He knows that the world has become a furnace. St. Louis was not hit by nukes, but the radiation sloshes through the air and soaks the ground and will linger for centuries, cesium 137 and strontium 90 serving as a different kind of vitamin for animals and insects. This is why wolves are hairless and spiders oversized. This is why some people are misshapen with tumors, born with withered limbs and milky, blind eyes and veins that seem to grow on the outside of their skin. And maybe—maybe—this is why he is the way he is. A mutant. Another example of the world moving on. But he is not alone. He has the girl now, Gawea. She did not call him a freak. She called him the next. They are the next.
They ride. Sometimes they gallop and sometimes they canter, but for half a day, they do not stop. They take to the roads when the roads permit, but more often the asphalt is buckled, riven. So they ride through yards and over collapsed fences. They dart through the dried maze of Forest Park. They follow ditches. They chase the shoulders of highways. Stalks of mullein thwap and stain the horses’ breasts yellow. Dried brush claws at their flanks. Sand and cinders kick up in clouds and muddy their eyelashes. They tie handkerchiefs around their mouths to breathe. In the sand, every hoofprint leaves a clear impression, their granular passage there for any to follow, on occasion zigzagging, but otherwise unfurling west. They cannot hope for rain, but with time the wind should chase away some of their tracks.
Already they have gone farther than Clark has been before. They do not speak. The wind whisks dust off branches and it falls through their translucent shadows. With every clopping step, the air seems to vibrate. At strange noises before and behind them they pause and pet their snorting horses and try to shush them so that they might listen better.
When Clark hesitates, reining her horse one way, then another, confused about their direction, the girl waves them forward and digs in her heels and takes the lead. Clark and Reed make eyes—a question crushed into their stare—and then follow her.
They leave behind the city, the suburbs, and break away from the freeway to follow the cracked clay of the Missouri River. Here, in a silver pocket of shade beneath a bridge, they finally pause for water. Their horses foam with sweat. Their legs tremble and jump. They aren’t breathing so much as heaving. Lewis feels as though he is riding even after he dismounts from Clark’s horse, the ground seeming to rock, as if he is in two worlds at once.
York guzzles at a canteen, and Clark twists her brother’s ear and drops him to his knees. “Only a taste, you idiot,” she says.
The dry riverbed looks like the passage of an enormous snake, the stones running along its bottom like shed scales. A gabled house sits on a bluff overlooking it. The windows are broken, but curtains still hang from them. Their tattered forms move with the wind, rising and falling, so that it looks like there might be bodies in there still breathing. In a way, this is their great gamble—that out here, in the Dead Lands, there is yet life.
Gawea sits in the shade with her hand pressed to her throat. The doctor approaches her, asking if she’s all right, asking to check her bandages, and though the girl tries to wave her off, she eventually relents to the doctor’s fussing. The doctor makes a tsk sound at the dust-caked wounds beneath and digs around in her satchel for cleansing alcohol and fresh dressing. And she hands out to the rest of them a dented can of ointment and tells them to smear it anywhere they feel blisters rising. “You need to tell me where it hurts,” she says. “I’ll take care of you.”
Lewis leans his weight on one leg, then the other. The insides of his thighs burn. The muscles at the small of his back have gathered into a fist. His center sloshes. He opens his silver tin and fills his fingernail twice, snorting and sneezing and shivering with fresh energy.
He does not complain—but his expression is plain for any to read—because Clark approaches him and speaks with the steady, placating voice you would use on an aggrieved child. “No whining.”
“I haven’t said a word.”
“This is only the beginning.”
“I understand that.”
“From now on, you ride your own horse.”
“But I don’t—”
“Come here.”
She seizes the reins of the roan he earlier had not been able to mount, and she leads it toward him. Its sweat smells of sweet, scorched paper. Black jelly runs from one of its eyes. Its mane is clumped and wet, its coat spotted with burrs. It breathes with an asthmatic wheeze. “Why did you give me this horse?” he says. “It’s obviously a terrible horse.”
“It’s a fine horse. But it’s our oldest. And tamest. Tame seems to suit you.”
Clark digs into a satchel and scoops out a handful of dried corn. She indicates that Lewis should take it from her, and he does, with two hands brought together to make a bowl. The horse sniffs. Its lips curl back to reveal teeth that look more like broken shells. Its long pink tongue, filmed over white, works every last crumb from his hands.
When it finishes, it raises its muzzle to sniff him. He raises a hand, too fast, and it flinches. He says, “Sorry, sorry.” This time he draws his hand slowly toward its neck, and the horse lets him. There is hair and there is skin and there is muscle, not a trace of cushioning fat. The neck ripples under his hand.
“Does he have a name?”
“He’s a she,” Clark says. “We call her Donkey.”
Minutes later, when they straddle their horses and chase their shadows west, Lewis falls immediately to the rear of the company and chokes on the dust they kick up.
They ride on—into what was once a pasture or a field, now a flat stretch of land remarkable only for the scalloped texture and pink color, a vast nothing. That is how he quantifies these sand flats and bone-dry canyons and skeletal forests and sunken-roofed towns—as nothing. All these years, all those books—he has built kingdoms in his skull. The world within him is full. The world without, empty.