Exit Kingdom

between life and death, between should and shouldn’t. And there are forces, ambling armies on the earth, that are there to take a bite out of your soul at your electingto transgress.
    And it’s true – the right has never been more beautiful, has never been bolder in the colour of sunrises over the blasted plains.
    Moses was blind to it before, but now he runs his palms along the underbellies of the aeroplanes, like an honest supplicant to the altar of righteous ingenuity. People didn’t use to be
able to fly, and so they built wings. And now those wingsare clipped, people gone to ground – but the artifacts of majesty remain, all the more beautiful for their inutile splendour.
    Now there is much to appreciate in the perfectly curved surfaces of human architecture. And so he wishes he were an artist or a craftsman – someone to build things and name them names.
    What’re you doin? Abraham asks.
    Nothin, Moses says, startled. Come on. Let’scollect what there is to collect.
    *
    At the end of one runway is an overturned plane, its fuselage bent and cracked in the middle. There are bodies, long ago dried up, but they have been taken care of. Every one of
them has a gunshot wound in the skull. They hunch over, some still buckled in, even though they and their clothes have become indistinguishable from the upholsteryupon which they sit.
    A breeze blows through the massive metal straw, and Moses can see the filaments of hair on these dead skulls whipping to and fro like blades of summer grass.
    Bleak pastoral.
    But the broken plane has been picked through before. Abraham finds some packets of ibuprofen in one of the seat-back pockets and a set of dried-up watercolour paints in the pink backpack ofone
of the little girl corpses.
    What’re you gonna do with those? Moses asks.
    I don’t know. Maybe take up paintin. Maybe it’s an artist’s eye I got.
    You mean the one eye that ain’t beat shut from your debauchery?
    But Abraham remains unfazed.
    That’s the one, he says.
    Emerging again from the fuselage onto the tarmac, Abraham runs a hand over his scruffy chin and considersthe massive terminal in the near distance.
    I bet there are some treasures to be found in there, he says. All shut up tight away from prying hands other than ours.
    Moses too looks at the terminal.
    Look at all those windows, he says.
    So? his brother asks.
    We’re off the grid here. You notice any lights last night?
    No.
    Me neither.
    Moses knows that where the populationis dense enough to be strategic, there are people barricaded in power stations, keeping segments of the power grid alive. There are even a few who have
managed to recapture and run refineries. Corpus Christi is one Moses has seen with his own eyes. Gas and electric. Infrastructure. Humanity clawing back some of what was taken from it.
    But between those oases of civilization, there are vastwastelands of dark – and it is in these places that the settlers have reverted to primal frontier living.
    If you were gonna take up residence in this area, Moses continues, wouldn’t you want to do it in a stronghold that’s got unbreakable glass walls and all the light you need?
    Oh, Abraham responds. You think there’s people in there? People who don’t care for the scavenging likes of us?

    What do you think, little brother? You feelin watched?
    Always, Abraham says. But usually by you. Anyway, if it ain’t been co-opted, that makes it prime co-opting for us.
    So they find a way in, bashing in one of the maintenance doors and climbing their way up an unlit concrete stair until they come through a door and into the terminal building proper. Inside,
there are very few signsof disturbance – almost as if the place were shut up and made relic before the chaos of the dead had a chance to crumble it.
    The light coming through the tinted panes of glass all around is dimmed to a faint blue that’s almost like sweetness, and over everything is a thin coating of dust, the settling of the air
itself as though time makes all things – even breath – palpable and falling.

    They pass a number of gates until they arrive in an open area that Moses recognizes as what used to be a food court. Above is a mezzanine level, but both escalators leading up to the balcony are
barricaded with heavy chairs, tables, vending machines, barbed wire and other debris.
    What’s all that for? Abraham wonders.
    Don’t know, Moses replies. Ain’t no other signs of skirmish. Couldbe this was a last