Garrett Michaels

Garrett was born December 15th of 1980. Grew up around Vancouver, Canada, as an only child. His father, Tim Michaels was a fisheries officer out of Stevenston, while his mother Kathy worked as an accountant in Vancouver itself. The family home was located in the quiet suburban neighbourhood of North Delta.

Growing up, there was little that distinguished Garrett from his friends. Like most boys at the age of 12 he was active into sports playing soccer and enjoyed being a Scout. But by 16, his interest had turned to computers, and gaming. For him at that time, girls were more a nuisance than an interest. Sure he tried dating a few, but they didn’t hold his interest long.

Garrett was what most would term a computer geek (complete with nerdish glasses). That’s not to say he didn’t have other outdoor interests. He enjoyed his weekend excursions with his Dad, boating on the ocean, fishing and hiking. He camped out during the summer with his gaming buddies, but overall he was more comfortable with electronics than with people or the outdoors.

When it came time to decide what to do for college, Garrett tried his hand at a college trade school to get his electricians ticket to please his parents, but he switched subjects after a semester to instead go for computer programming and repair. He moved out of the family home to a small apartment in the just outside the heart of Vancouver. His apartment though small, did however have a decent view of English Bay and it was the perfect place to game with the guys and play his Sony Playstation.

After graduation, Garrett got a job as a computer repair tech at Future Shop, and did computer programming as a hobby on the side. None of his game programs were ever accepted by the Silicon Valley bosses but he did have few small contracts with lesser known computer companies. In the mid-90’s, as the internet became more widely known Garrett, moved his focus from programming to webpage design and started his own business helping other companies with webpage’s and online advertisements.

It was through his business, that Garrett met his fiancée Sheri, in 2005. She was an advertising director for a big firm out of Toronto, who hired Garrett to design and implement several high-profile webpage’s for a public viewing. For Garrett, it had been love at first sight, not so for Sheri and he had his work cut out for him, getting her to ease up on the ice-queen demeanour. It took a full year of his traveling back and forth from Vancouver to Toronto every few weeks for a 4 day stint to convince her that yeah, he was head over heels for her. Being a modern day couple – he moved in with her and worked his business out of the North York sky-rise apartment. Life was good then. Sheri had a busy workweek, but the weekends were all theirs. They would often leave the city to go canoeing out in Algonquin Park, or go visit her parents on their hobby farm in Clinton. It was Sheri who finally convinced Garrett to give up his nerd glasses for something more contemporary - the new pair of glasses made Garrett look almost like a professor. Garrett and Sheri were engaged Christmas eve of 2007. But as the axiom goes nothing lasts forever.

In the summer 2008, amidst the hustle and bustle of wedding planning, Sheri was diagnosed with lung cancer and the prognosis wasn’t encouraging. She refused to go ahead with the wedding until she was well again. When prayers and chemotherapy didn’t stop its’ progression, the alternative was surgery. But complications occurred while under anesthetics and Sheri died just after Thanksgiving, despite the doctors’ best efforts.

Garrett was devastated. He had never experienced loss like that before and he didn’t know how to cope. At first he withdrew from everyone - his parents, his friends, her friends, everyone. He barely ate or drank, never slept. His time, when not focusing on his work, he spent pouring over photo albums of that brief happy time together. On the one year anniversary of their engagement, Garrett travelled to Niagara Falls. It was supposed to be their honeymoon – he spent the night out watching the Falls alone, missing her.

But even grief has its’ limits. Eventually, Garrett joined the world again – and moved back to Vancouver in the spring of 2009 to help out at his parents’ house, after his father suffered a mild heart attack. His life settled into normal rhythms again. Family, friends and work. However, just before Christmas each year, Garrett travelled back to Toronto to visit Sheri’s grave and spend a nights’ vigil over looking Niagara Falls.

So it was that Garrett found himself flying eastward on Dec 21st when disaster struck. Severe icy storms in Northern Ontario around Thunder Bay and Lake Superior detoured the Boeing 737 jet further south, where sudden high winds in the Lake Michigan area forced an emergency landing that went horribly wrong. The plane as it approached the O’Hare runway was picked up by a sudden updraft and sent spiraling into the heart of the “Windy City.” The plane crashed wildly into more than one building, including the famed Chicago Skydeck, before finally coming to rest in the Chicago Stadium.

Garrett survived the tragic crash - one the few to survive and amazingly with only minor injuries, requiring no more than a few stitches. If Garrett were religious he might have called it a miracle, but Garrett no longer believed in God. Sheri’s death had taken what little faith he had retained from childhood and crushed it.

With the hospital filling quickly with other more urgent casualties – all caused by the violent wind storm that was continuing to blow, Garrett was released from the hospital and the airline provided lodging in a nearby hotel until other arrangements could be made. Just as he was settling into his room, the power went out and emergency backup battery lights activated in the hallway. Exhausted from his traumatic experience, Garrett opted for sleep rather than to sit in the dark.

He woke to violent shaking, and the sounds of wood and steel groaning. He squinted against the darkness of his room but could not make out anything. He fumbled a hand about reaching for glasses that were not there, in an attempt to see what was going on. His glasses had been lost in the plane crash earlier. There was an ever stronger shake and another, this time directly above his head. The ceiling above his head came falling down in pieces around him. He could hear shrieking, was it his or someone else’s? Something struck his head and the darkness and noise dissolved.

He awoke again this time to hear the wind howling - an eerie and forlorn sound - but couldn’t see anything but a small beam of dim light amidst shadow. It was when he attempted to move and sit up that he discovered his predicament. He was buried alive under who knew how much rubble! He couldn’t move. There was pinning weight all over him and a sharp pain in his leg. His only salvation was that for the moment there was a slight opening in the rubble above him, allowing him air to breathe.

How long he lay fading in and out of consciousness, calling for help from beneath the rubble of the hotel building, he had no way of knowing. Was it aftershocks he felt shaking him or was that his imagination? Fever took hold of him and his calls for help weakened. He was certain he was going to die there. But his fevered cries for help were answered by two teenage girls who on their own dug him out from the building and carried him to their makeshift shelter of a derailed trains’ cargo container. Garrett was weak from dehydration and hunger, and feverish fighting off infection in his leg. But the girls kept telling him how lucky he was that he didn’t have any broken bones.

For the next two days, the girls took care of him, rationing out their meagre food and water supplies looted from a grocery store. On the third day of his fever, the older girl Maria, tried to see about finding some medical help but returned soon after frightened, describing to him and her friend Tanya, a sickness that was affecting the few other women she had seen. That same evening Maria became ill herself, and Tanya not long after. Garrett, still feverish with infection, tried his best to help them but without medication, there was nothing he could do to save them. They died wracked with cramps and abdominal pain. Garrett felt certain he was next and in his fevered dreams that night he thought he could hear Sheri’s voice calling to him to hold on. When he awoke next morning his fever was gone and with it his listlessness. He couldn’t stay here.

Garrett covered the girls’ bodies as best he could with the loose rubble near the cargo container. He then spent the rest of the morning sorting through what goods they’d managed to acquire. Five bottled water remained and some very dented canned food. It wasn’t much... but it should manage to hold him over a week – he hoped. Gathering all this into one of the two bed sheets the girls had pulled loose from the rubble along with him and wrapping the other bed sheet about him for warmth against the chill winter air, Garrett set out into the ruined city of Chicago.