The Kingdom of Heaven

By 19

The war had ended six years before his birth.

The world it left behind was a colorless place of sporadic electricity. The government was a distant shell, a thin mask for a rotting face. Any reference to democracy was lip service. They still held joke elections. Nobody cared.

People lived in huddled little towns that ruled themselves. Most were securely rooted in a post-war brand of Christianity. There were strange new laws. Each township was its own dangerous game, but necessities like cash, food, and medical attention were often unavailable anywhere else.

He lived a double life. Like many others, he would travel from place to place, living in towns, saving up cash and supplies, then fleeing out into the wilderness until necessity drove him back into the maw of society again.

You either followed the local laws of behavior, or you left.

Quietly.

In the dead of night.

And you drove fast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 19
• Release date: Apr 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311695185

19

I am quite male, quite gay, quite unsafe for work.I am quite fond of androgynous boys, spaceships, exquisitely constructed gore, well-written horror, sushi, cats, poisonous plants, classic cars, goth/industrial, vinyl you wear, vinyl you listen to, pointy shiny things, and beer.I write to construct unspeakably beautiful evil, because I've already eaten all of that I can find, and Earth definitely needs more.Your mother would not like me or the terrible things I write, and she would not let you trick-or-treat at my house.

Book preview

BOOK ONE:

STAR

(1)

They almost got him.

The sun was setting straight ahead of him, glaring on miles and miles of sand, scruffy little bushes, brown grass and patchwork highway. He was trying to shield his eyes with his hand, trying to ignore the ominous scraping coming from the truck's ancient engine, trying to tell desert from road.

An amputated handcuff still dangled from his right wrist, the chain clattering occasionally against the steering wheel. Above it, his arm was decorated with just-scabbed cuts, long, shallow, swerving gashes.

There were two of them. They never traveled alone. Two battered Buick police cars, the lettering sloppily whited over, black crosses spraypainted on both doors, the hoods, signifying the new kind of police.

One of them was inches behind him, the other walling him on the right. Through his passenger-side window he could see the cup of one headlight gaping empty, the grille splattered with dark stains that weren't mud.

His throat burned, his hands clotted into fists on the steering wheel. He stared straight ahead, into the sun.

Two days left, maybe not even that, and they get me now.

The current slang for them was the thoughtpolice. If they thought you'd look better dead, they wouldn't hesitate to test the theory. They were wolves. Anyone alone out in the wilderness was easy prey.

He didn't have a gun. Didn't have a knife. He was six-foot three, not bad in a fight, but this wouldn't be a fight.

Adrenaline shook him hard. He was freezing to death here, in the middle of the fucking desert.

They wouldn't turn the lights on. No flashing, no sirens. Just a hard slam, grinding metal and the truck mangled in the sand, hands dragging him out through the shrapnel into the bloodred light.

The one behind him swerved by, just kissing his bumper hard enough to jolt him into making a small frightened sound.

Then, they roared past him.

He watched them, his eyes watering, until the skein of road pulled them ahead of him into specks, then over the horizon.

He coaxed the truck off the road, rattled along for a few feet and cut the ignition, even though he wasn't certain it would start again. The sun was a blinding sliver on the horizon The shadows were already miles long, blurring together into night.

He listened to the engine, hissing and ticking, listened to the desert spread out vast around him. He cried a little, for the space of two breaths. The sound of it was so ugly and small he stopped, ashamed.

They could have had me, he thought. He wrestled the door open in a fit of claustrophobia, climbed out and let it creak closed. He climbed up into the cab and sat with his back against the rear window.

He groped in his pocket for a crumpled Camel box, took out a half- smoked joint, lit it with a bent match.

He drew in deep green smoke, staring out into the desert.

It was still dark when he woke. He was lucky. The engine turned over on his fourth try. It wailed and rattled its way into awkward stumbling life, ground into gear, and scraped back onto the highway.

The floor of the passenger side was crowded with an array of gas cans. More of them were empty than full.

The war had ended six years before his birth.

The world it left behind was a colorless place of sporadic electricity. The government was a distant shell, a thin mask for a rotting face. Any reference to democracy was lip service. They still held joke elections. Nobody cared.

People lived in huddled little towns that ruled themselves. Most were securely rooted in a post-war brand of Christianity. There were strange new laws. Each township was its own dangerous game, but necessities like cash, food, and medical attention were often unavailable anywhere else.

Underneath this narrow world a subculture existed, of those who could not or would not live under such limitations. There were careful rules followed by those who lived outside of the organized townships. In this shadowspace that offered the only freedom left on Earth, you lived by who you knew, or who would speak for you.

Most pariahs lived a double life. They would travel from place to place, living in towns, saving up cash and supplies, then fleeing out into the wilderness until necessity drove them back into the maw of society again.

You either followed the local laws of behavior, or you left.

Quietly.

In the dead of night.

And you drove fast.

He had, of course, doubted the directions Jordan had given him.

Take Route 66 past Dunwich. Couple hundred miles later, you'll see a big cliff, dead white like somebody scraped it with chalk. Stop there. At dawn, you'll see the angel. We'll be waiting about sixty miles north of her.

Angel. Hell, Dunwich, for that matter. Wasn't that that town from the Lovecraft stories, where those lizard people lived?

Then, turn left and drive across the desert when you see an angel? What would it be, anyway? Some obscene plaster tourist attraction?

He looked at his involuntary bracelet again, at the ladder of cuts above it. Jordan was a dear, sweet soul who had saved his life two days ago, but he wasn't so talented with a hacksaw. It had been dark in the jail, and he hadn't made a sound even at the deepest of the cuts, gritting his teeth, closing his eyes.

He was probably lucky he still had his hand.

Flashback: startled out of sleep, his cry muffled against wide long fingers that smelled of opium. He was crouched in the floor of the cell, his left arm handcuffed to the bunk. The snap of a cigarette lighter. Jordan's face, lit up like a jack-o-lantern, barred by dreadlocks.

Be quiet. If they catch us, we're dead.

The terrible cramp in his arm when the chain finally broke. Hugging Jordan, fast and frantic, saying my friend, my best friend, my only friend, thank you, thank you. You just saved my life.

Jordan had laughed. I woulda missed you, you freak.

The gritty, dizzy run out of Haven, into the edge of the desert. He remembered feeling the dark windows on either side of them, waiting, dreading that the lights would flicker on. He was only running hard and fast, his breath deafening in his ears, horrified by this exodus, running, gasping in a deep wide panic, with a stab of pain in his left side. He was overwhelmed by the awful fact that this was fun in some terrible irrational way.

Then, the rusted grinning hulk of the truck, waiting patiently beside Jordan's insane surrealist excuse for a motorcycle. It was almost impossible to stop running, almost impossible to stop that animal instinct to run until he dropped from exhaustion.

Jordan, panting, whispering. There's water, food, blankets, gas...most of your books and stuff. I couldn't get everything so I brought the ones I thought were important. Take Route 66 past Dunwich...

He shook his head, pushed back his long hair. It was filthy. He could smell himself, like the smell of clothes wet with seawater and left to dry.

The headlights worked, anyway, otherwise he would have missed it, a battered sign that read Dunwich 37.

Well. He'd spotted the first one, anyway. What was that C.S. Lewis book, where they were searching for signs? The Silver Chair?

Dunwich was an abandoned little hellhole in the bleary rising sun. Skeleton cars, collapsing wooden buildings. A single brick structure, hopefully labeled CITY HALL.

He pulled over to the side of the main road, put it in park, let it idle. He didn’t really have any hope of finding anyone. He was tempted to do something insane, like yell, hello, is anybody out there?

It was getting to him, the emptiness, especially after the cops. Just anybody. A bum. An insane combination of the Unabomber and Thoreau would have been fine with him. Anybody, as long as it was another human being.

He stepped out of the truck, left the engine running.

It was too hot to be believed. The air was like a chemical assault, scouring away what little moisture remained in his throat. The sand was hellish, slapping him in the face immediately.

–Fuck, he muttered to himself. He pulled the neck of his t-shirt up over his mouth and nose, squinting, raising one hand to shield his eyes. The dust was spraying around the edges of his sunglasses, stinging his eyes so badly it reduced the world to a white blur.

He was tempted to keep driving. Still, even if there was no one here, there might be something worth scavenging. Food, or water, or blankets, electrical equipment…the list of useful items was endless. Gasoline. Spark plugs. He remembered reading in one of the garage-press magazines years ago, when he was maybe ten, that spark plugs by weight were worth more than cocaine. And the value had only gone up.

He had left Haven with considerably less capital than he’d planned. It would be foolish not to at least look around.

He bundled up his hair, stuffed it down in the collar of his shirt to keep it from smacking him in the eyes. Dunwich was a little one-street town, with ratty board buildings lining either side of the main road. He started trying doors. It was in the code that you didn’t break a locked door unless your life depended on it, even if you knew damn well that no one had been inside the building for years.

Nothing.

The only door that opened was what had once been the post office. It was creepy, inside, reeking of dust and something sickly-sweet that he suspected was a dead animal. He took two ballpoint pens, and stuffed them into his pocket.

He kept walking along the left side of the street, trying to cling close to the sides of buildings for what little shelter it offered. Ahead, there was a fenced-in yard, the chain-link rusting.

He decided to investigate that, and then head out.

There was a spindly crooked gate, which he forced open. From what he could see, it had once been some kind of park or playground. Technically. Realistically, it looked like a dog pen.

The little yard was against the side of CITY HALL. There was some kind of dismembered engine lying in one corner. It drew his attention so quickly that the only way he saw the painting was out of the corner of his eye.

It spun him around in a rough circle like a blow. There was a quick vicious pain in his chest, like the rumor of a heart attack. The wind snapped up hard, heavy.

He felt surrounded.

The figure was larger than life, done in spray-paint so thick that even the constant desert had hardly scarred it at all.

It was a careful, almost talented painting of a man with long black hair, elongated narrow limbs, with his hands raised to the sky. The man was staring directly out at the viewer, with mismatched eyes. One whiteblue, one dark hazel.

Dim ghostly figures crowded around the painted man like an army.

He pressed his hands to his chest, gasping.

His fingers found his sunglasses with the quickness of self-preservation, adjusting them to cover his eyes completely.

He backed away from it, nearly killing himself in the gate.

He turned, fled back to the truck, without grace, without cool.

He drove through Dunwich in less than five minutes, shaken so badly he was afraid he might throw up. No Order of Dagon here. Shame, really. He could have asked for directions. He laughed at that one, raked his hands through his hair, chewed his bottom lip.

He lit the joint again, steering with his knee. He wondered what it must have been like to make such a drive at eighty miles an hour, or even fifty-five, but the fractured road and the ancient truck kept him at not quite thirty.

He turned on the radio hopefully, listened to static and squealing that was probably space noise, and turned it off again.

He was fighting the urge to talk to himself. In that direction, madness lay.

The sun drifted across the sky, too slowly, like a hallucination.

He stopped in the shadow of a large dune, slept again. Too long. When he woke the sunset was edged with vivid green.

Poison.

He moved the little sunvisor over to block it. The truck was less merciful this time, and by the time it started he’d begun to panic.

He almost missed the cliff in the darkness. He just happened to notice one clump of rocks jutting higher than the rest. Something made him risk going into reverse and switching the highbeams on.

It was as white as lime.

The joint scorched his lip, forgotten. He dropped it, picked it up again, set it in the corroded ashtray.

He pulled off the highway.

Dawn came too early, too bright, and forced him awake. He'd fallen asleep still sitting in the driver's seat. He was one ache from the back of his neck to his ankles.

He managed to pull one of the canteens out from under the seat. One of them water, the other vodka. He stared at it, wondering which, then drank anyway. Vodka. Oops. Oh well. At least it was wet.

Then, he looked up, and saw the angel.

It was half rock, half shadow. The angle of the light was the only reason he could see the illusion at all. It looked a little like a statue of Justice.

Damn, he thought. Not such bad directions after all.

He persuaded the truck to start, turned just past the illusion. Right. The sun stared after him, lighting particles of sand on his windshield.

It was evening when he finally made it. The sand was level enough, packed hard enough not to drag at the tires too badly, but the truck had added a new horrifying noise to its repertoire. It overheated around noon. He had to wait almost three hours before he dared to start it again. He stripped down to his underwear, wet his hair with vodka. He slept across the front seat with both doors open for what little breeze there was.

The heat was incredible. Nobody in their right mind tried 66 in the middle of fucking July.

After that he kept it at twenty when he could.

Sometimes he had to go so slowly he could have walked faster. He was about to shut the damn thing off and just sleep underneath it, walk the rest of it in the morning, when he saw the thin trailing plume of smoke against the sky, just to the left, about a hundred feet away.

He went even slower, cut the engine.

Flashed the headlights twice.

He waited five minutes.

Jordan was only a shadow, walking towards him, hands busy with a long narrow shape.

–It's you?

–Yeah, he called back.

–You're alone?

–Jordan, it's just me. Put it down, you're not James fucking Bond, he said, exasperated.

Jordan lowered the gun.

He climbed out of the truck, stiff and tired. Nothing had ever felt so good as being able to straighten his knees again.

–Too old for this, he muttered, stumbling.

–Long drive?

–And terrible directions, he agreed, not exactly joking.

–Yeah, so you got here, didn't you? Jordan pointed out.

He ignored that, started to walk towards the fire, built in the shelter of a sheer block of stone, when he noticed that Jordan wasn't following him.

A trap?

He felt instantly guilty for even suspecting such a thing. Then again, you couldn't be too careful. Not in the kind of a world it had become since the war. Not in the middle of the desert.

–So are we going back, or what? he asked, trying to sound casual.

–Um. I should tell you, uh, that...

He had already seen.

He stopped, standing perfectly still, paralyzed.

At first he thought it was a woman, until the man turned to look at him. He got a stunning mosaic of a chin-length cap of black hair, delicate fey features, wide gray eyes. Then the man turned away again, raising one hand in a careless languid wave, holding a cigarette between two long fingers.

–That's Zillah, Jordan told him, with his usual lack of social awareness.

He eyed Jordan. The expression on his face was the usual too, a kind of oblivious happiness. It almost made him laugh.

As far as he's concerned, that's all I need to know. His name, he thought, grinning a little, still unnerved.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe.

He sat by Jordan, trying to stay as far away from Zillah as possible without being too obvious about it. He pulled his fingers through his hair. The entire length of it was greasy, gritty. He wrapped his arms around his knees.

Jordan handed him a pipe. He took it without asking, hit it absently. He had to move considerably to pass it to Zillah. Their fingers touched. He sat down again, wrapped that hand in the sand, his jaw tight.

–There's more stuff out in the truck, he said. Too much silence.

–I'll get it, Zillah offered, shocking him with the texture of his voice. Strange. He had a clipped, almost northern accent. His voice was much deeper than it should have been.

How old is he? Fifteen? Thirty?

What the fuck is he doing here? This is just all I needed right now.

He tossed the keys over, against his better judgment, waited until Zillah was out of eavesdropping range, and turned to Jordan.

The question broke apart on his lips.

Jordan's eyes were following Zillah, out to the dim shadow of the truck. His face was as transparent as it had always been. The pure adoration in his eyes left the question already answered.

He asked anyway.

–Jordan, you're not...are you? The two of you? he said, more pleading than inquiring.

Jordan gave him a stark, sad look, then turned to watch Zillah again.

It made him straighten his back, sorry he had spoken. He helped himself to the pipe again. –Do you know how dangerous that is? he asked, quietly.

Jordan shrugged, still looking out into the desert, muttered something inaudible.

–What?

–I said, I don't care how dangerous it is. I...I love him, I think, Jordan told him, sounding almost angry, defensive.

There was a long silence after that.

Zillah returned carrying the two canteens, with the sleeping bag over his shoulder.

He took his bag from Zillah, muttering something similar to thank you. He unrolled it, extracted the package of drugs. More marijuana. A twist of paper around a rainbow clump of pills. A gummy ball of fragrant opium, the size of a shooter marble. A rusted tin box that said Altoids in faded letters, packed full with a baggie of cocaine.

Flashback: in the little office outside the jail cell, flashlights casting the room in strange crooked angles.

Jordan behind him, saying, Are