Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

This is a bedroom that doubles as an office. A four-poster bed rises beside the wooden desk where he sits in an orange circle of light thrown by a lamp. There is an inkpot, a pile of paper, books, a shortwave radio. He fiddles with the knobs, scratching through frequencies, settling now and then on voices that sometimes speak English and sometimes languages he does not recognize. He needs no translator to recognize the occasional panic and anger in their words.

There is a knock at the door, and when he does not respond to it, another knock follows, and when he does not respond to this, the door opens. A face peeks through, brown skinned, bald headed. Monroe, his valet. He wears a pocketed vest over a collared shirt. “Mr. President?”

He does not turn. His naked back carries an American flag tattoo across its shoulders. It is inked in black and broken by wormy scars.

“They’re waiting for you, sir.”

The door closes. He continues to listen for another minute, channeling between silence and voices. Lightning forks the sky outside, and the thunder that follows shakes the windows and fuzzes the radio. He snaps off the volume and rises from his desk and pulls on a shirt and begins to button it.

The room is walled with bookshelves and anchored by a long table made from rough-hewn pine. Around it sits his Cabinet, a small, bug-eyed woman, a man with a tumor bulging redly from his neck, a brown-bearded man missing a thumb, and a black woman with a gray nimbus of hair. They stand when he enters and then tuck their bodies back into their chairs when he motions for them to sit. He takes a chair at the head of the table and it groans beneath his weight.

An enormous map sits at the center of the table. It has been torn into many pieces and fitted together again to create a warped representation of the country. Water stained. Rimed with mold. The Midwest and Southwest are shaded a poisonous yellow. The Plains white. The Northwest green. The South, ranging from Texas to North Carolina, a watery blue. So many sections are surrounded by red circles indicating an uninhabitable blast zone, the biggest of them corralling the entire East Coast.

They motion to the map when they speak, talking about hazards and possibilities, a railroad line reconstructed here, a community built around a coal mine there. There are black X s and red X s sketched throughout the West, and there are skulls drawn on several states in the South, and the Cabinet members stab their fingers at these when they talk about rising threats.

All this time, the man they call president says nothing, his posture stiff and his hands balled on the table before him. His eyes flit from speaker to speaker, the only indication he is listening. There is one window with a crack running across it that weeps rain. Every now and then it goes blue-white with lightning. The room shivers with thunder and the lights sputter on and off.

The room goes quiet when something crashes in the hallway. Voices call out. There is a hurried knock at the door that does not wait for an invitation. Monroe enters backward, nearly falling. He is being kicked at by a hooded figure braced by two guards. A voice — a woman’s voice — curses them, says she’ll stomp their mouths, make a necklace of their teeth. Four more guards follow, clutching two other hooded figures, though these stand quietly and make no move against them.

Monroe brushes off his vest and says, “We found them outside.” He begins to say something more, but thunder crashes and steals away his words.

The guards pull off their hoods. The woman, Clark, wears her red hair short around her ears. She looks wildly around the room and tries to rip her arms away from the guards, but they only grip her more tightly. Gawea regards them with black eyes that reflect the astonished expressions of those in the room. Lewis is white haired and clean-shaven, and though he keeps his eyes steady on the president, he tells Clark to settle down and says in a cool voice that they mean no harm and need not be detained.

One of the guards says, “This is what they had on them.” He clunks onto the table three holstered belts, each carrying two long-nosed revolvers. Then three more rifles. “And this.” A metallic bird, golden and no bigger than an infant, built in the shape of an eagle. He sets it on its side and it does not move, except for an aperture widening in one of its glass eyes.

Monroe stands by the president now. He leans in and speaks at a whisper everyone can hear, “They said you would want to see them. They said they came a long way to speak to you.”

The president rises from his chair. He walks slowly, his footsteps thudding, and as he does the windows again blaze with lightning followed instantly by thunder. He does not keep his distance but stops within arm’s reach of Lewis, who asks, “Are you President Jefferson?”

His voice is like a rockslide. “What do you want?”

Outside the thunder crashes again. Lewis opens his hands and wires of electricity dance between his fingers. When he speaks, Clark and Gawea speak with him, their voices the same. “We’re here to help.”

Thanks to my agent, Katherine Fausset, for her wisdom and friendship and muscle and savvy. Thanks, too, to the rest of the gang at Curtis Brown, especially Holly Frederick.

I am eternally grateful to Helen Atsma at Grand Central and Oliver Johnson at Hodder. Due to their editorial vision and encouragement, this novel transformed dramatically from first to final draft. Thank you for riding into battle with me again.

Thanks to Sonya Cheuse, the best publicist in the biz, and everyone else at Hachette (in the US and UK) who make publishing a book so much fun: Brian McLendon, Allyson Rudolph, Jamie Raab, Marissa Sangiacomo, Kerry Hood, Anne Perry.

A short section of this novel originally appeared in Ploughshares —thanks for the showcase.

Thanks to William Souder, Dan Hernandez, Jeremy Solin, for their help with environmental research. And I’m indebted to books like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us for helping me understand the science of the apocalypse. The Kingkiller Chronicle series by Patrick Rothfuss made me fall in love with fantasy again, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for that and for his intricate magic systems, which influenced my own clumsy attempts at spellbinding.

And finally, thanks to my wife for her unending love and patience and good-heartedness and support.

BENJAMIN PERCYhas won a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a contributing editor at Esquire and the author of two other novels, Red Moon (also available from Grand Central Publishing) and The Wilding , as well as two short story collections, Refresh, Refresh , and The Language of Elk (available as an e-book from Grand Central Publishing). He lives in Minnesota with his family. For more information, you can visit www.BenjaminPercy.com.

In what ways is the Sanctuary a shelter? A prison? In times of crisis, are governments ever justified in setting curfews or limiting travel by citizens? Why or why not?

Would you have joined Clark, Lewis, and the others on their journey? Why do you think the doctor went? Why do you think Danica stayed?

While THE DEAD LANDS takes place in a postapocalyptic world, the names of some of the characters — and the journeys they undertake — hearken back to the historical roots of the United States of America. Did this novel give you a new appreciation for the journey undertaken by the real Lewis and Clark? What personality traits help explorers — real or fictional — push through their arduous quests?