The Dead Lands (35 page)

F
OR A FEW LONG
hours, Lewis and Colter are locked away in a windowless basement with mildew mucking the floor. There is no light except the gray sliver beneath the door at the top of the stairs. Lewis sits on the bottom step while Colter walks the perimeter of the room, running his hands along the walls, looking for some way out or something to aid them in escaping. “Aren't you going to do anything?”

“What is there to do?” Lewis says. “We are here. We're finally here. And now we need to understand why.”

“Why?” Colter says. “I didn't come here for the
why
. I came for the
where
. I came for a place dripping with water and layered with black dirt. That's
why
enough for me.”

“I came for those things too.”

“And I came for you. Don't you forget that. I came for you and you better not let me down.”

“I won't.” He glances at the door. He has traveled these many months and thousands of miles for it to open. Aran Burr waits somewhere on the other side. “Let's hope he won't either.”

Colter paces back and forth and slashes the air. After so many months of movement, he can't sit still. “They put us in a cell.” There is a caged-animal quality to his voice, a desperate growl. “I'm not going to spend any more of my life in a cell.”

“Just wait. We've waited this long. What's a few minutes more?” Lewis says, but Colter pushes past him, climbing the stairs, and at their top he swings his prosthetic against the steel door with a clang.

“I wouldn't do that.” Lewis backs away from the staircase and says more loudly than before, “Please don't do that. They put us here because we attacked their men.”

Colter continues to pound the door and punctuates every clang with a word: “I'm—not—going—to—spend—any—”

The door swings open and knocks Colter against the wall. He loses his footing and stumbles down the stairs and falls to the floor, where a moment later he is muscled in place by the five men who come hammering down the steps.

They wrestle with Colter, who does his best to lash his arms, kick his feet, arch his back, bite. One of the men cries out with a gash to the temple, but they soon overpower Colter, knotting his wrists and ankles.

Then one of the men—breathing heavily—turns to Lewis. His arms appear oversize, thicker and longer than legs. Weeping sores fleck his face. “Your name is Lewis Meriwether?”

“Yes.”

“He's been waiting for you.”

Aran Burr makes his home in the Flavel mansion, a Queen Anne with a hipped roof and a rounded wraparound porch and an ironwork veranda and a peaked three-story tower that looks down the hill and across a bay studded with fishing and crabbing boats. It is in impeccable condition, even its garden, hedged in by white roses so fat they bend their stems. Several men kneel in the garden, deadheading flowers, ripping out weeds. They have numbers and letters burned brightly along their forearms.

Burr is seated on a patio swing. A wind chime made of wishbones clinks in the breeze. His mouth hangs open as if he has been waiting to speak for a long time. He waves away Lewis's escort with one hand, knotted with arthritis, and then smiles a yellow-toothed smile and says, “I knew you'd come.”

He wears a long white robe and he has long white hair, just as Lewis dreamed, but he otherwise looks different—terribly different. He is the oldest person Lewis has ever seen, his skin mottled and papery, his joints bent and bulging. His breath sounds like blowing sand. But it is his head that bothers Lewis most. It is twice the size it should be, most of it forehead, with veins worming through it and pulsing visibly beneath his skin. He appears not so much flesh as he does intelligence. “It's nice here.”

“Is it?”

“I think you'll like it.”

Despite the frailty of Burr's appearance, Lewis feels weak before him. He does his best not to show it, steadying the tremble in his voice. “Where is Gawea?”

“She's fine.”

“I said
where
is she?”

“She did what she was supposed to do and got what she wanted.”

“What did she want?”

“Never mind that. There are so many other things to discuss.”

“Like why I'm here.”

“Like why you're here. So many questions. So much to talk about.” A black cane lies across his lap. He takes hold of it now and tocks the porch with its tip. Then he leans forward, rocking the swing and using its momentum to help him into a standing position. “Come.” He leans heavily on the cane when he struggles across the porch and knobs the front door. “I want to show you something.”

Lewis feels drawn to follow as if pulled by a wire. The wood interior gleams, freshly polished. They walk past hand-carved pillars and tiled fireplaces and ceilings busy with plaster medallions and crown molding. There are lamps in every room, with no evident wiring, but they flare when they enter and fade when they leave. The air seems to be humming.

Lewis hears the marbles long before he sees them. Maybe a hundred of them, white and colored and clear, with green and blue and red threads twisting through them, all rolling madly across the wooden floor of the room they enter. They rattle to a stop.

A boy sits in the middle of the floor with his legs folded under him. Maybe five years old. He has a cleft palate and one ear folded over like a shell. Lewis tries to recall everyone he has seen so far, every one of them marred by some deformity. The boy stares at them blankly.

“Go on, Mason.” Burr's voice is like a rusted instrument blowing out notes. “Keep playing. Show us how you play.”

The boy drops his eyes to the floor and once again the marbles come to life, spinning around him, clacking together. Sometimes they join in streams of color, sometimes in shapes Lewis thinks he might recognize: a bird beatings its wings, a horse galloping through a meadow, a salmon crashing upstream to die.

“Good boy, good boy, good boy.” Burr brings his arthritic hands together in a pantomime of applause. He cannot turn his enormous head, so he turns his body to study Lewis. “You see? Do you understand?”

“He's like me.”

“He's like you. Yes, yes. He's like Gawea. He's like
us
.”

“The next.”

“The next people, yes. The next America.”

And then Lewis feels invaded, as if something many limbed has crawled into his head to prod at his brain. He hears Burr's voice, but a stronger and younger version, the voice from his dreams. “This country has evolved. Through revolutionary wars and civil wars, wars against terrorism, wars for racial and feminist rights. And now, as a result of the last war, the war to end all wars, it has changed again. And we're changing with it. Fins to limbs, freshwater to air breathing, lobe-finned swimmer to land-dwelling tetrapod. We are the next step.”

L
EWIS AND BURR
sit in two leather chairs in a library walled by books. For the past hour, they have been talking, though Lewis is unsure how much of the conversation has been spoken aloud. His head throbs with the words and images runneling through it. He knows about the altar—the Hanford nuclear site—that feeds the river, that nurtures change, genesis.

He knows, too, about Burr's father. He survived the flu, one of the few immune, but he endured a missile strike on Portland. He was on the Willamette River, out on his boat, his home, the only place he felt safe, anchored far from shore, when half the sky lit up with the trembling white of a gas flame edged blue and red where it battled the night. The concussion arrived seconds later, splitting trees like pencils, melting his skin and crisping his hair and hurling him twenty yards from the deck of his cruiser. He did not know up from down, deep in the swirl of black water, nor did he see what looked like electricity snapping and rippling across the surface—and then suddenly rolling back the way it came—because the blast burned away his vision. His eyes were thereafter sunken hollows, the lids stitched closed. But he could see. He could see things others could not. The radiation changed him, improved him.

“We're both the products of powerful men,” Burr says. “My father was the beginning. He taught me and now I teach others.”

The mere mention of Lewis's father makes him flinch. Would he be proud of Lewis, having traveled all this way? Or disgusted at the folly of it, putting his faith in a man he had never met, a man he had not made up his mind about, a man who simultaneously terrified and worried and awed him, a man who in many ways resembled his father.

Their conversation is interrupted by a woman appearing in the doorway. She is primitively dressed in a rough brown dress, which seems at odds with the porcelain cups she carries on a silver tray. This she sets on a short table between the two chairs, and when she does, her sleeve pulls back to reveal the scarred numbers beneath.

“Thank you,” Lewis says, and Burr says, “You don't need to say thank you.”

The cups steam with black coffee roasted from chicory nuts.

“Why not?”

Burr gives a croaking laugh. “Because she's a slave.”

The woman bows and leaves them. Lewis sips from his cup and cringes at the bitterness.

Burr holds his with two trembling hands. “Not to your liking?”

“No. It isn't.” Lewis sets his cup on its tray, giving up on it. “Gawea had those same markings on her.”

“She did.” His enormous head shivers more than nods. “She does. I can tell that this bothers you, but if you look back, way back, on the long hoof-marked trail of human history, slaves are the standard of empire. Rome. Egypt. The Macedonians and Ottomans. The Chinese dynasties. These United States. That's how you build something big. You have to abuse some to benefit many. In this case, it's not just about power; it's about survival. We're on the brink. This could be the end. The world will keep spinning without us if we don't stake our claim. I'm the person who is making this happen. You're capable of helping me. Help me.” His voice grows kind and weary. “Look at me, Lewis. I won't be around much longer. I need you.”

The old Lewis might have believed him. The old Lewis, who held others in disdain, who clapped himself away in his office, who studied the world with a cold remove. But that man is gone, shed like a dark chrysalis, and the new Lewis has traveled to the horizon's rainbow edge, where he has discovered—no better word for it—a magic in himself and others.

His mind turns to Colter then, his demand that Lewis not dis­a
ppoint
him. As a delaying tactic, to get his head in the right place, he nods at the bookshelves and asks, “May I?”

Lewis is a scholar, after all. He is a man who reads in order to figure out how to behave. He rises and walks the length of the shelves and pulls down a book at random and cracks it open and breathes deeply. Parchment, leather, mold. He has missed this, the company of books. And they give him a confidence he lacks when fumbling around on his own. He remembers his own journal. He remembers that he is writing his own book, that
he
is authoring his own story, not this man and not anyone else.

“They're so comforting,” Burr says.

“They are.”

“Because they feel so fateful. In them people do things for a reason. They are following a predetermined pattern, often one established long ago by another writer, or another hundred writers, or another thousand writers, so that every story might seem unique and particular but is actually recurring, in conversation with others. That's how history works too. That's how life works. We're all characters caught in a cycle of ruin and renewal.”

“That's a way of looking at it.”

“There's no
way
of looking at it. It's true. We're at the beginning of a time of renewal. And you—you are one of my fateful characters.”

“Hmm.” Lewis closes the book and fits it back on the shelf.

“Have you read many novels?” Burr says. “I've always liked novels best. The hero comes from humble or disadvantaged circumstances. He suffers a loss or injury that presses him into a fight or quest.” His coffee steams. “He gets help. From a
friend
. They push their way through a dark time. They triumph. Everything makes sense. Everything turns out for the best.” He slurps loudly. “I can be that friend.”

Lewis stares at him a long moment and says, “I tend to prefer nonfiction.”

“Of course you do.” Except for his head, Burr is so much smaller than expected. Bird boned. As if a hug could crush his ribs. Just looking at him, Lewis doesn't understand his power, his seeming command of this place. “You can read whatever you wish. The library is yours. Consider this home.”

Lewis feels the words pulled from his mouth. “I would like that.” He brings a hand to his mouth, too late to stop himself.

“You would. Yes, you would. To study under me. To call me your teacher.”

Lewis feels something like fingers inside his mouth, his throat, making him gag, making him say, “Yes.” He snaps his jaw twice, biting away the word, the sensation. “
No
. No, I would not. I consider myself a man of science, but what you're doing here seems to go against God.”

“What God?” Burr croaks out a laugh. “If there was a God, he made cats that play with birds before eating them. Just the same as he made stillborn babies and rapist fathers and brain tumors and viruses that make you cough your lungs inside out. There's no right and no wrong in any of that. Only the survival that comes with strength and a little bit of luck.
We're
God, Lewis. You and I. We're the gods of this time.”

Again the fingers in his mouth, pinching his tongue, clawing his throat, drawing something submissive from him. But he fights back with a word, “No.”

The lights blaze. Burr seems suddenly to grow larger. Lewis swears he stands, even as he plainly remains seated. “I hoped you wouldn't say that, but I expected you might need some convincing.”

Footsteps clomp down the hallway. Two figures appear in the doorway. One of them is the man who escorted him here—the one with the arms too big for his body—and the other is a woman with her hands secured and a burlap sack over her head. She struggles against the man's grip and tries to stomp on one of his feet. He brings a fist to her stomach to quiet her. With a moan she bends in half and he rips off the sack to reveal a fiery tangle of hair. Her face is bruised, but Lewis recognizes her all the same.

“Clark!” He tries to move toward her but something invisible grips him, anchors him in place.

“She arrived two days ago by train. I've been very happy to make her acquaintance.”

Lewis's face twists in several directions. He can't decide how he feels. First an ebullient giddiness. Then a lingering fury. This mellows when he realizes why she is here, how Burr hopes to use her against him. Lewis feels more and more like a marionette tugged by strings, dragged thousands of miles and now asked to dance, shaken when not compliant.

“You see, don't you?” Burr says gleefully. “You understand? You'll maybe listen a little better now?”

Lewis thinks about lying, about saying she means nothing to him, but he feels as if an eye is rolling through the corridors of his mind and he must dim the lights and close the doors on it. He removes from his mind any thoughts of Clark. In defense, he focuses all his attention instead on the grain of the wood in the floor, how much it looks like the whorl of a fingerprint. For the moment that is all he knows.

“I understand,” Lewis says and he feels the eye retreat, releasing him. He realizes only then that he is crumpled on the floor, like a boneless pile of clothes.

He reaches into his pocket—his habit from long ago, when he would seek comfort in his snuffbox—and finds not a silver tin but a wooden case. The coffin-shaped one containing the vial. He transferred it there when they left their bags in the cove. He didn't want to leave it behind, thinking it too valuable and dangerous. How easy it would be to snap its top, shake its contents into the coffee cup beside him. He wonders how much time would pass before Burr began coughing, before his fever spiked. He wonders how long it would take for the infection to work its way through all of Astoria. A viral infection that would wipe away the human infection.

It is then that a thunderclap sounds, though only a few clouds spatter the sky. They all hunker down. A crack runs through the window. A book falls from the shelf. Outside, down the hill, a bloom of fire, a plume of smoke. The aftermath of a bomb. A concrete building crumbles in half, opening its dark, gaping center. The noise of the explosion lengthens as it orbits the town.

Burr has risen from his chair and stands by the window. Lewis can sense his anger, but it is momentarily directed elsewhere. “It's those goddamned women again,” he says.

Now. Now would be the time. To crack the container, to twist open the vial, to dose his coffee.

Then he hears a crying. The boy stands in the doorway. The boy with the cleft palate and the marbles. His cheeks are wet with tears. He runs to Burr and clings to his leg and the old man pats him and says, “There, there. Nothing to be afraid of. Just some bugs that need to be squashed.”

Boys. Girls. Men and women. The innocent and the terrible alike. If he shook out the specimen and infected Burr, this is what Lewis would be destroying. Then he would indeed be playing God. He will have to find another way.

Outside, with every passing second, the smoke blackens and thickens. Then comes a second explosion, farther away than the first, that jangles the cups on their saucers.

The wrinkles in Burr's face seem to multiply when he turns from the window. “I'm needed elsewhere. Which will give you some time to think about this,” he says, with a voice with a lot of teeth in it. “Adapt. Or face extinction.”