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”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cherry Hill is right in the middle of the park!” Where she went, I followed.

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

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

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

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

“uhhhhhhhhh” Would you believe I once won a poetry contest?

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

“What…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One….Two……THREE!”

“Now is not the time for this!”

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

“What one do we fucking take” Rain was starting to have to raise her voice over the ever rising pitch of the wind. Tiny drops of rain began hitting my face pricking my skin and raising small red welts.

Before us sat three black holes. Each with cars clogging their respective entrances. The Lincoln tunnel built in the early 30’s, once considered a marvel of engineering, was now little more than the final resting place for hundreds of abandoned cars, there was also a good chance that many people now rested forever in it’s depths.

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

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

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

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

After 100 yards the cars started to get closer together, and the road began to go downhill. After 200 yards we were forced to turn our bicycle lights on to see in the ever increasing darkness. After 300 yards we had to start lifting our bikes over the cars and walking on the roofs. It was probably a good thing that we couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of us, some of the cars looked like they still had occupants, and the smell was becoming foul. After 400 yards I lost it.

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

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

“I am scared of dark enclosed spaces.” It attempted to speak between sobs.

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

“Q, get up, come on we have to go”

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

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

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

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

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

The shock was physical, mental and complete.

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

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

In a daze I began moving again, slowly at first and then faster. We threw our bikes over our shoulders and began to leap from car to car. They were crammed so close together that we had little trouble.

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

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

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

“Tremble all who come before me.”

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

What had once been miles upon miles of New York City suburbs was not nothing more than a pile of post apocalyptic crap.  The buildings that where not smashed in, were on fire, or worse covered with racist and hateful slurs painted in a quick hand with all colors of spray paint.  Humanity was at its best during an all out panic.  Suddenly all the people who lived side by side for years were tearing each others throats out to escape the worst storm in human history.  The smoke burned my eyes, causing the entire scene to flow by in a blurry mess.

My legs screamed out for relief, and my arms felt as if they could crack in half, but we didn’t stop.  Early human hunters used to catch food this way.  Their primitive weapons were good enough to wound the prey, but often not good enough to kill them.  For days a band of taught, rip cord muscled young men would chase a dying animal.  Perhaps they ran for 100 miles, perhaps 200, but the end result was the same.  The men wouldn’t stop, and the animal eventually died of its wounds.  The human body had been shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of this.  Evolution had built into us the ability to ignore the pain, to move forward, to chase the goal, and just keep moving.

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

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

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

“I know Q, I know.” 

She had always knows what we were getting into.  If she wasn’t going to stop, well neither would I.  I moved left and found a little extra energy deep in my legs, we had to go faster.

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

“Q, that’s the entrance to the Lincoln tunnel.  It’s the fastest way from where we are to the Island.” 

The simple brick and stone structure was like a pair of black mouths swallowing all light.  The light bulbs inside of this monument to mankind’s engineering prowess had long ago gone dark.

“How are we going to find them Q, The City is huge.” 

The wind was starting to kick up; blowing tendrils of Rain’s blond hair around the back of her aviatrix helmet, it looked like Ophelia was ahead of schedule.

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

“Rain, look…” 

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

“Mr. Anderson”

“Central Park, Cherry Hill”

I sat dumbfounded for a second watching the large yellow dots blur in and out of my vision.  Who are these people and what the hell do they want with me!  How had they managed to get a blinking road sign on top of the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel while the end of the world happened.  Clearly these people had resources at their disposal that we didn’t know about.  My haze was broken when large needle like rain drop started hitting my cheek. 

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

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

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

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

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

“We have to go get them”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are Jake and Marla in New York City, who has taken them, how do they know about us, how did they find me, and most importantly, what do they want? In a world plunged into madness nothing really makes sense, but this was a whole new level of insanity.

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

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

And so we moved, two machines made out of meat and bone, our only purpose, move forward as fast as possible. My lungs burned, my legs screamed, my heart felt like it would jump out of my chest, and yet we didn’t stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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