Moving Day

Boris ran his gloved hands through his long, tangled, black hair as the wind whipped through it. His merciless, ice-blue eyes squinted as he looked out across the limitless expanse of the ocean from the back of his nameless black horse, the horse’s hooves stamping impatiently on the surface of the sea upon which it stood as nonchalantly as can be.

Boris couldn’t see the land from here, but he knew it was out there.

After all, he’d been there before and for a nearly identical purpose. Yes, it was countless millennia ago at this point – the last time he was fully awake and alive with a monumental mission to accomplish – but the memory was still as vivid and colorful as if it were yesterday.

He remembered how quickly the waters had risen at his command – a process that had begun so simply, with a nonchalant flick of his armored wrist. He remembered the way all the people who had been so certain that this could never happen, despite all the warnings they’d received, suddenly realized it was all true. That this was really it – the last storm they would ever see and the final experience they would ever have on earth.

But most of all, he remembered the sharp tang of building electricity in the air. He remembered the way the storm had started as a small but determined breeze making strange ripples across the surface of a glass-like sea. Caged, hungry energy with the potential to accomplish anything, even the destruction of an entire world.

And Boris thought about the way it was all about to start again. Except this time it was meant to be for good, as humanity had finally exhausted its very last chance. This time, he was certain the Creator would spare no one. And then Boris could truly rest, just as he’d dreamed of doing since the beginning of time.

He looked across the expanse of the sea at those familiar ripples that were once again starting to form. And he smiled an eerie smile that would have been just wide and unnatural enough to be unsettling, had anyone human actually seen it.

He had waited so long, and now his moment was finally here. All that was missing was the signal that meant it was time to proceed. And that would come any second now.

*

Amanda tossed the last of the boxes into the back of the old, maroon van her mother had owned for as long as Amanda could remember before yelling over her shoulder that everything was ready.

Her father had bought this van for her mother, Mavis, so that she’d have a vehicle large enough to shuttle the kids around, take the German shepherds to the vet when they needed their shots, and easily bring home enough groceries to feed a family. And this van had done all that and more over the years.

But now Amanda’s father was long gone, off to start a new life that no longer involved having a wife, or kids, or dogs that needed anything as mundane as yearly shots. Amanda’s brother was gone, too, having been estranged from the rest of the family for years now. Yet the maroon van remained, stubbornly refusing to stop existing despite numerous mishaps, including a head-on collision with a deer last year.

Mavis refused to get rid of it, as it was one thing that had remained a constant in her life. It was reliable, it was safe, and it was familiar. And now it would take Mavis, the teenage Amanda, and Dima, the last of the aging dogs that had once belonged to Amanda’s father, into a new future.

It was a future that would no longer involve wandering husbands or wayward sons who heard voices in the middle of the night. But there would be a blue house under power lines that crackled when the fog rolled off the ocean at night. And maybe one day, the sun would come up again and shine on a life that felt something like normal again, even if that’s not how things felt right now.

“Mom, did you hear me?” Amanda yelled again toward the open door of the rental that no longer felt like home. “This is the last of them, and we should really hit the road. It really looks like rain now.”

Mavis appeared in the doorway, as if on cue. She closed the front door behind her for the last time and dutifully locked it before flashing Amanda a nervous smile and walking toward the dented driver’s-side door of the old, maroon van.

When did life come to this? Where did it all go wrong? And Amanda was right about those clouds. They were heavy and grey, hanging in thick, ominous folds overhead. And the air had that feeling. But Mavis assumed that was just her overactive imagination at work again. She had never been good with change, after all.

But that didn’t stop her from sliding into the driver’s seat and turning the key in the ignition the way she had done countless times before. The familiar sound of the van’s aging engine roaring to life calmed Mavis’s nerves.

“OK,” she said as she prepared to step on the gas. “Let’s rock and roll.”

*

The winds were really picking up now, where Boris and his horse waited on the surface of the ocean. His hair whipped wildly as the waves churned and seethed underneath the horse’s hooves.

And then he heard it. A booming, low, mournful sound that could easily have been mistaken for a foghorn by untrained ears. But Boris knew better. Foghorns didn’t operate on a frequency that shook the earth under a person’s feet. That was the sound of the Great Horn, the same sound that had signaled the start of the last flood.

It was the signal Boris had been waiting for.

He reached for his helmet, which hung from his saddle, and placed it on his head – the steely grey helmet adorned with feathers from the tail of one of the harpy eagles he kept in his stone palace beyond the edge of the earth. He stretched out his hand over the surface of the treacherous waters just as he’d done before.

And with another flick of his wrist, it began again. The waters churned, and foamed, and rose at an alarming rate as the sky above turned black, boiling with swollen clouds and vibrating with the terrible sound of thunder.

Boris dug his heels into his horse’s ribs on either side to tell it that it was time to ride. And the nameless, black steed sprang into action as naturally as you please, riding out across the surface of the angry ocean as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

*

Amanda dug her fingers into the sides of her seat as the old, maroon van continued up the familiar seaside road she and Mavis had traveled many times before. The wind had suddenly gone from strong to positively terrifying. She could actually feel it rocking the van from side to side, threatening to roll it off the road and into the churning ocean waters below.

And speaking of the ocean, something strange and disturbing was happening to it. It was rising. But this was so much more than just a simple tidal rise, even one that was rolling in a lot faster and higher than normal. The waters had nearly reached the level of the road itself, and that had never even come close to happening before.

She could see her mother trying to pretend she wasn’t absolutely terrified. Mavis’s eyes were steely and determined, watching the road ahead as intently as can be. But the way her bloodless knuckles gripped the steering wheel gave away her true emotional state.

She was terrified, and rightly so. Dima, the aging German shepherd, whined nervously where she lay next to Amanda. Amanda scratched the dog’s ears lovingly, hoping to bring her pet a little bit of comfort, but there was no denying it. She was worried – very worried.

The water was now at the level of the road, lapping at the old van’s tires as Mavis tried to keep them from hydroplaning into the ocean or into some other obstacle. But it was nearly impossible to see. The sky was a swarm of fat, stinging raindrops and the air was alive with the insane howling of the wind.

And then Amanda felt it. A gust of wind enveloped the van so completely that the vehicle actually caught air and left the ground for a moment before touching back down upon the road again. And then it happened again. And again.

Amanda’s stomach lurched uncomfortably as her eyes caught her mother’s in the rearview mirror and saw they were filled with terror. Dima went from whining and shaking to howling mournfully in despair. It was like she knew, like they all knew, what was coming next.

And then it happened. The next gust of supernaturally strong wind was so violent that it lifted the van into the air and hurled it out into the ocean like a bored child skipping a stone. Amanda was sure that was the end of them, because surely the van would sink like a stone once it hit the furious ocean waters.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, that old, maroon van, the same van Amanda had wished over and over that her mother would just sell already, was miraculously floating on the surface of the water, like a cork, while the winds wailed and screamed around them and the rain pelted the windows.

And that was the way things stayed as time and reality lost all their meaning for a while. Amanda, Mavis, and Dima stayed still as stones and watched the world go mad from the windows of the maroon van as it floated over the ocean in the middle of an unbelievable storm. After all, the world had to be mad now, because Amanda was clearly hallucinating.

She really thought she had seen a tall, dark man with a feathered helmet riding a horse across the ocean through the chaotic rains, and that just couldn’t have been true.

*

Mavis had no idea how long they had stayed miraculously afloat in that old van as the oceans and the winds raged around them, but it had to have been days and days. (Thank goodness for the abundance of food they’d packed to make sure their trip was a comfortable one.) But eventually, the storm had passed, and the wheels of the van found themselves in touch with actual land again.

Mavis did not recognize the world she saw outside the windows. The buildings that had once been there were completely leveled, and the only signs of other human beings were the piles of bloated dead they saw heaped here and there across the landscape. It felt like the end of the world, and maybe it was. But here they were all the same.

What kind of future could they hope for in such a world? Were they even meant to survive whatever catastrophe had just happened? Mavis might never know the answers to those questions. But here she was all the same. And the sooner she found out what awaited them outside the familiar comfort of the old, maroon van, the sooner she could figure out what to do next.

And with that, Mavis took a deep breath, opened the driver’s side door, and stepped outside.