Dec. 13, 2011

Carrie wasn’t sure she wanted many more days spent talking with Kenneth.

She awoke with a small, annoying headache, brought about by relentless dreams in which she would be pulling up to the cabin at Lake Cocolalla, happy and looking forward to a quiet few days painting and just ‘being’ with me. And then the driveway to the cabin would grow longer and rougher and she’d be alone in the car and feeling despair. Then the driveway would turn into the sky and she was in the back of Kenneth’s turbulence-finding plane, circling the top of a smoking, bubbling volcano.

Over a dinner of canned green beans, canned tuna and old multi-grain pasta, with a powdered milk, garlic powder, ketchup and canned mushroom sauce, Kenneth gave Carrie and Stacy a 101 course on the ‘holy eye’ and attempted to explain to them exactly what had happened and was going to happen.

“For starters,” he said, “Nothing is firm. By that I mean, the Mayans had it right but they also had it wrong. Give ‘em credit, by golly, because they showed some remarkable intellect and vision just for attempting the math.

“Today is Dec. 13, 2011 — so do we have a year and eight days to live on this Earth — on this plain, as the Mayans suggested, ala their calendar? No. We may be here much longer than that. The fact is, they ‘saw’ to that point in time and they used the alignment of the planets — the plane of the ecliptic, where the sun and the planets follow the same orbital plane.” He stopped and looked hard at the women to make sure he wasn’t wasting his time. Tough stuff this.

Carrie was looking at him as earnestly as she could and Stacy was stabbing sliced mushrooms onto her fork. She looked at him with a “what?” expression.

He continued.

“The Mayans based their calculations, the fear-mongerers that they were, on something they called the Xibalba. It is a band of dark dust clouds in the Milky Way, also known as the Dark Rift, or the Black Road. They pinpointed where the ecliptic intersects with the Dark Rift, when the sun becomes exactly aligned with this intersection — on the winter solstice of 2012. Now, the Mayans didn’t leave great stone tablets declaring that the world would end at that time. They merely believed that a great transformation or transition would happen to mankind. Now, that could be, as would make sense, this world is destroyed by gamma rays sent up the amplifier that would be the alignment of the planets, or it could be as simple as humankind realizing that the collection of material wealth and hyper-consumption is a cancer destroying from within humankind’s true essence, which revolves around love, or that reality television and the Internet are corporate ploys to save and make money while brainwashing the simpletons who encompass the majority of human civilization.

“But somehow I don’t think that will be the case. Something bigger is afoot,” Kenneth said, believing himself to be funny. Carrie and Stacy stared at him, missing the joke.

“Any rate,” Kenneth continued, “the so-called end that we must be prepared for is going to occur sometime before 2036. So we could be here for another year or so or for another 25.”

Flushing and suddenly piqued, Carrie asked, sitting up straight in her chair, if that was the case, why couldn’t Rob remain with her?

Kenneth waved her question aside like an expert politician searching for softballs instead of meaty, informed queries.

“Because,” he said, more as a cough than a clear statement, and continued with his lesson.

Carrie scowled at him, unsatisfied with his dismissal.

“The disappearance, as you ladies call it,” he said with ramped up volume, attempting to refocus his pupils, “was a glorious sub-atomic feat, let me tell you. The ability to pinpoint all that good and sift out the evil, all while neatly separating the next generation of angels and keepers, is mind-blowing, to say the least. Something even I cannot come close to understanding because, quite simply, the human brain is incapable of remotely understanding such complex calculations.”

Stacy pushed her plate away from her and leapt into the conversation. “Kenneth, you once told me that ‘when the time comes, the world’s good will be harvested and its seeds would be planted on a new world. And that evil would have to fight amongst itself in order to see the light. What exactly did you mean by that? And where, exactly, did all our loved ones go?”

Kenneth said he was impressed Stacy could remember all that, as she’d been drinking a fair amount of wine that night.

Carrie smiled at Stacy. Despite what had occurred since she met her, she liked this woman.

“I am sure there is a great deal of soul-searching going on right now,” Kenneth chuckled. “All those Christians and Muslims and Hindus and all the other religions mingled together, waiting t’be returned to life.” He chuckled again. “I’d really love to be a fly on the wall.”

He rose from the table and while stacking the dinner plates and walking them to the kitchen sink, said, “The disappearance removed the majority of souls from Earth so they would be spared the hell that is now on Earth. They are, I guess to simplify things, in a form of stasis, at a sub-atomic level, stored carefully at a precise frequency that will be in instant harmony with the energies released by the holy eyes when… the time comes.”

Stacy nudged Carrie’s arm and said, “Kinda like Star Trek. They’ll be beamed to their new world in the final flash of this planet’s existence and the evil that has prepared accordingly, during this time of waiting, will be, by God’s will, preserved as a necessary ingredient for the establishment of a new human race.”

Carrie’s head slid into her hands, which rubbed against her face. “Phewwww,” she groaned.

“It has a lot to do with wave-function,” Kenneth said, spraying water on the dinner plates.

“So what about all the naysayers and experts who offered some pretty convincing counter-theories to the Mayans’ work and other peoples’ prophecies and predictions?” Stacy said, adding she had spent a considerable amount of time sifting through scientific papers and Internet chatroom sites focusing on quantum physics and astro-physics.

Carrie joked that she didn’t even know how to spell quantum. “Spelling was Rob’s department,” she said, taking a sip of wine. She was on her fourth glass of pinot now and was starting to enjoy the conversation. At glass of wine one she was tight and annoyed and at glass of wine two she felt like slugging Kenneth. By the time she started her third glass, she felt it necessary to hear his fabulous jabber and now she was turning flip and felt like bugging this craggy old man.

Kenneth, again seated at the table, became animated as he searched for words to answer Stacy.

“Stumped him,” Carrie shot, passing a closed fist to Stacy, who smiled and bumped knuckles with her.

“Ahh,” he began, “scientists are smug insects who postulate with absolute certainty but they don’t know if they’ll have a cheese sandwich or beef dip for lunch from one day to the next. The fact is, human science has developed grand theory and established solid laws but the infinite chasm of the universe and the infinite wisdom of God surpass mankind’s puny scientific efforts on a scale that is so complex and vast that the average human mind would implode from the mere attempt to consider it. The most brilliant physicists would smile for a brief second and then drop stone dead, their limbs, fingers, toes and facial extremities wiggling frantically. I knew Einstein, y’know? Good fella.”

Carrie told Kenneth he reminded her of me. He shot her a puzzled look and continued: “Any rate, I got him onto the whole ‘objective existence’ thing and he really took off with it running.”

Carrie slapped Kenneth across the back and laughing said, “I haven’t got a freaking clue what you are saying. Must be the accent. Hey, how come you still have an accent if you are so old and have been in America for so long?”

Kenneth rose from the table and announced he was going to bed.

“Aw, lessons over?” Carrie laughed. “G’night then.”

Stacy felt Kenneth’s disappointment but she also understood Carrie’s mood.

“Think of Swiss cheese,” she said to Carrie. “Space and time have holes in them, like a block of Swiss cheese.”

Kenneth snorted. “Don’t bother, Stacy. She will have lots of time to figure out quantum physics and all the other things she’d rather ignore by getting drunk.”

Carrie’s face reddened. “Fuck you!” She shot, hoping the old bastard would come back and argue. Kenneth disappeared through the door to a bedroom and quietly closed the door. Then from behind the door he shouted, “Oh, and by the way, all that bloody Mayan shite… it’s consumerism running amok again. Their bloody calendar merely ends. Every calendar ends. What do you do then? You bloody change it over. G’nite.”

Carrie glanced at Stacy. “He really does remind me of Rob, you know.” Her heart was laden with frustrating, nagging weights, her head was dizzied by confusion. Without saying goodnight to Stacy she disappeared into her room.

Carrie sat up in her large wood-framed bed and looked at the bedroom window, which was a winter wonderland scene. People try to make their windows look like that at Christmas, she thought.

It was difficult to become motivated enough to climb from bed. Carrie had never been a quitter, but the pummeling her brain had taken the last month and the traumas inflicted on her heart were taking a toll.

How the hell does he know all that stuff? She wondered, and lay back down, wondering if he was on the up-and-up.

The snowstorm that was blanketing West Yellowstone was also coating Bend.

I stumbled out of my room, grinding my right heel in my boot, trying to convince it to open up and let my foot in. The boot always wins. Thumbing my foot in, my blood-surged eyeballs noticed thick, heavy snow on the edge of the exterior hallway that led to a sloping walkway down to a parking lot that had about a dozen vehicles covered with snow. My eyes burned at the unexpected brilliance of a fresh dump of snow blazing away with morning sunshine.

The hotel foyer was in a separate building that looked out over a pool.

The lobby, tucked down from the massively cluttered roadway that separated the hotel from the Bend River Promenade mall, provided “perfect cover,” Andy noted. To the right of the lobby were a restaurant, a parking lot and an ornate wooden covered stairway leading to the street.

As I blinked my way across the parking lot, I noticed several other lines of tracks in the snow leading up to the lobby building.

A strong and warmly greeting smell of coffee caressed my senses as I stepped inside. Andy was holding court, with Calder, Hex, Peterson and Crest listening earnestly.

They all turned to look at me as I stepped in and mumbled good mornings.

The fact that I was saying good morning to possible throat slashing maniacs wasn’t lost to me. It was obvious to me that Hex was a killer. May, sleeping off a morphine and crack binge, which Hex was still running with, also seemed to be seriously off course on the sanity sea.

“Fuck May — all right guys, let’s team up here for a minute,” Andy barked as my depth perception failed me and my right hand missed its first swipe at the coffee pot.

“I’ve said this before but our newest member needs to hear it,” Andy said. Pouring coffee into a small Styrofoam cup, I offered a half-hearted nod of recognition and cast a weak gaze over the four other men — demon spawn all. Why did he say “fuck May?”

“It is a brave new world guys and for us to survive we must be united, in synch, in touch and intense when shit happens. And we’ve seen lots of shit happening,” Andy said. “It is truly a time when one must kill or be killed.”

He then outlined his plans for us, which included us staying in Bend for the time being and making this small resort our base of operations.

“I roamed all around this place last night and there is a grand amount of booty to keep us sustained. The mall across the street has been plundered but only so much. The Food 4 Less in the mall has massive quantities of goods left. It must have been hit right at the start, because fresh goods seem to be all that has really been gathered. Not far from that is another mall, some froofy joint — Cascade Village, I think — that also has a shitload of stores that will serve our needs, as well as a sporting goods store filled with ammo and weapons. In short, Bend is ours, it seems.

“This complex offers perfect cover because of all the lights shining out there still. We blend in Bend, as it is. And this complex is nicely defensible, as long as we post ourselves in the right rooms and remain in contact with this lobby. I scored these walky-talky things last night,” Andy said, dropping small, plastic bundles on the front desk.

“The package says they’re good for up to five miles,” so keep these on you at all time. Batteries aren’t really an issue yet,” he laughed.

“We’re going to take six hour shifts here in the lobby and we’ll do patrols — in groups of three each, to make sure we are alone. I don’t think we are but whomever or whatever is out there is outfitted and quiet. So no biggy there.”

Andy then motioned to Calder to provide a course on the body-halving M249 light machine gun pointed toward the entry road and further toward a Shari’s restaurant. A heavily tattooed metal head with a particular fondness for Norwegian Satan metal, picked up patrolling the dusty perfumed roadways of Iraq, Calder swore by the weapon’s diverse uses.

“Defense, offence and statement statement statement,” he said as he clacked it into firing position. “Do you see? It’s simple. If a threat appears beyond the fancy shmancy entrance thing out there, take aim, take a breath and as you exhale, let her rip. Don’t worry about the glass shattering when you fire — the noise from the gun will already have you shitting your pants.”

Crest snorted, “That’s a fact, fuck! It’s wicked!”

Calder continued: “I am going to create a funnel to force anyone coming in here to come right into that snout of the 50, so even you rookies can take them out.”

He explained that a few appropriately parked vehicles would create the funnel and “don’t worry about them serving as cover. One burst from the 50 will remove much of the cover.”

Calder, talking to Andy now, said he would also establish a few perimeter posts, with stashed weapons and other supplies, should we come “under siege.”

Nearby the 50 was a heavy duty spotting scope and next to that was a nine-round Mauser 86 SR .308 sniper rifle on a swiveling tripod.

Leaning against the front desk, was an XM25 grenade launcher — “for those special occasions,” Calder explained. And beside that were several fun-looking rifles. In addition to the heavy armament in the lobby, we were all outfitted with a rifle, shotgun and as many handguns as we could comfortably fit on our “mobile rigging.”

My bottom lip had become stuck to the coffee cup. The surrealistic macho nature of the conversation I had just been privy had frozen my attempts at sipping at an empty cup.

Peeling the cup away, I took a step toward the coffee pot and had to slap a hand against the wall to secure my balance.

“Bit unsteady this morning?” Hex cackled. His normally crazed expression was amplified by the massive narcotic cocktails that he and May had been smacking down all night. His eyes cut through me like a saber wielded by a shrieking banshee.

I ignored him and unsteadily poured another cup of coffee. Carrie swam through my thoughts like a cavitating Sea-Doo on a small lake. I longed for her — for everything about her.

As I sipped at the hot black morning juice, I questioned why I was so eager to follow this Andy guy. That’s what I was doing. I was subservient to him, like the others, I realized.

I couldn’t help it. I found Andy to be a most educational and interesting creature, even if he did hang out with truly sketchy people.

He held a wisdom that was vital to our situation and he exuded a confidence found only in the most successful and alpha of men and I believed I could use his safety net and, hopefully, help to get Carrie back.

Satisfied that we would hunker down and avoid the bad weather, I decided to get dressed and go in search of more music for the Dodge. I had grown weary of the limited selection of music and thought this would be a good time to go shopping. I had to do something mindless or I thought I would lose my mind. The urge to shoot Hex was growing in me like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

Aware of it, I paused to feel sorry for myself. Kenneth was right. I did harbour some pretty savage thoughts, I realized.

I had to get away. I needed air.

Quietly, I topped my coffee cup up and stepped outside.

Snow had covered our tracks into the resort and offered signs of anyone coming near our location, so I decided I would make only one trail in it as I walked toward a nearby shopping mall.

Pulling my coat zipper up, I jerked nervously when I heard Andy’s voice, slicing through a crack in the front door, “Going somewhere?”

Coffee had skipped over my thumb and I shook it off.

“Jesus! No — just needed some air, man, thanks,” I replied.

“Need some tunes, too. Did you see anything like a tune store in any of those malls?”

Andy said he hadn’t noticed but there were enough stores between the two malls that I should be able to find something.

“Try not to wander off too much alone,” he said, his voice laced with caring advice. “A buddy system is best. Want me to come along?”

My hesitation was an answer to him. “All right then. I know when I have been rebuffed.” Andy laughed and pointed out that I had my 10-guage and Glock on me.

“Should be good,” he laughed. “You can get ammo for both those weapons, if you need, at Dick’s Sports Goods, a convenient six minute walk from this lovely riverside resort. I didn’t see anything last night so you should be good, but remember you are never alone.”

His last sentence stuck in my sore brain as I trudged toward the wooden stairs. Calder was at the stairs, stashing an assault rifle in a thick canvas bag beneath them.

“I am rigging a grenade in here, so watch for the trip wire when you come back,” he said as if telling me about wet paint.

It took about 10 minutes to walk to the “froofy” mall and along the way I visualized the final moments in Bend. Each place I had been through since the disappearance gave off a unique stopping signature. Bend seemed to be the most orderly place I had seen. The many retirees who called the place home must have been keeping their distance and driving slow because a junction leading to the mall featured vehicles neatly stopped in all directions, including a turning lane with cars appearing as though they had been purposely left there.

On the Highway 97 side of the froofy mall, close to the sporting goods store where I found ample ammo for my guns and helped myself to several other useful looking handguns, a semi trailer was tipped on its side, atop a small import car of some kind. I remembered seeing that when Carrie, Stacy and I drove through a few weeks earlier.

Re-armed with a down-sliding mood, I turned back toward the resort.

At the Bend River Promenade mall I squirreled up a mediocre variety of common tunes, including Frampton Comes Alive, Godsmack’s The Oracle, Kiss’s Greatest Hits (not sure which greed-crusted edition it was), AC/DC’s Back in Black, Gary Allan’s Living Hard, Dire Straits’ Greatest Hits, Neil Young’s After The Goldrush, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run and the gem of the search, Rush’s Hemispheres.

I longed for my extensive music collection, likely still safe and preserved in what would be a frozen condo in Cranbrook. I felt a twang of remorse for our plants, including one that had I been packing about with me since I was 18.

The malls had been ransacked but there was a great deal of useful stuff still in it for me, including long underwear, warm socks, canned goods and bottles of red wine. I also grabbed some warm gloves, enough for everyone, and scooped an armful of DVDs into a sack. They’d come in handy today — snow day of the apocalypse.

Careful to follow my tracks as best as I could, I trudged back to the resort, over the trip wire and handed out my gifts, stowed the tunes in my truck, which was now in the parking lot behind the lobby and returned to my room where I watched Avatar and Black Hawk Down, and ate too much junk food, before succoming to a pot-aided sleep.

Outside a heavy, constant snowfall continued to roll in from the Cascades.

 

Seated in a badly vandalized coffee shop in West Hollywood, shaking from terror and bleeding heavily from a large indentation in the top of his forehead, George Clooney inserted an index finger in his left ear and twisted it.

In front of him on the table was a shiny .44 magnum. Clooney’s eyes were locked on the pair of feet sticking out beyond the sightlines of his table.

Alone and afraid since the disappearance, Clooney had mostly kept to the shadows and avoided anyone he came across.

Everyone left behind experienced the disappearance differently. Clooney woke up late that day after a previous day of shlepping his latest film, ‘The Ides of March.’ He had an idle afternoon reading a new script, drinking coffee and working on his empathic noises. He didn’t turn the television on and hadn’t noticed the chaos outside. He didn’t hear the cacophony after the disappearance, either, which is surprising as Greater Los Angeles erupted into a series of hellacious explosions and ground-shuddering tremors as jetliners plunged to the ground, trains ‘car-anged’ into one another and derailed and as hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks came to messy stops.

It wasn’t until dinner time neared when Clooney snapped to. His agent was supposed to come by to get him. He dialed the agent’s number and left a message.

A short while later he slipped some shoes on and stepped outside and his world had been one big funky chicken since.

He couldn’t find anyone, besides street freaks and dangerous people, so he remained hidden and only went out at night to search for supplies.

His famous face eventually did him in on this day. He’d found this coffee shop a few weeks earlier and was visiting it every evening, making some coffee and just sitting and reading, trying to find a vein from his former life.

The smell of coffee lured the pair of feet into the coffee shop. At the time the pair of feet had ownership of the .44 magnum and the pair of feet was spectacularly thrilled to realize that he had the drop on none other than “the George Clooney.”

Before he realized who he was mugging, the pair of feet bonked Clooney on the head with the butt of his gun.

Unfortunately for the pair of feet, George Clooney was in no mood to be interrupted from daily reverie and being a seasoned action actor, the blow to the head didn’t stun him. Without thinking, Clooney’s left hand shot out and grabbed the muzzle of the .44 and he pushed it to the side. The gun exploded and the resulting burst of adrenaline gave Clooney the strength of three men. He savagely pushed his right hand into the pair of feet’s throat and squeezed.

Actually a man named Hector Calabaza, a former lousy welterweight boxer who became a crack and heroin addict after his 12th straight defeat and eventually became a liquor store robbing piece of shit who gunned a 21-year-old woman down one night when his hair-trigger .44 went off, the pair of feet’s trachea cracked and the gun fell from his hand. The .44 hit the floor grip first and it fired again. Calabaza clutched at his groin area and fell violently to the floor.

Clooney stood over the man and watched him bleed to death. The .44 slug tore through his femoral artery and traveled up into his crotch. After a minute of screaming and pleading, the pair of feet died.

Clooney scooped up the gun and sat down at the table. His ears were ringing from the sound of the gun and the cut on his head bled more as his heart beat faster.

He twisted a finger in his ear again and looked down at the pair of feet.

“Cut,” he said.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

---

Article Share

---