The Dead Lands

The other day, when he was walking without an escort through the Fourth Ward—a collection of deteriorating buildings full of cutthroats, gamblers, whores—someone hurled a bag of filth at him. It exploded against his chest and then plopped to the ground. He stood there a moment, incredulously wiping his hands through the oozing smear, before looking around and noticing the streets crammed with crook-mouthed, thin-eyed people who studied him with a collective ferocity that made him feel, for the first time in his life, small. He hurried away, knowing that they might be seconds away from swarming him. For all his administration, Thomas has relied on the enemy beyond the walls, but he must worry now about the enemy within them.

 

If Thomas knew about Ella, she would be dead. And if Ella were anyone else, Slade would have killed her himself. But so many months ago, when he first questioned her in the museum, he immediately noted her as a favorite, like a special passage earmarked in a book. It was a feeling he knew well—the same spark of recognition he experienced around Jillian and Becca and Manda and Ankeny. His gallery of favorites.

 

He can harm her. He can harm anyone. He has the power to accuse strangers, beat them senseless, cuff them and noose them, with nothing in the way of consequence except more hatred directed his way. He is omnipotent. And omnipotence comes with boredom. That is why the Greek gods used to assume human form. To play with stakes that at least felt more real. He likes to play. He likes reducing himself to a kind of suitor.

 

Of course she knew something about Lewis departing the Sanctuary. Of course he would communicate with her by owl. Of course she was responsible for the rabble-rousing graffiti. That was one of the reasons she was a favorite. Because she wasn’t a common fool like so many others, but a worthy adversary, a mind sprung with claws. Which made it his job to tame her, cow her.

 

He follows her sometimes. Through the sun-soaked streets, the cluttered aisles of the bazaar, not because he believes he will learn anything professionally valuable, but simply to make a study of her. He likes the way she marches instead of walks, always square shouldered. He likes the way she bargains with people—pointing a finger and setting her mouth—and the way she touches whatever interests her—a carved door, an overripe melon, a one-armed doll—lets her finger linger as if to taste.

 

This morning, after she collected her daily ration of water, he followed her back to the museum, trailing her like a shadow. She sensed him only when she keyed open her door, and by then it was too late. She turned in time to see him shove her inside.

 

Her jug fell and the cap spun off and the water glug-glug-glugged across the floor, and for a moment that was the only sound besides their breathing as he rammed her up against the wall with a palm cupping her shoulder, a thumb horning her clavicle.

 

Then he said, in a calm, quiet voice that hardly paused between words, “You stupid girl. You stupid, stupid girl. You think I don’t know about what you’ve been up to. You think you can go on pretending you’re not a part of what’s happening. Let me tell you something. Let me give you a little lesson. Some believe love is the most powerful of all emotions. But that’s just a nice lie people tell themselves. Terror wins. Terror beats love any day. No emotion can control a crowd, can imprint itself so fully onto the human mind. You run this museum, so you know all about this, don’t you? You know about how this country—if you can call it that, a country—has been held hostage by terrorism? The bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the terrorist attacks of September eleventh. Yes, I know a thing or two. I’m not as mindless as some people think. Those stories—of long ago and far away—might not seem real. But they happened. And when they happened, they owned everyone. They paralyzed everyone. By the millions. That’s what terror can do. That’s what I can do. To you. And to this city.”

 

He let her go then and stepped back and the last of her water hiccuped from the jug.

 

She rubbed her chest where his arm had been. “You’re a no-good bully. And you’re wrong.”

 

He laughed then. He couldn’t help himself. He outweighed her by more than a hundred pounds. He could crush her like a cockroach. But she would not flinch. She had such fight to her. “Oh, do tell. How am I wrong?”

 

“It’s like this. Terror might make someone kill, but love will make someone die. People die for love. They would give up anything for love, even their life. And don’t you see, that’s a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival.”

 

Her eyes wander away from his and seem to zero in on something, but when he turns, there is only an empty doorway. “What were you looking at?”

 

“Get out of here,” she says. “Leave me alone.” She tries to push past him. He slaps her and forces her to the floor with an elbow to the throat, and she burbles like a toad at the pressure. “No,” she says, but seems again to be looking behind him. “Don’t!”

 

From his pocket he removes a pair of pliers. He fingers open her mouth and shoves the pliers inside and says, “Steady now.” With a wrenching crack he removes one of her molars.

 

He holds up the red-rooted tooth as he departs her. “That’s for what you wrote on the wall and all the trouble it’s caused me. The next time you do something stupid, I’ll come back for the rest of you.”

 

Now, in the basement, in the dark, he holds the molar in his palm. He pops it in his mouth and sucks on it and tongues its grooves and tastes her sour blood. Then he spits it out and dries it on his shirt and retrieves a pot of glue and patiently holds it to the mouth of her dummy as if suffocating it. When he lets his hand fall, the tooth remains, jeweled to the face of the thing.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 44

 

 

 

THE MOUNTAINS grow nearer, gradually dominating the horizon, their peaks cutting into the clouds. In their foothills the snow begins again, whiter now than before. They rest in Billings for several days, and again in Bozeman. Here the downtown is surrounded by a defensive perimeter made from logs with sharpened points. It has been burned and breached. Blackened wood and blackened bones rise out of the snow. The smell of smoke still lingers in the air. The people here have been dead weeks, maybe months.

 

“Who did this?” Lewis says. He kneels beside a skull, small enough to fit into his hand, a child’s. “What happened here?”

 

“Are you sure we should be going this way?” Colter says.

 

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