ONLINE NOVELLA: ENTRENCHED

Prologue

I was twenty-five years old when The God arrived.

I remember going through my father’s tackle box looking for the gold spinner lure we used to catch rainbow trout and finding that soiled knife. The knife he was holding when the dock broke. The blade was thick with grime from gutted fish, sliced up earthworms, and who knows what. Yet there it was. I faintly recall my aunt Janie meticulously gathering everything from the lake after the funeral and neatly arranging it in the shed behind our summer cabin. Like nothing bad had ever happened. She’d even gotten that knife, which had to have been at the bottom of the lake after the accident. Never asked her how she did that. She went above and beyond.

 I also faintly recall going into the tackle box a few times in the decade since he died, sometimes looking for something to fish with and sometimes looking for something that made it easier to remember my father. Everything in there was caked in memories of him. Oftentimes, I was stymied on both accounts, whether by fear of the rising emotions or the fact that fishing never took on the same significance in his absence. That day I was determined to show my newest lady friend I knew how to conduct my manly business with a stick and some thread.

Then everything went belly up.

The flash of light. The impact. The sound of a magnetic nothingness. Everyone on the planet felt the presence of The God at precisely the same moment. I was reeling in a lure very slowly when it happened, a little crank and tug before the spinner caught the light to tell the trout that the dinner bell was sounding. Clara sat behind me nursing a beer and laughing at my lack of style when it happened and I instantly thought of terrorism. Knee jerk reaction back in the day. You heard a big boom and it was on. The Rags were invading our space again. That was the knee jerk. Reality was a concussive force and then the physics which followed.

I fell on my ass, but she wasn’t laughing any more.

Human beings are pretty spiffy but the animal parts of the brain and the neurological impulses which fire in times of heavy shock remind us that we’re not as special as our air-conditioned homes would lead us to believe. Regardless of creed or culture, we all knew the jib was up for us when it first washed over us that blistering summer day.

The God chose a field in upstate New York to be its Ground Zero. Fitting I suppose. It was a serene enough place, cows and red barns and the whole nine. A six thousand foot chunk of jagged rock standing in the middle of it all was just another skyscraper in the state with the most famous ones in history.

Our history.

The thing stood there casting a shadow somehow miles long despite the time of day. It hovered an inch above the ground and it could be seen from twenty miles away, some sort of cosmic optical illusion. It could be seen from space, as witnessed by the astronauts unlucky enough to be in orbit during its arrival. They all came down to Earth in embers. So did the satellites and so did most of the commercial and military aircraft en route to wherever they thought they were going. The God seemed to issue an unspoken mandate on mankind’s desire to fly, a stamp marked “No” witnessed by Notary Public and sealed with a wicked kiss of instant death to all who defied it. My sister Kate was a flight attendant and it was only later I discovered that she was lucky enough to be judged by The God in that first fell swoop.

But here I still sit, aged like a cheap wine and with more stories and theories than minutes on my own life’s clock. I sit still and remember. Memory is the only freedom we have now, an offering from a vengeful God.

The God’s minimal grace was a bouquet of flowers compared to the work of Its Followers. They arrived much later. Right about after we got used to the idea of a whole and pure power standing tall above us and owning our every move.

Its Followers snuck in the back door.