Read Online Kingdom by Anderson O'Donnell - Free Book Online

in the car, people he had never met or maybe he had and their names were already forgotten and then a girl—blonde, beautiful in that way only American girls can be beautiful but wearing too much makeup, too much leather, too much silver—was whispering in his ear, asking if he had any more coke before confiding in him that she was afraid because she heard that in London the government was considering stacking corpses in graves because they were running out of space but that the whole situation might be OK because only abandoned graves dating back more than 100 years would be disturbed.
    Her hand was on his thigh as she was telling him this, her fingers—immaculately manicured, her nails adorned with a garish red—crawling toward his crotch but then the limo was stopping and people were getting out and the girl was trying to pull Dylan toward the door but he resisted, hanging back until the last possible second, until the point where if he waited any longer there would be concerned inquires, knowing looks exchanged followed by encouragement to bump another line because like, after all, everyone’s waiting.
    Not that another bump was a bad idea: He couldn’t shake the memory of the PROGRESS poster, of the man’s eyes boring a hole in the horizon, eyes that reminded him so much of his father. Reaching into the breast pocket of his suit jacket he produced a small glass vile half-filled with white powder, a little bit of which he proceeded to dump out on the faux granite surrounding the wet bar. He used a credit card to divide the coke into two fat lines, one for each nostril. Seconds later both lines were gone and the memories of those eyes staring back at him from that monstrous skyscraper? Fucking irrelevant.
    Laughing at nothing, his world suddenly very bright, tight, and shiny, Dylan kicked open the car door and launched himself into the street. A crowd had gathered outside the entrance to the club—there was no name anywhere on the building’s exterior, not even a symbol ripping off some long-forgottenculture, some kind of ancient totem turned marketing gimmick. There were velvet ropes running in every direction but each time Dylan approached one a voice crackled over a headset and an instant later a hand appeared from nowhere, removing the rope, allowing Dylan to continue past the crowds, past the voices shouting—he heard Spanish, English, Russian, Arabic—the different languages all conveying a single frenzied emotion: want. Several flashes went off, prompting Dylan to turn in the direction of the light. Someone was shouting his name and he was smiling at no one, at everyone, his jaw clenched tight from the coke.
    Dylan pushed forward into the club, confused, the coke racing through his nervous system. And then someone was welcoming him—not to any specific destination, simply “welcome”—offering to take the coat he wasn’t wearing before ushering him through the doorway and propelling him into a shadowy hallway, the only light coming from a chandelier hanging overheard, a security camera nestled between the fake candles. The hall was empty, serving only to funnel customers toward a staircase 30 or 40 feet beyond the entrance. Dylan proceeded down the hallway, one hand on the wall, tracing the bumps of plaster under the yellowed, peeling wallpaper—pre-aged for effect by an interior design company—imagining they were a new form of Braille, a secret language capable of providing an answer, some wisdom or guidance, if one knew how to interpret the patterns hidden behind the paper. But such divination was beyond Dylan and he began to climb the stairs, nodding at another bouncer stationed at the top of the flight.
    The main room of the club reminded Dylan of every other bar in Tiber City’s Glimmer district: dance floor in the middle of the room, with several tables and three bars framing the perimeter. On the far end of the dance floor, three or four steps off the floor, was the VIP area. The aesthetic