Exit Kingdom

the Airforce Academy is on, so there are bright lights shining down from tall towers and illuminating all the
structures in the round valley – a giant bowl of light.
    When Moses sees the military vehicles ahead, he abandons the car and climbs into the hills. He carries with him things he took from the satchel in thetrunk of the car: a 9mm pistol in one hand
and in the other the massive bladed truncheon crafted for him weeks before by the tinkerer Albert Wilson Jacks. He makes his way up the slope and through the trees, following the hillside that
flanks the gasworks. The conflict between the soldiers and the bandits below must just have begun – because he can hear the sounds of warfare in escalation. Pistolsand machine guns rattling
off their rounds, explosions echoing up through the valley, orders being issued through megaphones on one side – and on the other animal screeches, the ripping calls of wild men who have for
many years survived in a hostile world on nerve and simple, unadorned violence.
    He climbs higher, past the mouth of the valley and around the perimeter. There is no pointin fighting through the main body of the conflict. This is not his battle. He seeks two people: his
brother and the Vestal Amata. Once he finds them, he will leave the rest of it behind to resolve itself.
    This is how the world works: smoky blazes that burn bright for a short time and then die out again, leaving the charred quiet we are accustomed to.
    Finally, he breaks through the treesand sees the whole valley spread wide before him – an abstract carnival of dread made absurd. It is a place of metal and machine, all the surfaces gone
brown or green with rust and oxidation – as though the forged metals of man have reverted once again to nature and settled back into the forested landscape surrounding them. Moses does not
understand the function of the structures below him– but there is something awful and gorgeous about them – like artifacts of a more ingenious time, the elegance and efficiency of
human industry gone wild. In the centre of the gasworks, there are six massive tanks around which are built creaking gantries, bent scaffoldings, spiral stairs, interstitial pipes, valves and
wheels. Among the six tanks are three metal smokestacks that climb higherout of the valley than anything else – reaching tall and rotted like the fingers of the dead from out a bank of snow.
It is a mazy sight – metal twisted around metal in purposeful shapes like the biological organs of industry itself, evidence of man’s desire to outdo God in the creation of a complex
corpus. We forge ours out of metal and spark, and it puffs itself to life like an armoured dragonin the mist-covered valley.
    But this apparatus has been long dead. And, with the same impulse that causes us to make art from the detritus of other art, the bandits have painted murals and words all over the tall rusted
metal structures. The graffiti is awkward and colourful, obscene and lovely. There is a pastoral scene, painted simple, as though a child had done it – a sunrise betweentwo mountains, and
someone has painted a smiling face on the sun. Next to that is a black spray-painted scrawl of male genitalia, and beyond that a woman with huge, pendulous breasts and thick, monstrous red lips.
The red of her lips is striking against all the blacks, whites, greens and browns of the place. As though the painted mark of womansex is anathema to nature itself.
    And Mosescan make out one more graffito – a series of words painted in neat white around the top of one of the tanks. The motto says, simply:
    AT DESTRUCTION AND FAMINE THOU SHALT LAUGH.
    Moses recognizes the quote, for it was one he has said to himself at times over the past fifteen years of his life – usually in quiet places, under roofs with rain falling
on them, or on sunless dayswhen it seemed the road may have no end. He knows the quote, and he completes it under his breath:
    Neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth.
    Moses knows it to be true – that the words are the best and the worst of everything.
    Around the base of the six tanks are other structures, squat wide buildings that must contain the machinery that once processed and refined whatwas held in the tanks. And among and upon the
structures of the gasworks, there is a war going on.
    Figures run every which way, calling out or pointing their guns or hiding in some enclosed niche or collapsing to the ground with