The Gospel of the Font

Chapter 1

"Make way! Emergency coming through!"

The first thing I do when my boots hit the sand is drop my pack and walk around to the other side of our old, rusted-out bus. I lean back against the side of the bus and undo the button and zipper of my cargo shorts. The shorts come down, the panties come down, I squat down to a crouching position while still leaning back against the bus, and I; well, you know how sometimes you take a piss that feels so good that your eyes roll back in your head? Well, that's where I'm at right now.

"Note to self, never drink a liter of Pepsi before riding through the desert again," I whisper quietly to myself after closing my eyes. The Egyptian desert isn't exactly the most welcoming of environments, and it's even worse when you've been holding it in for the last forty minutes.

"That's disgusting!" I hear a squeaky female voice shout from beside me.

I don't even open my eyes to look at her. I just give her the one-finger salute as I finish my business. That's Molly. I've known her since freshman year of college about seven years ago. Never understood why she wanted to become an archaeologist since she hates getting dirty. She's always just so prim and proper, not to mention a very vocal Jesus freak which always turns me off.

I stand up and pull my pants back up as a tall, skinny guy with sandy blond hair comes around the side of the bus. He smiles at me as he drops his bag on the sand.

"You too, huh?" he asks.

I nod as I lean back against the bus again.

He unzips his fly and proceeds to make a puddle next to mine. "Oh yeah!" he groans as his head leans back. That stream of piss is coming from Tim. He's my best friend and as queer as a four-dollar bill, but I'm bi and that's one of the reasons we clicked. He's also the only person in our graduating class who's smarter than me. We finished first and second respectively.

I laugh a little at the face he's making.

"I swear you two are like cave people," Molly says.

"It's the middle of the fucking desert, your majesty," Tim says as he zips his fly back up. "Not a lot of other options around." Tim and I like to sarcastically imply Molly is royalty since her dad is Reverend Roberts; the flashy suit-wearing, plastic hair sporting, Bible-waving, forehead smacking preacher on TV who is stupid rich and about as pleasant to listen to as a cat with its tail caught in the vacuum.

We all make our way back to the right side of the bus. I retrieve my bag and the three of us trek up a small sand dune towards the old man standing at the top. That's Walter, the head of the archaeology department at UNC Charlotte. He's an aging hippie with long salt-and-pepper hair and a beard that would make Santa proud.

Walter got called to come investigate some strange finding way out here in the middle of nowhere. Since it was so close to graduation, he said he'd take the top three in the class with him. It sure caused a lot more people in our class to show up at the library instead of the bar for a few weeks, but Tim, Molly, and I were already so far ahead of them it wasn't even a contest.

"I don't get it," Tim says as we make our way up the dune. "Why would anyone build something out here? There's no record of any civilization living out this far."

Walter is still just blankly staring down the side of the dune. It doesn't take us long to see what he's looking at.

On the other side of the dune is a large plateau of jagged rocks. The entire area looks to be about one hundred or so square yards. Large chunks of stone are sticking up out of the sand randomly. They are very dark in color and look strangely porous.