Kingdom (20 page)

“Understand what, Mom? Just try and calm down and we can figure this out together,” Dylan pleaded.

But his mother just continued screaming, her eyes growing larger as the focused anger that had flashed just a moment earlier was replaced by a directionless rage. In the hallway outside the room Dylan could hear movement and then someone was knocking on the door, asking if everything was all right, and although Dylan assured them it was, his mother’s screams contradicted his claims. The knocking grew louder and his mother—now pressed into the corner of the room, looking impossibly small and frail, her bathrobe slipping off her shoulder—continued to rant about the Heffernan flyer.

“Those are your father’s eyes,” she was telling him as the orderlies finally forced open the door. “Don’t you see that?”

And then Dylan was being asked to leave, being
told
to leave. It was suggested that maybe his visits weren’t particularly helpful—that maybe he needed to reconsider any plans for visits in the near future.

Someone put a hand on his shoulder and he lost it. Wheeling around, Dylan took a swing, his fist flying blindly toward the source of the passionless drone—a pear-shaped bureaucrat in his early to mid-40s, not tall, not short; not skinny, not fat: simply there. But the blow missed its mark and Dylan was tumbling forward, the earth surging up to break his fall, a vision—or was it a hallucination—of his mother scrawling something onto the back of the Heffernan flyer before stuffing it back into his jacket pocket along with something else, something small and silver, was the last thing he remembered.

Over the course of her life, Elizabeth Fitzgerald had heard Death described in a variety of ways: grim reaper, pale rider, gentleman caller. But when Death came for her, it had a different name, albeit one she had heard before, one her husband used to cry out in his sleep: Malachi al-Salaam. Al-Salaam was an ambassador of the desert, a dark man who whispered of loneliness and alienation and the 21st century. He slipped into her room, materializing out of the darkness and speaking to her about her husband; her son. Al-Salaam told her some truths; he told her some lies, mixing and twisting the two. But mostly, Death asked her questions. Questions about her son: What had she told him, al-Salaam wanted to know. Even when her silence was greeted by physical pain, she said nothing.

Instead, she only found it curious Death was not omniscient after all.

It came sooner than she hoped, but no sooner than she expected. Her only regret was that she did not tell her son more; that she did not do enough to prepare him for the coming storm. That was a mother’s job—to prepare her children. And as Death forced open her mouth, ramming pills down her throat, her only fear was that she had not done her job well enough.

The Journal of Senator Robert Fitzgerald
Excerpt # 4

To Dylan,

Riding in the back of a limo after a Progress Party fundraiser in Boston, something went wrong. This incident started off as just another panic attack, the kind where I feel untethered from this world. When these attacks strike, I feel like I have no boundaries, that I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. What’s the problem, you’re probably already thinking. Absolute freedom, defiance of limitations: These are the pinnacles of human existence, the things we strive for each day. A year or two ago, I would have agreed. But I’ve come to understand that when most men talk about absolute freedom, they are referring only to their ability to have limitless choices, limitless options; endless means of amusement, entertainment, and comfort. In reality, such an abundance of choices just allows man to wander for an even longer time, to be distracted and never find his place.

Every man has his place, and when he finds that place and learns to exist within its boundaries he is free to fully realize himself. These are not arbitrary boundaries—nor are they the product of any government, any bureaucratic scheme. Rather, they are the product of a natural order that I have come to know only because I exist outside of it; I doubt I would even notice this sensation were I able to commune with this order: I suspect the fact I recognize this separation is a direct result of my inability to make this connection.

This must sound insane! But my son I promise you there is something more to life that what we can see and touch every day: I know it is there but despite the fact that every privilege in the world is mine for the taking, I simply cannot ever know this other—and that is the price of this absolute freedom. I have tried going to church, I have tried going to temple. I sat down with Buddhist monks in a monastery outside Seattle and I saw fear in their eyes when they asked me to leave.

So what happened in Boston? I was in the limo and one of these attacks began: I poured myself a drink and stared out the window watching the lights of satellite towers blink red on the horizon, transmitting information into space; the pit of my stomach went cold and I was so afraid: There was something electric out there, something waiting for me to…respond. That’s the best way I can describe it. I sense that, were I able to connect with this force on even the smallest, most insignificant level—perhaps even
a subconscious level—I might have been OK. Instead my body went into some kind of frenzy: uncontrollable seizures that left me writhing on the floor of the limo, strange white foam pouring out of my mouth. And then, there was nothing.

When I awoke I was in a helicopter being lifted over the city, red and green and yellow wires connecting me to machines that, for the moment, were keeping me alive. All around me men were shouting over the roar of the blades; the wind blasting over, under, around the copter; the bleat of the machines. And then a man appeared by my side—I had seen him before; he was one of Morrison’s security personnel—and as the helicopter continued to rise, he jammed a syringe into my vein and the world started to glow, the thump thump thump of the rotors soothing as I drifted back to sleep.

Love,
Your Father

Tiber City
Aug. 31, 2015
10:10 p.m.

F
or almost two days, Campbell slept, his body exhausted and wracked with fever as the Treatment worked its way through his system. His dreams, like always, were filled with half-formed creatures pleading with him, begging for something he was supposed to know but could not remember. When Campbell woke, Sweeney had been dead for a little over 10 minutes.

It was not, however, the bartender’s death that jolted him out of his drunken stupor. Piano wire around Sweeney’s neck had sliced the man’s jugular, turning the top of the bar into a crimson mess: The bartender’s execution, while messy, was silent—a severed windpipe tends to have such an effect. Instead, Campbell was woken from his hibernation when Sweeney’s killer’s left boot crashed through the rotting stairwell leading from the main bar up to the loft.

He shot to his feet too quickly and a wave of nausea coursed through him, the Jameson still sloshing about in his stomach, the Treatment leaving his joints inflamed. Stumbling backward, Campbell caught his balance against the side of the wall just as the lock on his door sprung open. It
shouldn’t have been so easy to pick that lock, he thought, his hands grasping behind him for any type of offense—even the most rudimentary type of weapon would have done. But within seconds the door was ajar, a massive shadow eclipsing the entire doorway. Campbell had just enough time to steady himself, his hands closing around the base of one of the candles left burning beside his cot.

A man loomed in the doorway, tattooed and enormous, gold teeth glittering as the candlelight emanating from the bedroom rose and fell and rose again. Muscles, the work of serious tissue grafting, threatened to swallow the man’s features whole. Seconds later the man was in the room, walking toward Campbell, a large syringe dangling from his right hand.

“Exodus needs you,” the giant growled, holding up the syringe as though it was a warning. “You’re rejoining the Project: The only question is what kind of condition you’ll be in on your first day.”

Campbell smiled, a response that seemed to confuse his assailant, causing the giant to pause. That split second of hesitation was all Campbell needed: He charged the invader, driving the flaming end of the candle into the man’s right eye. The eyeball exploded from the heat, splattering all over Campbell’s shirt. The intruder reeled backward, clawing at his face as the flame began to spread, his momentum carrying him back onto the rotting stairway. The force of his attack pulled Campbell forward as well and the combined weight of the two men was too great: The decrepit stairs groaned and then collapsed.

Smashing hard into the earth, Campbell felt his world go fuzzy, darkness bleeding into the corners of his peripheral vision. As he struggled to remain conscious, Campbell twisted his neck left, then right, looking for his assailant: The man lay in a heap 10 yards away, impaled on the broken edge of railing, his corpse consumed by the flame from the candle. Yet, fire was avaricious by nature and within seconds, the flame spread to the bar, devouring the ancient wood and spilled alcohol, flooding the room with smoke.

As high-proof bottles of alcohol began exploding around him, shards of glass raining down like razor–tipped hail, Campbell saw another figure cutting through the shadow and smoke—it was Jael moving across the bar with her gun drawn, swinging the barrel in an arc around the room as she called out to him. Campbell opened his mouth to reply but his lungs filled with smoke and he was gagging, hard. And then Jael was over him, pulling him to his feet. He was able to stagger a dozen feet toward the exit but the
blaze continued to spread, greedy and unforgiving. Campbell’s body faltered. The world began to spin and as Campbell crashed to the earth, he noticed Sweeney’s corpse roasting behind the bar, the man’s black tongue sizzling from the hellish temperatures.

And then there was only black.

Tiber City: Glimmer District
Aug. 31, 2015
2 a.m.

P
ressing up against the blackened steel rail that ran the perimeter of the open-air platform, Dylan stared down at the mass of flesh pressed together in celebration of The End of World—one of Tiber City’s roving bacchanals. The End of the World was thrown at irregular intervals in different locations across the city: Information about the party was restricted to an exclusive guest list and disseminated via encrypted transmissions to would-be revelers’ mobile device of choice.

Earlier that night, Dylan received his invitation and even though he should have stayed home and slept every time he closed his eyes, he saw his father’s face, heard his mother’s pleas—he needed to get out of his apartment, go somewhere, do something. Anything. His mother had scrawled an address and some numbers on the back of the Heffernan flyer before she slipped it back into his pocket—just more crazy shit—but instead of just throwing the thing away, it just sat on the nightstand next to Dylan’s bed, Heffernan’s eyes following him as he paced the apartment like an animal. But the flyer wasn’t the only oddity: There was a key as well, a tiny silver thing with jagged teeth. He wanted to believe there was some method to his mother’s madness,
that she had created the whole scene so she could slip Dylan the key without the security cameras noticing—at least not noticing until he was on his way back downtown. But no matter how many times he replayed the events of that afternoon in his head, the truth remained elusive and now his brain was just spinning.

He tried calling Meghan but he got her voice mail and that only made the situation worse. Sure, they were going to take whatever was between them slow but his life wasn’t exactly tailored to gradual revelation. Not only could a few key search engine terms reveal more facts about his life than he even remembered—in part because lots of information was embellished or straight up bullshit—but the issues he was struggling with were beyond his control: His demons had a life of their own, manifesting themselves when and where they chose. Dylan’s emotions bled through whatever façade he tried to throw up, a trait that could wear on relationships, a trait that might explain why Meghan Morrison wasn’t picking up her cell phone. Not that he could blame her; maybe that night at the bar had reminded her that the good old days weren’t that good, they were just familiar, and in these days, in this city, that counted for a lot.

He finally gave up trying to get a hold of Meghan and fired off a series of texts to Chase and Mikey, explaining that the last few days had been pretty heavy and were they up for an End of the World party?

Tonight, the End of the World was being held in one of the Jungle’s abandoned warehouses and by the time Dylan and his friends arrived, the party was well underway. A grated platform rising two or three stories in the middle of the space—a cube-shaped industrial artifact that once upon a time was used to store goods before they were shipped across the country, the continent, the world—now supported a massive stone altar. The surface of the altar was a jumble of video monitors and turntables, which a DJ—female, topless, and wearing a World War I style gasmask—used to create the electronic trance music blasting out across the party: sinister, androgynous vocals purring over relentless pulsing backbeats, the lyrics dark and terrifying. Occasionally this high priestess of the Tiber City underground would raise her hands as the music built to a crescendo, the crowd mimicking her movements, the beats moving faster as the vocals stretched endless before the DJ threw her hands down and the music crashed back into its rhythm, sending the crowd into a frenzy.