Exit Kingdom

themselves out. The ground is charred black, and the structures that stillstand are twisted and skeletal.
The stink of sulphur is everywhere, and ash blows in the breeze, itself lighter than the snow that is now falling. And so there are two currents of air visible – the one that carries to the
ground a speckled white to erase the destruction of man with its own destruction, and the other that blusters upwards the grey, dusty remains of people and things, like thetide that takes souls to
heaven.
    It is quiet, peaceful, and Moses searches the remains of the valley. He turns over the corpses one by one and looks them in their faces, searching for some sign of the Vestal Amata, dead or
alive as she may be.
    Some of the dead have risen again, and they struggle to move towards him over the snowy, ashy earth. But their skin is charred black and flaky,and it rustles in the breeze, the flakes of their
burned flesh like the leaves on a budding tree in the springtime. A shimmying, fluid quality of death he can’t remember seeing before. One of the dead, man or woman he can’t tell, is a
walking skeleton. Its skin has been burned away entirely, a blackened exposed skull with its wide bony grin. And, too, its eyeballs have been boiled out of thesockets, so it finds its way blindly
through the wreckage, stumbling pathetically and falling face down into the mud, rising again and smelling its way forwards a few paces.
    Moses puts them all down, spending his ammunition indiscriminately to make the valley an entirely quiet, entirely dead place. He puts down the ones who are still walking and examines the others.
Rummaging through thewreckage, he finds the bladed cudgel he dropped in order to carry to safety the man he thought was his brother. The cudgel’s handle juts straight upwards like a chiding
finger, its head bent and melted into the remains of some fallen tower. He pulls once, twice, at the handle, trying to dislodge the thing, but he is obviously unworthy of this particular Excalibur,
as it does not budge – andthen he thinks that this is as good a resting place as any for the brutal bladed thing. He continues to look.
    Finding nothing, he widens his search, stomping through the base of the tree line where the fire has wilted the evergreens and cooked them all black on one side.
    He circles the valley once, and then again higher into the trees. On the third time around he sees something caughtin a tree branch, dangling and whipping back and forth in the snowy air. He
comes closer and takes it in his hand.
    It’s the Vestal’s little wooden cross pendant, the one she wore around her neck, and it’s a sign if it’s anything. He recalls the Pastor Whitfield’s warning not to
disdain symbols, and he realizes he does not disdain them at all – though he wishes he knew how to read them.He is illiterate in the language of symbols.
    What does the cross mean? That she is alive? That she left it as a breadcrumb for him to follow? That it fell, unknown, from her neck in her escape? Or simply that it was blown off her body in
one of the explosions and that she is now part of the dusty ash he breathes into his weary lungs?
    Symbols everywhere, and they refuse to be read.
    He takes the cross, twining the thin silver chain around his thick, calloused fingers, holding the tiny wooden pendant tight in the meaty palm of his hand. He holds it as though he will never
let it go.
    Though that, too – the gripping of the cross – that too is a symbol for the speculation of those who know the language.
    The night falls, and he stays among the ruins. He lies on the groundand lets the snow fall onto his beard and his eyelids and his lips. Finally, in this place of devastation, this graveyard of
man and industry, this broken toe of civilization, finally, he sleeps.
    *
    When he wakes, it is full dark, and he realizes he has slept many hours there on the ground. He stands and sheds a thin layer of snow that has fallen and wed him to the ground
onwhich he lay. He shakes it off, and he is not cold though he can see his breath.
    The moon is out and casts mangled shadows over the valley, and in the dark he believes he sees a figure darting through the trees. A naked girl, skin pale and shimmering, almost translucent, red
hair chopped short – and there she dashes from tree trunk to tree trunk, disappearing into the shadows and reappearingelsewhere in unexpected places, like a capricious sprite or a trick of
the eye. He would