Kingdom

by Anderson O'Donnell

  Surrounding the mattress was a mess of broken glass beakers, hot plates, empty lantern fuel cans, duct tape, red-stained coffee filters, and a blowtorch lighter—meth-lab garbage. Joe’s Gas-n-Go: putting a new spin on the term “full-service station.”

  Dylan lowered himself onto the mattress, dust exploding up into the air like a miniature mushroom cloud before the fallout fluttered back to the filthy rayon. Next to the makeshift bed was a metal container, maybe the size of a shoebox. Like everything else in the place, the padlock was rusted and busted, dangling uselessly. Dylan knocked it to the floor and lifted the metal lid. Jackpot: Underneath a ton of pictures, faded, dog-eared memories with names and dates written on the backs in smudged ink, was a large bandage, a wad of cash—mostly fives and ones, a few 20s—some matchbooks, an old AM/FM radio, and some antibiotic cream. And underneath all that was a silver snub-nosed .45: all the crank chef essentials.

  After taking off his shredded jeans, picking the shards of highway and glass out of his leg, and spreading ointment over the wound, Dylan learned back on the mattress and began wrapping his leg with the bandage. He tried to lay back but his head knocked against something hard hidden beneath the tattered rayon pillow. Reaching under the pillow, Dylan felt the familiar plastic case of a laptop computer. He pulled the laptop out from under his head and held it up into the light. The case was black, scrubbed of all brand names or trademarks, and covered in gray scuffmarks. A power cord was still attached to the back of the computer, running from the laptop to a socket in the wall behind the bed. He popped open the laptop. Aside from a small crack in the screen’s upper right corner and a missing “E” key, the machine was in pretty good condition—there were even two USB ports along its side, the kind that would read the flash drive Dylan found in his father’s journal.

  “No way,” Dylan muttered to himself as he pressed the power button. To his surprise, the power button flashed green and, after several seconds, the screen burst to life, an obsolete Windows operating system logo floating in front of a black background. It took the system a few minutes to boot up but eventually a desktop appeared. A quick tour of the computer’s hard drive told Dylan nothing about the service station or where its owner had gone: It was loaded with various tutorials on optimal meth-cooking methods, a collection of decade-old MP3s, and tons of pornography—with names like ass2mouthsluts_6, myanalsummervacation, and DPCougars_9, it wasn’t too hard to guess at the files’ content.

  Balancing the laptop on the mattress, Dylan slid the flash drive into the USB port: There was a single video file, titled “Exodus.” Dylan dragged the cursor over the file and double-clicked.

  The footage was shot with a night vision lens, greens and grays mixed with black. In the bottom left-hand corner, a single sentence appeared: Project Exodus recovereds.

  The camera operator’s hands were shaking and for the first few seconds the footage was third-person schizophrenic, jumping from blurry object to blurry object. There was audio as well—an inhuman wailing that persisted over the steady drone of electronic equipment. Finally, the camera steadied and the picture began to clear, revealing a large room, lined with two rows of beds.

  The camera panned the room, offering a panoramic view of a primitive medical facility—the place looked like a World War II field hospital. Men in green masks moved between the beds but the camera ignored them, choosing instead to begin moving down the center aisle toward the back of the room. Reaching the end of the room, the camera stopped before turning to the right and then down toward the last bed in the row. For a moment the lens was out of focus but only for a moment: The picture came back into focus, revealing a pair of feet, covered in sores and puss-caked lesions, protruding from under a single sheet. One foot had seven toes, each with long, black nails curling toward the ceiling; both ankles turned at impossible angles.

  The camera lingered for a moment before panning up the cot. Dylan could see the outline of pair of legs and a lower torso visible under a stained, rumpled sheet and he wanted to look away; he wanted to take the laptop and slam it against the wall but he couldn’t—the camera was moving and through the thin sheet he could see a man’s chest covered with what appeared to be six or seven crusty eyes, each blinking madly, the eyeballs themselves darting in every direction, rolling back under the infected lids to escape the light of the camera. Dylan leaned over the edge of the bed and threw up.

  The video seemed to anticipate such a reaction, lingering for a few moments on this creature’s ruined chest before resuming its march up the length of the cot, past a jagged, jutting collarbone and a bloated neck, swollen with throbbing veins. Dylan had no explanation for what came next. At first, he was certain he was hallucinating. He closed his eyes for a moment, listening to the sounds of ragged, agonized breathing coming from the laptop competing with the sounds of the wind whipping against the gas station walls and the faint roar of an airplane overhead.

  Then Dylan opened his eyes and screamed.

  The video had ended and the screen was frozen on the final frame: the face of the creature on the cot. Only, it wasn’t just the creature’s face. It was his father’s face; his father’s eyes, the eyes that watched the city from a hundred Jack Heffernan billboards—the same eyes that stared back at Dylan every time he looked in a mirror.

  Chapter 24

  Tiber City

  Oct. 2, 2015

  Dylan had crashed at the abandoned Gas-n-Go for the past few weeks, spending his nights reading his father’s journal, the collection of letters, over and over, trying to make sense of the story they seemed to be telling: that his father had been, somehow, not entirely human, that Michael Morrison bore responsibility for his dad’s condition, and that Morrison had most likely murdered his father. There were too many moving pieces, too many facts still obscured, but Morrison wasn’t exactly an auto mechanic or anything—if anyone had the ability to do the things his father was suggesting, it was the world’s preeminent geneticist.

  It was breathtaking in its audacity and yet Dylan believed. Part of his belief was, of course, the footage: He had watched the video on the flash drive at least a dozen times and when the camera zoomed in on the broken, deformed cot-creature’s eyes, Dylan not only saw his father, but he saw himself as well. Whatever had broken his old man, it was alive inside of him too.

  But it wasn’t just the video that consumed him; it was the other things his father had written about: about the alienation he felt, about the incident in Boston—and how something had reached out to his father, something his father needed but couldn’t respond to, an inability to experience that something had driven the man insane. Had Dylan read those words months, even weeks ago, he would have been skeptical. But how was he able to reach out and make that connection that forever eluded his father?

  On more than one occasion he considered heading back to Tiber City, or at least checking into a motel somewhere further down the highway. But he needed some time alone first and while crashing in an abandoned service station that more likely than not moonlighted as a tweaker pad hardly constituted a monastic retreat, it was what Dylan needed: no television, no cell reception, no Wi-Fi, no way of anyone tracking him down. He even made a trip back to the scene of the motorcycle crash and retrieved his ruined bike, which he stashed in one of the garages behind the service station—he didn’t need rescue workers looking for him or, even worse, celebrity bloggers speculating about his death.

  His leg was still in bad shape, but the infection had faded and nothing was broken—just a deep gash that would produce an ugly, crooked scar. The accident had left him weak, so in the mornings he would leave the service station, wearing a pair of jeans he had found tucked under the mattress, a torn T-shirt, and his old leather jacket, which had survived the accident, minus a chunk out of the right shoulder. He walked north, testing his leg as he drifted toward the old industrial towns—a blur of brick buildings and barbed wire; of dried-up riverbeds that once served as tributaries to Tiber City’s mighty Acheron River b
ut were now little more than glorified garbage cans, a sad trickle of brown rainwater struggling to circumvent abandoned shopping carts, ancient automobiles, and mounds of unidentifiable plastic and metal.

  These towns were home to dozens of abandoned factories and early-20th-century mills, and Dylan spent entire days wandering through these structures—squatters had broken the locks a long time ago and no had bothered to replace them. These were foreign places to him, stranger than the Jungle district’s darkest rabbit holes and filled with the tools of industry, none of which he could identify, let alone operate. Dylan knew words—drill press, lathe, four-slide, injection-molding machines, boring mills, radial drills—but he couldn’t connect these names with any specific machine. This realization disappointed him and he would spend hours in these manufacturing graveyards, limping across the shop floors and loading docks, wiping away the massive cobwebs that now linked many of the machines. He imagined that each morning these machines waited for their masters to return, for that first jolt of electricity, unaware that their time had passed and that the world had moved on.

  He couldn’t remember when he last spent this much time alone and unplugged but as he limped across the empty manufacturing plants Dylan learned to welcome the solitude—his mind remained clear and quiet as his limp faded and his body healed. He brought his father’s journal with him and as he sat among these ancient industrial tombs he read sentences, paragraphs, entire letters aloud over and over until his own voice faded and his father’s began to emerge from the prose. The old man asked his son for understanding, forgiveness, vengeance. The son understood; the son forgave. Vengeance would come.

  As darkness fell, strange clusters of men would appear on the fringes of these towns, materializing from the gathering dark before sweeping through the old factories and junkie pads—flashlights and hard whispers and the crackle of radio static heralded their approach—and so when dusk began to creep across the horizon Dylan would return to the service station, stopping only to purchase food from one of the anonymous vending stalls littering the landscape—tiny wooden frames that served as docking stations for lunch cards: no names, no menus, no seats, cash only. Gnarled old men with wind-blasted skin and heavy accents would back their carts into these stalls and throw together two or three dishes, which they then displayed on a rack over the counter; noodles, stew, hot dogs: The menu selections broke down into one of those three categories. A few offered a single beer selection as well but it was a bitter, foul-smelling brew and Dylan usually passed, selecting only a carton of noodles, which he would devour as he walked down the access roads and alleyways that led back to the service station. And as he walked, he tried to make sense of everything that had happened.

  What was the truth about his father?

  What was this experience that he had felt, and that his father had so desperately sought?

  He was nearly certain that, whatever the truth was about his old man, Michael Morrison was responsible for his death.

  And if his father was something other than human, what was Dylan?

  Each night as he walked back to the gas station he would think about these questions, his brain turning each issue over, seeking connections he might have missed, details ignored—perhaps some alternative means of resolution. But time and time again, he reached the same conclusion: He would confront, and then kill, Michael Morrison. What surprised Dylan the most was not the ease with which his mind settled on killing a man, but that this decision sparked no anxiety within him, no urge to gobble a fistful of pills; gone was the nagging dread that cast a shadow across life in the 21st century.

  Some nights it was too hot to sleep inside the service station. Dylan would position the radio he found in the trunk on the windowsill and sit outside, smoking, watching the satellite towers and Tiber City skyscrapers twinkling in the distance as the tuner struggled to pick up signals from the surrounding countryside—keyed-up late-night talk show hosts ranted about strange flashes in the sky and a vampire coven operating out of a warehouse in the Glimmer district. Listening to the scratchy AM signal as the world lay dark around him reminded Dylan of when he was young, when his father was away and he couldn’t sleep and he would turn on the radio—the one his old man bought him for his seventh birthday so he could listen to the Tiber City Black Sox, even when they were on a West Coast swing and Dylan’s mother made him go to bed before the first pitch—and lay in the darkness by himself but not alone.

  On more than one occasion he found himself standing in front of the dumpster behind the service station, his hand resting on the cool, sticky aluminum as though merely touching this glorified garbage can would somehow trigger the Experience, the Connection he had felt when he first arrived at the gas station. But of course it didn’t and Dylan would wind up smoking an entire pack of cigarettes, waiting for the sun to come up as he watched a solitary police boat make slow, sad loops across a small section of the Acheron, trawling for a body it would never recover.

  The next day, he turned his phone back on; there was still no reception. But he carried it with him as he once again headed back up the highway, snub-nose revolver tucked in his waistband, toward the crumbling mill towns. Dark clouds were swarming overhead, devouring what little blue sky and sunlight were left—the air was stifling, working on suffocating, and although it was only mid-afternoon, he could feel the thunderstorm building.

  A mile away from the gas station, he heard his phone beep: Dozens of backlogged messages flooded his screen—digital coverage restored. But he ignored the messages; scrolling past them until he found the number he was looking for and pressed send.

  Meghan answered on the third ring.

  “I need to meet with your father,” Dylan said. The reception was weak—static danced across the connection and he could hear noises in the background. The wind kicked up—a hot, dry burst that sent dust and highway garbage cartwheeling through the thick summer air. In the distance Dylan could hear the groan of cables, of ancient power lines struggling against nature’s sudden surge.

  “Where are you?” Meghan asked.

  Dylan gave her the address.

  “You’d better have one hell of an explanation,” Meghan replied.

  Dylan looked down at his phone and saw she had hung up. He lit a cigarette and began to make his way back toward his roadside sanctuary, wondering how you break it to the woman you love that you’re probably going to have to kill her old man.

  Two hours later, with Meghan by his side, Dylan watched the video for a final time. It was funny: Each time he viewed the clip, he expected it to be somehow different, that the footage would be revealed as a hoax, or end differently—maybe with some contrite resolution that would clear everything up, that would provide some sort of explanation for why a creature that looked very much like his father, very much like Dylan, was locked up in what appeared to be the Morrison Biotech laboratories. Of course the ending didn’t change and when the clip concluded Meghan was crying. He showed her the journal and while she read it the wind rattled the front door so hard Dylan was certain it would shatter. But the door held and when Meghan finished reading she stood up, dropped the book, and kissed him hard; her face was wet, still streaked with tears and mascara and she whispered into his ear: “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Dylan told her but she was already pulling away, shaking her head, telling him he didn’t understand.

  “Understand what?” Dylan asked as she turned and started toward the front of the Gas-n-Go market, toward the exit.

  “I just need a few minutes,” she called back to him as she pushed open the door and stepped out into the twilight.

  Dylan thought about going after her but considering everything he just laid on her, he was lucky that she asked for a few minutes—and not a restraining order. So instead, he picked his father’s journal up off the floor and began to rip out each entry, page by page, before tossing them into the unplugged freezer sitting in the middle of the store. He then began grabbing anythin
g else left on the store shelves that looked flammable: old maps detailing countries that no longer existed, coffee filters, and discarded motor oil containers. He retreated into the back room, tearing some of the porno pictures off the wood-panel walls and crumbling them into a ball, just like he used to watch his father do with newspapers to start a fire on Christmas morning; he popped open the metal footlocker and grabbed the pictures, the cash, and the matchbooks—all of which he tossed into the freezer.

  Standing over his makeshift pyre, Dylan lit a cigarette and studied his work. It would end here: No matter what happened next, there would be no record of his father’s transgressions and there would be no media circus. He didn’t need the journal to confront Morrison—Dylan himself was living proof. Taking the cigarette out of his mouth, he held it above the pyre, pausing for a moment to watch the smoke curl toward the ceiling before flicking it into the freezer.

  He heard the door rattle behind him and he swung around, expecting to see Meghan standing in the entranceway. But there was no one; just empty shelves and a decade-old cigarette ad hanging over the checkout counter—the actors’ once smug and satisfied expressions now faded and blank. Dylan shook his head and turned back to the pyre, back to the flame that was licking and clawing the side of the freezer, fed by the pages of his father’s journal. He closed his eyes, focusing on the warm glow thrown off by the fire. And then he felt a sharp prick on the back of his neck. His legs went rubbery and he was falling forward, toward the burning pyre but at the last second a pair of hands grabbed the back of his shirt, and he hung suspended inches above the flame. And then the world went black.

  The Journal of Senator Robert Fitzgerald

  Excerpt # 7

  To Dylan,