Exit Kingdom

doesn’t havean onset until later in life. But there’s something about the disease, something in
her blood. The dead don’t like it. Or, no, that’s not right. See, they don’t attack her for the same reason they don’t attack each other.
    Whitfield waits for the full meaning of his words to settle.
    She ain’t dead, Moses says. She ain’t.
    No, Whitfield says. But she
is
dying. Her body – it has a predeterminationfor death. They think that’s why . . .
    Moses is silent again for a moment, piecing things together. The Vestal. A tiny firebrand of a woman, chopped red hair, a catalogue of personalities, impossibly dishonest, witchy and tricksy as
any cheap fraud, a calamity with translucent skin. Cursed, dying, the whole time. It is too much. Too much by any measure.
    You told her? Moses asks.
    We did.
    And then she left.
    She did.
    Then they got her too. Fletcher got her too.
    Maybe not.
    You didn’t have to tell her.
    Now Whitfield is silent.
    You didn’t have to, Moses repeats.
    Then he shakes his head and looks at the man of God eye to eye.
    Jesus Christ, he says to the pastor, do we have to know the name of everything?
    *
    So he goes back outsidewhere he can see his breath in the cold night wind and crosses the massive courtyard at the base of that purple nightmare cathedral – and before he
reaches his car, he is accosted by a soldier on guard.
    Where you headed? asks the soldier.
    East, says Moses. It ain’t your intent to stop me, is it?
    No, it is not, says the soldier. You going after them?
    I reckon so. You know whatroad they took?
    You don’t want to go there. It’s bound to be a mess of destruction. Not something you want to be caught in the middle of.
    Son, I ain’t got the luxury of wanting things. Which road east?
    The main one, says the soldier and gives him a shrug. You’ll be able to follow the tracks. I’m sure there’s only one army that’s passed through since the last
snowfall.
    Moses drives.His one remaining headlight illuminates the road ahead – the palimpsest of tyre tracks in the snow. The road goes through the middle of town – which is populated only
by icicles and the frozen dead. Bodies slump over against the concrete bases of buildings, many of them lost or near lost in drifts of snow. One dead woman with frosty hair sits buried in snow up
to her armpits – like deathin hibernation, her joints frozen until the thaw in the spring when her creaky bones will come to life again, and she will crawl, starved for a season, to the
nearest meat she can find to nourish herself.
    Just beyond that slug, in another deep drift of snow, Moses sees two hands poking out at the top. One is bent like a claw and the other is frozen open, like a gesture of constant wavingwelcome.
    Here the dead wait patiently. They sit, affixed in their places, like plants and other anchored creatures of nature, biding their time, their mouths filling up with snow, their eyes filling up
with snow, spectral and full of peace.
    And Moses drives on, towards the indefatigable conflicts of the living, while here, in this frozen city, death is rendered petty, benign, thoughtlessand allegiant to the hobbyhorse rocking of
the old, tired earth.

Part Three
    CRUCIBLE

Ten
    Interlude
» The Gasworks » Rosie and Lily Todd » Soldier Boy » Battle » A Locked Shed » Another Confession »
Wishes
    You see now? Moses Todd asks. You see? It ain’t about what you think it’s about. All the wandering, all the mad pursuit, all the spinnin cycles of life and death
and death and life over and over until you ain’t but a dizzy-headed creature roamin the plains. It ain’tabout anything but one thing. Drollery. You fight and you create and you fight
and you destroy – and sometimes in the middle somewhere you happen to love. But it all comes down to ridiculousness. Dead hands waving at you from out a bank of snow. An abducted brother who
ought to of paid for his sins in some such way long before. A dying redhead with deceitful ways and an immunity to that whichalready had a hold of her. Ridiculous. You could laugh your guts out if
you keep your brain on it too long. I challenge you. I challenge you to look it in the face and keep from laughin.
    *
    It has started to snow again by the time Moses sees the commotion in the distance. The gasworks is at the end of the road, in a mountain cul-de-sac, surrounded on all sides by
ice-ladenfoothills. The bandits are leeching electricity from the same power grid