Kingdom (5 page)

The nightmares came hard and fast, accentuated by the fever-induced delirium gripping Campbell as darkness crashed across the land. Sprawled out on the boxcar floor, the desert winds rattling the freight’s loose steel frame, Campbell spent the night in a haze, crying out as each of the creatures he encountered in Morrison’s lab paraded through his dreamscapes. There were other visions as well; strange men and women creeping across the desert, moving in and out of Campbell’s boxcar, working silently under a starless sky. His left leg was paralyzed with pain and, as a result, Campbell could only lie on the floor, covered in a blanket that may or may not have been in the freight last night, staring up at the side of the car, losing himself in the simplicity of the symbol tagged halfway between the floor and the ceiling. The sharp smell of spray paint permeated the boxcar, or at least Campbell thought it did, and while he recognized that this was probably an important detail, he no longer cared for such complexities and instead was content to slip back into a near-coma as darkness once again descended.

At first, Campbell thought he was having another nightmare. Lashed to an ancient gurney, he was being hustled down a bland adobe-walled corridor while strange men, their features obscured by green surgical masks and 300-watt headlamps, stared down at him. His head, like the rest of his body, was held in place by a thick leather strap so when Campbell screamed, the only ones paying attention were crude images of angels carved into the patchwork
ceiling of dried earth and stone. From the corner of his eye, Campbell noticed a flicker of color; the adobe-induced monotony was shattered every few yards by a series of blurred frescos recounting the biblical punishment of Korah. The gurney, uttering terrible mechanical moans as the men in masks cajoled it across the rocky terrain, was held together by several pieces of dirty surgical tape slapped tightly around the essential load-bearing joints, and Campbell wondered if it was going to collapse, prayed it might collapse. The gurney men quickened their pace and everything around Campbell became a blur of light and pale surgical green. Nausea washed over him and just as the gurney slammed its way through a pair of plastic double doors, he lost consciousness again, slipping back into a darkness punctured by blurry images of Aaron swinging an incensor while the earth around him broke apart, swallowing men whole.

Campbell’s eyes shot open, an involuntary response to the pain tearing through his entire lower left side. For a moment, the world was an explosion of hot light, the kind of light that illuminated dentists’ offices and convenience stores at three in the morning. Still strapped to the gurney, Campbell could sense people moving around him, hands passing objects back and forth over his body. He tried to shout out, demanding an explanation for any of the questions racing through his mind, but his mouth felt like it was stuffed with mothballs and his speech dribbled out in a series of whimpers.

A single, massive light bulb dangled five feet above Campbell’s head, engulfing the entire room with its relentless illumination. Two of the men who had pushed the gurney were now hovering over Campbell, one on either side. Seconds later, a third gurney man entered the room pushing a stainless-steel cart, its wheels squeaking as it made its way across the room and toward Campbell. Partitioned by three shelves, each level of the cart was a mess of gauze, syringes, and strange instruments that looked as though they might be useful under the hood of a car. On the top level of the cart was the biggest saw Campbell had ever seen.

“Oh God,” moaned Campbell, sweat cascading down his brow as he thrashed about on top of the gurney like a fish with lungs full of oxygen. The gurney men paid scant attention to these wild movements; his body ravaged by fever, Campbell was no match for the leather bindings securing him to the gurney. Instead, the man closest to Campbell picked a syringe filled
with murky brown liquid up off the cart and without warning slammed it into Campbell’s left thigh. Loaded with morphine, the needle pierced a large blue-green vein traversing the length of Campbell’s left leg, instantly flooding him with a twisted euphoria. Seconds later, entranced by the beautiful numbness blooming throughout his entire central nervous system, Campbell passed out.

“You won’t feel a thing,” commented the gurney man closest to Campbell.

And he was right; even when they re-broke the bones in his leg and began scraping away the destroyed ligaments, Campbell never felt a thing.

For several nights, Campbell lingered in chemical twilight, drifting in and out of consciousness. At some point in time, his naked body had been transferred from the gurney to an actual bed and this was where he now found himself, in a massive hall filled with other small beds. The beds were arranged in two rows facing one another with space cleared down the middle. A few gurney men moved about the room, tending to the occupants of each bed. Campbell cried out to them but they ignored him and continued to move back and forth between the various beds. He still had no idea where he was or why he was even still alive, but he was getting tired of other people making that decision for him. He could remember nothing about the past week; everything after the freight yard was a blur. And the people who might be capable of filling in the blanks were in no hurry to do so.

Inhaling sharply, Campbell ripped the IV from his bruised inner arm before swinging his lower half over the edge of the tiny, sweat-soaked mattress. Pressing his right leg down on the cool concrete floor, he pushed his body forward, transferring his weight from right to left as his muscles, dulled by inaction and morphine, returned to life with a series of spasms. And then Campbell was tumbling forward toward another bed, his body refusing to aid him in his escape plan. Throwing his arms out over his face, Campbell braced for the impact, which arrived a half a second later as he landed on top of another patient, bone meeting bone with a sickening crunch. Campbell, the bed’s occupant, and the bed itself all crashed to the floor, an IV stand chasing after them. The other patient was thrashing about under the sheets, screeching incomprehensively. Campbell tried to put his hand over the other patient’s face but the man would not stop screaming and now there
was movement rippling across the room as other guests of the gurney men, roused by the commotion, began stirring.

Realizing that the already narrow window for escape was about to get a whole lot smaller, but before he could drag himself to his feet, Campbell found himself beneath the other patient, gagging as breath, ragged and rank, exploded in bursts, centimeters from his face. But it wasn’t a man that was on top of Campbell. It was something else, a creature with thick, hairy teeth protruding from where its eyes should have been and a half-developed, puss-caked appendage protruding from the side of its neck. The creature seized Campbell with swollen, six fingered hands, pinning him to the earth as it tried to force speech from its ruined vocal chords.

“Kill…Kill me. Now. Kill. Me. Now. Kill me now,” the creature wheezed.

Screaming, Campbell heaved the monstrosity to the ground and began scrambling backward on his hands. The gurney men were moving toward Campbell, syringes at the ready. Prepared to make a final stand, Campbell attempted once again to pull himself to his feet. It was at this moment, however, when Campbell realized the lower portion of his left leg was covered in blood-soaked gauze. He stopped screaming and just collapsed.

A needle pricked the back of Campbell’s neck but he barely felt it. The creature was still crying out to Campbell as the gurney men dragged it away because it knew, just as he knew, that they were kin. Campbell was the father, and the creature, the creature was the son; two members of the same terrible brood born deep below Morrison Biotechnology.

The American Southwest
The End of the 20th Century

F
or the rest of his life, Campbell would bear the mark of the gurney men, the men he now knew as members of the Order of Neshamah.

He had remained in their custody for weeks after his encounter with the creature, convalescing alongside those he had helped ruin. And then, one morning, he woke up in a nameless motel near the Texas-New Mexico border, naked with only a single pair of pants left atop a rickety dresser, along with his ID and credit cards. His leg ached and at that moment he would have performed any number of reprehensible acts for a few opiates and a shot of Jameson. There was, however, no scar; only a deep, consuming pain that expanded then exploded when he swung his legs over the side of the bed and onto the floor. Gritting his teeth, he managed to weave his way to the shower.

Stepping under the piss warm water dribbling from the motel shower-head, Campbell felt a new pain, one that dwarfed the discomfort in his leg and drove him to his knees. Staring down into the drain, he noticed the water collecting around a hairball missed by the maid was pink. A cold panic washed over him, twisting his stomach into knots, and he began running his hands over his arms, his legs, his torso, searching for the source of the blood:
nothing. The panic mushroomed and he saw stars, little explosions of light dancing across his field of vision as he tried to retain consciousness.

Campbell managed to stumble out of the shower before collapsing, bits of broken tile piecing his skin as he hit the floor. That’s when he saw it: Reflected back from the cracked mirror fixed to the ceiling, running the length of his back, was an enormous tattoo—still fresh, the skin still raw—of an asterisk in a circle. He had been marked.

In the following years, Campbell would court oblivion, trying to escape the things he had done and the things that had been done to him. And yet, no matter how deep into the American night he sank, the mark remained, both a reminder and a warning. Yet Campbell believed the mark was also a promise that, one day, he might be forgiven.

Until that day arrived, he would remain a shadow, a former colossus consigned to the fringes of the fading century. Specific details from his days in exile were impossible to recall; his memories were a blur of biker bars, methamphetamines, and cocktail waitresses. Eventually, Campbell had found himself on the edge of the Vegas Strip. He overdosed once, twice, but even the third time wasn’t the charm. He bought a gun and on more than one occasion, wrapped his lips around the barrel. One night, however, stood out from the rest.

He had been at some strip club on the outskirts of Vegas and it was the pre-dawn crowd, with the pre-dawn dancers presenting their decidedly pre-dawn wares next to a picked-over buffet table. Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” pumped from a decade-old sound system while junkies and single mothers flashed tit on stage, feigning arousal at 4 o’clock in the morning to a crowd of exhausted second shifters, bikers, and ageless drunks sulking in the shadows. Campbell was in the corner, chasing Benzedrine with bourbon, and then bourbon with Benzedrine, just trying to build up the courage to die, when he saw it: Mounted over the bar was an ancient CRT television monitor, the only one not tuned to a horse race or ballgame—or maybe it had been and the news feed had interrupted the broadcast. Regardless, there it was: The press conference of his old pupil, Michael Morrison, announcing that Morrison Biotechnology would break from its long-standing tradition of political neutrality and endorse a candidate for the U.S. Senate.