...god of concrete and cold places
The God of Concrete dwells in fireproof emergency staircases, spiraling in square lines up and down through endless towers in drugged-out dreams. Florescent lights flicker between steel fire doors, protecting in shadows the creeping rats that bring offerings to altars tucked away behind rusting grates. Where the harsh splashes of white on grey stop, the black girds them in the robes and veils of their furry order, and they chitter harsh prayers to the saints and martyrs immured in cracks in the walls. In the temple of the God, there are no cats, no competition, nothing but sugary-sweet bubblegum offerings flattened to the rough floor.
And He does not speak so much as echo of the empty places and the edges of dreams that His priests have nibbled away. Every bit of flattened gum is another dream, every wrapper tossed away is another leaf in the Girder Bible and the Psalms of the Rebar. The rats chitter verses, watching from the shadows as exhausted feet shuffle through the darkness, on their way to nowhere ever again.
...god of steel and rusting yards
The God of Steel dwells in the Woodpecker that has an all-night buzz as the chanting litany of his order. Antennas anchor down the dreamtime rusting, lockjaw shrine, and it spans the horizon, shimmering in the dawn light, glimpsed from I-90 through Gary. Unlike the echo of the God of Concrete and his chittering attendants, He is not silent. He is brash and loud and roaring, a veritable railroad alive with cursing and pouring molten things.
But He is mostly rust, and his attendants are caparisoned in headphones or bearing scepters of microphone stands. Wild-eyed, they are the last generation before the God of Copper and the God of Glass, when Marconi was a holy man and musicians sang hosanna, hosanna out of crackling speakers. In the dreamtime, they are wild-eyed East Russians his rig, hooked into the Woodpecker's buzzing, all night, watching over the horizon.
Disagreements over the papal bull have their brothers, the Eastern Rite operators, buzzing back, interfering with holy signal through a hundred enameled rigs, a thousand knobs in the night.
For a slip of paper, for a line of beeps, they say, you can swear yourself to the God of Steel. For a hammer, you can swear, or worship in the church of the last great automotives, singing westwards on the tracks in search of the saints of the God of Steel.