Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“You’re threatening me again?”

“I’m telling you the way things are, old friend.”

* * *

The streets are empty except for dogs lounging in shadows, dust devils that die as they take shape. The wind carries the creak of the turbines and the distant cheers and whistles from the stadium. In an alleyway a figure appears — a woman dressed in the black uniform of the deputies — surveying the street before darting across it like the shadow of a crow. It takes only a moment for her — her face obscured by a black hat and neckerchief — to scale the wall of the museum and slip through an open window.

She pauses in the half-light, her eyes adjusting, taking in her surroundings, an interactive exhibit featuring the games of another era. There are chess- and checkerboards, tables strewn with playing cards and a jigsaw puzzle that comes together into a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, bins full of balls and bats and racquets and mallets, game consoles with slits in their sides and wires tentacling out of them.

She slips out of the room and into a hallway festooned with suits of armor from various ages and regions, some clad in reeds, others in metal, before climbing the stairs, fast but not so fast as to clomp her boots or whine a floorboard, every step a whisper. She glances over her shoulder often and sticks to the shadows.

Here, at the center of the museum, the building rises into a square tower, its highest story consisting of Lewis’s office and living quarters. She pauses on the landing with her head cocked — and then peers over the railing, back the way she came. Voices swirl faintly upward, Lewis and his aide, their voices sharp and bullying — but distant.

She seems confident she is alone now as she starts down the hall and knobs open the door to a room that remains as dim as twilight. The floor is a mess of books. The windows are curtained off, and the sheets of one bed are tidily made, squared and tucked beneath their mattress. The sheets of the other hold down an old woman who smells of lavender and rot and urine, who observes the approaching black-clad figure with one bulging eye. When the figure hovers over her a second before gently pressing a pillow to her face, she does not struggle except to lift a hand, let it shiver and fall.

The owl observes all of this from the night table, its glass eyes trained on the figure who remains hunched over the bed for a long time, long enough for her arms to quake, for her legs to collapse so that she kneels beside the bed as if overcome by a terrible prayer.

A lamp on the wall sputters and emits a dim, brown glow. Before it can brighten fully, she wobbles upright and stumbles from the room and in doing so trips over a stack of books and knocks into the bureau, and then the door, as if lost in some dark place, uncertain where she is.

* * *

Lewis and Ella are struggling up the stairs with a femur the size of a log. They have rested several times on their way up from the basement, and he has stumbled twice and nearly lost his grip. She is cursing him all the way, asking why they cannot wait, why this has to happen now. Normally they seek help from one of their custodians or guards, but the museum is closed and everyone is away, no one wanting to miss the execution.

Lewis lives most often in a state of poised stillness — seated at his desk, bent over a book. He has never been interested in any sort of exercise. But these past few days, ever since he hurled Clark against the pillar, he has felt a restlessness that needs some outlet. He doesn’t know if it is the lingering sense of power — the humming at his fingertips, as if they were orange-hot blades struck on an anvil — or the possibility of escape, stealing past the wall, exploring landscapes that he previously believed would exist for him only on paper and in dreams. But he cannot sit still. He cannot stop pacing, tidying. He desires movement.

He and Ella rest again when they reach the landing, setting down the femur with a thump. She wears the outfit of a boy: short pants, short-sleeve shirt with a leather vest. Her hair is damp with sweat, plastered to her forehead. “I’m sitting on this thing, whether you like it or not,” she says and collapses onto the bone, a yellow-brown bench with hairline fissures running through it. The cracks in it are like the cracks in everything — cracks in concrete, cracks in rubber and asphalt and glass, cracks in faces ruined by the sun. Nothing is new.

Above them rises the bowl of a rotunda, one of two in the museum, each bearing a fresco — the sky by day, the sky by night. Theirs is the night, star-spangled and moonlit.

Lewis would love to reach for the silver canister inside his pocket, shove his nose into it, snort his way into a numb, pleasant dream. But he has heard enough scolding from Ella this afternoon. He pushes his fists into the small of his back and stares upward. He breathes heavily and says between breaths, “I would love to walk on the moon.”

Before he finishes the sentence, he hears his echo, the ghost of his voice whispering back.

Ella glances up as if she might spot another version of Lewis hovering above them. Then she looks at him, smiles until dimples pocket her cheeks.

“Say something,” he says. “See if it comes back to you.”

She leans back her head, her mouth open and ready to call out, when — from somewhere upstairs — comes a distant sound, a slam and groan, like something heavy shoved across the floor. Then the patter of footsteps.

The two of them look at each other, startled, before pursuing the sound’s source, taking the stairs two at a time.

THE SANCTUARY’S founders deliberately signed their constitution on July Fourth. They hoped to at once borrow and revise the sentiment of nationhood. They were America. A miniature version — living off hope, waiting for help — but America nonetheless. For a long time this worked. On what came to be known as Resurrection Day, people painted black circles beneath their eyes the night before, to indicate sickness, and washed them away the next morning, to signify health. Gifts were exchanged. A costume parade — full of dancing skeletons — marched through the city, ending at the stadium, where so many years ago men pulled on padded armor and crashed into each other while chasing a football, where the faded murals of the St. Louis Rams still adorn the pocked concrete tunnels and walls that surround the field, and where the citizens of the Sanctuary drank and feasted and danced.

The mayor always rode at the back of the parade — as Thomas does now — wearing a bone crown on a bone chair atop a horse-drawn wagon decorated with clattering bones. He waves at the people who fill the sidewalks, but no one waves back. They watch him with what can only be fear and distaste. His waving slows, then stops altogether, along with his smile, and he tells the driver to hurry up, hurry up already. His eyes dart about, as if he is worried something might be hurled at him.

Today, before the Resurrection Day feast, the rider will be killed. Many, including Lewis, including the city council, have asked Thomas not to do so. He would spoil the fun, they said. Ruin the holiday mood. People need something to celebrate. If he insisted on killing the girl, why not drag her out the gates and chain her to the altar, like everyone else? Because she comes from out there, Thomas said, so she must be punished in here. Here, too, he has a captive audience. He wants to put an end to the graffiti, to the effigies, to the underground mutterings of whatever faction is out to ruin his time in office. At the stadium he will force people to see what he wants them to see, a demonstration of his power.

The synthetic dome that once covered the stadium was long ago torn away and salvaged, so the sun beats down this July Fourth on the many seated now in the lower deck, more than twenty thousand bodies, all shading their eyes and squinting painfully. Everyone studies the four black-mouthed tunnels at the corners of the field. Their voices begin as a hesitant mutter that rises into a charged hum the longer they wait. Energy emanates from them like waves of heat, some combination of loathing and confusion and excitement for what they are about to witness. Afterward, there will be music and food. There is that at least. Not like the feasts of the old days, but something.