Exit Kingdom

a bullet gone through them. And here is the full-blown bathos of
it all. Moses can see now that there are four distinct factions at battle down in the bowl-shapedvalley. There are the soldiers in their pressed uniforms, engineering precise manoeuvres around the
tall metal structures, fighting with the cold confidence of a reborn civilization striking out against the filthy reminders of its own wild past. Then there are Fletcher’s men, a ragged
collective, a mobile army which has gathered guns from all corners of the country. They have experience ontheir side, for every day on the road is a battle for them. They live conflict. Then there
are the bandits who have been residing at the gasworks. These are almost indistinguishable from Fletcher’s men – but if one looks, one can see that they are even more ragged, embattled
by stasis and starvation. They wear more the look of survivors than marauders. And they do not fight in tandem with Fletcher’smen but against them as well as the soldiers – perhaps in
retaliation for Fletcher having brought this battle upon them in the first place. And the final faction is the dead themselves. Some rogue has set free all of Fletcher’s monstrous sideshow
dead, and it seems the bandits may have had some caged dead on hand as well. Now they all roam free, feeding on the newly dead and the not quiteso dead, pacing slowly through the combat, without
rush, without malice – possessing the neutrality of parasites on a larger body. Some of them are struck down, and they fall with the same implacable calm with which they walked a moment
before – but most are ignored since their threat is the slower one. Almost insect-like, some of these anthropophages sit cross-legged on the ground, the soundsof death and destruction coming
to bear all around them, while they slowly munch away at the leg or arm of a fallen combatant and let the snow collect gently in their hair.
    Good lord, Moses Todd says from his perch above the valley. As he watches, a bandit woman with a longrange rifle hunched atop one of the tanks is pierced by a bullet that sends a quick atomizer
mist of blood out fromher back – then she topples over and falls to the ground, crashing once over a railing that cracks her body and folds it backwards unnaturally so that when she comes to
rest the heel of her foot is up by her ear. Then a slug wanders over without haste to the bent body and digs into it with unhurried and brute fingers, opening the abdomen of the woman and pulling
thick ropes of viscera free fromthe cavity. As the slug chews on the rubbery intestines of the woman, he looks around him with patient, ruminative eyes.
    Moses Todd turns his gaze away from the fray and looks behind him – into those empty mountains and the grey sky, even the misty implication of the wide country beyond. For a moment it
looks as though he will turn his back on it all, as though he may give a shrugging refusalto it all. He is a mountain man, as he is other things. A nomad with many more wildernesses to explore
– and it is so much easier to travel away from things than towards them.
    But it’s the words that are a curse – because he cannot utter a simple goodbye.
    *
    He remembers his daughter. His girl of the meadow – all red cheeks and powder skin, a tiara of wildflowers in her hair.How she would run to him, and he would hoist her in
his arms. He would enclose her away from the world and she would cry happily to be enclosed – and his bigness was a powerful and good thing because it meant shelter for her from the world.
Her tugging at his beard with her little grasping hands. His fear of crushing her, because his brute arms were not built for such delicacy as daughtersoffer.
    And his wife, too. A woman who presented herself as beyond the knowing of any in the world but him. The way she cut his hair and trimmed his beard and made him more man than beast. He was
nobody’s master when he was with her – but just an overgrown child with big notions that got wobbly with her gentle smile. She did not know how she was wound around everything in him,
as thoughhis lungs and heart and stomach were gripped tight by the burning gaze of her.
    And there was no goodbye for them either. Even after he stopped looking for them. Even now, years later, there is no goodbye. A farewell is a thing of the mind – and, as such, you can shut
it behind doors.
    *
    So he turns his eyes from the empty frontier of the woods and back