Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“Please,” he says. “Why are you doing this to us?”

She babbles something then about the bad people.

“I don’t understand.”

“The bad people. You’re the bad people. You come in the night. You steal us away. You make slaves of us.”

“No, we do not. We most certainly do not. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here—”

But she is already wandering away, again whispering into the phone, leaving him to wonder what has made these women so angry and fearful.

IF YOU COULD observe the Sanctuary from above, as a vulture riding an updraft, you would see the brown and gray squares of buildings, the dusty complicated swirl of streets between, which all together, from this great height, would look rather like a desiccated brain, within which the dark specks of the deputies appear like clots, spreading, spreading, until their infection is complete, the Sanctuary taken hostage.

Smoke rises — from this building, then another — and stains an otherwise pure blue sky, clouds your vision, so you must return to the streets once more to see the deputies hurling torches through the windows of the Dirty Shame, where someone sang a ballad about Lewis and Clark the night before, a ballad that others are now humming in the streets, singing under their breath. The bartender tries to leave, but they push him back in. The flames make a noise like a thousand fingers snapping in excitement. The roof collapses — the metal sheeting sending up a swirl of sparks — as the clay walls blacken and crack. Where there was once a building, there is now a dark hull, like the disintegrating remains of a beetle.

Anyone caught singing the song — or any song — is hurled to the ground and beaten with cudgels until muscle pulps, bone shatters. Some try to help. A group of six men push the deputies, grab them by the wrists, try to wrestle them away. At first they succeed. Then more deputies come, and more still, and by the end of the day the six men are hanged — from balconies, from the wall, all over the Sanctuary — their bodies twisting in the wind, crows roosting on their shoulders and feasting their faces down to bone.

The wells are shut down for two days. Deputies surround them with fresh skins of water hanging plumply from their belts. For personal use. They guzzle from them theatrically. A barrage of people gathers. Before long it is a mob. They beat the bottoms of their buckets and jugs and make a storm of noise. They yell and their dry lips crack and make their mouths bloody.

Graffiti appears overnight, hurriedly smeared onto alley walls, scratched onto shop windows. THE SANCTUARY = PRISON and DEATH TO LANCER and BRING DOWN THE WALL and WHEN HOPE IS DOWN, THE SOLUTION IS UPRISING. The buildings burn. No matter if the people inside are not responsible for the graffiti.

When Oman arrives at his apothecary, the keys jangling in his hand, ready to open for the day, his black-toothed mouth unhinges in a silent scream. Because the shop is burning, crowned with fire that gives off many curious colors — green and purple and pink and gold — as his many powders and potions erupt.

This lasts for a few days, but there are too many buildings to burn now, too much danger in the fire spreading like the anger that reddens their faces and hoarsens their voices.

The deputies retreat, at Lancer’s request, still visible but disengaged, walking the streets like black shadows the sun can’t erase. The wells open. Long lines form, reaching down alleys, around buildings, no end in sight.

New graffiti appears. TRUST LANCER. And OUR HOME IS A SANCTUARY. Deputies linger nearby and menace anyone who means to scrub it away.

Bodies keep piling up. Two of the sentinels on the wall. A mother and her three children. A drunk in an alley. A tinker at his cart. They are robbed sometimes and sometimes not, killed simply because everyone is burning up with anger.

Then come the bodies reported to be those of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The rangers drag them through the gates one day, piled in a wagon. They are rotted and disfigured beyond recognition. They have been hiding out there this whole time, the rangers say. And now they finally met the end they deserved. Killed by wild animals.

“I don’t believe it,” some say, but some say they do. Some say the end of the rainbow leads to nothing but a pot of sand and spiders.

IF THE WOMAN on the phone had not gone mad with grief after losing her husband and daughter, if she had lingered to answer Lewis’s questions, this is what she would have told him.

The slavers came in the night. Every man who fought back, they killed. Every woman too old and slow to follow their commands, they killed. Every baby, they abandoned or ran through with a knife. Everyone else they kept. They hurled them into wheeled cages — jerry-rigged trailers and truck beds — dragged by horses and oxen. There was a bucket of water, frozen across the top, refreshed daily. And another bucket for waste. And many blankets to share, beneath which they huddled together for warmth.

No matter how they begged or screamed, no matter how desperate and plying their questions, the slavers would not respond except to say, “Hold your tongue. Or we’ll cut it out.”

They traveled two days across the plains — the snow infrequent here, a mere dusting — with the frozen ground crackling beneath them. They then arrived at a small town of cadaverous houses. Rusted grain elevators reached several stories higher than any other building in town and next to them sat a train station made from red brick with plywood nailed over the windows. Here they came to a creaking stop and the slavers unhitched the oxen and brushed them down and fed them hay while their captives pressed their faces against the bars and asked questions that vanished into vaporous clouds, unanswered.

The slavers retreated inside the train station, and minutes later smoke wormed from its chimney. Only then did the caged men and women notice the trampled snow and grass and the freshly split firewood stacked along one wall of the building with the occasional mouse sprinting in and out of it. The slavers had been here before. But why they chose this building, of all the places they might have taken shelter, their captives could not understand.

Nor did they understand what came a few hours later: the trembling that shook the ground, the banshee wail that split the air. They were already afraid, but now their fear heightened to the borderlands of terror, hysteria. Some of them whimpered and wiped tears from their eyes. Some shook the bars and screamed their throats raw. And some huddled in the corner of the cage and waited for whatever was coming, growing louder by the second.

They could not see it until it was nearly upon them, the black engine car with the pilot grille that looked somewhere between a triangular weapon and a toothy grin. Steam clouded from the smokestack. It continued past them, the crankshaft slowing, the brakes sparking and screeching. It was followed by three coal cars that gave way to a dozen more boxcars and cattle cars and flatcars.

Not all of them knew the word— train —but soon they were all uttering it the way some might say dragon or comet , with a mixture of fear and excitement and otherworldly awe. The train was something out of history, but the train was also now indicative of some strange future, so it made them feel out of time, completely at odds with the present.

There was a long hiss. And a clanking as the metal settled. The slavers exited the station and stood on its porch and watched the train creep to a halt and then set to work.

A metal ramp was drawn from each of the boxcars, and it rattled when the men walked up it. They hauled open the door and a crowd of men and women stood blinking in the gray light. A few tried to escape but were beaten back with the clubs the slavers carried. A joke made, laughter. Buckets of water were replenished. A crate of food was delivered. Waste was collected, along with several stiff, gray-skinned bodies.