They walked together from beginning trailhead into the shadows of the trees. Even in the shade, the August sun left the air warm and dry. It was a dry year, and in the August heat, shallow rooted grasses browned and died away. Low branched leaves of the trees were the first to surrender their selves for attempted saving of the greater body of their living tree, and walking, Emma and Ryan stared on the starving world.
Beneath their steps, dry and rusted clay loam stirred in the light scratch of shoe soles upon it, kicking into low dust that hued the sides of shoes and their soles.
The trail led out to a reservoir, its surface and depths contracted in the strain and taking of the drought. Of the rivers that converged to create the body of the reservoir, little water arrived, and the flow of the water emptied through dam and drained in the taking of dry and evaporating days.
In the shrink of the water’s body, the bed of the reservoir showed spans of mud flats dappled with stumps where timber stood before the flood. Further out, lines of stumps showed as old field edges, once the most fertile fields of the river’s flood plain before designed submersion in construction of the reservoir.
Elders still spoke of the river before the reservoir’s construction, how it had ran clear and free, catching walleye and other fish in its riffles before being dammed and becoming a clouded body mostly catching mud and runoff from the three rivers’ basins.
The sun shone warm on their skin. In the summer and the season, it bleached away the winter darkness of Emma’s straight hair. It tanned and rose patterned freckles across her skin that hid away in the paling of winter and departure of summer’s revealing light.
Ryan burned, skin darkening, and the contrast of skin to color and focus of his eyes projected a harshness in spirit belying the true gentleness of his demeanor.
Across the mud flats, weeds arose, bright and green across exposed skin of rich soil shone to sun. They were the only green in a season of burning and loss.
Emma looked to the flats. “It’d be prettier with the lake back up,” she spoke.
Ryan smiled, its spread softening the hard features of external-viewed countenance.
“It’ll return,” Ryan answered.
“Not soon enough,” Emma answered.
Looking on the stump fields immersed in climbing verdure of green, Ryan joked, “At least it’ll save the blades on a few outboards.”
“I’m sure the repairment could use the business…Everyone could.”
Without the reservoir in full use, the local economy suffered, and with price of gas, shortage of resources, traffic and tourists that flowed into the little town as steady as the waters of the reservoirs feeding rivers dried, too, away.
It was an uncertain future—locally, domestically, and abroad—a world of change that gave no indication of fixed direction or balanced, foreseeable end state. Such was good for producers, so long as you didn’t have to burn fuel to deliver—which everyone did—so all suffered no matter beginning gross profit margins before accounting of costs rising faster than product profit.
It didn’t really matter anyways. With the drought, it was all burned up. Cattle numbers were culled and reduced in effort to sustain on pastures that dried and failed all the same; and the momentum of life of the world seemed as the reservoir—receding.
Looking over the flats, Ryan asked, “May I be dark for a little while?”
Emma listened. There was a difference in his tone, a woe in one she always perceived as endless in a hope.
“What is it?” Emma asked.
“Do you mind if I sound crazy for a little while?”
She laughed, and her bright smile gave a coolness in the heat of the August sun. “I didn’t know you could sound anything but,” she teased, “but share whatever you’d like. I haven’t shut you out yet, and I don’t plan to if you stay and speak true.”
The reservoir bed shone as oasis of green in a world of aridity and death.
“Have you ever read the Book of Daniel?” he asked.
“It’s been a while,” she answered. “I don’t know if I could remember anything specific in it.”
“It begins with the King of the Babylonians, Nebuchadnezzar—interpretations of his dreams–and Nebuchadnezzar seeking to make all worship his golden idols, and when three of Daniel’s his fellow Jews refuse to prostrate before and worship a false-god, they throw them into the firey furnace. In the fire, an angel saves them.
Later, Darius—king of the Medes, Persians—seeks to forbid prayer, and as Daniel continues practice of his faith, he is thrown into the Lion’s Den. With God’s protection, he is unharmed, and when checked on the next day, he is set free and his accusers and their families consumed by the lions that left Daniel unharmed.
Then the book gets interesting.”
“How so?”
“A vision.”
“Of what?” Emma asked.
“An Apocalypse,” Ryan answered. “He saw a vision of four beasts: a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear, a leopard with wings of birds, and a fourth beast—‘terrible and wonderful, and exceeding strong…great iron teeth, eating and breaking in pieces, and treading down the rest with its feet.’
It is the fourth beast that comes to dominate and rule the world, a beast of metal in the image of a dragon…
…A kingdom from the south rises up to destroy a kingdom in the north led by a ruler at the pinnacle of his power, who—in the peak of his own power—witnesses his kingdom dissolve to the winds.
…The educated are destroyed in the false indoctrination of their teachings and only ‘the people who know their God shall prevail and succeed.’
In the after apocalypse, a new god rises up: ‘and the king shall make no account of the God of his fathers: and he shall follow the lust of women, and he shall not regard any gods: for he shall rise up against all things. But he shall worship the god Maozism in his place: and a god whom his fathers knew not, he shall worship with gold, and silver, and precious stones, and things of great price…’
Only after this happens does Michael the archangel rise up to destroy the monster and its people.”
“What does it mean to you?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know,” Ryan answered, “but it makes me think. I know man throughout history has always looked in his present day as conditions for the end of times. Maybe man’s right. Maybe every generation is potential for the Apocalypse, but by faith and living in belief of God and not the chaos of purposeless nihilism, man is gifted the blessing to continue in created existence.
What if that changed? What if we ceased to worship and praise, and nihilism and nothingness became our dominant social religion—even if we call it something else? Would we manifest the chaos and our end? What would it look like?”
Emma listened.
Ryan continued on, “If the beasts were kingdoms, what would we make of them in our present day? Could not the Lion with Eagle’s wings be us? Is not Russia’s very symbol the Bear? And the fourth, an empire of iron and hardness and the image of a dragon…might that not be China?
An empire of the south destroys the kingdom of the north at the height of its ruler’s personal prowess…Where is China? Where is Russia? As Putin plays his game, exerting power at home, is he not losing influence abroad the longer his actions in Ukraine extend? He pushes to displays of nuclear employment he calls deterrence but are really plays in desperation to maintain his own hold and influence in a resisting world and his own nation’s sentiment that, if deposed, would tear his kingdom to the winds.”
Emma listened.
“Our world is caught up in a war by the Bear that is really a distraction and condition that allows the greater beast to assess and plan before its own decisive action…When the speak of the new God that will appear in the post-Apocalypse, ‘Maozism,’ it is one letter from the very state-religion of China and its idolization of its modern Communist founder…
All of this was written twenty-seven hundred years ago. The third beast appears in a statue in front of the United Nations offered with nearly a verbatim slogan from the Book of Revelations…”
“Why are you telling me this?” Emma interrupted and asked.
“I was just thinking,” he answered.
“What?”
“If in the Apocalypse stars rain down as written,
‘And I saw, when he had opened the sixth seal, and behold there was a great earthquake, And the sun became black as sackcloth of hair: and the whole moon became blood: and the stars from heaven fell upon the earth, as the fig tree casteth its green figs when shaken by a great wind…‘
Is that not a nuclear end: the earthquake and shaking of the earth, the great wind of the wave of impact pulse, fusion being the very process that feeds and lights stars as they fall—then burst—to destroy all the earth…
I wondered, ‘How does God rebuild?’”
Emma listened.
“I think sometimes God gives us little pieces of information spread throughout a life to, later, piece together and make a semblance of a sense—even if it’s all still crazy.
You know where we live. You know what’s right next door to your home. That’s one of the highest strategic targets of the entire nuclear doomsday. It will be flooded with waves of missiles to destroy our nuclear counterattack response.
If such a moment ever happened, as inconsequential as our backcountry is—it will be one of the first wiped from existence.”
Emma listened.
“And I was thinking. I’d had conversations with people I work with on the old guidance cables that go and die in the middle of the lake. You can still see their trails on years like this when the soil disturbed to lay the cables dries before the rest, and you can see their lines criss-crossing the countryside where missiles used to be staged. I always thought it’d be interesting if the Army Corps of Engineer reservoirs from the eighties, when the Cold War was just about to end, were constructed to hide and insulate missile launch positions from aerial observation: no visibility, limited destruction through submerged protection, no heat signature or visible action should there be means to access the sites through other near-shore points.
Another friend, older than me, gave a different theory. What if the reservoirs weren’t to protect the missiles, but man. What if the reservoirs and their water were an insulation for the radiation fallout that will hold and settle over all the exposed earth, and the last hope for man is buried beneath the waters.
They are placed and constructed to fill with sediments from the surrounding countrysides…”
Emma looked again to the green oasis showing in a world of drought, the seed and life waiting—years submerged—to be exposed and raised in the light of the world as appeared and showed right then before their eyes.
“Maybe this is where man will begin again…” Ryan spoke. He began to laugh soft, conceding the craziness of the consideration, but spoke more to the absurd. “Bethlehem Township, Mount Zion…they are all references and pivotal in the Bible…our home country, the Holy Land named, but in a new place…
…If the winter comes. Blow the dam and begin again. Mankind will return to the rivers and the fertile soils saved by the flood: same as in times and legends of old. Begin again,” Ryan pressed.
“Why are you telling me this, and why should I care?” Emma asked.
“Maybe you are a centerpiece to man’s salvation,” Ryan answered.
“What?!?”
“You have amazing natural maternal and caring gifts…You live to help others rise and relearn to live… Your great grandmother is one hundred and one and still going…”
“Why does my great grandmother matter?” Emma asked.
“If man is to rebuild. Maybe mankind will need lineages that will last and produce with bounty in years and ages referenced in the old testament that sound crazy today.
I read a paper years ago about a phenomenon called hormeosis. It’s the process where exposure to something generally harmful and lethal, in small amounts, actually creates amazing health benefits. It’s a small-dose spike of crazy improvement before moving past the threshold causes lethal effects on a living organism.
Around Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in a certain mile radius and distance of air-drift, there is a band of the longest-living and lowest cancer populaces in the world. What destroys their ancestors improves longevity of the descendants as the radiation influence still holds.
Maybe you are away, maybe you are beyond the band of effect when it happens, and maybe your longevity, maternity, and love for others is what will give man a chance. Maybe you will live, and restoring mankind, for beyond a century.”
A wind changed, blowing soft, and its difference spoke in the whisper of drying, dying leaves.
“Why me?” Emma asked.
Ryan fixed on Emma’s eyes. “Why not you?” Ryan answered. “Maybe you have the marks and thy symbol, and words of millennium before are alive and present in you.”
“What is that?” Emma asked in disbelief.
“Maybe you are the Lily of the Valley—not Mary—but Mother for a New Age: maternal, chaste, fertile, lovely, slender, rising from the winter to restore life and beauty in a world in need of all of that. Maybe it is you…”
There lived an affection in her heart.
“And what of you?” Emma asked.
“If true, and I prove a prophet, I will likely be immolated and carried on to whatever follows after,” Ryan answered with a levity absurd to the weight and consequence of the thought.
“But if not,” Emma pressed.
“But should I live, and you do too; my soul and conviction are unchanged. If we were the last two in this world, and man had one hope for salvation and to begin again in love for God, self, and one another: I pray that it is you.”
*****
The changed wind stayed, stirring and waving the sea of green in a world of killing aridity.
They departed from oasis vision, and in the night, rains began and fell for three days restoring the starving world, filling the rivers and flooding away the flats, returning them again beneath spread of water’s face.
In the world, war still waged. The world still changed. Two Beasts weakened as another poised to rise. Ryan prayed, and Emma lived affected.
