The Dead Lands (4 page)

He feels nauseous—his stomach an acidic coil—but cannot stop himself from filching a rat kabob from a market booth. He takes a few rubbery bites before tossing it aside. He makes his way to the morgue, in the basement of the hospital, a pillared marble building that shares a block with the museum. Here he worms his way through the ventilation pipes—navigating his way left, left, right, shimmying down one level, then right, right, right again, trying not to sneeze at the dust he stirs up, trying not to clank his knees and elbows against the metal—to see his father one last time before he is processed. Another hour and his body will be rendered into fat for candles, bile for ink, ligaments for stitching, bones for tools, meat for the pigs, every part of him translated into something useful.

The morgue is one of the few cool places in the city. He has been here before, to steal medicines and instruments—and to view his mother's body after the cancer ate its way through her. He stares through the ventilation grate, not expecting to get any closer than this, watching the morgue attendants deconstruct the dozen or so bodies cooling on their slabs.

Then a white-jacketed nurse pushes through the door and says the sentry fires have been lit, that something is happening outside the wall. Everyone departs the room in a hurry. Simon slides aside the grate. Dust spills out and he drops to the floor. He approaches the slab upon which his father has been laid.

Lamps glow and pulse and their shifting yellow light makes the bodies appear to tremble in their sleep. A bucket and a tray of instruments sit next to his father. Simon breathes through his mouth to try to fight the smell, the nausea that makes the floor feel unsteady. His father's skin is gray-green where it isn't red. He is slashed and chewed in so many places, his stomach torn open completely, a tangled pile of yarn Simon tries not to look at, studying instead his father's face, the remaining half of which appears serene, transfixed by a pleasant dream, as if death were the only way to find peace in this place.

His father prized above all else a guitar strung with rusty baling wire. He kept the fingernails long on his right hand for plucking. Simon takes that hand now—the hand that made music, the good hand, the best part of his father—and kisses it and makes a silent vow to one day revenge him.

Lewis has known the mayor, Thomas Lancer, longer and better than anyone else in his life, though they can't be called friends. Not anymore. There was a time, so long ago, when they were children, when they would thumb marbles beneath the table while their parents dined or ride bucking sheep for sport or play prey/predator in the gardens, one sneaking up on the other with his hands made into claws.

Lewis remembers especially loving the drum game. One of them would race off with a handheld drum while the other tied a blindfold around his eyes and waited for the thumping to sound. Thomas always preferred that Lewis pursue him—beating the drum sometimes softly, sometimes loudly—leading him through the Sanctuary, down alleys, through stables, over bridges, into and out of buildings, until finally Lewis crabbed out a hand and caught him.

The game has not changed so much. Thomas beckons him now with a deputy instead of a drum.

The Dome is gold leaf and during the day shines like a second sun. Its halls are made of marble interrupted by grooved pillars and oil paintings and frescoes and sculptures and staircases that spiral into many dark-wooded chambers where the lights sizzle on and off depending on how hard the wind blows.

Lewis needs no escort. When the deputy guides him by the shoulder, around a corner or down a hall, Lewis shrugs her off and says, “I know.” He grew up here, after all, sliding down the staircases, reading books in the library, exploring the crypt, his father the longtime mayor. Then came his death, and Thomas's election.

One hundred and fifty years ago—when the world began to fall apart, when the flu mutated and millions began to die, their lungs hitching until they coughed up blood—several businessmen and politicians and National Guard units fortified downtown St. Louis with the improvised panic of people scrambling for cover against a sudden storm. There was no time for committees, for debate, for a show of hands. There was not even enough time to collect toothbrushes, rifles, photo albums, to call upon family members to join them. They had to make the immediate decision to live or die. The flu was airborne. It was burning brains with fevers, choking lungs with blood. And it was coming. So the wall rose around them, like a swift buckling of the earth.

A constitution followed a year later. They did not call themselves a country. They were a sovereign city, a temporary haven awaiting reincorporation. The United States would rise again, and in the meantime, they would uphold as many democratic principles as they could while maintaining strict control. They elected their mayor and city council to two-year terms. All firearms were abolished, all currency collected and redistributed.

Lewis's father was elected and reelected for more than thirty years. When he died, Thomas, a member of the city council, announced he would run for mayor. He had such an easy way with people, always smiling, looking deeply into eyes, taking a hand with both of his and not letting go. His campaign slogan,
Evolve
, asked that people reconsider the Sanctuary. Previous administrations insisted that the world was not lost, that the Sanctuary was a temporary haven, that one day the country would reunite. Thomas argued for an end to the lies. He wanted everyone to recognize that they were on their own, that they needed to change, to progress. The Sanctuary was more than an old city—it was the new world. He designed a flag—what would become the flag of the Sanctuary—red, white, and blue, but carrying a single star.

Several approached Lewis and begged him to put in a bid. They said people liked familiarity. His name, Meriwether, carried currency, had history. People would vote for him because he would make them feel safe.

Lewis said they were fools. People detested him. He was not familiar, despite his last name, but the very definition of unfamiliar. Different. Weird. Unsettling. If his father walked through a crowd, they swarmed him; if Lewis walked through a crowd, they scrambled to escape him. And he had no interest in politics. He only wanted to retain his stewardship of the museum, the place he served as an aide throughout his childhood, the only education available in the Sanctuary after children left school to work at the age of ten.

A few put in bids against Thomas, but he dominated the ticket. People believed in his platform. They wanted to evolve. They were ready for change—and they got it.

A heavy oaken door swings open and tendrils of steam escape it. Water splashes. Someone titters. Lewis enters the bath, the marble floor rising into a rectangular tub bigger than a bed. Three square windows are cut into the wall and they flood the room with light that swirls with steam through which Lewis observes Thomas.

He sits in the middle of the tub, joined by a long, lean boy who couldn't be more than twenty. Lewis seems to recall his name as Vincent. It is hard to remember them all. Some are male, some female, all young. Thomas once told Lewis he would screw anything, as long as it had skin and yielded to him. His wife, he claimed, was made of bone. So he found other ways to entertain himself. Vincent must be special—he has lasted longer than the others. The boy licks his sponge across Thomas's back and shoulders, his neck and belly. His face is a foaming mess of soap, costuming him with the beard he cannot grow. His eyes appear glazed—perhaps from sex, the heat, the glass of brown liquor resting at the edge of the tub.

Lewis clears his throat and says, in the pause that follows, “You demanded my audience.”

Thomas blearily observes him, then startles to attention. “Lewis.” Waves of water slosh when he lifts his arms in greeting. “I'm so glad to see you, so glad you could come.”

“I didn't have a choice.”

Thomas dunks his head and works the soap from his hair and then rises sputtering. His face appears to sulk even when he smiles. A trail of gold hair drops from his belly button to his groin—otherwise his skin is as bare as an infant's, maybe shaved. “Yes, well, you know how you are.”

“Reluctant.”

“Always busy. Always working. You never have time for old friends.” He turns to Vincent, who smiles at him curiously, his sponge oozing soap down his thigh. “Go away. Though I may call for you later.”

Vincent climbs from the bath and wraps himself in a robe and splashes through the puddles on the floor on his way out. Thomas watches him go before eeling his way to the head of the tub, hooking one arm over the edge. On the ledge rests a tray piled high with baked grubs. He snatches one, pops it in his mouth.

“There is no life without water, Thomas. That is the immutable law of the universe.”

Thomas suckles the grub. “What are you getting at?”

“Do you know how upset people would be if they knew you were taking baths?”

Thomas makes a dismissive gesture, then lets the beak of the grub slip from his lips. It drops to the tray with a
tick
. “We recycle the water. Everything here will be bucketed into the gardens.”

“How generous of you.”

His eyes narrow and his voice drops to a whisper. “So have you done it?”

“No.”

“Have you even tried?”

“Yes.”

“That's a lie. If you can build an owl, you can build a gun. You can build me whatever I ask for.”

Thomas is right. Lewis is lying. He has not tried and he will not try. Three months ago, when someone began painting protest slogans across buildings, when a brick crashed through one of the Dome's windows, when an effigy of the mayor was found floating in the sewage canal, Thomas approached Lewis about the possibility of black powder, of guns. Their forebears had thought it unwise, in such a contained community, to make it any easier to kill what few people remained in the world. And in the second amendment to their constitution, all rifles and pistols were destroyed. When Lewis reminded him of this, Thomas raised an open hand. “I know. I know what they said. But times are different. They had
water
. I need to be able to better control my people.”

Thomas has never appeared physically threatening, but his mind has a shrewd capability for violence. Even when they were children, he knew how to hurt, placing a hand to the chests of those who wanted to be with him most, saying, “You may not play with me.” Now Lewis sees a similar sharpness in his expression, a barely controlled fury that twitches the corners of his mouth. “You wouldn't want to see your precious museum closed, would you? Then all the knowledge would be left to those who know what to do with it. Men like us. The less people know, the better off they are.”

“The better off you are, you mean.” Knowledge is a threat. Lewis is a threat. It isn't the first time Thomas has mentioned closing the museum. There was even a motion to do so last month during a city council meeting—so that the space might be occupied, its many treasures repurposed—but it was struck down.

Thomas says, “You are deeply unpleasant, you know that?”

“Closing the museum is an empty threat. People would riot. It's one of their only pleasures.”

“It's a shadowy junk pile, a haunted house. You're the only one who takes pleasure in it.” Thomas is smiling, but he clenches his jaw as if to keep himself from swallowing something bitter. “What about your mother?”

“What about her?”

“I would hate it if something had to happen to your mother.”

“Be quiet.”

“Death might actually be a favor. It's not as if she knows whether—”

“I said, shut up!” With that Lewis kicks the tray and it splashes into the bath and the grubs dirty the water and a small wave rolls into Thomas.

The two men stare at each other for a long moment, and then Thomas's severe expression breaks and a bright laughter overtakes him. The water ripples around him. “You know what I love about you? I can always count on you to speak your mind. That's what I love about you.” He climbs out of the bath and water trails off his body and makes a silvery path on the stone floor. He pulls a towel off a shelf and wipes himself dry. He is a short man, the top of his head coming to Lewis's shoulder. Though he is lean, he is also soft, cushioned, not a bone on his body visible. “You've heard about the rider?”

“I have.”

“A girl. Amazing. They say her eyes are as black as night.”

“So they say.”

“She's a mutant. She's poison. And when everyone hears about her—when they begin to dream about other worlds and doubt the wall—what then?”

“It has nothing to do with
doubting the wall
. This is what we've been waiting for. This is why the Sanctuary has survived. Hope.”

“You're wrong. The Sanctuary has survived by keeping people afraid.”

“You're worried they'll leave. Maybe they will. Shouldn't that be their choice?”

“We're talking about the survival of the human race. Forty thousand people. I am responsible for them.”

“The rider proves there are others. Maybe your responsibility isn't so great after all.”

Thomas throws the towel over his shoulder and goes to a window and looks out it and heaves a sigh. Lewis joins him there. From this high vantage, in the center of the Sanctuary, so much of the city can be seen, the topography of streets and buildings arranged around the Dome as if they have begun to orbit around a drain.

Thomas lays a damp hand on Lewis's shoulder and says, “Something bad has been coming for a long time, old friend, and I'm worried it's finally here.”

O
UTSIDE THE HOSPITAL
a crowd gathers. Their low muttering is like the thrum of a hundred wasps' wings. Their hats shadow their faces and their expressions twist through a range of emotions—dread, hope, disbelief, curiosity—refusing to settle on a single one. They want to know if the rumors are true. They want to know if a rider has come out of the Dead Lands.

“Is she sick? What if she's sick? They shouldn't have let her in.”

“Someone said her eyes were black. Like a doll's eyes.”

“They shouldn't have let her in.”

“You know what this means, of course? This means there are others out there. We're not alone after all.”

“Wherever she came from, it must be worse off than here. Otherwise, why would she leave it? Maybe she's the first of many. People looking for help when we don't have help to give. This is the beginning of some trouble; I can feel it. They shouldn't have let her in.”

Far from all these voices, deep within the hospital, in a stone room with no windows, she sits in a wooden chair. A lantern hangs from a chain and presses the shadows into the corners. Her face is hard-edged, sunbaked. She wears a doeskin vest and leggings, but no shoes, her feet as thick and gray soled as hooves. Her skin is deeply tanned, filthy except where her wounds have been dressed, the dirt and sweat and blood wiped away from her shoulder, her hand, her stomach, wrapped with cotton bandages. Her wrists remain bound. What looks like a white scarf is tied around her throat. A rose of blood blooms from it.

There is a scarred metal table before her. On it Clark sets a bowl of salted sunflower seeds and a mug filled with water murky and warm, but the girl doesn't seem to mind as she rushes it to her mouth and guzzles it down. Then she sputters and doubles over and brings her hands to her throat, to the place where the arrow pierced her. She does not emit a sound, gritting her jaw through the pain before righting herself and staring at Clark where she leans against the wall and then at Reed, who sits opposite her.

Clark demanded to be here. She berated Reed, calling him a fool, calling him reckless, calling him a failure. To allow
this
to happen. The arrival of this girl might be the most important thing that has ever happened to the Sanctuary, and he stands by with his mouth hanging open as his men pincushion her with arrows. Clark said she would speak to the girl and he conceded to her then just as he conceded to her in bed, letting her take the lead, telling him where to put what and how fast or slow to move.

Clark will take care of the questions. She will ask them kindly. She will try to make the girl forget about her injuries, and she will try to distract her from thinking about the fate that awaits her. Clark has no doubt that the mayor will isolate the girl, pervert the situation, use her to his advantage. There isn't much time.

The girl's eyes, black and empty, seem to look through them. Many in the Sanctuary are born with deformities—cleft lips, stunted legs, misshapen skulls—blamed on the radiation, the same as the cancer that afflicts so many. But Clark has never seen anything like this. The girl appears insectile, as if she were less than or more than human.

“She's not sick?” Reed says.

Clark says, “Of course she's not sick. No one's sick anymore. That's all in the past. You know damn well that's just a ghost story meant to keep people afraid.”

“Maybe so, but still, I'm asking. You're not sick, are you?” He asks this with the half-joking, half-worried tone of someone who says, “You're not going to kill me, are you?”

The girl shakes her head,
no
. She cannot speak. Her injured throat makes even breathing difficult.

They lay a sheet of paper and pen before her. She makes no move to pick it up. “Please,” Clark says. “I'm sorry about what happened to you. I'm sorry you're hurt. Not everyone here is a friend. But I am. And if I'm going to help you, I need to understand why you're here.”

There is a long pause—punctuated by another
please
from Clark—and then the girl slowly and clumsily picks up the pen. She can write. Not very well and not very fast, maybe because her dominant hand is injured or maybe because she is unpracticed. Literacy is never a given in this time. Her writing looks like a bird's scratching, and her eyelashes, bleached from the sun, like little feathers.

Clark asks for her name and she writes,
Gawea.
Clark asks how far she has come and she writes,
Far.
Clark asks where she has come from and she writes,
Oshen.

Reed says, “Impossible.”

Clark shushes him and then asks the girl where, what part of the ocean, and she writes,
Oregon.

Reed shifts in his chair, wanting to say something but holding back.

Clark speaks, with hopefulness rounding her voice, “Describe it.”

Her pen scratches paper.
Fish. Lots of rane. Grene gras. Apals. Blakbary. Mowntins.

This is enough to silence them for a long time, the thought of a place where clouds share the sky with the sun, where rain falls every week and fills rivers and lakes darting with trout. The trees weighed down with apples red, green, and gold. Corncobs growing to the size of a man's forearm. The woods tangled with blackberries, their juices and your blood oozing together as you fill a bucket and gladly risk the threat of thorns.

The girl's eyes might be alien and remote, but her face is earnest and pleading. She
believes
in what she is telling them, and that makes Clark want to believe too. It is as if, like some seer, the girl has sketched to life a dream she thought was hers alone.

Help me
, she writes.

Reed has not washed up or changed out of his ranging gear. His hat is in his lap and his face looks like the cracked remains of a mud puddle. When he leans forward, laying his hands flat on the table, his leather vest creaks. Normally his posture is straight, but this afternoon his body appears bowed, the shape of a question mark. At moments like this Clark can't help but consider him weak. He should be taking orders;
she
should be in charge. His voice is hushed when he says, “How can we help you? Why are you here?”

Sent.

“By whom?”

Burr.

Reed says, “Who is Burr?” at the same moment Clark says, “Why were you sent here?”

The girl's attention flits between them, then settles on Clark.
Brot letter. Letter tels yu.

“Letter?” Reed says over the top of Clark saying, “What letter? We searched your horse—there was no letter.”

Letter for—

At that moment the door crashes open and the sheriff, Rickett Slade, fills the doorway, and then the room, the space seeming smaller. He moves swiftly for such a big man. He does not pause to acknowledge any of them but stalks directly to the girl and pouches a hand behind her head and slams her face into the table and knocks her unconscious.

Slade breathes fiercely through his nose. Clark can never tell where his eyes are looking, pocketed as they are into his face, but he seems to regard them both at once. “I will take it from here,” he says. “You are excused.”

“On whose authority?” Clark says.

Slade says, “Your girl has a mouth on her, doesn't she?”

Before Reed can respond, Clark says, “I said, on whose authority?”

“As always, I speak for the mayor.”

Heavy brown curtains choke away all but a cool white line of moonlight running down their middle. There are no paintings on the walls, no decorations on the bureau except for a single short candle sputtering on an iron tray, illuminating this room in the upper stories of the museum. There are, in abundance, books. Some yawning open. Some closed with a ribbon or feather marking his place. Stacked along the walls, piled and tiered across the floor, like their own kind of furniture.

Lewis stands between the room's two narrow beds, his own empty, the other occupied by a woman. Her body is so slight it barely dents the blanket that covers her, tucked all the way to her chin. Her downy white hair twists across her pillow like the silk from a split milkweed pod, and Lewis runs a comb through it now. His movements are delicate, with first the comb, then his fingers, as he untangles the snarls, neatens her hair into a white halo that surrounds her ruined face.

His mother suffered a stroke three years ago, and since then, he has cared for her as she once cared for him. He was so often sick as a child—wracked by fevers that sweated into his mattress the imprint of his body—and many of his memories are of her hovering over him in the dark, laying a cool washcloth on his forehead, humming lullabies.

Now the left side of her face appears melted. She sometimes yammers at him, as if reciting some foreign alphabet, but mostly she remains still and silent, propped up in a chair, curled up in bed, sleeping with one eye closed, the other half-shuttered.

He sets down the comb on the night table between their beds and picks up the vial from Oman and uses a dropper to squirt some of the tincture into her mouth. It is meant to increase brain activity, speed recovery. Whether it works, he does not know and does not particularly care, as long as he is doing something for her. She smacks her mouth at its bitterness and regards him with her one good eye. He gives her a pained smile.

The owl, too, sits on the bedside table like a little brass clock. When Lewis sets down the dropper, he notices beside it a letter. It is sealed with a red circle of wax that bears the imprint of what looks like an eye.

“What's this?” he says and tears open the letter. He holds it before a candle whose flame trembles like his hand as he reads.

The entry to the museum is a fanned set of stone stairs. Lewis rushes down them with the letter in his hand and then secreted up his sleeve. He pauses for a moment on the sidewalk, listening to the small sounds of the city at night, the groaning of the wind turbines, before hurrying in the direction of the prison—where he knows the rider is being held—and where he does not plan to sign in with the guards or request permission to speak with their prisoner. In his gray duster he appears yet another shadow sliding along the street, and he has ways of making himself unseen, of distracting and then sliding past whoever might block his way.

He does not know what hour it is—he has trouble keeping track of time—but guesses it late, the streets empty. There are no lamps lit. The buildings are stark and silver-gray. Beyond them the black mass of the wall rises into the less-black sky, and above it hangs a half-moon, the shadowed side of it visible, but barely.

He has so many questions. He tries to keep them straight in his head, but they crawl all over each other and merge into a swarming mess like so many fire ants. It is because of his distracted state of mind that he does not notice the two men charging out of an alleyway until they are upon him.

The last thing he sees, before they drag a bag over his head and carry him bodily away, are the black sacks that shroud their faces.

It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust. At first he can see only blackness interrupted by the four torches flaring around the room—as if he is floating through some region of outer space lit by many competing suns—and then the room begins to take shape.

He knows he is underground, from the staircase they dragged him down, the steadily cooling air, and its sulfuric, mushroomy smell. The floor is crumbling concrete. Square stone pillars are staggered throughout the space, the basement of some store that must have once sold children's toys. There are heaps of rusted bicycles and baby strollers, a life-size clown with hair made of red yarn, moldy stuffed bears, shelving units full of video game consoles.

Among the stone columns stand a dozen or so bodies—whether men or women, he doesn't know. They surround him, he discovers when he spins in a circle, all of them wearing black sacks over their faces.

“Go ahead. What do you want?”

When one of them speaks, he can tell the voice is a put-on, roughened to sound deeper than it is. “What do you know about Oregon?”

He checks his sleeve to make sure the letter is still there. “Oregon.” Until now, he has never said the word aloud, though he has read it countless times on maps, in books, and only minutes before in the letter. He feels as if someone has reached into his head and stolen what preoccupies him. He tries to keep his voice as calm as possible, but still it quivers. “Why do you want to know about Oregon?”

“Do you know the way there?”

“I don't know,” he says. “I know maps. I know paper. But that's not the same as—”

“You want to leave this place, don't you, Meriwether?”

That voice. Husked over, but familiar. He stares at the black sack. Holes have been cut into it for the mouth and eyes. He wonders if he can recognize someone by the eyes alone. The figure retreats a step.

Lewis says, “What do you know about—”

“You want to. Who wouldn't want to? You've always dreamed about leaving this place. That's why you bury your face in books and maps. You like to imagine that there might be more to life than this. You aren't alone. We feel the same. We want you to take us beyond the wall. We want you to help us find the way to Oregon.”

“Absolutely not.”

“We need your help.”

“I am needed here.”

“We need you.”

“I am needed here.”

“By your mayor or your mother?”

“I am needed here.” He feels something rising inside him—boiling, spilling over. If it was a taste, it would be bile. If it had a color, it would be red. “Don't make me upset. I'm getting upset.”

The ceiling seems to lower and the stone pillars to crowd around him like bars. The masked figures sneak closer, knot around him. His breath is whistling through his bared teeth. He is blinking back tears. He imagines that beneath their clothes are bones, that they are a horde of skeletons beckoning him into an open grave.