SABIS the SURVIVOR

Chapter 1: The Ice Storms Arrive

Chapter 1: The Ice Storms Arrive

A few days after what was TLI's final launch, Gadi had brought his family from Marseilles, France to the Andorran Pyrenees. He, his wife Marie, and their two daughters Isabelle and Genevieve had escaped the city the day after the two orbital blasts had pushed the moon and pulled the earth out of its usual elliptical solar orbit. Gadi decided to take his family to the Andorran mountains where his parents Ernesto and Veronica resided. Due to the world-wide disruption of electrical and magnetic fields, they had to travel by a diesel-powered bus. The local French authorities had decided to evacuate Marseilles due to the threat of earthquakes and tsunamis.

After arriving at the remote and scenic village, Marie and the children rested at the family home while Gadi went for a reconnaissance hike. Later that afternoon, they planned to evacuate the village and rendezvous in a nearby town for land transport to an inland fallout shelter in Madrid.

While out on his hike, Gadi felt the earth move under his feet. Thunder and gale winds turned fleeing and confused birds into pinballs, tossing them into trees, where they ricocheted off unsuspecting ice-covered oak and pine tree branches. Their feathery carcasses then attached themselves to the partially denuded bark, ripped to shreds where the hail had pelted.

In a mesmerized state of shock and awe, he watched the feathers blow away in the wind (later he would call it the 'hand of a sky God') by the tremendous natural forces that had been unleashed. As he stared up at the heavens to get a sense of the turmoil and tumult, his blue eyes mirrored the clear but ozone-depleted expanse above, although if you looked carefully, you could see the onset of a pale yellow ring that circled each iris. The same pale yellow also permeated the sky, from one horizon to the other, like a cape of blue and yellow that would cause the death of a generation.

There was no way for him to contact anyone else. In the first days after the space blasts had moved the earth's orbit, tsunamis had washed away all of the taller buildings, cell towers, and infrastructure. So he decided to return to his parents' home before proceeding to the rendezvous point.

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Gadi

When the ice storms first arrived, I was visiting my parents at their village in the mountains. The one path which led to and from the village's town square had become impassable only moments after the ice and snow fell. The vast quantity of precipitation had never been seen like this before in this region.

Inside their humble abode, where I spent the majority of my youth, I found my parents huddled around their wood-burning fireplace and pellet stove. Marie and the kids had already left hours ago for the rendezvous point and I feared for their safety.

"Mama, Dada, why are you still here? We have to evacuate. The ice and snow will crush the roof and this house will crumble."

"Gadi, you go! We wish to stay here and take our chances. We are too old to travel on foot to the neighbouring village. Besides, we would only slow you down."

I felt a heaviness on my chest and a knot in my stomach, like my torso was caught in a vice grip.

"I want you two to come with me. I will help you along the path. Let's go now!"

I had to venture out and attempt a reunion with my wife and children who were waiting for me at the rendezvous point in the neighbouring village. I looked up at the lofted ceiling that creaked and groaned then back at my seated parents. They were holding hands. In their eyes, I saw reflections of the life that they had built for the three of us.

Carefully placed around their bungalow were mementos like a stone sculpture of the condor from the mountainous regions of Chile. Father always said that he looked to this condor as his inspiration: It has the largest combined weight and wingspan of any land bird, it thrives in both mountain elevations of five thousand meters and sea-level habitats. Furthermore, this mainly black and partially white vulture can live up to seventy years or more and is an expert scavenger. And since its neck changes colour depending on its emotional state, Father used to think that he himself was an Andean Condor in a previous incarnation. Originally born in Chile amidst the overthrow of a dictatorial government, he and his parents had been flown out of Chile, actually extradited, with the help of Fidel Castro, another dictator who had been sympathetic to the removal of Augusto Pinochet's regime.