With the enemies defeated and peace at hand, the need for the brutal John Adams incarnation had passed. He had served his people and maintained the power of the new nation. When he looked on what he had wrought, John Adams is said to have let out a month-long howl from the center of the sacred House in White — a scream so terrible in force it rendered an entire generation deaf and ripped apart the very earth, forming the great canyon of the western desert, a fissure the Adams incarnation disappeared into only to reemerge weeks later as the kindly Jefferson form.
Hopefully continued archeological expeditions into the continent will uncover more findings to expand our understanding of the ancient United Statsian religion and society. It is important to remember that the early United Statsians were a frightened, but proud, people. Despite the lower levels of spectrum radiation and thinner dust-metal storms, the world was as confusing and painful a place to them as it is to us now. Although their religion may strike us as arcane and barbaric, you must put yourself in their mindset. They were building a new society in a strange and foreign land. The night was dark; the beasts were loud. Death, in all its myriad incarnations, was, as always, right around the corner.
DARK AIR
How we ended up in those backwoods hills was Iris said we needed to “get a little air,” and Dolan added, “country air!” and that was that. Iris was my lover, and Dolan was her roommate I’d never liked. All of us were alive, at that point.
I had no problem with city air. I figured it was the same air out there as in here, but the decision had been made in my presence without my participation.
“You know what we mean, goofus,” Dolan said. “The noise. The lights.”
Iris giggled and put her hand on Dolan’s arm. They had their own private definition of humor.
A few hours later we were rolling through the hills. We’d been in the car the whole time, and we had the windows up, AC blasting. We hadn’t yet felt the country air.
The roads in these mountains were littered with signs. Caution for this, danger about that. Falling rocks, bobcat crossing, dangerous incline. There must have been a dozen ways for us to be crushed or torn apart.
“You never see green like this in the city,” Iris was saying. She clicked away with her phone as we rounded a chunk of mountain that had been blown open with dynamite.
“You live by the park,” I said. “The park is green.”
“That’s a fake green. I mean real green.”
“This is the green,” Dolan said, “that’s good for the soul.”
Dolan was giving out the directions, steering us toward one of the “Top 10 Secluded Spots for Selfies” he’d read about online. There was a basket of turkey sandwiches and seltzer water in the back.
Dolan wasn’t wearing his seat belt, and as I drove I imagined the door popping open when we went around a sharp turn, then watching him tumble down the cliff and disappear.
After that, maybe Iris and I could get a fresh start on our own.
The dinky towns and small shops had died out miles before, and we still hadn’t found Dolan’s spot. Even the danger signs were worn away here, rusted or obscured with splatters of brown goo. The trees were a sickly yellow-green. I rolled down my window, but there was a bad smell in the air.
Iris and Dolan were in the back talking about books I’d never read.
“It’s bad air up here,” I said. “Something huge must have died, like a bigfoot.”
“You’re so negative all the time,” Iris said. She reached up to plug in her phone’s playlist.
“Yeah, lighten up and soak in this country sun,” Dolan chimed in.
I shut up and let the landscape roll past me. I had a lot of things to think about anyway, from where things were going with Iris to what the hell I was even doing with my life. I was at that age where it seemed as if everything was still possible but only to someone else. I lived in the city in a small apartment I hated and crashed most nights with a girlfriend who sometimes wasn’t even there.
At the top of one hill, I saw a white goat standing on a rock. Its horned head twisted to follow our car as we passed.
He had some wound in the middle of his forehead that looked like a misplaced eye.
“Maybe it’s time to head back,” I said, but no one responded. Dolan had his headphones on, and Iris was pretending to sleep.
“Hey, I said—”
I think that’s around when the creature burst from the bushes on the side of the road. It was black and pink and skittered across the pavement without using its wings. When we hit it, the left front tire popped, and we started fishtailing. Dolan and Iris were both awake now and screaming.
I swung the wheel to the right and allowed the rock face to stop us. The car filled with dust, and my face was smashed into the dense pillow of an air bag. The screams were muffled now. Slowly the air bags deflated, and we wiped the blood from our bruised noses with our sleeves.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Iris shouted.
“My car! My fucking car!” Dolan moaned in a continuous loop.
Sitting there, shirt stained with blood, Iris photographing her face “for the records,” I had the feeling that things between us might be reaching the end.
When we went over to look at the creature, it was mostly flattened. It looked like a crow, except the feathers had fallen off its back. Underneath, the flesh was scaly and pink. The exposed skin was split in half by a row of translucent spikes. The spikes were moving slightly, pointing first in this direction then in that. The smell made me wrinkle my nose. It was an oddly sweet smell to find outdoors, like an open vat of lollipop flavoring.
For some reason, bumblebees were hovering above the carcass like buzzards. They made me dizzy. Iris started dry heaving.
“Bees!” Dolan shrieked. He grabbed Iris and held her in front of him. “First my car, now killer bees.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Iris said. She sounded defeated. “Let’s just go home.”
“Okay,” I said, but I wanted to get a closer look and maybe a few photos of this thing. I figured they might get me some favorites and likes on the internet.
When I squatted close, I noticed that alongside the undulating spikes there were two watery ovals ringed with a ridge of veined flesh. They looked like eyeballs without the pupils. I wanted to reach out a finger and poke one.
When I did, the creature came back to life.
After things calmed down, I saw Dolan on his back in the road. I had closed my eyes and run away, swatting bees blindly with my hands. One of them had stung me on the neck. Dolan was doing much worse, though. His whole face was like an over-inflated balloon. His skin was turning a dark, bruised red. Foam pooled beside his cheek on the pavement.
“Oh my god,” Iris said. “We have to get him to a hospital.”
I’d always suspected she was cheating on me with Dolan. This didn’t seem like the time to be thinking about that, but watching her kneel to cradle his head, I couldn’t help it.
“There aren’t any hospitals around here. I haven’t seen a town for miles.”
“We have to do something!”
Her phone wasn’t getting any signal, and mine was dead. I looked around and tried to think. A little way down the road there was an old dirt path leading into the woods. It looked sparsely used, but at the foot there was a bashed-in mailbox labeled “The Scintleys.”