December 4, 2011

After a couple of miles, Carrie yalped, “Look!”

The blurting wrenched me from the exhausted reverie I was experiencing and I spilled my beer. Since we began to climb into the mountains, slowly rolling up a road blanketed with about 10 inches of snow, much of it fresh, I began to feel weirdly euphoric. It was like I was heading out on a third date with Carrie – the whole world glowed with hope and love.

The Jeep skidded to a stop and beer soaked my crotch.

We were now looking at fresh tire tracks in the snow, coming from the north and turning across our lane and up a side road that meandered into a dark forest with a thick white mantle.

“What should we do?” I whispered, my right hand squeezing the steering wheel and left hand swatting at my crotch.

Carrie didn’t say anything. She just looked at me and after a few seconds said, “we have to know. I don’t know. I’m not scared. Are you?”

I nodded vigorously. “I’ve wet myself.”

Then without yet agreeing with myself to take such action, I turned the Jeep onto the side road and tried to turn the lights off. A strong beam continued to carve into the dark, despite my increasingly stronger yanking, tugging and shoving of the light switch.

“These fucking new vehicles.  You can’t sneak up on shit in these things, unless you disconnect your daytime running lights. It’s really damned inconvenient for people when they’re trying to sneak up on one another,” I whined, as the Jeep thudded up the narrow, potholed lane.

After about a kilometre, we crept into a large D-shaped opening, with a large timber log home at the end. The source of the tracks — a Japanese model four-wheel-drive — Toyota possibly — was parked in front of the house. I quickly shut the ignition off and hissed at Carrie to “get out!”

She was out of the Jeep in a second but I took a few seconds longer, fumbling badly for my beer then remembering that I wanted the gun and not the booze. Damn it to hell, I am too pissed for this, I raged inwardly. A coolness embraced my crotch.

I clicked my door shut and we looked at each other through the murk, over the top of the Jeep.

“What should we do?” Carrie whispered.

“I dunno,” I said weakly, staring at the house. Wood smoke filled our senses in the darkness and a thin orange light — created by a candle, or two, flickered in a window. A warm, welcoming, embraceable blue light emanated from the front door.

In another time, it would have been a heartwarming, romantic sight. A postcard of a winter wonderland on the edge of the North Cascade Mountains.

But my mind raced. Cannibals, killers, rapists, mad white power nuts, deranged criminals to the person — were all that we’d come across so far. So what were we going to come across this time?

I assumed it was the combination of exhaustion, raging stunned madness brought on by a world turned inside out, seven or eight Keystones, several thumb-sized joints and twitching terror, as well as the sticky coolness of my crotch, that was making me oddly euphoric. I thought how I might be evolving into a savage killing machine – and the prospect of blazing away with my trusty Glock… where is my gun?

We heard the crunch in the snow behind us before the voice — a soft, lilting trill of a voice.

A woman’s voice.

“Hold your ground, please,” she said with a friendly tone.

“And drop your weapons, if you’ve got ’em.”

My eyes shut tight and I exhaled a swirling, tired puff of breath into the chill night air. The moon is out, I noticed. Almost full. Now you’ve done it you stupid git. Should have walked up.

“Saw your lights come up the drive,” she said, making my shoulders hunch from the feeling she’d read my mind. “Come on now, please drop your weapons.”

I heard Carrie’s pistol clatter to the ground and I dropped mine, too.

“Can you please head toward the house. Easy. Don’t make any sudden movements other than, obviously, moving toward the house,” her soft voice said with a chuckle.

We crunched forward in 18 inches of snow toward the warm looking cabin.

As we clomped up the steps leading to a front deck, the voice exclaimed, “You’re a woman!”

We stopped and turned to face her.

Her face was partially hidden by a ball cap that was covered with a white hood. She was also wearing a white parka.

My journal entry described our first encounter with Stacy, the angel of the Cascades, this way: “She’s like a cross between Rambo and Mother Teresa. Her voice was the first female voice I’d heard, besides Carrie’s, since the disappearance and I could tell from just her voice that she was beautiful. And possibly extremely dangerous.”

She was also exceptionally friendly.

We stepped into the warm cabin and the smell of cooking food smashed into our senses, eradicating the previous wood smoke and candle light airy fairy nonsense with good old basic needs.

We nervously stumbled in the door and fumbled at our shoes and coats.

“My name’s Stacy,” the voice said as her face appeared from under the hoodie and ball cap.

A poof of curly brown hair flopped down across her shoulders and smiling dark eyes welcomed us into her home. Her voice made her sound older. She was perhaps 40.

“Please make yourselves at home while I ask you a few questions,” she said, indicating with a jab of her rifle toward the living room that she wanted us to go that way.

Carrie grabbed my hand as we stepped uneasily into a cozy living room. A woodstove ticked and pinged in the centre of the room and candles cast a serene glow over pictures of smiling people and paintings of landscapes.

We sat down beside each other and looked silently at the woman.  Carrie’s hand pressed hard into mine.

“Where you folks from?” she asked. She had slipped out of her white parka. She wore a front buttoning sweater and faded blue jeans and she cast an aura that lit up the room. Her smile made me feel immediately better about the situation.

“I’m Carrie and this is my husband, Rob.”

The woman’s continuous smile cracked even wider across her face.

“Wow,” she said. “How cool is this?”

Leaning forward, I asked her what was cool?

“You two. Together. You stayed together. What are the odds of that? They’re measureless. Wow,” she enthused.

“Where did you come from?” She asked.

“From Cranbrook,” Carrie immediately replied. “Up in…”

“In B.C.,” Stacy cut in. “I’ve been there a few times. Lovely area. But how did you end up here?”

We proceeded to tell her an abridged version of our story and as we finished, she set her rifle, which had been laying across her lap, against the wall.

“Can I get you something to drink,” she asked, sweeping to her feet.

Carrie and I bounced words off one another and together managed to blurt, ”okay.”

Stacy disappeared into her kitchen, which also generated a soft, warm orange glow, and shouted from it, “Is beer okay? I haven’t melted enough snow today for three people.”

And then, just as Carrie cleared her throat to speak, she added, “or wine? I’ve got lots and lots of wine. Make it myself.”

Carrie got up and walked toward the kitchen. “White wine would be lovely,” she said, tentatively before disappearing into the warm orange glow.

I scanned about me and felt the warmth from the wood stove. A peaceful sensation washed over me again — of the like one gets on Christmas Eve when the spirit arrives or when one sees their small child or grandbaby do something cute.

Laughter from the kitchen forced me to rise and join the sound.

Carrie and Stacy stood near another wood stove that was the source of the delectable smell.

“It’s only a leftover stew,” Stacy said as I appeared and noticed me looking at the stove.  “But there’s enough for the three of us.”

I thanked her and the journalist in me escaped, albeit just briefly. “And what is your story, Stacy?”

Handing me a beer, with a sweet smile that would have turned the entire bastion of evil scum in Spokane into a masturbatory frenzy, she said, “Have a seat” and cast a hand toward a table near a large window that glistened a dark blue.

We sat down and she lifted the lid off her stew pot and stirred.

“I think my story is about the same as yours, except I am alone. Well, I thought I was alone up to about a week ago, too.”

“There are others like you?” Carrie asked hopefully.

“A couple of others, any way,” Stacy replied. “In Leavenworth — not that far from here.”

I said that was where we were heading when we saw her tracks.

Carrie told her about our efforts to lose possible trackers and we shared more of our experience in Spokane.

Stacy listened with hushed awe as we told her about the violence and madness and seemed disconcerted when I said, “We thought everyone left alive was … sick and evil, seeing as how we’d only come across total nut bars.”

She said she didn’t think we were evil and suggested she herself wasn’t prone to “bouts of malevolence.”

Her ceaseless smile, at any other time, might have started to make me feel like she was a touch batty but it worked on me like a can opener slicing through tough tin.

“So it stands to reason, then, that not everyone left alive is evil. We’re not evil, are we?” Stacy continued. Her query of “are we” was said as she looked hard but serenely at me.

“We won’t hurt you, Stacy. I promise you that. As long as you promise you won’t hurt us. Please excuse our jitteriness but it’s so bizarre to come to this new junction. So these people in Leavenworth, they’re not evil? Nuts? Bonkers? Prone to fits of human flesh snacking or placing fertilizer bombs beside government installations?”

Stacy fetched me another beer and, handing it to me, said, “Yes. I think there is something wrong with them. That’s why I am being careful. I have hardly slept in the last week and I keep expecting them to come up here. I think the only thing that has kept them away is the fact that I have left tracks all over the place and they have, too. They’re from Seattle, they said, and have taken over the Edelweiss Hotel in downtown Leavenworth.  I snuck up on them like I did you. But after our second visit, I didn’t feel like I needed to have the drop on them and they seemed intent to leave me alone. The one fella, Keith, is a big bear of a man and his friend, Randy, is a quiet little guy who smokes like a chimney. They wanted to know where I lived and I just told them down in Wenatchee… that I had come up that way to look for people. Fact is, I haven’t been down to Wenatchee. Don’t care, really. Got all I need, pretty much, here. And I’m keeping the grocery store in Leavenworth operational.”

Stacy’s eyes looked at the wood stove and they glistened. My heart ached. I couldn’t believe what was happening. We’d actually found another person who didn’t seem to be completely insane.

But the night was still young, I cautioned myself.

Stacy and Carrie really hit it off. Carrie told me later that she could feel a part of her old self become resurrected — the part that embraced girlfriend time and getting away from me.

They nattered and chattered and I followed as best as I could.

As I slurped back my third beer, Stacy dished out a tasty beef and vegetable stew, with a dense but savory homemade bread and we ate quietly, each absorbed in our own freshly altered thoughts.

After dinner I ventured back outside to move the Jeep closer to the house and bring our weapons and booze inside.

At the time I was doing that, Mike and his boys were stopped in downtown Leavenworth, convinced they had caught up to us.

Two blocks away, lounging in a spacious guest area of the Hotel Edelweiss, Keith Jesperson and Randy Woodfield were watching Braveheart on a big screen television as a large fire cracked in the background. They’d been drinking non-stop since they managed to free themselves from Oregon State Prison, where they’d been on death row.

Jesperson was known as Happy Face Killer because he drew smiley faces on letters to the media while he was rampaging about Washington, Oregon, California, Florida, Nebraska and Wyoming, murdering young women while he worked as a trucker.

In front of Jesperson, on a spacious glass coffee table, was a nude sketch of a woman — of Stacy.

Beside him, Woodfield munched on potato chips and scoffed at Mel Gibson. “He’s not even a fucking American, you know? Punk piece of shit raps his period bile and on we go!”

Jesperson ignored his sour friend, who occupied the death row cell next to his the last year before the disappearance.

They were the only two left in the death row cells after the disappearance and they were freed from a horrible flesh crawling death by five other inmates who remained following the disappearance.

The two mass murderers let their emancipators live for the first week as the seven of them made their way north from Salem into Washington and to Seattle, where they became embroiled in a swirling toilet bowl of insanity — like Spokane but worse. Small gangs vied for control of nothing and newcomers to the new world of limitless freedom and an endless lack of mercy were seen as interlopers who had to die, unless they offered some skills or information that made them useful.

Jesperson, being a large but unhealthy man with bad legs and a bad back, was able to convey an image of a man not to be trifled with. His crimes did not resonate with the ignorant, unwashed evil drones they encountered.

However, Woodfield, who was known as the I-5 Killer, was treated like a celebrity. He captivated gang members with tales of how he raped and killed more than 18 women.

But all good things must come to an end when everyone involved in a given thing is evil and bent on only one thing — inflicting hell.

Once the novelty of their freedom began to wear off and reality truly set in, Jesperson and Woodfield opted to leave Seattle behind and venture into the mountains. The Canadian-born Jesperson wanted to head north to Canada, as he still didn’t believe he was free. He thought he could blend into Canadian society and Woodfield, now adept at grinding his friend’s balls, took delights in ripping apart his wishes.

Jesperson longed to savagely murder Woodfield and he dreamed of lashing him, still alive, beneath a semi and dragging him to a searing, smashing, brutal death.

And Woodfield also longed to slash his friend’s throat but he needed him for the time being. There was a comfort in not being alone.

The only reason Stacy was left alive was she got the drop on the two drunken louts and, like the cowardly pukes that evil people are, they wanted to reduce her caution before they tied her up and raped her to death.

Their second encounter saw Stacy deliver them home cooked food and cookies, and once again they were disarmed.

They vowed that if she showed up again, they’d have their way.

She did show up again, a day later, this time brandishing warm clothes and more home cooked food. Despite being enormously evil, her glowing charm and warmth disarmed them and once again, they bid this smiling angel adieu as she drove back toward Wenatchee.

“Okay, next time,” Jesperson said to himself. Besides, he’d been touring around the town to make sure there were no other people and there was a maze of tire tracks leading everywhere and nowhere at all. Stacy had done a brilliant job of covering her tracks.

Luckily, heavy snow fall and determination, as well as a realization they had come upon fresh tire tracks, made Mike and his boys miss Stacy’s tracks leading off Highway 2 toward her log home and pottery studio.

They rolled on, buoyed wildly from finding fresh tracks, toward Leavenworth.

As they wound around vehicles and chaos into the scenic Bavarian-style town nestled against the side of the Cascade Mountains, their heads swelled with aggravation.

“Jesus pissing Mahoney, this guy is starting to tick me off!” Mike growled, looking at tracks leading to and fro. They pulled in front of a restaurant with an onion bulb tower and stopped.

One of the boys suggested they get out and “have a listen.”

Mike agreed and, grabbing their guns, disembarked their vehicle, leaving it ticking in rapid cool down mode.

“Do you smell that?” Mike said, grabbing one of the boys by the shoulder. “Wood smoke!”

“Lock and load,” Mike snarled.

I stomped back into Stacy’s house and we resumed what was swiftly becoming a party.

Stacy and Carrie were laughing hard when I walked into the kitchen and they stopped abruptly, stuttered off again and then forced themselves to stop. I sensed a conspiracy.

“What’s up,” I said, clanging beer cans into Stacy’s fridge — kept cold by blocks of ice she squirreled up from her daily visits to Leavenworth.

Her power went out the day after the disappearance, but this self-sufficient lady had clearly been living off the land as much as possible, so the loss of power was a minor inconvenience to her.

“I was just telling her about the time we went to Rome,” Carrie said with recent laughter woven through her words.

“Oh, when you fell backwards into that fountain after we’d been drinking wine for eight hours?”

Carrie was so stoked to be speaking to another woman — she loved her gal pals and missed them dearly — that she completely sidestepped my brilliant attempt at diversion and continued: “When we went to that gay bar. Mister Canada here, with his khaki shorts, golf shirt and, this is the best part, sandals with socks! And we go into this bar and sit down. Right away, Rob is pointing out guys who appear to be…”

As Carrie regaled our new friend about how I judged people to be freaky when I was in fact the biggest freak, in terms of current fashion norms related to a given location,  Mike and the boys were closing in on the Hotel Edelweiss, where two sick and twisted serial killers lounged, half pissed and stuffed full of junk food.

Stacy had a long laugh and her eyes twinkled as she looked at me and smiled.

Her face then transformed, morphing from playtime to work, and she leaned toward me. “How is it, do you think, you came to be here?”

I snapped open a beer and, turning the tab to the left – old habits – replied, “I followed your tracks.”

Stacy smiled and continued her line of questioning. “No, how did you two end up here tonight?” She looked at Carrie, as if to inform her that she could also take part in this conversation.

Carrie didn’t hesitate. She plowed forward with the story of how we came to be there.

Stacy was nodding thoughtfully and earnestly as Carrie spelled things out. Now and then I would interject with a better adjective or a nitpick that only a Virgo could summons.

We were telling her about how we came to realize we were alone when Smiley, a dense but excitable rube from Missouri, who had been doing a 20-year stint in Walla Walla for killing a high school girl one meth-crazed afternoon, took a tentative step into the front door of the Hotel Edelweiss.

Jesperson and Woodfield had been making their way along the second floor of the hotel, staying in different rooms every couple of nights. They were finishing off the tour of the 13-room hotel and both were starting to think about how they would get the 13^th room. They were seated in the common area watching television. Leavenworth is a classic example of a town that saw the floor opening in the resource extraction industry and went whole hog after a tourism identity — in its case, a Bavarian theme, in order to allow its municipal tick shell entity to keep clinging to an economic vein.

Like Kimberley, the small alpine city just north of Cranbrook, the highest in Canada (above sea level and not baked), its determined citizens did a fine job trying to capture the essence of the theme.  The hotel Jesperson and Woodfield was fouling with their vile presences did not have televisions in the rooms and guests had to share a bathroom on each floor, ala Europe. A small fireplace in the common room helped cozy things up and served as a beacon to sociopaths, who would have otherwise preferred to sit in their own rooms and not speak to each other.

They were so secure within their cozy little lazy world that they were in a fuzzy time bubble, which they occupied with much discussion about the disappearance. They’d talked to each enough in prison and knew who and what the other was all about, and were friends, despite their inherent evil. Evil needs friends – just as much as the good.

Their particular disassociation with what had happened in the world forced them into pseudo-fetal positions, where they just wanted to avoid the madness of the world. They were both just too tired to have to display their given talents — which led them to the precipice of life. Rather than become free of their bars and dive back into the new, empty and chaotic world of scatter and shatter, they withdrew to a sheltered mountain paradise, lit fires, ate junk food, masturbated incessantly while staring at scrounged up porn, slurped booze, played video games, all the while marveling at what had transpired, electronically, since their incarcerations. They even spoke about religion, which would have been a discussion I’d love to have overheard.

They were sitting quietly, watching Mel Gibson try to liberate Scotland from the effete English, when Mike and the Boys stood in the Edelweiss lobby and whispered out an attack plan.

Mike was certain they’d found us. He told his boys so.

Smiley brandished an ugly, short shotgun that looked like something a street slug should hold in his dirty mitts. Next to him, Mike held a hand cannon — a Colt Anaconda .44 — and, nearest the door, was Grim, an always-unhappy psychopath who hated his two companions but was too inwardly chickenshit to try to take the lead or go out on his own, so he followed along, boiling and seething and generally despising all he encountered. Such a demeanor and the occasional unleashing of a violent streak as wide as his birthplace Texas landed him in Walla Walla, where he hooked up with Mike and Larry after the disappearance. This gave him some leverage over the other guys and he snidely quivered inside at the thought he was important, in the current scheme of things. He wasn’t going to fuck this up. Not this time. No way.

He looked at Mike and tried to make sure he knew he was listening to every word he was saying. Mike hated Grim. He named him Grim. His real name was Thomas something or other. Mike didn’t care.

Mike wasn’t as twisted as Larry. He didn’t stalk, kidnap, fatten and then eat his victims, like Larry, who, Mike knew, was hoping to add some cooking juices to Carrie before cutting my head off and kicking my corpse into the Spokane River and butchering her. He was one of the few people who knew Larry did such a thorough job on his victims that their bodies were never found, except the last one. He was only getting around to plumping her up (Larry stalked fit young women and went about fattening them up himself because, as he said to Mike, “I like my fat to be grown from healthy things.”) when he was nailed by the FBI.

Mike was good with burgers and chips. Maybe a steak or some chicken. He never could understand what Larry was all about, but he didn’t care. Like Larry, he got a big buzz out of killing. He was a random killer. One never knew when Mike would pop off and murder someone. Larry liked that about him. It made him the perfect right hand man. Mike saw otherwise. He let Larry lead because he didn’t give a shit about it. He liked the order and the lack of headaches.

And if he didn’t bring dinner back for Larry, that order could get messed up. It would make Larry want to hit the messy highway and fuck only knows what could happen out there. Mike was sure that all people left alive were sick, evil fucks. Even that sharp blue-eyed babe who Larry said would be “11 fucking great meals,” was probably evil. And with that in mind, he whispered, “Keep your heads up, morons. These fuckers have gotten here. They got away from us. They made it to Spokane. So they’re not to be taken lightly, capiche? Larry only eats women but he might make an exception if we don’t get that bitch back.”

Grim shut his eyes and loathed Mike. He’d said that, how many times? Ten, 20, since they started tracking those two ‘Canadian shits.’

Smiley was shaking in anticipation of some good old uber-violence. “Let’s go,” he urged with a sneering whisper.

“Shhhh,” Mike hissed.

Upstairs, Jesperson swung his leg off the arm of the sofa and stood, stretching. With an “ahhhrawww,” he shuffled toward his room, where his bottle of vodka, and his .45, were situated.

His footsteps creaked on the ceiling, freezing the three men downstairs.

“Shhh,” Mike hissed, jabbing his .44 toward the ceiling.

He whispered for Grim to take the west stairway, jabbed his revolver toward the east stairway and looked at Smiley, who darted away immediately. He looked again at Grim and said, “I’ll go up these stairs.”

Mike placed a foot on a step of the main stairway and slowly applied his weight, trying to see if there would be a squeak. “Go,” he hissed at Grim, who was staring at him. “Fuckin’ terd.”

Grim tromped away and Mike slowly moved up the stairs.

Jesperson returned from his room, holding a fresh vodka and soda, and farted.

Two-thirds of the way up the nearby stairs, Mike froze. He heard the fart and clicked his hammer back, agonizingly slowly.

Woodfield harrumphed at Jesperson’s gaseous nature, again, and cast his eyes back toward Mel, who was rallying the troops like an early Blue Man Group castoff. Woodfield sat slumped in a large armchair, surrounded by empty beer cans and his trusty Remington Model 870, rarely more than five feet away, was laying on the floor beside him.

At the far ends of the hotel, Grim and Smiley were just reaching the second floor.

Mike tried to peek around the wall to catch sight of his prey. He heard Mel taunting the English on the television.

Right then, Carrie concluded her abridged version of the tale of us and I returned to the kitchen for another beer and to have a puff.

I asked Stacy if she’d like to join me and she brightly responded that her only form of poison was wine. I shrugged and stepped into the kitchen. As I grabbed a beer, I noticed a dog-eared poster on the wall beside the fridge. Four long, black scratch marks stood out on a shiny white background.

Smiley burst through the fire escape door, 20 feet away from Woodfield and Jesperson. Grim heard the move but paused. Mike shouted “no” and spun around the corner.

Jesperson dropped his glass of vodka. Woodfield flung his beer can aside and his right hand slapped the floor, feeling for his shotgun.

Smiley screamed, “don’t move mothafuckers” and Mike came into full view, his .44 leveled at Jesperson.

Woodfield’s hand snatched the shotgun, obscured to Smiley, and out of sight of Mike who was staring at Jesperson, smiling tauntingly. Grim stood in disbelief at the far end of the common room, his shotgun pointed away from the men, at the wall.

Woodfield flung his shotgun up and spun it at Smiley, who pulled the trigger on his sawed off jobbie. The blast ignited a spectacular blue hazed melee.

Smiley’s shot chewed into the side of the armchair, knocking Woodfield sideways. Mike fired at Jesperson who wisely hit the floor. Mike’s shot whizzed past the big killer’s head and smashed into the wall, shattering a mirror on the other side. Grim pointed his shotgun at Jesperson, who was rolling across the floor.

Smiley stepped toward Woodfield, who leapt to his feet and with one squeeze of his trigger, separated Smiley’s head from his body.

Mike instinctively turned at the sound of the shotgun blast and fired another round, while Jesperson continued to manically roll across the floor screaming wildly.

Mike’s round blasted a hole in the floor near Woodfield’s elbow, which was barely holding him up, his barrel still pointed toward Smiley, whose body flumped lifelessly to the hardwood floor, with a fountain of blood gushing upward.

Woodfield spun toward Mike who fired a third round that found its mark — slamming into the centre of Woodfield’s chest, killing him instantly. Mike fired a fourth round that cut into Woodfield’s mid-section. Jesperson’s hand grabbed Mike’s ankle and he flicked all the power he could muster from his 6’6” frame. Mike fell backward, away from the line of fire of Grim’s poorly placed shot. Had Jesperson not grabbed Mike, Grim would have cut him down. His shot blew open a window, sending a gush of cold air into the formerly cozy, albeit smelly room, now polluted with heavy blue smoke.

Arching backward, Mike fired another round that just missed Jesperson’s leg but wood splinters shot upward into his calf, forcing a scream from him.

Grim jumped sideways to get another angle at Jesperson, who was partly hidden by a coffee table. He fired again, exploding the coffee table and stinging his intended target with a few pellets of buckshot. Jesperson howled and tossed himself at Mike. His momentum forced the two men forward and, grappling, they thudded into the sofa that Jesperson had been enjoying a few short moments ago.

Jesperson’s right hand expertly shot out to Mike’s throat and the force of pressure on his windpipe forced him to drop his revolver. Grim was screaming and running forward.

Jesperson punched Mike hard against the side of the face and then blackness descended, with hundreds of piercing bright specks of light dotting his fading consciousness. Grim hit him square in the forehead with the butt of his shotgun, just as Mike landed a punch against his face.

The two men stood up, weaving slightly on their feet and breathing hard. Jesperson was slumped chest first on the sofa, his legs splayed out across the floor behind him, his chin shoved against a cushion, forcing his head upward on an angle. His face was peaceful – like a fat-faced young lad looking out on a still sunrise sparkling lake.

Woodfield and Smiley lay in deep crimson puddles of blood. Smiley’s head bits ran down the flowered wall paper, dripping to the wood floor.

Outside, an inert Bavarian-theme town remained still, though a group of cats meowed beside a garbage bin at the back of a restaurant that once served schnitzel and tasty sausages, remnants of which, now a month on in delayed late autumn decay, smelled tantalizingly wonderful to the cats and the ever-growing murder of crows that relentlessly watched the old hotel.

I stepped back out of the kitchen, holding a fresh round of drinks and a query for Stacy, who was jabbing a poker in the door of her wood stove.

“Interesting poster,” I said. “Is it supposed to be 11:11 or does it just look that way?”

Carrie sat forward, interested in what I’d seen. “Yeah, I wondered that too,” she said, and rose to go into the kitchen.

Stacy’s voice stopped her.

“Yes, it is supposed to be 11:11. Do you know about 11:11?”

I said I did, a bit. So did Carrie, who was always seeing 11:11. Had been for years. In fact, she’d been harping about it non-stop since the disappearance, having noticed that it happened, near as we could tell, on Nov. 11, at about 11:11 a.m. If she hadn’t been prattling away about 11:11 and other numerological nonsense the last few weeks, I would have seen four claw marks on a plain white background when I looked at that poster.

The fact is, I’d been seeing 11:11 a lot over the past couple of decades, too. It was a bonding thing for Carrie and I — one of those things that couples share that become the litany of love and attraction.  I became mildly interested in the ‘phenomenon’ many years before I met Carrie because my oldest friend, Paul, and I had exchanged “do you ever see the number 11?” words while in the throes of absolute hedonistic dementia.

Later, while working as a journalist, I spoke with people who were completely freaked out by the number 11, tying it all into conspiracies involved with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City, and eventually onward to the Mayan end of days prophecies.

I enjoyed the conspiracy theorizing and, to tell the truth, buy into aspects of some, including the one that implicated George W. Bush as being an oil cranking Satan. And the one about the Pentagon attack. That still smells to me, more than a decade later, as I sit here in a desolate world, where all forms of life have disappeared, save those needing photosynthesis and the odd crow, cat and, from what we’ve seen thus far, a ragtag remaining dollop of shit human stew.

How we remained is beyond me. Well and truly beyond me. That was my take and I had been standing by it.

But not to Stacy. After glancing at the poster, Carrie returned and we listened, breathlessly almost, to her as she laid out her theory as to what was going on.

She asked us what we heard when “the time came?”

Carrie and I looked at each other and shrugged. I couldn’t help myself. The beer and the hoots were doing their thing. “I don’t know? A bigga badda boom.”

“An explosion,” Carrie said, ignoring me. “Probably the train de-railing.”

“It wasn’t an explosion,” Stacy said.

“What was it then?”

Stacy wiped a hand across her cheek, as if brushing a snowflake away, and said, “It was the sound of life being sucked from the world.”

I burst out laughing, surprised by this seemingly light-hearted, angelic woman’s sudden plunge to the dark and thorny.

She looked at me with that now suddenly spooky twinkle-in-the-eye warmth and charm and I immediately felt like having a nap. When our eyes met, I felt instantly calmed and at peace.

Carrie slapped me across the shoulder and asked me to “be polite.”

It took an eternity to pry my eyes away from Stacy to turn to Carrie and declare, “I am being polite!”

“That’s exactly what we heard,” Stacy continued. “I don’t how but that’s what it was.”

I couldn’t help it. “And how do you know this?”

She gave me that smile again and said, “I’ve been told.”

Stacy said she had a friend who lived in northern California who was an “angel.” He was one of 1,111 old souls tending to all souls on Earth, “in this dimension.” While sleeping, they work as angels, guiding the dead home.

“Uh huh,” I said, asking Stacy if she was sure wouldn’t like a puff. “Cuz It’s working for me.”

She looked at Carrie and continued.

“I know it sounds fantastic and other-worldly, I always thought so. But I liked the sound of it. Always have. At any rate,  Kenneth — that’s his name — says our time in this dimension is coming to an end. All living things die, eventually, in order to complete the necessary circles of life. Dimensions are no different. There are 11 Earths all existing out there. There are 11 mes, 11 yous and to keep the cycle cycling, a dimension dies now and then, to be replaced by another.”

I nodded and smiled, hoping that the tinge of insincerity I was exuding wasn’t too noticeable. Carrie was raptly focused.

“Eleven dimensions! How does Kenneth know that? What’s that from?” She fired away.

Stacy mentioned something about seeing something on Oprah about the Mayans, or maybe it was 20/20, she couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like just another doomsday scenario being hyped by Hollywood in order to sell summer blockbusters.

I said that I agreed.

“Well, there aren’t too many people left to spend hard earned wages on big screen features,” Stacy noted. “And they did capitalize on the stories, no doubt. And badly, too.

“In a nutshell,” she continued, “It seems that most of humankind, and all living beings, were taken when the time came.  And all who were in-tune to eleven’s harmony, were left on Earth to become angels.”

Carrie, thinking about her kids, asked, “Where were they taken?”

Stacy, a kindred spirit, was also thinking about her three daughters and understood Carrie’s pleading tone.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Up? To another dimension, where their souls will be cued up for new lives in the new dimension? Kenneth could tell you. All I know is that I think we’re supposed to be angels in the new world.”

I was struggling now. “Angels? Us? Why? Why us?”

Stacy looked at me and shrugged again. “Not sure,” she said. “Because we’re nice? Because we’ve been good in this life or past lives? Because we’ve been chosen?”

Carrie cut her off. “You can’t tell me that those crazy men we ran into Spokane are destined to be angels?”

Stacy pointed at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was 11:11 p.m.

A shiver coursed along my spine.

“No, you see, if what I have read and heard is true, and much of it sure seems to be happening, the Merkabah, or soul ferry sent to Earth by the dimensional keepers, is only tuned to 11 or 444 or 1110, and a few other psychic vibrations, and only those in tune would be taken, or rescued before the apocalypse. All the rest must remain on Earth and perish. It is said that 75,000,000 of mankind’s most evil creatures would be left to face their judgment when the time comes. But Kenneth could do a better job telling you. We should go see him.”

My head wasn’t swimming but it was definitely treading water.

“How do you know all this?” I gurgled again.

Stacy smiled, again, and with the patience of an understanding angel dealing with a moron child, said, “I just do. Kenneth is very, very wise. And forget about me for a second – why did you two come to me? I believe we were meant to come together and I believe we shall find more like us. Kenneth said it would be so.”

Carrie said that prospect scared her because of what we had experienced.

Stacy pointed out that she had only met two other people, in Leavenworth, and they seemed like odd but “generally harmless” men.

“We should go see them in the morning,” she said. “Oh, you two can sleep in this guest room,” she said, motioning us to follow her.

We walked down a hallway to a room at its end and Stacy lit a long match before entering it. She slowly and carefully lit a lamp beside the bed and smiled when she was successful.

“I love candle light. Don’t you?”

Carrie said she did and thanked Stacy for her hospitality. I echoed her. “Uh, yeah, thanks.”

“I am going to turn in now. Tomorrow is another day,” Stacy trilled. “I think I have said too much for one night. It’s a lot to digest, all this stuff, eh? I promise I am not a nutty old bird. Tomorrow we’ll go to town and get some supplies and then we can think about going to see Kenneth.”

We thanked her again and bid this angelic woman good night.

Once the door clicked closed, I exhaled deeply and stifled the urge to burst out laughing. Carrie knew where I was heading and whispered harshly, “Don’t say anything. I know it sounds bizarre but… what the hell? This is all beyond bizarre so why should what she said be all so strange?”

I admitted she had me there and sat on the edge of a most comfortable feather bed.

Carrie asked if I thought we should go with Stacy to California. I said I didn’t know and added, “What about Vancouver?”

“When you were out having a puff she said it would be best to avoid big cities, because they’re gathering points for bad people,” Carrie said. “I am afraid…” her eyes filled with tears. She sat down beside me and rested her head on my shoulder. “I think it hit me tonight – I’m never going to see my kids again.”

I put my arm around. “I’m here girl. Let’s have a good night’s sleep and see what’s what in the morning.”

Before I went to bed I went back to the living room and kitchen and checked the doors, and looked outside at the still unfolding wintery scene. Our vehicles were now covered with six or more inches of snow.

I contemplated being noble and staying awake, and on guard, but a large yawn signaled me back to the bedroom.

Carrie lay in bed, the blanket pulled beneath her chin, making her blue eyes all the more beautiful.

“I think we should go with her. My boy was a sweet, sweet soul, like my other boy and like our daughters. They’re all gone,” she said, blinking out fresh tears.

Tugging my shirt over my head, I replied, “I know. They’re all gone. It’s just us now, babe.”

As I slipped into bed beside Carrie, Keith Jesperson was opening his eyes.

He had been dragged downstairs and was laying across the bottom steps. His face and head ached and his hands and feet were tightly bound.

Mike noticed he was awake and said, “good morning honey bun.”

Jesperson looked at him and blinked hard. His mind was foggy on what happened an hour earlier. He thought the voice belonged to Woodfield and was startled to see Mike glowering at him. And behind him was a greasy-faced, ugly guy holding a sawed off shotgun.

An interrogation ensued and Jesperson spelled out who he was, leaving out the mass murderer bit, and he in turn was able to glean some information from his captors, who informed him of their militia unit in Spokane.

“Militia, eh? You guys are holding the fort while all the shit is goin’ down?”

Mike said, “yeah, something like that.” He and Grim left out the part of their nefarious pasts, too.

“Shame we didn’t get off on a better foot,” Jesperson said with a wince. His head pounded.

“Yeah, shame,” Mike said. “Look, have you seen a man and a woman come through here?”

Jesperson said he’d seen a woman, but no man. “Lots of men in Seattle but no women, that I saw. But this one woman here — she’s something fine. A striking lady.”

Mike thought he was getting somewhere. “Yeah, so is this one. Wild blue eyes.”

Jesperson shook his head. “No, this one has light brown eyes — maybe amber.”

Grim snarled, “What the fuck is amber?”

Mike ordered him to “shut up” and asked Jesperson, “Where is she?”

He shook his head and said, “Don’t know. She’s coming back again tomorrow, though. She’s actually been feeding us. Too fuckin’ wild.” He chuckled.

“Why didn’t you keep her with you?” Grim cut in.

“Because she got the drop on us — clever girl,” Jesperson replied, irked at the little puke’s tone. He flashed on a memory of tying the body of one of his victims beneath a tractor-trailer and drag erasing it. “Anyway, she just showed up out of the blue the next few times. Wasn’t enough snow until the last couple of days to try and follow tracks and there are so many around town now, from her and us, that it didn’t seem worth it,” he said.

Jesperson felt nothing over the loss of his companion. He thought Woodfield an odious creature but an odd compunction kept Jesperson from ending him. He was someone to talk to and, besides, he was a bit frightened of him.

“She’s coming back tomorrow?” Mike asked, scratching his armpit. “That’ll do. So, we good?”

Jesperson said he was good if Mike was good.

With Grim objecting, Mike untied the big killer. “I trust you,” he said.

Jesperson shot a hard look at him and cocked his head, as if about to say something. Mike leaned forward, anticipating words, then stepped back when Jesperson mumbled that there were empty rooms down the hall. He rose to his feet and noticed Woodfield’s body laying near the front door of the hotel.

“Guess we should clean up a little bit,” he said.

Grim said he was going to bed and disappeared up the stairs.

Jesperson gruffly hoisted Woodfield’s corpse over his shoulder, taking care not to cause too much blood to splatter, and hauled him outside. He deposited his body in a dumpster at the back of the hotel and on his way back upstairs, stopped to extract snacks from a machine.

His psychotic nature allowed him to immediately deposit all thoughts of dismay at the loss of a friend. He threw those thoughts away with his body.

Mike’s plan was to wait for Stacy and take her back to Spokane. Screw the other one. This new one sounds good and Larry will be happy to know that there are other women out there. That should keep the crazy fucker sated for a good long while.

He shivered at how it all put a different spin on “there are other fish in the sea.”

 

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