Disintegration seems imminent. I haven’t sleep well in months; every time I close my eyes I see scenes from that video. Even when I take three, five, seven Ambien and fall asleep, the nightmares are relentless: ruined, forsaken monsters reaching out for me, calling my name as their faces morph into mine until I am standing in that underground hospital, surrounded by dozens of deformed versions of myself. They reach for me and I wake up screaming, the sheets soaked and bunched up around me, ripped from where I tore at them in my sleep.
Tomorrow night, I will confront Morrison. I want to know everything: about the videotape, about the injections, about “Project Exodus.” But no matter what Morrison tells me, one thing is clear: Effective immediately I am leaving politics; I do not want to run for president. I no longer want the kingdom Morrison offered me so many years ago. I’m coming home.
Love,
Your Father
Chapter 25
The American Southwest
September–October 2015
For the past month, Jonathan Campbell had been unable to sleep—images of the massacre at Ramoth seeped into the darkness of his dreams and he would snap out of semi-slumbers with a jerk. He’d lie awake in the darkness, trying to catch his breath, shivering as the air conditioning blasted his sweat-soaked skin. Once his limbs stopped shaking—or at least steadied enough that he could hold a bottle—Campbell would exit the suite, drifting through the gleaming, sterile corridors of Morrison Biotechnology. Even though the hallways were empty he could hear the echo of hard-soled shoes, snippets of muffled conversation, the constant chime of arriving elevators, as he traversed entire wings that all seemed to pulse with the same garish fluorescent light—a constant glow that made it difficult to remember if it was night or day and on more than one occasion Campbell had gotten lost.
Sometimes he found himself standing alone on the 18th-floor observation deck, watching as lightning bolts slashed the horizon. The sky was always the color of a bad bruise and on most nights Campbell would swear he could hear voices crying up from the desert. He tried to convince himself it was just satellite dishes being battered by the wind but there were shapes in the darkness below, long black shadows that slipped into the desert whenever a security drone appeared overhead, its searchlights swirling across the sand.
Campbell would stand alone on the sweltering deck, pressed up against the railing, smoking, and taking pulls from the flask he kept tucked in his back pocket, and stare at the fires burning in the distance; at the strange lights that would sometimes appear in the sky over the arcology, glowing orbs that flashed through the poisoned atmosphere, diving toward the cities far in the distance, at the edge of the desert. On some nights, he would stare down at the rocky terrain and consider flinging himself over the rail, imagining his own death as if he were a director; he’d pull the camera back, imbuing his soundless, pre-dawn plunge with an eerie, almost cinematic grace. But on other nights, he would watch the sky, the whiskey a temporary talisman against the cold; but eventually the alcohol wasn’t enough and Campbell’s leg would begin to ache—the cold seemed to seek out the old scar tissue, clawing the tendons and tissue that never quite healed, driving Campbell back into the arcology.
Once inside, there was only one thing left for Campbell to do: ride the elevator down into the Exodus laboratories, to where Dylan Fitzgerald was being held.
The Exodus laboratories had changed since Campbell’s initial work on the Project. Gone were the deformed infants and murky vats, replaced by neuroimaging equipment: PET scanners, SPECT machines, and legions of mainframe computers and network servers, monitors stacked on top of monitors, gray plastic sentinels that kept vigil through a blur of red blinking lights and the hum of computer fans clicking on to cool off overheated hard drives, giant memory vaults that stored the Exodus data, evidence of Campbell’s sins preserved in ones and zeros for all eternity.
The most significant addition, however, was the young man whose brain activity these legions of machines had been designed to monitor: Dylan Fitzgerald, son of Robert Fitzgerald, the original Exodus man and the only reason Campbell was still alive. Each night for the past few weeks, Campbell had run tests on Fitzgerald, working with the dozen or so machines positioned around Dylan—Morrison’s charge to Campbell had been both straightforward and impossibly complex: Tell me if Fitzgerald has a functioning Omega gene; tell me if he has a soul.
Campbell did as he was told; reporting to the laboratories when Morrison summoned, waiting for his opportunity. And as he ran the various brain scans and neurological feedback tests, Campbell spoke to the dead senator’s son. The kid was semiconscious but that didn’t matter; Campbell poured whiskey from his flask into a glass he kept in the laboratory and raised a toast to the kid’s old man. Closing his eyes, Campbell would drain his glass and tell Dylan about Exodus, about Morrison, about his father, Robert. His eyes burning from exhaustion and the whiskey and the harsh lights lining the ceiling, Campbell told Dylan everything he knew about the Order and about the human soul. He poured another drink, lowered his voice, and spoke about his time lost in the desert.
There were nights when Campbell was convinced he could take Dylan with him, that they might be able to slip out of Morrison Biotech together, undetected, and head south, searching for signs of the Order along the chaos of the Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo-Buenos Aires mega-sprawl; Campbell would find work in the Uruguayan clinics, help the kid keep a low profile and hope that the Order found them before Morrison did. There were other fantasies as well, darker visions of wrapping his gray, weathered hands around young Fitzgerald’s throat and squeezing and ending Exodus in the same place it started, deep under the Chihuahuan desert.
But sitting alone in the laboratory, talking to the dead senator’s unconscious son, Campbell came to understand something: He might still find redemption, and Exodus might crumble, but the two weren’t related. He had seen the road to his salvation and it was through the work he had performed in the Order’s camps, tending to the dying and discarded, the forgotten. Any actions he took to destroy Exodus, to sabotage Morrison’s plans to revive the program with Dylan—even if he somehow succeeded—came with a price he was unwilling to pay: slaughter. He would save the Order; that would be his redemption. And as the plan began to take form, for the first time in a long time, Campbell smiled.
Chapter 26
The American Southwest
Halloween 2015
2:19 a.m.
The suite was anonymous and over-sanitized, more laboratory than residence. Morrison made sure Campbell had the tools he needed to continue Exodus’ pursuit of Dylan Fitzgerald’s soul; as for Campbell’s own soul, the suite’s décor reminded him it was expendable. He had a killer view of the desert, but he kept his blinds closed; he saw too many lights in the sky, too many things he couldn’t explain.
Since returning to Exodus, Morrison had insisted he accept a more rigorous Treatment schedule; every two weeks, Morrison’s doctors appeared outside Campbell’s suite: black suitcases, white gloves, clear syringes, murky liquid. After the needle delivered its payload, the men left Campbell prone on his bed, his skin on fire as his body struggled to remake itself. Normally, Campbell would be incapacitated for 36, maybe 42 hours after an injection of the Treatment. During that time, no one would be looking for him; his absence from the labs, from the security cameras would be expected. It would be explainable.
And so, in the dead of night, Campbell waited, eerily calm as he sat at his desk, ignoring the glowing red light on his phone, the flashing envelope at the bottom of his screen telling him he had unread email, the webpage that kept refreshing even though he didn’t click the refresh button—as though the software couldn’t wait to deliver more content; the browser could no longer hold the data back—there was too much. It just forced its way through the fiber optic cables that wove like veins behind the gleaming, stainless steel walls of Morrison Biotechnology, so many updates that stories were buried in minutes, sometimes even seconds, the new being the only measure of
worth or quality or necessity.
Campbell sat at the desk only to ensure that, when the doctors arrived, everything would appear normal: He worked nights, stripped to the waist, sweating even though the air conditioning kept the room cool, whiskey bottle by his side, no glass, the passage of time measurable by how much of the bottle had vanished; by the warmth in Campbell’s stomach.
Tonight, however, there would be two important differences: Campbell usually didn’t keep a six-inch scalpel tucked in his waistband. And he usually didn’t commit murder. But none of that mattered. By the time Morrison’s men discovered just how different tonight was going to be, it would be too late.
The intercom on his desk buzzed sometime later that night, announcing the doctors’ arrival. There was no need for Campbell to go to the door; Morrison’s men all had access to his suite, including the doctors who administered the Treatment.
“Come in,” Campbell rasped, as he rose from his desk. The door to his suite popped open and to Campbell’s surprise, a single doctor strode into the room. Usually the doctors came in pairs; tonight there was only one—nondescript with thinning gray hair and wire frame glasses. Campbell smiled.
“I’m Doctor Miles Lynch,” the man said as he laid an aluminum briefcase across the too-bright powder coat finish of an empty steel workbench. Lynch was still wearing his operating room scrubs; a surgical mask was dangling around his neck; and his hands were covered by white plastic gloves, the kind that left skin smelling like rubber for days.
Campbell stood up from his desk, his left arm extended forward in a gesture of compliance, his sleeve rolled up.
“Good man,” Lynch said with a smile. “You’re my last stop of the night, so I appreciate the cooperation.”
Campbell stood motionless in front of the doctor, his left arm still extended as Lynch turned his attention to the briefcase.
“Biometric security system,” the doctor was telling Campbell as he pressed his finger to the top of the briefcase. “Takes a few seconds…There,” Lynch said as the briefcase emitted a low, electronic groan, an affirmation, a signal of some sort that the security system had been deactivated. Lynch reached into the suitcase, taking out a single clear syringe filled with a brown liquid. Campbell felt his heart skip a beat as Lynch held the syringe up to the light, sliding the cover off the needle and checking the dosage level. Satisfied, the doctor began to turn back toward Campbell.
“Now,” the doctor began. “As far as the actual injection goes, this won’t hurt a bit…”
You’re right, Campbell thought as he snaked his right arm behind his back, feeling a grim pleasure as his fingers closed around the scalpel tucked into his waistband. It won’t.
And then Campbell was lunging forward, his attack nowhere as graceful or fluid as he had spent the past few weeks imagining but he still caught the doctor by surprise, and before the man could react Campbell drove the knife-end of the instrument into his trachea, piercing Lynch’s windpipe. The syringe holding the Treatment tumbled from his fingers as the force of the blow sent the doctor staggering backward, his arms reaching out toward Campbell, a look of disbelief plastered across his face. He was trying to speak, his lips moving, but no words came out—just a strange, slow hiss, like the air being let out of a balloon, that Campbell realized was coming from the wound. The doctor began twitching, his arms and legs seizing as he struggled against Campbell but it was too late. Campbell’s left arm shot forward, grabbing a fistful of blood-soaked suit, trying to hold the dying man steady as he jerked the blade down, steel ripping apart tissue and muscle, crimson spraying in every direction as life drained from the man’s body.
A wave of remorse washed over Campbell and he felt his knees buckle, his stomach tighten, as vomit rose in his throat. He swallowed hard and slumped back into his desk chair, quickly finishing the bottle of whiskey as he stared at Lynch’s lifeless body—blood was still bubbling from the massive neck wound, running over the body and out onto the cool white tile, where it washed over the broken syringe, collecting in the grout where it pooled together with the Treatment. Campbell was breathing hard, vaguely aware there was blood on his hands, on his clothes, in his mouth. He shifted his gaze over the body, training his focus on the door to his suite, which he expected Morrison’s men to burst through at any second.
Yet seconds morphed into minutes and no one came for him. Campbell sat still, listening, waiting. He could hear the soft hum of the air conditioner, the vents vibrating as cool air struggled against the heat that seemed to permeate every inch of the arcology. There were other noises as well: the desert wind had kicked into a frenzy and the individual panes were rattling so hard Campbell was convinced the blast resistant glass would shatter. But the whiskey felt warm and even though he felt older than he ever remembered feeling, he pulled himself to his feet, the realization that Morrison’s men were not, at least yet, coming for him reverberating through his skull as he made his way toward the corpse. It would be dawn soon, and Campbell had a great deal of work left to do.
A few hours later, a security camera watched as Miles Lynch, suitcase in hand and still wearing his surgical scrubs, as well as a surgical mask, exited Jonathan Campbell’s 15th-floor laboratory suite and headed down the hall toward the elevators. Although the camera’s facial recognition software was unable to verify Lynch’s identity—the surgical mask made an accurate scan impossible—satisfactory identification was presented at each of the floor’s two automated security checkpoints: The individual in question produced Lynch’s ID card as well as his laboratory clearance chip. And given that Lynch had the top-level clearance necessary to access the 15th floor, no alarms were triggered and Lynch was allowed to continue.
Another camera then picked up Lynch at the end of the hallway, slipping into an elevator, still clutching the black suitcase, still wearing his surgical mask. According to the elevator logs, he got off on the third floor and then there was more video of him moving toward one of the shipping bays and then he was gone.
It wouldn’t be until three days later that Morrison’s security would discover Lynch’s bloated corpse, rotting in Campbell’s bed. By then, Campbell was over a thousand miles away.
Campbell moved quickly, cutting his way toward the end of the continent. He passed shantytowns thrown up along the perimeter of great, dying American cities and remembered his time wandering in the desert, before the Order, wondering if redemption would ever come. He had been afraid then; he wasn’t afraid now. These were the lands where Exodus was born; these were the lands where Campbell would die. But first, he would be redeemed.
Morrison’s assassin—al-Salaam—was hunting him, but it was too late. Campbell spoke the language of the new America that was emerging in violent fits and starts from the rotting carcass of a dying nation-state—the America of those who lived in the shadows of great failed cities, but who were determined to forge something out of the nothing they were given. Al-Salaam knew only the desert. As Campbell made his way through the sprawl that sprang up along the Rio Grande, he followed. Al-Salaam believed Campbell was going toward the two other camps operated by the Order: Golan and Bosor. Al-Salaam was wrong.
Billion dollar satellites aided in the hunt, attempting to track Campbell’s movements from space; hackers who had gone corporate monitored pay phones, cell phones, email, websites, VOIP, text messages. Every modern method of communication was covered; Morrison’s men assured him that any attempt to warn the Order through these methods would fail. They were right.
But there were other ways of communicating, of telling a story, of sending a message, that were forever beyond the reach of the thousand metal moons orbiting the earth: These were the means through which Campbell would warn the Order.
And so Campbell continued across the heart of the fading American empire, using whatever means of transportation was available to carry him from city to city; there was an increasing number of cars left at the edge of the desert by their owners as if they were some kind of sacrifice, an offerin
g to the gods of unsustainable financing terms. Or perhaps some people just gave up and melted away into the desert nothingness. Campbell pressed forward, weaving in and out of immigrant slums and homeless encampments, stopping only to sleep, eat, or visit a church—not the iridescent megachurches but the older structures left to rot in abandoned neighborhoods. So much graffiti covered the walls of these forgotten structures that when Campbell added a new symbol to the mosaic of urban artwork—just like the Order had taught him—almost no one noticed. There would be a few watching, a few who would see the asterisk drawn inside of a circle and know: Evacuate the camps.
On the seventh day, al-Salaam caught up with Campbell. In the cities that twisted and bent around the deserts of the American Southwest, men lived in fear. And al-Salaam, the desert emissary, understood this fear, he knew how to manipulate it, how to amplify it—men were eager to tell him their secrets and so learning of the old gringo limping through the sprawl, drawing on the walls of abandoned churches, was simple.
Kill the old man before he could warn the camps: that was al-Salaam’s order. But it was no longer clear that Campbell was going to the camps. Campbell’s fixation on abandoned religious structures amused him, so al-Salaam was content to shadow him for a little while, a predator toying with his prey, pleased that the old man had gone mad; pleased that fear drove him to old gods long dead—their inability to save Campbell only reinforced their impotence, their irrelevance.
Yet, on this last day, Campbell did not visit a church. Instead, he spent most of the day wandering through one of the slums pressed between Los Angeles and the desert. He spoke to no one: He moved silently, watching the people—the displaced, the transient, the ones who went off the grid, the ones for whom the American dream never quite clicked—before stopping at a tiny cemetery at the center of the slum. There were no marble mausoleums, no massive monuments to mortality: just rows of makeshift memorials—chunks of jagged scrap metal strung together with barbed wire to approximate a cross.
Kingdom Page 25