The Dead Lands

 

Wherever they stay the night, they raid the area for supplies. One time, inside a steel-roofed log home, they find a table still set for dinner and pajamas laid out on the beds, but no bodies anywhere, as though the people who once lived there dissolved into dust. Another time, they find a television in the corner of the living room, the glass knocked from it, the electronic guts ripped out and replaced by dolls and action figures arranged in a still life. Clark stares at it for a long while, as if expecting them to animate and entertain her, but they remain still, entombed in their dark box, and she can’t help but think maybe this is the world, no matter where or how far they ride.

 

“I thought we would have found something by now,” Reed says and kicks the television, and a few of the dolls fall over.

 

“Like what?” Clark says.

 

“Something better.”

 

She reaches into the broken television and rearranges the fallen figures. “We’ll find it.”

 

“Will we?”

 

“I don’t want to hear questions like that. Neither does anybody else. Okay? We need hope right now, not doubt.”

 

There is a cocoon of soiled blankets on the floor and the back porch is full of garbage—canned food and cereal boxes with their tops torn open. Lewis asks, “Does someone live here?” and Clark says, “I don’t see how that’s possible,” but then they find a plastic mop bucket splattered with shit that still smells and they go silent for a long minute before Lewis asks if they should press on and stay somewhere else. But they have already unsaddled and brushed down their horses, and the sun has set, and the night is so monstrously dark, its star-sprinkled blackness absent of any moon.

 

They sleep instead in the cavernous pole barn, which stinks of hydraulic oil, and Clark volunteers to take the first watch. She pinches her thigh, slaps her cheek lightly, takes deep breaths, but their days are so long and she can’t keep from falling asleep. She wakes hours later. The moon has risen and its light streams in the window and gives the floor a glow, as if a sheet of fog lowered while they slept. She studies the space around her. A snowmobile with a tarp thrown over it, a four-wheeler with sunken tires still caked with mud, a Farmall tractor, a manure spreader, a planter, a combine the size of a dragon, and finally a grain truck with tires as tall as she.

 

She knows something must have woken her and she listens to the breathing all around her until she discerns a noise different from the rest, a damp smacking, like a foot working its way out of mud. She unholsters her revolver and approaches the barn door and cracks it open and finds one of their horses dead and a bent-backed wild-haired figure lowered over it, ripping into it, feasting. She fires at him, once, twice, three times, until Reed grabs her and says, “Enough. He’s dead.”

 

He lies on his back, staring at the sky. The man who arranged toys in a dead television is the same man driven wild enough by hunger to bring down a horse. His hair is dreaded with grime and his beard clotted with blood, making him look more beast than man. But underneath all that, he is just like them. She wonders how far away they all are from crossing that line.

 

They were on alert when they first departed the Sanctuary, glancing constantly over their shoulders, keeping their fires small at night, sending the owl into the sky to track what lies before and behind them, but they have grown lazy in their habits. Tonight they slept deeply and foolishly and encountered their first realized danger. And it is her fault. She should have stayed awake. She should have taken better care of them—she is responsible for them—and instead of a horse next time it might be her brother.

 

They bleed the horse and bottle the blood. They butcher the carcass and cook and salt the meat and ride away from the farm in an arrowhead formation, with Gawea at the point. The air is so hot and brittle, it seems, with every breath, they risk the danger of shattering. The sun rises behind them and their shadows lead the way west, one fewer than before.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 11

 

 

 

EVERYONE CALLS IT the news. The windowless wall, several stories high, next to each of the Sanctuary’s wells. It is the obligation of every citizen to check the news daily. Whatever they need to know—about an execution, rationing, construction, whatever—is painted there, over a whitewashed background, in giant dripping black letters. For those who can’t read, a town crier wanders the streets at dawn, noon, sundown, to shout the same.

 

Ella stands in a long line with an empty jug. So long that she reads the news a dozen times or more. NEW CURFEW. HOME BY NIGHTFALL. ENFORCED.

 

With no explanation as to why. There never is. Why is irrelevant, Ella knows, to the servant. Why shine shoes, why wash windows, why sweep floors or polish silver or wind clocks? Because someone more powerful than you demands it, and if they tell you to eat shit or crawl on all fours like a dog, you’ll do that too. Because if you don’t, they can hurt you or take away what’s most precious to you, food, water, home, family.

 

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