found drama

The end of the world! The flood waters are coming! Imminent watery destruction for everything and everyone! There’s but one chance. One hope to survive. An Ark-esque airship – – hydrogen filled and ready to be set aloft. Big enough for all. We need merely to get there. Orderly, single-file through the city. If we follow the provided instructions then we can out run the coming waters. Just barely but we will. We’re being ushered forth from an auditorium. Two at a time.

Down the institutional staircases and out onto a special scaffold that has been built just over the streets. You can hear the oceanic rush of the water in the background closing in. We hurry along the scaffold. Everyone has something in their hands. Something they’ve chosen to salvage. I’m carrying nothing. The man next to me in our two-by-two columns nudges me. There’s a faster way. Another way. A safer way. Up and over the scaffold he says.  I’m skeptical, everyone else who has gotten too close to the edge has been swept away by the rushing waters.

But over he goes just the same, taking me with him – – my elbow grasped tightly in his vice-like hand. This way. Down onto the street itself; through the avenues and boulevards and alleys. He says he knows a way to duck through a couple of buildings. A way to get us through to the airship that much faster. But in the alley we’re spotted by a gang of four or five guys that have clearly chosen to take their chances. My partner ducks behind some doors. I’ll handle this… He urges me to lie down play dead. It doesn’t work and they fall on me with crushing blows.

The frame freezes and I’m back in the auditorium. I get another chance? This time I won’t go. I duck out and through a hallway filled with utility piping and make my way out back to a gigantic turbine system. There are little towers of sensors sticking up all over the place – – listening for intruders like me. I hold perfectly still but I know they can detect my thoughts. Thoughts are an electronic emissions too low to measure but just enough above threshold to show up as activity in the system.

About Rob Friesel