Exit Kingdom (20 page)

See, she says. Whatever I am, so are you – but worse, cause you can’t admit to it. You ain’t no gentleman, Moses Todd.

He looks at her a moment longer. Some part of him desires to take that crazily cut redhaired head and hold it against his chest as he would a small, shivering
animal. Yet another part of him, a
confused and muddy and thickly despairing part of him, would like to wrap his hands around the girl’s neck and squeeze until she is quiet, until her witchy words no longer have the power to
sink him so low.

No, he says. I guess I ain’t so much of a gentleman. Guess I never have been much of one.

He waits a moment longer, but she has nothing more to
say. She turns again and looks out at the pelting snow. Their voices have been muffled and wrong in this building of plaster and
concrete.

I’m comin back, he says one last time.

Then he turns and goes.

Whitfield brings him a bottle of pills.

Biaxin, he says. It’s an antibiotic – a powerful one. The doctors tell me it should keep your brother’s infection from spreading.
But you’ll bring him back here? We have
the facilities he needs.

Moses agrees and stuffs the pills into the pocket of his jacket.

I thank you, Pastor, says Moses. I’m in your debt.

Whitfield clears Moses’ debt with a wave of his hand.

The world we’re living in now, Whitfield says, nobody owes anybody anything except kindness.

You’ve been more than generous to us. I ain’t
so accustomed to it. I don’t expect I know how to act around it.

The pastor smiles.

I’ve seen rougher than you, he says. This country hardens people.

Back on the road, travelling the inverse of his former journey, the world looks reversed. There have not been many times in his life that Moses has retraced his steps. He is
defined by forwardness – a true frontiersman,
foraging the wilderness, chopping through the untamed tangles, burning to ash the road behind him. And there is ever more. There are an infinite
number of roads – an embarrassing possibility of directions to travel. You can keep moving your whole life and never cross the same intersection.

Not wishing to meet them face to face, he looks for signs of Fletcher and his caravan. But he finds
no trace of their immense footprint. Perhaps they have lost the trail – or perhaps they
have gone a different way.

Back at the citadel, they filled his tank with gasoline, so he drives straight through without stopping. He knows, having just come from them, which roads are good and which are bad – and
he takes detours where necessary. Still, travel is slow. He remembers, in his youth,
when miles and minutes were commensurate. On the freeways of the nation, you could measure the one against the
other with modest accuracy. But now, with the crumbled tarmac, the piles of abandoned cars, the collapsed overpasses, everything moves more slowly. The traffic of the dead and gone – there is
no more dense population anywhere.

The sun goes down, and he makes his way in the dark.
Normally he would stop rather than risk damage to the car by driving at night. But his brother is waiting for him, his leg rotting away by
the hour. He can see it, the rot, spreading through Abraham’s body. A creeping rot gripping his heart and lungs, greening his brain with sour fungus. His brother, a creature of rot and decay.
And so he is – and so he ever was.

He drives, and the muffled
silence of the car is powerful. He has not, in his life, been much alone with his thoughts. It has been him and his brother. But now, by himself in the car, his large
body balking against the small seat, driving this desolate road under a sky full black like drowning – now he perceives entire the eminence of the unbreathing lacuna in which the world has
found itself.

He thinks about his
wife, his daughter – and he does not wish to. He steps on the accelerator, trying to outpace his own memories. He will run from them where they cannot follow. He
swerves between the mountains of wreckage on the road, faster and faster, clipping abandoned vehicles, shearing off the rearview mirror on the passenger side. Still, the thoughts follow him. And
they come with other thoughts: his brother,
that blasted-out shell of a man, all yellow teeth and grotesque appetite – and the Vestal, too, that pale luminous face like a moon behind clouds,
her red hair spilling in chopped locks around her, a madwoman gone tricksy in the manners of the earth, the gorgeous get of a blighted world, so perfect in her lying everything, so—

And would she be . . . would she stay? . . . So pliant as the
road takes her – so false and calamitous—

Suddenly there’s a figure in the road, ambling towards the centre line, and Moses turns the speeding vehicle but strikes it anyway. The slug’s body fractures and spins madly, its
legs propellering up into the air, a macabre carnival act, the head swinging down and forward to crash with a wet thunk into the windshield right in front of Moses’ face,
a grim explosion of
wasted meat, a spiderweb shattering of glass.

Moses jams the brakes, the car skids on the icy surface of the road, flings the slug off, spins around two full times before coming to a rest in the dead centre of the road.

And he’s breathing fast and heavy now, leaning forward and resting his forehead on the wheel.

The impossible raucous silence of everything. Nothing
sounds more like annihilation than deafening quiet.

He throws open the car door and looks back on the icy road where the body lies. There is no need to put the slug down – his head is split wide from the impact. He looks down the road, the
pool of light cast by the car’s one unbusted headlamp.

Lord, Moses whispers. Lord, lord, lord.

As a prayer it isn’t much, but it is as good as
any on this lightless plain.

The car still runs. He gathers a handful of snow from the ground and uses it to wipe the gore off the windshield. Then he continues. He drives through the night, more slowly
now, the calamity in his head dampened again by his own iterant voice filling the small space of the car, his voice repeating over and over something he learned as a child
in school:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . .

He speaks it in its brief entirety as he learned it by rote. The words, he knows, speak of a war that is meaningless to him, even though they seem to evoke – in their notes of endurance
and the
brave men, living and dead, who consecrate this ground – the bleak road on which he finds himself travelling. Still, he does not think about the words but simply utters them. They
quiet his mind. They are comforting because they feel stitched into the very back parts of his brain where things are archival, peaceful, resolved.

And so he drives and fills the space with uttered words and makes
his way back into the mountains where the sun is cresting up over the horizon when he finds the place where the small path winds
up into the woods. He climbs out of the car and listens to the morning birdsong and draws the icy cold deep into his lungs where it might purify him.

He climbs the path between the trees and sees the cabin ahead of him. It is dawn, and the light casts long shadows
on the snow. He does not know what he will find in the cabin, whether he will
find his brother alive or dead. Abraham said he could last it. It’s true – he said those words – but life can be a tricksy thing itself. Sometimes it just runs away from out
between your grasping hands.

Moses does not know what he will find as the cabin comes into sight. But what he does not expect to see, sitting
there on the collapsing front porch and drinking something from a steaming mug,
is a man who is not his brother.

It’s the doctor, Peabody, from Fletcher’s caravan – the one they left tied to a tree.

Moses pulls a gun from his belt and advances on the man, his feet pounding thick and hard through the drifts of snow.

Where’s my brother? he says in a loud, hoarse voice.
I’ll kill you if you—

Inside, the doctor says, dropping his mug and splashing hot brown liquid everywhere. Where it falls on the snow, the steam rises in sudden wisps. The doctor holds up his arms before his face,
defending himself from the assault that is coming his way across the clearing.

Moses keeps the gun trained on the man’s head and advances onto the bowing porch. He grabs Peabody,
gets an arm around his neck and presses the barrel of the gun against his temple. Then
he spins and puts his back against the logs of the cabin and, having taken his hostage, waits for the assault of Fletcher’s men.

But that’s when the door of the cabin opens and Abraham emerges, squinting his sleepy eyes against the morning sun.

Abraham spots his brother and yawns, scratching his ass.

Hey, brother, he says. What’re you doin with the doc? You want some coffee? We found some grinds under the floor.

When Moses and the Vestal tied him to a tree they thought Fletcher’s men couldn’t fail to notice. But, instead, when Fletcher bolted in pursuit, they did not bother
to count heads or look around even. Or perhaps they simply took the doctor’s life for forfeit,
given up to the wilderness or the wildness of man. Peabody called out, but none could hear him
over the revving of the engines and the cries of the caravaners to move.

Abraham found him later, coming down out of hiding in the woods when he heard the sound of motors die away in the distance. It had been unnecessary to hide – Fletcher was not interested in
what might remain at the cabin
once the Vestal was no longer there. He heard the doctor’s cries from down by the road. Peabody was calling crazy by then, quite sure he would freeze to death
in a few hours, kissed on the lips and tied to a tree by a holy woman, abandoned without regard by his own travelling companions. No one, he was sure, would come for him. The guttural noise from
his throat was a keening of grief and despair,
hopeless, tuned to the pitches of nature and birdsong – a moribund bleating skyward.

Which is how Abraham found him.

I told him I’d kill him if he tried anything, Abraham says. And you know what the man did? The man laughed. I knew he was okay then. He’d gone past loyalties.

I brung you these, Moses says, giving Abraham the antibiotics. For your leg.

Look, Abraham says and shows
Moses the wound in his thigh. It isn’t healed, but the swelling seems to have abated, and it is less burning red at the edges.

It’s gettin better, Moses says.

The doc made a poultice, Abraham says. Out of twigs and pine needles and garbage like that. It helps.

It just calms the wound, Peabody says and nods to the pills. Nothing compared to what a real antibiotic like that will do.

Moses turns to Peabody.

I apologize, he says. For the gun. For tyin you to a tree. We thought . . . Thank you greatly for helpin my brother.

Peabody shrugs it off.

It was a symbiotic relationship, he says. Fletcher kept me safe, I took care of his people. But he wasn’t a good man.

But you didn’t have to save Abraham’s leg. That was a righteous thing for you to do. If things’d
gone a shade different, we might of killed you.

Again Peabody shrugs. He runs a hand across his balding pate. Wisps of grey hair fall down nearly to his shoulders. He must be ten or even twenty years older than Moses. Here is a man who lived
a good solid chunk of life before the dead started coming back and everything changed. Here is a man with memories – a man who still holds faith that
things might change back, because he can
hardly help but remember vividly the world before. Perhaps he even believes he could reconstruct it out of the recollections and blueprints he carries in his own aging mind.

So he shrugs, and this is what he says:

Saving or killing. I’ve been a doctor so long – and the world gone topsy-turvy the way it is – it’s sometimes hard to tell which is
called for. You have to do some of
both if you would be a man in this world. And which end of the act you’re on is the luck of the moment. So no hard feelings.

The three men drink weak coffee made from water heated over the fire. Abraham takes two of the pills, and Peabody looks at his wound.

How’s it look, doc? Abraham asks.

It’s holding, Peabody says. But the jury’s still out.
If there were facilities, we could do more about it.

I found a place, Moses says to Peabody. It has what you need. It’s a good place. We’ll drop you there.

Peabody looks first at one brother and then other. He nods and resumes his inspection of Abraham’s leg.

Later, out by the pond where the surface has mended itself in ice and there is no longer any face staring up from below, Moses
talks with his brother alone.

You got there? Abraham asks.

I did.

The girl?

She’s there. They’re lookin at her. Trying to figure her. I told her I’d come back once I got you.

You did? How come?

Moses shrugs.

It ain’t exactly safety she feels bein there. She asked me to come back. I told her I would.

Is it safe?

I don’t know. I think so. It’s like a fortress
there, Abe. Like the modern world again.

Abraham smiles.

Hot water?

Hot water.

Food?

Food.

They got something to plug this into?

Abraham tugs at the yewess bee around his neck.

I reckon they probably do.

Girls? Are there girls? I ain’t had a right fuck in ages it seems like. Not a right one at least.

Moses says nothing. He looks down at the seam where he
chopped open the ice days before. Then he says:

It ain’t a place of brutishness, Abe.

The smile goes away from Abraham’s face. He looks mean in the eyes, like he would spit on something if there was something to spit on.

You reckon me to be a monster, don’t you, Mose?

Moses sighs heavily and strokes his beard. He looks away from Abraham.