The Dead Lands

REED’S EYES FOCUS on nothing. He won’t speak unless pressed, responding yes or no with the barest whisper. He whimpers when dreaming. He waves people away when they come near. His eyes, when closed, look as black as shadows, as if two holes have been bored into his head—and when open they are no less disturbing, threaded with capillaries. His skin is pale, so sunken and drawn against his skull it appears to have given way to bone. He often reaches a hand into his pack to fondle the tiny coffin he keeps nested there.

 

One day they find him with a knife in one hand and his braid in the other, the long black coil of it sawed roughly from his head, twined around his knuckles. Clark says, “Why would you do that?” and shakes her head sadly.

 

She must feel some sympathy for him. Every now and then she places a hand on his shoulder, reminds him to drink, to eat. But a part of her—he can feel it—wishes he would die. He is an emotional liability, a smear of human waste. He should die. But really, they should all die. They’re going to die. He can taste it like ashes on his tongue.

 

*

 

 

 

The treetops—some pine, mostly ash and oak—cut through the low-sailing clouds. The air is so cold it hurts to breathe, as if their lungs are crystallizing and might shatter. Their faces and hands are a raw red, windburned. Their lips crack. So do their knuckles. They can never get warm, not fully, as if their very marrow has hardened into a chalky freeze. “Are you sure this is the way?” they ask Gawea, and she says, “This is the way.”

 

They allow Colter to walk and to sleep without restraints. The world is his prison. He will die if he departs them, and he will die if he attacks them, and everyone seems resigned to this. He stops trying to convince them he’s on their side, understanding they need time. He plods along with his head down, occasionally reaching for the place where his arm used to be as if to scratch it.

 

Whatever hurled the deer on their fire, whatever steals the food from their traps, is following them. In a shed Clark discovers an old trap, big enough to look like the jaws of some mechanical beast. One day, when they have settled on a place to camp, she heats the trap in the coals of the fire and limbers the gears, works free the rust. Then she hikes into the woods and buries it in the snow a few feet from a wire trap, in the open space between two trees, the most likely hallway in this tangle of bushes. She drives the spike deep into the ground.

 

That night, they add more and more wood to the fire, building up the flames to their standing height, and they turn their backs to it to preserve their vision and face the forest. The heat thrown by the fire is so tremendous that sometimes their skin feels as though it might split and peel, but they dare take only so many steps away from it, the black perimeter of the night as solid and forbidding as a wall.

 

Colter asks for a rifle, and they give him a club. They keep their hands out of gloves, despite the cold, so that their fingers might be free to pull the trigger, snatch a knife. Their breath ghosts from them. They see eyes glowing like twin candle flames. They see shapes, sometimes low to the ground, sometimes standing upright. They hear broken branches, crunching footsteps, growling and huffing. And, at one point late in the night, a high-pitched cry—an animal unmistakably in pain.

 

They assign a watch in two-hour shifts—while the rest try to sleep, huddling together for warmth. Gawea cozies next to York and pulls his arms around her like a coat.

 

The next morning Clark works her way through the woods, following her old footsteps between the ice-frosted trees. The sun is only a hazy light seen through the clouds, like a candle buried in cotton. She clicks off the safety on her rifle when she nears the trap.

 

The wind rises and briefly lifts the branches like so many skeletal arms beckoning her forward. Through the bushes, she sees blood on snow and an uncertain shape caught in the trap. She picks it up. The chain rattles and clanks.

 

It is two times the size of her hand—white furred and black padded and yellow clawed—severed at the joint, torn or chewed off.

 

*

 

 

 

Reed has no words for the others and they have few for him except to occasionally ask how is he feeling, how is he holding up? He does not respond except to stare back the way they came, at the long dark channel crushed into the snow, reaching off into the distance, his link to the Sanctuary.

 

He longs for the time when he mattered, the place where he mattered. He cannot understand what compelled him to leave. There was his opposition to the mayor, his gnawing worry that his dalliance with Danica would be discovered, and his belief that they had to leave behind the Sanctuary to survive. But all those feelings have turned to dust. And all his memories seem like happy ones, lit with a sunset glow. He remembers the thousands of faces that cherished him. He remembers the wind lifting dust from the streets and rooftops like banners. He remembers the chiming progress of jingle carts dragged by tinkers and pharmacists. The laughter in the bars and the shouted parley at the bazaar. The wind turbines creaking and the electricity sizzling. The sun flashing off thousands of points of metal and glass. Swallows flying in dark murmurations that looked like clouds, the only thing marring the blindingly blue sky. He remembers people despairing their lives, sure, but isn’t that always the case, everyone wanting more than what they have, expecting something better on the horizon? If this was it, then they could have it.

 

So when Clark returns to camp, when she shows them the severed paw, Reed says, “I think we need to face the facts.”

 

Clark throws the paw on the fire, where it spits and bubbles and blackens.

 

“I think we need to turn back.”

 

“Shut up, Reed,” she says.

 

His voice was calm before, but now he hurries out his words. “This is suicide.”

 

“We trust the girl. She said there was an end to the desert, and there was, and she says there is an end to the snow, and there is.”

 

“There’s death. If we keep going, we have nothing to look forward to except death.”

 

“What’s happened to you?”

 

“What’s happened to me? What’s happened to you? You used to love me.”

 

“I used to fuck you.”

 

“There’s a difference, isn’t there?” He smiles terribly. “So now you hate me?”

 

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