Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

His wife sits across from him. Her hair is pulled back into a braid, making her face appear even more pointed than usual. Despite the heat, Danica wears a thin, open-throated sweater. Her plate remains full. She never eats much — but at a standard meal she will at least prod at her salad. Her chair is angled away from him. She sits so still that a yellow-breasted bird lands on her plate and pecks at the pile of grasshoppers braised with vinaigrette.

He peels a shriveled orange and eats it in three chunks and spits the seeds onto the ground. “Something is bothering you.”

“No.”

“You’re just not hungry?”

“I’m just not hungry.”

“Ah.”

The door to the kitchen swings open and Rickett Slade ducks through it and marches toward them without pausing to request an audience. A peacock stands on the path before him. At his approach, it unfurls its tail into a fan with a steely rattle of feathers. Slade does not pause. It appears he will crush it, or kick it aside, but at the last moment it skitters to make way for him.

Thomas dabs a napkin at the corner of his mouth. “What?”

Slade towers over them. The breath whistles from his nose. “Two rangers are unaccounted for, among them their captain.”

“Unaccounted for?”

“Gone. Missing.”

“Well, what do you think has happened to them?”

“They have left.”

His hand crushes the napkin. “The Sanctuary?”

“Yes.”

“You mean to tell me that they have left the Sanctuary and deliberately not returned?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know this?”

“Because the sentinels they held at gunpoint told me.”

“Guns? Gun point? Who has guns to point? What are you talking about?”

“They do. We assume they are somehow in league with the girl.”

Thomas absently wipes his mouth. “This is a little hard to take.”

“There’s more.”

“Of course there is.”

“Your friend , the curator, Meriwether. He is also unaccounted for.”

“Impossible.”

The bird remains at his wife’s place setting. Its claws scratch the plate. Its head darts and its beak pecks at a grasshopper, punching holes in the body, mangling it beyond recognition. She will not look at him, her face as blank as the pale sky above. She seems to be holding her breath. So does the world. Everything motionless except the bird as it tears patches in the grasshopper.

Thomas clears his throat and straightens his posture and wipes the crumbs from his lap, and in a voice that sounds far too calm to be his own, he tells Slade thank you. He tells him to leave. He tells him to return in an hour. By that time he will have made a decision. In the meantime he needs to think.

Slade’s eyes flit to Danica before he departs the atrium.

When the door closes, Thomas lunges across the table and brings his hand down on the bird. Its wings snap open, but he strikes it before it can take flight. It has grown lazy, living in the atrium, imbued with a false sense of safety. He catches and breaks its left wing. The plate shatters. His palm bleeds. The bird calls out, then flutters off the edge of the table and flops on the ground, where he pursues it, stomping once, twice, until its body stills and smears. Blood bursts from its beak.

She will not look at him, not even when he says, “What do you know of this?”

“Nothing.”

He grabs her by the arm. The sweater is thick enough that he cannot feel her, one more thing coming between them. “I know you’ve been fucking him.”

“That’s how this marriage works, isn’t it? We fuck other people.”

He yanks her from the chair. It overturns with a clatter and her body spills to the ground. She gives him a baleful stare. Her hair has come loose from its braid in white filaments. Thomas says, “You share a bed with someone, you share secrets. What did he tell you?”

Her eyes shine with tears. “I said I know nothing .”

He stares at her — and she stares back, her eyes too white around the edges and her teeth bared. He grabs her by the throat with one hand and with the other scoops up the dead bird and mashes it into her mouth. That is how he leaves her, gagging out its broken body, scraping feathers from her tongue.

* * *

Lewis clutches Clark and keeps his eyes on the surrounding city, certain that at any second, more spiders will drop from trees, wolves will explode from doorways, snakes will twist from porches and pursue them.

He has read about Chernobyl. He knows, in the years that followed the nuclear meltdown, in the two thousand square miles surrounding the power plant, biodiversity exploded. Radiation can result in a kind of accelerated evolution, mutagenesis. Many of the mutations die out. Some are merely deformed. But others grow stronger, accommodating the harsh conditions. After World War II, mutagenic breeding in plants resulted in strange colors, better taste, tougher hulls, but also in disease- and cold-resistant strains of everything from rice to wheat to sunflowers to cocoa to pears that became a sizable portion of harvested crops. Useful mutants.

He knows that the world has become a furnace. St. Louis was not hit by nukes, but the radiation sloshes through the air and soaks the ground and will linger for centuries, cesium 137 and strontium 90 serving as a different kind of vitamin for animals and insects. This is why wolves are hairless and spiders oversized. This is why some people are misshapen with tumors, born with withered limbs and milky, blind eyes and veins that seem to grow on the outside of their skin. And maybe— maybe —this is why he is the way he is. A mutant. Another example of the world moving on. But he is not alone. He has the girl now, Gawea. She did not call him a freak. She called him the next. They are the next.

They ride. Sometimes they gallop and sometimes they canter, but for half a day, they do not stop. They take to the roads when the roads permit, but more often the asphalt is buckled, riven. So they ride through yards and over collapsed fences. They dart through the dried maze of Forest Park. They follow ditches. They chase the shoulders of highways. Stalks of mullein thwap and stain the horses’ breasts yellow. Dried brush claws at their flanks. Sand and cinders kick up in clouds and muddy their eyelashes. They tie handkerchiefs around their mouths to breathe. In the sand, every hoofprint leaves a clear impression, their granular passage there for any to follow, on occasion zigzagging, but otherwise unfurling west. They cannot hope for rain, but with time the wind should chase away some of their tracks.

Already they have gone farther than Clark has been before. They do not speak. The wind whisks dust off branches and it falls through their translucent shadows. With every clopping step, the air seems to vibrate. At strange noises before and behind them they pause and pet their snorting horses and try to shush them so that they might listen better.

When Clark hesitates, reining her horse one way, then another, confused about their direction, the girl waves them forward and digs in her heels and takes the lead. Clark and Reed make eyes — a question crushed into their stare — and then follow her.

They leave behind the city, the suburbs, and break away from the freeway to follow the cracked clay of the Missouri River. Here, in a silver pocket of shade beneath a bridge, they finally pause for water. Their horses foam with sweat. Their legs tremble and jump. They aren’t breathing so much as heaving . Lewis feels as though he is riding even after he dismounts from Clark’s horse, the ground seeming to rock, as if he is in two worlds at once.

York guzzles at a canteen, and Clark twists her brother’s ear and drops him to his knees. “Only a taste, you idiot,” she says.