The Dead Lands (16 page)

I
N THE BASEMENT
of the museum, when Simon slips from the ladder, when he holds out an arm to brace his fall and it snaps beneath him, she climbs down. He can hardly hear or see her, the pain so absorbs him, a hot sword that jags from his wrist to his chest. He can see his own bone—his inside brought outside—and he feels as amazed as he does disgusted, touching the sharp, slick point of it with a finger. Already he has lost so much blood. He does nothing to stop the flow of it. He just stares and matches his heartbeat with its ebb and flow.

Then the girl grabs him by the shirt as if to throttle him, but she only means to rip it, a sharp blade of glass in one hand, the remains of his lantern. She slices away the fabric and tears it off him and knots it around his arm to stanch the wound. She slides him out of his backpack and he cries out with pain and she tells him to quit whining, the worst is yet to come.

Then she hoists him onto her shoulders. She grunts her way up the ladder. And in this way, she escorts him outside, through the nighttime city, to the hospital, where a sleepy-eyed doctor sets the bone and sews the puncture and wraps him into a temporary cast and fits him with a sling. Simon faints more than once from the pain. During his moments of wakefulness she berates him. “You are a world-class moron,” she says. “World-class.”

Her name is Ella, she finally tells him. Her shoulders are squarer than his. She keeps her straw-colored hair cut in a pageboy. Her forehead is so often wrinkled with suspicion and consternation that even when it goes flat it carries red creases. Her eyes rarely blink, steady in their focus, above a small nose freckled and rounded at the tip.

It is still dark when they leave the hospital. He walks in a wobbling way and she supports him with an arm as if he were drunk. He does not think to question where she is taking him. He is not capable of rational thought. He has lost too much blood and the doctor has doped him with an opiate. His mind is a pleasant fog.

At one point, a deputy steps from the shadows and orders them to stop. They are out past curfew, he says, and that is all he says, because the girl lights into him, saying that there is nowhere else she would rather be right now than
home
, but Simon broke his arm badly, a compound fracture, and if not for her, he probably would have died, but she managed to drag him to the hospital and now she has to drag him back home, and that's where they are headed if the deputy would only get out of their way thank you very much.

The man says nothing—he seems afraid that will only encourage her to keep talking—but steps aside. The streets are shadowed canyons Simon does not recognize in his delirium. They branch and branch again and he wonders if they will ever find their way.

“I could have turned you in, you know,” she says. Not only was he trespassing in the museum—that was trouble enough—but can you imagine what the deputies would do, she says, if they knew he was roaming around
beneath
the city? They would make an example of him; that's what they would do. Whip him or hang him or worse. What was he thinking?

Simon shrugs and then flinches at the lightning strike of pain in his arm. He is not sure what to think of this girl who never seems to stop talking. That's what she is, a girl, maybe a year older or younger than him, but she speaks with the domineering voice of an adult. She smells nice. He'll give her that. Grassy.

The sky is beginning to lighten and the first bell is ringing when they arrive at the museum. His backpack, he says as she leads him inside. He needs his backpack.

She asks what's in it and he says a fifty-pound load, some to sell, some to keep.

“A load of what? What could you have possibly taken from the sewer?”

Probably he shouldn't speak so loosely, but she has protected him so far—and right now, with drugs in his veins and a poisonous snake with big fangs seeming to twist through his arm, nothing seems to matter.

“I didn't find anything in the sewer. The sewer is the way in and the way out.”

“The way out?”

“The way out of the Sanctuary.”

T
HE FIVE OF THEM
stand before the house on the hill. A cloud hangs over it like a messy gray wig. The siding is pocked with holes from birds and bugs. The porch sags and blood stains it, they hope from the deer the day before. Lewis stares at the black doorway, with the wood scarred and splintered all around it.

There was a time, when they were children, when Clark bullied him. Knocked a book from his hands. Yanked down his pants and ran away. Fired a pebble at his cheek with a slingshot. Hog-tied him and hung him from a balcony. But there was a time, too, when they played kindly with each other. And on one occasion, during a game of hide-and-seek in the Dome, he feared her gone forever. He searched for what felt like hours, peering under beds and in closets and behind doors, all the usual places where she couldn't be found. He began to cry out—“I give up! I said I give up!”—and even then she did not appear. She had abandoned him, it turned out. Grown bored. Gone outside. He was reduced to tears and the terror that the building had somehow swallowed her up—until he heard laughter out a window and spied her playing in the streets with a gang of children. He had never felt so irrelevant, betrayed.

He wishes for such a betrayal now. He would laugh with relief if she came wandering up, uninjured, whistling a song, asking what was the matter, clueless to their worry. But this time the game isn't a game. This time, a building really has swallowed her up.

Reed grips two revolvers. He snaps off their safeties and starts up the first step. The wood cries out. A swirl of dust rises around his boot.

Lewis tells him to stop. He reaches into his duster. From a pocket he removes the owl, holding it out before him, cradling it in his long, thin hand. “We need to know what we're walking into.” He pets it and its bronze feathers shimmer. The gears inside it whir and click. When he sends it off into the darkness, it flies noisily, its wings creaking.

At first they can hear it churning inside, moving up and down the stairs, looping through the rooms, occasionally thudding against a wall. There follows a long silence. They cock their heads to hear it better. Their eyes, trained on the black doorway, come unstuck, and they study each other with the questions no one need utter because no one can answer—
Where is it? What should we do?

They don't realize they're holding their breath—not until they hear another thud, followed by a ticking and grinding—and all their chests deflate at once. They can see the owl. Deep in the house, it is a glimmering hint, like a candle cupped in a hand, and then it grows brighter as it wings toward them and bursts into the sunlight.

Lewis holds out an arm and it comes to a creaking stop and roosts there. He walks to the shaded side of the house. The others follow. Daylight makes the projection difficult to see. So does the cracked and warped siding. They squint their eyes and edge closer to make out the wobbling blur of the house. The owl circles rooms and bobbles down halls and nearly knocks into a light fixture dangling from the ceiling by a cord. Pictures have fallen from the walls. A chair lies on its side. The springs have coiled through couch cushions. But there are no birds roosting in the closets, no raccoons beneath the beds. Anything with a pulse knows better.

Then the owl bends around the corner and finds the basement, a dark door leading to a dark place. They can see only dimly. The stairs long ago collapsed like a rotten accordion. The plaster walls are crosshatched with claw marks. It is nearly impossible to see, given the speed and bob of the owl's flight, but the floor is a nest of bones. Knobbed vertebrae. Basketed ribs. Skulls cavitied by black sockets. Among them, what appear to be fresher acquisitions, the empty sack of an opossum, two deer with bloodied necks, and Clark. At first she is a mere flash in the darkness, but the owl circles back to focus on her, a curl of a body, her face half-hidden by her hair. Yes, it is her.

Reed says, “How do we know if she's even alive?”

“We don't,” Lewis says, but he feels it. A pull.

It is then that the owl swoops upward and they see the ceiling from which the bats dangle. Their eyes are closed, their bodies hanging tightly together like a cluster of stalactites. How many of them, it is impossible to tell, because the projection is already past them, heading out of the basement, toward the hallway, the light at the end of it where Lewis waits with his arm extended.

The air is dim and hot. The smell, puffing from the basement, tangy and fertile like marrow spooned from a split bone. A bare patch has spread across the floor here, where the hardwood drops off into the darkness, a rough circle a few feet across. He touches the splinters of it and imagines claws scraped across it night after night. A landing pad for them as they climb out and drop into their den. Lewis opens his silver tin and takes a dose of white powder up his nose and feels a little braver for it.

The house creaks in the heat. Flies buzz in and out of the doorway. Otherwise, there is no sound. They do not speak, not even to whisper, when they tie one end of the rope to a heat register and the other to a lantern with a low wick. This they drop into the darkness.

Gawea and the doctor will remain above, their weapons ready, while the rest of them descend. Reed goes first. He tries to slide off the ledge as quietly as he can, but he carries two holstered revolvers and they clunk and scrape the wood. Then York bellies into the darkness. Lewis is last. The doctor gives him an encouraging squeeze on the shoulder and he lays his hand over hers. “You bring her back to us,” she says, and he says, “I will.”

Then he scoots to the edge and takes the rope and allows his weight to pull him down. He dangles there a moment, and when a fly lands on his face, he slaps himself in his hurry to brush it away—and loses his grip.

It is fifteen feet to the floor, the surface of it strewn with the remains of the staircase. And guano. And bones. They lie scattered in piles still webbed together by ligature and papery skin. Lewis falls into the horrible mush. He is muddied with guano and cut along his hip. But somehow the bats remain unfazed by the noise of his descent.

He stands and wipes himself off as best as he can. Reed told them beforehand not to look at the lantern, and yet that's exactly what Lewis does, his eyes drawn to the only light in the room. He immediately turns away, blinking hard, trying to restore his eyes.

Eventually the shape of the basement takes form, and he can see the two men creeping away from him. He yanks his gun from his holster and follows. Every step is uncertain, the ground pulpy from guano and brittle with bones. They cannot be as quiet as they hope to be. To get to the far side of the room, they must pass beneath the bats, many of them man-size. Their faces are snouted and deeply wrinkled. Their claws latch to the rafters and their wings surround them like a veined chrysalis. The ceiling is tall enough to leave three feet of space beneath them. Lewis ducks down to pass beneath them. He has never felt so vulnerable, with the bats hanging above them, as if they might spear his bent back.

By the time he gets past them, the others are already hunched over Clark. She is not moving except as they shake her. Her clothes are torn, her neck and wrists and thighs gashed. Where her skin isn't bloody, it is alabaster pale. They do not know where to check for a pulse, with her neck and wrists opened, but Lewis leans his face into hers and detects a shallow breath. She lives. The bats have kept her to bleed until emptied.

They move as slowly as they can—Reed getting behind her, looping his arms beneath her shoulders—York gripping her by the knees. Lewis takes the lantern. Bones stir and snap. They pause at every noise, waiting for the bats to wake.

When they duck down—beneath maybe a dozen bats altogether, their hanging forms a mob of all different sizes—Reed and York steal forward in small steps, backs bent by the weight of Clark. Lewis follows in a hunch. He moves more slowly than they do. He toes aside a bone. He slides his boot through a pile of black guano. He can feel a breeze, their breath against his neck. He keeps the lantern low. In his hand it feels like a small sun, its light too bright, no matter how spare the wick.

Reed and York already have Clark at the base of the stairs. Lewis tries to concentrate on them. He tries not to look up. But then he senses some movement in his peripheral vision and cannot help himself. A bat hangs beside him and one of its ears is twitching. Maybe because it hears him. Or maybe because it tracks some prey through the night sky of its sleep, its ears spasming like the legs of a dreaming dog. Its mouth opens and closes with a damp sound. Its eyes shudder beneath wrinkled lids.

Ahead, he can see Clark dragged through the air, over the ledge, the rope cinched beneath her armpits. He can see the rope fall again and Reed hoisting himself up. York looks back and waves impatiently. Lewis wakes from his fearful daze and takes another step forward.

A bone shatters beneath his foot. In the silence of the basement, the sound is tremendous, as though the very darkness has cracked open. He looks down to see it was a femur. He looks up to see the bat's eyes snap open. They are huge and white and gelatinous.

Then comes the
chittering
sound, at first only from its mouth, and then from the others waking all around him.

He hears his name. “Lewis?” Reed is calling for him and he is stumbling toward his voice. “Lewis?” The doorway hangs above, his body a black silhouette against the gray light of it. “Lewis!”

There is a rustling behind him, like a wind sweeping across a desk stacked with paper, and then a shotgun blast from York. The clap and crash of it fills his ears and seems to shake the very foundation of the house. He throws down the lantern and it shatters and he staggers and trips and catches the rope and uses it to right himself. York fires again and says, “Go, go, go, go!”

He clambers up, one hand over the other, the rope pinched between his thighs. In this way he inches toward the doorway. He is weak enough and slow enough that Reed knows to help, dragging him the rest of the way.

The splintery lip of the hardwood scrapes his belly raw. He is out, among their legs. He scrabbles forward, and in that moment, moving from darkness into light, he feels as he did as a child, returning from the toilet at night, leaping into bed, certain that a hand with sharp black fingernails would snatch hold of his ankle.

For a second he can't help but stare at Clark. She lies in the hallway, as still as a corpse. The doctor kneels beside her and hauls her body toward the daylight.

Lewis is roused by the screaming above him—of Reed encouraging York to hurry, hurry goddammit—and the screaming below. Lewis rises from the floor. In the basement, the shotgun fires and he sees in its sunburst the bats crowding around York, and when it fires for the second time he sees a spray of blood. He sees tattered wings and cratered chests.

The rope goes taut. York is climbing. Reed fires his revolvers repeatedly into the darkness with a sound like storms crashing against each other, warring for the sky.

Lewis grabs hold of the rope and heaves and heaves again. First the boy's hands, and then his face, appear at the bottom of the doorway. He is smiling. Blood speckles his face. His feet dangle in a cavernous dark. But he is alive and for this he can't help but smile crookedly.

Just as he stands upright, the doorway behind him fills with the white blur of a bat, and before his smile can die, one of its wings curls around him. It draws him back—drawing him down into the dark—but his hand shoots out and catches the doorway and he holds fast there.

It is then that a voice calls out—a throaty, ash-edged voice none of them recognize—yelling, “No!”

Gawea. Her face seems to have cracked open, revealing for the first time actual feeling, raw panic. “Leave him alone!” She rushes forward and shoves her rifle into the bat's open mouth and fires.

The fire catches easily. It begins with the lantern Lewis dropped. Reed adds to it by sparking a match against a bookcase, a lace curtain, a dried bunch of grass beneath the porch. The flames thrash. The smoke rushes from the windows, streaming upward as fast as water, the streams gathering into the dark lake pooling above. Timbers snap. Nails and screws come loose with pings and pops. Hardly ten minutes pass before the house is overcome by a snapping peak of fire, the orange bones of its timbers barely visible through the flames. He and York and Gawea step back and step back again. The air warps and ripples with the heat. They stare into it, the light so painfully bright, with their guns still at their sides. They might see figures writhing within, but they might not. The fire's dance, like the desert's mirage, sometimes gives you what you want.

Lewis does not notice. All of his attention is focused on Clark. He wipes the blood from her face. Her skin is the yellow-white of dough. Her neck and her wrists and thighs have been torn by fangs, the flesh there swollen into purplish white mounds scabbed at their crowns.

The doctor brought her leather satchel—it is split open beside her now—and she withdraws from it wipes, gauze, a short bottle of sugar, a tall bottle of clear alcohol. The breeze rises to a wind that carries smoke and dust. She sets to work cleaning the wounds and instructs Lewis to prop up Clark's head and spoon some sugar water into her mouth. He barely hears her. “That won't be enough,” he says.

“We'll do what we can and that's all we can do.”

“She's lost too much blood.”

Her voice sounds very far away when she says, “Yes.”

He thinks about what York said to him that morning: why didn't he
do
anything when the bats descended on their camp? Raise his arms and let loose a flash of light and make everything better? Lewis didn't have an adequate answer. Because he doesn't like what he doesn't understand, what he can't label and quantify? Because it makes him feel inhuman? Because his father made him afraid of himself?