The Dead Lands

“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.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 47

 

 

 

FITTED 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.

 

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