March 15, 2012

Andy I spent the night in a farmhouse near Eagle Lake. It was a night rocked by earthquakes and terrifying dreams, for me. Each nerve-shredding series of images that rampaged through my feverish mind included various fatal ends for Carrie. On cue, the earth would shake, I’d have a vision of Carrie being set upon by a large bear or run over by a maniac or brutally murdered by some pharmaceuticals-fried psycho and I’d awake in a fit of stammering and slobbering.

Andy’s laughter stopped the cycle and I sat up on the musty couch I’d passed out on several hours before.

Thunder rolled in the distance and it appeared to be raining through the streaked living room window but there was no soothing pitter and patter and splitter and splatter. Ash was falling faster and heavier than before.

Noticing I was awake, Andy said, “The jetstream has changed and there seems to be a wicked amount of subductive activity.” Punctuating his observation, the old house trembled and creaked again. I gripped the sofa cushions and winced.

When Yellowstone exploded, it set off a chain reaction of events that would become the new definition of apocalypse, had there been humans around to seize on it.

The ash and fallout from the massive eruption, roughly 1,000 times greater than Mount St. Helens last tizzy, piled up 10 feet high in some locations in the Mid West.

Luckily for us, the blast itself pushed due east, with the blast wave and pyroclastic flow carving its way in a speartip shape northeast toward Billings, Montana, southeast along the Continental Divide in Wyoming and due east into the Bighorn Mountains.

Its force and fallout fanned, rolled and snarled as far east as Sioux City, Iowa, northeast to Yorkton, Saskatchewan and southeast to Garden City, Kansas. For a further 100 miles from that fan-line, the ash rolled overland, pushed by the prevailing winds.

All life within that area, however rancid and undeserving, came to an end.

A true bright side to this calamity was the long-needed demise of Fred Phelps, pastor of Westboro Baptist Church. A demented maniac, Phelps became wrongly famous for his crazed campaigns against homosexuality, other religions and pretty much everything else that he viewed as evil and sick and wrong with the world.

He was listening to God Hates the World, his church choir’s rendition of the late Michael Jackson’s We Are the World, on the cassette player in the old Chevy truck he’d killed one of his parishioners for in order to escape Topeka and the clutches of the evil Kansas Army warlord. Sadly for him, that warlord was his own daughter, Margie. The chorus was just hitting when a gritty, almost viscous cloud of ash and dust and soil slammed into him. Phelps screamed for God’s help as the truck was knocked sideways into a shallow ditch. The truck rolled twice and Phelps felt burning pain in his rectum before he passed out.

Once it was clear the apocalypse was in motion, and Phelps and several dozen of his followers and family members were left behind to start a brave new world free of evil and unholy beings, he set about establishing a great crusading army to span across the land, crushing unbelievers, Jews and faggots.

What he didn’t count on was his batshit daughter turning on him. Mere weeks after the disappearance, she had her father beaten and jailed and she embarked on a murderous rampage across Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri and up into Iowa, where she was halted by a determined band of insurance agents, crop modification engineers and government workers from Des Moines and area at the Battle of Waukee.

The Iowanians drove her back across the Missouri and she ultimately fled south to Topeka. As Margie licked her wounds and sent troops out to round up more soldiers so she could embark on another crusade, Margie had ‘fag’ tattooed in bright pink on her father’s forehead.

Phelps finally coerced a former parishioner to have pity on him and help him get away. He rewarded the trusting, child abusing farmer with a steak knife through the right eye. That was a week ago. Phelps had been running scared ever since, sneaking from prairie town to prairie town seeking food and gas.

He came to dangling from his lap belt in the overturned truck and screamed in pain. When the truck rolled, the pile of placards laying against the passenger seat, bearing such messages as ‘God hates fags,’ ‘Thank god for Dead Soldiers’ and ‘USA fag nation’ were snapped like whip ends through the cab and when the truck rolled a second time, a placard handle holding a sign stating ‘God hates you’ was rammed through his blue jeans straight into his rectum.

Dangling in the truck cab, whimpering, Phelps tried to extract the placard handle and he screamed in agony again. Realizing he needed more leverage, he unclasped the seat belt and when he fell to the roof of the truck cab, the placard handle pushed further into him, gouging into his intestines.

Phelps lay in a tight fetal position and wept like a child. As his rotten life leaked from his ass, his truck was methodically covered by ash and dust and by the time he died, about three agonizing hours later, from blood loss and his lungs filling with cement, Phelps prayed and prayed, ‘God hates you’ protruding from his bum.

Because of the mixture of ash and dust and the oncoming frozen hell of a world denied sunlight from the amount of material in the Earth’s atmosphere, Phelps would become a well-preserved example of fringe lunacy – almost mummified inside the truck with the most appropriate of signs hanging from his ass, providing would-be archaeologists with lots to work with.

Thousands of sick, evil souls died in rapid succession, as the massive cloud of doom fanned out and over Montana, Wyoming, southern Saskatchewan, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado and western Kansas – their throats first torn to ribbons from the abrasive material falling and the mixture of blood, ash and saliva.

Only the weak western winds spared those farther downwind, saving them for the slow crawl to freezing death.

Being on the other side of the Rockies, all that came our way were dustings of ash – at first.

Andy had us moving at first light.

We entered the one-time fortress town of Susanville as the sun strained through the dark eastern horizon. Their numbers badly dwindled, the demon-troops there fled back to Reno and disappointing deaths at the hands of an unimpressed lieutenant the night before.

Andy decided to take the time to stop at round up extra fuel and weapons, which were plentiful in the abandoned post.

He was bound and determined to get us to Long Valley as soon as possible.

“They’re probably there by now,” he said, staring at the strip of highway grey that rolled below the off-pitch grey that the sky had become in the dusty morning light.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Carrie. I was convinced Andy would get me to her once again; my dead world demon master friend deserved my confidence in him.

Expecting too many obstacles near Reno, Andy skirted us down back roads to Truckee, where we came upon another abandoned post with several dead bodies, covered in gleeful crows,  mixed in for good measure. We then followed the western shore of Lake Tahoe and I actually found myself thrilling at the view, badly interrupted at times by hanging clouds of ash that settled slowly into the lake waters.

It was 2:22 p.m. when we passed through Devil’s Gate and Andy declared that whoever named the location “didn’t know diddly about devil’s gates.”

Half an hour later we entered Mono County and Long Valley.

Stopped at an overlook by Mono Lake, with the Sierra Nevada Mountains towering above us, Andy sighed. “Guess I didn’t think it would that hard to find them once we got here,” he said. “This could take a little bit.” He rolled back onto the highway and we pushed toward Lee Vinning and then past the entrance to Yosemite National Park.

I thought of John Muir and Kenneth’s face appeared, making me blurt, “Fuck off.”

Andy looked hurt.

“Not you,” I said, startled by my flirtation with Tourettes. “Hey, what about Yosemite?” I suggested.

Andy drove past the Highway 120 turnoff. “Nuh, uh,” he puffed.Half an hour later we pulled into Mammoth Lakes, tucked into the edge of the Long Valley caldera.

The lack of crazies shooting at us was becoming something of a sore point for Andy, who was once again becoming increasingly agitated. What he wasn’t telling me was that he couldn’t ‘feel’ Kenneth or Stacy or Carrie. And with each passing mile and minute, he seemed to be getting darker and moodier. I began to fear a return of the Gardiner Andy and started making jibber-jabber conversation out of my growing fear.

We rolled through the chaos that was Mammoth Lakes; we drove up to the ski resort and back down to the town. Darkness forced us to call off our search and we took refuge inside a palatial ‘cabin’ on the southern outskirts of the town.

Half an hour later I was stirring some Scotch Broth soup in a pot balanced on a glowing log in the cabin’s living room fireplace when the lamps and ceiling fans began to rattle. I took a nervous sip of the beer I’d found in the long-dead fridge. A few seconds more and the entire cabin began swaying as a massive earthquake rolled through Long Valley.

Andy suggested we take refuge beneath the entryway to the living room, which included a massive central beam above us. I grabbed the pot of soup and, standing, trembling from the steady pulsating roll of the world, I slopped a spoonful of the lamb goo into my mouth.

I didn’t taste the soup. All that went through my head was, “Carrie didn’t like this stuff.”

The ripples from the Yellowstone eruption shuddered through the Earth’s crust and mantel, that set off a chain reaction of earthquakes and tremors along every fault.

About 120 miles off the west coast, running north-south between Northern California and the northern end of Vancouver Island, the Cascadia Subduction Zone was violently ripped open, splitting the Juan de Fuca and North American plates farther apart. Had there been scientists around to look at seismographs, there would have been a great deal of exuberant professional curiosity followed by shrieks of soul-smashing terror. The 9.3 Richter Scale quake and its subsequent tsunami made the 2011 Japan (Tohoku) event seem isolated and puny and the rupture below the ocean was eight times the size of the 2004 Indian Ocean event. The Pacific charged into the mainland with terrifying speed, hitting the continent in a fan shape that spanned from the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the north to San Francisco in the south.

Water surged through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, obliterating Victoria and then, hitting shallower water, rolled and slammed 60 feet high down onto Richmond and over the Fraser Valley. The vast majority of Greater Vancouver was inundated or erased. To the south, Mount Baker steamed and trembled.

Seattle, protected from the islands of Puget Sound, was spared the blunt edge of the tsunami but water levels rose to the sixth floor of downtown buildings.

The Columbia River’s massive roll, smashing into the Pacific at Astoria, created challenges for the largest tsunami in recorded human history, but Portland still suffered from flooding that the Columbia and Willamette Rivers never came close to performing prior to the heavy damming of the Columbia.

The greatest force of the tsunami, a relentless wave 115 feet high, hit Crescent City dead centre. Had there been a population in the town, aside from a few hundred corvids, it would have been wiped away. All along the Pacific Coast, towns and cities were obliterated.

Greater San Francisco suffered much the same fate as Greater Vancouver – with 50 foot waves smashing into it. The San Francisco Army, headquartered at Alcatraz, was completely destroyed by the tsunami, as was the old prison.

The adjacent San Andreas Fault began to slip and burp – and dozens of quakes, from 5.0 to 8.5, turned the entire West Coast of America and much of Canada and Baja Mexico into roiling death zones. Mountains collapsed; cities vanished. And then more water came.

Greater Los Angeles was ablaze and flooded at the same time; its glass and steel skyline cracked, tilting and glowing from fire.

On cue, all the volcanoes associated with the Cascadia Subduction Zone began burping and farting and thousands more tremors and earthquakes radiated through the Earth’s crust.

Mount Baker stopped smoking and immediately after, Mount Garibaldi woofed its cookies. Ash and debris began pouring down on Squamish and Whistler, and some made its way over to Vancouver to mix with the subsiding ocean waters.

One by one down the Cascade Volcanic Arc, volcanoes began springing and stretching to destructive life.

After its nap, Mount Baker blew its top, and then Mt, Rainier; Mt. St. Helens, bursting westward this time, and then Mt. Adams erupted. Glacier Peak strained like a drunk over a toilet but refrained from blowing its load.

Inspired by Mt. Adams’ show, Mt. Hood proclaimed its superiority, while Mt. Jefferson and Three Sisters rattled and rolled and steamed like angry cartoon characters. Mazama (Crater Lake) hissed and sizzled and south into California, Mount Shasta, long slumbering, popped its top. The pyroclastic flow erased the town of McCloud.

Last to erupt was Lassen Peak. First the Fantastic Lava Beds flowed to life and then, in perfect natural harmony with the Earth’s sudden massive spasms, Yellowstone’s ripples hit their peak.

Huddled in the cook shake, four kilometres away, Carrie wept, her face buried into Stacy’s right ear. Stacy tried to comfort her but her voice gave away her own fear. Kenneth stood by the door and peeked out the narrow crack he dared allow. The world outside was a swirling, throat shredding fog; the ground trembled relentlessly.

The air inside the shack was growing increasingly harsh and Kenneth closed the door. He reached into a pack for a couple of t-shirts and poured water onto them. After squeezing excess moisture from them, he handed them to Carrie and Stacy and instructed them to wrap them around their faces.

Carrie drank in the sudden, soothing coolness from the wet t-shirt and thanked Kenneth. She pulled her head away from Stacy and they locked eyes. Carrie’s piercing blue eyes gave Stacy a surge of calm and she smiled beneath her cooling wrap.

An ear piercing crack thundered the brief peaceful respite into retreat. Carrie grabbed Stacy’s good arm and the cracked cement floor of the shack heaved and buckled.

“Go ye my angels; go ye with the love you are and make a better world than this one,” Kenneth shouted, his voice barely audible over the roaring wave of conclusion that hit the shack like a piece of ancient paper being inserted into an incinerator.

Kenneth, the most ancient of Earth’s angels, took one last breath and the final second before the blast wave, greater than two nukes combined popped him into nothingness, whispered, “Go ye angels.”

Carrie and Stacy watched as their world turned into a hellish conflagration and the peace of a womb consumed them. Carrie felt her hand let go of Stacy’s arm and she turned to look for the source of the tug she was feeling. Stacy’s eyes, mouth, ears and nostrils glowed a low gold. Her face was serene and Carrie realized she was also feeling enormously tranquil. She felt no fear; she felt no pain; she felt no remorse; the guilt she carried over not seeing her children before the disappearance and over leaving me alone in a dying world dissipated into elation. She remembered standing shoulder-to-shoulder with me at the Remembrance Day ceremony in Cranbrook. A train whistled in the distance as the Canadian flag fluttered in a stiff breeze.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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