The Dead Lands (30 page)

S
LADE IS TIRED
of clearing paths through the whores and beggars on the streets, shoving aside those bone-thin and swollen-bellied and bent-kneed rabble who ask him for money, for food, for water, for a fuck that might come with a favor. He is tired of people speaking to him with voices that range only between pleading and accusatory. He is tired of the blinding sun. He is tired.

So he goes where no one can bother him, to his windowless basement room, where the shadows are as deep and cooling as water. Here he keeps company with his dummies. He walks among them, the mannequins with cracked faces and glued-on hair and torn fingernails and the patchwork ensemble he gathered gradually for all of them. One was Jillian, a baker's daughter, whose hair smelled like flour and whose breasts reminded him of mounds of dough. Another was Becca, the sister of one of his deputies, who liked to whistle when she walked, like a little bird beckoning him. And Manda and Ankeny. And now Ella—so fierce—his favorite so far.

His ears still buzz with the noise of the city—his mind still aches with the brightness of the day—but if he closes his eyes and stands as still as his dummies and breathes deeply through his mouth, he feels like he is drinking in peace, filling himself with a cool, blue calm.

Every day, he enlists more deputies. But he has no illusions about their loyalty. They are devoted only to the food and water that come with the job. And though a man with a weapon and a uniform is worth five without, his police force is outnumbered many times over. The Sanctuary could be overtaken, if only people weren't so afraid. He must keep them that way, as a manager and profiteer of terror.

The other day, when he was walking without an escort through the Fourth Ward—a collection of deteriorating buildings full of cutthroats, gamblers, whores—someone hurled a bag of filth at him. It exploded against his chest and then plopped to the ground. He stood there a moment, incredulously wiping his hands through the oozing smear, before looking around and noticing the streets crammed with crook-mouthed, thin-eyed people who studied him with a collective ferocity that made him feel, for the first time in his life, small. He hurried away, knowing that they might be seconds away from swarming him. For all his administration, Thomas has relied on the enemy beyond the walls, but he must worry now about the enemy within them.

If Thomas knew about Ella, she would be dead. And if Ella were anyone else, Slade would have killed her himself. But so many months ago, when he first questioned her in the museum, he immediately noted her as a favorite, like a special passage earmarked in a book. It was a feeling he knew well—the same spark of recognition he experienced around Jillian and Becca and Manda and Ankeny. His gallery of favorites.

He can harm her. He can harm anyone. He has the power to accuse strangers, beat them senseless, cuff them and noose them, with nothing in the way of consequence except more hatred directed his way. He is omnipotent. And omnipotence comes with boredom. That is why the Greek gods used to assume human form. To play with stakes that at least felt more real. He likes to play. He likes reducing himself to a kind of suitor.

Of course she knew something about Lewis departing the Sanctuary. Of course he would communicate with her by owl. Of course she was responsible for the rabble-rousing graffiti. That was one of the reasons she was a favorite. Because she wasn't a common fool like so many others, but a worthy adversary, a mind sprung with claws. Which made it his job to tame her, cow her.

He follows her sometimes. Through the sun-soaked streets, the cluttered aisles of the bazaar, not because he believes he will learn anything professionally valuable, but simply to make a study of her. He likes the way she marches instead of walks, always square shouldered. He likes the way she bargains with people—pointing a finger and setting her mouth—and the way she touches whatever interests her—a carved door, an overripe melon, a one-armed doll—lets her finger linger as if to taste.

This morning, after she collected her daily ration of water, he followed her back to the museum, trailing her like a shadow. She sensed him only when she keyed open her door, and by then it was too late. She turned in time to see him shove her inside.

Her jug fell and the cap spun off and the water
glug-glug-glugged
across the floor, and for a moment that was the only sound besides their breathing as he rammed her up against the wall with a palm cupping her shoulder, a thumb horning her clavicle.

Then he said, in a calm, quiet voice that hardly paused between words, “You stupid girl. You stupid, stupid girl. You think I don't know about what you've been up to. You think you can go on pretending you're not a part of what's happening. Let me tell you something. Let me give you a little lesson. Some believe love is the most powerful of all emotions. But that's just a nice lie people tell themselves. Terror wins. Terror beats love any day. No emotion can control a crowd, can imprint itself so fully onto the human mind. You run this museum, so you know all about this, don't you? You know about how this country—if you can call it that, a country—has been held hostage by terrorism? The bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the terrorist attacks of September eleventh. Yes, I know a thing or two. I'm not as mindless as some people think. Those stories—of long ago and far away—might not seem real. But they happened. And when they happened, they owned everyone. They paralyzed everyone. By the millions. That's what terror can do. That's what I can do. To you. And to this city.”

He let her go then and stepped back and the last of her water hiccuped from the jug.

She rubbed her chest where his arm had been. “You're a no-good bully. And you're wrong.”

He laughed then. He couldn't help himself. He outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds. He could crush her like a cockroach. But she would not flinch. She had such fight to her. “Oh, do tell. How am I wrong?”

“It's like this. Terror might make someone kill, but love will make someone die. People die for love. They would give up anything for love, even their life. And don't you see, that's a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival.”

Her eyes wander away from his and seem to zero in on something, but when he turns, there is only an empty doorway. “What were you looking at?”

“Get out of here,” she says. “Leave me alone.” She tries to push past him. He slaps her and forces her to the floor with an elbow to the throat, and she burbles like a toad at the pressure. “No,” she says, but seems again to be looking behind him. “Don't!”

From his pocket he removes a pair of pliers. He fingers open her mouth and shoves the pliers inside and says, “Steady now.” With a wrenching crack he removes one of her molars.

He holds up the red-rooted tooth as he departs her. “That's for what you wrote on the wall and all the trouble it's caused me. The next time you do something stupid, I'll come back for the rest of you.”

Now, in the basement, in the dark, he holds the molar in his palm. He pops it in his mouth and sucks on it and tongues its grooves and tastes her sour blood. Then he spits it out and dries it on his shirt and retrieves a pot of glue and patiently holds it to the mouth of her dummy as if suffocating it. When he lets his hand fall, the tooth remains, jeweled to the face of the thing.

T
HE MOUNTAINS
grow nearer, gradually dominating the horizon, their peaks cutting into the clouds. In their foothills the snow begins again, whiter now than before. They rest in Billings for several days, and again in Bozeman. Here the downtown is surrounded by a defensive perimeter made from logs with sharpened points. It has been burned and breached. Blackened wood and blackened bones rise out of the snow. The smell of smoke still lingers in the air. The people here have been dead weeks, maybe months.

“Who did this?” Lewis says. He kneels beside a skull, small enough to fit into his hand, a child's. “What happened here?”

“Are you sure we should be going this way?” Colter says.

Gawea shakes her head—maybe she doesn't know or maybe she doesn't care or maybe she doesn't want to tell.

Not so long ago Lewis believed in the end of the rainbow. A shire. An emerald city. Elysian fields. What his childhood storybooks promised. He believed, back when they first set out from the Sanctuary, that something arcadian awaited them. Not anymore. Not now. Not when he sees the bone-riddled ruins of Bozeman. It is not only the landscape that disappoints. It is humankind. Inside and outside the wall, humans remain the same, capable of wonderful things, yes, but more often excelling in ruin. And Burr is human.

He cups a handful of snow over the skull and stands and wipes his hands off. “Is there something you need to tell me, Gawea?”

“No,” she says and keeps her head down and continues hiking forward.

At the edge of town they enter a pole shed with rust trails weeping from every bolt. Inside they find a sign,
BOZEMAN FOUNDRY
, hanging above a desk with a pile of paper squared on it. Lewis picks up a work order for two dozen horseshoes, a sharpened saw, a repaired scythe. There is some dust but not a lot that he runs a finger through. This was a working site, a working community, home to however many thousands.

Gawea shrugs off her pack and lies on the floor and shoves her fists against her eyes. Colter says, “You all right?” and when she doesn't respond, he begins opening and closing drawers, closets, cupboards, not knowing what he might find, something of use, while Lewis walks through the entry office and into the cavernous work space. His boots crunch over metal shavings. Hammers and clamps and files hang from the wall. He wanders past forges, stacks of casings and molds, an induction furnace and an electric arc furnace, a small hill of firewood. The air is dirty with the scorched-nut smell of molten metal. His foot clatters a ladle lying on the floor and the noise brings Colter out of the office.

He's gnawing on something and holds out a handful of it. “Found a stash of jerky. Not bad.”

Lewis tours the equipment and then settles his gaze on Colter.

“What?”

“I'm sorry I doubted you.”

“Only a fool wouldn't have doubted me.”

“I want to do something for you.”

They spend the rest of the day burning wood, pumping bellows, stirring coals, scraping designs into sand castings. They melt scrap metals and refine the alloy and pour it into the molds and let it cool before tumbling the component from it. They sweat. Their skin blackens with soot. They wield tongs and sledgehammers and scythe hammers and embossing hammers that chirp against the heated metal set upon the bullhorn anvil. Red and yellow sparks fall around their feet. They grind and sand and polish. They fit together hinges, tighten bolts, oil gears, and when they finally finish, Colter slides the stump of his arm into the prosthetic and Lewis tightens the leather straps around his shoulders and buckles them.

In the place of bones there are fitted pipes, and in the place of a hand, three barbed fingers that open into a claw and close into a fist. He experiments with it, bending his elbow, extending his arm for a slash.

“They used to call me the Black Fist, you know?”

“I know.” Lewis crumples onto a stool and wipes the soot from his face with a rag. “What do you think?”

Colter bends over and picks up a cinder block. His claw crushes it and a spray of gray gravel dusts the air and dirties the floor. “I think it will do quite nicely.”

Gawea presses her fists against her eyes and pushes until colors violet and rose red and dandelion yellow explode against the lids. They remind her of flowers, fields of flowers that she might dive into, roll around in, tangled in their stalks, bombed by their perfume. It's so much easier to dream in color than to open her eyes to the gray nothing of the world.

She should have known better. She shouldn't have let herself get close to them. But York wouldn't leave her alone, his face always dodging into her field of vision, his hands always touching her on the shoulder, the waist, the cheek. That day she swiped the trout from his plate and shoved it in her mouth was only the beginning of the tastes shared between them. Now he is gone, just like her parents, like her
oma
, everyone close to her punished and then killed, so that living feels like a rehearsal for dying. She was just so lonely and felt antidoted by his company, warmed by his touch.

She was sent to retrieve Lewis. Not Clark, not Reed, and not the doctor and not Colter. Not York. Just Lewis. But she had no choice. They came as a group. She planned to deliver Lewis, as promised, and then Burr would give her what she requested. Whatever happened to the rest of them, she did not care. Initially, if they got in her way, she might have killed them herself. They were irrelevant to her. That's what she told herself. That's why she maintained such a cool distance, until she couldn't anymore. They became relevant to her, more than names, but people, friends.

The hard part was supposed to be the journey. The unforgiving temperatures, the cruel landscape, the scarcity of food and water. But it is the mental assault that has been unendurable. Maybe this mission means nothing. On the one side, Burr is a false prophet. On the other side, Lewis strives for irrelevance. There is no human endeavor. No matter how much people clung to family, breeding more children, and to community, building more houses and businesses and roads to bind them, everyone dies alone. Whether from sickness or injury or old age, you die alone, and there is nothing bad or good about death, just as there is nothing redemptive or admirable about being human. It doesn't matter how powerful you are or how far you travel or how many books you read or where you live—that's all one big distraction from the open grave waiting to swallow you in the end. There is no escape for humankind, and there is no escape for her, and none for Lewis either.

But despite all these feelings thrashing inside her, she has continued to put one foot in front of the other, leading them toward Oregon. Trees don't love and they don't mourn, but they strive for sun and for water. They live. That is the one true impulse, she supposes, that everything wants to live. Something waits for her in Oregon that is the equivalent of sun and water. A promise. Burr promised her.

Lewis trusts her. He handed over his life to her. He follows her still, as if they are corded together. He follows her through pillaged and burned communities and the best answer she can give him when he asks what happened is “I don't know.” Though she does. The same thing that happened to these villages happened to hers. How can she ignore that? She is betraying herself as much as betraying Lewis. But she guides him and he follows her and she follows the river, and in Three Forks, the river finally dies, a gray wash of seep that they give wide berth, not wanting to get stuck in the slush. They follow the remains of the freeway for three days, before the mountains rise severely before them.

Slabs of stone, like altars and pillars, peek out of the snow with lichen stitched across them like the cipher of some dead race. They pass through Butte and the mountains become a toothy maw that surrounds them. The elevation steepens and the cold makes the air feel thinner than it already is.

In a narrow pass, the road has washed away entirely, replaced by trees and boulders that create a labyrinth of ice. The ground is angled steeply. Its snow-swept corridors cut this way and that way, and it is soon difficult to tell which direction she faces. At one point she looks down, at a slick floor of pure ice that mutters and cracks beneath her weight, and feels certain she is standing hundreds of feet in the air and might plummet through at any second and maybe that would be for the best.

Night comes. When they finally step out of the labyrinth and into the open pass again, a frigid wind roils over her and knocks her back a step before she presses on with her head down and her eyes watering and her tears freezing to her lashes. The road begins again, a white ribbon curling around the mountain, and here she finds a jackknifed semi.

They climb inside and the three of them fall asleep with their arms wrapped around each other, shuddering like old lovers. Her teeth won't stop chattering, a skeleton's song, so she draws closer to Lewis, so close that her mouth is nearly at his ear, and she whispers, “I'm sorry,” but he is sleeping and does not hear.

They wake at dawn. The men are weak and sick. They are cold one minute, feverish the next. Every small movement brings a painful pulse to their foreheads. They limp along. They wear snowshoes that sink into the powder, snow collapsing onto them, burdening every footstep. Sometimes they pause for a minute or more to gather their strength before continuing on, making slow progress.

They fall now and then. It takes longer and longer for them to get up each time. And then they don't get up. She does not go to them. She stands over them, wavering in the wind. It would be so easy to leave them there. Then she wouldn't have to see their faces when they realize her betrayal.