Benjamin Percy: The Dead Lands

SHE KNOWS THERE IS something wrong with the baby. She has known from the very beginning. First there was the nausea that left her bedridden for weeks, dizzy and barely able to eat, chewing on cucumbers, filling up on springwater. Then the surges in temper, the blackening headaches. And finally a stillness inside her when there should have been movement — a fluttering, like the tail of a trout; that’s what her friends told her — so that she would twist her body and prod her belly until the child readjusted itself, assuring her it was there, it was alive.

They live in a windowless cabin high in the mountains. Others live not far away, some near a spring-fed stream, others cut back in the woods. Together they form a village of sorts, happily isolated, wary of outsiders and change, fearful of the stories told by their elders, stories of an illness that causes a bloody cough and blistering fevers, stories of missiles raining from the sky and cratering the earth, stories of scavengers with meaty breath and teeth filed into points.

Outside the snow is knee-deep. Before long it will be taller than her husband, taller than the cabin, and every day they will need to shovel a wide passage from their door in case they should be trapped, shrouded.

Sometimes she dreams the child is not a child. It is a grub, fat and white and segmented, with black eyes. It is a beast with tiny yellow fangs and tiny yellow claws, its body covered in fur as sleek as an otter’s. Or maybe it is a nothing, a dark spirit, a possessed vapor, and her body the house it haunts.

So she is relieved when she gives the final push and feels a tear, a gush, an emptying — and then the midwife smiles and coos and says, “There now.” She cuts the cord with a knife. She carries the child to the table and wipes it clean with a rag.

Juliana bunches towels between her legs and watches the child through heavy-lidded eyes. Everything is fine. Everything will turn out all right after all. She is, as her mother always said, a worrier.

Then she notices something. The absence of something. The baby is not crying. The baby has not made a sound. The midwife stands over it, the red rag in her hand like a crushed rose.

“What’s the matter? Is it alive? It’s alive, isn’t it?”

The midwife nods.

“Is it all right?”

The midwife looks at her, looks at the baby, with a mouth that quivers with words she cannot express.

“What is it? A boy?”

“A girl.”

“What’s wrong?”

Her voice comes out a choked whisper when she says, “Her eyes.” She drapes a blanket around the child and hurries to the bed in a rush to be rid of it.

Juliana accepts the child and tears away the wrappings. Her face — splotchy and wrinkled and coned from birth — looks like any baby’s face. But her eyes — they are wide open, seemingly lidless, with no whiteness to them, all pupil, no iris, as if splashed full of ink.

The midwife says they will worry about it later. For now the child must eat. The midwife thumbs down the baby’s chin and plays its mouth along her nipple, while Juliana massages her breast and brings from it a thick, yellowish bead of colostrum. The baby nods toward the taste but will not latch on. She keeps pulling away to stare at Juliana. It may be a trick of the light — the cabin so dim — but the baby’s large eyes appear somehow sorrowful. Juliana struggles to hold the baby’s head in place. She does not believe the baby should be strong enough to do so, but she is, arching her back and twisting her head to study Juliana’s face.

* * *

Robert cannot take the sound of her screams. Or the sight of his wife writhing naked in pain. He tries to help at first, packing snowballs to rub along her wrists and ankles and forehead, but he cannot stop staring at her belly, which seems somehow separate from her, the skin so tight it appears ready to split, almost purple in color, with a white line running down its middle. He thinks he sees shapes in it, what look like hands, a face pressing against the skin, the baby trying to claw or chew its way out.

So he pulls on his boots and doeskin jacket and escapes outside. Snow falls and accumulates on his shoulders when he paces. He is a simple man who pleasures in small things, the song of a nuthatch, the last flare of sunlight on the horizon before night rushes in, the taste of rare lamb and oak-aged whiskey. His wife confuses him. She is a woman of many moods, rarely steady in her feeling, weeping when she says she loves him and draws him into a hug, weeping when she laments him and hurls a dish at the wall. He has learned, when her anger spikes, not to say anything. Not saying anything is the best medicine for their marriage. And making himself scarce. After one of her spells — that’s what she calls them, as if they were dark magic — he might chop wood or weed their garden or wander around the bend to his nearest neighbor, Colson, for a game of cards or dice.

He hears another cry from inside — the loudest yet and the worst sound imaginable, like an animal dying, falling from a cliff or rent in half by an ax — and he can only hope that the baby is here, that this is the end.

The snow is thick — and his mind distracted — so he does not look east, where through the falling snow he might notice a faint orange glow, his neighbor’s cabin burning. And when he paces, the snow creaks beneath his boots, so he does not hear the hushed passage of the two men clambering up the hill toward him.

They appear as beasts, robed in bearskins, the hollowed heads of which rest atop their own, the snouts like toothed visors that throw a shadow over their faces.

They run a few paces, their boots splashing up snow, and then crouch down. Run and then crouch. In this way they progress up the hillside, threading through trees, trampling icy bushes, plunging over frosted logs. Then they duck down and scuttle close and lift their heads slowly over a lip of snow to observe him pacing and muttering — and then, with a white, sparkling explosion, they rush forward.

At first, they try to wrestle him down, shoving him, trying to kick out his legs, but he puts up enough of a fight that they stop trying and jab a knife into his stomach and then drag it across his neck. They hold him down in the snow until he bleeds out into a red slushy puddle, until his body stops struggling.

* * *

When the door first crashes inward, Juliana is fatigued enough by the labor and distracted enough by the child that she does not scream. She only thinks, How strange, a bear. Hurrying out of the night and into the cabin. Shaggy and caked with snow and thudding across the floorboards.

It pauses near the fire, the snow melting in the heat, steaming off its fur — and only then does she see the bearded man beneath the skins, the light brightening his eyes into orange coals. In one hand he grips a knife. Its metal is bloodied — a red patina with ice crystals flowering from it.

The midwife edges her way along the far wall and tries to dart past him, and he lets her — but just before she reaches the doorway, another bear-suited man steps through and seizes her and drags her into the night, her screams muffled by the snow.

The first man starts toward Juliana. She is naked. She is physically ruined. She is beyond exhausted after eight hours of contractions, two hours of hard labor. But still, she tries to fight him. She nestles the baby into a blanket on the bed, then lurches her body to the edge of the mattress, reaching for the rifle her husband keeps there.