Exit Kingdom

the valley below – still muffled by his buffeted eardrums. The sun peers through the treetops, and he
drinks in the cold air like an elixir.
    He licks his lips. There are things to say and no one in the world to say them to. Not even God – who is about his business on the wonders of the world and doesn’t – should not
– take timefor the puny sufferings of one bereft man.
    So instead he talks to the charred body of his brother.
    She lied, he says. She lied to me, Abe. And I almost took trust in it. Shamed to say I almost did.
    There are now popping sounds down in the valley, as of a series of small tanks exploding. It will take days for the valley to burn itself out completely.
    He licks his lips again.
    I guess it’s lucky for you you died, Abe, he says. This world, it was too easy for you to get into trouble in.
    Then he gets up and crawls to his brother’s body and takes the arms from where they are flailed wide and lays them neat and proper across his chest. And that’s when he notices
something. The index finger on the left hand is gone to the second joint. He raises the hand to look close.It seems the wound is an old one, the scar healed over clean. Then he looks more closely
at the melted face, pries open one of the charred eyelids.
    Moses Todd sighs heavy and sits back again against the trunk of the tree.
    Goddamnit, he says. You ain’t Abraham.
    There is neither relief nor disappointment in his voice. It is just a statement of fact. The compass of your own self ishard to follow if the world keeps changing the direction of true
north.
    He sighs and squeezes his eyes shut with his grimy fingers and says:
    Just when you think things’re sorted.
    *
    Moses walks to the edge of the clearing and looks down into the bowl of fire below him. He feels the heat blustering up into his face like a summer wind – and melting the
ice in the treesfor an artificial kind of rainfall. The structures are all collapsed or gutted by flame – metal twisted brutal and liquid around metal. A thick grey smoke rises into the air
and clings to the trees all around, causing Moses to bend double coughing. What down there was living before is now dead and gone to ashes.
    When he turns back to the clearing, he sees the burnt corpse of the boot thiefstirring. He walks to the slug and gazes down on it for a moment. Then he uses his pistol to put a single bullet
through the forehead, and the dead man settles back into stillness.
    Moses bends down and removes the boots from the dead man’s feet. Then he leans against the trunk of a tree and looks up between the branches into the smoky sky. There is an exhaustion on
him the like of whichhe has never felt before.
    His hearing is still shot, so he wonders deafly what kind of complaint the birds must be making about the smoke that poisons their arboreal homes. He has an affinity for nature, he realizes,
because it is governed by principles and laws that are clear and precise as anything.
    It’s the various and mutable nonsense of man he can’t abide.
    *
    Hefollows the ridge around the valley and back to the road. There are signs of battle everywhere. Moses sees what has happened. When the explosives were detonated, the
inhabitants of the valley fled by the main road, but they were met by the soldiers who cleaned up whoever was left. It looks like they were shot with mounted guns – some of the bodies
perforated almost in half by a line of bulletholes.
    But one thing about the military: they do things right. There is not a corpse left that hasn’t been neatly brain-killed. So despite the full garden of bodies, nothing stirs in the hot
breeze. Rivulets of melted ice flow down the tarmac, shifting their course around the various dams of bodies.
    It is quiet, so quiet. Except now there’s a ringing in Moses’ ears growing louder, andhe knows this to be a portent of the return of his hearing.
    He finds the car he came in, but it has been pushed onto its side into a ditch and likely wouldn’t run any more anyway. He searches for another vehicle, but the ones that remain have been
shot to pieces or salvaged of their vital parts. So Moses sets off walking up the road. The clip of his pistol holds only three more rounds –and his bladed cudgel got left behind when he
carried the boot thief out of the valley – so he is likely to be in trouble if he encounters any resistance.
    But the road is clear, and the sun is bright. And soon his hearing returns. It seems to rush