to spread. They will slop it over the top of whatever is written there already.

  A deputy guards the well. They can see him now, walking in slow circles around the stanchion of the wind turbine. The blades rotate and cast spinning shadows and make a rusty, grinding music. Simon isn’t worried about being heard over the top of them, but he is worried about being seen. If they can only get up the ladder, into the shadow of the wall, he thinks they’ll remain un­detected.

  He hurls a rock across the square. It sizzles through the air before finally striking a storefront awning made out of a sheet of metal. The sound startles the guard and he marches toward it with his hand at the grip of his machete. Simon tosses another rock—even farther—guiding the guard down an alley.

  They scurry then to the wall, invisible in the shadow of it. There are two rebar ladders built into either side of it. They hurry to glug out their canteens, fill their pans, tuck their brushes into their belts, and climb.

  * * *

  At dawn, after the first bell rings, after the sun brightens and warps the horizon like hammered gold, people begin to l
ine up for water. They are thirsty, and they are hungry, too, and they are ready for good news. They are ready for the giant red letters slashed across the wall near the well. LEWIS AND CLARK, the message reads, CANOE RIVERS AND SEND HOPE. A brief, bright message. Some people laugh and point their fingers. Others frown and wonder aloud whether it is true—how could it possibly be true?—and whether they dare believe. They share the words with those who can’t read. Some are so excited they depart the line without filling their jugs. By the time the sun lightens the wall, two deputies have climbed the ladders to whitewash over what they call graffiti. But they cannot erase words etched already in the mind, words whispered in the streets like a gathering wind that eventually reaches Thomas’s ear.

  Slade delivers the news. He hunts his way through the Dome, looking for Thomas, finally pushing through the double oaken doors and discovering him alone in the council chambers. He wears a sky-blue silk shirt with an open neck and gold stitching along the collar. He sits in the dark, at the head of the empty table, his hands flat on the wood as though he were about to take up his silverware and carve a meal. The windows are shuttered, but bars of light fall across him.

  Thomas appears to be speaking to himself—moving his lips, whispering to an audience of shadows—cut short by Slade clearing his throat.

  Thomas twists in his seat and flickers a smile. “You know I’ve always liked the sound of my own voice.”

  “I’ve been looking for you.” Slade enters the room fully.

  “Bad news, I assume?”