The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

Rebecca went to her, watching her baby the sleeping kitten. “Fern had a cat,” said Rebecca, remembering.

She saw suddenly how empty her life had been over the past year. How she had been hiding in Vermont, nursing her wounds — pretending to get stronger, but in truth just hiding. Polk’s secession from Gilchrist seemed reasonable to her now. He had abandoned his hometown before it could abandon him. She hadn’t walked away from Manhattan so much as she had declared war on it, the Manhattan that had once been her and Jeb’s. The Gilchrist that had once been Polk’s.

Mia withdrew her finger from the cage. “Do you think you’ll ever write about this?” she said.

The notebook computer Rebecca was lugging around everywhere with her. The novel gestating inside. The writing life seemed so far away now.

Rebecca shrugged. “Do you think I’ll ever get the chance?”

She later checked on polk at the other end of the house. Swathed in sheets and blankets, unshaven, his hair mussed and his aged skin grubby, he could have been wrapped in mover’s quilts in a doorway off Lexington Avenue. They were all homeless now.

There was a portable telephone next to a packet of Jokers on the dresser. A cartoon dog eraser capped the antenna. Rebecca could have called Jeb again, but what was the point? In theory, she could imagine the relief of hearing a familiar voice. Just not his.

Rebecca got her case and set up her laptop on the table desk inside the vet’s office. She risked tying up the phone line for a few minutes and fed her modem wire into the wall socket. Her America Online account came up and she signed on.

The front page headline hyperlink read:

She went to Google and typed in “Errol Inkman.” The returned list of newspaper headlines told the story:

And so on. She pursued it no further. Instead, she searched Kells , realizing she did not know his first name.

She scrolled through such random sites as the homepage for a Boston bar and a gamer’s favorite death-match foes. Tenth on the list of ten returns was a year-old article from the New York Post , but the link only gave her the first few paragraphs:

An agent of the Pentagon’s “Doomsday” Agency remained unrepentant yesterday, defending his unauthorized simulated gas attack as a necessary wake-up call to the city.

In a scene eerily reminiscent of the 1995 Tokyo sarin attack, midday shoppers emptied onto 14th Street yesterday in a panic after a parcel inside a Barneys shopping bag began to sizzle and smoke inside Union Square station, filling the station with a sweet-smelling gas.

No injuries were reported.

Defense Department authorities were embarrassed by the unauthorized simulation, although the agent responsible for the midday drill, Alex Kells, offered no apologies.

“There is no defense against this type of attack except increased public awareness,” he wrote in a prepared fax distributed to media outlets. “The materials involved in assembling this device cost me less than the price of a hardcover book. It could have been substantially more than the scent of jasmine filling your lungs.”

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency was created to counter the emerging threat of unconventional warfare attacks by terrorist cells and rogue nations.

Emergency personnel cleared the scene just before rush hour, and many evening commuters, unaware that any emergency had existed, praised the improved smell inside the station.

That was why he had not contacted his superiors. Alex Kells was the last person the government wanted running loose inside Gilchrist.

She signed off her account and unplugged her modem. Just then the task of packing up her computer seemed too daunting. Instead, she pointed her cursor at her novel-in-progress and the document scrolled onto her screen. She scanned the first few sentences. They thudded like notes banged out on an old piano. She switched off the computer before upsetting herself any further. Too exhausted to sleep, she lay her head down on her crossed arms anyway.

The subway station was crowded with prisoners dressed as prison guards. Rebecca stood among them, still and tense. A train pulled up and all the doors opened and Kells stepped off wearing a three-piece suit. The cons all watched him in a complicit manner but no one said a word.

Kells approached her. Rebecca waited to catch his eye but he passed without a glance.

A parcel he left on the subway car started to sizzle. Smoke began to flow out of the sliding doors, becoming snow that fell inside the subway station, piling up on the platform. The snow was deadly poisonous and the disguised prisoners ran for the turnstiles while Rebecca stood there cradling her laptop, open and swaddled in a blanket of soft pink chenille. The infant’s face on the screen blinked and smiled at her, then began to cry. Its wailing turned heads. Jeb rushed over, dressed as the prison warden, trying to wrest the laptop from her arms. Rebecca fought him off until he became Jasper Grue. The laptop screamed and wriggled in her arms as she ran through the poisoned snow to the turnstiles, where Luther Trait was waiting to take her ticket. You have something for me , he said.

She awoke from the dream — back in her bed at the inn. The quilt comforter was warm and heavy on her chest and legs. It was night still, and the relief Rebecca felt was immeasurable. It all fell quickly into place: the prison interview, the evening snow, meeting the inn guests, sleuthing around after the mysterious Mr. Kells. She was fascinated by the way her unconscious mind had sorted these things into the fantasia of a prison riot and the takeover of the town, and meant to think on it some more. She reached for a glass of water on the night table, and that was when she saw the man watching her from the foot of her bed. He came at her out of the shadows with incredible speed.

she awoke in the vet’s office with a grunt and the squeak of the chair. She looked about, confused that she had dozed, then greatly disappointed not to be in her bed at the inn.

She felt a cold draft, as though somewhere in the house a door had been opened. She heard voices and stood at once, following them down the hall to the pantry.

Everyone was at the open back door. Two men were walking out of the trees. The larger one, Kells, wore a black ski mask and carried a large camouflage bag slung over his back. Coe trudged a step or two behind.

Inside, Kells pulled off his mask with a crackle of static. Coe’s cheeks and chin were windblown red, his eyes bleary. They stood in the kitchen, emanating cold, stamping their feet.

Tom Duggan said, “Where are the sleds?”

Kells’s mask had left his jaw muscles warm enough for speech. “Ditched them. Too noisy. More trouble than they’re worth. We have something better.”

He slid the camouflage bag off his back to the linoleum floor, its contents clattering, bulging strangely. He left it there, too stiff from cold to kneel, so Dr. Rosen got down on the floor and unzipped the bag.

“Snowshoes,” said Kells.

Not the old wood-and-rawhide kind, but modern aluminum frames with waterproof decking and step-in bindings and toe crampons. There were three pairs. Underneath was other gear for winter trekking: ankle gaiters, full-boot crampons, thermoses, an ice axe. And one of the strapped Micro Uzis favored by the prisoners.