Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

They sleep instead in the cavernous pole barn, which stinks of hydraulic oil, and Clark volunteers to take the first watch. She pinches her thigh, slaps her cheek lightly, takes deep breaths, but their days are so long and she can’t keep from falling asleep. She wakes hours later. The moon has risen and its light streams in the window and gives the floor a glow, as if a sheet of fog lowered while they slept. She studies the space around her. A snowmobile with a tarp thrown over it, a four-wheeler with sunken tires still caked with mud, a Farmall tractor, a manure spreader, a planter, a combine the size of a dragon, and finally a grain truck with tires as tall as she.

She knows something must have woken her and she listens to the breathing all around her until she discerns a noise different from the rest, a damp smacking, like a foot working its way out of mud. She unholsters her revolver and approaches the barn door and cracks it open and finds one of their horses dead and a bent-backed wild-haired figure lowered over it, ripping into it, feasting. She fires at him, once, twice, three times, until Reed grabs her and says, “Enough. He’s dead.”

He lies on his back, staring at the sky. The man who arranged toys in a dead television is the same man driven wild enough by hunger to bring down a horse. His hair is dreaded with grime and his beard clotted with blood, making him look more beast than man. But underneath all that, he is just like them. She wonders how far away they all are from crossing that line.

They were on alert when they first departed the Sanctuary, glancing constantly over their shoulders, keeping their fires small at night, sending the owl into the sky to track what lies before and behind them, but they have grown lazy in their habits. Tonight they slept deeply and foolishly and encountered their first realized danger. And it is her fault. She should have stayed awake. She should have taken better care of them — she is responsible for them — and instead of a horse next time it might be her brother.

They bleed the horse and bottle the blood. They butcher the carcass and cook and salt the meat and ride away from the farm in an arrowhead formation, with Gawea at the point. The air is so hot and brittle, it seems, with every breath, they risk the danger of shattering. The sun rises behind them and their shadows lead the way west, one fewer than before.

EVERYONE CALLS IT the news. The windowless wall, several stories high, next to each of the Sanctuary’s wells. It is the obligation of every citizen to check the news daily. Whatever they need to know — about an execution, rationing, construction, whatever — is painted there, over a whitewashed background, in giant dripping black letters. For those who can’t read, a town crier wanders the streets at dawn, noon, sundown, to shout the same.

Ella stands in a long line with an empty jug. So long that she reads the news a dozen times or more. NEW CURFEW. HOME BY NIGHTFALL. ENFORCED.

With no explanation as to why. There never is. Why is irrelevant, Ella knows, to the servant. Why shine shoes, why wash windows, why sweep floors or polish silver or wind clocks? Because someone more powerful than you demands it, and if they tell you to eat shit or crawl on all fours like a dog, you’ll do that too. Because if you don’t, they can hurt you or take away what’s most precious to you, food, water, home, family.

The people around her mutter their theories and complain about the unfairness and malicious idiocy of it all, but they do so quietly enough that they are not overheard by the deputies who wander up and down the line. Ella grinds her teeth, grinds down what she wants to yell at them all. It’s Lewis’s fault. If they’re looking for a why , there it is. Him. Damn him. He is the reason for the curfew. He is the reason Slade nearly tossed her in a cell. He is the reason she alone is responsible for a museum that feels suddenly like a shed chitinous husk. She can’t not be angry. She hates everyone, and everything is awful. The sun burns down and the wind gusts and the rotor on the turbine spins and eventually she finds herself at the spigot, filling her jug with water so murky she can’t see through it.

She lugs the water, leaning into its weight, shifting it from one hand to the other. She crosses a stone bridge over a mud-slick sewage canal. She waves her free hand at the blue-black flies that swarm there. They get caught in her hair and crawl on her skin and follow her for a block, and their buzzing matches the noise of the crowd gathered near the museum. She curses the flies and she curses the people, all of them in her way, a bother.

Then she sees the man chained to the whipping post, the third in as many weeks, and her annoyance gives way to guilt-tinged sadness. He is bearded, shirtless, the skin of his belly and back a grub white compared to the tanned darkness of his face. Already he is pinkening under the sun, burning. He does not weep, not yet, but looks warily about him. He stands on an elevated platform, his wrists bound by two short chains anchored to a metal post. A voice calls out then, a voice she recognizes. She elbows through the crowd until she can see him. Slade.

He and his deputies, dressed in black, are like walking shadows. He steps onto the edge of the platform and surveys the crowd and tells them about the man. At a bar the other night he sang a song about the mayor. “A profane song. A mocking song. Remember, friends, there is always someone listening. There is always someone watching. You are never alone here. What you tell one person you tell forty thousand. Now this man says he is sorry about his little song. He says he meant it only for fun, not as an act of civil disobedience. And for now he has our mercy.”

In Slade’s hand, a coiled whip. He opens his grip so that its length unravels. He shakes his wrist one way, then the other, making it dance, its tip a fanged barb. He takes a few steps back, gauging the distance between him and the man. Then draws back his arm and casts the whip forward. It seems to pause a moment in a dark parabola — before sinking, darting in to strike. The crack gets mixed up with the scream. The man falls into the pole, hugging it. A winged flap of skin opens across his back. From it blood sleeves.

The whip lashes again and again and again. Eventually flesh gives way to the white nubs of vertebrae. Slade loops the whip in his hand and once again surveys the crowd. His eyes are lost to piggish folds of flesh that turn down their corners, but Ella feels certain his gaze follows her when she hurries away, back to the museum.

This would be a good time to have parents. Someone to turn to in a bad time, ask for help, a hug, a meal. Though Lewis would never think of himself in this way, he was her guardian, the one who years ago snuck up beside her in the west wing and startled her when he said, “You’re under this roof more than anyone but me.”

Vagrant children were as common as rats, and she was one of them, living in the Fourth Ward, in the pantry of the kitchen of a brothel. She came to the museum nearly every day — it was her way of forgetting. She could think of nothing to say to Lewis in response except, “I’m sorry.”

His hands were behind his back, the posture of a scholar. “You should be,” he said, looming over her. “You haven’t earned your rent.”

She flinched when his hands shot from behind his back — she thought he would strike her. But he held a feather duster. He shoved it into her chest, with a puff of motes, and told her to get to work immediately.

She did, and since then she has never really stopped working. She feared him at first. The thin-lipped expression. The words fired from his mouth like poison-tipped darts. The impossible mechanics of the owl and other inventions he sometimes tested out: a steam-powered bicycle, a lantern that never extinguished, a multi-lens set of glasses that could alternately study the moon or an amoeba. But then she discovered how frail and incompetent he was in human affairs, and in that recognition of weakness she gained power over him.