Exit Kingdom

knives that
lodge deep and true, children with sharpened teeth that have been taught to climb your body and rip out your throat as though they were feral animals. Moses slashes his way through them, digging
his heels into the muck for leverage against the ugly onslaught.Everywhere is the music of slaughter, shrill swords fifing their way clean through the air, the deep baritones of surprised death
cries, the airy percussives of bodies falling to the ground and giving up their final appalled breaths. And who is the conductor? And who waves the baton? And who stitches together these crescendos
of grotesque majesty?
    And, too, the battle is manifold – becausethe chaos is too thick for the combatants to end things right, to make sure the dead stay down, and so the slaughtered everywhere on the field of
battle begin to rise again – and Moses finds himself killing again those he already killed once before. Death begets death, and it is no wonder that the world is overrun so. They rise slowly
amidst the pandemonium, overlooked because of their calmin the middle of such frenzy. A corpse lying face down in a puddle of bloody snow melt will twitch first in the arms, a shiver will run
through the torso and all the way down to the legs. Then an arm will straighten itself, find a handhold on the ground and gently leverage itself with fresh muscle to hoist the rest of the body face
up. And there it might lie for minutes at a time, opening itseyes anew to the sunlight and the noisome activity going on around it. The orbs of its eyes roll lazily to and fro until, at last, it
inches itself upwards, first on its hands and knees, and then rising to full height, standing tall in sudden mockery of life itself.
    And so the valley quickly fills with the mangy slubberdegullions of death. They reach out pathetically for those alert bodiesmoving by them with the speed of survival – but when their
hands grasp nothing, they drop again to the ground to feed hyena-like on the stillwarm corpses of the newly dead. And if a man, along his way to other death than this, should happen to put a bullet
through the slug’s brain as it eats its first meal, then in a travesty of sacred stygian rites that call for dim ferrymen to cross slowbetween the shores of life and death, these creatures
will have died twice in the space of an hour.
    Now Moses confronts one of Fletcher’s surgical abominations, a slug dressed up like a sasquatch, its body patched all over with the scalps of other slugs sewn on its skin – a motley
of hair, some long, some short, some blond, some brunette, some curly, some straight, much of the hair crustedhard by ooze and blood. Moses dispatches the thing quickly, one bullet to the brain,
because it is a sign too distressing to look upon – humanity inverted somehow.
    For a moment, Moses Todd, having killed everything around him that moves, finds himself in a wide radius of stillness. The other combatants occupy themselves at a distance, and he breathes deep
the stench of wasted biology thathangs cloudy in the air. He stands, a droll on an empty stage, waiting for a response from the darkened seats – laughter or applause, it makes no difference
– raising his brutal weapon to examine it against the spotlight of the sun. The bladed cudgel is tangled with gore. Like a nightmare Christmas tree, its welded limbs are ornamented with human
viscera, tinselled with hair and stringy offal,flaps of torn flesh that hang from the tips, sticky bile that is already beginning to crust over in the metal interstices. It is a thing that does
not soften to the human condition. People explode against the weapon, undeniable. It is a force, like the abstraction of American industry itself, a machine whose gears care not what they
grind.
    Moses whips the weapon down and flings off someof the loose numbles that splash onto the watery ground. Then he takes a moment to reload his pistol while scanning the structures around him.
    There is a series of low metal buildings, indistinguishable from one another. He walks to the first one and kicks in the door, aiming his pistol through the doorframe and waiting for his eyes to
adjust to the dim light inside.
    The place is mostlyempty. There are the skeletons of massive refining machinery, long ago frozen and rusted into position. Atop and around this dead machinery there are strewn blankets and slop
buckets and filthy mattresses. In the corner he finds three women huddled against the