Exit Kingdom

by Alden Bell

  This blood, the blood in the gutters downtown, is less than a year old. This place is among the recently fallen, and there is a grim sombreness in the air.

  But it explains why there are so many slugs, and why they are so active.

  There were survivors here, Moses says. Till not so long ago.

  How can you tell? the girl says.

  I can tell.

  Could there be some left?

  Moses shrugs.

  There could be, he says. We’ll keep an eye out.

  Is it too dangerous? she says. Should we go back?

  Moses shrugs again.

  Everywhere’s dangerous. Just different kinds is all. Abraham and me, we’ve been through most varietals. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

  They drive until Moses finds what he’s looking for: a hospital. But the place is blasted through, burned down to its empty metal skeleton, unsalvageable. So he looks for the next best thing, a drugstore, but those too seem to have been looted clean a long time since. Yes, this place was a thriving bastion for a long while.

  No luck, Moses says to his brother. We may have to do it on pure nerve.

  We done it before, Abraham says, taking another gulp of whiskey. I got lots of nerve left, I reckon.

  So they find a place that looks shut up tight, a hotel, and they climb up on a dumpster and bust through a second-storey window and hoist themselves in. Then they kick the dumpster away so that they won’t be followed.

  Inside, the building is deserted. They sit Abraham down in the big dusty lobby, on a green upholstered couch with a filigreed back, and then Moses and the girl light candles to search the dark back rooms.

  In the abandoned bar, they find two whole bottles of Jameson’s.

  It’s Abraham’s lucky day, Moses says. He can drink himself straight into anaesthesia.

  You think they have any canned food? the Vestal asks. All I’ve been eating is beans and garden fruit for weeks. That’s probably the kitchen back there.

  And she pushes through a swinging door into the next room.

  Be careful, Moses calls out after her. Don’t get et.

  He peruses the bar some more, but many of the bottles are gone or smashed. There’s a register with a drawer full of money – bills that he remembers people coveting in his long-ago childhood – but now they are the last thing the survivors are interested in lugging around. They make good kindling, but that’s about it.

  When he pushes through the swinging doors into the kitchen, he spots the Vestal on one end, leaning deep into a cupboard and sifting through its contents. On the other end of the kitchen, on his hands and knees, is a slug. It’s an ancient man, hairless and dressed in an apron. His skin is grey and shrivelled and flaking as though he were made of papier mâché, a crawling stuffed mannequin, a mocking imitation of humanity.

  The first thing Moses notices when he steps into the kitchen is that the slug is not making his way hungrily towards the Vestal. It seems he has climbed to his hands and feet with only a vague interest in the sudden movement around him. He stares after her as Moses has seen some slugs stare at night-time stars or at television screens that have not yet burned out or even at each other – simple, animal curiosity.

  So it is no trick. The girl is somehow, impossibly, outrageously, beyond their appetite.

  And it is just her, because when the slug sees Moses, he immediately begins a jaw-clamping crawl towards him, reaching out his grey bony fingers with the little strength he has left in his desiccated muscles. The thing would consume Moses if it could, would eat him right up. And yet it has no interest in the redhead wearing the white robes.

  Moses takes an iron skillet from a hook hanging above him and bashes in the slug’s skull. The head caves in easily, the slug collapses on his stomach, and whatever small amount of blood there is slowly oozes out of its ears and nose.

  Startled, the girl emerges from the cabinet.

  What was that?

  Slug, Moses says, pointing.

  Oh, I didn’t see it.

  You should be more careful.

  I’ll be all right, she says and shrugs. Look what I found.

  She holds out a jar of olives in oil.

  When was the last time you had an olive? she asks.

  I don’t care for olives, he says.

  Look at you! she says. Some high and mighty mister with tastes! Well, some of us can’t afford to have picky palates.

  She tries to pry the lid off the jar, but it’s on tight. She holds the jar between her knees and leans over, getting her whole back into the project, but the lid won’t budge. Then she knocks the lid against an aluminium tabletop, and all the discarded utensils on the table shudder and rattle like bones. But when she tries again, there’s still no movement.

  Moses watches the entire process until she looks up at him, holding the big jar in front of her like an infant baby.

  Will you open it for me? she asks. Please?

  Come on, Moses says. Let’s go get that bullet out of my brother.

  *

  Abraham drinks until he can no longer keep his head from lolling around on the loose hinge of his neck. Then they lay him out on a bed in one of the guest rooms on the first floor, and Moses removes his pants.

  Do you wish me to avert my gaze? says the Vestal Amata, but Moses can tell it is said in jest. She has rested the big jar of olives, still unopened, on the night stand.

  Moses puts towels under his brother’s legs and uses a steak knife from the kitchen and a claw-like instrument from an ice bucket to dig the bullet out. At the first thrust of the knife into the bloody hole, Abraham screams loudly then passes out. The rest of the operation takes place in silence, the Vestal compressing the wound firmly so he won’t bleed out. Then they wrap the thigh tight in ripped towels and let Abraham sleep it off.

  He’ll be hurting when he wakes up, the girl says. Do you have anything for the pain?

  Aspirin, Moses says, but not much.

  It’ll be bad.

  We’ve been through worse.

  Then Moses goes to the olive jar on the night stand and uses the pressure of his thick paws to wrench the lid free.

  There, he says. Thanks for the help with him.

  My pleasure, says the Vestal, her eyes going wide at the green oblongs floating in oil. She plucks one up between her thumb and forefinger and pops it in her mouth. Scrumptious, she says.

  You take the other bed, Moses says. I’ll sit here in this chair tonight. I ain’t used to sleepin much anyway.

  Are you kidding? she says. We’re in a hotel. There are beds everywhere.

  Safer to stick together, says Moses. Don’t worry, I ain’t gonna touch you or make any untoward advances. That’s more Abe’s thing, and he’s down for the count tonight.

  So she settles onto the bed and leans back against the headboard and eats olives from the jar.

  You did good with him, she says to Moses after a silent while. What were you before? You know, before all this happened.

  Me? Moses replies. I was a no-good. I didn’t do much of anything. I think maybe I was just waitin on the apocalypse so I would have something to occupy me.

  So are you occupied now?

  More or less. What about you? What were you?

  I was just a little girl. I don’t remember much. Just a lot of people everywhere.

  What about after? What were you before you were part of Fletcher’s sideshow?

  Lots of things, she answers in a sleepy voice. Lots of things. Many lives. I wasn’t even always a redhead.

  But she doesn’t want to talk any more and falls asleep on top of the blankets. Moses goes over to the bed and takes the jar of olives out from between her embracing arms, sets it on the night stand and puts the lid back on. Then he returns to his chair and lets his mind wander wide – though his thoughts don’t get very far before he, too, is lost to sleep.

  *

  When Moses wakes again, it is because his brother is calling to him from where he is sitting
up in the bed.

  Mose – up and at em, big brother!

  Bright light floods the room, and Moses pinches his eyes closed. He turns in the chair he has slept in all night, and his bones creak, his muscles complain. He realizes it frequently these days: after four decades on the earth, he is getting to be one of the aged things.

  The nun’s gone, Abraham says.

  What?

  The red nun. She’s gone.

  His brother points to the other bed in the room, which is empty save for a pad of paper with something written on it

  She’s not a nun, Moses says and rises to take the note from the bed. The paper has the hotel’s logo on the top of it, and her note is scratched onto it with pencil in the curlicue handwriting of a young girl.

  Thanks for the lift.

  You are two souls lit by heaven.

  Bon voyage!

  Peace and love,

  The True Vestal, Canoness Amata

  What’s it say? Abraham asks.

  She left, Moses says.

  Left where? Out there? Slugland? Without any protection?

  I reckon she don’t need protection from the dead.

  You really believe it’s real?

  Moses looks away from his brother to the window where the sun feels hot and good on his face.

  It ain’t an issue of belief, he says. She’s took off. Whether she’s gonna be et or not, she ain’t here any more.

  So what now?

  Now we try to find her.

  Goddamnit, Abraham says. Seems like we’re settin up to spend an inordinate lot of time pursuing a girl we ain’t allowed to bang when we find her.

  Moses looks at his brother’s leg, stretched out straight on the bed with a towel wrapped around it.

  Can you walk?

  It hurts like straight damnation, Abraham says. What’d you do, gnaw the bullet out of there with your teeth?

  Are you able to walk on it?

  If you ain’t in the mood to carry me, I could hobble.

  Fine. Let’s go.

  *

  Outside, in the car, they drive slowly, looking for traces of the Vestal Amata. The dead are dense and easily riled, but there are no signs of a wake – a tide of dead all moving in one direction, at the head of which you usually find some poor fool running for his life. It seems that they are so uninterested in her they don’t even pay much attention to her passing. She’s an invisible – a ghost even among the dead.

  They do not know which way to drive even, and Moses makes widening concentric squares in the car – a series of right turns, each one a block further than the previous. But the dead accumulate, drawn by the sound of the car – and their density makes it increasingly difficult to push through.

  We’re collecting quite a crowd here, Mose, says Abraham.

  Moses drives on in silence, the dead becoming so thick that their clawing hands on the car sound like driving rain, their nails ripping away on the painted metal, their skin, sometimes, sloughing off in sheets that stick and will harden in the sun if they are left untended, fleshy tattoos of the dead past plastered on the decaying machines of a promised future that will now never arrive.

  Moses leans forward to gaze out the windshield with grim seriousness.

  It seems impossible that they will ever find her. The world is wide, and she, blessed or cursed as it may be with freedom beyond the common share, has the impunity to go anywhere in it.

  Hours pass and the sun starts a descent on the far side of its meridian. She is an invisible, and she could be anywhere, and the world is wide, and Moses is near to giving up when he sees something in the road.

  There, he says.

  What? says his brother.

  Moses stops the car but doesn’t get out. There are too many slugs around. He points through the windshield to a broken jar on the side of a main drag that leads to the freeway ahead.

  She’s been took, Moses says.

  Took by who? Slugs?

  No. Not slugs. Took by other people. Maybe Fletcher, maybe others.

  What’re you talkin about?

  That olive jar. She was feastin from it last night.

  How do you know it’s the same one?

  It’s recently busted. There’s juice still in it.

  Okay. So why does that mean she’s been took?

  She ain’t the kind to go bustin jars just for the jollies of it. Plus, she knows we’re after her, and she wouldn’t of left any clues behind on purpose. No, she’s been took.

  If it’s Fletcher, that’s bad news for her.

  Mostly likely it’s bad news for her any which way. No kind soul givin somebody a lift would begrudge them the luggage of a jar of olives. A conflict took place here.

  So they know they are headed in the right direction anyhow, and they drive with an eye on the horizon, looking to find some sign of the Vestal.

  They drive slow, and soon the city is behind them. Just before evening falls, they see something else caught up on the bramble bushes by the side of the road. The vestments of the ghost herself, like a disregarded bedsheet left over from a child’s Halloween costume: the Vestal’s white robes.

  At least we know they went this way, says Abraham Todd grimly. He massages his knee below the gunshot thigh, wincing.

  When night falls, they stop, afraid to miss the clues of the Vestal’s path, and barricade themselves in a dusty second-floor room of an old motel. The dead have a difficult time climbing steps. They can do it, eventually, but it costs them time and fuss – and by the time they have reached the top, they have usually forgotten what brought them there in the first place.

  That night Moses lies awake listening to his brother turn fitfully in the bed next to his. The room has heavy curtains blocking out the moonlight and so is straightup blind dark. He has grown accustomed to it over the years of roaming the deadlands of the country – but it was not always like that. When he was a child, there was light everywhere. It seeped in under doors and through blinds. Nothing was ever entirely dark. You had daylight, and then you had dimness – and it seemed as though the world was a glowworm of a place, a thing that produced its own bioluminescence – and you would never have thought how dead a place it could be.

  Abraham shifts again in the dark.

  How’s the leg? Moses asks.

  Guy must of shot me with a poison bullet, says Abraham.

  You want to take a look?

  Tomorrow.

  Again silence permeates the dark, and Moses feels what it must be like to be buried alive. Then he listens harder, and he can hear the dead outside, bristling along against each other like a nest of rodents.

  Then Abraham speaks again.

  Why do you think she ran away?

  Don’t know, Moses says. Likely she’s the kind who eschews too much company on her travels.

  But a holy girl. How’s she got the guts to . . .

  She ain’t so holy.

  What do you mean?

  It occurs to Moses that his brother has never seen the other side of the Vestal Amata. He was tending his leg when she shot the man who injured him. He was waiting in the car when she nearly bashed Fletcher’s brain in.

  She can take care of herself, Moses says. You haven’t seen it. She’s got a little bit of killer in her. Who knows what else.

  That girl?

  You didn’t see.

  So she ain’t immune to them? That was just a trick? I knew it.

  No, it ain’t a trick. I don’t know what it is. Maybe she’s holy in some ways and unholy in others. Or maybe holiness wears a new aspect these days. I don’t know. But all I know is that she ain’t no damsel in distress.

  Abraham is quiet for a moment. Then he says:

  If she ain’t no holy girl, does that mean I can bang her when we find her?

  He chuckles in the dark, and Moses replies with simple silence.

  Sometimes Moses feels he is more at home among the wandering dead – for while he does not share their appetites, he can understand them
. Now he finds himself in the company of reprobate brothers and unholy Vestals. The dead may refuse to rest, but it’s the world of the living that’s gone asunder.

  No, but serious now, Abraham says again in the dark. If she ain’t a holy girl like we thought before, what are we huntin her for? We ain’t getting paid, and we ain’t on a mission for God – so then what?

  She’s still a lost girl – holy or not.

  But it seems like she don’t want to be found.

  Moses says nothing for a moment. Then he turns over on his side and blinks his eyes. The dark is the same no matter whether his eyes are open or closed.

  I don’t got the answers for everything, he says. Sometimes you do things just cause they need to be done by someone and there ain’t nobody else around. Is that answer enough for you?

  Abraham shifts again in his bed, grunting.

  Sure, he says. Me, I’m easy. Free and easy. Abraham Todd is like a delicate autumn leaf, brother. He goes where the wind blows.

  *

  The next day they find her in a little town called Fountain Hills at the edge of a vast scrub desert. They follow the tides of the dead, who are stirred up, presumably, not by the Vestal herself but by whoever took her. There is a park in the middle of the town, and that’s where the bandits have set up camp. There are not many of them – maybe ten – just enough to travel light but protected. Their cars are parked in a huddle, the bandits are guarding the camp from the slow but steady onslaught of the dead while at the same time they hoot and holler at the redheaded girl dancing naked in the centre of the camp.

  The exchange is a quick one. The bandits see the Todd brothers approach and attack. It is no matter to them who the Todds are or what they want: this group of travellers moves from place to place exercising their desires with a violence inherited from the very land over which they travel. They are scarred and ugly and brutal in their actions. They speak the language of death with accents muddy and coarse.

  But the Todds have travelled the same ragged roads, and violence is a language that flows from their tongues as well. There are a couple with rifles, and Abraham dispatches those quickly, cutting off their range. The others scrabble to melee – but they are all distracted, caught unaware in their leisure.