I STIRRED GROGGY AND SORE in the watery well of a blackened crater that cradled me like a babe. Arms and hands crusted with blood, a ringing in my ears like a humming wire, I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there.
Rain pattered over me and trickled down the scars in the crater’s steep walls. The air reeking of chemical fire, the sky opaque with violet fog, bombs thumped somewhere out of sight, the ground quaking as if beasts long trapped in the earth’s core kicked the underside of the land, demanding their parole into the world.
I heard a gentle splash, and was startled to find a woman crouched at my side. I was sure I was hallucinating, something in the air tripping my mind, but there she was, skin gray as tin, turbid eyes peering lovingly over me.
Then I recognized Mama’s wide mouth and tapered chin. A wound marred her forehead, a bullet hole, the gray skin seared and puckered. I began to tremble and Mama’s hand, as cold as stone, gently turned me onto my side.
I couldn’t see her face. I could only feel the chill of her behind me. A sharp pinch in one shoulder blade, like a needle piercing the skin, a pressure like twine tugged through.
I couldn’t move or even speak, but I wasn’t scared. Mama was there. Mama was with me. I tried not to flinch as the pain grew acute and then the hurt was too much and I howled as the world drained of form and color.
I SQUINTED against the dawn. No violet light, Mama gone, I was alone and the world seemed the world again. A heaviness like a blanket draped my frame. I sat up in the puddle of soot-black water to discover that what felt like a blanket was a shawl of feathers.
My back muscles flexed and the feathers lifted as naturally as an arm. I felt the cold where my damp shirt was shredded up the back, and reached over my shoulder and touched the muscle that fused with the curved ligature and the pneumatized bones of a wing.
Horrified and confused, I paced circles, sloshing about the watery hole. Then I began to remember. Scraps. Disconnected bits. Scorpions slapped together in a tub. Alone and marching through the freezing desert. Screaming at a light in the night sky. Lightning flash; a soundless explosion of light.
I didn’t consider the movement in the way a baby taking her first steps doesn’t consider walking, but the wings swooped upward then thrust sharply down and my entire body lifted. With a second flap, the crater’s floor released me.
My lungs bucked from fear and my wings clamped against my body and I splashed back down into the basin. The chalk sky open above me, I pressed a palm to my sternum and felt the muscle of my heart throbbing through the bone.
I tugged a wing as if to yank it from my back. My muscles seized against the pinch. The wings were somehow connected to the pain-center of my mind. I descended into panic, curled my fingers into claws, stiffened my heels into spikes, leaping and kicking, but the crater’s walls were too slick to scale.
Trapped and despondent, I finally allowed the wings to unfurl. I raised my arms and the wings flapped in spastic bursts. Higher I flew until I shot my hands above my head and grasped the crater’s rim and pulled myself up to stand in the acrid wind blowing over the raw empty desert.
WHITE PAWS sullied with midway dust, their withers higher than the highest head, a pair of white lions as stout as bulls parted the milling crowd. Sweating in my tac vest, I watched the giant cats lumber between the booths with carnies hawking games, past the funnel-cake vendor and the grill pits of corn.
A little man in a white suit followed the enormous lions, clutching a chain in each hand, the chains hooked into the cats’ massive collars. As they passed before me, I noted the man was in fact a boy, with pale skin and hair so blond it was almost white. A teen, if barely, he called with a grown man’s authority after the crowd, who turned to his voice and followed in his wake.
Twenty years old and fresh from boot camp, this was my very first mission. Though Sergeant Nazari had emphasized the mounting terror threats throughout the south, patrolling the West Texas Fair felt unworthy of the uniform of the United States Army. For the After Action Review, I’d justify my interest in the boy and lions as a security concern, though at the time I sensed nothing at all dangerous. I was simply bored. Curious and bored.
I trailed them into a little outdoor amphitheater and stood near a concrete stage that faced a semicircle of ragged wooden grandstands. The bleachers filled quickly, and the people cheered as the boy put the lions through a series of exercises one might a dog: pushing a ball with their noses, lifting one enormous paw and then the other, rolling over and roaring on command.
Then the white-suited boy positioned the lions on their haunches at center stage. With one and then the other he pried his fingers between their fanged teeth to spread wide their jaws. When the boy faced the audience and spoke, his voice boomed from speakers embedded in the lions’ gaping maws.
“What have we become?” he asked, letting the question hang over us. “In my life, I’ve seen America in five different wars. I’ve seen viruses take countless lives. I’ve seen quakes swallow coasts and ruin cities, and new cities rising in their place. I’ve seen the wildfires and storms get worse and worse and—” He reached inside his jacket, withdrew a small white Bible, and held it above his head. “I’ve read my Bible every day to grant my life a context. I’ve seen that context shift over the years. This is to say that even the Bible changes with the times. I understand that’s a dangerous thing to say, but I mean no blasphemy. Soon we’ll be living on some space station, and who knows what it’ll mean then. The stories of the Old Testament. The wisdom of Christ. What will Eden mean once we’re gone from Earth? What will Bethlehem be to a child born on Mars?”
I surveyed the grandstand, people shaking their heads or checking their phones in realizing the boy had tricked them with the show of lions and was now going to preach.
The boy minister pushed up his sleeves, panned his eyes over the restless crowd. “There’s a sermon I’ve given in my mind many times, but never spoken aloud. It seems to have come from the darkest of truths, and it greatly scares me.” He stepped to the front of the stage and boldly pronounced, “I don’t believe in the Devil. I believe it’s only us. Jesus was paraded to the cross, a crown of thorns on his head. Judas gave him up. Peter denied him. What did we do to save him? What did you do? I wasn’t there, you cry. It wasn’t me. But you were there. You’ve always been there. Let’s be honest. Can we be honest?” he said, his voice rising. “We’ve gotten exactly what we want. Storms and disease. War and terror. It’s exactly what you want. And the relief you feel is tremendous. I knew it’d come to this, you say. I knew I was right. The power of knowing the despair you ordered has finally come to pass makes you feel like a god. Let’s be honest. It’s what you want. You want this world to collapse. Want people to be every awful thing.”
The boy pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, dabbed sweat from his brow. “I’m one of you,” he said, softer now. “I’m not shaming anyone. I’m done with shame. All my life I’ve been ashamed of my thoughts, doubting I’d be understood. This is what I’m saying. I’m saying God gives us what we want. Not just what you say you want, though that’s a part of it. I mean your every thought becomes the world. Your every prayer. But not just your prayers. Their prayers, too. And from these prayers we get all the bigotry, all the poverty and violence, and all the harm we need done to those not like us because we hate ourselves and hate each other.”
“Stop it,” a man shouted from the stands.
The young preacher winced. He gazed out in the direction of the heckler. I leaned to see a bald muscular man glaring at the boy from the third row of the center bleachers.
“Stop it?” the boy preacher said to the man. “Isn’t that about all we ever say? Stop making me hope. Stop asking for love. Love costs too much. Hope hurts too much. Stop it—that’s exactly what we said to Christ. We say that we love him, but the truth is he asks too much. Be merciful? Be meek? Be the peacemaker? What weakness. What cowardice. Isn’t that what you feel? None of it gives you what you want. That power over your fears, over others. That utter destruction. Stop it. Fine, fine,” he said, patting the air. “God is listening to everything you say and don’t say. God gives you what you want. He put his son on that cross and Christ cried out, ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ God’s reply was clear—‘I have not forsaken you, my son, but simply given them what they want.’”
Chatter rippled through the stands. The muscular man stood and sidestepped to the aisle. He stormed out of the amphitheater, a young woman in a tank top following close behind.
The preacher shuffled his feet, seemed to shrink up there on the stage. “Listen,” he said, brushing blond-white hairs back from his sweat-beaded forehead. “You want me to talk about the End Days? About the final stand? About the Beast from the Sea? Seven heads and ten horns and ten crowns? I know that’s what you want so you can feel it’s all something beyond you, that we’re all just a victim of some great invasion. No,” he said, shaking a scolding finger. “It’s your heads and horns and crowns. If God only gives us what we want, then want must be most sacred, above everything. Above love, above peace. For our God is want, and want is God, and what we want is this world we’ve made. This world. We’ve made.”
A scuffling broke through the amphitheater, people rising and filing out of the stands.
“What about the children?” the preacher cried after those leaving. “What will you tell the children?”
The boy preacher’s chin dropped to his chest. He remained in that posture before slowly lifting his head and turning to the lions. He clapped his hands and the cats’ jaws snapped shut. The lions peered drowsily about, as if waking from a slumber. They lumbered up to the boy, nuzzling in close as to comfort him. The preacher slumped against a lion’s flank, burying his face in its snowy mane.
The remainder of the crowd stood, calling out insults as they passed. It’s hard to believe, knowing the terror the boy would unleash, but I felt pity for him. What have we become? His question clanged inside me. But it was pity, only pity, that compelled me to step to the front of the stage.
When he finally noticed me, his eyes slick with tears, I didn’t know what to say and called out for him to stay strong. The young preacher wiped his cheeks and approached me. Once near, I saw he had the most striking eyes: one blue, the other green.
He read my name off the patch on my uniform. Goodwin. He asked my first name and I told him it was Mazzy. He repeated my name like it was a mantra, then handed down his white Bible, small enough to fit in a pocket, its pages edged in gold.
I didn’t want the Bible, but couldn’t bring myself to refuse his gift. I thanked him. With a doleful grin, he nodded. Then, without a word more, the boy preacher eased back between the pair of lions. He whispered into one cat’s tufted ear. He turned to the other and repeated the gesture.
Whatever the boy said released the beasts from their tether. The behemoths sprang so viscously from the stage their wind pushed me sideways. The ground quaked upon their landing and the lions loped with startling speed into the crowd, gnashing their maws, their sickle claws flailing skin and snapping bone.
I spun to find the boy up on the stage. Smiling. He was smiling. He glanced one last time at me, his queer eyes beaming with righteous pride. Then he turned and strolled off toward the rear of the stage, as if shielded in the protective light of God.
All I had to do was raise my rifle and end this saga right then and there. To be the hand of justice. Maybe it was the shock of it all, the spasm clenching the muscles of my back, or the Bible in my fist, but I proved impotent in my first test as a soldier. Paralyzed in the noise and chaos, I watched the preacher hop down from the stage and disappear into the scrambling masses.
BY THE TIME our unit put every bit of firepower into taking down the lions, they’d killed ninety-three, injuring a hundred more. An exhaustive search of the fairgrounds continued throughout the night, but the boy preacher had vanished like a dream to daylight.
The midway tents shredded, trailers knocked off their blocks, bullet holes in signboards, and blood in the trampled grass, the morning pitched gray as we haggard soldiers watched a forklift haul the riven husk of a lion toward a black government truck.
Sergeant Nazari stepped up beside me. He pulled a red rope of licorice from his tac vest. One side of his mouth permanently drooped with a burn scar down his chin, he told me that beyond our After Action Report, the feds would need to hear my testimony.
Nazari tore the licorice, offered me half. We ate the licorice and watched the lion being loaded into the truck. The sergeant chewed with the unburned side of his mouth and said, “Investigate until the sun goes cold, but the only way this shit’ll ever end is to kill every last motherfucker who claims to speak for God.”
AFTER MY FAILURE AT THE FAIRGROUNDS, sleep became elusive, my upper spine locked in a way that made it hard to turn my head, and in a neurological quirk I’d briefly lost my senses of smell and taste. The medics categorized the symptoms as combat stress reactions. The Army granted me a three-day mental health leave to return to my little hometown in the coastal mountains of California.
Mama, Ava Lynn, and Dewey Chang picked me up at the hyperloop station. Mama drove, had just finished her shift at the glass factory, was tired but in good spirits. Ava Lynn, my seven-year-old sister, was telling me something about her school, but the car windows were down and she was in the back seat and I couldn’t much hear her over the wind. Dewey sat beside her. He was six foot three, his body hardened from hauling nets on fishing boats, was my best friend and boyfriend whenever I accepted the kindness of his affection.
We sped across the arid valley. When I was a girl, irrigation trenches wended through vast fields of garlic and tomatoes, pistachio groves, almonds and olives, beans and berries. We grew everything here. Then the drought hit and the irrigation trenches became ruts of sand, and desperation grew where crops could not.
It had seemed a miracle when the first cloud-seeding drones soared through the stratosphere, trailing their magic elixir. From the lookout tower atop our mountain, what the Forest Service once used to spot wildfires, Mama and I would peer up into the sky, the spray drifting down in a great shimmering curtain that bubbled red at the edges and blossomed into rain clouds.
Shade cast over the mountain, the birdsong would fall silent. Then the sky took a deep sighing breath and the rain fell steady over the scorched land. If a child knows the world by her mother’s face, then in that moment I knew only hope and wonder.
To the farmers’ dismay, the scientists determined the geoengineering had created troublesome reverberations, systems over the Pacific growing unpredictable, seismic activity from stormquakes more frequent and profound. The government didn’t heed the scientists’ warning. The seeding program continued, and the Great Quake of 2029 split the valley and devastated the coastal cities, the ocean surging inland, and a whole new coastline was born.
Mama pulled off the highway and drove through the remnants of Jaynesville. They’d covered the old elementary school in clear plastic that moved in the wind and seemed alive, boarded over every glassless window in the two-block stretch of town, and barricaded the impassably buckled side roads. Back then, we’d figured it’d all get fixed and everything would return to how it was, but the town was ruined, forever ruined.
If the drought and quakes weren’t enough, then the megastorms began. After the first storm, ten days of torrential rain and tsunami, the land was littered with fish. Steelhead in the flats. Chinook in the ditches. Sturgeon like logs in the road. The land salt-white and so many flies Mama said the town was like a dead thing on a beach.
I was nineteen when I enlisted in the Army. Mama thought I was too bright and headstrong for the military. Maybe she was right. We discussed how those were dangerous times, conflicts across multiple continents, ongoing virus and climate riots, decades of racial violence and domestic terror.
Back then, I hadn’t a thought about politics or war. I told Mama I had few options, that the military seemed noble, even righteous, but more than anything I had to get out of that fly-ridden town before I became just another fish gasping in the briny dust.
Mama reluctantly gave her blessing. My decision was validated the following Sunday, when Pastor Lundquist, at the Western Valley Community Church, announced my enlistment from the pulpit. He had me stand at the front of the congregation, and together we all sang “America the Beautiful” like a hymn.
Mama slowed the car as we entered Grace Hill, the new town built along the new coast. Uninspiring despite its name, it was just a strip mall and a diner, two churches, a gas station, and a school. Mama turned onto a rutted lane and Ava Lynn cheered as we bumped down to the ocean and the marina where Dewey worked.
The marina had a little café, their specialty being pistachio ice cream, which Mama knew was my favorite. The sun warm, the waves lapping the pylons and the gulls whirling above the boats, we stood on the dock with the other locals and a few tourists returning from their fishing expeditions.
Watching the others smile and eat their ice cream, I became overwhelmed in realizing they were oblivious to what I’d endured at the fairgrounds. Sergeant Nazari had warned about such obliviousness, and told me to not despair, because the obliviousness of civilians was the truest sign of freedom, something Americans enjoyed that much of the world was no longer afforded, and the very thing we fought to protect.
I tried to feel good about my military service, to feel that in some small way I allowed my loved ones to laugh and eat ice cream, oblivious that somewhere violent plots were being laid and bombs were dropping and who knew what menace lay just beyond our sight. Mainly, though, I felt hopelessly apart from them.
A morose pall crept over me. I stood with them in the sunshine, thinking about the boy preacher smirking as monstrous lions ripped through flesh and the fairgrounds rang with deathly screams.
Dewey studied me with sullen eyes, staring at my uneaten cone and the ice cream dripping down my hand.
I licked ice cream from my fingers and tried to joke us back to center. “Do you still love me with my head shaved?”
Dewey shyly grinned. “Hair grows back.”
MAMA HAD BEEN A PARK RANGER until the park system was defunded. Though she lost her job, no one chased us off the land so we stayed on the outpost, a little stone house and stables high atop a mountain. ...
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