The Dead Lands

by Benjamin Percy

  He stares hatefully at her.

  Sasa asks for his name and he tells her Jon Colter.

  “Why are you smiling, Jon Colter?”

  “I’m not,” he says. “There’s something wrong with my face.”

  “What’s wrong with your face?”

  “A wolf bit it.” He looks around, as if seeking escape. “Whatever you think we did, we didn’t. We didn’t do anything to any of you.”

  She raises her eyebrows and tells him with a placid voice, “You killed our parents. You killed our husbands and our sisters and our brothers. You killed our children.”

  “No.” He laughs, but in an ugly way. “No, no, no. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care who you are.”

  “Why else would you come here? A place this cold. A place this sick.” When she stands before a crowd, her voice takes on the same rhythms as that of the seer in her village. “Fires burn on the horizon. Ash falls from the sky. No one comes here. This is a place for no one.”

  “You’re here.”

  “To hide. From you. But you’ve found us.”

  He is smiling now. Really smiling, showing all his teeth. “Listen to me. We came from St. Louis. We’re passing through—”

  She laughs and automatically several of the girls laugh along with her.

  The smile dies from half his face. The humor in the situation belongs to her. “What’s so funny?”

  The fire barrels cough up sparks. Sasa nods and the guard takes a knife to the rope that binds his wrist to his thigh. He flexes his hand and looks around him as if seeking a way out.

  She tells him to remove his clothes, and when he refuses, she tells her girls to do it for him, tearing off his boots, his pants, dragging him out of his coat and knifing off his shirt, until he stands naked and trembling before them. His body is a mess of scars that seem to whiten as his skin pinkens in the cold. He would cross his arms if he could, but as is, he can only clutch his middle one-handed.

  Sasa studies his body and says, “You look like you’ve been chewed up and spit out.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Here’s how this will work. I’m going to give you a head start of thirty seconds.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “And then I’m going to come after you.”

  “Even if I outrun you, I’ll freeze.”

  “You look like you’re accustomed to surviving.” She makes a shooing motion with her hands. “One,” she says. “Two, three, four, five,” and before she can count six, he has leapt off the stage, knocked aside tables, padding away.

  Sasa continues to count aloud in a calm voice that matches her movements as she steps off the stage and retrieves her bow and quiver and walks down the corridor that leads to the entry.

  The women follow her into the half-light of day. The air is bracingly cold. The clouds boil. The horizon burns. An ice storm has coated everything so that it appears as slick as glass. In the distance, almost halfway across the vast open parking lot, Colter races away from them. He keeps his steps short and his good arm outstretched for balance. He falls twice but does not pause, scrambling up to bolt forward again. His buttocks redden. His breath chimneys from his mouth.

  She hears a few of her girls say, “Don’t” and “Let him go, Sasa,” but she doesn’t listen. She has to be strong for all of them. She has to expel the hurt stored inside her.

  She pinches an arrow from her quiver and notches it into the string and lifts it to her eye and says, “Thirty.”

  * * *

  Simon and Ella expect a visit from Danica, but she doesn’t come for several days, and when she does, she is limping, she has a fat lip, and one of her eyes is plum purple, swollen so badly, revealing only a weepy slit. She tries to mask it with makeup. And she tries to walk without wincing.

  She comes through the side door, into the kitchen, and Simon pulls out a chair for her at the table and she settles into it with a sigh. She wears a foul, rotten cloak so as not to be recognized, and he helps her out of it and hangs it on a hook and asks her if she needs anything and she says no. When he remains beside her, hovering, leaning into her as if she were a flower, she waves him away.

  Ella can’t help but feel instantly annoyed. Annoyed by Simon, the way he behaves around her, like a cowed pet. And annoyed by Danica, not for anything she has said or done, just for existing. She cannot help it. She has always found pretty women—the kind who seem to waste time in front of the mirror, who seem to serve no purpose outside of lounging and preening—to be trifling, pathetic, even foul, like dead songbirds with maggots nesting inside their bright breasts. But when Danica rubs her knee, in obvious pain, Ella grudgingly allows her annoyance to give way to concern and asks, “What’s happened?”

  “He’s angry. That’s what happened.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. I’m glad he’s angry. He’s angry because he’s worried.” Her hand rises from her knee to her thigh, where she keeps her dagger beneath her dress. She fingers it and her mouth twitches with a smile. She says she knows what they’re wondering. They’re wondering, if she hates her husband so much, why not poison him? That is the woman’s way, isn’t it? Poison. She has considered it. Of course she has considered it. These days, he has grown more and more paranoid, and before he would sip his wine, before he would knife into a steak, he made his chef or server—or sometimes even Danica—taste everything.

  Every s she utters takes a little too long to get out of her mouth, so that her sentences sound like a spitting fuse. Ella can’t tell if it’s the swollen lip or some pain-relieving opiate that causes this.

  Besides, Danica says, poisoning him, killing him, would accomplish little beyond her temporary satisfaction. She might get away with it or she might get caught. And then? Someone else would take his place of power and similarly abuse it.

  Ella cannot help but wonder about her, cannot help but feel this woman is more than she appears. There is something far more substantial and dangerous about her. She is like the blade she carries. A blade is rigid and cold and sharp. A blade is a decoration. A blade is a tool. A blade is a threat.

  In a cold voice, carefully enunciating each word, Danica tells them her reason for coming now: she has a plan—and the plan concerns them, and the plan could kill them, if they aren’t careful. But if it works, and it just might, then an uprising will come that the deputies will not be able to quell.

  “Go ahead, then. What is it?”

  “My dear husband,” she says, “has decided to throw a ball.”

  “Who’s he going to throw it at?” Simon says.

  Ella says, “She means a party, you idiot.”

  “A party,” Danica says. “A costume party no less. With cheeses and meats and sweet liquors and desserts and everything else one might consider far too extravagant for these thin times. And he plans to invite everyone who matters, who has any influence. Just as he believes in terrorizing those who defy him, he believes in spoiling those who would support him.” She brings a hand to the corner of her swelled eye. “If there was a time for us to do something, it would be then, wouldn’t you agree?”

  * * *

  The first arrow misses, sailing to the left of Colter and embedding itself in the ice. The second arrow, too, skitters past him. The third arrow might have struck its mark if not for Clark.

  The crowd of girls did not notice her when they charged out of the mall. Nor did they notice the gone guard, no longer at her post. They were too intent on the naked figure sliding jerkily across the ice-scalloped parking lot.

  So when the woman named Sasa falls forward with an arrow nested in the back of her skull, when they spin around to see Clark standing there with another arrow notched, they can only stare dumbly. They are pale and thin and quivering and bent backed. No longer a mob, just a bunch of lost little girls. Then one of them asks, in the smallest of voices, “What have you done?”

  Two of the girls hug each other. One of them—the only old woman among them—whisper
s into a dead phone. The others look around as if to wait for a command that never comes.

  “Anyone else want any trouble?”

  The girls shake their heads or study the ground, no threat to her. She lowers her bow and calls out for Colter, tells him to come back.

  Then she settles her eyes on the girls and asks them where the rest of her friends are and they point to the mall and she says, “Show me.”

  Chapter 40

  FOR DECADES NOW, in the Sanctuary’s Fourth Ward, you didn’t want to walk around at night unless you were looking for trouble. Something to snort, someone to fuck or fight. Every morning, the first bell rang and the sun chased away the night and revealed the bodies. The bodies of those beaten and stabbed and the bodies of those who choked on their own puke and the bodies of those who decided enough was enough and dove out a window or fell on a knife. In the heat, they bloated and festered, attracted rats and vultures, spread disease. So the Sanctuary authorized a cleanup team. The gatherers, they were called, mostly teenagers without a trade looking for some coin. When she was thirteen years old, Clark joined them. Mornings, a donkey pulled a cart and she hauled the bodies into it, with an apron and elbow-length gloves and a bandana shielding her nose and mouth. She came to associate this color—the ashen color of early morning—with grief. Grief was a color.

  And that is the color of this place, North Dakota, and that is the color of her current state of mind.

  By the time Lewis finds her, she is already drunk. They have given her what she asked for—a drink, a real drink—a jar of moonshine derived from tree bark. She gulps from it, her thirst returned. This is on the roof of the mall, where her legs dangle over the edge, her body hunched over in the shape of a hook.

  Lewis approaches and touches her gently on the back. “I was worried about you.”

  “Was?”

  “Am.”

  “Yeah? You should worry about yourself.” She stiffens and his hand falls off her.

  “York?” he says.

  She shakes her head and drinks and roughs a sleeve across her mouth.

  For a long minute they stare off at the ice-humped city and the furnace glow of the oil fires beyond it. She drinks again from the jar. Her eyes waver in and out of focus. “Hey, have you ever noticed something?” She licks her lips as if her mouth has gone too dry for words. “Have you ever noticed how my head is different shaped? How one side of my face looks different than the other?”

  “No.”

  “It’s true. Look.” She turns her head one way, then the other, arranging her face into a scowl. Her breath is sour. “See?”

  “No.”

  “It’s true. You’ve just got to look closer. One side is kind of pretty. You’re not supposed to say that about yourself, but I’ll say it. Okay? I’ll say it. I’m pretty. But not the other side! The other side, if you look at it on its own, is ugly.” She slaps a hand to her face in order to shade the one side of it. Maybe he can see it now. The drooping cheek. A broader ridge of forehead. The slight bulge of the eye, a little more lid around it. “I’m like two different people.”

  The wind gusts and carries bits of ice in it. She wobbles on her perch before catching her balance, spilling some of her drink.

  “You should come down from there.”

  “Didn’t I say to worry about yourself?”

  She looks at him with her red-rimmed eyes. In these long wordless seconds, during which time they stare painfully at each other, he wants to tell her how sorry he is about her brother. He doesn’t usually say things like that—sorry or thank you or please or any common pleasantry; it just doesn’t occur to him—but he knows he ought to. Sorry might be the medicine she needs. He wants to tell her how much he admires her fearlessness and impulsiveness, how he has learned from her, grown into a better man by her example. He wants to tell her he not only worried about her last night—he missed her, too, as if he were a lizard dragged from the sun, so that he felt enervated without her around, sour and cold-blooded. He wants to tell her he needs her. They all do. He gathers his breath, but before he can blow out the words, she says, “I’m a killer.”

  “You—”

  “I killed that woman outside. I killed my own brother. I killed Reed. I killed them all. I might kill you next, who knows? This was my idea, coming here. It was a stupid, deadly idea. And we’re all worse off for it.”

  “Stop it. Don’t be so self-pitying. It doesn’t become you.”

  “Do you know what I feel like right now?” Her voice comes sliding out of her like sharpened steel. “I feel like eating you.”

  “Clark—”

  “I feel like eating the whole world. Shoving all the metal and concrete and wood and bone and meat into my mouth until there is nothing left.”

  “You need to rest. You’ll feel better once you rest.”

  “I killed her, Lewis.”

  “You did what you had to do. She was going to kill Colter.”

  “I don’t mean her.”

  It takes him a moment to process this. “Then who?”

  “Her.”

  “Her who?”

  “Your mother, Lewis. I killed her. So that you would come with us.”

  The world seems to dim. The sky seems to sag. The wind rises and slaps his face. He waits for the anger to come—he knows it is there, inside him, waiting to catch flame—but for the moment there is only a sick feeling, a green-tinged sadness. He opens his mouth, but no words will come.

  “Go away, Lewis. Before I hurt you more than I already have.”

  When he makes no move to leave, she says, “Go!” in what sounds like a half howl.

  * * *

  Now Lewis is running, pounding along as fast as he can, sliding, occasionally falling, but always scrambling to his feet, always moving, away from the world he thought he knew and into the world he does not. Snow kicks up beneath his heels. Though the air is cold, his throat burns with exertion. The mall is behind him, like a great tomb, and he races away from it. He can feel the rage growing, growing, so that his inside feels bigger than his outside. And he is so hot, not just his breathing now, but his head, his skin, the core of him furnaced. He could tear off his clothes, eat snow.

  With this comes that familiar feeling—of the sky opening up to watch him. He can sense it homing in on his dodging figure, and he knows he cannot escape it. Above him the clouds begin to twirl, as if spun with a spoon, and he hears the kind of crackling sound that comes from thick wool socks sliding across a rug.

  The parking lot reaches on endlessly. No matter how furiously he pumps his legs, the edge of it seems to grow no closer. He sees the vapor of his breath. He sees the ground, thickly floored with ice. He sees the flicker of light gathering in the sky, where the clouds darken and churn and foment, as the anger spills out of him and takes hold of the world.

  The air around him seems to sparkle. He listens for thunder but hears only the panicked gusting of his breath. He tries to run faster, but the lightning stops him midstride. It shoots from the sky and spears him, jags through his body like a second spine. Several more bolts join the first, like so many whips lashing at him, their barbs caught in his skin, filling him with painful light.

  He wakes naked. His clothes are ashes curled away by the wind. His hair has scorched and brittled, and when he runs his hand across his belly, his eyebrow, his head, it crisps away. He is purely skin, his body as white and rigid as alabaster.

  He lies on his back, staring up at a night sky that looks like holes punched through black cloth, the biggest of them the moon. The moon! How he has missed it, as shadowed and pale as a favorite grandfather’s face. For a long time this is all he sees, his vision absorbed by the sky, so that he might as well be floating through space.

  There is no sound except a distant ring, like the single undying chime of a silver bell. He sits upright and takes in a world he recognizes, but not quite. Here is the parking lot, but it is crowded with cars. Here is the mall, but it is glowing with light. A woma
n in a red coat approaches, carrying shopping bags weighted with clothes. A man carries a girl on his shoulders. A couple walk arm in arm, laughing at a joke he cannot hear. The woman pauses to cough, and the cough overwhelms her, bending her over and spasm­ing her body, and the man rubs her back to comfort her.

  The headlights on a truck flare beside him—and he stands in a hurry, spotlighted.

  The truck does not seem to see him, rolling from its spot, and he darts out of the way. He calls out to the woman in the red coat, but she does not look his way, digging into her purse and removing a silvery flash of keys. He grabs her then, presses his thumb deeply into the basin of her elbow, and though she frowns, she does not pause. He releases her as she pulls away.

  All around him, he now notices, lights glow, a galaxy of light. Stoplights, streetlamps, headlights, billboards, signage over stores and the windows beneath them. The starlit sky above cannot compare.

  Lewis wonders if he is caught in a dream, even as he knows he is not. He is perfectly awake and cannot escape or manipulate what surrounds him, slash a hand through it and make it ripple like water. Yet like a dream, he goes along with whatever presents itself, in this case, a black tunnel toward the edge of the parking lot, the only break he can find in this weird-familiar world. A tunnel of trees, all the trunks leaning inward, arched and raftered with branches silvered with snow.

  He moves through its darkness and the darkness moves through him. It is comforting. Familiar. Deep. Timeless. He walks the passage, not cold, not at all, despite his bare feet padding the frosted ground. The sound grows louder, more painful, the farther he travels. Instead of a bell it is now a knife in his ear. It warps and solidifies into a word, his name. A voice calls for him. Burr’s. He does not want to go forward but feels pulled there as if down an inhaling throat. A branch scratches his arm. Shadows shift among the trees, pacing him.