The Dead Lands

“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.

 

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