The Axe Prophet of Iron Horse

By ten o’clock on a Saturday night, the whole edge of Spark had begun to vibrate with that particular kind of neon despair that only shopping centers and casinos can manufacture. The air smelled of fryer grease, stale beer, hot brake pads, and somebody’s cheap cherry vape juice leaking into the atmosphere like a chemical weapon.

I was sitting in the parking lot of Iron Horse Shopping Center when the radio chatter started snapping through the police scanner like machine-gun fire.

“Security requesting immediate assistance…male subject armed with an axe…”

An axe.

Not a knife. Not a pistol. An axe.

That changed the whole flavor of the evening.

Iron Horse Shopping Center was one of those exhausted retail graveyards where half the businesses existed only as tax write-offs and the other half sold lottery tickets and beef jerky behind bulletproof glass. The security guards wore yellow windbreakers, and the expressions of men who had made several catastrophic life decisions in a row.

I spotted them near the laundromat.

Three guards backed against a concrete pillar beneath a flickering sign that read CASH FOR GOLD, while standing twenty feet away in the parking lot was a giant scarecrow of a man holding a splitting axe over one shoulder like Paul Bunyan after a meth binge.

His name, I later learned, was Jasper Vermillion.

At the time, he looked less like a human being and more like an omen.

He wore steel-toed boots, camouflage pants soaked dark at the knees, and a filthy trench coat despite the warm weather. His beard exploded from his face in all directions. His eyes had the thousand-yard stare of a man who had either seen God or spent too long awake near truck stops.

“You boys work for the kingdom?” he shouted.

One of the guards, a teenager with acne and a flashlight trembling in his hand, answered with the confidence of a hostage negotiator who earned twelve dollars an hour.

“Sir, we just need you to leave the property.”

Vermillion laughed. It was the kind of laugh you hear moments before an electrical fire.

“Property?” he barked. “There ain’t no property anymore. The banks own the dirt. The government owns the air. You people guard empty shoe stores for ghosts.”

He swung the axe lazily through the air, not close enough to hit anyone but close enough to rearrange the mood.

By then, the police sirens were coming in hard from the boulevard, blue and red lights bouncing off storefront windows like a traveling disco for the criminally insane.

Two officers rolled up fast, stepping out with hands already near their holsters.

“Drop the weapon!” one shouted.

Vermillion looked almost disappointed. He lowered the axe head slowly onto the asphalt.

“You ever notice,” he muttered, “how everybody’s armed except the poor?”

Nobody answered him.

The younger officer cuffed him while the older one kept his eyes fixed on the axe like it might suddenly rise from the dead and continue the argument on its own.

The parking lot had gone silent except for the buzzing lights overhead and the distant whine of traffic on the highway. A woman pushing a shopping cart stopped to watch, chewing gas-station nachos with detached interest.

As they loaded Vermillion into the cruiser, he twisted around and shouted toward the shopping center:

“You’re all guarding ruins!”

Then the door slammed shut.

And that was that.

Another Saturday night in the empire. Another broken prophet hauled away beneath fluorescent lights while the vape shops stayed open and the security guards lit cigarettes with shaking hands.

The laundromat doors hissed open behind me.

Somebody inside was folding towels as if civilization were still perfectly intact.