Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

Something that extends as far east as Laramie and as far south as Palo Alto. They are growing. And they will continue to grow. Not just as a society, but as a species.

There were sixty-five nuclear power plants in the United States. Their hot innards seeped through cracks and seams. And in Washington, along the Columbia River, there is Hanford, the most contaminated nuclear site in the country, storing two-thirds of America’s high-level radioactive waste. Used nuclear fuel — in waste dumps containing rods that give off heat and beta particles and gamma rays — mutates into isotopes of americium and plutonium, making it a million times more radioactive than it was originally. When the facility was abandoned, the cooling ponds boiled over and evaporated. Exposed to the air, the waste ignited, creating a fire that clouds radiation into the air, spills it into the Columbia River, and to this day continues to burn.

The nearby reactors, in a state of meltdown, did not ignite when they overheated. They melted into radioactive lava that consumed the concrete and steel surrounding them, gelling into a massive silvery blob.

Aran Burr calls it the altar. So they call it the altar. Because his word is their word.

Astoria is close enough to the altar, and far enough away from it, kissed but not pummeled by the radiation. Some of them die of cancer. Some die of blood or respiratory disease. And some don’t. Some are born with mere deformities. A face that looks melted. A second set of teeth barnacling their shoulder. Cysts bulging and sacs of fluid dangling. Moles so plentiful that a body appears like some fungus found in the forest. But others are special, gifted. Some are born with oversize eyes that can see a mile, see in the dark. Some are born walking on all fours and able to outrun any dog. Some can lift boulders.

It is what makes them so special. Mutational genesis. Become the next. Evolve or face extinction.

That is what he says. And they all do as he says.

GAWEA FINDS a river. The first canoe fills with water. The second floats. Colter takes the stern, Lewis takes the bow, and she nests between two gunwales in the center of the vessel. Sometimes they are walled in by basalt and rushing along whitecapped rapids and sometimes the river broadens and they can see far into hills dotted with sage. The world is not sand and the world is not snow. There are green-leafed trees and green-grassed fields. For the first time, outside of a map, outside of a book, Lewis can see the world the way it was, an inhabitable, living thing.

One night, in eastern Washington, Lewis slicks his cheeks with mud and shaves with a slow scrape of his knife. His beard falls away in white curls spotted with blood. And though the water runs cold, he bathes in it, scraping the grime off his body with handfuls of sand. Afterward, he feels better, tidier than he has in a long time.

He is ready. And they are getting close. New wonders await every bend of the river, but the thrill of discovery has worn off. They have escaped the sand and the ice. They have found the new country promised to them. One goal has been satisfied. Another remains. They can travel to the very edge of the ocean, but Lewis will remain an unfinished map until Aran Burr helps him find his compass.

Birds shuttle through the air and snatch the bugs that fly in clouds above the river. The water glitters with stars. He thinks about all the leftover light, the memory of light, millions of years old. Light streaming from distant stars, soaking now into the river and into his eyes while colliding with light sent forth from the earth thousands of years before, so that in a way that time still exists, the energy of it still present somewhere, and eventually, he knows, because of the shape of space, it will return; the past will intersect with the future. Aran Burr sent off his own message, so many months ago, and now Lewis has come. Now their energies will finally collide.

The river meets up with the wide, fat stream of the Columbia. They pass through a burning plain. The fire has spread for miles and walls them in with high flames and black smoke that makes them cough until they vomit.

They portage the canoe around dams. Some are still solid. Some cracked and seeping. And some split wide, gushing a white-collared rush of water. And then one night, to their north, they pass by the Hanford site, the storage center for nuclear waste, which Gawea calls the altar.

“The altar? Why do you call it the altar?”

“It’s just what people call it.”

“Why do they call it that?”

“It works invisibly. It brings good things and bad things. It’s like a god in that way.”

“What good things does it bring?”

She regards him with her nightmare-black eyes. “People like you and me.”

The air feels almost palpable, as if you could pack it with your hands and take a bitter bite. And it burns to breathe, smelling like melted plastic. The throbbing glow of it blots out half the stars in the sky. They paddle swiftly, trying to get past this place as soon as they can, and it is then that dark shapes begin to knife past them and riffle the water. Lewis sees a pale set of eyes staring back from the place where he is about to place his paddle.

In the gorge, along the Columbia, the river is dotted with islands, and all around them stacks of basalt rise like dried-out layer cake. Mount Hood looms in the distance, white hatted with snow and glowing at night. The lap lines of the floodwaters of millennia past stitch the canyon walls. Past The Dalles, at Seven Mile Hill, a vast hillside of huge-headed sunflowers wobble in the wind.

They travel through the day and all the next night, knowing the ocean is near, and before dawn they approach not a town but a city. “This is it,” Lewis says, “isn’t it? This is Astoria.”

It is lit with lights, like a net of stars dropped from the sky, lining the banks and rolling into black, humped hills. Lewis leans into his paddle, urging them forward — when Colter says, “Wait.”

“Wait?” Lewis says. “Wait what?” He feels a hurried need to get there, as if a sudden wind has risen inside him to hurry him these final few miles.

“I say we do this in the morning.”

“Why? We’re here.”

They raise their paddles and the canoe lists sideways.

“Don’t rush into things. I learned that from you. Remember?” He opens and closes his prosthetic claw. “I don’t know what to expect and neither do you. She’s hiding something from us. That much we know.”

“Gawea?” Lewis says.

In the middle of the boat, she is curled into a ball. He says her name again and she says, “I need to think.”

“What do you need to think about?”

“We’re waiting until morning,” Colter says. “This isn’t up for debate. Now, paddle.”

They keep their canoe to the far side of the Columbia, a safe distance. None of them say anything for fear their voices will carry across the water. Gawea tightens her body, hugs her legs to her chest.

A strange smell fills the air, briny, fishy, like the residue on his fingers in the hours after he guts a trout. Lewis hears something ahead of them, the distant growl of what turns out to be waves curling over, the river spilling into the surf, the ocean, the end.

He stops paddling a moment, made dumb by the realization that after all these miles, all these months, so far and so long, his previous life impossibly distant, he has made it. A sense of accomplishment momentarily overwhelms whatever fears and questions bother him. He is in awe of himself and in awe of the ocean. He stills his paddle, transfixed by the sight of it. The chop rolls over. The moon is full and its white reflection smears the roiling water. A whole other universe exists beneath its surface. He can’t see it, but he knows.