My father reaches for a long, flat club that resembles a cricket bat. I can’t read the words carved into its surface, but I can tell by their medieval script that they are scripture. My father has never hit me before, but something is different today. His anger usually blazes for a few minutes, then dissipates into the air, but today he found somewhere to channel it. Today he grabbed my hand and dragged me to this store with a purpose in his eyes, and now he studies the club with grim satisfaction, like he’s finally found an answer to some shouting inner voice.
It is a weapon against sin, he tells me as we leave the store. Against rebellion and ungodly passion. I try to believe this as it strikes me over and over, embossing scripture into my reddening skin. I try to understand what I’ve done wrong so I can repent of it, but it eludes me. It will be years before I can grasp the intangible abstraction of sin, and by then my father will have moved beyond this wooden club. He will not bother to dig it out of the closet when his hands are already clenched. Punishment needs no special ceremony; it surrounds us always like our guilt, eager and pulsing.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Paul Bark says, watching from the corner of the room as I endure the pain I’ve earned. I’m not sure if he’s addressing me or my father. “We all have it in us.”
Then the pain is gone, and so is my father. He sits slumped in his recliner, black phlegm running down his chin, his final cigarette scorching his fingertips. Year after year his smoke rose up to Heaven. He sacrificed himself on a thousand tiny pyres.
“We all need something to hate,” Paul says, “and what’s nobler than hating yourself?” We are standing outside the house, watching it burn. “You don’t have to die to be a martyr.”
He nudges me forward. My skin blisters.
“I hope you’re not buying this hairshirt bullshit,” my grandfather says, clamping a sharp hand on my shoulder. “Why fight yourself when you can fight for yourself?”
I follow him along the edge of the stadium roof, open to reveal the teeming masses below, the farms and gardens and apartment towers and the swarms of soldiers patrolling them. I see Ella Desconsado coughing in her bedroom. I see Wally and David and Marie assembling rifle parts. I see the once hopeful Nearly Living, hopeless and nearly dead.
“No one’s tallying your deeds. No one’s watching. It’s just you and yours, here and gone, so take what you can while you can.”
I’m sitting in a metal chair in a dark locker room, and he crouches down to leer at me, his rancid breath hissing through gapped teeth. “You know none of this is real, don’t you? The world’s a dream. It’s your dream. And do you feel guilty for what happens in your dreams? When you kill and steal and fuck the forbidden fruit?”
He runs his leathery fingers along Julie’s arm. She is slumped in the chair next to me, collared and wrapped in cables, her hair covering her face, blood dripping from her mouth.
“You know the world will disappear without a trace the moment you wake up, so you might as well have your fun with it.” He lifts Julie’s chin. “Like you did with her.”
I grab his wrist. I wrench his hand away from Julie and it snaps off; a brittle crack and puff of dust. He looks at the dry stump with a bemused smile.
I hear Paul Bark’s laughter as I struggle to untie Julie. “Do you really think she still loves you? How could you imagine you deserve such grace?”
I fumble with the cables. My fingers are slick with her blood. Her eyes slide open and watch me through the gaps in her hair, but I can’t read what’s behind them.
Paul Bark says: “Haven’t you learned we deserve nothing?”
I spin around, gritting my teeth, and Paul smirks at me from the shadows. “What now, Brother Atvist? Have you got a new sermon for us?”
I open my mouth—but there is no air in my lungs. My roar of defiance leaks out in a groan.
I wake up.
I am curled into a ball, trembling with rage. I fill my lungs till they hurt and I scream into my knees, throat straining, veins bulging. It’s the loudest sound I’ve made in at least two lifetimes.
I uncoil and scramble to my feet. I’m in a small, dark chamber with rusted metal walls; the air smells of dried blood and decay, and I think I must not be awake after all. Another nightmare. My twisted little brain, half-rotted and hateful. Is this what Julie experiences every night? An endless procession of horrors and accusers? And worse yet, is that why I love her? Because we share the same sickness?
My hand touches the cold steel, and reality seeps in. I’m not in Hell. I’m in a train. An empty freight car—it must have been hauling meat. A white bar of daylight glows through the half-open door.
Last night returns in red-orange flickers: wandering through the empty streets of this half-abandoned town, breaking shop windows, kicking down doors, searching for a violence strong enough to squeeze the poison from my veins. I don’t remember how it ended. How I found my way to this metal box and somehow managed to sleep. I only know I couldn’t sleep in the RV, alone in a bed I’ve shared with Julie, waiting for her to slip in next to me and feeling my guts twist tighter with every hour she didn’t.
I stumble out of the train into a dim gray oven. Cast-iron clouds diffuse the heat, baking me from all directions while the humidity threatens to drown me. Where am I? What country is this? What planet?
I walk for a few minutes before realizing I actually don’t know where I am. The train must have moved in the night. The same wooded hill looms up ahead, but there is no station platform and no sign of the Fire Church’s quaint little compound. A gravel road leads from the tracks to the hill, so I follow it.
Soon I’m surrounded by trees, but I hear noise up ahead: the rumble of big engines and occasional shouted commands. As the woods open into a clearing I feel an instinct to proceed with stealth, but I’m too angry to obey it. My stomach is burning, I have swallowed caustic chemicals, and if anyone stops me I will puke fire in their faces and stand tall for the consequences.
I stroll into the clearing like I belong there—and maybe I do. No one takes note of my presence. A few dozen young men mill around the field of dried mud, loading fuel cans and what looks like bundles of riot gear into the backs of trucks. The trucks are hitched to freight trailers, but these are not the standard highway haulers. The trucks are armored bricks on solid-rubber wheels, the kind once used to move cash between banks. The trailers themselves look reinforced as well, though they’re riddled with outward dents like they’ve been carrying loose boulders.
I think of a circus backlot. The trampled field of crew trucks, generators chugging inside sooty white trailers, gnarled carnies sucking cigarettes by the outhouses, a grimy reality behind all the whimsical lights and color. But where is the bigtop in this image? Is it God’s House at the top of the hill? Or is it the strange structure at the center of these trucks? I see nothing familiar in its outline; it’s not the usual repurposing of an old-world building for new-world needs, schools into barracks, stadiums into fortresses. Whatever it is, it appears to be built from scratch for a purpose I can’t imagine: a squat mass of thick steel sheets, the kind used to cover holes for road work, welded together to form…a box. A windowless, featureless box the size of a department store.
And what is that sound inside this box? What subtle undertone do I hear beneath the engine noise and shouting?