ET had to piss in a dream about being sick in bed during an air raid evacuation. He was panicking as the emergency broadcast system interrupted some weird show with deformed people living in a cave, worshipping a bum as jesus. ET looked out his window to see a Goliath black tidal wave racing over the surface of the town, but it wasn’t his town and the sky was not the blue hue of constant storm cloud riddled Alaska.
It was looked like Bhagdad or Gaza in silhouette behind a huge glowing atom cloud. The blinding fireball and the racing water were framed by large cinderblock towers reduced to dust as his eye lids melted in an orange glow of his retnas burned off in the 10,000 degree sun touching down on the earth. Somewhere he knew this was a dream and all around him the sounds of the real world merged with the dream. Sounds of wind, rain, alarms and yelling. Just then he was slapped to his senses by the Chief. “Wake up Enceladus, we got hit by the storm!”
The half built tent is totally inundated with water, the forrest floor is gone under several inches of rushing black rain water. The trees are snapping in violent wind and all around shrill wind cutting through the howling sound somewhere in between a supersonic jet and the sound a broomstick makes when swung as a weapon. Whooph like a kung fu movie. The sky cracks with lightning and the rain is hitting their skin with a belligerence that actually feels like being slapped across the face with each of hundreds of beads a second.
They are taking a real beating but the good news is the chief has brought several flash lights you get free for turning in Camel cigarettes and Budweiser coupons. A little TV-Boombox-Spotlight he is holding lets ET feel some security. ET has some kind of yellow flashing sea rescue flasher strapped around his forehead so in the rage of wind they almost look like a slow moving helicopter to each other.
They left their sleeping bags and tried to run by the wind had g-forces strong enough to throw you off the trail and into the darkness dozens of feet away if you rise more than a crawl on all fours. Whole trees are ripped from the roots and spinning down the hill like giant circular saw blades, ripping through the forrest. In the blackness of the night the flashlight can only illuminate a few feet as the rain and splashing water has created obstacles to its beam. The darkness of the storm has taken its own shape, a hostile foe that wanted to tear them limb from limb and leave their body parts strewn down cliffs and fields of crags.
The way down was impossible, the Chief is yelling but ET can’t make out a single word. Both of them are ripped violently off the trail into the darkness and with sheer will to live were able to crawl back. The wind is coming off the sea, up the mountain but has changed direction to hit them sideways. Abruptly they change direction from going downhill towards the truck. Instead they are going with the wind back up the hill at a gradual grade where the trees are so dense they need to crawl over stumps and under roots.
Finding a hallow under a mighty 1000 year old Western Red Cedar they come face to face with a panicked family of deer not wanting to share their hiding place. The mother deer bit ET on the back of his shoulder and the baby was bleating a warning for them to go.
Just then a bear the size of a Volkswagen beetle tore into the opposite side of the root cellar and seizes on the mother deer who makes the most awful sound of being eaten alive while the bear snapped its spine at the hip. The Chief grabs ET by the neck and tears him into the underbrush. The glow of cheap beer and cigarette company TV static, flashing yellow lights and blinking flashlight beams enrages the bear whose pounding footsteps they can hear crushing downed trees and snapping at their heels.
Coming to a cement retaining wall they lose the electronics, they are swept up in a rushing drainage culvert that batters the fuck out of them. The Chief must have snapped on some neon rope around each other since it has popped over ETs shoulder and is choking the life out of his neck while he feels like he is drowning in man made rapids. ET totally obvious to what he was doing grabbed the baby deer who is now thrashing in his arms. Last thing ET remembers before his face smashed into a cement door frame is the baby deer seeming to go limp from inhaling water.
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ET wakes up to the Chief pressing on his chest as if he drowned. Thankfully it is either half hearted CPR or just pretending to show him someone would notice if he was dying. ET comes to his senses in a little square room. It’s colder than outside but there is a small fire building in a coffee can inches from his head. The baby deer is awake and alive stumbling around the room, its hooves echoing into unseen recesses. ET’s eyes hurt, his ears feel full of water and his throat feels like he is coming down with a cold. They are in a cement bunker, around the sides are olive green computer screens and radar alarms long abandoned. The Chief is singing some old song from the 50s and is busying him self with snapping branches and small logs that blew in with them.
The steel door is ringing with the raging storm battering it with broken trees. Its a surreal moment, being in some kind of military facility in the woods. Everything covered in graffiti and signs of decades of teenage vandalism. The Chief tells ET to watch out for tree spiders and to check his arms and legs for any breaks. The Chief is cleaning his nails with a buck knife and has hungry eyes following the baby deer is it slips and bows sideways on unsure footing. ET stops him from killing the thing right there and the baby deer instinctively huddles up with ET for protection. The fire getting low and the room full of smoke as wet wood burns dirty. The Chief decides to open the heavy metal door and like a nightmare the massive bear as found them, letting out a fearsome roar and charging its head into the room as the Chief struggles to slam the door a couple times on its snout.
The door slams shut with an echo that pops ET’s ears. The fire in the coffee can is flickering out and they sit in total darkness for a while. The floor is a mix of freezing cold cement and sharp metal grates. ET can hear his heart beating in his ears and the scared breathing of the deer fawn. In the darkness the Chief is crawling around the perimeter of the room with a flickering lighter, not totally engaging the flame to conserve butane, just enough for the flint to give a hint if something in the dark is about to poke him in the eye or any crawling centipede is lying in wait to make a meal of his fingers. A couple time the Chief cries out when started by one that he uses his shoe to swat.
Miraculously there is an old time wood stove in here and even more auspicious it is totally full of dry logs, so much so the Chief has to empty it out by 2 thirds to get a fire raging. Beside it is a high pile of news papers and magazines from the 1950s. With no effort at all the stove roars to life and gives the space some much needed warmth and rich golden light. Looking around the bunker ET sees something that must be an optical illusion. Sitting on chairs totally covered in spider webs are the skeletons of radar men who must have staffed this installation. The Chief thinks this is great, making jokes and swatting the corpses on the shoulder like old pals.
ET is creeped out, unable to look away from the moldy eye sockets and gleaming white teeth. It’s a strange thing to wonder what causes the Army to abandon this place and leave these guys here to whither for decades in this dark and musty hole in the side of a mountain. Everything here is covered in so much dust that breathing is a struggle to not chock on horrible spider debris, old webs rolled into balls of splinters and desiccated insects, things like hairballs and creepy things you touch in the dark and snap you hand back better not to ponder what kind of horrible thing you just crunched with your hand like dry rat bones or leaves full of flesh eating fungus.
By morning a dull grey light comes in through thick glass slits embedded with wire inside the glass. The quality of light leaves much to be desired and just makes it harder to see as this stormy darkness of daylight tries to duel the wood stove for supremacy, leaving an optical stain to their battered and dehydrated eyes. They must have been in there more than a day or two before they awoke to sounds of birds singing and ravishing warm light came in the blast windows. The Chief had filled the dark days down here with stories of his usual lore. Cannibal tribes the South Pacific, mushrooms that turn people into zombies, witches who live in these woods. ET was not really listening, he was instead trying to remember his dream about tidal waves and nuclear horizons for a comic book he was planning to draw.
In the light of day there were no more skeletons and he decided to not bring it up. Several times when talking to the Chief he would go to endless lengths ET didn’t see something he clearly remembered like the Chief sneaking girls into the house when he was supposed to be baby sitting, or occasions ET saw him stealing something or beating a drifter to death and cutting up the body in front of him. The Chief had this funny smile like, “go ahead and tell, i will just stop talking to you and I’m the only one who gives a shit.” ET starts to think the Chief burned the soldiers bodies in the stove and ate the baby deer but as the door is flung open ET sees the fawn dart into the blinding morning light.