The Dead Lands (19 page)

“Your father.” The danger of last night, which seemed so far removed a moment ago, now flashes across her face. She looks as though she might say something, but a tapping sound distracts her. They turn to the window, where Lewis's owl waits patiently beyond the glass.

H
IS NAME IS
Jon Colter, but for some time he was known as the Black Fist. He might have invented the name. He might have encouraged its use. He liked it. He felt it captured what he was, how he wanted others to consider him. Someone once told him the scariest part of any story was when a character crept forward to investigate a strange sound. Whatever nightmare waited around the corner did not matter, its revelation almost always a disappointment. It was the imagined threat that mattered most. A fist was a threat. A clenched fist raised and ready to swing. In this capacity he served the Sanctuary for many years.

He began as a sentinel, and one day, when ranging the Dead Lands, he walked through the open door of a house that was a wolf's den. They sprung and burrowed their muzzles into him and mauled him nearly to death before the other sentinels fired arrows and sent them limping and yipping off.

Eventually he healed, the scabs and then the scars hardening him back into the shape of a man. His mouth slashed open along the left cheek a permanent half smile. He sought out the wolves, hunting them down in their den, chaining them and whipping them into submission, making two of them his own, so that he would walk the streets leashed to them, first as a deputy, then as sheriff under the late Mayor Meriwether.

Saddled on the back of a black horse called Nightmare and guided by his wolves, he now stalks his way across a parched country, a never-ending valley of the dry bones with no Ezekiel to call them up. He is schooled enough to know that God drove men west—across the ocean, across America. They followed the compass of Manifest Destiny and they claimed the country in God's name. But their God must not have been pleased, because he smote them down and cursed them with the hot wind breathed through his clenched teeth.

The same breath that wakes Colter tonight, on a farm outside of Omaha. He first hears the birds squawking and fluttering in the rafters of a pole shed. And then the hiss that swells into a sound like grain sliding down a metal chute. His horse whickers and his wolves whimper and pant and he hurries outside to see a vast section of the sky absent of stars. They have been eaten up by the black wall of sand moving toward him. He barricades the door and drapes blankets over the broken windows. When the sandstorm hits, the shed lets out a metallic groan as if ready to collapse, but it holds strong as the wind scours the metal and sends dust swirling through every available crack and he and the wolves huddle down with their eyes pinched shut.

He is not afraid. Not of the heat, the emptiness, the radiation, the bone piles and splintery ruins, whatever danger awaits him. He prefers to imagine the world fearing him, as it was before, when he roamed the streets of the Sanctuary, one hand leashed to the wolves, the other teasing the machete sheathed to his thigh. Everyone made way for him, darting down alleys, pressing their backs against buildings, closing their eyes if the wolves paused to sniff them.

He was not a big man, but their fearfulness made him feel that way. Too big. So that he and the mayor began to thrash against each other, their tongues like quarreling daggers. He thought he knew one thing and the old man another. “You are the muscle; I am the brain.” That's what the mayor always said, and Colter came to reject it. He knew best which wards needed more or fewer patrols. He knew best what ordinances and punishments worked and didn't. After a heated city council session, after they closed the meeting and took to the hallway, after Meriwether jammed a finger against his chest and told him to stand down, Colter lost his temper, twisted the old man's arm behind his back, and broke it with a damp pop. Not on purpose. By accident. If temper could be considered accidental.

Sometimes the world felt like a game in which everyone vied for power. Those who didn't have power tried to maneuver or rage against those who did. And those who had power pushed to oppress further those who didn't. He played the game well, until he lost it. On the floor, with his arm bent unnaturally, the old man screamed and ordered Colter's own deputies against him. He might have said sorry if given the chance.

But they silenced him by disappearing him into a cell. A few might have died dragging him there. And there he has remained, his anger growing viler and more toxic as time progressed. With chunks of stone and hunks of rusted metal, he sketched out on his cell walls scenes of war and torture, a fantasia of retribution that became his reality, like someone who reads over and over again a novel until its words are rote and its characters flesh.

The old man who put him there is dead. The doctors said it was the result of infection brought on by the surgery, his arm broken in several places. The old man had been in a cast only a few days, wracked by the fever that came from the infection, when he suffered a heart attack. Colter knew the heart attack could have come at any time, when he was giving a speech or humping his wife or knifing into a steak, whether his arm was broken or not. But all the what-ifs and maybes did not change the fact that his death more or less came at Colter's hand.

The mayor's son is alive. Hiding somewhere out in all this waste. Colter has been given a gift. The gift of freedom. They let him go and wished him good hunting. Colter knows how to hunt and he knows how to hurt. With knives and ropes and whips and glass and fire. With his own hands. With his wolves. And now he is supposed to hurt Lewis, the man he still thinks of as a thin-wristed, pale-skinned weakling of a boy, the son of the man who clapped him away and left him to rot after all his years of service.

He follows the dry river, follows the messy stream of hoofprints in the sand, follows the ashen piles of dead campfires, the withered lumps of stool, the castaway supplies the wolves sniff, lick. He squints at the horizon, where the sun sets, a kaleidoscope of bloody colors.

E
VERYONE CALLS HER
the doctor. She doesn't mind. She knows that once a woman becomes a certain age, people stop seeing her. In the Sanctuary, at the hospital, people made eye contact, asked questions, listened to her answers, because she was of service to them. She was
the doctor
. But on the streets she was no one, invisible. Not the doctor and not her given name, Minda Shields. She was a ghost.

She never married, never had children. No one ever bothered to pursue her. Maybe because of the way she looked, face scrunched, prematurely gray, appearing old long before she ever was. Maybe it was because the right man never seemed so important and the right woman always felt impossible to acquire. Or maybe it was the way she behaved. All business, people said. Which was another way of saying, unkind. She didn't mean to be. It was just her way. If someone came in, whimpering about stomach cramps or heatstroke or whatever ailed them, she would say, “We're here for symptoms, not sympathy.” She understood the way the body fit together and came apart, the way it ruined and healed, and she wanted to help a person in the same way a builder might mortar a crumbling foundation or a gardener might pull a weed in an overgrown pot.

As the years passed, she tried to be better. She tried to help more, mother more. She wanted people to turn a needy face toward her in a bad time. She had no one but her patients. That is how she knows Clark, as a patient, treated for alcohol poisoning. She pumped her stomach and brought the cups of sugar water to her lips and held her hair as she vomited into a bucket and monitored her for twenty-four hours. She checked up on her weeks later, finding her at the stables, asking if she needed anything.

“What makes you think I need anything?”

“I'm just checking. That's all. Just seeing if you're all right. Healthy.”

“I'm fine.” Clark looked at her curiously. “Hey, you want to get a drink?”

A patient treated for alcohol poisoning asking her out for a drink. The doctor almost laughed, but she could tell Clark asked the question without irony. To her drinking was like breathing, like talking, and the doctor decided she would like to share that with her. She wasn't one to visit bars, but she visited one that night. Clark had a way of rallying people, convincing them of what they never realized they wanted. It wasn't one drink or two. It wasn't two weeks or three. It was a long seduction, a slow, secret sharing, before Clark revealed their plans and asked if the doctor might join them. They needed someone like her. To care for them.

To be needed. How good that felt.

The doctor realized then she couldn't remember the last dream she dreamed. She couldn't remember the last patient she saw or the last meal she ate or the last book she read. Those things happened, but they happened in the haze that had become her life. Nothing was worth committing to memory any longer. So she said, “Yes.” She would go. She would go anywhere Clark asked.

Clark might be reckless, given to wild mood swings, occasionally crippled by her indulgences, but there was something about her—the way she punched the air to punctuate a sentence, the way she never stopped moving except right before she was about to give an order, the way she threw back her head when she laughed, as if her laughter were a swallowed sword. Her heart was too big. It owned her. And when she was angry or happy or sad, you knew about it, because her heart couldn't be hidden, slamming everyone within fifty yards with its drumbeat. It was hard to doubt someone like that, someone who lived so fully.

The doctor is taken. They all are. They are all there because of Clark. She is their rallying force. Which is why, when the doctor leaned over her cold, pale body, when she dug through her bag and searched for anything that might restore the life to this beautiful, precious person, she felt wounded in a way she never had before. She understood at last what it meant to be the weeping patient.

It was not her care that brought Clark back. It was not anything the doctor pretended to understand, a force beyond any education. But none of that mattered. All that did was Clark's survival. About this the doctor feels, with no other comparison available in her life, joy.

The doctor dotes on her. Tidying her blanket. Cleaning the dressing on her wounds. Telling her to rest, rest, please. Pushing back her hair and kissing her on the forehead. Whatever she needs, the doctor will take care of.

She tells Reed to leave Clark be. “She doesn't need
you
.”

And she doesn't. The doctor has never liked him. He is the kind of man women love—with his predatory smile, his stalking walk, his way of standing too close—but he has always struck her as a rank dog eager to hump a leg.

She does not care for Lewis either. For other reasons entirely. She has a grandnephew, a boy of seven who can play the fiddle brilliantly but avoids eye contact and makes strange conversation with himself. There is something similarly unsettling about Lewis, who has always seemed to occupy a different room even when in the company of others and who has abilities beyond any of their understanding. A magician, a miracle worker, an aberration—she's not sure what word best suits him.

The doctor thought he would die. After the transfusion—if that's the right word for it—he remained still for two days. His breathing so shallow his chest barely moved. His pulse so weak she gave up trying to read it, sensing only one impossible heartbeat a minute. The doctor stayed away, but Gawea sat by him.

She could talk now—the doctor suspects she has been able to talk for some time—but rarely speaks, as if rationing her words. If the doctor asks how he is doing, she says, “The same,” and if she asks if Gawea has brought a damp rag to his lips, she says, “Yes.” Gradually his color flushed. And his eyes began to shudder beneath their lids. And he began to speak in his sleep, uttering words that were clearly enunciated but in no recognizable language.

Gawea is gone, foraging in the woods, when the doctor approaches him tonight with a rag and a bowl of water. She strips him, bathes his thin, wasted body by roughing the rag across his skin. The campfire crackles nearby. The stars are like a fistful of salt flung across a black blanket. His ribs are too visible, pressing painfully against his skin. His black hair, once so short, is now a messy corona. He smells strangely metallic. “What's going on inside of you?” she asks, not expecting an answer, but when she dips the rag in the bowl and wrings it out and brings it to his face, his eyes spring open.

Before she can cry out, he has seized her by the wrist and shot straight up. “Where is my tin?” he says.

She tries to pull away from him. “Clark threw it in the river.”

He blinks a few times, swallows hard. “She
what
?”

“She was right to do it.” She explains that there is no better time than now to wean himself, when his body is restive, healing. “She gave up the hooch. Now it's your turn to be strong enough to do the same.”

“That bitch.” At this point the others have gathered around them. “You bitch!” he screams at Clark.

He blinks hard, as if he remains unsure of his whereabouts. The doctor knows his mind and body must feel gripped by an arthritic fist. He releases her then. His face tightens and he brings a hand to his chest.

“What's wrong?” the doctor says, and he says his heart. It feels like one big wound, like nails have been pumped through his veins and clustered there. He lets his head fall back and struggles to breathe and struggles to keep his eyes open.

He obviously wants to say something more—to curse them, wish them dead—but can't find the breath. Sleep pulls him away like a current. His mouth is moving, but they don't hear what he says, the words seeming filtered through water so that he might as well be sinking past the reaches of moonlight to the stony bottom of the nearby river.