Exit Kingdom (11 page)

It seems impossible that they will
ever find her. The world is wide, and she, blessed or cursed as it may be with freedom beyond the common share, has the impunity to go anywhere in it.

Hours pass and the sun starts a descent on the far side of its meridian. She is an invisible, and she could be anywhere, and the world is wide, and Moses is near to giving up when he sees
something in the road.

There, he says.

What?
says his brother.

Moses stops the car but doesn’t get out. There are too many slugs around. He points through the windshield to a broken jar on the side of a main drag that leads to the freeway ahead.

She’s been took, Moses says.

Took by who? Slugs?

No. Not slugs. Took by other people. Maybe Fletcher, maybe others.

What’re you talkin about?

That olive jar. She was feastin
from it last night.

How do you know it’s the same one?

It’s recently busted. There’s juice still in it.

Okay. So why does that mean she’s been took?

She ain’t the kind to go bustin jars just for the jollies of it. Plus, she knows we’re after her, and she wouldn’t of left any clues behind on purpose. No, she’s been
took.

If it’s Fletcher, that’s bad news for her.

Mostly
likely it’s bad news for her any which way. No kind soul givin somebody a lift would begrudge them the luggage of a jar of olives. A conflict took place here.

So they know they are headed in the right direction anyhow, and they drive with an eye on the horizon, looking to find some sign of the Vestal.

They drive slow, and soon the city is behind them. Just before evening falls, they see
something else caught up on the bramble bushes by the side of the road. The vestments of the ghost herself,
like a disregarded bedsheet left over from a child’s Halloween costume: the Vestal’s white robes.

At least we know they went this way, says Abraham Todd grimly. He massages his knee below the gunshot thigh, wincing.

When night falls, they stop, afraid to miss the clues of the Vestal’s
path, and barricade themselves in a dusty second-floor room of an old motel. The dead have a difficult time climbing
steps. They can do it, eventually, but it costs them time and fuss – and by the time they have reached the top, they have usually forgotten what brought them there in the first place.

That night Moses lies awake listening to his brother turn fitfully in the bed next to his.
The room has heavy curtains blocking out the moonlight and so is straightup blind dark. He has grown
accustomed to it over the years of roaming the deadlands of the country – but it was not always like that. When he was a child, there was light everywhere. It seeped in under doors and
through blinds. Nothing was ever entirely dark. You had daylight, and then you had dimness – and it seemed as
though the world was a glowworm of a place, a thing that produced its own
bioluminescence – and you would never have thought how dead a place it could be.

Abraham shifts again in the dark.

How’s the leg? Moses asks.

Guy must of shot me with a poison bullet, says Abraham.

You want to take a look?

Tomorrow.

Again silence permeates the dark, and Moses feels what it must
be like to be buried alive. Then he listens harder, and he can hear the dead outside, bristling along against each other like a
nest of rodents.

Then Abraham speaks again.

Why do you think she ran away?

Don’t know, Moses says. Likely she’s the kind who eschews too much company on her travels.

But a holy girl. How’s she got the guts to . . .

She ain’t so holy.

What do
you mean?

It occurs to Moses that his brother has never seen the other side of the Vestal Amata. He was tending his leg when she shot the man who injured him. He was waiting in the car when she nearly
bashed Fletcher’s brain in.

She can take care of herself, Moses says. You haven’t seen it. She’s got a little bit of killer in her. Who knows what else.

That girl?

You didn’t see.

So she ain’t immune to them? That was just a trick? I knew it.

No, it ain’t a trick. I don’t know what it is. Maybe she’s holy in some ways and unholy in others. Or maybe holiness wears a new aspect these days. I don’t know. But all
I know is that she ain’t no damsel in distress.

Abraham is quiet for a moment. Then he says:

If she ain’t no holy girl, does that mean I can bang
her when we find her?

He chuckles in the dark, and Moses replies with simple silence.

Sometimes Moses feels he is more at home among the wandering dead – for while he does not share their appetites, he can understand them. Now he finds himself in the company of reprobate
brothers and unholy Vestals. The dead may refuse to rest, but it’s the world of the living that’s gone asunder.

No, but serious now, Abraham says again in the dark. If she ain’t a holy girl like we thought before, what are we huntin her for? We ain’t getting paid, and we ain’t on a
mission for God – so then what?

She’s still a lost girl – holy or not.

But it seems like she don’t want to be found.

Moses says nothing for a moment. Then he turns over on his side and blinks his eyes. The dark is
the same no matter whether his eyes are open or closed.

I don’t got the answers for everything, he says. Sometimes you do things just cause they need to be done by someone and there ain’t nobody else around. Is that answer enough for
you?

Abraham shifts again in his bed, grunting.

Sure, he says. Me, I’m easy. Free and easy. Abraham Todd is like a delicate autumn leaf, brother. He
goes where the wind blows.

The next day they find her in a little town called Fountain Hills at the edge of a vast scrub desert. They follow the tides of the dead, who are stirred up, presumably, not by
the Vestal herself but by whoever took her. There is a park in the middle of the town, and that’s where the bandits have set up camp. There are not many of them – maybe ten
– just
enough to travel light but protected. Their cars are parked in a huddle, the bandits are guarding the camp from the slow but steady onslaught of the dead while at the same time they hoot and holler
at the redheaded girl dancing naked in the centre of the camp.

The exchange is a quick one. The bandits see the Todd brothers approach and attack. It is no matter to them who the Todds
are or what they want: this group of travellers moves from place to
place exercising their desires with a violence inherited from the very land over which they travel. They are scarred and ugly and brutal in their actions. They speak the language of death with
accents muddy and coarse.

But the Todds have travelled the same ragged roads, and violence is a language that flows from their
tongues as well. There are a couple with rifles, and Abraham dispatches those quickly,
cutting off their range. The others scrabble to melee – but they are all distracted, caught unaware in their leisure.

Moses uses Albert Wilson Jacks’s horrible blade for the first time. It is grotesquely heavy, and once put in motion it seems to swing through arcs of destruction all of its own accord.
Moses finds himself merely trying to finesse the direction of centrifugal rage in the weapon. It rips and tears and leaves slews of rooster-tail blood behind its swing. Moses flails it across one
bandit’s middle and sees the man’s guts spill out of the multiple gashes opened up in his abdomen. There is no grace in the weapon, no art. Brought down on another bandit’s head,
the skull simply pops
like a frail coconut, the mess of grey brain splashing every which way and the cudgel digging itself well down through the man’s throat and lodging between his shoulder
blades. Moses has to let the body fall and put his foot against it to pry the weapon out again. Graceless and resolute, the thing moves through flesh without recourse or order or reason or
precision. It is the opposite of surgery
– it is senseless and animal.

Many of the bandits dead and the others fled, Moses Todd wipes his face on the sleeve of his shirt, getting the blood out of his eyes but smearing it across his cheeks and forehead like a
successful hunter wallowing in the sloppy viscera of his prey.

The Vestal Amata stands amid the wastes of carnage, still naked, her white skin spattered with blood and
white splinters of bone. There is a leaf of scalp adhered to one breast, and she plucks
it away by the hair and lets it drop on the ground. Her eyes are wide, fixated on the mush of a body at her feet.

Abe, Moses says. Find the girl some clothes.

Then he turns to the Vestal Amata herself.

Come on, he says. We’ll get you cleaned up, but not here. We gotta go. All this commotion –
there’ll be more slugs than we know what to do with.

So Abraham finds the girl some clothes belonging to one of the smaller bandits – men’s pants and a shirt that fits her ill but covers her nakedness.

What Moses expects in her face is the blank trauma of horror – but the expression is different altogether. It is something of weariness, something even of irritation. In the back seat of
the car, droplets of blood crusted in her red hair, she looks at Moses in the rearview mirror.

Who called in the cavalry? she said. Damn inelegant is what that was. I had the situation under control.

Is that right? Moses says. What was your plan? To tarantella them to death?

It was a distraction, she says. They were lettin down their guard. The slugs were coming. They would of been
overrun in another fifteen minutes.

And what about you? Abraham says. Where would that leave you?

The Vestal shrugs.

Slugs don’t bother me none. You’ve seen it yourself. I would of gone along my merry way.

What’s with the talk anyway? Abraham asks. How come you keep changin the way you talk?

Why, sir, she replies with a sly smile, I can’t possibly imagine what you mean.

They drive north, and the road takes them through an empty desert dotted with dense copses of brushwood. They put Fountain Hills behind them, and the bandits, and the accumulated dead. The Todds
made sure, as they always do, that those they killed are killed for good. They will not swell the rout of walking dead on the surface of the earth.

Soon they are in a town called Sunflower, which
is a nothing of a place. They take an off-ramp from the highway to find a few untouched buildings, some corpses, long dead, littering the street.
Some of the corpses try to pick themselves up when they hear the noise of the engine drive by – but so old are they that their flesh has burned itself to the very tarmac, and when they rise,
they pull half their faces off. Then they sit, their energy
wasted in the simple act of rising, and poke curiously at their own faces, the exposed skull and the dry eye, now lidless, which will
never shut again.

But there is a women’s discount store on the main drag of the tiny town, and the Vestal Amata scrounges for clothes better fitting than those Abraham found for her in the bandits’
inventory. They do not trust her not to run away again,
so the Todd brothers go into the store with her. They stay at the front, spreading out a map on the counter and trying to figure out the best
way to reach Colorado Springs. The largest freeways are not always ideal, travelling as they do through cities most densely populated with the dead.

As they consult the map, Moses notices that his brother keeps looking away, distracted. It’s the Vestal.
She’s walking up and down the aisles pure naked. She tries on garments and
slings them over her arm if she likes them or drops them to a pile on the ground if she doesn’t. Her face and hair are still spattered with dried blood, but the rest of her body is a pale
white thing like something just crawled out from under a rock and feeling the sunlight for the first time in years. She is freckled
all over her chest, and her bosoms are small and pointed.
Unselfconsciously, she scratches at her crotch and the bush of red pubic hair until she finds a pair of red underpants that suit her. Moses does not know what kind of textile those underpants are
made from, but they are shiny and not at all modest.

She wears a necklace, Moses sees. It’s a small wooden pendant in the shape of a cross.

Stop gawking, Moses says to Abraham to make his own leer feel less criminal.

What’s she gotta walk around like that for? Abraham whispers. She’s testin me, Mose. That nun is testin my mettle.

I told you she ain’t a nun.

Then what is she? She think she’s immune to the appetites of live men like she is to those of the dead?

I don’t know what she thinks. Let’s just take her where
she’s gotta go and get our leave of her. That’s all.

They continue north, and the road climbs into the evergreen mountains where the slug population is sparse. Where there were very few living, there are very few dead. They come
to a small bridge and see a stream running underneath. Moses pulls the car over, and they clamber down the verge, Moses helping his brother, to where
the water runs cold and clear.

Thank God, says the Vestal. I’m crusty all over.

She strips off the impractical outfit she got in the last town – a leather skirt and a corset-type top – and wades into the river naked, splashing the water on her skin.

It’s bracing! she cries. You boys have a nose for the good life. Maybe I’ll think twice before running off again. Hey, what’s the matter
with Abraham?

Moses looks at his brother. There is an expression on his face of outraged desire – as though he is furious at the girl for making him want so much. Moses has seen that expression before,
and it does not bode well.

Moses says, I reckon you best try to keep yourself covered up around us, Vestal. A desperate man’s a sore creature to deal with.

The redhead laughs and splashes
water at them.

Silly boys, she says. The world’s gone dead everywhere you look, we’re livin on the opposite side of grand apocalypse, and they’re still Adam-and-Eve-ing it through the
corridors of their own shame. They’re just bodies is all. I bet you seen countless dead pussies, but a living one gives you quivers all over. Puzzle that one through for me.