The Galvanic Gods

This was a piece I submitted for a university assignment and I am actually rather proud of it - have yet to get my results back though, so fingers crossed for a good grade!

I was just a child of six in the fair town of Eureka when they arrived. Barely old enough to comprehend the vastness of the world in which I lived; only just getting acquainted with the technology on which it depended; possessing a fragile grasp on the concept of religion. Consequently, I cannot say I mourn the loss of the old ways as others do, though they left their mark on me all the same.

That night in November of 2011, I had just said my prayers beside my mother’s bed at the hospital, and my father and I were preparing to go home. My mother had been involved in a car accident earlier that year which had left her in a coma. I recall feeling strange seeing her like that, with all the tubes, wires, and beeping, not responding when I said hello, though it bothers me even more now to think this is the only way I remember her. I have tried to conjure up some other memory by staring at a photo of her on my bedroom shelf, but she always continues to look like a stranger to me. Making our way out of the hospital, a nurse came over to tell us it wasn’t safe to travel at the moment.

“A storm has picked up. It might be best if you stayed the night. We have some spare beds,” she said. And so, we returned to my mother’s room and listened to the slowly rising wind. It was the kind which started out as a rushing through the trees but quickly evolved into a howling which ripped the tiles from the roof and made the windows rattle in their frames. As a child, this was frightening enough, but as I had been told that hurricanes were highly uncommon in Eureka, I immediately clung to my father.

“Dad, what’s happening?” Already the lights had begun to flicker.

He assured me that it was only a storm and everything would quieten down again soon, before returning to gently brushing the hair from my mother’s forehead, the fingers of his other hand tightly interlaced with hers. Moments later, there was a muffled crash outside and the lights winked out, followed by a sound I was too young to comprehend.

“Julie? Julie, no!” my father cried as a little green line buzzed across the screen beside the bed. He leapt from his chair towards the door. “Stay right there,” he said to me and disappeared. “Doctor! Someone please get the power back on. My wife is dying!”

Sitting in the blackness, unable to move, I began to cry. “Dad? Dad, where are you?”

My only answer was the continual roar of the wind and the occasional shattering of tiles. And so, I did as I had been taught: I got down on my knees, closed my eyes, and prayed to God above for help.  The moment I spoke ‘Amen’, a gentle glow began behind my eyelids. Sunlight was creeping through the window behind me.

“Thank you, God,” I said, using the light to reach the door. I couldn’t see my father anywhere, just strangers rushing around, and so I went back to my mother’s bed. I didn’t know that she was already dead, although my father had educated me on the concept.

“I know I’m supposed to do as dad says, but I’m really scared. I have to find him. I promise I’ll see you again soon.” Kissing her hand, I left the room.

Outside, the sunlight was getting brighter, illuminating a battery-powered clock in the hallway which I proudly remember being able to read. I forget the exact time, but I know I understood it to be an unnatural time for sunrise, which didn’t frighten me as much as the need to find my father. Joining the confused mass of people running around the hospital, I caught snatches of conversation:

“The generator. We need to-”

“-blankets, and lots of them!”

“Most peculiar storm I ever-”

“-act of God. Was only a matter of time.”

This last comment forced another lesson into my mind: in times of trouble, find your local priest – a philosophy which, in spite of what happened, I follow to this day. As my father had taken me to the church after every visit we made to the hospital, I knew I wouldn’t get lost; getting there under such conditions, however, didn’t even cross my mind. Naively, I followed the signs on the floor to the exit, until the automatic doors sprang apart and the wind hit me. Only then did I start to doubt myself.

“Hey son, you can’t go out there!” a man said from behind me, “It’s dangerous!”

Things may have turned out differently if I had listened to him, if I had gone back to my mother’s room and waited for my father, witnessed his breakdown over her body, and then sat in confusion with the rest of society as it too, inexplicably, broke down. But I was, and still am, a stubborn child, so I simply shouted that I needed to find my father and ran off into the storm. Trees and power lines spitting sparks lay scattered across the road, partially blocking my way while, just visible in the distance, the spire of the church was snapped off like a broken bottle top. I had trudged halfway towards it and was already feeling exhausted, my skin prickling with sweat and static, when the droning started.

It was a sound with no earthly origin: a hollow monotonous tone wailing from the sky, suffused with the crackling strobe of plasmic energy and a subtly unnerving shriek that made my skin crawl. At first, the wind drowned it out, but it soon grew in volume. I once tried describing it to my own children as like the sound of a low flying jet in an electrical storm, until I remembered they didn’t know what a jet was. Up ahead, I saw several figures in clerical robes gathering in the street, gazing into the sky in wonder. Terrified yet curious, I began to run towards them. Many were on their knees, crying – though they did not look sad – while others were shouting that it was ‘a sign of the second coming of Christ’. This was a foreign concept to me at the time, so all I could do was tug at their robes.

“Have you seen my dad?” I asked one of the men. It was Father Watt. He smiled benevolently at me and pointed up.

Against the brilliance of the sky, several figures had begun to materialise, descending on vast wings. Each like a miniature sun in human shape, I was forced to shield my eyes until their incandescent skin began to dim. As they drew closer, I felt the wind gradually drop, their wingbeats slowing to ease them down to take their first steps on the Earth: it scorched beneath their gleaming feet. And then, through the blue fog clouding my vision, I got my first proper look at what Eureka later dubbed, the Galvanic Gods. For a child they were immense, yet even the men were dwarfed by them at they stood illuminating the night, energy sparking from the Tesla coil haloing their featureless heads. And all the while, the drone continued, uttered seemingly from within their metallic bodies for they had no mouths.

The brothers around me fell to their knees, quaking in their presence, forcing me to do the same, which appeared to satisfy them as the drone cut out immediately. There followed a silence, during which several people inside the church tried to get closer, only to be chased back by an electric shock from the gods’ wings. My father-in-law was among them and still bears the scar to this day. But finally, they spoke; the problem was it was not in a language anyone could understand.

As one, their eyes, like dying stars, opened, as did their mouths, which they also possessed, resembling the star’s aftermath: a black hole. From that emptiness, their voice thundered in a wall of white noise, the echo lasting for a full half minute afterwards. I often wake from dreams of my mother with that face, coming out of her coma to scream at me. As bad as it was, I am only thankful my father never saw the gods as I imagine his dreams would have been far worse. If they had expected a reply, however, it was not one coherent to them either. Father Watt brandished his crucifix before laying it at the gods’ feet, chanting in what I was told was Latin and Hebrew, but the gods remained unmoved. Only after another painful wait did their inner fire blaze once more as, kneeling, wings spread upon their backs, they placed their palms flat against the asphalt, searing it until smoke poured from between their fingers. At the time, I had no idea of the magnitude of this action; I was simply in awe of their power. Meanwhile, across the town, every machine, lightbulb, and mobile device had fallen dead. Many kids older than me mourned the loss of phones, laptops, and games consoles but, as I mentioned, this did not affect me as much as them: my father had intended to restrict me to the television until I was twelve. For others, however, the loss was far more tragic as, like my mother, several died in the hospital or, losing their way in the dark, injured themselves and, unable to seek help, perished. Father Watt seemed to sense this and made to intercept the gods but, in a movement too fast to follow, was immediately struck down. Several of the brothers rushed to his side only to meet the same fate.

As if to deter the rest of us, one god held its hand out, sparks writhing in its palm only inches from my face. I can recall its stinging warmth against my cheek, and my own childish ignorance at how close I was to death. Fortunately, one of the brothers pulled me out of harm’s way before I foolishly tried to touch it.

“What do you want?” he asked of the towering figures before him, evidently still oblivious to the damage they had wrought, but by then, they were already preparing to leave. Their bodies blazed and the wind rose beneath their articulated wings, pushing them back into the stratosphere, knocking the brother off his feet, and leaving my town colder, darker, and more helpless than I had ever known.

The year is now 2071, sixty years since Eureka suffered its technological reboot. Somehow we survived the initial wave of panic and disaster which followed the collapse of our modern society. In the confusion, my father managed to find me and rebuild our lives without my mother, just as the rest of Eureka tried to restart their own. We emerged, decades later, on the cusp of a second electrical era. The Galvanic Gods’ disturbance of the atmosphere made hurricanes an almost annual occurrence in Eureka, necessitating the construction of a siren tower atop the church and storm shelters in our basements. Meanwhile, the money-hungry tried to turn the burnt handprints on the asphalt into a tourist magnet. However, with no working vehicles or telephones to contact the outside world, this plan seemed doomed to fail. Several hopefuls tried to ride horses out to Austin, the nearest town for nearly seventy miles, but none ever made it. We couldn’t even rely on divine guidance anymore; the Galvanic Gods had shaken our faith too much. Instead Father Hertz, the new priest when his father died, decided to preach a hybrid religion, a mix of the Holy Father and electric angels. Over time, this story became gospel, yet no one could definitively say if or when they would return. Even today, we still cannot be sure. All we can do is watch the sky, living in fearful expectation of the day we finally get our answer.