The Dead Lands (36 page)

I
T WAS NEVER
going to be easy. Gawea knew that. But she thought the trouble would come from hunger and thirst, storms that spit snow, sunlight that scorched, insects that stung and animals that clawed. She thought her flesh would be vulnerable, not her heart.

When they paddled the Columbia, when they followed the final artery of water that would lead them to Astoria, she hoped that she would return in more ways than one—to her home and to her original frame of mind, indifferent to her cargo. She didn't want to care about Lewis anymore. It was too hard.

The current pulled them and their paddles pulled them and Burr pulled them, and at one point she almost yelled at them to stop, turn back, but by then it was too late. The lights of Astoria glowed in the distance. She could call a snake up from its burrow or a bird down from a branch, but she could not control the guilt and the doubt twisting inside her, and on the beach she decided she could not face Lewis any longer. Before she stole off into the night, she told herself that he would be fine. If he gave in and did as he was told, if he became the old man's instrument, he would be rewarded. She would not consider the alternative.

Burr made her a promise. If she delivered Lewis to Astoria, he would give her what she has pined for all these years. Family. Her mother. This, she thought, was what she wanted. This would give her the sense of wholeness that has escaped her all her life.

When dawn comes, when she presents herself to Burr, he pets her hair and thanks her and feeds her and questions her and makes good on his promise and directs her up the bald-sculpted hill where clouds pattern the grass with fast-moving shadows. Here the Astoria column rises, with pioneers and trappers painted in a swirling mural along its length, memorializing all those who braved the way west in the hope of a better life.

Its long shadow points to a gazebo. In it she finds her mother waiting on a bench. She forgets all about Lewis then. Her feet whisper in the grass when she approaches and stands a little off to the side until her mother turns to look at her. The last time Gawea saw her, seven years ago, she clutched a baby to her breast and contorted her face in fear when a storm of wasps came pouring in the window. She looks calm now—sad but calm—acknowledging Gawea and then returning her gaze to the ocean. The salt wind blows and knocks her hair—streaked gray—around her head like tentacles. “I never thought I'd see the ocean,” she says. “I've never seen anything like it.”

Gawea takes a step closer. “Do you remember me?”

Her mother blinks hard, as if something bothers her eye. “I remember.”

Gawea takes another step closer and another still. “They told you why you're here? They've treated you well? You look well.”

She does. She is deeply tanned and furrowed with wrinkles—and her hands are so callused they appear hooved—but she is freshly bathed, wearing a pine-green dress that matches her eyes. Which makes it all the more unsettling when she takes a deep breath and asks Gawea in a calm, cool voice, “Why won't you leave me alone?”

It takes her a minute to find any words, and when she does, they're the obvious ones. “Because I want to be with you. I want us to be a family.”

“I'm sorry, but I have another family now.”

“You were a slave. Now you're free. I made that happen.”

“They stole me away once. Now they've stolen me away again. If I'm free, then let me go back. I have children. I have a home.”

“I'm your child too.”

“Maybe.” Her mother's eyes, her green eyes, regard her, so different from Gawea's. She is different. They are different. “But that was a long time ago. And I was another woman. I just want to forget all that. Don't you understand that it's easier to forget? It's harder to remember.” She reaches out a hand for Gawea to take. Its fingernails short, its calluses rough. “You must have people who care for you. Go to them.”

Her mother was different, but Lewis was like her. Gawea was like him. All this time she kept yearning for her mother, when he was more family to her, a brother beyond blood, fused by their abilities. She needed him, and right now—maybe more than ever—he needed her.

The knob and then the deadbolt lock behind Lewis and Clark, but the footsteps do not retreat. The man waits outside, guarding them, his feet shadowing the light under the door.

This is the tower of the Flavel house, an octagonal sitting room with cushioned benches. At its center, a narrow metal staircase spirals upward into another windowed peak, four stories high. Lewis goes to one of the benches and looks out across the bay, all that open space rolling off to the horizon. No fences, no walls. No fear.

Because these people are the ones to fear. He understands that now.

“I'm sorry,” Clark says behind him.

“Are you?”

He has come here looking for an answer. But it is not the answer he is looking for. The present is constructed from the past. The future is predicted by the past. Virgins are hurled into volcanoes. Children are stabbed on altars. Women are burned at the stake. Natives are gifted with blankets smeared with smallpox. Africans are hunted down and chained and stuffed into the bellies of ships. Jews are marched into gas chambers, their bodies wheelbarrowed to furnaces that pump black clouds from tall chimneys. A bomb whistles from the sky and flattens a city. Planes become weapons and rip down buildings. Serbs are killed. Tutsis are killed. Hmong are killed. Homosexuals are killed. Muslims are killed. Christians are killed. The wheel of time turns. People kill people. People enslave people.

Burr is wrong. The world is not evolving. The world stays the same. The circumstances change but not the matter. The world has not destroyed itself. The world has always been destroying itself, a perpetual apocalypse. What hope is there?

He feels suddenly overcome. He has traveled all this way for
this
. He tests the window, toying with the idea of throwing himself out it, but finds it nailed shut.

Clark says, “Back at the Sanctuary, when we were ranging the Dead Lands, we sometimes came across animals. Sand wolves. Bears. Javelinas. Spiders. We were trained to never run.
Never
run. If you run, you give up your power. You face whatever it is that's dangerous. You face it, and if you need to, you fight it.” Her voice chokes and she goes quiet a minute. “I forgot that. I ran away from what scared me. But I'm ready to face it now. I'm ready to fight by you again.”

She appears beside him. He does not look at her directly, but sidelong, and still he sees her battered face. If she is anything, she is a fighter. She's not going to give up, not on living and not on muscling him over to her side again. “I said I'm sorry and I mean it, Lewis. I'm sorry for everything.”

“What happened to the others?”

She tells him. About the hundreds of men who charged out of the fog, who swarmed the mall and overcame their defenses, who beat them and interrogated them and crushed them onto a train. The doctor—here she clears her throat and says, “Minda”—Minda did not make it, a blow to the temple cracking her skull and making her brain swell so that she cried out visions the rest of them could not see before falling into a deep sleep she never woke from.

“I think she might have loved you, you know,” Lewis says.

“I know.”

Clark reaches for Lewis and at first he flinches from her. Her hand pauses in the air between them and then continues and she runs her fingers across his scalp, his hair now as white and stiff as a horsehair brush. “What happened to you?” she says.

“You. You happened.”

She smiles with her whole face, everything bending into an expression of warmth. “Did you ever think you'd see me again?”

“I hoped I would.”

“What's going on in that head of yours?”

When he thinks about the Clark he grew up with and the Clark who stands beside him now, he might as well be staring at a mirror with a crack running through it. He sees a similar division in himself. While the Sanctuary brutalized them, the journey has humanized them. He is not the same man; she is not the same woman. To blame her for what she did would be to blame a hard-faced stranger. He would have never been capable of such a gesture before, but he takes her hand now and their fingers knit together.

Lewis blows out a sigh, and, like an echo, another explosion concusses the air.

More and more people appear in the streets. They appear frenzied, lost. They run one way, pause, and then run the next, like ants rushing out of a kicked hill. The sky is dirty with smoke. Maybe they are afraid. Maybe they should be afraid. Maybe they need a wall of their own.

“Somebody is fighting back,” he says.

Clark sees him, knows the potential inside him more clearly than Burr ever could. “So are we going to join them or fucking what?”

He feels a small flash of hope once more. “I thought I came here to join something. Now I understand it's to stop something.”

“That's the spirit.”

He leans against the window, pressing his cheek against the cold glass, fogging it with his breath, trying to see where the latest explosion has come from.

That is when the first gull swings by, a flash of white that startles Lewis back a step. It is followed by another, this one tapping at the glass, chipping it with its beak.

He looks up and sees a flock swarming the sky, so many of them that they make the yard swim with shadows. He sees, then, in the center of the lawn, Gawea staring up at him. The gulls scream and her black eyes shine and she raises a hand to him in greeting or apology. He returns the gesture, his hand flat on the glass.

Behind them, in the hallway, there are voices. Lewis cannot hear the words but recognizes them as pitched high with anger. This is followed by the thunder of a body rolling down the stairs. A second of silence passes. The knob turns and catches and shakes.

There is a bang and the door strains against its hinges. Then another that rains splinters. Then another—and the door crashes inward and Colter steps through the storm of dust and motes of plaster. He waves them forward with his prosthetic. “Come on already. Didn't you hear me knocking?”

T
HE STREETS ARE
buzzing with people, but they are distracted by the explosions and give the four of them no more than a passing glance. Some wear necklaces linked with shells. Some have colored scars and pearls jeweling their noses and ears, forked beards or strange braids stiffened by egg whites. Lewis sees one man with no legs dragging himself along on a wheeled sled. Another with what appears to be a fleshy tail hanging out the back of his pants. So many have physical deformities of one kind or another, and so many more are brightened by sores and lumped with tumors.

Only one man calls out for them to stop. He reaches for the pistol at his belt. But his attention soon turns skyward, where he sees the birds, a white cloud of gulls, all screeching at once. Gawea sends them rushing down. Their white wings make the air appear stormed with windblown paper. Lewis throws up his hands, but none molest him. They concentrate on the man with the pistol, who vanishes into a cyclone of beaks and wings and webbed claws and eyes as black as those of the girl who commands them.

The gulls depart as suddenly as they arrive. They leave behind a damp, musty smell and hundreds of feathers pinwheeling the air and the body of a man with hollowed eyes and bones glimpsed through the many holes in his skin.

They hurry on, down gravel roads, past rows of houses, until they push into the moss-furred woods and then find the bay beyond. Lewis feels suddenly uncollared as he escapes the town, able to breathe better with every step he takes, distancing himself. With the dangerous attraction of Burr so close, he cannot help but think about the black hole at the heart of every galaxy, and how the biggest grow out of elliptical galaxies, where black holes merge and become one, forming antimatter more powerful and dangerous than any other force in existence. He cannot allow himself to be taken again.

They splash along the beach until the cliffs fall away, replaced by sand dunes that roll into a hillside choked with rubber-leaved salal and bony manzanita. They find a cedar with a kink of roots hanging over a shallow gully and they settle beneath it to rest.

Lewis looks to Gawea and says, “You came back for me.”

“All this time you've been following me. I decided it was time to follow you.”

“We need to find who set off those explosions. Can you help?”

She nods and looks to the sky, where the cloud of gulls spins. At that instant they break apart and spread in every direction.

The sewage-treatment facility is north of Astoria, on a peninsula that reaches like a mandible across the mouth of the Columbia. There are massive open-air cauldrons, walled in by concrete, with metal walkways reaching across them. This is where they find the sisters, who dip long poles with screened scoops into the sludge beneath them and splat it into one of many five-gallon buckets they have lined up on the walkway. Their rifles are strapped across their broad backs, and when Lewis calls out to them, they drop the poles and quickly arm themselves.

“I'm a friend,” he says.

They do not ask him what he wants, but they do not fire either, when he approaches them with his hands up. The rest of his party remains below. The seagulls whirl overhead and dapple him with shadows.

At the museum, in his office, there was a section of his desk worn smooth and discolored from where he always rested his arm. It was the best kind of polish, shabbied over time, earned. That is what their faces remind him of. The women resemble each other, broad figures, short graying haircuts that look like tweed caps set on their heads. They both wear denim pants, canvas coats. If he didn't have a rifle pointed at his chest, he might notice more about them, but for now, one is in front, the other in back, and that is what distinguishes them.

“What do you think?” one says.

“Don't know,” the other says.

“I don't think he's one of them.”

“You one of them?”

“No,” Lewis says.

“What about the rest of them. The ones down below?”

“They're good.”

“They're good, huh?” The women look at each other. Some sort of unspoken communication seems to pass between them. “I don't know.”

“Weird,” the other one says. “There's something weird about you.”

Lewis lowers his hands and they tense their rifles. “We want to help you,” he says.

“Help us?”

“You mean you want to harvest some algae?”

He can't tell if they're joking. Everything they say comes across as a gruff bark. “You set off the explosions earlier today?”

“You bet we did.”

“We blew the shit out of them.”

“Well,” Lewis says. “We want to help. We want to join your army.”

The women laugh together, a single mean
ha
. “Army.”

“No army. Just us.” One of them shoulders her rifle and picks up her pole and returns to skimming the pond, glopping the buckets full.

Lewis says, “There's no one else.” His words sound defeated, accusatory. He doesn't know what he imagined, but not this, two women stirring a sewer. He cannot think of anything more to say. He is all out of words. But the second woman, with her rifle now propped on her hip, is staring at him expectantly.

“Why are you harvesting algae?” he says.

“For fuel.”

He looks around as though searching for an explanation.

“For our truck.” She motions with the rifle. “It's parked right over there.”

“You have a truck?”

“Yeah, it's right over there,” says the other sister, hoisting up a dripping scoop of sludge.