Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“Me too,” Clark says.

York blows on the fire, makes it bend and snap. “Are we really going back? Like, at the end of all this? We’re not really going to hump all the way back, are we?”

“Of course we are,” Reed says, and then, with his voice lowered, “Aren’t we?”

But no one answers.

Clark wakes to the smell of smoke. She is already hot. And terribly thirsty, her mouth like sandpaper. Her head aches from dehydration and the fuzzy memory of yesterday’s long ride. She rolls into a seated position and swigs from her canteen, its water somehow seeming warmer than the air.

They are north of St. Joseph, and though the sun has not yet risen, the sky has lightened enough for Clark to see Reed. They spent the night beneath an open-air shelter in a park, and he sits on a splintery picnic table with a revolver split open. He dampens a rag with oil and drags it through the barrel.

“What are you doing up?” she says.

“I’m thinking.”

“You like your new toy?” she says, and he looks at her but does not say anything. Half-moons of fatigue bruise the flesh beneath his eyes. His lips are chapped and cracked. His peeling sunburn makes him look like he’s falling apart. He appears old, ugly. They all do, she knows. The doctor has been fretting over them, asking them to take foul-tasting supplements from a dropper. She says it will keep them healthy, strong, but they look and feel the opposite. These days, conversation comes less and less frequently, as if they are rationing their voices, too. When they do speak, the words flash like impatient weapons.

She is as guilty as any of them — especially with her brother, whose every decision she sometimes feels compelled to question. When he drinks too much water, when he builds too big a fire, when he stands too near a cliff’s edge or walks too quickly into an abandoned house, as if there is nothing to fear in the world. She often cuffs him, berates him, can’t stop herself from pointing out his idiot mistakes. He fights back, cursing her, raising a hand as if to slap her. “You’re making me look like a fool.”

“You’re making yourself look like a fool.”

“Treat me like a man, Clark.”

“Act like one.” Here she lowered her voice and jutted a chin in the direction of the girl. “And don’t get too attached to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I see the way you look at her. Keep your guard up. We still don’t know if we can trust her.”

Even the horses seem angry. One dropped dead from exhaustion. The others droop their heads and hood their eyes. Some of them limp with split hooves. Yesterday, when Lewis spurred his horse, it swung back its head and bit his calf.

Dawn steals across the sky and suffuses everything with a faint orange light. In the center of the shelter is a short-walled fire pit with a round grate that pipes into a chimney. Smoke eases from the grate, bending with the breeze, twisting toward her, acrid with the smell of rotten wood. She stands upright and presses her hands into her back, nudging her spine until it click-click-clicks into place with a sound like dry timber. “I suppose we better get moving.”

Reed snaps the revolver together. “Suppose we better. Our big hurry to nowhere awaits us.”

“Do you have a problem? Something you want to say?”

He won’t meet her stare, so she breaks away and calls out to everyone, telling them to move, get their asses up. A few of them groan and roll over. Ever since Kansas City, everyone has been quiet, slow, as if the lingering poison of the place infected them all. It is harder to believe in humanity surviving, she supposes, when you see how it is capable of destroying itself.

She walks from bedroll to bedroll, kicking Lewis, pulling her brother’s hair, saying, “Up, up, up, up”—and they yawn and stretch and rub their hands across their faces. Somebody says, “What’s the point?” and when she says, “Who said that?” there is no answer except her nickering horse.

She fills a nose bag and fits it into place, and while the horse eats noisily she studies the brightening sky. At first she doesn’t recognize the cloud. It isn’t much — seen through the trees, a white wisp hanging in the air like a shed feather — and her eyes initially sweep past it. Then she nearly cries aloud. It has been so long. Seeing the cloud is like sitting in a bar and hearing the band strike up a song she knows but forgot existed.

Reed stands with his gun ready. “What?”

The shelter is located next to a wall of trees at the bottom of the sloping hill she races up now. She can hear panicked voices behind her and ignores them. She trips twice in her rush, but she does not pause, not until she reaches the top, where she turns to take in the view.

For so long she has seen the sun rise into a cloudless sky, it is difficult to imagine it any other way. Cerulean. That’s the description Lewis used for it the other day. A word that sounds cruel to her.

“Look,” she says. “Everyone, come up here and look.”

They stagger from beneath the shelter, up the hill, staring at her and then at the sky. What she initially saw — that white wisp — was only the beginning, the first tentacles of a roiling bank of clouds stacked up on the horizon.

WHEN CLARK ROUSES them from sleep, when she calls them up the hill, when they look to the sky and see the clouds piled up like tangled gray scarves, the others cry out with delight — at the promise of shade, of moisture — but Lewis goes silent because he sees something else. He sees the man. The man in white. Aran Burr. He takes up half the sky. His hair is wild, windblown. His eyes and mouth are lit with balls of lightning. His hands — with torn gray fingers — reach for him, beckoning.

He haunts Lewis. Whether he is asleep or awake, Burr is there, at every turn, summoning him. His skin is so pale Lewis can see the veins marbling greenly beneath it. His knuckles are cubed with arthritis. His mouth is a hole that holds a shadow when he whispers his name, “Lewis.” Isn’t that what he should expect, with his brain drying like a nut from lack of water, with the heat warping the air and the sun heliographing off broken nests of glass? A mirage? But he doesn’t see water and he doesn’t see his office, the two things he longs for most. He sees Burr.

Lewis was, in his previous capacity, not a teacher but an educator. A curator of stories meant to help people better understand their lives. The museum might make them feel a little richer or entertained or wistful. Or it might make them feel like an irrelevant bit of debris caught up in the cyclonic rotation of history. He didn’t particularly care. He just wanted to be sure they knew this wasn’t it — the Sanctuary was not the world and human history was a long gauntlet of troubles and triumphs they might learn from, aspire to.

But that life is far behind him now. He no longer frames his thoughts around nurturing others, but on feeding himself, gobbling up everything he encounters. There is nothing in this new America not worth learning. He is the student. A disciple. He bothers Gawea whenever he can, but even if she wasn’t temporarily mute from her injury, he suspects she would give him only so much. There is a notable reluctance whenever someone approaches her with a question.

“If you can make birds come to your rescue, why can’t you ward off a snake or lure in a rabbit?”

Her stick sketches the sand. ASK. NOT MAKE.

“You ask. So you’re saying not everything answers, not everything wants to listen?”

Y is her shorthand for yes .

“Did Burr teach you how to ask?”

Y , she writes, & N .

“He said we’re the same. Do you think we’re the same?”