The Lord of the Zephyr [2013]

1

I’m running, gasping. For air. Running fast. It’s cold.

The branches hurt as they slap me in the face. It’s so dark out here, I can’t see anything. But, the moon. I can barely see the moon through the haze. It’s not normal. It’s scary looking. Through the haze it’s almost reddish.

Still running. Too afraid to stop. I must keep running. Where is she?

I’ve gotta stop. Breathe. Oh my God, I can’t catch my breath. I haven’t run like this in twenty years and 120 lbs. ago. My lungs. Breathe.

Look at that moon.

It’s so cold, I can see my breath. Am I shivering? I’m breathing so hard I can’t tell. I’m deep in the woods. I’m lost, yet I know my direction. I have to find my wife. They took her!

Who took her? Those men, I’ve never seen before. Soldiers in black. They wore all black and came to our house and they were looking for me. I was walking home from the neighbors. It was late. I saw them carry her out of the house and put her into a truck. They drove away so quickly.

The terror I feel. I can’t explain it. What’s been happening? Catastrophe, worldwide devastation.

Oh my God, I’m scared. What can I do? I feel so helpless.

Get up now. Must keep running. Must find her.

I’m running again. The branches, they hurt. I’m using my hands to swipe them away but it’s not working very well. There are too many. No leaves on them and it’s cold, but there’s no snow on the ground yet. The moon is full.

I’m forty years old. I haven’t run like this in years. Oh how I wish I would have listened to Jill when she wanted to get that membership at Snap Fitness. This beer belly has never served any purpose, and now I can’t breathe.

I can’t remember how I got here in these woods. I think I ran east from my house in Crawdad. I just kept running after the black truck that took her.

I love her so much, oh God. Please let her be safe. Let her be okay.

And the kids, oh no. They’re with their Grandpa. I just left them. They’re just babies.

Wait, what’s that. I see light ahead. I hear noise. I hear something. Not running, I’ve stopped to listen. It sounds metallic. Reminds me of the noises that have been heard all around the world for the past two years, the strange sky trumpets.

I’m shivering uncontrollably. Is it the cold or is it the dread that’s enveloped my body?

I’m so scared. Always thought I was a brave man, but I feel like a lost lonely terrified child right now.

Courage. Must find it. I have to get closer and see what it is. I have to find her.

I’m walking slowly through the dark chilling woods towards the light and the noise. Now I can see something. It looks like people. A long line of people are walking towards a building. The soldiers in black are escorting them. They carry guns. They’re walking into a large building.

Must get closer.

I’ve come to a fence with barb wire. I can see their faces now. Dismay is all I see on their faces. Shock at what is happening to them.

There’s Jill! Oh my God.

“Jiiillll,” I scream out. It does no good, she doesn’t hear me. A soldier has. He turns to look at me.

“Jiiillll,” I’m screaming out. Oh no. Here they come.

She is still walking towards the building when the entire facility explodes. Everything erupts in a violent explosion, knocking me into the air.

My skin is burning. I’m burning.

And then I awaken in a pool of sweat. Jill is lying next to me sleeping so effortlessly. A sleep her body could no longer deny after the events of the past few days.

“Oh thank God,” I say aloud with a tremble to my voice. It was a terrible dream, but it was so vivid.

I get up and go to the kitchen for a drink of water. I can’t shake the images of the dream. It seemed so horrifyingly real. My beautiful wife is okay and the kids are sleeping, our two month old baby in the bassinette next to our bed, and my two boys in their room.

The thought of the dream and how real it could have been brings a tear to my eye.

It’s five thirty in the morning. I’m not going back to bed anytime soon. Might as well put on a pot of coffee.

2

I know it’s the events of the past few days that are causing my nightmares. How could I sleep at all? A restless few hours of tossing and turning is the best I can do considering that the date is now December 22, and I am still here.

The world was supposed to end yesterday. Although it did not end, the world I knew has died. It all started a few days ago.

All I know for sure at this point is that a massive X-Class solar flare erupted from the sun on December 17 and within hours all hell broke loose. First, there were the news reports about the massive geomagnetic storm, but of course, they downplayed it as though we had nothing to worry about. Then, the picture on the tube went fuzzy fading in and out before going out altogether.

My wife and I had just put our three children down to bed. We were watching the news about the storm after first hearing about it on the conspiracy theorist website that created my paranoid state in the first place, Above Top Secret.com.

You see, I believe it’s my infatuation with conspiracy theories that planted these vivid nightmares in my head. Initially, it wasn’t 2012 doomsday conspiracies that intrigued me. It was politics. It was my interest in underground government bunkers, FEMA death camps, Homeland Security purchases of over a billion bullets, hundreds of thousands of stored black coffins, and finally, the strange trumpet sounds echoing all over this planet.

After we lost our cable channels, I turned on the radio. I tried not to show my agitation. I had to be strong for my family, although, deep inside, the pits of my stomach insuppressibly churned. Stations on the radio that normally came in clear as a whistle were filled with static.

Jill and I stared into each others eyes for a moment. I knew what she was thinking as I knew she knew what I was thinking. After loving this girl for two decades there was no way I could cloak the emotions ready to spew forth. She already knew that I was worried that the December 21 Mayan prophecy was coming to fruition by way of a solar flare.

Suddenly…I had a cramp in my side. Nervous anxiety took over and I had to relieve myself with a quick trip to the bathroom. But, that was the wrong place I wanted to be moments later when the power went out. There I was, caught with my pants down in pitch black. Thinking to myself that this was the place I was going to die. Jill came in with a candle and gradually my panic subdued.

I'm not going to die just yet, I thought.

continued

3

With the nightmare of the explosion still canvassing across my thoughts, I step out onto the deck of the rear of my house. It’s a cold morning, the mercury dropping to 37 degrees, but still warm for the pre-dawn morning in late December. The temps and the weather have been abnormal for months. Here I am standing on my deck overlooking my yard and there’s no snow on the ground just three days before Christmas.

Christmas. What a pleasurable reflection right now. If only for a spell, I go back to my tenth Christmas. My brother and I shared a bedroom and I remember how that year we had our own little three foot tall decorated tree on a table in the corner. We had strings of lights and garland all around the ceiling of the room. Oh how cool it was to go to sleep at night with all those lights on, and flashing of course.

The sliding glass door opens. Jill walks out from our dining room, a cup of coffee of her own. She probably smelt the coffee brewing all the way into the bedroom. Well, it wasn’t really brewing. I heated up some water in our fireplace and then added some instant. Nasty, but it works for today.

“Can’t sleep?” she asks.

“No. You?”

“Nightmares,” she speaks in a whisper. I can see her breath from the cold like smoke from a chimney. I embrace her, ever so tightly. Not only to comfort her because I know the persistent awareness of the nightmare I had only moments ago, but also to warm her on this remarkably crisp December morning.

As I’m holding her to my chest, she says, “I’m scared, I’m really scared.” I feel the ache in her voice as she starts to cry. I pull away holding her by the shoulders.

“We’re going to be alright, baby. Look, it’s almost 6:00 in the morning on December 22. The Mayan thing was all BS. What’s happening here is all part of a natural phenomenon and we’re going to survive it.”

“How can you be so sure,” she asks as she looks up to the moon. I follow her gaze. It’s nearly blood red. As the moon lies just above the horizon readying itself to set for the day, giving way to the sun, she looks larger than she ever has. It’s not quite full, but more than three quarters. The redness is surreal, like right out of the bible.

For a moment, we just gaze up. I look back at her and the small river of tears running down her cheek glistens from the light of the bright red moon.

As I wipe the river away, I tell her that it’s only because of the volcanic eruptions and their ashes carrying across the lands with the winds from the west, the Zephyr.

continued

4

For the first three nights after the largest coronal mass ejection in the history of mankind, the aurora borealis was incredible. From one end of the sky to the other the green, red and purple waves of light danced in a magnificent choreography only God could create. There was no part of the sky that was left out of this incredible brilliance.

It was on the fourth night, December 20 that the dancing lights gave way to the blood red moon. It was on that day that I walked down to the gas station just a few blocks from our house to see what news I could find out.

We lived in Crawdad, Wisconsin, a small town of just a few hundred people about an hour east of the Twin Cities. Although the power was out, our town was still functioning. Two days prior to this I took the family for a drive around the area to see how widespread the blackout was and to find out some news. We found out that it was worldwide. The power grid fell like dominos. Radio and internet were down as well. I knew at that moment that it wouldn’t take long for law and order to fall apart.

We went home and decided to stay put and pray. We felt relatively safe in our small town. Our home was a split-level two story built onto a slight hill. To the west, towards the Twin Cities, were several smaller homes at the bottom of the hill and out towards the corn fields. To the east were more homes up the hill. Our home was on the outskirts of the town which sat to the north.

Thinking back now I wished I had prepped for all that was happening. I wished I had stored food, bought guns, stocked up on batteries, bought a ham radio and well, you get the point. I suddenly felt a profound determination to protect my family at all costs. We had to stay in our home and hope for the best.

As I walked the several blocks through town, there was an eerie stillness that settled upon Crawdad. There were people walking to and fro but in the street. No one used the sidewalk. They were in their yards but everyone was off a bit. They kept to themselves and it seemed no one was interested in the next guy.

And the quiet. It was disturbing. There wasn’t one generator running anywhere in town.

They readied themselves. They were as if it were the final day of our existence. The next day would be December 21, the day that prophecies predicted the world would end.

As I got to the gas station I saw that Tim Johnson was in his backyard unloading wood from his pickup. He was tossing the chunks directly into his wood chute.

He lived next door to the gas station. I’d known Tim since I moved to Crawdad the year before. He was the gym teacher at Crawdad Community School, a small school that had grades k-12. The class of 2012 had 23 graduates.

“Hey Tim, what’s going on man,” I said to him as I walked up behind him. He startled a bit.

“Oh, Jack,” he looked relieved to see me. “You got to be careful sneaking up on me like that.”

He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t joking, not on this day.

“What ya up to,” I asked. I didn’t think he had a wood stove.

“What do you mean,” he paused. “You haven’t heard what’s going on?”

“No, I’ve been at the house with my head buried in the sand. Just hoping the power would come back on I guess.” He’s shaking his head, eyes bulging at me like I’m the dumbest fool he’s ever spoken to.

“The friggin world is coming to an end, Jack, and if it isn’t, our president is going to make sure of it,” He said.

“Our president,” I question. I already knew there must have been a lot of frightened folks out there with the blackout, internet down and no way to communicate. The brilliant northern light spectacle was enough to bring any man to his knees and pray for salvation, but what else had been happening to make Jack believe it was his last days.

“Look, look here,” he stuttered. Tim pulled out a St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper. It was dated for December 20, that morning. It had a large roaring headline that read simply Doomsday? Below the headline were four smaller headlines above their own columns. They each described four major events that happened since the geomagnetic storm.

The first story said that more than a dozen major volcanoes exploded in the two days following the initial blast from the sun as well as another dozen earthquakes above 7.0 on the Richter scale. Three of the volcanoes were North American.

“Mt. Saint Helens, man,” Tim said nervously. “”It exploded again and it was pretty bad.” The story also said that Mount Hood in Oregon, a volcano that hasn’t erupted since 1866, blew its top. And then there was the Big Island in Hawaii that was now covered in lava because Kilauea, the world’s most active volcano, exploded like never before.

continued

“The story says the ash cloud will be arriving here today. This isn’t good,” I said as I looked up at Tim.

The earthquake story said that thousands of people were dead from the initial quakes that rocked the globe in the first 24 hours. Since, there are other tremors reported in areas that are awaking. These included Yellowstone and the New Madrid fault line. Two of the quakes on December 18 included an 8.8 in San Francisco and a 8.1 in Oregon not far from Mount Hood.

The third story talked about the worldwide loss of communications with no power, internet or radio. It said there were a few stations still broadcasting in some areas, but their reception was limited to within a couple of dozen miles. That’s why we couldn’t hear anything from the Twin Cities.

I hadn’t even realized how bad I was shaking. The words I was trying to read were blurry. I didn’t even want to know what the fourth story said. I looked up at Tim. He must have known.

As he pointed to the fourth headline, he said, “The president declares martial law as order dissolves in major cities. It says that tanks and troops have already arrived in Minneapolis because hundreds of fires have broken out. Thousands of stores have been robbed and looted, and not for your regular high end items like TV’s and Ipods, man. No, they are stealing for food, guns, winter clothes and whatever else they need for survival. People weren’t ready for this, Jack. There’s going to be a lot of scared hungry people out there, and where do you think they are going to head when they escape the madness of the big city?”

Even though I knew the answer the second he said it, I was speechless.

“Crawdad and all the other small towns out here in Wisconsin,” Tim said. “There are more than 2 million people in the Cities and martial law has been declared. They’re not all going to be sticking it out in the Cities as they’re rounded up for those FEMA death camps. The story says there’s already been gun fights in the streets between the National Guard and militia’s.”

“I think I better get home, Tim,” I said. I was about to hurl all over the hood of his truck. The gag reflex was right at the back of my throat. All I wanted to do was hold and squeeze my family.

Stay tuned for second story, the conclusion

I am waiting in suspense! Please continue.

I just recently started reading in the short stories forum, and I like your style!

reply to post by Keron


Thanks, Part 2 is in my signature, but its also in the short story forum.