The Dead Lands (17 page)

He feels a heat first mistaken for the fire crackling behind him. But this comes from inside him. His chest feels tornadic, a blistering wind caught behind his ribs. He swells with it until he knows he must find an outlet or else incinerate. Embers swirl at the edge of his vision. There is no stopping it this time.

The doctor's face creases. She takes several steps back, telling Lewis to settle down, holding out her hands as if to block something hurled at her.

He feels too full, as if his skin might break and release a flood of energy, and he knows where to release it, recognizes the gaping emptiness inside Clark that must be filled. He reaches into the doctor's satchel and removes a scalpel. With it he traces his wrist—and then rips into it.

He holds his arm over Clark's. His blood puddles onto her. And then, slowly, it begins to siphon into her wound, the gash trembling at the edges like a grateful mouth. He feels separate from himself when he presses their wrists together. It is a compulsive act, as when the proboscis of a butterfly sinks into a flower. Their bodies know what to do. She draws the blood into her, sucking, sucking, until he feels the last corner of his body emptying. His eyes are closed. He may hear screaming.

At last he pulls away from her and discovers the others standing around them, watching him with fear and revulsion, except for Gawea. She steps forward. “Burr was right,” she says. “You are like me.”

Clark stirs. Her skin has gone from pale to a flushed pink. Her back arches. Her stomach heaves. She turns her head and something hot surges up her throat, escaping her with an oily black splatter. A fly lands at its edge to taste of it—and immediately expires.

Her eyes tremble open just as his fall shut.

G
AWEA IS DIFFERENT
. She has always known she was different, like a baby raised among wolves, and this difference came with a lifelong sense of separation, loneliness. Loneliness is what she knows best. She was born into it.

After the men swept a knife across her father's throat and smashed his face into the snow, after the men dragged her mother and midwife into the night and through the whirling storm, after dawn came and revealed the snow-swept ruins of the village, Gawea remained alone in the bed she was born in, alternately squalling and sleeping.

Her cries eventually brought her
oma
. She was injured, her gray hair clotted at the temple where the men had struck her twice. But when she shrank into a corner, they left her there, so old she must have already looked dead enough to them.

Oma stood over the bed, where Gawea rested in a nest of blankets, and wept. She cried for the village, much of it burned to ashes, and she cried for her daughter, dead or kidnapped, and she cried for this grandchild of hers, born with a pair of eyes that matched the night-black world.

Deformities are normal. Some are born with extra fingers and toes, others with diminutive limbs, crooked spines, birthmarks brightly staining their faces. In their village, a child was born without any mouth, only a slitted nose, and without any genitals, just a fleshy mound where there might have been a cleft or shaft. Another child, a boy with gigantism, was cut from his mother's belly after only seven months, because they worried his kicks might shatter her ribs. He was born as big as a toddler. He lived and grew to be twice as tall as any man in the village, with a shelf of a forehead and spiked, uneven shoulders, but died before he was twenty. Some say his heart couldn't keep up with all that body. And then there was Denver, more than a hundred miles away, nicknamed the Goblin City. A warhead detonated there, mangling the downtown and opening up a crater so big it appeared half the city had been scooped by a giant shovel. The buildings glowed at night, some said, as did the people, all of them with skin like melted wax and hair that grew in patches, their mouths hissing a language no one understood but them.

Gawea was a kind of goblin. When she was two and did not want to go to bed, Oma told her, the lantern shattered and licked the floor with a tongue of fire. When she was three, she could whistle and call a bird fluttering from a branch to her shoulder. When she was four, she began to work in their garden and the vegetables grew oversize and the flowers remained in bloom through the fall. When she was five and wandered away from the cabin alone, Oma spanked her and woke up the next morning covered with hundreds of spider bites.

Oma read stories to her, played games with her, taught her how to sew and knit and cook, how to gut a fish, butcher an elk, and though Gawea could talk—in a tiny, calm voice—she never asked questions, only gave answers. Sometimes it seemed she had another way of communicating with the world, plugged in to a connection unavailable to the rest of them. And more than once Oma found herself fetching a cup of water that Gawea reached for eagerly, though she never asked for it.

Oma kept a picture of her daughter, Juliana, a charcoal sketch, the frame stained darkly along the right side from all the time she spent holding it in her hand. Sometimes she and Gawea went hunting. Not for deer or elk or bear, but for information. About the men who had come in the night. They found other villages scorched and riddled with bones. Sometimes dried-out corpses hung from trees like cocoons, and sometimes spears bristled the ground, their tips topped by skulls. They found survivors, mostly old men and women, who told them about a long parade of wheeled cages crammed with men and women and children.

“Which way did they go?”

“That way,” the old man said, pointing north. “Or maybe that way.” West.

“Thank you,” Oma said, and the old man said, “I wouldn't go that way. I'd stay as far away as you can from there. There's a darkness rising.”

Then Oma died. Her glands swelled—in her armpits, below her jaw—into lumps, what they knew must be cancer. She became feverish. Her sweat smelled like sulfur. She lost her appetite and slept most of the day and thinned to a skeleton with loose, papery skin. After Gawea buried her in the backyard, she remained by the hump of dirt for hours, and the sky steadily filled with shrieking birds. The birds always listened.

There was nothing for her here. Her sense of aloneness was so complete, so consuming, that the rest of the world blurred away, and there was only her mother's face sketched in charcoal. Her
oma
believed her alive. So did Gawea. She was sad and scared, but Oma taught her what she needed to know to live, and she was fourteen now, not a woman but the beginning of one.

She hiked across Colorado and into Utah and in her pack she carried the sketch. When she smelled smoke, when she happened upon trails that carried footprints and wheel ruts, when she spotted lamplight flaring through the woods, she watched for a long time before she approached. Sometimes people fired arrows or threw rocks at her. And sometimes they talked, though none seemed eager to offer much of themselves to the black-eyed girl.

Many told stories about the slavers, about the wagon trains driven west, about the drumbeats they sometimes heard that took over their pulse and made them fear the night and what it might bring.

The high-walled valley was a bowl of fissured clay, empty of anything except a single boulder deposited there by a glacier. The boulder was pocked and red and round, its own tiny planet. She rested in the shade of it. The day was so hot her lungs felt scalded. She was in Utah, near Salt Lake City, or so she believed from studying her map. She snacked on beef jerky, smoked fish. She drank from her canteen, then spared a few drops to make mud on her palm to spread on her sunburn. She took off her hat and fanned her face and gave up when she felt no relief.

She curled up, hoping to sleep, to hike again after the sun set. So she did not notice, a long way off, near the neck of the valley, a ribbon of dust dirtying the sky, kicked up by a caravan of oxen and carts. Nor did she notice the trembling in the ground. Their slow progress matched the sun—it was as if they were pacing each other—both of them rolling along for the next hour, the sun centering the sky just as the first of the carts heaved to a stop beside the boulder.

It was too late to hide.

The nightmare parade consisted of twenty cages, some built from wood and barbed wire, many of them repurposed truck beds with cages welded over the top, each dragged by two rib-slatted horses or oxen that foamed with sweat and bled at the yokes. The wheels of their caravan cut deep furrows in the clay. Men and women and children peeked out of the cages. Their lips were cracked and bleeding. Those with white faces were a mess of peeling, reddened skin. A few muttered and sobbed, but most observed her silently.

The boulder offered the only shade in the valley, and burrowed beneath rested a jeweled nest of lizards and snakes. One of them rattled its tail now, and the rest joined in, making a sound like a storm of gravel.

The man in the lead cart wore cracked sunglasses and a round-brimmed hat with what looked like a bite taken out of it. His beard had a white streak waterfalling down its middle. “Well, well.”

The rattling faded, snake by snake.

He dropped down stiffly from his perch. His boots shattered the crisp patina and a dust cloud rose and breezed away. He jerked a knife from his belt and stepped toward her, ready for trouble. She trembled. Cast down her eyes.

“She alone?” said one of the other drivers.

“Looks it.”

The man smelled unwashed, and she breathed in the thick, oily flavor of him. She wanted to run, but this was what she had been looking for—wasn't it? By finding them she might find her mother. The man nudged up her chin—and it was only then that he noticed her eyes, black and empty, watching him. He took a step back.

“What?” the other driver asked.

“Something wrong with her.”

“Not so wrong. Throw her in.”

He hesitated only a second before grabbing her by the hair and dragging her to the bed of a Toyota. He unlocked the tailgate and forced her inside. Bars reached over the truck bed like a metal rib cage with a threadbare tarp thrown over for shade. It snapped in the wind and a triangle of sunlight flashed the ten people huddled there. Some of the men and women didn't move, slack faced and staring into a middle distance available only to them. Others tried to comfort her, telling her, “It's all right, dear,” though they pulled away hesitantly when they noticed her eyes. One of them pressed a baby to a flattened breast.

The man dug through her pack. He tossed aside what he didn't want. In his hand was the picture of her mother, the framed charcoal sketch. He studied her mother's face a moment before letting the wind carry her away.

Soon the caravan groaned forward again, the wheels cutting through the baked skin of the valley floor, hushing the sand beneath. They continued through the day, into the night, and they entered a rockier territory. The truck bed tipped one way, then the other, knocking them about. There was a jug of water that sloshed violently. Now and then they drank from it, everyone saying, take care, take care, who knows when they'll refresh it. Gawea took three little sips before the jug was yanked from her.

Some of the men and women were bone thin, and some were heavy, with arms that slopped and folded over each other many times. All of them were dust smeared. Mostly they huddled in stunned silence, but occasionally they wondered aloud where they would be taken, what would happen to them. “I heard about them,” the woman with the baby said. “Heard they were coming. Man came through and warned us. Said he had seen one of their hives with his own two eyes. That's what he called it. Not a city, not a town. But a hive. As if they weren't people, not in the standard sense, not with hearts and minds. Just a bunch of bugs with pinchers and stingers.”

A skeletal man with a broken nose was nodding when she spoke. When she finished, he said he had heard stories too. About men on horseback with whips looped at their belts and rifles holstered at their sides overseeing slaves as they felled trees, graded roads, dug irrigation canals, raised barns, built fences. They were building something, trying to put the world back together again, and treating people like the tools to make it happen. “That's us. That's what we're going to be to them.”

“Not me,” a heavy woman with a red face said. “I'm nobody's tool.”

“I guess we'll see about that.”

They kept on with their talking and Gawea found her eyes drawn to the cratered face of the moon and the stars that pricked the sky. She got lost in their depths, as if falling into a pond full of quartz. Somehow, despite their lurching passage, they all eventually drifted to sleep.

The next morning the baby did not wake. The mother wailed for half the day before going quiet. Gawea watched her clutch the baby and felt a renewed hollowness, an inversion of her own pain in the mother's.

A week later, the air changed. She could smell the water from a long way off. The mineral sharpness of it, like the tears of a stone. Where before there was no road, they now followed the pocked and rutted tracks of others, a narrow chute between two ridges. When they passed through the other side of it, big pines clustered, their cones crunching underfoot, their branches scraping metal. The shade pooled. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Through the pine needles the sunlight filtered green. The men and women, who said nothing for days, now pressed their faces against the bars and chirped with excitement at the green bunches of bear grass, the red splash of Indian paintbrush. The sun, which had pressed down on them for so long, now felt worlds away.

Then the pine resin and sage gave way to the smell of smoke. Cooked meat. Their smiles flattened. They passed a dented green sign whose white lettering read,
ASHTON, POPULATION 10,272
. Once there was an asphalt road here—buckled and broken and made impassable—but the mess of it had been cleared away into a cinder grade.

They passed a white steepled church, a blacksmith, a mercantile, all of them newly constructed, freshly painted. The trees opened up, making room for the sun. A garden, planted with rows of lettuce and carrots and onions and potatoes, reached a square acre. A man sat on a horse beside it. A rifle rested across his lap. Below him ten boys and four girls leaned on hoes, watching them pass with the same blank expression as the cattle that crowded up against the fence of a slatted pen.

The carts rolled past a man at a pump, jacking the metal arm of it, splashing full a bucket. He shaded his eyes to watch them pass. And here was the open garage of what was once a mechanic, now a carpentry shop. A man stood between two sawhorses and carved a tool along a length of wood, dirtying the floor with yellow shavings, making what appeared to be a door. A boy with a broom swept up the mess, his ankles chained loosely.

In the center of town was a park and through the park purled a river. The spring-fed water ran clear except where it made a white collar along a broad shoal built from melon-size stones. Several women crouched in the water, the water foaming with soap. With brushes, they scrubbed at laundry before hanging it from wooden racks to dry upon the shore. Their ankles were chained too.

The caravan pulled into the roundabout of an old yellow-bricked elementary school, and there he was, waiting for them on the front step—a thin man, bald and goosenecked, with a notebook and pen. He was smiling wanly. He, with the help of the drivers, unloaded every cage and examined every slave. That's what they were now, slaves. The heavy woman tried to pull away and got kicked to the ground and beaten with a cudgel. A boy cried and one of the drivers cuffed him in the ear and he cried all the louder.

The thin man did not answer questions, but he asked them. “Have you had any illnesses? Have you had any children? Do you know any trades? Do you know how to cook? Do you know how to sew? Do you know how to garden?” And he commanded: “Open your mouth. Take off your clothes. Hold out your arms. Turn around in a circle.”