Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

The girl appears so thin, like a piece of wood somebody whittled and gave up on. Though there remains something strangely vibrant about her. Her skin has an earthen richness. Her hair is the same black as the vultures that spin in the sky. Her posture is unyielding despite her circumstances. Danica watches her with grim curiosity when the deputies lead her up the steps of the gallows to the platform.

The people in the stands watch too — whether hopefully, judgmentally, Danica doesn’t know — but when the girl turns in a slow circle and tries to meet their gaze, they drop their faces and go silent, as if frightened her dark eyes alone might carry some contagion.

Vultures tornado the sky and she stands among the black, swirling color of their shadows. She looks as if she might say something, but the injury to her throat prevents it.

Then the deputies fit the noose around her neck, and Thomas stands up to cheer and clap his hands. He swings his arms so wildly that he knocks an elbow into Danica and she staggers a few steps. As she does, she looks to the doorway behind her, where Reed stands. He nods at her.

She runs her hands along her dress, straightening out the wrinkles. She leans in to her husband and tells him she feels ill, she will see him later.

“What?” he says, then, “Oh. Fine.” Not even bothering to look at her, his eyes on the field, his hands still clapping sharply together.

* * *

She follows Reed at a distance, down a staircase, along a concrete corridor with rusted pipes veining its ceiling. He slips through a door and she is not far behind him. Light streams from a single window. The air smells of metal and leather and oil. The deputies use these rooms for storage. Bows hang from hooks on the walls; knives and bats and arrows lie strewn across a table that runs the length of the room.

Just as she enters, Reed shuts the door behind her and presses her against it. What they are doing is kissing, though it looks much like eating. Their mouths opening and closing hungrily, their teeth biting down on lips, cheeks. When they pull apart, their faces are a splotchy red and he is bleeding from the corner of his mouth.

“What have you learned?” she says.

“They’re going to do it. They’re going to leave. They’re making every preparation.”

“They, they, they. Don’t try to separate yourself from them.”

“We, then. We’re going to do it.”

“Are you?”

“You can come. You should.”

“Hmm.”

“You must.”

“Are you still fucking that woman?”

He gapes at her, his hesitation all the answer she needs.

“I thought so,” she says.

“I don’t feel about her the same way I do you.”

“Is that right? She’s just someone to fuck?”

“I love you . I do. And I want you to come with me.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“We’ve been waiting for the right moment. It’s here. We’ve been talking about this for a long time. Now is the time.”

“We’ve been talking , yes. Doing is something else entirely.”

“We’re trying to get Lewis Meriwether to join us.”

She snorts through a smile. “Why do you keep bringing him up? What use is he?”

“He knows more about the outside world than anyone else. He knows more about every thing than anyone else.”

“He knows paper. He doesn’t know blood or dirt or sweat. Besides that, he has the fortitude of a sick child.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. There are things about him that would surprise you.”

“ Please . You’re not fool enough to believe in what people say about him. Lewis, the eater of children, the binder of spells, the freak in the dark tower.”

“I might be.”

She runs a hand along his beard, then pinches a whisker and rips it out. He flinches and she shoves him aside and walks to the table at the center of the room. “So you’re suggesting that we uproot, say good-bye to all we have built here, on the word of one girl?”

“If it’s true — if what she says is true — the country there is rich.”

“ If it’s true.”

“Is there any future here? Really?” Her back is to him, but she can hear him slide closer to her, can feel his breath at her neck. “What does your husband say?”

“Do we really need to talk about him?” She picks up a dagger — black handle, black blade — and runs her finger along its edge. “He says it’s not true. Of course he says that. And he says — even if any of it is true — no good can come of it and we must put it behind us. The more people know, the less sure they will be of everything. That’s what he says.”

“Look at it this way. Even if we stay here, this is a chance to trade, to open lines of communication. To unite. Maybe even make a kind of country?”

“How patriotic of you.” She turns around and prods his belt with the knife. “The other possibility is that this is all a pipe dream.”

“I’d like to think it’s true. We’ve got to believe in something.”

She drops the dagger on the table and reaches her hands around his neck, massages him until his head lolls with her fingertips. “Relax,” she whispers. “Relax.”

His eyes shutter closed with her rubbing. “This could be a chance for us to start over too.”

Her tongue darts from her mouth and wets her lips. “Enough talking.” She releases him and turns around and lifts up her dress until it bunches around her waist and leans over the table stacked with steel. “Hurry up and take me.”

* * *

The black-clad figure races the streets, cutting through alleys, breathing in panicked gulps, before finally collapsing in a shadowed alley. The neckerchief peels away to reveal a face — Clark’s — just in time for her to vomit freely.

She throws her hat aside. Her hair has come loose from her ponytail. Her stomach clenches and empties. With a line of spit hanging from her lips, she cries out with inarticulate shame and fury. Out of the cracks come several scuttling beetles, joined by a black-winged butterfly, to drink from the mess she has left for them.

She roughs her mouth across her wrist. There was a time when she found herself often in this position, hunched over, her throat surging, yesterday’s meal flecking her lips and a bottleful of tequila puddling the ground between her feet. She couldn’t stop herself. One drink always became ten drinks — and she would end every night swinging a fist or falling into bed with someone she couldn’t remember in the morning. She didn’t have any sort of excuse. Drinking was a way to antidote the boredom, the sense of purposelessness. Drinking was a way to numb the anger she always felt coiling inside her. Maybe. But in the end she believed it came down to the sort of person she was — a woman of great appetites.

Soon she will leave this place. And when she leaves, she will have escaped her old self, the old Clark. She will be able — they all will be able — to begin again. Lewis’s mother is dead, but she was already dead, a ruined vessel no different from the city presently rotting around her. Clark was doing her a favor; she was doing Lewis a favor. I am trying, she thinks. I am trying to make things better, trying to help. But she knows that the murder — no, the death ; that’s a better way to think of it — the death of the old woman will weigh on her chest like a cold stone.

For the moment, though, she need only worry about Lewis. More than once in her life she has witnessed the unexplainable. A storm of dead crows raining from the sky. A plant, like a long green finger, that came twisting out of the ground when she spilled water from her canteen. The man with the parasite that grew so massive inside him that his belly distended and shifted as if from some alien pregnancy. The seers in the market who could read your past and future in your palm, in tea leaves, in the squiggly purple guts of rats. But never anything like the other night.