Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

Two of the girls hug each other. One of them — the only old woman among them — whispers into a dead phone. The others look around as if to wait for a command that never comes.

“Anyone else want any trouble?”

The girls shake their heads or study the ground, no threat to her. She lowers her bow and calls out for Colter, tells him to come back.

Then she settles her eyes on the girls and asks them where the rest of her friends are and they point to the mall and she says, “Show me.”

FOR DECADES NOW, in the Sanctuary’s Fourth Ward, you didn’t want to walk around at night unless you were looking for trouble. Something to snort, someone to fuck or fight. Every morning, the first bell rang and the sun chased away the night and revealed the bodies. The bodies of those beaten and stabbed and the bodies of those who choked on their own puke and the bodies of those who decided enough was enough and dove out a window or fell on a knife. In the heat, they bloated and festered, attracted rats and vultures, spread disease. So the Sanctuary authorized a cleanup team. The gatherers, they were called, mostly teenagers without a trade looking for some coin. When she was thirteen years old, Clark joined them. Mornings, a donkey pulled a cart and she hauled the bodies into it, with an apron and elbow-length gloves and a bandana shielding her nose and mouth. She came to associate this color — the ashen color of early morning — with grief. Grief was a color.

And that is the color of this place, North Dakota, and that is the color of her current state of mind.

By the time Lewis finds her, she is already drunk. They have given her what she asked for — a drink, a real drink — a jar of moonshine derived from tree bark. She gulps from it, her thirst returned. This is on the roof of the mall, where her legs dangle over the edge, her body hunched over in the shape of a hook.

Lewis approaches and touches her gently on the back. “I was worried about you.”

“Was?”

“Am.”

“Yeah? You should worry about yourself.” She stiffens and his hand falls off her.

“York?” he says.

She shakes her head and drinks and roughs a sleeve across her mouth.

For a long minute they stare off at the ice-humped city and the furnace glow of the oil fires beyond it. She drinks again from the jar. Her eyes waver in and out of focus. “Hey, have you ever noticed something?” She licks her lips as if her mouth has gone too dry for words. “Have you ever noticed how my head is different shaped? How one side of my face looks different than the other?”

“No.”

“It’s true. Look.” She turns her head one way, then the other, arranging her face into a scowl. Her breath is sour. “See?”

“No.”

“It’s true. You’ve just got to look closer. One side is kind of pretty. You’re not supposed to say that about yourself, but I’ll say it. Okay? I’ll say it. I’m pretty. But not the other side! The other side, if you look at it on its own, is ugly.” She slaps a hand to her face in order to shade the one side of it. Maybe he can see it now. The drooping cheek. A broader ridge of forehead. The slight bulge of the eye, a little more lid around it. “I’m like two different people.”

The wind gusts and carries bits of ice in it. She wobbles on her perch before catching her balance, spilling some of her drink.

“You should come down from there.”

“Didn’t I say to worry about yourself?”

She looks at him with her red-rimmed eyes. In these long wordless seconds, during which time they stare painfully at each other, he wants to tell her how sorry he is about her brother. He doesn’t usually say things like that— sorry or thank you or please or any common pleasantry; it just doesn’t occur to him — but he knows he ought to. Sorry might be the medicine she needs. He wants to tell her how much he admires her fearlessness and impulsiveness, how he has learned from her, grown into a better man by her example. He wants to tell her he not only worried about her last night — he missed her, too, as if he were a lizard dragged from the sun, so that he felt enervated without her around, sour and cold-blooded. He wants to tell her he needs her. They all do. He gathers his breath, but before he can blow out the words, she says, “I’m a killer.”

“You—”

“I killed that woman outside. I killed my own brother. I killed Reed. I killed them all. I might kill you next, who knows? This was my idea, coming here. It was a stupid, deadly idea. And we’re all worse off for it.”

“Stop it. Don’t be so self-pitying. It doesn’t become you.”

“Do you know what I feel like right now?” Her voice comes sliding out of her like sharpened steel. “I feel like eating you.”

“Clark—”

“I feel like eating the whole world. Shoving all the metal and concrete and wood and bone and meat into my mouth until there is nothing left.”

“You need to rest. You’ll feel better once you rest.”

“I killed her, Lewis.”

“You did what you had to do. She was going to kill Colter.”

“I don’t mean her.”

It takes him a moment to process this. “Then who?”

“Her.”

“Her who?”

“Your mother , Lewis. I killed her. So that you would come with us.”

The world seems to dim. The sky seems to sag. The wind rises and slaps his face. He waits for the anger to come — he knows it is there, inside him, waiting to catch flame — but for the moment there is only a sick feeling, a green-tinged sadness. He opens his mouth, but no words will come.

“Go away, Lewis. Before I hurt you more than I already have.”

When he makes no move to leave, she says, “Go!” in what sounds like a half howl.

* * *

Now Lewis is running, pounding along as fast as he can, sliding, occasionally falling, but always scrambling to his feet, always moving, away from the world he thought he knew and into the world he does not. Snow kicks up beneath his heels. Though the air is cold, his throat burns with exertion. The mall is behind him, like a great tomb, and he races away from it. He can feel the rage growing, growing, so that his inside feels bigger than his outside. And he is so hot, not just his breathing now, but his head, his skin, the core of him furnaced. He could tear off his clothes, eat snow.

With this comes that familiar feeling — of the sky opening up to watch him. He can sense it homing in on his dodging figure, and he knows he cannot escape it. Above him the clouds begin to twirl, as if spun with a spoon, and he hears the kind of crackling sound that comes from thick wool socks sliding across a rug.

The parking lot reaches on endlessly. No matter how furiously he pumps his legs, the edge of it seems to grow no closer. He sees the vapor of his breath. He sees the ground, thickly floored with ice. He sees the flicker of light gathering in the sky, where the clouds darken and churn and foment, as the anger spills out of him and takes hold of the world.

The air around him seems to sparkle. He listens for thunder but hears only the panicked gusting of his breath. He tries to run faster, but the lightning stops him midstride. It shoots from the sky and spears him, jags through his body like a second spine. Several more bolts join the first, like so many whips lashing at him, their barbs caught in his skin, filling him with painful light.

He wakes naked. His clothes are ashes curled away by the wind. His hair has scorched and brittled, and when he runs his hand across his belly, his eyebrow, his head, it crisps away. He is purely skin, his body as white and rigid as alabaster.

He lies on his back, staring up at a night sky that looks like holes punched through black cloth, the biggest of them the moon. The moon! How he has missed it, as shadowed and pale as a favorite grandfather’s face. For a long time this is all he sees, his vision absorbed by the sky, so that he might as well be floating through space.