Kingdom Page 3
While some men, like the Chihuahuan farmers, seek life wherever they can, others rush toward death; such were the men who entered these lands after the farmers left. The rogue scientists came first: Chemists set up methamphetamine laboratories in the basement of abandoned farmhouses while black-listed surgeons performed cut-rate surgeries across the street. Some even did both, everything the desperate and dying might need, all under one roof. And all for a small fee. There was, after all, always a small fee. And while in some parts of the globe Visa might enjoy a death grip on non-cash transactions, these outposts of the new American frontier only accepted two forms of payment: hard currency or soft flesh. Somehow, tourists always seemed to have at least one of the two on hand.
Most who made a pilgrimage to these Meth boomtowns ended up staying and a new settlement sprang from the poisoned soil: liquor stores, truck stops, strip clubs, fast-food joints, and 24-hour 7-Elevens with the Sudafed sealed away behind bulletproof glass and glossy covered porno magazines promising girls who just turned 18 sucking and fucking on each and every page. It was impossible to tell where one settlement ended and the next began; at night the single sandy road leading farther into the desert was one harsh light fixture bleeding into the next
There was no point to Campbell’s wandering, no particular destination he had in mind. There was no wife, no family, no children; he was killing time, waiting for one of Morrison’s minions to materialize out of the shimmering desert air and put a bullet through his skull. And yet, as the urban sprawl began to lessen, dying out under the unforgiving Chihuahuan sun, that bullet did not come.
The first few nights, Campbell crashed in hourly-rate fuck pads. However, as he continued down the solitary highway and the urban sprawl gave up more and more ground to the Chihuahuan, these motels grew increasingly infrequent. For miles, there was only the highway, framed by giant satellite towers jutting up on the horizon like crucifixes adorning the Appian Way. Now, as he continued his exodus across the same lands where the Anasazi had once constructed their own culture built on cannibalism, darkness was again pressing down low and hard against the desert, suffocating the light and raising the dead.
Pushing forward, Campbell could hear packs of wild animals gathering on either side of the road, emissaries of the desert nothingness. With little humidity to trap the sun’s warmth, at night the temperature in the Chihuahuan would plummet, tumbling well below freezing. These creatures had spent millennia adapting to the desert’s wild range of temperature; man had yet to do so. He considered turning around and heading back toward the artificial glow on the northern horizon but the sun had already ceded most of its celestial territory to the night and Campbell knew he would freeze to death before he made it back to the settlements. A mile or so up the highway the road seemed to shift right and beyond that, there appeared to be something. And if there wasn’t? Death wouldn’t come from a bullet after all.
A little more than a half hour later, Campbell discovered there was something along the side of the highway after all. Rising from the cracked earth was the skeleton of an abandoned freight yard and although the entire yard was closed off from the main road by a steel fence crowned with barbed wire, the main gate, smashed in years ago, lay broken on the desert floor, its red warning signs covered by sand. The aluminum signs clanked as Campbell forced his body over them; whatever warning they offered applied to a different time. A few yards from the entranceway was a building Campbell presumed had once been the yardmaster tower, a rusty, rectangular two-story building with clapboard siding and a peaked roof that acted as the hub for all freight traffic. Tormented by the desert wind and heat, the tower’s wooden exterior had begun to splinter and crack, the once proud yellow and blue color scheme reduced to variations of a washed out brown. Recently, someone had tagged the side of the building with white graffiti, spraying an asterisk in a circle over the decaying tower façade. As Campbell moved closer to the symbol, he was struck by two observations: The paint was still fresh and the job had been done in a hurry.
A fire escape ran up the back of the yard tower. Campbell trudged to the top of the ladder, then pulled himself onto the roof. From this new vantage point, the abandoned freight yard seemed to extend for miles in every direction, a sprawling industrial relic from a different America than the one he had just fled—dozens of different tracks converging upon the yard from every direction before melting into one massive primary track that ran into the building upon which Campbell now stood. Long dead signal lights constructed beside each track stared back at Campbell. Once upon a time, this freight yard helped subdue an entire continent. Now the continent was exacting its revenge.
Campbell found it difficult to imagine these tracks ever carrying freight trains. Yet, this yard had been a thriving commercial hub; the sheer amount of discarded freight was stunning. Burnt-out boxcars seemed to litter every track, some turned onto their sides, others merely left in the middle of the rails, their doors ajar. Other cars, which Campbell thought were called container cars, had been broken into, their steel bellies breached by some kind of welding tool, their cargo looted long ago.
The sun was now dropping below the horizon, lighting up the entire yard like a pinball machine, the dying sunlight bouncing off every half-buried piece of industrial treasure: steel, iron, and glass asserting their presence with unexpected majesty. As the wind whipped through the mechanical mass grave, it unleashed a mournful whistle. Looking down at his feet, Campbell noticed he was standing on top of another graffiti asterisk, also inside a circle and made with the same hurried strokes as the one grafted onto the side of the tower. A chill swept through Campbell and he wished the massacre he now surveyed was the result of a nuclear holocaust or some great plague; some brand of biblical disaster—real Book of Revelation shit. Instead, the dead eyed signal posts staring up at him were simply the result of neglect, of “number crunching” at some inaccessible corporate level, and of the blunt fact that the world was no longer what it had once been.
Not that Campbell had ever been a sucker for nostalgia: An Ivy League academic—Princeton for undergrad, Harvard for his Ph.D.—Campbell had long considered himself beyond any cheap addiction to cultural revisionism; every American neighborhood in the 1980s wasn’t a fucking John Hughes movie. No time in the past was ever as good or pure as those living in the present recalled it to have been. He understood that change was not only inevitable, but the very means by which species bettered themselves. But despite his deep disdain for those who pined for some make-believe past, Campbell had been unable to shake a sneaking suspicion that here, at the end of the American century, something was going very wrong.
Accompanying this nebulous, nagging dread was a growing disillusionment with his self-styled role as a man of science. Campbell was brilliant and, for a long time, he had surrounded himself, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps not, with men who made sure he never forgot this fact. But as the years began to tumble away, acclaim bred arrogance. The partnership he had joined into with Morrison—that was designed to cure America. Now he wasn’t so sure he didn’t help poison her. Campbell suspected there was something necessary, something vital about the materials left to rot in this industrial depot; they had once formed the foundation of America and now, choosing to reinvent herself for the digital age, she apparently had decided she no longer required their services. This struck Campbell as an extremely dangerous proposition; he was just too exhausted to explain why. But perhaps that was best: He was growing weary of theory and wished he could somehow just reinvent himself like a pop star.
By now, the sun had dropped below the horizon, the last rays of light extinguished as dusk stole across the desert floor. Campbell snapped back to the immediacy of his situation, of the fact the temperature was dropping. He needed to find shelter.
After maneuvering his way back down the same fire escape-cum-exterior stairwell, Campbell cut around the side of the control tower and into the main freight yard. Traces of limestone and coal mingled with broken glass crunch
ed under his feet as he pressed deeper into the yard, scanning the abandoned freight. The boxcars, the ones with the already half-open doors, would be the best bet for shelter, he reasoned.
The desert wind was intensifying, strafing Campbell’s eyeballs with bursts of sand and debris as he struggled to make his way through the train yard. Before he could make it any further, however, his left foot snagged the inside of a train track, catching itself on the intersection of steel and wood. Seconds later, he was tumbling forward, the earth rising up to land a body blow. Campbell’s shoulder took the brunt of the impact, but the unpleasant crash landing was nothing compared to the pain that exploded just above his right kneecap. Campbell screeched in agony. His hands shot down to his knee and when he pulled them away they were sticky with a warm liquid. He was cut. Badly.
As Campbell probed the wound, his fingers closed around something cool, metallic, and very sharp. He looked down: A large rail spike, twisted out of its natural place in the track and curled toward the sky, had helped to break Campbell’s fall. Unfortunately, it had done so by driving itself through Campbell’s calf. It was difficult to discern exactly how deep the wound was, although judging by the amount of blood, it sure as hell wasn’t a paper cut. The pain was excruciating and he realized it was only a matter of moments before he would pass out. Summoning every last bit of will left in his body, Campbell, digging his nails into the desert floor, dragged himself forward, sliding on his belly like a serpent. Pain laced through his leg and Campbell’s consciousness began fading in and out like poor radio reception.
And then he was free of the spike, fresh, hot blood pouring out of the now-gaping wound, splashing out onto the earth as Campbell continued to crawl across the desert floor, gagging as the wind kicked the dust up past his cracked lips before mingling with the cold metallic taste rising in the back of his throat.
The last thing Jonathan Campbell remembered was wriggling toward one of the forgotten boxcars, its sliding side door slightly ajar. Another asterisk in a circle, barely discernable in the last seconds of dusk, was tattooed across its exterior. And then there was nothing but the howl of the wind.
The nightmares came hard and fast, accentuated by the fever-induced delirium gripping Campbell as darkness crashed across the land. Sprawled out on the boxcar floor, the desert winds rattling the freight’s loose steel frame, Campbell spent the night in a haze, crying out as each of the creatures he encountered in Morrison’s lab paraded through his dreamscapes. There were other visions as well; strange men and women creeping across the desert, moving in and out of Campbell’s boxcar, working silently under a starless sky. His left leg was paralyzed with pain and, as a result, Campbell could only lie on the floor, covered in a blanket that may or may not have been in the freight last night, staring up at the side of the car, losing himself in the simplicity of the symbol tagged halfway between the floor and the ceiling. The sharp smell of spray paint permeated the boxcar, or at least Campbell thought it did, and while he recognized that this was probably an important detail, he no longer cared for such complexities and instead was content to slip back into a near-coma as darkness once again descended.
At first, Campbell thought he was having another nightmare. Lashed to an ancient gurney, he was being hustled down a bland adobe-walled corridor while strange men, their features obscured by green surgical masks and 300-watt headlamps, stared down at him. His head, like the rest of his body, was held in place by a thick leather strap so when Campbell screamed, the only ones paying attention were crude images of angels carved into the patchwork ceiling of dried earth and stone. From the corner of his eye, Campbell noticed a flicker of color; the adobe-induced monotony was shattered every few yards by a series of blurred frescos recounting the biblical punishment of Korah. The gurney, uttering terrible mechanical moans as the men in masks cajoled it across the rocky terrain, was held together by several pieces of dirty surgical tape slapped tightly around the essential load-bearing joints, and Campbell wondered if it was going to collapse, prayed it might collapse. The gurney men quickened their pace and everything around Campbell became a blur of light and pale surgical green. Nausea washed over him and just as the gurney slammed its way through a pair of plastic double doors, he lost consciousness again, slipping back into a darkness punctured by blurry images of Aaron swinging an incensor while the earth around him broke apart, swallowing men whole.
Campbell’s eyes shot open, an involuntary response to the pain tearing through his entire lower left side. For a moment, the world was an explosion of hot light, the kind of light that illuminated dentists’ offices and convenience stores at three in the morning. Still strapped to the gurney, Campbell could sense people moving around him, hands passing objects back and forth over his body. He tried to shout out, demanding an explanation for any of the questions racing through his mind, but his mouth felt like it was stuffed with mothballs and his speech dribbled out in a series of whimpers.
A single, massive light bulb dangled five feet above Campbell’s head, engulfing the entire room with its relentless illumination. Two of the men who had pushed the gurney were now hovering over Campbell, one on either side. Seconds later, a third gurney man entered the room pushing a stainless-steel cart, its wheels squeaking as it made its way across the room and toward Campbell. Partitioned by three shelves, each level of the cart was a mess of gauze, syringes, and strange instruments that looked as though they might be useful under the hood of a car. On the top level of the cart was the biggest saw Campbell had ever seen.
“Oh God,” moaned Campbell, sweat cascading down his brow as he thrashed about on top of the gurney like a fish with lungs full of oxygen. The gurney men paid scant attention to these wild movements; his body ravaged by fever, Campbell was no match for the leather bindings securing him to the gurney. Instead, the man closest to Campbell picked a syringe filled with murky brown liquid up off the cart and without warning slammed it into Campbell’s left thigh. Loaded with morphine, the needle pierced a large blue-green vein traversing the length of Campbell’s left leg, instantly flooding him with a twisted euphoria. Seconds later, entranced by the beautiful numbness blooming throughout his entire central nervous system, Campbell passed out.
“You won’t feel a thing,” commented the gurney man closest to Campbell.
And he was right; even when they re-broke the bones in his leg and began scraping away the destroyed ligaments, Campbell never felt a thing.
For several nights, Campbell lingered in chemical twilight, drifting in and out of consciousness. At some point in time, his naked body had been transferred from the gurney to an actual bed and this was where he now found himself, in a massive hall filled with other small beds. The beds were arranged in two rows facing one another with space cleared down the middle. A few gurney men moved about the room, tending to the occupants of each bed. Campbell cried out to them but they ignored him and continued to move back and forth between the various beds. He still had no idea where he was or why he was even still alive, but he was getting tired of other people making that decision for him. He could remember nothing about the past week; everything after the freight yard was a blur. And the people who might be capable of filling in the blanks were in no hurry to do so.
Inhaling sharply, Campbell ripped the IV from his bruised inner arm before swinging his lower half over the edge of the tiny, sweat-soaked mattress. Pressing his right leg down on the cool concrete floor, he pushed his body forward, transferring his weight from right to left as his muscles, dulled by inaction and morphine, returned to life with a series of spasms. And then Campbell was tumbling forward toward another bed, his body refusing to aid him in his escape plan. Throwing his arms out over his face, Campbell braced for the impact, which arrived a half a second later as he landed on top of another patient, bone meeting bone with a sickening crunch. Campbell, the bed’s occupant, and the bed itself all crashed to the floor, an IV stand chasing after them. The other patient was thrashing about under the sheets, screeching incompr
ehensively. Campbell tried to put his hand over the other patient’s face but the man would not stop screaming and now there was movement rippling across the room as other guests of the gurney men, roused by the commotion, began stirring.
Realizing that the already narrow window for escape was about to get a whole lot smaller, but before he could drag himself to his feet, Campbell found himself beneath the other patient, gagging as breath, ragged and rank, exploded in bursts, centimeters from his face. But it wasn’t a man that was on top of Campbell. It was something else, a creature with thick, hairy teeth protruding from where its eyes should have been and a half-developed, puss-caked appendage protruding from the side of its neck. The creature seized Campbell with swollen, six fingered hands, pinning him to the earth as it tried to force speech from its ruined vocal chords.
“Kill…Kill me. Now. Kill. Me. Now. Kill me now,” the creature wheezed.
Screaming, Campbell heaved the monstrosity to the ground and began scrambling backward on his hands. The gurney men were moving toward Campbell, syringes at the ready. Prepared to make a final stand, Campbell attempted once again to pull himself to his feet. It was at this moment, however, when Campbell realized the lower portion of his left leg was covered in blood-soaked gauze. He stopped screaming and just collapsed.
A needle pricked the back of Campbell’s neck but he barely felt it. The creature was still crying out to Campbell as the gurney men dragged it away because it knew, just as he knew, that they were kin. Campbell was the father, and the creature, the creature was the son; two members of the same terrible brood born deep below Morrison Biotechnology.