The Dead Lands

The temperature drops steadily. They have come from the Sanctuary, where the holes rotted through the ozone layer created a land of perpetual summer, to the frozen plains, thick with ashen snow and thundering clouds. The seasons do not turn. The seasons have been imprisoned.

 

There was a time, in South Dakota, when they could still forage for nuts, blackberries, button mushrooms, bolete mushrooms, and now that time is over. At night Clark sets traps in the woods, and when she checks them in the morning, she finds them empty but spotted with blood, clumped with fur, the snow around them crushed flat. Something is stealing from her. She tries to study the tracks. Sometimes they are lost to the falling snow and sometimes there are many of them trailing off in different directions. She does not recognize them, big footed, with a long stride.

 

Sometimes they hear noises in the woods. What could be deep-throated laughter.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 30

 

 

 

THIS IS SIMON’S chance to prove himself to Ella. She thinks of him as her ward, a clumsy child. He will show her what he is capable of, his guts and prowess, by breaking into the Dome to deliver the letter and search for whatever Lewis wanted them to find.

 

He will go there at night, when only a few guards haunt the halls and he can whisper in and out without any trouble. He will fold the letter into Danica’s panties, they decide. Not her pillow. There it might be discovered by a servant or her husband. And not a gown hanging in the closet. There it might wait undiscovered for a month or more. “No,” Ella says, “only her panties will do. A good everyday pair. Faded, worn, maybe even holey.”

 

“Woman like that would never wear a pair of holey panties.”

 

“Every woman has a pair of holey panties. They’re her favorite panties.”

 

Simon is disturbed by the two letters, the very different realities they present. Lewis talks of water and Reed talks of death. When he brings this up to Ella, she dismisses the question. “Lewis doesn’t lie. And he loves to complain. So let’s trust in his version of things. There’s water out there. There’s hope. And one day, we’re going to leave this place and join him.”

 

We. She uses the word so often these days, as if they are one. He likes the way it sounds.

 

In the museum, in their room, the windows are dark and a candle burns on the bureau. The flame flutters and sends furtive shadows dancing when Simon holds out his arms and turns in a circle and asks, “Am I ready?”

 

He wears all brown, except for his cast, which earlier she painted black, so that he might better merge with the shadows. She scans his body, then buttons his back pocket so it won’t scrape or catch on anything. She tells him to jump up and down, and when he does, his pockets rattle with some coins and a small ivory carving of a heart he hands over to her. “That’s from one of the exhibits,” she says, and he says, “Sorry. I just wanted to keep it for a little while.”

 

He jumps again, this time without any noise except the patter of his bare feet.

 

Ella moves to give him a reassuring pat on the shoulder but it feels more like a punch. “Ready.”

 

 

 

First the letter, then whatever Lewis alluded to, some thing they might use to their advantage. He has no plan except to sneak room to room, to inventory every drawer and closet. Whatever he seeks, he will hopefully know it when he sees it.

 

The night is wrapped in many sheets of silence. There is the silence of the night sky—flecked with stars, a glossy granite black—an imposing, powerful silence that makes him feel like eyes might very well be watching his every move. There is the silence of the streets, where by day brooms scrape and people walk and cats scamper and carts rattle, a place so often bustling that its barrenness feels like a skull once wild with hair, like branches stripped of leaves by a winter wind, like death. And then there is the silence inside him—the calm he feels whenever he readies to sneak his hand into a pocket or scramble through an open window—every fiber in his body under his control, awaiting his command.

 

An iron fence, with bales of barbed wire along the top, surrounds the Dome. Simon patrols its perimeter and finds one deputy on watch. He smokes at the front gate, and when he breathes, a bright red eye seems to throb in the dark. Simon slips off his backpack and holds it in one hand. He has been here before and knows he is just thin enough, if he turns his head, to mash his body through the bars. It takes a little more effort this time, maybe because Ella’s cooking has rounded him out.

 

Once through, he pads to the edge of the building, scraping through the bushes that grow along it. The windowsills are spiked with metal and glass, to keep birds from nesting and people from climbing. He removes from his backpack a pair of leather gloves, one of them slit along the wrist to accommodate his cast. Though it is past midnight, the metal still throbs with the heat of the day. He can feel it when he curls his hands around the spikes and hoists himself up. He does so crookedly, his left arm mostly useless except to stabilize his body as he draws it upward.

 

The first floor is barred with iron, but not the next level, the living quarters, where the windows remain open through the day and night to accommodate a breeze. Over the years, he has studied these enough to know where there is movement, where there is light, where he needs to worry about running into someone once inside.

 

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