Exit Kingdom (10 page)

I don’t recommend, says the girl. I’m just supplying information.

The road north is a small two-lane
black-top crumbled to dust in some places, piled high with the shells of abandoned cars in others. They frequently have to slow to a crawl and navigate the
sandy verge of the road, being wary about getting stuck since Abraham is useless to help at the moment. Moses looks intermittently in the rearview mirror, and so far he has seen no sign of
Fletcher’s caravan. The one advantage of the slow
road is that it will be even slower for Fletcher and his large, heavy vans.

Soon they see signs for what seems to be a cluster of large towns: Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa. The slug population, too, grows denser as they approach the city centre.

Do we go around it or through it? Abraham asks.

It’s up to you, brother. What do you feel like?

The sun is getting low on the horizon.
The day has been a long one. They have been driving non-stop. Abraham has been drinking from a bottle of whiskey for hours, readying himself for the
surgery he will have to undergo. He is sleepy and sputtering.

Hell, he says. Let’s stay in the big city for the night.

So they follow the road into the city, which is uninhabited by the living and dark as pitch when the sun falls. It is
possible that the entire state is off the grid, all the survivors having
moved on years ago to other, safer areas. Phoenix is a place gone to rust and ruin – massive buildings collapsed on themselves, weeds growing up through the cracked pavement, everything
etched to a pale, colourless grey by the sandstorms that whip around the corners of buildings season by season.

The firebird city
rises again only in the dead who wander its streets. It is a mystery what they are feeding on, these shambling slugs, for there are no signs of life. It is only when they
arrive in the city’s downtown that Moses sees the soot and ash everywhere settled like new snow, the black char on the sides of many structures – and he realizes something. This place
is not among the cities abandoned a decade
ago or longer. No, this place is newly dead. There were people here not long before.

The gutters are stained with dried blood, and he knows what that means.

He knows from experience how to age blood – how, upon leaving the body and splashing on a brick wall, for example, blood will go from red to brown to black to grey, how it will flake off,
eventually, in the desert heat, or how it
will rehydrate and run in the rain, how it will eventually disappear altogether, leaving only a stain like the dirt of the earth – and how, long
after that, even the stain itself will evaporate, because the elixirs of human life are unstable – because human life itself wants to merge again with the elemental world it was born out of
and is kept separate only by the puny will of individual fancies.

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.

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.