by Alden Bell
But the rightness of his face is distorted by the missing mandible. Even revolting things can be made to look whole if there is a symmetry to them but with the jaw gone, the face looks squat and the neck looks absurdly equine.
She moves her fingers back and forth before his one good eye, and the eye rolls around in its socket trying to follow the movement but stuttering in its focus. Then she puts her fingers down where the mouth would be. He has a set of upper teeth, cracked and brittle, but nothing beneath to bite down against. When she puts her fingers there, she can see the tendons tucked in behind his teeth clicking away in a radial pattern. There are milky white bones jutting out where the mandible would be attached and yellow ligaments like rubber bands stretching and relaxing, stretching and relaxing, with the ghost motion of chewing.
What you gonna do? she says. Bite me? I think your biting days are gone away, mister.
She takes her hand away from his face and sits back, looking at him.
He gets his head shifted in her direction and keeps squirming.
Stop fightin against yourself, she says. Your back’s broke. You ain’t going nowhere. This is just about the end of your days.
She sighs and casts a gaze over the rocky shoal in the distance, the wide flat mainland beyond.
What’d you come here for anyway, meatskin? she says. Did you smell some girlblood carried on the wind? Did you just have to have some? I know you didn’t swim here. Too slow and stupid for that.
There is a gurgle in his throat and a blue crab bursts out from the sandy exposed end of the windpipe and scurries away.
You know what I think? she says. I think you tried to climb across those rocks. And I think you got picked up by those waves and got bust apart pretty good. That’s what I think. What do you say about that?
He has worked the arm free from underneath him and reaches towards her. But the fingers fall short by inches and dig furrows in the sand.
Well, she says, you shoulda been here last night. There was a moon so big you could just about reach up and pluck it out of the sky. And these fish, all electric like, buzzing in circles round my ankles. It was something else, mister. I’m telling you, a miracle if ever there was one.
She looks at the rolling eye and the shuddering torso.
Maybe you ain’t so interested in miracles. But still and all, you can cherish a miracle without deserving one. We’re all of us beholden to the beauty of the world, even the bad ones of us. Maybe the bad ones most of all.
She sighs, deep and long.
Anyway, she says, I guess you heard enough of my palaver. Listen to me, I’m doin enough jawing for the both of us. Enough jawing for the both of us – get it?
She laughs at her joke, and her laughter trails off as she stands and brushes the sand off her palms and looks out over the water to the mainland. Then she walks up to a stand of palm trees above the beach and looks in the grassy undergrowth, stomping around with her feet until she finds what she’s looking for. It’s a big rock, bigger than a football. It takes her half an hour to dig around it with a stick and extract it from the earth. Nature doesn’t like to be tinkered with.
Then she carries the rock back down to the beach where the man is lying mostly still.
When he sees her, he comes to life again and begins squirming and shuddering and guggling his throat.
Anyway, she says to him, you’re the first one that got here. That counts, I guess. It makes you like Christopher Columbus or something. But this tide and all – you wanna bet there’s more of you coming? You wanna bet there’s all your slug friends on their way? That’s a pretty safe bet, I’d say.
She nods and looks out over the shoal again.
Okay then, she says, lifting the rock up over her head and bringing it down on his face with a thick wet crunch.
The arms are still moving, but she knows that happens for a while afterwards sometimes. She lifts the rock again and brings it down on the head twice more just to make sure.
Then she leaves the rock where it is, like a headstone, and goes down to her fishing net and finds a mediumsized fish in it and takes the fish back up to the lighthouse where she cooks it over a fire and eats it with salt and pepper.
Then she climbs the steps to the top of the tower and goes out on the catwalk and looks far off towards the mainland.
She kneels down and puts her chin against the cold metal railing and says:
I reckon it’s time to move along again.
Q and A with Alden Bell
Exit Kingdom is a prequel to your last book, The Reapers Are The Angels. How did you come up with the idea for The Reapers Are The Angels? What was your inspiration?
Reapers came about because of my lifelong love of zombie movies. But many post-apocalyptic stories are too nostalgic for my taste. They are origin stories that concern themselves with how the world came to this sorry state – focusing on characters who are driven by grief and nostalgia over the lives they have lost. Instead, I’ve always been fascinated by what post-apocalyptia would look like once it has been around long enough to become normalized (like, perhaps, Road Warrior or The Book of Eli or the video game series Fallout). So I wanted my main character to have grown up in this new world – to have no memories whatsoever of the pre-apocalypse. I wanted her to be comfortable in all the situations we would find so devastating and horrific. She sees beauty where we wouldn’t even think to look. I like that tension between beauty and horror – so, in Reapers, it was my idea to exploit it as much as possible.
Had you always planned to write a prequel to The Reapers Are The Angels?
No. Reapers was meant to be a stand-alone book. But, after I had spent some time away from it, I discovered I had a little more to say about that world. Also, I was intrigued by the idea of approaching the same landscape from a different perspective – taking a secondary character from Reapers and turning him into the primary character of Exit Kingdom. If I were to write a third book, I think I would do the same – maybe telling a story from the Vestal’s perspective.
Do you miss Temple, the protagonist from The Reapers Are The Angels?
Definitely. But I don’t believe in returning to a character or place or story just because I liked it a lot the first time around. I would imagine it’s difficult for writers to do a book series without it becoming a dog and pony show, without falling back on old tricks. I would be afraid of attenuating Temple. Sometimes the best way to show respect for a character is to leave her alone.
Your characters have a very distinct style of speaking. Why was language important in Reapers and Exit Kingdom?
Both books reflect a great deal on the inspiration of southern gothic writers like William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Franklin and Daniel Woodrell – all of whom celebrate the epic potential of language in their writing. My characters speak in a rather hyperbolic way; they use language that’s almost too big for their frames, biblical in tone, oratorical in performance – even, let’s admit it, unrealistic (though realism has never really been my aim). Stories are powerful not just because of the characters they contain or the plots they outline but also because of the language used to convey them. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the protagonist Marlow tells a story that engrosses his listeners precisely because of the impossibly over-inflated language he uses. He captures his audience with oratory, and he uses language to give immense authority to his perspective. Marlow was in the back of my head the whole time I was writing Moses’ campfire tale. And language is particularly important to people who are disenfranchised by the world at large. Words become not just a way to communicate but rather actions in themselves. A certain combination of words can be like an incantation: it can declare (and by declaring, create) an identity, it can be an attack more brutal than any physical assault, it can function as a gambit in a game of romance or loyalty. The characters in these books are desperately serious about language because, for them, words are all that are left to create meaning, purpose and order.
How has your o
utlook on life informed your writing?
I’m a sentimentalist, so my writing always borders on melodrama. On the other hand, I’ve always been a fan of books and movies that upset my expectations – stories that make hard left turns and go in entirely different directions than I expected them to. I love a good anticlimax – the moment where the book has built to a spectacularly dramatic peak, and then the rug is pulled out from under you and everything stumbles to a close. Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I’m a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing. I like a story that makes me work a little, a story that sneers haughtily at me from the windowsill, that nips at me if I try to get too cosy with it. It’s possible that a little masochism is required to enjoy my books.
How easy do you find writing? If you had to compare yourself to a composer, would you be Mozart, who effortlessly turned out symphonies with little revision, or Beethoven, who famously agonized over each note, going back and rewriting over and over again until he was eventually happy?
I’m no Mozart – but it’s true that I don’t do much revision in my writing. I tend to start at the beginning of a book and write it straight through to the end in scene order – and I almost never look back more than a page or two during the process. It’s not that I feel my words have any kind of holy sanctity but rather that once I’ve created those scenes, characters, events, it’s hard for me to go back and re-imagine them. They become absolutely real to me, for better or worse. I think there’s probably a flaw in my imagination that makes writing akin to glassblowing. You have to work fast and do a decent job the first time, because there’s no reshaping it later – and if it’s no good, you just end up with a twisted, ugly paperweight. Believe me, I’ve produced plenty of those paperweights.
Do you have a writing routine?
I am very ritualistic about my writing. I get up at 7.15 in the morning and start writing immediately. I write two pages and then take a break to purge the detritus from my mind with inane online searches, or Facebook, or computer games. Then I get back to the work at hand and write another two pages. My deadline for completing these four pages is 11.30 a.m. – at which time I take a walk to get a turkey sandwich for lunch. During lunch, I read twenty pages of whatever book I’m reading at the time. Then I walk back home and write another two pages in the early afternoon. That’s it. Six pages a day is my quota. Of course, this kind of rigid adherence to a schedule is easier if you don’t have to worry about the demands of society. It’s possible that my constitution (like Moses Todd’s) is better suited to the post-apocalypse.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Write what you want. Don’t try to conform to the fickle tastes of a fickle readership. The best audience you can aim for is yourself: write the book that you would buy, the book that you would have trouble putting down, the book that you would want to read but that nobody has written yet. That way, no matter what, whether published or un-, you will have produced a thing of value.
What was your favourite scene to write?
For all the running around and zombie-killing in this book, my favourite scenes are the quiet ones. The action in the book isn’t the point for me – it’s just the context. It gives a framework for all the late-night conversations between rough men and holy men and insane men and deceptive women and even the taciturn dead. All stories, in one way or another, are about people trying to puzzle through the mysteries of the world around them. The adventurous efforts of humanity to make sense of a chaotic universe, to give order and meaning to the void – those are the struggles worth writing about. And they happen mostly in the noiseless interstices between action.
By Alden Bell
Exit Kingdom
The Reapers Are The Angels
First published 2012 by TOR
This electronic edition published 2012 by TOR
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Copyright © Alden Bell 2012
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