Fire of the Atom

Date: 9.10.2224
Location: Old River Acres, Texas

I wandered too close to the wrong kind of worship today.

The air changed first turned thick like furnace breath. My lungs stung with every inhale, like breathing in burnt glass. Something was off. Not just the heat. Not just the haze. Radiation thick enough to taste, to feel—like it was chewing through bone marrow. I could feel my heartbeat in my teeth.

Instinct screamed Rad-X, but I was too slow. Vision flickering. Balance gone. I dropped to one knee and tore through my pack, hand shaking until I felt that familiar injector. RadAway. Bitter as ever. Burned on the way down, but it bought me just enough—enough to stay standing. Enough to witness what I wasn’t meant to see.

They call themselves the Children of Atom. But what I saw wasn’t childhood. It was something older. Something more dangerous.

They were gathered in the crater’s mouth like supplicants. Burnt robes, open arms, faces lifted to a sky they believe holds their god. And in the middle of it all stood their prophet—a skeletal man wrapped in light, voice like thunder wrapped in scripture. He raised his arms, and the heavens answered: a flash, a blast, a pillar of flame.

Not illusion. Not parlor tricks. Real fire from the sky. Controlled. Called.

But that wasn’t the part that turned my stomach.

What rattled me was how they believed. Eyes glowing—not from rads, but from devotion. Smiles on faces already melting. They worship the very thing that’s killing them—and he’s feeding it to them like communion. Like truth.

I’ve seen this kind of power before.
Not in fire, but in fear.
Not in radiation, but in rhetoric.

Men who use belief like a weapon. Who twist pain into purpose and call it holy. Who light the world on fire, then kneel at the blaze and call it a blessing. The Atomites don’t fear death. They’ve named it God. And that makes them far more dangerous than raiders or beasts.

I didn’t stay to argue. Didn’t stay to burn.

I turned away, lungs still raw, limbs still shaking. The prophet’s voice echoed behind me like thunder bouncing off old church walls. His fire scorched the sky long after I was gone.

I made it out. Barely.
But the image lingers.
Not the flame.
The faith.

— The Big Chief