Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

The guard watches Lewis — as he takes a deep, steadying breath, as if swallowing a barbed string of curses — and then backs away.

Clark is gone. So is York. The doctor is hunched over in exhaustion, her eyes closed and her arm bloodied. Colter crouches beside her, still and watchful. And Gawea has been knocked unconscious. Wrapped up in their furs, masked by their scarves, their guards have no recognizable builds or faces, so they seem like replications of the same person. They skin and butcher the bears and load the meat onto sleds.

An hour later, as instructed, they rise and trudge against the wind, punching their boots through the snow. Some of their captors walk before them and some behind, keeping them enclosed. They drag sleds, one carrying Gawea, the others stacked high with slabs and ribbons of meat. The sun dips lower, merging with the hellish glow of the oil fires on the horizon. The shadows are gray, the clouds even grayer.

The doctor collapses. Lewis tries to help her, but the guards push him away. They prod her with a bow, then kick her softly, and she says, “All right, all right,” and rises, and they continue their march.

Lewis notices first the smoke of many chimney fires rising into the sky, barely distinguishable, thin gray cords of smoke that broaden and dissipate and merge with the low-bellied clouds. And then the building comes into view. The sign is cracked and faded and scraped, but he can still make out the words, KIRKWOOD MALL.

He knows the word mall —the Sanctuary had its own airy plaza where the bazaar took place — but this looks to him more like a medieval fortress, virtually windowless, with white patches of paint clinging to the crumbling concrete exterior. It is surrounded by a kind of moat, a sea of snow splashed over asphalt, making it easy to spy any approaching enemy. Tracks dirty the ground, packing down trails, like the one they follow now, its bottom a slick blue-black ice that makes his footing uncertain, though their captors crunch along without any trouble, wearing snowshoes, framed by wood and webbed by tendons and clawed at the bottom.

Two rust-pocked trucks have been shoved in front of the wide entryway. Once there were glass doors here, the space now sheeted with wood and metal. Someone drags an unhinged door aside and they enter the dark.

Lewis’s eyes take a moment to adjust. Slowly the mall takes shape. A long, low-ceilinged chamber catacombed with stores repurposed into living quarters, some of them glimmering with lamplight. The air smells of urine and leather and smoke.

At that moment, their escorts rip off their hats and goggles, unwrap their scarves, to reveal messy nests of hair. Women. And girls. More of the latter than the former. Not a man among them.

Lewis hears voices muttering, footsteps chuffing the floor. People are standing from their campsites, walking closer to observe them. They, too, are women. They number around twenty altogether. Some are brown and some are black and some are so pale they appear made from winter, carved and spun from ice, except where their skin has splotched red. All of their eyes and cheekbones are carved out by shadows. They are missing teeth. Some of their fingers are half-blackened with frostbite. They look familiar, as survivors. But their expressions offer no welcome.

A taller woman — with close-cropped gray hair and a commanding voice — speaks to the group of them, saying she knew this day would come, she knew they would come. “But we hunted them down before they could hunt us down. We’re stronger than them. Didn’t I tell you that? That we’re stronger than them?”

The girls nod, eager for her words.

“No,” Lewis says. “We’re not—”

But before he can say anything more, he is shoved, along with the rest of his party, into an empty store with a metal curtain that rattles across the entry and locks them in place.

* * *

There is not a lot of thought left inside her. Clark hears the click and scrape of her revolver, the hammer thumbed back, released, thumbed back, released. She smells the smoke and the puddle of orange urine she left in the corner. She feels the sleet prickling her skin when she steps into the day. Outside of processing these few sensations, her brain is unbusied, more singular, as if requiring only the stem. All this time she’s been battling toward human progress and now it is time to succumb to the world’s beginning and the world’s end. The rules are simple. The fastest claws and the biggest teeth win.

Millions of ice pellets blur and clatter the air. She slides her feet, skating her way out the door, into the street, and after only a minute, her clothes are stiff, cracking and shattering when she moves.

She tucks her revolver beneath her coat so that it doesn’t freeze over. Her pockets rattle with bullets. The sun is beginning to rise — and the storm is beginning to subside. She moves slowly. There is no other way to move, everything glassed over, so slick she must slide her boots and constantly readjust her body to keep her balance. Her eyes water in the wind. Her coat flaps around her knees.

“Where are you?” she says.

Everything appears like something else, sheeted and encased with a gray-white ice. A streetlamp is a gleaming proboscis. A tree’s branches appear like dead veins reaching up some milky arm. A skeleton, like a man made of glass, hunches in a doorway. She makes her way past the giant brown slab of the civic center, past bars and hotels and credit unions.

A few more ice pellets patter her face, and then the clouds quit. The wind dies. The city quiets except for the ice muttering and splitting. She stands in a shallow canyon of storefronts, the buildings gray squares and the streets gray stripes.

She bites off her gloves and shoves them in her pockets so that she can better grip the revolver. “Come on,” she says, her throat raw and croaking. She coughs and swallows her spit and says, “Come on!” louder this time. The words echo away and come back to her mixed up and chittery, as if spoken over a nervous laugh.

She waits a long minute and then keeps going, dragging her feet, darting her eyes down the side streets, next to Dumpsters, anywhere shadows cluster. With a click, a fang of an icicle detaches from a gutter, falls, and shatters. At the sound — a splintering crack — Clark spins around and loses her balance and falls heavily on her side.

The ground knocks the air from her lungs. When she tries to breathe, there is nothing, a flattened ache. Then her chest opens and she recovers with a gasp. She is lying there, sprawled out in the center of the road, when she sees the bear. It is nothing more than a white blur that bounds between two distant buildings, but she knows. Her cheek lies flat against the ice, and when she tries to push herself up, it sticks, peeling painfully away, taking some skin with it.

She crouches, then wobbles into a standing position and turns in a slow circle, listening. Trees creak under the weight of ice. Something shatters in the distance, like a lightbulb popped underfoot. Then, she is almost certain, she hears it, a chiming.

The sleet has gathered in its hair, crusted it over, so that when it moves, it tinkles and chimes as if festooned with small silver bells.

She rotates toward the sound — slowly this time, not wanting to fall again — lifting her revolver. Her eye squints, looking for a target, but there is none, only the long, glassy channel of the street. The sound has vanished.

She doesn’t have to wait long before it comes again — the chiming, almost a ringing now, more frantic — this time to her left. But when she jerks the gun sideways, she finds only an empty sandwich shop with a tree springing through the roof. The chiming continues to evade her, in and out of range, rising from one alley and dying down another, nowhere, everywhere.