Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

She can hear Colter now. He is yelling at them, saying something she can’t quite make out, his words lost to thunder.

Lewis now appears almost phosphorescent, haloed in blue crackling light, as if costumed in lightning bugs. He moves as if in a dream. The sky flashes with a speed that matches the pulse inside her — and then coalesces into a stream of lightning. The clouds seem to split open and pour down blue jagged light that takes hold of Lewis. He shudders in his place as the electricity courses through him. Then he swings up his arms as if to hurl something heavy.

A white-hot beam blasts from his hands, dazzling its way across the river’s surface. Millions of raindrops catch the light and seem to pause in their descent. The electricity channels into the wolves — and then Colter — and for a moment Clark believes she can see their bones glow beneath their skin.

She opens her mouth to scream, but her voice is stolen away by the eruption of thunder seeming to escape it.

NORTH DAKOTA CONTAINS one of the richest oil fields in the world — estimated at one time as 503 billion barrels deep — and there are thousands and thousands of gas and oil wells there among the derricks and refineries and pipelines, the herds of snow-humped trailers and clusters of water trucks, the power transmission towers, the radio towers, the wind turbines, the natural gas pumping stations, the oil-loading train yards full of black tankers.

Once the wells were abandoned, the emergency generators kicked on, but after two weeks they ran out of diesel. High pressures matched against high temperatures resulted in explosions resulted in fires. There was no one to man the water sprayers, no one to cap the wellheads. The relief valves only fed the flames that could not be stopped, that will never stop. North Dakota will burn forever.

The air is thick with carbon, with dioxins and furans and lead and mercury and chromium. There is no night here, the horizon lit by flares, snapping pennants of colors red and white and blue. They flame against a black sky made blacker by the rank, sooty smoke.

This makes for a kind of nuclear winter, Lewis tells them.

The cold begins soon after they cross the state line. The wind skins the leaves from the trees. The river crusts over with ice and they abandon their canoes. The cattails shatter like stems of glass. Icicles hang from the trees, like the claws of dragons that might perch there. Snow falls. Sometimes thickly, sometimes in sputtery bursts. But the snow is not as they imagined, not the bright white frosting they have seen in cracked paintings and faded postcards. It is gray, ashen. It smears muddily against their skin. When they open their mouths and let the flakes fall on their tongues, the taste is as bitter as that of a chewed willow stick.

* * *

Colter lost his left arm at the elbow. The doctor sliced away the charred remains and treated the injury with yarrow leaves and snowberries mashed to a cream. From logs she kicked conk fungus, what look like the plates on a dinosaur’s back, and ground them into a powder and stirred them into water and made him drink and fight the possibility of infection.

He smelled like seared meat, burned cinnamon. His hair crisped away in places. His clothes scorched. But he is alive. His horse and the wolves were not so lucky. The lightning soaked into them and funneled through their bones and seized their hearts with an electric fist. Colter does not remember much of that night, only strobe-like flashes, and not much of the days that followed either.

They thought he was here to punish them. To cut off their heads and make a garland of them to bring back to the Sanctuary. They were right. That’s what the mayor asked him to do. But he does not serve Thomas Lancer. He serves the Meriwether family. He made a mistake when he broke the old man’s arm. The worst mistake of his life, it turns out. And the old man, damn him and bless him, clapped him away in a cell — the same way a father paddles a bottom and sends his son to his room to consider his bad behavior. Colter has had a long time to think about this. If the surgery hadn’t given the old man an infection, and if the infection hadn’t caused a heart attack, and if the heart attack hadn’t killed him, everything would be different, all would be forgiven. Colter has no doubt. He would have been released from his cell, humbled, forgiven, a prodigal son. That is how Colter thinks of himself, as a son, which makes Lewis his weakling brother — but a brother all the same.

For too long he has let hate and hurt take hold of his heart. If there were a word that captured dreams of bodies set aflame, glass smashed into open eyes, blades drawn slowly across genitals, then that would be the name of the demon that so often possessed him. He is here to seek atonement. He is here to serve the son of the one he served before. He shouldn’t have come in the night and he shouldn’t have come in the storm, but his eagerness for reunion was such that he could not stop himself once close.

“Hold your fire!” That was what he tried to yell to them that night. “I’m here for you.” It was hard to say then and harder to say now that his wolves are dead and his arm ruined, but he says it all the same: “I’m here to help.”

At first they don’t believe him, and at night they tie his wrist to his thigh and his ankle to a tree. Every now and then Clark will wander over and stand beside him with a gun dangling from her hand. She watches him curiously, as he alternates between sweating and shivering. “I could put a bullet in your head and no one would complain.”

“Don’t.”

“Because you want to join us?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a long way from earning our trust.”

“And you’re a long fucking way from mine.”

“Language like that isn’t going to help.”

He doesn’t hold back. That’s not his way. Prison won’t stop him, the desert won’t stop him, lightning won’t stop him, and neither will she, no matter if there’s a gun in her hand. “You listen. You listen good. You might think you’ve got a dick, though you’re a woman and one I’d like to lay, and you might think you’re stronger than me, but that won’t last and I’ll be strong again, and you might think you can tell me what to do, but you can’t, because I came here for Lewis and not for some red-haired, hatchet-faced bitch to tell me my business when my business is my own. I’m here to help and that’s the short and the tall and slow and the fast of it.”

She points her revolver at him, twists it one way, then the other, and makes a soft explosion with her lips. Then she drops her arm and says, “I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?”

“Guess we will.”

At first they carry him in a thick plastic utility sled, maybe two feet deep, once used to haul gear for ice fishing. They take turns dragging him, and Colter uses the front lip as a backrest, so that everybody else looks forward while he looks back.

The doctor bandages his stump. Twice a day, when she unwraps it and cleans it, the blackened flesh sputters and crackles and he cries out for her to help, to make it stop, in a voice he doesn’t recognize as his own for its jerky neediness.

Afterward he raises his head to swallow from the canteen she brings to his lips. The water dribbles down his chin as the tears dribble from his eyes. “What the hell did Lewis do to me and how the hell is it possible? I don’t understand, and don’t tell me you do either.”

“We don’t.”

“You don’t know that and you don’t know this. You don’t know how far we have to travel and you don’t know what lies ahead and you don’t know why a man can piss lightning. I go away for a year and nobody knows one fucking thing.”