Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

Gawea. Her face seems to have cracked open, revealing for the first time actual feeling, raw panic. “Leave him alone!” She rushes forward and shoves her rifle into the bat’s open mouth and fires.

The fire catches easily. It begins with the lantern Lewis dropped. Reed adds to it by sparking a match against a bookcase, a lace curtain, a dried bunch of grass beneath the porch. The flames thrash. The smoke rushes from the windows, streaming upward as fast as water, the streams gathering into the dark lake pooling above. Timbers snap. Nails and screws come loose with pings and pops. Hardly ten minutes pass before the house is overcome by a snapping peak of fire, the orange bones of its timbers barely visible through the flames. He and York and Gawea step back and step back again. The air warps and ripples with the heat. They stare into it, the light so painfully bright, with their guns still at their sides. They might see figures writhing within, but they might not. The fire’s dance, like the desert’s mirage, sometimes gives you what you want.

Lewis does not notice. All of his attention is focused on Clark. He wipes the blood from her face. Her skin is the yellow-white of dough. Her neck and her wrists and thighs have been torn by fangs, the flesh there swollen into purplish white mounds scabbed at their crowns.

The doctor brought her leather satchel — it is split open beside her now — and she withdraws from it wipes, gauze, a short bottle of sugar, a tall bottle of clear alcohol. The breeze rises to a wind that carries smoke and dust. She sets to work cleaning the wounds and instructs Lewis to prop up Clark’s head and spoon some sugar water into her mouth. He barely hears her. “That won’t be enough,” he says.

“We’ll do what we can and that’s all we can do.”

“She’s lost too much blood.”

Her voice sounds very far away when she says, “Yes.”

He thinks about what York said to him that morning: why didn’t he do anything when the bats descended on their camp? Raise his arms and let loose a flash of light and make everything better? Lewis didn’t have an adequate answer. Because he doesn’t like what he doesn’t understand, what he can’t label and quantify? Because it makes him feel inhuman? Because his father made him afraid of himself?

He feels a heat first mistaken for the fire crackling behind him. But this comes from inside him. His chest feels tornadic, a blistering wind caught behind his ribs. He swells with it until he knows he must find an outlet or else incinerate. Embers swirl at the edge of his vision. There is no stopping it this time.

The doctor’s face creases. She takes several steps back, telling Lewis to settle down, holding out her hands as if to block something hurled at her.

He feels too full, as if his skin might break and release a flood of energy, and he knows where to release it, recognizes the gaping emptiness inside Clark that must be filled. He reaches into the doctor’s satchel and removes a scalpel. With it he traces his wrist — and then rips into it.

He holds his arm over Clark’s. His blood puddles onto her. And then, slowly, it begins to siphon into her wound, the gash trembling at the edges like a grateful mouth. He feels separate from himself when he presses their wrists together. It is a compulsive act, as when the proboscis of a butterfly sinks into a flower. Their bodies know what to do. She draws the blood into her, sucking, sucking, until he feels the last corner of his body emptying. His eyes are closed. He may hear screaming.

At last he pulls away from her and discovers the others standing around them, watching him with fear and revulsion, except for Gawea. She steps forward. “Burr was right,” she says. “You are like me.”

Clark stirs. Her skin has gone from pale to a flushed pink. Her back arches. Her stomach heaves. She turns her head and something hot surges up her throat, escaping her with an oily black splatter. A fly lands at its edge to taste of it — and immediately expires.

Her eyes tremble open just as his fall shut.

GAWEA IS DIFFERENT. She has always known she was different, like a baby raised among wolves, and this difference came with a lifelong sense of separation, loneliness. Loneliness is what she knows best. She was born into it.

After the men swept a knife across her father’s throat and smashed his face into the snow, after the men dragged her mother and midwife into the night and through the whirling storm, after dawn came and revealed the snow-swept ruins of the village, Gawea remained alone in the bed she was born in, alternately squalling and sleeping.

Her cries eventually brought her oma . She was injured, her gray hair clotted at the temple where the men had struck her twice. But when she shrank into a corner, they left her there, so old she must have already looked dead enough to them.

Oma stood over the bed, where Gawea rested in a nest of blankets, and wept. She cried for the village, much of it burned to ashes, and she cried for her daughter, dead or kidnapped, and she cried for this grandchild of hers, born with a pair of eyes that matched the night-black world.

Deformities are normal. Some are born with extra fingers and toes, others with diminutive limbs, crooked spines, birthmarks brightly staining their faces. In their village, a child was born without any mouth, only a slitted nose, and without any genitals, just a fleshy mound where there might have been a cleft or shaft. Another child, a boy with gigantism, was cut from his mother’s belly after only seven months, because they worried his kicks might shatter her ribs. He was born as big as a toddler. He lived and grew to be twice as tall as any man in the village, with a shelf of a forehead and spiked, uneven shoulders, but died before he was twenty. Some say his heart couldn’t keep up with all that body. And then there was Denver, more than a hundred miles away, nicknamed the Goblin City. A warhead detonated there, mangling the downtown and opening up a crater so big it appeared half the city had been scooped by a giant shovel. The buildings glowed at night, some said, as did the people, all of them with skin like melted wax and hair that grew in patches, their mouths hissing a language no one understood but them.

Gawea was a kind of goblin. When she was two and did not want to go to bed, Oma told her, the lantern shattered and licked the floor with a tongue of fire. When she was three, she could whistle and call a bird fluttering from a branch to her shoulder. When she was four, she began to work in their garden and the vegetables grew oversize and the flowers remained in bloom through the fall. When she was five and wandered away from the cabin alone, Oma spanked her and woke up the next morning covered with hundreds of spider bites.

Oma read stories to her, played games with her, taught her how to sew and knit and cook, how to gut a fish, butcher an elk, and though Gawea could talk — in a tiny, calm voice — she never asked questions, only gave answers. Sometimes it seemed she had another way of communicating with the world, plugged in to a connection unavailable to the rest of them. And more than once Oma found herself fetching a cup of water that Gawea reached for eagerly, though she never asked for it.

Oma kept a picture of her daughter, Juliana, a charcoal sketch, the frame stained darkly along the right side from all the time she spent holding it in her hand. Sometimes she and Gawea went hunting. Not for deer or elk or bear, but for information. About the men who had come in the night. They found other villages scorched and riddled with bones. Sometimes dried-out corpses hung from trees like cocoons, and sometimes spears bristled the ground, their tips topped by skulls. They found survivors, mostly old men and women, who told them about a long parade of wheeled cages crammed with men and women and children.