March 1, 2012

Andy and I sped away from the lodge. Each turn of the wheels was like sticky bandages being torn from my soul. A sour, murderous rage began to grow in me. I wanted to find and kill all who posed a threat. Just let me share more time with my love.

Once we hit the park highway and turned south, Kenneth led Serena and Madeline out to the chopper. Stacy stood beside the roaring machine and opened the door for Serena, who moved gingerly into it. Madeline slid in beside her and helped her with her seatbelt.

Stacy clambered in beside Kenneth, who pulled the chopper into the thin Yellowstone air as soon as she clipped her seatbelt into place, secured her headset and yipped “okay” into her microphone.

The chopper backed into the sky, revealing the deep blue twinkle of the lake to the east. To the west lay a thick blanket of forest green and Kenneth pushed the chopper forward over it, keeping close to the treetops.

Ridley stepped back inside the lodge and greeted Carrie who had finally awoken. “They shouldn’t be long, he said. We’ve got to finish packing and be ready to roll when he gets back.”

Carrie was already packed. She moved in a fog;  like a dream, within a dream of a dream of a dream of a dream. She awoke wondering I was and shook off the thought. She swore she had just been with me and wrote it off to a powerful dream.

“When they get back from where?” Carrie asked finally.

“From someplace, not sure,” Ridley said through the fog. Carrie looked at him and blinked; the chopper ‘wooped’ into silence in the background.

“Interesting fella,” he said, again through a wavering fog – a thin veil of lace blowing in the breeze.

“His friend, too. Kenneth has told me about him since I was a child.”

Carrie glanced at Ridley. Her face turned into the sharp morning light off Yellowstone Lake and her eyes glowed gentle sapphire.

“What are you talking about?” she yawned.

“Your fella,” Ridley said, smiling.

Carrie asked, “which fellow?”

“Rob… Robert,” Ridley said matter-of-factly, unaware that Carrie didn’t know I had shown up. “And his companion – Andras.”

Carrie’s head suddenly pounded with a dull ache. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Ridley told her what he knew – that a killing machine dark angel and his friend, who was her life partner, had arrived just in time to dispatch an invading helicopter crew, before they heroically drove off to sacrifice themselves.

Carrie sat down hard on the padded bench and stared at Ridley.

“Why the fuck didn’t he wake me up?” She shouted. “Christ all mighty!”

Ridley told her he didn’t have an answer. “Serena spent quite a lot of time with him and really had him torn apart, poor guy.”

Carrie’s heart felt heavy and her throat was dry from suppressing a scream she feared would never end. Weariness wormed through her bones.

“Kenneth just told me to look after you and to be ready for anything,” he said. “And he said he’d be back right away. Never known Kenneth to not hold his word.”

Tears poured out of Carrie’s eyes and she closed them tightly, hoping that would drone out Ridley and take her away. Then she began to feel hope that I would be back soon.

“Who was this friend you said was with Rob?”

Ridley explained the enigma that is Andras, who had kept me from harm and delivered me back into her life – perhaps.

“I am grateful for him,” Carrie said softly.

Andy had the truck skidding around corners. I shouted that he might be immortal but I wasn’t. “You go on about that, too!”

He stared ahead with a small twinkle in his eyes. A vague smirk from a smug distant memory painted his face.

We came upon the trio of trucks in the time it takes to crest a rise in a road at 100 m/ph. The lead vehicle swerved to the left and the second vehicle swerved right. Andy locked up the brakes and our truck howled like a bloodhound with its nuts caught in the tailgate of a mufflerless old pickup.

The third truck was stopping directly ahead of us. Andy shouted “hold on!”

A smash preceded a robust poof of airbags. My head, still not completely itself since the concussion, screamed that it was sick of all this crazy violence shit.

I flumped in my seat and gibbered.

Andy was out the door before the wreck that was our truck had come a halt. The men in the truck we hit were in various forms of disarray when Andy’s blade snuffed their futures.

Ike Pondcaugh, a fetid liar and chronic fouler of children, had been given the vital assignment of establishing a forward position by his BFOTA (best friend of the apocalypse), Jess Oliver, who was in the front passenger seat of the lead truck. He saw the tree come blinking fast and then he saw nothing. The men in the back, to the man not wearing seatbelts, rocketed forward, creating a jiggling projectile of plasma.

The second truck fared better. Its driver skillfully skidded it to a halt and once the baboons in the back stopped squealing, the driver shouted that somebody should do something.

The stunned evil lout in the front passenger seat fumbled for his door latch, flung it open and tried to get out. His chest weighed a ton. He tried to move forward again and noticed the seatbelt still clinging to him. “Fuck!” He shouted and fumbled wildly.

The driver thought he was shouting ‘fuck’ because he had discovered that he was an idiot.

It was actually Andy appearing like a misty apparition with a foot long razor sharp blade plunging. His blade gashed through the passenger’s face and the baboons in the back squealed again. None of them noticed the grenade Andy flipped into the truck.

The Escalade and the six men within it ceased to be with a flaming concussive smack.

The explosion snapped me from my gibbering. I was fumbling to get out of the truck when Andy’s hand grabbed my arm and I slid forward from the truck.  Radiator fluid and oil and gas odors became rank burning plastic and rubber smoke odors. My knees had jackhammers attached to them.

Andy was busy retrieving our weapons from the truck.

“Ok, let’s go,” he said, swatting me across the shoulder and bounding off the highway toward the thick forest.

Sagging on my feet, I surveyed the carnage on and beside the picturesque highway. Andy had killed 18 foul, vile men in less than 50 seconds. If I wasn’t so concussed and heartsick, I would have been proud of my friend.

With heavy feet, I plodded after Andy, who was skirting the woods on the fringe of the highway cut.

He told me that a larger force would be coming next and we had to be prepared. I just huffed, puffed and agreed with him.

Jess Oliver and the bulk of the remaining Mormon Army was now approaching the southern entrance to Yellowstone. Jackson was left for the Wyomings.

Oliver intended to head to West Thumb and split into two forces — with one to head north and the other to head west to Old Faithful.

At the moment Major James Paul Duperow lifted his chopper skyward after re-fueling, Kenneth was setting his down in a small, dry, brown clearing.

Serena croaked in surprise at the sight of the troubled landscape.

Acids and poisons from within Yellowstone Caldera had started to work their chemical wonders on the grasses and trees, killing them fast. West of the clearing, located in the heart of a rarely accessed portion of the great park, were signs of recent tectonic activity. The ridge had bulged by more than 100 feet, Serena guessed as they climbed out of the helicopter.

“We don’t have much time, Madeline. Are you ready?”

The girl’s voice had a strength that Serena had not heard in many months.

“I’m ready,” Madeline said. “But… what for?”

Serena held out her hand to Madeline and Stacy slung a backpack toward the girl, who grabbed it with a quizzical look. Stacy smiled and swept her into her arms, holding her tight.

Kenneth appeared and with tears in his ancient eyes, he wrapped his arms around the three of them.

“It is finally time, old girl,” he chuckled into Serena’s eyes. “Finally, finally!”

He stepped back, placed a hand on Madeline’s cheek and turned away.

Serena tugged at the girl’s sleeve and they moved across the clearing. Once they reached the edge, the helicopter rose into the sky. Stacy waved down at them and Madeline replied in kind, then the chopper disappeared over the trees.

“Where are we going, Serena?” Madeline pleaded as silence folded them into its thin air embrace.

“For a picnic on top of that ridge,” she replied. “It’s time, my love.”

Madeline knew what she meant but she didn’t want to believe it. Her stomach fluttered from butterflies and regret. Her mind churned ‘it’s time’ over and over and over.

They crunched through the brittle remains of a doomed forest.

Serena carried two blankets and a jug of water. In the pack Madeline had over her shoulder was enough food to last them a couple of days.

“So what are we doing again?” Madeline said after a few minutes of crunching.

“We’re going to go have a fire and after a while, cook a nice meal,” Serena replied between puffs of heavy breath. She’d never felt so weak in her long and wondrous life.

Andy heard the Mormon’s chopper a good 30 seconds before I did.

He stopped and said a protracted “hmmm.”

“Okay, this is what we will do,” he then said and I immediately began to protest.

His plan was to stand in the middle of the road and wave at the helicopter. And when it moved toward him, I was supposed to start firing at it with my 30-30.

“That’s just loopy,” I howled. “What if it just cuts you into tiny pieces with one of those chain gun things?”

Andy said it wasn’t one of those kind of choppers and before I could ask him how he knew that, he was off for the road. “Prick!” I shouted.

I took a position behind a man-thick cedar tree and checked my ammo. I had ‘about’ 30 shells in my pocket and another 30 in my backpack. I chuckled at ‘30-30.’

Andy whistled and I looked up. Moving quickly up the centre of the road clearing was a basic six-seater helicopter. The pilot could see smoke farther up the roadway and believed he was looking at one of his own men. A survivor of the obvious attack, he thought and maneouvered the helicopter toward Andy, who waved frantically at it.

I stared through my scope and could only see one person in the chopper. The sites danced off the pilot to the skids back to the pilot, to the skids then suddenly to the woods across the road. The chopper thudded lightly to the roadway. Andy was running toward it in a crouch.

I watched through my scope as Andy appeared at the door to the chopper and the pilot cautiously opened it, holding a handgun. It was pointed at Andy’s head. In a blink the pilot was tumbling out the door of the chopper. In the time that I blinked, staring into the scope, Andy’s blade whisked out and sliced the pilot’s trigger/index finger off. The impact of the blade against the handgun made it fire but Andy had already moved and pulled the pilot to the ground.

The pilot’s sordid sins flooded to the surface as he begged for his life. Terror spun through him. He felt Andy before he landed. He felt terror but he felt compelled to land… to see… and now he was going to die. Andy’s black gaze tore into him in advance of his blade and the pilot died shuddering and shitting himself in the centre of the parkway, just north of West Thumb.

Andy waved at me to join him. I stepped from the woods and watched him climb into the helicopter. In a few seconds I was seated next to him and he lifted the craft expertly into the air.

“You fly helicopters but prefer to drive dirt bikes and such?” I barked over the noise of the engine.

“Thanks for shooting at the helicopter,” he replied bluntly.

We floated into the winter sky, which was a shade of blue that no human had ever seen in Yellowstone for that time of year, and roared south.

The helicopter was void of any weapons, aside from some rifles and side arms. I asked Andy what our plan was “now.”

He said he didn’t know. But he intended to “rain hell on someone.”

 

Kenneth and Stacy returned to the lodge and once the helicopter was refueled, they all clambered aboard and rose back into the sky. Carrie’s eyes darted over the terrain as Kenneth pushed the chopper west toward West Yellowstone.

I was nowhere to be seen. I was moving toward an advancing column of demon thugs — bent on stopping them from getting to my love.

That’s how I saw things, anyway. But the fact was Andy was going to take care of it, while I ducked for cover or served as a decoy.

A few miles away Jess Oliver’s column branched west while a second rolled north toward us.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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