Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“That’s right.” Clark crosses her arms. “No one. Now, pull yourself together.”

The horizon is lit red by the oil fires. A black snow begins to fall and blur the air, filling up their tracks, the way home. He cannot do it alone. The distance traveled and the dangers faced already feel impossible. He will starve or he will freeze or he will bake. He will fall or something will fall on him, a boulder or branch. He will succumb to a snakebite and wander for hours in a fever while one of his limbs purples and swells. He will be torn to pieces, a feast for the beasts and birds and bugs. There will be no marker for his grave except a half-buried pile of sinewy bones riddled with tooth marks. And even if he made it, even if he somehow stumbled out of the desert and into St. Louis, toothless from scurvy, mad with loneliness, what then? Maybe he would knock on the gates and shout, “Let me in, I’m back, so sorry to have worried you, it was all a dreadful mistake!” Or maybe he would sneak in, wait outside the Dome until Danica emerged for a walk, then grab her by the wrist, say, “It’s me!” She would pull away from him, he felt sure. She wouldn’t recognize him, just as Clark didn’t recognize him. He didn’t recognize himself anymore. And then Thomas would lop off his head and hang it somewhere for everyone to admire. It is clear now: if he returns, he will fail, and if he keeps going, they will fail. He is a failure. Life is a failure.

“Fine.” Reed nods. “Okay. You’re right. I can see that you’re right.” He keeps nodding, even when he withdraws his revolver and puts the muzzle in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

DANICA KEPT THE dagger. The one she found on Resurrection Day, in the stadium, when the girl was marched to the gallows, when her husband applauded, when she snuck away and Reed bent her over the table littered with weapons. He filled her, again and again, until she felt something unraveling inside her, as if every ligament and tendon and muscle fiber and nerve ending were loosening at once — and she reached for something, anything, to stabilize her, before she came undone. It was the dagger her hand curled around then. In a way she never let go.

The blade is six inches long, the hilt four, the guard the same. It is flat, meant to be worn close to the skin. She spears cockroaches with it. She tosses it, end over end, into wood floors for the satisfying thunk it makes. When she holds it up to a band of sunlight or moonlight, it makes a shadow like a cross on the wall. When she draws it across the skin at the inside of her thighs, it traces a thin pink line that wells into red dots. She keeps it sheathed beneath her dresses. She sleeps with it beneath her pillow. There is something reassuring, boosting, about always having its sharpness nearby. Maybe that’s how men feel about their cocks.

She had a blade when she was a girl. A belt knife. Her grandfather gave it to her, said it wasn’t a toy but a tool, said she should learn it like a limb. She carved her name into stucco, carved dwarves and goblins out of wood, carved up meat and cheese, carved off the ear of an older boy once when he tried to get between her legs.

Her hand is on the dagger and she is awake the moment her door cracks and the boy steals his way into the room. She watches him with her eyes half-lidded. Watches him watch her. Then study his surroundings. He wears a backpack. No shoes. When he whispers toward the dresser, she expects him to reach for the jewelry box atop it, but he does not. He slides open one drawer, then another, her underwear drawer, and reaches in. He is a pervert, then.

She could call out for help. But she has always preferred to take care of matters on her own. So she slides out of bed, slides across the floor, so quietly the air seemingly cannot grip her. She wears a silken slip that makes no noise.

And then the knife bites the boy’s back, just above his pack, the place where his neck meets his shoulders.

He spins around. He is such a little thing. Narrow headed and wide-eyed and slim limbed, like a skinned cat. He does not seem capable of lust. And when she takes in the sight of him, his hand gripping a bouquet of panties, she feels somewhere between amused and disgusted.

“What is your name?”

He says nothing until she leans the blade into his chest and then he says, with a whimper, “Simon.”

“You’ve come here to steal my panties, Simon?”

“No.”

“That’s certainly what it looks like.”

His eyes flash between her and his fistful of underwear. “I’ll admit, I was going to grab a pair.”

“Good. It’s good to tell the truth.”

“But that’s not why I came here.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Out with it, then. Before I open you up.”

“I came to deliver a letter. He sent you a letter.”

“Who did?”

“Reed did. That’s who. Reed.”

She takes two steps back and lowers her arm, nearly dropping the knife when it swings limply at her side. At first she cannot say anything, cannot make words, all of her attention on the flower of blood blooming at his breast where she nicked him. He reaches to touch it, as if bitten by a bug, and examines his red fingertips.

Then she goes to the hallway and checks to make sure it is empty before closing the door and gathering her breath and saying, “Show me.”

* * *

Ella asked how long Simon would be, how long it would take him to break into the Dome, creep through its many rooms, find whatever it is Lewis meant for them to discover. You must expose what is hidden in the Dome , he wrote to them — and there the letter trailed off.

Simon told her he might not find anything at all. And he didn’t know how long it would take. He would do his best and doing your best takes time. This sort of thing can’t be rushed. The necessary silence of his trade came with stillness, slowness. He might be two hours or he might be four hours.

“Four hours, then,” she said. “I’ll start to worry after four hours.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t want you worrying and I don’t want to feel rushed.”

“Four hours. It will be dawn in five, so you’ve got no choice but four.”

She tries to sleep but can’t. Of course she wonders what he might find — locked away in some closet or hidden in a drawer — whatever secret might serve them. But that seems secondary to him coming home to her. Home — that’s how she thinks of the museum — as belonging to them both. They share a room — with beds opposite each other — just as they share meals and duties and conversation. She might bully him, but with tenderness, every rough shove another opportunity to touch, every hard word a breath between them shared.

She waits in the kitchen — a long room crowded with cupboards and counters — where he will enter through a side door. She paces the floor and then collapses in a chair and rests her head in her hands. She imagines him whipped. She imagines him dead. She imagines him trapped somewhere, hiding beneath a bed or in a closet while people move all around him. She hates to admit it, but she cares about him, feels about him as she would a cherished possession, not wanting to let him out of her sight.

Dawn comes. There is a soft knock. The knob rattles. She hurries from her chair and yanks open the door and hisses, “Where have you been?” Her eyes take a moment to adjust to the light, blinking through a red haze, and then she makes sense of what she sees: Simon standing before a hooded figure.

“What’s this?” Ella says, her whole body suddenly numb. “What’s happened?”

Simon drops his eyes and lifts his shoulders in a shrug. Ella looks to the figure for answers. The hood holds a shadow, the face lost to it. “I’m supposed to just let you in?” Ella says, and Simon says, “Do it, please,” and she steps aside to accommodate them, then checks the alley before closing and bolting the door.