The Crooked God Machine (33 page)

Teddy laughed.

“It’s not a voice, Charles,” he said to me, “it’s a signal. And it’s over a thousand years old. By the time help came for you, the humans on this planet would have eaten each other alive.”

Wires choked and spit blood into his hand.

"I don't believe you," Wires said, "you may be God but you sure are a terrible salesman, and that's the truth."

Teddy laughed.

"You think I'm God? he asked, "No, son, you are sadly mistaken."

The storm whipped through the chamber and tore the heat from my body. In the cave below the castle I heard the echo of guards as they ran for the stairs. Like a child I held onto Leda and pressed myself into her for warmth.

The membranous ceiling above opened up, and the stars rushed into the chamber.

Teddy stood up.

"It's been a great run," Teddy said, "but it's time for me to go see my Father."

Teddy disintegrated into gray dust. The pale skin turned brittle and webbed, then broke apart into pieces. First his fingers. The pale skin turned brittle Then his arms, his legs, his torso. Last his head and slicked black hair. His snappy gray suit fell to the ground and the swirling dust rose as a mass up through the open ceiling and into the sky.

"What does he mean, he's not God?" Wires asked, "if he's not God then who is?"

Leda grasped my hand.

“The moon,” she said, “Charles, look at the moon.”

The black moon above lit up, illuminating the sky.

I saw then the black moon wasn't a solid ball of mass, but a platform of metal rings that formed interconnected circles, a geometric apparition of living machinery. Each ring seamlessly moved within the complex labyrinth of the platform, like black ribbons of sinew folding in and out of each other to form a flowing stream.

Camp and several other heretics ran into the inner chamber, followed by gray gunfire and blood in the snow.

“The guards!” Camp said, and he fell face down in the water with a hole blown into the middle of his back.

“Charles,” Leda said, “what do we do?”

I wanted to look at her, to reassure her, but I couldn’t look away from the black moon.

“Charles-”

“-There’s nothing left to do,” I said.

The guards arrived. My wrists grew limp and my jaw soft. I dropped my gun in the water and pressed my hands to the back of my head. The other heretics did the same. I trembled with the black moon full in my eyes.

They arrested us and took us out to where the hell shuttles waited. Everywhere the black moon shone its colorless shadow down upon us all, darkening the face of the black planet, cool and silent as always.

Chapter Fifteen

The hell shuttle left the capitol city and crossed a vast machine field. Through the iron slats of the hell shuttle I saw dead grass crack with lightning and turn orange with the heat. Plague machines and monsters looked up toward the skyline.

I watched them disintegrate into dust and rise up to meet the black moon.

“Leda,” I said, “do you see this?”

Leda rested her forehead against the iron slats. When she tilted her head toward me in the crowded car the sea of her black hair burst in my eyes and mouth.

“That’s why they killed themselves.”

“What?”

“Those people in the chamber, they found out what God was, so Teddy forced them to kill themselves.”

“Greetings prisoners,” spoke a cheerful female voice from speakers inside the hell shuttle, “soon we will be arriving to our final destination. But first, a little trivia. Can you guess why all of humanity must be consigned to the eternal fires of hell?

From all sides of the shuttle people pressed me into the iron slatted window. Leda on my right. Wires on my left, with his face turning the color of yellow chalk. More heretics behind me, all silent and faces grey.

“That's correct!” the female voice said, “Humanity must be destroyed because of the inherent imperfection of the human form, its unmanageable decay and inability for adaptation.”

The gray dust hovered against the sky like a film of static, blocking out all light and shapes except for the glowing black moon.

“Form follows function, isn't that so?” the female voice said, “That's what every child was taught in Biology 101, but what about when technological advancements exceed the evolutionary rate of humanity? Function can no longer benefit from the weak and slow human form. This is the future, ladies and gentlemen. There is no need for you any longer.”

The hell shuttle approached a black cave mouth that ruptured from the earth.

“Have a nice trip down.”

We went into hell.

The shuttle traveled through miles of gray cell blocks. On each side of the shuttle were huge iron cages, with hundreds of prisoners pressed up against the bars and huddled together on the frozen floor. Behind the prisoners I saw the silhouettes of angry machines. They extended a dozen arms outward and heated the floor and the walls until they blistered. Their mouths opened up to the ceiling, sucked the marrow out of the earth.

In the next cell block there was a blizzard screaming through the walls. The prisoners clung to each other in six feet of snow, choking in blue, rib cages and fingers dripping frostbite. So it passed this way from one cell block to the next. Heat and cold, heat and cold, until the difference no longer mattered.

“This is it?” I whispered to Leda, “this is all there is?’

Leda said nothing.

I pressed my face against the iron slatted window and red and blue, heat and cold, crawled its way into my skin.

The hell shuttle ground to a stop. The doors slid open and guards wearing dog-headed masks appeared out of the dark, as if spun from pictures out of the gray walls. They grabbed several prisoners and hauled them out of the shuttle.

“Don’t let go of me,” Leda said, “don’t let go. Don’t let go.”

She repeated the words even as a guard grabbed fistfuls of her hair and tore her out of my arms. I cried out her name, but the machines grinding away into the walls, the screams of gray-faced, metallic boned ex-humans, drained the noise away.

Those left were ushered out of the hell shuttle toward gray, box-like chambers at the end of the row. I looked back down the way we’d come and saw an endless line of hell shuttles, their lights doused with snow and shimmer heat, a train of them extending from us to the surface of the earth. Dozens of shuttles. Maybe hundreds.

We were taken into a gray box of a chamber, stripped naked by guards, and forced up against the wall. My Daddy’s jacket joined the rest of the clothes on the pile for burning.

“Don’t touch me!” I heard Wires say, and his voice sounded like the voice of a wounded car.

Nozzles snaked out of the walls and doused us with chemical spray. I bared my back to the spray and my skin burned.

“Leda!” I called out.

No response.

I was grabbed by the back of a neck like a dog and thrown to the concrete floor. A guard’s boot heel crushed the back of my head. I spit blood and watched it run down into the concrete, form a pool around my mouth. He shaved my head as I wallowed in the bloodstain.

“Heretic?” I asked as he pressed the tattooing needles to the back of my head.

“Sure thing,” he said.

“After you’re done with me they’ll do the same to you.”

“You bet,” he said.

“Leda!” I screamed, “Leda help me!”

He held me down as I squirmed. He tattooed onto the back of my shaved head the number six.

When he was finished he shoved me out into the corridor with the others. The guards out there ushered us to the end of the line, down to the last cell block where figures appeared and disappeared in the fog. I called out for Leda, but when I reached out to try to find her the machines answered instead.

They gripped my hands with their blinding heat, stung my fingers with eyes like poison nets. I stumbled through the mass of bodies. I followed them as they marched into the steam and fog from here to eternity, away from the line of hell shuttles and down into the place where the light couldn’t follow.

Maybe this is where the deadheads ended up when they punched the slip inside their head. Maybe if I peered hard enough into the black I would see my mother and sister, Jeanine’s ghost, the last vanishing shade of my father.

The guards opened the block six gates and the new prisoners spilled out into the gray edges of the cells.

Beside me Wires grabbed my shoulder.

“We’re so good at this sort of thing, you know,” he said, “That’s the terrifying part, we’re so good at it.”

“Good at what?” I asked.

Wires said nothing. He let go of me and submerged himself into the gray.

“Charles!”

Someone grasped my fingers through cell bars. I pressed my cheek to the cold metal and saw a familiar face, emaciated sharp lines, eyes wide enough to walk through. She edged her hand through the bars and brushed my cheek. In the center of her head was a torn hole where a slip implant used to be.

“Jeanine,” I whispered.

I turned back. The blinding heat and storm slammed itself into my eyes. Pink dots of blood lined my vision, and from all sides gray limbs reached out in a mass to block my way.

I pushed my way through the crowd and through the open cell gate toward Jeanine. She pressed her face against the cell bars, shaking, all her bones sticking blue against her skin. The snow did not melt on her body but stuck hard and crystalline to her face and shoulders.

“The hell shuttles took me during the parade,” she said, “I never got to tell you that I loved you.”

“I know. Your brother told me.”

I took her in my arms and tried to warm her body, only to realize we were both frozen, stuck together and sinking. That no matter how much I tried I could not transfer any warmth to her, because there was none left to have.

I pulled her out of the cell and back down into the hallway, to be swept up by the encroaching crowd. From all sides the machines shuddered and people screamed and fell down or remained silent, naked backs bared like offerings. I bit down on my tongue and blood filled my mouth. My limbs threatened to quit, but I kept moving down the line toward the end.

In the last cell block I found Leda huddling naked on the frozen floor, like an infant without her locks of black hair, her tender pale skin raised with welts and damp snow.

“Leda,” I said.

She didn’t look up. Jeanine shivered against me.

“Leda, it’s okay, you’ve heard the voice,” I said, “help is coming.”

Leda looked up at me from the folds of her arms, face stretched thin enough to snap.

“I’ve heard that voice for thirty years, Charles,” Leda said, “and you know what Teddy said. Help may be coming. But not for us. It’s too late for us.”

I knelt beside Leda and pulled her into my arms. She resisted at first, her body stiffened and she tried to fold down into her like a beached starfish.

“Please don't,” she said, “we failed.”

“I want to hold you. Please,” I said, “it's the end of the goddamn world. Let me fucking hold you.”

Leda gasped and her body relaxed. Gently, slowly, I pulled her into me as we sat naked on the frozen floor and snow and sleet fell down from the ceiling. I kissed the back of her neck and rubbed her arms to try to warm her.

“This is a fucked up planet you know that?” I said, “All of my life I just wanted love, to be loved. I didn't know we'd have to change the composition of the universe to do so.”

“Oh, Charles,” Leda said, “I love you. I'm so sorry.”

Televisions in the ceiling and walls flickered on. God in his black mask appeared on the screen.

“Hello humanity,” God said, “Good news. The rebellion has been crushed and those who would attempt to defy me have been cast out of heaven. With this final purge of the celestial body my supreme rule shall never be challenged again.”

Leda’s breath hitched and she turned away from the television. She buried her face in my shoulder.

“Life is a strange and flawed phenomenon,” God said, “You are irrelevant and the gates of salvation have been denied to you because of your refusal to be saved. After you are gone, the universe can return to its state of equilibrium.”

The television screens switched to a stream of the black moon and all its interconnected machinery, hovering about the planet and casting its black shadow over the landscape.

“When I have wiped your memory from the earth, all shall be paradise.”

The screens cut to streams of the empty planet. The skies boiled with gray matter, and the black moon shone its face down on the ground below. Empty cities, empty machine fields. Empty houses, with their faces shuttered in like gouged out eyes.

Fire rained down on the earth and hell stood still. The fire came from the core of the black moon, fell through the sky and struck the ground. Fire that obliterated everything it touched, burning the towns, destroying the fields, the woods, evaporating the rivers.

Leda closed her eyes and whispered, “please don't let me watch.”

I pressed my hand into the back of her head and she curled into me. I rocked her.

The fire destroyed everything. It destroyed the pagan temples and the last remnants of who we used to be, the abandoned tower in the sea and the ancient structures that told us, in their subtle, nearly invisible way, of a world before God. The fire destroyed the ancient, bristle thumbed trees and the swamp where Jolene once dragged away my dead baby brother. It destroyed everything that once stood between us and the black moon above.

The fire stripped the earth until it stood barren of life. Even as we froze to death I felt the heat hit me in a wave. Who we used to be burned and I burned with it. Soon there would be nothing but the ash that hovered in the sky above, the glowing crook of the black moon’s shapeless shadow, this invisible prison below.

Jeanine knelt beside me and embraced me. She cradled her head in the crook of my neck.

“In my perfect world we’d have night flowers that sang lullabies,” she said, “every book and marriage would have a happy ending.”

“Please,” I said, “not this game. Not now.”

The three of us held each other on the frozen floor, and soon we became too cold to move. The fire rained on and on, sucking the life from the earth, beating over our heads. Creating God's paradise. I tried to think of the lake Leda told me about, the cool, sparking lake. I tried to delve down into the waters and disappear in the depths below, but even my thoughts crystallized, froze over.