Benjamin Percy: The Dead Lands

The gates open and close behind the deputies. Clark walks to the edge of the wall and balances precipitously there. She imagines what it would feel like to slip, to fall, the wind roaring in her ears, the ground rushing toward her face. Join the fate of the man. He, after all, believed what she believes. He said aloud the same things she keeps caged inside her. For her to call this place home — to feel not sheltered but imprisoned — and do nothing? It’s too much.

That’s why last night, after the death parade, she drank herself into oblivion. She tried to hurry past the bar. Then she heard the laughter spilling out of it, and she paused in the wedge of lamplight that fell from its doorway into the street. She could see, through the rib-cage doors, beyond the swell of bodies, a man onstage plucking a guitar and stomping his foot and singing “Paint It Black”—and she gave in to the excuse that she would stop in for one good song, one strong drink. She had promised she wouldn’t, but her mood was foul and the night was hot and she was so thirsty.

Her name is Wilhelmina, a family name, a name she despises, a weak, perfumed, lacy thing she can tolerate only if shortened to Mina. But mostly she goes by her last name, Clark. Depending on the light, her hair appears red or blond, same as the sand. With a knotted strip of leather she keeps it tied back into a short tail. Her face is hawkish, her eyes always narrowed and her mouth always tightened as if tied at the corners by knots.

Though the bars serve other liquor — gin, vodka, whatever else is in the well, some hooch that goes down like snake venom — people drink mostly whiskey and mescal and sotol and tequila, and that was what she was drinking last night, tequila. The liquor was distilled in better times, when water ran more freely, aged now to potency and costing too much coin. The floor was wood shavings, the stools were old tires, and the ceiling scrap metal welded carelessly so that through its many holes she could see the stars spinning above like the ringworms in her glass.

People hurled feathered darts. They huddled together in card games with mismatched decks. They played pool with leather-tipped steel rods and rocks ground and polished into balls. The warmth of the liquor raced to her fingertips, pulsed at her temples, and before long she was burning inside like the cigarillo pinched between her lips, burning like the candle she held her elbow over too long on a bet, burning like the pain in her hand when she broke the nose of the bartender who asked her to leave, told her she had had enough.

She had had enough all right. This morning she can feel her heartbeat in her forehead, like a door slammed over and over again. She wears a wide-rimmed hat and shaded goggles, but still the sun seems too bright when she stares off into the ruined wilderness that reaches to the horizon, where sometimes she believes mountains are visible, though no one else will say so. They claim she is seeing what she wants to see. They claim it is a mirage, a trembling image brought on by the heat, like some hellish counterpart to her wall, spiny and manned by the spirits of dead giants.

She takes a pull of her canteen to try to fight the cottonmouth, but her body barely lets her swallow. The wind gusts. It sighs. It whistles through the many hollows of the wall in which swallows and wasps nest. It carries sand in it that stings skin and eats holes in cloth and dulls the edge of a blade. It nearly knocks her from the edge, and she wobbles back onto the landing.

The Sanctuary reaches across a mile in some places, a half mile in others. The wall is not a circle or a square — it is shapeless, an improvisation that became a permanent corral. She is a sentinel. She rotates in her duties, either scavenging outside the wall as a ranger or patrolling its perimeter on sentry. Every sentry is assigned a two-hundred-yard section of the wall marked by iron braziers filled with wood with torches lit beside them. If any threat emerges from the forest, whether man or beast, they are to hurl the torch upon the brazier as a flaming alarm.

Her uniform is not the night black of the deputies, but gray and brown, as though mended from stone and wood. Her job is to stare out at a fractal landscape of umber and dust and ruins, guarding against whatever awaits them in the Dead Lands. She does not answer to the sheriff. She does not serve as an enforcer. She does not hurt others, only protects. But still, her job feels like a betrayal of conscience, since she patrols the very wall she believes they need to escape, no matter the risk. Better to seek out life than wait for death in this dried-out fishbowl. She used to loudly debate this with others at the bars; these days, sharing such an opinion will only get her killed. But she is right. She knows she is right.

There were eight wells in the Sanctuary, all of them broad-mouthed pipes with metal ladders built down their throats. Three of them have collapsed, their casing pinched off and deemed impossible to repair due to some shifting beneath the earth. Another has gone dry. The remaining four are guarded by deputies who regulate the long lines, the people who come dragging jugs for their daily ration. A wind turbine lifts the water and shoots it from a spigot. The motor sits directly over the well, grinding away and dusting the water with rust and turning the impellers that reach deep into the aquifer beneath them.

The water used to come in a mineraly gush. These days the spigots dribble and sputter. The mayor says he is meeting with workmen who might worm their way down and extend the pipes, dig deeper, find the cold, good water that must be waiting to be tapped beneath their feet.

People are worried. Buckets and barrels and leather bags hang from every corner of the city to capture any rainwater — and a network of canals funnel water and sewage to their meager crops — but the clouds have not gathered and burst in more than three months, the standard of the past few years, the stretches between downpours longer and longer. People boil their urine for drinking water. They sleep below tarps that gather moisture from their breathing and channel it into a pot. They ration out the stores they keep in buckets and barrels. They drink the blood of bats and rats and birds. This is not a sustainable existence — the Sanctuary slowly knuckling in on itself like a dried date.

Below, Clark can hear the sentinels gathering into a ranging party. The stamping and snorting of horses, the creaking of leather, the clinking of spurs, the shifting of arrows in their quivers.

The sun rises high enough to crest the wall, and in a rush last night’s shadows retreat and the windows flash and the canals brighten into many diamond points. The sun, the cruel orange eye that cooks the sweat from their skin and the water from the ground and the clouds from the sky. The temperature in the Sanctuary immediately spikes fifteen degrees. The space beneath the gates, though, remains a pocket of shadow, and it is here that the riders gather.

The bone whistle sounds, the gates groan open, and the rangers ride out two horses abreast. They all wear hats to battle the sun and neckerchiefs to battle the dust. At their lead is Reed, the chief of the sentinels. Even from here she can see the long black braid twisting down his back like a shorn noose. She wills him to turn in his saddle and look for her, but he does not. She imagines she can feel his disappointment radiating off him. Earlier, when she stumbled out of her quarters and reported to the stables, he took her face in his hands and shook his head and told her to climb the wall. She was in no shape to ride, still drunk from the night before.

A great wing of dust rises behind them — and the wind carries it toward her, the grit pattering her clothes, biting her face when she watches them depart. It will be another week, she’s guessing, before he allows her to rotate back from sentry to ranger. He disapproves of her drinking not only because of the hazard to her body, the interference with her duties, but because he cannot risk her speaking loosely to others. The risk is too great — given their plans. She doesn’t know when they will leave, where they will go, or how they will get there, but she will not die here. She will escape.