Heavy Future

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

As it grew it acted like a giant snow plow, pushing a mound of sand and rock before it. Scraped violently one icy inch at a time from northern Canada and then pushed southward as the ice expanded. When the ice finally started to retreat, this long dune of sand and rock would mark the end point of the ice’s journey. Just off the coast of Massachusetts, the far eastern remnants of this mound formed Cape Cod.

This giant spit of land, this tourist Mecca, was really nothing more than a gigantic pile of sand. Imagine that stuff snow piles leave when they melt. Now imagine if the snow pile was over a mile tall. This is an important fact to know, because when a swirling mass of heat fueled destruction crashes into it at over 250 miles per hour, that sand is going to move.

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

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

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

When she had passed the Cape was gone. Ophelia violently erased years of hard work by map makers the world over. In its place she left a series of small islands situated in a shallow sand bar. Ophelia paused briefly as she devoured and destroyed, and then slowly, with a groan like a dying animal, turned north and began to take aim at Boston.

Every cheesy disaster movie, every TV show, any silly novel you have ever experienced, they pale in comparison to the stark horror of a metropolis in the grips of full on panic. People can do horrible, ugly things if they think it will keep them alive for a couple more hours. No one thought Ophelia would make it past the cape; the city hadn’t even been evacuated. What had been a tiny category 2 storm just yesterday was now a unstoppable juggernaut of destruction planning on visiting Boston.

Before the first wave of storm surge pushed into Boston harbor, the city was already in shambles. Gun shots rang out as people stole and re-stole any mode of transportation they could find. Boston’s notoriously labyrinthine streets were crowded with a mass of humanity moving west. A thousand tragedies played out on every street corner. Babies died, women were raped, and men were shot for their cars. Hell had set up a franchise in Boston. What we know comes from the handful of survivors that made it out, but no one will really know the full extent of the horror however, because Ophelia was coming to absolve everyone of their sins.

We could do not but stare. The pictures on the television were worse than anything we had ever seen. Later, when they reviewed the footage from the few news copters that had managed to out run the storm, they would find that Boston’s history of brick architecture sealed it’s fate. Brick buildings, brick sidewalks, coble stone streets, all ready made projectiles for a storm like Ophelia. She would devour a building or tear up a couple hundred feet of road surface, and then hurl masses of bricks at over 200 miles per hour in all directions. Mother Nature’s Armageddon shotgun.

The entire city had been leveled. Only a couple landmarks remained, the Prudential Center was still standing, at least the bottom 20 or so floors. Every single window had been smashed and you could now see clean through the building. Ophelia had only paused briefly several miles off shore, and yet the fringes of her massive girth were enough to erase over 200 years of human history in a couple of hours.

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

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

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

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

I didn’t understand.

“If you got enough information, about like casualty rates, and shit, could you tell me if my friends were dead or not?” She was almost begging.

Her voice had a sick desperation, not knowing if your loved ones were dead is worse in many ways than knowing that they are. I had no idea how this thing with my brain worked, but how could I tell her no?

“I don’t know Rain, I mean…I could try.”