He was happy to be where he was, in a metaphorical sense. That’s just the way he phrased it. No one was genuinely happy to be where they were. What he really was, was happy to be what he was. He was a man.
This had been true all his life. He had thanked God every day for making him a man instead of a woman. As a man, he felt powerful. He knew he wouldn’t feel that way as a woman. Never. But now, in this twisted world he had unwittingly become a part of, this feeling had blossomed into something more.
So many had given away their right to call themselves men, so many had “embraced evolution” as they so sickeningly called it. They were putting foreign objects on and in their bodies! They let godless men of science penetrate them and insert all manner of monstrous machines into their bodies. They had been created in the image of God and they threw it away! He supposed he could understand women partaking in this sacrilege. They had always been against God and men and did all they could to take his God-given power. But men were already masters of the earth. There is nothing they were meant to have God had not already given them or promised them. Some even went so far as to forsake their whole bodies, forsake their souls, to “move beyond the limits of the flesh”. It was all wrong. How had the world gone so disgustingly wrong. Immortality was for the dead.
He sat at the bus stop, his face pressed right up against the glass side. Droplets of rain reflected all manner of colors, neon and electric lights, recreating the soulless city around him. He thought back to when he first moved to the city. Money was the problem. Money was always the problem. Money and women. Everything was moving into cities and cities were moving everywhere, spreading out till some states were basically a conglomeration of different cities. New York had become indistinguishable from New York City, and New York City is where he had been forced to go. He was a schoolteacher. Schools moved to the cities and so did the schoolteachers or they were left behind to rot. Rotting wouldn’t have been so bad, now that he thought about it.
Busses came and went. There were two or three of them. Not enough people on any of them to make the effort worth it. He had put so much effort into this and he wanted God to be happy with his work. He closed his eyes, and God told him how pleased He was. He smiled and opened his eyes, and there it was. The bus was loaded with people. A man approached the bus and stepped on it, grabbing the frame of the door to pull himself in. The man’s metal fingers gripped the frame, followed by a faint sound of clicks and whirrs, and the man was inside the bus. It was disgusting. He would enter the bus with only his God-given body. People relied on machines too much. He pulled his coat closer around him, but not too close, and entered the bus. As he swiped his card to pay the fare, the bus driver smiled at him and his metal jaw reflected a distorted image of him, arm outstretched, gripping the card in his fingers. He swallowed his vomit and stepped to the back of the bus. It lifted off the ground and propelled itself forward.
The bus moved smoothly along its route, unaffected by any bumps or cracks in the street as it hovered three feet above the ground. Knowing he couldn’t wait too long, it was only a few minutes after the bus began moving again that he stood and moved to the middle of the bus. A few people noticed him, but most didn’t. They were too engrossed in their own selfish desires to notice anyone but themselves. Soon they would be cured of their faults and shown the error of their ways.
He dropped his coat, letting it slide off his shoulders and down his arms till it lay on the floor, bundled around his feet. A woman looked at him and screamed loudly. It made him sick, it sounded like it had been filtered through a metal tunnel filled with obtuse protrusions at odd angles. To him, it sounded like someone drowning in metal. The bitch had put metal in her throat for whatever reason. Soon he’d show her, he was about to show them all. His hand moved to the detonation trigger attached to the makeshift bomb he wore around his torso.
The next few moments were bliss. Those around him who had sold their souls for power knew their faults as he screamed God’s condemnation of them over the screams of terror. Those who had remained true to His design would be at peace soon, freed from the sin of this metal world. Once it had been Eden, a garden. Now it was nothing but metal, empty metal. The fire erupted from heaven, channeled through him. It washed them all away. Cleansing and condemning, it was good. The tears streaming down his cheeks were wiped away, and then they were all corpses. The bus sat in the busy street, a charred husk.
It was metal, and it was empty.
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