Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

He finds the police station empty, even the cells beneath. A desk overturned. A door ripped from its hinges. The occasional body slumped in a corner or sprawled on the floor with a knee bent strangely. When he calls out, his voice swirls down the hallways like water down a drain. The noise continues to rage outside, and he hurries to the dark nook in the basement he calls home.

He latches shut the door and leans his forehead against it and feels some sense of peace cooling him. He has separated himself, shuttered away the sun and the noise, in what feels an impenetrable nest. He rattles the dangling chains and makes music of them. He walks among his mannequins, his favorites, reassured by their company. Here he remains powerful. He strokes an arm, grazes a cheek, before finding his bed.

He sits at its edge, crushing the mattress with his weight. The metal frame protests and his sigh sounds similar — when it rises into a shriek. Because of the pain at his ankles. First one, then the other. A sharp slice followed by a hot flood of blood.

He tries to stand but cannot. His legs won’t work. He tumbles to the floor and barely throws out his hands in time to catch himself. He crabs his way forward, escaping whatever has injured him. He twists around to see her sliding from beneath the bed and then standing still among his mannequins, shoulder to shoulder with her own.

She is here. She is his at last. His Ella. His fierce, beautiful girl.

She tosses aside the scalpel, one of his own tools, used to slash and sever his tendons.

He smiles — he cannot help himself — but she does not smile back. Her face is grim when she hefts the baseball bat, testing its weight, knotting her fingers around the grip. “Remember what you taught me about terror?” she says. “You were wrong. Love wins.”

WHEN THE SISTERS show Lewis their stores of black powder, he knows what to do. He kisses his owl before sending it to the skies one last time.

So many minutes later, he feels something shift. Like a lantern extinguished or a vise released in his mind. And he senses it is done. Burr is dead. He wonders how many others suddenly feel the same, how strong and wide the grip of this one man. Lewis understands that once the queen bee of a hive dies, there is another to take her place, but for now he has done what he can. He has bet on humanity.

This is why he walks to a cliff overlooking the place where the river meets the ocean. He watches the currents mash together, a foamy roiling. Waves boom and turn over endlessly. The wind bites him with sand and dampens him with salt spray. He reaches into his pocket and removes the coffin-shaped box and opens it and fingers out the vial and grips it in his palm. He cannot help but hesitate, debate whether he should open it up, snort its contents, make himself into a human missile and take out the rest of the human population. Destroy what destroys.

Isn’t the world better off without people? There is a balance — trees make a mess that fire cleans; rain extinguishes fire and swells green shoots from the ground; a deer eats the grass, then dies and rots into the dirt from which trees grow to make a mess — a balance that everything but man and virus acknowledge.

Then he hears some laughter in the distance, Clark delighting in something small, maybe a joke told or a grasshopper caught in her hair or the sun slanting through the clouds. That is all the convincing he needs. A hard woman giving herself up to joy. For a long time Lewis has felt overwhelmed by immensity — the measurable immensity of time and distance, as he rode and hiked and paddled so many thousands of miles over hundreds of days, and the incalculable immensity that can exist between people who betray or grieve or hate each other. And when he considers all the places he has traveled and dangers surmounted and people encountered and words written over the past few months, he feels overcome, vertiginous, swept away. It is the laughter that brings him back, makes him feel anchored. He is connected to Gawea, just as he is connected to Clark, a kind of family, the beginning of the community and renewal he imagined he might find here all along. There is hope after all. Life might be a catastrophe, but it is a beautiful catastrophe.

He cocks his arm and pitches the vial out. Once exposed to the air, the virus should expire within minutes. Far below, it bursts on some rocks, a glassy dust that sparkles. The river dimples and swallows its remains, one more pollutant.

“What was that?” A voice behind him, Clark’s.

“The end of the world.”

They walk back together. The sun hangs over the ocean and the moon hangs over the coastal mountains, as if in an uneasy truce. In the cracked parking lot of the sewage-treatment facility, the sisters stand beside their idling truck, the doors of it open. They heft something from the rear cab, what turns out to be a shortwave radio, and plunk it on the front seat and plug it into the cigarette lighter. It sparks out a puff of smoke they wave away.

One of them settles into the seat beside the radio and aims the antenna at the sky and fiddles with the frequency and begins a transmission. “Sam and Olivia Field sending report. Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Over.”

The other leans one arm against the open door, turning when she notices Lewis leaning in to watch them.

“Moon’s out,” she says. “She’s trying for a moon bounce.”

“Sam and Olivia Field sending report. Is anyone there? I repeat, is anyone there? Over.”

Lewis has been awake for two days. He feels too numb and exhausted to talk, to process what he sees. He can manage a small question, “Which one of you is Olivia?”

She stabs her chest with a thumb. “That’s me.”

“I’m sorry. I should have asked you that before.”

She shrugs.

“It’s a pretty name.”

Sam speaks into the radio again, waits, hears no response except the pop and buzz of static.

The wind rises and Lewis wavers where he stands. “I don’t understand. Who is she speaking to?”

“Boss.”

“Who — who do you work for?”

“The government. We work for the government.” She says this as though she is talking about what they should expect for weather or what they might cook for dinner.

“What?” Lewis gives a short laugh. “What government?”

“The American government.”

He looks at her a moment to see if she is joking. The flat expression on her face tells him she is not.

“You never asked,” she says and uncrosses her arms and peels back one of her sleeves to reveal on her biceps a tattoo — an American flag inked in black.

WASHINGTON, D.C., is a swamp. The streets are sluggish rivers, the buildings mossy canyons, negotiated by rafts and canoes and johnboats. Mosquitoes dirty the air with their humming swarms. Through the muck walk egrets on stilted legs. Alligators laze on the steps of the Smithsonian. The monument is a broken fang rising from a lake. The rafters and arches of every memorial are busy with the nests of thrashers and waxwings. The dome of the Capitol has cracked open like a hatched egg. Everything smells of crushed earthworms. Night is falling. Balls of blue fire burn, pockets of swamp gas begin to glow. So do the lamplit windows of the White House, though it is hardly white, vined and ridden with algae and bearded with moss. A turbine spins on its roof. Its blades groan up to speed as the wind rises.

Thunder mutters. A storm is coming. A storm is always coming, with hurricanes whirling off the Atlantic every other week. Rain speckles the water, then thickens, lashing at the windows. In one of them, a man looks up, though he can see nothing but his reflection. A black face against a black window. His beard, gouged by a meaty scar, is beginning to gray. He is shirtless and has a bit of a paunch, noticeable only when he is sitting. But his chest and shoulders are round with muscle. Sweat beads on his skin, drips down his back like the rain down the window.