Who, me, Jewish? No way, man.

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Bill, my driver, picked me up from the motel in downtown Bakersfield at 9am and we headed straight out to the ARK’s research division — to the address Sarah provided.

Actually, it wasn’t just the driver. There was Bill and then there was his assistant, Tommy. We were in Bill’s beefed-up four-door pickup, and Tommy was in the back seat, manning the swivel gun mounted on the roof. “This isn’t your San Francisco or one of the master-planned compounds they’re building out here with dual perimeter walls and their own armed security teams,” Bill had told me by phone when I hired him for this trip. “No law out there up in the mountains. People will murder you for your underwear, if you let them.”

I wasn’t sure if this was just a ploy to pump more money out of me, but I agreed with the terms. Tommy came included with the price we negotiated, but there was a catch: if found ourselves in a situation that required Tommy to fire that giant gun on the room, I’d have to pay for the ammo used. “That’s if we survive, of course. Got no use for money if we’re dead,” Bill had said on the phone, laughing.

As we drove out of the city, past the southern security checkpoint, Bill quizzed Tommy to make sure we had packed all the necessary supplies: extra water, canned rations, boxes of ammo, grenades, an emergency radio…I watched them interact. They spoke in that older California accent that almost had a southern drawl. They both had the same hooded eyes that made them look sleepy and the same bulbous noses, too. So I figured Tommy was a younger relative of Bill’s — a nephew or something like that. Looking at their faces, I could tell right away that they spent a lot of time outside the badlands. They both had the same blotchy yellow skin with the same acne-like texture…inflamed pores, papules, pustules, scarring. Spend too much time outdoors in the dust and you’ll invariably start to look like this. And it’s worse for those with pink Anglo-Saxon complexions — like a monster sunburn on top of a monster sunburn on top of a monster sunburn…until your skin starts to sizzle. These guys will be dead from cancer within the next few years, I thought to myself.

As we drove south, we passed row upon row of warehouses — some rectangular, some dome-like. They were set up like fortresses, surrounded moats, fences, watch towers, guards with guns just out of view. It was mostly chicken and pig farmers out here, according to Bill. “Plenty of water in the aquifers getting recharged off Kern River. So they’re out here for that.”

An hour later, we were at the southern edge of the valley floor — at the junction of two mountain chains. On our left were the foothills to the southern Sierras, which ran north to south. And in front of us, slowly rising to fill our entire view, were the Tehachapi Mountains, a short mountain chain that runs from east to west, separating the Inland Empire from the rest of California. The Tehachapis are a civilizational wall — it was the only thing that kept the fallout that swept into Los Angeles and the rest of the Southlands from moving north and poisoning California’s farmland completely. The Tehachapis, their existence unknown to most Californians before the war, were the divide between life and death.

Out here, beyond the agri-structures, we were the only car on the dirt track. There was nothing around…nothing other than gutted carcasses of cars and trucks and formless junk breaking down in the harsh sun. Something moved off to my right — a herd of tule elk spooked by the sudden roar of our loud engine. I could see their white backsides flashing as they jumped, their antlers bombing up and down like inverted chandeliers. A few of them seemed oversized, near double the height and girth of the others.

“Yeah, the radiation does strange things to animals out here,” Bill said, seeing me tracking the herd as we passed it by. “I’ve seen coyotes as big as bears and bears as big as minivans.”

I nodded and kept peeking out at the majestic animals through the narrow strip of thick plexiglass that functioned as the window slit. With their white bottoms and the antlers spreading out like inverted chandeliers. I had seen plenty of photos of gigantism — cats, dogs, rats — some kind of mutation that causes an enlarged pituitary gland…and it’s the pituitary gland that works to regulate growth hormones. I thought about taking a photo to post on Raddies, but there was no way I could get a clear shot — not with the shaking and the dirty, scratched window.

“We hunt the elk a couple of times a year. Good tough meat,” Bill continued.

“Them and bears and coyotes,” Tommy chimed in from the back.

“You eat the meat?”

“Oh yeah. Why not? Everything is contaminated, anyway, even the warehouse stuff got some rads in it,” Bill replied. “We don’t eat anything that looks too weird but the rest of them—”

“—They’re not even fun to hunt,” Tommy cut in. “Most of them are half-blind with their cataracts and that. If you come up close with a sharp machete and give it a good swing, you can take their head right off. Remember how I did one last month? It was clean…just one beautiful motion. Like that movie…the jungle war one…what’s it called…”

“Apocalypse Now,” Bill added.

“That’s right!”

“We don’t do it often,” Bill said, as he took a left turn along a sandy road running alongside an empty concrete irrigation canal. “You don’t want to overdo it with the radiation. But once a month or two, when we get a hunger for meat.”

“And when you cut off the tumors, you can’t even tell there’s anything wrong with with the meat,” Tommy added from the back again.

“And anyway, a little rad isn’t bad for you,” Bill said. “My cousin worked in the cancer ward at a hospital in Lancaster before the war. They’d dose you with radiation to cure you.”

We were gently snaking into the foothills now — driving on a real wide highway with two lanes going each way. Well, it was wide before the war. Now, heavily used and unmaintained, the road was falling apart. There were sinkholes and washouts everywhere, and sometimes the highway narrowed to a tiny path just big enough for a single car to squeeze into. Bill told Tommy to stop talking and to stay vigilant now. And he told me to make sure my breather and filtration apparatus was at the ready. “If we get ambushed, it’ll be out here — on one of these,” he said, as we navigated another washout.

We drove in silence now. Bill and Tommy got real quiet and craned their necks left and right to peer at the bluffs overlooking the road. Bill was nervously fidgeting with the gun on his hip, turning the safety on and off…on and off…on and off. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be treated to the same road goblin routine I got in Napa to try to extract some extra cash from me. But, no, this time the fear felt real.

After a while, the road widened, and Bill picked up speed. We were getting close to the top of the pass…and I noticed that Bill kept glancing over at me with a strange look on his face.

“What?” I asked after a while, annoyed at the constant side-eye. “Do I have something on my face?”

“Oh, nothing,” he replied. But he kept glancing over.

“What?” I said again.

“Well…just thinking…you’re not…you know…Jewish?” he said, drawing out the last word and scowling a little as if it was some kind of disgusting evil thing.

I looked over at him. “Do you think I am?”

He just shrugged. “A little, yeah. I’d venture, yeah.”

“It’s the nose? Right?” I asked.

“Yeah, the nose…and I don’t know…just the general demeanor…something very kike like about you,” he said. I didn’t turn my head to look to try to remain cool, but I could hear Tommy shifting behind me, moving closer to my seat. An image of him holding the buck knife he had hanging off his belt…bringing it closer to my neck…flashed through my mind. I could feel the inside of the cabin getting smaller and warmer…my mouth began to dry out, tongue scraping against my palate. I was in the middle of nowhere with these guys. I could disappear here very easily, and no one could do anything. No one would do anything. There is no one back home who would care enough.

I’ll keep publishing bits of RADIANCE as the novel progresses.

Read previous chapters here.

“Yeah, I get it all the time,” I said as nonchalantly as possible, preparing to roll out a little act that I had pulled off successfully dozens of times in the past. “I’m Armenian, though. From Yerevan. My family came here when I was a little kid.”

He seemed unconvinced, so I continued. “Armenians also have big noses — like mine. So I get the question a lot. It’s been annoying…insulting, actually, to have to be confused with the kikes. The kikes killed everyone I know. Armenia is uninhabitable now, a radioactive zone. Everyone I knew there…my uncles, cousins, aunts…they never made it out.”

My guides still weren’t buying it. “I don’t even know what an Armenia is,” Bill said.

“Yeah, what the hell is an Armenia?” Tommy chimed in from the back. He was so close I could feel his breath on the back of my neck.

“A foreign country, man. Near the Middle East but not the Middle East. Close to Turkey.”

“So…you…you’re a Muslim,” Tommy said behind me.

I shook my head. “Hell no. No, we’re Christians. The original Christians, in fact. The Muslims. The Turks. They tried to genocide us because we’re Christian,” I replied. Then, pointing to the cross dangling off the rearview mirror, I added: “We were the first nation to accept Jesus Christ. We did it before the Romans while all your ancestors were all pagans doing animal human sacrifices. What are you guys? Germans? Scots-Irish? Something like that? We Armenians were Christians hundreds of years before a Christian ever set foot on your land.”

Bill said nothing. He was distracted, navigate a pockmarked section of the highway, with the truck wildly swaying side to side as one side dipped down into a hole and then came back up. “I fucking hate how hard it is to tell those kikes apart,” Tommy blurted out. “I mean they can look like me or you or some Arab or some Mexican asshole. They’re shapeshifters. There is no way to tell—”

“— And we can’t even look at their dicks to see if they’re Jewish like they did in Germany because most of us are cut like they are,” Bill added. “Shit everyone I know is circumcised just like the Jews.” He paused for a while, and then continued. “I asked my pops why he did it to me and he said he didn’t know. He said that he was cut and his dad was cut and everyone he knew was cut. It’s just what you did. It was supposed to be more hygienic or some shit like that. So when the doc asked if they wanted it done, he said, ‘Mom said yeah.’”

“But why? There no Christ or Paul or John telling us to cut our dicks to be holy. So why did we do it?” Tommy said, and I could hear him fall back into his seat behind me. The imagine of the knife at my throat began to fade.

“It’s the Jewish doctors,” said Bill. “The Jewish doctors. The kikes convinced us stupid goys to get our dicks cut like their’s so that they could hide among us…so they could live like wolves among sheep. You see it now?”

“Fuck those evil fucks,” Tommy said. But all the menace in his voice was gone. I knew that now I had them in the palm of my hand. And I was about to deliver the final crushing blow of my “I’m not Jewish routine” from which there was no escape.

“Oh yeah? That’s really fucked up, man,” I said in mock surprise. “They forced Americans to cut their dicks? You know, in Armenia men are never circumcised. My dick is intact. We didn’t have no Jewish doctors telling us what to do.”

“Bullshit. You’re lying,” Tommy said from the back.

“Yeah, I’ve never even seen an uncut dick,” Bill said.

“Well, I got one,” I replied, shrugging and finally relaxing into my seat, the knot in my stomach gone.

“Let’s see it then,” said Bill.

“You serious?” I said.

“Yeah, let’s see it,” said Tommy.

“Come on, guys. You don’t need that. Gimme a break,” I said, squirming in my seat and rubbing my hands together. I wanted to exaggerate my hesitation as much as possible…to make them think that I was lying. If they thought they had me cornered, my whole little act would be even more effective.

“Yeah, show it,” Bill said.

“If you don’t show it, you either a fucking fag or a kike,” Tommy added.

I shrugged. Then I slowly unzipped the thick rubber zipper of my rad suit, fumbled around in my underwear, and stuck my dick out. Peeking out through a layer of clothes and a thick rubber suit, it looked small and shrunken. It was not an organ of power and penetration…but a rubbery flap of vulnerability. I demonstrated the action of the foreskin, pulling it off and on several times, with Tommy leaning forward and looking over my shoulder now.

“That looks gross, man,” he said, retreating to the back seat. Bill said nothing.

We drove on in silence after that.

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