Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

When the owl returns to him, only thirty minutes after it departs, he yells out to Clark, telling her Colter is close. The time has come. They must find a place to make a stand.

Clouds boil ahead, grumbling with distant thunder and darkening a third of the sky. Rain trails from them like skirts of gray muslin. Lightning jags. The air shudders when thunder calls.

They paddle toward it in silence, and the gray-black clouds violently expand, as if rooted in a volcano, an eruption carrying ash and fire. This is not a sky for big, hopeful dreams like theirs. This is a sky for nightmares.

A hundred yards ahead, between two rushing threads of water, rises an island. They will go there, Clark says. And as long as they need to wait for Colter, an hour or a day or more, the surrounding river will stand guard, serving as their moat.

The rain begins before they arrive, as hot as the sun’s tears. Instantly they are soaked. For a moment they can’t help but laugh at the novelty of it. Rain. Not a passing shower, but a deluge, the air so packed with water they might well have upended, sunk into the river. They pause their paddling and hold up their hands and open their mouths until their laughing feels like drowning. They can barely keep their eyes open against the lashing rain, can barely see the island they paddle toward, and by the time they arrive, the canoes have filled with enough rain to slosh around their ankles.

THE ISLAND IS thickly wooded and a half mile long, shaped like an arrowhead, the current sharpening its tip, carrying silt downstream to deposit at its bottom. In some places it is edged by steep clay banks with roots spilling from them. In others, by stony beaches littered with logs.

The storm has paused but not passed. They are temporarily caught in some rift. Rain no longer drums the overturned canoes. The wind, once so powerful that it snapped several trees in half, has hushed. But the sky looks like spilled ink and thunder mutters all around them. Lightning blinks so often they feel caught in some seizure.

They stagger their positions along the western bank of the island, hiding behind trees, their rifles bristling like branches. They don’t know where Colter will appear, or if he will appear at all. York says maybe he won’t, maybe he’ll keep searching the shore for some sign of them, trudging past them in the dark. Why search this island of all places?

Lewis cuts him short with a no , and when they look to him for an answer, he says a dog’s nose, a wolf’s nose, is a hundred thousand times more powerful than man’s. “I realize it’s hard to imagine, because we can only perceive so much of the world, but try to envision a bright yellow fog streaming from this place. That’s how obvious we are to them.”

The veil of night overtakes the sky. Fireflies emerge, thousands of them. The air is so dark, palpably so, that they can see the shape of the shore by the insects’ winking constellation.

Above Clark, the clouds are high, churning in a black circle, while up the river the clouds seem so low their bellies graze the treetops. Lightning flashes and seems to crack the sky, while to either side of them, the shorelines wink and swirl with the yellow light of fireflies.

One hour becomes two becomes three. They do their best to keep their eyes sharp, but time dulls their focus. If anybody sees anything, they are supposed to whistle — two short high bursts followed by a long low note — but with the night birds beginning to call, everything sounds like a beckoning.

Clark is curled behind a stump with her rifle resting on top. Every few minutes one of her legs goes numb, and she shifts her body until the leg prickles back to life, and by then the other is cramping. She studies the shore, the lightning bugs sparkling there, the tufts of grass and thin-angled maze of branches beneath the green awning of leaves.

Clark can hear the rain coming again, the hiss of it not far off.

She looks to her right and thinks she can make out the silhouette of her brother leaning against a tree — and she looks to her left and sees a spark of red, the lit bowl of the doctor’s pipe, pulsing as she takes long drags off it. A soft breeze blows and the trees sway and the leaves shake and her eyes sweep up and down the shore until they settle on something.

It appears like a man, a naked man with a long, pointed face, clambering along on all fours. Another appears beside it, both of them trotting back and forth, dipping and raising their heads to test the air. Sand wolves. She might be able to hear them muttering, a soft, high-throated barking that reveals their excitement.

The rain begins again. Thousands of drops dimple the water, making mouths that seem to open hungrily for them. In that instant all the lightning bugs go dark.

Then comes Colter. Barely visible, on his horse, he moves from the forest to the grassy embankment.

Her veins constrict. Her pulse slams. She has seen the wolves before, on the few occasions she visited the zoo, a fly-filled, horseshoe-shaped collection of cages with games and candy carts at the center. Monkeys meticulously picked fleas from each other and ate them. A snake as wide as a man’s thigh coiled in the shade of a rock pile. And the wolves prowled constantly across the heaps of concrete that decorated their cage, every now and then gnawing on a log or shredding a tire with their claws or crashing against the bars and snarling when someone drew too near.

Now lightning flashes and arrests a clear picture of them huddled beneath their master, freed from their cages to bite and slash as they please. She cannot see their eyes, but she feels them, like black stones that weigh upon her own.

Colter digs in his heels and the horse starts down the embankment, into the river, where the water splashes around its haunches as it lurches toward the island. The wolves follow to either side, bobbing in the frothing wake of the horse.

A whistle sounds to her left, then another to her right, then another and another, the whole shoreline sounding the alarm at once, and only then does she bring her lips together and blow, the whistle failing on her dry lips. She chambers a round into the rifle and snaps off the safety and does her best to draw a bead on the wolves and then Colter, not sure what to shoot first, the brain or the muscle it commands. The water is first knee-deep, then rises to the horse’s breast; then only its head can be seen, with a white lapel of foam around it.

Their plan had been to gather together, to assemble and strike, but the alarm sounded too late and now it is unclear where Colter might come to shore, so they can only settle behind their stations and ready their weapons.

The rain stings like hurled pebbles. Lightning arrows and thunder mutters. It is followed by a volley of gunshots cracking all around her. At first they fire off hesitantly, then one bullet, one bullet, one bullet, becomes a swarm ripping the air. Colter does not stop. The water suds and pops around him with shots that miss their mark. She would have waited longer — waited until the bullet was sure to find an eye socket or open mouth — but the noise of gunfire is contagious. She pulls the trigger. There is a snap. And nothing more. A dead bullet. She ejects and chambers another. She pulls the trigger, and again, nothing. Colter is no more than twenty yards away and seems to be targeting her, the dark section of shore where no gunfire flashes.

Lightning flares again. She flinches at the thunder that follows. There is a moment of pause, when everyone reloads. It is then she notices her rifle is glowing. Blue light dances along its edges, outlining the shape of it, as if it were inhabited by some spirit. She drops it. The hair all over her body prickles and stands on end. She smells something like melting plastic. She looks to either side of her — ready to call out for help — when she sees Lewis stepping from his hiding place and approaching the river.