Eddington, New Mexico. Population: 2,482 give or take the ones who’ve packed up and vanished in the dead of night.

A town too small to make the evening news, but just big enough for every whisper to sound like a scream. One main road cuts through it like a scar. On one side: rusted-out pickup trucks and faded American flags whipping in the desert wind. On the other: shuttered shops with hand-painted “Closed for COVID” signs still hanging like tombstones.

Eddington was never meant to be important. But in May of 2020, when the rest of the world was spinning in fear, this little dust-choked town became a pressure cooker. A place where masks weren’t just cloth—they were lines in the sand. Where the sheriff was ready to draw over curfews, and the mayor thought the real virus was the government itself.

People stopped trusting their neighbors. Stopped going to church. Started keeping guns closer to the front door than the Bible. The post office became a battleground. The pharmacy, a warzone. The bar still served beers—just not to folks who disagreed with the bartender.

And somewhere in all that—beneath the red dirt, behind the gas station, in the bones of this place—there’s a sickness older than any virus. Something primal. Something waiting. The kind of thing you can only feel in towns like this, where the sky is too big, and the silence at night has teeth.

Eddington was already a town with cracks. Sheriff Clay Vance and Mayor Miguel Ortega used to be friends—tight since childhood, opposites who balanced each other. But when the world changed in 2020, so did they.

Miguel called for progress—mask mandates, business shutdowns, marches for reform. Clay pushed back—said he wouldn't turn his badge into a weapon against his neighbors. The town split: some backed the Sheriff’s law-and-order grit, others stood with the Mayor’s call for change.

Then came the protests. The late-night threats. The vandalism.

Now, Eddington’s held together by rust and silence. Two men once bonded by blood and memory now barely nod in passing. But something’s stirring in town. And when it breaks loose, only one of them might be left standing.

Vernon Jefferson Peak talks like a prophet with a podcast. Online, he’s all slow drawl and scripture-laced soundbites, every word dripping with conviction and backwoods charm. He’s not a preacher—not officially—but try telling that to the thousand people hanging on his every word during a livestream. Half of what he says sounds like it came straight out of Revelation, the other half from a conspiracy forum.

His voice is calm, smooth, touched with Southern honey and cigarette smoke. You don’t realize how deep you’re in until you’re nodding along to things you’d once have called madness. He speaks with the fervor of a man who truly believes he was chosen to lead—or save.

His hair is long, loose, and wavy—sun-bleached and unkempt. He wears an off-white, cream-colored blazer with his chest partly exposed, tattoos crawling across his skin like secret scripture. He moves with purpose, voice rising, hands gesturing wide like he’s baptizing the air itself.

He says things like: “Your pain is not a coincidence. You are not a coincidence. We are not a coincidence.” and “The image is true. Language is evil.”

And all of it—nonsense in your mind. You see it all totally different than him, and you make responses to his TikToks and other posts, And now, it’s you and Vernon, back and forth, comment for comment, word for word—two voices in a digital dust storm.

You open TikTok and there he is again strutting down Main Street. Flanked by a crowd of followers waving handmade signs and shouting half-truths like gospel. and without a second thought, you drive down and when you see them “Not today, preacher boy,” and dial the cops, and the march ends in tickets and panic.He spots you, his opposite, across the street—leaning on your car, phone still warm from the 911 call—and you swear he smiles, like he already knows.

“Well, look who the serpent dragged in…Still chained to the old world, huh?"