Year: 2011

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Now I know how zombies feel. Every muscle hurt, every sinew ached, every fiber of my being screamed out “fall down and die you fool!” Yet we moved. Fueled by a noxious cocktail of hate, despair, and fear, we shambled forth towards the center of the park.

Above us the sky was a whirling dervish, a chaotic maelstrom of black clouds and lightning. All around us the remnant bullshit of humanity swirled in the ever stronger winds. That guy from the “will it blend” viral videos came to mind. I became convinced that at any point Mother Nature was going to turn the earth upside down and pour out the dusty remains of this once proud megalopolis and a big YES with a check mark next too it would appear in the sky.

We brought the bikes, and stashed them under a small bridge. Just because the end of the world was scheduled for today didn’t mean you left perfectly good bikes behind to perish. Before us, backlit by the constant flash of the cancerous sky, was our destination.

At the top of Cherry Hill, in a small circular section demarked by a small paved footpath, sat two people huddling together against the sky’s rage. They looked cold and wet, but alive. Marla’s black dread locks whipped against her neck and Jake’s tall muscled form could be seen crouching over her. It wasn’t a dream, they were here and they were alive.

“Their they are Q! Run!” Rain was gone before I could stop her.

Her hair and messenger bag flailed wildly in the wind as she willed herself up the muddy slope. Her muscular legs tore giant clods of soil and grass free as she went.

A sinking feeling in me made me hesitate. Something was seriously wrong about all of this. Boston had been leveled. The very street surface had been ripped up and washed out to sea. How had these two people survived, only to be suddenly transported to the middle of New York City? The pain in my arm started to ignite a tingling sensation in my brain.

The raid on Rain’s apartment, the guys chasing her on her bike, the abduction of Marla and Jake, the strange message on the internet, the road sign at the Lincoln tunnel, why were these people going through all this trouble for a simple bicycle messenger. What did Rain do? They couldn’t possibly be this upset about the small amount of money she had borrowed.

None of it made any sense, and then suddenly, it did. The shock of the realization was palpable. My arm twitched, and my feet began to move. They weren’t after her, they were after me! The buzzing in my head was out of control, I only had a couple of seconds to stop what was about to happen.

“Rain, Stop! Get Down!” It was useless the gale force winds stole every word from my mouth and crushed them into oblivion.

I was literally running on empty. I hadn’t eaten in days, had been riding my bike at an exhaustion level, and recently had abandoned a couple pints of myself all over the ground. But I ran. My lungs tore at me, but I ran. I had to beat Rain up that hill I had to be the first one to the top.

I sprinted, really, a sprint. Poor skinny little me, sprinted. Within seconds I was right behind her; she seemed to have found a slippery patch and was having trouble moving any higher up the hill. Trouble I added to when I reached out and grabbed her by the leg and pulled her down hard into the mud.

I didn’t have time to stop and survey the damage I had caused. The vision in my head was so horrible that it had to be stopped. I reached the top of the hill covered in grime, before me sat Marla and Jake gagged and chained to large metal stakes that were securely driven into the ground. They both looked haggard, but unhurt. Their eyes pleaded to me to do something, anything to save them from the coming storm.

The sound had changed; the tone of the wind was picking up a notch. Larger chunks of debris began to skate across the ground, and the rain began to fall a little harder. Ophelia was done messing around, the real show was about to begin. I threw both hands up in the universal sign of surrender and began to scream.

From the darkness of the park sprang tiny red beams. They were like tiny spider webs of red holding a tiny ruby wherever they intersected the thousands of rain drops that were currently hogging the air space around me. These were the kind of red beams produced by several dozen military grade red laser sights as highly trained snipers took aim on us from hidden locations throughout the park. I knew what I had to do.

“If you hurt any of them, I won’t help you!”

 

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Everything was calm. My mind was filled with the sound old TV’s make when you turn them on. Far below me Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot swam sweetly in the cold vacuum of space. If you pointed you’re eyes at the upper hemisphere of this small wonder, you could see a giant hurricane the size of Texas eating the east coast of a preposterous little nation that used to call itself a shinning example for the rest of the planet.

People used to be concerned about the population bomb. Serious old white men in serious looking ties used to say important sounding things about places like India and China. These very serious old men would go on and on about the number of people in these countries, and how they were going to use up all the resources in the world. They would then go home and live a life that would use something like 32 times the amount of resources on a daily basis than any average Chinese or Indian citizen. This rampant resource usage effectively multiplied the impact of the American population. In the end the real problem turned out to be the developed world’s greed.

Currently the greatest proponent of this greed, the United States was being humbled by the natural result of burning a fuck load of carbon based fuels. Ophelia was beautiful in her destruction, long arms reaching out to gently scrape free the remnants of humanity from the east coast of this plucky nation. The eye itself was over 100 miles wide; the wind speed at the eye wall was estimated at over 400 miles per hour. It was estimated because nothing human beings were capable of building was strong enough to survive the journey through the wall to get a physical measurement. Looking at the massive storm seemed to draw me closer, and I began to fall, slowly at first, and then faster.

I was reentering the atmosphere. Something that shouldn’t be possible in a suit made out of skin and bone. I was going much too fast and the speed of my reentry was causing my arms and legs to start to warm up. Little molecules of oxygen, nitrogen, and recently a fair amount of Co2 began to bump into me. Their bumping caused friction and heat. Looking down I could see small bits of my arms and legs first begin to smoke, and then start to catch fire. The pain was getting worse. Looking back towards the storm caused me to fall faster. My eyes began to water, and then began to bleed from the speed of the decent. The pain started to spread up and towards my stomach as my hair, face, and chest burst into fire. And faster still I fell, directly into the pitiless black void of Ophelia.

I was a comet falling directly towards Central Park in New York City. I couldn’t close my eyes, my eye lids had long sense burned off. For some reason my eyes still worked, this was a visual feed that was impossible to turn off. The ground jumped up like a vicious dog going for my neck. Right before I plummeted into it at super sonic speeds two things happened. The first was that I began to see a pattern emerge, shadowy people with no names and no faces doing things I didn’t understand. These people were doing something, something wrong, something massive. The second thing that happened was that I finally began to scream.

Ripping itself out of me was a sound both pathetic, and horrific. The force of it drowning out the wind for a moment, before the effort of screaming was replaced with the effort of staying conscious.

The rebar had left a thick meaty hole in my arm that had quickly filled with blood, water, and dirt. Rain was there for me in a second, her arms holding me up out of the rapidly growing red puddle growing under the both of us.

“Q, hey buddy, look at me! Hey! Listen you got a big hole in your arm, and I know you don’t want to get up, but remember where we are. That fucking storm is coming and we have to get the fuck up out of here!”

No rest for the weary. She reached down under my good arm and drug me over to our bikes, which amazingly still looked like they could roll. Looking down at my arm revealed that the wound was not going to close on its own. Deep red arterial blood was flowing freely from the wound.

“Rain we have to stop the bleeding, I need your aviatrix helmet and the bottom half of your shirt” To her credit she didn’t even blink, in a moment I had half her shirt wrapped around my arm tightened down by the long leather straps of her aviatrix helmet. Good thing I used to watch ER, and to a lesser extent MacGyver. The bleeding did slow down, accompanied by a noticeable increase in the pain.

For those of you who have never stabbed a giant hunk of rebar through the upper part of their bicep let me give you a quick run down. The first thing you want to do is pass out, after that you want to vomit, followed by more passing out. However, and this is the key point to this particular scenario, if a giant flesh rending monstrosity of a storm is about to tear you to tatters you have to slightly revise your plans.

“Get up Q.” Rain tugged me forward and we were moving, once the bleeding was mostly stopped I found that it was much easier to concentrate on things like moving my feet.

“We are going to go get my brother and my friend and we are going to get the fuck out of here, you got that” She screamed into the darkened sky, the sound of the wind tearing the words out of her mouth almost before they could make it to my ears. I tripped on a piece of broken two by four and she was there to catch me. As she helped me up I was forced to grab her with my bad arm, another scream ripped itself out of me. Rain helped me up with both hands. Her red rimmed eyes were staring deep into mine, the wind and rain beating a constant death metal beat into our heads. Instead of the usual resolve I saw in her the shaky beginnings of a panic. For a moment I forgot that she was carrying me and I felt a strong desire to just hold her in my arms until she felt better.

With the wind whipping my wet clothing against me, and with a steady hail of the remnant filth of New York pelting me from all sides I reached deep inside and found some remaining bits of strength. Putting one foot down and pressing up with the other leg, I stood up on my own in front of her.

“Ok Rain lets go get them.”

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Sometimes still when I close my eyes I can see it. A purple black sky infested with frothy dark clouds hunching over the city like a muscle builder, flames rising up from the sky line. The entire landscape bathed in the near constant torrent of lighting flashes. Fires had already sprung up in most of the taller buildings. And, oh god, the sound. Like a million angry bees piloting a thousand enraged freight trains. The strange thing was that there was no one running, no one fleeing in panic. The entire world had gone crazy just for us.

This was the second time this city had encountered Ophelia on her endless looping travels. Much of lower Manhattan was a mangled mess of glass and bent steel girders. Every testament to man’s ingenuity brought low by the power of nature. The few buildings left standing were quickly succumbing to the torrent of lighting and hail. Glass rained down like deadly crystalline manna from heaven.

Ophelia was coming, and unless we hurried, she was going to be the last thing we ever experienced on this planet.

“Go Rain, Go!” I was forced to shout to be heard over the sound of the wind.

She didn’t need my urging, with a slight nod in my direction she mounted her bicycle, put her head down, and we were gone. We made our way as best we could with the wind ripping at us pushing us all over the cluttered road. In retrospect it was an absolute miracle we didn’t flat out in the first 50 feet. Our wheels crunched over dunes of broken safety glass.

We reached Central Park, exhausted from pushing against the wind the entire time. My calves burned and it had started raining, hard. Both Rain and I were soaked to the bone. The park was a tangled mess of broken trees. Some fluke in the wind patterns had tossed every ripped up road sign, abandoned shopping cart and bit of trash in the city into the park. It was as if someone had thrown a forest and a garbage dump into a food processor and hit the button for apocalypse.

“Cherry Hill is right in the middle of the park!” I followed her the best I could.

We had no plan, didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into, and honestly at this point couldn’t care. You know that tiny black void inside you?  The one that says “you are never good enough.” The one that whispers to you in your weakest moments that “no one loves you” and that “you are going to grow old and die alone.” Most days we keep this void pressed deep down, out of sight out of mind. On this particular day the void had escaped and expanded to eat the entire world.

Destruction on this level has a way of leveling you to your foundation. You can’t even picture a world in which something like this could be fixed. The entire city was taking the second beating by Ophelia, one of many to come, if such a magnificent object of humanity could be wiped off the planet so easily, what hope did we small delicate fleshy things have. The answer of course was that we didn’t, there was no hope, no hope for any of us.

We were almost to Cherry Hill when a particularly strong gust of wind reached down and plucked me from my bike. Sliding over the ground, propelled by the wind, I remember thinking that broken glass and water make a pretty good lubricant. The impact sounded like a giant had just stepped on a box of rice crispies.

Me, the bike, a generous portion of broken glass, garbage, a road sign, dirt, newspapers, and whatever else had been in the vicinity flew violently into a couple of concrete pylons. I knew right away that something was wrong. Lucky for me the next couple seconds were spent in a pleasant blackness.

“uhhhhhhhhh”

“Don’t try to move Q, I am trying to figure out how I am going to get this chunk of rebar out of your arm!” Her voice was mangled by the howl of the wind.

“What…”

I reached up with my right hand to feel my left bicep, it felt oddly warm. What greeted me was a 3 inch long stump of re-enforced steel that had taken up residence in my arm. Feeling the end caused my stomach to turn over in flips.

Rain hunched over me, blocking out the wind, and some of the ever increasing rain, she screamed over the maelstrom.

“Listen Q! This fucking thing is embedded into that concrete thing back there; it doesn’t look like it went through anything but your arm!”

She pressed her head closely to mine, her wet hair falling onto me. The flaps of her aviatrix helmet creating a small quiet space around both of our faces.

“You skinny little shit, I am surprised there is even enough of you for something to stab through.”

The humor helped keep me focused on her face, and not on what was going to happen next.

“Q, your new piercing looks like it is rejecting, so we are going to have to take it out, unfortunately the little fucker is at a weird sort of angle, so unless you can pick up that huge piece of concrete we are going to have to push you off of it…”

She moved around behind me, wedging herself in between the pylon, and the end of the long piece of rebar stuck into my arm. Her knees pushed up close to her chest, she gently placed one foot on my back and one on my left shoulder.

Now was perhaps the exact wrong time to look over and see the jagged piece of metal sticking through my arm. The rain was causing a red torrent to trickle down my arm and pool under my hand. If I had eaten anything today it surely would have taken this chance to evacuate ship.  After a brief pause I got on with it.

Turning my head sharply I gave a feeble nod in Rains direction.

“I ain’t gonna lie Q, this shit is going to hurt!”

The wind was kicking up, throwing dirty water into my eyes. Crying at this point had a certain sort of appropriateness, so I let the tears flow. I prepared myself the best I could.

“One….Two……THREE!”

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“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.”

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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.

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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.
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“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.”

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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A person on a bicycle is the most efficient form of human powered transport. Better than walking, running, rolling, you name it, the bicycle wins. If a human being could be modified to drink and process a gallon of gas, they would get between 600 and 900 miles per gallon. Remember that the next time you get in your Prius that is, if you can still find any place to buy gas for it.

In a sick sort of way human beings do run on oil. For almost 50 years American farmers have been in the business of turning oil into food. After we were done clear cutting all of the forests, and plowing under all of the grass lands, we set about the task of turning an eco-system into a monoculture. We turned a vibrant food web into the “green revolution” consisting mostly of corn, wheat, and soy. None of this could have been possible without oil, and lots of it.

We use oil to run our tractors, to create our fertilizer, to create the toxic soup of pesticides and herbicides, then more oil to move the whole mess from the farms to the store, keep it cool, then even more oil to get it from the store to our homes. For every one calorie of food we eat, 10 calories of oil must be used.

Or at least that’s how it used to be. Rain and I had been riding through upstate New York for days. At these slightly higher altitudes things were slightly greener, but you could tell the smaller trees and road side grass would have liked more water. Their leaves wilted in gentle protest to the oppressive conditions.

We passed farm after farm that was shut down because there is no way to farm a thousand acres of land with only one or two farmers. Without tractors, and without fuel to run them, food production all across the country had ground down to a bare minimum.

A couple towns back we had heard from a traveler that the southwest was experiencing food riots and that drug cartels had starting fighting with the border patrol for control of the few water supplies in the area. So far the border patrol seemed to be wining, but the traveler made it seem like this might not always be the case.

Here in the north east people mostly had started reverting to small gardens, embracing local organic food by necessity rather than choice. They concentrated on growing what they could to feed themselves. That is, if they could get anything to grow in the “new weather” as people had started calling it.

“Come on Q. race you to the next hill!” Rain was in rare form today, her well toned thighs pumping like tattooed pistons.

Trying to catch Rain on a bicycle was like trying to hold mercury in your hand, almost impossible, and with potential long term health consequences. She was faster, stronger, and in better shape than I would ever be, but I did my best.

The wounds on my arm were healing well, both the intentional and unintentional. My star scar was starting to turn a dull shade of pinky red, while my stitches had long ago fallen out. Amazing what food and sleep could do if you got them on a regular basis.

We had long ago given up on begging for food and had started bartering, stealing, or foraging most everything we ate. Even with the world falling apart around us there was still an awful lot of canned goods left in abandoned homes.

“Hold up…” Rain’s hand came down in the signal for stop. “What in the fuck is that thing?”

Before us on the crest of the hill rose a giant improbable tower. Bits of metal, wood, plastic and wire defied gravity with the determination of mountain climber. The whole thing looked to be held together with a collation of screws, duct tape, and rope. Long slim poles made from metal sprouted from the top like the antlers of a moth.

“It’s an umm, well…” For all I knew a tornado had run over the local down dump and deposited this thing here.

“That!” a voice from behind us proclaimed “Is the best god damn radio tower you are going to see this side of the Mississippi!”

We spun in unison, to be greeted by the business end of a rather large and weathered break-stock shot gun.