Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

* * *

At dawn, after the first bell rings, after the sun brightens and warps the horizon like hammered gold, people begin to line up for water. They are thirsty, and they are hungry, too, and they are ready for good news. They are ready for the giant red letters slashed across the wall near the well. LEWIS AND CLARK, the message reads, CANOE RIVERS AND SEND HOPE. A brief, bright message. Some people laugh and point their fingers. Others frown and wonder aloud whether it is true — how could it possibly be true? — and whether they dare believe. They share the words with those who can’t read. Some are so excited they depart the line without filling their jugs. By the time the sun lightens the wall, two deputies have climbed the ladders to whitewash over what they call graffiti. But they cannot erase words etched already in the mind, words whispered in the streets like a gathering wind that eventually reaches Thomas’s ear.

Slade delivers the news. He hunts his way through the Dome, looking for Thomas, finally pushing through the double oaken doors and discovering him alone in the council chambers. He wears a sky-blue silk shirt with an open neck and gold stitching along the collar. He sits in the dark, at the head of the empty table, his hands flat on the wood as though he were about to take up his silverware and carve a meal. The windows are shuttered, but bars of light fall across him.

Thomas appears to be speaking to himself — moving his lips, whispering to an audience of shadows — cut short by Slade clearing his throat.

Thomas twists in his seat and flickers a smile. “You know I’ve always liked the sound of my own voice.”

“I’ve been looking for you.” Slade enters the room fully.

“Bad news, I assume?”

“No other kind these days.”

One side of Thomas’s face jerks, as if he is uncertain whether he is suffering a barb, and then says, “Give it to me, then.”

Slade presses the door until it clicks, then walks to the opposite side of the long table, drags out the chair, and folds his body into it. “When you asked me to be sheriff, you told me you admired my brutal honesty. You told me you trusted me because of it.”

“I trust you.” And then, like an asterisk, “I trust your muscle.”

“Trust me when I say things are getting perilous.”

“Perilous. That’s a big word for you, Slade.”

“I’m more than muscle.”

Thomas gives him an assessing look. “Of course you are. Please. Tell me about how perilous things are.”

“The bodies are piling up at the morgue, some dead from the heat, some from illness, some from not enough of everything a body needs. But more and more of them are dead from murder. More and more dying because there’s more and more willing to thieve and to kill. People are talking. About how things were so much better under Meriwether. About how you’re going to ruin us all. How you’re fucking that—”

“Yes, yes, yes. Tell me what I don’t know.”

“I was working my way up to it, giving it adequate introduction.” He then explains to Thomas the red splatter of graffiti that appeared like a wound overnight. A message seemingly reported by Lewis and Clark. A message meant to excite and entice rebellion. “Maybe a thousand people saw it before we painted it over.”

His voice fires off questions like quills from a blowgun. “Do you think it’s true? Could they really be alive? Could there be water? Could they be maintaining communication with someone inside the wall?”

When Slade shrugs, his shoulders seem burdened by more than shadows. “Would it change anything if it was true? People seem to think it is. That’s what matters.”

“The owl. I bet he sent that ridiculous owl of his. Have you been to the museum? Have you searched it? Where else would he have sent it? He must have sent it there.”

“He might not have sent anything. The graffiti might be pure invention meant to cause this very response.”

His fingernails are long enough to staccato the tabletop. “What’s the answer, then? Enlist more deputies? Promise them food and water and we’ll have a wave of volunteers ready to serve and protect.”

“Done.”

“Punish anyone who so much as whispers anything treasonous?”

“Done.”

“Good.” Thomas leans back, his face escaping the sun, retreating into shadow. “Then there’s only one thing left to do.”

CLARK FOLLOWS THE tracks in the snow — through the woods, through a ruined neighborhood — until she finds her brother. His body abandoned. Still warm but already dead. She has her revolver drawn, but nothing to fire at. She hears a deep-throated huffing — what sounds like laughter — chasing through this frozen world, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere in particular. Some of the windows are broken, some shuttered with ice. They stare at her. She blasts a round into one of them for no reason except to unleash some misery.

Silence follows. She drags her brother into a brick house with half its roof collapsed. The walls are cracked and so water damaged they appear molten. She collapses in the living room and somehow day becomes night as she hugs and rocks his body. His skin grows hard to the touch, marbled many colors of purple and blue and white, like a winter sky just after the sun sets. His tears, or maybe her tears, have frosted white trails down his cheeks. And his carved-out stomach is a crystalline red.

It takes her a long time to realize she shivers from cold and not grief. She kicks apart a wooden chair and sparks a fire in the stone hearth that casts an orange glow. She does not move except to feed it more and more rotten wood. Thick gray smoke ghosts the air. Her mussed red hair falls across her face, matching the flames before her, as if she has caught fire.

Whatever she told York to do, he did, and now, because of what she told him to do, he is dead. It was a mistake. It was all a mistake. Her brother is lost and so is her confidence. She doesn’t know what has happened to the others. She might care in the morning, but she doesn’t care now, not in this cave of light she shares with her brother’s body. She feels momentarily numb to them, as she did when she stood over Reed’s grave. But York is her blood. York belonged to her. His death is like a diseased limb that has reached its rot into her heart.

She tries to sleep. At least then she can escape making any sort of decision. Or maybe she will wake to find this is all a dream. She clenches her body up like a big fist. But after only an hour or so, the fire has gone dead and she wakes, shivering. Even at this simple task, staying warm, she fails.

Now another storm has swirled over Bismarck. The wind carries sleet in it, whipping and tinkling the house with what sound like glass shards. She stirs the embers and tosses more wood in the hearth. A blast of steam escapes her mouth as a sigh or sob.

In the distance, over the noise of the ice storm, she hears grunting and chuffing, what must be the bear, and she cannot help but feel it is singing a hateful, mocking song for her.

Dawn comes. She stands over her brother’s body for a long time. Then she begins smashing chairs, splintering tables, ripping off cupboard doors, gathering whatever wood she can find to crush into the hearth. To this smoldering pile she adds his body.

She tells him she’s sorry. She should have taken better care of him. She turns to leave just as the flames catch his clothes.

* * *

They kneel in the snow, the cold creeping through their pants, with their wrists painfully bound behind their backs. Lewis twists against his restraints, testing their strength, until their guard comes by and kicks him in the back of the head hard enough to send him sprawling forward. He struggles upright, with snow powdering the side of his face.