What follows is my attempt at original fiction. It's a saga about survival both during and after the Great Destruction, a post apocalyptic adventure in short. Zechariah Sitchen wrote a series of books about a supposed 12th Planet in our solar system, an inhabited rogue world with a massive orbit that took it beyond the range of modern astronomical equipment to detect. What if this were remotely true? That's the premise for this story.
Let me know what you think, and enjoy. This is my vacation for Cassandra.
"...And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets. And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand. And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake."- Revelations, 8:2- 8-5 KJV.
In the near future...
The Mississippi sky is a cascade of colors. A rich display of ribbons red, blue, and all the other colors of the rainbow flood the heavens above intersperced with jagged arcs of lightning as the earth below rumbles with a fury not experienced here in living memory. The world is in a noisy terror, ripping itself apart in the face of a silent enemy looming near.
Glaring down on a patch of forest once glorious but now toppled and sundered is a moon larger than its natural counterpart. A rogue planet come 'round from somewhere in the depths of space spelling disaster for all of mankind. The warnings had come, but there was only so much that the earthly could do in the face of the cosmic.
Amidst this particular patch of forest is a clearing and a toppled trailer that had once been a yard and home. The place was just another scene of disaster amidst the ruin of a world swept away by a simple act of circumstance, evidence of how little humanity ever truly had under control. Ringing out amidst the low rumble of the still angry earth was a low metallic thudding. On the backside of this particular yard was a dropoff from whence it came, a tree had collapsed over a concealed entrance, a reinforced door and someone inside beating it open.
A groaning issues from the earth as a split opens. The door had been the back entrance of a makeshift bunker, literally a schoolbus had been buried for this purpose and as the earth inexhorably sighs, the red clay Mississippi dirt rends this impromptu shelter providing its occupant an opportunity to escape. The banging at the door ends and work gloved hands grasp at the shredded metal to pull up and escape.
First a rooster scrambles out of the metal framed hole in the earth in a frenzy of black and white feathers, then his owner with a heave of grey ensconced muscles. A burgundy haired woman with a rucksack and wearing the duster of a Confederate sergeant makes her way out of the failed shelter to peer around with emerald eyes.
Phoenix Ravenwing, plainly of mixed Irish and Native heritage by her hair and dark bronze skin stands in awe for all of two seconds at her surroundings before scooping up her rooster Jubal Early and escaping the still shifting maw of the earth beneath her feet. The ground is slowly shifting, water gushing forth from sundering pipes and the water table exposing itself making her progress precarious. Her poor chicken is a shivering mass of feathers under her arm and her rucksack slings about as she makes her way up the driveway to the safer asphalt. Even if it's splitting, her jungle boots can grip it more soundly than the slick clay loam.
One Year Earlier...
Phoenix is a single land owning woman with a successful business of her own. She runs a gunsmith shop and offers Friday and Saturday self defense courses. Sunday is her one day a week break and she spends it on herself.
The back half of her trailer has been many things over the years. Her late husband was a sports fan and a gamer. She kept his gaming room as it was in memory, he had made poor decisions in his battle with prostate cancer. She knew he'd given up in the end, his drinking and cigars more constant companions than he'd allowed her to be. In spite of this, she hadn't thrown away his collection of bottles and humidors nor anything else. The rest of this end however was another story.
Where he'd been a devout Irish Catholic, she had spent the last several years of her life drifting from that side of herself to her native roots. The far end was a shrine of sorts, sacred space where she could greet the sun in the mornings away from the frustrating mosquitoes and other assorted natural bothers. The irony was never lost on her friends about this room.
The living room was a mixture of native artwork and dedications to assorted saints. Amidst all of this was an old musket hung on the wall. Supposedly it'd been carried by a Confederate infantryman at the battle of Vicksburg, but noone doubted its age. Her husband had gone through great pains restoring it, and she'd been there with him for all of it learning his art. They were in agreement that while it might diminish its actual value, they had no plans to use or sell it so would rather bring it as close to how it had looked over a hundred years ago while replacing as little as possible.
The gunsmithing business of hers had two locations. At the intersection down the road from their home was the business proper. Gunsmithing was the cornerstone of their livelihood, but the two of them had always reinvested their profits into southern and native pride memorabilia. Their store was a hodge podge mixture of Confederate flags and novelties amidst Native Pride hats, leather slings, optional stocks, and sights and other things. The other side of the business was at their home where shipments were brought in and she did most of her actual gunsmithing.
Most gunsmiths need very little space to work, even professionally. A pistolsmith can do most of his work out of a tote bag's worth of items, a serious student needs only ten feet square to work out of on average. She had a small building renovated into a gun shop. The lion's share was dedicated to parkerizing and bluing, two chemical processes for protecting metal from the elements and giving it an attractively dark and smooth appearance.
She had been six months single by this point and no closer to considering moving on than the day of the funeral. There hadn't been much of one, he'd been cremated to Temple of the Dog. She still got teary eyed when she heard the lyrics,"I don't mind stealing bread from the mouths of decadence....I'm going hungry..." There was a round of toasts when the chorus broke in, a friend of theirs had provided a keg of home made mead for the occasion.
This Sunday, a story from CNN caught her eye that made her do a double take. A planetoid long rumored to be beyond the edge of the solar system had shown itself and was taking a very odd course across the paths of several planets and would cross paths with Earth some time before this time next year. She didn't know why, but she downloaded the report on it since it included interviews with a numer of prominent astronomers.
Back in the present...
The road is unfriendly and treacherous. She's in shock at the level of destruction. Trees look like they were simply bowled over by a swipe from the hand of a giant, the road is cracked and split and the sky is so illuminated via aurora that she can't rightly tell if it's night or day. Looking at her compass, it's spinning such that if she weren't sure of which way the roads went she might be worried about getting lost.
Her marching pack is heavier than she would like, but there's a few things she stubbornly refuses to leave. Her rifle was one, an old winchester .45-70 lever rifle. It was her dad's rifle, and his dad's before him. She knows how hard bullets are to find for it, and what she had weighed her down as well with the strap around the stock and the dozen or so rounds in the tube ready to fire. At her hip is an M9 and in her pack is a spare .38 to make up for the rarity of her rifle's ammo. She's a camelback in her rucksack and a canteen, a pair of freeze dried ziplock bags of fruit, and a small array of pocketted snacks as well as a simple survival kit, rifle kit, and a change of clothes and a few other odds and ends. She thought for a while about how she would make it on whatever trail she followed and knew it wasn't perfect. There are no perfect plans, and this won't be camping.
The wind is anything but steady as she carries on one foot in front of the other.She's grateful for her duster breaking the worst of the wind that does more to her than the four miles to the intersection. The whole way there, she scarcely sees evidence of life and the strange colors are a boggle to her mind.
Her arms rest on her slung rifle, the padding of the sling a comfort to her neck as she approached the gas station at the intersection. She'd walked further with heavier many times. Indeed, she and her late husband had walked all over the world, from touring Mount Roraima on the Venezuela border to the backwoods of Thailand making the pilgrimage to the Siddhartha Buddha's final resting place. She heaves a sigh as she reaches her goal, reaching for the tube at her shoulder for a refreshing draw from her camelpack as she looks up.
Ravenwing beholds a wonder like she never imagined in the sky. The angry new moon dwarfs its natural pair but that's not what draws her attention. A black spot she had never noticed before had appeared on the ordinary moon from whch twinkling lights glint forth to the new world in the sky.
She reflects as she watches this with wonder, these are interesting times. Suddenly, she whirls about as a crack of thunder roars on the horizon such as she has never heard in all her life. It came from where she figures to be the northwest, a brilliant light like a second dawn rises there but she knows from the gathering cloud and the ominous rumble beneath her feet that it's no sunrise.
"
The great day of the LORD is near, it is near, and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the day of the LORD: the mighty man shall cry there bitterly.That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness,"-Zephaniah 1:14-1:15, KJV
The Day After the Day of the Lord
A crack of lightning and peel of thunder like a cannon blast lets her know to take shelter. A bolt had split and sundered a toppled power pole raining splinters next to her. Her jacket stopped a few calcified wooden barbs, but she wasn't going to linger and see what comes next. The bitter second sunrise had rapidly blossomed into a dark mushrooming omen.
The thundering dawn growled on and on as the gathering cloud spreads over the illuminated horizon, and Phoenix plants her heel with force against the glass pane of the gas station door to make her way in. A sound like a train approaches and her rooster who had been in a terrified quiet in her backpack with his head poked out begins to squawk an alarm. It doesn't sound like a tornado, but she isn't of a mind to find out what it is so she snatches a few bags of chips and cans of ravioli as she makes for the bathroom. Shutting herself in, she drops her backpack beneath her, cradling it and the poor rooster as she waits for whatever's coming to pass.
The roar approaches with the solemnity of a gathering storm. Two minutes pass, then ten and the building vibrates around her. Jubal tucks his head down, his eye rolling around in the utter darkness as if looking for an escape that isn't there. Soon enough the roar becomes a scream overhead and all around drowning out everything else in existence as the roof is torn away by straight line wind. The cacophany carries on and on as they are buried beneath wood first, then cinderblock but she stays put as the rubble gathers around and over her shielding her like a turtle shell from the devastation.
She doesn't know how long this carries on, but eventually it does pass. Her ears ring from the droning mayhem as she struggles against the debris. She knows its been awhile from the smothering sensation that drives her up, but she has sensibility enough to don the gloves in her pocket when she realizes some of the things in her way are sharp and raspy. Forcing her way up, she moves aside boards laden with sundered cinderblock and wire, gasping in the dust that threatens to choke her. Coughing, she doesn't mind the chalky taste because it reminds her that yet again she has survived.
Dragging up her precious cargo to set it on top of the mound of desolation that was a gas station, she looks around to take stock of the state of her ever changing situation. A strange thing catches her attention from the sky. Dragging up the rest of her loot to toss it aside with more abandon than her rooster laden backpack, she finally frees herself the ruins to their surface.
Looking up, she sees what looks like balls of fire, or scarlet will o' whisps issuing from the bitter new world. This was the most curious of the new sights she's greeted with as she observes them travelling down to places far away from where she is now. That they aren't going anywhere near here is scant blessing though, the next thing is the fact that the gathering cloud from the horizon has extended to encompass the entirety of it such that she can no longer tell where it precisely originated from. Distant thunder groans and she can still feel ominous vibrations through the thick soles of her army boots.
Hefting her backpack to resling it and pulling up her rifle, she begins the chore of scavenging. She had her snacks, soon enough she found water and aspartame free tea drinks to go with and she was ready to move. She couldn't stay here forever, she may as well move.
Jubal was scared half to death, and truth be told she was too but she'd been in enough situations in her life that she knew how to properly react. Fear isn't necessarily a killer, it can be an instructor. Ignorance of how to react to fear is what kills. She is forced to confess to her rooster companion here that she is awfully ignorant, she doesn't which is worse: that the sky really is falling or that the earth could swallow them at any moment.
The heavy smell of gasoline brings her back to reality, they are still in the midst of a lightning storm. She gathers up her things and proceeds to march out of there post haste. Her mind wanders back to better days as she makes her way from the intersection preferring to take her chances with lightning rather than a spark amidst a gathering pond of combustibles.
The reports that Sunday roughly a year ago ranged from China's new gold backed currency that they refused to allow transferrence into dollars to the neverending troubles in the middle east. So long as there's a world, there's going to be problems she thought. One day she would be with her love somewhere between heaven and the pastures of her people, but in the meantime she couldn't dwell on such things.
At the time, the story about a seemingly rogue planet was an idle curiosity. It was infinitely more interesting than the economic commentary about the fate of the dollar and speculation about oil, but her Sunday rituals would be endured. How could she chat up customers the other six days if she didn't know what was going on in the world, she figured.
She listened to her podcast this Sunday while walking her property. She hadn't done that in quite a while, and she mildly cursed herself for it as she gathered up a young chicken from her coop who didn't look like it was going to be another hen. If this was to be the case, she didn't want him lingering amidst them so she wrapped him in a little towel to calm him and keep him from hurting himself as she carried the little guy for a travel partner on this particular stroll.
She always walked with a little .22 revolver holstered at her side to handle snakes. The eastern diamondback was one of many threats in the Mississippi woods, there was also the copperhead and the water moccasin among a couple others and she wouldn't tolerate any of them to linger in her patch of forest. Most walks were uneventful and relaxing, but she prefered safety to being sorry.
April is a month of showers for southern Mississippi, and those showers mean all sorts of things from water moccasins and mosquitoes on the negative end to new flowers and humming birds and the return of honey bees on the positive. She walks her property following an old deer trail that she knows well. Such trails are exactly what the term suggests, common roaming paths worn down by the grazing, rutting, and habitual roaming of deer native to the area. She herself isn't a hunter, but she knows from those who are a few of the curiosities of the gentle creatures.
Cradling the little chicken as he peers out at the world beyond what he's known all of his short life, she follows the deer trail down to a gully running with overflow from the nearby Leaf River. Any time ther's a lot of rain, her property has a creek. Minnows run and a few dragonfly nymphs dance through the flow. She rubs the back of the bird's head as she watches, settling him as he shifts likely eager to get at the aquatic critters. Chickens will eat anything, after all.
The chatter about the new world in her one ear phone was curious. She listened as the reporter interviewed a pair of astronomers from some university whose name she disregarded, apparently the projected path would carry it past Neptune and Jupiter before it reached Earth. There was concern about how close it might come to any of three but they were amazed by its initial recorded velocity.
***
Stumbling back to present day unreality, Phoenix sets Jubal down on the ground. He was smart enough to follow her and even understood a few basic commands. Squatting down beside him, she pops open a can of green tea and chugs back a quarter of it as she becomes irritably aware of how filthy she was. She brushes off dust from her coat and apologizes to Jubal when he goes into a sneezing fit from it. Chirping, he sets about trying to find grub of his own while warily eyeing his surroundings.
She takes the moment to dig out her rifle kit, wondering why she didn't pack it in the cargo pocket of her shorts. She needed to figure out which way to go. She didn't want to walk in the direction of whatever had just happened and there was no telling what nastiness the survivors of the city would get up to. She wasn't inclined to try the army outpost either as she figured they'd be laden in no time with rescue and preservation efforts. A distant explosion rings out as if on cue with that thought, then another and she looks towards where she knows by heart the direction the army base Shelby lies.
Jubal Early flutters and Phoenix nods to him as if understanding. She rises to her feet, grabbing up her can and taking another drink before pocketting her now retrieved rifle cleaning kit."This can wait, we're going towards Keesler. The coast it is." She takes an extra moment with that declaration to pack a few snacks into her cargo shorts pockets, not caring if they would slap around while she walked. It was more important to have them easily at hand.
With all the earthquakes and having literally drug herself up out of the earth not so long ago, she wasn't interested in being confined to a building. She'd seen the security the military offers before in other places, she merely intended Keesler as a direction. She doubted it'd be long before she saw the big planes and helicopters going to and from there, but she figured the coast would offer more than any place around here.
Adjusting her cowboy style pistol belt, then doing an overall readiness check of her big rifle she makes ready for the very long hike to come. A small town up the highway would herald her approach to the intersection that was the first leg of her journey to come. Then a truly long trek would carry her to the coast, but that small town she reckoned would give her a good idea of what to expect as far as how many survived the initial storm.
Dusting off a bit of dust from the barrel of her rifle and sinching down the bullet strap around its stock she once again puts one foot in from of the other to make her way up the hilly road to the first town on her journey. The road would be long and unpleasant, but she was resolved to endure.
@jamiewolfe7: Hmm need a wee bit more information before I make a judgement but there is definate potential here. Keep it up and show us a bit more of this 12th planet
Log in to comment