Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

Now, as she lies back on her bunk, staring at the ceiling, her mind is drifting, her hand is reaching for a bottle that isn’t there.

When the door opens and Reed steps through it, she rushes out of bed and takes the back of his head and shoves her face against his and drinks deeply of him until he pushes her back with a confused laugh. “Okay,” he says, “okay. I assume this means everything worked out? They’re safe?”

“They’re safe.” She still holds him by the head, his braid wrapped in her fist. “You smell funny.”

“And you taste like bile. Want to trade more love poems?”

“You do. You smell.” Her eyes sparkle angrily. “You smell like some flower.”

“Forget about it. I sat next to some reeking woman at the stadium.”

“What woman? Her? You said you were done with—”

“I said forget about it.” He pushes her hair back from her forehead and kisses it. “What happened with Lewis?”

She releases him then and falls back into bed and forces her head into the pillow as if to suffocate the words, “It’s done. She’s dead.”

* * *

Lewis is not the only body in his bedchamber, but he is very much alone. He kneels over his mother in much the same posture as the one who murdered her. Her face is a ghastly rictus of pain. He draws back the sheet to reveal the slim length of her, like a bundle of sticks. He does not cry — he cannot remember the last time he cried; he doesn’t know if he is capable of it — but he embraces her, drawing her body toward him so that it arches, her head lolling painfully back. He holds her like this for a long time. And while he holds her, the night gathers outside and deputies shout in the streets and the room flickers with light as the owl projects over and over again the grainy image of the deputy smothering her.

* * *

As expected, the deputies come for Clark. They ask about her brother and she says, “Half brother.” They ask if she has seen him, and she says, “I throw him some coin if I see him performing, but we don’t talk much, not anymore.” She denies any knowledge of his whereabouts, expresses her disgust and astonishment, and says she will be the first to let them know if he comes crawling to her. Then she excuses herself. “I have to work.”

She paces the wall all through the night as a sentry and now it is dawn and her eyes buzz with exhaustion and with the competing thoughts that bump around inside her head like bees in a jar: the possibility that she may escape, the possibility that she may not, that she may spend the rest of her life caught in this globe, like the one she salvaged from the Dead Lands, with sand instead of snow churning through it.

She tries to concentrate on her hands and feet, finding a good grip on the ladder, the strips of rebar cemented into the wall, but even now her mind wanders, her hands curling around metal in much the same way they curled around the corners of the pillow pressed down on the old woman’s gaping face.

The sky is pinkening, the first bell ringing, the Sanctuary coming alive around her when she drops onto the roof of an ancient school bus, then its hood, then the ground. A halo of dust rises around her. The faded, sandblasted black letters of ST. LOUIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS still reach the bus’s length, but it has no wheels, the undercarriage sunken into the dirt like a wallowing beast. Its occupants stir awake. They tear aside the rags hanging in the windows and curse her for waking them. In response, she fights a yawn.

There are many farms in the Sanctuary, all of them guarded and gated off, and though she isn’t supposed to, she cuts through one of them now, climbing and jumping the iron-spiked fence, hurrying her way home. One of the sewage canals is diverted through the quarter acre, its many small channels oozing and buzzing with flies. She tromps past a raised box of sweet potatoes, another clustered with beans, another spiked with corn, others with barley, wheat. The dirt is dusted with bone meal and moistened with sewage, some cocktail of nitrogen and phosphate to increase yields.

Several gardeners wander around, irrigating and harvesting. One of them asks if she thinks she can do whatever she wants and she says, “Pretty much,” before climbing the fence and dropping down on the other side.

She walks down a tight, shadowy street, so tired that at first she isn’t sure she hears what she thinks she hears — a whisper — her name. But when she turns, she sees the man standing twenty yards behind her. The wind tunnels through this cement corridor and knocks his gray duster back to reveal the thinness of his figure. Lewis.

He is far enough away, and the wind gusting enough, that she cannot be certain how his whisper carried so far, as if he tossed his voice like a ball through the air. “Come.”

She feels her face redden with a rush of blood, her guilt announcing itself. She cannot find her voice at first but manages to strangle out a question, “What do you want?”

He says nothing, only stares at her with those cold blue eyes, before turning, his duster snapping grayly behind him like a spectral hand beckoning her.

She follows him, not knowing what he knows, not wanting to know. Everything hangs in the balance, as if poised at the edge of a great chasm, and she feels at once ebullient and fearful. She does not notice the street unscrolling beneath her feet — until she finds herself in Old Town and climbing the steps of the museum. They seem to shake, but it is she; she is shaking.

He does not hold the door for her and he does not pause once they enter, but continues forward without looking back, gliding through the entry with the golden compass emblazoned on the floor and continuing to a circular stone staircase that from the landing seems to wind down into tighter and tighter circles, like the inside of a shell.

“Where is the girl?” he says.

“Safe.”

“There are only so many places to hide.”

“They won’t find her. I can promise you that.”

“People are saying she called the birds down from the sky.”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“I need to talk to her.”

“Only one way that’s happening.”

They descend three stories. At every landing, there is a doorway, and beside every doorway a lantern. By the time they enter the basement, shadow overpopulates light. Lewis tries a switch, but the bulb above them explodes with a spray of sparks. So he unhooks the entryway lantern and holds it ahead of him as he walks. She follows in her own private darkness while ahead he seems to float in a sputtering orange light that reveals the half-seen shapes of their surroundings — hallways that elbow into rooms full of shrouded paintings, glass-cased moths with eyes patterned on their wings, a harp with cobwebbed strings, a dust-clotted tiger with a raised paw and a snarl frozen on its face — stacked high all around them, sometimes with only a narrow corridor between. She rams her knee into a crate and six cockroaches come scuttling out from beneath it.

Lewis continues to creep along before her, his back hunched and bony. There is a smothering, airless feeling down here, and it is easy to imagine the light extinguished, the darkness collapsing all around her. It is easy to imagine Lewis pinning her to a velvet board, like one of his moths, making her a part of this vast, rotting collection.

Then he is standing before a giant American flag — a real one, not the mayor’s single-starred version — its stars and stripes stained and faded and untwining along the edges. He tears it away from the wall. They both cough at the dust that swarms the air and sleeves their throats, and when she calms her breathing, she notices the wooden door with the iron ring Lewis takes in his hand.

The wood has warped and the door has not been opened in many years, so Lewis must heave three times to expose even a thin black gap. He sets the lantern on the floor and takes the ring now with two hands — and at last the door opens with a groaning complaint.