Category: Future Crash Novel

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.

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.

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.

When I was a student I learned that one day our Sun would use up all of its hydrogen fuel, and expand out into a red giant, in the process swallowing the inner planets like candy. Mercury, Venus, Earth, would vanish in a fiery molten poof. I couldn’t sleep for days.

I couldn’t grasp that this event was not scheduled for 5 billion years. Five billion years is a number that our human scale brains can’t fathom. No one really “knows” how much a million is, let alone a billion. Our tiny little monkey frontal lobes have evolved over the eons to keep us in the now, to keep us safe from lions, to keep us from starving, it can’t handle concepts like a billion. When you hear something like “the US debt is so and so Trillions of dollars” your brain simply shuts down and you think “oh that sucks.”

When I told Rain what I had seen she seemed to take it pretty well, as well as anyone could really. She only cried a little, mostly because I had mentioned Boston as being “just the start.” I described to her how Ophelia was going to circle back around the Atlantic, how it could do this for years, and how it would shoot “normal” size hurricanes out of her like an Olympic discus thrower. In the process Ophelia would be killing millions and reworking the entire Atlantic coast line.

“I don’t get it, how can a hurricane become permanent?”

“Hurricanes are engines, they run on hot water, if there is enough hot water and they don’t run into land, they will just keep pumping up hot water and keep going.”

Ophelia was somehow avoiding land, she seemed to push herself away from land, building up some sort of self perpetuating circular motion that kept the winds pushing outward, always keeping her safe from a dry death on land.

When you learn that a there is now a global warming induced cyclonic death machine killing millions of people with the potential to permanently make the Atlantic ocean a no go zone for humanity, you sometimes cant really picture that in your head. Some problems are too big to understand logically, some problems you have to feel in your heart.

“Oh, that sucks.” Rain threw her bag on her bag and started walking towards the door.

We got our bikes, stole the rest of the pretzels from the break room and got back on the road. We spent the next couple of weeks cycling west.

Something was happening to nature. Tree’s wilted in the heat, and animals seemed to be on edge. We would regularly pass raccoons and squirrels sitting in the middle of the road. Watching you pass, no fear, not moving, just silently waiting for something to happen.

The roads were mostly empty, it was simply too expensive to operate a car. Gasoline had gone above $20 a gallon. All oil had to be shipped through the pacific, combined with the massive disruption caused in the Middle East when Ophelia sent a category three hurricane, like a snipers bullet, barreling through the Mediterranean into Israel and Palestine. It was now almost impossible to operate any North Sea or Gulf of Mexico oil fields because no one was suicidal enough to staff the platforms.

“You are doing much better Q, pump that shit!” Rain always seemed to be at her most joyful while riding her bicycle.

A couple weeks of steady cycling, regular meals (as regular as we could beg steal or trade for), and the other rigors involved in living on the road had started to show. My muscle mass had slowly started to come back, and I could now go for up to 40 miles in a day without feeling like I was going to die of exhaustion.

“A couple more weeks of this and you might graduate from ‘fucking pussy’ to just ‘pussy’.” Rain didn’t hide the fact that 40 miles a day for her was a relaxing ride around town.

“Speaking of which I am getting pretty tired, lets stop at the next little town.”

We had celebrated finally getting to New York State a couple days ago. Not that you would have noticed other than the sun faded sign that announces it as you ride in. There is very little regional culture left in this county. The Taco Bells in New York look an awful lot like the Taco Bells in Massachusetts.

We were sticking to back roads, finding it harder and harder to even find towns to stop at. They seemed to be emptying out; people would just get up and leave. Many times we found boarded up homes, with signs that read “out of money, gone to find work in the NYC” or “Cows died, heading to Albany.” Lonely sign posts, just in case a loved one came looking.

“Let’s just stop for a while” I huffed.

I was noticing just how much stronger Rains legs looked than mine, when I failed to negotiate around a rather large pot hole. Had I been a physics major it would have been to fun to calculate just how much speed you need to get your whole body to fly over the handle bars, and how much heat is caused by the friction of your body on the pavement, but because I was not a physics major I was content to just experience the pain. When I stopped sliding Rain was there to lean over me.

“That shit looks pretty gnarly man.”

“Is that your medical opinion, or your professional one?”

“I don’t know Q, I think you are going to need some stitches that arm looks pretty fugly”

Rain seemed to have a sick fascination with poking the rather deep gash on my left arm where it had encountered a rock.

“Don’t worry though, the bike is fine.”

We got out our map and took a look; we were only about ten miles outside of Kingston. I could ride, so we slowly made our way toward town. Even here, a once sizable community was showing signs of serious stress. The streets were full of empty shops; the grass was brown and dead in most yards, long and uncut.

The hospital was full of people with heat stroke, old people dying because it was so hot. Ten thousand years ago we didn’t live to be old, life was too hard. If you didn’t get eaten by a wolf, or break your leg and get an infection that ended your life, your teeth would grind down because of the rough nature of our pre-domesticated plants. Once your teeth went, so did you. It was starting again, the old, the weak, the young with no one to take care of them. The world was limping back to that more brutal time.

Strange the kind of things you think about while someone is sewing up your arm.

We filed for hardship care, and told them that we didn’t have any money to pay for the stitches. The lady at the front desk entered my name into a computer and we got back on the road, heading south.

The information that the kindly old lady with a southern accent had diligently typed into her data base was making its way at the speed of electricity into some very interesting computer systems. These computer systems began to become very active when they saw who had just gotten thirteen stitches in his left arm. This activity caused several large lights to begin blinking in earnest. This caused a lot of commotion, printers began printing reports, numbers were called, cell phones were texted, that blinking computer became the busy little center to a much larger system of activity. Someone very connected had been looking very hard for Quentin A. Anderson, and they had finally found him.

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.

A swirling maelstrom of hot air and water sat a thousand miles south of Iceland. Ophelia was doing something that no hurricane had ever done before. All previous storms unlucky enough to bumble into these cold northern waters soon suffocated and died from the lack of a power source. Not Ophelia, she was dancing with them that brung her. Her massive girth had pushed a wave of warm tropical water before her, the same wave that she was now feeding off of as she made a lazy two thousand mile right hand turn.

My view of the scene was that of a person looking down on a globe. From high above I saw the world go into a frenetic fast forward. Ophelia shrank and turned moving quickly towards the UK. Imagine all the water in the great lakes; now imagine that half of it has been whipped into a furry 300 miles wide bearing down on the English Isles, only to turn again sparing the small island and heading towards the northern coast of Africa. The vision flickered, like a movie missing every fifth frame. Ophelia grew to massive size drinking deeply of the hot tropical waters.

She paused briefly over the Canary Islands, removing them from the map, then Cape Verde vanished. She was so big at this point that she was flinging smaller hurricanes off her like angry projectiles. Places that had been nothing but sand for years, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, all awash in flooding. Places where no one but camel trains and desert traders went could now be traversed by boat. The death toll reached into the millions. Images of dead people swollen in the tropical sun were interspersed with the images I remember seeing from the Aftermath of Katrina. I tried to shut my eyes and realized that I didn’t have eyes, these images were being mainlined right into my head.

Fast forward again, Ophelia after her brush with western Africa was moving again, this time south, no south west. Oh God. She was coming back, she was lapping the Atlantic. The Prefontaine of ocean storms. Ophelia had reached some sort of critical mass; the Atlantic was so warm, and she was so big, she was no longer a storm, she was now a feature of the planet. Like the great red spot of Jupiter, Ophelia had graduated to an epic class. She would circle the Atlantic. For years? Forever? Annihilating anything that got in her way.

Before I could start to ponder the deaths this would cause, the world changed again, this time I experienced a sudden outward zoom, pulling back. Layers of data like transparencies started to appear over the map. Data points about temperature, population density, air currents, ocean currents, each with their own little Google map like pin, if I had a mouse I could click on them for more data.

They started to blink and pulse, dancing a data ballet. Something was becoming clear; Ophelia wasn’t just going to circle around the Atlantic killing and maiming, oh no she was going to do something far worse.

“How long have I been out?” My voice was 40 grit sandpaper.

“You screamed for about 5 minutes, then you sort of lost your voice and tensed up like you were being electrocuted for another 10 minutes or so.” None of what I had seen had happened yet.

“We really have to stop meeting like this.” I rasped.

Rain handed me some water in a little Dixie cup. I thought about how much energy it took to cut down the trees, make the paper, refine the oil based wax, package ship and stock this tiny cup, so that I could take one sip of water and then throw it away. Maybe we deserved everything we were getting.

“I am sorry Rain, I couldn’t see anything about Jake or Marla.”

She looked at me in silence; the space between us seemed to grow. I wanted to reach out to her, tell her it was all going to be alright, but I couldn’t. Especially because I knew for certain that far from being all right, humanity was royally fucked.

She spoke first.

“I am sorry Q, I shouldn’t have treated you like some sort of oracle. I know these things suck for you, but not knowing, it feels like my insides are gone, you know? Like I am fuckin hollow.”

I didn’t feel hollow; my innards seem to have been drained out through my eyes, only to be replaced with a sense of foreboding. It was a stone in my stomach.

“At least we are safe.” Rain seemed to come back; I could suddenly feel just how close she was to me. She was sitting next to me on the table, her skirt riding up a little allowing her thigh to touch my shoulder. I sat up slowly so that we were sitting next to one another.

“I guess we get our asses to Ohio, and find your mom.” Her breath was warm against my cheek. I reached out one arm and placed it around her shoulder. On it’s way up I noticed a large burn in the perfect shape of a star, just like the one on Rain’s ribs.

“A star huh” It still hurt, but not as much as I would have expected.

“Yea, now we are twins.” She smiled, “Wait till the first time you have to rub it with a tooth brush to get the scar tissue to form nice, that’s the best part”

“I can’t wait.” The water was working, I could almost talk normally. We smiled at each other. I held her with my un-branded arm for a while and she laid her head against my chest. I was still painfully bony and I could feel her ear studs rubbing against my sternum.

“Rain I have to tell you something, I saw something, something I am not even sure is possible.”

She reached around and held me, tighter. “I can’t take any more bad news right now Q, can it wait?”

Bad news, this was in a whole other league than bad news, this was the worst news I could think of.

“Sure.”

The light had been fading the whole time we had been talking, we decided to spend the night in the library, stacking our bikes in the reference section and sleeping in the science fiction isle. It was out of the way in case anyone looked in the window at night. We laid side by side on sleeping bags we had picked up a couple towns back.

“God I wish we were in one of these books. Some alien could come down and save us with a magic laser ray.”

“You like scifi?”

We were lying next to each other, in the H’s. Above our heads was Herbert, Heinlein and some others I hadn’t heard of. The shiny gold lettering of Dune, and Stranger In A Strange Land were visible.

“Yea I used to read them to escape into crazy alien worlds, or like fuckin weird ass alternate dimensions, I used to come to the library a lot as a child. I always really liked Dune, Herbert is like a god when it comes to Scifi.”

“Heh, that’s funny, Dune was always way too strange for me, I always liked books with like science and weird theories about the universe and stuff, like Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.”

We chatted about the merits of Dune vs A Brief History of Time for a while. Rain rolled over and put one arm over my chest her head tucked up under my arm. I fell asleep to the scent of her hair.

We woke to the smell of musty books. In an age of digital media there was still something magical about a place full of dead trees imbued with knowledge.

The break room had some pretzels, and herbal tea. Breakfast of champions. After which I told her the news.

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.

“Woah! Hold on, don’t hit me, I need my jaw Rain!” I held my hands up to ward off her vicious left hook.

She lowered her fists, “Well what do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know, there has to be some way to hurt me that won’t leave me unable to talk or eat for a week.” I rubbed my jaw remembering the last time she decked me.

We sat staring at each other; the burning in my brain was maddening.

“I have an idea Q, you might not like it though.” Rain was looking at me with a half smile on her face. “You ever get into body modification?”

“Body what?” I didn’t like that smile.

I should have known that a girl covered in tattoos was going to be into some weird shit. After a short lesson in the aesthetic values, and her assurance that yes it would hurt a lot, and instead of broken bones, or busted teeth it would leave me with a nice little memento, I agreed.

“Ok so once the wire gets hot enough I am going to press it into your arm and it’s going to hurt, a lot. Eventually it will burn away the nerve endings and you will only feel the normal burning pain, which is still going to hurt.” She looked at me with a sick sort of excitement.

“Don’t worry Q I have three of these and they all healed up just fine, you will love the look.” To emphasize her words she tugged her shirt up to show me three star shaped scars burned into her ribs.

“Can I…can I touch them?” They felt like scars, rough and raised. Delicate pink lines created by the bodies own response to injury. Running my fingers over them caused her to giggle and twitch. The skin around the stars was soft, even the scar tissue seemed somehow feminine. I pulled my fingers back, embarrassed again.

“Ok, well I guess its better than having you break my jaw” I couldn’t believe I was going through with this, but the hornet’s nest in my brain demanded that I do something soon, if not I was going to go crazy.

“What do you want? What shape?” She had gotten a thick wire coat hanger from the back room and was already heating it up over a Zippo, burning off the paint and getting it ready.

“You pick, I can’t really think right now” The feeling in my head was out of control, it was all I could do to talk.

“Alright, give me a second.” I heard the sound of hot metal being put into water. She began bending and shaping the wire, a couple of times she held it up to a reading light to make sure it was perfect.

The flick of the Zippo made me look up; she was getting the brand red hot, heating it evenly holding the end of the coat hanger between rolled up newspapers to keep from burning her fingers.

“Alright Q get ready, cause we only get one chance to make this look good.” She was smiling, still heating the end of the brand with her lighter.

I sat at the table one hand on the mouse, one on the keyboard. Browsing sites, looking for more data keeping in mind everything that Rain had told me about her friends and family, trying not to think of the burning hot poker Rain was about to push into my arm. She placed one hand on my right arm, holding it down on the table.

I smelled it before I felt it. The acrid smell of burning arm hair, then pain. It was strong, and clean. Unlike the throbbing dull pain of being struck in the face, this was more like being cut with a sword made of ice. The sensation sent tingles down my spine, before it caused it to tighten in a jerking spasm. Rain had my arm in a steely grip, she wasn’t about to let me go.

My eyes watered with tears blurring out the computer screen. I could feel something crawling up the back of my throat, trying to claw its way out. It was then that I felt the now familiar feeling of letting go, like some vital blockage had been removed, releasing the flood.

I started screaming because of the pain, but I kept screaming because of what I saw after that.

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.

We walked back to our bikes, silently. The prospect of doing something, anything, was better than nothing. The sheer horror of what we had been watching on the television had made us both numb.

“So how do we get started?”

“I don’t really know, I guess I need data, maybe just start talking and we will see what happens.”

We rode our bikes down the street towards a small library. It was the same kind of squat square uninspired block architecture you can find in suburbs everywhere. I never understood why anyone would build such boring structures to house humanities most valuable possession. They were only open twice a week now, budget cuts. Rain led us around back; we leaned our bikes against the ugly toad of a brick building and sat down.

“What do you want to know? I mean I have lived in Boston my whole life, or at least… I used to.”

The grief was just too much; it was going to take a while to start thinking about things like ‘The City of Boston’ in the past tense. After several minutes she used her arm to wipe her green eyes, and started again.

“I grew up poor, my mother was a drug addict and my father, well, I never really knew what happened to him, he left when I was 11. I spent a year or two as a ward of the state, spent a year living in a car. I managed to finish high school, and was going to go to college but needed to save up enough money. That’s why I was messin’ I figured I could collect enough cash and then go to school. Then mom got sick.”

She paused briefly.

“That bitch, she never did nothin but snort coke and bring home loser boyfriends. I almost had enough for the first year at Emerson, then that bitch goes and gets breast cancer.”

“I hate myself, for hating her. You are supposed to love your mother, I should be happy to give her all the money in the world, I should be happy to take care of her, but I always felt like she had it out for me. She ruined my past, and now was taking away my future.”

My brain was starting to feel a tiny itch, but it wasn’t anything like before. Rain kept talking as I leaned back against the building.

“But yea, I gave the doctors all my money, and even borrowed some, but you know how that turned out. All I got for my troubles is whatever is in this fuckin box.”

She reached into her messenger bag and pulled out a small cardboard box. It was from her mother, Karen, she had drawn a little heart on it, Rain really was named Rain. She saw me looking.

“Yea she named me Rain, because it was raining the day she took the pregnancy test in the back of a 7/11, great story huh? I should be happy she didn’t name me slurpy, or big gulp or some dumb shit. Fuckin drugies. I don’t know what could possibly be in this thing, but I just can’t bring myself to open it.”

She put the box back in her bag.

She looked unsure of what to do next, I hadn’t started screaming, or blurting out the future, it wasn’t working.

“Why not tell me about Marla?” I encouraged.

“Marla, that crazy bitch.” Rain said with a huge smile.

“I met her at a concert, she was in front of us and some jerk grabbed her boob, she decked him in the face. The bouncers kicked us all out. I was so pissed at her. She had a handle of vodka in her backpack. We sat around outside the theater and got drunk. You know I can’t even remember the name of the fuckin band we were supposed to see…Marla is like that, you only notice her.”

“We started hanging out. She was weird for sure, but she was a good friend and I loved her. She was the first girl I ever slept with, and let me tell you Marla is the kind of girl you want to be your first. She was amazing in bed, I mean the things that bitch could do with that snake tongue…”

I must have been turning a shade of red reminiscent of a beet, because Rain started giggling at me.

“Hey you told me to tell you everything right?” She laughed again “God I hope she listened to me and left the city.” Thinking about the city drew the joy out of her. She looked at her feet, and then at me.

“Is it working Q? You feel anything?”

“I don’t know, my brain…itches, but like nothing is coming, it used to work with less information than this, maybe we are not getting the right kind of data? I need like some websites or something to look at, something more about the city.”

Rain stood up, one hand on her hip, another on her chin, thinking.

“Stay here.” She reached into her back and removed a large U-lock and walked around the corner. I heard the tinkling of broken glass. Moments later the back door started to open, and Rain was there with one finger in her mouth.

“Cut mah fwinger on tha fuckin gwass, I wiwl be fwine.” She was talking with her finger stuck in her mouth.

We went into the dark library, heading towards the backroom. I knew from experience that you shouldn’t even bother going to the computer lab, they always have way too many filters to get a good data stream, we needed the staff computers.

We were in luck; the librarians had a high speed connection. It all came back to me as easy as breathing. I started clicking, opening windows, checking sites. The massive devastation of Ophelia was all over the net.

“Keep telling me about your friends, the more data sources the better.” I tried to split my attention between the two sources of data.

“I didn’t really hang out with that many other people; I spent a lot of my time at the hospital, or riding my bike.”

Thousands of bodies were washing up on the beach in Maine according to CNN.

“I knew some guys that I worked with, but we never hung out after work or anything. I was trying to save up as much money as possible to pay for moms surgeries”

Fox reports that southern Baptist preachers were saying that god had smote Boston for allowing gay marriage; the end times were surly at hand.

“I got hooked up with them mobster guys though this dude I knew who worked at a bakery in the north end. He said that they had helped him get some money for a car, so they could help me.”

Google maps had new satellite images up of the cape and Boston, the carnage was visible from space.

She was trying to read over my shoulder but I was opening and closing windows too quickly.

My brain was starting to itch badly, but still nothing was appearing. Had I lost the ability?

“What about your friend Jake?” I asked.

Weather.com showed that rain from Ophelia has caused massive flooding all along the east coast causing hundreds of more deaths.

“Jake, well technically he is my loser brother.”

Telephone networks were down all over the country as people flooded them looking for relatives.

She kept talking; Jake had never liked their mother and had refused to give her anything, leading to a rift. When Rain’s mother died Jake felt horrible, and had spent the last month trying to make it up to Rain. That must be why he gave me such a nice bicycle for free.

The entire front page of Digg was stories about the storm, the same with Reddit, and all the rest.

Page after page shot past my eyes, Rain continued to fill me in on details of her friends lives, where they lived, how old they were, what they were like in bed, everything. My brain felt like at any point it might catch fire it itched so badly. Why wasn’t it working!

In my frustration I grabbed my head in both hands and stared at the keyboard. As I looked down I saw the small cut on Rains finger, and I realized what was missing.

“Rain, I need more.”

“I have already told you everything I can think of.”

“I know, I think I need you to do something else for me. Every time I have been able to do this I have been in some sort of trauma. Either starving, or dehydrated, or…” The memory of her decking me in the jaw flashed in my mind. I looked up into her eyes.

“I think that it only works when I am in pain. I need you to hurt me, again.”

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 world wasn’t always like this. Long ago the world was a whole lot cooler. In fact 10,000 years ago, during the last ice age, a massive wall of ice covered everything that today makes up Canada, and a fair bit of the northern half of the US.

As it grew it acted like a giant snow plow. One icy inch at a time, from northern Canada southward, pushing before it a giant wave of sand and gravel. This long dune would mark the end point of the ice’s journey. The far eastern remnants of this mound created Cape Cod.

Cape Cod, tourist Mecca, was nothing more than a gigantic pile of sand. Just like that stuff snow piles leave in your yard in the spring. This is an important fact to know, because when a swirling mass of heat fueled destruction blows into it at over 250 miles per hour, that sand is going to move.

If you would have been standing on the southern shore of the cape when Ophelia arrived there are several things that would have concerned you immediately. First, you would have noticed that it was raining, a lot. Then the wind would start to push and pull against your flesh.

Soon the wind would be howling, hoping only for the chance to throw your fragile body into the nearest hard surface. If by some miracle you didn’t blow out to sea or become a mangled wreck of bone and tendon in the nearest oak tree, you would notice that your flesh was melting as millions of tiny grains of sand started to impact you at almost half the speed of sound. Once your flesh had been sand blasted off your skeleton, your bones would be ground into powder and washed out to sea.

It is no surprise then that not a single human soul survived on the Cape or Islands. Most people drowned in the giant storm surge. It was only the unlucky few who survived long enough to be ground into gristle by the blender that was broken trees and pleasure yachts.

The Cape was gone. Ophelia violently erased years of hard work by map makers. In its place was a series of small islands situated in a shallow sand bar. Ophelia paused briefly as she devoured and destroyed, and then slowly turned north and began to take aim at Boston.

No one thought Ophelia would make it past The Cape; the city hadn’t even been evacuated. What had been a tiny category 2 storm was now an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction.

Boston was experiencing the stark horror of a metropolis in the grips of full on panic. People do horrible, ugly things if they think it will keep them alive for a couple more hours. Gun shots rang out as people stole and re-stole any mode of transportation they could find. Boston’s notoriously labyrinthine streets were crowded with a mass of humanity moving west.

A thousand tragedies played out on every street corner. Babies died, women were raped, and men were shot for their cars. Hell had set up a franchise in Boston. Ophelia was coming to absolve everyone of their sins.

We could do not but stare. The pictures on the television were eerily similar to the visions I had seen in my head. Later they would determine that Boston’s history of brick architecture would be its downfall. Brick buildings, brick sidewalks, cobble stone streets, all ready made projectiles for a storm like Ophelia. She would devour one building, and then hurl masses of bricks at over 200 miles per hour in all directions. Mother Nature’s Armageddon shotgun.

The entire city had been leveled. Ophelia had only paused briefly several miles off shore, and yet the fringes of her massive girth were enough to erase 200 years of human history as if she was wiping crumbs off a table.

Rain sobbed softly next to me. I reached out to embrace her, there was no awkwardness. She held me close, her head buried in my shoulder. Her entire life had just been ground into splinters by the worst storm in human history.

“Rain, I am so sorry.” Words couldn’t make it better, nothing ever would but I still had to try.

We walked outside to sit on the bare concrete behind the gas station. The winter sun was low in the horizon and yet it was still uncomfortably warm outside. Rain sat and sobbed. She removed her aviatrix helmet and let her surprisingly long hair fall free across her shoulders. I held her, and we sat.

When it started to get dark she looked up to me, her eyes puffy and raw. “Can you find them, Q?”

I didn’t understand.

“If you got enough information, about like casualty rates, and shit, could you tell me if my friends were dead or not?” Her voice had a sick desperation.

“I can try.”

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A hurricane is an engine. Like any engine it needs fuel, in this case heat. Hurricanes feed on warm water, without it they die. There was no shortage of heat off the eastern continental coast of North America. For months now the oceans had been baking under an unrelenting sun. Heat that used to be reflected back into space, was instead bouncing right back. The end result of a snugly warm CO2 blanket pulled up tight by humanities fossil fuel habit.

The shallow oceans off the coast would have felt like a warm bath had you been unlucky enough to be taking a dip in them. Unlucky, because at that moment hurricane Ophelia was doing something that had never been recorded. Something that surly would have killed you had you been close enough to watch.

Ophelia, a modest cat 2 storm had been sitting as if stalled just off the cost of North Carolina for several days. She had almost died after traveling over Cuba, the high hills of that tiny island stealing almost all of her heat. But she had found the Gulf Stream and had drunk deep of its nourishing warmth.

She was swelling, radar reports would later show that she went from a cat 2 to a cat 5 in less than 24 hours. It wasn’t common, but hurricanes had done that before. Ophelia then did something no one had ever witnessed.

Young Peter, a hurricane that seemed to be on a trajectory to kiss the south west and then die out in the cool waters south of Greenland, never saw it coming. Ophelia bloated and fat from her feast of heat started to move northward at a furious pace. When she touched young Peter her giant arms pulled him to her bosom and she swallowed him whole. The eyes of the two storms doing a swirling dance before merging into one giant spot.

Ophelia was now the largest storm ever recorded.

“Come on Q, you can’t give up yet we are almost to Worcester” She pronounced it ‘wustah’.

I was exhausted. For two days we had been pedaling west, following back roads and staying off the radar. What was I thinking, ride our bikes to Ohio? We had only gone only 50 miles in two days; I was out of my god damn mind.

“Lets rest for a while Rain, I really need a break.” It came out between huffs.

I had been eating, sleeping even, but you don’t just become an athlete in two days. It hurt all over, my legs felt like wet noodles. My hand’s had blisters, my skin burnt in the sun, my spine creaked and popped, and my feet ached where the pedals dug into them.

“Fine, we stop at the next gas station. For an hour.” Rain’s facial expression made it clear she had never traveled this slowly on a bike in her life.

I limped slowly to the next gas station. Miraculously it was open. They had stopped selling gas; the high price had driven most gas stations out of business. Instead of going out like the competition this station’s covered awning now protected a small farmers market, and the garages had been converted to a small grocery store. People, it seems, will adapt.

The former waiting room still had a TV, and a place to sit down. That’s where we learned about what was happening on the coast.

When Rain and I got to the television we had to stand in the back as it seemed that everyone in the place was watching the screen.

“Jesus…” I looked up to see what Rain was looking at.

“Oh god.” I was not religious, but could think of nothing else to say.

Ophelia, now outside of the limit of most instruments to measure, was pushing up the east coast, she shepherded before her the now category 4 Martha and Ned. Both seemed to be doing their best to outrun the massive storm behind them. They needn’t worry; she was so big she was literally pushing them forward. It had started raining in Boston that morning, the farthest bands of rain coming off Martha. The city slowly filled with water.

Boston wasn’t always as big as it was now. It was originally built on a small peninsula that jutted out into the ocean. In the latter half of the 19th century the leaders of Boston began filling in the swamps surrounding the city. Twenty four hours a day seven days a week trains came to drop off fill from all over the east coast. For 25 years they filled in swamp, more than doubling the size of the original peninsula. Something they would have never been able to get passed the EPA today. The end result is that most of Boston was now just above sea level.

Martha, through some cosmic fluke, managed to smash directly into Martha’s Vineyard, her massive storm surge destroying almost every single building on the entire island. In one fell swoop billions of dollars in mansions and vacation homes were washed into the ocean. Ned wobbled a little, missing the islands, slamming instead into Cape Cod.

Cape Cod, home to almost 2 million people during the height of tourist season, has only two small bridges that lead on or off the narrow spit of land. Residents and tourists enjoying the unusual winter warmth were frantic to get off the Cape. Lines of cars stretched for tens of miles. As soon as the winds hit 75 Mph the National Guard closed the bridges to keep cars from blowing off. The death toll was horrific.

Martha and Ned hit the cape like freight trains. Cape Cod, home to rich politicians, champions of industry, and some of the biggest vacation homes in the world, a veritable showcase of wealth and privilege, was now indistinguishable from any war zone on the planet. Trees were smashed to splinters; boats were thrown miles inland, cars tossed about like children’s toys. Everything along the southern coast was simply gone.

The Cape had stopped Martha and Ned, both storms degraded into a sloppy rainy mess. Behind them, just hours later, came Ophelia.

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My face was pressed up against the glass, trying in some way to be closer to Rain, to push her out of danger by sheer force of will. That car was going to run her over; there was no way it could miss! Rain had started to slow for some reason. What was she doing?

“Faster Rain! Faster!” Talking to myself again, I didn’t care.

Rain was riding a fixed gear. She didn’t have a freewheel on her bike, if she pedaled forward she went forward, pedal backwards she would go backwards. That meant that for instance, if she were to hop slightly to lift the back wheel off the ground she could lock her legs. When the back wheel came back down she would be skidding. With a slight shifting of body weight she could turn her skidding bike to the side. A power slide on bicycle.

Rain was now moving to the right, the straps from her aviatrix helmet flailing like angry snakes behind her. She had slowed down just enough to keep her from flying over the handlebars as she performed her bicycle ballet. She shot up over the curb and down an alley pushing more speed into the cranks as she made her getaway.

The huge car behind her had no such turning radius; it continued going forward, dutifully following all the relevant laws of physics. Newton would have pointed out that it’s forward motion was transmitted into heat and noise as it smashed into the large truck that had just pulled out of a driveway.

Minutes later I heard the muted ‘ding’ of the elevator and turned to find a panting, sweaty, Rain holding her bicycle in one hand and a full bag in the other. She sat her bike against the wall as I ran forward to wrap her in a hug. She held on to me tightly.

It was a couple of seconds before we realized the awkward nature of our embrace. Pulling away we both looked down unsure of what had just happened. I was the first to break the silence.

“That was fucking amazing!” I was picking up bad linguistic habits from her.

I showed her the accident below, people were approaching the car, both passengers had not had seat belts on, it didn’t look good.

“Fuck, I didn’t want to kill them, stupid fuckers.”

“We better get going” She said as she grabbed my arm. “We still need to get you a ride.”

We snuck out the back of the office building, taking a route through a maze of dumpsters and loading docks. Rain walked next to her bike so that I could keep up.

“How did you learn to ride like that?” I was still in awe of her performance.

“You want to drop your package on time you got to ride hard.” Simple enough I guess.

We didn’t talk much, she was out of breath, and my jaw still hurt from where she had decked me. We stuck to the back alleys as much as we could, slowly working our way uptown, finally arriving at a small wooden door with a large chain ring from a bicycle nailed to it.

“This guy owes me a favor, but he is kind of a cranky bitch, so just don’t say nothing, and please Quentin, don’t have any freak outs in there, ok.”

She was trying to make it sound nice, but it sort of hurt my feelings anyway. I guess it showed.

“No don’t get me wrong man, I think you’re a pretty interesting guy, but well Jake is kind of a douche, but he has rides, and we need one, just let me do the talking k?”

I nodded.

Rain knocked on the door a couple of times, and a Jake opened it.

“Rain, what’s going on, didn’t see you round today? You got the day off?”

Jake was wearing a pair of cut off jeans that did little to hide his massive legs. The man was built like a T-Rex with calves that looked like they could crush a walnut. His brown hair hung down past his ears, and was tucked under a bicycle cap.

“Yea, well I’m taking some time off. Look Jake can we come in, we need to talk”

We went inside and I could see that besides riding them, Jake also like to fix bicycles. The shop was full of bikes in various stages of repair. I would later learn that Jake ran an unlicensed business building and fixing bikes for messengers. He would let them buy parts on credit and have them pay him back after they got paid. He seemed like a nice enough guy, it wasn’t until much later that I learned why Rain didn’t like him.

Rain and Jake went in the back room, leaving me alone to admire the bicycles. The different kinds of frames reminded me of some sort of metal geometry lesson. Triangles, circles, lines, combine them in just the right way and you got a bicycle. I had never really ridden much, but these machines looked so clean, appealing even. I had read on the internet that bicycling was the most efficient mode of human travel. Was I really going to ride one of these things all the way to Ohio?

Jake made fixed gears, he took normal bikes, removed all the extra gears, all the cables, and created bikes with just one gear in the front, one in the back. The handle bars all looked unique. Some like bull horns, some like strange insect arms curled under, some flipped over and cut off in the middle. I was absentmindedly looking at them when Rain and Jake came back in.

“So he needs a set of wheels, huh? Let’s see what we can do.” Jake was looking at me, sizing me up.

“You know how to ride? You look a little skinny man?”

“Just get him some wheels Jake.”

Jake picked out a bike from the corner; it was an old steel frame with Italian words on the side and no wheels. Jake selected some tubes and tires and I watched as he threaded the circles of rubber onto the metal rims. He then made me stand over the bike; sit on the seat, and a couple of other things. This resulted in various adjustments to the seat stem and the handlebars.

Before we left Jake gave me an old messenger bag and filled it with a set of Allen wrenches, patch kits, a bunch of tubes and tools to change a flat tire. Then he and Rain went back in the back room and I could hear them fighting. She came back out and she had tears in her eyes.

“Let’s go Q.” She was walking towards the door. When she got there she turned.

“Please think about it Jake, just for once use your fuckin brain and listen to me.”

Jake threw up his hands and swatted the air in frustration. Rain held the door for me and then closed it quietly. Outside it had become overcast and the wind had picked up. A storm was approaching.

Offshore, a giant cyclonic eye surrounded by miles of swirling winds was starting to push toward shore.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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“Are you out of your fuckin mind Rain? You can’t really be thinking about listening to this freak!” Marla’s forked tongue was visible when she screamed.

Rain was already on her way to the door. “Marla, listen I know he sounds like a freak, and I know he is strange but he saved my… he has been right before and well I need to get out of town anyway.” Rain had made up her mind.

“You should leave too.” I gestured towards Marla. It was hard to speak; my jaw had seized up like a rusty gear.

“Quentin, knows things.” Rain was making an awkward attempt to defend me. It made me feel strange.

“Oh really, like how to freak out and start screaming on my couch? Things like that?” Marla was dubious, dubious at best.

“Marla, you know I love you, we have a great time together,” a knowing smile appeared on Marla’s face, “but I am going to do this, and I think you should seriously consider taking a trip west, if only for a couple of days, what could it hurt?” She shrugged and continued to smile at Marla.

Marla smiled back, “Well listen, just take care of yourself, ok.” The look in her eye spoke of lust and love.

Rain already had her bag on her back, pausing briefly to make sure the small package was inside. Thinking of Rain and Marla tangled in a heap of naked tattooed limbs made me blush, I quickly thought of something else.

“You coming?” Rain was at the door.

I stood up and started to walk. I was almost to the door when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“If you hurt her, I will find you and I will cut off your balls and shove them up your ass.” The calm way Marla described the violence left no doubt that she was serious. Marla was the kind of girl that didn’t lie about this sort of thing.

We were several blocks away before I realized that we were walking back towards the T station. I paused momentarily.

Rain seemed to notice my apprehension, “We have to go back to my place, we have to get my bike, and then we have to get you one too.”

“Are you sure? I mean can’t we like steal a bike or something?”

“You don’t steal bikes, it is Karmically impure to even speak of such things.” Rain took bicycle ownership seriously.

“Listen Quentin, you said we need to walk or ride, we sure as shit ain’t walking to Ohio, so we get my wheels.” She looked at me, waiting for an answer.

Did I have a better plan? Not really.

“OK.”

Once again to the T, once again through the sweaty hot underground, more horrible noise, this time up an endless flight of stairs. I surprised myself by making it the whole way back without having to stop. Was I getting stronger, or was it the adrenaline. Were we really going to go back to the place that just this morning had been ransacked by a bunch of angry mobsters?

When we got a couple of blocks away from Rains place she stopped walking.

“Ok listen, not to be mean Quentin, but you’re not exactly in top physical shape right now.” She wasn’t being cruel, zombies had better constitution.

“So here is what we are going to do, you are going to go over to that office building and go up to the top floor.” She pointed several blocks down the road towards a tall glass building.

“I am going to go back to my place, get my bike and some stuff.”

A simple enough plan

“You wait for me on the very top floor. Trust me.”

The strange thing is I did trust her. I don’t know when it had happened but I was starting to think of Rain as my friend.

Rain walked with me towards the tall glass building, going so far as to lead me inside to a bank of elevators. The brass plate that held the floor numbers above the doors had tiny scroll work leaves and vines. The air was cool inside. The carpet felt strange under my feet, like it was made of tiny bits of moss stacked up just right, like you might sink in at any moment.

“Be right back.” She grinned and pressed the button for the top floor in the elevator. The doors shut with a silent motion.

The elevator shot swiftly upwards, producing an uncomfortable feeling in my spine. The increased gravity too much for my fragile bones. The doors opened with a gentle ding and I walked out into a large empty space. The top floor of this building was still under construction. Several saw horses and sheets of drywall sat near one corner, white dust clung to the floor where a recent sheet had been sawed in half. The air smelled like saw dust, and the pungent smell of industrial cleaners.

I walked to the windowed wall and realized that I could see straight down towards Rains apartment. Far below a miniature Rain was walking cautiously towards the back of her place. I could just make out her black skirt pushing out around her body. From this height she looked like a moving doll.

I watched her until she turned the corner and was gone from my view. The time dragged on for what seemed like forever. My arm pits started to get moist with nervous sweat, what was taking her so long?

I was just about to turn and head back for the elevator when I saw a miniature Rain this time on bicycle shoot out from the parking lot behind her building. She went right over the curb like it wasn’t their. She was followed closely by two men in dark clothing. She was already standing up on her bike, pumping her legs, swinging the bike out sideways, sacrificing stability for speed.

The men seemed to realize in unison the futility of chasing her on foot and ran back the way they had came, moments later a large dark car, came rocketing out of the parking lot. It was the kind of car you saw in old movies, wide enough to take up most of the lane, and with little fins on the back. That kind of car that had recently become very expensive to fuel.

They quickly made up the distance Rain had put between them. Her legs pumped like pistons, pushing her tiny bike forward keeping a short distance on the whale of a car coming up behind her. Ahead was a group of cars waiting at a red light.

She didn’t even slow down. She melted through the intersection like water through a sieve. It was dark messenger voodoo, the cars didn’t exist to her she was pure movement. The giant caddie behind her swerved to one side and put two wheels up on the curb, firing both hub caps off like cannons.

The mobsters made it through the intersection into the empty lane ahead. With nothing in their way they would soon overtake their prey. Rain looked behind her and I imagined she smiled when she saw the large car so close behind her. I imagine she smiled because of what she did next.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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“That’s strange?” Oh no I was talking to myself again.

I was floating, my vision blurry, like swimming in cotton candy. I had felt this way once when I was a child. As a boy I had been prone to chronic ear infections. My ears had gotten so bad that the doctors had to put tubes into my ears. The tubes would drain my ears, in theory preventing buildup of bacteria, or whatever.

The doctors had explained that they would put me to sleep and that I wouldn’t feel a thing. The black mask was placed over my face and I was told to count backwards from 10, I never made past 8.

When I woke up the world spun like a top every time I opened my eyes. There are tiny hairs inside your ear. These hairs live inside a bath of fluid and keep you balanced. Disrupting the hairs sends incorrect signals to the brain, and your brain tells the rest of you that the world is spinning in a rapid clockwise motion. Human signal processing is a lot like a computer, garbage in garbage out.

I was enjoying this floating, hazy existence when I achieved a sudden clarity. This clarity was accompanied by a sudden and sharp sensation localized in the region of my face.

“Hey, what is that?” Talking to yourself can be a very unrewarding exercise.

Oh, I know what that is…

“Ahhh!” My face was on fire, all my attention focuses intently on the fist that had just slammed into it. My hands came up to ward off future blows, Rain stood above me in a fighter’s stance. Her right hand clenched into a fist. She looked ready to hit me again.

“What did you do that for?” The pain had begun spreading down my neck.

“Sorry, you were screaming your lungs out, and wouldn’t stop, Marla suggested I hit you.” Rain unclenched her hand but stood ready just in case.

“I didn’t tell you to deck him!”

“I only know one way to hit someone. Sorry.” Rain lowered her arms to her sides.

The realization of what had been going on right before my “episode” flooded back to me.

“Rain, we have to get out of this city, and we have to do it right now.” The words flew out of me. I stood and started to move towards the door.

“Hold on there scream boy, what the fuck are you talking about?” Marla stood in front of me blocking my way, she was shorter than me, but in my current state she could have knocked me over with a finger.

My brain was on fire, too many thoughts were firing at once, my words flowed out in a torrent of babble and mumbling. I stopped talking and put my hand to my face in order to rub my jaw. The maneuver reignited a small explosion of pain. Oddly enough the pain seemed to focus my thoughts into crystal clear objectiveness.

“Boston… Boston is not safe, I can’t tell you why, but I know that we have to leave, and we have to go to Ohio, we have to get to my moms house, and then… I don’t know what happens then but I know that much.” I had to squeeze my jaw to keep my mind clear; it brought tears to my eyes.

“Are you talking about, the hurricane. It’s only going to be a category 2, Boston is going to be fine.” Rain put both hands on my shoulders and forcibly sat me down.

“No, it is not going to be a cat 2, it’s going to be something else, and that’s not the only thing, so many people, oh my god…” I was loosing it again. I could feel the screaming welling up inside, I had to fight to keep myself under control. I looked up at Rain, doe eyed.

“I need you to do something for me.” God this was stupid. “I need you to hit me again.” I pleaded with my eyes.

“What the fuck, hit you?”

“Hit me!” I screamed, surprising even myself.

The girl could swing, the hit was fast and hard, knocking my head sideways, my brain immediately became clear as my jaw erupted in a blossom of pain.

“Thanks.” It was hard to talk, my jaw was starting to swell. “Rain, I know you hardly know me, and I know I have been acting like the biggest freak in the world, but you have to trust me. Boston, New York City, Washington DC, all of them are going to get slammed by these storms, but besides that something else is going to happen, something I can’t, ‘see’.” I emphasized the last word. Using the same tone I had used to explain to her why I knew she wanted to jump off the bridge.

“You saw this, like last time.” She looked concerned, and confused.

I nodded, and started to talk again when I was interrupted.

“You two are into some kinky ass shit!” Marla threw her head back and laughed. “I once had a boyfriend who wanted me to spank him, but I ain’t never seen nobody getting their kicks from getting jacked in the face.” Her expression was a mix of ammusment, and arousal, Marla was the kind of girl who was into this sort of thing.

Rain and I looked at her in unison, “We aren’t together, and this isn’t a sex thing Marla!” Rain spat out.

“Quentin has, well let’s just say he was right before.” She paused, thinking. “If we were going to get out of the city how would we do it?” She looked to me.

“We can’t drive, and we can’t take a bus or train or plane.” The pain and clarity was fading, but I didn’t think I could take another hit. “We should walk, or I guess ride bikes.” I felt stupid saying it, who rides their bike to Ohio, but it was what I had seen.

Rain looked down; the straps of her aviatrix helmet fell across both cheeks. She shuffled her feet, causing her black skirt to swish gently back and forth. A small lock of her hair escaped her helmet, she reached up and tucked it behind her ear.

She had her own reasons for getting the hell out of dodge. Did it really matter what kind of crazy I was blurting?

She looked to Marla, and back at me, her eyes reflecting the worry and emotion she felt inside.

“Fuck it. We are going to need some wheels.”