In the Deadlands
Page 22
It was all
so distant,
so far away.
But on the east
the deadlands was close,
immediate.
It seemed to be so close
that you could step right out of the gondola and onto its hard baked floor.
You could see every detail of its orange and black surface.
so clear,
so solid.
You could see right down into the corrugations of the deadlands floor,
shallow ruts in a mottled orange and black surface.
It was as if it was only a few feet away.
Later, i learned that it was an optical illusion.
What i saw was not the regular corrugations—the ones you notice when you’re on the ground—the ones that catch and grab at your feet.
What it is, is that the deadlands is ridged—corrugated on a gigantic scale. Just as it is corrugated with shallow troughs and crests only a few inches wide, it is also corrugated with great troughs and crests many yards wide,
sometimes many miles wide.
The floor curves so wide and so subtly that you can’t detect it, except from a balloon.
i wonder,
i wonder, if i got down on my hands and knees and looked at the shallow ruts that are beneath my feet right now...
If i looked very carefully at these corrugations,
would i see
even tinier grooves scored within them?
i wonder...
Anyway,
they say that that’s what causes some of the weird things in the deadlands—the wide corrugations.
Things like the horizon being only twenty yards away,
or twenty miles.
i mean, that’s the logical explanation, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
Step...
Step...
Step...
Sometimes i wonder why they run the deadlands patrols.
i mean, they tell us why, but sometimes i wonder anyway.
i mean, why?
What’s it for?
Sometimes...
i think,
i think, maybe we’re supposed to be sacrifices, sacrifices to the deadlands.
Like, if we’re sacrificed to the deadlands it’ll be appeased for a little while and won’t want more.
So we go into the deadlands, deep into the deadlands, in case it wants us.
and if it doesn’t
then we come out.
i don’t like it. i don’t like it at all.
But i don’t have to like it. i only have to do it.
Step...
Nobody talks.
But then again, there’s little to say.
Step...
Every step scrapes.
scrapes.
scrapes.
There are things in the deadlands.
Oh, they won’t admit it, but there are
things.
You hear stories,
and once in a while a patrol doesn’t come back.
Scrape.
When that happens—when a patrol doesn’t come back—they never admit it. Instead they say that it’s been transferred.
Sometimes, even, they really do transfer a patrol. As if to prove all the others.
Scrape.
But you hear stories.
One patrol is rumored to have found some bodies. They were the bodies of the lost 31st patrol. (That’s one that they admit they lost—they can’t deny that one.)
They say that they were just sitting and staring,
just sitting and staring,
as if they had all died at the same time.
Scrape.
They say that they were perfectly preserved. You could even recognize faces.
They were mummified
like so much irradiated meat.
Scrape.
They left them there.
Later, when they went back, they were gone.
Scrape.
Scrape.
Scrape.
Just the hard-baked and orange-black floor
and the bright empty sky
and the white staring sun.
Step...
Scrape.
i remember,
when i was a kid—before i joined the patrol—we used to have a farm.
It was on the borderlands. On the outermost edge.
It was during one of those times when the deadlands was growing. It had already taken over the eastern part of the farm.
After dinner we used to sit out on the front porch, just me and Pa.
It wasn’t a very big porch, but then it wasn’t a very big house. It was just an old wooden house.
An unpainted gray house.
It never did seem like home to me anyway,
just some place we were living,
probably because the deadlands was so close.
The wood was dead. i mean,
most houses—the wood is alive, you can feel it,
but our house, the wood was different—dead to the touch. The whole house was gray and empty and hollow.
The walls were thin,
thin gray boards.
i guess the deadlands had already gotten to it by then.
Anyway,
we would sit on the porch and look across into the east field.
The deadlands had already taken it over by then,
and it was dying.
The whole east field was dying.
It was brown and starting to turn black,
black . . . with streaks of orange.
Already the ground was hard.
The crop was just a few scraggly ears of brown and dying corn, hardly worth the trouble to pick.
Even if we had, we couldn’t have sold any of it. Nobody will buy anything grown on a borderlands farm.
It has too much of the taste of the deadlands in it.
So Pa and i would just sit and stare at that worthless brown corn.
The deadlands had ignored our fences. It just crossed them like it didn’t matter,
like they weren’t there at all,
and pretty soon they weren’t.
I’d go out there,
and they’d crumble at my touch.
The ground
where the deadlands had touched it
was already different.
Not dead. Not yet—
Just different,
empty.
Hardly even dusty.
Dry, kind of.
We’d lost this field to the deadlands just like we had lost the others,
and probably just like we would lose all the rest.
Pa and i had tried everything.
We’d tried sprays and manures and colored lights and radiations and sonics and prayers
and curses.
But the deadlands just grew into the east field with never so much as a by-your-leave and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
i think that’s what killed Pa,
the deadlands.
i joined the patrol later.
i remember,
when it used to get dark
and we would sit out on the porch,
we would listen.
we’d listen to the deadlands,
just listen.
We’d sit out there on that gray wooden porch and watch as the eastern edge of the world grew dark.
A hot wind would come up out of the deadlands.
It would carry a sound with it.
It was a soft sound,
a faint sound,
and
we'd sit and listen to it.
There was something out there
it had a voice . . .
it sounded like—
a distant chorus,
a choir
singing,
moaning.
. . .it was a mournful sound,
dark and soft,
very faint
and faraway;
floating
just below the horizon,
the dark,
sharp horizon,
. . .something was there,
softly
keening.
Something is still there.
Something is out there.
waiting.
You can hear it
softly
keening to itself.
That’s why i don’t like the deadlands.
The sound it makes.
Pa used to say that it was voices.
Voices of all the people ever lost in the deadlands.
They’re wailing.
They’re far away, but they’re wailing and you can hear them,
softly.
They’re not crying for help either...
They’re calling for you to come join them.
At least, that’s what Pa used to say.
Then he’d take another pull on his pipe and stare off into the east.
The sky would slowly
grow deeper,
and darker
and we’d sit there
listening.
Pa and i would sit on the front porch
every evening,
just looking at the east field
and listening.
Every evening.
We’d sit that way for a long time,
till long after the sun had slipped down behind us
and it became too dark to see.
After a while,
i’d get up from where i sat on the steps and i’d kiss Pa good night.
His face was rough and stubbly with whiskers. That’s what I remember about him. His face was rough and stubbly.
Then i’d go upstairs and go to bed.
i’d slip into a thin cotton nightshirt and then between the dry dusty sheets and i’d try to sleep.
i’d lay there feeling very thin and very cold . . . and very naked and alone.
That’s when the deadland would moan its loudest.
i remember,
lying in bed,
trying to sleep on a night
and the wailing would come out of the deadlands like all the souls in Hell.
That’s how Pa would describe it.
Like all the souls in Hell.
Far off loud
and insistent,
a soft and empty
calling
sound,
waiting,
below the horizon.
After a while Pa would come up to bed.
We only had the one bed.
Pa would sleep on his side and i’d sleep on my side. Actually, it was Ma’s side, but
Ma hadn’t used it in a long time.
Ma followed a calf out into the deadlands one day.
Leastways, that’s what Pa said when i asked.
i was too small to remember and Pa never told me any more than that.
Anyway,
after a while Pa would come up to bed.
i wouldn’t say anything.
He always tried to be quiet because he thought i was asleep,
and i’d always try to be quiet because. . .
well, just because.
i guess i didn’t want him to think i was scared.
Once, though...
it was a long time ago...
once,
when the deadlands was particularly loud,
Pa got into bed...
(and the bedsprings creaked)
i was shivering
and i guess whimpering a little bit too.
Pa put his arms about me and drew me close.
He held me that way for a long time.
A long long time.
Like he was protecting.
i could feel the warmth of his strong old hands about me
i felt...funny...
like...
like...
like for once, i was a part of Pa.
i am.
i am a part of Pa.
And something else,
i’m a part of Ma too.
i guess that was why he held onto me for such a long time.
Because i’m a part of Ma too, and i was all he had left of her.
After a while he pulled away from me,
moved over to his own side of the bed.
i fell asleep with the deadlands ringing in my ears.
The whole house would moan with it...
Like Pa said,
Like all the souls in Hell.
If there is a Hell.
If there is a Hell, i’m not afraid of it.
Not after growing up with the deadlands.
Not after growing up with the gnawing fear that one night while i would be lying in bed asleep and helpless, the deadlands might just decide to grow a little bit and take over the house and everything in it,
and then the next time the deadlands wailed,
it would be wailing with my voice too.
The deadlands is growing you know.
Oh, they won’t admit it. They say that it’s only pulsing.
You know,
sometimes it gets bigger,
sometimes it gets smaller.
i don’t believe it.
Neither does anybody else who lives on the borderlands.
Maybe it does get smaller,
but then when it gets bigger again,
it gets a whole lot bigger.
Already, it’s taken over where our farm used to be.
The house isn’t there any more,
but i know where it was,
and it’s not there any more.
They tell me that I’m wrong.
They say that that’s not where the farm was.
The farm was farther north,
and it’s still there.
But they’re scared.
They don’t want to admit that one night the house just
disappeared.
Melted away.
Nothing left.
No house.
No fences.
No fields.
Nothing.
Just the deadlands a little closer than before.
Step...
Scrape.
Deeper now in the deadlands,
following the ruts.
The corrugations here are so even one can follow them for miles.
That’s how we know where we are in the deadlands. We can’t use a compass.
Compasses don’t work in the deadlands.
it’s like they’re dead. . .
lost all their magnetism,
or something.
So,
we use the ruts as a guide.
If we pick a starting point on the borderlands edge
and then follow one of the grooves in the deadlands floor,
we can almost always be sure that we are somewhere in the deadlands along that certain line.
If we start somewhere else and follow another rut, then we know that we are somewhere along that line.
And that’s about as much as anyone ever knows.
i mean, about where they are in the deadlands.
Step...
Scrape.
i hope that this one will be uneventful. This patrol, i mean. i hope we don’t find anything.
i’ve been lucky so far. i’ve never been on a patrol where they found anything, but i’ve heard stories.
i heard one story...
about—
But it’s supposed to be just a story.
i don’t know.
We’re probably five-six miles into the deadlands now.
We’re supposed to go as far as we can.
The commander wants to make twenty today.
Step...
Scrape.
Man shouldn’t be alone with his thoughts too long.
Least not in the deadlands anyway.
He starts thinking too many things.
About himself.
About his buddies.
i’ve heard about guys ou
t in the deadlands who have just turned and walked away from their patrols,
just stepped right over the horizon and disappeared
with never a word to their buddies
and nobody even noticed.
One patrol
didn’t notice until they had gotten out of the deadlands altogether
that their commander was no longer with them.
He’d wandered out by himself a few days before.
Step. . .
Scrape.
The orange-black floor,
the while staring sun,
the deep dark sky.
Step. . .
Scrape.
Best to stay in a group in the deadlands.
Safer.
Thought about the City again.
City!
Not big, but the biggest i’ve ever seen.
i had forty-eight hours leave there when i finished training,
before i was assigned to the patrol.
Had my first woman in the City.
Did not enjoy it.
No stimulation.
The guys say i did not miss
anything.
There’s talk about the deadlands patrol,
about what it does to you.
They say it kills your drive.
When i say they, i don’t mean the other guys in the patrol.
i mean other patrols.
Not deadlands patrols.
Other patrols.
Guys in the deadlands patrol don’t talk about it
i heard stories when i first joined the patrol.
The deadlands kills the sex urge.
The deadlands keeps you from enjoying a woman.
Could prove it by me.
Could prove it by this patrol.
Rarely hear guys talking about girls.
No pinups in barracks either.
No regulations against it. Just no pinups.
When i was younger, i heard that the greatest sensation in the world was being with a woman.
i don’t believe it.
The greatest sensation in the world is sleep.
Much more satisfying.
Especially sleep with no dreams.
Dreams are disturbing.
Step...
Scrape.
Twenty-three men.
Commander and eleven “two”s.
Carl—my other half—is new to this patrol.
So am i.
We are the next to last “two” in the troop.
We say nothing to each other.
i would like to talk to Carl.
In the barracks anyway.
Have nothing to say to him though.
So i say nothing.
Step...
Scrape.
The deadlands makes you feel
more
More intense.
Now,
i feel more of one thing than i have felt since Pa died.
i feel alone.
Step...
Scrape.
i do not like the deadlands,