The Dead Lands (31 page)

E
LLA LIES IN BED
all day with the curtains drawn, nothing but shadows to keep her company. She tries to empty her mind, but her tongue always finds the swollen cavity at the back of her mouth. Probing it reminds her of Slade, his oniony smell, his pitted cheeks and slitted eyes, when he leaned in to her, smashed her down, ripped out the tooth and held it aloft like a prize.

Lewis once called her belligerently confident. But now she feels so weak and small she wants to crawl in her own pocket and wither into lint.

Not even Simon can help. This morning, when she wouldn't get out of bed, he nudged her and she said, “Leave me alone.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes, leave me alone.”

He did, though she isn't sure she wanted him to.

So many hours later, her stomach feels flattened with hunger and her mind warped with loneliness. She ought to feel excited by the knock at her bedroom door, but it's an anxious excitement, wanting and not wanting to be bothered.

In response to the first knock, and the second, she says nothing. Simon cracks the door and light falls across her face and makes her flinch. He is carrying something toward her, setting it on the night table, food maybe. An offering. Without even knowing what it is, she feels both flattered and compelled to reject it.

Then he yanks the curtains and lets in the painful sunlight. She props herself up on an elbow and squints at him. He remains a bit breathless from his climb up the stairs. His thin chest flutters beneath his shirt. He is smiling idiotically. “I brought you something.”

“You mean you stole me something.”

“Same difference.”

She looks at the thing—a dented metal box with a handle and clasp—and says, “What is it?”

“Oh, right.” He fumbles with the clasp and swings open the top to reveal a dial and a turntable and an arm with a needle on it. “A portable record player!”

She plops her head back on her pillow and Simon's smile falls with her. “I thought it might cheer you up.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because it's a record player.” His mouth gapes and quivers a moment before he finds more words to fill it. “For your record.”

She puzzles up her forehead.

“The one you showed me. From your treasure box.”

“Dream box.”

“That's it.” He darts to the closet and digs around and retrieves the vinyl record in a brittle paper sleeve with Françoise Hardy scribbled across it. “I told you, my father used to have one of these.” He works the hand crank, grinding it in circles for a good thirty seconds. “That ought to do it.” Then he unsleeves the record and sets it two-handed on the turntable and drops the needle, and a rubbery scratch precedes the pop and syrup of the song. “This is called…” He studies the sleeve and shrugs and hands it to her.

Tous les garçons et les filles
, it reads. She does her best to pronounce it.

“What does that mean anyway?”

“I don't know, but it's nice.”

“It is nice.” He bobs his head dreamily along with the music. “Do you want to dance?”

“No.” She says it so quickly she must mean it.

“Come on. Can't lie in bed all day. We've got work to do, remember?”

“Then we don't have time to dance.”

“Just a quick one. Then we'll knock together our plan. Come on.”

“I don't know.”

“Won't take no for an answer.”

“I mean I don't know how.”

“It's easy. You just move your feet.” He holds out the hand with the cast still coating it—the very thing that brought him to her, that brought them together. “Here. I'll show you.”

Her hand is tucked under the pillow. She withdraws it now and hesitantly allows him to take it. He tugs her to her feet and they stand opposite each other with the husky, hurried voice of Françoise Hardy filling the silence between them.

Then Simon says, “What Slade said to you—he's wrong.”

She feels a jolt of pain and her tongue goes automatically to the wound. They haven't spoken of what happened. She wouldn't allow it. She knew he felt angry and disgusted and fearful—just as she did—but impotent, too. He had wanted to do something—she had seen him in the doorway with his pocketknife out and waved him away with a “No!” His knife, no bigger than a finger, would have pricked a man like Slade no more than a bee sting.

Now Simon puts one hand on her waist and holds out the other like an invitation she accepts. He pulls her one way, then another, and she allows him. Her feet feel clumsy, dragging a beat behind, but eventually they fall into a rocking rhythm.

“He was wrong about love, I mean. Love
is
stronger. Love is why we don't give up. Love is the reason we're alive at all.”

“We?”

“People, I mean.”

She wants to tell him to quit it already—she wants to drop her hands and plop back on the bed—but she doesn't.

He chatters on, saying, “There's a lot of love out there. There's the love a mother feels for her son, which is different than the love a son feels for a mother. There's the love for a dog. There's the love for a painting. There's the love for a warm rain. There's the love for a song like this one.”

She doesn't realize she's going to talk until she does. “There's love as infatuation and love that lasts into old age. There's angry love and pitying love.”

He nods and shuffles his footing before finding his way again.

She says, “What do you think is the best kind of love?”

He thinks for a time and then says, when he was a child, he woke in the night and came out of his room to see his parents dancing with their eyes closed, turning in small circles. They looked like one person. “That seems like the best kind, I guess.”

He clears his throat and she smiles and they continue to twirl around the room until the needle scratches off the record.

L
EWIS DREAMS
ABOUT
the ocean. The waves roll over black and foam red and rattle with bones. The seaweed is made of scalps and the hermit crabs have embedded themselves in skulls that scuttle across dunes. Burr's voice beckons him—but to what? To this? Is this the end that awaits him?

He wakes to the smell of woodsmoke. His eyes snap open, but they might as well remain closed, as it takes him a moment to make sense of what he sees, the ceiling of stone, veined with shadow and firelight, not so different from the underlids of his eyes. His head still pounds with fever. Every thought burns. Then he understands—he is in a cave. He can feel at once the coldness of the air and the heat of the fire beside him, but for the moment, he remains where he lies, dazed and studying the orange light playing across stone.

The cave wall is crowded with faces. Sketched with charcoal and painted with pigment. There are faces that smile and faces that frown. Faces with their mouths rounded in fear or surprise. They seem to move in the firelight. They are crude enough to be anyone and for a few minutes he imagines them as the faces left behind. His mother. Thomas. Clark. His world keeps shrinking, the company he keeps ever fewer. And where would his own face fit on this wall?

It is then he notices another face, bigger than the rest, with horns and pointed ears and forked beard and swirling eyes and a snake's tongue. A face the other faces feared or worshipped, a stranger or a monster to all.

He escapes his fever daze and recalls his circumstances, his last memory of collapsing in the snow, and rolls over.

Colter and Gawea sit huddled beside the fire. She is watching him. He feels unsettled by her gaze, owned by it. The darkness of it darker than he remembers, as if her eyes were black holes, matter with such force, such powerful gravity, not even light can escape them.

“You saved us?” he says.

“That's one way of looking at it.”

“What's the other?”

She shrugs.

Colter leans into the fire, his prosthetic arm extended. Its claw grips a cut of meat that cooks near the flames, the fat dripping into the coals with a sizzle.

Lewis feels a sudden hunger and wonders aloud how long he has been asleep.

“Can't say,” Colter says. “Been in and out myself.”

“Gawea? How long?”

“Days,” she says, her voice monotone. “Weeks. I don't know. Does it even matter?”

Lewis shares a look with Colter, who says, “Don't take it personally. She's being a real shit to me, too. I told her she should have left us to freeze and she gave me a look that didn't exactly reassure me.”

Gawea tosses Lewis a canteen, tells him to drink, and he does, deeply. She offers him meat next—a venison chop—and he thanks her.

There is a lidless, frightless intensity to her eyes. “Don't thank me.”

He doesn't know what to say to this, so he asks where the meat came from, and Colter tells the story about how, a few hours ago, a deer wanders into the cave, stands before her, then kneels and lays aside its neck for her to slit. He makes a knife of his hand, cuts the air. He pulls his own meat out of the fire, blows on it, says, “Why couldn't you stop those bears from attacking us, huh?”

Her voice is surprisingly sharp, almost a yell, beyond the emotional range they've seen in her for some time. “You think I didn't try? You think I wanted that to happen?”

They flinch as her voice echoes around the cave.

“I can only ask,” she says through her teeth. Her face grows still again, impassive. Her eyes, glossy black pools, reflect the fire. “I asked the deer. It answered.”

“You asked,” Lewis says. “And it trusted you. It followed you to slaughter.”

She gives him an almost imperceptible nod and then whispers, “Yes.”

It is soon after this—as they push farther through the mountains and the air begins to warm and the snow thins to gray tatters and green shoots spring from the muddy ground—that Lewis discovers the coffin-shaped box. Reed had the larger backpack, and after he shot himself, Lewis crushed together their supplies into one. There is a zippered interior pocket he has not noticed until this day, when he digs around for a needle and thread to sew a tear in the armpit of his long-sleeve.

The box is the length of his hand. He recognizes it as belonging to Reed. Something he held often, almost like a charm. His thumb flips the lock. The lid swings open. He leans closer to see what waits inside it. Nothing but a shadow, it first appears, but then he tips it toward the sun and sees the vial. A long glass tube. There is a black powdery substance inside, and when he tips it one way, then the other, the shadow comes to life. The label across it reads
Specimen: Live
Virus: H3L1
. He understands. The rest of the world blurs and the box seems suddenly to gain weight, to bend his arm.

He imagines the vial opened, the shadow within it escaping, its shape the shape of the wind, ribboning and clouding outward, filling the air around him like a thousand spores of rotten thistledown.

He claps shut the lid. His first impulse is to bury it, erase it. But something stills his hand. His role as a curator—one who preserves the past, both the awful and the regular—and the memory of the burned-down villages. The heads on sticks, the blackened bones unpuzzled in the snow. Whatever and whoever awaits him at the end of the trail. The lingering worry that humanity isn't worth saving after all and would be better off extinguished.

“What's the matter with you?” Colter says. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“Nothing,” Lewis says and hurries the box back into its secret pocket.

F
ITTED WITH BACKPACKS
and armed with compasses and clocks and lanterns, Simon and Ella work their way through the sewers. His goal has always been to escape the city as quickly as possible, so he has never gone this way before, down a branching series of tunnels with centuries-old muck scalloping their bottom. They are looking for the basement entry to the Dome, the one Danica told them about. “It was left open as an escape route,” she said.

Every minute or so they pause to listen. He wears a belt knife. Ella carries her baseball bat and keeps it constantly raised. Whenever a rat scuttles by or a spider drops on her shoulder, she swallows a scream. And because this is his opportunity to prove himself, to show Ella that he is capable and good on his word as a thief, he pretends himself unafraid, puffing his chest and crushing spiders with his palm and telling her not to worry.

Danica told them to wait until late night, early morning, when everyone slept soundly. That would be safest. Some of the ladders lead to manholes and some to grates, but in the full dark, it is difficult to tell if they are cemented over unless Simon climbs up to them. He loses track of how many he tries until he finds what he believes to be the correct entry, a grate that opens into a dark room.

“I think this is it.”

“You think?” Ella says. “What do you mean,
you think
?”

He cracked his cast off that day. It fell away like a shell and he did not recognize the arm within, the stick thinness of it. The skin was yellowish and scraped away beneath his fingernail. His tendons and muscles ache from lack of use and he finds it difficult to hold the lantern now while pushing up the grate with the other arm. The metal scuds across cement. He climbs up and knobs out a longer wick and a room solidifies around him.

“Hmm,” he says.

From below, her voice, “Hmm? What does that mean?”

“I don't think we're where we're supposed to be.”

There is a chair—that is the first thing he notices—a metal chair with straps dangling from each of its arms. He swings the lantern around him and knocks a chain that jangles and sways. A hook curls the bottom of it. There is a table along the wall and above it a wall of knives and barbed metal instruments he does not recognize.

Then there are the mannequins. With hair and jewelry and whatever else glued to them, they appear like some demented child's attempt to cobble together a person.

He feels breath against his neck and flinches. Ella comes up behind him with her lantern burning in her hand. “Where are we?” she says at a whisper.

“Not the Dome.”

They circle the room, working their way through the dummies but not touching them, as if they were strangers asleep. There is a bed against the wall. The blanket is thrown back and Simon puts a hand to the pillow and finds it cold. “Whoever lives here hasn't been home tonight.”

“Why wouldn't he be home? With the curfew, where else could he be?”

“Doing something creepy is my guess.”

Ella stands before a two-doored closet that takes up most of a wall. They each grab a knob. He steadies his breath and his eyes drop momentarily to his lantern. Because of this, he cannot see as well as he could, his vision smeared with light, so that when they swing open the doors, he believes in the monster. The monster in the closet is real.

It swings out at them, a dark shape, a twisting bunch of shadows. He sees then the hanger that holds it in place, the hollowed arms and legs with leather straps and metal buckles. A deputy's uniform. As massive as a tent.

He runs his fingers along the fabric, and something pricks the pad of his finger. A drop of blood swells and he brings it to his mouth to suck. It tastes like the air of this room, like the air of the morgue. He remembers the pallid face of his mother laid out on a slab. He remembers his father there, too. He remembers the breath of Ella when she sobbed and he clutched her after the tooth ripped from her mouth. He remembers the rage he felt then, and now, when he says, “Slade.”