The Dead Lands by Benjamin Percy Read Free Book Online

slack-jawed, fearful. Not the leader he needs to be in a moment like this, with the other rangers shivering their arrows in panic.
    “Hands up,” Reed says. “I said, hands up!”
    Slowly the girl lifts her arms.
    “Where have you come from? Who are you?”
    She opens her mouth to speak, but his voice barrels over hers in his panic. “What’s—what’s wrong with your eyes? Are you diseased? Where did you come from? What do you want?” The questions come so rapid-fire that he doesn’t seem to want an answer.
    This is when Clark begins to run. She pounds along the walkway until she reaches a ladder, rebar welded and mortared into place. She swings her legs over the edge and lets gravity take her down, snatching and kicking at the rungs as she descends. People are always telling her to remember her place. “You’re not the boss,” they say. “Quit meddling,” they say. “Shut your mouth,” they say. She does not care what they say. She thinks with her guts. And her guts are telling her Reed is about to lose control.
    Clark loses her grip, barely catching herself, then continues down, down, down, leaping the final ten feet and landing with a roll and popping up into a sprint and yelling, “Open the gates!”
    A crowd has gathered. Their eyes are on the smoke in the sky and on her as she approaches. The guard stationed at the gates shakes his head and crosses his arms and says, “Not on your orders.”
    She pushes past him and slams a palm against the barred double doors and tries to yell through them. “Reed! Reed, stand down! Please! Let me talk to her!”
    The guard grabs her by the elbow and she twists around and chops his larynx with her hand. He doubles over, trying to catch his breath. With a kick, she sweeps out his legs. The keys rattle at his belt. She swipes them, jams them into the deadbolt, twists it open. A two-hundred-pound beam hangs across the doors, and she gets her shoulder beneath it, grunting it off on one side, then the other. It lands with a clang.
    By the time she pushes open the doors, it is too late.
    She can hear their voices—Reed is yelling, the men are yelling.
    “Get away from here! Now!”
    “You need to leave!”
    “What’s wrong with your eyes, witch?”
    The girl is cantering one way, then another, reaching into a leather saddlebag and saying, “I came here to—”
    Her words are cut short by an arrow to the hand, another to the shoulder, her body quilled. She hunches forward with a garbled scream. And then another arrow catches her in the throat and the scream is silenced.
    In the chaos that follows—when her horse, driven mad by the smell of blood, bucks and hurls her to the ground and races in a circle and pounds off for the woods, when the rangers surround her and wrench her arms behind her back and bind them, when Clark asks Reed what the hell is wrong with him and he tells her to shut up—no one notices the letter.
    The letter the girl had been producing from her saddlebag. A square the color of an eggshell, folded and sealed with a red circle of wax. It has been flung and stamped and blown aside, nearly lost at the edge of the clearing.
    It lies there, like a scrap of bark, until a bronze owl drops from the sky and collects it between its talons and takes off with its wings creaking and gears twittering.
    *  *  *
    This morning Simon wakes in the lean-to he calls home. It is built against an alley wall, made of stucco and corrugated metal, tall enough at its peak for him to stand upright. The wall is plastered with salvaged images. A man with a stubbled jaw and a cowboy hat mending a barbed-wire fence with a pack of Marlboros rising out of his breast pocket. A sleek red car blasting along an open highway. A woman in a yellow bikini kicking her way out of the ocean. The torn covers of a few old books by Stephen King, Louis L’Amour, J.R.R. Tolkien. They are all brittle, faded, tattered. He doesn’t understand them, not completely, but they pull him in some