Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

For a moment a storm of snow obscures the air, buries their bodies. She thrashes her way out in time to see the doctor dragged by the long gray rope of her hair. What has her, Clark cannot say, but there are many of them.

They are huge and white, ghostly in the snow except for their red tongues and red eyes that appear like flames crushed into tiny caves. Bears, she realizes, loping and bounding in all different directions. Humpbacked, spade faced, their fat trembling beneath their shaggy white coats.

One dodges toward them. York digs in the snow, unearths a shotgun, fires from the hip, and sends the bear careening into a tree. It bellows, collapses into a heap.

He empties a shell, loads the breech, fires again, this time in the direction of the doctor. The bear opens its jaws, releases her ponytail, flinching back and whimpering in pain from the wound brightening its shoulder. Then it bolts for the woods. Clark counts four others. Their white hair silvered with snow. Their teeth like the shards of a kicked ice puddle.

One of them approaches York from behind and knocks him facefirst into the snow, and then turns to face Gawea. She tries to fire a shotgun but finds it jammed with snow and uses it instead as a club. Another bear has the doctor by the forearm, its teeth clamped down, its head shaking back and forth as if to tear her arm from its socket. And another slashes and lunges at Lewis and Colter, who have not grabbed their weapons in time and now swing sticks and fists.

And the last, creeping toward them, keeps an arm tucked protectively against its chest. Clark sees it is missing a paw — severed, a red nub not fully healed — and remembers her trap in the woods, the scream in the night.

Now she is the one screaming. Screaming until she doesn’t have any breath. Screaming her brother’s name. Because he lies there, knocked out, half-sunk in a snowbank. He shudders awake only when the bear mashes its mouth into his belly. He throws back his head in a silent cry and grabs its ears and pulls as if to draw the creature more fully inside him.

Then the bear vises its jaws around his shoulder and lumbers toward the woods, dragging him there and leaving behind a bright red runner of blood.

Her feet cannot kick fast enough as she pursues them.

* * *

Whether it is a knee or a branch or the stock of a rifle, Lewis doesn’t know, but when the shelter collapses and the bears attack, something strikes his temple and slows his mind, muddies his vision. He wobbles when he stands beside Colter. He grips a stick in his hands and swings it wildly when any of the bears draw near. All this seems to happen outside him. His head throbs. His legs feel glass stemmed. Distantly, he hears Clark screaming — and then sees her running for the woods, disappearing between the trees.

He stares after her, lowers his stick, and at that moment a bear darts forward and knocks him flat. Its weight sinks him into the snow, empties his lungs. He cannot draw a breath. Above him black clouds roil, his vision of them eclipsed by the triangular snout of the thing. It leans in, blasts him with its hot, carrion-reeking breath. He can see down the tunnel of its throat, the place he will soon travel, the last of this journey.

He closes his eyes, waiting for the worst. But the worst doesn’t come. He hears a guttural roar that heightens into a shriek. Then the bear’s head thuds into his breast. Its body slumps onto him. He pokes at it, shoves at it. He can barely breathe. It does not move — not until Lewis arcs his back, painfully, rolls its three hundred pounds off him.

His mind is still struggling to keep up. He didn’t hear a gunshot. Colter must have stabbed or struck it dead. However it happened, he is saved for now. He takes a deep, aching breath. Blood flows to places pinched off. He struggles to sit up. “Thank you,” he says to Colter and Colter says, “Don’t thank me.”

That’s when Lewis sees — in the slack face of the bear — a fletched arrow buried in its eye with blood jellying around it.

Colter remains stiffly where he stands, as if the wind has frozen him in place, and it is only then Lewis follows his gaze.

The snow has stopped. He can see now what they could not before. They stand on the outskirts of Bismarck. Only thirty yards away, ice-mantled houses cluster together, the beginnings of a lost neighborhood. In the distance he spies two collapsed sections of freeway — and beyond them, still soaring over the river, a rusted bridge.

Strangers surround them. Whether men or women, he cannot tell, not at first. They wear stitched gray furs, maybe made from rabbits, coyotes. Their faces are hidden beneath scarves and goggles. Their hands are the only part of them exposed — in order to better grip their bowstrings.

The bears lie in dead heaps, blotched with blood and quilled by arrows.

Lewis counts ten strangers, standing beside trees and snow-shrouded bushes, crouched next to cars, motionless. For a moment there is no noise except the wind hissing and their bowstrings creaking.

ELLA DOESN’T TRUST Danica, but you can’t trust a dagger either. You can use it skillfully, keep its point and edge away from your skin, or you can be harmed by it. So she’ll do as Danica requested, as Lewis requested. She’ll make some noise.

They leave when darkness cloaks the city, when curfew begins and everyone settles into sleep. They wear black pants, black shirts, mash spit and charcoal into a paste and smear their faces and hands, working together. Ella isn’t letting Simon out of her sight, not after what happened last time. She’s not as careless as Lewis. She won’t abandon those closest to her.

“Worried about me, are you?” Simon says. “I like that.”

“I just don’t want you to screw things up again.”

The streets are dark and dead. They slide from alleyways to doorways, moving as quietly as they can from every pool and wedge of shadow. The moonlight feels like a spotlight. Their skin bristles with fear and excitement. They go still whenever they hear a noise — a rat scurrying, a snore spiraling from an open window — and then move on.

When the city council wishes to share some announcement — about the curfew, rations, a death march — they paint it in black capital letters across the windowless wall that rises beside each of the Sanctuary’s wells. Simon and Ella will do the same. They will write the news.

They make the paint out of chalk, linseed oil, glue, beets. They carry it in canteens stashed in backpacks with pans and brushes. They have enough for only one well. And they do not have time to whitewash the current notice, wait for it to dry, before slopping out their own message. The beets stain their paint red: the color of anger, the color of danger, the color of the fire Danica said she wanted to spread. They will slop it over the top of whatever is written there already.

A deputy guards the well. They can see him now, walking in slow circles around the stanchion of the wind turbine. The blades rotate and cast spinning shadows and make a rusty, grinding music. Simon isn’t worried about being heard over the top of them, but he is worried about being seen. If they can only get up the ladder, into the shadow of the wall, he thinks they’ll remain undetected.

He hurls a rock across the square. It sizzles through the air before finally striking a storefront awning made out of a sheet of metal. The sound startles the guard and he marches toward it with his hand at the grip of his machete. Simon tosses another rock — even farther — guiding the guard down an alley.

They scurry then to the wall, invisible in the shadow of it. There are two rebar ladders built into either side of it. They hurry to glug out their canteens, fill their pans, tuck their brushes into their belts, and climb.