Today

In the cabin of the hovering Bell helicopter, a family of five South Koreans, all with face masks on, took holiday snaps of Athabasca Glacier below them. Upfront 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 ever since the Covid-19 pandemic mauled tourism.

Drawing hot water from an electric urn, Quintus made a cup of coffee. Not far away, Frank's 13-year-old grandson, Zac, surfed through channels on a small television.

'Hey Quintus, how're you doing?' the boy asked.

'Good Zac and you?'

'Wi-Fi isn't working anymore.'

'Wi-Fi not working. Embrace it. Read a book.'

'Nah, I'll watch TV, which Grandad calls the idiot's delight. 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 an obese middle-aged balding man dressed in a suit. The supertitle 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 but, to be honest, a bit too slow for my liking, yet 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 check what I have posted online at Temple Science Ministries.com or read my Twitter feed. 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 grunted and changed channels.

More news.

This time, a goose-stepping military parade in North Korea was accompanied by the voice of a news anchor.

'The White House has accused China's government of handing over advanced 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 prospects of a summit.'

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 peering outside at the tourists driving off in the minibus. Frank lit up a cigarette as Quintus approached.

'What's the latest?' Quintus asked with a kind tone.

'No surprises. It's just now official, we're totally finished. As of a minute ago, we're no more,' Frank replied as he began to shuffle some papers. 'The bank is sending in their evaluators tomorrow, and they'll end up taking everything. Three decades and it's come to this. Such are the times that test men's souls.'

Quintus was Frank's last full-time staff member. Others had long gone.

'They'll be managing severance pay for you,' Frank continued. 'I'm no longer allowed to touch the books, it seems.'

'No need. For that, just tell them I don't want it,' Quintus said as he sat in a chair in front of the desk opposite Frank.

'Quintus, take it. And I owe you money from that personal loan,' Frank said.

'Forget about that, Frank, seriously. We've spoken about it. I'm in a good position. I got plenty of cash but nothing to spend it on.'

'Damn it, it's no small amount I owe you, Quintus.'

'Yeah, but it's been canceled, Frank. It's settled.'

'C'mon Quintus.'

'Frank, you don't owe me anything. Not a cent. You and Linda; you're like family. Don't think about it. There's no need to burden yourself over it. You've got other things to worry about.'

Frank sighed again and took a moment to compose himself and then looked at Quintus and nodded in thanks. 'If I win the lottery, you'll be the first to know,' Frank said. 'Meanwhile, the whole world's going to hell in a handbag. Just don't get old and jaded like me, Quintus.'

'Well, you're not alone there,' Quintus replied.

After a brief pause of silence, the two men went on to talk some more and did so for half an hour, mostly about better times before the virus. Frank predominantly did the talking, and just as dusk arrived, he passed Quintus a slip of paper.

'Hope you don't mind, but I've phoned around,' Frank said. 'Don't feel obligated; they're just some suggestions.'

Quintus looked at the contact details scribbled on the paper.

'Not in Canada but in the States. They're good operators, both who'd like to meet you about flying choppers for them if you wanted,' Frank said. 'They're a bit of a way from here, but they're trustworthy and solid enough despite the last couple of years. 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, they say, even if it has a silly name. I can't vouch for the pay, though. 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 farm shed and then hike from there.

His quaint abode had neither phone nor electricity, let alone the internet. It was simple. Handmade. 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 and its resulting delusion. It tended to ruin everything it touched, he believed. It was a time when great numbers lived in nihilism 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 tramp. Broken. Cynical. Defeated. It was pitiful what he'd become, he later realized.

It was all desperation and darkness until the spirit 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.

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In effect, it was a decision similar to what he had made in Mexico a century or so earlier. With his last shreds of bravery and discipline, he trained alone again as Tai had once taught him. He worked on himself and sought peace, a pure heart. Slowly, yet steadily, he became unstuck and 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 the 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 the 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 of what Tai had trained him for, a duty that he had long thrust from his mind. A task that he sometimes 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 traveling 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.

Early Morning, Heading South

The shale of the Canadian Rockies crunched under Quintus' boots as he walked the trail for what may be 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 five-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 fall 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.

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. Life was being sucked from the crops. Their death was perceptible. For miles around the mumbling man, wheat just wilted, gasped, and crumpled.

Beyond crops, any nearby animal raised for food likewise just keeled over and breathed their last. In this part of the country, that meant cattle, sheep, the odd goat, and pig, even a few kangaroos. For some reason, their deaths were more discreet. It was the crops that died the loudest.

Back to Boise

Quintus arrived in Boise earlier than anticipated, allowing him to exchange some Canadian for U.S. dollars and buy some tulips, which were Kaitlyn's and Abby's favorites. At the city's main cemetery, he laid the flowers at their neighboring graves. He sat by their headstones, recollecting the good times while trying not to dwell on the loss.

If you, dear reader, have lost loved ones in tragic circumstances, you would appreciate how Quintus felt. The sorrow of losing his girls remained raw, but everything he learned on White Dragon managed to keep him evenly keeled.

After an hour, Quintus left the cemetery and drove to his old address. He didn't plan it, but the idea of finding some closure pushed him in that direction. Once he got there, his old street seemed smaller and duller than he remembered. Instead of driving through, he pulled his pickup over to the curb and parked a few houses down from where he previously lived.

He exited his vehicle and unhurriedly walked towards number 45, where his home once stood. Now, there was a modern, boxy-looking dwelling with dark green walls punctured by tall vertical windows. Hardly inviting, he thought, when compared to the double-story timber house that his family once called theirs.

Quintus did his utmost to avoid looking at the neighboring house — the past address of the murdering arsonist Andrei Vasiliev — which was likewise a different building from what used to be there. After what occurred in the fall of 1966, Vasailiev's house was bulldozed. No one wanted to live in a house where a murdering madman had hung himself, especially next to where he committed his dark deeds. Number 47 was left as an empty plot for 25 years or so. Probably just enough time for people to forget what happened there.

As Quintus got to the front of his old address, three girls, all sisters under the age of 12, playfully ran from the side of the house into the front yard. A fun-loving barking Labrador followed. The youngest of the girls saw the bearded and scruffy-headed stranger on the other side of the fence and promptly started shrieking. It started a chain reaction of hyped-up hysterics that all three joined in on.

'Weirdo! Weirdo! Weirdo!' they chanted as they turned and ran back to where they had come.

But the Labrador, sensing the man behind the beard was no threat, did the opposite and remained behind, wagging his tail.

'Howdy pup,' Quintus said.

The dog jumped up and placed his front paws on the fence so Quintus could scratch the side of his neck.

The house's front door clanged open noisily, revealing the girls' father, who was ruddy-faced, balding, and suspicious.

'Buster get inside,' the man said. 'Can I help you?' he inhospitably asked the stranger who the dog now abandoned.

'Sorry. Don't mean any harm. I used to live here. Sometime back,' Quintus replied.

'I'll call the cops if you keep loitering and scaring my kids,' the father said.

'Sure, on my way. I mean no harm,' Quintus said as he began to make his way back to his pickup.

'Yeah, so you said,' the man replied.

Quintus felt no malice towards the man. He is protecting his family as any decent father should, he thought.

As the dog brushed past the man's leg, he glanced back at Quintus, who, as he walked away, nodded at him. It was a simple and unexpected gesture of respect that melted some of the man's hostility.

'You hear about Venice?' he asked in a softer tone.

'No,' Quintus replied.

'You will,' the man said as he went back into his home, shutting the door behind him.

Tsunami TV

The Italian city of Venice had nearly been wiped out by a tsunami. The television in the motel room that Quintus was staying in had been on non-stop for the past 12 or so hours showing nothing but coverage of the disaster. There was ample video footage, most of it initially posted online by survivors. TV commentators by this stage were speculating fatalities, but I can tell you the massive wave took with it 80,000 plus souls.

Quintus pulled himself away from the TV and went to the bathroom, where he unpacked the hair clippers he bought from a department store not long after he visited his old street.

As he began clipping his hair to a half-inch from the scalp, the morning's sun snuck through the small bathroom window. After he finished with his hair, Quintus shaved off his beard. Barba non facit philosophum, he thought in Latin. 'A beard doesn't make a philosopher.'

Next, he showered and afterward watched more television. He flicked through channels, stopping on one that featured Chuck Goyette, that portly 'prophet of doom' being interviewed by two hosts, Ryan and Chloe, in a studio.

'You have stated that only your members will survive doomsday,' said Ryan, who was then interrupted by Chloe.

'We should also inform everyone that membership to your organization requires individuals to pay ten percent of their take-home income,' Chloe said.

Anyone watching the program would have noticed Goyette purse his lips at the innuendo of it all, but he allowed her to continue.

'How many members do you have?' she asked.

'I can tell you both it's a good number, and it is skyrocketing, but I think you're missing the point here, that being my prophecies, like the tsunami obliterating Venice, are consistently —' Goyette said before being interrupted by Ryan.

'But the details you give,' Ryan said. 'Such as the descriptions of so-called mystical mantras or incantations setting off these disasters, it just sounds like you're making it all up as you go along.'

Before Goyette could refute the claim, Quintus turned the TV off. There was little to gain from watching anymore, he felt. In his solitude, he sat on the bed and tried unsuccessfully to clear his mind. Instead, thoughts rushed in about his several past visits to Venice, the last being in 1396 when he helped build pedestrian bridges across canals.

He got off the bed, sat on the floor, and folded his legs into the lotus position. Again, he tried purifying his thoughts as he began his meditation.

Just over an hour later, he would check out of the motel, leave Boise, and make his way to Reno.