Exit Kingdom

unbreathing lacuna in which the world has
found itself.
    He thinks about hiswife, 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 theroad 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. Nothingsounds 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 asany 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 childin 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 thebrave 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 makeshis 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 shadowson 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, sittingthere 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