The God Who Ate Himself

As I felled him, that mighty oak of a man, or maple, as it were, the chainsaw splattered his sticky syrup all over the shortstack that was our expedition. There were four of us: Dave, Laura, the Prof, and of course me, and we stood there breathing heavily. I tried to hold my breath – one more heavy aerobic respirator was the last thing the Earth needed. I’m a waffle man myself, provided I can find a decent vegan recipe.

“Only one way to find out,” croaked the Prof, his mechanical voicebox wheezing softly in the smog filled air. More machine than man, the Prof ran more on sunlight and windpower than oxygen and food fuel by now; the turbine where his gut used to be served as a constant reminder, the pinwheel’s blades spinning like the stones of some vestigial gizzard.

The four of us got in the Prius and brought it up to critical velocity. We felt the surge of blood to our fingertips that meant that the time jump and happened, and pressed our nose-tips to the window to see if the world had changed with it.

No such luck. The smoggy wasteland we had jumped into blanketed us with its crushing heat. This was still the same environmental meltdown that we had just left. The three of us stepped out of the Prius and squinted our eyes in the particulate laden air.

I nodded in agreement, but the Prof was in his own world, stroking his beardless chin as if he had forgotten something. We had thought for sure that killing James Peyton was the answer. We could link almost every part of the current situation to him. He had been involved in the manufacturing of fossil fuel producing vehicles, and had been one of the most vociferous opponents of emissions regulation. He owned a cattle ranch and slaughterhouse in the ex-jungles of South America. He ran a fleet of private jets. If any man could be saddled with the responsibility for the de-terraformed Earth, it was James Peyton.

The Prof had organized the mission, of course. He was the brains behind the whole operation. He had developed the time Prius and selected the man most responsible for our current mess, the necessary sacrifice. He had selected Laura and me to accompany him on his mission, and the three of us had done our job.

Laura looked down at his pale fading face and looked like she might add some of her stomach’s contents to the pile of organic matter that would nourish this earth.

We looked around the encampment. The tents were gathered around the rubbish fires, and the people gathered around them were trying to pretend that the smell of burning rubber didn’t bother them. This was the same destitute and economically ruined Earth that we had left. The bright sun and grassy hills seemed to laugh at the squalor their children were living in. The gaiety of the natural world surrounding was no comfort to us. We had thought for sure that killing Ronald Beady would fix things. He was a capitalist of the worst sort, the sort of man with infinite profit margins and no liabilities, the sort that had landed the entire globe in this extended depression, full of sickness and hunger.

The Prof had organized the mission, of course. He was the brains behind the whole operation. He had selected me as his ideal partner, and together we had sworn to use the Time Prius to rescue the people of the Earth from this societal ailment, even if it meant killing; what was one man’s life compared to the fates given these people? Their lives were worse than death.

Adam Smith screamed as he burned. I laughed. The Prof laughed so hard that he felt weak. He had to sit down a little while. The Time Prius jumped smoothly back in time, back to where I knew our next victim was waiting.

The Prophet and I couldn’t keep from giggling, which of course spoiled the element of surprise. So of course Queen Elizabeth turned around just in time to see me with my garrote all ready for her neck. How embarrassing!

At that point me and the Prophet just couldn’t take it any more. “P-p-please one second,” was all I could force out before we dissolved in paryoxysms of laughter. Of course the Queen sent for her guards, but I just pulled out my .45 and shot them as they came at us. They got the message and backed off.

Once we had regained our composure, me and the Proph were ready to get back to business. We heaved the Queen out of her bedroom window and she suffered a fatal three point landing, like some sort of poorly designed VTOL plane.

“But I want to come too!” whined Bruce Willis. Michael J. Fox’s eyes lit up and he nodded his enthusiastic agreement. He was shaking with excitement, not from his not yet manifested pre-Parkinsons.

“Whatever,” said Keanu Reeves, “Incidentally, you’ve got the wrong Keanu; I’m the Keanu from Point Break – you want Bill-and-Ted-Keanu. Surfing or Federal Investigation, I’ve got you covered –this situation you’ve got grilled up, less so. Just give me a ride home when you’re done. Also, you’ve got Total-Recall-Arnold back here instead of the Terminator, but I think he’s enjoying himself so far.”

I chuckled a little and shrugged. Those guys were a barrel of laughs, but they could get a little antsy after a long car ride. After inventing the Time Prius, I had chosen them for my mission to save mankind – these guys were real professionals: nab the right moment of their existence, and you’ve got a crack team of time martyrs. I hopped out of the car and onto the hot desert dirt.

“I AM THE MESSIAH!” I screamed, pushing my hair out of my eyes and plunging my dagger into Jesus’ chest, mid gesticulation. He fell backwards, arms extended out orthogonally to his body. I let out a muffled chortle and thought of all the people in the future who would have no parallels to draw with this posture.

I saw a young boy run up and play in the dust, turning it over and over in his hands. The sweat of his palms took it up, and the “savior” was consumed by the greedy moisture of a youthful hand. I saw the boy grow. Something was wrong. I saw the Romans coming, and I saw the cross they erected. As quickly as they lifted the wooden scaffold, lifted the boy up, a thousand other scaffolds rose around it. A city of towering buildings rose, the true children of God resurrected.

I stepped out of the Time Prius. I scanned the jungle floor until I found my target. The rodent was crushed underfoot, my shoe stained with what seemed like an absurd amount of blood to fit into such a tiny creature. I got back in the Prius. I turned the engine on again. I felt the forgetting wash over me, felt my scales bristle with a sudden chill. I shouldn’t have come here. I needed some sun.

Lucifer was near. I could feel him. I engaged the parking brake, wrenching a hole in time with the sickeningly satisfying mechanical click that says “Dad just got home.” The bright light emanating from a tiki torch failed to warm my flesh. My vertically slitted pupils thinned like some sort of sliding door closing on my irises. I felt slow, run down, unable to concentrate.

Lucifer approached me. He was like no creature I had ever seen before. His skin had no scales, and was instead a fleshy pink, flecked with tiny hairs and freckles. His face lacked the jutting, taut structure of mine. Instead, he had a ridiculous area of thicker hair adorning the very top of a flat, careworn face. He wore a sacklike garment with a tag that read “CERTIFIED 100% ORGANIC.”

He smiled and nestled among his jagged teeth I saw a village of people, happily going about their business, bustling from thatched hut to thatched hut with carefree smiles that matched the one on Lucifer’s face. Not a single skyscraper tarnished the scene, no metal crosses raised themselves up into the sky in supplication. But as I leaned closer, I saw that the villagers themselves had no bones - they were held upright by 2x4s, rebar, concrete set in molds of iron. I saw through Lucifer. I saw God. I reached into his mouth and pulled out his heart. He fell to the ground. I dropped to my knees. I saw the tiki torches flicker fluorescently once, and then watched them go out. He shattered, broke, and I stood clear of the ensuing mercury vapors.

I felt a blast bright white cold light, and I saw God, just for an instant. He was an old man, but not ancient. In the center of his gut laid a wind turbine, describing a perfect circle cut out of his midsection, slowly filtering the surrounding vacuum. He opened his mouth to speak and I saw a light go on on the mechanical voicebox in his plastic throat. Just as he opened his mouth, I grabbed the cigarette lighter out of the Prius’s dashboard and thrust it into the old man’s face. He let out a shriek of pain and his flesh dissolved into nothingness. A rebar frame remained for a second before collapsing soundlessly downward, to where there was no ground. It fell out of view, into the converging horizon.

I went to the trunk of the Prius, pulled out the garden hose I found in there. I shoved one end into the exhaust pipe and carried the other to the driver’s side of the car. I got in with the end of the hose and rolled the windows up.

As I turned on the engine of the car and felt the skyscrapers hurtling towards me out of the nothingness, I looked down at the cigarette lighter still in my hand, only to find it had a new component attached to it. It read: