The Fierce Reads Anthology(32)

Thanks for the warning, Nightmare Boy. Not that it’ll do me any good.





2




I stood outside Mom’s bedroom door and listened to Prophet’s muffled voice. I couldn’t make out what he said, but after a month of Mom obsessively watching his televised sermons, I could guess the subject matter.

The end of the world is at hand.

Those who surrender their souls to Prophet will be saved.

Those who don’t will suffer and die and suffer some more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We heard you the first time.

“Mom?” I tapped on the door before turning the knob. It was seven in the morning, and outside the sun was doing its job, but Mom’s bedroom was a cave. She sat at her window in the grungy bathrobe she hadn’t shed in days, peeking through the slats in the blinds. Her eyes traveled back and forth between the window and the TV, which was playing The Hour of Light, Rance Ridley Prophet’s morning broadcast. He did three shows a day: morning, midday, and evening. Ever since we brought her home from the hospital, Mom had been obsessed with Prophet. The only way she missed his broadcast was if the electricity or cable went out. I almost looked forward to those outages now.

“Brothers and sisters,” Prophet intoned, “God will soon make His final judgment. You must decide now on which side you will stand, on the side of heaven, or on the side of earth and its wicked, worldly pleasures. Will you be lifted up, raptured to paradise, or laid low by God’s terrible vengeance?”

Prophet’s voice drowned out my entrance into the bedroom. Sometimes I wondered if Mom’s hearing was somehow damaged during the quake. She seemed so oblivious to what went on around her. The doctor who attended to her for all of five minutes before he gave her bed away to someone more needy said she was fine. Malnourished and dehydrated, but she’d live. After three days trapped under a collapsed building, she had some bad bruises, a few cracked ribs, and a dozen lacerations on her face and arms—caused by the wall of glass that had exploded near her when the building started to buckle—most of which had nearly healed by now. Physically, she was as sound as could be expected. Mental health was another matter.

The Internet—along with our utilities and cable—had been in and out since the quake, but when our connection was working I’d researched Mom’s symptoms until I determined what was wrong with her: Acute Stress Disorder—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’s evil twin on steroids—caused by a traumatic event, which is reexperienced in flashbacks, anxiety, delusions, emotional detachment, even amnesia.

Mom had all the symptoms and then some. She should have been in a hospital, under the care of a psychiatrist and a team of nurses tending to her round the clock. But the hospitals were still full of patients with actual life threatening injuries, people with broken backs and crushed limbs and infected burns. People suffering from earthquake fever, an immunity disorder caused by mold released from the ground during the quake. People so malnourished and dehydrated from the lack of food and water in the city that the only way their bodies would accept nutrients was through a tube. There were no beds for those with functioning bodies but malfunctioning minds.

The upside was Acute Stress Disorder usually lasted a maximum of four weeks, and it had been four weeks to the day since the earthquake. Three weeks and four days since rescue workers pulled Mom’s unconscious, dehydrated body from beneath several tons of rubble. It was a miracle she’d still been breathing. The people who’d been found with her were not so lucky. Some were crushed instantly. Others suffocated, and it was their deaths that saved my mom’s life. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the small cavern beneath the wreckage to go around.

Four weeks since the quake…it seemed like four thousand.

“Mom?” I said again. I kept my voice low, gentle, as though my words might hurt her if they came out too hard. She stiffened and her shoulders hunched as she craned her head around. It had been so long since she’d washed her hair that it appeared wet with grease. The scars on her face stood out in waxy, salmon-colored lines against skin that hadn’t seen the sun in weeks. It was an effort not to flinch every time I looked at her. At least my face had been spared from the lightning scars that etched the rest of my body. Mom’s face, on the other hand…she would need plastic surgery to remove the scars if she didn’t want to be reminded of the quake every time she looked in a mirror.

“We have already begun to witness God’s wrath,” Prophet continued. “He whispered to me that He would strike Los Angeles only minutes before His fist came down. The end of all things is at hand, brothers and sisters, and it will commence right here, in Los Angeles. For this is not the city of angels, but a city where devils rule from their hillside mansions and immense studios, spreading their corruption like a plague through your television screens and movie theaters and the Internet. Is it any surprise, in a city so amoral, that our young people—the ones who call themselves ‘rovers’—dance and drink and cavort on the graves of the dead in the Waste?”

I turned the volume down, averting my gaze from the milky orbs of Prophet’s eyes. His snowy hair avalanched over his shoulders, thick and frosty as a polar bear’s pelt, though he couldn’t be older than thirty-five, with that peanut-butter-smooth, tanned face. That bleach white crescent of a smile. But mostly when I looked at him I saw the eyes, empty and opaque, filmed with cataracts.