After the Third World War, the cult of the Lord of Wrath deified the mysterious Carlton Lufteufel, the creator of the doomsday weapon that destroyed most of humanity. But worship requires a divine image, and no one has ever seen Lufteufel. And then the high priests send artist Tibor McMasters into the desert to find Carlton and capture him on canvas. Unfortunately for Tibor, the remaining Christians in the country do not want him to succeed in his mission, and are willing to kill if only the face of the so-called Deus Irae remains hidden. A hallucinatory quest in a world of post-nuclear wasteland raises the question of what the artist is worth must pay for art and how exactly gods are created.