Snakes in Paradise
COURTNEY
PRESENT – SUMMER YEAR 2226 Mill Pond, Cascadia Courtney’s House
“I didn’t think paradise had venomous snakes.”
I spoke the words out loud, as if the creature could understand me. Formida-
ble, beady red eyes. Black, straight lines for pupils. I’d seen pictures of the deadly viper, but it wasn’t supposed to be in Cascadia. There weren’t supposed to be any lethal snakes in Cascadia. Yet somehow, there it was, on my front porch, looking threatened and about to strike.
With a jolt, I sat up, abuptly awakened. My clothes were damp. No. Soaked, actually. I couldn’t stop my jaw from quiv- ering, my body from uncontrollably shaking. The snake. Just a dream. Not real.
Two years. That’s how long it had been since Keith went missing.
Two years ago, my husband put together a rapid response team to help victims of a hurricane in The Tropics. But they never came home from the trip, and after all this time, they were still missing with no answers as to where they might be.
The not-knowing was the worst part.
To go on without him, not knowing whether he was dead or alive...To be honest, I’m not sure how my two teenagers and I man- aged it. For Laurel and me...it was denial, I suppose. We kept busy with her in sports and after-school activities. I had a house and ten acres to deal with, which I didn’t manage very well without Keith. I could barely keep my own hair combed, let alone try to maintain the overwhelming property. But at least the responsibility was a distraction for me.
For my son, Nick, the denial stage didn’t last long. He fell into a deep depression, and flunked all his classes in high school that year. Fortunately, he eventually got back on track and ended up graduating a year later than he was supposed to, the same year as his sister, Laurel.
We somehow carried on with our lives, holding on to hope deep inside us that Keith would eventually be found. It was a week after the kids graduated high school when we received the news.
“A package arrived, Mom!” Laurel, my lovely daughter who’d just turned eighteen, came in from the front porch and set a medium-sized box down on the kitchen counter.
“That’s strange. I’m not expecting anything.” I stared at the delivery. “Hmm, what could it be?”
“Did Nanny and Papa send it?” Laurel asked before she left the kitchen and headed down the hall to her bedroom.
I shrugged. “Probably. Nobody else loves me enough to send me gifts.” My parents often sent gifts, so I eagerly opened it, thinking it might be one of their nice surprises.
My heart stopped when I pulled out a bunch of packing popcorn and saw what was inside.
A Golden Eagles ball cap. Keith.
It was a vivid memory; what he wore the last time I saw him. The day he left for The Tropics to be a hero. A teal, purple, and pink Thunking Rabbits band T-shirt, a pair of olive khaki shorts, bright orange tennis shoes, and to cap it off, the red, yellow, and white Golden Eagles ball cap. I’d even said something about it.
“Wow. Look at you. Mr. Clash Act. You always pick that same cap to wear, even though you have a closet full of other ball caps,” I said to him as we were saying goodbye.
“It fits my head just right, Fashionista Officer.” Keith had said.
That was the last time I saw my husband before he went missing.
Now, staring at the ball cap that sat inside the box, it felt like there were two people inside me. There was the person who wanted to pick up the cap and see if it was really Keith’s, to see if his initials were embroidered inside. The person who wanted to finally have closure.
Then there was the person who said, “No. Walk away. Don’t look at it. Keep believing he’s coming home.”
The need for closure eventually won out, and with shaking hands, I pulled the cap out of the box and flipped it over to look inside.
There they were. Keith’s initials. Seeing them, I forgot how to breathe for a few seconds.
My knees buckled. I let go of the ball cap and watched as it fell to the floor. Grabbing on to the kitchen counter, I tried to keep from collapsing.
That’s when I noticed what else was inside the box.
“What is that?” I caught sight of something the cap was set on top of and reached in to pull it out. The second I caught a glimpse of what it was, I dropped it. A cry loud enough for the kids to hear escaped me. They both ran out of their bedrooms, down the hall- way, and into the kitchen, alarmed.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” Nick, now nineteen years old, saw the ball cap I’d dropped on the floor.
Laurel, a year younger than her brother, looked at the skull that was now staring at us from the kitchen counter where it had dropped when I let go of it. “What’s that? A skull?” She laughed. “Seriously, Mom? It can’t be real.”
“Who is this from, anyway? Seems like a prank,” Nick said, look- ing at me like I was off my rocker.
I stared into the hollow eyes of the skull, feeling as if a soul was staring back at me. I shuddered. Laurel laughed and pulled out a piece of paper that was still inside the box.
A minute later, she stopped laughing. “It’s on PAX letterhead,” she frowned.
“Really? Let me see that,” Nick said, reaching to grab it from Laurel. Laurel turned herself around and skimmed the letter first, before she handed it over to her older brother. I noticed the color had drained from her face.
Nick silently read the letter, and I saw his expression change from curious to angry. “That’s Dad’s hat. I remember now,” he said in a low murmur.
I didn’t want to look at that letter. Seeing my kids’ reactions was enough. Neither of them said anything more after they’d read it. They left the room, almost as if they didn’t care what it said. But I knew my kids. They cared. Too much. That’s why they avoided dealing with it.
I also avoided dealing with it, by leaving the letter in the kitchen and going outside. I worked on the property all day.
I drove my excavator out into the forest and battled with the claw of my machine against maple vines. One of the long arms of the beastly vine-trees whipped back at me, putting a gash in my cheek. Out in the forest, it was a gamble on who would win. My excavator or the maple vines. Today, the maple vine was winning.
When I finally got too tired to battle the beastly vines, I headed back into the house. It was time for me to pick up the letter. Some- how, I mustered up enough courage to look at it..
This letter is to inform you that Mr. Keith Anthony Drake was arrested on July 4, Year 2224, on the charges of spreading false propaganda about The Peace Alliance Ten (PAX), while in The Tropics Zone. Mr. Drake was executed as a convict on CAT 4 Island on The Day of Cleansing, October 11, Year 2224.
That night, the kids were both out with friends, celebrating their graduation.
For the first time in two years, I cried. Like a volcanic eruption, a loud, ugly, messy, wailing explosion ejected out of me, and didn’t stop flowing until I was at the point of exhaustion. I slept for a long time that night. By the next day, I felt...hollow.
PAX. A group of billionaires. Elitists who believed they could somehow create a utopian world. Globalists who had slowly been taking control of the world’s governments. The crazy thing was, at first, their plans had seemed like a great idea to many people. Even me. In fact, I’d liked a lot of their ideas.
But Keith was never convinced. And if you met Keith, you found out real fast what his political stance was. Unlike me, he loved to talk about religion and politics, and reveled in offending people.
He thought the billionaire globalists were a bunch of overgrown children who looked at the world like it was a game board, and viewed the inhabitants of the earth like they were pawns.
Way back when Keith’s team hadn’t come off the plane, when the embassy had no idea what had happened to any of them, my son Nick had voiced his suspicion that perhaps PAX had arrested the team. He wasn’t being a sensationalist to come up with that idea, considering it was against the law to speak out in opposition of the new government. Keith’s team had a reputation for being advocates of democracy, and they opposed the PAX takeover.
At the time I didn’t want to believe what Nick suggested. Even though I knew deep down it might be true. Now we all knew that Nick had been right.
Lately, PAX had become so controlling that they were talking about implanting ID chips in people so they could keep tabs on everyone. They spun a narrative that convinced nearly half the pop- ulation it was a great idea, too. With test trials underway, college kids were often the ones who jumped on board as testers, because PAX offered money to test human “guineas.”
As for my college kids, they didn’t buy anything PAX had to sell. Especially not Nick. He hated the thought of having a chip implant that would keep tabs on everything we did.
“We can never let them put their chips in us, Mom. Never!” Nick was so much like his dad. And now that he knew PAX was responsible for his father’s death, a deep-rooted anger and desire for vengeance burned inside him.
FALL YEAR 2226
Nick and Laurel were glad that the private universities they each planned to attend hadn’t enforced the chip implants yet. It was only a matter of time before PAX would find a way to force the private schools to chip their faculty and students. But for now, we embraced every inch of freedom that remained.
Nick chose a university that was six hours away by plane, in The Capitol, because he wanted to study political science. Politics, of all things. Yuck.
Of course, I didn’t understand why he chose that career path and asked him, “How can you still want to go into politics, Nick? Now that PAX runs everything, you’ll just end up working for them.”
His answer: “If there’s nobody good working in government, we have no hope of changing things, Mom. You know Dad would agree.”
“I’m not sure he would, Nick. He despised PAX. Why not choose to be an educator, like your sister?” I asked. “You can influence the next generations to be smarter than the current ones. And Laurel is only going as far as The Goldens. She’ll get to see Nanny and Papa on weekends, and she can drive home in a day from there.”
“Sorry, Mom. But I don’t want to teach. Maybe when I’m an old man, after I’ve lived a little. I need to be in The Capitol for my career path.”
What could I do? He was way too big to boss around. I had to let him be a man and choose his own way.
Saying goodbye to each of them when they left for their univer- sities was when reality began to set in. All the pent-up emotion I’d been burying for two years started to inch its way up, up, up.
WINTER YEAR 2227
By the time winter approached and the darkness started to set in as early as 4:30 in the afternoon, the dreary skies paired with my bleak mood were dismal.
Then, one night, lightning struck the giant cedar that Keith had once carved our initials in. As I watched that mighty Goliath of a tree break, something inside my mind broke with it.
The night after the cedar split, I pulled out old photo albums of Keith and me.
Bottle of rum in one hand, a rolling suitcase of pictures in the other, I headed out to my forest. I left the suitcase by one of my burn piles of fallen trees and logs and went into the shop, grabbed the blow torch and propane can, and loaded them into the back of my ATV, then headed back to the wood pile and started a bonfire. Picture after picture was thrown into the fire.
“I hate you Keith. I hate you for destroying my life! I hate you for going to help people in The Tropics, then getting yourself killed! You and your annoying, big mouth! How could you do this to us?” I took a swig of rum from the bottle and tossed a picture of him in the fire.
“And I hate that stupid, skinny girl I used to be, who fell in love with you and got herself pregnant at seventeen!” Another swig of rum, and a few pictures of us at our wedding were thrown in. As I saw the beautiful pictures that my parents paid a fortune for, I started to sob.
Too late. I couldn’t save the pictures from burning. Too late.
I stayed out there half the night, drinking rum, screaming, cry- ing, laughing, acting like an absolute lunatic. At one point, a strong wind suddenly picked up and blew through, causing the bonfire to jump to a huge, dead tree. The tree went up in flames. Good thing I lived in a wet climate, and it was drizzly out, or my whole forest might have burned down that night.
As I looked up at the burning, dead fir tree, I thought I saw a thick mist rolling in over the hill behind it.
But then I realized it wasn’t a mist.
“Holy $#*!” What I saw was unbelievable. I later wondered if it might have been a rum-invoked psychedelic hallucination.
What looked like a snake the size of my house was slithering over the hill. But then, its huge legs showed themselves. Claws large enough for three of me to fit in its grasp were revealed. Not a snake. More like a lizard’s body, but the size of the Tower of Upland.
The creature was emerging, growing larger by the millisecond, until finally its head rose up. It had a long snout, with a huge open mouth that revealed frightening-looking, razor-sharp teeth. Horns came out of its triangular head. Seven short horns. The light of the fire revealed its orange scales.
A frickin’ dragon!
I’d climbed up that mound many times, but made a point to never go down the other side of it, where there was an old mine at the bottom. When Keith was a little boy, his brother who was ten years older went with a friend to explore inside those mines, but there was a cave-in, and his brother had been killed. His parents posted “keep out” signs, and we’d all steered clear of the area ever since.
Could the dragon have come out of the mine? I stood, ter- ror-stricken, watching as the immense beast continued to rise up, spreading its massive wings. The night air grew colder in the shadow of the mighty creature, and I was thankful for the warmth of the fire.
Did it see me? Was it my loud ruckus that had disturbed it? I’d heard that some dragons didn’t bother humans, while others were deadly. The deadly kind, if I remembered correctly, were usually red. This one looked more orange in the light of the fire, but it was a dark night, and I could be mistaken. What if it was actually red?
I stayed still. Silent. Afraid to run. It might see me as prey and chase me. I glanced up at it, and saw that its yellow eyes were look- ing right at me. Or were they looking through me?
Panic took over, and it took all my strength to stand there with- out fainting or bolting off.
The dragon started to flap its wings, and lifted up into the black sky, its gale stoking the bonfire, causing the flames to grow and rage. Up it flew, high into the night sky, over me, over my ten-acre forest.
“What the...” I let out a gasp as it disappeared out of sight. “That had to be the scariest moment in my life.”
Dragons were endangered, and unless you travelled to Tanai, an island out in the middle of the ocean, people didn’t see them. The only reason we knew they still existed was thanks to the nature photographers, film creators, and adventure seekers who laughed in the face of danger and were crazy enough to go look- ing for them.
“How did that dragon get here?” I wondered.
The sky became even darker, and I heard the roar of thunder in the distance. Another lightning storm. Lovely. Still holding the bottle of rum, I took another swig, and hurried back through the forest to my house, the flames of the dead tree shooting up into the midnight sky behind me.
