I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Revelation 6: 12-14
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Words from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” as he observed the first mushroom cloud rise over Los Alamos, New Mexico on July 16, 1945.
Just got home from Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy!
Got to sit down, take a rest on the porch
Imagination sets in, pretty soon I'm singin'
Doo, doo, doo, lookin' out my back door. CCR
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It was an ordinary day in Decatur, sunny and 76, the usual piano-wire tension between the different flags underlying it all seemingly pacified on this bright August 8th morning, as Martin and MaryAnn Albright ate their cinnamon toast, dipped in McCafe, black, and bacon, crisp, while trading newspaper sections with each other across the table.
“Well I’ll be damned, Mare. A comprehensive peace agreement was signed yesterday between the Sudanese authorities and rebel factions to end armed hostilities. Maybe there will be peace at last in Darfur.” As he was pleasantly startled awake by the surprising, relieving bit of good news, sugary spiced crystals fell off his toast like stars in the rising sun, glittering to the Daily Herald’s business section below, the last to be perused.
“And the US and Russia are finalizing SALT III treaties later today at the UN; scientists at Livermore will be firing up their first test of fusion—the power of the sun for free—this afternoon in California; the flooding has stopped in Pakistan; Kim declared a truce between North and South ——
“Okay, Blitzer, time for a commercial break,” she said in a way that indicated that her coffee hadn’t fully reached her bloodstream yet. Mare was reading about last night’s White Sox win—yesterday’s futility of humans could wait a few more minutes.
He taught poli-sci at Richland Community College, she owned a boutique downtown. They kissed, wished each other a pleasant day as each noticed a small dark mass encroaching on the sun like cancer cells encroaching on a lung in a chest x-ray as they backed the cars out of the garage. “Funny, the news didn’t mention an eclipse today,” Martin said to the rear window, as morning crept a little more into dusk. “No matter, I’ve got young brains waiting for me to teach the truth about the ugly world they inhabit.
The first earthquake, shaking in at 4.3, occurred at 8:08. Martin was driving down North 22nd when it slid his Audi into an empty intersection at Highland; MaryAnn narrowly avoided colliding with a free-skating bread truck just past the Gin Mill on West Prairie. Neither was hurt—just shook up, not surprised. The Big One was expected sooner or later here in the middle of the continental USA, assumed by most Americans to be solid, fertile, (expensive), farm ground, not to be easily rattled like Earth's fragile substrates that were surveyed, bought and stolen, then dubbed Alaska and California.
The reality is that breadbasket states stretching to the southwest lay on a major seismic zone called the New Madrid Fault, and is a prolific source of intraplate earthquakes (earthquakes within a tectonic plate). In a report filed in November 2008, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency warned in a report that reached Martin’s eyes that a serious earthquake in the NMSZ could result in "the highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States," further predicting "widespread and catastrophic" damage across Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and particularly Tennessee, where a 7.7 magnitude quake would cause damage to tens of thousands of structures affecting water distribution, transportation systems, and other vital infrastructure. The earthquake is expected to also result in many thousands of fatalities, with more than 4,000 of the fatalities expected in Memphis alone.
It would not be the first significant rattle.
December 16, 1811, 2:15 am: a plate-smasher with its epicenter in northeast Arkansas caused only slight damage to man-made structures, mainly because of the sparse population in the epicentral area at the time; however, the future location of Memphis, Tennessee, was shaken with level-nine intensity. Little Prairie, MO was destroyed by liquefaction. Local uplifts of the ground and the sight of water waves moving upstream gave observers the impression that the Mississippi River was flowing backwards. 225Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡcCMNTJmCx3
At New Madrid, trees were knocked down and riverbanks collapsed. This event shook windows and furniture in Washington, DC, rang bells in Richmond, Virginia, sloshed well water and shook houses in Charleston, South Carolina, and knocked plaster off of houses in Columbia, South Carolina. In Jefferson, Indiana, furniture moved, and in Lebanon, Ohio, residents fled their homes. Observers in Herculaneum, Missouri, called it "severe" and said it had a duration of 12 minutes. Aftershocks were felt every 6-10 minutes, a total of 27, in New Madrid until what was called the Daylight Shock, which was of the same intensity as the first. Many of these were also felt throughout the eastern US, though with less intensity than the initial earthquake.
The largest earthquakes to have occurred since then were on January 4, 1843, and October 31, 1895, with magnitude estimates of 6.0 and 6.6, respectively. The 1895 event had its epicenter near Charleston, Missouri. The quake damaged virtually all the buildings in the village, created sand volcanoes, cracked a pier on the Cairo Rail Bridge, and toppled chimneys in St. Louis, Missouri; Memphis, Tennessee, Gadsden, Alabama, and Evansville, Indiana. People in Boston said their buildings swayed. It was the biggest recorded quake with an epicenter in Illinois in that state's recorded history. Until a few hours from now.
Because the Albrights surmised that more rich rolling farmland as aftershocks were probably on the way, they both called it a day and headed back home. To safety, they surmised.
As the sun kept dimming.
Just before 12, with it high in the sky and beaming darker, the Big One hit. In just 19 minutes, twenty-two seconds, Decatur, Illinois resembled another mid-sized city halfway around the globe gone in a flash on this same date decades before. All was rubble.
The few surviving neighbors on South Wooddale, stunned by the smoking annihilation, gathered, chattered, wondered and worried, as it now became as midnight, the moon waxing blood red at noon. Was this a local catastrophe? National? Global? No way to know without electricity. Did the planet shift on its axis? Change polarity? Did its dirty, rocky, watery skin slip somehow?
Now they were rattled by a galactic tearing of the sky, like the Daily Herald being torn apart, as startling as a million thunderclaps, and watched in awe as the atmosphere curled back like a can of Fancy Feast being opened.
Now stars began to fall through this tenuous veil that once separated dark from light, like sugary spiced crystals falling from toast.
Now sasquatches, skunk apes, skinwalkers, werewolves, centaurs, minotaurs, Jersey devils, ogres, and banshees stalked or poked through the smoking ruins.
Now rotating acorn-shaped UFOs, laser-lit flying pyramids, and white, oblong ‘tic-tacs” zipped in, out, and around Decatur’s flattened skyline like flies on feces; short, skinny Orion Greys toddled along the broken yards and sidewalks, while 8-foot Blues from the Pleiades and medium-sized, but two-faced Greens from M51 promenaded up and down the ruptured avenue.
Now appeared eleven more dimensions; the absence of time, past and future.
Now witches, trolls, leprechauns, gnomes, giants, elves, pixies, and munchkins (yeah, Oz is a real place, too!) were splashing and soaking over in the Johnson’s swimming pool, now filled with orange jello; in Jan and Paul Broski’s backyard, unicorns and giraffes were playing badminton, and tambourines and elephants were playing in a band; over at Pete and Millie Morgan’s a lunatic was in the grass, a White Knight was talking backwards, and of course Henry the Horse was dancing the waltz.
Now ghosts, goblins, poltergeists, and dead people drifted about, as real as the survivors were. Or were they?
The neighborhood remnants tried to make sense of it all: “Are we trapped in a batshit construct of hell—or heaven—sprung from a cataclysmic event?” wondered Beth Seville, who used to live a block over.
“A distorted afterlife that’s more like a small-town carnival midway than the unfaithfully promised Disneyland by every lying god, goddess, religious leader, and charlatan down through time? A fictionalized place of peace and harmony in every sacred text?” fumed Mac Johnson from two Jenga piles up.
“Did the fusion test at Livermore have a seriously worse outcome than the fission test at Los Alamos?” asked a worried Martin Albright. “Did a flag set off their nuclear fireworks? Were they all super dead? Super alive? Is reality really nothing more than a Salvador Dali painting? An eternal acid trip?”
Welcome, Decatur, to the Other Side.
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