Dec. 9, 2011

Ng waited until he was about 200 feet from the north side. He reached into his satchel, where he had five more sticks of dynamite and a couple of hand grenades, and pulled one out. He clipped most of the curling fuse off with a pocket knife and lit it. Ng grinned as the fuse hissed to life and with a shoulder popping grunt, he heaved it over the side of the bridge. That done, he lit the fuse on the stick in the truck and darted toward the north side of the bridge.

The first stick of dynamite fell 130 feet and exploded three feet from the surface of the water.

Kenneth, Stacy and Carrie all instinctively recoiled away from the picture window they were peering out of and Carrie let out a brief yip of a scream.

Luckily, for him, Ng was wrong about the fuse. It took 44 seconds for the second stick to go off. The adrenaline release from the first blast allowed him to race faster than normal and he was able to clear more than 250 feet from the truck when the second one erupted, causing the still full tank of fuel to explode right after it.

The blast knocked Ng sprawling forward like a string puppet kicked by a petulant child.

He slammed sideways into the front door of a mini-van and his satchel flew from his grasp. Ng bounced back and slammed into the road, which oscillated from the explosions. Abandoned vehicles bounced and shifted on the bridge decking.

Kenneth gasped when the second explosion went up and he noticed how the tanker truck heaved forward, then the third blast from the fuel created a massive fireball that mushroomed out from the beautiful 75-year-old steel and reinforced concrete structure.

Its twin 350 foot steel arches groaned and the entire structure screamed, it seemed, to the stunned Sacramento survivors, who stumbled backward and away from the bridge.

On the north side, Ng’s crew looked like a tree full of monkeys surprised by a panther when the blast went off. Perry brought his bike to an ugly, panicked halt and he threw himself to the ground. A warm gust of smoke blew over them and Perry looked up, certain Ng was a crispy critter.

In a hillside apartment overlooking the quay and the bay, Kenneth, Stacy and Carrie emitted various sounds related to amazement. A fireball and then billowing black, brown and white cloud of smoke burst forth from the centre of the bridge and they stared, open mouthed, as the semi cab fell to the water below. The trailer burst out in every direction.

One large piece of it landed 10 feet from Ng, who was lying winded on the road next to the mini-van, sucking violently for air.

With thick, choking smoke blowing over him, Ng regained his breath, rose in a crouch and began to scamper toward the north side of the bridge. A few moments later, the tree full of monkeys went off again, whooping and hollering at the sight of a blackened Ng emerging from the smoke.

Once the tattered and excited remnant of Ng’s crew was organized again, they turned off the bridge and wound down to the quay area. The rumble of their bikes grew louder and echoed off the buildings and hillside. Kenneth had the ladies armed and ready and watching from different windows. Using his binoculars, he was able to follow the bikers until they disappeared behind a row of buildings.

One of them was a formerly busy waterfront bar, populated by locals who worked on the ocean, in processing plants, in the nearby forests, or in the many tourist businesses that made up Newport’s economy. And in the bar went Ng’s crew. It had been a rough day. They had traveled about 5,000 feet in total from the brew pub across the bay.

“First round is on me,” shouted an elated and impressed Perry.

“Ng, you are a fucking nut, man,” he bellowed, handing him a warm beer.

 

Andy, squinting into the murk and haze of the biker trashed bar, told his charges they would have to be extra careful moving forward, as whatever “pack of foul louts did this will be most worth avoiding.”

No one questioned Andy.

They stepped back into the sunshine and resumed their crawl north up the Coast Highway. The ocean breeze that had blended so well with the morning had turned into a gust now, and an expansive horizon gave way to dark clouds in the west. Andy formed a plan to bed down in Newport, a town he had on occasion done business in.

 

I didn’t feel the change in the wind nor notice the increase in size of waves slashing into the jagged splendour of Cape Perpetua. I was clambering back into the Dodge, freaking fine on a fresh fattie and new, cold beer.

Andy saw the Sacramento stragglers well before they observed his small band — too busy looking over their shoulders for the demons that had just slaughtered their brothers-in-arms.

In a blink he pulled sharply to the side of the highway, lay his bike on its side and waved at the rest to do the same.

All six were pulled over and bristling with weaponry when the Sacramento survivors saw them. It was the last thing all seven of them saw. Andy fired first and the bark of his high-powered rifle signaled an echo from his crew. Seven dark figures fell from seven skidding, toppling and crashing Harleys.

It was a bad morning for the growing Sacramento army. No message would be delivered.

Once the deed was done, Andy quietly sheathed his rifle back across his back and hoisted his bike up. A gander told him he hadn’t damaged it in his haste to dismount and without saying anything, he kicked her alive and rode off. He idled past the splayed, bleeding bikers and pointed at one who was still alive.

Following closely behind him, Hex fired a round from his .44 and the biker stopped moving. The small band buzzed down the highway away from their most recent proficient kill.

Andy didn’t need a large force. He was one on his own and his crew had been carefully selected for their various useful traits and skills.

I crossed the Alsea Bay Bridge and rolled past the recently abused bar and the sight and smell of smoke alerted me to ensure my Glock was on the seat next to me. I rumbled north toward Seal Rock.

The bodies of the seven dead bikers were still warm and blood still oozed from several of them, creating large, wind rippled puddles in the middle of the higway. For some reason I thought of Jim Morrison and the Doors’ Dawn’s Highway. “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding; Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind.”

My hands gushed hot terror over the shotgun they clenched, alabaster knuckles shining. The Glock was tucked Into the front of my trousers. I didn’t remember clambering down from the clacking truck. The visage of a slew of freshly killed bodies lying around the highway, at that time, ranked as the most surreal and disturbing I could recall since the disappearance.

Black smoke filled the sky to the north.

Shaking, I leapt back into the Dodge and then paused. “What to do?” I fretted out loud.

I hadn’t come upon anyone, I reasoned with myself, so whoever did this is heading north as well. If I go slow and be careful, I should be okay.

I longed for the cloak of invincibility that I wore so selfishly back in Crescent City.

“Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven” rattled in my head as the Dodge clacked forward. “Blood in my love in the terrible summer.”

Andy and his crew were two miles from the Yaquina Bay bridge when they spotted the curl of smoke being pushed inland up the Yaquina River. They cut their speed and split into two columns of three and rolled toward the scene of complete carnage.

Ng and his lads were into their third round when Andy and company pushed their bikes past a throng of contorted bodies, feeling relatively secure that there was no guard point at the south end of the bridge. Just to be safe, Andy ordered a rapid assault of the south side of the bridge, with two men taking the western stairs leading to the deck and Hex and May, a heartless street slag who once slashed a razor across a crack dealer’s eyeballs to avoid having to pay him for his wares and to rebuke him for his lewd comments, took the east stairway. Andy and a lanky blonde lad named Peterson attacked head on and they shared a hearty laugh when their caution was for naught.

Andy warned, “Keep alert as we get across. Whoever did all this is in a bad way. Their lack of respect for others on this road is almost insulting.”

They had to help one another lift their bikes over wreckage when they came to the remains of the tanker truck, which still huffed a fair amount of heat. As they appeared on the north side of the wreckage, Kenneth caught sight of them and started violently.

He pressed the binoculars into his orbital bones, as if that would let him see farther. He counted six ant-sized figures crawling over the bridge and tried to assume they may be a rear guard left by the crew down the street, or they might the remains of whomever that crew battled. But he knew they weren’t.

Little frightened Kenneth, because little could be done to him.

In his 3,000 years of life on this world, he’d been run through with a spear in 222 B.C., gored by an elephant tusk one insanely drunken evening in what it now South Africa in 11 A.D., and nearly hacked in two by a pair of sword wielding, wine sotted Romans in 101 A.D.

By then, he began to master the art of blades and ax and lance and, more to the right side of smart, he learned to avoid trouble. In a sense, he had become a fully evolved keeper by then. Still, one can’t be a nosey, suggestive, bossy type and not get into a scrape or two now and then.

All the previous attempts to test his immortality were larks compared to having his throat slashed with the heavy, flying tip of a broadsword soon after he first arrived in Scotland in 1111 a.d. After that, he adopted a Highland cover, having been so utterly impressed by their friendly contempt.

That really made him take a step back and all that happened until 1313 a.d., when he felt the crushing grind of  a mace to the side of his head. He hated to remember that. Trying to impress a young maiden with his aim with a mace, in Spain, Kenneth accidently clobbered himself. The blow knocked him unconscious for the better part of a day and when he awoke, his purse strings had been cut and the maiden was long gone.

In 1515 a.d., as a special advisor to the Swiss Mercenaries, he was shot in the heart by an impressively well-advanced French archer in the Battle of Marignano.

Then in 1661 he was shot for the first time by a gun, this time in the face by a large, fat musket ball fired by a Fifth Monarchist swine when they attempted to seize control of London. It made a horrible mess of the left side of his jaw, which never really fully regenerated, for some reason he was unclear about. After that time, he tended to grow beards.

In 1717 he was shot twice in the chest and stomach by one of the pirate Blackbeard’s men when they sacked the ship he was aboard, the second time he headed to North America, to attempt to get to Long Valley. He intended to cross Central America and head up the Pacific Coast to California, on the advice of a peer. He eventually made it back to California and began his favourite practice of avoiding humankind whenever possible by living as a hermit deep in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The first time Kenneth saw Long Valley was after he arrived in North America with Hernan Cortes in 1533, serving as an advisor. He tagged along with Capt. Deigo de Becerra and advised Fortun Jimenez to lead a mutiny. After he landed at the Bay of La Paz with them, he disappeared into the jungle and began trekking north. Soon after he left them, Jimenez and most of his men were slaughtered in an attack by Guaycura Indians.

Kenneth saw Long Valley for the first time in 1535, well before any white man.

It was a pivotal time in his development as a keeper of the holy eye.

The transition from corporeal to the bardo infused his being with knowledge of the universe and he could not hide his superior mental properties, so he became widely sought after for his sage advice.

This did not sit well with him, as he began to be paraded about the courts of Europe and found himself being urged to take sides. So he donned another disguise, assumed the name Kenneth McKay for the first time, and joined the crew of an English spice ship, which fell beneath Blackbeard’s hungry gaze.

Kenneth enjoyed peace and solitude and regular visits to the occasionally rumbly Long Valley and fell deeply in love with the surrounding countryside. Until the early 1770s, his only human contact was with the First Nations people, who feared this ranting raving white ghost.

The most telling impact on Kenneth, after he first came upon Long Valley and his transition station, was the complete whitening of his hair and beard and the aging he underwent. Kenneth began life on Earth like anyone else. He was born the second child of a Britanni Celt and grew to manhood in what is now southwestern Holland. He had no idea about his immortality until many years had passed following the death of his first wife. He still looked like a man in his early 30s but was actually closer to 80, which was ancient in those times.

Life just continued for Kenneth and as the years passed, so grew his knowledge and his yen to travel increased every year, too. He was drawn to the oceans and he trekked the old world relentlessly.

When word came of the New World (Kenneth never subscribed to the flat world theory), he began hanging around Western Europe, following his gut instinct that it would be from there that the New World would be discovered. For many reasons, he missed out on the first voyages but eventually established enough rapport with the Spanish, by impressing them with his skills in languages and overall knowledge.

In 1868 he assumed the identity of a little-known trekker named John Muir, from Wisconsin, whose frozen body he came upon near what is now known as Sonora Pass, north of Yosemite National Park. Muir’s journals gave him all needed to know to assume his identity and the dead man looked for all-the-world as Kenneth did before he first entered Long Valley.

Kenneth’s final joust with the mysteries of immortality occurred in 1881 while he was exploring the Alaskan coastline, still searching for the ‘third holy eye of the Americas,’ which turned out to be in New Mexico, he learned, in 1888.

He was hunting with two Tsimshian guides, when one, the young son of the main guide, slipped on a moss-covered rocky slope and his rifle discharged. The bullet his Kenneth in the spine, between the cervical and thoracic vertebrae and dropped him like a stone. Kenneth’s body rolled down the rock slope and plunged 80 feet down to the surf. The guides retrieved what they believed was his body and were awe-struck to find him still alive.

While Kenneth’s body is capable of regeneration, it took more than 48 hours for his spine to knit back together and another 48 hours before he could stand.

The youngster who accidently shot him was dispatched to get help, more than two days’ walk and paddle away. When he returned with several men from Kenneth’s (Muir’s) exploration party, they found a wobbly but bi-pedal Kenneth having a lively chat with his guide.

He would tell people afterwards that the young Tsimshian’s bullet missed him but the fright made him fall.

Only the Tsimshians knew that he had a hole the size of a quarter in the upper middle of his back a few days earlier. For generations after, a tale would be told of an old white bearded shaman who rose from the dead.

Kenneth’s mind wandered to the time he spent with the elder Tsimshian guide — a man of infinitely larger soul than so many of the child-like banshees he had to contend with as California became overrun with white settlers.

“Focus ye silly beggar,” he urged himself and cast another eye down toward the street where the bike gang had gathered. Back on the bridge, Andy and his men were cautiously approaching the north entrance.

And I was retching like a pelican that had accidently scooped a fat dead raccoon in an oil slick — having just come upon the death display on the south side of the bridge.

After a good old fashioned puking session, I rose back to my unsteady feet and suddenly the bodies seemed otherworldly — alien and not related to my species.

Not as wise as Andy, I foolishly wandered up to the south side of the bridge to get a look at what was burning.

It didn’t dawn on me until well after how quickly the ‘ick’ factor dissipated and how easily I was now picking my way past the splayed, contorted, ripped open bodies. Fear, it seemed, ebbed and flowed in me like the tides that lapped at the base of the bridge I now contemplated crossing. Shock and surprise were also being moved to a higher, less easily reached shelf.

I rose upon my tiptoes to try and get a view down the bridge. Whatever was burning was big, I could tell that much. I clambered atop one of the vehicles closest to the south end of the bridge and got a clear view of the carnage ahead.

Not seeing any obvious threat, I decided to walk across the bridge to determine how passable the bridge would be for the big Dodge.

As I ambled up the roadway, a memory of walking over the bridge during another life — 18 years earlier, with my daughter, my sweet, precious baby daughter, still only six months old in a sling,dangling asleep from my chest.

At that moment the world seemed as dead as dead could be and the bodies back at the bridge entrance struck me as being failed guardians to a better way just across the bay.

About one mile away, hidden from view behind a large window that held the reflection of the Yaquina Bay bridge, Carrie, Kenneth and Stacy nervously kept watch, scanning the lower Quay area and the bridge for further signs.

Stacy saw Andy’s crew first, slowly rolling past the small opening between houses that made the highway momentarily visible. She told Kenneth and he whisper-barked an order for her to keep a sharp look out.

“There is another opening — there —” he pointed toward a street that intersected with the highway, right before Newport’s upper downtown began. “Let me know if they turn down that street, because it leads around to where the others are. I don’t think they are together. This may get Interesting.”

Stacy agreed, noting they were riding dirt bikes and not Harleys.

Carrie tilted her head and then pressed her eyes into the binoculars she was holding. With the binoculars, she was only able to make out a solitary figure emerging from the black smoke spewing wreckage.

“There’s more movement on the bridge,” she reported.

Kenneth hustled back to the picture window and grabbed the binoculars from Carrie.

“One…” he counted and paused, waiting for more figures to emerge. I was nearing the north end of the bridge when he whispered, “just one. Hmm.”

Standing at the northeast corner of the bridge, I was able to see down SW Bay Boulevard and along with spotting the familiar signs for the wax museum, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and the undersea centre, my heart jumped when I noticed several dark figures moving among a throng of higgledy-piggledy parked motorcycles.

I dropped into a squat and peered between the bridge railings, trying to figure out what to do.

My shotgun was slung over my back and the Glock was tucked in my waist, but I felt horribly exposed on the bridge. My journey over it told me I could probably get the Dodge across, if I used its bumper to push a few vehicles out of the way. The explosion that tore the tanker truck to pieces rocked a larger truck against the west bridge railing, making an opening big enough for the truck.

After a few seconds of panicked planning, I opted to retreat back across the bridge to the truck and head to the southern marina to try and get a better sense of what was in Newport.

As I slinked back across the bridge, Carrie again caught sight of me and told Kenneth, “That one is going back,” she said. Then she briefly contemplated ‘what if that was Rob?’ Kenneth’s voice removed her from that daydream. “That means he isn’t with that lot down there.”

Stacy had watched Andy and his crew file past the final vantage point and informed Kenneth they passed them by. Up on the highway strip, heading north, Andy and his five followers weaved among the abandoned vehicles and pulled into a Target parking lot.

They carefully made their way into the store and began looting it for supplies.

In the bar, Ng and his boys were polishing off yet another round when he declared, “Time to get moving. Portland isn’t far from here.”

Several of his men grumbled about leaving and he ignored them.

As I scurried back across the bridge in a ducking, bent-over scamper, I noticed a backpack and instinctively picked it up. I noted its weight and peeked inside, where with wide-eyes I saw sticks of dynamite and two hand grenades.

With a laugh, I clenched the back straps and continued on my way, feeling a tad better about self-defense.

Standing in Mariner Square, not far from the bar, two of Ng’s men, who had snuck away for a brief homosexual fling, observed my Dodge moving across a parking lot in the marina across the bay and, hitching their trousers and buckling their belts, trotted to the bar to make a report.

Ng was unconcerned and assumed it was part of the gang they’d just taken down.

Once down in the marina, I stepped from the truck and sauntered onto a dock. I walked past a scene that made my imagination race. There was a cooler, two cans of beer and two crabbing rings laying on the dock. Two people were enjoying the start of an afternoon of crabbing when they disappeared, I surmised. I peeked in the cooler and was relieved to see it was filled with cans of Budweiser, laying in a cool dash of water. I grabbed the cooler and walked back to the truck.

I couldn’t see anything from the marina and decided I would find a spot to lay low.

Ng had walked to Mariner Square and observed me depart the parking lot and disappear from sight.

He shrugged and felt no concern. The urge to taste a woman was starting to make the inside of his skull itch.

I found a quiet alcove between two boathouses and backed the Dodge into it. In silence, I rolled and smoked a pin joint and snapped open one of the Buds I had liberated from the dock.

It was dark when I awoke with a start. The fitful sleep I had wrestled through ended with me dreaming that I was waking up in the truck, the faces of the dead bikers I had stepped through earlier pressed against the windows.

Almost directly across the bay, Carrie was also having a crummy nap, while Kenneth and Stacy vigilantly kept watch.

The bike gang rolled out of the lower quay with a rumble that brought great relief to Kenneth. When they disappeared from sight up the highway, he decided he should head down to the bar and take a look around.

As he picked his way down the hill to the quay, Andy and his charges were kicking back in a sea front hotel suite, on the northwest side of Newport. Andy had seemed unnaturally happy since they crossed the bay bridge. It was like he had found something long lost, Hex thought.

Ng’s crew bypassed the hotel, located a couple of blocks off the highway, and rolled east down highway 20 toward Corvallis.

Starving and thirsty for something other than beer, I made my way on foot to the brewpub I passed on the way down to the marina and was disgusted to find the establishment completely trashed and emptied of anything remotely useful in terms of sustenance. However, there was lots of booze and a few opened bags of pretzels and chips, which I gathered together and lugged back to the truck. I didn’t know what to do, so I lay down on the bench seat and eventually fell back into another cold sleep.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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