Kingdom

by Anderson O'Donnell

  Chapter 4

  The American Southwest

  The End of the 20th Century

  For the rest of his life, Campbell would bear the mark of the gurney men, the men he now knew as members of the Order of Neshamah.

  He had remained in their custody for weeks after his encounter with the creature, convalescing alongside those he had helped ruin. And then, one morning, he woke up in a nameless motel near the Texas-New Mexico border, naked with only a single pair of pants left atop a rickety dresser, along with his ID and credit cards. His leg ached and at that moment he would have performed any number of reprehensible acts for a few opiates and a shot of Jameson. There was, however, no scar; only a deep, consuming pain that expanded then exploded when he swung his legs over the side of the bed and onto the floor. Gritting his teeth, he managed to weave his way to the shower.

  Stepping under the piss warm water dribbling from the motel shower-head, Campbell felt a new pain, one that dwarfed the discomfort in his leg and drove him to his knees. Staring down into the drain, he noticed the water collecting around a hairball missed by the maid was pink. A cold panic washed over him, twisting his stomach into knots, and he began running his hands over his arms, his legs, his torso, searching for the source of the blood: nothing. The panic mushroomed and he saw stars, little explosions of light dancing across his field of vision as he tried to retain consciousness.

  Campbell managed to stumble out of the shower before collapsing, bits of broken tile piecing his skin as he hit the floor. That’s when he saw it: Reflected back from the cracked mirror fixed to the ceiling, running the length of his back, was an enormous tattoo—still fresh, the skin still raw—of an asterisk in a circle. He had been marked.

  In the following years, Campbell would court oblivion, trying to escape the things he had done and the things that had been done to him. And yet, no matter how deep into the American night he sank, the mark remained, both a reminder and a warning. Yet Campbell believed the mark was also a promise that, one day, he might be forgiven.

  Until that day arrived, he would remain a shadow, a former colossus consigned to the fringes of the fading century. Specific details from his days in exile were impossible to recall; his memories were a blur of biker bars, methamphetamines, and cocktail waitresses. Eventually, Campbell had found himself on the edge of the Vegas Strip. He overdosed once, twice, but even the third time wasn’t the charm. He bought a gun and on more than one occasion, wrapped his lips around the barrel. One night, however, stood out from the rest.

  He had been at some strip club on the outskirts of Vegas and it was the pre-dawn crowd, with the pre-dawn dancers presenting their decidedly pre-dawn wares next to a picked-over buffet table. Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” pumped from a decade-old sound system while junkies and single mothers flashed tit on stage, feigning arousal at 4 o’clock in the morning to a crowd of exhausted second shifters, bikers, and ageless drunks sulking in the shadows. Campbell was in the corner, chasing Benzedrine with bourbon, and then bourbon with Benzedrine, just trying to build up the courage to die, when he saw it: Mounted over the bar was an ancient CRT television monitor, the only one not tuned to a horse race or ballgame—or maybe it had been and the news feed had interrupted the broadcast. Regardless, there it was: The press conference of his old pupil, Michael Morrison, announcing that Morrison Biotechnology would break from its long-standing tradition of political neutrality and endorse a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

  It wasn’t seeing Morrison grinning through the flickering satellite feed that sent Campbell stumbling back to his motel room to finally pull the trigger; it was the young congressman—a Robert Fitzgerald, the screen informed him—standing next to Morrison at the press conference. Campbell had seen this man before, only he hadn’t looked quite so dapper. But, considered Campbell, it’s hard to pull off dapper when you’re half-formed and floating in a vat miles beneath the Chihuahuan desert. Even now, Campbell could remember laughing hysterically at that notion, laughing and crying until a bouncer dragged him off his bar stool and cast him out into the moonless night; the radioactive glow of neon from the crumbling core of Vegas was Campbell’s only guide as he weaved back toward his motel and the single bullet that would allow him to fade into the blackness he so desperately sought.

  When he returned to his motel room, there had been a letter waiting for him, a note bearing the same symbol that was tattooed across his back, a rosary, and an address: 321 Easton Ave., Tiber City. Campbell put the gun away, but kept a bullet in the chamber.

  All night, the pay phones lining the back wall in the Greyhound bus station rang.

  At first, Campbell answered, picking up the sticky metallic handset on the third or fourth ring. Each time, however, the line was dead. Giving up, Campbell retreated to a corner of the station with a bottle of whiskey, the onset of Benzedrine withdrawal gnawing at the edges of his frayed nervous system.

  Located on the western edge of the desert, the bus station was too far away from the Strip to attract tourists. Instead it hosted a collection of the souls Vegas had broken: not the businessman flying home to the little woman with a substantially smaller bank account, but the showgirl, the real estate hustler, the valet, the handicapper who caught a hot streak five years ago and decided to stay; the people who couldn’t leave until Vegas cycled them through the system, using them until they broke before discarding them on the edge of the desert. Cities like Vegas were machines; human flesh and blood were the gasoline. The phones continued to ring; sudden, strident cries with no discernable pattern or purpose. For a moment, Campbell wondered if he was hallucinating; it had, after all, been a fucking long night. He scanned the station, searching for an indication he was not the only one who heard the phones, but the bus station was empty except for two homeless black men and a plump teenage girl in fishnets who was crying, her mascara running down her cheeks as she sniffled. There was also, Campbell noticed, a trannie leaning back against a pinball machine on the other side of the station, leopard skin skirt hiked up past bruised thighs, legs spread with mutilated genitalia visible whenever the screen mounted above the game cycled through the high scores.

  While the girl and the trannie were oblivious to the phones, the homeless men were visibly panicked, their bloodshot eyes darting from the phones to Campbell, back to the exits, and finally, back to the phones. It made Campbell dizzy and the whiskey wasn’t sitting well; nausea began to rise in his throat. Then he was on his feet, rushing past the homeless men. Campbell’s sudden charge toward the bathroom was the last straw; the two homeless men took off, shuffling back into the night.

  Seconds later he was alone in the unisex bathroom, the mosaic of reds and browns lining the inside of the toilet bowl fueling his nausea, the smell of regurgitated whiskey sealing the deal.

  After staring into the mirror for five—or was it 15—minutes, Campbell wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his Salvation Army jacket and headed back out into the station’s waiting room just in time to see the chubby girl board a bus to L.A. She was no longer crying, just the occasional sniffle, although the mascara had left two long black streaks connecting the bags under her eyes to the cold sores above her lips. She was heading toward one end of America, leaving Campbell alone—save for the comatose transvestite—waiting for his ride to the other.

  A strong, hot wind had kicked up and the station’s foundation groaned while the palm trees outside the grimy glass door pitched so far forward Campbell was convinced they would snap in two, crashing through the roof and rendering everything that had happened to him irrelevant. Occasionally, the wind would blow so hard the door would pop open, wind and debris rushing into the breach.

  Campbell struggled to stay awake as his eyes began to shut involuntarily; he suspected that his odds of escaping Vegas alive would decrease dramatically if he fell asleep. Funny, he considered, only a few hours after almost committing suicide, staying alive was suddenly his priority.

  Eventually, Campbell’s bus arrived and as he mov
ed to the boarding area he noticed that one of the phones—the very last one in the row—was off the hook, dangling from its armored cord inches off the floor. Campbell shut his eyes tight and tried to remember whether the phone had been like that the entire night. For a moment, he was convinced the last phone had been hanging there for all eternity as the voice on the other end continued to speak without a response, insistent and determined to communicate the incommunicable.

  Suddenly all the other phones began to ring at once, jarring, mechanical cries that rose up in concert, breaking the wind’s dull roar. Campbell was filled with a sense of dread and he began to jog toward the exit. He pushed open the glass doors, moving past the tattered missing-children posters taped to the glass and out into the depot, the phones still calling to him. He was running now, careening toward the idling bus, the entire depot awash in a sick, soft florescent glow.

  Taking the steps two at a time, Campbell bounded aboard the bus, his hands trembling as he looked down at his ticket before handing it over to the driver:

  Tiber City, One Way.

  For days, Campbell’s bus crawled across the American landscape as he drifted in and out of slumber; it seemed that every time Campbell approached something resembling a genuine REM cycle, the bus arrived at another station in another town ripped from Americana mythology, garish lighting and muffled announcements over the intercom jarring him awake. Sioux City, Des Moines, Allentown; Burger King, McDonald’s, Arby’s: each new stop indistinguishable from the last, a blur of downsizing and outsourcing and stadium naming rights. SUVs and minivans rocketed past the bus and Campbell tried to remember when the backseat of cars turned into de facto movie theaters; every car that shot past him sported two or three miniature LCD monitors extending from the ceiling, giving off an artificial flicker as jump cuts destroyed the attention spans of a generation. Once upon a time, Campbell considered, backseats were reserved for an awkward fuck on a Saturday night; now they belonged to computer-generated Disney characters.

  These were the things Campbell thought about as night bled into day and back into night and then the voice over the intercom was calling out “next stop Tiber City.” There was no iconic entryway to Tiber City, no massive bridge to traverse, no mountain range to subdue: The highway ended and the city began and only the massive skyscrapers looming in the distance gave any visual evidence of the city’s size. Campbell wondered how long the trip had taken. Days? Weeks? Hours? Even the date was uncertain; newspapers scattered on the floor of the bus each offered differing opinions. It was the end of the American century and Campbell was limping out of a bus station in Tiber City in search of an address scrawled at the bottom of an anonymous letter: At the moment, he could be sure of nothing else.

  The moon was nowhere to be found when Campbell stumbled out of the station and into the street but the downtown financial district threw enough light over the horizon that the slums ringing the city were bathed in a perpetual twilight. Campbell’s legs were stiff and unresponsive and the world was swimming as he tried to ward off chemical withdrawal. The Benzedrine ran out somewhere in Ohio but that was only part of his problem: There were chemicals he had shot into his system when he was with Morrison, chemicals that helped his body defy the aging process, complex compounds that he could approximate through black market connections; he would often do a little work in return for the materials he needed. At best though, his supply was inconsistent; in Tiber City it was nonexistent.

  A steady rain sizzled down against the pavement as hustlers descended upon Campbell, watches, wallets, and phone sex advertisements waved in front of his eyes, sales pitches and sob stories delivered in a dozen different dialects as the rain continued to bounce off the roofs of cars and broken neon signs. In the distance Campbell could see two spotlights strafing the sky and then he was moving away from the masses mobbing the bus station and into a cab, rumbling through the broken streets of Tiber City.

  Campbell didn’t remember telling the driver where he was going but before he could say anything the cab door opened and the driver was already explaining to him in broken English how much he owed. Unable to understand the exact amount requested by the driver, Campbell thrust a fistful of crumbled bills at the driver, who took them but not without admonishing, or was it warning, Campbell about…What? His accent was too thick and it was possible the man—older than Campbell originally assumed, with strong body odor and several missing teeth—was not even speaking English but another ancient language that whispered of ritual, custom, and gods long dead. What was the man trying to convey? It didn’t matter because the next minute the door slammed shut, water splashing up against his jacket as the cab sped away from the curb and into the night.

  Campbell could hear cars in the distance—the familiar sound of automobiles coasting through the enormous puddles; that rolling, elongated whoosh as rubber meets rain—but the streets in front of him were deserted. He tried to read the sign hanging off an overpass several dozen feet down the road but it was too far, the night too dark.

  There was movement behind him. He spun around, noticing—for the first time—that amidst the abandoned row houses and dead neon was a bar. A man shuffled out of the front door, his eyes tracking the pavement as he drifted into the night. Muffled noises carried out from the inside and a tiny crack of light spilled out of the darkness, just enough to illuminate the name and address scratched over the doorway: Lazarus. And, below that: 321 Easton Ave.

  Campbell felt his heart leap and he took one step toward the building’s entrance and then another and he was moving, pushing his way past the steel door into the bar. He was greeted by a wall of warm, stale air and the sound of a cue ball breaking rack.

  He stood in the entrance for a moment, scanning the room, looking for something, anything that could help explain the nightmare his life had become. Yet, whatever he had expected to find, he was pretty sure this wasn’t it.

  Weaving his way across the room, Campbell stepped unsteadily over puddles of spilled beer, crushed cigarettes, and a discarded condom, which may or may not have been used. There seemed to be blood streaked across the wood paneled walls but it was too dark to tell for sure. He managed to pour himself onto one of the stools lining the bar, signaling to the monster tending bar for a drink as he struggled to maintain consciousness. How long had it been since he had last eaten? Hell, when was the last time anything other than whiskey or speed passed between his lips? Catching his reflection in the mirror behind the bottles lining the back wall of the bar, Campbell was struck by how quickly he had aged and suddenly the fact that he had fled the desert, that he had fled Vegas, that he hadn’t deep-throated the desert eagle tucked away in his bag and pulled the trigger seemed ludicrous. The image reflected back at Campbell was that of a dead man: Why drag out the inevitable?

  But sitting there in a tiny bar somewhere in the slums ringing Tiber City, listening to the rain pound the tin roof overhead, his joints on fire, Campbell knew he couldn’t walk away.

  And then the bartender—a giant in jeans and a faded white oxford shirt rolled up at the elbows to reveal thick hairy wrists and a mosaic of tattoos—was pouring two shots of Jameson: one placed in front of Campbell, the other for himself.

  “Welcome to Tiber City,” he said, raising his shot glass toward Campbell as an old jukebox kicked back to life and three seconds of vinyl scratch introduced “Highway to Hell” with Bon Scott assuring the darkened bar that he was still on his way to the promised land.

  Campbell raised his shot as well, tapping the rim of his glass against the bartender’s. He opened his mouth to return the greeting but as the bartender finished his shot and raised his hand to wipe his mouth, Campbell saw it: Tattooed just above the man’s right wrist was a circle with an asterisk in the center.

  Campbell’s arms and legs went numb as the shot glass crashed to the floor. He tried to get off the stool but his body was done and the world went fuzzy, disintegrating as if it were a movie shot by a student filmmaker who just discovered the
soft focus lens. And then he was falling and the last thing he remembered was waiting to hit the floor. But he never did.

  Chapter 5

  New Mexico

  Aug. 25, 2015

  11:22 p.m.

  The Morrison Biotech arcology pierced the rust-colored sky high above the New Mexico desert, a twisted mass of satellite receivers and helicopter landing pads, all designed to extend man’s influence beyond its natural boundaries. Strange purple and orange hues danced around these upper levels of the arcology, stratospheric symptoms of a poisoned atmosphere that pressed low against the desert, choking out whatever sparse life still remained. Toxins drifting downwind from Los Angeles, smoke from the border riots, meth labs littering the Chihuahuan desert; all these contributed to the pollution that hung like a rotting crown around the headquarters of one of the world’s most powerful corporations. The never-ending surge of Mexican immigrants had rendered traditional geo-political boundaries irrelevant and whether Morrison Biotech was bound by the laws of the United States or Mexico was a matter of open dispute. However, as long as the corporation stuffed cash into the pocket of politicians from both sides of the Rio Grande, there was no rush toward resolution. Mexico was a failed state run by narco-terrorists and the United States was especially fond of Morrison Biotech’s shadowy existence—the company’s private security forces filled these power vacuums nicely, providing a buffer between the interior United States and the chaos along her borders. Subsequently, for CEO Michael Morrison, acid-tinged rain and a strange sulfuric smell were a small price to pay for the pleasure of doing business in the Chihuahuan.

  On most nights, Morrison spent long hours alone in his office on the 21st, and final, floor of the biotech arcology—the sprawling, self-sustained research facility where Morrison’s most skilled scientists both worked and lived—staring into the nothingness of the New Mexico night. Sixty-five years old, Morrison had twisted science, achieving an ageless appearance. He was neither young nor old but reaped the benefits of both; Morrison’s physiology was the flesh and bone equivalent of a masterfully tuned sports car. While forced to temper his epidermal alternations—only so much could be attributed to plastic surgery—the nine systems scattered throughout Morrison’s anatomy could now only vaguely be called human.