by James Burke
‘Where are you going with that young lady?’
‘To watch daddy,’ was the matter of fact reply.
Upon getting to the window Abby stood on the stool and looked out the window to see her father below in the garden doing his Tao Yin exercises.
‘What’s daddy doing?’ Abby asked her mother who came up alongside her.
‘He is exercising,’ said Kaitlyn.
Abby wasn’t sure what exercising meant, so she pushed open the window.
‘Daddy! What are you doing? Are you gardening?’
Fairy Talk
Dressed for work, Quintus tipped the last dregs of his coffee into the kitchen sink. As he wiped his hands, he felt a tug on one of his pant legs.
‘The fairies want me to tell you something,’ said Abby who stood beside him, chewing on a piece of toast spread with honey.
‘And what’s that Abby?’
‘They think you are very, very old. Like ancient old. Dinosaur old,’ she said, emphasizing the last description with a dramatic facial expression.
‘Well you inform those gossiping fairies that I’m not that old,’ Quintus said while winking at her.
He then kissed her on the head and made his way towards the back door.
‘See you after school Abby girl. You look after mommy,’ he said, nodding towards Kaitlyn at the kitchen table finishing her breakfast.
‘Quintus try to be home early please,’ Kaitlyn said. ‘Theo and Julia and the kids are coming by at five-ish for dinner okay.’
‘Roger that,’ he replied. ‘You want to go to Lake Pend Oreille for our next week away?’
‘Sure. You’d better go, or you’ll be late. Enjoy work, I love you.’
‘Love you too,’ were his parting words.
News from Charlie Simpson
Sitting at his staff-room desk, Quintus corrected essays submitted by an ancient history class about how the modern world was influenced by the Romans. He was midway into marking one focusing on the calendar when he heard someone running down the hallway outside.
It didn’t sound like the run of a teenager. It was labored and untrained. It was Charlie Simpson, the slightly-overweight biology teacher. He came to the door, sweating profusely. His bulging eyes searched the room. His stare fixed on Quintus who he frantically waved to.
‘Quintus!’
‘What’s up Charlie?’
‘Your house, it’s on fire!’ Charlie yelled, somewhat louder than intended.
The dozen or so other teachers in the room turned heads to watch Quintus exit the room with Charlie who would drive him to his home.
The next day the house fire was on the front page of the city’s newspaper. It wasn’t that a house had been burnt down that gave it the newsworthiness as a front-page lead. It was the distressing fact that the fire killed Kaitlyn and Abby and that it had been lit by their neighbor Vasiliev who later hung himself from a beam in his own house before police arrived.
Out of respect and real sorrow for Quintus, the school closed for the rest of the week, but he never returned to teach.
To Wander
In the shade of a large elm tree, Quintus sat near the roadside somewhere in the backblocks of Washington state. His clothes were filthy. He had a motley beard and unkempt hair. That’s what happens after three weeks of walking country roads like a lonely ghost.
The day after his wife’s and daughter’s funeral, he grabbed a small rucksack that survived the fire and just took to the roads, rambling his way north. Within one week he’d ambled out of Idaho and into the top of Oregon and then onwards some more.
Now in Washington he didn’t care that the coming winter bit through his clothes. Physical discomfort and deprivation at this stage mattered very little. He just wanted to walk and outpace his misery.
By the time he reached that roadside tree the pain in his heart had dulled a bit. He was fixing one of his shoes, which had a hole in its sole, as a police cruiser pulled up on the opposite side of the road. Its driver, a middle-aged state trooper, wound down his window.
‘Hey buddy what’re you doing out here, all alone?’ he asked.
Quintus didn’t reply. His attention remained on repairing his shoe.
‘Hate to say it but there’s no vagrancy in this county so you need to move on,’ the trooper said.
Vagrant, derived from the Latin word vagari — to wander, Quintus thought as he wedged the cardboard further into the shoe’s toe.
He looked up at the cop and gave him a half-hearted smile.
‘Yeah I’ll be on my way shortly. Just fixing something,’ he said.
‘Okay I’ll be driving back this way in about an hour. I sure don’t want to find you still here alright. If I do I’ll put you in a cell for the night,’ the trooper said, not expecting or wanting a reply.
The cruiser drove off.
Quintus put on his shoe, got to his feet and shouldered his rucksack. He readied himself to resume his walk while thinking about the last time he saw Kaitlyn and Abby. Kaitlyn was talking about friends coming over while Abby was talking about the fairies who shared their backyard. He wondered how the fairies were feeling now. They’d still be grieving he guessed, for such little creatures they were certainly big hearted.
Quintus pushed out such painful thoughts. He looked to the mountainous horizon ahead and began to walk towards it. Within ten days he was in Canada.
CHAPTER V
Today
In the cabin of the hovering Bell helicopter, a family of five South Koreans took holiday snaps of Athabasca Glacier below them. Up front in the cockpit their heavily bearded pilot deftly handled the controls. It was Quintus.
When the half-hour joy flight over this part of the Canadian Rockies finished, Quintus landed the chopper at the Alpine Heli Tours’ helipad where the tourists exited to be escorted to a waiting minivan.
After the Bell’s engine cut, he got out and made his way to the company office, a somewhat quaint building in the clichéd fashion of a small Swiss chalet.
Inside the office, framed photos covered the wall showing the company in better times. Some featured the bearded Quintus and Frank, the 76-year-old chain smoker, who sat at the manager’s desk talking on the phone as he entered.
‘So, there’s no other course of action I can take?’ Frank said on the call while waving Quintus to go grab something from the kitchen area. To give him some privacy, Quintus did so. He knew Frank and the company were in dire straits; things had been coming to a head for some time.
Drawing hot water from an electric urn, Quintus made a cup of coffee. Not far away, Frank’s pre-teen grandson, Zac, surfed through channels on a small television.
‘Hey Quintus, how’re you doing?’ the boy asked.
‘Good Zac and you?’
‘Always awesome. Got a joke?’
‘Of course,’ Quintus said. ‘What do you call a pig who knows karate?’
‘Dunno. What?’
‘Pork chop.’
The boy laughed. ‘That’s dumb but I like it,’ he said while stopping on a news report featuring an on-the-street interview with a portly middle-aged balding man dressed in a suit. The super title at the bottom of the screen identified him as Chuck Goyette.
‘The Australians are in a pickle with what’s occurring to their agricultural sector, something I prophesized months ago, and I can add that it’s only going to worsen,’ the televised Goyette said. ‘Famine is moving his way through the Aussie outback and to be honest a bit too slow for my liking, but it is what it is. However, Famine is really the least of your problems,’ he said.
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked the off-camera reporter.
‘Well you can wait and see, or you can do your research and read what I have posted online at Temple Science Ministries.com. It’s all there, at least everything that I’ve said thus far. The world’s end is coming very soon, just around the corner in fact but whether you can accept it or not is not my concern.’
Disinterested, Zac gru
nted and changed channels.
More news.
This time a goose-stepping military parade in North Korea accompanied by the voice of a news anchor.
‘The White House has accused China’s government of handing over missile technology to the North Koreans,’ said the anchor. ‘It’s a dramatic turnaround from a month ago when officials from Pyongyang and Washington were talking up peace prospects.’
Zac changed the channel again, this time he stopped on a rerun of the American game show Family Feud. He sighed in relief and stayed with that.
Quintus heard Frank finish his call. He looked over to see his boss looking outside at the tourists driving off in the minibus. Frank lit up a cigarette as Quintus approached.
‘What’s the latest?’ Quintus asked.
‘It’s official, we’re finished. As of now we’re no more,’ Frank replied. ‘The bank is sending their evaluators in tomorrow and they’ll end up taking everything. They’ll be managing severance pay for you, I’m no longer allowed to touch the books it seems.’
Quintus was Frank’s last full-time staff member. Others had long gone. Quintus sat in a chair in front of the desk and the two men spoke for half an hour, mostly about better times. Frank predominantly did the talking, Quintus did the bulk of the listening.
Just as dusk arrived Frank passed Quintus a slip of paper.
‘Hope you don’t mind but I’ve phoned around,’ Frank said. ‘Now don’t feel obligated, they’re just some suggestions.’
Quintus looked at the contact details scribbled on the paper.
‘There’s some good operators in the States who’d like to meet you about flying choppers for them if you wanted,’ Frank said. ‘They’re a bit of a ways from here but they’re trustworthy and solid. One’s in Reno, Nevada and the other is in southern California.’
The mention of Reno stung Quintus a bit, but it didn’t show in his manner.
‘Reno?’ Quintus asked.
‘Yeah Reno, nice place in parts, a guy there by the name of Johnny Pence runs a recreational helicopter fleet,’ Frank said. ‘You been to Reno?’
‘While back,’ Quintus said. ‘The gesture is appreciated Frank, thanks.’
‘Least I could do. Johnny is with Flying Cowboys, a good outfit so they say, despite the name. Heck, you’re a fine pilot plus a mechanical whiz, you could get a job anywhere on the planet,’ Frank said as he stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Besides, it’ll probably do you a world of good to get off that mountain of yours.’
Rare Dreams
Quintus sat on the porch of his mountain cabin and soaked in the view. Its outlook and peaceful seclusion reminded him of White Dragon Mountain. To the rest of the outside world it may as well not even have existed and that’s how he liked it. There was no road directly leading to the cabin. He had to park his pickup truck some two miles away in an old shed and then hike from there.
His quaint abode had neither phone nor electricity, let alone internet. It was simple. Old fashioned. Like him. It went well with his beard and shoulder-length hair. Here he could do his exercises and meditation without being disturbed.
Quintus didn’t bother to get a permit to build the cabin eight years earlier, mostly because he loathed the modern world’s compulsion for regulations. There were many things he didn’t like about modernity. It tended to ruin everything it touched, he believed. It was a time where great numbers lived as if Gods didn’t exist, something that he was even guilty of for a time. For a decade after the deaths of Kaitlyn and Abby, he lived the life of a dejected, fractured tramp. It was all desperation and darkness until the ghost of Bruce Lee came along. He saw the late Hong Kong martial arts superstar on television sometime in 1976 using nunchucks in a game of ping-pong. It was an odd ‘road to Damascus’ moment but Lee’s simple, yet exceptional, act of skill shamed Quintus enough to have him consider returning to the path and that’s what he did. In effect it was a similar decision to what he made in Mexico a century or so earlier.
Alone, he trained again as Tai had once taught him. He worked on himself, letting go of his grief and anger. He sought peace, a pure heart. Slowly, but steadily, he regained much of what was lost.
In the practical world, he had several identity changes and went from his first Canadian job as a truck driver to becoming a helicopter pilot. Not long after he started flying for Alpine Heli Tours he built himself the log cabin.
It may have been Quintus’ version of paradise, even during winter months, but he was now pondering if he should up and leave it behind. He had long recognized how comfortable he was there and knew that in itself was a distraction. His master did not train him for all those years to live a life of ease and isolation.
But the idea of abandoning the mountain wasn’t over guilt of a laid-back lifestyle or that he no longer had a job to go to. Instead it was due to a recurring dream he had several times during his short sleeping spells.
In each dream, Quintus walked along a ridge just above the tree line during the night. He saw what appeared at first to be a falling star hurtling across the ink-black sky. It descended, hitting the earth some 20 miles away from where he stood.
BOOM!
It was nuclear. A flash. A harrowing roar. Then another ‘falling star’ plunged to earth but much closer.
KA-BOOM!
Blinding white light was followed by a fireball. Everything was vaporized. The sound that followed was the incessant screaming of the world’s people. The only thing moving in this bright fiery void was a silhouette of a flying seven-headed dragon. It circled Quintus. It got closer and closer, its dark mass increasingly glowing, becoming redder. As its features became clearer, so did the evil resolve in its beady eyes.
And with that Quintus would wake up, typically in a cold sweat. He was not sure if such dreams were a harbinger for what Tai had trained him for, a duty that he had long thrust from his mind. A task that he assumed had run flat.
But as he sat on his porch, Quintus felt he was perhaps at another crossroads in his long drawn out life.
Over the course of history, he had faced more than one instance of people believing the end was nigh. The Plague of Justinian of 541–542 AD and the Black Plague of the mid-14th century were just two examples. There was of course the Millennium Apocalypse that saw various Christian clerics, including Pope Sylvester II, predicting the end of the world to occur in 1000 AD. It caused riots in Europe and sent thousands of pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem, where Quintus was living and working at the time. More recently, he remembered all the hoo-ha caused by Halley’s Comet in 1910 when some believed it was going to poison the Earth’s atmosphere.
In none of those cases did Quintus feel like the end was upon the world and of course it wasn’t, yet now he had a nagging sense that humanity was sleepwalking into oblivion.
Fate, he felt, was pushing him in a certain direction but whether it would take him all the way back to White Dragon Mountain — as Tai once said it would — was another thing.
As the sun dipped, and its dying glare blanketed the ranges, he again studied the piece of paper that Frank gave him. Among the jumble of words that made up the address details one stood out like neon.
Reno.
The Nevada city was, he guesstimated, about an easy two-day drive from where he sat.
I’m no good to anyone just passing time here, he thought. Fate, he believed, would reveal what would come, for better or worse. If revisiting Reno was a part of that then so be it.
Heading South
The shale of the Canadian Rockies crunched under Quintus’ boots as he walked the trail for the last time. Wearing well-worn denim jeans, a t-shirt and a baseball cap, he carried a duffel bag and shouldered a backpack.
After five minutes, the trail stopped at the lip of a cliff that dropped some 50 feet or so before rejoining another track further down. Without a second thought, Quintus stepped over the ledge and floated down, landing at the bottom as soft as a butterfly.
From there it was another fiv
e-minute walk till he reached his aged Ford F-150 pickup parked in a shed just past a grove of trees. He got into his vehicle and turned the engine over. He backed out and drove off, heading towards the border which was just over an hour away. Despite its closeness, it would be his first time inside the U.S. in over 50 years. He planned not to attempt Reno in one trip. He was first driving to Boise, Idaho to pay his respects.
As he approached the first bend of the road he came into radio range and he found an American news channel which he turned up.
‘Scientists in Australia have yet to determine any causes behind either the widespread crop failures or the mass livestock deaths witnessed across inland regions of the eastern state of New South Wales,’ the radio said.
‘The affected communities have been through years of prolonged drought and battled the odd bushfire, but nobody expected or has experienced anything like this before, locals say,’ the radio reported.
‘U.S. officials are in contact with their Australian counterparts and there have reportedly been discussions about the possibility of quarantining Australian agricultural products coming into America as a precautionary measure.’
Deadly Mumbles
There was a full moon in the southern night’s late Autumn sky. Underneath it, a gaunt, tall middle-aged man shuffled along the side of a quiet dirt road. He was somewhere between the small Australian cities of Albury and Wagga Wagga.
His skin was a sickly yellow. His eyes deeply set. His hair was thin and scraggly. He wore a dirty trench coat, from which flies and other insects escaped from.
He was mumbling an incantation and if you could hear it, it would raise the hair on the back of your neck. It was spooky. Foreign. Incomprehensible.
Under such utterances something else could be heard; a collective groan coming from the fields of young wheat on either side of him. The life was being sucked from the crops. Their death was perceptible. For miles around the mumbling man wheat just wilted, gasped and crumpled.
