Kingdom (4 page)

While some men, like the Chihuahuan farmers, seek life wherever they can, others rush toward death; such were the men who entered these lands
after the farmers left. The rogue scientists came first: Chemists set up methamphetamine laboratories in the basement of abandoned farmhouses while black-listed surgeons performed cut-rate surgeries across the street. Some even did both, everything the desperate and dying might need, all under one roof. And all for a small fee. There was, after all, always a small fee. And while in some parts of the globe Visa might enjoy a death grip on non-cash transactions, these outposts of the new American frontier only accepted two forms of payment: hard currency or soft flesh. Somehow, tourists always seemed to have at least one of the two on hand.

Most who made a pilgrimage to these Meth boomtowns ended up staying and a new settlement sprang from the poisoned soil: liquor stores, truck stops, strip clubs, fast-food joints, and 24-hour 7-Elevens with the Sudafed sealed away behind bulletproof glass and glossy covered porno magazines promising girls who just turned 18 sucking and fucking on each and every page. It was impossible to tell where one settlement ended and the next began; at night the single sandy road leading farther into the desert was one harsh light fixture bleeding into the next

There was no point to Campbell’s wandering, no particular destination he had in mind. There was no wife, no family, no children; he was killing time, waiting for one of Morrison’s minions to materialize out of the shimmering desert air and put a bullet through his skull. And yet, as the urban sprawl began to lessen, dying out under the unforgiving Chihuahuan sun, that bullet did not come.

The first few nights, Campbell crashed in hourly-rate fuck pads. However, as he continued down the solitary highway and the urban sprawl gave up more and more ground to the Chihuahuan, these motels grew increasingly infrequent. For miles, there was only the highway, framed by giant satellite towers jutting up on the horizon like crucifixes adorning the Appian Way. Now, as he continued his exodus across the same lands where the Anasazi had once constructed their own culture built on cannibalism, darkness was again pressing down low and hard against the desert, suffocating the light and raising the dead.

Pushing forward, Campbell could hear packs of wild animals gathering on either side of the road, emissaries of the desert nothingness. With little humidity to trap the sun’s warmth, at night the temperature in the Chihuahuan
would plummet, tumbling well below freezing. These creatures had spent millennia adapting to the desert’s wild range of temperature; man had yet to do so. He considered turning around and heading back toward the artificial glow on the northern horizon but the sun had already ceded most of its celestial territory to the night and Campbell knew he would freeze to death before he made it back to the settlements. A mile or so up the highway the road seemed to shift right and beyond that, there appeared to be something. And if there wasn’t? Death wouldn’t come from a bullet after all.

A little more than a half hour later, Campbell discovered there was something along the side of the highway after all. Rising from the cracked earth was the skeleton of an abandoned freight yard and although the entire yard was closed off from the main road by a steel fence crowned with barbed wire, the main gate, smashed in years ago, lay broken on the desert floor, its red warning signs covered by sand. The aluminum signs clanked as Campbell forced his body over them; whatever warning they offered applied to a different time. A few yards from the entranceway was a building Campbell presumed had once been the yardmaster tower, a rusty, rectangular two-story building with clapboard siding and a peaked roof that acted as the hub for all freight traffic. Tormented by the desert wind and heat, the tower’s wooden exterior had begun to splinter and crack, the once proud yellow and blue color scheme reduced to variations of a washed out brown. Recently, someone had tagged the side of the building with white graffiti, spraying an asterisk in a circle over the decaying tower façade. As Campbell moved closer to the symbol, he was struck by two observations: The paint was still fresh and the job had been done in a hurry.

A fire escape ran up the back of the yard tower. Campbell trudged to the top of the ladder, then pulled himself onto the roof. From this new vantage point, the abandoned freight yard seemed to extend for miles in every direction, a sprawling industrial relic from a different America than the one he had just fled—dozens of different tracks converging upon the yard from every direction before melting into one massive primary track that ran into the building upon which Campbell now stood. Long dead signal lights constructed beside each track stared back at Campbell. Once upon a time, this freight yard helped subdue an entire continent. Now the continent was exacting its revenge.

Campbell found it difficult to imagine these tracks ever carrying freight trains. Yet, this yard had been a thriving commercial hub; the sheer amount of discarded freight was stunning. Burnt-out boxcars seemed to litter every track, some turned onto their sides, others merely left in the middle of the rails, their doors ajar. Other cars, which Campbell thought were called container cars, had been broken into, their steel bellies breached by some kind of welding tool, their cargo looted long ago.

The sun was now dropping below the horizon, lighting up the entire yard like a pinball machine, the dying sunlight bouncing off every half-buried piece of industrial treasure: steel, iron, and glass asserting their presence with unexpected majesty. As the wind whipped through the mechanical mass grave, it unleashed a mournful whistle. Looking down at his feet, Campbell noticed he was standing on top of another graffiti asterisk, also inside a circle and made with the same hurried strokes as the one grafted onto the side of the tower. A chill swept through Campbell and he wished the massacre he now surveyed was the result of a nuclear holocaust or some great plague; some brand of biblical disaster—real Book of Revelation shit. Instead, the dead eyed signal posts staring up at him were simply the result of neglect, of “number crunching” at some inaccessible corporate level, and of the blunt fact that the world was no longer what it had once been.

Not that Campbell had ever been a sucker for nostalgia: An Ivy League academic—Princeton for undergrad, Harvard for his Ph.D.—Campbell had long considered himself beyond any cheap addiction to cultural revisionism; every American neighborhood in the 1980s wasn’t a fucking John Hughes movie. No time in the past was ever as good or pure as those living in the present recalled it to have been. He understood that change was not only inevitable, but the very means by which species bettered themselves. But despite his deep disdain for those who pined for some make-believe past, Campbell had been unable to shake a sneaking suspicion that here, at the end of the American century, something was going very wrong.

Accompanying this nebulous, nagging dread was a growing disillusionment with his self-styled role as a man of science. Campbell was brilliant and, for a long time, he had surrounded himself, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps not, with men who made sure he never forgot this fact. But as the years began to tumble away, acclaim bred arrogance. The partnership he had joined into with Morrison—that was designed to cure America. Now he wasn’t so sure he didn’t help poison her. Campbell suspected there was
something necessary, something vital about the materials left to rot in this industrial depot; they had once formed the foundation of America and now, choosing to reinvent herself for the digital age, she apparently had decided she no longer required their services. This struck Campbell as an extremely dangerous proposition; he was just too exhausted to explain why. But perhaps that was best: He was growing weary of theory and wished he could somehow just reinvent himself like a pop star.

By now, the sun had dropped below the horizon, the last rays of light extinguished as dusk stole across the desert floor. Campbell snapped back to the immediacy of his situation, of the fact the temperature was dropping. He needed to find shelter.

After maneuvering his way back down the same fire escape-cum-exterior stairwell, Campbell cut around the side of the control tower and into the main freight yard. Traces of limestone and coal mingled with broken glass crunched under his feet as he pressed deeper into the yard, scanning the abandoned freight. The boxcars, the ones with the already half-open doors, would be the best bet for shelter, he reasoned.

The desert wind was intensifying, strafing Campbell’s eyeballs with bursts of sand and debris as he struggled to make his way through the train yard. Before he could make it any further, however, his left foot snagged the inside of a train track, catching itself on the intersection of steel and wood. Seconds later, he was tumbling forward, the earth rising up to land a body blow. Campbell’s shoulder took the brunt of the impact, but the unpleasant crash landing was nothing compared to the pain that exploded just above his right kneecap. Campbell screeched in agony. His hands shot down to his knee and when he pulled them away they were sticky with a warm liquid. He was cut. Badly.

As Campbell probed the wound, his fingers closed around something cool, metallic, and very sharp. He looked down: A large rail spike, twisted out of its natural place in the track and curled toward the sky, had helped to break Campbell’s fall. Unfortunately, it had done so by driving itself through Campbell’s calf. It was difficult to discern exactly how deep the wound was, although judging by the amount of blood, it sure as hell wasn’t a paper cut. The pain was excruciating and he realized it was only a matter of moments before he would pass out. Summoning every last bit of will left in his body,
Campbell, digging his nails into the desert floor, dragged himself forward, sliding on his belly like a serpent. Pain laced through his leg and Campbell’s consciousness began fading in and out like poor radio reception.

And then he was free of the spike, fresh, hot blood pouring out of the now-gaping wound, splashing out onto the earth as Campbell continued to crawl across the desert floor, gagging as the wind kicked the dust up past his cracked lips before mingling with the cold metallic taste rising in the back of his throat.

The last thing Jonathan Campbell remembered was wriggling toward one of the forgotten boxcars, its sliding side door slightly ajar. Another asterisk in a circle, barely discernable in the last seconds of dusk, was tattooed across its exterior. And then there was nothing but the howl of the wind.