ONCE UPON A TIME…IN WEST TERRA1
Wind whipped through the ragged town of Hazmat. The buildings were old drinking buddies slumped together. Dust tore over abandoned storefronts and the wooden-planked sidewalks jutted out like false teeth.
At the top of the hill, the double helix steeple struck the quarter hour. The bell tolled and down below the crooked doors flew open one by one. The townsfolk emerged in goggles, strapped head-to-toe in belts and overcoats. They sucked air filters and stepped into the dust storm dressed in their Sunday best.
Some clutched bonnets, others held their hats like shields. Weary parents pushed or pulled their kids up the path. Young Abner Sloat helped his grandmother along, the poor thing. He held a tired afghan around her bony shoulders as she trembled up the hill. The Vanvulcanburgs and the Skars. The Novas, Comstocks, and Wolframs. The whole town, save the sinners still sleeping off their drink, pressed on, heads against the wind, and marched the path to glory.
Headstones sprouted here and there at the bottom of the slope and up the winding path they came into full bloom. At the summit, Our Lady of Constellation sat perched over the Faultlines. The graves leaned toward the chapel the way houseplants bend to catch the light.
The imitation organ thrummed. Sound seeped through the walls, slipped through cracks in window seals, and escaped in gasps as the double doors thumped open and shut. Sand was stomped off boots, coats and gas masks were hung on the hooks in back. The crowd became murmurs of good morning, blessings of Sancti Mundus. Throats were cleared. Yawns covered up like crimes.
The town spilled, the pews filled, and the congregation stumbled note by tone-deaf note through the daily hymnal.
Outside the residents of McDougal Hill shared a moment of silence. There was Miranda Koffin, taken by blood lung not long after her husband took up with the Saints. Hezekiah lay next to her with only half a brain. The remainder painted on a sidewalk outside Atlas First National Bank and long since sprayed and gone down the drain. Resting on his other side was Henrietta Jahlen, long-rumored to be Hezekiah’s mistress and whose gravestone was still freshly vandalized by Miranda’s great-great-grandchildren. Among the generations of small-town families tangled like roots over and under the hill, not a single axe had yet been buried.
There was also Virgil M. Sloat, locally famous for filling the first grave dug in Hazmat township after the Reclamation. He was also famous for falling slopping drunk off the old water tower with his pants around his ankles. Unfortunately, at least for the extended Sloat family, the two distinctions weren’t mutually exclusive.
Virgil’s grave shuddered in its sleep. The ground shifted and revealed a small wheel, turning and creaking. The rust whispered in protest as the metal hatch popped open. Dust swirled up from the hole and out climbed a man who was completely and undeniably naked.
Walter Bohr shouldn’t be here.
The Executive Itinerary at Bohr Industries placed him 200 miles due East at the research base in Atlas Rock, in and out of internal meetings all day. Heartland University Online was still accepting registrations for his upcoming remote seminar on Advanced Alchemetaphysics, scheduled to begin in just a few short hours. And his yearly shuttle tune-up was on the books for tomorrow morning at Mercury’s Tank and Tire.
Yet here he was: naked, cold, alone, and light-years away from home.
A pair of glasses covered his eyes. Strange markings covered everything else. Needle holes wrapped around his skin in concentric circles.
Walter bent over the hole and assumed the position of the most popular prayer in the known universe. His stomach twisted as he retched up nothing and more bloody nothings.
A shadow appeared at the bottom of the ladder.
“Shit,” he said.
Walter fumbled and shut the hatch. Sand washed over it as he wobbled to his feet. He spun around in a fever. His eyes scattered over the humble town: retrofitted solar panels, antennae, and personal windmills lined the roofs. They rattled and swayed in small, rusted cornfields. Cartoon-patterned pajamas flapped on laundry lines above empty plastic pools filled with cheap toys. A battered old tricycle with a new pink paint job wobbled slightly on its lopsided front wheel.
Anywhere, he thought. Anywhere but here…
The air went static. Walter shivered under his own weight. Negative space gathered behind him and flashed with a sudden charge. A figure in a radiation suit appeared, wheezing through its mask.
Walter gasped and the man in hazmat reached for him, but Walter recoiled. He groaned and clutched his chest. The physical laws of his body were breaking down. He no longer knew what he was or was not capable of, so he stared out into the distance and focused his mind as far off as he could. His body shuddered like a film reel and, just like that, gravity no longer applied.
Walter tumbled through the air. He knocked against the ground and sent plumes of sand upward. The hazmat suit disappeared after him, zapping out to where Walter’s body flowed to, but he fell behind with each jump, each delay stranding him further from his prey.
Walter flopped along, helpless, until he skidded to a stop fathoms away in the outskirts of Kronos County in the middle of a coughing fit. When at last he cleared his throat, he ambled to his feet, shook the sand off, and winced into the desert. Nothing but sand and hills and the warning towers of long-defunct outposts. Walter turned back toward Hazmat, but it was gone. Too far off. Swallowed up in sand.
Good, he thought. No telling at this point…
He wiped his mouth, leaving a brushstroke of blood on his forearm. He stumbled along for a spell, climbing up and down the rolling hills, drifting deeper into the wastes until his legs collapsed and he dropped to his knees.
He tried to take his pulse, but lost track when he passed three hundred beats per minute and the numbers on his watch melted into hieroglyphics. Walter then started drawing formulas in the sand to approximate how much time he had left. Veins bulged from his pulsating skin. Bones shifted and made muffled cracks and pops. His muscles swelled and shrank with each labored breath.
He scribbled his way through the calculations as his shadow stretched thin and began to fade.
“Okay,” he mumbled. “Assuming antiparticles of similar mass and opposite charge…”
Night chill still clung to the air, but Walter dripped sweat. Steam rolled off his shoulders in tumbling little clouds. He was freezing. He was on fire.
“All things being equal…that means we should get…”
The equations faded as his fingers went see-through; his silhouette now a mirage. As molecules phased in and out of sequence, his watch band snapped through his wrist and fell into the shifting sand.
Walter threw his hands down and took a deep breath. He blinked into the mad light of the new day, his fogged-up glasses gleaming in the morning glory. He thought about his family, his home back on Earth, and how he wished to God and everything else that he could be there right now.
Then he remembered this place wasn’t always called Terra. He remembered this was the first place. The place that had become a distant memory, nearly forgotten after centuries of drifting through the black and white speckled empty. The birthplace of a name we’ve always known. A word taken and given many times over.
A word for home.
Walter had to laugh at that.
“Well, what do you know?” he said. “I’m already home…”
His lungs let go of last breaths. The shadow evaporated and his skin cells swirled away, bits of pollen in a swift daisy chain reaction. Each individual particle separated one from the other and joined the world of dust.
The hazmat suit materialized as Walter’s glasses plopped to the ground. The lenses glinted in the sun. Sand gathered in the corners of the frames.
“Shit…”
The suit vanished and the wind went dead.
Dawn flared along the horizon like an open wound.
Day spilled over night.
And the sun baked away the stars…
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You’re listening to HOT 104.9: Desert Eagle Radio, home of Up N’ Atom with Fartin’ Martin and the Tumor…
Welcome back, Tumor Nation. Welcome back. Wipe the sand from your eyes and get primed for liftoff with a split-atom weather minute from our favorite fallout ape. Whatcha got for us today, Tumor?
Forget about that low-level radiation from yesterday’s allergy forecast, Marty. That’s all getting swept away by some pos-i-tronically nasty wind-storms rolling through the Dust Belt. So, grab yourself a gas mask and enjoy the shade while it lasts, folks, because once them clouds clear, this Sabbath’s gonna be a real scorcher…
The God Complexes 