Kingdom

by Anderson O'Donnell

  The air sizzled with unnatural electricity and Campbell felt fear exerting a stranglehold across the land. He passed a scared looking white man in pleated Dockers, another Jungle tourist trying to make it back to the suburbs before the sun stumbled over the horizon. Campbell gave him a 50-50 shot of making it out of this place alive. Most likely scenario: The guy sticks his dick in the wrong glory hole and gets rolled by a couple of skinheads cranked to the gill—that was how things worked out here. All around Campbell the world appeared to shimmer and fade until it seemed as if the earth itself was laboring for breath and Campbell wondered how long this city, this whole country, could hold together before everything collapsed—a breaking point at which it was all too much: and after that, disintegration? Most people expected something cataclysmic: a nuclear blast or complete economic meltdown—endless lines outside of banks, riots in the streets, the collapse of world governments, mushroom clouds billowing under a blood red sky. But looking around the Jungle, Campbell realized this was a gradual decline; society was unraveling slowly enough that the corporations and world governments had the time to fill the resulting vacuum left by loosening of family, tribe, and empathy. Corporations like Morrison Biotech.

  His head down, lost in thought and trying to blend in, Campbell would have overshot the CitiMart megachurch but a flare of light from a 16-foot cross attached to the side of a sprawling two-story building that looked more like a mall than a house of worship—dig the giant “CITIMART” sign casting light into the dark—snapped him back to the present.

  It had been a long time since Campbell had seen the inside of a church. That’s not to say he hadn’t considered returning to the old continent faith of his parents, of his grandparents—he just had no business setting foot on holy ground. Besides, if he felt worthy to kneel before an altar of God, he sure as hell wouldn’t have picked this place.

  For starters, the glowing cross aside, Campbell would have never realized the building in front of which he now stood was meant to be holy ground. The building itself was made up of some sort of post-modern, gaudy white tile, giving the entire place an institutional, over-sanitized vibe. Slapped onto the face of the building was a digitalized news tracker—like the kind they have in airports or on Wall Street. Rather than displaying flight schedules or stock market fluctuations, however, this particular tracker displayed worship times and local advertisements, with random bits of “The Good News,” the temperature, and stock quotes tossed in for good measure—abundance, after all, was a sign of His blessing.

  In order to capitalize on the growing megachurch trend of the new century, several of the more prominent evangelical media superstars teamed up with various corporate conglomerates to move beyond the early megachurch model, which consisted of amphitheatre-sized churches, television broadcasts, satellite feeds, and book deals. Still reeling from the negative publicity brought on by the exorbitant executive bonuses, shareholder losses, and cozy bankruptcy agreements of the last decade, the suits were happy to help: In exchange for naming rights, the corporate coffers doled out enough cash to help several enterprising digi-evangelists create worship centers where churches melded with lifestyle centers to satisfy the needs of modern America. The most prominent evangelical preachers in the land were able to sign lucrative exclusivity deals with larger corporations or development groups—the CitiMart Church was a product of this movement.

  When it was built, the CitiMart Church was meant to be the cornerstone of yet another Jungle revitalization project. That particular project, like so many other renewal schemes, failed, but the church attracted a decent congregation on weekends: There were still some men and women in the Jungle trying to make an honest living, immigrant families severed from nation and family, seeking anything resembling community—the fabric of American life was unraveling too quickly. There was also a smattering of junkies and winos searching for a different kind of fix, as well as the freaks that gobbled hallucinogens and sat at rapt attention through six services straight.

  Squinting against the neon glare, Campbell walked toward the two reinforced, bulletproof glass doors, which swung open automatically as he approached. He moved through a series of metal detectors, those ubiquitous metallic butlers of modern America, and into the lobby, where he was greeted by the smiling visage of a youthful but not exactly young man looking down at him from a giant high-definition plasma television mounted over another set of double glass doors perhaps two-dozen feet from the main entrance.

  To Campbell’s surprise, the man on the television began to speak.

  “Welcome friend, to the CitiMart Church of Christ. We know that when it comes to your all-in-one worship needs, you’ve got a lot of choices. So thanks for choosing CitiMart. I’m Pastor Rick, and I hope you’ll let me share just a few moments of your time to help explain to you just why we’re Tiber City’s most successful faith-based lifestyle center.”

  Campbell stood motionless in front of the massive, digitalized talking head, staring at the man’s perfectly styled hair as the honey-smooth voice rolled over him. Clearly, it had been a long time since Pastor Rick had set foot in the CitiMart faith center. Not that Campbell was surprised: Most of these digi-evangelists recorded from a central location and then franchised the rights, making personal appearances at only the most deserving, i.e., most lucrative, congregations. From the looks of things, the Tiber City CitiMart Church was not such a congregation.

  Two additional concourses ran from either side of the lobby, and signs on both sides of the monitor listed which concourse led to which shop or restaurant. Thing was, the entrance to concourse A had been boarded up a long time ago, a “Please Bear With Us, We’re Undergoing Renovations” sign, complete with a picture of a smiling bear pleading for patience, plastered over the sheetrock and plywood, framed by exposed wiring. And it didn’t look like construction had ever even begun on concourse B: The pathway leading from the lobby toward the signs for concourse B went for 20 or 30 feet before running into a solid concrete wall.

  “Hallelujah,” Campbell muttered as he walked through the lobby doors and into the church, while behind him Pastor Rick continued to preach, spreading the good news about a sale in the phantom concourse B.

  The inside of the church was deserted. Deserted, at least, of any human presence. Other than that, the joint was jumping. Stadium lighting lined the sides of the ceiling, illuminating the gigantic flat screen video attached to the walls on both sides of the pulpit with a harsh cold light. Despite the absence of parishioners, the monitors continued to pump out the same messages Campbell had seen on the smaller ticker outside the church. The left monitor was offering an inspirational message—a reading from the Gospel of John—while the monitor on the right extolled the Christian virtues of life insurance from Homeland Insurance Co. The monitors’ messages were also competing with the building’s PA system, which was bleating out Christian pop—the end result being a cacophony of noise that made Campbell wince. Yet, the oddest thing, thought Campbell, was what seemed to be an ATM, complete with neon Jesus screensaver, installed in the back corner of the church.

  Scanning the pews, Campbell realized he had been mistaken: He wasn’t alone after all. At the front of the church, kneeling in the front row, was Jael.

  He walked down the center aisle toward her but before he could reach her pew she was already on her feet, looking over his shoulder, at the entrance to the church.

  “What took you so long?” Jael asked.

  “It’s nice to see you too,” Campbell said, sliding into the plastic pew next to Jael. “Considering that a couple of days ago I woke up half dead in some motel and can barely walk, I thought I made decent time.”

  “Yeah, you’re welcome for that,” Jael replied, still standing, her eyes locked on the door at the back of the church. “Were you followed?”

  “Don’t think so. But like I said, I’m in rough shape so I was moving slow.”

  “No shit: I can smell the fucking booze from here, Campbell. I didn’t drag
your ass out of that fire just to let you finish the job yourself,” she said, traces of an accent—maybe South American, maybe Mexican—surfacing as it often did when she got angry.

  “That’s not what I meant. Is this why you saved me? Buy yourself a few more years of giving me shit?”

  “Let me tell you something, Campbell,” she said, her voice going up an octave as she turned to face him. “If I had any say in the matter, you’d have been a dead man long before that fire, but lucky for you I don’t, so…”

  Some people might have been offended by Jael’s revelation, Campbell considered; it was always difficult to accept that a fellow human being not only actively wished death upon you, but would happily do the deed. But Campbell couldn’t blame Jael. After all, he knew about the experiments in the urban slums. The black SUVs. The vaccines and the tests. The men who came out of the desert and slaughtered Jael’s people. Campbell knew it all. Sure, he didn’t know anything at the time, but he was the father of Project Exodus—Morrison’s crimes were his cross to bear.

  A noise echoed in the back of the church, cutting Jael off mid-sentence. She brought a single finger, crowed by a painted nail, to her burgundy lips in the signal for silence. With her other hand, she reached behind her back and pulled a Magnum out of her waistband, training the sight in the direction of the echo.

  Campbell sat motionless in the pew, his neck craned toward the church entrance as he stared past the endless, tumbling labyrinth of pews and lights and monitors. Seconds turned into minutes as he imagined the church operating for infinity, independent of man or God, a shrine not to the Yahweh of Moses and Abraham but to automation and bloodless process.

  And then Jael was moving out of the pew and, her gun still drawn, toward the very front of the church, where, traditionally, there would have been an altar but now sat a massive pulpit flanked on either side by massive JumboTron video monitors. Campbell followed her, glancing once, then again, toward the entrance to the church,

  Jael knelt next to the video monitor to the right of the plastic pulpit, gesturing for Campbell to take the other side. Together they began to exert pressure—he pulled, she pushed—and the monitor began to slide to the side; there was a set of wheels attached to the bottom of it. Campbell maintained his grip on the other side of the video screen and together they managed to move the screen about three feet to the right before his bad leg gave way, forcing him to let go and stumble back against the podium.

  Over the course of his life, so many unusual things had happened to Campbell that when Jael slammed her boot through the rotting wooden door concealed behind the monitor, Campbell barely raised an eyebrow.

  Chapter 18

  Tiber City: Jungle District

  Sept. 5, 2015

  5:42 a.m.

  After tugging the monitor back over the hole in the wall, Campbell turned around and took in his new surroundings. At first glance, the room under the CitiMart Church appeared to be some sort of forgotten storage area: Wooden shelves lined the walls, filled with forgotten icons and other relics that once upon a time had been sacred. One shelf was devoted entirely to Ziploc bags filled with communion wafers—competing with the cobwebs, forever waiting consecration.

  Blinking hard against the dark, Campbell stumbled forward, knocking into one of the shelves. A two-foot tall statue of the Virgin Mary—reds and blues and a hand raised in benediction—was jarred loose by the impact and tore free of the Sunday comics and spider webs it was wrapped in, pitching forward off the shelf before crashing to the earth, the noise of shattering ceramic echoing over and over until it faded into the darkness.

  “Careful,” Jael hissed, appearing by his side, flashlight in one hand, Magnum in the other.

  “Where the hell are we?” Campbell whispered.

  “Technically speaking? The basement of a Catholic church. But it’s not on any map; just another one of Tiber’s forgotten spaces. I mean, I’m sure it’s on a blueprint or something in some office downtown, but that’s about it. When the city tore down the original building, they couldn’t spare the time to finish the job; they just threw the new one—CitiMart or whatever the fuck they are calling it these days—up on the original foundation. It was faster and cheaper to just bury everything else. I swear—the city has collective ADD. The only time anyone ever gives a fuck about the past is when it gets in the way of something new.”

  Jael paused, waving the flashlight around, the bright yellow beam sending cockroaches scurrying into the cracks in the wall as it crisscrossed the room. The swirling streams of light triggered a strange rush of memory and emotion, reminding Campbell of the opening night of new research centers, of gala fundraisers, of the way a city looked from the cabin of a private jet, beams of light dipping and diving in exaltation of celebrity. A cockroach raced across Campbell’s boot; the past faded.

  At the far end of the room, a wall had collapsed, revealing a tunnel into the darkness.

  “And this place,” Jael continued “Isn’t getting in the way of anything.”

  “So we’re safe here?” Campbell asked, running his fingers along the wall, tracing cracks in the cool concrete.

  “For a little while anyways; it won’t take Morrison too long to track us down. There is a passage ahead that will take us back to Ramoth.”

  “Back to Ramoth?”

  “For some reason, the Order wants to keep you alive,” Jael said, spitting the words out as she began to make her way through the storage room, pushing aside old chests and crates, her flashlight trained on the opening in the wall.

  “At least somebody does. Thing is, I have no idea why,” Campbell muttered as he fell in step behind Jael, climbing over chunks of concrete and into the tunnel. He trudged forward, following the arc of Jael’s flashlight. He was aware of the sound of dripping water, of insects, of Jael’s leather jacket, of the crunch of stone under his boots.

  “Trust me, Campbell, there’s a good reason,” Jael laughed, her voice a low rasp.

  “So enlighten me,” Campbell said.

  “What do you know about the field of neurotheology?” Jael asked.

  “The whole proving-God-through-science thing?”

  “Crude, but essentially correct.”

  “What about it?”

  “Neurotheology is the method the Order uses to pursue its primary goal: mapping and cultivating the human soul,” Jael said.

  “The soul?” Campbell asked, skeptical, his words echoing off the decaying walls and into the darkness ahead.

  “The soul,” Jael affirmed. “And not some abstract philosophical concept, but the real deal; an actual, physical thing. Hell Campbell—you’ve seen the backroom at Ramoth, all that equipment. That’s what it’s for: mapping the soul.”

  In spite of everything—the fact that he was stumbling through a dark, dank tunnel that smelled like decades’ old sewage, choking on air so thick he felt like he might suffocate, every joint in his body feeling like it was on fire—Campbell had to laugh.

  “Sweeney laid a similar story on me when I first arrived,” Campbell said. “I’m not saying I thought it was bullshit, but I wasn’t really in any position to argue. The Order had just saved my life…”

  “It sounds insane at first; I had the same reaction. But the Order makes one hell of a case,” Jael said, the beam from her flashlight still dipping, darting as the terrain continued to shift.

  “Try me,” Campbell said as he pressed into the darkness, trying to keep his balance, the stone under his feet smooth, hard, and increasingly slick. He could hear water in the distance, the drip-drip-drip of leaky pipes occasionally interrupted by a loud splash that sounded too big to be made by a rat but not big enough to be made by a human. Campbell attempted to focus on maintaining his footing, on following Jael’s story.

  “The Order’s studies rely solely on one very specific component of neurotheology: brain imaging. They’ve got a tomography camera that can detect a radioactive tracer injected into the brain—it basically performs a high-tech PE
T scan that creates three-dimensional images that can show what’s going on in the brain.”

  “But why brain images?” Campbell interrupted.

  “When the Order began its search for the soul, it measured the brain activity of volunteers.”

  “Volunteers,” Campbell repeated.

  “Yeah—volunteers,” Jael said. “The members of the Order don’t just all live underground and sleep in coffins. They’re monks, sure. But they have ties to the academic community, to research facilities. Especially in the beginning, before we found you. And we’re not the only ones to have run these kinds of experiments either. We just had a more specific approach.”

  “So what kind of results did these brain images produce?”

  “Initially, in every test, the Order found unusual and unexplained activity in a tiny section of the brain called the Orientation Association Area, or the OAA. This section of the brain is always active: There are varying levels of activity, different people have different levels—but always some activity. When the tracer goes through this part of the brain, it registers the activity in this area but usually that’s all it picks up: constant, low-level activity, like a computer in sleep mode. In fact, this activity seems so unremarkable that most scientists dismiss it as an evolutionary vestige, like the tailbone. Something humans used to need but don’t anymore.”

  Campbell felt a chill race down his spine; dismissing unusual biological phenomena as vestigial or inconsequential: That was one of the flaws of Project Exodus.

  “But contrary to popular scientific belief,” Jael continued, “the activity in this part of the brain does not always remain constant. There are studies that have shown that some people—Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns for example—have the ability to push this mundane, low-level OAA function into a level of activity so frenzied that it eclipses the rest of the brain scan. These explosions of OAA activity almost always occurred during religious services or when the subject was meditating or praying. And each of these experiences was accompanied by the subjects reporting incredible feelings of a connection with something greater than themselves, something transcendent.”