Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“No one.” She tries to say this casually but she is not a practiced liar.

“Really? I thought I heard voices.”

“Sometimes I like to recite Shakespeare. To pass the time.”

His voice takes on an affected timbre when he says, “‘And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence.’” He takes one sliding step into the room. “That was Shakespeare.”

“‘There’s daggers in men’s smiles.’ That’s Shakespeare too.”

“Clever girl.” He has kept one of his hands behind his back all this time. He lets it show now, a jug of water dangling from a finger crooked like a tusk. He gives it a sloshing shake. “I brought you something.”

“Why?”

“I thought you might want it. I thought you might be thirsty. The rations can be difficult for all of us.” He takes another step toward her and extends the jug. “Here. Take it.”

She considers denying him but knows that will only lead to more trouble. Slowly she raises her arms to accept the jug. What he carries with one finger weighs down both her arms. The jug sweats. She sets it on the floor between her legs and feels the cold coming off it, licking her skin. “Will you go now?”

“What’s the hurry? And should I be offended that you haven’t thanked me? That you’re not asking me to sit down? That you’re not bringing two glasses to fill so that I might have a taste?” He circles her twice, his footsteps heavy enough to send a trembling through her body, and then approaches the open window. He rests his hands on the sill and the wood complains. He looks out on the turbines spinning all across the city, their blades cutting the air like weapons wound and spun.

She does not know where Simon hides, maybe on the ledge just beyond the window, so she calls to Slade in a panic, “You’re right. Thank you. Thank you very much. You’re very kind.”

He turns. His body eclipses the window entirely, casting a shadow across the room. “That’s more like it.”

The jug dampens the floor, wets her ankle, sends a chill up her leg. When Slade approaches her, she does not move, willing her body to remain still. Even when he leans in, as if to plant a kiss on her cheek. His mouth pauses next to her ear. She can smell him: wool, onions. For a moment there is only his breathing. Then it pauses — and he takes a small bite of her. She feels her cheek slurp into his mouth, feels the teeth chew down, feels the flesh clip away. Still she does not move or cry out. She pinches shut her eyes and clenches her fists and waits and waits and waits until his footsteps retreat from her, into the hallway, down the stairs.

She does not dare to open her eyes, not until Simon climbs through the window and touches her cheek, where the flesh is bitten and the blood dries in a tacky trail, and says, “I’ll kill him before he touches you again.”

FOR A LONG TIME they stand in a silent, wavering circle. No one needs to ask the question. They know their options. They can fight or they can run. They look first to each other — well rested, but bony and slumped, their bodies like a bunch of broken dolls — and then their stares settle on Reed. He keeps his face downcast, studying the ground, kicking a hole in it, as if the answer might be buried beneath him. “What are you all looking at me for?” he finally says and then, “This is on you, Clark.”

She does not hesitate. “We run.”

They have guns and they outnumber Colter, but they have been trained to fear him. With night as his ally and with wolves as his weapons, some of them will probably die. Lewis guesses him a few days away. They plan to continue forward and keep track of his progress with the owl and hope to lose him or find a more defensible position.

As they press on, the water steadily deepens, the river widens. They can wade past their knees. Houses dot the woods, choked with vines and set back on hillsides, sometimes with the gray, crooked remains of stairways leading to the water, where docks remain like bridges to nowhere. They pass many boats, overturned, spun around, mired in the mud. Birds nest in them. Fish rest in their shade.

Periodically, Lewis sends the owl skyward. Less and less time passes before it returns to them, ten hours, nine hours, eight. A horse cannot gallop as fast as the owl can fly, so Lewis can only guess his distance by studying landmarks in the footage, four days away, then two days away.

Reed wants to drop his gear and sit down and flop his hands apologetically and say, “This is the end.” The end of their journey, the end of their dream, the end of their lives. The end of the Sanctuary. And the human world, in whatever clusters it still exists, might not be far behind. He is gnashing his teeth and blinking back tears, ready to say, “Enough!” when they find the canoes.

This is outside Sioux City, at a marina, where skiffs and johnboats and bass boats and Jet Skis lie half-buried, where dock posts rise from cracked clay and the slats they once carried accordion all around them. Their wood is gray, beetle bitten, pocked by woodpeckers.

The shed door hangs at an angle, one hinge stubbornly holding on. When they open it, pigeons the color of storm clouds burst from inside. They wander in to the sun-slatted shadows and find six Alumacrafts, seventeen-foot canoes stacked on a metal frame. They are splattered with bird shit, full of feathers and nests, but when dragged to the water, they float. Even when heaped full of supplies, even when bearing the weight of their exhausted bodies, the canoes float and they begin to furiously paddle their way up the river.

In this way, they travel north and west. Every now and then, the canoes will come to a scraping stop and they will climb out and portage to deeper water. And every now and then, they will look over their shoulders as if they expect to see Colter splashing toward them. They battle the current, but the current isn’t strong. The finish flakes off their paddles, and cracks run through them, but they do their job, cutting through the water, drawing them forward.

Lewis’s shoulders and elbows ache, but he would happily paddle a thousand years before he took another step. He prefers the canoes even to horses. Their speed might be slower, but their passage is so smooth, unlike the rocking jolt of his saddle that every day threatened to knock his bones from their sockets. Sometimes he cannot help but marvel at the novelty of it all. He is traveling by canoe. There is enough water in the world, more than he ever dreamed he would see, to accommodate a canoe. Water dribbles from his paddle. Water runs between his fingers when he dips a hand into the river and cups it to his mouth. Water dimples and splashes when a frog leaps off a rock or when a trout jumps in a rainbowed flash to seize a dragonfly. If he narrows his eyes until the world fuzzes over, he can almost forget what they have left, where they are going, but then, in the river, he will see Aran Burr. Swimming alongside the canoe. Wearing a flowing white robe and a necklace of black stones. He calls Lewis’s name, drawing out the s in the swishing pull of his paddle.

Once a day, he sends off the owl, and as its flights grow shorter and shorter, so does time seem to stretch longer. An hour could be a day, a day a year. So different, he thinks, from his time at the Sanctuary, when time slipped like sand between his fingers, one day blurring into the next. There, nothing was new, nothing at stake. Every day, he saw the same people wandering the same streets under the same sun. But out here, in the Dead Lands, everything is new, everything a threat, forcing him to notice — every sun-sparkled wave on the river, every shadow sleeving the shore — and the more you notice, the fuller time becomes, and the fuller time becomes, the more it drags. Even the light seems to fall more slowly between the branches.