The Cult of Glow Snek

Chapter 1

What if we were wrong about the quarantine? After eleven hours on the road, I couldn't have been the only one thinking it, right?

I rested my head against the cool glass of the car window. My dim reflection looked back at me, and a tinge of unease ran down my spine as I imagined it was a stranger. Past the reflection, tall moonlit trees receded out from the corner of my vision as the car continued through the empty road.

I'd been sitting for so long, and I hated it. My knees were stiff, so I stretched my legs forward to what little space there was behind the front passenger seat.

If we were really headed towards some mutant strain of bird flu, then this may have been the last night of my life. I needed a distraction. I reached in my pocket for my phone, but I remembered that I turned it off to save battery. Instead, I just imagined some weird shit like a floating black pyramid silhouetted against the moon.

"Shit, Ricardo, how're you still up?" Jules said to me from the driver's seat. His green eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror. I didn't know much about him, but I knew his brother was kinda famous on the forums. Under the username Czernobog6669, his brother leaked pictures of the light-beings from inside the city. His brother was also the one who was supposed to sneak us in.

"I'on know, just can't sleep in moving cars." I ran my fingers through my short, messy afro, and yawned.

"Well, I can definitely sleep. You wanna drive?"

"My license expired. Don't want to get stopped by cops." It was the truth, but I also just didn't want the stress of driving. It always conjured memories of my dad making me practice in his Oldsmobile and how he'd snap at me over the smallest mistake.

Out of the four of us in the car, Jules was the only other one awake. For several minutes, I thought of things to say, like asking him about his job or what recent movies he'd seen, but everything I thought of sounded like forced attempts at kickstarting a conversation.

Cosima stretched as she woke up on my left. She had short black hair with those goth, V-shaped bangs and wore a denim jacket with a fur collar. She wore a bunch of occult medallions, and I didn't get a great look, but she did have a cool tattoo of what looked like a koi fish on her neck. Cosima was my age, twenty-five, and was the one I was most familiar with on the forums before this trip. She posted a lot of weird theories and ideas for rituals. And from the places and clothes in her Chirper pics, it seemed like she was pretty well-off.

"I just had a dream that I saw the Glow Snek, and it was flying around me in this weaving pattern." She made serpentine movements with her hands. "You guys, I think it might be a sign—like a divine vision."

"I guess you're the new high priestess of the Glow Snek—ordained voice of the first light-being." Jules kept his eyes on the road.

"I'm serious." She laughed. "Glow Snek is why we're going there, right?"

"I've been wanting to really see it since I was a kid," Jules said. "I plan on studying it or any other light-being I find. Biological samples, spectrographic analysis, temperature, and magnetic field measurements. All that. I got all my equipment, and I'm ready to make history."

I didn't need to see his face to know he was smiling.

"I've daydreamed about doing this since I was fourteen," I said. "I don't have to worry about my dad anymore, so I'm finally free to take wild risks like this. Still . . . I'd be lying if I said seeing it was my only reason."

"So, what's your other reason?" he asked.

"Immigration goons were raiding my hometown for undocumented immigrants, but they can't deport me if I'm in a quarantine zone," I said with false optimism.