Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

She leads her horse into the park and the others follow. She knows what she needs to do, but for the moment she can only stare at the jungle gym and imagine this as a place where children once played.

A voice calls behind her. “Is something the matter?” When she doesn’t answer, the voice calls out again, “What are we doing?”

She hopes they won’t fight back. She wants them to make their way home safely, to tell everyone what has happened, to spread the dream of their mission and the promise of their return — before Thomas can warp Clark into a traitor. She plans to cuff their ankles and wrists, to steal their horses. They are only a little more than a mile from the wall and should be able to hop or crawl home before dark. Unless something — spiders or snakes or worse — finds them.

Clark swings her horse around and nods at Reed. The two of them separate from the nine, their horses slowly retreating. Reed withdraws two revolvers. She does the same. Their hands shake. The nine rangers — two women, the rest of them men — stare at the sunlight gleaming from the gunmetal and then settle their gaze on Reed.

“It’s time for us to say good-bye,” he says.

* * *

Gawea might smile at Lewis, but her face has a woodenness that makes it difficult to read. She stands. She walks toward him and he can’t help but take a step back. A bloodied bandage scarves her neck. She motions to it, excusing her lack of voice. He is more than a foot taller than she, but there is something about her that makes them seem the same height.

She reaches out both her hands, one of them bandaged, the wrappings looping her palm and binding her wrist. It takes him a moment to realize he should respond in kind. He is not used to touching others, not to embrace, not to shake hands, not even to brush up against on the street. It’s more than the intimacy — it’s the sense of getting rubbed away. But in this case, when his hands fall into hers, he does not feel drained so much as he feels charged, fuller. More confident and excited than ever about what might lie ahead.

“It’s true? It’s really true? You’re going to take us — you’re going to take me to him?”

She nods.

“Why?”

Again she motions to her neck. Then she brings a finger to the counter and cuts through the thick dust, writing out: U R THE NEXT.

“I am the next? What does that mean?”

Gawea is about to write something more when the doctor says, “Think I hear something.” The sun is reaching higher — the windows are beginning to glow — and the doctor leans into the glass with pipe smoke coiled around her, her stare fixed on the road.

Something scuttles by the glass doors. A shadow falls across the floor, just for an instant, as if the sun blinked. Lewis cannot distinguish a shape. It is too fast, moving at a blur, and the doctor is standing in the way of it. “There’s something out there,” she says, taking several steps back.

A rasping sound comes from the wall, as if something is trying to claw its way inside.

“Arm yourself,” Lewis says, and they each snatch up a rifle. The doctor and York hold theirs awkwardly, studying them, rearranging their grips.

Lewis has never fired a weapon, but he has studied them, cleaned them, broken them down and built them back up, and he models for them now: finger off the trigger, palm beneath the forestock, butt against the shoulder.

A long silence gives way to a thundering, the swelling sound of horse hooves headed their way. “They’re coming,” York says, and all of their attention now swings toward readying their supplies.

They have organized a different pile for every horse, each containing clothes, food, canteens, knives, matches, ammunition, rifles rolled into blankets. Lewis’s pile, at the end, rises taller than the others, a tidy pyramid built from a compass, many maps, his owl, three silver canisters packed with his medicine, quills and ink and a blank calfskin journal kept shut by a long bicuspid braided through an eyehole loop.

Clark and Reed appear in a storm of dust and dismount and yell at everyone to hurry, move their asses, and Lewis finds his thoughts twined up and his body startled out of his control. The doors are swinging open and closed, open and closed, with rusty shrieks. Everyone is racing back and forth, scooping up their gear, yelling — yelling at him, he realizes — and only then does he rush forward and stumble and knock his pile in many directions.

Everyone is waiting for him, their horses snorting and spinning in circles. He processes his surroundings in flashes — Reed staring back the way they came; York smiling down at him and saying, “So this is the way it’s going to be?”; Clark jabbing her finger at an empty mount and telling him to move .

The horse — a roan with a gray muzzle and dark-socked legs — shifts away from him when he tries to fill her saddlebags. He chases her one way, then the other, slowly sorting his gear, wasting more minutes and earning the curses of the other riders. When he tries to foot his weight into a stirrup, he grabs hold of the reins and the horse rears and begins to clop slantingly away from him. “No,” he cries. “No. Stop.”

He is about to ask for help when he notices Clark go rigid in her saddle. Everyone has fallen silent, their eyes on something behind Lewis.

He knows he will not like what he sees. And he is right. A huddle of spiders slink toward them. A dozen of them. As big as dogs. They scuttle from behind the gas station, over and around the pumps, all of them long legged and big butted and spiked with tiny blond hairs. Their many eyes gleam like gems. Their mandibles dangle from their snouts like deadly mustaches.

They pause at the pumps, ten yards away, rasping their mandibles, stuttering their legs. The horses snort and whinny. They stomp their hooves, fighting the commands of their riders. Then, from around the side of the gas station, comes a spider larger than the rest. First there are only legs. They move with a hypnotic needling, like the whirring of a magician’s fingers before revealing some horror. Then its segmented body, a hairy fist of a face. Some of the eyes appear blinded, scarred through with what look like slash marks. It reaches one leg forward and pauses it in the air, as if to point.

The other spiders start toward them.

Reed lifts his revolver and Clark says, “No! The sound will carry to the Sanctuary.”

She spurs her horse toward Lewis, and he finds himself frozen in their shadow. She raises a hand. He wonders at first if she is going to strike him. Instead she gathers his reins into her fist, steadying the roan. “What’s wrong with you?”

He doesn’t like how high his voice sounds when he says, “I’m not used to moving so quickly!”

He can hear the patter of the spiders’ many legs closing in on him like a dry rain.

Her eyes flash between him and the spiders and the road ahead. Then she grabs him by the arm and helps him onto her own horse and tells him to lasso his arms around her waist and hold on for his very life.

* * *

Thomas receives the news in the atrium. This is a vast, high-walled garden built onto the Dome. Flowers spring brightly from pots and hanging baskets. Water drips from them like tears. Paths made from paver stones run between boxed beds crammed with potatoes, onions, corn, squash, beans, sunflowers. Some have, some have not. Thomas is happy to have . All those who have — among them the council members — have certain things available to them that others do not, including access to the atrium and a seemingly depthless access to water. Or that’s how it feels to Thomas anyway.

The ceiling is netted with wire mesh to contain the dozens of birds that nest in the colored boxes that stand on poles. Three peacocks roam about, their feathers a ghostly white and their eyes so red they do not look like eyes at all but the beaded blood that wells from blinded sockets. When they walk, their claws scratch the paver stones and their necks dodge forward and back. Every now and then they stiffen their bodies and fill the atrium with a banshee cry. Thomas likes to take his meals here, at an ironwork table, with the peacocks strutting and the songbirds whistling and flitting around him.