The Dead Lands (11 page)

When Clark hesitates, reining her horse one way, then another, confused about their direction, the girl waves them forward and digs in her heels and takes the lead. Clark and Reed make eyes—a question crushed into their stare—and then follow her.

They leave behind the city, the suburbs, and break away from the freeway to follow the cracked clay of the Missouri River. Here, in a silver pocket of shade beneath a bridge, they finally pause for water. Their horses foam with sweat. Their legs tremble and jump. They aren't breathing so much as
heaving
. Lewis feels as though he is riding even after he dismounts from Clark's horse, the ground seeming to rock, as if he is in two worlds at once.

York guzzles at a canteen, and Clark twists her brother's ear and drops him to his knees. “Only a taste, you idiot,” she says.

The dry riverbed looks like the passage of an enormous snake, the stones running along its bottom like shed scales. A gabled house sits on a bluff overlooking it. The windows are broken, but curtains still hang from them. Their tattered forms move with the wind, rising and falling, so that it looks like there might be bodies in there still breathing. In a way, this is their great gamble—that out here, in the Dead Lands, there is yet life.

Gawea sits in the shade with her hand pressed to her throat. The doctor approaches her, asking if she's all right, asking to check her bandages, and though the girl tries to wave her off, she eventually relents to the doctor's fussing. The doctor makes a
tsk
sound at the dust-caked wounds beneath and digs around in her satchel for cleansing alcohol and fresh dressing. And she hands out to the rest of them a dented can of ointment and tells them to smear it anywhere they feel blisters rising. “You need to tell me where it hurts,” she says. “I'll take care of you.”

Lewis leans his weight on one leg, then the other. The insides of his thighs burn. The muscles at the small of his back have gathered into a fist. His center sloshes. He opens his silver tin and fills his fingernail twice, snorting and sneezing and shivering with fresh energy.

He does not complain—but his expression is plain for any to read—because Clark approaches him and speaks with the steady, placating voice you would use on an aggrieved child. “No whining.”

“I haven't said a word.”

“This is only the beginning.”

“I understand that.”

“From now on, you ride your own horse.”

“But I don't—”

“Come here.”

She seizes the reins of the roan he earlier had not been able to mount, and she leads it toward him. Its sweat smells of sweet, scorched paper. Black jelly runs from one of its eyes. Its mane is clumped and wet, its coat spotted with burrs. It breathes with an asthmatic wheeze. “Why did you give me this horse?” he says. “It's obviously a terrible horse.”

“It's a fine horse. But it's our oldest. And tamest. Tame seems to suit you.”

Clark digs into a satchel and scoops out a handful of dried corn. She indicates that Lewis should take it from her, and he does, with two hands brought together to make a bowl. The horse sniffs. Its lips curl back to reveal teeth that look more like broken shells. Its long pink tongue, filmed over white, works every last crumb from his hands.

When it finishes, it raises its muzzle to sniff him. He raises a hand, too fast, and it flinches. He says, “Sorry, sorry.” This time he draws his hand slowly toward its neck, and the horse lets him. There is hair and there is skin and there is muscle, not a trace of cushioning fat. The neck ripples under his hand.

“Does he have a name?”

“He's a she,” Clark says. “We call her Donkey.”

Minutes later, when they straddle their horses and chase their shadows west, Lewis falls immediately to the rear of the company and chokes on the dust they kick up.

They ride on—into what was once a pasture or a field, now a flat stretch of land remarkable only for the scalloped texture and pink color, a vast nothing. That is how he quantifies these sand flats and bone-dry canyons and skeletal forests and sunken-roofed towns—as nothing. All these years, all those books—he has built kingdoms in his skull. The world within him is full. The world without, empty.

They come upon a town and ride through an amusement park, through the mouth of an enormous clown, through an alley of rotten stuffed animals and a dunk tank full of sand, past the rusted remains of Tilt-A-Whirls and roller coasters and drop towers and Gravitrons, past a carousel whose fiberglass horses have faded and cracked like the wings of dead butterflies.

It is then, as the Ferris wheel looms before them like a mechanical moon, that Lewis believes he sees a man. A man in white. He sits in one of the Ferris wheel cars, near the top, appearing at first a blaze of light, what must be the sun on metal, but no, from the rocking back of the horse, if Lewis concentrates, he can make out pieces of the man—hair blown about his face in smoky tendrils, a silver ring on a hand raised in greeting, a ragged robe like a dove's torn wing. Lewis's lungs constrict and can't find enough air. Every hair on his body goes erect. The air seems to shimmer. He knows the man. He phantoms through Lewis's dreams, always far away, always beckoning. And now the man has a name, Aran Burr.

Then the fairground barns close around Lewis, and he is traveling down a shadowy chute between them, the smell of cattle and hogs somehow still in the air. Every few minutes, the others are in the habit of turning in their saddles to check on him, dawdling their horses to make up for the sometimes thirty, sometimes seventy yards he trails behind. Now he slows more than ever, so enchanted by the sight of the man that he might turn around to assure himself he was real, when Clark drops back to pace him. She wears a neckerchief over her nose. It is damp in the shape of her mouth. He can barely hear her voice over the roaring wind and the pounding hooves. She is asking if he is okay.

“I thought I saw someone.”

She pulls down the neckerchief. Loose strands of her hair catch in her mouth and she spits them out. “You didn't see anyone.”

“I swear I did.”

“You didn't. Now, come on.”

They reach the edge of town, but before they head into the open country, they ride through a dozen pyramids, each one a heap of blackened bones, what must be hundreds of bodies, heaved here and splashed with gasoline and lit with a match in the hope that fire might stop the flu.

They ride through cars whose tires have rotted away like black socks. They ride by school buses full of skeletons. They ride past fallen barns bordered by silos that look like the missiles that once fell from the sky. They ride past what were once fields, now sandy barrens interrupted by dead cattle, their ribbed impressions like roots or tubers that failed to take purchase.

There is no trail to follow so they make their own. They ride in fear of what lies before them and what lies behind. They ride in pain, but they know pain already or they would not have come, so they ride through the pain in the hope that it will one day lessen. And when night comes, they ride still, following the stars, trying not to worry about what might await them in the dark. They ride through the night. Lewis wakes with a start when his horse lurches beneath him, sliding down a steep grade, and he wakes again in time to jerk his head away from a branch clawing toward him like a hand. Only when dawn breaks behind them and the sun rolls across the empty blue bowl of the sky and chases the shadows to the corners of the earth and glares furiously down at them do they stop to rest, at last.

The police headquarters is a rectangular, gray-stoned building with courtrooms in its upper stories and windowless holding cells in its basement. Thomas pushes through the entry, into a shadowy, squared-off room with the seal of St. Louis on the floor, benches along the walls, and a desk manned by a deputy. Slade leans over the deputy and jabs his finger at a map of the Sanctuary.

Thomas overhears the word
mutiny
and clears his throat and the two men raise their eyes to consider him.

“You told me an hour,” Slade says.

“It turns out I didn't need that long.”

Everything will be all right. He has every confidence that he can manage a situation only temporarily out of his control. On the walk here he could feel his thoughts sticking, clumping, like dust on a wet eye.

Now Slade tells him, “You should have requested an escort.”

“I can't walk around my own city?”

“No, you can't. There are plenty who would like to kill you.”

“I want you to take me below.”

“Below?”

“I want you to take me to see Jon Colter.”

His lips might thin. The skin might tighten around his eyes. Otherwise, Slade's face is as hard and featureless as the stone blocks stacked into walls around them. “I'll get the keys.”

There is a wind turbine located on top of the building, and the lights pulse on and off at a steady rhythm, so that after a while you get used to the passing darkness, as if a great eye were opening and closing. Slade does not bother to fetch a lantern, so every few paces they pause and wait for the lights to brighten again.

When Slade keys open the door at the top of the stairs, the smell comes rushing out and nearly knocks Thomas back. It is almost tactile, something that grows hair and pisses and shits, something that can crawl down your throat and claw out your insides. He brings a hand to his nose so suddenly he slaps himself. His eyes film over with tears.

Slade says nothing, but his mouth horns at one corner, the beginning of a smile. He leads Thomas down the stairs. With each step his boots thump and his keys rattle, but over the top of this Thomas can hear something else. The sound of many people breathing, like an uncertain wind. A voice muttering. A moan that goes on so long it becomes a wretched song.

At the bottom of the stairs, before a caged door, the lights fade and black out and they wait there for a few long seconds. The noises grow louder. Thomas can hear feet padding against concrete. Hands gripping bars and rattling them. A stream of urine splattering the bottom of a bucket. Whispers.

The lightbulb above them sizzles to life. Slade unlocks the door and the two of them pass through and it shuts behind them with a clank. To their right reaches a cinder-block wall—and to their left, ten cells, their bars a chipped white. Several of the men are naked. Their hair is long and matted. The ones who are white are as white as grubs from lack of sun. Some of them crouch in a corner; some lie on their cots and observe the visitors with craned necks. Others press their faces between the bars, like this man, who looks like a skull with slimy hair and who hisses and spits until Slade slams a baton against his hand and sends him whimpering to the floor.

There are only two lights socketed into the length of the room. They dim and die just as Thomas and Slade reach the final cell. In the bewildering darkness Thomas tries to remember how close he stands to the bars and wonders how far a man might reach. He can hear someone, in the near distance, breathing. He imagines fingers ghosting through the air, grabbing hold of his neck.

He waits, and he waits, what feels like an interminable length, and just as he is about to call out a question to Slade and ask if something is wrong, a surge of light brightens the air. He blinks until he finds his focus.

The man at first appears like some shadow that clings to the cell. He stands with his back to them. He has been imprisoned here as long as Thomas has been mayor, a year now, but confinement has not softened him. One of his arms is raised and his back and shoulders jump with muscle. He is short but square, built like a blunt weapon. His attention is focused on the wall, which he has sketched over, made into a mural. In his fingers he pinches a piece of metal, maybe a nail, and he uses this to scratch the concrete. There are many-headed beasts battling men with swords, naked bodies twined together in lust or combat, severed heads trailing ropes of blood, skeletons dancing, every inch of wall etched into some curious detail. The floor, too, has been sketched over. And small bits of stone carved into what look like trolls, fauns, beasts.

“Turn around,” Thomas says.

The man adds some flourish, a horn on a head. “There.” He drops his hands to his hips and turns to face them. The light is faint, making every line on his body stand out with shadow. The muscles rippling across his stomach. The scars, too. There are many of those. He appears like several bodies stitched together, many membranes of skin pulled taut and discolored, the most noticeable of them across his face. The left side of it has been torn away, one eye like a white egg deep in a nest of scars. His ear merely a hole, the hair around it gone and the skin a mottled gray. His teeth reach across his cheek, so that half his face appears always gathered up in a grin.

“You've been busy,” Thomas says.

“Have to find a way to pass the time. Otherwise, a man's likely to go crazy.” His voice sounds rough-edged, rusted out. “You've come to say you're sorry?” His permanent half smile makes it difficult to tell whether he's joking.

“I've come to offer you your freedom,” he says to Colter, first in darkness and then in light, as the lights sizzle off and on. “And ask for your help.”

Colter's tongue worms along his bottom lip. “Why would
I
want to help
you
?”

“Because this”—Thomas steps close enough to the cell to knock the bars with an open hand—“is your alternative.” The clang of metal shakes the air.

Colter runs a finger along his arm, tracing the purple ridge of a scar. “What about my wolves?”

“Still alive. Still scaring children. We've kept them at the zoo.”

“All of us in cages, eh?”

“Not anymore. Not if you bring me back some heads.”

The lights crackle off again, and in the dark the men keep their silence. Several seconds later, there is a sputtering hum and the air goes from black to gray to yellow, and Thomas sees that Colter has crept closer, to the very edge of the cell, his fingers curling around the bars to either side of his ruined face when he says, “Let me out then. Let me out and bring me my wolves.”