Dec. 7, 2011

Morning arrived like water from a bucket. It was raining buckets.

Kenneth’s small cliché of a cabin wrapped around me like a piss-soaked sleeping bag — but not soaked with your own urine… it’s the urine of the most foul-looking sea hag you can imagine and she’s been tying one on with all sorts of sour, rotten elixirs.

Carrie softly snored in the bed next to me.

Lying in the soft warmth of the morning bed, I let my eyes drift around the small room. They alit on two tarnished bronze frames, with cracked glass covers. One was a picture was of President Teddy Roosevelt and the other held a craggy, white haired undertaker-looking man.

I bolted upright. Something slipped into my soul from my fevered dreams, littered with unreal visions. The aftermath on a busy interstate of dozens of vehicles left to rolling ends. The twisted metal carnage in the downtown of my sleepy Rocky Mountain city. Cats the only users of a once teeming major city thoroughfare; the sound of crows and ravens echoing in the deserted canyons of downtown Calgary. The complete disappearance of human beings and the realization that we are not completely alone comes from meeting a deranged white power nut. A gunfight on a Spokane River bridge and salvation from a faceless evil by a murderous cannibal and flight across the rolling snow-covered roads of central Washington and stumbling upon an… angel?

I winced when my feet hit the cold, damp floor of Kenneth’s… who the fuck is Kenneth? And where is he? Why did we come here again?

My nose interrupted my trek to the wrong side of the bed. Shut up! Coffee!

“Where you going?” Carrie yawned. “Come back to bed.”

When I think about it now — it makes me want to explode into a million icky chunks.

I actually felt impeded by Carrie. For the love of coffee.

Elusive light minced through the smoky glass of Kenneth’s kitchen window. There was no sign of Stacy. The wood stove emitted a small glow of warmth; it hadn’t been tended in hours. The first sip of coffee told me the coffee had been made hours earlier.

There wasn’t a clock to be found in the four-room cabin, which appeared to be the home of a man trapped in the 1930s. There was no television or computer or microwave. There wasn’t even central heating.

“Kenneth couldn’t be someone with some luxuries, eh?” Carrie said, shuffling into the kitchen.

I jammed a hunk of cedar into the woodstove and sliced some slivers of kindling with a hatchet that dangled from a makeshift clothes hanger holster attached to the stovepipe.

Carrie enquired about Stacy.

“She must have been up hours ago,” I said, moving from the kitchen, down the short, dank hallway to the front room. The fireplace was dark and cold. The same animal that had been gnawing at my guts when I went to bed returned with a vengeance, angered by the old, strong coffee. The vehicle is going to be gone, I said to myself. She’s buggered off.

Sure enough. I swung the door open and there was no black SUV where there should have been one.

“Ball me gently,” I glarbed.

Carrie pushed past me and stood in a steady rain, looking at the spot where our vehicle had been and then back at me.

“Where’d she go?” She asked.

“Come inside,” I said stunned.

We were like children left by their parents in a strange, creepy place. Carrie’s face was ashen.

“She wouldn’t just leave us here, would she? I mean, where the heck are we for starters?”

I gave her my estimate as to our whereabouts, concluding we couldn’t be more than 10 or 20 miles from Crescent City.

Carrie displayed a courage I hadn’t yet mustered and opened the scuffed, battered old icebox that tilted against the timber wall of the cabin near the back door, which was unused thanks to a stuffed bookshelf that leaned against it.

“Great,” she coughed, jerking backwards and slamming the door.

Seated a dozen feet away, I was immediately repulsed by the stench.

“Fuck me rudely,” I bellowed. “This Kenneth guy hasn’t been here in a while. He’s toast. Gonzo. Ravish me meticulously. What the hell was that in there?”

Carrie began laughing. I joined her.

Rain was sloshing down on the cabin’s mossy cedar shingles. Kenneth may have been extremely aged and old fashioned, and he left alien autopsy remnants in his long ago melted icebox, but his roof kept Mother Nature’s plentiful pissing at bay.

After we laughed ourselves out, we sat in silence for about half an hour, poking at the fire, daring sips of horrible coffee and listening to the rain.

“What should we do?” Carrie asked finally.

“Well, there’s no food and the water we’re getting from the pump tastes like squirrel bile, so…” I replied, “guess we need to hoof out of here. But let’s give Stacy some time. Maybe she just went off in search of some grub. Reckon she had the same fridge freak out and just decided to go round up some supplies.” I was speaking hopefully.

“Don’t know why she wouldn’t wake us,” Carrie said, slightly wounded at Stacy’s reckless move. We were thinking the same thing. Stacy seemed to be way too smart to just go off by herself — to God knows what.

A couple of hours later we were slipping our boots on and preparing to embark on the trek out of Kenneth’s cabin. Constant paranoia had us remove all our weapons from the vehicle, so we were packing substantial heat as we stomped down the sodden gravel and dirt road away from the cabin, which now reminded me, as we walked away, of the cabin in Evil Dead.

I wondered what Kenneth was doing when the disappearance happened. I still don’t know why I did that.

As we slopped up to the highway a dozen minutes later, Carrie beeped.

“I have cell service,” she exclaimed. “Hmm, it’s 2:22 p.m. Thought it was later. Which way do we go?”

I was already walking west on the highway.  “This way; 2:22 eh? Thought it was later.”

The rain was relentless. My right hand, clenching the stock of my shotgun, was numbed from the vague December chill in the saturated air. I was worrying about Carrie because she didn’t do cold weather well.  She trudged along quietly. What a trooper. Pride cantered through my heart.

The gusts of wind that slashed rain across our faces had the redwoods and other giant rain forest denizens swaying like pole dancers with vertigo.

We marched on — up and down long hills and stopped briefly now and then so Carrie could cheekily insert a hand up my back or down my pants.

It was 3:33 p.m., according to Carrie’s cell phone, when we came upon a five-car crash scene. Several of the cars seemed to be in passable shape and I tried to start them. They were all out of gas and electronically snuffed. A few hundred feet away a green highway sign told us that Crescent City was three miles away. Another said that we were at Bertsch Terrace.

I was starting to feel pretty miffed at Stacy and was grumbling a bit too much.

“You don’t know that,” Carrie said every minute or so as I fired another spiteful volley toward Stacy’s now departed way.

The more I groused the snarlier I became.

“I mean it was her fucking idea to come down here to find this super-seer Kenneth fuck-stick. Trounce me ponderously.”

Carrie growled at me and strongly suggested that I “give it a goddamned rest.”

I put my head down and cursed at the rain that kept slapping me in the face.

The day’s light, already dampened by the clouds and rain, was slipping away. We needed to get to Crescent City and sort ourselves out, but quick. My mind was racing like a gerbil on a well-greased wheel.

Carrie turned her iPod on and stared straight ahead at the dark grays of the highway.

Stacy almost ran us over.

All I saw was a black blur and the loud whine of a disturbingly close engine. I remember my only reaction being the saucer-like widening of my eyeballs. Carrie shrieked.

The SUV skidded and stuttered over the wet highway and slipped down into a shallow ditch, where it came to a stop. I saw the passenger side door swing open and Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather leapt out.

Kenneth McFedren’s gaunt visage appeared before my rain mottled face and demanded, “Why the bloody hell are you in the middle of the feckin’ road yeh stupid reckless fool!”

I blinked and water cascaded down my nose. I blew the water away by puffing air from my bottom lip. It sent a speck of water toward Kenneth and hit him square in an eyeball. He flinched and returned to giving me a stern staring down.

I looked past him at Stacy whose face was as grey as the highway. My first reaction upon seeing her was to lift my shotgun and point it at Kenneth. Maybe this wasn’t the guy we were looking for. Maybe this was some lunatic who had captured her. Maybe…

“C’mon ye suicidal gits, come get out of the rain.”

Carrie and Stacy were hugging. Kenneth was stomping down into the ditch toward the SUV. I felt freakishly alone. A universe of sorrow blew through the centre of my chest, like a silent shotgun blast. Tears warmed the corners of my eyes and I had to struggle to keep my emotions in check. A rampaging doubt icicle jabbed into my frontal lobe.

Was I that happy to see Stacy? Was it shock from almost being splattered by a vehicle? Was it general madness brought about by playing a central role in an insanely long and demented play? I assumed it was a bit of everything and accepted Stacy’s apology for having left us at the cabin.

“I didn’t think I would gone so long. I just had to check the airport, to see if Kenneth’s plane was there… or just see, you know?”

I patted her on the back and told her I was glad to see her. She smiled at me and instantly my emotions swung back toward the light side. Carrie’s hand found mine as we sidled down the weedy ditch toward the SUV.

“Ye may have to push,” Kenneth roared from the vehicle. We stood aside and watched as he clumsily maneuvered the SUV back onto the highway.

“Didn’t think so,” I muttered. “Ain’t much of a ditch.”

I felt a strong pang of dislike for this harsh, volatile man. The world was just too upside down for such behaviour, I thought. Who needs yelling and name-calling?

Carrie and I slipped into the back of the SUV and Kenneth stomped on the gas pedal. The rear tires spun on the wet pavement and I momentarily thought we might end up back in the ditch.

‘This guy flies a plane?’ I grumpily thought as I pulled my hood back and removed my glasses to clean the water off them.

Stacy turned and looked back at us. It seemed as though she was disturbed about something and I again wondered what was up with this grouchy old bastard she held in such high esteem. She turned away and I knew she wanted to say something but couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

Kenneth drove in silence, with both hands clenched side-by-each at the top of the steering wheel. He leaned forward and peered into the wet grey day, as if expecting another couple to be strolling along the centre of the highway.

I was still holding my shotgun in one hand. It rested on the seat between Carrie and me, pointing up at the dome light.

The SUV turned onto the dirt road that led to Kenneth’s shabby hovel and after he finished the turn, I caught him looking in his rearview mirror at me. His eyes shot back toward the road when he saw me notice him looking. My index finger rested against the safety and I visualized jabbing the shotgun against Kenneth’s large, angry head and telling him to take a pill and chill.

In a moment we pulled into the damp, woody yard that Kenneth called home and he verily chirped happily “we’re here!”

My finger stroked the safety and as I looked at Carrie, she gave me a glance back that told me to ‘behave.’ She smiled and my finger slipped from the safety as I felt a fresh burst of calm course through me. Her eyes blazed sweetly from the shadow covering her face from the baseball cap and hood that she uncharacteristically had on her head.

The SUV stopped and Kenneth barged from it toward his cabin, like a man who had to piss big time, or perhaps squirt vile amounts of liquid fire feces from his demon’s ass.

“We have to talk,” Stacy said erratically as we climbed from the vehicle. She had waited until Kenneth was out of earshot to say that. The calm that Carrie’s beautiful smile had erected in my mind was once again pummeled and left quivering in a usually unused corner of my skull. My finger found the safety again and flicked at it.

“What’s up?” I ventured.

“Let’s get in, warm up and dry you guys out and have some tea,” she said.

“That sounds nice,” Carrie said cheerfully.

Kenneth was gloomily snapping kindling in his phantom claws when we scuffed into his cabin.

“Bloody cold in here,” he said. I took it as an accusation that we had abandoned his cabin and left it to face the natural elements.

I set the shotgun down, helped Carrie out of her coat and hung it on the small deer antler coat rack braced to the wall that once held a cheerful wallpaper but was now faded, long lost to the ravages of time and wood smoke.

I jammed my coat over Carrie’s and unlaced my boots.

Small flames found fuel and growth in Kenneth’s fireplace.

“Keep this movin’ and I’ll get the kettle on,” he said to me, his eyes shooting soul-scratching daggers. I nodded and thought, ‘Hi, my name is Bob and you are?’

He clomped into his kitchen, where Stacy was already stoking the woodstove to boil some water.

Carrie was onto my disgruntlement.

“You sure are a happy puss today. What’s the matter?” she whispered.

I stepped to the fireplace and placed a couple of slabs of cedar onto the crackling orange, thinking that would piss Kenneth off by wasting nice kindling cedar in such a fell-swoop.

“Ye want coffee or tea?” he shouted from the kitchen.

“Tea please,” Carrie replied. “Coffee,” I added.

“Oh I gotta make both, do I?” Kenneth brayed.

“Should be some still in the pot,” I said, smiling at Carrie. “Just heat it up. That’ll be fine.”

Carrie held out her hand to me and I gratefully accepted it. We stepped into the kitchen and Stacy was tearfully and frantically whispering at Kenneth.

We halted awkwardly in the doorway and she jammed the brakes on her dialogue.

“Guys, I am sorry if I freaked you out. We are sorry,” she said.

Kenneth nodded.

“No problem. It’s all good now,” Carrie said. I nodded and looked at Kenneth, who was glaring at me. That was it.

“Okay, look,” I said, “We’ve had an odd sort of day and that’s saying something as we’ve had a plethora of odd days the last month or so and, you know, I am getting a sense that we are intruding and if that is the case, I apologize and if you could just drive us somewhere where we could get a vehicle and some gas, we’ll get out of your hair.”

Kenneth fanned a hand at me. “Get over ye self and sit down,” he commanded.

I raised an eyebrow and considered telling him to blow me but out of respect for Carrie and Stacy, held my tongue and sat down heavily in one of Kenneth’s rickety kitchen chairs.

Carrie’s mood was now swinging down to meet mine. I could tell she wasn’t impressed with Kenneth’s tone. She sat down beside me and with grace and class infused her voice with a sweet tone. “What is going on, please?”

Stacy sat down uneasily and Kenneth pressed a hand on the handle of the kettle that was ticking and creaking on the woodstove.

“Guys,” Stacy said, her voice catching on a branch of sobs, “I don’t… I can’t do this Kenneth.”

Carrie and I looked at each other in shock and Kenneth began speaking. His words came at us like a squadron of Stuka dive bombers. Each strafing run blasted new holes in our decidedly fucked up reality. My head throbbed and ached from what it absorbed and I fought off the urge to leap to my feet and start smashing Kenneth’s face in with my fists. As I visualized hammering him over the noggin with the kettle, he stopped speaking and lifted the hissing kettle from the woodstove.

Boiling water hissed into an ornate, dainty teapot and the four of us sat in silence, like moviegoers waiting for a fade-to-black to fade back to light.

Up to that point Kenneth had informed us that the world was ending and that the only humans left “on this plain” were either inherently evil or angelically good.

“The middlings have been spared and they are now being prepared for life anew on a freshly groomed world,” he said.

“Their souls have been transformed back to light and their bodies will serve to nourish the universe. They did not die, as you know it — they were rescued for salvation. Some might call it the rapture; others the beginning, others just the end and others still call it hell on Earth.”

Then he said the words that erased me.

At that moment, 3,000 miles away, crazy old Vincent was being beaten to death by a gang of New York City thugs. His life had come to that. He was losing it at the feet and hands of a mixture of black, Hispanic, Asian and white crazies — a perfect blend of all of God’s lost children.

The wars of the cities were raging in the east, as increasingly larger gangs of evil maniacs banded together to crush equally evil maniacs. New York, being the biggest and baddest of the eastern cities, had become the epi-centre of sick madness and an army of the sickest and maddest was preparing for war against Philadelphia, Boston and Newark.

Thousands were dying every day as unchallenged bloodlust soared to heights humankind had never reached. All the depraved behaviours of every megalomaniacal nation slayer before — from those history’s passage had erased to the human consciousness to Ghengis Khan to Hitler to the puniest but comparably soulless murdering, raping individual, were being surpassed by horrors only the truly evil could enact on the truly evil.

The remains of humankind were devouring themselves the globe over.

In Europe, nations warred once again, like bitter tribes seeking better climates to bolster their bounty. In Asia, gangs of savages ravaged one another.

Evil raped evil; evil killed evil; evil tortured evil. Evil died at a rate of one person every 11 minutes.

Gangs comprising hundreds of variously twisted sickos roamed the continent, clashing and slashing and burning. A few hundred miles away, in San Francisco, two small armies, armed to the teeth and committed to murder, waged hit and run attacks, using the great bridges as barriers and fronts.

Scenarios like this played out around the globe, as the munitions and toys of every army became available to whoever got there first. Kingdoms began to form; uneasy alliances were established and then shattered in ways that made Hitler and Joseph Stalin appear severely saccharine. In between these organisms of the end game were the drifters and shifters and scattered about the world, according to Kenneth the Wise and Fucking Annoying, were people like himself, Stacy and Carrie.

Cities burned. Souls burned. The world died one death at a time.

“And you are evil.”

I blinked.

Kenneth handed me a cup of coffee as punctuation to calling me evil.

I blinked again. Carrie laughed out loud; snorted, actually.

Stacy’s eyes were wet and they burned holes into her socks.

“Am I?” I said indignantly.

“And what are you then?” I felt anger and hatred rising in me like a full moon charging up the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains.

“I am here to tell you that you are evil and that you must leave us,” Kenneth said matter-of-factly. It was like he was telling me he preferred marmalade over raspberry jam.

“All right,” I said standing violently. Kenneth stepped back in alarm but his eyes, dark and brain-addlingly piercing, stopped me in my tracks. I glared at him, weaving slightly.

“Relax you goofy old bastard, I won’t hurt you. Stacy, I don’t know why you brought us here. I don’t know why this guy was here when everyone else is gone and I don’t know why I am listening to this shit. And it is shit. Fucking evil.”

Stacy pleaded tearfully for me to sit down and listen.

I did as was asked and cursed a blue streak. Carrie had a perplexed yet somewhat bemused look on her face. She wasn’t believing what she was hearing.

“Kenneth is… like an angel… is an angel, Rob. You must try to understand. I don’t want to… want to believe him but he just knows. And I know he knows. There is so, so, so, so much for you to be told but we just don’t have the…”

Carrie shouted, “Oh fuck off!” Her voice changes octaves when she is really pissed and it had gone up three or four.

My heart puffed with gratitude and love for her.

“Carrie,” Kenneth said like a father trying to steer his daughter from making a fool of herself, “Ye cannot be expected to understand what is happening. No person could understand this or perhaps even should have to understand this. All I ask is that ya keep listening and keep watching. You will see and you will hear the universe calling ya. But it won’t call him. It never will. His reason for being here is unclear but he cannot be with us, it is as simple as that. Your reason is noble and it is vital. You, my dear,” he said with an effective, attention-getting pause, “will serve a vital role in the new world. You and her – but not him.”

I shouted something unintelligible. My brain could not access my voice box with full accuracy because my head was spinning like a top about to topple.

“Well, that’s enough of that. Let’s get out of here, babe,” I finally said, standing uneasily.

Stacy politely asked me to sit back down.

I gawped at her. “Oh for Christ’s sake,” I moaned.

“Stacy, you can’t be serious,” Carrie said, laughing nervously.

“Look you guys — just sit and listen some more, okay Rob? You have to hear what Kenneth is saying. He is… a keeper of souls, of a sort. He has been working on Earth… as we know this planet… for many thousands of years,” she said.

Carrie cut her off and shouted, “Stacy, why didn’t you tell us this shit before we got here? And what do you mean he has to leave? Listen to yourself!”

I was nodding vigorously. “Yeah!”

Stacy’s voice was soft and soothing and I marveled once again how she could immediately remove any foul emotion that bubbled forth from me. Carrie did that, too.

“Carrie was meant to find me and perhaps your role was to lead her to me, so I could deliver her to Kenneth,” she said.

“You know,” I snarled, “we’ve run into some seriously off-their-nut  people the last bit and up to now I thought you were some kind of lucky charm or angel but now you are weaving this wild tale and you expect us to just gobble it up and say ‘okey-dokey then, I will be on my way and I will just leave my only reason for living here with you? Fuck that noise. Carrie, we are out of here.”

Stacy screamed at me to sit down. “Rob, this is what it is. Like it or not. Kenneth has a job to do and so do I. I can’t tell you how I know this but I just do. I always did and it led me to Kenneth years ago. I told you about that.”

She leveled her pistol at me and sobbed for me to sit down. I gulped back an insult.

Carrie then urged me to sit down and relax. Her eyes said ‘humour them’ and I figured that was the right thing to do. So I sat down and listened to Kenneth dictate to us about life on Earth, the end of the Earth and the birth of a new Earth — just over there, through a quantum wormhole of some kind, which will be initiated by cosmic means that even the most brilliant and imaginative scientist could slightly dream about.

Apparently, according to Kenneth the angel soul keeper, our world was doomed and “God’s children would not be sacrificed.” And if God was going to go out of his way and save billions of souls, he added to the budget and decided to get rid of all the evil in mankind to try and give the next world a more Utopian feel.

“Only the truly evil are being left behind. It is the rapture, as the Bible called it, per se,” he said, his Scots accent really tucking into ‘per se.’

I asked him why the world was doomed, aside from the usual reasons.

“The time has come. Every world has a limit to its life. Suns die, worlds fade away. Life begins anew elsewhere. The human being is God and God finds a way to keep it all going,” he said.

Carrie interjected with a fierce recount of recent events, her voice slashing and rising and then, finally, falling and trailing off, tears welling in her eyes once again. A form of shock was building in her, robbing her face of colour and voice of strength.

“Why any of what you’re saying should be a surprise or be considered bizarre at all is beyond me but you have to understand… I can’t… you can’t expect us to just accept it at face value. We’ve been through everything and we’ve been together…” she looked at me and her beautiful face gushed with emotion.

I sat still, trembling slightly and truly loathing our decision to come down to this rain-soaked shit hole. I felt a stomach-stabbing hatred for the old man.

Unfazed by Carrie’s pleading, Kenneth pushed on. His gaunt face, complete with what I now noticed were sharp blue eyes buried in shadowy hollows topped with sharply arching white eyebrows, seemed sympathetic, in a mechanical sort of way. His head moved from side to side, like Stevie Wonder singing a slow song, as he brogued forward with his explanation for our world gone utterly awry.

It was like listening to John Muir and a Scottish version of Teddy Roosevelt blended into one formidable package, holding an environmental summit atop of a grand Yosemite canyon cliff wall, preaching to the ignorant and somewhat conveniently enlightened, pressing a point so massively otherworldly that only high drama would suffice in the delivery.

My head pounded as I fought off anger and outright ferocity. I wanted to punch Kenneth so hard in the face that my knuckles were white from me clenching my fists beneath the old oak table in his kitchen.

And I could tell that he knew I was thinking those thoughts. It was like he knew all about me.

He told me I had to search within for the truth — which I already knew but my ego wouldn’t allow me to accept.

While he jabbered on about the aspects of the Bible and Koran and Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tanakh, as well as a few holy tomes I’d never heard about before and how they were guideposts to this very moment in time and how to prepare for it, I thought about all the wrong or naughty things I had done in my life.

Most of the really wrong things I had done were as a child, or a teenager. Stealing eight-track tapes from The Bay in downtown Winnipeg; lying to my parents; slugging my shit-spewing brother’s beagle on the head so hard that her legs squished out from below her like a deflating whoopee cushion; breaking into homes to steal liquor and loose change; ‘borrowing’ cars or bicycles because immediate transportation was required; shooting any wild creature that crossed my rifle sites; pinching nudie mags and paperbooks from unsuspecting shopkeeps in downtown Manchester, when I spent a wayward, twisted summer smoking vast quantities of hashish and guzzling British beer as a 15-year-old. And there was more — much more.

Siphoning gasoline when I was a broke university student so I could afford to get my Rambler back home; dumping my first girlfriend for being flat; crosschecking a big, slow Indian kid in the mouth for playing defense properly and keeping me off the scoresheet; piling old tires across the highway near where I grew up and watching with a wide-eyed  mixture of glee and horror when a car slammed into them and nearly flipped over hood to trunk; pouring 10 gallons of my dad’s lawn-care gasoline into an ant hill and then lighting it (I killed millions, I am betting); slashing a few tires belonging to some wrong-doers who had harmed me or a friend; pelting cars with tomatoes and eggs on gate night; driving drunk as a skunk; getting into fights for no other reason than I needed to be smacked; vomiting like a rubbie into an ice making machine at a hotel I was angry with for not remembering which room a stag party was in; selling oregano to a couple of young punks outside a Nazareth concert in order to scratch up enough cash to buy some real weed; shit-stomping a RCMP cruiser outside a restaurant for no explicable reason.

Those thoughts took a second to flash through my mind and I felt like a weeping swine being exposed by Oprah. These were things Carrie didn’t know about me, but I was sure Kenneth had me sussed. Oh yes, those stabby blue eyes looked through my face, into the crux of my inner dialogue and wrapped around my thoughts like a boa constrictor.

“And it’s nay just the things you have done, but the things you are going to do. It’s also the thoughts ye have and the desires you feel and express,” I heard him repeat, more to Carrie than to me.

If the rash inconsideration of my youth wasn’t enough to seal the deal, that turned me into a weakened shell of a man.

My face found a resting place in my cupped hands and I battled off the urge to scream uncontrollably. Carrie’s hand, which had been rubbing my knee, traced up to my shoulders and she embraced me. She whispered into my ear that she loved me. I replied with a shuddering sob.

Kenneth continued to pound at us.

The times I had fantasized about inflicting violence upon another or contemplated devising dastardly deeds, such as laying out a plan with a friend to rob a gold mine near Dawson City. The fact that we were hatching the plan in a Vancouver bar and were about six pints past it kept us from performing the deed.

Then there was the deep consideration about going on a grain elevator robbing spree in Saskatchewan during harvest, or a bank-robbing jag in the same unguarded province. There was the plan to smuggle 120 pounds of lovingly grown California hydroponics ganja into Alberta and then there were the few times where I considered ending my own life, when feeling pressed to the edge of sanity due to the mesmerizing abundance of frustrations stemming from a heart overflowing with desire and a body racked by uncontrollable testosterone and a soul burned by wrong-doings.

I was always an angry young man, though I managed to retain control better than many of my peers. I felt that should be given some consideration toward making me ‘a good person.’

According to Kenneth — not so.

I proudly announced that I had been faithful to all the girls and women I’d been in relationships with and had never harmed an innocent soul. I pleaded that I had actually stopped kids from picking on other kids in high school. It was easy to do because my pals and I were the thugs of the school.

“Evil thoughts are seeds to evil-doing,” Kenneth said. The Scottish prick.

Taking another shuddering breath, I winced at my most recent internal outburst of spite and felt lost.

Through all the earth-shattering Carrie and I had experienced the last few weeks, including the grief of believing we had lost all our family and friends, I had not felt so lost and despondent.

My life has come to this, and it is my own fault, I thought. And I have to hear it from this stranger who is telling me that I must leave the love of my life alone and behind.

Once again, an urge to grab the shotgun and flick a thumb at the safety washed through me, like a shot of drugs taking off through my veins.

Kenneth was still going — now speaking about aliens who work in concert with God.

That was it.

“Oh shut the fuck up!” I screamed, bursting to my feet.

Kenneth calmly sipped from his teacup and blinked at me. His bushy white eyebrows closing over his piercing eyes that were, I just now realized, the same soul-snagging sharpness as Carrie’s and Stacy’s.

My dull green eyes leant perfectly to the notion that I was just a common maniac like the rest of the damned skulking about our dying world.

Carrie’s hand pressed down on my shoulder and she whispered calming tones at me. I plunked back down into the chair and howled, “How else am I supposed to react to this?”

Kenneth said the first words I agreed with since he and Stacy nearly obliterated us on the highway.

“I know this is impossible for you to grasp. But you must grasp it for the sake of Carrie and for all of us. We have work to do. We have to prepare and we cannot be hindered by… evil.”

My hanging head snapped upright and I shot him the hardest look I could. Oftentimes such a look would make bigger men than I flinch. He merely slurped at his tea and blinked that fluttering white fluff of an upper face flurry.

“Stop calling me that!”

He clinked his tea cup down. “Look, there is just too much to discuss with you right now and not enough time. I know it all sound weird to you and this will sound even stranger but what do I have to lose? I have been… for well on 2,000 years… one of six guardians of the holy eyes — the gateways to God. When the time comes, and it has come spot on when we were told it would, and yes the bloody Mayans were onto something there, myself and five other keepers must release all the world’s souls so they may travel across to the new world and begin to populate it. We have a new home — God’s home — for us to go to now and this world must be recycled.”

His voice came at me as if whispered into a six-foot-long highway cone.

After an indeterminate amount of time filled with him blabbering, I burst to my feet and stormed from the kitchen in search of fresh air and silence. I slammed the door so hard that a tuft of moss and splatters of water showered down from above.

Time disappeared and distance passed. Before I knew it I was back down at the highway, shivering from the damp coolness. I hadn’t put a coat on before I left.

Kenneth’s ethereal face danced in my wobbled vision and his words ricocheted from one hemisphere to another.

He and five other keepers are the managers of an ancient order of 1,111 angels — “midwayers” he called them, who have been tending to humankind since the dawn of our time and my life partner was destined to become one of the next crop of 1,111 on the next plain — the next world. Stacy was to become a keeper. They had to get to Kenneth’s appointed holy eye but first had to “lend a hand” at one of the other holy eyes.

Me? Wait for the apocalypse with the rest of the tortured evil souls. Sounds fair.

“Fuck this! Fuck it!” I screamed. My words became immediately muffled by the thick rain forest, incapable of breaching the towering canopy above and reaching God — as I hoped.

I had never been a religious man. It had always seemed to be a pile of hooey that weak or simple people clung to because they didn’t want to try and comprehend the vast emptiness that might await us all in the end. My head felt like a soaking wet soccer ball balancing on a strand of fettuccini.

My butt hit the faded yellow line in the center of the highway and dampness seeped in. I cried like I had never cried in my life. Every poor decision; every rash act; every weak moment and every positive one merged together in my mind and exploded into a single thought.

“We have to get out of here,” I growled, rising stiffly to my feet.

Denial was dancing with me now and I had to get Carrie into the SUV and we had to flee. I was once again at complete odds with what Kenneth was saying and that was that. Time to go. This guy is some kind of Charles Manson oogie boogie freak, I reasoned, and he has Stacy brainwashed and now the two of them are working over Carrie.

Then I noticed the lights of the SUV glowing weakly at the end of the dirt road leading to the highway.

Its windshield wipers were the only thing moving. I put my head down, sighed, and took a step toward it.

Its tires spun on the wet gravel and reddish mud and it roared past me.

Everything was moving in slow motion at that time. I saw Carrie’s desperate face looking at me from the passenger seat. In that grey, blurry, horrible second, I locked onto her eyes — her beautiful, soul comforting eyes — and felt a fence post burst through the center of my chest.

The vehicle disappear down the road, water flicking outward from its tires and its brake lights flashing as Kenneth slowed to pass two abandoned trucks crumpled together in their final rolling acts.

And then I was alone.

Rain began to flicker down again.

Now, you might think I would be completely crushed and panicked.

I wasn’t.

My initial thought was they were heading to town to get some food or some other kinds of supplies. The realization that I was abandoned did come to me until I got back inside the cabin and found a note, written by Carrie but not in her words.

‘My love — I am leaving you for now because I have no choice. I am doing this becausee of Kenneth’s and Stacy. They are forcing me to go with them but I believe I am safe with them and they believe that I am not safe if I am with you. Kenneth says you have done your part by bringing me to Stacy and to him and that now our destinies lay directly ahead.’

Her handwriting grew erratic at this point and was all the more difficult to read due to the huge volume of tears gushing from my eyes and the snot billowing from my face.

‘I have never loved anyone more than you and I wish we could just die together right now. Kenneth says we cannot give up because it is vital that we complete that what must be completed. I cannot imagine how I would have managed to move on if you had not been with me but for now, my love, we must be apart. I swear to you that we will be together again. Love you forever — Carrie.’

I calmly folded the letter and slipped it into the breast pocket of my flannel shirt, below the sopping wet sweater that I tugged over my head and placidly dropped into the fireplace. As it hissed and sizzled, I walked over to my shotgun, leaning against the far wall and then sauntered into the kitchen.

I didn’t know what I was doing, even as I chambered a shell and shattered the damp silence in the cabin. The first blast left the slightly ajar door of the woodstove hanging by a single hinge. The second blast severed the stovepipe and smoke curled into the kitchen.

My jacket was draped over the chair where Carrie had been sitting before I impetuously fled the cabin. My father always said that my emotions would get the better of me and they finally had.

With fat fingers and numb thumbs, I chambered another round and with the calm of a surgeon about to cut into a chest, I squeezed the trigger. The blast left a tattered hole in the wall behind the woodstove and I noticed a magazine — an old National Geographic — slip down into view in the hole. A small headline declared Yellowstone National Park to be growing In popularity. The place was lined with magazines and newspapers.

Smoke continued to billow into the cabin and my eyes stung and lungs ached.

My chest pounded and head thumped; my mouth was desert-dry. I placed the muzzle of the shotgun under my chin and closed my eyes.

Some people might consider killing themselves at such a juncture but I had a much more productive series of things to do. I pulled the muzzle from my face, visualizing missing the Important bit that need shooting and just removing my face. My luck, I’d survive and have to end up wandering around hell like some deeply wounded, hideous demon.

I kicked the woodstove onto its side and watched with icy purpose as blazing coals spilled onto the floor. I blasted another shotgun slug into Kenneth’s disgusting fridge.

And I gathered up my pistols, jammed one into my belt and a second into my jacket pocket and snatched the box of shotgun slugs from the kitchen table.

Thick, acrid smoke was filling the cabin as I walked from it. Nothing was going through my mind at that moment. I began to walk away down the puddle-covered lane, intent on heading off after Carrie.

By the time I reached the highway, Kenneth McFedren’s cabin, soaked on the outside but tinder dry within, was fully engulfed. Thick blue and white smoke curled around the rain forest vegetation. A lone crow cawed and circled above, looking for something to eat. I silently dared it to come near.

I felt no fear. I felt nothing but the primordial pull of love.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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