Lee Clark Zumpe, an entertainment columnist with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his Bachelors in English at the University of South Florida. His nights are consumed with the invocation of ancient nightmares, dutifully bound in fiction and poetry. His work has been seen in magazines such as Weird Tales, Space and Time and Dark Wisdom, and in anthologies including Horrors Beyond, Corpse Blossoms, High Seas Cthulhu, and Cthulhu Unbound Vol. 1. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter. Visit: http://muted-mutterings-of-a-mad-poet.blogspot.com.
On that blistering October evening—in the days of smoldering skieswhen pale little ghosts foraged for foodin junkyards on the city’s fringes—I enlisted with the multitudesseeking out the supposed prophet.We disfigured pilgrims quit our dwellingsamidst the fallen monumentsand, in sewer dungeons fouled by fetid darkness and ageless filth, climbing the dizzy stairways of some crumbling old cathedral whose long-dead worshippers had doubtless found an apathetic god. He spoke of the sanctity of technology and of salvation through transformation— the sparks of his divine machinery danced above the roofless temple beneath the swarming, callous stars. I saw inappropriate shadows congregating in the midnight streets below, the moon sporadically glinting against gold-anodized, aluminum alloy casings. Sickened by the ghastly prospect of forfeiting the residue of my humanity, I recoiled in horror when his metal minions began to harvest reluctant volunteers to undergo radical reconstruction— I fled as their appeals for clemency drifted, unreciprocated, to the pallid twilight. The prophet drives his drones, still, amidst the ruins of this charred world.