Kingdom (33 page)

The scene played over and over in his head, low-grade video with static-y audio, like some YouTube clip stuck on repeat: His father was in an enormous hyper-modern hotel suite
—
lots of hideous paintings and muted tones, aesthetic forever divorced from function. But that was all on the periphery and vaguely out of focus: Whoever was directing this clip seemed most interested in Dylan’s father, who was slumped in some overly formal black stuffed chair and gripping a glass of scotch and melting ice cubes so tightly that Dylan wondered why it hadn’t shattered, cutting his father and sending the watered-down scotch to the cold black tile. His dad appeared older than Dylan had ever remembered him looking: huge black circles, cracked skin, and a five- or six-day-old beard
—
the old man never had stubble. He was wearing suit pants with dark socks and a white undershirt, which wouldn’t have been that unusual except Dylan could count on one hand the times he had seen his father in an undershirt. It was his father and it wasn’t: This man was only a shadow, an approximation of Senator Robert Fitzgerald. But that was how it had been in those last weeks. And that was something Dylan would never forget
.

His father wasn’t alone in the hotel room; there was someone else, someone off camera at the moment. This person was speaking; Dylan could make out pitch and tone: muffled, garbled snippets of speech but no actual words. Dylan wanted to fast-forward the scene, to get to the end
—
he was getting very cold
—
but the director was insisting on pacing. And then his father was struggling out of the chair, pointing to the person off camera, raw hatred radiating through the old man’s bloodshot eyes. The senator was on his feet
—
unsteady, but standing nonetheless, his nose starting to bleed
—
and then the glass of scotch was flying across the room, shattering against some unseen wall, object, person, mirror
—
it didn’t matter because seconds later Dylan knew what would happen: His old man would pull out a gun, suck on the barrel, pull the trigger. He’d been watching this rerun for years. But then something was changed: There had been a last-second rewrite and instead of reaching for a gun under the chair, his father just stared off screen, a profound sadness settling across the man before Michael Morrison walked into the shot, pumped a single bullet into his father’s head, wiped the handle for prints, and then placed the gun in his father’s hand
.

Dylan came to on the side of the road soaked and screaming, tangled in the machine that used to be his father’s motorcycle, huge chunks of hail still blasting from the sky. It was pouring rain and his right leg was ripped up, but nothing felt broken. Still, the bike was ruined and he needed to wrap up his leg—not to mention the fact that the hail seemed to be getting bigger,
sharper, and one direct hit might send him back into unconsciousness. He dragged himself to his feet, his weight shifted onto his left leg. He tried to take the bike but it was too much and so, still trembling from the crash, Dylan left it along the side of the road as he began to scan the area for shelter, the image of Michael Morrison executing his father looping through his frontal lobe as he staggered north.

Ten minutes later, Dylan saw it: a solitary structure coming into view on the side of the empty highway. The place looked closed but he’d have to take a chance: The storm was showing no signs of letting up and his iPhone wasn’t getting any reception, let alone email, texts, or Internet—even if he wanted to contact someone, he couldn’t get through. His leg was bleeding badly and tonight wasn’t the night to find out how much blood loss was too much.

A jagged streak of lightening slashed the clouds overhead, throwing a momentary burst of light across the land and through this light Dylan could make out a series of gas pumps and the vague outline of a service station. He was moving as fast as he could but it wasn’t fast enough—the hail was coming harder, the rain falling faster and for a moment Dylan was sure he wouldn’t make it, that this is where his life would end: no resolution, no purpose, no meaning. He lifted his head back and felt the hail bouncing off his face; he tasted the rain’s acid tinge, that strange battery flavor that reminded him of elementary school calculators and discarded circuit boards, of the color brown, and Dylan just let the pain course through him: no barriers, either physical or chemical. In between thunderclaps, Dylan heard an ominous, metallic ding. He looked up and, to his surprise, he was standing in the parking lot of a service station.

Rising a little more than 10 feet off the ground, a steel totem pole offered all the information a potential consumer might require: On the top of the pole was a dented aluminum sign, maybe 8 by 10, informing Dylan that he had arrived at Joe’s Gas-n-Go; further down the totem were four smaller signs, each proclaiming the price of a different grade of gasoline. The one on the bottom, diesel, had been gnawed away by something or someone so only the number nine was discernable. But the strange teeth marks were the least of Dylan’s concerns; it had been a very long time since this service station had been in operation—unleaded gas hadn’t cost $3.50 a gallon in at least five years.

Dylan made his way across the desolate filling station parking lot, past a series of pumps, each identified by a number, one through 13. Several of
the pumps had been stripped: all the parts gone—steel, aluminum, copper—removed with something less than technological acumen, an operation performed quickly under chemical duress—the onset of methamphetamine withdrawal didn’t lend itself to mechanical precision. Most of the parts were probably in some Tiber City pawn shop but that wasn’t Dylan’s concern so he kept on moving, past the pumps until he reached the glass door that served as the main entrance to Joe’s Gas-n-Go.

Knocking on the glass door would be pointless: The lights were off and likely had been for a while. So Dylan grabbed the curled silver handle and pulled, his flesh sticking to the frozen steel, wondering if maybe he might catch a break—that whoever had closed the store last had forgotten to lock it, had maybe been so preoccupied with some pussy waiting in an idling pickup in the parking lot that they just dashed out, allowing the door to swing shut on its own. Or maybe it was some sort of genuine political preoccupation—not that pussy waiting in an idling pickup wasn’t a valid distraction—with rumors of wars and pending global economic collapse whispered across anonymous Internet message boards and late-night talk radio. But regardless of the cause, the end result would have been the same: an unlocked door that no one ever returned to secure. But when he pulled on the handle the door held firm—someone had locked the door on the way out—and while he had expected this, Dylan felt a stab of anxiety. Why lock the door if you weren’t coming back?

Whoever ran this place, this tiny outpost for refugees from the Jungle, long-haul truckers, and 24/7 tweakers—what happened to that person? Death? Disease? Disinterest? Just another lost soul swallowed whole by the blur of modern life? Then again, thought Dylan, what did it matter? He could ponder every existential question ever posed and the door would still be fucking locked; hail stinging his exposed skin; his father still slain. Excessive rumination at the expense of action was the primary source of his current predicament: If he had acted sooner, if he had just refused to accept the lull of Tiber City life, maybe he could have at least saved his mother.

“There’s gotta be another way inside,” Dylan murmured as he limped away from the door, working his way around the side of the building toward the back, ignoring the lights winking at him from the horizon—lights that promised high-speed connections, endless streams of data, fresh content, on-demand everything; need, desire, want, want, want; yeah there’s an app for that; all sustaining the illusion that your opinion mattered, that your personal
preferences were unique to the point of being revolutionary, that these huge towers of titanium and steel and fiber optics were monuments to you.

He turned the corner and discovered a series of double-doors lining the rear of the service station but these were also locked, as was the triple-bay garage behind the station. To the right of the garage, Dylan spotted another sign that this service station had been abandoned for a very long time: A decaying red dumpster adorning the rear of the property was overflowing with corroded scraps of metal and mortar. A gust of wind exploded across the landscape, propelling hail and rain like buckshot. The large sign in front of the gas station was moving in a strange, arrhythmic jerk, creaking and moaning as the wind blasted past. There was another noise as well: a strange crunching sound that at first Dylan thought was the hail hammering the earth, ricocheting off the bits of metal punching up out of the dumpster and toward the sky, but the noise began to grow louder and Dylan realized it wasn’t hail—it was something else, a desperate, frenzied clawing coming from inside the steel dumpster, the sound of a rat, or maybe something bigger, maybe the thing that had taken the chunk out of the diesel gas sign, trying to work its way up through the labyrinth of forgotten scrap, its nest of manganese and iridium under siege from the hail. As the air from the Jungle drifted up into these old mill towns, even Nature began turning against her own, lashing out with indiscriminate fury.

A wave of anxiety swept over Dylan and he pulled out his iPhone, ready to call Meghan or Mikey or Chase or even a fucking taxi to take him to the hospital, let someone else take care of him, and after he got out, book a flight to Mykonos or Malta; somewhere, anywhere warm, maybe develop a hip little heroin addiction, try to forget everything—he felt himself beginning to crumble under the weight of the questions swirling around him, of the decisive action his father’s journal commanded. And so Dylan began moving his finger across the phone’s touch screen but before he could decide whom to call the tiny bars in the corner of the screen that indicated reception strength vanished.

“Motherfucker,” Dylan screamed, slamming the phone back into his pocket: eight gigs of music, two hours of high-definition digital video, a personal GPS, and a 24/7 concierge—fucking useless. Exhaling as the pain in his right leg mushroomed, Dylan tried to focus: He needed shelter and he needed it now. Locked or not, his only option was the gas-and-go; he was going to have to find a way inside.

There were several pieces of corroded metal jutting out of the dumpster, some intersecting others horizontally, like makeshift metal crosses. Dylan took hold of one of the horizontal pieces of metal and after shifting all his weight to his left leg, pulled hard. It didn’t budge. Dylan pulled again and again, trying to wiggle the piece free, cursing and shaking the metal as he tried to balance on his one good leg.

Slamming his palm down on the side of the dumpster, Dylan howled in frustration. If he could only get one of the pieces free, he could use it to pry the door to the service station open. But the metal held firm and Dylan’s body ached in ways he never imagined it could—he was exhausted; the pain in his left leg was increasing with every movement, and his brain felt like an overheated circuit board, sparking and smoldering as the CPU demanded more than which it was capable. Tilting his head toward the sky, Dylan felt the sting of the hail as tears began to stream down his face. He opened his mouth to scream again but this time no sound came out. Instead, Dylan felt the world recede, the mundane replaced by hyper-real awareness of the glow of Tiber City in the distance, of the dark sky above, of the rain, of the hail, but he wasn’t just aware of these things—they weren’t just set pieces in a play: There was some connection, some reason that seemed so close that if he just focused, just concentrated a little harder, he might be able to comprehend. He wondered if he was dying, if he had survived the overdose and the motorcycle crash just to drop dead next to some rancid dumpster behind an abandoned gas station.