Kingdom

by Anderson O'Donnell

  Watching the gurney men work—packing the wrapped ice around the boy before hooking him up to an ancient IV and heart monitor, administering antibiotics, all in a vain attempt to contain the fever ravaging the child’s fragile frame—Campbell’s mind began to race, conjuring up images of the life this boy might have led—that pastoral American existence. Instead, this boy, nor any other of the dying children hidden away in Camp Ramoth, would never go to school, fall in love, fight, fuck, or have children of their own; they would know only shadow, pain, and loss. As the gurney men began spreading an ointment over the puss-caked lesion, Campbell’s legs buckled and he slid down the cracked and crumbling concrete wall until his ass met the floor. Squeezing his eyes shut, Campbell focused on the bleat from the rusty monitor, tears beginning to tumble down his cheeks as the EKG again spiked, the beeping quickening in response. In that instant, Campbell’s entire universe was that robotic blip and the attendant reminder that no matter how many times he did this, each death was his own personalized trip to hell.

  The noise coming from the monitor reached its crescendo, that split second stretched out for an eternity where it might break in either direction: flatlining or easing back toward a stable rhythm. In that moment the child cried out—no words, only a single wail that expressed more than any language ever could—and Campbell gritted his teeth, waiting for the monitor to emit that drawn-out insistent drone that generations of Americans since the advent of television recognized as an EKG flatline, the modern equivalent of the passing bell. Yet, seconds later, the monitor’s moan was slowing, falling back into a steady beat and Campbell opened his eyes, disbelief dragging him off the floor and onto his feet and for an instant the gurney men parted, moving to either side of the child in order to give him a clear view of the boy who was not dead but asleep, the lesion dressed in a clean bandage.

  The gurney men moved away from the cot, filing back down the corridor. There was no need for words; there was nothing to say. Campbell took a deep breath and, leaning over the child’s cot, tucked in the edges of the blankets.

  Taking a final look at the boy, at the monitor beeping softly and consistently, Campbell turned and began walking across the room toward the exit, trying to ignore the empty cots lining the walls on both sides of the room. Those cots, he remembered, had not always been empty.

  Campbell drifted through the rest of the camp, his mind slipping back to when he first arrived in Tiber City. Ten years ago, after stumbling off that cross-country bus and into the Lazarus bar, Campbell had slept in a room above the bar for a week straight. When he woke up, he wandered downstairs, where the bartender, a guy named Sweeney, already had a couple of burgers waiting. As he began devouring the burgers, Sweeney poured two double shots of Jameson and began telling him about things that, only a few weeks earlier, he would have dismissed as absolute bullshit. The way Sweeney told it, the men in the surgical masks—the ones Campbell referred to as the gurney men—had another name: The Order of Neshamah.

  According to Sweeney, the Order was founded by a group of renegade scientist-monks. Most were disillusioned scientists—men uncomfortable with the divide between spirituality and science. A few other founding members had been theologians in search of a new theology. There was no specific religion driving these men, Sweeney had explained. Just a single common quest: to better understand the nature of the human soul. That’s where the name came from—

  Neshamah was an Old Testament word meaning “breath of life.” Sweeney had whipped out an old Bible, weather-beaten with a black, cracked cover; the following verse in Genesis was highlighted:

  Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

  It was this breath of life, this Neshamah, that gave man a full and connected life, an existence separate from the dust and the void. In short, it gave man a soul.

  Campbell had tossed back the shot and immediately asked for a refill; Sweeney’s story sounded like complete and utter bullshit. Once upon a time, Campbell had been perhaps the preeminent geneticist of a generation and old habits were hard to shake; the scientist in him recoiled from Sweeney’s tale. But at that moment in time, he had few precious options left. Besides, the Order had saved his ass back in the desert and, despite the fact he had been forever marked with the tattoo on his back, he figured he still owed the gurney men a few favors. And, to be honest, Campbell was pretty curious why they even bothered to drag him out of the desert in the first place.

  In the months following his arrival in Tiber City, Campbell spent most of his time trying to answer that question, wandering the underground tunnels that led in, out, and through Camp Ramoth. He took instructions from Sweeney and a woman named Jael who was head of security at Ramoth—the gurney men never said a word to him. Sweeney wasn’t technically a member of the Order, but he was privy to many of its secrets and, in addition to running Lazarus, he served as the group’s liaison to the Tiber City underworld. It was Sweeney who provided day-to-day instructions to Campbell, Sweeney who gave him a room above Lazarus to call his own. And it was Sweeney who finally explained to him why he had been brought to Ramoth: to serve.

  And Campbell had served—he had spent much of the past decade tending to the sick and dying housed in Ramoth. Yet, the Order did not exist merely to serve. There were other rooms constructed in the back of the camp and filled with various pieces of aging yet still functional pieces of medical equipment, mostly diagnostic tools such as PET scanners. Despite his relative familiarity with the equipment, Campbell had no desire to explore these rooms. Not only was his job to tend to the residents of Ramoth, but, on the few occasions he had ventured into these posterior chambers, he had seen things for which he had no answer: members of the Order in deep meditation, some surrounded by religious icons, others sitting motionless on the stone floor of empty rooms. Each member’s head was shaved and sported the asterisk tattoo, and each had a dozen or so wires attached to their bald heads, wires that were attached to the large gray blocks of medical equipment.

  Campbell asked Sweeney about the meditation sessions, the wires, and the strange symbol that marked each of the members but Sweeney just shook his head, slow and sad, and smiled.

  “Remember what I told you about the soul?” asked Sweeney. “The asterisk in the circle, well, that’s meant to be representative of the divine spark within every man; that spark, that connection to the divine, it’s made possible by the soul. The mark is just a reminder because man, let me tell you: It’s easy to forget. As for the machines and the meditation, well, that’s how they look for the soul.”

  Campbell raised an eyebrow. “Yeah and how’s that going?” he asked, the skepticism in his voice unmistakable. “They find anything?”

  Sweeney only offered that same slow smile. “Maybe someday you’ll find out. First, you gotta be ready. And let me tell you, you ain’t ready yet. But the Order is patient. So if I were you, I’d just do what you’ve been asked to do.”

  “Serve,” Campbell said.

  “Serve,” Sweeney nodded. “And wait.”

  Initially, he bristled at the idea of being kept in the dark—Morrison’s treachery was seared in his memory forever. But Campbell was granted entrance to every inch of Camp Ramoth; he just wasn’t cleared to review the data compiled by the Order. And so Campbell learned to wait. And to serve.

  In many ways, this place, Camp Ramoth, was identical to the room in which he had awoken almost 20 years ago after the gurney men found him left for dead in that abandoned freight yard. Serving as a hospital but more closely resembling a subterranean refugee camp, the room he just exited was located in the slums of Tiber City, in an area known only as “the Jungle.” The original camp—Camp Golan—had been constructed in the basement of an abandoned Church in the Chihuahuan desert. Golan was where Campbell had first encountered the gurney men, where they had saved him from the nothingness of the desert. It was also where Campbell came face to face with the ruined creat
ures he helped create, the creatures produced by Project Exodus and recovered by the Order. But those creatures had long since died, and Golan, along with another camp—Bosor—became just another place of refuge, a place where the Order might continue its search for the soul. Ramoth, established in Tiber City, became the third. Why Tiber City, Campbell had asked Sweeney once. The surge of sickness and disease in Tiber City, Sweeney had explained: It’s not just physical.

  As Campbell stepped into the stairwell, a familiar atonal beep echoed off concrete, alerting the camp that someone was exiting or entering the facilities. This was the extent of Ramoth’s security system: a single, annoying electronic blast. Did it even matter? Campbell wondered. There were no police, no corporate cavalry riding to the rescue if someone did manage to stumble across Ramoth and shit went sideways.

  Campbell trudged up two flights of stairs that led from the basement of the warehouse, toward the front of the building, and out into the Tiber City night. There were other ways out, emergency exits that led into the maze of alleyways behind the building, but, so far, those had gone unused.

  Reaching the exit, Campbell pulled open the steel door that marked the camp’s main entrance. Like much of Tiber City, the old warehouse—the basement levels of which held Camp Ramoth—had been hastily constructed to satisfy an immediate need and then forgotten, money, politics, and power always pushing forward, need begetting need begetting ever more need. Consequently, rather than taking the time and the money to tear buildings down, these structures were buried alive, fresh concrete and steel poured over the still-viable structures. When the money dried up, these new buildings—little more than heaps of cheap material slapped together atop uneven foundations by strangers, by men who were not from these neighborhoods, by men who couldn’t care less—began to crumble. And when they did, no one gave a shit because the goal had never been sustainability; turn a profit and move on was the fundamental philosophy. Structure began cannibalizing structure, and as the foundations of the newest buildings collapsed, older, forgotten buildings were unearthed. As a result, the Jungle’s geography was forever changing as the slums rose up to reclaim the land, prefab material no match for the infinite patience of time.

  The warehouse that became Camp Ramoth was one of these older buildings: The main entrance was still obscured by a partially collapsed wall but a tunnel led from the alley behind the building into the warehouse. After that, a single flight of stairs funneled visitors onto the first floor of a viable commercial warehouse: Electricity, plumbing, even heat were all still available; someone had simply forgotten to turn off the utilities. Advertisements covered the entire side of the warehouse, tattered and torn flyers pasted one on top of the other: Promo posters announcing the opening of a new club competed with notices of foreclosure auctions and shaky, handwritten phone numbers scrawled under messages promising transsexuals versatile enough to satisfy every taste.

  Individually, these flyers were a schizophrenic mess of human desire and weakness; when considered in their entirety, they offered a crash course in the history of the neighborhood. Peeling back the yellow dog-eared edges of the current batch of flyers was like embarking on an archeological excavation: Dead rap stars still hyping their newest album gave way to ads for a mayoral candidate whose predilections for underage black pussy only resulted in single-digit defeat, an opportunity to make BIG $$$$$$$ (and lose weight!) while working from home, and finally warnings about a flu strain that, according to some, was responsible for thousands of deaths somewhere outside Mexico City while others maintained the only damage done was the insignificant death of several elderly residents in a nursing home in Boise.

  The floor between the subterranean warehouse-turned-refugee camp and the street level had once served as a sales team bullpen and administrative area—the purgatory of the corporate theology. The place had been deserted for most of the past decade: windows boarded up, adorned with graffiti and posters of missing children. Inside, the maze of cubicles constituting the sales bullpen had been left behind, the cheap wood rotting and warped, the water cooler in the corner half full with stale brown liquid. Impossibly large rats dodged in and out of the various cubicles and stacks of office supplies, splashing through puddles created by a rusted and corroded piping system running the length of the ceiling leaking toxic water that had eaten through the cheap, prefab walls long ago. Motivational posters, still clinging to the walls of some of the cubes, edges curled and tattered, challenged the rodents and rust to Dare to Soar, because, after all, Your Attitude Almost Always Determines Your Altitude In Life.

  The office had been thrown together on top of the warehouse in a desperate attempt to chase some new business trend, from an idea prompted by positive-thinking seminars filled with obese women and men with ballooning alimony bills networking in Omaha, in Orlando, in Phoenix, always in some Holiday Inn, forever earning miles or points or some other nebulous reward. But the world moved so fast that after the idea was sold, forces so far beyond the control of these Holiday Inn heroes shifted the economic landscape, sometimes in imperceptible ways—imperceptible, of course, until the markets began to react and the “can’t miss” economic trend of the year became a footnote and new seminars and conferences were thrown together to take advantage of these new opportunities. So by the time the bullpen had been filled and calls were being routed from the U.S. to New Delhi, to Baghdad, to Singapore, the original vision that had prompted the creation of this office space was in tatters, leaving unfortunate would-be entrepreneurs to choose between picking the bones of the carcass or chasing the latest new dream. Either way, the results were the same: empty, abandoned office space. But in Tiber City, temporary so often became permanent. Men appeared and then disappeared seemingly overnight, and their businesses rose and fell so quickly that eventually people stopped paying much attention: Buildings might sit abandoned for months, years, decades.

  Fuck it, Campbell thought, as he moved out into the warm Tiber City drizzle, squinting against the inescapable neon; whatever the story, all that mattered was that, so far, no one had noticed them.

  “God damn lucky,” Campbell muttered, squinting against the neon.

  “Luck’s got nothing to do with it, Campbell.” The voice—female and low—drifted out of the shadows. Campbell grinned in spite of everything and ducked under an adjacent fire escape, lighting a cigarette.

  “I didn’t know you were around tonight,” Campbell called into the darkness.

  “Yeah, well, I heard they brought a new one in, so here I am.”

  Striding out of the shadows and into the neon twilight, Jael moved with purpose, studying Campbell’s face before pulling the cigarette from between his lips and taking a drag. Her olive skin was accented by deep, intense eyes and full lips. She had scars but flaunted them like other women wore diamonds; Campbell was half-convinced she wore her hair back so everyone could see exactly how far the gash along the right side of her cheek went. She wore dark jeans, boots, and a knee-length leather coat, but Campbell knew that was all bullshit; underneath her street clothes was a network of ultrahigh molecular-weight polyethylene.

  “Pretty bad, huh?” It wasn’t so much a question as a statement.

  “Actually the kid was having a blast,” Campbell replied. “Gurgling up blood—what kid wouldn’t want an extended stay in Ramoth? It’s like Disneyland. Next thing you know, the Order are gonna be running around in fucking mouse suits.”

  “Funny. I’m surprised they don’t let you do stand-up down there,” Jael said. “But I’ll take that as a yes, because anytime your hard-ass act goes into overdrive, it’s bad.”

  “When is it good?” Campbell asked, his breath hanging in the air, his words more accusation than question.

  Jael turned away, taking another drag off the cigarette.

  “You tell me,” she shot back. “You’re the one who decided to re-invent mankind; the one who decided the original model wasn’t any good.”

  Campbell opened his mouth to reply but she
was already moving away, flicking the cigarette into the air. Before she melted back into the alleyway she stopped, turning back toward him.

  “Oh yeah. I almost forgot…” she said, reaching into her coat, seconds later producing a small leather carrying case—the kind Campbell had seen chefs on television use to store knifes. Catching the bag, his hands closing around the worn, cracked leather, he knew that, whatever its original purpose, it no longer carried knives; there was something else inside.

  He stared at the bag for a moment before looking back toward Jael but she was gone. The red glow from the discarded cigarette burned for another few seconds but then the fire died and there was only the rain.

  After tucking the carrier under his arm, Campbell stood there for a moment, watching two massive spotlights strafe the starless sky, wheeling back and forth, motion for motion’s sake, purposeless and frenzied. The rain began falling harder and Campbell closed his eyes, tilting his face toward the sky, imagining for a moment that the water pelting his face was clean and pure and cleansing. But the smell was too strong: sulfur and garbage. And then he was moving, away from the entrance to Ramoth and deeper into the Jungle district, the taste of the rain rancid in his mouth.