The Dead Lands by Benjamin Percy

Author:Benjamin Percy [Percy, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781455528226
Google: sqGdBAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00MEMMTPG
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2015-04-14T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

HIS NAME IS Jon Colter, but for some time he was known as the Black Fist. He might have invented the name. He might have encouraged its use. He liked it. He felt it captured what he was, how he wanted others to consider him. Someone once told him the scariest part of any story was when a character crept forward to investigate a strange sound. Whatever nightmare waited around the corner did not matter, its revelation almost always a disappointment. It was the imagined threat that mattered most. A fist was a threat. A clenched fist raised and ready to swing. In this capacity he served the Sanctuary for many years.

He began as a sentinel, and one day, when ranging the Dead Lands, he walked through the open door of a house that was a wolf’s den. They sprung and burrowed their muzzles into him and mauled him nearly to death before the other sentinels fired arrows and sent them limping and yipping off.

Eventually he healed, the scabs and then the scars hardening him back into the shape of a man. His mouth slashed open along the left cheek a permanent half smile. He sought out the wolves, hunting them down in their den, chaining them and whipping them into submission, making two of them his own, so that he would walk the streets leashed to them, first as a deputy, then as sheriff under the late Mayor Meriwether.

Saddled on the back of a black horse called Nightmare and guided by his wolves, he now stalks his way across a parched country, a never-ending valley of the dry bones with no Ezekiel to call them up. He is schooled enough to know that God drove men west—across the ocean, across America. They followed the compass of Manifest Destiny and they claimed the country in God’s name. But their God must not have been pleased, because he smote them down and cursed them with the hot wind breathed through his clenched teeth.

The same breath that wakes Colter tonight, on a farm outside of Omaha. He first hears the birds squawking and fluttering in the rafters of a pole shed. And then the hiss that swells into a sound like grain sliding down a metal chute. His horse whickers and his wolves whimper and pant and he hurries outside to see a vast section of the sky absent of stars. They have been eaten up by the black wall of sand moving toward him. He barricades the door and drapes blankets over the broken windows. When the sandstorm hits, the shed lets out a metallic groan as if ready to collapse, but it holds strong as the wind scours the metal and sends dust swirling through every available crack and he and the wolves huddle down with their eyes pinched shut.

He is not afraid. Not of the heat, the emptiness, the radiation, the bone piles and splintery ruins, whatever danger awaits him. He prefers to imagine the world fearing him,

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