Noah was turning 23 and desperate to get out of town. Pulnick, Missouri had always been a hopelessly hayseed blemish on the pallid face of rural Bible-belt America. Always bland and soporific, it was now being invaded by white supremacist meth heads, visited by an unprecedented crime wave, exploited by spiritualists and local politicos, and driven to hysteria by paranoid rumors that the world would end on November 11th. Moreover, Noah's personal life was becoming more convoluted by the day. Everything seemed to conspire against his singular need to go somewhere where he could begin a new life and learn how to dream.

Chapter One May 5… Bambi Meets Godzilla Noah was watching Bambi Meets Godzilla on YouTube. He loved that little film. How many times had he seen it? Fifty? A hundred? Almost the entire length of the three-minute film consisted of opening credits rolling over an idyllic animation of Bambi eating and frolicking in the forest. Gentle spring flute music playfully accompanied the chirping of birds. Finally the credits finish and to a thunderous, forest-shaking kaboom!, Godzilla’s giant foot comes down and squashes the innocent little fawn. All we see is Godzilla's grizzly leg and Bambi's four tiny twig-like limbs sticking out from under the giant reptilian foot. The music and birds have stopped, and as the kaboom! trails off in a long tail of reverberation, The End fades up on the screen and the film is over. What a perfect metaphor! thought Noah. Especially for life in this stinking town. As many times as he had watched it, it never failed to put him in a great mood. Of course, the first twenty or thirty times left him rolling helplessly on the floor in convulsions of laughter. Now it just left him pleasantly amused. Buoyant. Hopeful. He knew he wasn't alone. Like minds. Somewhere out there. When the clip finished, he clicked on the Today's Recommended Videos link. The Featured Video was called "11-11-11: The Pleiadians Warned Us!!" What was this all about? Some fat loser with greasy hair flopping in his face offered a five minute rant based on alleged alien visitations from the Pleiades constellation. Filmed with a hand-held camera, it was replete with photos of flying saucers and very weird mathematical symbols scribbled on a white board. The presentation concluded with a wildly unhinged catalog of every imaginable catastrophe and collusion of spiritual forces, a cosmic fusillade of supernatural cataclysms all occurring exactly at 11:11 am on November 11, 2011. Right. What a pile of kaka! 11:11 am. What time zone, loser? Jokers like this annoyed him. All of these prophets of doom, conspiracists, rapturists and various peddlers of paranoid poop ____ and that included gurus, televangelists and faith healers, even parish priests and local Bible-thumpers if they were mongering fear from their bully pulpits ____ really pissed him off. Whether they believed their own nonsense or not, these lunatics went around spewing this ridiculous crap, scaring the hell out of people and actually getting paid for doing it, while real people like himself actually had to work for a living. Speaking of which…he had a job to go to. Noah threw on his work clothes. He didn't have to be at work for three more hours but this was a perfect day for riding. He hated it when he got sucked into the internet and wasted such beautiful weather geeking out. With a wifebeater under his open work shirt, a pair of jeans tucked into his riding boots, and his backpack buckled on, Noah kick-started his 140 cc Kawasaki off-road bike. It fired up on the first try and he did a decent enough wheelie out of the garage under his tiny studio apartment. Without looking back, he knew his landlady was at her window cursing him and his errant youthful ways. She would go back to mumbling prayers for God's forgiveness and His blessing for her abominable existence here on Earth. Pulnick was one of the three main city-towns along a corridor that ran diagonally through Monroe County, Missouri. Monroe City sat in the very northeast corner of the county, Paris was dead center, and Pulnick midway between them just north of the artificial lakes that were the recreational foundation for Mark Twain State Park. Pulnick's surrounding landscape was a mixture of farms, woodlands, and open fields, and showed both the growing and shrinking pains of development, successful and otherwise. The area bore witness to the ambivalence of a region of middle America which could not make up its mind whether to jump on the freight train of industrialization and modernization, or to just lean back as it had for many decades and watch the corn grow. As the crow flies, Noah's job was exactly 18 miles east and slightly south of Pulnick. If he went straight across town on Main Street, hammered it along Highway 24, then took some back roads east around Mark Twain Recreation Area, he could be there in less than twenty five minutes. Frankly, this was a pretty boring way to go. He had done it way too many times. Today he had the time and wanted a little variety and challenge. That either meant heading north on the county roads where he could open up his little screaming metal monster for some serious speed, or south of town past the Monroe County Industrial Park, out toward Swinkley Lake. The lake was surrounded by woods, and there were lots of hiking and biking trails. It was fairly hilly and if he could avoid the mud holes from the recent rains, he could do some great off-road riding. Noah opted for speed. He banked a right on Dillinger, left on Smithers, then right on Gandolph, which turned into County Road 171 at the outskirts of town. Two more lights and a stop sign and he'd be looking at thirty miles of pedal-to-the-metal open road. He could pull around any cars and trucks without blinking. Just as he was approaching the last four-way stop, he suddenly heard a strange sound. It was coming directly from his left and behind him. It sounded like a combination of the roar of a truck engine and the blast of air brakes. Then nothing.