Exit Kingdom

But this apparatus has been long dead. And, with the same impulse that causes us to make art from the detritus of other art, the bandits have painted murals and words all over the tall rusted metal structures. The graffiti is awkward and colourful, obscene and lovely. There is a pastoral scene, painted simple, as though a child had done it – a sunrise between two mountains, and someone has painted a smiling face on the sun. Next to that is a black spray-painted scrawl of male genitalia, and beyond that a woman with huge, pendulous br**sts and thick, monstrous red lips. The red of her lips is striking against all the blacks, whites, greens and browns of the place. As though the painted mark of womansex is anathema to nature itself.

And Moses can make out one more graffito – a series of words painted in neat white around the top of one of the tanks. The motto says, simply:

AT DESTRUCTION AND FAMINE THOU SHALT LAUGH.

Moses recognizes the quote, for it was one he has said to himself at times over the past fifteen years of his life – usually in quiet places, under roofs with rain falling on them, or on sunless days when it seemed the road may have no end. He knows the quote, and he completes it under his breath:

Neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth.

Moses knows it to be true – that the words are the best and the worst of everything.

Around the base of the six tanks are other structures, squat wide buildings that must contain the machinery that once processed and refined what was held in the tanks. And among and upon the structures of the gasworks, there is a war going on.

Figures run every which way, calling out or pointing their guns or hiding in some enclosed niche or collapsing to the ground with a bullet gone through them. And here is the full-blown bathos of it all. Moses can see now that there are four distinct factions at battle down in the bowl-shaped valley. There are the soldiers in their pressed uniforms, engineering precise manoeuvres around the tall metal structures, fighting with the cold confidence of a reborn civilization striking out against the filthy reminders of its own wild past. Then there are Fletcher’s men, a ragged collective, a mobile army which has gathered guns from all corners of the country. They have experience on their side, for every day on the road is a battle for them. They live conflict. Then there are the bandits who have been residing at the gasworks. These are almost indistinguishable from Fletcher’s men – but if one looks, one can see that they are even more ragged, embattled by stasis and starvation. They wear more the look of survivors than marauders. And they do not fight in tandem with Fletcher’s men but against them as well as the soldiers – perhaps in retaliation for Fletcher having brought this battle upon them in the first place. And the final faction is the dead themselves. Some rogue has set free all of Fletcher’s monstrous sideshow dead, and it seems the bandits may have had some caged dead on hand as well. Now they all roam free, feeding on the newly dead and the not quite so dead, pacing slowly through the combat, without rush, without malice – possessing the neutrality of parasites on a larger body. Some of them are struck down, and they fall with the same implacable calm with which they walked a moment before – but most are ignored since their threat is the slower one. Almost insect-like, some of these anthropophages sit cross-legged on the ground, the sounds of death and destruction coming to bear all around them, while they slowly munch away at the leg or arm of a fallen combatant and let the snow collect gently in their hair.

Good lord, Moses Todd says from his perch above the valley. As he watches, a bandit woman with a longrange rifle hunched atop one of the tanks is pierced by a bullet that sends a quick atomizer mist of blood out from her back – then she topples over and falls to the ground, crashing once over a railing that cracks her body and folds it backwards unnaturally so that when she comes to rest the heel of her foot is up by her ear. Then a slug wanders over without haste to the bent body and digs into it with unhurried and brute fingers, opening the abdomen of the woman and pulling thick ropes of viscera free from the cavity. As the slug chews on the rubbery intestines of the woman, he looks around him with patient, ruminative eyes.

Moses Todd turns his gaze away from the fray and looks behind him – into those empty mountains and the grey sky, even the misty implication of the wide country beyond. For a moment it looks as though he will turn his back on it all, as though he may give a shrugging refusal to it all. He is a mountain man, as he is other things. A nomad with many more wildernesses to explore – and it is so much easier to travel away from things than towards them.

But it’s the words that are a curse – because he cannot utter a simple goodbye.

*

He remembers his daughter. His girl of the meadow – all red cheeks and powder skin, a tiara of wildflowers in her hair. How she would run to him, and he would hoist her in his arms. He would enclose her away from the world and she would cry happily to be enclosed – and his bigness was a powerful and good thing because it meant shelter for her from the world. Her tugging at his beard with her little grasping hands. His fear of crushing her, because his brute arms were not built for such delicacy as daughters offer.

And his wife, too. A woman who presented herself as beyond the knowing of any in the world but him. The way she cut his hair and trimmed his beard and made him more man than beast. He was nobody’s master when he was with her – but just an overgrown child with big notions that got wobbly with her gentle smile. She did not know how she was wound around everything in him, as though his lungs and heart and stomach were gripped tight by the burning gaze of her.

And there was no goodbye for them either. Even after he stopped looking for them. Even now, years later, there is no goodbye. A farewell is a thing of the mind – and, as such, you can shut it behind doors.

*

So he turns his eyes from the empty frontier of the woods and back to the battle below. Something in him clicks, some knife switch jams into place, and he is suddenly full of purpose and movement. He scans the structures, mapping them in his mind, determining which ones would be most likely to hold his brother and the Vestal.

Then he clambers down the face of the hill, sliding much of the way on the dirty ice, controlling his fall by grappling onto the tree branches and dragging the truncheon behind as a kind of brake. He slides to the base of the hill behind one of the wide, flat buildings where piles of chopped wood are stacked against the cinderblock wall.

Before he can think what to do next, one of the foot soldiers speeds around the corner and comes to a halt three feet from where Moses stands. The soldier, little more than a boy, aims his gun instinctively at Moses’ head – but there is fear and trepidation in the boy’s eyes, and he does not pull the trigger immediately.