Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

He stares hatefully at her.

Sasa asks for his name and he tells her Jon Colter.

“Why are you smiling, Jon Colter?”

“I’m not,” he says. “There’s something wrong with my face.”

“What’s wrong with your face?”

“A wolf bit it.” He looks around, as if seeking escape. “Whatever you think we did, we didn’t. We didn’t do any thing to any of you.”

She raises her eyebrows and tells him with a placid voice, “You killed our parents. You killed our husbands and our sisters and our brothers. You killed our children.”

“No.” He laughs, but in an ugly way. “No, no, no. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care who you are.”

“Why else would you come here? A place this cold. A place this sick.” When she stands before a crowd, her voice takes on the same rhythms as that of the seer in her village. “Fires burn on the horizon. Ash falls from the sky. No one comes here. This is a place for no one.”

“You’re here.”

“To hide. From you. But you’ve found us.”

He is smiling now. Really smiling, showing all his teeth. “Listen to me. We came from St. Louis. We’re passing through—”

She laughs and automatically several of the girls laugh along with her.

The smile dies from half his face. The humor in the situation belongs to her. “What’s so funny?”

The fire barrels cough up sparks. Sasa nods and the guard takes a knife to the rope that binds his wrist to his thigh. He flexes his hand and looks around him as if seeking a way out.

She tells him to remove his clothes, and when he refuses, she tells her girls to do it for him, tearing off his boots, his pants, dragging him out of his coat and knifing off his shirt, until he stands naked and trembling before them. His body is a mess of scars that seem to whiten as his skin pinkens in the cold. He would cross his arms if he could, but as is, he can only clutch his middle one-handed.

Sasa studies his body and says, “You look like you’ve been chewed up and spit out.”

“Pretty much.”

“Here’s how this will work. I’m going to give you a head start of thirty seconds.”

“Fuck you.”

“And then I’m going to come after you.”

“Even if I outrun you, I’ll freeze.”

“You look like you’re accustomed to surviving.” She makes a shooing motion with her hands. “One,” she says. “Two, three, four, five,” and before she can count six , he has leapt off the stage, knocked aside tables, padding away.

Sasa continues to count aloud in a calm voice that matches her movements as she steps off the stage and retrieves her bow and quiver and walks down the corridor that leads to the entry.

The women follow her into the half-light of day. The air is bracingly cold. The clouds boil. The horizon burns. An ice storm has coated everything so that it appears as slick as glass. In the distance, almost halfway across the vast open parking lot, Colter races away from them. He keeps his steps short and his good arm outstretched for balance. He falls twice but does not pause, scrambling up to bolt forward again. His buttocks redden. His breath chimneys from his mouth.

She hears a few of her girls say, “Don’t” and “Let him go, Sasa,” but she doesn’t listen. She has to be strong for all of them. She has to expel the hurt stored inside her.

She pinches an arrow from her quiver and notches it into the string and lifts it to her eye and says, “Thirty.”

* * *

Simon and Ella expect a visit from Danica, but she doesn’t come for several days, and when she does, she is limping, she has a fat lip, and one of her eyes is plum purple, swollen so badly, revealing only a weepy slit. She tries to mask it with makeup. And she tries to walk without wincing.

She comes through the side door, into the kitchen, and Simon pulls out a chair for her at the table and she settles into it with a sigh. She wears a foul, rotten cloak so as not to be recognized, and he helps her out of it and hangs it on a hook and asks her if she needs anything and she says no. When he remains beside her, hovering, leaning into her as if she were a flower, she waves him away.

Ella can’t help but feel instantly annoyed. Annoyed by Simon, the way he behaves around her, like a cowed pet. And annoyed by Danica, not for anything she has said or done, just for existing. She cannot help it. She has always found pretty women — the kind who seem to waste time in front of the mirror, who seem to serve no purpose outside of lounging and preening — to be trifling, pathetic, even foul, like dead songbirds with maggots nesting inside their bright breasts. But when Danica rubs her knee, in obvious pain, Ella grudgingly allows her annoyance to give way to concern and asks, “What’s happened?”

“He’s angry. That’s what happened.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. I’m glad he’s angry. He’s angry because he’s worried.” Her hand rises from her knee to her thigh, where she keeps her dagger beneath her dress. She fingers it and her mouth twitches with a smile. She says she knows what they’re wondering. They’re wondering, if she hates her husband so much, why not poison him? That is the woman’s way, isn’t it? Poison. She has considered it. Of course she has considered it. These days, he has grown more and more paranoid, and before he would sip his wine, before he would knife into a steak, he made his chef or server — or sometimes even Danica — taste everything.

Every s she utters takes a little too long to get out of her mouth, so that her sentences sound like a spitting fuse. Ella can’t tell if it’s the swollen lip or some pain-relieving opiate that causes this.

Besides, Danica says, poisoning him, killing him, would accomplish little beyond her temporary satisfaction. She might get away with it or she might get caught. And then? Someone else would take his place of power and similarly abuse it.

Ella cannot help but wonder about her, cannot help but feel this woman is more than she appears. There is something far more substantial and dangerous about her. She is like the blade she carries. A blade is rigid and cold and sharp. A blade is a decoration. A blade is a tool. A blade is a threat.

In a cold voice, carefully enunciating each word, Danica tells them her reason for coming now: she has a plan — and the plan concerns them, and the plan could kill them, if they aren’t careful. But if it works, and it just might, then an uprising will come that the deputies will not be able to quell.

“Go ahead, then. What is it?”

“My dear husband,” she says, “has decided to throw a ball.”

“Who’s he going to throw it at?” Simon says.

Ella says, “She means a party, you idiot.”

“A party,” Danica says. “A costume party no less. With cheeses and meats and sweet liquors and desserts and everything else one might consider far too extravagant for these thin times. And he plans to invite everyone who matters, who has any influence. Just as he believes in terrorizing those who defy him, he believes in spoiling those who would support him.” She brings a hand to the corner of her swelled eye. “If there was a time for us to do something, it would be then, wouldn’t you agree?”

* * *

The first arrow misses, sailing to the left of Colter and embedding itself in the ice. The second arrow, too, skitters past him. The third arrow might have struck its mark if not for Clark.

The crowd of girls did not notice her when they charged out of the mall. Nor did they notice the gone guard, no longer at her post. They were too intent on the naked figure sliding jerkily across the ice-scalloped parking lot.

So when the woman named Sasa falls forward with an arrow nested in the back of her skull, when they spin around to see Clark standing there with another arrow notched, they can only stare dumbly. They are pale and thin and quivering and bent backed. No longer a mob, just a bunch of lost little girls. Then one of them asks, in the smallest of voices, “What have you done?”