Exit Kingdom (Reapers 2)

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.