Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

At night they are a small cave of light in a never-ending darkness. That is when the noises begin. In uneven waves, the wind howls and moans and mutters, the nightmare sounds of a zoo on fire. Gawea sleeps without any seeming trouble, but Colter wraps a blanket around his head to muffle the sound. Lewis tries to sleep but cannot. The night shrieks. It pleads and threatens and whines.

When he does dream, he dreams of terror. Clark waits for him outside, her face transformed into a wolf’s. A lighthouse flares and profiles the figure of Burr standing before it. A lump swells painfully along Lewis’s rib cage. He lances it open and finds an eyeball blinking redly at him.

He is awake long before dawn. He watches the fires pluming out in the darkness. He misses the stars he hasn’t seen in such a long time. They remain hidden — along with the moon, the sun — behind the suffocating mantle of clouds. He thinks of them now, thinks about how, just out of sight, all that light is streaming down, light that has traveled millions of years, billions of miles — for what? For nothing, all that time and distance sponged away. He worries that is what is happening to them, to the group of people that set out from the Sanctuary, all the energy that made them press across what felt like an interminable nothing, now dissipating, in danger of being lost altogether.

He kneels by the fireplace and unsleeves his journal from the oilcloth that surrounds it. It feels warm in his hands, as if blood courses through it. He fingers through its pages, with a bird-wing flutter. Here is a song York sang around a campfire. Here is a mixture of several herbs the doctor told him would heal an infection. Here is a sketch of the river alleying through the woods. And another of a mutated squirrel. And another of an unusually large and spotted egg, something waiting to be born.

And another of Clark atop her horse, profiled against the sun. He has left her behind, but in a way he feels he still follows her. He closes the journal with a sense of loss and longing.

They travel farther and farther still, into eastern Montana, where the oil fires cease and the snow thins and gives way to browned grass and sagebrush. In the distance rises the massive spine of the mountains. Their footsteps cut across the grass, the frozen ground, with a shredding sound.

“What were you thinking, Colter?” Lewis says.

“You mean when I was running naked across that field of ice from a group of madwomen who wanted to stick me full of arrows?”

“I actually meant why did you come with me?”

“What was the alternative? Stay behind in the iciest asshole of the world? Besides, you’re such good company. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Lewis stops. “Really. I want to know.”

“Oh, we’re getting all shitty and serious, are we?” Colter pulls down his scarf and reveals his scarred face. He studies Lewis a long time before saying, “I said before, I thought of your father as if he were my own father. I meant that. I guess that makes you a kind of brother. However you want to think about it, we’re in common cause. We’re both serving something bigger. That’s what I used to think about the Sanctuary. That’s what I think now. You feel the same, don’t you?”

“I do.” Lewis trudges forward again and Colter matches his pace. “I wouldn’t be able to do it without you.”

“Not going to argue with you on that one.”

They are so thin the veins stand out from their skin like wires. They kill pheasant, grouse, possum, rabbits, rats, sheep, coyote, deer, antelope, some mutated and some with cancers blooming like mushrooms inside them. Though Lewis has no appetite, every nerve in his body frayed by exhaustion, he forces himself to eat.

Colter believes they are being followed. It is hard to tell, with the wind searing and his eyes welling with tears and blown snow obscuring the air. In a bare passage of land, nothing but bunchgrass, they walk for several miles, making sure there is nothing around they might mistake for a person, and then they spin around. Nothing. “I swear,” Colter says. “The hair on the back of my neck swears.”

Lewis knows whom it is Colter senses, the same man he feels tugging them forward. The man in white. Aran Burr. In Lewis’s dreams, he dropped a stone and the stone fell. And then the stone rose. The stone flew from the ground and snapped into his palm, caged by his fingers, as if he possessed his own gravity. That is how Burr feels to Lewis: gravitational. There was a time in his life when he saw his father everywhere — on a stage before a crowd of people, in a painting in a hallway, at the head of a long table — and even when he didn’t see him, he thought of him, anticipating his command or disapproval, straighten your posture this and get your head out of a book that. And now, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot remember his father’s face. It has been replaced by Burr’s. He sees him in the snow and in the clouds and in any mirrored surface. Burr visits him when he sleeps. He holds out a hand, beckoning him, and Lewis feels a pull — he feels as the stone must.

“We’re being watched,” Lewis says. “But there’s no one there.”

Every day he asks Gawea to tell him more — about Oregon, about Burr — but she no longer wishes to talk. “Just wait and see,” she says. Or “It won’t be long now.” Or sometimes she says nothing at all.

He tries not to feel bothered by this. York’s death did something to her. She has regressed, grown guarded and reserved again, as if contained by her own personal wall, not wanting to let anyone get close. Sometimes her eyes look like black puddles that with a blink will go streaming down her cheeks. He hopes time will heal her, bring back the girl they were just getting to know.

SLADE IS TIRED of clearing paths through the whores and beggars on the streets, shoving aside those bone-thin and swollen-bellied and bent-kneed rabble who ask him for money, for food, for water, for a fuck that might come with a favor. He is tired of people speaking to him with voices that range only between pleading and accusatory. He is tired of the blinding sun. He is tired.

So he goes where no one can bother him, to his windowless basement room, where the shadows are as deep and cooling as water. Here he keeps company with his dummies. He walks among them, the mannequins with cracked faces and glued-on hair and torn fingernails and the patchwork ensemble he gathered gradually for all of them. One was Jillian, a baker’s daughter, whose hair smelled like flour and whose breasts reminded him of mounds of dough. Another was Becca, the sister of one of his deputies, who liked to whistle when she walked, like a little bird beckoning him. And Manda and Ankeny. And now Ella — so fierce — his favorite so far.

His ears still buzz with the noise of the city — his mind still aches with the brightness of the day — but if he closes his eyes and stands as still as his dummies and breathes deeply through his mouth, he feels like he is drinking in peace, filling himself with a cool, blue calm.

Every day, he enlists more deputies. But he has no illusions about their loyalty. They are devoted only to the food and water that come with the job. And though a man with a weapon and a uniform is worth five without, his police force is outnumbered many times over. The Sanctuary could be overtaken, if only people weren’t so afraid. He must keep them that way, as a manager and profiteer of terror.

The other day, when he was walking without an escort through the Fourth Ward — a collection of deteriorating buildings full of cutthroats, gamblers, whores — someone hurled a bag of filth at him. It exploded against his chest and then plopped to the ground. He stood there a moment, incredulously wiping his hands through the oozing smear, before looking around and noticing the streets crammed with crook-mouthed, thin-eyed people who studied him with a collective ferocity that made him feel, for the first time in his life, small. He hurried away, knowing that they might be seconds away from swarming him. For all his administration, Thomas has relied on the enemy beyond the walls, but he must worry now about the enemy within them.