The Dead Lands

On this morning, they gather in the atrium, what was once the food court. The floor is cracked tile. The ceiling is a pyramidal skylight cloaked in snow. Three garbage cans crackle and give off waves of heat from the wood burning inside them. Smoke hazes the air. She paces on a short stage and punctuates her sentences with a fist to the palm. Her girls lounge in metal chairs. They nod and mutter their agreement.

 

Over the past few months they have mentioned the bison. The herd that caused the train wreck, that deposited them at the outskirts of Bismarck. They were saved and they were saved for a reason. The bison were an instrument of God. The world wanted them to live. But to survive, they must be strong. Being strong means making difficult choices. Making difficult choices means hurting back those who mean to hurt them.

 

“We knew they might come for us. And now they’ve come for us.” She makes a fist that matches her clenched face. “We won’t be victims this time.”

 

Her eyes narrow at the sight of the man escorted toward them. He has only one arm, the wrist of it secured to his thigh. He knocks against several chairs, which screech and clatter. He tries to yank away, tries to run, but he trips into a table and falls to the floor. He kicks at the women who huddle around him until they take out their knives and threaten to gut him, and then he goes still and allows them to drag him onstage. He refuses to fall to his knees. Every time they push him down, he struggles to his feet, until Sasa says, “I like this one. He’s a fighter. I’m going to give him a fighting chance.”

 

He stares hatefully at her.

 

Sasa asks for his name and he tells her Jon Colter.

 

“Why are you smiling, Jon Colter?”

 

“I’m not,” he says. “There’s something wrong with my face.”

 

“What’s wrong with your face?”

 

“A wolf bit it.” He looks around, as if seeking escape. “Whatever you think we did, we didn’t. We didn’t do anything to any of you.”

 

She raises her eyebrows and tells him with a placid voice, “You killed our parents. You killed our husbands and our sisters and our brothers. You killed our children.”

 

“No.” He laughs, but in an ugly way. “No, no, no. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care who you are.”

 

“Why else would you come here? A place this cold. A place this sick.” When she stands before a crowd, her voice takes on the same rhythms as that of the seer in her village. “Fires burn on the horizon. Ash falls from the sky. No one comes here. This is a place for no one.”

 

“You’re here.”

 

“To hide. From you. But you’ve found us.”

 

He is smiling now. Really smiling, showing all his teeth. “Listen to me. We came from St. Louis. We’re passing through—”

 

She laughs and automatically several of the girls laugh along with her.

 

The smile dies from half his face. The humor in the situation belongs to her. “What’s so funny?”

 

The fire barrels cough up sparks. Sasa nods and the guard takes a knife to the rope that binds his wrist to his thigh. He flexes his hand and looks around him as if seeking a way out.

 

She tells him to remove his clothes, and when he refuses, she tells her girls to do it for him, tearing off his boots, his pants, dragging him out of his coat and knifing off his shirt, until he stands naked and trembling before them. His body is a mess of scars that seem to whiten as his skin pinkens in the cold. He would cross his arms if he could, but as is, he can only clutch his middle one-handed.

 

Sasa studies his body and says, “You look like you’ve been chewed up and spit out.”

 

“Pretty much.”

 

“Here’s how this will work. I’m going to give you a head start of thirty seconds.”

 

“Fuck you.”

 

“And then I’m going to come after you.”

 

“Even if I outrun you, I’ll freeze.”

 

“You look like you’re accustomed to surviving.” She makes a shooing motion with her hands. “One,” she says. “Two, three, four, five,” and before she can count six, he has leapt off the stage, knocked aside tables, padding away.

 

Sasa continues to count aloud in a calm voice that matches her movements as she steps off the stage and retrieves her bow and quiver and walks down the corridor that leads to the entry.

 

The women follow her into the half-light of day. The air is bracingly cold. The clouds boil. The horizon burns. An ice storm has coated everything so that it appears as slick as glass. In the distance, almost halfway across the vast open parking lot, Colter races away from them. He keeps his steps short and his good arm outstretched for balance. He falls twice but does not pause, scrambling up to bolt forward again. His buttocks redden. His breath chimneys from his mouth.

 

She hears a few of her girls say, “Don’t” and “Let him go, Sasa,” but she doesn’t listen. She has to be strong for all of them. She has to expel the hurt stored inside her.

 

She pinches an arrow from her quiver and notches it into the string and lifts it to her eye and says, “Thirty.”

 

*

 

 

 

Simon and Ella expect a visit from Danica, but she doesn’t come for several days, and when she does, she is limping, she has a fat lip, and one of her eyes is plum purple, swollen so badly, revealing only a weepy slit. She tries to mask it with makeup. And she tries to walk without wincing.

 

She comes through the side door, into the kitchen, and Simon pulls out a chair for her at the table and she settles into it with a sigh. She wears a foul, rotten cloak so as not to be recognized, and he helps her out of it and hangs it on a hook and asks her if she needs anything and she says no. When he remains beside her, hovering, leaning into her as if she were a flower, she waves him away.

 

Ella can’t help but feel instantly annoyed. Annoyed by Simon, the way he behaves around her, like a cowed pet. And annoyed by Danica, not for anything she has said or done, just for existing. She cannot help it. She has always found pretty women—the kind who seem to waste time in front of the mirror, who seem to serve no purpose outside of lounging and preening—to be trifling, pathetic, even foul, like dead songbirds with maggots nesting inside their bright breasts. But when Danica rubs her knee, in obvious pain, Ella grudgingly allows her annoyance to give way to concern and asks, “What’s happened?”

 

“He’s angry. That’s what happened.”

 

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