Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“What about her?”

“I would hate it if something had to happen to your mother.”

“Be quiet.”

“Death might actually be a favor. It’s not as if she knows whether—”

“I said, shut up!” With that Lewis kicks the tray and it splashes into the bath and the grubs dirty the water and a small wave rolls into Thomas.

The two men stare at each other for a long moment, and then Thomas’s severe expression breaks and a bright laughter overtakes him. The water ripples around him. “You know what I love about you? I can always count on you to speak your mind. That’s what I love about you.” He climbs out of the bath and water trails off his body and makes a silvery path on the stone floor. He pulls a towel off a shelf and wipes himself dry. He is a short man, the top of his head coming to Lewis’s shoulder. Though he is lean, he is also soft, cushioned, not a bone on his body visible. “You’ve heard about the rider?”

“I have.”

“A girl. Amazing. They say her eyes are as black as night.”

“So they say.”

“She’s a mutant. She’s poison. And when everyone hears about her — when they begin to dream about other worlds and doubt the wall — what then?”

“It has nothing to do with doubting the wall . This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is why the Sanctuary has survived. Hope.”

“You’re wrong. The Sanctuary has survived by keeping people afraid.”

“You’re worried they’ll leave. Maybe they will. Shouldn’t that be their choice?”

“We’re talking about the survival of the human race. Forty thousand people. I am responsible for them.”

“The rider proves there are others. Maybe your responsibility isn’t so great after all.”

Thomas throws the towel over his shoulder and goes to a window and looks out it and heaves a sigh. Lewis joins him there. From this high vantage, in the center of the Sanctuary, so much of the city can be seen, the topography of streets and buildings arranged around the Dome as if they have begun to orbit around a drain.

Thomas lays a damp hand on Lewis’s shoulder and says, “Something bad has been coming for a long time, old friend, and I’m worried it’s finally here.”

OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL a crowd gathers. Their low muttering is like the thrum of a hundred wasps’ wings. Their hats shadow their faces and their expressions twist through a range of emotions — dread, hope, disbelief, curiosity — refusing to settle on a single one. They want to know if the rumors are true. They want to know if a rider has come out of the Dead Lands.

“Is she sick? What if she’s sick? They shouldn’t have let her in.”

“Someone said her eyes were black. Like a doll’s eyes.”

“They shouldn’t have let her in.”

“You know what this means, of course? This means there are others out there. We’re not alone after all.”

“Wherever she came from, it must be worse off than here. Otherwise, why would she leave it? Maybe she’s the first of many. People looking for help when we don’t have help to give. This is the beginning of some trouble; I can feel it. They shouldn’t have let her in.”

Far from all these voices, deep within the hospital, in a stone room with no windows, she sits in a wooden chair. A lantern hangs from a chain and presses the shadows into the corners. Her face is hard-edged, sunbaked. She wears a doeskin vest and leggings, but no shoes, her feet as thick and gray soled as hooves. Her skin is deeply tanned, filthy except where her wounds have been dressed, the dirt and sweat and blood wiped away from her shoulder, her hand, her stomach, wrapped with cotton bandages. Her wrists remain bound. What looks like a white scarf is tied around her throat. A rose of blood blooms from it.

There is a scarred metal table before her. On it Clark sets a bowl of salted sunflower seeds and a mug filled with water murky and warm, but the girl doesn’t seem to mind as she rushes it to her mouth and guzzles it down. Then she sputters and doubles over and brings her hands to her throat, to the place where the arrow pierced her. She does not emit a sound, gritting her jaw through the pain before righting herself and staring at Clark where she leans against the wall and then at Reed, who sits opposite her.

Clark demanded to be here. She berated Reed, calling him a fool, calling him reckless, calling him a failure. To allow this to happen. The arrival of this girl might be the most important thing that has ever happened to the Sanctuary, and he stands by with his mouth hanging open as his men pincushion her with arrows. Clark said she would speak to the girl and he conceded to her then just as he conceded to her in bed, letting her take the lead, telling him where to put what and how fast or slow to move.

Clark will take care of the questions. She will ask them kindly. She will try to make the girl forget about her injuries, and she will try to distract her from thinking about the fate that awaits her. Clark has no doubt that the mayor will isolate the girl, pervert the situation, use her to his advantage. There isn’t much time.

The girl’s eyes, black and empty, seem to look through them. Many in the Sanctuary are born with deformities — cleft lips, stunted legs, misshapen skulls — blamed on the radiation, the same as the cancer that afflicts so many. But Clark has never seen anything like this. The girl appears insectile, as if she were less than or more than human.

“She’s not sick?” Reed says.

Clark says, “Of course she’s not sick. No one’s sick anymore. That’s all in the past. You know damn well that’s just a ghost story meant to keep people afraid.”

“Maybe so, but still, I’m asking. You’re not sick, are you?” He asks this with the half-joking, half-worried tone of someone who says, “You’re not going to kill me, are you?”

The girl shakes her head, no . She cannot speak. Her injured throat makes even breathing difficult.

They lay a sheet of paper and pen before her. She makes no move to pick it up. “Please,” Clark says. “I’m sorry about what happened to you. I’m sorry you’re hurt. Not everyone here is a friend. But I am. And if I’m going to help you, I need to understand why you’re here.”

There is a long pause — punctuated by another please from Clark — and then the girl slowly and clumsily picks up the pen. She can write. Not very well and not very fast, maybe because her dominant hand is injured or maybe because she is unpracticed. Literacy is never a given in this time. Her writing looks like a bird’s scratching, and her eyelashes, bleached from the sun, like little feathers.

Clark asks for her name and she writes, Gawea. Clark asks how far she has come and she writes, Far. Clark asks where she has come from and she writes, Oshen.

Reed says, “Impossible.”

Clark shushes him and then asks the girl where, what part of the ocean, and she writes, Oregon.

Reed shifts in his chair, wanting to say something but holding back.

Clark speaks, with hopefulness rounding her voice, “Describe it.”

Her pen scratches paper. Fish. Lots of rane. Grene gras. Apals. Blakbary. Mowntins.

This is enough to silence them for a long time, the thought of a place where clouds share the sky with the sun, where rain falls every week and fills rivers and lakes darting with trout. The trees weighed down with apples red, green, and gold. Corncobs growing to the size of a man’s forearm. The woods tangled with blackberries, their juices and your blood oozing together as you fill a bucket and gladly risk the threat of thorns.

The girl’s eyes might be alien and remote, but her face is earnest and pleading. She believes in what she is telling them, and that makes Clark want to believe too. It is as if, like some seer, the girl has sketched to life a dream she thought was hers alone.