The Cult of Glow Snek

Chapter 3

The figure kept advancing until the end of the gun was so close to my face that it blurred.

"Relax, my dude." He lowered his rifle and lifted the gasmask to reveal a dumb fucking smile. He was a white guy with green eyes.

"What the fuck is this?" I lowered my hands and clenched them into fists. Fear turned to confused anger.

"Come on bro, it's just a prank. I'm Jules' brother, Lester, A-K-A Czernobog6669, A-K-A Snek Eyes, A-K-A Electric Hyena." He placed the mask on the sink and pulled down the yellow hood of the hazmat suit covering his curly, brown hair. He tilted his head to show the tattoo of a rainbow-colored snake with sunglasses on his neck. "That last one is just what I'd be called if I was a Metal Gear Liquid character."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"Look man, I'm really sorry." His nonstop smiling made that hard to believe. "Let's get out of here; I'm gonna get you guys past security and into the city."

I wanted to punch his piece-of-shit face, but I didn't. I'd never really been in a fight before, and someone holding a gun seemed like the wrong person to start with. Instead, I followed him out of the bathroom.

Self-control was a form of self-violence.

#

We moved our bags to the trunk of Lester's Humvee, put on the extra hazmat suits we found in there, and got in. Jules rode in the front with his brother, and the rest of us sat in the back. We finished adjusting our gasmasks just in time for the vehicle to reach a blockade point. I hated these rubber gloves and how they stuck to my fingers.

According to Lester, we just had to play it cool and let him do the talking.

The hazmat soldiers pointed their guns at first, but Lester quickly won them over. He presented them with some papers and claimed he was ordered to transfer some scientists, us, into the quarantine zone. When they asked why, he said it's classified and showed them an ID badge.

They agreed to let us through. Rather than waiting for them to move their vehicle to unblock the path, Lester just drove off the road to get past them.

"Fuckin easy." Lester chuckled and took off the gasmask. "These guys think they're running things, but they're just bouncers that have never been inside the club."

We follow his queue and remove ours too. I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Are they Army?" Cosima asked.

"Nah, National Guard. I am too, but my unit's been stationed in Pineridge for years. These new guys are just to block roads for the quarantine," Lester said.

"The quarantine . . . it's bullshit, right?" I asked.

"I think it's a cover for a huge horde of light-beings spotted months ago in Pineridge, but they don't tell us. Information's compartmentalized—Manhattan Project shit." Lester unzipped his hazmat suit, grabbed a bag of Skittles from one of his pockets, and poured some in his mouth before passing the bag to Jules. "But even the civies are figuring out something's going on."

My stomach growled demands.

It couldn't have been later than 6:00 p.m., but the darkness crept up so fast that I barely had time to notice.

The headlights flashed on to reveal another checkpoint ahead with two more hazmat soldiers standing guard, but Lester got us through like last time.

We headed into the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest and traveled on a thin road between the towering conifers. It used to fall under the US Forest Service, but there was that leaked document a few years ago that said it's been under the Department of Defense since the late eighties. Our destination, Pineridge, was supposed to be just beyond those woods.