Kingdom (34 page)

The air felt electric, almost alive, bursting with possibility and mystery and the insistence that there was something
more
waiting under the surface of things, something forgotten, some necessary truth. There was no active thought process; no reasoning involved. Dylan simply understood and at that moment, he was aware of
something else
—something other than himself—and his body responded: He felt a surge of emotion, as if something buried deep inside of him was not only awake, but straining to connect with that
something else
that had somehow not just surrounded him, but overwhelmed. And as quickly as it had begun, the experience was over, the feeling and emotion gone and a new sense of clarity and purpose settled across his beaten body and beleaguered brain. Seconds later, Dylan turned back to the dumpster and, with barely any effort, slid his scrap metal Excalibur from its shit-hole sheath.

And as soon as the broken piece of metal fell away from the garbage dump, the world rushed back into focus. By tearing away that single piece,
Dylan had disrupted some sort of détente between the various elements of the scrap heap and piece after piece began to collapse onto one another, the remaining scrap metal crosses sinking down into the snow-covered mountain of filth. A terrible stench assailed Dylan’s nostrils and in a moment of awful realization it struck him that perhaps this wasn’t just a huge scrap heap after all, that maybe this place was abandoned for a reason, but now he was moving away from the dumpster, back around toward the front of the building, his numb fingers wrapped around the thin-but-solid piece of scrap metal. Moments later, he was wedging the piece of scrap metal through the tiny space between the door and the front of the service station. Having spent most of his teenage years trying to sneak out of various boarding school dormitories, Dylan had grown quite adept at bypassing locked doors and Joe’s Gas-n-Go proved to be no exception: The door popped open with a simple click and for the first time in several years a human being entered Joe’s Gas-n-Go.

Ambushed by darkness, cobwebs, and the overpowering stench of ammonia, Dylan groped the side of the wall until his still-numb fingers found and flicked the light switch. When nothing happened the first time, he began to flip the switch up and down, as if he could somehow transform his frustration into fusion and get the joint jumping again. Just as he was about to break the switch off, a single florescent ceiling light at the far end of the room sputtered to life, flooding Joe’s Gas-n-Go with a weak white light.

Whereas most gas stations were now mini-supermarkets complete with gourmet coffee and Wi-Fi, Joe’s had been an old school service station. There was no brand-name coffee kiosk welcoming travelers weary from the trials and tribulations of SUV ownership: just a chipped glass coffeepot with a plastic orange handle left out amidst a sea of cups and stirrers and white packets of real sugar, not the synthetic shit that, although rife with carcinogenic properties, might help keep an extra quarter of an inch off one’s waistline. Air fresheners, although not enough to dispel the odd odor, which Dylan could only liken to cat piss, and discarded plastic motor oil containers tipped on their side littered the aluminum stocking shelves that cut down the middle of the room while an ancient cash register sat expectant on a dusty countertop, guarding the cigarettes and chewing tobacco stored inside the off-green Newport Lights sign hanging overhead. Behind the counter,
plastic phone cards dangled from the back wall: The flags grouped together told Dylan that once upon a time someone tried to organize the cards by continent; the grouping of Angola and Israel and Spain told Dylan someone wasn’t a geography wiz. Underneath the phone cards was a near-empty magazine rack; a few plastic sheathed copies of
Swank
drooping over the edges were the only selections still in stock.

Dylan pulled a cigarette and a lighter out of his jacket pocket. Although he was soaking wet, the pack—in addition to surviving the crash—managed to stay dry. It took the lighter a few clicks to catch, but flame finally burst forth and, as he limped down the aisle, Dylan took a long drag, his mind returning to the experience he had moments ago behind the store.

The Connection—that was the only way Dylan could describe what he experienced. Something within him had leapt at something out there—something unseen yet absolutely present.
I’m describing something supernatural
, he admitted to himself.
And it sounds insane
. But for the first time in his entire life, Dylan felt like he was part of the world, as opposed to separate from it. And perhaps the most compelling part of the experience was that he felt like he was only apprehending the very surface of things, that there were unseen depths to the world that he was not capable of touching, at least not at that moment—of that he was certain.

There was no rational way to explain what happened: If he had been back in Tiber, moving through the parties and the clubs, snorting or smoking whatever anyone put in front of him, he could have just written the whole thing off as some drug-induced hallucination. But he knew that wasn’t it—it was different, somehow. When he did bump lines and the evening dissolved into a blur of coke chat and overconfidence, there was always some part of him that knew the experience was just chemically induced bullshit. But what happened in front of that dumpster felt authentic in a way drugs never did. And sure, it could just have been a product of physical and mental exhaustion; maybe the pain from his leg played some role in the experience. Whatever the source, the experience, this Connection, had quieted his mind and allowed a sense of calm to spread through his being.

He finished his smoke and began limping toward the other side of the store, his mind filled with a sense of clarity and purpose he hadn’t known in a very long time. He passed an unplugged power cord, which was coiled around the side of a machine like a tail. Although the sliding-glass top was caked with a flaky black mold, part of the covering had collapsed and Dylan
saw the freezer was filled with rib bones and discarded ice-cream containers. The rib bones were big, too big, thought Dylan and there were still some resilient bits of meat hanging off the bone. But he just pressed forward, trying to stay focused on finding a first-aid kit and a working telephone.

To the right of the freezer, a low, narrow doorway led into an even narrower room: 10 by 10, at best, with wooden walls plastered from end to end, top to bottom—even the ceiling was covered—with pictures ripped from porno magazines, some glued on top of others, all ripped from their stapled bindings in some sort of frenzy and slapped onto the walls without any discernable pattern. The room was awash in a dirty yellow light—a sickly illumination that Dylan associated with band-aids and the 1970s. In the center of the room was an ancient mattress—no frame, no box spring, no sheets—stuffing spilling out of several tears in the scratchy gray surface.

Surrounding the mattress was a mess of broken glass beakers, hot plates, empty lantern fuel cans, duct tape, red-stained coffee filters, and a blowtorch lighter—meth-lab garbage. Joe’s Gas-n-Go: putting a new spin on the term “full-service station.”

Dylan lowered himself onto the mattress, dust exploding up into the air like a miniature mushroom cloud before the fallout fluttered back to the filthy rayon. Next to the makeshift bed was a metal container, maybe the size of a shoebox. Like everything else in the place, the padlock was rusted and busted, dangling uselessly. Dylan knocked it to the floor and lifted the metal lid. Jackpot: Underneath a ton of pictures, faded, dog-eared memories with names and dates written on the backs in smudged ink, was a large bandage, a wad of cash—mostly fives and ones, a few 20s—some matchbooks, an old AM/FM radio, and some antibiotic cream. And underneath all that was a silver snub-nosed .45: all the crank chef essentials.

After taking off his shredded jeans, picking the shards of highway and glass out of his leg, and spreading ointment over the wound, Dylan learned back on the mattress and began wrapping his leg with the bandage. He tried to lay back but his head knocked against something hard hidden beneath the tattered rayon pillow. Reaching under the pillow, Dylan felt the familiar plastic case of a laptop computer. He pulled the laptop out from under his head and held it up into the light. The case was black, scrubbed of all brand names or trademarks, and covered in gray scuffmarks. A power cord was still attached to the back of the computer, running from the laptop to a socket in the wall behind the bed. He popped open the laptop. Aside from a small
crack in the screen’s upper right corner and a missing “E” key, the machine was in pretty good condition—there were even two USB ports along its side, the kind that would read the flash drive Dylan found in his father’s journal.

“No way,” Dylan muttered to himself as he pressed the power button. To his surprise, the power button flashed green and, after several seconds, the screen burst to life, an obsolete Windows operating system logo floating in front of a black background. It took the system a few minutes to boot up but eventually a desktop appeared. A quick tour of the computer’s hard drive told Dylan nothing about the service station or where its owner had gone: It was loaded with various tutorials on optimal meth-cooking methods, a collection of decade-old MP3s, and tons of pornography—with names like ass2mouthsluts_6, myanalsummervacation, and DPCougars_9, it wasn’t too hard to guess at the files’ content.

Balancing the laptop on the mattress, Dylan slid the flash drive into the USB port: There was a single video file, titled “Exodus.” Dylan dragged the cursor over the file and double-clicked.

The footage was shot with a night vision lens, greens and grays mixed with black. In the bottom left-hand corner, a single sentence appeared: Project Exodus recovereds.

The camera operator’s hands were shaking and for the first few seconds the footage was third-person schizophrenic, jumping from blurry object to blurry object. There was audio as well—an inhuman wailing that persisted over the steady drone of electronic equipment. Finally, the camera steadied and the picture began to clear, revealing a large room, lined with two rows of beds.

The camera panned the room, offering a panoramic view of a primitive medical facility—the place looked like a World War II field hospital. Men in green masks moved between the beds but the camera ignored them, choosing instead to begin moving down the center aisle toward the back of the room. Reaching the end of the room, the camera stopped before turning to the right and then down toward the last bed in the row. For a moment the lens was out of focus but only for a moment: The picture came back into focus, revealing a pair of feet, covered in sores and puss-caked lesions, protruding from under a single sheet. One foot had seven toes, each with long, black nails curling toward the ceiling; both ankles turned at impossible angles.

The camera lingered for a moment before panning up the cot. Dylan could see the outline of pair of legs and a lower torso visible under a stained,
rumpled sheet and he wanted to look away; he wanted to take the laptop and slam it against the wall but he couldn’t—the camera was moving and through the thin sheet he could see a man’s chest covered with what appeared to be six or seven crusty eyes, each blinking madly, the eyeballs themselves darting in every direction, rolling back under the infected lids to escape the light of the camera. Dylan leaned over the edge of the bed and threw up.

The video seemed to anticipate such a reaction, lingering for a few moments on this creature’s ruined chest before resuming its march up the length of the cot, past a jagged, jutting collarbone and a bloated neck, swollen with throbbing veins. Dylan had no explanation for what came next. At first, he was certain he was hallucinating. He closed his eyes for a moment, listening to the sounds of ragged, agonized breathing coming from the laptop competing with the sounds of the wind whipping against the gas station walls and the faint roar of an airplane overhead.

Then Dylan opened his eyes and screamed.

The video had ended and the screen was frozen on the final frame: the face of the creature on the cot. Only, it wasn’t just the creature’s face. It was his father’s face; his father’s eyes, the eyes that watched the city from a hundred Jack Heffernan billboards—the same eyes that stared back at Dylan every time he looked in a mirror.

Tiber City
Oct. 2, 2015

D
ylan had crashed at the abandoned Gas-n-Go for the past few weeks, spending his nights reading his father’s journal, the collection of letters, over and over, trying to make sense of the story they seemed to be telling: that his father had been, somehow, not entirely human, that Michael Morrison bore responsibility for his dad’s condition, and that Morrison had most likely murdered his father. There were too many moving pieces, too many facts still obscured, but Morrison wasn’t exactly an auto mechanic or anything—if anyone had the ability to do the things his father was suggesting, it was the world’s preeminent geneticist.