Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

He can’t be sure how long he sleeps, maybe an hour, maybe a minute, but he feels that disoriented dream-tug when he wakes, the edges of the world slippery. He could so easily close his eyes again, but he knows something must have woken him. He calls out for his wife and receives no answer. She is hard of hearing, so he repeats himself, louder this time. With some difficulty, he rocks forward in his chair and twists around, looking behind him.

The living room is shadowy enough that he at first does not recognize the darkness beside him as a man — as Rickett Slade — until the sheriff says, “This will only take a minute,” lifting the decorative pillow from his lap and pressing it to his face.

DANGER SEEMS far away from this bend in the river. Lewis bathes until his toes and fingers wrinkle. He drinks until his stomach aches. The horses splash along the banks and feast on grass, and when Lewis walks past his own mount, she whickers and nuzzles his neck and stares at him with her soft black eyes and he pets her and can’t help but smile.

The doctor takes a knife and hacks down some leafy willow branches and hands them out for everyone to swing over their shoulders to warn away the mosquitoes and deerflies. The earth has greened and blued. Water unspools beside them, the river ever widening. Flowers bloom in explosions of color that match the feeling inside them all. Gawea helps them forage, showing them what to look for — strawberries and raspberries and blueberries and gooseberries — until their fingers and lips are stained, the flavors impossibly good. They eat bird eggs, sorrel leaves, basswood leaves, oyster mushrooms, currants, clover, worms, grubs. If things are this good now, their mood seems to say, how much better might they be in Oregon? It is unimaginable.

They dig a hole and surround it with stones and fill it with a pyramid of wood and the fire snaps and pops and sends sparks swirling up to join the stars beginning to burn in the iron-colored sky. They eat the venison cut into chops and steaks. York takes a flask of tequila from his saddlebag and says he wasn’t planning on sharing, but what the hell — it feels right — it feels like one of those nights.

“You’ve been hiding that all this time?” Clark says. Her mouth quavers as if eager to accept the flask.

“There’s water in the world, after all,” he says. “So let’s drink!”

They pass around the flask and shudder and hoot at the taste. All except Clark. She takes it and stares at it a long time. Her mouth goes damp. Her teeth click together. Her throat feels as though it is widening to accommodate whatever she might pour down it. The coldness of its metal like a gun in her hand.

Then she shakes her head — hard — and hands the flask to Gawea. “Take a taste for me,” she says. “A lot of tastes.”

The girl no longer wears bandages, her neck healed, scarred an angry red. Still she doesn’t talk. Clark bothers her as often as possible, no longer believing in the injury, believing instead that the girl is holding back, hiding something from them. It is more than her silence. It is her distance, the thin thread that binds her to them. She rarely engages, often staring off into the distance as if listening to instructions only she can hear. And her looks — eyes black, face dead — indicate her utter indifference, which seems at odds with her mission. Clark forces the flask on her now and hopes the liquor might loosen her, surprise a word out of her.

But Gawea only takes a nip and then cringes and trembles. She passes the flask to York, who throws back his head and guzzles. York, York, everyone keeps saying his name, York . They smack him on the side of his head and thank him for the booze and the meat and he grins around a handful of flank steak.

The flask circles the fire twice and then twice again and York’s voice grows louder and louder and soon he wobbles upright and tells them to make way, make room, he wants to show them something. This is his standard over the past few weeks — teasing, joking, storytelling — always trying to distract or surprise them with a laugh. He is known for his mouth. He claims to have bedded more than five hundred women, and every woman seems to have something strange or ridiculous about her. This one had nipples so long and rigid a bird might have roosted on them. Another used her teeth so generously when fellating him — he pronounced it filleting —that he rolled out of bed the next morning circumcised.

He brings a hand to his stomach, feigning stomach cramps. His tongue peeks between his lips. He begins to dry heave. Out of his mouth — one, two, three — come yellow agates. He bulges his eyes in mock surprise. He tosses one of the stones up and catches it. Then tosses another, and soon he is juggling them in wider and wider arcs. Two he lets fall into his pants pocket — but the third he launches at his sister.

It whizzes through the air. If her reflexes were not as sharp as they are, the rock would strike her square in the forehead. But her hand rises up to snatch it. There is a smack . Everyone goes quiet for a moment. Everyone expects her to scold her brother, maybe hurl the rock back his way.

But the river has mellowed her. She slowly brings the rock to her temple and makes a doink sound and crosses her eyes and slumps backward in a mock faint. Everyone applauds.

The flask passes around the fire a few times more, and their words begin to tumble freely, their faces flushed, numbed. A pitch pocket pops. Frogs chirp. The river hushes. A chittering comes from the sky — followed by the shaky nickering of a horse. Someone claps a hand and crushes a mosquito. Then York clears his throat and announces that he has to take a leak so bad that the river will rise five feet in the next five minutes.

They hear the chittering sound again, what could be mistaken for a high-pitched giggling. York is a few yards from the fire now, and he spins around to say he hopes nobody misses him when he’s gone. It is then, with his smile a white crescent and his body ghosting into the dark, that a shadow comes alive behind him. And though everyone laughs at first, thinking that this is another trick of his, thinking that his screams might be an act, this is not the case.

Something has him. Something is dragging him away. What it is, Lewis cannot see, his night vision blurred from all his time staring at the fire. Now the horses are screaming along with York. Lewis can hear their hooves kicking, as they rear back against the harnesses that bind them to the trees.

Lewis has had too much to drink. He cannot process what is happening. He studies Clark’s face to see if he ought to be scared. She already has her revolver out. A muscle ripples along her cheek. She is standing — she is running — the gun’s metal dancing with orange light thrown by the fire. Reed does the same. So does Gawea. The doctor lifts a rifle to her shoulder and swings in an unsteady circle. No one shoots. They don’t know what to shoot at.

There is a piercing scream — inhuman — and York races out of the dark. Claw marks run across his face. In his hand he carries a bloodied knife. He throws aside his packs until he finds his holster and belts it around his waist. “Move,” he tells Lewis. “Move, move, move, or you’re dead.”

Lewis is unarmed. He never keeps a weapon ready, not like the others. But he manages to force his brain into action. There is no moon. They need light. They need to shove back the night. His eyes fall to the nearby pile of wood. He tries to run and trips. He scrambles on hands and knees. The first gunshot sounds. The horses keep screaming — a sound like metal dragged across metal — though their screams seem fewer now. Lewis grabs what wood he can, feeding the fire three split logs, a branch full of dead pine needles. The flames rise with a crackling flash. The shadows retreat between the trees. And in the light cast by the fire he sees the bats.