The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

Rebecca reached blindly into the open drawer. She was standing there holding a two-pronged serving fork. The prisoner laughed and came at her as the swinging doors opened behind him.

It was Kells. The gun in his hand went off and the prisoner’s shoulders flew back. Kells advanced with the gun held in front of him and fired twice more before the prisoner could turn. Kells kept coming and firing until the prisoner was lying dead.

The revolver did not explode in Kells’s hand. It made only a dull loud cracking noise. There was no explosion of flesh, only coin-sized holes that gurgled blood. And he did not grin. He appeared deadly purposeful and short of breath.

Silence then, the strangest, loudest silence, a smoky moment in the room. Kells heard words spoken in the hallway and walked back out through the swinging doors. The doors rocked back and forth.

For some reason Rebecca followed him. Kells strode around the tables with his gun ahead of him like a flashlight. The second prisoner, dark like the first, turned the corner into the function room and Kells fired first and fast, hitting him in the stomach, the face, and a leg. The prisoner stumbled to the empty bar, slipping to the brass foot rail and falling still. He was alive and concentrating hard on his breathing. Kells kicked the man’s gun away.

“How many more?”

Kells was talking to her.

“One,” she answered, shocked that she was even visible.

Kells proceeded into the hall. Rebecca went only as far as the edge of the carpet.

Halfway to the main doors, lying twisted and still in a lilac ski suit, was Darla.

An older man inside the front doors wore a long black overcoat and wielded a long rifle. Kells stopped near him and called down the hall in Spanish. He yelled again, then started along the opposite wall toward the reception desk.

A prisoner rushed out of the manager’s office firing a rifle. Kells cut him down. The prisoner collapsed in the hallway, and Kells advanced, sticking his revolver back into his shoulder holster. The prisoner was dragging himself toward his dropped rifle.

The man in the overcoat stepped next to Kells. He raised his long rifle over the prisoner but could not shoot.

Kells reached down for the prisoner’s rifle and finished him with a single shot to the back of the neck.

There were no flourishes. He killed without style and without hesitance. Dutifully, he killed.

The man in the overcoat just stood there. Kells started back past Darla to the function room, right around Rebecca to the prisoner lying at the bar. He searched the inside of the man’s unzipped North Face jacket as the prisoner watched, for some reason unable to move. He flexed his hands but his legs were still and loose. He was saying something over and over in Spanish, with what sounded like a Cuban accent. Kells responded in Spanish, finding a small, thin canister inside the prisoner’s jacket.

It was a can of mace. Kells stood and sprayed the prisoner in the face, and the prisoner coughed and seethed.

Kells moved on to the kitchen doors as the man in the hangman’s coat approached. Rebecca recognized him now. Tom Duggan, the undertaker from the town ceremony the day before.

Rebecca heard weeping behind the bar. She circled it, wide around the agonized prisoner.

Dr. Rosen was sitting there with his head in his hands.

Tom Duggan had followed Kells into the kitchen and Rebecca went too. Kells was kneeling next to Fern. She was dead and Terry was dead and Robert was dead. Shy, goofy Robert looked bewildered as Mia screamed over him.

The doors opened behind her and Coe appeared with a short, round-bellied old man wearing furry boots. The mountain man, Polk. He limped forward a step or two, then stopped.

Kells was on his feet again. “Get the kid out of here,” he told her. “Take the girl.”

Rebecca reached for Coe’s shoulder, but he shrugged her off. “Fern,” he said. It was Kells who stepped up and pushed Coe out the swinging doors. Rebecca needed help with Mia too, tearing her away from Robert’s body. The undertaker just stood in the middle of it all and watched.

Rebecca led them down the long hallway to the lounge, past Darla and the dead prisoner. Rebecca left them there to go back for Dr. Rosen, helping him to his feet. The maced prisoner sputtered something in Spanish as they left.

She had to walk Dr. Rosen past Darla. His gaze stayed on her fallen body as they passed.

There was glass on the floor of the lounge and wind and snow blowing through the broken window. Rebecca sat with Mia on the couch, Coe across from them crying into his fists. Rebecca laid one hand on Mia’s shivering shoulder, the other on her thigh. The old man wandered in and took a chair in the corner without saying anything.

Rebecca’s despair was too general for tears. For a while her mind went black, a deep, lightless place. She tried to will herself back by focusing on the physical, staring at the hearth fire that had cooled. She noticed a bloodstain on one wall, perhaps where Darla had been shot, the spatter like an augury portending a terrible future.

Luggage lay about the lounge like bodies. Terry’s designer suitcase. Darla’s thick American Tourister. Robert’s hockey duffel. Fern’s carpetbag.

Bert-and-Rita’s backpacks were there but their skis and poles were gone.

At one point the undertaker appeared in the hallway to drag the third prisoner back to the function room, then to carry Darla.

The old man had fallen asleep. Mia’s heaving slowed, her eyes settled into a deep stare. Coe emerged from the stones of his fists every now and then to look around the four corners of the room, searching for something, like a way out.

Finally Rebecca had to leave Mia and walk about. She was leaping with nervous energy and it took all her concentration to move slowly and not alarm the others. She went to the cracked window, feeling the cold. The light was fading. The short, terrible day was ending, the snow turning luminescent, and the flakes draping them in silence.

Staring into the snowfall made her light-headed. Before turning away, she thought she saw a form disengage from one of a cluster of tree trunks to stand on two legs. Bert-and-Rita again came to mind and Rebecca blinked and squinted into the darkness but saw nothing.

She waited awhile longer for it to return, until she doubted her own vision. A thread in the bullet-cracked glass had tampered with the fading light, she decided, deceiving her. She turned from the window and her nerves compelled her to the hallway.

She could hear whimpering coming from the function room. It was doglike, a kind of dry crying. Maybe she was hearing things too. What was taking them so long? Still light-headed, she reached out for the glazed stones of the wall, making her way past the bloodstains toward the end.

She turned the corner and onto the royal blue rug of the function room. The prisoner was still alive. He was seated in a chair set against the great wall of windows overlooking the dark eighteenth hole. He was a broken man, shirtless and bloody, with tears and all manner of mucus and saliva running down his pulpy face, the small hole in his stomach clogged with blood. He would have collapsed to the floor were he not bound to the chair with the gold cord from the curtain. He had been tortured, and he had talked. She could tell this just by looking at him. The corpses of the two dead prisoners were arranged against the window, sitting, heads to the side, empty hands in their laps. Their faces and palms had been mutilated. Arched over their heads were two words painted onto the glass, the drippy green letters reading like a comic book scream:

The scene was arranged for maximum impact, like a macabre piece of performance art.