CHAPTER 1
1935
10 YEARS
REMAIN.
They say that there was a big bang when the world began. When a whole lot of nothing exploded into everything. Some say that it was the one true god speaking, commanding the light and the water and the earth to all be. The end, from what I’ve read, doesn’t seem too different. The sun will go supernova. Loud and violent. Or maybe, they say, it will be trumpets blown by angels made out of wings and eyes and wheels. Roars of beasts and leviathans. But that’s all a lie. First of all, there isn’t only one god. There are two Sisters—Life and Death—and their Mother, who presides over everything else. And the Sisters like to gamble against each other with things like time and space and human lives. And when our world ended and their Game began, it was silent and smothering as the grave.
I was six years old.
On April 14, 1935: Black Sunday, the dust rolled over the whole Oklahoma Panhandle, black and boiling, a thousand feet high, filling the sky and our eyes and our mouths and our lungs. Darkness. Suffocation. But what I remembered most was the silence, as though some divine power was watching us, holding its breath, waiting for our first moves. We had no way of knowing then that They were.
We crept out of our shelters, those of us who had found shelter, and what we saw terrified us. Our fields were gone, our farms were gone, and in their places was nothing but desert, gray dunes stretching over miles immeasurable. A still, waterless sea with only our town standing in the center. The dunes broke into ridges, canyons, cliffs we had never seen before, and among them lay the pieces of what had been. Cars lay covered; headstones were buried; cattle and horses lay dead, their lungs and stomachs filled with mud; and strange new creatures watched us from behind the dunes.
Some of us went out into it, to go to Boise City and see if they’d weathered the storm all right. But what we found was that there was no Boise City. No Dalhart, no Kenton or Felt or Texhoma. No sign even of the XIT Ranch that had spanned miles and miles in its own right. They were all simply gone, without the slightest trace that they’d ever been. And if you kept walking, even in the straightest of lines, somehow, you’d find yourself back where you started again. This world wasn’t right; it wasn’t natural. Now creatures like fire coyotes and carnivorous hordes of locusts roamed the desert, along with some things too terrible to even think of. And when we turned on our radios to listen for President Roosevelt’s assurance that everything would be all right, we couldn’t even hear static.
But it was only at sunset, when Death had her first say, that we realized how bleak our situation truly was. At first, we had thought it was a black roller, a dust storm rolling in from the north. But as we braced ourselves in the wreckage, the black dust stopped at the edge of town and went no farther. Then we saw what it was: soldiers, one hundred of them, all made entirely of black dust. Each of them stood eight feet high, and in the light of the full moon overhead, their shadows seemed to cut teeth into the sand. They had swords in their hands, swords made of jagged black stone, and our blood curdled in our veins as they called out for our leader.
The fathers of each family, farmers and cowboys alike, fell silent, looking at their empty, work-hardened hands. We looked to them, and for once, they had no answers. God had failed them. Hard work had failed them. Manhood had failed them. Then a woman stepped forward, an old, pale woman with tattooed hands.
“Bruja,” I heard someone whisper. But I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.
“I’ll speak for this city,” she said to the Dust Soldiers. “What do you want?”
Their leader opened a mouth like a well and spoke in a voice like grinding stones.
The Goddesses Life and Death have begun a Game. They have given you exactly ten years to build your city. No more, no less. During those years, you will put aside one-third of your crops for us every year. We will return at sunset on the final day to judge you. If we judge your society good and responsible, despite your difficulties, then Life has won, and your society will continue. If your society has been irresponsible, then Death has won the Game. And every man, woman, and child shall be slain.
“This is a wicked Game to impose upon us,” the old woman said. “Haven’t we suffered through enough already?”
But the Dust Soldiers did not—or could not—answer, and in the end, the old woman had no choice but to agree to the terms of the Game we had been entered into.
“Who… who are you?” a man whispered when the Dust Soldiers had gone.
“I am Mother Morevna,” she said. “And if you listen to me, we’ll get out of this mess just fine. But we will have to do things exactly as I say.”
There was a murmuring among the crowd, then a nodding of heads. And then an acknowledgment: We had found ourselves a new leader.
That night, we gathered at the center of town and listened as Mother Morevna told us about the world we would make. Because, she said, we’d been given a chance to create a world that could be truly wonderful, truly prosperous. She said that we must band together—no matter our sex or color—or we would perish. She told us that we must build wells and irrigation systems, shelter, fields, and, most importantly, walls to keep ourselves safe from the desert creatures. We had to reinvent ourselves. And we did.
Cars proved useful once again: to be taken apart and used for scrap. And the old Case tractors… well, they had been the cause of a lot of our problems in the first place, hadn’t they? They were the first things we used for the walls. Next had come possessions. Last had come the bodies of the fallen, and between dust storms, the walls rose around us, keeping us safe.
Until I, Sal Wilkerson, brought an end to everything.
1944
4 MONTHS
REMAIN.
My nose was broken, it was pretty clear. It was reddish-black and bruised, and twisted off to one side, and when I touched it, pain lit up my whole face. As I sat up on my perch on the top of the west wall, I tried to lessen the pain by counting the names carved into the walls below me. Behind each one of those names was a body, adding its height to our walls. Joanna Schutter, Gregory Farrell, Ludie Mae Fuller, Andrew Jackson LaGrange, Noemi Álvarez…
In cultivation class, Trixie Holland had accidentally hit me in the face with the backward stroke of her shovel, then made such a big show of being sorry that my classmates ended up consoling her. I tried, again, to breathe through my broken nose and felt a surge of anger as a big wad of blood slid down into the back of my throat. I hacked for a minute and spat it over the wall, into the desert, then wiped my nose again and wrote Trixie Holland is a bitch in blood on the mud brick beside me. Juvenile, sure, but it helped, if only just for a moment. Then I felt bad about it and wiped it away.
The walls were my sanctuary when Trixie and her girls tried to follow me after school—which was getting more and more frequent these days. They’d hide behind houses, under windmills, in storm cellars. Then there’d be a “Hey, Sal!” and the running would begin. Sometimes they caught me and harassed me, tore my things. Sometimes I lost them. It didn’t help that Trixie’s was the reluctant family I was supposed to be staying with this season. They say it takes a village to raise a child. But that only works if the village wants her. And after everything that had happened, Elysium, Oklahoma, did not want me.