Fracking

R. Boon

11/17/13

Fracking

2013:  6,526,548

            Seven hours before, the conversation had gone like this:

            “Hey, bossman, you sure we want to do this?  We don’t have clearance to be fracking here.”

            Josh Aaron spit on the ground and flipped Jack off.  “Dumb roustabout.  Do your job.”

            “But aren’t we too near the Lake?  A lot of Dallas water comes from Lake Ray Hubbard.”

            “So what?  We’re just using lake water and a little sand, and it’ll go right back.  Everybody drinks bottled water these days anyhow.”  He checked the well head once more.  “Ready?”

            “Yeah, but boss…”

            Josh patted Jack on the shoulder.  “You saw those ground scans.   There’s a finger of the Barnett Shale over here, and looks like it has an incredible layers of gas in there, if we just bust it up enough.  You just keep that casing stable.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”  Jack hit the switch and the high-pressure pumps kicked in, shaking the ground as the water, sand, chemical mix shot down into the earth.  He gazed away at the canopy of city lights from Dallas-Fort Worth, at the cars racing over the causeway.  He was pretty sure the main line sucking water straight out of Lake Ray Hubbard was illegal. His friends Matt and Pete waved at him from the trailer.  Matt turned on some Sinatra song he was always humming and went in for coffee.  “I get no kick in a plane, / Flying too high with some gal in the sky…”

***

2015:  92, 149, 667 

Around 11 that night, there were pressure changes, a little a first, then wild swings.  Pete was checking the gages, was on the line asking about doing a fast shut-down.  Things smoothed out, then an hour later, all the gauges stopped dead, as if the injection stream was going into an empty pocket, something so enormous there was no resistance at all.   Then flow completely stopped, lurching, pushing back.  Jack could tell some of the casings had buckled.  The ground around the well head shifted, then fell away from their rig, then the rig, the pipes, casings, all were pushed up thirty foot, then pulled down and snapped off.  Jack began running toward high ground.

When he turned to look, the trailer was caught at the edge of the new pit.  He saw Josh’s truck pull up at the service road.  And rising out of the pit, he saw—he shook his head and sniffed the air, wondering if gasses were tricking him.  He saw a swirl of tentacles? Tongues? Sick flesh laced with red and gold energy flashes, like solar flares, and then gaps of dizzying absence.  Each flash scarred away part of Jack’s vision, and radiation began to shrivel lines across his skin.    In his head, Jack heard it announce itself:  “I am A^ble’y^egha!k!lrayun-e, your god returned…”  Jack whimpered and wanted to look away. 

            At the edge of the pit, not floating, but crawling, came a different pulse of darkness, like the sludge of raw oil, convulsing, bulging with cavities and mouths, a stench and a sense of absolute—hunger.  Jack heard again in his head, “I am Thuut, Master Lord of the Dark.  You will feed me.”  An amoebic pod rushed out and pulled Josh from his truck, crushing his legs and dissolving his skin.  Josh kept screaming, until only his head and spine were left and dropped.

On the other side of the pit, A^ble’y^egha!k!lrayun-e  reached out with its tentacles and neatly sliced through the trailer walls, then as quickly sliced through Matt and Pete, sucking, taking something from them, blue and green flashes, folded into the vortex.  Souls, perhaps.  The discarded limbs and parts crawled the ground, searching for each other, combining in random, twitching clumps that scampered off toward the highway.

A^ble’y^egha!k!lrayun-e sniffed the air.  “Three hundred million years, trapped below with our last great feast.  This time there are even more lives to use.”

Jack felt Thuut pulse an eagerness, watched a pod reach out to the Lake.  Where it touched, a pink-orange mist rose and rushed across the city.  Jack could see through Thuut’s mind the joy of dissolving the 6 million people there, leaving them a strange jelly, filled with twitching eyeballs and grasping fingers.  A swamp of boiled flesh, more than Thuut would be able to consume in years.

“You waste them,” said A^ble’y^egha!k!lrayun-e, flaring brighter.

“They are humans, and will breed enough to refill a 100 such cities,” answered Thuut.  “And did you not feel the joy of their agony?  The shattering of all their reason?  How I have hungered for that.”

            “Yet I am the higher being, and you must have my sanction for such events.”

            Jack watched Thuut swell.  He threw up, then found Thuut reaching into his mind, to find other full cities, Houston, Tulsa.  He walked down the hill. “You have no right.  No right to come here.  No right to take away all those lives, to leave nothing.”  He stared at the gods, feeling his face begin to melt.  He felt Thuut’s rage reach out to him.  And felt it stopped.  Stopped by the laughter of A^ble’y^egha!k!lrayun-e.

            “A human claims the value of human life,” laughed A^ble’y^egha!k!lrayun-e.  “It believes they should not simply feed us.  That they should be remembered.  So be it.”

They changed him.  Thuut swirled around him, healed his body and made it unbreakable, immortal, and A^ble’y^egha!k!lrayun-e lashed him with his fire.  “You are now become a god with us.  You will catch the memory of every human death, for all time.”

And the memories, the essence, of the six million recent dead flowed into Jack, and he screamed and wept and crawled away, and hid himself in dark hills and burning forests, but nothing stopped the dead from joining him, for hundreds of years, as A^ble’y^egha!k!lrayun-e and Thuut moved and destroyed most of what humans had built, and deaths soared.

2078:  1,899,443,146

***

            Jack no longer was compelled to follow the swaths of carnage, his feet bleeding, survivors cursing him, stoning him, offering worship, pleading.  He rested in the great desert that had once been the plains of Kansas or Nebraska.  Another joined him in death.

2156:  4,287,231,432

            He spoke with the voice of billions inside him.  “It is enough.  The balance has turned.”  With one collective thought, hard as an obsidian knife, he sliced a deep gash in the earth, and thrust Thuut and A^ble’y^egha!k!lrayun-e back into darkness.  Billions inside him wept and rejoiced.  Jack reminded them, “at 7 billion, we shall have the strength to find their worlds, and destroy them all.” 

More lived, more died, and the vengeful god grew strong.

© 2013, Robert E. Boon