The Dead Lands (27 page)

Ahead rises a hill topped by a single oak. Its vast branches sag beneath the weight of the ice it carries. Gray slivers fall from it like blighted leaves that glimmer in the cloud-filtered light. She walks as fast as she can, making for the rise. The chiming makes her skid to a stop. It comes from behind her, like a concert of bells. The bear waits in the street, its body porcupined with frost.

She fires, and fires again, and it bounds a few paces away before pausing. When she reaches for her pockets to reload, she finds them empty except for one last bullet. She has either blasted off the rest—or lost some from her pocket when slipping in the streets, careening around corners.

One bullet. She takes her time loading it, chambering the round with a snapping finality. Gun smoke drifts. She breathes in the sweet stink of sulfur. For the moment, she doesn't feel poisoned by grief, she doesn't feel guilty for leading a failed expedition to this icy nowhere, she doesn't feel thirsty for whiskey. Instead she feels her hands curling around the revolver. She feels the cold air piping in and out of her throat. She feels an acidic rage boiling in her guts.

She does not bother running any farther. She crouches down among the graves, with a clear avenue between her and the gates and the street beyond. This is where the bear will enter, and when it does, she will be ready.

The bear teases by the entrance many more times, running in a rocking way, and then, when she doesn't fire, it squats down and studies her. Then the bear—the one with the severed paw, the one who killed her brother—starts toward her at a lope, rounding the fence, passing through the entry; and once there, it rushes forward, more swift and sure-footed than she could ever be. Steam blasts from its snout. Its red eyes do not stray from her. The chiming of its ice-clotted fur is manic, matching the feeling inside her.

“Come on,” she says. “Come and get me, you son of a bitch!”

The cold brings tears to her eyes and she blinks them hurriedly away, keeping her focus. At first the bear runs low, ready to duck a bullet, and when the bullet doesn't come, its body opens up, curling in on itself and snapping outward as it sprints. Twenty yards, fifteen yards, ten yards. The rest of the world falls away in a blur, all of her attention crushed down to a tunnel of ice through which the bear hurtles. She waits. She waits until she can be sure, until the bear is nearly upon her, widening its jaws.

Then she fires.

Through the teeth, down the throat, out the back of its neck, right where the spine nests in the skull, the bullet finds its mark. A feathery spray of blood. The bear drops, goes limp. Just like that. Like a flip switched,
off
. The gunshot claps through the cemetery. The body skids and rolls heavily into her, knocking her down. The gun skitters off. The back of her head clunks the ground. Her vision wobbles in and out. She is holding the bear, her arms wrapped around it, when it coughs and shudders and goes still.

L
EWIS CALLS
her name, “Gawea,” and she wakes. Her head wobbles and her eyelids shutter. Her face is swollen and netted with blood that seems to contain her, trap her inside herself. “Please,” he says. “Are you all right?”

Gawea is supposed to guide, Clark is supposed to lead—and now he doesn't have either of them. But his decisiveness surprises him when he tells Colter to help him and then the doctor out of their restraints. Once freed, he pulls off his shirt and tears it in half. Part of it he uses to tie off the doctor's bitten arm—she has lost a lot of blood and her skin is cold and her breath comes in shallow gasps—and the other half he presses to the girl's wound. “York,” she says, her voice muddled. “What happened to York?”

“Rest,” he tells her. “You need your rest.”

Lewis can smell their meat cooking now and hear the women speaking, but they are out of sight, around the bend of a shadowy corridor. He shakes the caging at the front of the store and calls for help. “Come here. I want to talk to someone this instant.” But no one appears except a toothless woman—older than the others—with a blind white eye and a bright red scar dividing her forehead.

She has a phone pressed to her ear, the curled cord dangling from it and wrapped around a finger. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I see,” as if plugged in to some lost conversation. When Lewis asks her to fetch someone else, to tell the others that one of their party is gravely ill, she goes still and cups a hand over the receiver and whispers harshly to the imaginary person on the other end of the line. Her white eye catches the light and brightens.

“Please,” he says. “Why are you doing this to us?”

She babbles something then about the bad people.

“I don't understand.”

“The bad people. You're the bad people. You come in the night. You steal us away. You make slaves of us.”

“No, we do not. We most certainly do not. That's not why we're here. We're here—”

But she is already wandering away, again whispering into the phone, leaving him to wonder what has made these women so angry and fearful.

I
F YOU COULD
observe the Sanctuary from above, as a vulture riding an updraft, you would see the brown and gray squares of buildings, the dusty complicated swirl of streets between, which all together, from this great height, would look rather like a desiccated brain, within which the dark specks of the deputies appear like clots, spreading, spreading, until their infection is complete, the Sanctuary taken hostage.

Smoke rises—from this building, then another—and stains an otherwise pure blue sky, clouds your vision, so you must return to the streets once more to see the deputies hurling torches through the windows of the Dirty Shame, where someone sang a ballad about Lewis and Clark the night before, a ballad that others are now humming in the streets, singing under their breath. The bartender tries to leave, but they push him back in. The flames make a noise like a thousand fingers snapping in excitement. The roof collapses—the metal sheeting sending up a swirl of sparks—as the clay walls blacken and crack. Where there was once a building, there is now a dark hull, like the disintegrating remains of a beetle.

Anyone caught singing the song—or any song—is hurled to the ground and beaten with cudgels until muscle pulps, bone shatters. Some try to help. A group of six men push the deputies, grab them by the wrists, try to wrestle them away. At first they succeed. Then more deputies come, and more still, and by the end of the day the six men are hanged—from balconies, from the wall, all over the Sanctuary—their bodies twisting in the wind, crows roosting on their shoulders and feasting their faces down to bone.

The wells are shut down for two days. Deputies surround them with fresh skins of water hanging plumply from their belts. For personal use. They guzzle from them theatrically. A barrage of people gathers. Before long it is a mob. They beat the bottoms of their buckets and jugs and make a storm of noise. They yell and their dry lips crack and make their mouths bloody.

Graffiti appears overnight, hurriedly smeared onto alley walls, scratched onto shop windows.
THE SANCTUARY = PRISON
and
DEATH TO LANCER
and
BRING DOWN THE WALL
and
WHEN HOPE IS DOWN, THE SOLUTION IS UPRISING
. The buildings burn. No matter if the people inside are not responsible for the graffiti.

When Oman arrives at his apothecary, the keys jangling in his hand, ready to open for the day, his black-toothed mouth unhinges in a silent scream. Because the shop is burning, crowned with fire that gives off many curious colors—green and purple and pink and gold—as his many powders and potions erupt.

This lasts for a few days, but there are too many buildings to burn now, too much danger in the fire spreading like the anger that reddens their faces and hoarsens their voices.

The deputies retreat, at Lancer's request, still visible but disengaged, walking the streets like black shadows the sun can't erase. The wells open. Long lines form, reaching down alleys, around buildings, no end in sight.

New graffiti appears.
TRUST LANCER
. And
OUR HOME IS A SANCTUARY
. Deputies linger nearby and menace anyone who means to scrub it away.

Bodies keep piling up. Two of the sentinels on the wall. A mother and her three children. A drunk in an alley. A tinker at his cart. They are robbed sometimes and sometimes not, killed simply because everyone is burning up with anger.

Then come the bodies reported to be those of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The rangers drag them through the gates one day, piled in a wagon. They are rotted and disfigured beyond recognition. They have been hiding out there this whole time, the rangers say. And now they finally met the end they deserved. Killed by wild animals.

“I don't believe it,” some say, but some say they do. Some say the end of the rainbow leads to nothing but a pot of sand and spiders.

I
F THE WOMAN
on the phone had not gone mad with grief after losing her husband and daughter, if she had lingered to answer Lewis's questions, this is what she would have told him.

The slavers came in the night. Every man who fought back, they killed. Every woman too old and slow to follow their commands, they killed. Every baby, they abandoned or ran through with a knife. Everyone else they kept. They hurled them into wheeled cages—jerry-rigged trailers and truck beds—dragged by horses and oxen. There was a bucket of water, frozen across the top, refreshed daily. And another bucket for waste. And many blankets to share, beneath which they huddled together for warmth.

No matter how they begged or screamed, no matter how desperate and plying their questions, the slavers would not respond except to say, “Hold your tongue. Or we'll cut it out.”

They traveled two days across the plains—the snow infrequent here, a mere dusting—with the frozen ground crackling beneath them. They then arrived at a small town of cadaverous houses. Rusted grain elevators reached several stories higher than any other building in town and next to them sat a train station made from red brick with plywood nailed over the windows. Here they came to a creaking stop and the slavers unhitched the oxen and brushed them down and fed them hay while their captives pressed their faces against the bars and asked questions that vanished into vaporous clouds, unanswered.

The slavers retreated inside the train station, and minutes later smoke wormed from its chimney. Only then did the caged men and women notice the trampled snow and grass and the freshly split firewood stacked along one wall of the building with the occasional mouse sprinting in and out of it. The slavers had been here before. But why they chose this building, of all the places they might have taken shelter, their captives could not understand.

Nor did they understand what came a few hours later: the trembling that shook the ground, the banshee wail that split the air. They were already afraid, but now their fear heightened to the borderlands of terror, hysteria. Some of them whimpered and wiped tears from their eyes. Some shook the bars and screamed their throats raw. And some huddled in the corner of the cage and waited for whatever was coming, growing louder by the second.

They could not see it until it was nearly upon them, the black engine car with the pilot grille that looked somewhere between a triangular weapon and a toothy grin. Steam clouded from the smokestack. It continued past them, the crankshaft slowing, the brakes sparking and screeching. It was followed by three coal cars that gave way to a dozen more boxcars and cattle cars and flatcars.

Not all of them knew the word—
train
—but soon they were all uttering it the way some might say
dragon
or
comet
, with a mixture of fear and excitement and otherworldly awe. The train was something out of history, but the train was also now indicative of some strange future, so it made them feel out of time, completely at odds with the present.

There was a long hiss. And a clanking as the metal settled. The slavers exited the station and stood on its porch and watched the train creep to a halt and then set to work.

A metal ramp was drawn from each of the boxcars, and it rattled when the men walked up it. They hauled open the door and a crowd of men and women stood blinking in the gray light. A few tried to escape but were beaten back with the clubs the slavers carried. A joke made, laughter. Buckets of water were replenished. A crate of food was delivered. Waste was collected, along with several stiff, gray-skinned bodies.

And then the slavers came for those in the cages. Some had to be carried or dragged, they were so fearful of the machine. And then, within a few minutes, they were all crowded inside and the door clanged shut behind them. At first, the two groups remained separated, the old and the new, watching each other fearfully in the dim light. Then the train huffed and clanged and lurched and several lost their balance and fell. Their cries broke the silence, and before long everyone was talking, a jibbering flood of words. They hugged just to feel the warmth and support of another.

There was an inch-wide crack along the door, and through it they could see the rolling grasslands punctuated by dead towns. Then the clouds darkened and the snow became ashen and the air tasted acrid and the oil fires bloomed all around them. Every now and then someone would rise to look, but the wind whistled painfully through the crack and their eyes watered over and froze their tears instantly to their cheeks. It was safer to stay in a huddle, beneath the blankets, with their hands tucked into their armpits or crotches for warmth. Some of them could not stop shivering, their teeth chattering along with the wheels clacking the tracks.

Their speed ranged from five to fifteen miles an hour. They stopped often to clear or repair tracks, sometimes progressing only a few miles a day. A man began to cry and would not stop. He had long brown hair but was balding in a way that made his forehead appear tremendous. He was an ugly crier. Not just his appearance, like a red cabbage, but the sound, a phlegmy hiccuping. At first everyone tried to comfort him, but when he would not stop they grew irritated and then furious and struck him with their fists and told him to stop, but this only made him grow louder, wailing now. After six hours, no one could tolerate the sound and several people held him down and strangled him and the long silence that followed was not as comforting as they'd imagined it would be.

It was not long after this that the brakes shrieked and the train shuddered and rattled as it tried to stop too soon, too fast. The cars wobbled when they accordioned their weight. There was a sudden clanking, like the shuffling of a deck of metal cards, followed by an impactful crunch. They did not have time to cry out as they were hurled against the front wall, and then the side wall, and then the ceiling, tumbling one way and then the next, like one massive body that continually broke apart and coalesced, bone and metal, hair and blood. There was no sense of up or down, only a weightlessness interrupted by moments of severe gravity. Gashes opened in the walls. The door rolled open and several people were launched through it. The train was twisting off the tracks, rolling down a snowy berm, throwing up a wave of ice and dirt. The clanging and scraping progress of the crash was so loud it seemed the very world might be rent in half.

And when the last of the metal warped and yawned and settled, when the smoke shushed from the crack in the combustion chamber, when the first of the survivors began to creep from the wreckage, they saw what had caused the crash.

Bison. What appeared to be hundreds of them surrounded the train, but the air was cloaked in sick black fog that made it difficult to see. Shaggy and horned and humpbacked. Their goatees crusted over with ice. Smoke tusking from their snouts. They drifted in and out of sight. A half dozen of them had been struck by the train, their bodies torn apart, strewn across the tracks and berm, limbs that still shivered and red smears that still steamed. The surrounding horde stomped the ground as if impatient to revenge the fallen.

Three slavers crawled from the engine car. One of them bled from both his ears and kept putting his hands over them as if to clap away the ringing there. Another clutched an arm to his chest, an arm whose elbow bent the wrong way. Another seemed unhurt but kept touching himself all over to find the injury that must be hiding somewhere. For a moment they stared dumbly at the train and the captives staggering from it and seemed not to know what to do—but only for a moment.

Their surviving captives were all women, mostly girls. They ganged around the slavers, who held up their hands to defend themselves, but the women pushed through them and knocked their bodies to the ground and beat them with their fists and feet. They did this casually, not rushing, as if they were carrying out some chore. A chest caved. A skull dented.

The girls did not know what to do or where to go, but they felt gifted and cheery and a few of them could not help but hug and cackle nervously before being hushed by the more fearful among them. They checked the wreckage for survivors and found few, one of them a slaver they disposed of with a sharp piece of metal.

By this time the bison had departed and the fog had lifted and in the distance they could see a city, Bismarck.

There are twenty-two of them altogether, mostly teenage girls. They call the mall home. The hundreds of thousands of pounds of steel and concrete feel good. Like armor. As does the charred sky, the icy wind, the oil fires torching the horizon. No one will find them here. No one will harm them ever again. This is what Sasa tells them.

She is one of the oldest among them, certainly the loudest. They look to her as a mother. She is the one who tells them they will live in the mall. She is the one who tells them they must wake from their daze—as they stumble around, trying to get used to the ashen cold, learning how to navigate Bismarck, vacant eyed, hollowed by the loss of their families. She is the one who demands they construct defenses, salvage goods, sew clothes, auger holes in the river to fish, set traps and string bows, feed and arm themselves. In this unfamiliar world, being told what to do is a comfort. They listen to her. They do exactly as she says.

Sasa keeps her graying hair cropped close to the skull in tight curls. She is tall, thin shouldered, long limbed. Her nose and jaw, both strangely pointed, seem like they could come together as a claw. Her skin is the color of old wood and the tip of her nose purpled with frostbite. A long knife hangs at her waist. Her voice is deep and even in standard conversation comes at a shout. Six months ago, she wasn't like this. Six months ago, she saw her husband hanged from a tree and her baby stomped flat. The only way to survive her grief was to harden, shield herself like some crustacean. She has a new family now, these women, and she will defend them from any injury.

Their lives are now a long winter, she says. She will help them endure it.

On this morning, they gather in the atrium, what was once the food court. The floor is cracked tile. The ceiling is a pyramidal skylight cloaked in snow. Three garbage cans crackle and give off waves of heat from the wood burning inside them. Smoke hazes the air. She paces on a short stage and punctuates her sentences with a fist to the palm. Her girls lounge in metal chairs. They nod and mutter their agreement.

Over the past few months they have mentioned the bison. The herd that caused the train wreck, that deposited them at the outskirts of Bismarck. They were saved and they were saved for a reason. The bison were an instrument of God. The world wanted them to live. But to survive, they must be strong. Being strong means making difficult choices. Making difficult choices means hurting back those who mean to hurt them.

“We knew they might come for us. And now they've come for us.” She makes a fist that matches her clenched face. “We won't be victims this time.”

Her eyes narrow at the sight of the man escorted toward them. He has only one arm, the wrist of it secured to his thigh. He knocks against several chairs, which screech and clatter. He tries to yank away, tries to run, but he trips into a table and falls to the floor. He kicks at the women who huddle around him until they take out their knives and threaten to gut him, and then he goes still and allows them to drag him onstage. He refuses to fall to his knees. Every time they push him down, he struggles to his feet, until Sasa says, “I like this one. He's a fighter. I'm going to give him a fighting chance.”

He stares hatefully at her.

Sasa asks for his name and he tells her Jon Colter.

“Why are you smiling, Jon Colter?”

“I'm not,” he says. “There's something wrong with my face.”

“What's wrong with your face?”

“A wolf bit it.” He looks around, as if seeking escape. “Whatever you think we did, we didn't. We didn't do
any
thing to
any
of you.”

She raises her eyebrows and tells him with a placid voice, “You killed our parents. You killed our husbands and our sisters and our brothers. You killed our children.”

“No.” He laughs, but in an ugly way. “No, no, no. I don't know who you are, and I don't care who you are.”

“Why else would you come here? A place this cold. A place this sick.” When she stands before a crowd, her voice takes on the same rhythms as that of the seer in her village. “Fires burn on the horizon. Ash falls from the sky. No one comes here. This is a place for no one.”

“You're here.”

“To hide. From you. But you've found us.”

He is smiling now. Really smiling, showing all his teeth. “Listen to me. We came from St. Louis. We're passing through—”

She laughs and automatically several of the girls laugh along with her.

The smile dies from half his face. The humor in the situation belongs to her. “What's so funny?”

The fire barrels cough up sparks. Sasa nods and the guard takes a knife to the rope that binds his wrist to his thigh. He flexes his hand and looks around him as if seeking a way out.

She tells him to remove his clothes, and when he refuses, she tells her girls to do it for him, tearing off his boots, his pants, dragging him out of his coat and knifing off his shirt, until he stands naked and trembling before them. His body is a mess of scars that seem to whiten as his skin pinkens in the cold. He would cross his arms if he could, but as is, he can only clutch his middle one-handed.

Sasa studies his body and says, “You look like you've been chewed up and spit out.”

“Pretty much.”

“Here's how this will work. I'm going to give you a head start of thirty seconds.”

“Fuck you.”

“And then I'm going to come after you.”

“Even if I outrun you, I'll freeze.”

“You look like you're accustomed to surviving.” She makes a shooing motion with her hands. “One,” she says. “Two, three, four, five,” and before she can count
six
, he has leapt off the stage, knocked aside tables, padding away.