In the Deadlands (28 page)

They say that the deadlands floor is completely dry—that there's no moisture in it at all.

But i always thought that when ground became completely dry that it turned to dust—that it needed moisture to hold it together.

i don't know. There's a lot of things that they say...

                                       
Step...

    
It's all wrong.

    
It is.

    
It sounds hollow. Maybe it is.

And it's the wrong color too. Ground should not be orange and black and all run together and mottled.

    
It should be soft and brown and

    
gritty with little rocks in it,

    
and things growing

    
and

               
Nothing grows,

               
and there's no sand...

               
not even dust.

You can walk out of the deadlands with the same shine on your boots as when you walked in.

You would think that there would be sand in great curving dunes sweeping slowly across the deadlands.

                                       
There should be.

But there isn't. The deadlands is barren.

                                       
No dunes,

                                       
no sand,

                                       
no dust.

                                       
Just the ground and the sky.

                                       
Step...

The deadlands sky is so deep it hurts.

i mean, it's empty.

Nobody looks at the sky in the deadlands.

There are no clouds in a deadlands sky. There never are.

Just that deep empty blue.

If you look at it long enough, it begins to seem like the sky is underneath you and the ground is above you

and that you're walking across a great rusty ceiling with nothing beneath you and any moment

you are going to miss a step

and slip

and fall

and go plummeting down endlessly into that deep empty sky, turning and twisting forever trying to grab onto something . . .

something that isn't there.

               
It never is.

Just that deep empty blueness.

i mean, it's empty.

But that's the way it is in the deadlands.

               
Empty.

Your eye searches for something to hang onto, but there isn't anything.

Except, of course, the great painful white of the sun.

They say that it used to be yellow—the sun, i mean. i don't know. You hear a lot of talk about the way it used to be.

Like
green.

    
They say that there used to be a color called
green.

They say that all the plants were colored
green
. . . the grass and the leaves and the trees and the bushes. . .

    
all were
green.

    
Not brown and orange and black

    
—but
green.

    
Whatever that means.

    
i don't know. Maybe the stories are true.

    
Probably they're just folk tales.

Although, when you're in the deadlands, you can't see how there ever was anything else
but
deadlands.

The deadlands is eternal.

i mean, if anything is eternal, the deadlands is.

                                       
Step...

    
There's no wind in the deadlands.

    
No. That's wrong.

               
There's no wind in the deadlands now.

Other times there is a wind.

Mostly, it's a hot breath on the back of your neck,

but there are stories about the deadlands wind picking a man up and carrying him off.

i guess the deadlands gets to you after a while . . . that sky and that barren floor.

Funny thing about the floor. It's rutted from horizon to horizon. It's pitted and creased and scarred.

                                       
Used...

Corrugated like a sheet of rusty iron.

In some places it's scored as evenly as if it were done by a machine.

Every step scrapes along the grooves of the deadlands floor.

The ruts are shallow and just about the width of a man's foot.

Your boots stick in them.

With every step you take, the deadlands catches and grabs at your feet.

                                       
Step... (grab)

                                       
Step... (grab)

                                       
Step... (grab)

We've been walking for about an hour now. It's hard to tell. Not many of us have watches

and in the deadlands, time is frozen by a white staring sun.

                                       
Step...

i guess i said that i don't like the deadlands, but it bears repeating.

Some of the guys say that you get used to it, but i don't see how. i never have.

They say that the deadlands has a weird kind of beauty.

Actually,
beauty
is the wrong word.

It's not beauty. It's a kind of...

It's a kind of...

a kind of...

                                       
There is no word.

It's like a feeling,

an empty feeling,

like something quiet

waiting.

                                       
Step...

There are twenty-three of us on this patrol. There's the commander and eleven
“two”s.

Twenty-three men.

A double line, walking.

                                       
Step...

                                       
Step...

                                       
Step...

Eleven
“two”s.
They run us in “two”s because they want us to each keep an eye on our other half.

                                       
Ha.

i don't think Carl and i have exchanged twelve words total.

                                       
Step...

i don't know why they run the deadlands patrols anyway. It seems foolish,

a waste of effort.

They say that it's to protect the borderlands from attack

But nobody really expects anyone to mount an attack across the deadlands.

Not really.

Of course, nobody really knows what's on the other side of it, either.

We don't even know that it has an
other
side.

i mean, nobody's ever seen it.

That is, nobody's ever seen it and come back across the deadlands to tell us about it.

But,

even if somebody did manage to cross the deadlands from the other side, we'd see them coming for a long time before they got to the borderlands. We'd see them from the balloons.

. . .i was up in a balloon once.

It was an anchored balloon—they all are now—but it was still a balloon. (The balloons have to be anchored; otherwise they go drifting into the deadlands.)

This was a long time ago, but you could see twenty...maybe thirty miles into the deadlands.

Strange...

We were high—really high.

We could look back to the west and see the gray roofs of Fort Borderlands and the gray barracks, and the distant village of thatched roofs, and the surrounding fields of brown and gray; and in the far distance, the black Eternal Mountains.

It was all

so distant,

so far away.

                                       
But on the east

                                       
the deadlands was close,

                                       
immediate.

                                       
It seemed to be so close

    
that you could step right out of the gondola and onto its hard baked floor.

You could see every detail of its orange and black surface.

                                       
so clear,

                                       
so solid.

You could see right down into the corrugations of the deadlands floor,

shallow ruts in a mottled orange and black surface.

It was as if it was only a few feet away.

Later, i learned that it was an optical illusion.

What i saw was not the regular corrugations—the ones you notice when you're on the ground—the ones that catch and grab at your feet.

What it is, is that the deadlands is ridged—corrugated on a gigantic scale. Just as it is corrugated with shallow troughs and crests only a few inches wide, it is also corrugated with great troughs and crests many yards wide,

sometimes many miles wide.

The floor curves so wide and so subtly that you can't detect it, except from a balloon.

i wonder,

i wonder, if i got down on my hands and knees and looked at the shallow ruts that are beneath my feet right now...

If i looked very carefully at these corrugations,

               
would i see

               
even tinier grooves scored within them?

i wonder...

Anyway,

they say that that's what causes some of the weird things in the deadlands—the wide corrugations.

Things like the horizon being only twenty yards away,

or twenty miles.

i mean, that's the logical explanation, isn't it?

Isn't it?

                                       
Step...

                                       
Step...

                                       
Step...

Sometimes i wonder why they run the deadlands patrols.

i mean, they tell us why, but sometimes i wonder anyway.

i mean, why?

What's it for?

Sometimes...

i think,

    
i think, maybe we're supposed to be sacrifices, sacrifices to the deadlands.

Like, if we're sacrificed to the deadlands it'll be appeased for a little while and won't want more.

    
So we go into the deadlands, deep into the deadlands, in case it wants us.

    
and if it doesn't

    
then we come out.

    
i don't like it. i don't like it at all.

    
But i don't have to like it. i only have to do it.

                                       
Step...

    
Nobody talks.

    
But then again, there's little to say.

                                       
Step...

                     
Every step scrapes.

                                       
scrapes.

                                       
scrapes.

    
There are things in the deadlands.

    
Oh, they won't admit it, but there are

    
things.

    
You hear stories,

    
and once in a while a patrol doesn't come back.

                                       
Scrape.

When that happens—when a patrol doesn't come back—they never admit it. Instead they say that it's been transferred.

Sometimes, even, they really do transfer a patrol. As if to prove all the others.

                                       
Scrape.

But you hear stories.

One patrol is rumored to have found some bodies. They were the bodies of the lost 31st patrol. (That's one that they admit they lost—they can't deny that one.)

    
They say that they were just sitting and staring,

    
just sitting and staring,

    
as if they had all died at the same time.