Month: March 2011

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

“Now is not the time for this!”

That’s what I kept telling myself over and over. If I said it enough times perhaps it would come true. Now was not the time to freak out, now was the time for action.

“What one do we take” Rain had to raise her voice over the rising pitch of the wind.

Before us sat three black holes. Each with cars clogging their respective entrances. The Lincoln tunnel built in the early 30’s, once considered a marvel of engineering, was now little more than the final resting place for hundreds of abandoned cars.

Smoke gently billowed from the center tunnel making our choice a bit easier.

“Eeeny meeny… fuck it we go left” And that was that. I followed Rain into the left tunnel.

Now is not the time for this, now is not the time for this, now is not the time for this… My palms began to sweet, my face felt warm.

We threaded our way forward into the blackness, dodging over and around cars the best we could. My brain, in a vain attempt to stay calm, was flinging random ideas at me. If only the authorities had banned cars from the tunnels and used buses instead they could have moved thousands of more people through here to safety. God bless Americans and their attachment to their cars.

After 100 yards the cars started to get closer together, and the road began to go downhill. After 200 yards we were forced to turn our bicycle lights on to see in the ever increasing darkness. After 300 yards we had to start lifting our bikes over the cars and walking on the roofs.  After 400 yards I lost it.

My vision narrowed down into tiny black dots, and the familiar feeling of consciousness leaving me struck and I had to sit down. My bike fell against an unmoving car making a loud noise.

“Q What The FUCK is wrong with you!” What was her problem; all I wanted to do was curl up next to my bicycle light and puke my guts out while hyperventilating.

“I am scared of dark enclosed spaces.” It attempted to explain.

Rain placed her bike against the side of a car and walked over to me, finding me in the dark by following the faint outline I made against the flickering bike light. She emerged from the darkness her face a pale white in the faint light.

“Q, get up, come on we have to go”

“I can’t move, my legs wont move Rain, just go on without me, I will stay here you can get me on the way back”

“Fuck that Q, I need you, get up, get up, GET UP!”

She reached down and put her hands on my shoulders; her long hair had spilled free from her helmet and caressed my forehead and ear. I could smell the leather and sweat from our long ride. She put her face close to mine.

“Listen Q, you are ok, this is what we are going to do, you are going to get up, and we are going to walk out of here, and then we are going to find my brother and Marla and we are going to get the fuck out of town before a giant hurricane kills us all”

To punctuate her rally the troop’s speech she kissed me forcefully. Her athletic body pressed against mine, her lips pressing against mine while her fingers ran up my back and entangled themselves in my hair, holding my face hard against her mouth.

The shock was physical, mental and complete.

“Rain, what, what are you doing!” I stood and sputtered at the same time.

“See your legs work, now lets get going.” Did I detect a hint of a smile in the darkness?

I began moving again, slowly at first and then faster. We threw our bikes over our shoulders and began to leap from car to car. They were crammed so close together that we could almost walk on them.

Before long the road began to flatten out, the smell of burning, mold, and human waste combined to form a noxious potion. The sound of running water could be heard and the road surface was clearly filling with water. Was this a break down in some sort of pump, or was the storm surge from Ophelia pushing water into the tunnel? All of these ideas were clearly for someone else to worry about because we had to move.

After what seemed an eternity we began to hear wind again, and the road began to move uphill. I looked forward and could see a faint outline of Rain as she moved towards light.

Her silhouette, bike over one shoulder, was briefly brought into greater contrast as the sky flashed with lighting. The first outer reaches of Ophelia had arrived. If a hurricane could talk the wind and lighting would be her way of saying,

“Tremble all who come before me.”

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

Head down, elbows bent, back hunched, pedal. Head down, elbows bent, back hunched, pedal. Move forward, ignore the pain, move forward. We had been doing nothing but pedaling for two days, sleeping just long enough to get stiff and then getting back on the bike. The images from my peripheral vision changed from dying trees, to dying farm land, to dying town, and eventually to a dying metropolis.

What had once been miles upon miles of New York City suburbs was now nothing more than a pile of post apocalyptic crap. The buildings that where not smashed in, were on fire.  It was like everyone had just left.  The empty nature of it all was worse than the destruction.   The smoke burned my eyes, causing the entire scene to flow by in a blurry mess.

My legs screamed for relief, but we didn’t stop. Early human hunters used to catch food this way. Bands of taught, rip cord muscled young men and women would chase an animal. Perhaps they ran for 100 miles, perhaps 200, but the end result was the same. The group wouldn’t stop, and the animal eventually fell over from exhaustion. The human body had been shaped by thousands of years of this. Evolution had built into us the ability to ignore the pain, to move forward, to chase the goal, to just keep moving.

The punishment and suffering emptied you out. It was horrible, but after a while you seek this state. A hollowed out husk has nothing left inside to hurt. Your mind went elsewhere, for its own protection. You thought about nothing. With my legs on fire, lungs coughing up a faint mist of blood, and my eyes feeling like pools of acid, I experienced more peace than I had in weeks.

My body may have been shaped by evolution but Rain was a machine designed in a lab. She simply had no stop in her. “Q draft left the wind is changing looks like the sky is getting dark ahead of us.”

“Rain, it’s going to start pouring soon, and it isn’t going to stop” The words were squeezed through gnashing teeth as I tried to maintain her pace.

“I know Q, I know.” She had always known what we were getting into. I hadn’t needed to tell her that this could be a one way trip, but if she wasn’t going to stop, well neither would I. I moved left and found a little extra energy deep in my legs, we had to go faster.

You move, and you push, and you suffer, and then all of a sudden you stop. We had been threading our way through an ever denser line of cars. They were now too close together to move any further. Some cars looked like they had been set on fire; others had just been left on the side of the road.  The one thing they all had in common was that they were facing the opposite way we were going.

“Q, that’s the entrance to the Lincoln tunnel. It’s the fastest way from where we are to The City.” The simple brick and stone structure was like a pair of black mouths swallowing all light. The light bulbs inside of this monument to mankind’s engineering prowess had gone dark.

“How are we going to find them Q, The City is huge.” The wind was starting to kick up; blowing tendrils of Rain’s blond hair around the back of her aviatrix helmet, Ophelia was ahead of schedule.

I hadn’t really paused to think about how we were going to track down two people in a city that used to house millions. Before I had time to panic, the answer was made clear.

“Rain, look…” At the entrance to the Lincoln tunnel was a large blinking road sign, the kind you see on the side of the road when they do construction, it had some solar panels on the top, and blinked out a simple message over and over.

“Mr. Anderson”

“Central Park, Cherry Hill”

I sat dumbfounded for a second watching the large yellow dots blur in and out of my vision. Who are these people and what the hell do they want with me! How had they managed to get a blinking road sign on top of the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel while the end of the world happened. I snapped back to attention when large needle like rain drops started hitting my cheek.

A hand rested on my shoulder, I turned to see Rain’s sweaty face, her eyes looking into mine. With the other hand she pointed at the blackness in front of us.

“Q, we have to go in there, this rain is getting worse”

I guess now was a bad time to tell her that I didn’t do so well with enclosed spaces.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

The road seems longer when you travel it in silence. It had been hours since Rain and I had last spoken. She wrapped in a towel on the edge of the tub, me sitting head down on a toilet.

I had explained to her my decent into madness, my schizophrenic record keeping on a cat food recall forum, my turn as internet oracle. She listened, sat silently and finally said,

“We have to go get them”

We arranged with Jason to give us a ride half way back to New York City, he could only get us half way because the truck ran on cooking grease, and if he ran out of fuel he would not be able to get the truck back to Watkins Glen.

With our bicycles in the back my mind ticked off the lonely miles. The sickly smell of fryer oil wafted in the open window, carried on wind that buffeted my slowly growing mop of shaggy hair.

Seeing Rain in such pure agony at the thought that her brother and friend could still be alive was unbearable. She had seen me do things; know things, that no one should know. Was she thinking in the back of her mind that this was another magical pronouncement from a prescient vision? I didn’t have the heart to tell her that this was nothing more than a posting on an internet forum.

“This is about as far as I can get you guys,” Jason tapped the fuel meter with the back of his fingernail the way bomber pilots did in bad World War 2 movies, “Hell I am going to have to push it the last couple miles home most likely.”

Jason was a good man, in an increasingly evil world; he drove off in a pale cloud of exhaust leaving the smell of fish sticks cloying to our clothing.

That’s when we began to pedal. Rain had always been in better shape than me, and now she was determined to prove it. We set out at twice our normal speed pushing many more miles into a day than I was used to.

“Stay close to me, get into my slip stream.” It was the first words she had spoken in hours. The familiar and comforting topic of cycling was a refuge for a mind filled with too many loose ends.

The message had simply said “We have Jake and Marla, go to New York City, or else.” Why are Jake and Marla in New York City? Who has taken them? How do they know about me? And most importantly, what do they want? In a world plunged into madness this was a whole new level of insanity.

“You are the weaker cyclist Q, but if you let me break the wind for you, we can both move faster as a team, move your front wheel just behind and to the left of my back wheel.”

“Good, now you feel that, you are in my slip stream, feel the little extra bit of energy you have now?” She was right, I had been getting strong over the last weeks, but there was no way I was going to be able to keep up, even with the aid of her breaking the wind for us both. But who could blame her, her entire family was at the end of this long road, how fast would you go to get to the ones that you loved?

And so we pedaled, two machines made out of meat and bone, our only purpose, move forward as fast as possible.

The thing about New York City is that it doesn’t really end. Instead it sort of bleeds out into New Jersey. In most of the east coast you can’t tell when you leave one city and enter another. They spread out into one another like amoebas, hungry for land. Was this humanities future? To spread out until every inch of the planet was covered in pavement and buildings?

In the mid-west you knew you had left the town when the corn started, and you knew you were in another town when the corn stopped. But even in that relatively rural setting, nature had been moved aside for human needs. Corn wasn’t a plant nature would abide. The corn grown by your average farmer in Ohio couldn’t even reproduce; it had to be planted anew each and every year. It was the largest mono-culture species on the planet.

A mono-culture is one in which everything but one kind of something has been pushed out. Think farmers field (corn), think golf course (grass), think major metropolitan city (pavement). Ten thousand acres of nothing but corn leaves little space left for trees, prairie grass, or any sort of complex eco system. It didn’t help that we sprayed the whole thing with toxins on a regular basis.

As we moved closer to the city the space between human settlements grew smaller and smaller and the amount of concrete and human habitation grew larger and larger.

It’s funny what will happen to your mind as you travel, with little else but the back of Rains bicycle to look at for hours your mind wanders. Sometimes I would think of Rain naked, the hot streaming water running down her taught body, sometimes about the earth and its slow heat induced death, but the issue that concerned me more than anything was something I had seen a long time ago.

When Rain had pressed the red hot end of a bent coat hanger into my arm, I had seen a vision of New York City, one drenched in the most horrific destruction, a vision that I had been trying to forget ever since.

Had Jason driven us fast enough to the half way point, were we moving fast enough? I had told Rain most of what I had seen that day, what I didn’t tell her, what I couldn’t bring myself to explain to her, was that we were now pedaling directly into the path of Ophelia. My best guess was that if we could keep up the speed we were going, we would have about ten hours to find Jake and Marla, and get out of New York City before it and everything in it are swept into the ocean.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

“You had better get that fucking gun out of my fucking face man or I am going to fucking stick it up your fucking ass.” Rain, was feeling diplomatic.

“What my friend here means sir is that we mean you no harm, and I am sure she would never think of doing anything with your gun sir” If the expression on my face could talk it would say ‘Jesus Christ Rain, shut the fuck up, this crazy yokel has a fucking cannon pointed at our face!’

“You ain’t here for scrap?” The man holding the gun was dressed in a pair of worn but clean work pants, and a button up flannel shirt. A green John Deer cap covered salt and pepper hair. His face was middle aged, but hardened, a look we had seen a lot on our travels. The end of the world has a way of doing that to people.

What followed was a tense, but civil, discussion about local gangs, scrap metal thieves, and ham radio.

“So now that you know we are not here to steal your tower, could you please put that gun down.” I had gotten pretty tired of staring into the double barreled depths of the thing.

“Hell this aint even loaded, names Jason, Jason Devires.” Jason lowered the gun and reached out his hand, pausing only to wipe it on the leg of his pants.

“My names Quentin, and this is Rain.” To her credit Rain extended her hand and made nice with a man she would have happily killed moments ago.

“You all look a bit hungry, here follow me.”

Jason took us back over the hill and our jaws dropped. Before us was a vibrant village teaming with people.

“Holy shit, how are all these people able to live here, we haven’t seen anything but po-dunk wasteland for miles…no offence” Rain was as surprised as I was to see a thriving village tucked amongst the rolling hills.

“Ha ha, you haven’t heard about ‘the miracle of Watkins Glen’, let me show you around” Jason led the way and we followed.

Watkins Glen NY, was little more than a tourist trap in the finger lakes region before, known more as a place to buy collectible magnets in the shape of New York state than as a hub of habitation. But now it was a thriving town of more than 20,000 people. The reason being.

“Mother fucking wind turbines,” Jason pointed to the top of a nearby hill, two large wind turbines could be seen slowly turning in the breeze, “Them fuckers were on there way out to Cape Cod, but some dumb rich yacht owning idiots decided they liked the view better than the free electricity, so they been sitting in a warehouse here for years.”

It seems that some rich power plant magnates had gotten religion and were trying to put up a giant wind farm just off of Cape Cod. The even richer, blue blood, oil and coal magnates had a different idea. They didn’t want to despoil their pristine ocean view with a bunch of wind mills. For years they had tied up the proceedings in court. I guess Ophelia didn’t care either way because she ground their mansions along with everything and everyone else on the Cape into a fine powder.

“We ‘borrowed’ a crane from the old quarry, and set them up on top of the ridge, lucky for us some Dutch engineers were here for some wind conference when the new weather hit, or else we wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to set them up. A little digging, some concrete and a whole lot of steel later whalla! Watkins Glen is the only fully wind powered town in New York, maybe all the US. We sunk every last penny we had into this operation, and a good thing too, cause now money ain’t worth shit, and we got the only power source that don’t cost a million dollars for hundreds of miles!”

Watkins Glen had other surprises, a biodiesel refinery that turned used vegetable oil into fuel and glycerin used for soap, solar thermal panels for hot water, two communal gardens that produced an abundant crop of produce, a school, a working hospital, and Jason’s favorite part.

“This is my baby, my very own wind powered ham radio set!” Jason led us to a tiny shack several hundred yard from the tower.

“Ham radio? Has the internet died in the last two weeks, why use such old technology?”

“No man, you can still get internet, hell the power grid still works, but its all failing, the internet is just America and Europe and parts of Asia now, the rest of the world can’t afford to keep the servers running, and if we didn’t have our wind turbines we would be paying all our money for power to keep the lights on, don’t you see man, that shit is old news”

Jason was nice enough to let us sleep on his floor. We stayed in Watkins Glen for the next couple of days, helping out on the farm, doing small tasks; in exchange we got food, shelter and good company. It was tempting to think we could stay there for a longer period. But we both knew that we would have to leave this wonderful little town and continue on our journey.

I thought a lot about what Jason had said, about the internet being old news. I shuddered to think of a world with out the internet, the pinnacle of information sharing, arguably one of mankind’s greatest inventions, gone because we couldn’t keep the lights on. It had been weeks since we last heard anything from the greater world; Jason let me borrow his laptop to check up on news.

Ophelia was still making her way around the Atlantic. She was now just off of Brazil, killing whoever was still close to the water, and destroying hundreds of acres of rain forest. One could almost think she was doing it intentionally, trying to keep the trees from soaking up any carbon that would keep her from her nice global warming induced fuel source.

In the United States eastern seaboard cities had largely been evacuated; pictures were all over the net of the last people to leave New York City. It was a stark reminder that while we had been pedaling our bicycles through gently rolling hills, the rest of the world had been falling apart.

On a whim I decided to see if the site hosting the cat food recall forum was still up and running. In what now seemed like another life, I used to post the results of my crazy ravings here, a subtle vanity. I wanted people to know that I knew things, but didn’t really want anyone “real” to read it. That’s why I did it all under an assumed name and used the back ass end of the internet to post my findings.

I typed in the familiar but obscure URL, making sure to get the series of question marks, slashes, and numbers correct. I was stunned when I saw what FireFox presented me.

I ran into the other room where Rain was taking a shower, throwing open the door before I could even think. Rain stood naked, sun warmed water streaming down her body, her long blond hair in a wet heap down her back. Her pale skin was decorated from head to toe in colorful tattoos, her nipples pierced twice each. Down both sides of her ribs the now familiar row of scarified stars stood out against the paleness of her abdomen. I couldn’t help but notice that she shaved all of her pubic hair revealing a small hoop through each side of her vaginal lips.

“Q! What the fuck man!” Rain seemed surprised but didn’t make any move to cover herself.

I quickly threw my hands over my eyes, blushing deep red, but undeterred.

“I’m sorry Rain, but we have to go, now! I found Jake and Marla, they are alive, and in New York City.”