by Victor Allen
**********
Norm Norton was roused from slumber by a feeling of dread. His body was a wet rag, the remnants of a dream receding shadowy and indistinct behind his eyes. The walls of his bedroom glowed with a green, goblin light. The glow vanished, only to be replaced with an equally unearthly orange glow. He realized then that an electrical storm was brewing.
He swung his feet over the edge of the bed, his joints popping and complaining like the unoiled hinges in the tin man’s legs might do. He found his slippers by feel, slipped them on, and scooted over to the window. He raked the curtain back and looked at the sky.
Strokes of lightning lit the sky through the sheeting rain. Strange lightning that was blue and green and red like the aurora, still far enough away that no thunder could be heard. Thick, irregular clouds ran in streaks across the constantly shifting palette of colors. The hues whirled like smoke in a fan as the rain intensified to torrents that splatted forcefully against the window panes. It was looking to be a bad day on Gaia.
We’re not in Kansas, anymore, he thought. Troubled, he let the curtain fall back into place and flicked on a lamp. After his eyes adjusted, he inspected his room. Assignments he had been grading lay in neatly stacked piles. A new, half-finished best seller lay at an angle on his bed, a page sticking up in a plea to be read. He decided there was nothing amiss with his room, but that feeling of foreboding vexed him.
He ambled to his living room and switched on the TV. Wide bands of diagonal snow shifted and moved in waves across the screen in strange patterns. A crackling hiss came from the speakers. The sound was different from regular static, loud and laced with harsh snapping noises like the breaking of twigs.
He left the TV playing and cranked up his radio. He heard the same, odd static, but occasionally caught a word, or part of one. The only words he was able to make out were “shadow” and “Middle East”. That couldn’t be good. Thunder, much nearer, rumbled through the house.
Norton picked up his phone. No sound at all came through the receiver, either cell or land line. His chest tightened, as if the muscles had constricted and tried to make him smaller, less vulnerable. What was happening?
His lights flickered and buzzed. Ceramic what-nots began to tremble and clink together. A three-inch globe rendered in etched glass fell to the floor and rolled over to his feet. He was staring at it when the lights went out.
The static from his electronics cut out. In the silence he almost heard the throbbing of a pulse that began beating behind his left eyeball as if an ice pick had been stabbed through it. His fingers tingled as the lightning flashed more frequently and his home was washed in that weird, witch’s light. The pounding of the rain against the window became a roar.
Something bumped against his back.
His body stiffened and his eyes popped as a bolt of fear surged through him like a high voltage short circuit. His hands clenched involuntarily and he squeaked a little sound of fear as lightning burned across the sky. He saw his reflection in the window, a terrified man with his back against the wall. Thunder trembled the foundations of the house like an earthquake.
Glass blew inward with a crunching blast. Knife-edged fragments of blasted glass rocketed towards Norton. With a shrill cry he got his arms up fast enough to ward off most of the flying shrapnel and keep it out of his eyes. One piece sliced across a forearm, cutting it deeply.
Rain bellowed through the blasted aperture, driven with gale force by the screaming winds. Norton stumbled towards his bedroom, bleeding and whimpering, reduced to a crouching animal. He flung himself on his bed and cowered beneath the covers while thunder split the heavens above him.
A third of the way around the globe, in the Middle Eastern Countries of Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel, huge, unexplained tidal forces raised a massive tsunami from the Mediterranean that swallowed the land masses of all three tiny countries in a fifty foot deep deluge. Thousands ran screaming from seaside resorts as the waters ominously gathered themselves, pulling away from the beaches and stranding millions of aquatic animals to gasp and suffocate. Men, women, and children were trampled by those stronger and faster. The bulk of the wave built and built, towering to over two hundred feet, visible from thirty miles out even over the curvature of the earth. It crashed home with an earth-shattering boom, sweeping all before it with its ungovernable power. The death toll was in the hundreds of thousands, the carnage massive. For any who thought this to be some sort of Divine retribution on the warring tribes of Babylon and Mesopotamia, they were terribly mistaken. This was only the beginning.
At astronomical tracking stations across the globe, compass needles pitched erratically while gyroscopically stabilized telescopes bucked and sputtered, jittering on their gimbals. Radio telescopes whined and complained, overwhelmed by overpowering bursts of gamma radiation that nullified the faint signals from the stars. Unable to handle the overload, monitors and display terminals burned out or simply shut down. Harried astronomers desperately tried to contact each other on a communications grid that had gone completely dead, as if all the satellites surrounding the earth had simply become inoperable. A few communications took place before the bulk of the cosmic storm arrived, and the consensus was that a massive object had entered the solar system along the plane of the ecliptic, its immense gravity distorting everything within its range of influence. It had not been forecast, not been tracked, it was suddenly just there. Now, with all communications and power gone, they could only wait like scared cavemen with the rest of the world to see what it was.
In California and Japan, earthquakes crumbled skyscrapers to dust and unchained more tidal waves that rolled over the coasts of Japan, and China, killing millions. Seventy five percent of the globe was buffeted by intense electrical storms usually associated with sunspots. Strange lightning was the rule as normally inert atmospheric gases were irradiated with the gamma rays and the quantized electrons released light. The suddenly unstable tectonic plates shifted abruptly and volcanoes dormant for a million years suddenly belched flaming rock and molten metal.
Then the bombardment came. As the massive object moved towards the asteroid belt, chunks of rock from the size of pebbles to the size of Texas were flung from their stately orbits and hurtled towards earth like killing javelins. Their impacts raised plumes of dust forty miles into the air, blasting tundra and forest not already ravaged by the death throes of the planet, and blocking out the sun to most of the world.
And while half the globe was suffering through the horror, the other half was just awakening to it.
