Free Exit Kingdom by Alden Bell Page A

now he aims a gun at them.
    If it’s any help, he says to the three of them now, here’s my suggestion.
    The gun in his handfires, and Moses’ brother Abraham cries out and falls to the ground.

Five
    An Injury, a Murder and a Hostage » Fletcher » A Test of Mettle » A City Hotel » A Jar of Olives » An Operation » A Note of Farewell »
A Search » Fountain Hills » A Bandit Camp » Rescue and Reclothing » A Mountain Stream » Mademoiselle from Armentières »
Interlude
» A Bronze
Disc
    Aw, fuck! Abraham yelps. He lies on his back on the ground and clenches his thigh with both hands.

    Before Moses can determine his next action, he sees the Vestal already running towards the man with the gun. The man wears jeans and a pair of boots and a baseball cap, but no shirt. His bare
chest is gaunt and taut against his ribs, his skin tattooed with homemade designs. The Vestal runs straight at him, in spite of the fact that the gun is pointed directly at her chest. This is
somethingMoses will remember about the girl. It’s not bravery – he wouldn’t call it bravery. Nor is it fury or daring or hard mettle. Not exactly those things. In fact, it is
nothing she possesses in the positive but rather something she lacks. There is a blankness in her action – an absence that allows her to move rapidly and without hesitation. Yes, that is it.
It is not bravery but instead theabsence of fear.
    Whoa, says the bare-chested man to her. Hold it there. I’ll shoot you, I swear to—
    But he doesn’t shoot. Instead he begins to back away, and he can’t even complete his sentence before she is on him. She seems to pass right by the gun, as though he were merely
holding his finger out to her in playful mimic of warfare. She moves past it, leaping at him, her small formstill dressed in the white robes tossed absurdly against the larger man, her body itself
a weapon, her thin elbow cracking him across the face, something snapping in his jaw, a jet of blood, black in the night, spitting from his nose.
    Her movements are not beautiful or elegant – she is no graceful spectre or lithe athlete. Her violence is not art but simply the act of a weary and brutalpractitioner.
    The man drops the gun, and screams loudly.When he stands upright again, Moses can see that his jaw is dislocated, his lower teeth jammed at an oddly angled underbite, the bony hinge protruding
at the side of his face, tenting out the flesh of his cheek and giving an inhuman droop to his eyelid. The man has been made immediately monstrous, and he is suffering – his hands uparound
his jaw as if wanting to put it back in place but at the same time afraid to touch it lest it pop off completely.
    Moses sees the Vestal retrieve the man’s pistol from the ground, and before he can call to her to stop, she has aimed it at the man’s head and pulled the trigger.
    A charred hole appears in the man’s cheek, and a thick soup sprays from the exit wound at the back ofhis head. He collapses first to his knees, his hands still held up near his skewed
jaw, and then falls forwards on his face. There is an absolute stillness to him now, and the bullet through the brain means he won’t come back.
    What’d you do? Moses calls to the girl.
    She turns to him, still holding the gun, looking confused.
    He rushes to her and seizes the pistol away from her.
    What? she asks. He shot your brother.
    In the leg, Moses says, pointing to Abraham who sits up in the distance, gritting his teeth and grasping his thigh.
    I know him, the girl says about the corpse at her feet. He would of killed all of us give him the chance.
    And besides that, Moses goes on, the racket’s gonna bring em all—
    But it’s too late, because beyond the girl’s shoulder hecan see them coming around the perimeter of the wall, a group of men with rifles and baseball bats. There’s one man in
front, wearing a wide sombrero. He would seem ridiculous if he weren’t so putrid with evident corruption. There are