March 1, 2012

Kenneth heard the tires squeal and announced to Serena, “They’re coming.”

I stopped the truck beside Serena’s and we stepped out. Andy stretched, as if he had just taken a nice, long tour through the park and was now heading into the lodge for lunch. I ran ahead of him and burst through the doors of the lodge — straight into Kenneth.

“Whoa there,” he said, holding his hands out. I looked past him.

Carrie lay on a bench in the centre of the lodge foyer. My eyes told me she was here but my mind was reeling. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Andy stepped into the lodge and slapped me on the back. “Well there ya go, my friend.”

My legs felt like well-sucked licorice as I stumbled to her. Her angel’s eyes were closed and she was in a deep sleep.

Kenneth, keeping his eyes on Andy barked, “She’s out and will be for a while I should reckon. Don’t wake her. She needs to rest.”

“Aw, baby angels,” Andy said, “They do need their nap time, don’t they Ken?”

Kenneth crossed his arms over his chest and said, “well, I haven’t seen or heard about you in… what? How long has it been?”

Andy shrugged. “Not a clue old fella. Must be a couple of hundred years at least. How ya been?”

Kenneth, who was now joined by Serena, shrugged back. “Been much worse Andras. But here we are, eh? The time has finally arrived.”

Andy noted, “It surely has, hasn’t it?”

He offered Kenneth his hand and after a few second pause, he accepted Andy’s expansive, wiry appendage.

“Good to see you again old woman,” Andy said.

Serena grimaced at him and then stepped toward me. “Come,” she said, grabbing my elbow and leading me to Carrie.

I sat beside her and a tsunami of love and unchecked emotions exploded from me. Serena’s hand on my back gave a jolt of awareness and I scooped Carrie into my arms. I pulled her close and felt her warm breath on my cheek. It was the greatest moment of my life. I never felt happiness such as that before and never would again.

Andy walked back toward Kenneth. “So the holy eye… is she ready old fella?”

Kenneth snorted and grinned at him.

Through gushing sobs of relief I whispered into Carrie’s ear that I had her and that everything was going to be okay. I blubbered like a wired baby.

Serena sat beside me and nudged me with her butt to give her some room. I shuffled Carrie forward and carefully laid her head back down on the thin bench cushion.

“Is she okay?”

Serena nodded and said she’d been sleeping for hours. “She is preserving her energy, literally,” she said. “She will be with you soon, dear.”

I looked at her through eyes filled with tears of joy. “Thank you,” I said through gusts of snot-filled blubbering. “Thank you for letting me be with her. You have no idea how much this means to me.”

Serena said she knew exactly how I was feeling.

“Love is the greatest thing in the universe,” she said. “It is the glue that binds all life together and it is the engine that powers all of us. But you know that, don’t you.”

She patted my shoulder and I gave her my hand, feeling gratitude of the like I never knew existed. I was surprised at the strength of her grip, for being such an old woman.

Serena offered me a smile that was as warm as sunshine on your face after emerging from a cold basement. I turned back to Carrie and wished my eyes could burrow into her mind and shout out that I had found her.

“I have to tell you,” Serena began, “before you get to far into this, that you won’t be able to see her for long.”

My head snapped back toward her from my non-stop gaze upon Carrie. “No. What do you mean?”

Serena said she believed I knew what she meant.

“Kenneth told me everything, dear. He’s quite impressed with you, you know that?”

I gawped at her. “Huh?”

“Yes, he didn’t think you could do it and he’s absolutely impressed. That ole poop doesn’t admit to being anything, besides hungry,” she said.

I gawped at her to tell me more.

“That you have allied yourself with his old adversary Andras, lord of hell’s legions. To get here shows that you have the heart of a lion,” she said with a decidedly cryptic tone that bordered on humour.

I repeated my question. “What do you mean,” I said, a vague anger welling in me.

“The time is coming for us all to perform our duty. You, me, Carrie, Kenneth, Andras… all of us. Now that Kenneth and I are together, and our charges are secure, we can set about the end. The pre-ordained splendor of it all,” she said excitedly. “Truly amazing. Just like we were told it would be. Amazing really.”

I said to this kind old lady that I had given up trying to understand what was happening around me. “I always believed I would find her,” I cried and leaned forward into Carrie again. My face pressed against hers and I let my lips press down on hers.

“I’ll never let her go again,” I said, sitting back up and looking at Serena with a purpose.

“Rob,” she said firmly, “Listen to me. You do not have any say in how things will occur but you are paramount in all of it. You are who you are and you are not like Carrie. You cannot be like Carrie and you cannot go with Carrie.”

I asked where she was going.

“She is going to a new world — to a new life and she will be very important to the well-being of that world and of all its souls. I thank you with all humility for ensuring her safe passage to Kenneth.”

Instinctively I told her she was welcome and asked, “Kenneth didn’t say anything other than that I am evil and that I had to get lost. So why am I now so important?”

Serena’s voice lowered and Kenneth’s and Andy’s voices bounced off the high ceiling of the foyer, like monks seeking divination in a grand cathedral.

“I know it is hard for you but the fact is you are evil, Bob. I can feel it surging from you now. Such an anger… such hatred that has existed in your heart. I am so sorry for you, for having to feel that all these years.”

I sighed, “Evil. I know I am not evil. I know I am a good man.”

Serena said there was no doubt. “Not all evil men are bad men,” she said.

“There are many layers to evil, Rob. You seem like a very nice fella… and my heart breaks to think that you must stand aside and watch your love disappear,” Serena said softly after a few moments of unwelcome silence. Carrie’s breathing offered a rhythmic cadence to the stillness.

I leaned toward her to hear her better. “What do you mean stand aside?”

Serena patted my knee and looked hard into my eyes. “You know why Rob.”

I shook my head and tears of broad frustration fell from my eyes.

Serena removed her hand from my knee and wiped a tear from my cheek.

“Rob, you have a massive hole in the centre of your soul and within that cavity is a hatred that has consumed you at times in your life. Right?”

“I guess so,” I sobbed.

“You have felt angers that pushed you into the realm of evil. Instead of stepping back and seeing the light in the world — in seeing the positives that sway too and fro in the passages of time and space, you have chosen to see the dark… to see the negative and that in turn, like a cancer, has led you to this point in time. I don’t know why you are evil because I am not a mind reader, nor do I know anything about your past, but I can see your aura and there is a hue in it that sadly declares you to be an evil person. In the new world, evil must be allowed to grow on its own, to spring forth from the natural essences of the universe because evil is the bum on the other side of the teeter-totter,” Serena said.

My head slipped down and my hands grasped it, as if to stop it from rolling onto the floor.

“Did you ever seek help for your anger?” she continued. “Like get counseling?”

I told her I hadn’t.

“Then how did you deal with your anger?”

I told her I smoked a lot of pot and, being an Irish-Viking, tended to gravitate to fermented beverages.

“So you masked it then. How did you deal with it when you were a child?” She said, her voice ringed with urgency, declaring this was the zooming in point.

“I don’t know. I got mad, I guess.”

“Did you lash out? Did you hurt people or yourself? Did you ever behave in a violent manner toward yourself?”

I nodded yes.

“All of it,” I said with a shuddering sob and I hunched further forward, resting my elbows on my lap.

Serena’s hand came to rest on my head and I felt an immediate calm wash through me.

“You do have a great desire to love, don’t you? That makes me feel very sad,” Serena said quietly.

In the background, Kenneth continued to spar with Andy, whose occasional punctuations of laughter rang out like a cry in a dark wilderness — like a loon cry over a still lake.

“All I want is my Carrie,” I said with a heaving, creaking sob. “Why should my anger — my failure to come to grips with the cards I was dealt in this life be the deciding factor now. I was a fucking child,” I rasped.

“What did you do?” Serena pushed.

“What do you mean?”

Serena voice firmed up and her hand left the back of my head. “The fact is Rob, you never came face-to-face with your hatred and anger and that creature over there knows that. He has brought you along for a reason and it isn’t friendship or companionship or safety. He is the most dangerous being possibly left on this world and this world’s ending is due in part to his manifestations and schemes. We are, at this time, perched on the edge of the abyss and there is a perfect balance. His presence here is as welcomed as we are. We need Andras as he needs us but Andras also cannot come with us or there will be unnatural balance in the new world. He must be born again and he must not step through the holy eye. So I am asking you for help. I am asking you, for the sake of your love… for that angel over there — to come to terms with your anger when the time comes and sacrifice yourself.”

I sat upright and wiped the tears from my face.

“I would march through hell for her,” I said. “I have been, as a matter of fact.”

“And so you shall my friend,” Serena replied. “And if you do, you will be absolved. You will have to ride out your days in this dying world but you will know that your love will be safe from further harm.”

I said that would be a perfect outcome, almost.

“What made you angry as a child?” Serena asked again.

“A lot of things, I guess,” I said.

“What was done to you to rip open that hole in your middle?”

I whispered that I had been sexually abused when I was 10.

“Oh dear, the evils…” Serena said. “And you never told anyone, I should think. You never talked to anyone about it.”

I nodded. “I couldn’t,” I said with a new pack of sobs stampeding up my throat.

“Why not?”

“Because it was a coach. How could I say anything? I was fucking 10 and I was scared out of my mind,” I said. “I mean, how do you…”

“I know dear,” Serena said softly, caressing my hair with her electric hand. “But that led to you acting out, didn’t it.”

I told her about fits of savage rage that explode from me when I would become frustrated and or felt helpless. I told her about how I would slap myself silly. I remembered, when I was 16, punching myself in the head so hard that I concussed myself. I told her about going on murderous rampages about my parents’ country estate in Winnipeg, killing anything that came into my gun-sights — squirrels, birds of all kinds, even cats, skunks and raccoon.

“I couldn’t help myself,” I wept. “As soon as I would put the final shell into an animals head, or check on a bird to see that it was dead, I would feel sick to my stomach. But then I’d hear a squirrel chattering across the way and the hunt would be on again.”

Serena said such behavior wasn’t all that uncommon for angry boys.

“What else did you do?”

I told her about how I vandalized my neighbourhood and how later in my teenaged years I resorted to break and entry and shoplifting. I told her about how I plotted to commit crimes of all stripe.

“I didn’t know how to stop myself,” I said.

“What about your parents?” She said, almost checking off the question from the standard shrink queries.

“What about them?”

“Did they love you?”

I said they did.  “Of course they loved me,” I said defensively.

“Did they love you enough?”

“They loved me as much as any person could love an adopted child.”

Serena let a silence settle over us.

Andy laughed in the background and Kenneth harrumphed, “Ye stupid bastard, you never could get that through your head, could you?”

“So you were adopted? Who were your real parents?”

I told her that all I knew was what I discovered after my daughter was born. I wrote to the Manitoba Adoption Agency asking for medical history, to ensure there was no generation skipping problems we might have to be aware about and a few months later I received a detailed 20 page letter that outlined everything about my birth parents and their immediate families.

“They even told me about what my mother and father were good at in school, what kind of sports they played, how well they did in school and at sports and what their interests and dislikes were. They told me about my grandparents and…” I laughed weakly, “My mom’s father was me. It was so bizarre. The way he was described, he sounded like me. His sense of humour, his likes and whatnot. And the description of my mother made me see her in my daughter. I was living on the Sunshine Coast, north of Vancouver, when I got that letter and I remember sitting in the parking lot of the post office, in Gibsons, weeping as I read the letter. It made me want my mother. It made want to know my parents and that family, but I never tried to contact them.”

Why?” Serena urged.

“Because I couldn’t do that to my parents.”

“Your adopted parents,” she said, seeking clarification.

“Yeah. They didn’t deserve that.”

Serena asked me how old I was when I was adopted.

“Well, my adopted mother told me I was brought home just before Christmas and I was born September 3.”

Serena’s gaze softened again.

“The most important time in an infant’s development is the first three months. So you spent your first three months in a hospital. I bet you cried your tiny eyes out, craving your mother’s love, craving touch and voices and sensations. You poor soul. That right there tells me a great deal about how your anger was born. When you got older, life and its ways came at you and roots of evil began to sprout in that cavity. Anger and hatred was the soil, fertilizer, water and sunshine that nurtured them.”

I said that I always believed that I was a good person, despite indiscretions. “If I wasn’t a good person, how did I manage to make an angel-in-waiting fall in love with me?”

Serena told me that answer dwelled within nature’s infinite wisdom.

“There is a reason for everything, dear. It’s why you led Carrie to Stacy and then led them to Kenneth and then appeared here to conclude your purpose in your life. Like I said, there are countless layers to evil. Some people hit the very bottom and become hell creatures. You — I’d say you are about as mildly evil as there is. You are at the top and your reason for being — your mission in this life — was to be here, now. To be here tomorrow. To take your love’s hand to the precipice and see her safely to a new life. It is terrible for you to hear this, dear, I know that, truly, but all that happened to you from being born and taken from your natural mother, being left wanting in a crib and then being rescued by a loving adoptive family and given a chance to have a life, then moving forward, all that you did, all that happened to you, all led you to this point. This world is over, dear. The living who are left, such as yourself, are the burnt bits on the bottom of a pot of overcooked soup. This world is long overcooked and the time has come to renew. Even if you had not come across Andras, you’d be here now, you know that?”

I told her I didn’t understand how that could have happened.

“It just would have. Luck of the Irish-Viking, if you will,” she said winking.

“Am I going to die?” I asked with a dry shudder.

“We are all going to die,” Serena smiled. “I can’t wait, personally. These very old bones have become wearying. I have never know such pains as I have been feeling the last few years and I have lived a thousand lives. It pains me to the quick to think of what kind of pawn your life has been, Rob. We are all tools in the grand design and you should feel honoured, if you can, to know that you have the highest purpose of any soul left on this world.”

I told Serena that wasn’t comforting.

“Perhaps not,” she said. “Perhaps not. But I am honoured to know you, young man. I have always known this moment in time would happen. I prepared for this moment for more than a thousand years. My purpose is about to unfold in finality and perhaps I am a bit too giddy for my own good,” she laughed softly.

Carrie moaned and turned on the bench.

“Come now, dear. Let her sleep and let’s get some food into you.”

Like a boy obeying his mother, I rose from the bench, never taking my eyes from Carrie.

At that moment, in a small, greasy kitchen in a Ugandan hovel, Joseph Kony burned his hand with boiling water. His shriek of pain was heard by a pack of cats nearing the hovel and they circled the sun-baked building. Once the lead cat found the open window that led into the kitchen that was it for the savage life of Kony. More than 40 starving cats filed into the open window and swarmed the ex-warlord, who shrieked and waved his hands in a pathetic jabbing manner, like a marionette in a wind tunnel.

Perched intensely in the front of the chopper, Beasley looked down at West Thumb as they flew over and momentarily marveled at the intense Adriatic blue of the bubbling waters that line the lake, formed after the last massive blast of the super-volcano.

A few moments later we heard the chopper approaching.

Kenneth looked at Andy and shook his head. “I expected shenanigans from you, Andras. You never disappoint me.”

Andy wore a large, silly grin and he tittered, which didn’t fit his imposing stature.

I gently placed Carrie back onto the bench and, keeping one hand on her head, asked, “What is that, a helicopter?”

Andy said he believed it was.

Beasley spotted smoke billowing from the lodge and radioed the tailing ground squad to pick up their pace.

“I’ve got ‘em,” he said.

Less than 90 miles away, Duperow banked his machine over Jackson. Pillars of smoke rose from burning vehicles and buildings and he couldn’t make heads or tails out of the chaos below.

A ‘zing’ sound told him that he was being fired upon and he forced his helicopter upward. While doing so his radio told him that Beasley “got ‘em” and he laughed, thinking that was a reference to the singular rifle shell that hit the bottom of his heavily armoured ship.

“Okay,” he blustered and zeroed in on a target below. A rocket raced away and then another and a second or two later, two large black and white clouds burst upward from downtown Jackson. Both rockets made an impact, blowing a hole in the slowly advancing Wyoming line. The Mormons cheered, believing the chopper was on their side. Duperow then expertly banked his craft north and unleashed two more rockets at a makeshift barricade of vehicles and other debris stretched across the highway at the north entrance to town. Once again his aim was true and another hole was ripped open, this time in the Mormon line.

With that, he eyed his fuel gauge and opted to head back to Idaho Falls for supplies, and to initiate a troop movement to Jackson.

Beasley directed his pilot to set the small chopper down at the southern edge of Grant Village. He and the two men seated in the back clambered out and, ducking, raced for cover beside a water pump shed.

His plan was to reconnoiter the lodge and wait for reinforcements.

He’d just begun to direct his men to take up fire positions with a view of the front and back doors of the lodge when a dark figure appeared in a clearing, about 150 yards down a small slope before them.

The figure appeared unarmed but it didn’t matter. Beasley’s men felt sweat icicles course down their spines, as did he. They froze.

“Get him,” Beasley said, panicking.

His men said nothing. He turned his M-16 toward them, and then glanced back toward the dark figure, which had disappeared.

“Where’d he go?” One of his men blubbered, terror bursting from his throat.

In the lodge, Kenneth, Serena and I had taken up defensive positions at windows.

“He won’t be long,” Kenneth said. “If there is one thing that creature can accomplish right, it is the death of others. How fitting he is here now.”

I felt a gush of pride in my friend and once again felt eminently relieved to have such a lethal chum. My cold, sweaty hands palmed the shotgun in my hand.

Beasley and his two men formed a triangle near their chopper and waited for another glimpse of the figure. This time it was going to be hell raining down on him in the form of withering M-16 fire, Beasley said to himself.

It was his last thought. Andy swooped in on them, brandishing the two foot-long blades that he kept in a unique sheath strapped on his back beneath his outrider coat.

He threw one blade that struck Beasley in the centre of his face, making his men turn and look with shocked awe and they then failed to get a bead on Andy.

In the lodge, we heard two short bursts of rifle fire and Kenneth laughed out loud.

“He’s getting slow! There was a time when no one would have seen him before they felt his blades.”

I heard my voice before my brain could tell me to be quiet.

“Okay, what the fuck is the deal with you guys?”

Kenneth brushed me off with a wave of his hand.

“It is a story none of us have the time to impart to you. Just know that we’ve known one another and known of one another for as long as humans have been humans.”

I blew a half-hearted raspberry and muttered, “whatever… whatever.”

The sound of a helicopter engine speeding up to take off forced silence upon us. A few moments later, Andy set the machine down on the parking lot to the north of the lodge and sauntered back inside.

“I should think there will be more coming,” he smiled. “That was just a scouting force.”

Kenneth glared at him. He knew he needed Andy and Andy knew it as well, but there was a reason he gave their positions away.

“Come one Rob, we’ve got some work to do,” Andy said. “There’s a chopper there for you Kenneth. Has lots of fuel. That should help whisk you away. Don’t worry, we’ll cover you.”

Kenneth scratched his chin and pondered what steps he had to take to stay ahead of Andy.

I reluctantly followed Andy out the door, brandishing my shotgun, with a 30-30 strapped across my back and my trusty Glock holstered on my belt.

“It has truly begun, Serena,” Kenneth said as we clomped out the door. I cast a look back at Carrie and had to wrench myself forward to leave her there. An angry panic washed through me as I felt I wouldn’t see her again.

“Not now God,” I prayed.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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