In a world shattered by a nuclear war in 1982, fallout and radiation have driven widespread mutations among humans and wildlife, while a new messianic religion has emerged. The Servants of Wrath (SOWs) worship the creator and detonator of the war’s ultimate weapon, Carleton Lufteufel, formerly the chairman of the Energy Research and Development Agency of the United States (ERDA/USA). Across Charlottesville, Utah, heated debates unfold between the SOWs and the dwindling Christian communities, as people search for meaning in a landscape ruined by catastrophe.
The faith of the Servants of Wrath rests on an anger-driven view of godhood, a stark contrast to the beliefs of the surviving Christians, and it is this clash that gives the story its name, deus irae—Latin for “God of Wrath.” At the center of the tale is Tibor McMasters, an armless, legless cyborg phocomelus artist who has been commissioned to paint a mural of Lufteufel. Yet no one knows where Lufteufel lives or what he looks like, and McMasters undertakes a pilgrimage to locate the figure and capture his divinity in a mural.
Along the journey, the world’s communications remain severely damaged after the war. McMasters and other seekers encounter mutant wildlife—lizards, birds, and insects that have evolved sentience—and they also confront the Big C, a decaying artificial intelligence that survives by consuming humans for their trace elements. As McMasters travels, the story exposes how civilization has been eroded, and how faith, technology, and myth intertwine in a post-apocalyptic reality.
A crucial moment comes when Lufteufel sustains a forehead injury while removing shrapnel. In his effort to stop the bleeding, his intellectually challenged daughter, Lucía Adúriz, Alice, tries to assist by pressing on the wound with a shirt. This act leaves a bloody imprint that becomes the only surviving likeness of Lufteufel’s face, turning the shirt into a relic and evoking religious artifacts like the Shroud of Turin and the veil of Veronica.
Under the alias “Jack Schuld” (German for “guilt”), Lufteufel ends up killing a dog belonging to McMasters, and, in a confusing turn of events, McMasters murders Lufteufel without realizing his identity. After Lufteufel’s death, Alice is visited by his spirit. Though the spirit does not speak, it helps her by lifting the fog in her brain, effectively easing her disability and suggesting that his spirit may be at peace. This theophany is not unique: another survivor experiences a vision of a Palm Tree Garden, an Eden-like place that hints at Lufteufel’s possible role as a gnóstic demiurge—an earthly deity who believes himself omnipotent but is constrained when compared to higher levels of divinity.
Meanwhile, McMasters remains ignorant of Lufteufel’s death and is manipulated by his Christian companion Pete into using an elderly, dying alcoholic vagrant as the likeness for Lufteufel for the mural. The choice anchors Servants of Wrath institutions in a controversial fiction, illustrating how faith, memory, and art can be shaped by necessity and myth rather than strictly by historical events. The mural’s survival thus becomes a subtle argument about belief itself: whether religious narratives arise from real events or from mythic storytelling that endures beyond their origins.
