Exit Kingdom

That’s what they told me, the doctors. That’s why the slugs don’t
touch me. I’m dyin from the inside out, Mose.
    So’s everybody – part dead.
    She recoils from him, her face curling into a fierce snarl.
    You ain’t a man, she says.
    Likely I ain’t.
    She spits at his feet and rushes towards the door and flings it open. Outside,the sounds of warfare continue. Someone lets loose a ripping scream. She pauses.
    You best run straight for the trees, Moses says to her back, or they’ll get you sure.
    She hesitates a second longer, closes the door and turns back towards Moses.
    Take me, Moses. Take me out of here. Please.
    Abraham, he replies flatly. I ain’t leavin without him.
    I
told
you, she says.
    You saidsome words all right – but I ain’t sure what exactly you told me.
    She comes back over and stands before him, looking up at him as though he were sitting in the very top of a tree – as though he were so high above everything that you had to squint up your
eyes to see him against the shining heavens. It’s all a show. She puts it on. He knows now.
    I told you he’s safe, says the Vestal.He’s gone. They let him go.
    Let him—
    He was – he was headed back to you. But his leg, it was in bad shape. He wasn’t movin so good. They didn’t give him a car or nothing. Listen, I saw an empty garage about two
miles up the road when we were comin in. He’s probably there – probably he holed up for the night.
    Let him go? Why? Why would Fletcher let him—
    Moses, please. Please let’sgo – the whole place is comin down. We’re gonna die, Moses. I don’t want to – not here.
    Why?
he says, his voice booming down on her now.
    She shrinks back. In her eyes there is a searching, but he does not know for what. She does not wish to say what she says – but her reluctance could mean anything or nothing.
    Cause of me, is what she says.
    Cause of you how?
    She just looksup at him now with an expression that could be hatred or shame or simply goneness.
    I acquired his release, she says. I purchased it. From Fletcher.
    He looks at her. There are sounds outside the thinwalled structure, clambering echoes of moribund hordes, foolish humanity balking against its own beginnings and its own ends. Half dead.
That’s the phrase that throbs in Moses’ brain. Halfdead, half dead, half dead. He says nothing to the holy woman in front of him.
    It ain’t nothing, Moses, she says. It’s cheap currency. It ain’t a thing of meaning.
    No, Moses says.
    He shakes his head. He feels the handle of the cudgel in his hand, and it feels right and true and hefty and thick with the logic of order and reason and purpose and all the concrete yeses and
nos thatcould end all the ambiguous sentences on all the pages of the world’s manuscript.
    No, he says. It ain’t true. You’re a prevaricator is what you are. You already shown it. You ain’t to be believed.
    It’s true, Moses. I’m tellin it to you true. He’s – he’s in that garage. I’d bet my whole real self on it.
    Your whole real self, he says with disdain.
    I’m done with misdirection, Moses.I swear it. I got nothing. Nothing at all.
    You just want taken out of here. You would say anything. You would thieve my aid with your deception.
    No, Moses, no. It ain’t that.
    Then what? Then give me to understand why you would of purchased his life, his freedom. The life of a transgressor. A reprobate who for two decades has been only
my
obligation to keep and
defend – and that onlycause I’m his blooden kin. A transgressor. The world seeks to correct him and it’s only
my
duty to exempt him from his rightly course – succeed
or fail as I might. And succeed I have, over and over. Except I
will
fail. One day. A man, he can’t hold on for ever – his fingers loosen. And who are you to intervene on this
transgressor’s behalf?
    But it wasn’t for him, Mose. Don’t you see howit wasn’t for him?
    Then what? For the cheapness of the price? The ease of credit granted you by your sorry lot in life?
    No, not that either.
    Now he says nothing, because he can tell what she will say next. There is a look in the eyes that precedes some words – as though the foundation for language is laid with look. You roll it
out with the eye and then you utter it with the tongue.He is already recoiling from it. The calamity of a lie so big it devastates decency itself. For in lies such as these there is the unbearable
possibility of truth.
    She gazes up at him. So