Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

Out of the corner of her eye, a darkness where none existed before. This time she doesn’t turn to face it, but flits her eyes and observes the bear. There is a bar and grill with a railed porch that it moves along the edge of, slinking along quietly now, humped low to the ground. She wants to be sure. She wants no more than ten yards between them. She does not move her feet, fearing she will fall, but twists her body. When she lifts the gun, the bear is already scrambling back the way it came.

She fires. She probably shouldn’t, but she fires anyway. She doesn’t know what happens to the bullet, its report and impact lost in the icicles falling and shattering from eaves and lampposts and signs all up and down the block.

The many streets that surround her offer too many outlets to hide in and dart down and burst from, so she keeps moving, hoping to find a more defensible position, a more open space. The bear paces her. She can hear its chiming progress. She can see its body, just as tall as she but twice as broad, flit out of sight. She fires at it and it flinches away but always returns, always shading her.

She is lost in a crystal world, a labyrinth of ice, its walls several stories high. She wanders its corridors. Some of the eaves are messily roofed with nests — whether for birds or squirrels, she doesn’t know — and she thinks she can hear them peeping and scraping inside them, sheathed by ice.

A white shape shimmers across a glassy wall — and she startles away from it and fires and recognizes her reflection just as it shatters. There is a popping sound, followed by a scrape and a chuff as the two feet of snow piled on the angled roof come loose and avalanche toward her. She hurls herself down a narrow chute of an alley just as the icy slab crushes and piles brokenly in the place where she stood.

A crystal dust fills the air. Through it shambles the bear, blasting past her, snapping its jaws, dragging its claw across her arm. Her coat shreds, already red with blood. And then it is gone, out the other end of the alley.

She follows. The alley opens into another, where she finds loading docks, a cluster of Dumpsters, a delivery truck with an empty bed, all frozen. She crunches her way forward. She hears a growling, then a chiming, and spins around but does not know where to aim. Shapes slide across the ice so she cannot tell what is real and what is a reflection, a distortion.

She fires the gun. A wall of ice collapses into a thousand tinkling shards. She fires again, and again, and again, fumbling to reload. The gunshots clap off among the buildings and roam the sky. The splintering collapse of ice makes it sound as if someone has launched a china hutch down a staircase.

After the last shards fall, she is left in silence, alone except for the shard-edged piles glinting all around her. In one direction, she sees more buildings — and in the other, maybe a block away, a grayish expanse of rolling hills dotted with mature and stunted trees. A cemetery surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, as if the dead might rise and escape. She hurries there. Most of the tombstones are camouflaged by snow, ambered by ice, but she can see the larger crosses and a few crypts rising from the drifts. Nothing can sneak up on her here.

Ahead rises a hill topped by a single oak. Its vast branches sag beneath the weight of the ice it carries. Gray slivers fall from it like blighted leaves that glimmer in the cloud-filtered light. She walks as fast as she can, making for the rise. The chiming makes her skid to a stop. It comes from behind her, like a concert of bells. The bear waits in the street, its body porcupined with frost.

She fires, and fires again, and it bounds a few paces away before pausing. When she reaches for her pockets to reload, she finds them empty except for one last bullet. She has either blasted off the rest — or lost some from her pocket when slipping in the streets, careening around corners.

One bullet. She takes her time loading it, chambering the round with a snapping finality. Gun smoke drifts. She breathes in the sweet stink of sulfur. For the moment, she doesn’t feel poisoned by grief, she doesn’t feel guilty for leading a failed expedition to this icy nowhere, she doesn’t feel thirsty for whiskey. Instead she feels her hands curling around the revolver. She feels the cold air piping in and out of her throat. She feels an acidic rage boiling in her guts.

She does not bother running any farther. She crouches down among the graves, with a clear avenue between her and the gates and the street beyond. This is where the bear will enter, and when it does, she will be ready.

The bear teases by the entrance many more times, running in a rocking way, and then, when she doesn’t fire, it squats down and studies her. Then the bear — the one with the severed paw, the one who killed her brother — starts toward her at a lope, rounding the fence, passing through the entry; and once there, it rushes forward, more swift and sure-footed than she could ever be. Steam blasts from its snout. Its red eyes do not stray from her. The chiming of its ice-clotted fur is manic, matching the feeling inside her.

“Come on,” she says. “Come and get me, you son of a bitch!”

The cold brings tears to her eyes and she blinks them hurriedly away, keeping her focus. At first the bear runs low, ready to duck a bullet, and when the bullet doesn’t come, its body opens up, curling in on itself and snapping outward as it sprints. Twenty yards, fifteen yards, ten yards. The rest of the world falls away in a blur, all of her attention crushed down to a tunnel of ice through which the bear hurtles. She waits. She waits until she can be sure, until the bear is nearly upon her, widening its jaws.

Then she fires.

Through the teeth, down the throat, out the back of its neck, right where the spine nests in the skull, the bullet finds its mark. A feathery spray of blood. The bear drops, goes limp. Just like that. Like a flip switched, off . The gunshot claps through the cemetery. The body skids and rolls heavily into her, knocking her down. The gun skitters off. The back of her head clunks the ground. Her vision wobbles in and out. She is holding the bear, her arms wrapped around it, when it coughs and shudders and goes still.

LEWIS CALLS her name, “Gawea,” and she wakes. Her head wobbles and her eyelids shutter. Her face is swollen and netted with blood that seems to contain her, trap her inside herself. “Please,” he says. “Are you all right?”

Gawea is supposed to guide, Clark is supposed to lead — and now he doesn’t have either of them. But his decisiveness surprises him when he tells Colter to help him and then the doctor out of their restraints. Once freed, he pulls off his shirt and tears it in half. Part of it he uses to tie off the doctor’s bitten arm — she has lost a lot of blood and her skin is cold and her breath comes in shallow gasps — and the other half he presses to the girl’s wound. “York,” she says, her voice muddled. “What happened to York?”

“Rest,” he tells her. “You need your rest.”

Lewis can smell their meat cooking now and hear the women speaking, but they are out of sight, around the bend of a shadowy corridor. He shakes the caging at the front of the store and calls for help. “Come here. I want to talk to someone this instant.” But no one appears except a toothless woman — older than the others — with a blind white eye and a bright red scar dividing her forehead.

She has a phone pressed to her ear, the curled cord dangling from it and wrapped around a finger. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I see,” as if plugged in to some lost conversation. When Lewis asks her to fetch someone else, to tell the others that one of their party is gravely ill, she goes still and cups a hand over the receiver and whispers harshly to the imaginary person on the other end of the line. Her white eye catches the light and brightens.