The Dead Lands (12 page)

L
EWIS WAS SUPPOSED
to be her supervisor, her teacher, though often their roles seemed reversed. Ella did as he asked, but with some complaint or revision. They had a set of rules between them. She did as she was told—she looked to him for guidance and instruction—but so did she point out his every failing. He did not like his schedule disrupted. He suffered always from headaches and moodiness. He grew peevish and short when he couldn't find what he was looking for, and on and on. He was a difficult person, she told him often, and he did not deny it.

Together they discovered his dead mother. The way he held her, with his arm behind her back, made her body arch as if she were a torture victim suffering some unimaginable pain. When Ella touched him on the elbow, when she told him to set his mother down, he let out a guttural cry but otherwise said nothing and did as he was told. She then took his clammy hand and dragged him down to her height and kissed his cheek.

She doesn't know he is gone, not for sure, until the deputies come looking for him. He has been missing all day. She has never known him to break his routine, but figures, with the recent death of his mother, he may have earned an excuse. After the deputies rip through his office and bedroom, after they knock down bookshelves and turn over his bed, they drag Ella to a medieval display, a room full of lances and flails and tapestries, where Rickett Slade is waiting for her.

Of course she has seen him before, dropped her eyes when they passed in the street, but they have never spoken. He sits in a massive gold-trimmed throne. He barely fits, the arms of it biting into the sides of his belly. Across his thighs rests a baseball bat—her bat, the only weapon she keeps in her quarters, with the word
Peacemaker
burned by a magnifying glass across its cracked, wooden length. On the floor, tossed aside, lies the sign she wrote in careful calligraphy,
Please do not sit on the display
.

“Can't you read?” she says.

He may smile or he may frown; it is difficult to tell. His face is pocked with acne scars, each of them carrying a small shadow. He motions with the bat, across the room, indicating where she arranged a Judas chair opposite the throne. The same sign rests on its spiked seat. “Please,” he says, “let's both be where we're not supposed to be.”

A deputy—a woman with her head shaved except for a rat-tail braid—grabs her by the wrist and Ella shakes her off and says, “Don't you touch me.” She approaches the chair and lowers herself gently onto it. She has done so before, when no one was looking, and knows the points on the seat and back and arms dull enough to be tolerable for a short period of time. “Now is when I tell you I don't know anything and you choose not to believe me.”

This time he does smile, she is almost certain. A hint of teeth beneath his upper lip. “Lewis didn't tell you.”

“No, he didn't tell me.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Mad. I'm mad.” And she is. She is trembling with anger. “And though I'm sure these feelings will pass, right now, frankly, I hate him.”

“How old are you, girl?”

“I'm sixteen.”

“And you're going to take care of this museum all on your own?”

She stiffens then. She knows what she looks like to him, a plain-faced girl with short hair the color of old straw. She looks like someone barely worth talking to, someone your eyes pass right over. She isn't going to let him dismiss her. “There's no one else who can do it, is there? And he didn't leave me much choice, did he? That's typical. He's the most arrogant, inconsiderate man in the whole world.” She doesn't realize she is yelling until she finishes.

“We could always burn the place down.”

She can feel the seat digging into her now, hot points of pressure. “Go ahead. Enjoy policing the riots that follow. This place is holier than any church. The Sanctuary's only escape.”

“Not the only escape. Your friend Lewis found some other way.” The sensation of his eyes on her is like two hands pushing her around. “We found a radio in his office. Isn't that what it was? A radio?”

“It doesn't work.”

“You aren't using it to communicate with him?”

“It
doesn't
work, so no, I am not.”

He shrugs. “Well, I smashed it to pieces anyway.” He holds up the bat, swinging it one way, then the other, like a metronome. “This yours?”

“You know it is. You found it in my quarters.”

“You keep it because you're scared.”

“I'm not scared. I'm a realist. Sometimes you have to hurt other people before they hurt you.”

He rolls forward, extracting himself from the throne. It groans in relief. He crosses the room and stands before her until he fills up her entire field of vision. He reaches out a hand. “I'm not supposed to believe you.” Her entire head seems to fit into his palm. “But I do.”

There is a tug—followed by a sting—behind her ear. When he pulls his hand away, he pinches a clump of her hair between his fingers. He tucks it into his pocket. Then departs the room, flanked by his deputies. He speaks without turning to address her. “If you find anything, if he left anything, you tell me.”

“I don't know what good it would do you.”

“Let me decide that.” He drops the bat when he exits the room, and the rattling echo of it seems to linger in the air a long time.

Later, she finds the note. There was a stack of paper squared neatly on his desk. Now the sheets lie scattered like dead leaves around the office. She traces her fingers along each one and brings them to her nose to smell. Finally she finds what she is looking for, the faint texturing and lemon scent. She lights a candle and holds the paper a few inches above the flame, and within seconds the letters begin to darken and shape into words.

No apology. No well wishes. No promise to return for her. No explanation beyond what she heard from the deputies. She lowers the note onto the candle and drops it to the stone floor and watches it flame and blacken upon itself. She walks through the museum then, every room of every floor. She has to see for herself that she is alone. She finally comes to a stop in the rotunda, where she throws back her head and yells at the starry mural above, “You son of a bitch!” The words clap back at her, her voice a dozen times angry. “You son of a bitch, why didn't you take me with you!”

Slade lives in the prison. Wood rots. Plastic cracks. Cement crumbles. But stone and iron last. And that is what the prison is made of, stone and iron. It is a place of security, a place he can hide things away.

The door is dented steel with a line of rust running like a tear trail from the lock. It groans when he closes it. The room is windowless. Electricity courses through the walls, drawn from the creaking rotor of a wind turbine on the roof, but he keeps no bulb in the ceiling fixture. He lights a linseed oil lamp instead. He likes the room dark, likes the sun shuttered away. Outside he feels exposed, the sun's eye and
their
eyes always on him. Here he feels safe, nested.

The lamp's light makes the mannequins seem to move. There are five of them, collected from a department store with birds roosting in the rafters. Some are missing arms. Their plastic skin, a cancerous shade of yellow, has cracked through the eyes, the mouth, along the neck and belly, their bodies webbed with fissures, some gaping.

They wear clothes, torn and stained. A leather necklace, weighted with a stone, rounds one of their necks. Earrings dangle from another, unevenly, hooked through the cracks in the plastic. He painted four of their faces. Red smears across their mouths. Blue or green or brown pools in their eye sockets. A black smudge of mole. A dusting of freckles. There is a tooth, a canine, embedded in one of the mannequin mouths. Fingernails. All of them have hair, chunks small and large.

“Hello, pretties,” he says.

His bed is pressed up against the wall, a knot of blankets over a metal frame. In the center of the room is a chair, a metal chair with leather straps looping from each of its arms. The seat and the legs and the floor beneath are stained a rusty red, a skirt of dried blood. A table reaches along the wall, and above it a pegboard carrying coils of wire, barbed metal instruments.

He goes there now and grabs a ceramic pot of glue. He approaches the only naked mannequin. To bring their faces together he must crouch. They are similarly ruined, his by acne scars, hers by clefts brought on by heat and time. He breathes out of his mouth. He opens the pot of glue and daubs some across the crown of the mannequin's head. Then he reaches into his pocket and removes the clump of straw-colored hair and mashes it into the glue.

The mannequin wobbles a few seconds before going still.

“You're a fierce one,” he says. “I like that.”

W
EEKS PASS,
and the six of them chase their way west. There are mountains in the distance, Clark knows. The mountains she has dreamed of all her life. She still cannot see them, but Lewis promises they are there, as they move across Missouri, where the dead forests give way to windbeaten yellowed grass that cooks down to sand.

Her entire life she has spent looking at the same thing—the same ruined buildings, the same defeated faces—and now everything new strikes her as particularly vivid, almost painterly. The heat shimmering in the distance so that the world appears through warped glass. The white snakes of dust that come squiggling out beneath the horses' hooves with every step.

She is impervious to the heat. And though her body aches for water, she is less thirsty every day for a pint or a tumbler. Maybe because she knows there is no tavern around the corner. Or maybe because her body needs so many other things. Or maybe because her mind is so distracted and hopped-up with constant adrenaline. But probably it is because of her brother. He is the real reason.

She has always felt protective of him, never more than now. People talk about her arrogance. People talk about her recklessness. She and York share the same blood and the same qualities, his exacerbated by the teenage belief that his story is more important than any other, that his body is indestructible, that guts matter more than brains, that his cock is the compass point worth following.

She keeps her eyes on him constantly, watching with a mixture of affection and annoyance and obligation. He might look like a man, taller and broader than she, but younger, younger by a decade, an almost unfathomable amount of time, and not to be mistaken for mature. Since he was nine, she has shielded him, nursed him when sick, comforted him when scared, punished any bullies who taunted him, made sure he was properly fed and dressed. For five years, he slept in her bunk while she slept on the floor. Other than drinking spirits, and ranging beyond the wall, he has been her main interest. She doesn't want children—who would want to bring something so delicate into this punitive world?—but she has one. He is hers. In the same manner that parents view a child as their body's extension, the closest they come to reincarnation, she wants his life to be better than hers. That's the promise that waits for him, that waits for them all, on the horizon.

His expression is arranged in a sleepy smile, as if he is living some dream he knew would come true, unaware or uncaring of any danger. This isn't a mission to him; it's an adventure, an entertainment. “Why are you always so serious?” he says to her one day, and she says, “Because everything is at stake, even if you don't realize it.” When he fires an arrow into a quail and a feather catches the corner of his mouth, Clark tenderly plucks it from his lips. And when he rides beside Gawea or tries to share a canteen with her or juggles stones to entertain her, Clark worries.

Clark does and does not trust Gawea. In part it is the silence, her throat punctured and infected and slow to heal. When she tries to make words, her voice rasps like a rust-deadened hinge, and when she writes, the words come slowly in a mess of bird-scratch letters. Lewis asks who is Aran Burr and she writes,
Leeder. Teecher.
Lewis asks whom he leads and she says,
Everyone
, and Lewis asks if he is like a mayor or a governor and she hesitates before writing,
Mostly.
Lewis asks if she made the birds fall from the sky, if she made them attack the stadium and aid in her escape, and she writes,
Did not maek.
Her bandaged hand, her dominant hand, clumsily grips the pen and scratches out each letter:
Asked.

“You asked?”

She underlines the word:
Asked
.

One morning, Clark wakes to find Gawea standing at the edge of their camp, a single moth dancing above her. Clark closes her eyes, eking out another minute of sleep, and when she opens them again finds dozens of moths now swirling around Gawea, dirtying the air. The girl does not often smile but she is smiling then, with her hands outstretched and moths balanced on her fingertips. Clark sits up in her bedroll and says, “Hey,” and Gawea drops her smile and her arms and the moths flutter off like a blown cloud of ashes.

She did this alone. That's what Clark has to keep reminding herself. That's what makes the distance seem bridgeable, possible, even when they come to the Nebraska border, where the bluffs drop into plains that roll on and on, the color of aged parchment, like one of Lewis's maps forever unscrolled. The girl came all this way without anyone. The balls on her.

“How much longer?” Clark asks her. “When does this end? You said it would end.”

It ends
, she writes.

“But when?”

Weeks.

“How many?”

Gawea shrugs.

Their water halves, and halves again, and their mouths go to cotton from rationing. At some farms they find iron pumps tapped into deep wells. Besides ceramics, which have the same basic composition as fossils, nothing has lasted like iron. Gates and pans and pipes like this one. The metal was once red, but except for a few specks, the paint is chipped from it. The handle juts out like a one-armed man trying to keep his balance. They take turns priming the arm, and when they first call up the water, it sometimes carries rust and muck for an hour before running clear.

They follow the girl and she follows the river, the Missouri River. “Do you really trust her?” Reed says, and Clark says, “I trust that she knows how to survive out here, but for now, that's all.” They ride through crumbling towns and cities, everything a splintered mess, and they ride through the empty spaces between them. They ride around trees that fell years ago and trees that fell last week, through fences, onto houses and cars, across streets. Trees on top of trees on top of trees. They ride past leaning electrical poles with their snapped and frayed wires. They ride past roads buckled to pieces, crumbled to gravel. They ride past the litter of ripped balloons, shriveled condoms, six-pack rings, diapers, and chip bags and Ziploc bags and grocery bags, plastic bags, so many of them, that flutter from bushes and trees and gutters and fences like ruined egg sacs.

At one point, York says, “God, would you look at all this dead shit.” There isn't much more to say than that.

The wind creaks and knocks things over with a crash so that the world seems to be muttering about them in their passing. And everywhere—in windows, doorways, the knots of trees—there is the sense of eyes watching.

Coyotes yip and howl at night. Snakes rattle their tails and startle the horses. They surprise a huddle of javelinas, the big bristly pigs snorting and squealing, rushing toward them and hoofing up a big cloud of dust and swinging their tusks from side to side, and Clark drops two of them with arrows before the drove escapes.

They need to be able to protect themselves, but none of them know how to use the guns they carry. When Reed asks if the ammunition will even fire, Lewis says there is only one way to find out. He says the desert climate is to their advantage, the dryness a preservative. That's why archaeologists, he tells them, pulled scrolls thousands of years old out of Egyptian tombs. “It would take moisture to neutralize the powder or primer,” he says, and because the bullets have been stored in ammo boxes—in a relatively cool, intensely dry basement—they should ignite.

The bullets rattle when they finger open the .357 boxes. Their metal has oxidized, giving them a slight green crust, but otherwise they have not visibly degraded. The cartridges for the .30-06 rifles appear much the same. And though some of the shotgun shells are a loss, their plastic cracked and spilling buckshot, most seem serviceable.

That morning, everyone sits in a half circle and Lewis stands before them holding a revolver. The sky, still pinpricked with stars, pinkens behind him. He has to hold the weapon with two hands, its weight too great for his thin arms. He lectures everyone first on the mechanics. He thumbs the safety on and off, swings out the cylinder and spins it. The hammer cocks and releases. He goes on for some time about the double-action mechanism, about safety concerns, about how to break down the weapon, clean it with a brush and rag and oil, when York says, “Shut up already and let me try.”

The others whistle and clap when he jumps up and smacks the dust from his rear and snatches the revolver Lewis reaches to him, grip first.

York smiles for his audience. He shoves the gun in his belt, crabs out his arms, then draws and pops an imaginary round at each of them. He spins the gun on his finger—then loses his grip and it thuds to the ground.

“Don't be an idiot,” Clark says, “you idiot.”

He slides the bullets into their chambers, then slams the cylinder home as if he has done so a thousand times before, his hands moving with a magician's adeptness. “What should I aim at?”

The doctor is smoking her pipe, blowing smoke rings. “The moon,” she says.

“Yeah, the moon,” Reed says. “Blast it out of the sky.”

The sun is rising and the moon is sinking out of sight, its crescent like a clean slash. York spreads his legs and raises his arms and draws a bead on it. He holds his breath, then compresses the trigger. The hammer falls with a sharp click.

Nothing.

He lets out his breath. “Broke.” His stance relaxes and the revolver droops to the ground. He snaps the trigger twice more, and then again, and a round blasts from the chamber with a sound and force greater than any of them has experienced before. The dirt kicks up a fist-sized crater beside his foot. The gunshot thunders. He whoops and drops the gun and runs a few paces from it before saying, “Shit! Fuck! Damn!”

Everyone ducks down, their hands clapped over their ears or eyes. Now their shocked expressions give way to laughter. The deep-bellied kind. When York dances over to Gawea and says, “What do you think of that? I shot the moon for you, baby!” even she smiles and brings her hands together twice in mock applause.

It feels strange, almost dangerous, for them to be laughing, and, as if in agreement, they all stop and look over their shoulders as if they might be punished for a moment of levity.

Gawea wonders if she will have to kill them.

She could do it without any trouble. One by one, a snake curled in a boot, a centipede coaxed into an ear, a few days or weeks between them so as not to arouse suspicion. Or all at once—slit their throats or call down the birds when they are sleeping—but that would be less than ideal. Lewis would know. He would hate her and distrust her and resist her. She has no doubt she could overcome him. He seems so frail, like a bundle of sticks, but it is easier to lead than to drag. She cannot understand why Burr wants him, cannot understand why he refers to Lewis as “the next.” But it is not her job to defy or question. It is her job to deliver, as if he were a parcel. She will deliver Lewis, and then Burr will make good on his promise. Everyone else is expendable.

It hurts to swallow. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to turn her neck one way but not the other. Sometimes she wakes up to a line of ants trundling up her shoulder to taste the wound. It feels like a hot stone is lodged there, as if she could nudge it loose with a cough or a finger. But if she does cough—if she sucks in a lungful of dust or woodsmoke—something bursts and blood or pus fills her hand.

If she really tried, if she kept her voice a whisper, she could probably talk. But she won't. This way—with the doctor treating her for a slight fever and wrapping her scabbed-over wounds with bandages—she remains the victim instead of a threat. She is the one hurt, not the one who would hurt. They have so many questions, but her answers can only be few when scratched out on paper or in the sand, agonizingly slow.

Burr warned her. He said that Gawea might face resistance. He said that Lewis would not come alone. He said that others would want to chase what she promised—water, civilization—and she would do well to treat them not as an impediment but as a tool. They might slow her down, but so might they prove useful, offering protection and even camaraderie, neither of which she felt she needed. She can protect herself, and she prefers to be alone. She has always been alone, even in the company of others. She is alone now, though they do their best to engage her. It's the questions that bother her, the constant questions. Some of them logistical: “How many people live in this town you mention, Astoria?” “How about in Oregon?” “In the Pacific Northwest, in the country?” “How does your money work?” “Does everyone speak the same language?” “Where will we live?” “What do people eat?” And some of them poetic: “Will you tell me about the mountains?” “What songs do people sing?” “What does the ocean smell like?” “What does fish taste like?”

And then there is the boy, York, always goofing for her, trying to catch her eye. He rode past her while doing a handstand on his saddle. He juggled three knives along with a chop carved from a javelina's rump and by the time he finished, it was carved into bite-size pieces that fell neatly on a plate. Sometimes she can't help herself. Sometimes she snorts a laugh. And when she does, he is only encouraged, saying, “Oh! Look, everyone! Of all the unknown wonders in this new America, I am most in awe of this: our girl actually smiled!”

They watch her. They are suspicious of her, she knows, but they are more suspicious of the world. She tries to keep as still and silent as possible, and then their attention is drawn to a groaning wind turbine, a dead forest, strange splay-toed tracks, a deer carcass opened up and scattered into a thirty-foot orbit.

And they are suspicious of each other, too. They seem wary of Lewis. And they seem worried about the doctor, whether she can keep up. And they seem disturbed by the fact that Reed is fucking Clark. Sometimes this happens quietly, deep in the night, with sighs, shifting fabric, the moist meeting of mouths, and sometimes more obviously, during the day, in an outbuilding within earshot of the group. They are not in love. That is clear. They don't stare at each other fondly, hold hands, rub each other's shoulders or feet. The sex seems almost accidentally cathartic, like someone picking up a stone to exercise with or stumbling across a flower to sniff. Clark constantly questions and belittles Reed, and he testily responds that he knows what he is doing and will she lay off already? But they are united, even if only physically, and that alignment makes people nervous. A joining of power, a sharing of secrets.