The Dead Lands (32 page)

T
HE DOCTOR HAS
a new name now. Mother. That's what the girls call her.

She doesn't know what to think at first. They ask if it's all right, if she minds, and she licks her lips and blows out a breath full of emotion. “If that's what you'd like, I think
mother
will suit me perfectly.”

“It would mean a lot to us,” they say. “It really would.”

“That settles it, then. Mother.”

She rather likes the sound of it. And she, after all, calls them her girls, this den of young women she considers a kind of family. They helped her heal, and now she helps them build a life in Bismarck. They construct a greenhouse on the roof. From cellars they harvest mushrooms and lichens and mosses. They dig up roots. They shovel through grain bins and discover preserved cores of corn and soybean to plant and to eat. They mash medicines, vitamins to ruddy their skin and harden their bones and battle the scurvy weakening them. She teaches them everything she knows about anything she knows. For some of them, that means simple reading. For others, basic surgery.

Her injured arm—now scarred over—hangs useless at her side, good only for gripping the walking stick she uses to get about. She lost enough blood to permanently weary her heart. Her body feels shrunken, bent. But she gets by. Her girls keep her busy.

Every morning, they auger fresh holes in the river and bait their hooks with hunks of liver and drop their lines. By the time they snowshoe the banks and woods and fallen neighborhoods to check their traps—collecting into the back of their sleds the rabbits and beaver and otter and mink and porcupine—the tip-ups on the river have flared their fire-bright ribbons. There is no shortage of fish. The river surges with them, mostly carp, but plenty of catfish and bluegill and trout and smallmouth. Sometimes, on the coldest days, in an effort to stay warm, the fish swirl together beneath the water, coalescing like dark planets, and when this happens the auger holes splutter and the ice begins to thin and crack, and the girls move their tip-ups and find another stretch of river, because they have fallen through before, pulled away by the black current, lost.

They don't see much of Clark. She ranges the outer reaches of Bismarck, the woods, sometimes hunting the plains, where she has shot elk and antelope, once a bison whose herd departed in a thunder that shook the ground.

The doctor is more grandmother than mother to them. They are by and large teenagers, except for Marie. No one knows how old she is, but she has gray in her hair and her blind eye is as white and bulging as a boiled egg. She carries a phone everywhere she goes and mutters into it. The girls treat her kindly, but Clark seems to hate her. “It's that eye. It seems to probe you, see inside you.”

One time Marie removed the phone from her ear and held it out to Clark. The cord dangled like a vein. “It's for you,” she said.

“Yeah. Who is it?”

“Lewis,” she said. “It's Lewis.”

Clark knocked the phone from her hand and it went skittering across the floor.

Sometimes the doctor sees Clark staring at the horizon. She doesn't ask, but she knows. She is thinking about Lewis. Something happened between them the doctor does not understand. And something has changed in Clark, turned over inside her like a big black dog, and if the doctor reaches out a hand she knows it will come away bloody. So she waits, hoping Clark will announce her problems when ready.

But she doesn't. The optimism that once brightened her voice—the authority that once straightened her spine—is gone. The Clark she knows is gone. She disappears for days, returning with meat. Or she drinks herself into unconsciousness, seeking that numbing burn that expands inside her, spreading to her toes and fingers, the tips of her ears, fuzzing over any thoughts that might bother her.

Today the doctor finds her kneeling beside the fountain. Here the girls dump buckets of snow that island and melt into gray water for them to drink or wash their dishes and clothes. She splashes her face clean, rubs away what dirties her. She cups handfuls and handfuls to her face. Water was sacred in the Sanctuary, and the old women were always talking about how it cleaned more than your skin, and even wetting your hands, your face, could chase away something that spoiled you. The doctor hopes so. “Do you miss him?” she says.

Clark's face drips. The fountain's surface settles into a rippling mirror. A skylight wavers to life, a silver-shaped diamond that overwhelms her own reflection, her face a mere pale smudge, barely recognizable, barely her. The doctor thinks she sees what Clark sees. A thing. When Clark widens her eyes, the thing widens its eyes. And when she opens her mouth, the thing seems to snarl and spring fangs.

The doctor dashes a hand through the water, and when the image calms this time, it looks a little more like Clark.

“There's a lot of men I miss,” Clark says, “but my brother most of all.”

“You're not to blame for—”

“Shut up. Just shut up and leave me be. You might think you're their mother, but you're not mine.”

I
T TAKES ANOTHER
hour, but Simon and Ella backtrack and discover where they took a wrong turn and follow the proper sewer channel and crawl into the Dome's basement and discover there the thousands of oak and plastic barrels Danica promised. “Barrels and barrels and barrels,” she said. “More than I've ever counted. And far more valuable than any wine. Enough to share. Enough to remedy the Sanctuary's drought for many months. But my
husband
bathes in it instead.” This is what Lewis alerted them to in his letter—a vast storeroom of water.

The smell—of mildew—is a new one. Breathing is a little like drinking. Some of the barrels sweat and drip. Simon runs a hand across one and licks his palm. “Son of a bitch.”

Ella says they need to hurry. Dawn can't be far off.

They heft one from a stack—wobbling under its weight and nearly dropping it with a crash—and then hitch it with two lengths of rope drawn from his backpack. They curl the ropes around a pillar and stand on the opposite side and keep their grip tight when they hand-over-hand lower the barrel into the dark.

They climb down after it and drag the grate back into place. They do the best they can to secure the entry, threading the grate with a thin length of chain that they then knot around some piping below and anchor with a padlock. “Make sure there is no escape,” Danica told them. “The Dome should be watertight.”

They untie the barrel and tip it on its side. It sloshes and mutters and Simon imagines taking a knife to it, sucking out a drink to ease his dry mouth. With one hand they hold their lanterns and with the other they roll the barrel awkwardly along the sewer walkway, constantly readjusting their course.

By the time they return to the museum, they are both covered in grime and sweat, bloodied, burned, red-faced. Simon drags the grate back over the sewer entry and then drags a box over the grate and sits down on it and puts his head in his hands and says, “Thank God that's done with.”

“Oh no,” Ella says.

He looks at her through his fingers. “What?”

He is always the one making mistakes. Falling off the ladder and breaking his arm, allowing Danica to surprise him with the dagger, climbing into the prison instead of the Dome. A small part of him relishes the idea of Ella making an error—until he notices the way she backs away from him with tiny steps and worry creasing her face. “I'm so, so, so sorry.”

“What?”

“I forgot my bat. At Slade's.”

He lets his hands fall with relief. “I'll steal you another one.”

“You don't understand.” Her cheeks bunch up. Her eyes glimmer with tears. She explains how Slade toyed with it when he searched the museum, threatened her with it. “He knows it's mine. He'll know I've been there. He'll come for me.”

Once again Simon stands in the sewer at the bottom of a ladder. He has not had enough sleep. He has not had any breakfast. He felt excited and driven before, but that has given way to exhausted fearfulness. He studies the tunnels branching all around him. He feels about this place—the Sanctuary—as he feels about the human mind. It seems contained, limited, and yet constantly opens into new corridors and closets, an endless vault, much of it dark.

Ella gives him a nudge. “Are you going or am I going?”

“I'm going.”

Slowly he begins to climb. His feet ring against the rungs. His lantern dangles from his bad hand, a clumsy grip, and rust crumbles against the palm of the other as he pulls himself up. He reaches the top and threads his fingers through the grate, ready to shove it aside, when a key sounds in a lock and the door to the room opens.

He keeps his fingers where they are but swings the other arm out, bringing the lantern up against the sewer's ceiling, hoping to shield its light. Slade does not carry a lantern of his own, but the room nonetheless brightens, the residue of the hallway. The footsteps, slow, heavy, grind dust into the concrete. Simon's fingers must be visible, white and rounding the grates like some cellar fungus, and he imagines a boot coming down on them, mashing them into the metal, clipping through bone. He fights the compulsion to pull back.

A foot clunks down on the grate—rust rains down on Simon—and because he turns his face away, he is for a moment unsure whether his fingers remain uninjured. And then the grate shifts again, loosened of weight, and the footsteps continue to the other side of the room.

Simon already knows who it is, but he wants to see. He presses his face up against the grate to study Slade, a massive slab of a man. He wears his black uniform. The back of his head is lined with fleshy rolls. If he spots the bat, wherever it might be, Simon knows it is only a matter of seconds before he checks the grate.

One of his hands rises. It carries a set of metal knuckles, bladed and rimed with blood. He hangs them from a peg like an ornament and there they sway. He spins around and Simon ducks down and cringes as a footstep once more clatters the grate.

All this while his other arm trembles with the weight of the lantern. His wrist feels stabbed through with hornets and he fears he might lose his grip altogether. When the door closes and the bolt turns, he drops his arm and nearly drops the lantern.

Only then does he look for Ella. She has crept back in the tunnel and lowered the wick on her lantern so it gives off only a little light and makes her look small, a hundred miles away.

He waits a long minute and then pushes aside the grate and pokes his head above the floor. The room is empty. For how long, he doesn't know. He can see a crack of light under the door.

The bat remains where it was, unnoticed by Slade, propped against the wall by the closet. He checks the door again, the ribbon of light beneath it, and sees no shadows in the hallway, no indication that anyone might be near. He wills his breathing to quiet, but his lungs cannot fill fast enough to satisfy his body.

Across the room he pads, making no sound. He trades the lantern to his good hand and carries it before him, not wanting to set it down for fear he might forget something else in his haste. His free hand—his bad hand—closes around the bat. His grip is not good enough, ruined by the strain of the past few minutes. He makes it a few steps before the bat slips and falls with a clatter magnified by the concrete floor.

He watches it roll in a long parabola, spinning with the slope of the floor, toward the open grate. It catches briefly at the lip—and then falls through, into the dark square.

A long second of silence passes. Then the bat hits the sewer floor with a dong and rattle. Ella does not scream at him, call him a fool, but he knows she will. He can hear her voice call, “Hurry,” can hear the bat scrape when she picks it up. And then he hears something else.

Footsteps. The sound is more than a sound—it is a presence—powerful enough to be felt as well as heard. The very air seems to shake. He knows he cannot escape it. He does not have time to think. If he did, he would not do what he does next. He drags the grate back over the hole and crashes it in place. For a second he stares through the bars at Ella, far below him, her face oranged by her upheld lantern, but before she can question him, he is running for the door, snapping the lock, twisting the knob, yanking it open.

There is only one way to save her. He must steal time, what may very well be his last act as a thief.

When Slade rounds the corner, Simon hurls the lantern at his face and the big man raises an arm to swat it aside, but before he can, Simon has already dropped to the floor in a slide. Slade's legs are wide enough apart to shoot through, and, once past them, the boy bounces up and into a hard run. All this before Slade knocks the lantern against the wall.

The shattering matches the feeling inside Simon. This might be the one building in the Sanctuary he has never visited—the police headquarters—and he can only guess which way he is going as he negotiates a series of dimly lit corridors. He enters a room of barred cells, and several men reach for him and rattle the bars and moan and cheer. One of them nearly snatches him, a raisin-faced man with black snot bubbling from his diseased gash of a nose. Simon makes it through one doorway, then another. He could turn this corner and just as easily find a closet, but his luck holds out. A stone staircase rises before him.

Behind him Slade does not bellow, does not scream or curse or growl. He merely pursues, all his noise invested in his movement, stomping his feet and crashing into walls and shoving through the doors Simon closes on him in his passing.

They race up the stairs and out of the basement and down a tiled hallway framed by dark wood and festooned with old photos of policemen who watch them forbiddingly. Simon has never moved faster in his life. His feet hit the floor so hard pain rifles up his calves. The ceiling bulges upward, into a meeting hall, where the noise of his footsteps and the footsteps pursuing him multiplies.

He races now toward the entry, where two deputies appear. They drop their hands to their machetes. They call out for him to stop. And he does, skidding, nearly falling. He does not bother turning around, knowing Slade can't be far behind, but he spies to his left the staircase that leads to the second level, and he hurries there.

Another deputy appears on the landing, close enough to reach a hand and snatch his collar, but Simon twists from his grip, slipping off his shirt altogether and running bare chested down a long hallway.

He has no plan except to avoid the voices that pursue him. Halfway down the hallway, he pushes through the door of an office. He jumps onto the desk, shoves aside the chair, and worms his way out the window. The sill is spiked with nails and glass, but he does not have time to take care. He slices a finger, spikes his palm, when swinging himself over.

He tries to let go, but his hand won't loosen, his bad hand. It has been run through by a nail. He yanks at it and the pain electrifies him, not from the nail, not yet, but the tendons twisting and snapping in his wrist. His legs dangle in the air, maybe thirty feet between him and the ground.

He feels eyes on him. He hears voices in the street, a gathering crowd.

In his mind, he calls up the vision of Ella—them dancing to the Françoise Hardy record—and wishes her face to be the last thing he sees. But it is not. Another appears above him, like a risen moon. Slade is not smiling or frowning. His slitted eyes study Simon with a predatory fascination. Then he takes hold of his hand and pats it comfortingly before dragging it off the nail—and letting go.