“Come on,” she says. “Come and get me, you son of a bitch!”
The cold brings tears to her eyes and she blinks them hurriedly away, keeping her focus. At first the bear runs low, ready to duck a bullet, and when the bullet doesn’t come, its body opens up, curling in on itself and snapping outward as it sprints. Twenty yards, fifteen yards, ten yards. The rest of the world falls away in a blur, all of her attention crushed down to a tunnel of ice through which the bear hurtles. She waits. She waits until she can be sure, until the bear is nearly upon her, widening its jaws.
Then she fires.
Through the teeth, down the throat, out the back of its neck, right where the spine nests in the skull, the bullet finds its mark. A feathery spray of blood. The bear drops, goes limp. Just like that. Like a flip switched, off. The gunshot claps through the cemetery. The body skids and rolls heavily into her, knocking her down. The gun skitters off. The back of her head clunks the ground. Her vision wobbles in and out. She is holding the bear, her arms wrapped around it, when it coughs and shudders and goes still.
Chapter 37
LEWIS CALLS her name, “Gawea,” and she wakes. Her head wobbles and her eyelids shutter. Her face is swollen and netted with blood that seems to contain her, trap her inside herself. “Please,” he says. “Are you all right?”
Gawea is supposed to guide, Clark is supposed to lead—and now he doesn’t have either of them. But his decisiveness surprises him when he tells Colter to help him and then the doctor out of their restraints. Once freed, he pulls off his shirt and tears it in half. Part of it he uses to tie off the doctor’s bitten arm—she has lost a lot of blood and her skin is cold and her breath comes in shallow gasps—and the other half he presses to the girl’s wound. “York,” she says, her voice muddled. “What happened to York?”
“Rest,” he tells her. “You need your rest.”
Lewis can smell their meat cooking now and hear the women speaking, but they are out of sight, around the bend of a shadowy corridor. He shakes the caging at the front of the store and calls for help. “Come here. I want to talk to someone this instant.” But no one appears except a toothless woman—older than the others—with a blind white eye and a bright red scar dividing her forehead.
She has a phone pressed to her ear, the curled cord dangling from it and wrapped around a finger. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I see,” as if plugged in to some lost conversation. When Lewis asks her to fetch someone else, to tell the others that one of their party is gravely ill, she goes still and cups a hand over the receiver and whispers harshly to the imaginary person on the other end of the line. Her white eye catches the light and brightens.
“Please,” he says. “Why are you doing this to us?”
She babbles something then about the bad people.
“I don’t understand.”
“The bad people. You’re the bad people. You come in the night. You steal us away. You make slaves of us.”
“No, we do not. We most certainly do not. That’s not why we’re here. We’re here—”
But she is already wandering away, again whispering into the phone, leaving him to wonder what has made these women so angry and fearful.
Chapter 38
IF YOU COULD observe the Sanctuary from above, as a vulture riding an updraft, you would see the brown and gray squares of buildings, the dusty complicated swirl of streets between, which all together, from this great height, would look rather like a desiccated brain, within which the dark specks of the deputies appear like clots, spreading, spreading, until their infection is complete, the Sanctuary taken hostage.
Smoke rises—from this building, then another—and stains an otherwise pure blue sky, clouds your vision, so you must return to the streets once more to see the deputies hurling torches through the windows of the Dirty Shame, where someone sang a ballad about Lewis and Clark the night before, a ballad that others are now humming in the streets, singing under their breath. The bartender tries to leave, but they push him back in. The flames make a noise like a thousand fingers snapping in excitement. The roof collapses—the metal sheeting sending up a swirl of sparks—as the clay walls blacken and crack. Where there was once a building, there is now a dark hull, like the disintegrating remains of a beetle.
Anyone caught singing the song—or any song—is hurled to the ground and beaten with cudgels until muscle pulps, bone shatters. Some try to help. A group of six men push the deputies, grab them by the wrists, try to wrestle them away. At first they succeed. Then more deputies come, and more still, and by the end of the day the six men are hanged—from balconies, from the wall, all over the Sanctuary—their bodies twisting in the wind, crows roosting on their shoulders and feasting their faces down to bone.
The wells are shut down for two days. Deputies surround them with fresh skins of water hanging plumply from their belts. For personal use. They guzzle from them theatrically. A barrage of people gathers. Before long it is a mob. They beat the bottoms of their buckets and jugs and make a storm of noise. They yell and their dry lips crack and make their mouths bloody.
Graffiti appears overnight, hurriedly smeared onto alley walls, scratched onto shop windows. THE SANCTUARY = PRISON and DEATH TO LANCER and BRING DOWN THE WALL and WHEN HOPE IS DOWN, THE SOLUTION IS UPRISING. The buildings burn. No matter if the people inside are not responsible for the graffiti.
When Oman arrives at his apothecary, the keys jangling in his hand, ready to open for the day, his black-toothed mouth unhinges in a silent scream. Because the shop is burning, crowned with fire that gives off many curious colors—green and purple and pink and gold—as his many powders and potions erupt.