The Dead Lands (13 page)

It could be Gawea won't have to kill them. It could be they'll be killed all on their own, maybe by each other.

Wherever they stay the night, they raid the area for supplies. One time, inside a steel-roofed log home, they find a table still set for dinner and pajamas laid out on the beds, but no bodies anywhere, as though the people who once lived there dissolved into dust. Another time, they find a television in the corner of the living room, the glass knocked from it, the electronic guts ripped out and replaced by dolls and action figures arranged in a still life. Clark stares at it for a long while, as if expecting them to animate and entertain her, but they remain still, entombed in their dark box, and she can't help but think maybe this is the world, no matter where or how far they ride.

“I thought we would have found something by now,” Reed says and kicks the television, and a few of the dolls fall over.

“Like what?” Clark says.

“Something better.”

She reaches into the broken television and rearranges the fallen figures. “We'll find it.”

“Will we?”

“I don't want to hear questions like that. Neither does anybody else. Okay? We need hope right now, not doubt.”

There is a cocoon of soiled blankets on the floor and the back porch is full of garbage—canned food and cereal boxes with their tops torn open. Lewis asks, “Does someone live here?” and Clark says, “I don't see how that's possible,” but then they find a plastic mop bucket splattered with shit that still smells and they go silent for a long minute before Lewis asks if they should press on and stay somewhere else. But they have already unsaddled and brushed down their horses, and the sun has set, and the night is so monstrously dark, its star-sprinkled blackness absent of any moon.

They sleep instead in the cavernous pole barn, which stinks of hydraulic oil, and Clark volunteers to take the first watch. She pinches her thigh, slaps her cheek lightly, takes deep breaths, but their days are so long and she can't keep from falling asleep. She wakes hours later. The moon has risen and its light streams in the window and gives the floor a glow, as if a sheet of fog lowered while they slept. She studies the space around her. A snowmobile with a tarp thrown over it, a four-wheeler with sunken tires still caked with mud, a Farmall tractor, a manure spreader, a planter, a combine the size of a dragon, and finally a grain truck with tires as tall as she.

She knows something must have woken her and she listens to the breathing all around her until she discerns a noise different from the rest, a damp smacking, like a foot working its way out of mud. She unholsters her revolver and approaches the barn door and cracks it open and finds one of their horses dead and a bent-backed wild-haired figure lowered over it, ripping into it, feasting. She fires at him, once, twice, three times, until Reed grabs her and says, “Enough. He's dead.”

He lies on his back, staring at the sky. The man who arranged toys in a dead television is the same man driven wild enough by hunger to bring down a horse. His hair is dreaded with grime and his beard clotted with blood, making him look more beast than man. But underneath all that, he is just like them. She wonders how far away they all are from crossing that line.

They were on alert when they first departed the Sanctuary, glancing constantly over their shoulders, keeping their fires small at night, sending the owl into the sky to track what lies before and behind them, but they have grown lazy in their habits. Tonight they slept deeply and foolishly and encountered their first realized danger. And it is her fault. She should have stayed awake. She should have taken better care of them—she is responsible for them—and instead of a horse next time it might be her brother.

They bleed the horse and bottle the blood. They butcher the carcass and cook and salt the meat and ride away from the farm in an arrowhead formation, with Gawea at the point. The air is so hot and brittle, it seems, with every breath, they risk the danger of shattering. The sun rises behind them and their shadows lead the way west, one fewer than before.

E
VERYONE CALLS IT
the news. The windowless wall, several stories high, next to each of the Sanctuary's wells. It is the obligation of every citizen to check the news daily. Whatever they need to know—about an execution, rationing, construction, whatever—is painted there, over a whitewashed background, in giant dripping black letters. For those who can't read, a town crier wanders the streets at dawn, noon, sundown, to shout the same.

Ella stands in a long line with an empty jug. So long that she reads the news a dozen times or more.
NEW CURFEW
.
HOME BY NIGHTFALL
.
ENFORCED
.

With no explanation as to why. There never is.
Why
is irrelevant, Ella knows, to the servant. Why shine shoes, why wash windows, why sweep floors or polish silver or wind clocks? Because someone more powerful than you demands it, and if they tell you to eat shit or crawl on all fours like a dog, you'll do that too. Because if you don't, they can hurt you or take away what's most precious to you, food, water, home, family.

The people around her mutter their theories and complain about the unfairness and malicious idiocy of it all, but they do so quietly enough that they are not overheard by the deputies who wander up and down the line. Ella grinds her teeth, grinds down what she wants to yell at them all. It's Lewis's fault. If they're looking for a
why
, there it is. Him. Damn him. He is the reason for the curfew. He is the reason Slade nearly tossed her in a cell. He is the reason she alone is responsible for a museum that feels suddenly like a shed chitinous husk. She can't not be angry. She hates everyone, and everything is awful. The sun burns down and the wind gusts and the rotor on the turbine spins and eventually she finds herself at the spigot, filling her jug with water so murky she can't see through it.

She lugs the water, leaning into its weight, shifting it from one hand to the other. She crosses a stone bridge over a mud-slick sewage canal. She waves her free hand at the blue-black flies that swarm there. They get caught in her hair and crawl on her skin and follow her for a block, and their buzzing matches the noise of the crowd gathered near the museum. She curses the flies and she curses the people, all of them in her way, a bother.

Then she sees the man chained to the whipping post, the third in as many weeks, and her annoyance gives way to guilt-tinged sadness. He is bearded, shirtless, the skin of his belly and back a grub white compared to the tanned darkness of his face. Already he is pinkening under the sun, burning. He does not weep, not yet, but looks warily about him. He stands on an elevated platform, his wrists bound by two short chains anchored to a metal post. A voice calls out then, a voice she recognizes. She elbows through the crowd until she can see him. Slade.

He and his deputies, dressed in black, are like walking shadows. He steps onto the edge of the platform and surveys the crowd and tells them about the man. At a bar the other night he sang a song about the mayor. “A profane song. A mocking song. Remember, friends, there is always someone listening. There is always someone watching. You are never alone here. What you tell one person you tell forty thousand. Now this man says he is sorry about his little song. He says he meant it only for fun, not as an act of civil disobedience. And for now he has our mercy.”

In Slade's hand, a coiled whip. He opens his grip so that its length unravels. He shakes his wrist one way, then the other, making it dance, its tip a fanged barb. He takes a few steps back, gauging the distance between him and the man. Then draws back his arm and casts the whip forward. It seems to pause a moment in a dark parabola—before sinking, darting in to strike. The crack gets mixed up with the scream. The man falls into the pole, hugging it. A winged flap of skin opens across his back. From it blood sleeves.

The whip lashes again and again and again. Eventually flesh gives way to the white nubs of vertebrae. Slade loops the whip in his hand and once again surveys the crowd. His eyes are lost to piggish folds of flesh that turn down their corners, but Ella feels certain his gaze follows her when she hurries away, back to the museum.

This would be a good time to have parents. Someone to turn to in a bad time, ask for help, a hug, a meal. Though Lewis would never think of himself in this way, he was her guardian, the one who years ago snuck up beside her in the west wing and startled her when he said, “You're under this roof more than anyone but me.”

Vagrant children were as common as rats, and she was one of them, living in the Fourth Ward, in the pantry of the kitchen of a brothel. She came to the museum nearly every day—it was her way of forgetting. She could think of nothing to say to Lewis in response except, “I'm sorry.”

His hands were behind his back, the posture of a scholar. “You should be,” he said, looming over her. “You haven't earned your rent.”

She flinched when his hands shot from behind his back—she thought he would strike her. But he held a feather duster. He shoved it into her chest, with a puff of motes, and told her to get to work immediately.

She did, and since then she has never really stopped working. She feared him at first. The thin-lipped expression. The words fired from his mouth like poison-tipped darts. The impossible mechanics of the owl and other inventions he sometimes tested out: a steam-powered bicycle, a lantern that never extinguished, a multi-lens set of glasses that could alternately study the moon or an amoeba. But then she discovered how frail and incompetent he was in human affairs, and in that recognition of weakness she gained power over him.

In most matters she bullies him into getting her way. Lewis has given her a roof, a purpose, an education, but she would never describe him as a giving person, not someone to ever touch her gently on the shoulder or offer a kind word. But in this particular matter he would have helped her, he would have protected her, if only he were here.

She tries not to think about Slade, but even with the door shut, she can't shake the feeling he pursues her. His eyes are like hands that touch her all over. She tries to concentrate instead on the small things. She has to eat. She has to sweep and dust and polish. She has to escort four pods of children through the museum exhibits. She has to finish the display cards for the dinosaur collection. She has to check the windowsill outside Lewis's office to see if his owl might perch there. Sometimes, when she works a rag into a stubborn smear of tarnish, when she stomps a scuttling cockroach—the world crushes down to a steel breastplate, a stone square, a task, and she gratefully forgets where and who she is. Then the quiet comes. The moments she can't fill with anything but her thoughts. Night is the worst. She sleeps at the museum, and when she lies in bed, no matter how hard she tries to concentrate, something shadows her, paces the perimeter of her mind.

Tonight—with prayers on her lips and the image of the whipped man's back redly staining her mind—she spends hours staring at the ceiling and noting the clicks and hums of the museum, wondering what they belong to and whether she ought to investigate. Then she hears something she can't ignore. What sounds like singing.

She keeps the bat—the baseball bat Slade played with—by her bed. She carries it with her to the top of the staircase. She leans over the railing and looks down into the dark, and sure enough, a voice spirals faintly toward her. She descends the stairs.

The various hallways and chambers offer noises that are distant and vague and melt into other sounds, the sounds of the nighttime city. Moonlight streams through the windows, and the shadows crisscross the floor. It isn't until she pads all the way down the stairs, creeping into the basement, that she can make out the words to the song—“Yesterday,” the Beatles—belted out, full throated, by some phantom tenor.

She snatches a lantern off a hook and lets out the wick and continues into the dark with a shroud of light to guide her. The voice grows louder and louder—until she enters the storage room, where the voice goes suddenly quiet, as if someone dragged a needle off a record.

She pauses among the heaps of boxes, her ears pricked to pick up every sound. The wick of her lantern sputters. A cobweb seems to breathe. There is a breeze. The air moves down here, drawn to some source. She navigates her way through the shadowed maze until she comes upon a clearing where the ground slopes toward a grate.

Her eyes are immediately drawn there because the grate is glowing, like the door of an oven. She can hear something moving beneath it, breathing and clambering upward. She sets down her lantern in order to grip her bat better.

Then the gate lifts, the rusty maw of it moaning outward, and something is rising from below, what appears to be a glowing ghost. She screams and so does the ghost, their voices pitched high.

She sees then his face—the face of a boy—colored orange and warped by shadows thrown by his own lantern. But only for a moment, as he jerks away from her and loses his purchase and drops back into the hole from which he climbed. The grate clangs behind him, shaking the air and nearly masking the noise of his body thudding, the lantern shattering.

She creeps to the edge of the grate. Fifteen feet below, in the dying light of his lantern, he lies on his side, beetled by a backpack. She calls out to him—“What are you doing sneaking around down here?”—but he doesn't answer, biting back a scream.

Only then does she notice the bone showing whitely through the meat of his forearm.

F
OR A LONG TIME,
they stand on a bluff looking out at the blackened fangs of high-rises and broken-backed bridges and the shadows that cling to walls even in full sun. The air smells like burned plastic. They can see two craters, each a half mile wide, from which everything seems to lean.

“This is from a missile?” Lewis says.

Paper is precious, so Gawea writes in the sand with a stick.
Yes.

“Do you know of many other cities in the same condition?”

Many.

Right then, Clark remembers the bullet her brother shot into the sand and tries to imagine the size and sound of what caused this, tries to imagine the windows shattering and roofs peeling upward, the people who barely had a chance to scream before their hair caught fire and their skin crisped and ashed off their bones. Closing her eyes doesn't help. She still sees the city: the afterimage of the sun shining off mangled metal and molten puddles of glass making blue and white networks on her eyelids.

“Are we in danger?”

Gawea writes:
Maybe. Goblins. Moov on.

“Goblins? What do you mean by goblins?”

She underlines
Moov on
with the stick.

They lead the horses down the bluff and into a neighborhood where the houses are husks and the trees nothing but charcoaled sticks that smear their flanks blackly when they ride past. They pass a mailbox that has lost all its letters but one,
Z
.

Something skitters out of the underbrush. Something they see only briefly and cannot identify. York says it looks a little like a human head covered in bristly fur. They see other things too. White ants. A two-headed squirrel. Mutations.

Goblins
, Gawea writes again in the sand. Soon after that they pass a trampled circle of grass splashed with blood.

Lewis tells them how radiation will cling to the place for thousands of years, so they give the city wide berth, arcing away from the river for fifty miles or so before returning to it.

That night, around the campfire, everyone is jittery, hollow eyed, ready to curl up in a ball or walk into the woods and offer themselves up to whatever might prey on them. At least then the pain will end. It doesn't help matters when Reed asks, “What do you miss?” He is looking at everyone, his sunburned face peeling so badly that the firelight playing off it makes him appear aflame, burning alive. “About the Sanctuary. I mean, you have to miss something.”

Clark says, “I don't know if that's the kind of conversation we should be having.”

“Why not? What's wrong with missing something?”

“We don't need to be looking back at a time like this.”

He pokes the fire with a stick and a spiral of embers rises in the air. It seems that no one will respond until Lewis says, “I miss my books. My desk. Stillness. Aloneness.” He opens his silver tin and scoops out a sniff from it.

“Me,” York says, “I miss the ladies and the laughter.” He smiles and bobs his eyebrows. “What about you, Reed? Since you asked, what do you miss?”

“Oh, I just miss certain people, I guess.”

“Like who?”

Reed glances at Clark and then away. “Just the people who used to fill my days.”

York says, “Gawea? You miss anybody back home? Anybody special waiting there for you?”

She shakes her head, no.

“Well, that's good. Because I'm all the man you need.”

She does not respond except to stare into the fire.

The doctor smiles warmly at Clark. “I don't miss a thing. Anything is better than that place. I couldn't be happier than where I am right now.” A lie, of course. But a good one, a necessary one. They need lies like it to get them through the months ahead.

“Me too,” Clark says.

York blows on the fire, makes it bend and snap. “Are we really going back? Like, at the end of all this? We're not really going to hump all the way back, are we?”

“Of course we are,” Reed says, and then, with his voice lowered, “Aren't we?”

But no one answers.

Clark wakes to the smell of smoke. She is already hot. And terribly thirsty, her mouth like sandpaper. Her head aches from dehydration and the fuzzy memory of yesterday's long ride. She rolls into a seated position and swigs from her canteen, its water somehow seeming warmer than the air.

They are north of St. Joseph, and though the sun has not yet risen, the sky has lightened enough for Clark to see Reed. They spent the night beneath an open-air shelter in a park, and he sits on a splintery picnic table with a revolver split open. He dampens a rag with oil and drags it through the barrel.

“What are you doing up?” she says.

“I'm thinking.”

“You like your new toy?” she says, and he looks at her but does not say anything. Half-moons of fatigue bruise the flesh beneath his eyes. His lips are chapped and cracked. His peeling sunburn makes him look like he's falling apart. He appears old, ugly. They all do, she knows. The doctor has been fretting over them, asking them to take foul-tasting supplements from a dropper. She says it will keep them healthy, strong, but they look and feel the opposite. These days, conversation comes less and less frequently, as if they are rationing their voices, too. When they do speak, the words flash like impatient weapons.

She is as guilty as any of them—especially with her brother, whose every decision she sometimes feels compelled to question. When he drinks too much water, when he builds too big a fire, when he stands too near a cliff's edge or walks too quickly into an abandoned house, as if there is nothing to fear in the world. She often cuffs him, berates him, can't stop herself from pointing out his idiot mistakes. He fights back, cursing her, raising a hand as if to slap her. “You're making me look like a fool.”

“You're making yourself look like a fool.”

“Treat me like a man, Clark.”

“Act like one.” Here she lowered her voice and jutted a chin in the direction of the girl. “And don't get too attached to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I see the way you look at her. Keep your guard up. We still don't know if we can trust her.”

Even the horses seem angry. One dropped dead from exhaustion. The others droop their heads and hood their eyes. Some of them limp with split hooves. Yesterday, when Lewis spurred his horse, it swung back its head and bit his calf.

Dawn steals across the sky and suffuses everything with a faint orange light. In the center of the shelter is a short-walled fire pit with a round grate that pipes into a chimney. Smoke eases from the grate, bending with the breeze, twisting toward her, acrid with the smell of rotten wood. She stands upright and presses her hands into her back, nudging her spine until it
click-click-clicks
into place with a sound like dry timber. “I suppose we better get moving.”

Reed snaps the revolver together. “Suppose we better. Our big hurry to nowhere awaits us.”

“Do you have a problem? Something you want to say?”

He won't meet her stare, so she breaks away and calls out to everyone, telling them to move, get their asses up. A few of them groan and roll over. Ever since Kansas City, everyone has been quiet, slow, as if the lingering poison of the place infected them all. It is harder to believe in humanity surviving, she supposes, when you see how it is capable of destroying itself.

She walks from bedroll to bedroll, kicking Lewis, pulling her brother's hair, saying, “Up, up, up, up”—and they yawn and stretch and rub their hands across their faces. Somebody says, “What's the point?” and when she says, “Who said that?” there is no answer except her nickering horse.

She fills a nose bag and fits it into place, and while the horse eats noisily she studies the brightening sky. At first she doesn't recognize the cloud. It isn't much—seen through the trees, a white wisp hanging in the air like a shed feather—and her eyes initially sweep past it. Then she nearly cries aloud. It has been so long. Seeing the cloud is like sitting in a bar and hearing the band strike up a song she knows but forgot existed.

Reed stands with his gun ready. “What?”

The shelter is located next to a wall of trees at the bottom of the sloping hill she races up now. She can hear panicked voices behind her and ignores them. She trips twice in her rush, but she does not pause, not until she reaches the top, where she turns to take in the view.

For so long she has seen the sun rise into a cloudless sky, it is difficult to imagine it any other way. Cerulean. That's the description Lewis used for it the other day. A word that sounds cruel to her.

“Look,” she says. “Everyone, come up here and look.”

They stagger from beneath the shelter, up the hill, staring at her and then at the sky. What she initially saw—that white wisp—was only the beginning, the first tentacles of a roiling bank of clouds stacked up on the horizon.