Charlie was a good dog. He knew this was true because when he opened his mouth just so, and wagged his tail just so, and made just the right kind of bark he got treats from Master. Master was a good dog too, because he always scratched Charlie’s ears, and gave Charlie treats, and made sure Charlie had a warm place to sleep. Master was a funny looking dog, he moved funny, and barked funny, but Charlie didn’t care because Master was the source of treats, and ear scratches, and Charlie liked both of those a lot. Charlie was a good dog, and he loved his life. He would run along the beaches, and chase the crabs back into their holes in the sand. Charlie always wondered where the crabs went, but no amount of digging ever seemed to produce them. Charlie didn’t care; he liked digging in the sand.

Sometimes Charlie would run around in the ocean, Charlie liked the ocean. Master would toss a stick, and Charlie would get it back. Master liked this, and Charlie liked this, and the water was fun to play in. When Charlie was hot the water made the hot go away, and when Master was near Charlie would shake the water off in a synchronized dance starting at his nose and going all the way to his tail. Master liked the water because he would always bark his funny bark when Charlie brought him ocean water to make the hot go away.

Because he was a good dog Charlie got Blanket. Blanket was great, Charlie could attack Blanket, he could chew Blanket, and he could rub new smells onto Blanket for later. Charlie loved Blanket. Sometimes he would bring Blanket to Master so he could play with it, or they could each pull on it. Charlie liked pulling on Blanket. Charlie had a problem though. He couldn’t find Blanket.

Charlie had lost blanket when the big noise had come. The big noise had made Charlie’s ear hurt, and had made Charlie hide with master in the cool dark room of the basement. The big noise had come and scared Charlie very badly. When the big noise was gone, Charlie was surprised to find that sunshine had come into the dark cool basement, Charlie could never remember a time when sunshine had been in the dark cool room.

Charlie looked all over but couldn’t find Master. He looked in the cool dark room, and under the stiars. Charlie eventually found Master. Master was hiding under some big sticks, sticks so big that Charlie couldn’t fetch them, instead he dug and dug until he found the source of Master’s smell. Master was very quiet. Charlie barked and barked but Master didn’t want to play. Charlie licked Master’s face, and opened his mouth just in the right way, and wagged his tail in just the right way, and made just the right bark for treats, but Master didn’t give Charlie treats. Charlie was sad, he liked playing with Master. Charlie sat down next to Master and waited for a long time, maybe Master would like to play later.

When Charlie started to get hungry he got up and checked on Master again. Master was starting to smell strangely. Charlie had never smelled a smell like that before, and Charlie knew a lot of smells. Charlie wanted to find Blanket to save this smell for later. After rolling on Master and giving his face a final lick Charlie left the dark cool room, which was not so dark or cool anymore.

Sunshine was now in all the rooms of Charlie’s house, he had never felt so much sunshine before inside the house. When Charlie got to the front room he was surprised to find that the door was open. An open door meant that Charlie got walks! Charlie loved walks. Charlie was a good dog; good dogs got to go out. Charlie quickly forgot about Blanket. There was so many new smells in the yard. The tree smells were different, and the ground smells were different, and the same smell that Master had made was all over the place. Charlie also found out that the fence was no longer there. Charlie had never been outside the fence without Master before. But there were so many wonderful smells, he couldn’t resist. Charlie was hot, when Charlie was hot the ocean made the hot go away. He would go towards the ocean.

Following his nose Charlie quickly reached the ocean. Tiny crabs littered the beach, to his surprise the first crab Charlie lunged for didn’t run away. Charlie noticed that none of the crabs were moving. Before him on the beach were hundreds of thousands of crabs, fish, sea weed, and a million new smells for Charlie to explore. Charlie didn’t know what to do so he tried tasting some of the crabs. After a couple he noticed that the beach was covered with other strange dogs like Master.

Charlie had met other dogs like Master before, sometimes they were nice to Charlie, and sometimes they were mean. Charlie was always worried about other dogs like Master, he was always careful to give them a good smell before he trusted them. Every strange dog on the beach was making the same smell that Master had made. Charlie didn’t like this new smell, he barked loudly and ran the other way down the beach.

Charlie sat on the beach for a long time and got very sad. He didn’t have Blanket, Master wouldn’t play with him, and he was hungry. Even ocean wasn’t making the hot go away, for some reason ocean was very warm today. Was Charlie no longer a good dog? Had he chewed something he wasn’t supposed to again? Once Master had not given him treats because he had chewed something he wasn’t supposed to. Charlie went and lay down on his paws in the shadow of a large boat that had been washed up on the sand. He whined quietly, wishing Master was here to give him an ear scratch.

As Charlie sat on the beach a wind started to blow. At first Charlie was happy because he had gotten very hot and was very thirsty, and the wind made him cooler. But then the wind started to get louder. It was just like before when the big noise had come. Charlie thought about running but he was mad at the big noise. Charlie would scare the big noise away! He would protect Master and make sure the big noise went away. He kept barking until a large piece of wood slammed into him crushing his small yellow furred ribs in. He was able to get one more bark out before the tidal surge washed him out to sea. Charlie was a good dog.

NOAH advisory 09SCWA001: Tropical event Ophelia came ashore briefly in previously un-affected South Carolina shore near Isle of Palms. Mandatory evacuation orders were ignored by approximately 1% of the population, no survivors reported. Damage was consistent with previous affected regions. See attached documents for latest satellite revisions to east coast sand bar locations.

Primary projection of Ophelia’s path: East Coast on trajectory 10A. Future actions not required; all areas marked uninhabitable/evacuated.

Human beings are creatures of the now. Snap emotional judgments, instant reactions to hot and cold, fight or flight. They didn’t get this way by accident. Hundreds of thousands of years to evolution conditioned them to deal with the immediate. An entire world lived in the “right now!” The lion, the ache of hunger, the need to protect your kill from a rival clan. Sitting around thinking about what you were going to do in 20 years didn’t get your hunting and gathering done.

It was only later, that evolution found some use for longer term planning, agriculture, animal husbandry, culture. Even then it is debatable if that really lead to anything special. Sure we made some nice art, but would any of that be around in 1000 years, 10,000? Even the best planners tend to think about lifetimes. A hundred or so years to kick around this rock and then they are gone. Our brains just aren’t set up to deal with large spans of times. The spans of time needed to say, plan for what a couple hundred years of burning fossil fuels would do to the ecosystem we needed to survive.

So when a couple of corporate shills decided to cram my head full of sophisticated technology so they could artificially do some long term planning, they really didn’t think it through very well. I was going to show them that fucking with the future could have serious consequences. Funny how history repeats itself over and over.

There’s was the same mistake all seekers of the future make. They simply wanted to know tonight’s lotto numbers. They wanted the right now. Who cares what happened tomorrow. They were making so much money that the boys in accounting didn’t even bat an eye when the next report told them to buy this chip and not that one. Or that the sound cards on the complex computers were switched out with new ones from South Korea. They didn’t notice when a couple lines of code were rewritten for the power management software for the lights. They were too busy counting the millions to notice that the research division had ordered the tech division to change the interface on my data ports, or the new flash memory upgrades, or the reprogrammable optical interface.

I had been thinking about it for a while, what would we do once we got out? It was irony at a base level, but it was still true, the oracle had no idea what he would do in the future. I knew that Rain and I were trying to get to Ohio, trying to find my mother, but what then? What if The Company came looking for us? No amount of data seemed to produce a trend that would tell me what I would do in the future. Maybe it didn’t work that way. Maybe when you are swimming in the future you couldn’t pick what direction the waves would come from next. Instead of rely on some prediction I set about to give myself and Rain as many options as possible.

The Company had successfully done something no one else had managed before, a viable brain-technology interface. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t put to waste. If I was going to be a freak I was going to be a freak on my own terms. Standard jacks, programmable open source software, memory recall, I was getting upgrades. The world was changing faster than most people could keep up. Why should I be limited by proprietary hardware? I could now interface with almost any computer on the planet; my brain had its own data storage area, hell you could run a telnet session with the optical interface. The old me would have killed for such a system, the current me required large doses of pain killers to deal with the constant surgeries.

Keeping it all secret was easy enough, though the new interface I could erase records, make changes in billing, order parts, create work orders, change drug dosages. The hardest part was also the easiest. The only time I could possibly give myself away was when I was not hooked up to the chair, but it was easy to act like you despise someone when you had a deep burning hatred for them.

The techs continued to drug me (now with a cocktail of my own design), Grey Suit still talked to me like I was his best pupil, Rain was trotted out in front of me every couple weeks. What really scared me was how it all seemed to have become normal…like living in an underground secret bunker having the future tortured out of you was something everyone did. ‘How was your day today Son?’ ‘Oh you know mom, some corporate goons used nerve inductive pain in order to torture me until I told them what stocks to buy…same old stuff.’ ‘That’s nice honey.’

No one cared about the slight alteration in guard schedules, or the work order that moved our gear and bicycles to the top level of the complex, or any of a million other changes that I made over the next couple weeks. There was no way to tell Rain or Marla what was going on, but I was sure they would know what to do when the time came. The biggest problem, the thing that kept me up at night, was that my entire plan required one key ingredient. We needed Ophelia.

The pain is so intense it causes my tendons to contract with enough force that, before the muscle relaxants, I tore muscle from bone. The clean razor like blasts of pain lasts for what seems like an eternity, my teeth grinding themselves flat, in a vain attempt to mediate the experience. It is right about here, right when my entire body is alight with pure agony that I pass out, only to babble the secrets of the future to these cretins.

But not this time. The comforting blankness, the sweet oblivion, never comes. Instead the pain focused, honed in like a laser burning thorough the filters my brain had previously set up to protect itself. This time the cacophony of data was there in front of me.

Each day you learn a million new facts, so many in fact that the brain would soon become overloaded with useless minutia, the flicker of a shadow, the sight of a piece of trash floating on the wind, the exact color of a blade of grass. Each of these memories represents a neural connection, a path from one tiny brain cell reaching out to the next. Each night while you sleep your brain prunes away these useless connections in an orgy of selective destruction. If you don’t sleep for a week your brain is so fuzzy with connections that you can barely operate.

The opposite is true as well. When you want to get good at baseball you practice baseball. Over and over you throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball, run the bases. Inside your brain each night the dance of destruction is still going on. But the connections for baseball have gotten too strong, your brain is unable to prune them down, and at a certain point will assume they are important and leave them alone.

For weeks something had been happening in my brain. Slowly the neurons had been pruned by repeated application of pain and data. Slowly it had literally rewired my brain. If you think the current state of human mind is what makes you, “you” then I was now a new man. Aided and molded by hardware forcibly rammed into my skull, my brain had stopped trying to fight what was happening to it, and had “learned” to accept the onslaught. I had been practicing telling the future, and now it would seem, I could be a conscious participant.

Oceanographic data from buoys still operating, satellite feeds, ground based radar, blog entries, the remnants of network television, the automobile mesh network, internet traffic, phone calls, all of it seemed to have been funneled down into a needle and then shoved into me. I could “see” it, right there; if I had not been drugged and restrained I could have reached out and touched it. It was beautiful in its hopelessness. Transparent plains of colors and sounds, my brain had managed to add some structure to the chaos. What had started as a lot of ones and zeros was now a cohesive picture of the earth dying.

Ask me how long it would be before Bermuda was scrapped down to sea level (10 more direct hits by Ophelia). Ask me how many people had already died today due to weather related causes (15,484..485…486…). Ask me how many times Bobbie Jennings was able to say the phrase “I love you” before her husbands line went dead due to an F5 Tornado killing everyone stationed at his office in Atlanta (0).

It was all there, presented to me like some sort of video game. Perfect little boxes, translucent and moving, I had only to think and they would rearrange to tell me what I needed to know. While at the same time a completely separate feed of things were appearing that had not happened yet. On one side of my vision the present, on the other the future. Move something on the left, and the right would change.

The truth, laid out in perfect simple detail. Slowly the data came into focus the great scheme apparent, they were using me. Ask me who they were and I would tell you that they were the combination of several large government contractors. Halliburton, KBR, GE, most of the aerospace industry, and a couple criminal mafias. Ask me what they were doing and I would tell you, making money.

These people had abducted me and my friends, killed people, and crawled through destroyed cities, to make money. They had built a monopolistic shadow government, to make money. They had killed thousands, and allowed tens of thousands to die, to make money. They had no grand scheme, there was no evil genius in a volcano calling the shots, this wasn’t world domination or religious zeal, they simply wanted to make as much money as possible.

I had been telling them lots of things, but the only thing they cared about was how they could effectively manipulate the global market. They were using me to make the invisible hand into a marionette, and it was working. I told them when to buy lumber, when to sell copper, where to station agents, how much to pay for fuel, when to invest, when to buy bonds, when stocks. Capitalism once wild, now domesticated. This new company, known internally as simply “The Company” was now richer than most of the world’s governments put together. The US government was now a contractor to them, and no one was the wiser. In case you hadn’t noticed most of the world’s governments had some pretty big problems to worry about.

The Company didn’t know everything through. They didn’t know that I was on to them. They also didn’t know that unless stopped, Ophelia would do a lot more than continue to destroy the Atlantic basin. And the number one thing they didn’t know, something I would be sure not to tell them when, in a second, I started screaming out the future, was that I knew how to get out of here.

The future is not ‘told’ with a tarot deck or ‘read’ in tea leaves. The future is ripped out of you kicking and screaming. It was that time again, I always knew when it was coming; it had been several weeks since they last ground the prescience out of me. It was time once again to play oracle. I would vomit, but the various drug cocktails they injected me with made it difficult. Marched from my cell down to ‘the lab,’ I knew just what to expect.

First the eye caps, saline drops followed by full contact lenses. The center of each lens contained a thick fiber optic cable which made it impossible to close my eyes. Not that it would matter, the surface of the contacts fed direct visual input into my eyes, it was as if the world was on fire with data when they turned them on. In the beginning I would blink over and over in an attempt to get that dirt in the eye feeling to go away, but I was told to stop, 65% chance of corneal abrasion which when combined with the high volume of optical activity has a 52% chance of leading to blindness.

Next the ear plugs, that had drilled into my skull and implanted hearing aid like devices into the cochlear areas of my ear, combined with a form of bone conduction head phones I was wired for sound. A tiny hole slightly behind and above my ear still itched, I was ‘discouraged’ from play with it, 23% chance that if it became infected I would go deaf. It looked like any normal headphone jack except it was made of gold and the flesh was pink and swollen around the wound. It felt slightly cold, and the ‘click’ of the jack seating itself into my head made my toes curl. When I clenched my jaw I could feel the muscles moving over the new metal “additions” to my skull.

Lastly, my least favorite part, the needles… Gun metal colored, thin and strong, they were inserted into ports drilled into my skull and the base of my spine. These were for the pain. Connected directly to nerve centers these little beauties could, with the flick of a switch, drown me in pure mainline pain. Pain fed directly into my nervous system. It was far more efficient this way; pain by nerve induction leaves no messy wounds. I held perfectly still as they were slowly inserted, bugs running up and down my spine, 85% chance of complete paralysis should cranial probe alpha fail during insertion.

Once completely hooked up I was lowered into the vat, saline solution neutral buoyancy, helped take out the static from my other senses, things like touch, taste, and smell would only get in the way of what was to come anyway. As they lowered me in I saw my arm, the scar Rain had helped me create. It seemed so long ago. At least she was still alive. They would cart her out once in a while to “keep me motivated.”

“Hello Q, you don’t mind if I call you Q, do you? I feel we have become somewhat familiar with each other.”

Grey suit. Never got a name never got an explanation. Fastidious little man never seen in anything less than the finest grey suites. I have never hated someone until I met him.

“Call me whatever you want, lets just get this over with.” There was no reason I had to enjoy the part I played in their game.

“Ho ho, you are feisty today! Let’s hope that means the new amphetamine analogs we have been giving you are keeping your mood up. Nasty business you tried last month, wouldn’t want to see that again.”

My eyes were drawn to the relatively fresh and jagged wound across my left wrist. They had made the mistake of using the same food tray over and over, a couple strokes on the concrete floor each time had slowly honed the edge into a relatively sharp makeshift knife. Escape doesn’t always mean tying your bed sheets together.

Telling the future for these people was now my full time job. It was a relatively straight forward setup, they hooked me up to the remains of the information super highway, which for the last 5 months Ophelia had been doing her best to destroy, and pumped as much information as my poor drug addled brain could accept then blasted me with intense bone cracking pain till I spat out tomorrows news. It didn’t take them long after I first got here to beat the method out of me, information plus pain equals forecast.

These people had done their homework, they knew everything about me, from my shoe size to how I wiped my ass. They knew they needed Rain for leverage, Marla and Jake had been collateral. They had not been too sure about how the “magic” worked, so they took everything and everyone. Our bikes, our bags and anything else we had bumped into in the last year or so. They even had all the garbage from my old place in Boston.

“Ok Q, here we go.”

It always started with a buzzing deep in my skull, the ear implants warming up and running through the diagnostics. Next came the multi-color test pattern on the contacts. If I strained very hard I could see my brain readouts scrolling across a bank of monitors across the room. Technicians monitored them and watched the optical centers of my brain pick up the test patterns. Once the readouts were optimal, the deluge.

Imagine sitting inside a sphere made of a million televisions. Each one set to change station every half seconds with the volume turned all the way up. Imagine if your eyes were held open with wires, and you couldn’t cover your ears. Now imagine that the whole thing is shrinking toward you, the sound increasing as it comes closer and closer. Your eyes forced to encompass the full magnitude and horror of the data stream of a world being ravaged by an unstoppable killing machine. You might scream, but it would be drowned out by the audio, the damn thing keeps shrinking and intensifying until it is crammed directly into your brain via your optic and auditory nerves…I will forgive you if you can’t picture it. I wasn’t really ready for it the first time either.

The only redeeming part of the whole experience is that right about now…when the buzzing in my head is at full blast, and they kick in the pain probes…

An intricate series of improbable events produced quantum fluctuations in the early big bang expansion universe lead to the formation of large scale meta structures known as galaxies full of what would come to be known as stars, and around some of these stars, gravitational workings in dust clouds lead to the formation of rocky bodies in a region of space warm enough to support liquid water, and on these rocky bodies through a long process of chance and natural selection complex organic entities came to exist.

In order to more effectively survive these entities developed an ever more complicated internal mental landscape. Slowly over eons these mental landscapes diversified and became more complex, mostly in relation to certain natural forces selecting for maximal reproductive success. To reinforce good selections certain of these creatures (let’s call them humans) developed a complex chemical and physical response to positive stimuli called love.

This mental condition has caused even the most rational of these entities to behave in ways that seems directly opposite to their own best interests.

Even though she was exhausted, even though she was covered in bruises, and grime, even though she had just been thrown twenty feet down a tunnel, Rain still didn’t stop fighting. As soon as she hit the ground she was trying to get back up to her brother. Green Eyes had other options, he had her instantly.

Jake was already near the top of the tunnel, Rains struggles to escape produced little more than annoyed grunts from Green Eyes. His muscular arms were secured tightly around Rain’s neck, she couldn’t even scream. A strangled weeping would have to suffice.

Jake made it to the Hummer door as it began to shake and rattle, the sound of the storm invaded the tunnel in a drum beat of deafening chaos. The sound blasting us every time the car door came even an inch off the ground. All I could see was the back of Jakes wet body. I don’t know why but I imagine him closing his eyes, as he threaded his body through a rung of the ladder, gripping it with his powerful legs. I imagine him listening to the un-earthly sound of Ophelia’s destruction, what must it be like to understand you are about to be ground into meat by an apocalyptic wind? I imagine him saying goodbye to the world, I imagine the pain.

A strong gust attacked our hiding place and the piece of metal protecting us began to rise. Rain’s hair began to stand up like it was electrified, Ophelia had found us, and she was hungry. Just as quickly her hair collapsed back down onto her shoulders in a dirty heap. Above us Jake had grabbed the door, one hand on the handle, the other slid elbow deep into a hole. The strain on his body was visible, legs shaking, arms quaking.

“Run!” It was torn from him, the sound wrenching out over the noise of the storm.

“Run Now Go!” So we did.

Green Eyes was shoving us into the side tunnel, Rain first then myself. She tried one last time to make it past him back to her brother; she was rewarded with a swift punch to the kidneys that caused her to buckle into me. For a moment our faces were right next to each other.

“When this is over, he dies.” Rains face was covered in small cuts and bruises, her eyes were shrink wrapped in tears and burning with a mix of rage and sorrow. No words could fix this so I slowly nodded and held my forehead to hers.

Behind us the storm volume was quickly growing, as was the volume of the screaming both rising at an exponential rate. Briefly the screaming won out drowning us in a symphony of pain, then only the wind. Jake had given us the extra five minutes that we needed to escape. He had paid a dear price for it.

Every time I close my eyes I imagine what it must have been like to have been torn limb from limb, tendons popping then tearing, muscles rending off bone, bones breaking…I can only hope that it was fast.

The side tunnel offered far more protection and soon we were herded through several large air lock style doors, we were violently separated, hoods put over our faces and when they were removed gray walls…steel door…toilet. I had spent the last couple hours pacing back and forth like an animal at the zoo. Someone must have been watching, someone must have thought I looked better. The sound of my door opening caused me to back into the corner, unsure of what was next.

A small man in an expensive business suit escorted by two large soldiers entered my room. He walked over to me and leaned in close to my face.

“Young man, you appear to have healed up nicely from your ordeal” he said as he inspected my arm. He voice was effected by a soft lisp that made my spine crawl.

“Very good!” He clapped his hands together in a fit of glee then motioned to the two brutes, they grabbed me and frog marched me out the door.

“Have to be well healed for what comes next, wouldn’t want you to die on us…”

We conquered paradise, just to burn it to the ground. We bring destruction, we bring war without an end, and then we hope that tomorrow never comes. But of course it always does. Weeks alone in a cell gives you a lot of time to think about things. My hands seem to be particularly fascinating. I look at them and think to myself, “These are adult hands.” I used to look at my fathers hands, the same hands I have now, and think that adults had such huge hands. Such strong and reliable hands, I used to think adults had everything figured out. Now I stare at my hands and realize that appearances can be deceiving. Adult hands can’t hold back the horrors of the world.

Rain was on the top of Ophelia’s hit list, and there was nothing I could do. My arm was a worthless piece of meat, the effort of pulling myself down into the ground had re-opened the wound, blood and dirty water trickled down my side. I could taste pennies, and my vision was slowly closing in around the edges. The whole world had gone crazy, and now it wanted to take away the only person who seemed to care about me.

I couldn’t lose her, not now, not after everything we had gone through. The funny thing about nature is that it couldn’t care less what you think. The deep roaring above us was starting to take on a higher pitch. Ophelia was going to kiss New York City before moving back out to sea. The near supersonic wind speeds of the eye wall were approaching. Wind speeds never before experienced by human beings. Wind strong enough to thrust grains of sand through steel, winds strong enough to grind granite into a fine powder. Wind’s more than strong enough to kill the only girl who I had ever loved.

It was true, I loved her, and I don’t know if it had happened slowly, or if being moments from death clears the mind, but I did, and I wasn’t going to lose her. Against the protesting of my arm, and the screaming in my head that this was surly going to get me killed, I began to move upwards. Above me Marla was still making her way down, her black dreads pulled upwards into the vortex. Once I was close enough I could shout into her ears.

“Keep moving down! I am going to get Rain!” Her wet body slid next to mine. She nodded the fear clear in her eyes.

Next was Jake, he seemed to instinctively understand what I was doing. A quick look up and he was moving towards Rain with me. It was much easier to go up than down, Ophelia helping us along the way a glutton shovels food into his mouth. Rain meanwhile had to battle for every inch, a battle even her strong body would soon lose. Jake was the first to reach her, he grabbed her left foot; I appeared soon after and grabbed her right.

“Rain! We are going to help!” I could barely hear myself, but she seemed to understand.

The three of us began working our way downwards as swiftly as possible. Putting our feet into the rungs below and pulling “up” with our legs, our bicycle strengthened thighs burning with the effort. Above us the tunnel entrance seemed to be getting closer. The primitive base of my brain flooded my nervous system with neurotransmitter based terror. Was this what our tiny mammalian ancestors felt like when some giant lizard pursued them into a burrow?

As fast as we could scuttle down it seemed that Ophelia could dig faster. We were loosing, and we knew it. Above us random bits of refuse were slowly grinding the tunnel the ladder and anything else that got in the way into gristle. Sparks flew from random contacts with the metal bars of the ladder, showering us with shattered glass, broken rock, and wood splinters.

My legs felt like jelly, and my body was giving me signs that it was about to give up, when from above an impact like a great “whump” shook the entire tunnel. The sudden comparative silence shocked us all into a stunned daze. Gravity had returned and we all started moving downward at a much faster rate. Looking up the letters “UMMER” were clearly made out along what looked like sandblasted metal. The tangled metal blocked the tunnel, plunging us into sudden darkness.

The sheer insanity of it was overwhelming; a Hummer tangled and compressed from a thousand rolling impacts had landed directly on top of us. The door handle, and door frame still intact. The irony was thick, but we didn’t have time to contemplate our good luck, the poster child for global warming was now saving our lives from it.

Our brief moment of reprieve was spent frantically moving down. Below us Green Eyes had cracked several industrial strength glow sticks bathing the entire tunnel is an eerie green light. The soldiers with our bikes and gear were already far enough down that they had moved into a side tunnel, salvation was 30 feet below us. Every part of my being screamed “RUN!” We moved downward as fast as we could, until the unmistakable sound of bending metal began to cry above us.

Twenty feet above us the hummer started to move. The whine of the wind had reached a nails on chalkboard pitch. Whatever was above that mangled hunk of metal was far worse than what we had been dealing with before. The winds would suck us out, no matter how hard we held on, our bones would break, and our flesh would rip.

Jake crawled next to Rain, and placed a hand on my shoulder from above. He seemed to appraise the situation observing the exhaustion writ large on Rain’s face, he acted.

“I Love you.” He kissed Rain gently on the forehead and then with a swift kick sent me falling down the tunnel, Rain came flying shortly after pushed by his strong arms. We landed in a heap on top of Green Eyes, his strong arms breaking most of our fall, above us Jake looked down, his hand held up in a wave.

He then began to climb upwards.

If you take a glass tube and fill it with mercury, then turn this vial over and let the mercury exit into a small bowl (and this is the tricky part) while holding it so that the mercury in the bowl keeps the mercury in the vial from completely flowing out, you will have created a mercury vacuum. This tiny pocket of empty space at the top of the vial is just that, empty. Really empty, apart from a couple errant mercury atoms, not much else is in there. Perfect, clean, vacuum.

Nature abhors a vacuum. The entire weight of the atmosphere will try to crush that tiny empty space out of existence. The same weight we all suffer under every day without noticing. It’s not until that entire atmosphere gets moving around real fast that you perk your ears up and notice. Funny how the things you learn in science class come back to you in the strangest of times. Ophelia didn’t just abhor a vacuum; she didn’t reserve her rage for something so mundane. Oh no, she was far less picky, she wanted to destroy…everything.

At a certain point your ears just give up. The sound is so loud, so deep, so all encompassing that your brain simply refuses to register input from the nerves in your ear. Or maybe the sudden pressure drop caused all of us to go temporarily deaf. Not to worry though our other senses were still dutifully recording the horror. The sudden appearance of the sky was accompanied by a wave of dirty cold water. A shower of filth rained down from above burning our eyes, making us cough with the sudden cold shock of it. I had strange rashes for weeks.

Almost as soon as it appeared, the water stopped falling on our heads. The ladder we had been going down became an anchor holding us from going up. Ophelia was going to suck us out of our little hidey hole and feast on our bones. I held on the best I could with my one good arm, even going so far as to thread the bad one around a wrung in the hope that I could wrestle some last bit of strength from it.

Looking up I could see Jake, Marla, and Rain clenching for dear life, then two soldiers, while above them the entire world spun in a purple maelstrom. It was a testament to his training that the soldier farthest up the ladder didn’t scream as he was forcibly ripped from the ladder and torn to shreds by the sandblaster above. The deep “dong” of his head hitting the iron utility cover managed to plow into my deafened ears.

I could do little but cower, holding on for dear life. After what seemed like an eternity I felt my legs being pulled from below. Green Eyes was pulling me down further into the safe depths of the earth. The glow of his eyes snapping me out of my terror, it was time to go. Slowly, one foot hold at a time we moved further down. The entire line began to slowly pull ourselves downward towards salvation.

None of us even thought about escaping upwards, when a blender the size of Texas is above you, no one has to point a gun at you to make you go down. Some underused part of my brain thought we might even get deep enough to out run the horror above, until the next soldier was taken. He was not as stoic as his co-soldier. Nor was he as lucky.

The shudder in the ladder soon grew into a full force tremor. The storm had lifted the several hundred pound iron utility cover out of the ground and was sucking it into the sky, the same several hundred pound utility cover that was anchored to the ladder we were pulling ourselves down. The entire length of the ladder moved upwards half a foot. Now held in place only by the relatively weak bolts on the side of the tunnel. The flash of lightning illuminated the tunnel in a nauseating strobe light flicker.

The soldiers left arm, which happened to be above him at the time, was torn out of his socket like a turkey leg at a medieval feast. As soon as he lost his grip on the ladder, he was sucked screaming up the tunnel. If he had hit his head on the edge of the tunnel he could have expected a swift merciful death…but like I said he wasn’t as lucky.

The jagged edge of the end of the ladder had been sculpted by the wind into two giant hooks after the removal of the utility cover. The soldier raced towards the sky, his upward accent halted stiffly as two ragged steal fangs appeared between his ribs. In seconds the helmet and night vision gear were stripped from his head, a blast of lighting illuminated the look of surprise on his face. The next flash showed him flailing like a horrible stop motion puppet. The next showed him slumped in a dead mans float one arm hanging limp below a broken body, the next showed the flesh on the back of his head being sand blasted off, the next showed a ragged headless torso, the next only a ragged stump of flesh wearing the front of a bullet proof vest. I looked down and began to vomit.

Ophelia was killing us one at a time, my stomach dropped again when I realized that Rain was next in line.

Gray walls…steel door…toilet. I hadn’t seen much else for days…weeks, I was unsure. At what seemed like random intervals a hand would open a small door and slide some sort of bland food into my cell. I didn’t think of this thing as a person, all I ever saw was the hand. I marked the passage of time by the slow healing of the large hole in my arm. The gash has slowly closed into a small bubbly scar that looked like a pair of pink lips. No one talked to me, no one asked me any questions, and I hadn’t seen Rain, or Marla since we were taken.

One day blended into the next, with no windows I could only guess what time it was. The steady hum of institutional fluorescent lighting never turned off, the gentle flicker meant that they were using the old fashion ballasts, wasting energy even now. I had forgotten how many times I had cried myself to sleep only to be awakened by horrible dreams of our final moments in New York. If only I could find some way to forget that as well…

They moved swiftly, with an efficiency one gets from years of training. Even in the wind and rain they were on top of us in seconds. The cold steel openings of large rifles made it clear that if I were to run I wouldn’t make it far. The massive rain drops pounded a tattoo drum beat into my skull, the feeling steadily moving from a strong pinch to a deadly sting. The wind was kicking up.

“You try to get away, you die. You don’t do what we say, you die. Now Move!”

It was the only thing he ever said to us. His face was covered in some sort of electronic mask, it gave him the menacing appearance of a demon from a Japanese play. The night vision made his eyes glow an unearthly green. The rifle in his hands was the only persuasion we needed. That and the giant swirling engine of death that wanted to smash New York and everyone in it to flinders. I began to do as he instructed.

A commotion behind me alerted me to the fact that they had subdued Rain. One black clad soldier was holding his groin where she had demonstrated how strong bikers legs could be. The other three seemed to have a good grip on her. Strong hands ushered us towards a utility cover under the bridge were we had stashed our bikes.

In the brain of women is a biological system that releases chemicals to help erase the memory of the intense pain of giving birth. Evolutionary biologists speculate that this is nature’s way of tricking women into giving birth more than once. This natural amnesia protects them from the trauma, leaving behind only happy memories of the experience. Nature has no such mechanism when it comes to memories of being run over by the biggest storm the earth had ever seen.

Green eyes opened a large metal door that led into the ground and motioned us to move downward. A ladder was embedded into the wall. My final glimpse of New York was of the remaining buildings trying in vain to hold back an unending wall of swirling black. Each building touched by the void was embraced and folded into the behemoth, more ammunition for Ophelia’s destruction.

Etched into my brain was the sound of iron and steel and glass howling in agony as it was rent and thrown about by the raw face of nature’s fury. Nothing will make it go away. Nothing can remove the feeling of sheer terror as the very ground beneath you starts to pull up into the sky. If not even the solid earth below is safe from such a thing, what hope do we small fleshy things have?

We began to climb down, a task made harder by the fact that one of my arms had recently been the victim of the business end of a rather large metal spike. Two soldiers strapped our bicycles to their backs, and two others took our bags, they seemed determined to make sure to bring everything. The steel ladder ran down the wall of a large diameter tunnel that seemed to pierce deep into the earth. Below us was only blackness, the wall before us faintly illuminated by the glow of LED’s from the soldiers gear, and as always the green demon glow of their night vision glasses.

“Q, what the hell is going on?”

Rain was above me but her voice managed to bounce its way down the masonry walls. Before I had time to explain what I had seen above something happened to my ears. It was like flying, I tried swallowing to clear the cotton feeling from them, but it simply wouldn’t go away. I was then that we were blinded as a dirty gray light was turned on overhead. Ophelia had ground the bridge above our tunnels entrance to powder, and had then ripped open the lid to our small sanctuary. She wasn’t going to let us get away that easily.

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. Brains were on the menu, and we were going to get us some.

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 got moving.

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 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!”

Everything was placid and calm. My mind was filled with the sound old TV’s make when you first 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 head at the upper hemisphere of this small wonder, you would see a giant hurricane the size of Texas slowly 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 32 fold. 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 rampant burning 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. The 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 center 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 just fine, this was a visual feed that was impossible to turn off. The ground started to jump up at me like a vicious dog going for my neck. Right before I plummeted into the ground 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, and something never done before. The second thing that happened was that I finally began to scream.

Ripping itself out of me was a sound I didn’t know a human being could make, at once both pathetic, and horrific. The force of it easily drowned 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, rain, and dirt. Rain was there for me in a second, her arms holding me up out of the rapidly growing puddle growing under the both of us. A puddle that looked like it was part rain water, and a lot blood.

“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, get up Q, GET UP!” 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”