Exit Kingdom

by Alden Bell

  What happened? he says, climbing out of the car.

  They shine a spotlight in his eyes.

  State your name, someone calls through a bullhorn.

  What happened? he says again. They got my brother.

  State your name, the voice repeats.

  But he doesn’t have to reply this time, because there is commotion. Someone must recognize him from the night before, because he is taken and escorted onto the compound, across the wide courtyard. The lights on the jaw-bone chapel illuminate the structure violent against the blackness of night.

  Inside, he is taken to a new place, a large room where people in uniforms of authority are gathered around a table in grim, controlled debate. On the sidelines, Moses spots the old man, Pastor Whitfield, who approaches him.

  Marauders, Whitfield says before Moses has a chance to ask him anything. A caravan. It was led by a man in a sombrero.

  Fletcher, Moses says.

  You know this man?

  He took my brother. Where’d he go? Which direction?

  You aren’t . . . affiliated with him?

  I ain’t affiliated. Except in the sense that I’m the man scheduled to remove the head from the rest of his body.

  They broke through the fence.

  They were after the girl, Moses explains. The Vestal.

  Whitfield looked confused.

  But they didn’t take the girl, Whitfield says.

  You repelled them?

  We did. At some cost to our people.

  He’s still got my brother. Do you know where they went?

  Slow down, says Whitfield. You don’t understand.

  He reaches a hand out to touch Moses’ arm, and Moses strikes it away. There is something happened inside him. Some safety turned off – some tribal code of civility gone away in the face of his brother’s abduction. He gives Whitfield a look as violent and full of murder as any on the wild plain.

  Tell me now, man of God, he says. Two heads are the same as one to me. Godful or godless, it makes no difference.

  The Pastor Whitfield does not flinch. He simply gives Moses a mild look and a gentle, pitying smile.

  You’ve been on the frontier too long, my friend, he says. But so have we all. I’ll give you the information you want. But you must listen to me.

  Moses relents. He has no choice.

  We’ve already sent a regiment. This man Fletcher – apparently he’s allied with some local bandits. Together they levied an effective assault. They did a great deal of damage and took some valuable equipment. The fear is that they are gearing up for a larger assault. So we are going to end it. We sent a battalion.

  Who? Moses asks. How many?

  Whitfield shrugs.

  I’m simply a pastor. My colleagues at the table there are the ones who specialize in land conflicts. I watched the soldiers go. Maybe fifty.

  Where?

  Apparently there’s a gasworks some miles east of here. It’s where the bandits call home – where your man Fletcher might be as well. But listen, my friend, this is a battle between two stubborn factions who have not yet realized that possession means nothing any more. You don’t want to get in the middle of that.

  What I want? Moses chuckles sourly. Then he repeats the words, shaking his head: What I want. Pastor, what I want is so far from what I got . . . it’s all semaphores across an empty ocean. I’m gonna check on the girl. Then I’m leavin.

  Wait, Whitfield says. Wait.

  But Moses ignores him, walking to the door of the wide room – wanting out of the noise and commotion of miniature human strategy.

  The girl, Whitfield says more loudly just as Moses reaches the door. She’s not here.

  Moses stops and turns. Whitfield walks quickly over to him.

  That’s what I was trying to tell you, he says.

  You said they didn’t take her.

  Whitfield shakes his head.

  They didn’t take her, he says. She left.

  With Fletcher?

  Whitfield shakes his head again.

  By herself, he says. Shortly after you left. She didn’t even stay the night.

  You didn’t hold her?

  We don’t keep people against their will here, says Whitfield. This is not a penitentiary.

  But for her own good.

  One’s own good – that’s exactly the kind of thing you can’t define for people. As much as we might like.

  Moses is silent for a moment. He looks at the floor and contemplates all the silly things in the world – all the things impossible to get your mind around.

  Then, in a quiet voice, the Pastor Whitfield says:

  They found something out about her.

  Why she ain’t attacked?

  Whitfield nods.

  She’s got a condition, he says. A . . . genetic disorder. Related to something called Huntington’s Disease.

  She’s sick?

  In a sense. Always has been. It’s something you’re born with even if it doesn’t have an onset until later in life. But there’s something about the disease, something in her blood. The dead don’t like it. Or, no, that’s not right. See, they don’t attack her for the same reason they don’t attack each other.

  Whitfield waits for the full meaning of his words to settle.

  She ain’t dead, Moses says. She ain’t.

  No, Whitfield says. But she is dying. Her body – it has a predetermination for death. They think that’s why . . .

  Moses is silent again for a moment, piecing things together. The Vestal. A tiny firebrand of a woman, chopped red hair, a catalogue of personalities, impossibly dishonest, witchy and tricksy as any cheap fraud, a calamity with translucent skin. Cursed, dying, the whole time. It is too much. Too much by any measure.

  You told her? Moses asks.

  We did.

  And then she left.

  She did.

  Then they got her too. Fletcher got her too.

  Maybe not.

  You didn’t have to tell her.

  Now Whitfield is silent.

  You didn’t have to, Moses repeats.

  Then he shakes his head and looks at the man of God eye to eye.

  Jesus Christ, he says to the pastor, do we have to know the name of everything?

  *

  So he goes back outside where he can see his breath in the cold night wind and crosses the massive courtyard at the base of that purple nightmare cathedral – and before he reaches his car, he is accosted by a soldier on guard.

  Where you headed? asks the soldier.

  East, says Moses. It ain’t your intent to stop me, is it?

  No, it is not, says the soldier. You going after them?

  I reckon so. You know what road they took?

  You don’t want to go there. It’s bound to be a mess of destruction. Not something you want to be caught in the middle of.

  Son, I ain’t got the luxury of wanting things. Which road east?

  The main one, says the soldier and gives him a shrug. You’ll be able to follow the tracks. I’m sure there’s only one army that’s passed through since the last snowfall.

  Moses drives. His one remaining headlight illuminates the road ahead – the palimpsest of tyre tracks in the snow. The road goes through the middle of town – which is populated only by icicles and the frozen dead. Bodies slump over against the concrete bases of buildings, many of them lost or near lost in drifts of snow. One dead woman with frosty hair sits buried in snow up to her armpits – like death in hibernation, her joints frozen until the thaw in the spring when her creaky bones will come to life again, and she will crawl, starved for a season, to the nearest meat she can find to nourish herself.

  Just beyond that slug, in another deep drift of snow, Moses sees two hands poking out at the top. One is bent like a claw and the other is frozen open, like a gesture of constant waving welcome.

  Here the dead wait patiently. They sit, affixed in their places, like plants and other anchored creatures of nature, biding their time
, their mouths filling up with snow, their eyes filling up with snow, spectral and full of peace.

  And Moses drives on, towards the indefatigable conflicts of the living, while here, in this frozen city, death is rendered petty, benign, thoughtless and allegiant to the hobbyhorse rocking of the old, tired earth.

  Part Three

  CRUCIBLE

  Ten

  Interlude » The Gasworks » Rosie and Lily Todd » Soldier Boy » Battle » A Locked Shed » Another Confession » Wishes

  You see now? Moses Todd asks. You see? It ain’t about what you think it’s about. All the wandering, all the mad pursuit, all the spinnin cycles of life and death and death and life over and over until you ain’t but a dizzy-headed creature roamin the plains. It ain’t about anything but one thing. Drollery. You fight and you create and you fight and you destroy – and sometimes in the middle somewhere you happen to love. But it all comes down to ridiculousness. Dead hands waving at you from out a bank of snow. An abducted brother who ought to of paid for his sins in some such way long before. A dying redhead with deceitful ways and an immunity to that which already had a hold of her. Ridiculous. You could laugh your guts out if you keep your brain on it too long. I challenge you. I challenge you to look it in the face and keep from laughin.

  *

  It has started to snow again by the time Moses sees the commotion in the distance. The gasworks is at the end of the road, in a mountain cul-de-sac, surrounded on all sides by ice-laden foothills. The bandits are leeching electricity from the same power grid the Airforce Academy is on, so there are bright lights shining down from tall towers and illuminating all the structures in the round valley – a giant bowl of light.

  When Moses sees the military vehicles ahead, he abandons the car and climbs into the hills. He carries with him things he took from the satchel in the trunk of the car: a 9mm pistol in one hand and in the other the massive bladed truncheon crafted for him weeks before by the tinkerer Albert Wilson Jacks. He makes his way up the slope and through the trees, following the hillside that flanks the gasworks. The conflict between the soldiers and the bandits below must just have begun – because he can hear the sounds of warfare in escalation. Pistols and machine guns rattling off their rounds, explosions echoing up through the valley, orders being issued through megaphones on one side – and on the other animal screeches, the ripping calls of wild men who have for many years survived in a hostile world on nerve and simple, unadorned violence.

  He climbs higher, past the mouth of the valley and around the perimeter. There is no point in fighting through the main body of the conflict. This is not his battle. He seeks two people: his brother and the Vestal Amata. Once he finds them, he will leave the rest of it behind to resolve itself.

  This is how the world works: smoky blazes that burn bright for a short time and then die out again, leaving the charred quiet we are accustomed to.

  Finally, he breaks through the trees and sees the whole valley spread wide before him – an abstract carnival of dread made absurd. It is a place of metal and machine, all the surfaces gone brown or green with rust and oxidation – as though the forged metals of man have reverted once again to nature and settled back into the forested landscape surrounding them. Moses does not understand the function of the structures below him – but there is something awful and gorgeous about them – like artifacts of a more ingenious time, the elegance and efficiency of human industry gone wild. In the centre of the gasworks, there are six massive tanks around which are built creaking gantries, bent scaffoldings, spiral stairs, interstitial pipes, valves and wheels. Among the six tanks are three metal smokestacks that climb higher out of the valley than anything else – reaching tall and rotted like the fingers of the dead from out a bank of snow. It is a mazy sight – metal twisted around metal in purposeful shapes like the biological organs of industry itself, evidence of man’s desire to outdo God in the creation of a complex corpus. We forge ours out of metal and spark, and it puffs itself to life like an armoured dragon in the mist-covered valley.

  But this apparatus has been long dead. And, with the same impulse that causes us to make art from the detritus of other art, the bandits have painted murals and words all over the tall rusted metal structures. The graffiti is awkward and colourful, obscene and lovely. There is a pastoral scene, painted simple, as though a child had done it – a sunrise between two mountains, and someone has painted a smiling face on the sun. Next to that is a black spray-painted scrawl of male genitalia, and beyond that a woman with huge, pendulous breasts and thick, monstrous red lips. The red of her lips is striking against all the blacks, whites, greens and browns of the place. As though the painted mark of womansex is anathema to nature itself.

  And Moses can make out one more graffito – a series of words painted in neat white around the top of one of the tanks. The motto says, simply:

  AT DESTRUCTION AND FAMINE THOU SHALT LAUGH.

  Moses recognizes the quote, for it was one he has said to himself at times over the past fifteen years of his life – usually in quiet places, under roofs with rain falling on them, or on sunless days when it seemed the road may have no end. He knows the quote, and he completes it under his breath:

  Neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth.

  Moses knows it to be true – that the words are the best and the worst of everything.

  Around the base of the six tanks are other structures, squat wide buildings that must contain the machinery that once processed and refined what was held in the tanks. And among and upon the structures of the gasworks, there is a war going on.

  Figures run every which way, calling out or pointing their guns or hiding in some enclosed niche or collapsing to the ground with a bullet gone through them. And here is the full-blown bathos of it all. Moses can see now that there are four distinct factions at battle down in the bowl-shaped valley. There are the soldiers in their pressed uniforms, engineering precise manoeuvres around the tall metal structures, fighting with the cold confidence of a reborn civilization striking out against the filthy reminders of its own wild past. Then there are Fletcher’s men, a ragged collective, a mobile army which has gathered guns from all corners of the country. They have experience on their side, for every day on the road is a battle for them. They live conflict. Then there are the bandits who have been residing at the gasworks. These are almost indistinguishable from Fletcher’s men – but if one looks, one can see that they are even more ragged, embattled by stasis and starvation. They wear more the look of survivors than marauders. And they do not fight in tandem with Fletcher’s men but against them as well as the soldiers – perhaps in retaliation for Fletcher having brought this battle upon them in the first place. And the final faction is the dead themselves. Some rogue has set free all of Fletcher’s monstrous sideshow dead, and it seems the bandits may have had some caged dead on hand as well. Now they all roam free, feeding on the newly dead and the not quite so dead, pacing slowly through the combat, without rush, without malice – possessing the neutrality of parasites on a larger body. Some of them are struck down, and they fall with the same implacable calm with which they walked a moment before – but most are ignored since their threat is the slower one. Almost insect-like, some of these anthropophages sit cross-legged on the ground, the sounds of death and destruction coming to bear all around them, while they slowly munch away at the leg or arm of a fallen combatant and let the snow collect gently in their hair.

  Good lord, Moses Todd says from his perch above the valley. As he watches, a bandit woman with a longrange rifle hunched atop one of the tanks is pierced by a bullet that sends a quick atomizer mist of blood out from her back – then she topples over and falls to the ground, crashing once over a railing that cracks her body and folds it backwards unnaturally so that when she comes to rest the heel of her foot is up by her ear. Then a slug wanders over without haste to the bent body and digs into it with unhurried and brute fingers, opening the abdomen of the woman and pulling thick ropes of vi
scera free from the cavity. As the slug chews on the rubbery intestines of the woman, he looks around him with patient, ruminative eyes.

  Moses Todd turns his gaze away from the fray and looks behind him – into those empty mountains and the grey sky, even the misty implication of the wide country beyond. For a moment it looks as though he will turn his back on it all, as though he may give a shrugging refusal to it all. He is a mountain man, as he is other things. A nomad with many more wildernesses to explore – and it is so much easier to travel away from things than towards them.

  But it’s the words that are a curse – because he cannot utter a simple goodbye.

  *

  He remembers his daughter. His girl of the meadow – all red cheeks and powder skin, a tiara of wildflowers in her hair. How she would run to him, and he would hoist her in his arms. He would enclose her away from the world and she would cry happily to be enclosed – and his bigness was a powerful and good thing because it meant shelter for her from the world. Her tugging at his beard with her little grasping hands. His fear of crushing her, because his brute arms were not built for such delicacy as daughters offer.

  And his wife, too. A woman who presented herself as beyond the knowing of any in the world but him. The way she cut his hair and trimmed his beard and made him more man than beast. He was nobody’s master when he was with her – but just an overgrown child with big notions that got wobbly with her gentle smile. She did not know how she was wound around everything in him, as though his lungs and heart and stomach were gripped tight by the burning gaze of her.

  And there was no goodbye for them either. Even after he stopped looking for them. Even now, years later, there is no goodbye. A farewell is a thing of the mind – and, as such, you can shut it behind doors.

  *

  So he turns his eyes from the empty frontier of the woods and back to the battle below. Something in him clicks, some knife switch jams into place, and he is suddenly full of purpose and movement. He scans the structures, mapping them in his mind, determining which ones would be most likely to hold his brother and the Vestal.