Radiant Dawn Read Free Page A

same. Edgar Cayce said we've got a good five hundred years yet. And he was an American."
    "Cayce predicted in his sleep. He was dreaming. Nostradamus predicted wide awake. Stared into the sun. He saw the day coming. Nostradamus and five bucks says it goes down on the Fourth."
    Zane Ezekiel Storch moved to swat a fly dancing a tarantella on his scalp, gave up. It would drown in sweat soon, anyway. "Both full of shit. Don't want to hear any more apocalyptic bullshit on my porch."
    "Two kinds of people 'round here these days, young Zane: them as're afraid the world's gonna end and them as're afraid it won't," Hansen said. "This ain't no place for an honest man with his head on straight anymore." The coroner/taxidermist/librarian fumbled out his tobacco pouch, a tanned baby gila monster with a zipper in its belly, dumped out a pinch of his rust-red blend. Rolled a cheroot.
    "Tellin' ya, if it was gonna happen, it should've by now. Fucking gyp," the Bad Mood Guy growled from under the porch. The Bad Mood Guy had sacrificed two hundred dollars and his satellite dish to the Field Marshal's Armageddon Betting Pool—and eaten two sheets of acid to forget about it.
    They sat on the porch of Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply, watching the old man they called Pop Sickle as he weighed and pinched at foil pouches of freeze-dried astronaut ice cream on aisle three like they were cantaloupes. Pop Sickle never talked, and Storch nurtured a supernatural dread of what he might say if he ever did. An albino giant with a beluga whale's torso and pipestem limbs, Pop Sickle had horrible weeping lesions and gigantic bruises on nearly every exposed inch of moonstone skin. Circulation so bad you could hear whatever he used for blood sloshing inside when he moved. He was hairless but for a tumbleweed goatee of fiber-optic polar bear hair. He wore a spelunker's helmet, ski goggles and a nylon and rubber spring wetsuit, but even on a hundred and six degree high summer day like today, he didn't—or couldn't—sweat. But even so, Pop Sickle lived up to his name. He melted.
    "Shit, Hi. It ain't just here," Ely picked up the lost conversational thread. "The artificial threshold we've set up in the Millennium is nothing more than an appointed time for us to clean out our collective unconscious. Millennial psychosis is a timed anxiety release, throughout history. The problem is, the nuts who really expected the big one to come down get really fucked up when they're denied the cathartic vindication of their psychoses. Case in point the Bad Mood Guy down there."
    Storch knew who Ely Buggs was really talking about, but he let it lie. Pissed about Harley Pettigrew, his store manager, two hours AWOL; pissed at his cashier running down his old man. Pilgrims came to Thermopylae in the heart of Death Valley to burn their insanity away, or gave it free rein to thrive in a boundless wilderness of blank canvases on which to paint their fantastic, paranoid mindscapes. In one way or another, they were all pilgrims.
    Ely Buggs, smiling, always smiling into the sun, smiling and waving, cooking up apocalyptic prophecies, posing for satellite photos, wants to believe he's blowing some National Reconnaissance Office spotter's mind. Ely was obsessive-compulsively driven to kick people in the brains. He had been much sought-after as a computer programmer, but collected SSI because he couldn't pass someone who wasn't looking where they were going without assaulting them. Always said that when people surrender their personal safety to a painted crosswalk or the defensive driving of others, it is incumbent on their fellows to shock them back to their senses. He hitchhiked into town one morning eight months ago, and immediately signed on. To Storch's one question job interview: "Why are you here?" Ely Buggs answered, "To get away from the powerlines. They play hell with your DNA." The first and only time he jumped on his boss, Storch broke three of his fingers and his wrist with