Kingdom (23 page)

“The flyer and the key,” Meghan was saying. “Where are they?”

“Come on,” Dylan said. “I’ll show you.”

Less than an hour later, Dylan and Meghan arrived outside his apartment door, damp from the endless drizzle and still dressed in mourning black. Emotionally drained and physically exhausted, his body still reeling from last week’s overdose, Dylan leaned back against the hallway’s brick interior, patting the various pockets lining his suit in search of his keys, wondering what purpose this building had originally served—in another era before the ad men and the money men arrived with the glitterati in tow: There were hints of an industrial, manufacturing past; maybe something was made here? Something useful? One of those items taken for granted by society but upon which the orderly functioning of society depended: washers, screws, buttons, bolts?

He found the keys and popped open the door, letting Meghan in first. The entrance opened into the kitchen, which was the same as every other high-end loft kitchen in Tiber City: stunning with zero functionality; track lighting installed over gleaming black granite and stainless steel appliances. Dylan didn’t even know if they worked—he couldn’t remember the last time he had used them, if he ever used them; they came with the place and he got take out or delivery every night. He didn’t even own a dining room table; meals were a rushed, uneventful affair, a menagerie of ethnic foods—Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Mongolian—that eventually all tasted the same, most a Western approximation, an idea of how various cultural cuisines should—not did—taste; meats and noodles drenched in hot spices delivered by a smallish delivery man of indeterminate age and precise cultural heritage. Unlimited options for nourishment narrowed down to a single choice based on a vague determination of preference: Do you
feel
like Thai?

Before he had left for the funeral, Dylan had stuck the flyer to the subzero refrigerator like it was a child’s drawing or a homework assignment that got an A—something that would have been unheard of in the Glimmer district of Tiber City: Almost no one had kids and the few who did sure as well
weren’t going to fuck up that stainless steel gleam with stick figure drawings or spelling tests.

His mother’s handwriting was cartoonish: large fat letters scratched across Senator Heffernan’s face. It dawned on him that maybe he should have put the flyer somewhere a little more private but slapping it on the fridge was an insurance policy against inaction: Every time he walked through his front door, Jack Heffernan, cosmetically enhanced via his mother’s scribbling, would be staring back at him. If he hid the thing, the odds were much higher that he would be able to force himself to forget about it, to fabricate reasons why he should put off doing anything about it until tomorrow or next week. For this same reason, he left the key his mother slipped him on the counter adjacent to the fridge: the thing’s awkward edges a sharp contrast to the kitchen’s cool black granite and functionless design.

He grabbed the flyer off the fridge, holding it up for Meghan to see.

2720 Linmont Road, Westland. That was the address, and it was a familiar one; Westland was a small town on the coast, and he spent lots of time at the shore as a child: His family owned a beach house in Havenport, a few towns over.

061280091177. That was the number written underneath. The number was not familiar.

He pulled out his iPhone and typed the address into Google, the search engine’s autumnal theme aggravating in its perkiness, its elementary school appreciation for minor Hallmark holidays and seasonal changes. A second later, the website offered him several options: Did he merely want to see a map? Or would he prefer directions to and/or from that address? There was also an option for an aerial view of the geographic area in question, but even after selecting a locale, there were still more choices: Did he want to see traffic patterns, terrain overview, or satellite imagery? Finally, there was the option to see video of the desired locale, prompting the question: How was this accomplished? Did the search engine have thousands and thousands of employees crisscrossing the country with video cameras, endlessly recording and uploading, recording and uploading? Or were there only a few intrepid explorers charged with filming every address in America? What drove these modern Magellans? Was corporate sponsorship involved? The idea of a small band of men and women roaming the country filming every square inch was both absurd and terrifying: What was the point? And what happened when, as was inevitable, buildings rose and fell and rose again? Or was the process
endless? Did fathers pass on this task to sons, who, in turn, would pass it on to their own sons, like some medieval curse, a burden to be borne?

Finally the information he was waiting for popped up: According to Google, the address belonged to a bank in Westland, two hours east of Tiber City and less than 20 minutes from his family’s beach house. Dylan tossed the phone onto the table, patting his pockets for a stray cigarette, while Meghan jotted down the directions. The bank was too close to the beach house to be a coincidence. He stared at the numbers: 061280091177. He considered the possibilities: Could be a bank account; could be some sort of deposit box. More important than what was
why:
Did his mother have an account there? Unlikely: The institutionalization process included a review of all personal assets.

He lit the cigarette and slumped back against the granite counter. He was exhausted: After overdosing and burying this mother in the same week—not to mention dealing with the anniversary of his father’s death, a process that got harder as the years passed—to say that he could use a little downtime was an understatement. But no matter how exhausted he was—physically, mentally, emotionally—more than he needed rest, he needed answers.

“You OK?” Meghan asked, bringing her hand to the side of his head, running her fingers through his hair.

“Look, whatever this is, I’m going with you,” she said, their faces now inches apart. And then she was kissing him, soft and searching at first, but then, as he started to kiss her back, more confident, her intensity increasing, the years falling away, and Dylan remembered a time when words like “future” “identity” “mystery” and “love” held any meaning for him at all.

“I missed you,” she was saying, her head now on his shoulder and he was telling her the same thing over and over, terrified because he meant it.

They stumbled backward into the apartment, fumbling with each other’s clothes, her taste familiar but still electric and then they were on the couch and he was inside of her, their bodies moving together and they were fucking but it wasn’t just fucking, it was different and he was excited and terrified at the same time; she was on top of him, her hands on his chest, her hair falling forward over her face as she stared into his eyes and then he was coming, pushing himself deeper into her as the outside world faded away and there was only the sound of their breathing, rhythmic and free.

Tiber City: Jungle District
Sept. 5, 2015
3:55 a.m.

I
n the week since the attack at the bar, Campbell had found shelter under the neon canopy of the Jungle’s post-industrial sprawl. Moving constantly, he was changing motel rooms once, sometimes twice a day, sleeping no more than four hours at a clip, the mysterious cell phone that had been left on top of the motel nightstand now tucked into the one pant pocket without a hole in it. Campbell knew he could only blend in for so long; Morrison’s men would find him and try to force him to return to Exodus. And if he refused, he knew that, this time, they wouldn’t hesitate to torture him; eventually, they would execute. In the meantime, Jonathan Campbell sought redemption.

The days slipped into nights back into days, and all the while Campbell tried to absorb what had been left for him, spending most of his time sitting on grubby motel carpets, the singed pages of Morrison’s karyotype report—the one showing the two extra pairs of chromosomes in Project Exodus experiments—spread around him in a sloppy, scattered circle. He had read through everything once, twice, three times and still his mind would not stop churning as he tried to make a connection between the failures of
Exodus and what Morrison had dubbed “the Omega gene,” the only gene that the greatest scientists in the world could not reproduce.

He was drinking but not heavily—just enough to keep a buzz going and to take the edge off some of the speed he copped from the pregnant 20–year-old who was dealing out of a corner of an abandoned Arby’s parking lot. The brawl at Sweeney’s had done a number on him: He was covered in bruises and his whole body ached, the old wound in his leg flaring up in an orgy of pain and discomfort. A dose of the Treatment would have helped with all that but that option had been left behind somewhere in the smoldering ruins of Sweeney’s bar. He would need to come up with a substitute soon, but how soon was tough to gauge.

It was going to have to be a delicate balance of Benzedrine and Jameson: Just enough booze, just enough speed and he might survive long enough to figure out the identity of the Omega gene and to—somehow—put an end to Project Exodus. After that, what happened next didn’t matter.

Some nights, the speed and alcohol feeding off one another, his discipline over his chemical concoctions wavering, he waxed almost pornographic, fantasizing about running, just vanishing into the Jungle, fuck the Order and fuck Michael Morrison. He would spend a few months drifting further off the grid, shaking just enough to stay alive but not enough to draw any attention, and then taking off for Mexico, heading for the lawless border region where Exodus was born but ignoring the past and continuing down into South America; getting lost in any one of the shantytowns outside Sao Paulo would give him five, six more years on this earth. Five or six more years of guilt and neurological decay spent trying to scrap together enough black market chemicals to approximate the Treatment only to mistakenly shoot up rat poison, die seizing and foaming at the mouth in a stall behind some banana republic brothel. There were moments when, suffocating under the weight of his sins, such escapism felt almost erotic.

And then one night, the cell phone began to buzz. For a moment Campbell thought he was losing his mind; that the combination of too much Benzedrine, too little sleep, and no Treatment had sent him over the edge and the aural hallucinations were kicking in. Then he caught a glimpse of the phone resting atop one of the many miniature mountains of paper spread across the room, its tiny display screen flashing with an incoming call. With a strange mixture of relief and terror flooding his already overtaxed system, he flipped open the phone:

“Hello,” he rasped.

“He is coming for you,” a familiar voice warned. “Take only what you absolutely need and leave now. You know that megachurch on 111 and Phoenix?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“I’ll meet you there. But go. Now.”

“Wait—who is coming? …” Campbell asked, staring into the receiver.

“There is no time,” the caller said and then the phone went dead.

It was a little past 3 in the morning, and Campbell, having left the motel 15 minutes earlier, was cutting through the Jungle, the booze and speed pushing him past the death, decay, and neon of Phoenix Avenue. Helicopters circled above the city like vultures ready to pick the Jungle’s steel skeleton bare, their spotlights zigzagging across the ocean of shattered lives and empty bus stops and underground clubs where people disappeared, where entire lives simply ceased to exist and all the while the dark energy of this digital era rushed through the city, harnessed by false prophets with expense accounts who encouraged the dead simply to reinvent themselves.