Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

Then they read the sign set on a stand. Harvested from the basement of the Dome. One of several thousand in storage. This afternoon Thomas Lancer is hosting a lavish party. There will be platters of food and bottles of liquor. And water tapped from barrels like this one. You were not invited .

On the other stage sits the Judas chair. Thick wooded, with leather straps. Armored with spikes that needle the back and seat and arms of it. Empty except for a note that reads in tidy script: Reserved for Thomas Lancer .

Everyone files through the room, some of them silent and awed, some of them already making the noise expected of a mob. There is a third display, though few see it. It hangs from the wall next to the exit. It is labeled The Uprising . Beneath today’s date reads a story, told in future tense, about the thousands of tired, disenchanted citizens who will take to the streets and who will storm the Dome and who will see Thomas Lancer seated in the throne he deserves before being hanged and dismembered and burned.

The people move through the museum at a slow walk, but they leave at a run.

FOR A FEW LONG hours, Lewis and Colter are locked away in a windowless basement with mildew mucking the floor. There is no light except the gray sliver beneath the door at the top of the stairs. Lewis sits on the bottom step while Colter walks the perimeter of the room, running his hands along the walls, looking for some way out or something to aid them in escaping. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

“What is there to do?” Lewis says. “We are here. We’re finally here. And now we need to understand why.”

“Why?” Colter says. “I didn’t come here for the why . I came for the where . I came for a place dripping with water and layered with black dirt. That’s why enough for me.”

“I came for those things too.”

“And I came for you. Don’t you forget that. I came for you and you better not let me down.”

“I won’t.” He glances at the door. He has traveled these many months and thousands of miles for it to open. Aran Burr waits somewhere on the other side. “Let’s hope he won’t either.”

Colter paces back and forth and slashes the air. After so many months of movement, he can’t sit still. “They put us in a cell.” There is a caged-animal quality to his voice, a desperate growl. “I’m not going to spend any more of my life in a cell.”

“Just wait. We’ve waited this long. What’s a few minutes more?” Lewis says, but Colter pushes past him, climbing the stairs, and at their top he swings his prosthetic against the steel door with a clang.

“I wouldn’t do that.” Lewis backs away from the staircase and says more loudly than before, “Please don’t do that. They put us here because we attacked their men.”

Colter continues to pound the door and punctuates every clang with a word: “I’m — not — going — to — spend — any—”

The door swings open and knocks Colter against the wall. He loses his footing and stumbles down the stairs and falls to the floor, where a moment later he is muscled in place by the five men who come hammering down the steps.

They wrestle with Colter, who does his best to lash his arms, kick his feet, arch his back, bite. One of the men cries out with a gash to the temple, but they soon overpower Colter, knotting his wrists and ankles.

Then one of the men — breathing heavily — turns to Lewis. His arms appear oversize, thicker and longer than legs. Weeping sores fleck his face. “Your name is Lewis Meriwether?”

“Yes.”

“He’s been waiting for you.”

Aran Burr makes his home in the Flavel mansion, a Queen Anne with a hipped roof and a rounded wraparound porch and an ironwork veranda and a peaked three-story tower that looks down the hill and across a bay studded with fishing and crabbing boats. It is in impeccable condition, even its garden, hedged in by white roses so fat they bend their stems. Several men kneel in the garden, deadheading flowers, ripping out weeds. They have numbers and letters burned brightly along their forearms.

Burr is seated on a patio swing. A wind chime made of wishbones clinks in the breeze. His mouth hangs open as if he has been waiting to speak for a long time. He waves away Lewis’s escort with one hand, knotted with arthritis, and then smiles a yellow-toothed smile and says, “I knew you’d come.”

He wears a long white robe and he has long white hair, just as Lewis dreamed, but he otherwise looks different — terribly different. He is the oldest person Lewis has ever seen, his skin mottled and papery, his joints bent and bulging. His breath sounds like blowing sand. But it is his head that bothers Lewis most. It is twice the size it should be, most of it forehead, with veins worming through it and pulsing visibly beneath his skin. He appears not so much flesh as he does intelligence. “It’s nice here.”

“Is it?”

“I think you’ll like it.”

Despite the frailty of Burr’s appearance, Lewis feels weak before him. He does his best not to show it, steadying the tremble in his voice. “Where is Gawea?”

“She’s fine.”

“I said where is she?”

“She did what she was supposed to do and got what she wanted.”

“What did she want?”

“Never mind that. There are so many other things to discuss.”

“Like why I’m here.”

“Like why you’re here. So many questions. So much to talk about.” A black cane lies across his lap. He takes hold of it now and tocks the porch with its tip. Then he leans forward, rocking the swing and using its momentum to help him into a standing position. “Come.” He leans heavily on the cane when he struggles across the porch and knobs the front door. “I want to show you something.”

Lewis feels drawn to follow as if pulled by a wire. The wood interior gleams, freshly polished. They walk past hand-carved pillars and tiled fireplaces and ceilings busy with plaster medallions and crown molding. There are lamps in every room, with no evident wiring, but they flare when they enter and fade when they leave. The air seems to be humming.

Lewis hears the marbles long before he sees them. Maybe a hundred of them, white and colored and clear, with green and blue and red threads twisting through them, all rolling madly across the wooden floor of the room they enter. They rattle to a stop.

A boy sits in the middle of the floor with his legs folded under him. Maybe five years old. He has a cleft palate and one ear folded over like a shell. Lewis tries to recall everyone he has seen so far, every one of them marred by some deformity. The boy stares at them blankly.

“Go on, Mason.” Burr’s voice is like a rusted instrument blowing out notes. “Keep playing. Show us how you play.”

The boy drops his eyes to the floor and once again the marbles come to life, spinning around him, clacking together. Sometimes they join in streams of color, sometimes in shapes Lewis thinks he might recognize: a bird beatings its wings, a horse galloping through a meadow, a salmon crashing upstream to die.

“Good boy, good boy, good boy.” Burr brings his arthritic hands together in a pantomime of applause. He cannot turn his enormous head, so he turns his body to study Lewis. “You see? Do you understand?”

“He’s like me.”

“He’s like you. Yes, yes. He’s like Gawea. He’s like us .”

“The next.”

“The next people, yes. The next America.”

And then Lewis feels invaded, as if something many limbed has crawled into his head to prod at his brain. He hears Burr’s voice, but a stronger and younger version, the voice from his dreams. “This country has evolved. Through revolutionary wars and civil wars, wars against terrorism, wars for racial and feminist rights. And now, as a result of the last war, the war to end all wars, it has changed again. And we’re changing with it. Fins to limbs, freshwater to air breathing, lobe-finned swimmer to land-dwelling tetrapod. We are the next step.”