The Dead Lands (21 page)

If a rock falls, it falls down, not up. Because a force, the force of gravity, draws it down. It is this same force that keeps an arrow from sizzling through the air for a thousand miles, keeps a horse's hooves on the ground instead of pounding the animal upward in the air. To make a rock fall up instead of down requires another force, a force stronger than gravity.

He thinks of the rockets they used to blast into space. An engine could do it. An engine made by man, metal and plastic, conceived by the mind, constructed by hand. Gawea tells him, “There are forces—there is energy—all around. Not only in gravity, but in air and earth and water and fire.” Energy that makes things slow and speed up, cool and burn, grow and shrink, and she is helping him discover this, like a child who finds his shadow and begins to cast his hands into doves, dragons.

Today a shadow ripples across his journal. He looks up to see a flash in the sky, the sun reflecting off metal, the owl. It spirals toward them. The sound of its fast descent is as bright as a boiling kettle.

Lewis holds out an arm and it lands there and he sets it on the log beside the fire. The gears wind to a stop inside it. When he reaches for its breast, he pulls his hand back with a hiss, the metal hot from its flight. He tries again, hurriedly flipping open the compartment door. Sand spills from it. He fishes out the note folded inside. He ignores the others when they request he tell them what it says, until he has read it through twice.

His tongue wets his lips. “It says, ‘Dear Lewis, You can imagine my surprise and disappointment when I found you gone. Did I curse your name and wish upon you unimaginable pain? Yes. But I also hoped that you might live to write this note, just as I continue to hope you might live to write another, the next time to tell the rest of us to follow. As you might imagine, things have been unwell since your departure, worse even than before. Hurry. Be safe. And please do not forget about us. I will do as you asked and share the news of your success, but your note ended abruptly and it remains unclear to us what you want us to find in the Dome. Ella.'”

“Us?” Lewis says. “Who's
us
?”

Reed snatches the owl. Its wings flap and its claws rake the air. There is a noise inside it like an alarm clock dropped down the stairs. He peers into its hollow breast. “Is that all?”

“What else would there be? Why would there be anything for you?” Lewis holds out a hand until Reed returns the owl to him. Then he starts for the forest. He does not look over his shoulder when he directs someone to bring a blanket. He knows they will.

They follow him between the trees, into the shade, several degrees short of evening, but gray enough. Lewis indicates a low-hanging branch and Clark throws the blanket over it. They huddle close. Lewis holds up the owl. There is a metallic snap, a motorized buzz. Its eyes glow.

On the blanket, a burst of static solidifies into the image of a hillside strewn with red rock. A dead bush trembles in the wind. For a long minute this is all they see and Reed says, “What's the point of this?” and Lewis holds up a finger to hush him.

At that moment there comes a noise from the other side of the hill, a clopping and clanking, like some piece of machinery grinding into motion. No one moves or says a word, not even to say,
What is that?
, though they all wonder.

A shape trundles into view, slowly cresting the hill—a man, Colter. He rides an armored black horse and wears a wide-rimmed black hat that casts a shadow over his face, but Lewis knows him. He knows him immediately. One hand rests on the saddle horn and the other on the machete strapped to his thigh, the blade catching the sun like a crackling spurt of yellow-orange flame. Two sand wolves appear on either side of him, panting and pricking their ears and testing the air with their noses.

“The man who killed my father,” Lewis says, “has come to kill me.”

L
EWIS MUST WANT
her dead. That's what Ella keeps saying to Simon. He must want to see her dragged out of the Sanctuary and shackled to the altar and torn to shreds. Or whipped. Or maybe bludgeoned or speared through the middle. Chopped up into tiny pieces and fed to rats. He couldn't possibly want her to live, not with the charge he has given her in this letter.

There the letter ends.

“You will,” Simon says. “You will
what
?”

She stands by the open window and reads by the dying red sunset. She crumples the letter into a ball—then hurriedly flattens it again. She should feel thrilled, she knows. He is alive. There is water. There is life. There is, as he says, hope after all. But how on earth she will share this news with others—without arousing suspicion that she is the source—she has no idea. And his impersonal tone, his arrogant presumption, his reckless directive—it's enough to make her want to write
fuck you
on a piece of paper and shove it in the owl and hurl it out the window. He is asking her to risk her life. Is a
thank-you
or a
please
or an
I hope you are well
so much to ask?

“I hate him,” she says. “I hate hate hate
hate
him.”

Simon wears a fresh plaster cast that cuts off at the elbow. He has drawn on it a picture of a broken bone. The skin beneath itches as if socked by fire ants and he keeps an old wire coat hanger handy to creep inside the cast and scratch those hard-to-reach places. “What about the other one?”

On the bed lies the other letter, the one sealed and addressed to Danica Lancer. They crouch on either side of it, their faces propped in their hands, their cheeks bunched and their mouths fishy from the pressure. “Are we supposed to open it, you think?” he says.

“Is that your name?”

“You think that's going to stop me? I'm a thief, remember?”

Ella tightens her lips into a pink button. “Go on, then.”

He fingers open the seal and he unfolds its many creases and reads, in a rush, the words scribbled there. “‘My darling Danica!'” His voice comes out as a flamboyant yell, as if he were a street performer. “‘With every mile I travel, my pulse seems to weaken, as if I am farther from its source, my heart.'”

She rips the letter from his hand. “Let me see that.”

“It's just a stupid love letter.”

She reads silently at first, then aloud. “‘I didn't realize how much you mattered until I left you. And now I feel sick. I'm fucking sick. I'm fucking sick sick sick. I want to eat rocks and puke blood and stab myself with sticks. I want to open that box you gave me and lick its center and let death come because that would be easier than this. We're all going to die anyway. The world is eating us one by one. So we might as well die now.'”

Simon says, “Wow, I thought it started off bad.”

She goes quiet another few seconds before saying, “I can't read anything in the last few lines—his handwriting is a mess—except the words
death
and
love
.”

A sound comes from the hallway. What could be a cough or a broom sweep or a boot scuffed across stone. Before Ella can process what has happened, before she can say,
Hide
or
Someone's coming
—Simon has already snatched the letter from her hand, the owl from the bedside table, and darted out the open window, cat quick.

She turns to face the sound just as Slade darkens the doorway.

He leans against the doorframe. The last bit of sun flares from the window, reddening his face, which the very next instant goes to shadow. He is smiling. His teeth are too small for his mouth. “Who were you talking to?”

“You can't just come in here.”

“Can't I?” His eyebrows are only a suggestion, two fleshy creases above his eyes, but they raise now. “Who were you talking to?”

“No one.” She tries to say this casually but she is not a practiced liar.

“Really? I thought I heard voices.”

“Sometimes I like to recite Shakespeare. To pass the time.”

His voice takes on an affected timbre when he says, “‘And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence.'” He takes one sliding step into the room. “That was Shakespeare.”

“‘There's daggers in men's smiles.' That's Shakespeare too.”

“Clever girl.” He has kept one of his hands behind his back all this time. He lets it show now, a jug of water dangling from a finger crooked like a tusk. He gives it a sloshing shake. “I brought you something.”

“Why?”

“I thought you might want it. I thought you might be thirsty. The rations can be difficult for all of us.” He takes another step toward her and extends the jug. “Here. Take it.”

She considers denying him but knows that will only lead to more trouble. Slowly she raises her arms to accept the jug. What he carries with one finger weighs down both her arms. The jug sweats. She sets it on the floor between her legs and feels the cold coming off it, licking her skin. “Will you go now?”

“What's the hurry? And should I be offended that you haven't thanked me? That you're not asking me to sit down? That you're not bringing two glasses to fill so that I might have a taste?” He circles her twice, his footsteps heavy enough to send a trembling through her body, and then approaches the open window. He rests his hands on the sill and the wood complains. He looks out on the turbines spinning all across the city, their blades cutting the air like weapons wound and spun.

She does not know where Simon hides, maybe on the ledge just beyond the window, so she calls to Slade in a panic, “You're right. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're very kind.”

He turns. His body eclipses the window entirely, casting a shadow across the room. “That's more like it.”

The jug dampens the floor, wets her ankle, sends a chill up her leg. When Slade approaches her, she does not move, willing her body to remain still. Even when he leans in, as if to plant a kiss on her cheek. His mouth pauses next to her ear. She can smell him: wool, onions. For a moment there is only his breathing. Then it pauses—and he takes a small bite of her. She feels her cheek slurp into his mouth, feels the teeth chew down, feels the flesh clip away. Still she does not move or cry out. She pinches shut her eyes and clenches her fists and waits and waits and waits until his footsteps retreat from her, into the hallway, down the stairs.

She does not dare to open her eyes, not until Simon climbs through the window and touches her cheek, where the flesh is bitten and the blood dries in a tacky trail, and says, “I'll kill him before he touches you again.”

F
OR A LONG TIME
they stand in a silent, wavering circle. No one needs to ask the question. They know their options. They can fight or they can run. They look first to each other—well rested, but bony and slumped, their bodies like a bunch of broken dolls—and then their stares settle on Reed. He keeps his face downcast, studying the ground, kicking a hole in it, as if the answer might be buried beneath him. “What are you all looking at me for?” he finally says and then, “This is on you, Clark.”

She does not hesitate. “We run.”

They have guns and they outnumber Colter, but they have been trained to fear him. With night as his ally and with wolves as his weapons, some of them will probably die. Lewis guesses him a few days away. They plan to continue forward and keep track of his progress with the owl and hope to lose him or find a more defensible position.

As they press on, the water steadily deepens, the river widens. They can wade past their knees. Houses dot the woods, choked with vines and set back on hillsides, sometimes with the gray, crooked remains of stairways leading to the water, where docks remain like bridges to nowhere. They pass many boats, overturned, spun around, mired in the mud. Birds nest in them. Fish rest in their shade.

Periodically, Lewis sends the owl skyward. Less and less time passes before it returns to them, ten hours, nine hours, eight. A horse cannot gallop as fast as the owl can fly, so Lewis can only guess his distance by studying landmarks in the footage, four days away, then two days away.

Reed wants to drop his gear and sit down and flop his hands apologetically and say, “This is the end.” The end of their journey, the end of their dream, the end of their lives. The end of the Sanctuary. And the human world, in whatever clusters it still exists, might not be far behind. He is gnashing his teeth and blinking back tears, ready to say, “Enough!” when they find the canoes.

This is outside Sioux City, at a marina, where skiffs and johnboats and bass boats and Jet Skis lie half-buried, where dock posts rise from cracked clay and the slats they once carried accordion all around them. Their wood is gray, beetle bitten, pocked by woodpeckers.

The shed door hangs at an angle, one hinge stubbornly holding on. When they open it, pigeons the color of storm clouds burst from inside. They wander in to the sun-slatted shadows and find six Alumacrafts, seventeen-foot canoes stacked on a metal frame. They are splattered with bird shit, full of feathers and nests, but when dragged to the water, they float. Even when heaped full of supplies, even when bearing the weight of their exhausted bodies, the canoes float and they begin to furiously paddle their way up the river.

In this way, they travel north and west. Every now and then, the canoes will come to a scraping stop and they will climb out and portage to deeper water. And every now and then, they will look over their shoulders as if they expect to see Colter splashing toward them. They battle the current, but the current isn't strong. The finish flakes off their paddles, and cracks run through them, but they do their job, cutting through the water, drawing them forward.

Lewis's shoulders and elbows ache, but he would happily paddle a thousand years before he took another step. He prefers the canoes even to horses. Their speed might be slower, but their passage is so smooth, unlike the rocking jolt of his saddle that every day threatened to knock his bones from their sockets. Sometimes he cannot help but marvel at the novelty of it all. He is traveling by canoe. There is enough water in the world, more than he ever dreamed he would see, to accommodate a canoe. Water dribbles from his paddle. Water runs between his fingers when he dips a hand into the river and cups it to his mouth. Water dimples and splashes when a frog leaps off a rock or when a trout jumps in a rainbowed flash to seize a dragonfly. If he narrows his eyes until the world fuzzes over, he can almost forget what they have left, where they are going, but then, in the river, he will see Aran Burr. Swimming alongside the canoe. Wearing a flowing white robe and a necklace of black stones. He calls Lewis's name, drawing out the
s
in the swishing pull of his paddle.

Once a day, he sends off the owl, and as its flights grow shorter and shorter, so does time seem to stretch longer. An hour could be a day, a day a year. So different, he thinks, from his time at the Sanctuary, when time slipped like sand between his fingers, one day blurring into the next. There, nothing was new, nothing at stake. Every day, he saw the same people wandering the same streets under the same sun. But out here, in the Dead Lands, everything is new, everything a threat, forcing him to notice—every sun-sparkled wave on the river, every shadow sleeving the shore—and the more you notice, the fuller time becomes, and the fuller time becomes, the more it drags. Even the light seems to fall more slowly between the branches.

When the owl returns to him, only thirty minutes after it departs, he yells out to Clark, telling her Colter is close. The time has come. They must find a place to make a stand.

Clouds boil ahead, grumbling with distant thunder and darkening a third of the sky. Rain trails from them like skirts of gray muslin. Lightning jags. The air shudders when thunder calls.

They paddle toward it in silence, and the gray-black clouds violently expand, as if rooted in a volcano, an eruption carrying ash and fire. This is not a sky for big, hopeful dreams like theirs. This is a sky for nightmares.

A hundred yards ahead, between two rushing threads of water, rises an island. They will go there, Clark says. And as long as they need to wait for Colter, an hour or a day or more, the surrounding river will stand guard, serving as their moat.

The rain begins before they arrive, as hot as the sun's tears. Instantly they are soaked. For a moment they can't help but laugh at the novelty of it. Rain. Not a passing shower, but a deluge, the air so packed with water they might well have upended, sunk into the river. They pause their paddling and hold up their hands and open their mouths until their laughing feels like drowning. They can barely keep their eyes open against the lashing rain, can barely see the island they paddle toward, and by the time they arrive, the canoes have filled with enough rain to slosh around their ankles.