The Crooked God Machine

by Autumn Christian

  ***

  It only took a few days to arrive at the temple entrance.

  Several yards away from the entrance plague machines with hard eyes and swollen nests full of breeding plagues towered up over the horizon line. The machines extended their necks and reached up into the sky to pull down a storm. Beside them lay a prophet of God wracked with seizure. Around them stood God’s dead army stirring their feet in the dirt. Some were newly dead, their skin only bloated with a tinge of gray. Most were in further stages of decomposition. Their skin flaked away at the blue bones hung together as if by strings. Their heads were obscured by swarms of insects that hovered around their skulls.

  “Where did they come from?” I asked.

  “Hell or the machine fields, what does it matter?” Nina asked, “see anyone you know?”

  The prophet, twitching and hacking blood, shouted at us.

  “God has found you unworthy of life! You have rejected the gifts of the trinity and will pay eternally for your crimes!”

  “Let's be quick,” Camp said.

  Leda and I went first down into the temple, followed by Camp and TJ, Nina and Sunray, then the others, about twelve in total.

  The prophet’s voice barreled its way into the ruins of the temple after us, and the eternal torrent of the machines smashed against the temple’s foundation. Black edged rain struck the sides of the walls. Behind us the dead army surged forward.

  “How is that even possible?” TJ asked, “how do they move the bones without any muscle?”

  “With God all things are possible,” Shooter said.

  We took a flight of stairs further down into the dark, sprawling expanse of the temple ruins and a thought hit me in a panic. I couldn't remember where the room was. The first time inside the temple I’d been dragged through its rooms half unconscious, and now I couldn’t orient myself to the right direction.

  “Where's the room?” Leda asked.

  “I don't remember,” I said, “I'll find it.”

  “What did he say?” TJ shouted. No one responded.

  We wandered through rooms I couldn't remember from before, rooms containing bloodstained baths and broken computers, rooms with words written on the wall in spider languages and others with empty pools full of coins, statues with their faces smashed in. My body pulled itself in six directions, a swollen wreck. Every time I looked down I couldn't see the floor. I only saw empty space. In my absence the temple must have shifted its rooms. It must have changed its identity and become part of another history, one which erased my experience from its memory.

  God’s voice smashed through the temple ceiling.

  “There is no escape from the almighty God! You shall be punished for your transgressions and burn for all eternity in hell!”

  I nearly fell to the floor of the temple with the force of those words.

  “Come on!” TJ said, “we don't have much time.”

  We turned a corner into a hallway full of the dead. They stood upright, holding makeshift weapons and scratching the walls with their nails and teeth, bones shifting to the noise of the machines above. The prophet stood among them. He was a bow-backed, dark haired man with eyes the color of warm spit. When he smiled blood spilled out of his mouth. He was too old to be a prophet for much longer. The shiny sphere in the back of his head sucked out his life and spit back cerebral palsy.

  “Hello motherfuckers,” he said.

  “And looks like we're out of time,” TJ said.

  We ran back the way we came and the dead ran after us. Nina took her rifle off her shoulder and fired a few shots, but a dead man killed her with a sledgehammer blow to the side of her head. Sunray screamed and tried to pull Nina's body away from the oncoming horde, but a dead woman grabbed her sunlight hair, dragged her down onto the floor, and broke her neck.

  We became separated soon after that. I ran without looking behind me, through the ever-rotating channel of rooms, through claustrophobic hallways and tilting chambers. I reached out for Leda, thinking she was still behind me, only to find no one there. I went into a room where a swarm of insects with lion’s faces and red teeth waited for me. They stuck to my face and arms, scratched and bit and pinched. I cried out, ran out of the room, and fell down in the hallway.

  In the hallway I passed the sandstone pictograms, the ones depicting once-glittering machine shells surrounding the black moon, and the monsters with pumice red nails and eyes waiting on the black planet below. Then the shells growing tails of fire as they hurtled to the planet. After that, the machines fighting the monsters, tearing them apart.

  At the end of the hallway I came to pictograms I’d never seen before. Even with the army behind me I couldn’t help but notice the field of yellow poppies where the monsters lay down to die and decompose. Above them shone the black moon, and from its rays sprang more flowers, cities, humans.

  The ceiling behind me broke when a plague machine stuck its fist through the stone. Its fingers, caked with plaster, unfurled against the floor and a cloud of locusts streamed forth.

  I escaped into an adjacent room. On the floor lay the remains of the dead girl in the black vellum dress, her caved in face now strewn in pieces. I saw once again the pagan altar, the corner of the room where the dead girl once slept and ate from clay wine bottles.

  “Charles!”

  Leda crouched in the corner of the room behind the altar. She’d lost her gun and her clothes were torn and stained with blood, hanging off her body like strips of skin. She tried to stand up but her body shook too hard.

  “Don’t move. Please. Where’s Camp?” I asked, “where are the others?”

  “I don’t know,” Leda said.

  She held her arms out to me. I reached out for her and she smelled of plaster and crushed paint and black ichor. The swarm of insects crawled into my ears and burrowed into my skin.

  “This is what happens when you defy the almighty God!” the shouted, “This is what it feels like to watch everyone you love be destroyed. How does it feel? Is not God a beautifully just god?”

  Leda pressed her bloodied hands to her ears. I pulled the gun from my hip holster.

  “Charles,” Leda said, her lips swollen purple, insect wings spilling out of her open mouth, “you can’t do that. You need to find the room.”

  “It's gone,” I said.

  But I didn't mean the room. I meant the floor and the walls. My fingers and feet, the rupturing earth. In another part of the temple, someone screamed. I pulled the insects off my skin but they stayed in the walls, hissing and turning the plaster into boiling water and clacking their red teeth.

  I ran down the hallway once more to find the pictograms defaced and the sandstone eaten away by tiny insect mouths. God’s voice slithered down through the ceiling.

  “You should have known better! Did you think I wouldn’t find you and destroy you? Did you think you could get away with attempting to rebel against me? Those on the side of God are always triumphant.”

  I ran past God’s snake voice on the beam of light, out through the swarm of locusts spewing volcanic ash, beating their brains against my head. On the other side of the wall I heard the prophet’s hacking cough. He laughed like a garbage disposal.

  Around the corner a dead woman reached out for me with hands buzzing clouds. Fingers sprouted out of the stone like flowers. I tried to run, but I slipped down into a pool of dark hair.

  The dead woman grabbed my neck. She smelled of rot and ginger, and when I closed my eyes her nails dug into my arteries.

  “Where’s the pretty dark haired girl?” the prophet spoke from the other side of the wall, “where is she hiding? I can hear her crying.”

  The prophet spoke in a sing-song melody, and as the woman pulled back my head I imagined his words splattering red against the walls like engorged butterflies. Like frozen meat.

  I stuck the gun muzzle into the rictus of the dead woman’s mouth and squeezed the trigger.

  Her head snapped back and I reared up. Her fingers wh
ipped against my face and left an angry mark, and then she let go and I watched her fall, silent, down into skin and flowering bones below.

  I ran.

  More of the dead lifted their bodies off the floor to reach out for me. Their limbs in time with the plague machines.

  “Where are the rest of you motherfuckers?” the prophet yelled.

  I followed his voice. He coughed and I gripped the gun tight. It throbbed in my hands like a headache. As I ran the walls around me collapsed and the storm above kicked like a bad baby. The walls pushed me forward, the ceiling’s belly scraped against my forehead. The end of the hallway opened its jaws to let me through, honey-comb colored stone, dirty animal skins hanging down from razor strops.

  The dead burst through the walls, riding hot off the waves of the plague machine. A maelstrom blew through the temple that lifted me off my heels.

  I felt the heat coming off the prophet’s shiny sphere. I ran.

  “Come on out lost little lambs,” the prophet said, “I’ll take good care of you.”

  Then I was on top of him. We flew into the walls and rocked up to the ceiling. Then we came down onto the floor and my knees crashed into his ribcage. He tried to cry out, but before he could make a noise I smashed the butt of my gun into his temple. The dead reached for me, but they couldn’t pry me away. I hit the prophet again and again. His shiny sphere cracked. Black fluid seeped out of the back of his head.

  When the prophet was dead the army collapsed and they didn’t get up again.

  Yet the plague machines continued to rock the temple from side to side. I ran back toward Leda.

  I found Camp crouched over her with his head a swarm of insects, his rifle clutched in his dragon purple arms. The temple lurched and I slid across the floor toward them. Camp caught me before I hit the wall.

  “What happened?” Camp asked, looking down at my hands. They were covered in black fluid.

  “I killed the prophet.”

  “You what?” Leda said.

  I reached down and lifted Leda up from the ground. I pulled insect wings off of her lips and stingers out of her cheeks. Her eyes were nearly swollen shut.

  “We have to find the room,” I said, “can you walk?”

  “The others are dead,” Camp said.

  “We’re not,” I said.

  Camp followed Leda and I out of the room. I kept one hand on her shoulder, the other on the gun. I knew where to go now, because the hallways were the passageways of my brain and the plague machines above were the synapses firing off the walls, God’s voice the exploding cannon of my basal ganglia.

  I found the abyss of the black room. Leda saw it and cried out, but I held fast to her and we didn’t fall.

  “It can’t hurt you,” I said.

  I stepped inside and the black room burst into a storm of light and fire. The white cloud spun out of the ceiling. Camp stumbled and went down on one knee before

  “Stand on your feet and I will speak to you,” spoke the shifting figures within the cloud.

  “I stand on my feet and I listen,” I said.

  The figures stirred and rolling fire shot straight through Leda and me. An enormous, translucent fist shot through the storm cloud and hovered in front of us. The fist held a scroll, which it unrolled in front of us like a glowing wall. On the scroll was a code of glowing white text, flowing in a constant, indecipherable stream.

  “What do you wish to access?” the voice spoke, cool and toneless. Behind the scroll the shifting figures still moved, coiling in and out of the cloud, flashing white, growing hooves and dog faces.

  “The defenses,” Leda said, “we wish to access the defenses.”

  “My apologies. That registry no longer exists.”

  “Registry?” I said, “this is a computer?”

  “We are the living creatures. We have been here with God since the beginning of time.” the voice said, “what do you wish to access?”

  “You were right. It's gone. Someone's destroyed the defenses. Got rid of them.” Leda said.

  “What do you wish to access?”

  “We need to access the defenses,” I said, “the security defenses.”

  “My apologies. That registry no longer exists.”

  “Do you have history records?”

  “My apologies. That registry no longer exists.”

  The text continued to stream through the glowing scroll.

  “If this is a computer, then it's been wiped,” Leda said.

  Her words clawed themselves out of her lungs. She coughed them into her palm like sticky burrs. She stood against the wall on her tiptoes, trying to avoid the flames rolling through the floor. Her face was pale, her eyes reflecting back to me the fire and the storm brewing in the center of the room.

  I gripped Leda's hand, our fingers sticky with blood. An insect crawled out of my shirt and splattered on the floor. From all sides the noise of insects and dead scraping teeth pressed into the walls.

  “Who is God?” I asked.

  “He is the creator of the universe. He is the alpha and the omega. The savior of the world, and the destroyer of evil,” the voice said.

  “No,” I said, “I mean what is God? Where did he come from?”

  “I do not understand the question.”

  God's voice shuddered through the temple. The plague machines groaned with the weight of his shouting.

  “There is no escape from the almighty God! You shall be punished for your transgressions and burn for all eternity in hell!”

  “What do you wish to access?” the voice asked again.

  “The defenses are gone. The history records are gone. Who’s been here before us?”

  “Before humanity there was only God.”

  “Yes, but where did God come from?”

  “I do not understand the question. What do you wish to access?”

  Above us the ceiling shook. Leda gripped her head as if to keep it from bursting.

  “Forget the defenses,” Camp said, “we’re not going to last another minute once those plague machines come crashing through.”

  “The plague machines!” I called out to the room, “we wish to access the plague machines.”

  “Earlier in this conversation, I identified your language as 21st century Earth English. However, I am not familiar with the term plague machines. Did you mean the splicers? nano-machine factories?”

  “What?” Leda asked.

  “Let's take a guess,” I said, “Nano-machine factories.”

  “Nano-machine factories register accessed. What is your input?”

  “Disconnect them. Shut them down,” I said.

  “Request confirmed.”

  The chuk-chuk-chuk of the plagues machines above sputtered and died. After a moment's pause the plague machine's steel limbs collapsed. Some crashed through the temple ceiling, the walls. The voice of God, mid-sentence in a damning condemnation, ground to a stop. The temple shook with the thudding of insect shells and dead bodies falling to the ground. Leda held to the wall. I held onto her torn sleeves.

  “Disconnection successful.”

  The three of us walked out of the glowing room and it fell back into darkness. Out in the hallway the corpses shone with locust skins. Leda and I crawled over them to get to the stairs. Leda’s blood trailed behind her like balloon strings.

  “Leda?” Camp called.

  She didn’t respond. She crawled beneath the toppled pillars at the entrance and out into the open air.

  Camp and I followed her outside. As I went I pulled the locust stingers out of my skin.

  We found Leda crouched underneath an immobile plague machine.

  “It’s over,” she said, her voice like gravel “if we can’t access the defenses there’s nothing left for us to do.”

  ***

  That night we slept in the desert among the battered hulls of the plague machines. In a dream Teddy came down from heaven on a static wave to speak to me.

  “You're going to throw away you
r chance at salvation, all because of a woman?” Teddy asked me, “Your father taught you better than that.”

  “I know what happens to the people who search for salvation,” I said, “The same thing that happens to everyone else.”

  “Why didn't you marry a nice girl like Chicory?”

  “This isn't about Leda.”

  “Of course it is. She was never nothing more than a symbol of the unattainable.”

  “I didn't ask God for much. I only wanted the noise to stop.”

  “You want to know what I think?” Teddy said, “you clearly have mother issues.”

  He opened his hands and showed me faded photographs of my house. He flicked his hands, and then they turned into photographs of Momma and Sissy. They sat in front of the television with swollen limbs and emaciated bodies.The hot wire spiders inside of them still shone an angry red.

  “And don't forget about sweet Jeanine,” Teddy said, “remember her? The girl you abandoned? The girl that loved you?”

  He produced another photograph. This one of Jeanine, stripped of clothing and head shaved, curled up on the floor of a dank cell. On her head was tattooed the number six.

  “What were you and your merry band of rebels planning to do again? Prevent the apocalypse? Kill God? Your family's already dead, son. There's no home for you anymore. If you think about it, destroying you would be a blessing.”

  “Earth,” I said, “the computer said we were speaking 21st century Earth English. What is Earth English?”

  “I don't know. It's nothing but words to you now. If God dies, you and the rest of humanity will be floating through this black universe all alone. There's no going back to what you once were.”

  “Is that what you think we want?” I asked, “to go back? The further we go back, the darker it gets. I’ve seen the pictograms. I’ve seen the pictures of the plague machines fighting the monsters and the machines being thrown down from space.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Why are you even speaking to me? It’s over now. There’s nothing left we can do. God’s going to keep on living and we’re going to end up washed up on the beach.”