11:11 Part Two

Dec. 8, 2011

I spent a short, moist, sob-infused night in a house about a mile from Crescent City.

The power was long out and the only food that was still edible was dry and canned goods in a cupboard. I made a breakfast of instant Asian noodles and canned mushrooms and the infinite strength of the universe, which forces living beings to fight for their lives, coursed through me as I ate and digested. It meant nothing to me that I cooked the meal over a fire I built in the kitchen sink. A black smudge, like a stain from a person who goes ‘poof’ from spontaneous combustion, blotched the once clean white ceiling of a kitchen that must have belonged to a fastidious, caring, loving cook.

As luck would have it, I found a 12-guage shotgun with almost two boxes of shells. God bless Americans and their love of weaponry. I was down to my last few 10-guage slugs and was also running low on ammo for my pistols, as I had not removed it from the SUV. At least Carrie had it.

Feeling re-armed and renewed, I emerged from the old farmhouse to an entirely new day. The first rays of sun that I had seen in days pierced the muted dawn light, adding further strength to my improved disposition. My chest, throat and sinuses felt hollow from hours of wailing, blubbering and sobbing. My knuckles were raw and bloodied from an enraged outburst, resulting in holes in the cracked wallpapered kitchen walls of the farmhouse. The first two punches thrown at the wall were deeply satisfying and massively cathartic; the decades old drywall offered only knuckle scratching resistance and exploded apart with a delicious crunch. The third punch powered through the drywall directly into a stud, forcing a halt to my fists of fury and re-directed it, complete with shrieking pain adrenalin, to my vastly more armored feet. A once ornate but now age stained refrigerator and stove held their own against my boots and I concluded the frothing eruption by landing a toe-kick against the stove door. The glass centre easily gave way and my foot slammed ankle deep into the stove. Momentum created a muscular ripple in my body and I twisted sideways, falling forehead first into the fridge. I lay against the side of it with my right leg hanging from the stove door and sobbed.

I didn’t realize it but as I stormed down the highway toward Crescent City, I had been bawling like a crazy deprived of medication. When I discovered how I was behaving, I realized that I was acting like an emotionally deranged hermit, which made me laugh out loud — and then led to hysterical hooting that ended badly, with me curled in a tight ball in the middle of the wet highway, wailing, “why?”

Later on I would read a poster in a small town medical clinic, while rooting for useful medicines that described a nervous breakdown thusly: ‘A person having a nervous breakdown may have been depressed or anxious for quite some time before the break. Some symptoms of a nervous breakdown: Deep depression; sharp anxiety; extreme malaise; loss of gumption; rapid decline in morale; loss of self confidence; loss of reasoning ability and awareness of reality; paranoia; easily distracted; feelings of persecution; hallucinations; babbling and incomprehensible speech; wild mood swings.’

I remember laughing at the ‘loss of gumption’ bit.

The poster was a clear indicator of the times before the disappearance. Two years into the great recession, times continued to be all about the rich getting much richer and the poor becoming poorer and gap between the two had become so wide that the world was folding into the abyss. The living cells on the skin of Mother Earth inadvertently reacted to the approaching apocalypse.

Eventually, after about half an hour of varied displays of twitching, writhing and coiling into tight fetal balls, I heard crows cawing. It was like I was baked out of my mind, passed out on a floor and hearing a voice calling my name. Opening my eyes, the face of the person speaking to me appears but my eyes see things as one does when looking down a pair of binoculars backwards. Cawww… cawww.

Then I sat up and the fog lifted. Caw. Several crows were in the trees beside the highway.

My old friend self-preservation grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and slapped aside my loss of gumption and I got to my feet.

Breath. Caw. Another break. Another caw. One foot forward. Caw. Another foot forward. Another caw. Rhythm and blues.

I walked in a blank minded stupor and grappled with purpose and reason. Despite a hard-driving and well-presented case to give up and go completely insane, Carrie’s face kept reappearing. Down a long tunnel — toward the light — strength — purpose: love.

And just like that — Rob was back, walking crisply down a wet Northern California highway, soaking, cold and some pissed off.

The plan for the day: find Carrie. Simply put, that was going to be the plan for the rest of my life. I spent the first 30 years of my life searching for her, so in comparison to that lengthy trial, what lay before me was a piece of piss.

I would find her. I knew that. I knew that like I knew I was going to take the next step or breath. It gave me 20 times the strength that the food and sunlight had. With my survival instincts and desire to continue re-constituted, I double-timed down the highway, which had thin wisps of mist rising from it as the sun now fought its way through the clouds in the northeastern California sky.

It was 10:10 a.m. when I first caught a glimpse of Crescent City and 10 minutes later I came upon a fancy ranch house, with a metallic black, fat-tired, kit-lifted 2010 Dodge Ram 3500 in the driveway.

I had checked dozens of vehicles between Kenneth’s hovel and the town limits but everyone was dead — out of gas and sapped of battery juice.

The door to the house was cracked open and a dark brown crust, which had been a puddle of milk, lay beside a split paper bag of groceries at my feet. Directly in the center of the brown crust was a set of keys next to a pile of clothes. It was easy to imagine the owner of this fine home and that big bitch of truck outside just stepping in the door and WOOMPH — off to the alien mother ship or to the waiting room of the holy eye in a big gust of severe light they went. Their final act on this plain served to spare my aching feet.

The keys snapped out of the crusty spill remnants and jingled in my hand. I wiped them against my trouser but milk had found its way into the cracks in the fob and key ring.

It didn’t matter because the new truck clacked to life, its impressive 6.7 litre Cummins Turbo Diesel engine growling lowly like a titan after a good shagging as I pulled onto the sunlight highway and sped toward town.

A sign proclaiming Del Norte County’s Jack McNamara Field gave me the directions I needed and in a few minutes I was rolling down a road to the airfield. Excitement surged in me as I hoped to find Carrie here. I assumed they would have fled here so he could fire up his plane and get out of town.

Sadly, I was right. A shiver of excitement coursed through me when I caught sight of the black SUV and I sped up to it. The Dodge’s thick bush tires made a honking sound as I skidded to a stop and lunged from the truck, a Glock in my left hand and the 10 gauge shotgun in my right.

A quick tour of the area around the SUV resulted in no sign of my love. I nosed through the nearby hangers, hoping to find Carrie enjoying a nice cup of tea with two angels but within a few minutes, my soaring hopes came crashing down.

A thousand yards down a runway was the crumpled, charred wreck of a small four-seater airplane that came to an unguided end while either taking off or landing. But it was the only plane I could see.

I searched through the SUV, hoping to find a clue as to where they may have gone but ended up slouched over the steering wheel, sobbing again. Carrie’s hooded sweater lay in a wrinkled, crammed heap against the back of the seat. I pulled it up and pressed it against my face. It smelled of old rain and a trace of her — like a ghost passing in the darkness. A million emotions forced their way to their surface of my mind and because of their vast number, the only thing my brain could manage was to be still and quiet. I could hear blood pumping in my temples and my heart made small oscillations in my chest, slightly shaking my jacket.

I searched the SUV again, hoping to find a message or a clue but that just served to crack open my inner stillness and incite tears to once again force themselves out of my face.

God only knew where they had gone. Literally, I assumed.

Winds gusting in from the Pacific buffeted the SUV and between gusts, a murder of crows could be heard enjoying the late-morning sunshine. I was so engrossed in my renewed despair that I failed to notice said murder approaching.

Not only were they enjoying the sunshine, but also the possibility of a fine snack out of me.

When I emerged from the SUV, I caught a glimpse of a shadow and ducked, wincing and swearing wildly.

Two crows swooped past my face, their wings brushing my head.

Running hunched over, I made it back to the big Dodge and clambered inside, slamming the heavy door closed with a grunt. More than 20 crows descended on the truck and gracefully alit on it. Their black, shining eyes shot hungry looks through the windshield at me and I briefly thought about firing my Glock at them but I came to my senses and brought the diesel engine to life. Some of the crows hopped up a foot or two and then landed back onto the hood, blinking their cold, hungry black eyes at me, imploring me to come outside for a bit.

As I sped away, several of the starving creatures remained standing on the hood until physics forced them to launch clumsily into the air. One skidded into the windshield and clattered up it, before lurching into the air in an ungainly arc.

The crows followed me down the airport road but once I screeched onto the highway, they turned away — likely too weakened by starvation to give any kind of real chase.

A hot, moist hand fumbled at the truck stereo. I hit ‘seek’ hoping to find a radio station. Old habits. When nothing but silence or cracked hissing greeted me, I hit the CD button and swore loudly when some peeping pop princess began to trill about how life was so hard.

It was 11:11 a.m. when I pulled the Dodge into an overlook on the Pacific Coast Highway and stared forlornly out across the vast greenish blue of the ocean, stretching away from North America toward a world relieved of the cancerous cargo that had been nibbling it to death for the past couple of centuries.

“We had it coming,” I moaned, wishing I had some proper tunes to listen to. Or some weed. I needed something to wrench my mind out of the cataclysmic funk it was in. Old habits. I checked carefully over my shoulder as I backed up and wheeled the big blue truck back onto the highway. I didn’t pick a direction. It picked me.

I headed north toward Smith River and the Oregon state line.

Carrie could have been taken in any direction, I pondered. But I believed Kenneth would keep clear of the more populous San Francisco area to the south, so they either went north into Oregon, or back east into the Cascades and toward Nevada.

Where would they go and why would they go there? If they’re all angels and they have ‘a mission,’ I guessed, they would be in search of other angels, right? So where would angels be?

As I picked my through the carnage in Smith River, I seized on the fact that they were flying and would have to hop from one airfield to another. I needed a map or a list of airfields and chastised myself for not thinking of that when I was at the Crescent City airport. A green highway sign noted that Brookings was a few miles up the road and I decided that I would have to find need-to-know intelligence there. And some music. And some weed. Surely, there will be some weed lying around in Oregon. Those people are freaks of the highest order; or were.

While I steered past the final crunching throes of abandoned vehicles into downtown Brookings, Gary Bettman, the former commissioner of the former National Hockey League, was scooping barbecued brains from the skull of his latest victim — a rival gang member who was a former NBC television executive who once told Bettman that Americans would rather eat barbecued monkey brains than watch hockey. He giggled a high-pitched chortle at the delicious irony and flicked the brains at the group of sundry thugs and psychos’ feet who awaited his latest orders.

Keeping an eye out for crows, I strolled through the eerie stillness of the humanless Brookings, vaguely enjoying the sunshine. I was joined by a rakish cat, its ribs bulging from its sides. It meowed happily and I had a new mission — feed the cat.

I came upon a convenience store and dug up a variety of canned goods, which I then opened and scooped onto the pavement. The cat slammed its nose into a combination of tuna, beef ravioli and Spam. Across the street was an electronics/computer store that bragged about used CDs. Shouting “hallelujah,” I trotted across to the store and happily picked out a variety of listenable recordings, including Boston’s first album, CNSY’s American Dream, Garth Brooks, Dwight Yoakam, Metallica’s Black Album and, to my greatest pleasure, Pantera’s Far Beyond Driven. My hands snatched a clutch of other CDs and stuffed them in a sack with the carefully selected tunes and I moved toward the door. As I looked out the door, I saw a flash of brown. My jaw dropped as I saw a cougar dart off with the starving cat in its wriggling in its mouth.

“You motherfucker,” I screamed, dropping the CDs and whipping the pistol from my waistline. I ripped the door open and fired several shots in the direction of the fleeing cat, which cleared a newer model VW Beetle wedged against a bike rack and parking meter, in one graceful bound and disappeared.

The thought that cougars were still prowling about left an unsettling lump in the centre of my chest and I wondered what other beasties might be left on Earth?

If there are cougars, there must be lynx and tigers and such, I rationalized. And then I had a thought that I believed flew in the face of Kenneth’s assertion that I am evil. I thought about finding zoos to see if there were other animals that were left, and need to be set free or fed.

Then I thought about bugs. It hadn’t crossed my mind about those vile bastages, being winter and all. But Kenneth’s cabin seemed like a glorious spider hole and I didn’t see a single one of those eight-legged freak machines. Didn’t mind that, actually. I used to state, when I was a younger lad, that “when I am Lord God of the Universe, I shall abolish spiders and hornets and big icky locusts.”

That thought was gone by the time I finished scooping up the sack of CDs and walked back to the Dodge.

And Kenneth would nod, smile and point out that he was right. Fuck him, I thought. He can free the cats of the world and hopefully he will be eaten by a murder of crows in the process.

As I crept through Brookings and moved north up Highway 101 along the Samuel H. Boardman State Scenic Corridor, Kenneth was wiping vomit from the floor of his Cessna, a by-product of his kidnapping of Carrie and flying her and Stacy to a small airfield near Newport, Oregon — about 215 miles north.

If God wanted me away from Carrie, he/she/it wasn’t doing a good job because, even though I didn’t know it, I was moving in the right direction.

Kenneth had previously scouted out the airfields after the disappearance and knew that this particular field had plenty of good fuel and was far enough off the beaten track that roaming bands of evil scum wouldn’t be around. Besides, it was on the way, sort of, to Yellowstone National Park, where he was taking Carrie and Stacy to link up with some other angels — guided to that super-volcano by a purpose higher than any of them could ever comprehend in corporeal form.

Brookings was only good for music and some intelligence about the fact that cats will meet the same horrific apocalyptic end as all the bad and evil people — including, apparently, me. I’d always had a soft spot for crows and ravens but was a bit disturbed about the fact that they, too, didn’t make God’s cut-off point.

I felt a soft glow knowing that I had always been a dog person and felt happy that dogs would be spared. But all dogs? Surely not all dogs are good. What about frightened Chihuahuas or yappy toy poodles, I wondered. Surely those things should have been left behind for crows and cats to eat, or at least torment.

Ah, evil thoughts. I caught myself and slipped Far Beyond Driven into the stereo. I rolled north up the occasionally cluttered, scenic highway, my fingers flailing away on the steering wheel. I stopped at a gas station in Gold Beach and, after much ado, was able to get a gas pump working and filled the Dodge with stinky diesel.

As the old pump clanged away, I scanned about and began to feel like I was being watched. Long, thin, frosty fingers skittered up my spine to the back of my neck and I grappled for the Glock. The warmth of the afternoon sun made me remove my jacket, containing the pistol, a few miles back and I felt starkly threatened without it now. The other pistol was on the front seat, along with the two shotguns. I flicked the pump into self-fill and with jittering nerves, flicked the door open and grabbed for a gun — any gun. My fingers fell upon the jacket and I dragged it out and with all the uneasy staggering of a first-time gunfighter, I drew the Glock and felt its secure weight in my hand. The pump clunked off, causing me to start.

A soft breeze wafted in from the nearby ocean, which surged and groaned to my west. I pumped a final few drops of diesel into the truck, hopped up into it and roared off down the highway, feeling the creeping crawlies in my spine dissipate with each 10 mp/h more attained. An equally frightened old woman, lurking in the shadows of a building across the highway from the gas station, quivered and sighed heavily as I disappeared past a clutter of crashed vehicles. She had just witnessed a large number of crazies on motorcycles and in various trucks and cars snarl by an hour or so earlier. They were hot on the heels of another group of crazies, led by a slightly built Asian man in his mid 50s, heading north from San Francisco in search of territory to conquer and souls to devour. The second group was a rival gang from Sacramento and they had dried blood below their fingernails, and murder on their breath from their latest clash with a gang from Los Angeles, that was on its last legs from taking beating after beating since they left the safety of the now smog-free and cat-teeming megalopolis.

The current human trend in the world was to form gangs, or more accurately, join them. And the least popular trend, as it was when good and evil existed side-by-side, was avoiding society. Small bands of wanderers would become the information highway.

One such gang had also passed by the old woman’s shadowy vantage point that morning — ahead of the groups of sadistic clichés.

Five men and a woman passed through Brookings — home of the Brookings witch, a creepy old woman who preyed on pets and cast spells on neighbours. The witch spotted them picking their way along the highway, past her spider infested coastal home and felt herself weaken. Her knees buckled and stars popped in her head. Slumped against a wall and casting terrified, hideous eyes out her window — the same window through which she cast so many vile and miserable spells, she saw a tall, dark haired man pushing a dirt bike. Behind him trailed four rogues; dark warriors all. And behind them skulked a harsh, hard looking street hag. They all carried weapons that matched their demeanors.

The old witch was sure her presence was great enough that the dark-haired man would sense her. He oozed a pleasant, peaceful calm, in direct contrast to the fearsome entourage that followed him down the cluttered highway.

This small band was the precursor to the old witch’s bout of terror, which ended as I disappeared from her sight. A heart that was only 73 gave out with a massive plunge and swoon. A heart that had held an inherent evil captive for 73 years, which allowed hideous, petty act after another to unfold, despite knowing better, ceased to beat. Behind her crumpled body hung four skinned caps, dripping into a tub.

Part two next week

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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