Kingdom by Anderson O'Donnell Read Free Book Online

the boarding area he noticed that one of the phones—the very last one in the row—was off the hook, dangling from its armored cord inches off the floor. Campbell shut his eyes tight and tried to remember whether the phone had been like that theentire night. For a moment, he was convinced the last phone had been hanging there for all eternity as the voice on the other end continued to speak without a response, insistent and determined to communicate the incommunicable.
    Suddenly all the other phones began to ring at once, jarring, mechanical cries that rose up in concert, breaking the wind’s dull roar. Campbell was filled with a sense of dread and he began to jog toward the exit. He pushed open the glass doors, moving past the tattered missing-children posters taped to the glass and out into the depot, the phones still calling to him. He was running now, careening toward the idling bus, the entire depot awash in a sick, soft florescent glow.
    Taking the steps two at a time, Campbell bounded aboard the bus, his hands trembling as he looked down at his ticket before handing it over to the driver:
    Tiber City, One Way.

     
    For days, Campbell’s bus crawled across the American landscape as he drifted in and out of slumber; it seemed that every time Campbell approached something resembling a genuine REM cycle, the bus arrived at another station in another town ripped from Americana mythology, garish lighting and muffled announcements over the intercom jarring him awake. Sioux City, Des Moines, Allentown; Burger King, McDonald’s, Arby’s: each new stop indistinguishable from the last, a blur of downsizing and outsourcing and stadium naming rights. SUVs and minivans rocketed past the bus and Campbell tried to remember when the backseat of cars turned into de facto movie theaters; every car that shot past him sported two or three miniature LCD monitors extending from the ceiling, giving off an artificial flicker as jump cuts destroyed the attention spans of a generation. Once upon a time, Campbell considered, backseats were reserved for an awkward fuck on a Saturday night; now they belonged to computer-generated Disney characters.
    These were the things Campbell thought about as night bled into day and back into night and then the voice over the intercom was calling out “next stop Tiber City.” There was no iconic entryway to Tiber City, no massive bridge to traverse, no mountain range to subdue: The highway ended and the city began and only the massive skyscrapers looming in the distance gave any visual evidence of the city’s size. Campbell wondered how long the triphad taken. Days? Weeks? Hours? Even the date was uncertain; newspapers scattered on the floor of the bus each offered differing opinions. It was the end of the American century and Campbell was limping out of a bus station in Tiber City in search of an address scrawled at the bottom of an anonymous letter: At the moment, he could be sure of nothing else.
    The moon was nowhere to be found when Campbell stumbled out of the station and into the street but the downtown financial district threw enough light over the horizon that the slums ringing the city were bathed in a perpetual twilight. Campbell’s legs were stiff and unresponsive and the world was swimming as he tried to ward off chemical withdrawal. The Benzedrine ran out somewhere in Ohio but that was only part of his problem: There were chemicals he had shot into his system when he was with Morrison, chemicals that helped his body defy the aging process, complex compounds that he could approximate through black market connections; he would often do a little work in return for the materials he needed. At best though, his supply was inconsistent; in Tiber City it was nonexistent.
    A steady rain sizzled down against the pavement as hustlers descended upon Campbell, watches, wallets, and phone sex advertisements waved in front of his eyes, sales pitches and sob stories delivered in a dozen different