Kingdom (27 page)

Campbell wanted to pause, investigate the equipment, the data from the brain scans, but Jael kept moving, not even acknowledging the instruments and monitors, stalking the corridors without a sound, never looking back, using hand signals to beckon Campbell forward, back, left, right, hurry the fuck up. So Campbell kept moving, propelled by an awkward half-jog half-stagger as he tied to keep up, dodging through the camp’s hallways and storage areas, past the kitchen and monks’ barracks. The place was empty, but the smell was growing more intense.

Finally he hit the entrance to the camp’s main room. The lock wasn’t just broken—the entire door was gone, the hinges smashed and useless, a gaping black hole left in its wake. Campbell leaned back against the side of the hallway and dry heaved. The smell had become almost unbearable. But Jael plunged forward into the darkened room, leaving Campbell with little choice but to follow.

The room was dark save for a single florescent ceiling panel flickering on and off, the room vibrating with an electric hum as it labored to fulfill its single reason for existence, but like everything else it was damaged so the lighting was inconstant and weak: shadow followed by rapid bursts of illumination followed by shadow. And it was through one of these sudden bursts that Campbell saw the source of the stench: human corpses, at least a dozen, probably more, all wearing the tattered remnants of pale green surgical scrubs, laid stacked in the middle of the room.

Jael was standing over the pile, her face frozen in horror as she sunk to her knees. The lighting continued to flash on and off, the massacre revealing itself in bursts of weak light as Campbell stumbled into the room. He had witnessed his share of human cruelty and slaughter: He had seen terrible things in the labs of Morrison Biotechnology; he had spent years drifting through the American underground. He had watched dozens of children suffer and die in Camp Ramoth. But this was different—each of the dead gurney men had been expertly tortured. Large swaths of skin had been peeled away from each of the bodies, the exposed muscles and bone dosed with chemicals; limbs had been severed, the wounds cauterized to prevent the victims from dying too quickly. Worst of all, however, was the sound of thousands of white maggots feeding on the mangled, mutilated flesh that once constituted human beings. The sound of mindless insects swarming over one
another—like someone churning a vat of cottage cheese—seemed to amplify by the second, growing louder and louder in Campbell’s mind as he staggered toward Jael, who was still kneeling beside the pile of bodies. One burst of light showed her lips moving in prayer.

There were other bodies as well: A row of cots lined each wall and while some were empty, others still held their occupants—all children—each of whom seemed to have been executed by a single bullet to the brain. Although they bore no signs of torture, the children in these beds had suffered—their bodies riddled with deformities and puss-cakes lesions. IVs and surgical carts stood like silent sentries over the dead.

From somewhere behind him, Campbell heard Jael scream: not in fear but anger, a rage so sharp and clear it sent a chill down his spine. He turned in the direction of the scream and that’s when he saw it—past the pile of bodies and maggots, past the corpses in their hospital beds, toward the back of the room. A man, also wearing the tattered green hospital rags, had been crucified against the far wall.

Crossing the room, every step accompanied by a sickening splash, the bottom of his pants soaked crimson, Campbell approached the crucified man, the sloshing of maggots seemingly synched to the hum of electricity as the lights continued to cut in and out.

The man—well into his 60s with longish gray hair, thin but not fragile—was pinned to the concrete wall by three steel spikes: one driven through his right heel, another through the left heel, the last entering through the palm of his left hand at an angle, exiting through the wrist and into the wall. Although there had been a fourth spike driven through the palm of the right hand, it had torn loose, bone and sinew sliding forward, over the head of the spike and away from the wall, and now the man’s right arm dangled awkwardly at his side, blood still running from the entry and exit wounds.

Campbell stood motionless in front of the crucified man, frozen by a combination of terror and helplessness. The man was still alive. His breathing was shallow and ragged, punctured every few seconds by an agonized gurgle as his hyper-extended lungs filled with blood. Given the amount blood on the floor, on the wall, soaking the man’s body, it was a miracle he was still drawing breath.

The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and his entire body began to spasm: his chest pressing forward as his one free arm reached toward Campbell. The nail had smashed through muscle and tendon, leaving a hole in his
palm the size of nickel framed by the jagged edges of shattered bone. His other three limbs strained against the nails pinning him to the wall, every muscle in his body jerking and twitching as his mouth began to open and close, each time slamming shut with a violence that reminded Campbell of a malfunctioning hydraulic press. As the man’s jaws burst apart yet again, his face contorted as he tried to generate the strength to communicate, Campbell realized the man’s tongue was gone—gone as in had been ripped out of his mouth; a thrashing pink nub, loose strands of muscle dangling in the back of his mouth, the only evidence this man had ever been able to taste, to speak, to communicate.

Campbell took a step closer, now standing only centimeters from the trembling fingertips of the man’s ruined right hand that continued to reach toward Campbell, straining to convey what his mouth could not. The crucified man’s eyes reflected a physical agony unlike any Campbell had ever seen, a pain that seemed to be amplified beyond any natural limits by his inability to cry out, to express this suffering. And then the man began shaking as another violent seizure ripped through his body, his ribs pressing so hard against his flesh that, one by one, they began to crack with a sad, defeated crunch. His mouth was still pumping open and shut, trying to speak, the fact that his tongue had been removed lost somewhere in neurological translation.

The man finally lost any control he had over his broken body: His head began snapping back and forth as his bowels emptied onto the hard concrete. The trickle of blood dribbling out of the man’s mouth became a steady stream and, like a man electrocuted, his entire body began convulsing in a final massive spasm, so violent Campbell was convinced that the nails pinning the man to the wall would not withstand the pressure.

A single shot rang out and the man’s chest exploded, spraying Campbell with a crimson mist, small bits of flesh and bone flying into his open mouth as he tried to scream. He whipped around just in time to see Jael squeeze off another shot—he felt the heat from the bullet as it whizzed past his ear; he heard the sound the bullet made when it hit its target: the center of the man’s forehead. Gore exploded, splattering across the wall behind the man; spraying out across Campbell’s face.

Jael was screaming, emptying the rest of the clip into the ceiling, squeezing the trigger over and over even after the last round was gone, the empty chamber clicking uselessly. Neither she nor Campbell saw al-Salaam slip out
from the shadows in the corner of the room; by the time they realized they were no longer alone, al-Salaam’s blade was sliding across Jael’s throat, severing her carotid artery with a single movement. Jael went down in a hail of crimson, dropping to her knees first, her face twisted with rage as she brought he hands to her throat before collapsing face down on the concrete, gurgling and grunting as her heart stopped beating.

Al-Salaam turned toward Campbell, smiling as he stepped over Jael’s still-twitching body.

And then the cell phone tucked in Campbell’s pocket began to ring.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” al-Salaam asked, gesturing at Campbell’s pocket with his bloody blade. “Answer it.”

Wiping the blood off his face with one hand, Campbell flipped open the cell phone with the other, and raised the handset to his ear.

“Hello Jonathan. Its Michael,” the caller said. “I think you and I need to talk.”

Tiber City–Havenport
Sept. 5, 2015
7:22 p.m.

B
orne by his father’s old Harley Davidson XL50 1200, Dylan sped through Tiber City’s industrial sprawl. Meghan was sitting behind him, her arms wrapped around his waist, her hair flying loose as dusk fell across the burnt-out landscape.

As they swung away from the city’s core, towering skyscrapers gave way to a mixture of nondescript midsized office buildings that in turn yielded to empty lots and dead factories left to rot in abandoned industrial parks where, one time or another, there had been a plan, an idea, but now there was only cracked concrete and ragged weeds fertilized by glittering broken glass. It had been years since Dylan visited his family’s beach house and the path out of the city had changed: His father used to lead the family through the labyrinth of on-ramps and off-ramps and mergers and lane closures and massive eighteen-wheelers blasting down the highway. Now Dylan was trying to remember the way; Meghan’s grip around his waist tightening every time he had to cut across several lanes to make an exit, horns blaring. He remembered his old man guiding the family SUV by memory; Dylan had to switch on the bike’s GPS system but even that was useless: The streets and alleyways
were forever shifting, mutating in accordance with the dying city’s erratic rhythm; buildings melting into one another in a frenzy of underground mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers, outsourcing, and corporate restructuring. Collapsed buildings swallowed up entire avenues; whole industries would explode on Monday only to vanish by the following Sunday, fortunes won and lost in a matter of hours, a matter of keystrokes, random fragments of data on a server in Bonn the only evidence this vanished wealth ever existed. No matter how many of their steel suns cluttered the sky, these satellite-mapping services couldn’t keep up. Eventually, the GPS tracker crashed, leaving Dylan with no choice but to aim the bike east, away from the fading sunlight and toward the coast.

Located a few miles off Havenport’s boarded-up main drag, the Fitzgeralds’ beach house had been his father’s sanctuary from the pressures of public life, a place for the family to regroup before the grueling campaign seasons. The Fitzgerald retreat, as the press liked to call it, was sealed off from the outside world by a 15-foot, ivy-coated brick wall, complete with two wrought-iron gates that locked in the middle and were controlled by a password-protected guard box at the foot of the quarter-mile-long gravel driveway.

It had been at least five years since Dylan had been to the beach house, maybe more. There were the promises around Christmas: next summer,
that
would be the summer that he and his mother would invite their extended family down to the house for a long weekend but those long weekends never materialized because when the next summer rolled around there was always one other party Dylan had to be at, always some other girl, some other group of people doing something—summer weddings upstate, lost weekends in Vegas; it didn’t matter what, there was always something, and Dylan was just drifting.

Gazing up at his father’s house from just outside the main gate, his motorcycle idling, a flood of images came rushing over those brick walls, threatening to overwhelm him with the emotions they triggered. Memories Dylan thought he had sealed away years ago now ripped free from their chemically constructed confines; his father showing him how to break in a baseball glove with oil and twine, his mother teaching him how to read under the brilliant canopy that seemed to form a green halo over the entire
property. Dylan shut his eyes, trying to recall some of the prayers his mother had taught him when he was younger—any of the prayers—but the words just swirled about in his brain, lost to the amnesia of adulthood. The God that once seemed so real to the little boy growing up behind the walls of the Fitzgerald estate had long since given away to the more easily accessible and—for a socially conscious East Coast scion—more acceptable gods of whiskey, cocaine, and 19-year-old pussy.

It took Meghan’s hand on his shoulder to jar him back to the present.

“You all right?” she asked over the noise of the engine. “Look, even if the numbers and the address on the Heffernan flyer are bullshit, it’s good we’re out of the city. You need some rest. And it’d be nice to spend some time together without all the bullshit.”

Dylan nodded. He knew she was right but rest was the last thing on his mind. There were too many questions, too many uncertainties. He leaned over and punched the access code into the black security box outside the gate. The tiny digital display flashed red. Dylan frowned and re-entered the code, this time with greater force, as if extra emphasis was what had been missing in the first place. The display flashed red again and Dylan slapped the side of the box.