Earth's Blood

By Ethan Holmes

Earth's Blood introduces you to Dr. Niles Havoc and his colleagues, Peter & Leslie Armistead, who find themselves looking out at a full blown blizzard in July in Jerome, Arizona. Captain Ben Vorghees is helpless as his Cruise Liner Aurora gets tossed around like a toy ship in a bathtub. Ito Isaki survives an earthquake only to find a black-walled tsunami looming on the horizon, all thanks to the single most cataclysmic event on Earth.
A small group of distinguished scientists have been warning governments on all levels for years about what is happening to Planet Earth. Tectonic Plates grinding against each other for millenniums with no truly substantial release of pressure will produce the most profound geological and seismological event ever known.
In Earth's Blood, richly detailed stories from across the planet immerse the reader into the ramifications and peripheral events which combine to drastically change the physical planet. The result: Near extinction of the human race as modern society and all its dependencies collapse and destruction and chaos rule.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ethan Holmes
• Release date: Aug 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9780615396606

Ethan Holmes

Ethan Holmes is the author of six books including the novels, Earth's Blood, Water and The Keystone. He is also the author of two collections of short stories, A Multi-Pack of Brain Flakes and Shorts and Other Laundry.. Currently residing in Northern Arizona, he enjoys hiking, playing twelve string guitar, reading, writing and participation in most active sports.

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EARTH’S BLOOD

By, Ethan Holmes

©FrozenMan Productions, Revised Edition, 2013

©Smashwords Edition, 2013

This book is sold for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be given away or re-sold in any form to other people. If you would like to encourage your friends to read this book please purchase a copy for them or encourage them to purchase a copy. Thank you for showing respect for the hard work of the Author.

No segment or whole of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. All rights reserved. All rights under the copyright reserved above remain unlimited.

This novel is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination and/or are used fictitiously. All references to any and all characters in this novel are strictly fictional. Any semblance to any real person is strictly unintended and deemed incidental by the Author. The Author hereby acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. The author does not endorse or otherwise recommend any of the various products/services which may be mentioned in the novel.

Credits:

Grateful acknowledgement to my staff of editors;

Linda Christie, Chief Copy Editor

Sue Connell, Storyline Editor

R. Watts, Storyline Editor

Earth’s Blood Table of Contents

Chapter One: In the Beginning

Chapter Two: And the One Seated Upon It Was Called Death

Chapter Three: And Earthquakes in One Place after Another

Chapter Four: And the Sea Is No More

Chapter Five: And There Will Be Adversity upon Adversity

Chapter Six: And the Ground Itself Is Ruined Into a Desolation

Chapter Seven: Then Sudden Destruction Will Be Upon Them

Chapter Eight: And the End of It Will Be By Flood

Chapter Nine: You Yourselves Will Go Hungry, You Yourselves Will Go Thirsty

Chapter Ten: The Sea Gave Up Those Dead in It

Chapter Eleven: A Foolish Man Who Built His House upon the Sand

Chapter Twelve: The Badness of Man Was Abundant In the Earth

Earth’s Blood

By, Ethan Holmes

Chapter 1: In the Beginning...

11 July, 2014: It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and snowing heavily on the diminutive former copper mine town of Jerome, Arizona. It’s a soft heavy snow chock full of quarter-size feathery flakes coming down just thick enough that you can still see the ghost-like outlines of the historical buildings perched precariously on the steep slope of Mingus Mountain. The enchanting scene is quickly covered with a downy blanket a foot deep and silences the world as only a heavy snowfall can. There are only two problems; it’s not supposed to be snowing here at this time of the year and the world does not need silencing. That happened a while ago.

1June, 2012: Mary Ellen Siemes was proud of herself and justifiably so. The bottle-dyed blonde who managed to just crack a measuring tape at five foot two inches was sitting at her computer processing medical claim forms for insurance companies and doctors in a home she had purchased all by herself just two years ago. After getting her accounting degree from Mesa Community College Mary Ellen spent twelve years working for Bell and Thomas, Inc. in Phoenix as a certified public accountant. One day not long after her thirty sixth birthday and with the proverbial ‘big four 0’ looming in the not so distant future, she had enough of the long, stress-filled days that could stretch to fourteen hours during tax season.

It was a profound yet rewarding step starting up her own home-based company from the house she had purchased on Black Mountain, the most notable landmark in Carefree, Arizona. Here at her modest late seventies ranch-style home she could do all the work on her own computer and never have to commute among the three million other inhabitants of the Phoenix Valley except when she had to drive into the city to pick up or deliver paperwork from her clients. All in all not a bad arrangement and the money was getting better all the time, particularly after she invested a princely sum in the new accounting software which cut her computer time by a third.

Today Mary Ellen planned to make the trip into downtown Phoenix from her home twenty-three miles north of the valley to deliver some work and pick up a rather sizable check; the kind that makes a small business owner very happy. Sometimes she still had to put in long hard days but now she was investing in herself and her own future.

Mary Ellen reached for the green print button on her new HP all-in-one machine when suddenly the whole house shuddered violently and the power went dead instantaneously. She had an APC Backup Pro to prevent any unforeseen power interruptions or spikes but cursed under her breath as she watched the monitor go black. At the same time her tan leather office chair took off on an impromptu trip across the floor. Frantically, she clung to the edges of her white pine office desk hanging on for dear life.

How am I ever going to explain this to those people? Mary Ellen envisioned the invoice evaporating into the black hole of cyber-space, lost forever. Did anyone else feel that?! An earthquake in Carefree!? And when my computer comes back up I can’t wait to see what else I lost on there!

The shudder itself was the strangest and most disconcerting thing she had ever felt despite the fact that she was a veteran of the 2008 Mission Bay quake that had brought down a chunk of San Diego and temporarily emptied the bay. This one didn’t shake or roll nor did it last very long at all like most quakes seem to do. The whole house just sort of jumped up sharply and then back down like someone snapping a blanket to spread it across a new-made bed.

All the software and music CD’s had fallen out of the flimsy plastic storage tower next to her computer and the family photos on her desk were either lying flat or had crashed to the floor. The three-drawer metal filing cabinet was leaning against her pine bookcase with the top two drawers bent on their runners and sticking halfway out. Surveying the mess, she saw that her calendar, her wood-framed cork bulletin board full of multicolored post-it notes and anything else which used to be hanging on the walls was now lying on the floor in a chaotic jumble.

It’s going to take a whole day just to clean this up!

Mary Ellen struggled to her feet, kicked some debris out of the way and stumbled to the kitchen to find every right-hand cabinet door wide open. Dishes, boxes, cans of food and pieces of glass were scattered everywhere. The refrigerator and freezer doors were wide open. Most of the food and beverages were splattered on the floor in front of and to the left of the appliance. The white, four-slice Cuisinart toaster, normally sitting on the counter on the right side of the sink, was sitting cockeyed in the sink. It looked as though the whole room had abruptly shifted to the right and forgot to take all the contents with it.

Clambering over various household furnishings into the bedroom she found the same odd looking chaotic mess in there. She was astonished to see that her queen-sized waterbed mattress, though still intact, had been thrown completely clear of the bed frame. It was sitting half on the floor and half against her antique wormwood dresser, nearly a thousand pounds of loose water sitting in a giant contorted sack on the left side of the room. All of it was still neatly covered by sheets and a white goose down comforter. The chenille-covered pillows were still sitting on the wooden slats within the metal bed frame on the floor.

From behind the disconcerting pile that was her mattress she heard the pitiful, choking cry of her pet brown and white terrier. Darva had always liked to sleep on the waterbed whether Mary Ellen was in there or not despite her half-hearted attempts to break the dog of the habit as a puppy. The truth was she didn't mind Darva sleeping with her. At least something was in there with her when she lay her head down at night.

Mary Ellen scrambled over the big sack of water toward the master bath in an attempt to find the dog. Following the cries she peered under the far end of the mattress half-propped against the dresser and there was Darva tightly pinned between the dresser and the mattress. She could see blood running from both corners of her dog’s mouth as she came to the realization she could do nothing to prevent Darva from being slowly crushed to death.

Charlie Baye was working on his car. He was always working on his car. The dusty, leaky, oil-burning piece of rolling crap was twenty-two years old and held together by baling wire and twine. Two floor jacks supported the front end and he had a jack stand under the rear pumpkin; all four wheels off down to the axles. Today he was working on the exhaust, so rusted out that it was almost completely comprised of JB Weld patches, screening and hangers. It was hot too, being June, and working on your car in Queen Creek, Arizona in June was about as much fun as firing up the oven and sitting in it naked.

The southern end of the Phoenix valley had long ago given up its vast stretches of irrigated fertile farmland to the voracious greed of housing developers, convenience stores and strip malls. The over-abundance of concrete and macadam seemed to hold the one hundred degree plus heat to the ground and make summers in Queen Creek unbearable to any sensible being. Yet here was Charlie, lying under the car on a once-colorful, tattered Mexican blanket trying not to listen to his wife Charlotte scream for him to come in and get some lunch and sticking just one more hopeful patch on this piece of used-to-be pipe. Four seconds later Charlie would have to patch no more and the junky primer-gray ’67 Pontiac would be sitting there completely flat on the ground. Charlie’s feet were sticking out of it like the Wicked Witch of the East, killed by a car instead of a house.

Charlotte always knew that car would be the death of him yet and she finally hit the truth on the head. Charlotte however, was too busy lying on the kitchen floor with the refrigerator lying across her.

What the hell happened? One minute I’m bending over to get Charlie a beer and the next it feels like the whole damn kitchen jumped across the room at me! she screamed inside her own head as she tried desperately to draw sharp little breaths that seemingly contained no air.

The agonizing pain of a large kitchen appliance laying on her would normally have been unbearable if Charlotte had been able to feel anything at all. As she sucked her last few drafts of life-sustaining oxygen she realized she could feel nothing from her neck down except an overwhelming pressure and a complete inability to move.

When the infamous Mission Bay quake hit in July, 2008, you would have thought that people would finally awaken to the fact that something much more catastrophic was about to hit in the near future. The event was to be the second of what later came to be known as ‘the great signs’ that something so cataclysmic was about to happen that events like Krakatau, Mount Vesuvius and the massive China and Peru earthquakes of the late 1990's and early 2000's would come to seem like minor disturbances rather than the catastrophes they were thought to be at the time.

None of those events took the amount of human life that the Mission Bay quake wiped out. Scientists, geologists, volcanologists and seismologists all over the planet spent years making excuses, conjecturing why and how it happened. They stumbled all over themselves trying to explain why they didn't see it coming.

So much attention and publicity was given to the San Andreas Fault over the last fifty years that every seismologic event from the Baja Peninsula to the Aleutian Islands was allegedly the direct result of the fault moving. If the earth shook at all in that region it was always attributed to the San Andreas Fault; the break between the Pacific and North American Plates grinding against each other in the great, titanic struggle for superiority. If a volcano went off, like Mount St. Helen did in 1980, it was the San Andreas that did it; except it wasn’t. Mount St. Helen is a Plinian volcano. It erupted because of a pressure-packed explosive build-up of lava underneath the dome like an over-inflated balloon that finally blew.

When Mission Bay came along all the eggheads were aghast and shocked because it exposed just how little they all knew about what was really going on between the Pacific and North American Tectonic Plates. The long and short of it was that a million and a half people lost their lives in the space of twenty four hours during that quake, many of whom were never accounted for, never found.

What made this event unusual was the fact that its epicenter was directly under the bay and it didn't rock and roll like most earthquakes. Rather, it was an abrupt movement, a sudden, rapid upheaval of a great mass of the sub-oceanic crust of the earth.

The snap itself knocked down nearly every man-made structure for over thirty miles in a 180-degree range from the epicenter. It also effectively emptied out Mission Bay for a short period until the Pacific Ocean succeeded in reclaiming it. It must have been quite a sight but no one who actually witnessed it on the ground was around to tell the story. Point Loma and Coronado simply disappeared, not a trace to be found. Out of a metropolitan area of just over 3 million, in the blink of a geological eye, half were gone. More people drowned or were washed away never to be seen again than in any other prior recorded disaster. Panic and chaos were the order of the day for months afterward and the scientists ran around pulling their hair out trying to figure out why they did not see this particular event coming; all but one.

Niles Havoc had been fascinated with the inner workings of planet Earth for as long as he could remember. As a boy, shows on the Discovery Channel about earthquakes, volcanoes and natural disasters held his rapt attention. They still did years later when he became a noted geologist and seismologist. In addition to his scientific bent, Niles had a ‘feel’ for the earth, an inexplicable connection with whatever part of it he was in close contact with. It was there since his childhood yet he never directly disclosed this fact to any of his family or colleagues.

There were perhaps four people he could call friends who knew about and believed in his amazing ability to ‘feel’ things about Planet Earth. They were amazed at his stunningly accurate predictions of seismological events that were about to happen, yet most of his associates in the fields of geology and seismology tended to write him off as something akin to a coocoo-woohoo psychic or doomsayer prophet. He alone had called the San Diego catastrophe almost dead-on even correctly predicting the fact that the epicenter would be located undersea, not inland around the San Andreas Fault. He also predicted it would be a sudden and wildly destructive fracture, brief in nature yet very violent.

Of course, as is usually the case when one person stands up and predicts or points out something that no one else wants to hear Dr. Havoc was laughed at, ridiculed and in most cases completely ignored by everyone but the ever-present tabloids. They threw up headlines that made him out to be some prophet/alien from another planet, a messenger from God, a soothsayer. They followed him around like a pack of hyenas photographing him and peering into his garbage at home every time he publicized a prediction.

Niles felt that anyone who was the least bit in touch with the earth beneath their feet would be acutely aware that something monstrously catastrophic was about to happen in the near geological future. Nevertheless, despite his Doctorate, his Masters, and his ground-breaking research into the Tectonic Plates that had revealed more faults and fissures than had ever been considered before, in places never before considered, he was pretty much written off by most of the trade publications and major media every time he opened his mouth.

Dr. Havoc was one of the few in his field who dared to openly dispute the decades-old notion that most other geologists and other scientists had about the so-called Big One predicted to strike along the San Andreas Fault.

Late in 2004, at a seminar in San Francisco, he had the audacity to get up in front of three hundred of his colleagues and tell them that the Big One was going to be so big that it would literally change the face of the earth, the climate of the planet, and society itself as they currently knew it. His theory was that tremendous pressure was building in the collision between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate. It had been accumulating for so many years without any form of major release of the stored energy. He believed that, when it did finally go, it would go with such force that it would snap violently in a way the human species had never witnessed before.

Pointing out the signs over the last twenty five years or so that seemed to fortify his predictions about what was going to happen did not improve his credibility. There certainly were plenty of them; the severe movements of the Pacific Plate around Japan, the tsunamis and volcanic activity in Indonesia and severe earthquakes along the coasts of North America and South America.

In September of 1985, over 7000 people lost their lives in one of the most powerful earthquakes recorded in the 20th century, centered in and directly under Mexico City and subsequently followed up by two more quakes farther up the line in California in 1989 and 1994. All the signs and research now pointed to yet another major event before the year 2008 was out. In addition, he pointed out, scientists had remained somewhat baffled by the discovery in early 2001 of an apparent diastrophism, a huge bulge in the central Oregon/Washington area not very far from the Columbia Plateau basalt plains that marked the spot of previous upheaval long ago in an unrecorded time. This would later prove to be another of the ‘great warning signs’ as it grew larger and more baffling to scientists and geologists.

To Dr. Havoc it was frustratingly obvious what was going on. There is certainly no mystery to this. he explained to the gathering in San Francisco. Something massive is building beneath us. It involves pent up energy from the movement of multiple plates across the globe, not just one. We're talking about centuries, perhaps even millennia of build-up.

His theory and prediction was that this time the release of energy would be nothing like any event ever appearing in the recorded history of humans. To him the geological signs were as plain as daylight; huge manifest traffic arrows showing him exactly what was going on and what was going to happen. The Mission Bay, quake four years later, would only serve to further confirm in his mind that what he saw coming was going to have a world-wide impact. For now, he was nearly being jeered off the stage by the same people who should have been helping him to investigate this further and try to prepare for the inevitable.

1June, 2012: Stumbling his way through the pile of debris that was once his small adobe home, Adan Guillarte stepped out into the dirt road across the way from Charlie and Charlotte Baye’s house. He was still trying to get the gritty, powdery dust out of his eyes but that was nearly impossible since it was hanging thick as a northeast fog in the air. He could barely see what used to be Charlie’s house and as he made his way across the road he could barely make out the outline of Charlie’s old junker sitting on the ground underneath the Palo Verde tree in their front yard.

Adan was a familiar companion to Charlie and his weather-beaten primer-gray Pontiac having spent many a Saturday and Sunday afternoon helping Charlie try to fix it. He liked to spend his weekends like that after working all week at his landscape laborer job, in part because Charlie always had plenty of Corona on hand.

As he got close to the car Adan could see Charlie’s feet sticking out from below the driver's side door but it was not until he got right up to it that he noticed the frame of the car was sitting flat on the ground, no wheels, no space for poor Charlie. He gasped as his befuddled brain figured out that it was not just an empty pair of dirty white sneakers sticking straight up in the air. Making his way over to the pile of partially standing walls and debris that used to be their house, he heard a faint moan escape through the choking dust. Adan called out for Charlotte, his throat grating and nearly closed from the blanket of talcum-like dust. Another feeble moan and Adan finally figured out it was coming from the remains of the Baye’s kitchen. Climbing over and through the debris, Adan peered in and just made out Charlotte lying on the floor surrounded by broken cabinets, dishes, pots, pans, great chunks of drywall and adobe brick, food and a clunky old almond-colored refrigerator laying across Charlotte’s body.

Adan, being only 5'6" tall and maybe 140 pounds if he was wet, was in no position to get the refrigerator off Charlotte. Charlotte, being paralyzed, was in no position to help Adan bench press it off her. None of that mattered as Adan made his way over to Charlotte.

She looked up at him, gasping, Adan, what the hell happened and where is my Charlie?

Adan watched sadly as she sucked one last short grating breath and died. He could have told her what happened to poor Charlie but he didn't know why it happened. All he knew was that his home was destroyed and so was everyone else’s as far as he could see through the dust. He also noticed, in a rather distracted manner, that he could not see or hear a single animal anywhere; a most unusual thing since his neighborhood was usually full of domestic pets including dogs, cats, chickens and the occasional goat.

Adan went back outside, stumbling around amidst the rubble. He decided to head up the dirt road he lived on to see what had happened to his other neighbors.

That’s the funny thing about a disaster. When it happens you get the feeling that somehow you are the only one that experienced it until you see others suffering the same fate. Right now all he knew was that something had knocked his little house flat in just a few seconds and that his neighbors across the way had taken worse. Now he wanted to see what the rest of the neighborhood looked like so he took his tattered, blue and white bandana from his pocket, tied it around his mouth and nose and headed up the road the half-mile that would take him to Saltillo Flats General Store, the local gathering place and watering hole.

It was just too quiet and the dust was getting thicker. It didn’t take too long to figure out why. As Adan got close to where Saltillo Flats used to be standing all he could see was a huge chasm in the ground. Anything and everything that was not in the chasm was lying on the ground, including much of the indigenous plant life. Massive thirty-foot saguaros were now lying flat on their sides with their huge arms splayed fan-like; this after having withstood everything the harsh Arizona desert had thrown at them for hundreds of years. Only the occasional Palo Verde or mesquite tree remained severely leaning to one side or the other clutching dearly at the dry, unforgiving ground with the last remnants of their roots. There was not a soul to be found or heard anywhere nearby, not human, animal, or bird; just dust and dirt hanging all about in a great choking and seemingly endless cloud.

The power was obviously not coming back on anytime soon. Mary Ellen was just getting angrier by the minute, particularly since she was getting a solid wall of busy signals trying to raise the power company on her cell phone. Her frustration and anger only increased as she resorted to dialing every contact on her cell phone with no success. No matter who she called, all she heard was an eerie silence on the other end; not even so much as a pre-recorded message.

Mary Ellen decided to head outside, jump into her cherry red 2004 Honda Accord and find out what was going on in North Phoenix. Picking her way through the household items and strewn furniture she reached for the keys from the little green, wooden saguaro key hanger on the wall by the kitchen door. Much like everything else that used to be on the walls they were not there. It took a few minutes of searching through the wreckage but she finally found the keys lying on the floor among shattered plates and glasses under the dining table.

Wondering what else she would have a hard time finding in this mess she stepped outside to the quick realization that her car might be difficult to find. Instead of sitting at the side of the house where the quarter mile dirt and gravel driveway winding up the side of Black Mountain ended, the car was nowhere in her immediate line of sight.

No, can’t be, it couldn’t have been that hard a jolt to move my damn car! she muttered to herself as she made her way over to the edge of her driveway to peer down the side of the steep rock-strewn slope. Sure enough, there was her Honda sitting about forty yards down the rocky slope with a boulder the size of her kitchen sitting squarely on top of it. Ten yards farther down she was also horrified to see a white Ford F350 pick-up truck resting on its driver’s side.

Recognizing it immediately as the truck belonging to her neighbor, Mr. Edwards, who lived further up Black Mountain, she scrambled down to see the whole thing up close. Making her way around to the front of the pick-up, Mary Ellen turned away and jammed her fist to her mouth to suppress a scream that, had it escaped, would have broken any window nearby which might still be intact. There was poor Mr. Edwards, half of him that is, sprawled on the hood of the truck, sticking out of the middle of what used to be the windshield. Until she had scrambled down there, clambering over fallen trees, cactus and displaced rocks and boulders she couldn't see that the roof was crushed completely flat against the cab. The upper half of the unfortunate Mr. Edwards was perfectly pinned in the dead center of the hood, his body nearly severed at the waist yet held in place with his lower torso by the compression of the roof against the dashboard.

Standing there trying to choke back the horror of what she was looking at, Mary Ellen was not immediately aware of the low rumbling coming from the peak of Black Mountain.

All of the area around Carefree and Cave Creek, long before recorded history, was an active volcanic and glacial debris area. The landscape, thousands of years later, still vividly reflected the upheaval and violent force that once marked the place. Everywhere there were great piles of rounded, well-worn glacial rocks many of which deceptively appeared as though you could just walk up and push them with your finger in order to start a massive tumble of rock and debris. The piles, including those that made up much of the face of Black Mountain, looked precarious to say the least yet had stood so for millennia, giving the two small towns a very unique look much as nearby Sedona had its own ‘red rock’ identity. Now that precarious look to the rocks would manifest itself in all too deadly a fashion as Mary Ellen looked up in time to see what appeared to be the entire northwest face of the mountain cut loose in one giant tidal wave of boulders.

Tim and Nancy Brock considered Sequoia National Forest in Central California an almost sacred place to visit. They met each other here on a hiking trail near Lake Isabella three years ago and became nearly inseparable immediately. Both shared a deep abiding love for nature, ecological awareness, and nature conservancy. They also shared a passion for camping and hiking that found them spending many weekends and vacations trying to squeeze in as much exploration and discovery as possible in the short time allotted. Tim was the classic thirty-four year old California sun-bleached blonde. He worked for himself as a carpentry sub-contractor building new homes. At times he found this chosen trade somewhat contrary to his passions about the planetary environment and nature.

Nancy, thirty-two, with shoulder length black hair and an athletic build, was a manager for a nationwide upscale woman’s department store chain. Making her living satisfying the whimsical, selfish needs of spoiled brats and wives or girlfriends of rich men seemed to her an empty vocation. There were many times when rather than satisfy the customer’s needs, Nancy felt what they most needed was a hard slap to the side of their overly-coiffed head. Laughing, she would remind herself that if she did that she would have to clean up all the make-up that would fall off their face and on to the floor. She found their constant whining and complaining downright annoying. Equally annoying was the fact that the richer the women were, the more they whined for free stuff.

Heading to the wilderness was their escape. Since they found no fulfillment in what they did for a living, they tried to find it by getting close to nature, going back to true basics, constantly exploring yet certain that there was never going to be enough time to see and experience it all. Today found them coming back from a long hike near the Isabella Reservoir looking forward to getting back to their tent, a hot meal grilled in the mountain air and a soft place to sleep under the stars.

Back at the trailhead they stopped for water and a snack break. They decided to sit trail-side on a huge hollow log with the water of the reservoir still in sight just north of them and the east and south bounded by high pine forest. The parking lot where they had left the truck was about one hundred yards away to the east just before the tree line. Though it was only late afternoon they found themselves already anticipating breaking out the tent and sleeping gear for a beautiful night under a starry, western sky uncluttered by city pollution.

With no warning other than a subtle rumbling from the ground, a roar like nothing either of them had ever heard before began to build in the distance to the west. It gathered speed easily discerned by the ear, the crescendo of it building rapidly. Without a word both of them fixed their attention on the western horizon watching a huge, angry, overly animated, brownish/gray wall hurtling eastward as the rumbling intensified under their feet. It was moving toward them like a relentless, high-speed freight train of chaos as far from north to south as either of them could see and as high as the sky.

Nancy and Tim looked at each other with the identical puzzled, what the hell is that? look and knew instinctively that if they did not find shelter right now they would not be around to talk about it after whatever it was passed by. They could already feel a warm wind pushing against their suntanned faces as though someone had flicked on a giant hair dryer. A few seconds passed as it dawned on the both of them that there was no time to ask what it was, where it came from, where it was going; only time to get the hell out of the way before becoming part of it.

Tim looked around almost frantically for some sort of protection from the oncoming maelstrom. Nancy knew it wasn't like Tim to get panic-stricken but she wasn’t exactly the eye of the storm either as she looked around desperately for a safe haven.

By now the howling wind was nearly deafening and the terribly strange, brown and gray wall loomed over the trees on the edge of the parking lot. The sheer size of it appeared to consume the entire western horizon. Small pieces of unidentifiable debris had already begun to pelt them. Nancy noted the strange sound of thousands of pieces of this same debris hitting the foliage of the trees around them. It had the familiar sound of the beginnings of a violent thunderstorm yet the pitter-patter was soon completely drowned out by the roar of the terrifying monstrosity.

The hot wind was pulling and tearing at their clothes and by the second it became increasingly difficult to look around without risking taking a piece of unidentified debris in the eye. The truck was too far away. Failing to think of anything else Tim screamed at her to