The Cult of Glow Snek

Chapter 2

I checked my phone. Four hours passed, and I was starting to feel the lack of sleep.

I probably could have dozed off if it wasn't for Jules and his damn snoring. It was the kind of snoring that stops and starts again without warning so you can never get used to it. I wanted to hold his fucking mouth shut or smother him with a pillow. I didn't though. I just kicked the back of his seat instead-not hard enough to wake him, just hard enough to give myself the illusion of doing something about it.

Alex had taken Jules' place as driver, and we were now in Kamiah. I liked that name.

I looked it up on my phone and turns out this place once belonged to a tribe the French called the Nez Perce. It later became part of a reservation for the government to force them into after stealing the rest of their land, and then that reservation became open to white settlement in the 1870s. Kamiah's population was now over eighty percent white and less than ten percent Native American. That was some depressing history, but I supposed that applied to most of the past half millennia.

The sun was out, and light snow sprinkled down and covered the roads, buildings, and trees like celestial parmesan cheese. I was hungry; I wonder if that diner had packets of parmesan I could have sprinkled on things. I should have ordered more food before the waitress vanished. Was she really okay? Maybe whatever truths we'd discover in the quarantine zone would answer that.

We passed a lot of small one-story buildings along the road, and behind them was a bunch of empty grassland. I've only seen a handful of cars here. This place was clearly not that populated.

"Hey, we found it," Alex said. "Looks right out of a survival-horror game."

I leaned left to see past the seat blocking my view. Ahead was one of those roadblocks with black and yellow stripes, and beyond it was a Humvee parked to block the path. Two figures in yellow hazmat suits and gasmasks stood next to the roadblock while holding assault rifles. The are we going to die? feeling was back. How quickly would they shoot us if they saw us trying to sneak past the blockade? How many people had they already shot?

Alex made a right turn and drove to a park down the street. It was just us there.

"Jules, wake up! Text your brother!" Cosima reached for Jules' shoulder and shook him until he groaned and pulled away.

"Tell him we're in Kamiah. We saw a quarantine blockade with spooky hazmat soldiers," Alex said.

"Fuck . . . alright." He sighed as he began searching his pockets.

I was so tired.

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the firm headrest.

#

When I woke up, it was no longer morning. I wiped the grossness from my eyes and looked out. Heavy clouds blocked the sun and most of the sky, and there was still a thin layer of snow on the grass and trees.

Jules was sitting on a swing set in the park while looking down at his phone. I pulled out mine. It was February tenth, 2022, and the time was 4:35 p.m. A news notification said a Soviet representative was meeting with the US secretary of state in the World Trade Center. The meeting was about the upcoming economic reforms in the USSR. The battery was getting low.

Alex sat in the driver's seat. Her door was open, and she was facing out with what looked like a notepad in her hands.

"You're up," she said without taking her eyes off whatever she was looking at.

"Hi," I said. "Did I miss anything?"

"No, just waiting for the guy to show up. And Jules is still complaining that we couldn't stay behind to run tests in the diner."