January 23 – Feb. 22, 2012

Sleep, forage, portion, drink, smoke dope — numb the mind, freeze the heart.

That was my pattern in the dying the world.

Carrie’s was similar, except she had to undergo bombardments of blah by that fucking old Scots prick. But she also had Stacy. How weird. Stacy. Who was she a year ago? No one to me. Now, she’s my oldest friend outside Carrie — who I can’t see because some crazed old Scots prick says I’m bad news.

I was in the right place — on the sunny slope of the Grand Tetons, watching Old Man Winter getting the shit kicked out of him by otherworldly strong, warm winds. It was beautiful.

Andy called it the calm before the storm.

Carrie had also begun to go for daily walks, a Glock strapped to her side. Cats and crows remained as much of a threat as people and weapons were required to deal with even the smallest former nothing threat. Everything alive was fighting for the scraps on the eve of destruction, to borrow cheese from the fluidly lit sixties.

She wandered farther every day, as the ground dried and browned. All the snow that was left, incredibly, was sun-blocked lines and patches here and there. The fine, slick mud, “loon shit,” as Stacy called it, had turned crusty and Carrie’s feet lightly crunched as she walked down a back alley toward the center of West Yellowstone. She had come across a deli that was well stocked with herbal teas and she began to make the small café the turnaround point of her walks. She needed a daily task — a purpose no matter how trite.

The café had a large antique wood stove in its small kitchen and Carrie enjoyed putting it to use. After a few weeks it became her place. She lingered longer and longer and began returning to the B&B after dark, which earned her “tsks” finger wags from Kenneth and Ridley.

“You won’t heal as fast as I, dear,” Kenneth warned. “There are lots of cats in this country.”

“I’m the meanest cougar around,” Carrie quipped.

Stacy showed up the next day.

The charm and the escape offered appealed to her and they toasted to “getting away from Kenneth” with cups of green tea.

The old fella had been on a roll the past few weeks. Every evening he bombarded them with tales of his expansive past, all meant to serve metaphorically in relation to their future jobs as angels.

Like a young first-time father who doesn’t really ‘get’ it that he’s going to be a father, when the child is still forming inside mom, and then gets it when the infant arrives and squeezes his finger for the first time — Carrie was out of touch with all that ‘becoming an angel thing.’

She appreciated having a chance to have basic girl chat with Stacy.

“Angels in training; that’d be a good name for a band,” Carrie said one day during a lull in conversation. Fat snowflakes were falling outside. It was the first snow of any kind since the rain and warmth beat it into retreat.

“Those snowflakes,” she said softly, almost whispering, “I used to think big snowflakes like that were angels coming to Earth. Then I got older and my skin and head got thicker and the so-called demands of life took over. The snowflakes became work and they got in the way.”

She looked away from the window and squinted as her eyes adjusted to the grey and brown shadows of the café. “Guess that’s what we’re going to be doing, huh? Getting in the way… working… being angels.”

Stacy’s hands were wrapped around her cup and she held it close to her lips — hovering for another sip and taking in the heat.

“I didn’t believe in angels when I was a little girl. Don’t know why. No reason for it. I still don’t think I believe anything Kenneth says but… I know… it makes as much sense as anything else. And I did see that old coot heal freakishly fast. It’s like I won a prize but it’s not the one I wanted and though I know I should be appreciative, I feel gypped. I didn’t want to lose my kids. I didn’t want to watch Bob disappear from sight. I don’t want any of this but I’ve got it, don’t I? So put your hat on and cowboy the fuck up.”

Stacy arched her cup toward Carrie.

“Cheers.”

“And if that old bastard says ‘it is what it is and there’s nothing we can do about it’ again, I swear I will ring his neck,” Carrie laughed, clacking her cup against Stacy’s. “I’ve looked,” she said. “I’ve looked for Baileys or something but there isn’t anything like that here. We need to do some shopping.”

Stacy laughed, then woofed with surprise as Ridley stomped into the café, brushing snow off his head.

“Refuge, I see,” he said smiling. “A hiding place from the lessons. Good idea. Can I join the club?”

Laughter echoed in the café and drifted outside, floating in the rapidly cooling wind into splinters of noise.

“I thought I would come find you guys to make sure you were close by. It’s going to get really ugly again. Big blizzard coming, by looks,” Ridley said.

“Rats,” Carrie said, clunking her cup on a table. “Back to normal.”

Laughter blasted out of the café as Stacy and Ridley found Carrie’s deadpan delivery sidesplitting.

Carrie backed outside, slipping her light jacket on. She barely needed the jacket when she walked the seven blocks to the café but she needed a parka now. Before returning to the warmth of the café she stopped to appreciate a dazzling, dancing shimmer of northern lights.

Stacy had already dug out a jacket from the back of the shop and handed it to Carrie with a smile, who pointed out her greenish aerial finding.

The weather turned colder during the quick walk back to the B&B and all three had frozen noses, ears and fingers when they pushed their way into the warm home. Aurora Borealis skipped and jumped as they hurried inside.

Carrie, stomping her feet and blowing into her hands, saw Kenneth standing across the entry, wearing a gaudy orange and brown sweater, holding a cup of tea and smiling.

“Temperature is dropping,” he said. “Got northern lights, too, I see. Lovely.”

The temperature continued to drop all night, hitting its low at dawn the next morning. According to the thermometer outside the frosted kitchen window, it was –48º.

Carrie, who’d lived in northern British Columbia for 20 years, said she’d rarely experienced cold so horrifying.

Kenneth said he had always avoided cold climates, which is why he bolted from Scotland so early on.

“How’d you manage to keep your accent?” Ridley asked.

“We’re stubborn, we Scots,” he replied.

Stacy stared at out the small slit in the frost at the thermometer, urging it to keep going.

“You’re a masochist,” Ridley said, admitting he’d never experienced cold like this in Yellowstone.

“It gets into the minus thirties now and then, once or twice a year, usually around full moons — but this is just nuts. From one extreme to another. Hmm,” he huffed. “You have to think there is something going on with Mama Earth.”

An uncomfortable, itchy silence slithered over the room.

The deep freeze hit Jackson shortly after it drifted over West Yellowstone — pushed by a massive Arctic high formed in part by the recent massive bombardment of UV radiation and X-rays from a series of massive solar flares coronal mass ejections, that occurred at the beginning of January.

Had there been teams of scientists contemplating the heavens, they would have been collectively squawked-out after witnessing the most powerful succession of solar flares since mankind started monitoring them — 500 years.

Satellites, already spinning about lost and lonely since their signals stopped being received, conked out en masse after the largest flare — which would was classed an X-7 — or coronal mass ejection (CME).

The steady rise of evil’s paramilitary organization hit the skids as radio communications ceased, battered by a relentless machine-gunning shower of electrons and protons. And it was only a half-battering blow to the Earth.

In a giggling fit of irony, a band of vile cretins roaming the Russian Steppes, that called themselves ‘The Space Program’ because they had taken over an abandoned missile and rocket silo, were sent packing to the ethers when a burned out Japanese communication satellite plunged white hot from a night sky and slammed into the bus they were driving. The 11 evil souls on the bus were led by ex-Soviet Army Col. Sergei Yakushev and they were a perfect blending of all that was wrong with Mother Russia when democracy was absent and then when it took root. Sergei had always taken great delight in ordering timid, naïve young soldiers to execute entirely innocent people. Among the ghouls riding in the bus along with him was a Russian Mafioso — a second-tier lieutenant who murdered his own mother for chastising him for his course in life and a terrifying bear of a psycho named Alexei, who went by the fabulously unfitting nickname Tutti Frutti. Alexei’s pass into the great war of all tormented souls — the grand hand-me-down of kismet – was his propensity to break necks. Soaring past the 6’6” range and topping the scales at 330 pounds, Tutti Frutti had always enjoyed employment as a shakedown artist. He’d literally shake people until they complied with his queries or requests. And if they didn’t comply, he would smile wide, exposing a row of rotten choppers, and then snap a neck. Alexei actually felt sexual release at the point when the necked snapped, thick and wet, in his massive mitts. The rest of the ghouls on the bus were a hodge-podge of miscreants and street weasels who were lucky to have teamed up with such formidable monsters.

They were rolling back to their compound, through a completely unseasonable rain strorm, after wiping out and plundering a group of unarmed wandering lunatics, when the satellite squashed and shredded them.

At the same time, deep penetrating shockwaves were piercing Earth’s hot liquid centre, causing what would have been considered the greatest number of earthquake swarms in recorded history.

It was like giving someone with a healthy heart a blast with a defibrillator.

It is possible there were a few people left on Earth who may have been, at that time, postulating about the world having just been slapped by ‘the hand of God.’

If there were any people left who understood the dynamics of the sun and the continued aligning of the planets in the solar system, they’d be terrified, because the CME outburst occurred a full year before it was predicted to happen. What if that was just an initial wee burp before the big barf?

Of course, only Kenneth was thinking along those lines, and even then, he was coming from a fatalistic place where an ancient sense of destiny was to be fulfilled.

None of the quakes in the swarms in North America passed 5.0 on the Richter scale. The largest felt at Yellowstone was 3.8. Had Kenneth and Burton not been riding snowmobiles at the time, they might have felt it.

The largest swarm occurred in Indonesia. The smoldering remains of Jakarta, razed from constant warring between Muslim and Christian and sundry maniacs, were shaken and rattled into sociological pats on Mother Earth’s surface. Hundreds of lost souls were spared eternal woe.

The impressive aurora borealis being observed by a mostly uncaring and loathsome pack of souls the last few nights was a result of the Earth’s magnetosphere being warped from the giant CME.

Andy yelled at me to come “see” when he first spotted the northern lights. He was elated.

“Hello old friends!” He shouted from the small condo deck, like a small boy finding long lost favourite toys.

It didn’t strike me as anything odd. “Yeah, the northern lights,” I said unimpressed. “Ya know, there was a time when I would have gone running for my camera and tri-pod. Carrie and I would have had a blast clicking away.”

 

The cold snap, Which embraced the upper third of the north and southern hemispheres, lasted for eight days. Only a trace of snow fell at the start of the snap and right at the end, when January gave way to February.

Stacy never did get to see the mercury hit –50, but it spent more time in the –40s than anyone cared for.

The cold snap shut down what had been incrementally increasing activities with the rise of armed bands around the globe, as former military stores became accessed and in many cases, utilized due to many military types left standing, looking around stunned on Nov. 11. While much of the northern hemisphere cracked and came to a nerve freezing halt, the southern hemisphere burst into flames — literally as in the case of the eastern seaboard of Australia, which experienced record highs in temperatures followed by unchecked wildfires, which wiped out countless empty towns, villages and cities, including half of Sydney, lost in a two-day conflagration.

A budding power base in Australia, the Sydney Armed Front, lost more than half of its members, leaving them exposed and weakened, and eventually overrun by a course and vulgar mob from Melbourne.

The deep freeze also served as a rest period — a lull before the conflagration — and on Feb. 22, evil’s vortex hit a new crescendo, unfathomable to those taken in the disappearance. Each warring faction — worldwide — had reached ‘take-off’ at about the same time. Massive armies of demons to tiny bands of roaming scum, which I assume included Andy and I, had plans and supplies firmly in place before the deep freeze. When it lifted, on a day when strange was born, God’s arm was pulled back and an unstoppable force of splintered evil exploded forth — lashing out with full fury, seeking to fulfill prophecy and natural requirement.

Balance was also born Feb. 22, 2012. There became a singular purpose of the human species for the first time since it had wiggled from the ooze — to eradicate itself. Programmed by Mother Earth — or God — or the Gods, the species had a ‘best before’ date that was well-documented in ancient art and literature but ignored by the smugness of having and set aside to pursue the assurance of a gut and orgasm.

The day began pretty much the same for all involved in the telling of this story — in the Northern Hemisphere.

Andy rarely slept. When I awoke, he was sipping on a drink he called a “flip.” He started every day with one, and had since “the mid-morning of time.” It was a concoction of beer, molasses and rum all brought to life by being jabbed with a pair of white-hot knives.

He noted that the drink was supposed to be “touched with a glowing poker” and what he was downing was “sapped of its gusto by the urine-cloth-rinse that is American beer.”

Andy remarked several times after I had risen, “nice out today.”

I looked out the kitchen window and my eyes focused on water dripping past in a torrent. The sky over Jackson seemed almost purple — but a nice light purple, that isn’t to be confused with a bruise or a scab. It was a a nearly light lilac purple. The immense beauty of it forced me to dig out my camera, which had been stashed aside for many weeks now, and capture it. Why not, I shrugged. I stepped outside and a warm wind flapped the camera strap and my shirttail. “Holy shiny fuck!” I hollered.

Inside, Andy was pensive and silent. He simply sipped at his flip and sat on his lip.

Carrie had taken to sleeping in. Kenneth worried that it was a sign of relenting in her. He was right. Unable to venture outside and stuck with the same people for days on end in a limited space environment was taking its toll on her, as well as on Stacy and Jason. They each became withdrawn and spent hours feeling sullen and alone. Stacy longed for those gone from her life. Jason did the same.

And Carrie — my darling and my life — longed for her children and for me, as I longed for her. Her escapes to the café had been giving her separation and power but when she became jailed by the severity of the world, she slipped on self-pity and depression.

Stronger than me by a few society’s measures, she hadn’t been clouding the apocalypse with rampaging drug and booze consumption. She felt her pain and it was moving through her like an arthritic zipper when Stacy called for her to “come look.”

She padded out of her room, housecoat flapping ajar, and saw Stacy standing in the open front door. Carrie winced, expecting a shard of dry ice to engulf her. A silent and undeadly fart’s warmth wafted past her instead.

“Come out,” Stacy laughed, disappearing from sight.

Kenneth and Jason were at the front of the B&B property, on a thin tuft of grass that abutted the street.

Carrie felt her bare feet touch on the paving stones that led from the front door toward the driveway and street.

She squinted at the lilac sky and a wide smile cracked into full glory. Stacy was also glowing in the ethereal light.

“Don’t know what this is all about but it sure is cool,” Jason shouted, raising a coffee mug, cheers-style to Carrie, who nodded and smiled. She felt the hot morning sun push down on her flesh, which danced a thousand goosebumping jigs from its coming to life.

Serena and Madeline rarely ventured out during the cold snap. They’d done a thorough job of securing stores before and Serena’s doom and gloom mood was lightened considerably when the deep freeze settled over the land with a crystalline sheen.

Somehow, the ferocious cold dampened Andy’s presence, which she had been sensing. The extreme swing in temperatures — from –48º F the day before to +73º F this morning — brought the threat of evil back into Serena’s wheelhouse and Madeline was put out by her not being more receptive to the beautiful weather.

“Why don’t we go for a walk?” Madeline pleaded. “We could use the exercise and we’ll need supplies soon. Right?”

Serena told her not to wander out of sight of the apartment complex and disappeared back inside. Once the door closed she grasped at her throat and nausea coursed through her. Serena slumped into a loveseat and doubled over, moaning.

At that same moment Kenneth lurched toward Jason, spilling coffee and coughing.

He grasped at the space between his shoulder blades and cried out, falling forward. Jason wrapped an arm around him and guided him toward Stacy who grabbed an arm and helped Kenneth inside.

Carrie could only watch them pass by her into the house. Later she’d admit she felt guilty. “All I thought about when Kenneth had his attack was that I wanted a cup of green tea. Is that wrong of me?” she asked Stacy, her face showing uncertainty.

Kenneth was asleep in his room, soaked in sweat and, oddly, bleeding from a couple of small wounds in his chest and legs.

Madeline returned to the apartment and found Serena curled in a tight ball on the floor in front of the loveseat. She rushed to her, fearing she’d dropped dead. Madeline screamed her name and dropped to the floor near her. Panicking, she felt at her neck and relief burst out with a sob. It was warm.

Andy came out of his silence when he stepped onto the balcony that looked toward Jackson. “I have to go down into town,” he said flatly.

I was contemplating putting on some shorts when Andy walked out the door, hollering he’d be back in a while.

I shrugged, cracked a beer open and took a grateful slurp of the sweet elixir.

Looking back, that singular cracking sound could have signaled the tipping of the global scales.

The extreme heat that had been torching the Southern Hemisphere, with temperatures rising to a skin-roasting 52º C (125º F), or higher in some cases, had warmed ocean currents, creating massive storm systems.

On Feb. 19, the Indian Ocean reached 46º C. Had there been do-gooders taking readings and measurements, the world’s scientific community would have had their collective sphincters whistling Dixie because a creature of myth would have been rising before them in the form of a hypercane.

Storms had been pasting the east coast of Africa, India and Southeast Asia for a week before the greatest storm in human history unleashed itself on the same area.

In Indonesia, the survivors of the earthquake swarm looked into eternity’s eye as it bulleted toward them at 600 km/h (375 m/ph). To get a sense of the full frontal insanity of this storm, the most powerful storm recorded by humankind was 1979’s Typhoon Tip, which produced winds of more than 300 km/h (190 m/ph).

This was an upping of the ante that brought with it 52-foot (16-metre) storm surges and worse, its 30 km high clouds scratched the stratosphere open and by adding water molecules to the ozone layer, less ultraviolet light was absorbed.

First the concrete wall shattering winds wiped away what was along the East African, Indian, and Southeast Asian coastlines and surged inland like tanks rolling through cornfields.

Then came the tsunamis and more winds that pushed the oceans over the land like a wet cloth over a recently erased chalkboard.

The storm would lash one-third of the planet for a week, as more typhoons developed from the warmed ocean. There was no safe place to hide. Life – evil – was decidedly stamped out wherever this storm reached, including the western shores of Australia.

Tens of thousands of evil scum would be dead before a hot sun rose on the morning Feb. 23. An equal number would be dead in the next week as temperatures hit new heights, radiation sickness took root and new storms formed and pounded away, like bacteria in a boil.

Near Lake Toba in Indonesia, Ratu Joyoboyo, an ancient angel —huddled with his apprentice angels in an attempt to ride out Earth’s fury, which he had experienced many times before. But this was the end, he knew. His angels were terrified but he worked feverishly at helping them keep their wits.

It wasn’t enough. The third day into the wrath of the hypercrane — Feb. 22 — was the worst. A kilometre-wide wall of rolling debris pushed along by the winds gouged its way over the elaborate compound Joyoboyo had constructed near the lake, killing them all.

Immortals can withstand grievous injury, repeatedly, but they cannot bounce back from being crushed, smashed and rolled into thousands of small chunks of wet goo.

Kenneth, Serena, Hongi, Tomoe Gozen and Carmen Valerio were all struck down with a crippling sickness the moment Joyoboyo, the eldest of them, had his light extinguished.

His death also impacted Andy, and other forms of angels, who collectively felt off-put and melancholy.

We had no idea of the carnage being inflicted on that part of the globe. But our turn was coming.

With our world entering a new phase of hell, humankind’s remnants did what humankind did best — it warred.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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