Exit Kingdom

by Alden Bell

  Moses uses Albert Wilson Jacks’s horrible blade for the first time. It is grotesquely heavy, and once put in motion it seems to swing through arcs of destruction all of its own accord. Moses finds himself merely trying to finesse the direction of centrifugal rage in the weapon. It rips and tears and leaves slews of rooster-tail blood behind its swing. Moses flails it across one bandit’s middle and sees the man’s guts spill out of the multiple gashes opened up in his abdomen. There is no grace in the weapon, no art. Brought down on another bandit’s head, the skull simply pops like a frail coconut, the mess of grey brain splashing every which way and the cudgel digging itself well down through the man’s throat and lodging between his shoulder blades. Moses has to let the body fall and put his foot against it to pry the weapon out again. Graceless and resolute, the thing moves through flesh without recourse or order or reason or precision. It is the opposite of surgery – it is senseless and animal.

  Many of the bandits dead and the others fled, Moses Todd wipes his face on the sleeve of his shirt, getting the blood out of his eyes but smearing it across his cheeks and forehead like a successful hunter wallowing in the sloppy viscera of his prey.

  The Vestal Amata stands amid the wastes of carnage, still naked, her white skin spattered with blood and white splinters of bone. There is a leaf of scalp adhered to one breast, and she plucks it away by the hair and lets it drop on the ground. Her eyes are wide, fixated on the mush of a body at her feet.

  Abe, Moses says. Find the girl some clothes.

  Then he turns to the Vestal Amata herself.

  Come on, he says. We’ll get you cleaned up, but not here. We gotta go. All this commotion – there’ll be more slugs than we know what to do with.

  So Abraham finds the girl some clothes belonging to one of the smaller bandits – men’s pants and a shirt that fits her ill but covers her nakedness.

  What Moses expects in her face is the blank trauma of horror – but the expression is different altogether. It is something of weariness, something even of irritation. In the back seat of the car, droplets of blood crusted in her red hair, she looks at Moses in the rearview mirror.

  Who called in the cavalry? she said. Damn inelegant is what that was. I had the situation under control.

  Is that right? Moses says. What was your plan? To tarantella them to death?

  It was a distraction, she says. They were lettin down their guard. The slugs were coming. They would of been overrun in another fifteen minutes.

  And what about you? Abraham says. Where would that leave you?

  The Vestal shrugs.

  Slugs don’t bother me none. You’ve seen it yourself. I would of gone along my merry way.

  What’s with the talk anyway? Abraham asks. How come you keep changin the way you talk?

  Why, sir, she replies with a sly smile, I can’t possibly imagine what you mean.

  They drive north, and the road takes them through an empty desert dotted with dense copses of brushwood. They put Fountain Hills behind them, and the bandits, and the accumulated dead. The Todds made sure, as they always do, that those they killed are killed for good. They will not swell the rout of walking dead on the surface of the earth.

  Soon they are in a town called Sunflower, which is a nothing of a place. They take an off-ramp from the highway to find a few untouched buildings, some corpses, long dead, littering the street. Some of the corpses try to pick themselves up when they hear the noise of the engine drive by – but so old are they that their flesh has burned itself to the very tarmac, and when they rise, they pull half their faces off. Then they sit, their energy wasted in the simple act of rising, and poke curiously at their own faces, the exposed skull and the dry eye, now lidless, which will never shut again.

  But there is a women’s discount store on the main drag of the tiny town, and the Vestal Amata scrounges for clothes better fitting than those Abraham found for her in the bandits’ inventory. They do not trust her not to run away again, so the Todd brothers go into the store with her. They stay at the front, spreading out a map on the counter and trying to figure out the best way to reach Colorado Springs. The largest freeways are not always ideal, travelling as they do through cities most densely populated with the dead.

  As they consult the map, Moses notices that his brother keeps looking away, distracted. It’s the Vestal. She’s walking up and down the aisles pure naked. She tries on garments and slings them over her arm if she likes them or drops them to a pile on the ground if she doesn’t. Her face and hair are still spattered with dried blood, but the rest of her body is a pale white thing like something just crawled out from under a rock and feeling the sunlight for the first time in years. She is freckled all over her chest, and her bosoms are small and pointed. Unselfconsciously, she scratches at her crotch and the bush of red pubic hair until she finds a pair of red underpants that suit her. Moses does not know what kind of textile those underpants are made from, but they are shiny and not at all modest.

  She wears a necklace, Moses sees. It’s a small wooden pendant in the shape of a cross.

  Stop gawking, Moses says to Abraham to make his own leer feel less criminal.

  What’s she gotta walk around like that for? Abraham whispers. She’s testin me, Mose. That nun is testin my mettle.

  I told you she ain’t a nun.

  Then what is she? She think she’s immune to the appetites of live men like she is to those of the dead?

  I don’t know what she thinks. Let’s just take her where she’s gotta go and get our leave of her. That’s all.

  *

  They continue north, and the road climbs into the evergreen mountains where the slug population is sparse. Where there were very few living, there are very few dead. They come to a small bridge and see a stream running underneath. Moses pulls the car over, and they clamber down the verge, Moses helping his brother, to where the water runs cold and clear.

  Thank God, says the Vestal. I’m crusty all over.

  She strips off the impractical outfit she got in the last town – a leather skirt and a corset-type top – and wades into the river naked, splashing the water on her skin.

  It’s bracing! she cries. You boys have a nose for the good life. Maybe I’ll think twice before running off again. Hey, what’s the matter with Abraham?

  Moses looks at his brother. There is an expression on his face of outraged desire – as though he is furious at the girl for making him want so much. Moses has seen that expression before, and it does not bode well.

  Moses says, I reckon you best try to keep yourself covered up around us, Vestal. A desperate man’s a sore creature to deal with.

  The redhead laughs and splashes water at them.

  Silly boys, she says. The world’s gone dead everywhere you look, we’re livin on the opposite side of grand apocalypse, and they’re still Adam-and-Eve-ing it through the corridors of their own shame. They’re just bodies is all. I bet you seen countless dead pussies, but a living one gives you quivers all over. Puzzle that one through for me.

  She stands there in the river, the water up to her thighs, her arms akimbo, hands on her hips as though she were some kind of perverse schoolteacher. Her language has by now lost all of its polish and elegance. The Todd brothers say nothing in response. They have been scolded by a naked earth mother in a flowing river. Nature is a curious thing indeed.

  All right, she relents finally. I don’t like to cause a fuss. I’ll go secret myself behind that bush to conclude my ablutions.

  She moves down the riverbank a little way until she is just out of sight. But they can still hear her singing happily while she washes herself.

  Oh, Mademoiselle from Armentare, parlay voo.

  Oh, Mademoiselle from Armentare, parlay voo.

  She got the Palm and the Craw de Gare,

  For washing soldiers’ underwear.

  Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.

  You didn’t have to know her long, parlay voo.

  You didn’t have to know her long, p
arlay voo.

  You didn’t have to know her long,

  To know the reason men go wrong.

  Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.

  She’s the hardest working girl in town, parlay voo.

  She’s the hardest-working girl in town, parlay voo.

  She’s the hardest-working girl in town,

  But she makes her living upside down.

  Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.

  She’ll do it for wine, she’ll do it for rum, parlay voo.

  She’ll do it for wine, she’ll do it for rum, parlay voo.

  She’ll do it for wine, she’ll do it for rum,

  And sometimes for chocolate or chewing gum.

  Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.

  The cooties rambled through her hair, parlay voo.

  The cooties rambled through her hair, parlay voo.

  The cooties rambled through her hair –

  She whispered sweetly, ‘Say la gare.’

  Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.

  She never could hold the love of man, parlay voo.

  She never could hold the love of man, parlay voo.

  She never could hold the love of man,

  Cause she took her baths in a talcum can.

  Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.

  My froggy girl was true to me, parley voo.

  My froggy girl was true to me, parley voo.

  She was true to me, she was true to you,

  She was true to the whole damn army too.

  Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.

  You might forget the gas and shells, parlay voo.

  You might forget the gas and shells, parlay voo.

  You might forget the groans and yells,

  But you’ll never forget the mademoiselles.

  Hinky, dinky, parlay voo.

  They can hear a big splash at the conclusion of the last verse, and a high cheerful laugh following – as though the girl were having the gayest time of her life bathing there in the river in the middle of a deserted mountain range in the middle of a vast corpsedom.

  Abraham looks as though his muscles, beneath his skin, are all knotted taut around each other. He picks up a stone from the grassy verge and hurls it into the river, where it makes only the most pathetic little splash.

  I swear to God, Mose, says Abraham. Things are gonna start gettin rapey around here if that girl don’t leash herself somehow.

  Moses kneels down and splashes water in his face. It is cold, like melted ice, and the sound of it running over its rocky riverbed is peaceful.

  Stow it, he says to his brother. Come on, let’s take a look at that leg of yours.

  So Abraham strips off his pants, and they wash the wound in the river – but his thigh is still swollen and painful, and there’s an ugly brownish-grey colour in the skin around the hole where the bullet went in.

  Hm, Moses says.

  What is it? asks his brother.

  I ain’t sure about this.

  Forget it, Abraham says, grabbing his leg back and splashing some more water over it. I had worse. Everything heals give it enough time.

  Not everything.

  Never mind.

  So Moses strips naked too and submerges himself in the icy water of the river. When he rises, the water streams out of his beard. He sits in the shallows and plucks the nits from the coarse hair all over his torso, squeezing them between his fingers and then drowning them in the river and letting them wash away on the current. He must look, he realizes, like a massive infant – a big hairy baby or a corrupted orangutan or something else not quite right. It’s one of the happy things about a world gone so wrong: your personal freakishness don’t stand out so much.

  When the Vestal Amata wades back from around the bend to where the Todd brothers are, her lower half is sunk in the water and she is wearing a brassiere on her top half – which is something in the direction of decency.

  Hey, she says and points to Abraham’s wound drying in the sun, that’s not lookin so good. Is it going rotten?

  We’ll find somethin for it on the way, Moses replies.

  It ain’t anything, Abraham says and begins wrapping it up again to keep it from solicitous eyes.

  The three of them stay for a while longer, wading in the small river. They should be travelling, they know, and yet they are reluctant to leave. Overhead, a breeze rustles the leaves of the trees, and they shiver in the cold – and still they do not wish to go, as though dozing under some spell of nature, the classical form of the earth itself that they sometimes think of as lost and gone.

  After a while, they emerge from the river and let the air dry them. The Vestal Amata peruses her companions as they sit in the sun.

  Are you sure you two are brothers? she asks. One’s a big hairy bear and the other’s a skinny, runty little thing.

  We had different mothers, Moses says.

  I guess you did, the girl replies. Maybe not even from the same species. So what were you two up to before you embraced the duties of holy protectorate?

  We wandered around a lot, Moses says.

  Seein the world, huh? she says.

  There’s a lot of it to see, Abraham says.

  One thing a plague of death does, Moses says, is rip down a lot of borders that people used to put up to keep the likes of us out. Now there’s no place that’s off limits to us.

  True enough, the Vestal says, nodding her head. The world is wide open now. All those builders and maintainers of society – they’re dead and gone. So who rushes in? I guess us. The rules are gone. Is that happymaking or sad-making?

  It ain’t either one nor the other, Moses says, rising to his feet and beginning to dress. And the rules ain’t gone – they’ve just took up a new home on the inside of your brain rather than the outside of it.

  He walks back to the car and smokes a cigar while waiting for the others. It’s peaceful here, all right. So peaceful it makes you long for things you don’t know the names of.

  *

  She was beautiful, Moses says, addressing those members of the caravan still awake to hear his story. Some have slunk off and some have fallen asleep on their own arms by the fire. The sky is deep dark now and no one has spoken for a long while save the large one-eyed man himself. The fire is lowering. A few listeners toss twigs and brush into the flames, but more for the brief flashes of consuming light than to keep the fire alive. The face of the large man is becoming difficult to see – but by the momentary light of a handful of burning weeds, it is possible to make out his features, his grizzled beard, his downturned mouth, his liquid staring eye.

  Beautiful, he says again. That’s what you ain’t able to see. Her face. Her hair. Her body. These things, too, these images – they’re the prisoners of language, and I ain’t speaker artistic enough to set them free.

  He is silent for a while. A coyote howls somewhere on the plain, and it is a reminder of the wild things that roam everywhere around them. But the man seems not to hear the creature – in fact, seems to hear nothing save the voice of his own speaking, constant, inexhaustible, evened to a single level as if it were a thing forged in fire and hammered over time into something long and flat and unbendable. It is a voice that continues even when he has stopped speaking – for him and for the listeners too – a voice of mortar and steel, like the framework that remains when a building crumbles. It is a structural element that endures, even though it holds up nothing at all.

  Don’t get me wrong, he continues finally. I knew women in my time. Them and their flowery effulgence dropping like pollen on all the world. It’s a powerful dust – like fairies – it gets in your eyes and blinds you from things. And why have we always got to see anyway? Aren’t there times where we shut our eyes full willingly? The truth. They used to say that beauty and truth were the same thing. But from what I seen, the two are at deep odds. You try for the truth, try to fill your heart up with it. It’s the action of an honourable man, ain’t it?

  He is quiet again for a moment, and no one moves.

  But thi
s other woman, he says, this redhead, this priestess, this Vestal, whatever she was – she was beautiful in a different way, like she lived in that beauty the way other people live in houses. Did the beauty belong to her or did she belong to it? You can’t tell such things. She was all of a beauty, and there was no name invented by human tongue could check her. But she was other things too.

  He pauses as if to line up his words in proper order.

  It ain’t exactly right to say she was a trickster, ain’t exactly right to say she wore masks. Instead it was like one single mask handed off to a whole host of people for each of them to wear it for a little while. You spoke to her, and you weren’t never sure who it was behind that face. Not that it mattered none. The face itself was the thing. The face was the thing in the end. It made you love it – and whatever shams it perpetrated, well, you loved them too.

  *

  They drive on. In a place called Shiprock, they see signs for the Four Corners Monument where the miracle is that four states meet at a single point.

  Let’s go there, says the Vestal Amata.

  You’re just tryin to delay our trip, Moses says.

  Maybe I am and maybe I ain’t, but don’t you want to see it?

  Moses considers. Eventually, he says:

  I reckon I do.

  So they drive fifteen miles west and find the monument, which is just a big granite platform in the middle of the desert covered over almost entirely by years of collected dirt and weed. There’s a corpse half buried in the dirt, in the middle of the platform, its skin mummified black and leathery by the sun. Moses drags the corpse away.

  At first they aren’t sure what they’re looking for, and then Moses kicks away the layers of dirt on the platform where the corpse was until he finds a bronze disc the size of a saucer embedded in the middle of it. What the disc says is:

  US DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

  CADASTRAL SURVEY

  BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT

  1992

  And in the middle of the disc is something that looks like an addition sign with the names of the four states in each of the quadrants: Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico.