The Dead Lands (22 page)

T
HE ISLAND IS
thickly wooded and a half mile long, shaped like an arrowhead, the current sharpening its tip, carrying silt downstream to deposit at its bottom. In some places it is edged by steep clay banks with roots spilling from them. In others, by stony beaches littered with logs.

The storm has paused but not passed. They are temporarily caught in some rift. Rain no longer drums the overturned canoes. The wind, once so powerful that it snapped several trees in half, has hushed. But the sky looks like spilled ink and thunder mutters all around them. Lightning blinks so often they feel caught in some seizure.

They stagger their positions along the western bank of the island, hiding behind trees, their rifles bristling like branches. They don't know where Colter will appear, or if he will appear at all. York says maybe he won't, maybe he'll keep searching the shore for some sign of them, trudging past them in the dark. Why search this island of all places?

Lewis cuts him short with a
no
, and when they look to him for an answer, he says a dog's nose, a wolf's nose, is a hundred thousand times more powerful than man's. “I realize it's hard to imagine, because we can only perceive so much of the world, but try to envision a bright yellow fog streaming from this place. That's how obvious we are to them.”

The veil of night overtakes the sky. Fireflies emerge, thousands of them. The air is so dark, palpably so, that they can see the shape of the shore by the insects' winking constellation.

Above Clark, the clouds are high, churning in a black circle, while up the river the clouds seem so low their bellies graze the treetops. Lightning flashes and seems to crack the sky, while to either side of them, the shorelines wink and swirl with the yellow light of fireflies.

One hour becomes two becomes three. They do their best to keep their eyes sharp, but time dulls their focus. If anybody sees anything, they are supposed to whistle—two short high bursts followed by a long low note—but with the night birds beginning to call, everything sounds like a beckoning.

Clark is curled behind a stump with her rifle resting on top. Every few minutes one of her legs goes numb, and she shifts her body until the leg prickles back to life, and by then the other is cramping. She studies the shore, the lightning bugs sparkling there, the tufts of grass and thin-angled maze of branches beneath the green awning of leaves.

Clark can hear the rain coming again, the hiss of it not far off.

She looks to her right and thinks she can make out the silhouette of her brother leaning against a tree—and she looks to her left and sees a spark of red, the lit bowl of the doctor's pipe, pulsing as she takes long drags off it. A soft breeze blows and the trees sway and the leaves shake and her eyes sweep up and down the shore until they settle on something.

It appears like a man, a naked man with a long, pointed face, clambering along on all fours. Another appears beside it, both of them trotting back and forth, dipping and raising their heads to test the air. Sand wolves. She might be able to hear them muttering, a soft, high-throated barking that reveals their excitement.

The rain begins again. Thousands of drops dimple the water, making mouths that seem to open hungrily for them. In that instant all the lightning bugs go dark.

Then comes Colter. Barely visible, on his horse, he moves from the forest to the grassy embankment.

Her veins constrict. Her pulse slams. She has seen the wolves before, on the few occasions she visited the zoo, a fly-filled, horseshoe-shaped collection of cages with games and candy carts at the center. Monkeys meticulously picked fleas from each other and ate them. A snake as wide as a man's thigh coiled in the shade of a rock pile. And the wolves prowled constantly across the heaps of concrete that decorated their cage, every now and then gnawing on a log or shredding a tire with their claws or crashing against the bars and snarling when someone drew too near.

Now lightning flashes and arrests a clear picture of them huddled beneath their master, freed from their cages to bite and slash as they please. She cannot see their eyes, but she feels them, like black stones that weigh upon her own.

Colter digs in his heels and the horse starts down the embankment, into the river, where the water splashes around its haunches as it lurches toward the island. The wolves follow to either side, bobbing in the frothing wake of the horse.

A whistle sounds to her left, then another to her right, then another and another, the whole shoreline sounding the alarm at once, and only then does she bring her lips together and blow, the whistle failing on her dry lips. She chambers a round into the rifle and snaps off the safety and does her best to draw a bead on the wolves and then Colter, not sure what to shoot first, the brain or the muscle it commands. The water is first knee-deep, then rises to the horse's breast; then only its head can be seen, with a white lapel of foam around it.

Their plan had been to gather together, to assemble and strike, but the alarm sounded too late and now it is unclear where Colter might come to shore, so they can only settle behind their stations and ready their weapons.

The rain stings like hurled pebbles. Lightning arrows and thunder mutters. It is followed by a volley of gunshots cracking all around her. At first they fire off hesitantly, then one bullet, one bullet, one bullet, becomes a swarm ripping the air. Colter does not stop. The water suds and pops around him with shots that miss their mark. She would have waited longer—waited until the bullet was sure to find an eye socket or open mouth—but the noise of gunfire is contagious. She pulls the trigger. There is a snap. And nothing more. A dead bullet. She ejects and chambers another. She pulls the trigger, and again, nothing. Colter is no more than twenty yards away and seems to be targeting her, the dark section of shore where no gunfire flashes.

Lightning flares again. She flinches at the thunder that follows. There is a moment of pause, when everyone reloads. It is then she notices her rifle is glowing. Blue light dances along its edges, outlining the shape of it, as if it were inhabited by some spirit. She drops it. The hair all over her body prickles and stands on end. She smells something like melting plastic. She looks to either side of her—ready to call out for help—when she sees Lewis stepping from his hiding place and approaching the river.

She can hear Colter now. He is yelling at them, saying something she can't quite make out, his words lost to thunder.

Lewis now appears almost phosphorescent, haloed in blue crackling light, as if costumed in lightning bugs. He moves as if in a dream. The sky flashes with a speed that matches the pulse inside her—and then coalesces into a stream of lightning. The clouds seem to split open and pour down blue jagged light that takes hold of Lewis. He shudders in his place as the electricity courses through him. Then he swings up his arms as if to hurl something heavy.

A white-hot beam blasts from his hands, dazzling its way across the river's surface. Millions of raindrops catch the light and seem to pause in their descent. The electricity channels into the wolves—and then Colter—and for a moment Clark believes she can see their bones glow beneath their skin.

She opens her mouth to scream, but her voice is stolen away by the eruption of thunder seeming to escape it.

N
ORTH DAKOTA CONTAINS
one of the richest oil fields in the world—estimated at one time as 503 billion barrels deep—and there are thousands and thousands of gas and oil wells there among the derricks and refineries and pipelines, the herds of snow-humped trailers and clusters of water trucks, the power transmission towers, the radio towers, the wind turbines, the natural gas pumping stations, the oil-loading train yards full of black tankers.

Once the wells were abandoned, the emergency generators kicked on, but after two weeks they ran out of diesel. High pressures matched against high temperatures resulted in explosions resulted in fires. There was no one to man the water sprayers, no one to cap the wellheads. The relief valves only fed the flames that could not be stopped, that will never stop. North Dakota will burn forever.

The air is thick with carbon, with dioxins and furans and lead and mercury and chromium. There is no night here, the horizon lit by flares, snapping pennants of colors red and white and blue. They flame against a black sky made blacker by the rank, sooty smoke.

This makes for a kind of nuclear winter, Lewis tells them.

The cold begins soon after they cross the state line. The wind skins the leaves from the trees. The river crusts over with ice and they abandon their canoes. The cattails shatter like stems of glass. Icicles hang from the trees, like the claws of dragons that might perch there. Snow falls. Sometimes thickly, sometimes in sputtery bursts. But the snow is not as they imagined, not the bright white frosting they have seen in cracked paintings and faded postcards. It is gray, ashen. It smears muddily against their skin. When they open their mouths and let the flakes fall on their tongues, the taste is as bitter as that of a chewed willow stick.

Colter lost his left arm at the elbow. The doctor sliced away the charred remains and treated the injury with yarrow leaves and snowberries mashed to a cream. From logs she kicked conk fungus, what look like the plates on a dinosaur's back, and ground them into a powder and stirred them into water and made him drink and fight the possibility of infection.

He smelled like seared meat, burned cinnamon. His hair crisped away in places. His clothes scorched. But he is alive. His horse and the wolves were not so lucky. The lightning soaked into them and funneled through their bones and seized their hearts with an electric fist. Colter does not remember much of that night, only strobe-like flashes, and not much of the days that followed either.

They thought he was here to punish them. To cut off their heads and make a garland of them to bring back to the Sanctuary. They were right. That's what the mayor asked him to do. But he does not serve Thomas Lancer. He serves the Meriwether family. He made a mistake when he broke the old man's arm. The worst mistake of his life, it turns out. And the old man, damn him and bless him, clapped him away in a cell—the same way a father paddles a bottom and sends his son to his room to consider his bad behavior. Colter has had a long time to think about this. If the surgery hadn't given the old man an infection, and if the infection hadn't caused a heart attack, and if the heart attack hadn't killed him, everything would be different, all would be forgiven. Colter has no doubt. He would have been released from his cell, humbled, forgiven, a prodigal son. That is how Colter thinks of himself, as a son, which makes Lewis his weakling brother—but a brother all the same.

For too long he has let hate and hurt take hold of his heart. If there were a word that captured dreams of bodies set aflame, glass smashed into open eyes, blades drawn slowly across genitals, then that would be the name of the demon that so often possessed him. He is here to seek atonement. He is here to serve the son of the one he served before. He shouldn't have come in the night and he shouldn't have come in the storm, but his eagerness for reunion was such that he could not stop himself once close.

“Hold your fire!” That was what he tried to yell to them that night. “I'm here for you.” It was hard to say then and harder to say now that his wolves are dead and his arm ruined, but he says it all the same: “I'm here to help.”

At first they don't believe him, and at night they tie his wrist to his thigh and his ankle to a tree. Every now and then Clark will wander over and stand beside him with a gun dangling from her hand. She watches him curiously, as he alternates between sweating and shivering. “I could put a bullet in your head and no one would complain.”

“Don't.”

“Because you want to join us?”

“Yes.”

“You're a long way from earning our trust.”

“And you're a long fucking way from mine.”

“Language like that isn't going to help.”

He doesn't hold back. That's not his way. Prison won't stop him, the desert won't stop him, lightning won't stop him, and neither will she, no matter if there's a gun in her hand. “You listen. You listen good. You might think you've got a dick, though you're a woman and one I'd like to lay, and you might think you're stronger than me, but that won't last and I'll be strong again, and you might think you can tell me what to do, but you can't, because I came here for Lewis and not for some red-haired, hatchet-faced bitch to tell me my business when my business is my own. I'm here to help and that's the short and the tall and slow and the fast of it.”

She points her revolver at him, twists it one way, then the other, and makes a soft explosion with her lips. Then she drops her arm and says, “I guess we'll see about that, won't we?”

“Guess we will.”

At first they carry him in a thick plastic utility sled, maybe two feet deep, once used to haul gear for ice fishing. They take turns dragging him, and Colter uses the front lip as a backrest, so that everybody else looks forward while he looks back.

The doctor bandages his stump. Twice a day, when she unwraps it and cleans it, the blackened flesh sputters and crackles and he cries out for her to help, to make it stop, in a voice he doesn't recognize as his own for its jerky neediness.

Afterward he raises his head to swallow from the canteen she brings to his lips. The water dribbles down his chin as the tears dribble from his eyes. “What the hell did Lewis do to me and how the hell is it possible? I don't understand, and don't tell me you do either.”

“We don't.”

“You don't know that and you don't know this. You don't know how far we have to travel and you don't know what lies ahead and you don't know why a man can piss lightning. I go away for a year and nobody knows one fucking thing.”

“Are you always so angry?”

“Who's angry? I've got no arm and my wolves are dead and it's so cold my dick has curled up inside me so that it looks like I've got a second belly button between my legs. This is me in a good mood.”

She gives him a mirthless grin, the best bedside manner she can manage. “I'm going to ask you something and I want you to tell me the truth. Did you come here to hurt us?”

“No.” It is the truth. “No, I don't want that at all.”

She wraps the bandage tight and offers it a gentle pat. “I believe you.”

And maybe she does and maybe she says something to Lewis, because Colter wakes the next morning to find him standing nearby. His long, thin figure towers over him, like one more tree in the dim-lit forest. He has been avoiding Colter, and maybe that has something to do with guilt or maybe that has something to do with fear, since back in the day, on more than one occasion, Colter crushed him against a wall and made him eat dirt and told him to stop being such a book-eating puss.

But now he's here to talk, Colter can tell, give him the eye-to-eye, make it clear where he stands and figure out where Colter stands and see if they can find a balance. He looks different than Colter remembers him. Not a boy, but a man, and maybe not a man at all. His forehead is marked with weary lines. His firm mouth beneath the black beard he has grown seems to suck on something bitter. But it's his eyes—the blue-gray eyes, like cold moons—they glint with some curious power and make Colter shrink back a bit and feel small and chastened, aware of his defeat in a way he had never felt when jailed.

“How do I know,” Lewis says, “that this is not all some convenient lie to keep you alive?”

“Swear it.”

“On what?”

“Your father's grave.”

Something splits open in Lewis's face and just as quickly resolves itself. “You put him there. Swearing on his grave means nothing.”

“It means everything. Don't you see? Don't you see why I'm here? The old man is why.” He is not one to show any emotion beyond anger. He sometimes jokes that the last time he cried, a pebble fell from his eye. And then a rat came along and tasted the pebble and died. But he feels something now, cracking the edge of his voice and dampening the corners of his eyes. “Don't you see that the old man was like a father and I did him wrong?”

Lewis doesn't say anything for a long time. Snow falls and melts on his face and dribbles down his cheek.

“You could have killed me,” Colter says.

“I could have, yes.”

“But you didn't. You let me live. A part of you must want to believe in the good. There's some good in me once you get past the shit. A man can change, Lewis. You're living proof of that.”

They complain about following the river. If they cannot canoe it, then why bother? Why not bear west more directly? Gawea tells them, more than once, that with the constant clouds, she cannot guide them using the stars, and with the vast gray sameness of the snow-swept plains, their maps are made useless. The river is their known conductor, the channel that will lead them. This is the way she came and this is the way they will go. And the water, even when scrimmed with ice, attracts life. Their best chance in finding game is to follow its course. The water will eventually thaw, and when that time comes, perhaps they will find more canoes and take to paddling again.

Questions. They have so many questions for her. And the way she must answer them, always guarded, always worried she will forget or contradict one of her half lies, exhausts her. No, no one ever goes hungry in Oregon, and yes, there are pastures busy with sheep and cattle, pens with pigs, houses with hens, just as there are fields of corn and oats and barley and soybean and wheat, orchards of apples, tangles of blackberries. Hops for beer, grapes for wine. No, there isn't a wall. There isn't a curfew. There are ever-expanding towns and cities with roads threaded between them, the ligature of a larger organism. In the Sanctuary, they were trapped. Because of this, because they were walled in, they considered time and construction vertically, a layering—but out west, people have a horizontal perspective, spreading their fences and buildings outward. “Everything is bigger there.”

This keeps them going. The dream of what awaits them. And sometimes she can't help but believe in it too. That everything will be better when they arrive. They trust her. This pleases her and hurts her. At night, they all cram together for heat. York always manages to tuck in beside her and she often wakes up to find his arm around her. She does not knock it away. The closeness feels good.

Clark asks them to stay strong, to cheer up, look alive. She really believes, in the same way sailors and astronauts must have when launching themselves into an unknown darkness, that they have some higher calling, that their survival and whatever they discover might profoundly affect others, the future. “Gawea did this on her own. We can do this together. We're in this
together
.”

That includes Colter, who is now strong enough to hike alongside them, cursing the cold. They will not give him a gun, not yet, not until he's proved himself, and he complains about this too, but with a hand tapping his bandaged stump and a smile cutting his face. “I'm unarmed. You've unarmed me, you fucks. An unarmed man's worth as much as a teatless heifer in thirsty times.”

The temperature drops steadily. They have come from the Sanctuary, where the holes rotted through the ozone layer created a land of perpetual summer, to the frozen plains, thick with ashen snow and thundering clouds. The seasons do not turn. The seasons have been imprisoned.

There was a time, in South Dakota, when they could still forage for nuts, blackberries, button mushrooms, bolete mushrooms, and now that time is over. At night Clark sets traps in the woods, and when she checks them in the morning, she finds them empty but spotted with blood, clumped with fur, the snow around them crushed flat. Something is stealing from her. She tries to study the tracks. Sometimes they are lost to the falling snow and sometimes there are many of them trailing off in different directions. She does not recognize them, big footed, with a long stride.

Sometimes they hear noises in the woods. What could be deep-throated laughter.