Kingdom (35 page)

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 but 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 anything 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,

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.