Kingdom

by Anderson O'Donnell

  But the color of the pole didn’t even matter because each of the five dozen video monitors in the stadium were displaying the image of a waving U.S. flag, while the words to the pledge scrolled underneath and then the woman was waving goodbye and the opening chords of The Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” began blaring through the stadium. Seconds later two fighter jets blasted over the stadium—they weren’t actual fighter jets, just regular planes that Morrison had customized to look the part—and then the stage was opening and Jack Heffernan was rising on a platform, waving to the frenzied crowd, pumping his fist and giving the thumbs-up signal, even pantomiming a little air guitar as he stepped onto the stage.

  LED flashes burst out from every corner of the stadium—digital cameras and cell phones and smart phones thrust toward the stage—and Heffernan was looking out over the crowd, his hand pressed over his brow as he surveyed the stadium, pointing at random people in the crowd and flashing his golden smile, an image enhanced in real time in a control booth under the stage before being projected to every end of the stadium by two massive video monitors hung on either side of the stage, which were broadcasting the rally in cleaned-up high definition, offering a hyper-realistic version of events that, for the assembled mass, was the genuine narrative: The unprocessed life unfolding on stage was secondary. Finally, the crowd settled down and Heffernan, holding the wireless microphone in one hand and standing at the front of the stage, launched into his stump speech.

  For a delirious 30 minutes, Jack Heffernan prowled the stage constructed in the middle of the field, his sleeves rolled to the elbows as he spoke to the crowd, smashing the disconnect of modern life in the way no man had done since Robert Fitzgerald back in 2000. The video monitors cut back and forth from shots of Heffernan on stage to images of the faithful gathered in the crowd—men with tears glistening in their eyes; women with their arms stretched out toward the stage; everyone shouting and pressing smart phones toward the stage like relics to be blessed. It wasn’t just the masterful stagecraft that had whipped the crowd into such a frenzy; nor was it the words or the pledges and promises; it was something else, something devised in the desert, in the vats of Exodus, a genetic code optimized to appeal to the largest number of people, based on criteria that had been run through thousands of focus groups; even Jack Heffernan’s voice had been reworked over and over again, until the Exodus team was able to find the perfect combination of cadence and pitch and timbre to create and sustain the illusion that the individuals in the crowd were no longer alone because Jack Heffernan understood them; that Jack Heffernan would save them.

  And then something went wrong.

  The light in Heffernan’s eyes began to flicker, and the brilliant blue began to gray.

  His voice grew hoarse; his limbs were shaking. He was opening his mouth, trying to deliver the lines that had left so many audiences spellbound but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, garbled nonsense tumbled from his lips, guttural and frenzied, and a woman in the audience declared Heffernan to be speaking in tongues and people were shouting and pushing.

  A sudden shift by the crowd knocked over a lighting rig in the corner of the field and screams were now mixing in with the cheers. Heffernan’s microphone had been cut but his lips were still moving as he stared past the crowd, out to some point on the horizon or beyond; maybe toward the heavens or maybe just in the direction of Michael Morrison’s luxury box and even though he was still smiling his eyes spoke of fear and helplessness and confusion and by now the audience began to grow restless, confused by the sudden change.

  Heffernan had been their connection to a world in which they felt alienated and powerless; at the rally, bombarded by the multimedia product that was Jack Heffernan, this separateness—that nominal entry fee for the human experience—dissolved into an Edenic daydream. Heffernan’s bizarre meltdown had torn that feeling away from them, and, in its place, a dangerous tension began fermenting among the tens of thousands gathered in the stadium.

  Watching the rally from his private box at the top of the stadium, Morrison could feel his anger building. This was the moment he had hoped would never come to pass. Despite the setbacks of the past few months, Morrison still believed Heffernan would hold up, that Morrison and his team had stabilized the creature’s genetic code to the point where Heffernan could still win the presidency and last four, hell, maybe even eight, years in the Oval Office. Long enough, anyway, to make Morrison the most powerful man in the world. And Heffernan, he was only the beginning. Eventually, Morrison would use the breakthroughs made possible by Exodus to bring genetic modification to the masses; a wildly popular President Jack Heffernan would serve as the ultimate product placement.

  However, staring down at the field, watching his candidate come apart at the seams, the prospect of a Jack Heffernan presidency was growing dim. And those prospects would be nonexistent, Morrison knew, if he allowed a full-on meltdown to take place on stage that morning.

  Reaching into the pocket of his suit, Morrison pulled out his phone and after typing a single word pressed send. Aware of the potential need for a diversion, Morrison’s men had recruited several members of Tiber City’s ever-swelling homeless population to pose as protestors who would, if necessary, disrupt the rally. If questioned by any members of the media, these “volunteers” would admit to being supporters of a rival candidate. Morrison’s people had assured these homeless men and women there would be no violence. Morrison’s people had lied.

  Less than a minute later, to the left of the stage, a cluster of protestors appeared, carrying signs with slogans countering Heffernan’s vocal support for genetic engineering: “Man Cannot Make Man” and “God Created Man in His Own Image.”

  Several of these protestors pushed their way forward, steamrolling the crowd, moving closer to the stage. This sudden surge sent several Heffernan supporters sprawling to the ground, prompting the crowd to push back, angry barbs flying between the opposing groups. All of a sudden, two protestors leapt up from the snarling mass of flesh roiling in front of Jack Heffernan and onto the stage, screaming and shouting snippets of rehearsed catchphrases and shop-worn rhetoric. Police—plainclothes and uniformed—along with Secret Service and Morrison’s private security detail swarmed toward the two protestors. Seconds later, a cop took out one of them, tackling him from behind; it was one of those strange occasions when, during a moment of chaos, for the briefest of seconds, life seems to freeze, everything goes silent, and even the most insignificant sound is amplified, so as the two men crashed to the earth, the sickening snap of broken ribs reverberated across the arena. Then, all hell broke loose.

  Just about the time several of his accomplice’s broken ribs were puncturing his spleen, the other protestor who stormed the stage turned and leapt back into the crowd, knocking over Jack Heffernan’s podium in the process. Several officers dove in after him, their fat faces bright red and swollen as they plowed into the crowd. Heffernan, standing where his podium used to be, his lips moving but his microphone long since cut, was still attempting to deliver his speech. And then he was gone, hustled away by Morrison’s men as the initial clash between police and protestors escalated into a full-blown riot. Seconds later, a series of small explosions shook the earth and smoke began snaking out across the arena.

  Watching the smoke curl up toward his private box, Michael Morrison was suddenly aware he was no longer alone in the booth. Without turning his gaze away from the chaos consuming the field below, Morrison spoke:

  “Welcome, lieutenant.”

  “A pleasure as always sir,” the voice behind him said, a voice Morrison knew belonged to Malachi al-Salaam, his head of security and a former special operations agent that one of Morrison’s government connections found dying in the atomic wastelands ringing the Persian desert. The enemy had tortured the man, then bound his hands and feet and left him to be picked apart by the beasts foraging through the fallout zone. Any other man would have allowed himself to die: Anger—a festering, all-consuming
rage at those who left him behind, those in whose name he had committed unspeakable atrocities—kept this particular man alive.

  Morrison augmented al-Salaam’s genetic makeup through the same somatic treatment by which he stalled his own aging process. Rather than preventing him from aging, however, Morrison enhanced all the physical and mental attributes that had made the man one of the finest mercenaries in the Middle East wars of the early 21st century.

  Al-Salaam was more than just Morrison’s first lieutenant: He was Morrison’s death-dealer, the physical instrument through which the CEO advanced his vision of the world. From the moment he laid eyes on al-Salaam, even before the augmentations, Morrison knew he was perfect; it was something in al-Salaam’s face, something in his eyes and his expressions—an emptiness reflected, a glare so devoid of feeling or empathy most men couldn’t bear to sustain eye contract—absolute oblivion, Morrison’s kingdom come.

  “Lieutenant,” Morrison began, his gaze still locked on the chaos below, “things seem to be progressing a little quicker than I expected. We will respond in kind. Send one of your men to retrieve Campbell—that won’t be difficult; it’s unlikely he’ll be conscious, let alone sober.”

  “Let me go, Sir,” al-Salaam replied, cool and detached, his accent gone, replaced by a geographically neutral, timeless whisper. “The Jungle is an unpredictable place, and Campbell has friends…”

  “Under other circumstances, I would agree. But I have another task for you, one that requires your…personal touch.”

  “What would you have me do?” al-Salaam asked.

  Smiling, Morrison began to explain.

  Chapter 11

  Tiber City: Jungle District

  Aug. 27, 2015

  4:49 p.m.

  One of Dylan’s earliest memories was of traveling with his father’s campaign. They were somewhere in the Midwest—maybe Kansas City, maybe Tulsa, but it could have been anywhere—and the entire campaign was staying in some chain hotel that gave coupons for breakfast, left individually wrapped multicolored mints—the kind that tasted the same no matter what unnaturally bright color you selected for consumption—and pamphlets for local attractions next to the entrance. They boasted conference rooms with tan buckets full of melting ice and lukewarm soda, the aluminum cans slick with sludge from the ice and the dirt off the hands of everyone else who reached into the bucket before you; and, covering folding tables, tablecloths that inevitably bunched up or slid off the side of the table, revealing splintered wood and tarnished metal.

  Everyone would always be awake before dawn, scurrying back and forth in those last few moments of darkness, the moments when electric light felt inappropriate, as if the night was offended that you were rushing the entire process, and the hallways seemed to shimmer and pulse with a surrealism that left man feeling like an unwelcome guest, acutely aware of the wind and the cold and the fact that the sky stretched eternal. In those few minutes before the sun broke over the horizon, Dylan always found it impossible to believe that there were people on the other side of the planet, stockbrokers and waiters and teachers—that there was life anywhere other than in this anonymous chain hotel with its breakfast coupons and brochures for local attractions and the rumble of eighteen-wheelers blasting out across the plains.

  These moments always filled Dylan with a sense of dread and he would burrow in the hotel’s Technicolor comforter and wait until his mother—who usually accompanied her husband on these trips—came to wake him. But on this particular morning, his mother wasn’t out on the campaign trail—it was just him and his father and the legions of staffers. There was a pale light leaking from the bathroom out into the darkness; the light barely made it five feet beyond the cheap tile threshold before the night caught up and swallowed it whole. He could hear his father getting ready; the man’s heavy sighs competing with the halfhearted spray of the shower and faux energy-efficient faucets and ceiling fan.

  From underneath his comforter Dylan watched his father putting his suit and for a moment there was no dread, no sense that the day was already over before it even began, just a son with his father, who, in his Savile Row suit looked like he belonged atop Olympus rather than struggling with a jammed armoire in the last days of the American century.

  Dylan’s father noticed him and, smiling, came over and sat down on the bed next to his son. Dylan shut his eyes tight and pretended to sleep, not because he wanted to deceive his father but because he did not want this moment to end. Yet this moment was, as all such moments are by their very nature, unsustainable. And peering out at his father from the scrum of blankets, he noticed that there was something on his father’s tie.

  “Dad,” he had said. “Dad, there’s something on your tie.”

  He father looked down at his tie, at the streak of crimson, and smiled, in a sad and soft way to which Dylan was unaccustomed.

  “Guess I flossed a little too hard this morning,” his father had told him.

  And then the train was screeching to a halt, jarring Dylan back to the present. A mechanical voice was bleating out from somewhere, reminding passengers that this stop was the end of the line. Dylan opened his eyes, wincing, the lights lining the side of the subway car a reminder that he was still hung-over. Even though the voice continued to inform Dylan that he had reached the end of the line, the doors remained shut, the memories fading but not fast enough—he could still picture his father in that hotel room, trying to explain to his son why he was bleeding. Then saw it: The side of his own hand was streaked with crimson but there was no cut, no visible source of the blood, but his nose was tender and there was a good chance he had done some damage last night.

  With a hiss, the doors pulled apart and Dylan was on his feet, moving out of the car and into the above-ground station at 98th and Hazor—the only subway stop in Tiber City’s notorious Jungle district. The rain had stopped, but the humidity persisted and, before Dylan had even gone a dozen feet, he was sweating. The sounds of the Jungle were suddenly audible: the electric hiss of neon struggling to come to life; a man and a woman arguing in a language Dylan couldn’t recognize, the words ancient and sharp, alien to the soft cadence of the Western tongue, their words cutting downwind from the immigrant slums scattered like buckshot throughout the Jungle. These sounds fueled the desperation pressing down across the shattered landscape and every time long-haul truckers—one of those jacked-up knights of American highway mythology, jaw clenched from too much speed and too little sleep—hit a pothole while barreling down one of the distant freeways that framed the Jungle like a quarantine zone, the entire district seemed to shudder.

  Although many of Tiber City’s denizens regarded the Jungle district as a single monolithic slum, Dylan had come to appreciate the area’s geographic subtleties—an appreciation that kept him alive. The south end—which included the subway stop at 98th and Hazor—wasn’t always part of the Jungle. Over the last decade, a reverse gentrification had been underway, the Jungle’s aggressive sprawl devouring the failed industries and abandoned homes along its border. Neon sprung up seemingly overnight and the junkies, hookers, pimps, and street preachers followed like moths to the flame, driving away any square holdouts: the hipster couple with Ivy League degrees hunting for authenticity (and a bargain-basement mortgage), the businessman who was convinced that this time the area was going to realize its potential and wanted in on it. Generally, those folks learned quickly that the Jungle offered a lot more local color than they bargained for.

  Not that the Jungle’s south end was completely off-limits to the rest of Tiber City; there were enough dive bars, live sex shows, and hourly rate motels catering to bankers, lawyers, doctors, and politicians that the mobsters who took a piece of all the action knew too many headlines were bad for business. So the odds you might get jacked stepping off the subway were only about 50-50 and considering how fucked the rest of the world was—not to mention how boring the burbs could get—those odds weren’t so terrible. Too bad Dylan wasn’t staying in the south end.


  Turning north, Dylan began moving through the dying light of the late August sun. Unlike the rest of Tiber City, there were no skyscrapers in the Jungle. Yet even as night crept over the horizon the temperature lingered in the mid-90s. Empty newspaper dispensers lined the side of the street, serving as a canvas for aspiring taggers, a toilet for bums, or both and as Dylan moved past them he noticed several fresh pieces of graffiti—territorial markers indicating a new king had been crowned.

  Not that it mattered; Dylan had made this run enough times that he was familiar with some of the local players and he knew which blocks to avoid, which streets to take as he hit the sidewalk, striding north, deeper into the Jungle.

  His hangover was almost gone by this point, the over-the-counter shit curbing the pain just enough to keep him functional but the image of his father, the old man’s tie stained crimson, stayed with him as he pressed forward, eyes locked on the horizon, on the black clouds attacking the sun. Dylan could sense the expectant energy building around him; like vampires, the junkies would soon rise from their chemically induced comas and hit the streets to score. Even the speed freaks, the meth heads who had been up all night, were coming down—and the crash was never pleasant, which meant more meth was needed to avoid the crash. The doors to some of the shanty houses cracked open; bloodshot eyes peered from behind the blinds hanging in front of broken windows: The Jungle had begun to stir.

  Dylan picked up his pace, but kept his movements casual. When he hit 104th and Hazor he took a deep breath: Six blocks down, six to go, but the neighborhood was getting worse. Even the ballsiest suburban tourist—the father of four hot for an anonymous glory hole, the guy with the most to lose and therefore the need to absolutely not run into anyone he might know—would be hesitant to come this far above the 100 block. Strange things happened north of 100th and Hazor: the Web was always buzzing with rumors of vampire cults, voodoo congregations practicing animal sacrifice, and desperate digital alchemists forever seeking spiritual enlightenment from binary code, trying to extract the true nature of matter from the 0s and 1s swirling above the city. Dylan wasn’t sure about any of that—any time he ventured above 100th he was generally too busy avoiding the dangers he was familiar with: the junkies, psychos, and religious nuts that swarmed like piranha across the avenues and alleyways of the Jungle district. And so today he was being extra cautious.