Heavy Future

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.