Exit Kingdom by Alden Bell

The world is wide, and she, blessed or cursed as it may be with freedom beyond the common share, has the impunity to go anywhere in it.
    Hours pass and the sun starts a descent on the far side of its meridian. She is an invisible, and she could be anywhere, and the world is wide, and Moses is near to giving up when he sees
something in the road.
    There, he says.
    What?says his brother.
    Moses stops the car but doesn’t get out. There are too many slugs around. He points through the windshield to a broken jar on the side of a main drag that leads to the freeway ahead.
    She’s been took, Moses says.
    Took by who? Slugs?
    No. Not slugs. Took by other people. Maybe Fletcher, maybe others.
    What’re you talkin about?
    That olive jar. She was feastinfrom it last night.
    How do you know it’s the same one?
    It’s recently busted. There’s juice still in it.
    Okay. So why does that mean she’s been took?
    She ain’t the kind to go bustin jars just for the jollies of it. Plus, she knows we’re after her, and she wouldn’t of left any clues behind on purpose. No, she’s been
took.
    If it’s Fletcher, that’s bad news for her.
    Mostlylikely it’s bad news for her any which way. No kind soul givin somebody a lift would begrudge them the luggage of a jar of olives. A conflict took place here.
    So they know they are headed in the right direction anyhow, and they drive with an eye on the horizon, looking to find some sign of the Vestal.
    They drive slow, and soon the city is behind them. Just before evening falls, they seesomething else caught up on the bramble bushes by the side of the road. The vestments of the ghost herself,
like a disregarded bedsheet left over from a child’s Halloween costume: the Vestal’s white robes.
    At least we know they went this way, says Abraham Todd grimly. He massages his knee below the gunshot thigh, wincing.
    When night falls, they stop, afraid to miss the clues of the Vestal’spath, and barricade themselves in a dusty second-floor room of an old motel. The dead have a difficult time climbing
steps. They can do it, eventually, but it costs them time and fuss – and by the time they have reached the top, they have usually forgotten what brought them there in the first place.
    That night Moses lies awake listening to his brother turn fitfully in the bed next to his.The room has heavy curtains blocking out the moonlight and so is straightup blind dark. He has grown
accustomed to it over the years of roaming the deadlands of the country – but it was not always like that. When he was a child, there was light everywhere. It seeped in under doors and
through blinds. Nothing was ever entirely dark. You had daylight, and then you had dimness – and it seemed asthough the world was a glowworm of a place, a thing that produced its own
bioluminescence – and you would never have thought how dead a place it could be.
    Abraham shifts again in the dark.
    How’s the leg? Moses asks.
    Guy must of shot me with a poison bullet, says Abraham.
    You want to take a look?
    Tomorrow.
    Again silence permeates the dark, and Moses feels what it mustbe like to be buried alive. Then he listens harder, and he can hear the dead outside, bristling along against each other like a
nest of rodents.
    Then Abraham speaks again.
    Why do you think she ran away?
    Don’t know, Moses says. Likely she’s the kind who eschews too much company on her travels.
    But a holy girl. How’s she got the guts to . . .
    She ain’t so holy.
    What doyou mean?
    It occurs to Moses that his brother has never seen the other side of the Vestal Amata. He was tending his leg when she shot the man who injured him. He was waiting in the car when she nearly
bashed Fletcher’s brain in.
    She can take care of herself, Moses says. You haven’t seen it. She’s got a little bit of killer in her. Who knows what else.
    That girl?
    You didn’t see.

    So she ain’t immune to them? That was just a trick? I knew it.
    No, it ain’t a trick. I