Kingdom (21 page)

A fashion runway jutted out from behind a curtain covering the back wall of the massive warehouse, cleaving its way through the glitterati and
gilded starfuckers gathered on either side. The ceiling above the runway looked like the nest of some mechanical monster: titanium girders running in every direction to form the foundation for a giant overhead conveyer system; clusters of black wires and steel chains filled the gaps between girders. At the end of several of these chains, giant meat hooks dangled above the assembled masses, carrying female fashion models, one after the other—naked, motionless and covered in bruises and blood that may or may not have been fake—the length of the runway before snapping to a halt at the end of the platform. The conveyor belt then let out a mechanical hiss that was audible even over the music and the hooks jerked the models right, then, immediately, left in a perfect re-creation of an end-of-the-runway pose, the girls, hands on hips, staring into the crowd with open, expressionless eyes but no one was paying attention even though it was difficult to tell how exactly the girls were attached to the hooks—the lighting rose and fell in rhythm with the music and each time Dylan tried to figure it out the room again plunged into darkness and the next model was rolling down the runway, her eyes perfect reflections of oblivion.

Exhausted, Dylan stumbled back from the edge of the platform, crumpling onto one of the many black leather couches that formed a loose square around several glass tables. Chase and Mikey were lost in the crowd and now Dylan found himself pressed next to several young looking Japanese girls all wearing tiny pink backpacks lined with white fur. One wearing too much eye shadow and purple lipstick, white knee socks and tiny pink ribbons in her jet black hair, offered Dylan a shy smile. On her spray-tanned wrist was a bracelet made of alternating pastel beads, the kind that look edible, the pattern broken only by a series of white beads in the middle, each with a letter, the combination of which was meant by the manufacturer to spell her name but instead read W-H-O-R-E. He wondered how old she was. Maybe 16? Maybe younger? He looked away, the dark, pulsing trance continuing to swirl around him.

There was a massive line of coke sitting on the table in front of him; he wasn’t sure who had cut the line and he didn’t really care—he just leaned over and, pressing his left nostril shut, snorted the entire thing. When Dylan pulled his head back, blood fell from his nose, crashing into the table in front of him, blurring his reflection. With a trembling finger, Dylan reached down and began to trace a picture, outlining his skull, then adding two eyes and a twisted smile. The blood was beginning to flow a little more freely now. He
wondered if maybe he’d broken something. Several carefully wound hundred dollar bills lay scattered about the table. He wondered if he even cared. His heart was hammering his rib cage and one of the Japanese girls was saying something else to him but all he could think about were those eyes: Jack Heffernan’s eyes. And not just the ones watching the entire city from skyscrapers and video monitors but the eyes captured by the news footage of the IDD riot, the ones that reflected the same nothingness staring back at him from the blood splattered glass table in front of him. He should have looked up that address, he thought. There’s something wrong with the coke, he thought.

And then the Japanese girl was saying something to him. At first he thought she told him that there was an ancient belief that photographs could steal their subject’s soul and that was why she tried to avoid paparazzi—at least when practical, she stressed, or at least he thought she stressed, but the music was loud; he could have misunderstood and she seemed to sense this, to sense his confusion and lean closer, and he could see her lip gloss glisten, light reflecting off the strobe from the dance floor, and then she was saying something about wanting to suck his cock but again he wasn’t certain because his nose was really bleeding and the world was starting to turn a little fuzzy and that was not what good coke did: Good coke made everything clean and tight and shiny and bright—adjectives that in no way captured his present situation.

He tried again to get up but he couldn’t and the Japanese girl kept turning to her friend and giggling. The sound grated on Dylan, and he was really sweating now, the world coming in and out and back into focus as the music in the warehouse began to rise toward another frenzied peak, strobe lights spinning through the dark and although he wasn’t sure if the girls were giggling about the blood, or about sucking his cock, or even why they would giggle with the vacant outline of his face—the one traced with his own blood—staring back at the room he couldn’t focus: At this point he was just trying not to pass out. His thoughts spiraled out of control: cocaine-blood paparazzi whore celebrity vanish designers father lights information meghan.

It was at that moment Dylan realized he was overdosing, but as the lights from the club reflected off his blue eyes, making them glow ghostly silver, the music continuing to climb toward a moment—toward
the moment
—he simply did not give a fuck. He finally felt like he got his old man, finally understood why the motherfucker pulled the trigger. Staring straight ahead
at nothing, he lurched to his feet, laughing a soft, sick laugh as he moved toward a glowing red sign he thought was an exit but then someone was calling out to him, warning him that it wasn’t an exit and then he was falling forward, crashing through the glass table into utter nothingness.

He was his father’s son.

Tiber City: Jungle District
Sept. 3, 2015
2:27 a.m.

O
nce upon a time, the motel bed on which Campbell now lay on had been stiff as the lid of a freshly cut coffin. However, after more than a decade of service, the mattress—a virtual Jackson Pollock of piss, blood, and semen—teetered on collapse. The springs and coils were shot; the passing years had seen too many dull-eyed whores moaning canned porno lines while cranked up johns railed away. The busted springs didn’t bother Campbell; the hourly rates splashed across the neon sign out front led him to expect as much. No, what pissed him off was the junkie sag, the section of the mattress where smack heads must have lain for days, shooting up with the same dirty needle, into the same collapsed vein, before, during, and after pissing and shitting all over themselves. Such occupants only got out of bed for two reasons: Pizza guy was at the door or they were out of smack. And occasionally even such blessed events were not enough to rouse the junkies—overdoses made getting out of bed real tough. In such instances, they would just lay in the motel room for days, their rigor mortis ridden bodies sinking a little deeper into the flame retardant rayon, sunken eyes staring at reruns of
All In The Family
while the neighbors bitched through the crumbling
concrete and plaster wall about the smell: These were the images dancing through Campbell’s dreamscapes the past few evenings as he lay on a motel bed somewhere in the teeming, anonymous slums that were the Jungle, his own feverish body already reshaping the sheet-less, shattered mattress in his own ruined image.

On the third night, when Campbell came to a little after sunset, stripped to the waist and slick with sweat, he tried to take inventory of the situation. The last thing he recalled was the inferno engulfing Sweeney’s bar, the ceiling beams collapsing around him as the whole universe seemed to bow before the flame. By any account, he should have been dead. Instead, there was just a lot of blood, a hell of a lot of blood, but, so far as Campbell could tell, nothing was broken and he almost certainly was not dead. Were he dead, his environ would be a lot hotter. Then again, maybe he was dead but someone had cut him some slack and this was only purgatory. Languishing in a seedy motel for a few millennia while the Big Bureaucracy upstairs reviewed his case? Not exactly paradise but given Campbell’s previous predilection for the mortal variety of sin, such treatment wouldn’t have come out of left field.

For the time being, however, Campbell was sticking with the assumption he was still a terrestrial being, attributing his survival to yet another side effect of the Treatment: abnormally resilient bone structure. This made sense: Living to 120 wouldn’t do much good if your hips were brittle as a gingerbread house. So when he fell over the railing and onto the floor of Sweeney’s bar—a tumble that would have killed most men his age—he walked away with only a few nasty bruises. Not that it didn’t hurt like all hell; he just wouldn’t die, which, at the moment, didn’t feel like such a good trade-off.

But the pain wasn’t even the worst part of the deal: Without somewhat regular injections of the Treatment, those pains would pale in comparison to the agony of withdrawal symptoms. And therein lay perhaps another problem: His last batch of the Treatment’s black market approximation Jael had procured for him had been in his room above Sweeney’s bar.

Groping over the edge of the filthy mattress, Campbell’s sweaty, swollen fingers discovered a nightstand. A plastic whiskey bottle, streaked with condensation, lay on its side on the middle of the stand, right next to a compact cell phone that did not belong to Campbell. He wasn’t sure how either the phone or bottle got there; hell, he didn’t even know how he came to occupy a very used mattress in some anonymous fuck pad miles away from his last
memory—Jael dragging his sorry ass out of Lazarus bar just before the whole thing collapsed in a massive inferno.

But Campbell felt way too fucked up to try and answer such questions; he was simply glad he—or maybe Jael—had the good sense to purchase plastic: Glass bottles and memory blackouts were a bitch. Eyes shut tight against the pain, Campbell yanked the mystery bottle off the table and raised it to his blood-caked lips. Cheap, piss-warm whiskey flooded his mouth, careening past his esophagus as smoothly as discarded motor oil. There was a gaping socket along Campbell’s lower gum line that had once upon a time housed a molar or two. Now only the raw nerve endings remained, jutting out into his oral cavity, twitching furiously as the whiskey washed over them. Campbell gagged, but shoved the bottle further into his mouth. Not too much, he cautioned himself; just enough to get yourself together.

A bottle of pills, initially concealed by the whiskey bottle, was also on the nightstand—an ancient, “some assembly required” piece of shit covered in nicks and tattooed with knife grooves—next to the bed. Even as the whiskey slithered through his system, that warm familiar feeling extending its way from his gut to his extremities, announcing the alcohol’s arrival, Campbell’s pain continued to grow, until another blackout seemed inevitable.

Shooting up from the motel mattress like a reanimated corpse, Campbell grabbed the bottle and tore off the lid, the plastic seal still bound around its edges. He dumped several—maybe even a dozen (it was too dark to even bother counting)—colorful capsules into his right hand.

“Down you go,” Campbell muttered to the darkness as he catapulted the painkillers into his mouth. A splash of whiskey sent the pills ricocheting off his pharynx before the mess of medicine and alcohol cascaded into his belly. If he didn’t go into a coma, the pain would stop. The. Pain. Would. Stop.

For an instant, these words were all Campbell could focus on, lighting up his brain like the flickering neon lights outside his window. Somewhere in the distance, a chopper slung low across the city’s grid, stalking Tiber City’s Jungle district, its searchlight glued to the back alleys, the city’s unseen arteries, its dying slums where government housing projects were begun and then forgotten and then begun again, concrete stacked on top of concrete, shantytowns built on top of shantytowns, buildings stacked like corpses in a concentration camp. The search beam cut through the blinds, bathing the room in a bright white light as the chopper wheeled around, preparing to make another pass, continuing its hunt for some motherfucker whose dog/car/plasma
screen television told him—downright
insisted
upon it if you wanted to know the truth—that he slaughter the teenage girl who lived next door after raping her for several agonizing hours. And this was the world Campbell had, once upon a time in the New Mexican desert, sought to save.

Vertigo set in and Campbell knew Yeats was right, that the center could not—would not—hold and that all was lost. That men like Michael Morrison, having flung the meek down several flights of the socio-economic stairwell, were now first in line to inherit the earth, whether God liked it or not.

Morrison
. The name reverberated through Campbell’s skull like the thunder of heavy artillery. How was he, lying half-naked, barely alive, and soaked in whiskey on the floor of a junkie flop pad, going to stop Michael Morrison? A leveraged buy-out? Perhaps Campbell would just place a call to his broker, try and buy up all outstanding shares of Morrison Biotech. Despite the pain in his jaw, Campbell could not help but laugh out loud at the idea of himself standing before the board of Morrison Biotech, looking sharp in a new three piece pinstripe suit and proclaiming himself the new CEO; he’d be dead before he got within 100 miles of that place. Or maybe not: At the moment Morrison seemed far more interested in dragging Campbell back to Exodus—literally; hell, there was a reason Morrison’s thug at the bar was carrying a syringe rather than a semi.

The helicopter made another run over the industrial graveyard, the illumination from its searchlight, amplified by the neon of the Jungle night, again breaching the motel room’s twisted Venetian blinds with ease. As the light raced across the room, Campbell caught a glimpse of the entire room as reflected in the cracked mirror hanging above the dresser where the television might once have been. That’s when he saw it: Carved into the back of the door was the symbol of the Order: an asterisk in a circle. And in the middle of that sign, nailed like the Wittenberg theses, was a large manila envelope.