March 1, 2012

I was wide-awake hours before the sun crested the Rockies, as was Andy. That’s what happens when you zonk out at 6 p.m., mentally cudgeled from a tormented mind, an entire bottle of tequila and countless spleefs.

Hunger and a gnawing nervousness ripped me from the comfort of the downy bed that once served as a place of respite from some, apparently, good soul prior to the disappearance. She smelled good, I could tell. Or perhaps some metrosexual fellow smelled good. Whatever. I was grateful they smelled good and their essence clinged to their former vestibule of sleep. Judging from the photos and pictures on the wall, the video collection and things in the bathroom, the former resident of this ski hill condo was a forty-something woman — likely a professional of some brand. I lay in bed wondering what she was doing at the moment of the disappearance — and wondered where she called home.

I don’t believe Andy even slept that night. He was sitting in front of the fireplace squinting through the murky light at a Time Magazine that had a naked pregnant woman on the cover.

He turned and muttered a good morning to me and flopped the magazine on the fireplace rim.

“Are you ready to roll?”

I asked if there was coffee in the cabin.

“Dunno. Check it out – but make it fast.”

I rummaged through the kitchen and found the makings for coffee and set to work, while Andy carried guns and supplies to the truck.

When he opened the cabin door, a cool wind barged in and said a bitchy hello.

At that moment, in a New York City apartment that was heavily barricaded, sat Jon Stewart — the former comedy talk show host. Stewart had lapsed into massive alcoholism after the disappearance. Like all of us, he’d lost all that was near and dear to him but he had managed to fight his way through the street demons to find his good chum Stephen Colbert, who had become a minor deity to a group of life and innocence ending dregs, as well as a pair of metrosexual insurance agents from Connecticut.

Soon after a terrified Stewart had found his friend, he took his place at his side as another minor deity, but he didn’t take to the fawning and sycophancy of the dregs and begged his friend to come with him back to Manhattan, where they could enjoy a more civilized life, away from the blood-drenched monsters that Colbert was using to keep himself safe.

When Colbert agreed to go with him, he was unceremoniously torn to pieces by the dregs and Stewart barely managed to escape with his life.

Now he sat in a rocking chair and listened to the world drain down the bunghole in the city that had long laid claim to being ‘the capitol of the world.’ On the TV ran recordings of his show.

He was chuckling to himself, pleased with his string of words while discussing world events with a guest star — Tim Robbins, another evil soul who perished on the first day of the disappearance when he wouldn’t share a piece of gum with a knife wielding teenager — when the door to his penthouse apartment exploded inward.

A mob of tattered and bedraggled ghouls whisked in from behind the billowing cloud and Stewart fell below them, kicked, stabbed and cudgeled to his untimely demise.

He had been working at preparing his upcoming show for that evening when the disappearance happened. One second the sound set was abuzz with activity and the next, he was seated at his desk, shuffling papers and looking around, chuckling. Like many millions of evil swine who found themselves scratching their asses and wondering what had just happened, Stewart thought he was the victim of a prank. He fantasized Ashton Kutcher seated in a mobile production van outside his studio, laughing wildly at his latest brilliant video bon mot. Kutcher, by the way, was in traffic on a L.A. freeway when the disappearance took place. He was badly injured in a multi-car crash and died three days later, still pinned in his vehicle and pecked to pieces by a murder of crows. What led any of these celebrities to their fate is beyond me. I am merely passing on the whispers of the ethers.

An hour later Stewart was contemplating suicide. And an hour after that, he began his search for Colbert, convinced he would have the answers to what was going on.

The cavernous emptiness of New York City was periodically filled with the sounds of explosions, massive crashes (commuter trains and incoming jet traffic created major firestorms and obliterated large areas of the great city) and gunfire.

Stewart’s spiritual indiscretions, like Colbert’s, rested on the shelf that held other works by such notable monsters as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Peter Sellers and Bob Hope. Had they not already been dead, they’d have been scratching their asses, too.

Sadly, what Stewart never knew before he was killed, was that the mob that rushed his apartment was led by Glen Beck, whose mouth rat-a-tat-tatted away as usual, his words hitting selective ear drums that wanted to hear half-witted hatred.

Beck would meet a similar demise a few days later when a gang led by Hilary Clinton met up with his small, angry, smug force at the corner of Columbus and West 56^th Street. Clinton herself ran Beck through with a broken four iron.

As blood frothed and gurgled out of his prodigious pie slurper, Clinton leaned into him, pushed the shaft of the four iron through his back, sending a spray of bile and sour blood splattering across a New York Times paper dispenser.

“What do you have to say now, cocksucker?” Clinton growled, then laughing hysterically, she extracted the four iron and Beck sputtered forward. His face smashed into the pavement and he never moved again.

Clinted screamed like a saki worked up Japanese warrior about to charge a machine gun nest and proclaimed herself master of the world. Her minions giggled as several dozen cats whisked past their ankles and began tucking into Beck.

And just three days after that Clinton would be snuffed out when her force was overrun by an invading mob from Washington D.C., led by none other than Dick Cheney, who was actually a fallen angel like Andy, though of the minor category.

He would go on to become the general of the American Army and lead his demon troops to many glories before his reign of terror was ended by a previous nobody named Ernest Bifetto, who raced about the apocalypse naked and armed with a machine gun. When the disappearance happened, he was delivering auto parts to a garage in Freehold Township New Jersey. Sideswiped by an ‘abandoned’ taxi and knocked on its side, Ernest’s van slide into a fire hydrant, which erupted inside the vehicle.

Ernest spluttered out of the van, frothing angry and ready to reap revenge. His anger-driven violent streak was the reason he was left behind.

He found no one to pummel. The smoking taxi was empty. A crumpled pile of clothes lay on the front bench seat.

He staggered across the street into an auto-wrecking yard and found two more piles of clothes in the ratty office. He checked several more nearby businesses and in doing so found more piles of clothes, and passed several on the sidewalks.

That was when Ernest went mad.

He stripped off his soaking clothes in a fit of panic, believing that if he did so he’d end up where all the other people went. He was wrong.

Five years in the U.S. Marines made him dangerous enough to begin with, but now that he was stark naked raving mad, Ernest became a warrior of the dead age.

It was his nakedness that made Cheney pause long enough to give him time to cut him completely in half with several well-aimed bursts from his gun.

Because Cheney was immortal, he survived for days, separated from his lower extremities. Ernest dragged his babbling, swearing trunk away and after two days of tormenting him, he dropped him in the Hudson River.

Cheney bobbed downstream and spat out into the wash of the Atlantic, where he drifted for days before being washed ashore near Boston. Using his arms, he skittered up a rocky beach straight into a throng of cats.

It took them a matter of seconds to tear him to pieces and eat him.

 

The cold morning added to my nervousness. I felt like I was on my way to the gallows.

Andy whistled ‘Ava Maria’ as we drove back to the highway and began rolling our way to Yellowstone’s south entrance — open for the winter for the first time since humans began caging it off.

Serena felt Andy before he sensed her. She had Madeline up and moving in a matter of seconds and they raced up the road just ahead of us. Everything was going according to plan, for Andy and Serena.

 

Just over 20 miles away, Kenneth started panicking and babbling. He was sitting on the lodge’s front deck, gazing across Yellowstone Lake. Inside the lodge, Carrie, Stacy and Jason were in deep sleeps.

The combination of Serena and Andy approaching filled Kenneth with billowing joy and terror — all rolled into one repeating synapse firing of absolute confusion. “Here we go, boy-o,” he said to the lake.

Half an hour later, Kenneth heard Serena’s truck approaching. When he saw the gaudy ‘working man’s’ ride nearing, he felt a momentary twinge of doubt that it was Serena and he hid behind the murk of the lodge and light glare on the windows until he saw Madeline, yawning, hop out and then Serena. Kenneth burst from the lodge with a wide armed welcome for his old friend.

“Ah lass, it is good to see you!” He shouted, grappling Serena into a tight, off-balance hug.

“Careful old friend,” Serena said. “These ole bones don’t take well to anything anymore, it seems. And I’ve had some recent troubles.”

Kenneth said he knew what she meant and told her about being shot back at Old Faithful. “That’s when I knew the time was truly nearing,” he said, adding, “I didn’t think I could bounce back from it. It scared the heck out of me. And then the cougar attack… I tell you!”

Kenneth led them into the lodge, where a large fire warmed the foyer. Serena spotted Carrie lying on a lightly padded bench, sleeping.

“Aye, that’s where she made it. And him, too,” Kenneth chortled, wiggling an elbow toward Jason who was prone nearby. “Stacy is upstairs in her room.”

Madeline sidled up next to Serena in the foyer and dropped a pair of bags on the floor. She yawned again and rubbed at an eye.

“How are ye then lassie,” Kenneth said, smiling. He rubbed her head. Madeline winced. He always rubbed her head and messed up her hair whenever they said hello or goodbye.

She thought he looked much older and grayer than he did the last time she saw him. Being with Serena all the time dampened the dramatic aging effect that was occurring with the two ancient keepers of the holy eyes. She yawned again.

“All right girl, let’s get you upstairs into a nice warm room. You must sleep now,” Serena said with a maternal matter-of-factness.

Madeline said she could use a nap.

Kenneth suddenly hissed, “quiet!”

Serena placed a hand on his arm and squeezed.

“He saved us, Ken. He actually saved us. And the lynchpin is with him, too.”

Kenneth whistled. “That so? Well I will be damned; out right damned. That just goes to show what I know, dunnit? I didn’t think he had it in him to make it out of California on his own. Well, well. I am impressed.”

Andy told me to stop our truck at the entrance to Grant Village. We looked down the road that wound down toward the lake, past a series of former park staff accommodations and visitor services, to where it veered north toward the lodge.

“He’s there,” Andy said. “They both are. They’re all there!”

I asked him who was there? Because he hadn’t told me anything other than that we would link up with Serena again.

“My good old friend Kenneth,” he stated.

My ears took the full force of what he said and amplified his words to the nth degree as they roared past my cochlea, bounced off my eardrums and then slammed into my increasingly dizzied brain. My stomach leapt into my chest and my heart began to pound. My hands shook and my knees felt like they were being transformed into a gelatinous wad, as they swung together in a constant knocking, as if I had to take the most desperate piss. My tongue managed to work through the cotton balls in my mouth and I blurted, “Carrie? Is Carrie there? Seriously? Let’s go!”

Andy said we had to wait a while before we headed down to the lodge.

“Why? Fuck that noise, let’s go!”

“Trust me,” he said. “We have to sit here a spell. Smoke one of those joints you like so much and relax, because we’re not going down there until I say so.”

I had run out of weed back in Jackson and for the first time in my chronic adult life, I hadn’t freaked out and gone off in search of more. For some reason it just didn’t matter any longer.

I asked Andy again why we had to wait and he just stared down the road and ignored my question.

What I didn’t know was that when Andy went into Jackson the morning we left, to find the girls a truck, he had left a clear message to anyone entering the mountain city, its silence only occasionally disturbed by wind and the odd dying crow or raven, which had become so weak that they were no longer a threat to us. Worldwide, their numbers had rapidly declined as evil was now fond of barbecuing them, as well as cats.

Andy’s message cannot be easily comprehended by the average soul. The disturbing nature of it — designed to incense and enrage — was even too much for evil to grasp.

At the entrance to Jackson from the south, where the pitched battle had taken place, Andy had arranged the bodies of the Mormon and Wyoming army dead into a gruesome arrow pointing toward Yellowstone. At the front of the arrow, he organized a macabre dead flesh statue that featured Chad Orton’s body being mounted doggie style by the corpse of a Wyoming drone. Using wire and light rope, it appeared as though the Wyoming body, wearing a Stetson, was riding a bucking bronc. One arm was wired up in the air, as if it were being bounced up during a wild eight-second ride. On Orton’s bare back, he carved with a paring knife: “Oink oink, come to Yellowstone for a big bang.”

Only a scouting party of Mormons witnessed the freak display but they reported it back to Ambrose Beasley and his ‘staff’ of vile cretins.

While they were all evil, many of the remaining Mormons, including Beasley, believed they were still good, righteous, god-fearing men. In fact, Beasley believed he was an angel sent by God to protect his chosen people and lead them to the gates of heaven, where their women and children, taken in the disappearance, awaited them.

When the scouting party returned to report on how the glorious Orton’s corpse had been fouled, Beasley ordered his force into the town.

They were just entering Jackson when Wendel Horsman’s gunship swooped in from the east and unleashed hell upon them. More than a quarter of the Mormon force was wiped out by his rockets and chain-gun fire, as he rolled too and fro in the sky above them, laughing madly as he and his mostly untrained crew had their way. The Mormons poured withering fire at the helicopter but they could do nothing to this black demon of the sky.

Departing, Horsman radioed to the column that was creeping out of Bondurant and they picked up their pace to get to Jackson in time to take advantage of the disarray. Horsman returned to base and reloaded with munitions and fuel and returned to Jackson in time to join in on the chaos that was two armies of untrained fighters engaged in a battle that featured sweeping heroism from some poor doomed evil souls and disgusting cowardice from others.

Lines had already formed when Horsman returned and false security made him bolder than before. He slowed his airspeed to maximize his firepower, when a Mormon rocket clipped his tail rotor, sending him into a dizzying death spiral. The chopped slammed belly-first onto the highway beside Orton’s disfigured and dishonoured corpse.

Now it was the Mormon’s turn to bring in their own chopper to knock the Wyomings back.

Crackling, broken up radio transmissions from the Mormon front line to their rear line, asking for air support, were received by Major James Paul Duperow, who was patrolling near Idaho Falls. He turned his gunship to the southeast and opted to go take a peak at what was going on.

Beasley’s attention was halved. He wanted to roll down the road to Yellowstone and enact revenge, which was Andy’s hope. He also knew he had to deal with the Wyomings. After a brief moment’s consideration, Beasley ordered the chopper to pick him up and take him to the park, and he left the Jackson battle in the hands of a spiritually decrepit serial killer named Jess Oliver.

Duperow, now cresting the Idaho/Wyoming border just west of Jackson, received Beasley’s orders clearly. He decided to maintain course and prod carefully into Jackson’s perimeter, while Beasley whirly-birded north, hell bent on killing whomever had done such a hideous thing to his friend and fellow patriot. He ordered Oliver to establish a line at the north end of the city and send a patrol north to join him.

That was when Andy said, “Okay, let’s go. Should be good about now I think.”

I clunked the truck into gear and put my foot on the gas, sending the truck lurching forward, rear tires spinning on the dry pavement.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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