Exit Kingdom

by Alden Bell

  Here we are, says Moses Todd.

  Yep, says his brother.

  Sort of makes you feel like you’re at the centre of things, doesn’t it? says the Vestal Amata.

  It does at that, says Moses Todd.

  Someone went to all that trouble, says the Vestal, to locate that exact point in the dirt.

  And for what? says Abraham. Now it don’t mean anything.

  But Moses thinks differently.

  It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it’s the doin it that counts. It’s something. You draw imaginary lines. That’s what you do.

  The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate – even maybe admiring.

  Then what do you do with the lines? she asks.

  And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says:

  Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there.

  Part Two

  SANCTUARY

  Six

  Snow » Dolores » Historic Rio Grande Southern » USB » The Trials of Bitchery » Breakdown » A Clearing, a Cabin » A Face from Below » A Conversation by Starlight » The Ministration of Wounds » ‘Everybody’s Looking for an Entrance’ » A Midnight Baptism

  The air grows colder, and soon they begin to see snow on the ground.

  I’ll be damned, Abraham says. I ain’t been north in ages. Does that mean it’s winter then?

  January, Moses confirms.

  We missed Christmas?

  I guess we did.

  Abraham looks sincerely disappointed.

  Don’t worry, Moses says. It’ll come around again. It always does.

  A snow flurry stirs up, and the flakes whip around them as they drive. Moses pulls the car over, and they all get out. Abraham opens his palms to catch the flakes as they fall. He watches them melt immediately into his hands, fascinated, perhaps, by the ephemera of nature that shimmer away on contact with humanity.

  The Vestal Amata opens her mouth wide to catch the flakes on her tongue, as though she would consume greedily the falling sky itself.

  Moses himself remembers the snow from his youth, when he travelled many places. He is and has always been a traveller, for longing rather than necessity – even before things changed. With the agitation of the dead the world changed, and what it became suited Moses even more than what it was before. But he does recall a year he spent in the mountains of California, the heavy blades hitched to the fronts of trucks to push the snow out of the way, the mounds of sooty ice collected by the sides of the road. Back then, snow was a nuisance, an obstacle, something to be got around or over. Now the world has slowed down, there is no hurry. You watch the snowflakes fall lazily on their way, and you are reminded of your own floating, your own speedless descent through life.

  From a ditch by the roadside, they see a dead man stir. He, too, is blanketed with snow, which fissures and sloughs off as he rises slowly. He moves with exquisite languor, as though his very joints are frozen stiff. It takes him many minutes just to climb to his hands and knees and then to his feet. Then, for a moment, he simply stands there and looks around, his head turning on the creaky hinge of his neck. Who knows how long he has been lying in the ditch, and now what a wonder the world must look from this new altitude.

  Then the dead man seems to regain his purpose and shuffle slowly to where the three stand by the car. He scrapes his feet across the frozen tarmac and tries to lift his arms in a pathetic attempt at grasping. His skin is completely grey with blue undertones – death gone to pallid ash. The dead don’t take naturally to temperatures such as this. They don’t move well to begin with, and the cold slows them down considerably more. For this reason, there are more communities of survivors in the north where the seasons make it safer for many months of the year.

  The dead man reaches for them, his fingers immobile on the stumps of his hands.

  Poor thing, says the Vestal Amata. Do you have to kill it?

  It ain’t doing him any favours to keep him alive, Moses says.

  He walks over to the dead man and pulls a small folding knife from his pocket.

  The dead man reaches for Moses, opening his mouth. There is no smell to the man, dried up and frozen as he is, and Moses can see the shrivelled tongue in the well of his mouth, the cracked grey palate, the teeth turned to chalky stone.

  The arms grasp for him, but Moses gets to the man’s side and reaches one arm around the back of his torso to keep the arms lowered. It is a gentle gesture, almost like a brother’s embrace. The dead man looks confused. He tries to rotate his head to a position where he might get a bite out of Moses, but the neck doesn’t allow such range.

  Be still now, Moses says quietly.

  Then he takes the knife in his free hand, unfolds it, and raises it in front of the dead man’s face.

  Close your eyes, Moses says to him. It is tender, the process, like a surgery or a baptism or a sudden kindness. Close your eyes now, he says.

  He raises the knife to within an inch of one of the eyes, and the dead man instinctively closes them. He is peaceful now, his mouth still open but more by muscle slack than appetite. And then, with quick precision, Moses thrusts the knife deep into the man’s eye socket. A little dribble of fluid, neither pus nor blood, spills from the burst orb of the eyeball – and then the man’s whole body goes limp.

  Moses lets the body down gently onto the ground and removes the knife from the eye socket. Then he sweeps up a handful of frozen dirt from the verge to clean the blade with.

  Poor thing, says the Vestal again.

  You want to say something over him? Moses asks.

  Vestals must have blessings, she says. Don’t you think?

  But neither of the Todd brothers responds, and after a while of standing shivering over the dead man, they all return to the car.

  *

  They drive. They snow abates, having left a thin dusting over everything. Moses looks behind them in the rearview mirror and sees the two parallel tracks of his tyres marking their progress over the whited earth.

  There’s a town called Dolores, but there’s not much in it – just a few blocks of houses north and south of the main drag, which is called Railroad Avenue. But it must be on the edge of some active grid, because they see the lights miles before they reach it. It’s the first electricity they’ve seen in weeks, travelling the deserts of the south-west as they have, and their minds get filled with visions.

  But what the town of Dolores is is an outpost at the base of a mountain range – a last stop of civilization before the rangy wild. And it is an outlaw’s town, a bawd’s town. The Todd brothers have seen many assemblages such as this – pirates congregated at a pit stop for travellers. They provide safety and services for a fair exchange of goods – and they steal what they want above and beyond that fair exchange.

  It is night when they arrive, and snowing again – the streetlamps illuminating the flakes in smoky circles as they fall. They drive slowly, stared at by men whose gesture of welcome is that they hold their rifles casually at their sides. But in the middle of town they arrive at a large inn with twin gabled roofs, and a woman comes out to greet them.

  Welcome to the Historic Rio Grande Southern Hotel, she says.

  She is thick around the bosom and waist, and her flesh is pushed and pulled every which way by a bustier that cinches her middle, and squeezes her breasts up into a shelf of flesh. Her face is rouged, and her tinted hair piled in a gaudy stack on top of her head.

  She smiles invitingly to the Todd brothers as they climb out of the car, and the smile diminishes when the Vestal Amata emerges after them.

  We’ve got three churches in town, the madam says and folds her arms across her chest. They’re not in the best condition, but they’re still full of relics. Families like to stay there sometimes when they pass through.

  In the windows of the gabled house behind her, there appear faces of girls all lips
tick and powder. Their eyes dash back and forth, curious about the newcomers.

  No, ma’am, Abraham says and limps forward on his wounded leg. I reckon this is the place for us, Vestal or no Vestal.

  The smile reappears on the madam’s face.

  Then come on in, she says. Homestyle comfort right here in little Dolores.

  The town is grey and low, spread out in the small valley between the foothills of a mountain range to the north-east. Like most survivor towns, the outlying structures are run-down or fully collapsed, and all the residents have huddled into a few maintained buildings in the centre of town. Across the street from the Rio Grande Southern is a long ranch-style building like a train depot, with a raised porch that circles it entirely. At one end is a sign for what probably used to be a barbecue restaurant. The words Flying Pig are painted across it, and it looks like someone in town has restored the sign to its original colourful state. Except, dangling from the overhang of the place, there’s a skeleton of a swine to which some scallywag has wired white wooden wings. And such is the playfulness of the town called Dolores – muddied with grim horror.

  The sky overhead is slate grey and shallow with ugly clouds. Likewise, the street is pocked with dirty puddles of icy snow, the painted median lines long weathered away, the verge of the tarmac crumbled with use and age. It is a place to make you feel crushed, squeezed to suffocation between a low sky and a flat earth, as though life here continues narrowly, in a thin margin between earth and atmosphere. The residents stoop in towns such as this for fear of striking their heads on fallen skies.

  The three travellers are escorted into the Rio Grande Southern by the madam. Abraham stays in the lobby of the place with the Vestal Amata and a small host of women wearing all variety of nightclothes, while Moses follows the madam into a back room to make arrangements.

  Watch her, Moses says to his brother and points to the Vestal.

  Aye aye, brother, Abraham says and smiles at the roomful of women.

  In the madam’s office, the woman talks terms.

  It’s a luxury establishment we’ve got here, she says. There’s a price for bedding down here.

  What’s the price?

  What’ve you got?

  We’ve got pills, uppers mostly. Some electronics it looks like you could use. Some ammunition if you got the right kind of guns.

  It sounds like you might be able to afford us. What is it you want?

  Rooms for the night. Three near each other. Board. A girl for my brother.

  What about a girl for you? Or are you with the redhead?

  Ain’t nobody with her like that. A girl for me too, I reckon.

  So the redhead’s left out of it, is she?

  She don’t need any of that business. She’s a Vestal.

  A what?

  A holy type.

  That girl out there? That redhead? Honey, I think you might have misread a few things. But your business is your business. Let’s go out and see what you have in that car of yours – and maybe we can seal this deal.

  *

  Abraham has taken to wearing the harlequin Albert Wilson Jacks’s gift to him around his neck on a leather shoelace. He plays with the black plastic thing when he is bored, picking at its exposed metal end. When Moses is done making arrangements with the madam, he returns to his brother, who points to one of the older women in the lobby.

  That whore there knows what this thing is, he says. She says to me, Hey, I know what that thing is. It’s a yewess bee drive. And I says, A what kind of bee? And she says, A yewess bee. She says it plugs into a computer.

  Do they have one here? Moses asks.

  Huh-uh. She says they don’t have much call for computers round here.

  Which woman?

  Abraham points her out. She’s dressed more elegantly than the others – wearing a classy cocktail dress and sitting properly with one knee crossed over the other.

  Okay, Moses says. I arranged things for the night. Your pick of the girls. But I’m warning you – go easy. This ain’t a town to get jammed up in.

  You got it, brother. Easy’s my middle name.

  So Abraham picks a girl – the one who looks youngest and most frightened. He pulls her along up the winding staircase, taking her by the upper arm just under her shoulder as though he is punishing a child for some misdeed.

  Then the Vestal Amata is standing before Moses, speaking low.

  You ain’t takin one of these girls, she says to him.

  You got you your own room – right next to mine. Ain’t nothing going to happen to you.

  That’s fine, but you ain’t taking one of these girls. If you do, I’ll run off – like I did before.

  Where’ll you run to? Cold out there. Colorado’s not got such good walkin weather.

  I don’t care. I swear to God I’ll run off. I’ll hitch a ride on out of here.

  He looks at her, trying to figure the girl’s brain. It’s a muddled thing, that head of hers. She’s like an optical illusion, different each time you look at her.

  What do you care about it anyway? I got the feeling you ain’t so pristine about the business of the world.

  She slaps him. But ferocious as she is, she’s also a small thing, so her wee palm does little damage. She slaps him again.

  This time he picks her up and tosses her over her shoulder.

  I figured you might try somethin like this, he says. I got it arranged.

  She kicks and strikes at his back, but he carries her up the stairs and to the room designated as hers, where he tosses her on the quilted four-poster bed. The window of this room is boarded up, and there’s a lock on the door.

  Get some sleep, he says to her. And let’s keep our business in neat and tidy corners, what do you say? I’m carryin you from one place to the other, that’s all. I may port saints, but I ain’t one. Understand?

  Then the expression on her face changes. The anger melts to sadness before his eyes.

  Just because I ain’t a true Vestal don’t mean I ain’t of spiritual bent, she says. You mistake me, Moses Todd. I know right and wrong. I can tell the difference – in myself and in others.

  How do you know for sure? he says. How do any of us? I reckon I’ll take my own counsel on such matters.

  He doesn’t wait for a response but rather shuts the door and locks it up tight so she can’t get out.

  Still, he can’t get the Vestal out of his head, and he can’t get comfortable with his woman once she’s taken him to her room.

  It’s the older woman, the one who knew about the yewess bee.

  Maybe you just want to sleep for a while, she says. Don’t worry about it – we’ve got all night.

  He is silent, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling.

  We don’t get real men around here much, the woman says, winding herself around the poster at the foot of the bed like a snake.

  You can quit that talk, he says. I ain’t a man in need of being built tall.

  As you wish, she says and sits down in the chair in the corner near the foot of the bed. My apologies. You’re not like your brother. What would you like to talk about?

  You had a name for the thing around my brother’s neck. A yewess bee. A computer gadget.

  That’s right. You should have the same name for it. You look to be about my age.

  I never was much of a computer person – neither before nor after. What does it do?

  She shrugs.

  It could do lots of things, she says. It stores data. Who knows what the data does. Probably nothing.

  How come you know so much? What were you before?

  I was a secretary for a real estate attorney. I was just getting started.

  And now you’re here doin this.

  Moses shakes his head, commiserating.

  The woman recoils a bit in her expression, as if bitten. She moves to the window of the room and puts her back against it, folds her arms over her front.

  You think I regret it? she says. Living didn’t use
d to amount to much. Now it counts. I used to be a secretary for a real estate attorney. Now I’m a survivor of the apocalypse and a whore. I endure where others don’t. It matters. Just breathing means something now. Have you got a problem with whores?

  Moses cringes, chastened. He looks down at his dirty, brutish hands.

  Not as a general rule, he says.

  Then the woman softens a bit. She comes and sits on the edge of the bed, where Moses lies on his back looking at the ceiling.

  You and that redhead, she says. You two are together somehow?

  Me and the Vestal? Huh-uh. She’s just my charge is all.

  You’re a hired gun?

  Somethin like that.

  So what are you being paid?

  Moses goes silent. He gazes at the ceiling. He ponders when was the last time he laid beneath a roof and called it home. The world, for him, just keeps going on and on and on, long after he thought it ever would.

  Come on, he says and reaches for the woman. Lay here and just let me get some shut-eye for a bit. Then we’ll get down to business.

  *

  When he wakes in the morning, there is a tumult downstairs. He rushes down thinking that his brother has got into trouble again – but this time it’s not the riot of threat but rather the riot of laughter.

  In the sitting room, on a burgundy couch, he finds the Vestal Amata making merry with a passel of men. Townsmen – a number of the faces Moses recognizes as those of the men who were holding their rifles at the ready when they rolled into town. The redhead herself is lying across two of their laps, her bare feet resting on the arm of the couch, her toes wiggling playfully.

  Here he is, she says of Moses to the men. My Rock of Gibraltar. Come on in, Gibraltar. The boys and I have had quite a night.

  A couple of the other girls sit in the room also, but Moses sees that they are distinctly unhappy with this redheaded interloper.

  Brucie there gave my feet a nice hot salt bath, says the Vestal and points to a tough-looking man who nonetheless flushes when she says his name. Men are lovely, she continues. You try to pay them back in kindness, but they just give so much it’s difficult to keep up.