Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

And then the slavers came for those in the cages. Some had to be carried or dragged, they were so fearful of the machine. And then, within a few minutes, they were all crowded inside and the door clanged shut behind them. At first, the two groups remained separated, the old and the new, watching each other fearfully in the dim light. Then the train huffed and clanged and lurched and several lost their balance and fell. Their cries broke the silence, and before long everyone was talking, a jibbering flood of words. They hugged just to feel the warmth and support of another.

There was an inch-wide crack along the door, and through it they could see the rolling grasslands punctuated by dead towns. Then the clouds darkened and the snow became ashen and the air tasted acrid and the oil fires bloomed all around them. Every now and then someone would rise to look, but the wind whistled painfully through the crack and their eyes watered over and froze their tears instantly to their cheeks. It was safer to stay in a huddle, beneath the blankets, with their hands tucked into their armpits or crotches for warmth. Some of them could not stop shivering, their teeth chattering along with the wheels clacking the tracks.

Their speed ranged from five to fifteen miles an hour. They stopped often to clear or repair tracks, sometimes progressing only a few miles a day. A man began to cry and would not stop. He had long brown hair but was balding in a way that made his forehead appear tremendous. He was an ugly crier. Not just his appearance, like a red cabbage, but the sound, a phlegmy hiccuping. At first everyone tried to comfort him, but when he would not stop they grew irritated and then furious and struck him with their fists and told him to stop, but this only made him grow louder, wailing now. After six hours, no one could tolerate the sound and several people held him down and strangled him and the long silence that followed was not as comforting as they’d imagined it would be.

It was not long after this that the brakes shrieked and the train shuddered and rattled as it tried to stop too soon, too fast. The cars wobbled when they accordioned their weight. There was a sudden clanking, like the shuffling of a deck of metal cards, followed by an impactful crunch. They did not have time to cry out as they were hurled against the front wall, and then the side wall, and then the ceiling, tumbling one way and then the next, like one massive body that continually broke apart and coalesced, bone and metal, hair and blood. There was no sense of up or down, only a weightlessness interrupted by moments of severe gravity. Gashes opened in the walls. The door rolled open and several people were launched through it. The train was twisting off the tracks, rolling down a snowy berm, throwing up a wave of ice and dirt. The clanging and scraping progress of the crash was so loud it seemed the very world might be rent in half.

And when the last of the metal warped and yawned and settled, when the smoke shushed from the crack in the combustion chamber, when the first of the survivors began to creep from the wreckage, they saw what had caused the crash.

Bison. What appeared to be hundreds of them surrounded the train, but the air was cloaked in sick black fog that made it difficult to see. Shaggy and horned and humpbacked. Their goatees crusted over with ice. Smoke tusking from their snouts. They drifted in and out of sight. A half dozen of them had been struck by the train, their bodies torn apart, strewn across the tracks and berm, limbs that still shivered and red smears that still steamed. The surrounding horde stomped the ground as if impatient to revenge the fallen.

Three slavers crawled from the engine car. One of them bled from both his ears and kept putting his hands over them as if to clap away the ringing there. Another clutched an arm to his chest, an arm whose elbow bent the wrong way. Another seemed unhurt but kept touching himself all over to find the injury that must be hiding somewhere. For a moment they stared dumbly at the train and the captives staggering from it and seemed not to know what to do — but only for a moment.

Their surviving captives were all women, mostly girls. They ganged around the slavers, who held up their hands to defend themselves, but the women pushed through them and knocked their bodies to the ground and beat them with their fists and feet. They did this casually, not rushing, as if they were carrying out some chore. A chest caved. A skull dented.

The girls did not know what to do or where to go, but they felt gifted and cheery and a few of them could not help but hug and cackle nervously before being hushed by the more fearful among them. They checked the wreckage for survivors and found few, one of them a slaver they disposed of with a sharp piece of metal.

By this time the bison had departed and the fog had lifted and in the distance they could see a city, Bismarck.

* * *

There are twenty-two of them altogether, mostly teenage girls. They call the mall home. The hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel and concrete feel good. Like armor. As does the charred sky, the icy wind, the oil fires torching the horizon. No one will find them here. No one will harm them ever again. This is what Sasa tells them.

She is one of the oldest among them, certainly the loudest. They look to her as a mother. She is the one who tells them they will live in the mall. She is the one who tells them they must wake from their daze — as they stumble around, trying to get used to the ashen cold, learning how to navigate Bismarck, vacant eyed, hollowed by the loss of their families. She is the one who demands they construct defenses, salvage goods, sew clothes, auger holes in the river to fish, set traps and string bows, feed and arm themselves. In this unfamiliar world, being told what to do is a comfort. They listen to her. They do exactly as she says.

Sasa keeps her graying hair cropped close to the skull in tight curls. She is tall, thin shouldered, long limbed. Her nose and jaw, both strangely pointed, seem like they could come together as a claw. Her skin is the color of old wood and the tip of her nose purpled with frostbite. A long knife hangs at her waist. Her voice is deep and even in standard conversation comes at a shout. Six months ago, she wasn’t like this. Six months ago, she saw her husband hanged from a tree and her baby stomped flat. The only way to survive her grief was to harden, shield herself like some crustacean. She has a new family now, these women, and she will defend them from any injury.

Their lives are now a long winter, she says. She will help them endure it.

On this morning, they gather in the atrium, what was once the food court. The floor is cracked tile. The ceiling is a pyramidal skylight cloaked in snow. Three garbage cans crackle and give off waves of heat from the wood burning inside them. Smoke hazes the air. She paces on a short stage and punctuates her sentences with a fist to the palm. Her girls lounge in metal chairs. They nod and mutter their agreement.

Over the past few months they have mentioned the bison. The herd that caused the train wreck, that deposited them at the outskirts of Bismarck. They were saved and they were saved for a reason. The bison were an instrument of God. The world wanted them to live. But to survive, they must be strong. Being strong means making difficult choices. Making difficult choices means hurting back those who mean to hurt them.

“We knew they might come for us. And now they’ve come for us.” She makes a fist that matches her clenched face. “We won’t be victims this time.”

Her eyes narrow at the sight of the man escorted toward them. He has only one arm, the wrist of it secured to his thigh. He knocks against several chairs, which screech and clatter. He tries to yank away, tries to run, but he trips into a table and falls to the floor. He kicks at the women who huddle around him until they take out their knives and threaten to gut him, and then he goes still and allows them to drag him onstage. He refuses to fall to his knees. Every time they push him down, he struggles to his feet, until Sasa says, “I like this one. He’s a fighter. I’m going to give him a fighting chance.”