SODIUM:2 Apocalypse

Each of us controls the larger part of our own destiny. You either work hard and put up a good fight or just accept what comes your way. Choose wisely!

S.A.

Special thanks to my family and friends for all their help!

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Copyright 2011-2013 Stephen Arseneault, All Rights Reserved

It all started in 1973 -- I was nine years old. My parents had saved for several years for a family vacation out west to Yellowstone National Park. They had planned a two week trip by car leaving from Detroit the day after school let out for the summer. The baby blue family Rambler had been packed the night before. I remember being all excited before we left the house.

I never expected to have the fate of the world placed in my hands. One could only be amazed at how such a tiny device would change the course of history. Man was not aware that other beings, hostile beings, inhabited our little part of the universe. We had only recently set foot on the Moon.

We were not prepared to protect ourselves from hostiles that we had no idea even existed. Man had easily risen to the top of the food chain here on Earth. He was clever, resilient and bold. There had never been a test of Man's ability to survive like the one that was coming.

Our trip that day was to Indian country. All I could think about was fighting Indians and hunting grizzlies. Most every young boy back in the early seventies had dreams of being either a cowboy, a soldier or both.

After the first day's drive we pulled into a motor lodge outside of Sioux Falls on the eastern end of South Dakota, even with the excitement of the trip it was a tiring ride. We unloaded the car of what we needed for the night, checked into our room and went promptly to bed. After 16 hours on the road... the thrill was gone.

The following day was an early riser and back on Interstate 90 to Badlands National Park at the western end of South Dakota. My Dad had filled my brother and I with stories about how the Badlands was a big meteor crater. The meteor had come from Mars and fallen from the skies thousands of years before. As gullible kids, we spent the afternoon looking for Martians behind every rock. It was a spectacular place and could easily be mistaken for an alien world by any nine year old.

My Dad's antics were all that was needed to convince me that the Martian story was true. But try as we did, my brother and I were unable to track down a single alien. After a full afternoon of hunting and site seeing, it was back to another motor lodge along I90 for the night.

Again we rose early the next day for a long trek in the car. Our next adventure was to Little Big Horn and Custer's Last Stand. After my disappointment over not finding any Martians I had high hopes of fighting Indians. Every hundred miles along the interstate it seemed we would pass an exit that had a trading post with a teepee out front. It was definitely Indian country and my brother and I were keeping a sharp lookout for any signs of trouble.

This was by the urging of our father who had again filled us up with wild stories the night before. It was his attempt at adding excitement to our journey and keeping us occupied during the long rides. I was a little frustrated by seeing all the trading posts that advertised Indians, but we had not seen a single one.

After a night, a full day and another night at Little Big Horn we were ready to move on to Yellowstone. I remember being very disappointed that the only Indian we had seen was a wrinkled old man with a feather in his cap. He was smoking a pipe and sitting outside the visitor center at Little Big Horn. The old Indian certainly was not hostile and he certainly was not interested in my scalp.

After three adventurous days in Yellowstone, seeing the geysers, mud pots and buffalo, it was on to the Grand Tetons. We arrived at the Grand Teton Visitor's Center at about eleven thirty in the morning. Hunger was on all of our faces.

The Rangers in the visitor center directed us just down the road to a diner that served buffalo burgers. The diner, the Double S, was constructed to look like an old western building with weathered plank siding and a metal roof. It had a covered front porch with rocking chairs and a big wooden Indian by the entrance. The left end of the building had a giant teepee attached for drawing in tourists like ourselves. The smell of grilling buffalo was in the air and the hungry travelers were eager to get at it.

My parents and little brother walked in front of me up onto the diner's porch and in through the front door. I lingered for just a moment to check out the big wooden Indian. This one looked like it had more fight in it than the wrinkled old pipe smoker at Little Big Horn.

I stood making faces at the wooden savage as if I had nothing to fear from it, when suddenly an old man grabbed me by the arm. He had a full gray frazzled beard, was dressed in rags and had a smell about him that nearly brought tears to my eyes. He had big bushy eyebrows and one eye that squinted while the other looked fully open. He perfectly fit the stereotype of every crazy guy I had ever seen in the movies or on TV, but for whatever reason, I was not scared.

He shoved something in my hand and told me to watch out for "them". He said "they" were everywhere and to never give "them" the device he had forced upon me. He said to never tell anyone where I had gotten it from or "they" would kill him. He only said it once and then released my arm. I turned for just a moment to look for my parents who had already gone inside. When I turned back the old man was already disappearing around the corner of the building.

I stood there looking at my hand, then back at the corner of the building and then again at my hand. It was a strange looking cylindrical item that looked a bit like a tiny shock absorber. It had been broken off from something else at both ends. The device was a mystery and the circumstance by which it was placed in my hand immediately awakened my imagination.

Once again I was jolted by a grab... this time to my other arm. It was my little brother Rex ranting about buffalo burgers and lunch. I secretly slid the device into my pocket and followed Rex inside. As we waited to be seated I looked out the windows and caught a glimpse of the old man making his way into the woods behind the diner. He walked quickly, but with a bad limp. I took a final glance back towards the roadway to see if he was being watched or followed, there was no one else around.

I don't know why I never told my father about the incident or showed the device to him. Maybe it was the thought of getting in trouble somehow for talking to a stranger, maybe it was the fact that I did not want to let my pesky little brother in on my new adventure. Either way, it made for an exciting day.

Little did I know how significant a roll the tiny little item would play in my life. Somehow fate had seen to it that the strange little device had found its way into my hands. That one brief encounter would later play a major role in the survival of Man. Only luck would prepare me for the things that were to come.

From the Tetons we made our way down to Dinosaur National Park. We then had a several day drive back to Detroit. I had kept the old man's item hidden away from my little brother in my pocket. I took pleasure from the idea that I could reach in and fumble with it at will. I spent many hours wondering about who "they" were, what was so special about this device and why I was selected to receive it.

When we arrived home I raced into my room and into my closet. I had a small metal box with a combination lock on it, my mother had given it to me several years before. It was the one secure place I had where I could keep things that I did not want my brother to get his grubby little hands on.

For what seemed like every night for a month, I would go into my closet just before bed. I would get out the device to stare at it and daydream about what it might be. But I was nine and with it being summertime the intrigue of the device was soon denigrated to only the occasional look.

By the end of the summer the mystery device had lost its appeal and it did not see daylight again until my college days. Junior high and high school went by like a blur and I soon found myself wearing a cap and gown and receiving a diploma.

Renee's mother could not stand the thought of anyone seeing me drive onto their property in the beat up old muscle car. So, she saw to it that I had the keys to one of Renee's father's sports cars. This one was a beauty, a bright red Ferrari with all the trimmings.

Frank, Renee's father, put it in a custom shop immediately after purchase to beef up the already formidable engine performance. This was not the proper auto for an 18 year old male with an already inflated ego. And to prove such I would often challenge the local folk to the midnight expressway drag.

One particular night I had selected a fool and his Oldsmobile. For fifty bucks I was willing to humiliate him in front of his friends. I often laughed to myself at how easily I could take their money with the monster Ferrari. The thrill came in the humiliation it brought and the fifty was just icing on the cake. After all, with Renee, I had all the spending cash I could want.

We had made our way out onto the now largely empty freeway at around 3am. I was in the left lane and the kid in the Olds in the right. His friends had followed in their car and were kind enough to hop out and give us an arm drop start. Immediately the Ferrari lurched ahead.

I was once again giddy over the ease at which I pulled away from him. So much so, that as I passed through 100mph and shifted into third I decided to add to his embarrassment by swerving into his lane and then back into my own. There was no danger of a collision as I was easily five car lengths ahead of him at the time.

What I was not counting on was how hard the road surface was that night and also how hard my own tires were. It was eight degrees this cold Detroit night and the combination of the hard tires and road surface, along with my foolishness at that speed, spelled out disaster. Even though everything seemed to move in slow motion in my head, it all occurred in a flash. It was almost as though I was watching it all happen from a position outside of and just behind the car.

What seemed like only an instant later, I opened my eyes to the sight of flashing blue lights and to the sound of an approaching ambulance. Who knows at what point I had been knocked cold. Blood dripped from my broken and throbbing nose and through my teary eyes I could see that my left arm was bent where it should not have been.

I was shivering from the shock of the accident and from the frigid Detroit cold. Through what was left of my windshield I could see that the garage of a nearby home was in flames. The Ferrari had been cut in half after striking a phone pole broadside at more than 100mph.

The tail end of the Ferrari went crashing into the garage setting it ablaze while the front end, with me still inside, slid just between two large oaks and into a chain link fence. The fence had been ripped from every pole except for the corners and had acted like a giant net. This kept the cab and me largely intact, it had undoubtedly saved my life. I wasn’t sure at the time if it was luck, or if someone above had bigger plans for me, but either way I was happy to still be counted amongst the living.

The other car that I had been racing had fled the scene, but I could hardly blame them. What kid wanted to end up in jail over some idiot's behavior on the streets. I couldn’t handle the excessive maneuvers at that high rate of speed and as a result the Ferrari was sent spinning wildly off the side of the interstate, over a berm and into a sleeping neighborhood. My life had been spared, but my days of racing had come to an abrupt end...

Up until a few months before that day, my life had been pretty ordinary. I had grown up in a lower middle income home on the outskirts of Detroit. My parents both worked and had always provided my brother and myself with food, shelter and clothing. Much of our school district was the same income level so most everyone got along. It was your typical American neighborhood with one old used car in each drive and a clothesline in use out back during the warmer months.

I had managed three and a half years of high school football before a knee injury ended my college speculations. As a result I was destined for a factory job making auto parts down at the plant where my father had worked for thirty five years. That life had done well for my father and although we did not have a lot, we had always managed to get by.

It's strange how when you don’t have much you don’t seem to need much. We only had a handful of well to do kids in our school and they tended to stay to themselves, so no one had really viewed themselves as have-nots. You were taught to always live within your means and to be responsible for yourself.

My father was a shade tree mechanic in his spare time which meant I knew my way around an engine block. As a teenager, working on cars never really appealed to me, at the time I had no car of my own. Being without a ride I remember feeling lucky that the factory was only a three block walk from our house.

My father was always fixing the neighbor’s autos and anyone else's that got sent his way. It gave him extra cash to spend on a project car. I had hoped against hope for several years that it would not become my first vehicle as it was an old Mercedes diesel. Some years earlier he had purchased it and had then begun a restoration. He had named it Suzie.

Every six months or so, he would get the bug, or he had saved enough cash, to continue his work on Suzie. He had his friends in the auto business searching for a particular used part for most of a year before finally locating one. After some dealings over the phone he had it shipped to a guy at the Mercedes dealership across town and I was given the task of errand boy that day to go pick it up.

I had just graduated high school when I first met Renee. I was the handsome young buck without a clue and she was the carefree daughter of a well to do businessman. Her father was a partner in a financial services company which had left her family wanting for nothing. It was her summer to run wild before her senior year in high school and it was my summer to hang out with my buddies, drink beer and chase tail before beginning the second shift grind at the auto parts factory in August, when the new union contract kicked in.

Before I left the house that day for the dealership I was forced by my father to put on a nice set of clothes. Apparently my raggedy old jeans and tank top weren’t adequate for picking up a part at the dealership. It was as if the he thought the parts counter people were going to turn me away. But I had learned long before that it just wasn’t worth the arguing, so on the nice clothes went. Besides, I was happy to get out of the house, even if it was just behind the wheel of the old Rambler.

It was a Friday morning when I pulled into the dealership. The Rambler had seen its better days on the outside, but it purred like a kitten under the hood. The parts guy at the dealership had acquired a scarce part for my father and was holding it for him out of the normal stock. I arrived at the dealership at around 10AM only to find that Delmar wasn’t going to be in until noon. So, with a couple hours to kill, I thought I would take a stroll through the showroom and look at the latest models that I could not ever dream of affording.

I had my eye on a convertible when Renee came hopping through the front door with her father. For her seventeenth birthday it would seem that she was getting a new Mercedes, and, it would be a convertible to boot. Her father had accompanied her and made a beeline straight into the sales manager to start working on his deal. Renee had been left alone and was looking over the showroom queen when I decided to make my bold move.

She was just a petite little thing, but she had a great figure and a killer smile. I casually walked up beside her and asked if there was anything I could help her with that day. She said I looked rather young for a salesman so I decided that maybe she should be educated on the latest feature set of the convertible.

I began naming off fictitious features while waving my arms around like I knew what I was talking about. We sat in the car, turned on the radio and pushed various buttons and twisted knobs. I managed 2 minutes with my charade before a real salesman made his way over and busted me.

Renee was actually amused and giggling as I made my way out of the car, of course the whole time apologizing profusely to the salesman. I had just enough time to give her a wink before returning to the parts counter waiting room to once again wait on Delmar.

To my surprise, a few minutes later, Renee made her way in, swishing from side to side as she walked and then sitting down beside me with a big grin on her face. We talked for almost an hour when her father came in with the keys to that very same convertible. A chance encounter in the showroom that morning had started us on a journey of fun which would eventually lead us down the path to marriage.