THE SEX REBEL OF JESUSLAND, chapter 142

142. IN THE AIR.

“Nice day, guys. Jesus sweet. Were one of you praying for us last night?” Ezra asked over the radio.

“I’m wearing my lucky cross,” one of the guys answered.

“Your lucky cross?”

“Whenever I wear it to a bar, I score,” he said.

Ezra laughed. It wasn’t much of a claim. The guy was one of his leading gay porn actors, and the bars he went to were so low-rent you had to be a really penniless decrepit old queen not to score.

“I can’t wait to make a Clint Eastwood speech to a prison guard before I plug him,” said another guy.

“Which speech? The one about this is a Magnum?”

“No, the one about make my day, punk.”

“Wasn’t that the same speech?”

“How about De Niro? You talking to me?”

Suddenly the mood changed, and the banter stopped. They could see the Wound of Washington before them. It was as though the world turned from green to black-and-white, from summer to winter, from bright to grim.

The wall around the former capital of the USUG had been built with hastily thrown-together slabs. Some cement company had made a fortune. After they had built it, the prisoners who did the construction were kept inside the Wound, too exposed to the radiation to be allowed outside the quarantine area.

Inside the walled ruin of the Wound of Washington, there were signs of life: people moved about, even a few cars were driving, but there was a listlessness about the whole scene, as if half-lives were lived in a half-alive space. Vegetation was spotty. Most of Washington’s buildings had been blackened by the explosion for miles and miles, and from the epicenter where the Capitol had been, where the earth was baked black, fused as if made of a dark glass, the first ruins appeared in a clearly defined circle outside the flattened epicenter of ground zero, till buildings, although broken, appeared to be little higher, until a few miles before the permanent quarantine wall, where there were whole buildings standing.

There were campfires everywhere. Along with everything else, utilities like water and electricity had been destroyed. The thousands of radiated survivors who were quarantined behind the wall around the Wound of Washington had to make do like campers, burning camp fires to cook and stay warm, and carrying water from hastily dug communal wells.

They were flying low and faces looked up at them. Adam could see the faces: scarred, burned, malformed. Many of them looked blind. The most shocking sight was the children, born after the Great Attack, with missing limbs, and even more shocking, extra limbs. There were all sorts of wheelchairs around; half the population seemed to move about on prosthetic wheels. He saw a family. He saw that Ezra and the others were looking at them, too. They were in the backyard of a blackened house, having a barbecue. The mother’s face was burned away, as was the father’s. One child sat in a wheelchair, legless. Another had a great big boil-like extrusion, almost as big as his head, sticking out of his neck and shoulder. Everywhere they saw crosses. People had buried the dead everywhere, and crosses sprouted like a new kind of vegetation.

Adam felt the anger of revenge again flare in him. He thought of the love of his life – the one before Eve – lying somewhere in the dust under the Freedom Tower. He thought of the many living dead down below, and the real dead below them, the hundreds and thousands blasted away by a nuclear device. He thought of the fact that this nuclear device had been built right here, in America, and not even smuggled in. He thought of the people who had stolen it and what they did with it, of the Transgressor, the torched fiend, and he was filled with a rage, as if his rage reflected off the destruction that glared up at him, the desolation and his rage at it reflecting each other. He thought how obvious it was that such a tragedy would change a society so much, to the point that he had been handed a new career as a Creationist and Eve ended up on death row, with some people benefiting, and others not, by the great and terrible upheaval. It was obvious that a society so threatened, so wounded, would turn to God in its moment of extraordinary anguish, and align itself with His word so as to escape such wrath. God had punished them for being godless, homosexual, and feminist. This was God’s answer to the country’s earlier agenda, which had been called progressive but was totally decadent. The society had sinned, and God’s wrath had struck at them. Now they were pious again, and presumably safe, although after the calamity of the Great Attack an all-pervasive feeling of insecurity would never go away.

Adam turned around and looked at the family as they flew on. The mother was feeding the child with the big growth on its neck and shoulder. The child coughed and dribbled food down its front. The mother bent and wiped the food off the child’s shirt.

Adam heard a song in his earphones. The singer sang the lyrics, “Do it with a gun, do it with bomb, do it till you burn your face right off your skull, oh baby, do, do, do, do the radiation with me...”

Rod the gay porn actor’s voice broke in. “This is a song from a new underground group, The Terrorists. It’s called ‘Do the Radiation.’ They have another song you should hear. It’s called ‘I am the Bomb.’ Hardcore lyrics. ‘I am the bomb, I am the one blowing in your face. -- how do you want yourself, medium, rare or well-done?’” Rod laughed.

Then they were over the wall, and the earth below them was green again. The corporation who owned all this land had planted trees right up to the wall to give their property life again. Then they were there, at the giant prison factory.