Fall or, Dodge in Hell

Ameristan couldn’t have had less in common with how it would have been depicted in a movie or video game. Tom and Kevin had perceived or imagined some threat. Its nature was hinted at by the handmade sign they had passed at the crossroads. Maybe these guys also had access to edit streams of geodata showing hot spots of gunfire and of traffic slowdowns that might suggest roadblocks or checkpoints. But whatever they were worried about would have little to no visual signature. There was not going to be a central base, a nerve center with roads and wires converging on it. You could put anything in a barn.

Or maybe Kevin was bored and wanted to exercise the drone.

Their overall course was diagonal, but because of the grid they were always going either north or west. This made sense and worked perfectly in the almost obscenely flat middle part of the state. But the big rivers all ran from very slightly higher ground in the northwest to the very slightly lower southeast. So the caravan’s rectilinear zigzagging caused them to cross and recross rivers, and around the rivers there was some interesting topography, some actual valleys between legit hills, forested country a stain on the land infallibly marking every part of it that was too steep to profitably cultivate. The higher places—worn-down traces of a glacial moraine, she suspected—sprouted wind turbines of the most enormous type. The bigger they were, the slower they turned, which was a good thing for birds. Some didn’t turn at all because, one assumed, they were down for maintenance, or not finished yet. She grew used to them as hours went by.

And that was how the giant Flaming Cross of the Leviticans sneaked up on her, though the people working on it would probably have felt that she sneaked up on them. It wasn’t actually flaming. It wasn’t even capable of flaming yet, because it wasn’t finished. Its general size and shape were not terribly far off from that of a wind turbine. It was sited on the top of what passed for a hill around here—not to catch the wind, but to be seen from a distance as it burned in the night. Anyway, by the time she accepted that she was actually seeing it, the thing was less than a mile away. She could see a clutter of pickup trucks parked around its base and some pop-up canopies sheltering tables where workers could take water breaks. A row of portable toilets stood sentry next to an office trailer.

On an impulse, she opened a voice channel to Tom. In normal circumstances, his edit space and Sophia’s were totally disjoint; they would never encounter each other online, never meet, never see the same news stories. Anything that originated from the likes of Tom would be fastidiously pruned by the algorithms used by Sophia’s editor before human eyes ever reviewed it, and anything that came from Princeton or Seattle would never reach Tom’s feed until it had been bent around into propaganda whose sole function was to make Tom afraid and angry. But for today’s purposes they had a direct channel, unfiltered, unedited. “Hey,” she said, “how do you think those people would feel about our dropping in for a visit? Just, you know, in tourist mode?”

“Copy. Stand by,” Tom returned.

The sound of Sophia’s voice had broken her companions out of their media reverie, and so now came several moments of their pushing up their glasses, being astonished by the spectacle of the cross, talking about it, pulling glasses back down to search for more information.

“There’s a visitor center,” Tom reported. “With changing rooms. Probably easiest unless you want to have all your garments inspected.”

“Well, if there’s a visitor center, they must be okay with visitors,” Sophia said.

Phil, Julian, and Anne-Solenne could not hear Tom’s audio stream and so the changing rooms came as a surprise to them. They were in separate trailers for men and women; all of the Princetonians knew that it would be pointless, and probably inflammatory, to make inquiries about non-gender-binary cases. But the idea of having to don different garments just to set foot on a specific property was new to them.

“If we don’t, they’ll have to stone us to death,” Sophia explained. “And according to their interpretation of Leviticus, the modern equivalent of stoning people is shooting them.”

“Oh, I get it,” Phil said. “Because bullets are like little rocks.”

“Exactly. And a gun is just a modern labor-saving device that makes it easier to throw the little rocks really fast. Basically, to them, every reference to stoning in the Bible is a sort of dog-whistle reference to guns.”

Phil was working it out: “God knew guns would be invented in the future because omniscient, but He couldn’t insert direct references to them in the Bible because that would be a spoiler for the Bronze Age audience. So He used stoning as a placeholder.”

“And our clothing is immodest or something?” Julian asked.

“Not at all.” Sophia reached out as if to grab Julian by the scruff of the neck. Instead of which, she flipped the collar of his T-shirt inside out so that she could read the tag. “Mostly cotton but with some spandex. To make it stretchy I guess. If you wore this up there, they would have to stone—i.e., shoot—you.”

“They have something against spandex?”

“Against mixing fibers.” Sophia pointed to a sign mounted to the wall above a table on which a display of neatly folded white paper bunny suits had been laid out, in a range of sizes. The sign was a quote from the Bible, set in Comic Sans:

Ye shal kepe mine ordinances. Thou shalt not let thy cattel gendre with others of divers kindes. Thou shalt not sowe thy field with mingled sede neither shal a garment of divers things, as of linen and wollen come upon thee.

—Leviticus 19:19

Phil couldn’t get past the first bit. “Is that a proscription of bestiality between different kinds of animals?”

“Ssh,” said Anne-Solenne, for sitting nearby was an Iowan lady of perhaps sixty, monitoring a table of cookies and coffee, free but, in classic Midwest passive-aggressive style, with a jar for suggested donations.

“I guess they were anti-mule. Look. Point being we can either strip down and have her read all the labels on our garments, which is gross, or just change into the bunny suits.”

“What about him?” Julian asked, gesturing toward Tom, who was emerging from the men’s toilet. Then, realizing he had been a little rude, he turned to address Tom directly. “Tom, are you going to change clothes?”

“No need,” Tom said, and went into a curious routine of patting himself in various places. All of his garb was Tactical, Mil Spec, Rugged, and Grueling, even down to suspenders and socks. All of the tags were on the outside—not concealed in collars and waistbands, as was the normal practice. Which wasn’t obvious because the tags were tactical camo, olive drab or what have you, so that they wouldn’t stand out in a faraway sniper’s scope like stars in the night sky.

The Princetonians now all felt at liberty to approach and examine. The lettering and logos on the tags were subdued tactical colors and difficult to read until you got close. But all of them—along with the manufacturers’ logos and the incomprehensible laundry glyphs—bore a symbol consisting of a block letter L with a crossbar near the top and flames coming out of it. “It’s just easier to wear Levitican-approved shit,” he explained, “’cause of where I go in the line of duty sometimes.”

“So you don’t believe it?” Phil asked.

“Oh, fuck no,” said Tom. “But they do. And it’s real good clothing. Tactical.”

They changed into bunny suits—but not before the cookie warden had beckoned Sophia and Anne-Solenne over to the refreshment table and asked them sotto voce whether it was, for either of them, That Time of the Month. Both answered in the negative and exchanged a look meaning Let’s just not even go there. Later they could consult Leviticus as to what limits and penalties might apply to women who were on the rag.

“Oh, the KKK Libel. Good question. Glad you asked. That is one of the greatest misconceptions,” said Ted, Son of Aaron (as he was identified on the name tag clipped to his 100 percent cotton tactical bib overalls). He removed his gleaming white hard hat as if the mere mention of the KKK Libel had put him at risk of blowing his stack. The warm summer breeze streamed through his thinning gray hair and might have evaporated a small fraction of the sweat streaming over his scalp. After a moment he glanced up as if checking the sky for an angry Jehovah. But nothing was there except blue sky strewn with fluffy clouds and the steel crossbar of a two-hundred-foot-tall cross. Not currently flaming. The pipefitters had not finished the work needed to conduct natural gas out to its system of burners. “My wife’ll skin me,” he remarked, “if we don’t get under cover. Let’s duck in here so I can set y’all straight.”

“Why will she skin you?” Anne-Solenne asked curiously as they followed Ted into the shade of a pop-up canopy. Julian got distracted en route by three lambs gamboling in a makeshift chicken-wire pen.

“Melanoma,” Ted answered. “Have to go into Iowa City.” This remark was mumbled in a distracted way as he was getting a voice call, faintly and tinnily audible to them on the flip-up earplugs cantilevered out from the bows of his safety glasses. He indexed those down into his ears and answered the call, excusing himself with a nod and donning his hard hat as he stepped out into the sun and ambled over toward the livestock pen. His duties as Son of Aaron apparently encompassed not just construction management but inspection of sacrificial lambs.

A junior crew member bustled in to accommodate the visitors. He pulled a couple of folding chairs off of a stack and set them up at a folding table. This was strewn with printed documents kept from blowing away by rocks and ammunition magazines. He rearranged those to make a bit of space. “Y’all can help yourselves to water and iced tea,” he said, nodding toward a pair of insulated coolers on a smaller table nearby. Until he spoke Sophia had guessed he was in his late twenties, but now she thought eighteen. “I’d fetch it myself but my hands is filthy.” He held them up as proof and flashed a grin that would have been brilliant had his teeth been all present and not brown.

“Thank you so much, we will definitely help ourselves!” Sophia said loudly and distinctly, since the young man had his earplugs in.

“The reference to Iowa City?” Anne-Solenne asked. That was where they had stayed last night, in a boutique hotel next to a tapas bar.

“Where the big hospital is. So, another country to them. But they have to go there when they get sick. Like, to get a melanoma whacked off or whatever. They can’t afford Blue State hotel rooms or food, so they have to camp out on the periphery and cook over propane burners under tarps. Not a fun time.”

Anne-Solenne nodded. “Dentistry,” she said.

“Ted has normal-people teeth because he is old and grew up before this part of the world got Facebooked. After that, the people with education fled to places like Ames, Des Moines, Iowa City. Which includes dentists. A few mainline churches used to run charity dental clinics where you could get a bad tooth pulled, or whatever, but those are being chased away by these people.” Not wanting to be obvious, she glanced over at the gigantic cross. She took a sip of iced tea and grimaced.

“That bad?” Anne-Solenne asked.

“Sweet. Another cultural signifier. When we get to my aunt and uncle’s place they’ll serve it unsweetened, Northern style.”

The two women walked slowly back to the table, taking in the scene. Over by the livestock pen, Ted was explaining something to Julian, who looked dismayed. Most of the space around the site was given over to parking for workers’ pickup trucks. Not a single one had a license plate, but they were decked out with a range of stickers: a mix-and-match of Stars and Bars, Don’t Tread on Me, and what Phil had designated the Full Moab: in the center, REMEMBER or REMEMBER MOAB or simply MOAB, bracketed between a mushroom cloud and a profile silhouette of a man with a bowed head. The latter was a direct cut-and-paste job from the black “Remember POW/MIA” flag, which was also ubiquitous around here even though no American POWs or MIAs had existed for decades.

“Now, let me take the bull by the horns as far as the KKK Libel.” Ted had returned from inspecting the lambs. He set his weary bones down into a folding chair and indicated that the visitors should do likewise. Phil preferred to stand; he unzipped his paper coverall down to his navel, parted it to expose his chest, and stood sideways to them trying to catch the breeze. Sophia cataloged it as a microaggression, the hundredth today, not even worth noticing next to the twenty-story macroaggression that Ted and his crew were building. You couldn’t wear underwear beneath the bunny suit because that would miss the whole point unless your underwear was made of Levitican-certified unmingled fiber, and hers wasn’t, so her bra was down in a locker at the checkpoint and she couldn’t unzip as Phil was doing. She sat down next to Anne-Solenne. Ted’s nervous hands sorted and stacked documents—contracts, by the looks of them—as he calmly dismantled the KKK Libel. “Obviously you are not a white person, at least not one hundred percent,” he said, evaluating Sophia, “and I don’t know about him.” He cast a glance over at Julian, who was down on one knee feeding a handful of grass through the chicken wire to a lamb. Julian was part Chinese. “There’s been all kinds of confusion about the Leviticans.” This was the church of which he was a priest. “Some kind of imagined link to the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Maybe it’s because of the burning crosses,” Phil suggested, deadpan, gazing across a few yards of gravel to the massive concrete foundation from which the cross’s steel verticals erupted. Bracketed neatly to the structural members were the tubes carrying the natural gas from an underground pipeline. The actual burners didn’t start until maybe twenty feet above ground level, maybe because they didn’t want to roast parked vehicles. But there was a connection to an outlying altar, already dark with blood and buzzing with flies, including a sort of open crematorium that looked like it could get pretty hot.

“Supposedly the KKK burned crosses,” Ted said with a roll of the eyes.

“There’s no ‘supposedly’ about it,” Anne-Solenne started in. “What are you even—that’s like saying supposedly Muhammad Ali was a boxer. Supposedly Ford makes cars. It’s—” But Sophia silenced her with a hand on the arm. There was no point.

“If that is even true, it has no connection to our burning crosses, which have a completely different significance,” Ted announced.

Sophia said, “Okay. And that is?”

“So-called Christianity, as it existed up until recently, is based on a big lie,” Ted explained. “The most successful conspiracy of all time. And it was all summed up in the symbolism of the cross. Every cross you see on a mainstream church, or worn as jewelry, or on a rosary or what have you, is another repetition of that lie.”

“And what is that lie exactly?” Phil asked. He already knew. But he and the others all wanted to hear a living human actually say it, just as spectacle.

“That Jesus was crucified.”

There. He’d said it. No one could speak. Ted took their silence as a request for more in the same vein. “That the Son of God, the most powerful incarnate being in the history of the universe, allowed Himself to be scourged and humiliated and taken out in the most disgraceful way you can imagine.”

“‘Taken out’ means ‘murdered’?” Anne-Solenne asked. It was a rhetorical question that Ted answered with the tiniest hint of a nod.

“The church that was built on the lie of the Crucifixion,” Ted continued, “had two basic tenets. One was the lovey-dovey Jesus who went around being nice to people—basically, just the kind of behavior you would expect from the kind of beta who would allow himself to be spat on, to be nailed to a piece of wood. The second was this notion that the Old Testament no longer counted for anything, that the laws laid down in Leviticus were part of an old covenant that could simply be ignored after, and because, he was nailed up on that cross. We have exposed all that as garbage. Nonsense. A conspiracy by the elites to keep people meek and passive. The only crosses you’ll see in our church are on fire, and the symbolism of that has nothing to do with the KKK. It means we reject the false church that was built upon the myth of the Crucifixion.”

“So, to be clear, all Christianity for the last two thousand years—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, evangelical—is just flat-out wrong,” Phil said.

“That is correct.”

“The four gospels—”

Ted shook his head. “That’s the first thing the church did, was enshrine those gospels. Telling the story they wanted to tell. About the meek liberal Jesus who gave food away to poor people and healed the sick and so on.”

“And was crucified,” Sophia prompted him.

Ted nodded.

“And … resurrected?” Anne-Solenne asked.

“They needed some way to explain the fact that He was still alive, so they invented all that resurrection stuff.”

“So where’d Jesus go after that? What did He do?”

“Fought the Romans. Went back and forth between this world and heaven. He has the power to do that.”

“Where is He now?”

“We don’t know! Maybe here. He has been in eclipse for two thousand years. The conspiracy of the church was powerful. They staged a fake Reformation to get people to believe that reform was possible. All a show. Orchestrated from the Vatican.”

“So, Martin Luther was running a false-flag operation for the Pope,” Phil said. “In that case—” But he broke off as he felt Sophia stepping on his toe, under the table.

He looked down at her. Having caught his eye, she panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn’t Princeton. This was Ameristan. Facebooked to the molecular level. “Professor Long,” she muttered, “the Red Card.”

It was a reference to one of their teachers at Princeton who had gone so far as to print up a wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren’t going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on:

1 Speech is aggression

2 Every utterance has a winner and a loser

3 Curiosity is feigned

4 Lying is performative

5 Stupidity is power

They spent another quarter of an hour strolling about the hilltop, craning their necks to behold the outstretched cross arms, studded with nozzles that would soon hurl flame into the sky from sundown to sunrise. They gave the altar a wide berth; another Son of Aaron was in there whetting a long knife in preparation for today’s bloody oblation. Julian, unable to meet the gaze of his new lamb friends now that he understood that they were only here to die, instead tended to look out over the surrounding countryside. North of them a few miles, he saw a blue water tower, and, near that, a Walmart sign.

The two-lane road was a chute between walls of corn that were already, in early June, as high as a man’s head. Tom and Kevin’s pickup blocked the view forward. In the rearview loomed an even higher pickup truck whose driver very much wanted them to know that they were not going fast enough. None of them said a word until they had parked in the Walmart’s lot.

“I am gonna buy some flowers,” Sophia said, “to put on the grave. We’re almost there. Within the blast radius of this.” She nodded toward the front of the superstore.

“Blast radius? Could you unpack that mysterious statement please?” asked Anne-Solenne.

“It’s only ten miles farther. Any retail base in the actual town will have been obliterated by this. So if we want to buy anything, we have to buy it here.”

They clambered down out of the SUV and tried to find a walking speed that would get them into its air-conditioning as quickly as possible without causing them to get hotter because of exertion. Phil was walking backward, staring curiously at the water tower: a thing he understood conceptually but had never seen on such a scale, since he had spent his life in places with hills.

Apparently cued by Sophia’s reference to a graveyard, Julian had pulled his glasses down over his eyes and begun conducting research. Her grandparents had died and been put in the black soil sufficiently long ago that the details had found their way onto reasonably credible sites on the Old Internet—the Miasma, as many people in Sophia’s life referred to it. The Miasma as such had fallen some years ago, but emulators of it were still running and could be browsed on what had replaced it, which was too ubiquitous even to have a name. In old movies sometimes you could see apparently sophisticated characters saying things like “I’m going online” or “I’m surfing the Internet,” which must have seemed cool at the time, but now it was a non sequitur, as if someone, in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation, suddenly announced, “I’m breathing air.”

“You can’t possibly remember … Patricia … or John,” Julian ventured, “but you must remember Alice.”

“Grandma Alice died when I was twelve,” Sophia confirmed.

“And she and John and Patricia are all buried …”

“Where we are going,” Sophia said. “Yeah.”

At last they had reached the entrance of the Walmart—or to be precise, one of its entrances, since it had been hacked up into a number of quasi-distinct storefronts. They got inside and just stood there for a few moments, allowing their bodies to recalibrate in the air-conditioning. Then they split up. Sophia and Anne-Solenne figured out how to buy flowers. Phil and Julian ransacked the snack aisle. Somewhere along the line Phil also picked up a tactical camo baseball cap, Levitican compliant. Having paid for their stuff, they went out and got back in the car. Tom and Kevin had peeled off and checked into a motel across the street and so they drove the last few miles into town without an escort.

Anne-Solenne shifted the flowers in her lap. “As long as we’re talking about dead Forthrasts,” she said, “where’d you-know-who end up? His fate is shrouded in mystery.”

“No it isn’t,” Julian said, in the somewhat halting and breathy tone indicative of browsing and talking at the same time, “he died in—”

“I know when he died,” Anne-Solenne said. “But because Sophia’s from the weirdest family in the whole universe, that’s different from his fate.”

“We’re breathing him,” Sophia announced. That silenced the Land Cruiser for a little, and even caused Phil to push his glasses up on his head.

“His molecules, you mean?” Phil guessed.

“Atoms, more like,” said Julian, getting the drift.

“So he was finally cremated?” Anne-Solenne guessed.

“He was cremated one ion at a time, by a particle beam scanning his cryogenically preserved remains.”

“Probably a good thing,” Phil mused, “otherwise the data—”

“Could be anywhere,” Sophia said with a nod and a glance back in the mirror. “Yeah. I guess sometimes it’s better to wait.”

Anne-Solenne was still stuck on We’re breathing him. “I never thought of it like that,” she said, “but I guess the scanning process would generate—I don’t know—”

“Exhaust,” Sophia said. “Water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, calcium. Theoretically you could capture the solids and hand it to the family in a baggie, but why?”

“So they just—”

“Blow it out a pipe into the sky,” Sophia confirmed. “Given that it was Seattle, it was probably mixed with rain five minutes later, running through the storm sewers into Puget Sound.”

“Which is no different from cremation,” Julian hastened to add, in his ponderous East Coast way. “Crematoria have smokestacks. We just prefer not to think about the implications.”