Dusk

"Have you seen the sky this clear in your eighteen years?" Dario said. The other two singularly dressed boys gazed to the haze-clotted sky. Each wore a sterile mask about their mouths and nostrils. His voice was unhampered. "Shall we jaunt to the Christendom whilst in the area? I’ve a plan to bamboozle the opaque Christwhores." They nodded in tacit agreement.

A genuine prostitute accosted Dario. "Teeming Wallace? We can remedy that up in my apartment." The whore’s jaw was noticeably square.

"Have we not met?" Dario seized the whore’s crotch, firming his clutch around a pair of testes. He squealed. Dario slapped him across the cheek, ruffling the golden ringlets of his wig. Tears mottled the sacks of his eyes with mascara.

He offered a pain-ridden shrug. "Root hog or die."

"Then die."

Earth had become City, for there was only one. And all was under rule of the self-proclaimed God, a mortal, infamous for an unprecedented genocide of the minorities. He gave over the entire Black Continent to constructing the Quagmires, a massive dumping ground for remains of the victims. When God usurped reign over City, He abolished religion. Many pious Christians refused to acknowledge Him as a deity, and found death in the Quagmires. Others endured a worse fate.

Dario, Guido, and Alessandro stood upon the stoop of a drooping building, labeled Christendom by black wooden letters, all hanging by a loose nail. A crucifix, also woodwork, adorned the door. Dario eyed Guido up and down, head to foot. "Put down your hair."

"But if they catch me - "

"And if they catch you with this, would your punishment be less?" He tore a flask of whiskey from Guido’s hand. Overacting his reluctance, Guido removed a band from his russet hair, and it fell around his shoulders. Dario wheeled toward Alessandro. "Hold the door." Alessandro furrowed his brow. "It opens to the outside, but it takes a key from the inside."

"Don’t they worry someone will release them?"

"Who would hold the door for a Christwhore?"

The Christendom was a demented tableau of modern science. The patronage lurched in crude circles, bumbling the same four words with an eldritch monotone: Jesus is my God. Each squirrel-eyed waterhead reeked of camphor and ordure, and clad in asylum-suits with a crucifix upon the lapel.

In an adjacent room, faceless govies performed the operation. A nude woman screamed and writhed, bound to a gurney, as they drove the proboscis of a suction-hose through her temple. Several men and woman, all naked and bearing an alertness that was coupled by no one else in the facility, shivered and twitched beside the gurney. The snaking tube filled with a gelatinous substance - gray matter, unbound from her cranium. A blue liquid eddied through the tube and flushed the innards of her skull. She began the chant. She veered, unassisted, to the clothing rack and donned a nameless asylum-suit. A faceless govie hailed the next in line.

"Attention." Dario said. "The day of reckoning is upon us. Behold, Christ Jesus. And take at his heels, for he will lead you to the promise land." Aside, to Guido, "Hurry. Snap-snap. These scurvy wretches live in a sty, saturated with contagions." His mind went amok with images of lepers and moldering invalids.

They herded the disorganized drove into the streets. They’d taken back to the bumbling after a few minutes of perplexed silence. Alessandro gawped at Dario, then the brainwashed mass behind them. "What are we doing?"

"Go you know of the lemmings?"

The docks skirted the border of two districts. Though the lake was a cement-compressed skeleton of its former grandeur, the site was an attraction.