A loud bang followed a second later.
“He’s shooting at us!” Asher yelled.
She only looked back for half a second. Misha was on the boardwalk near where she’d given her talk. He wasn’t more than fifty yards away.
“Don’t stop!” she screamed.
Caught between two deadly threats, she made the decision to trust Mother Nature not to screw her over. She increased the speed of her hops and ran along a long stretch of high ground when she got there. Misha fired a few more shots—none of them caused the ground to explode like that first one. A half a minute later, after total disregard for her own safety, she was almost across.
“We’re there!” she shouted with relief.
When she got to the edge of the hot springs, she chanced a look. The red-shirted man ran back on the walkway toward where he’d come from, but he was so far away she didn’t think he could hit them. Asher was still ten to fifteen yards away, running over the uneven rocks at his own pace. A couple of seconds before he reached the edge, he disappeared.
“Asher!”
He’d fallen through the crust.
Kentucky
Ezra did his best to seem cool and relaxed as he walked along the cars parked on the road. Butch stayed with him, for which he was grateful, if only so he had someone to vouch for him if trouble showed its face. He kept his rifle slung over his shoulder and hoped it didn’t freak people out. The refugees were from Paducah, so each one probably had as many weapons as he did, but there were likely a few who were scared of guns, too. The last thing he wanted was a confrontation.
“Look, Butch, I have to ask you to hold off telling anyone else about the meteor. I’m afraid if we blurt it out, it’s going to send everyone into a panic. I’ve got to think of where they can go…” He still hadn’t mentioned his subdivision, or his idea about the basements. It tore him up not to reveal that piece of intel, yet knowing if he created a mad rush in all directions, no one would get to safety.
“Sounds reasonable for now, but if I see a streak of light, don’t expect me to stick around. I’m going to find a culvert and dive inside.” He laughed, as did Ezra, though the idea wasn’t terrible. Surely there were drainage culverts and bridges all along the roadway. The problem was finding them. Even if they could do an orderly search for all suitable drainpipes up and down the roadway, there wasn’t enough time left in the day. Sunset couldn’t be more than an hour or two away, if he was reading the hazy skies right.
“You’ve got a deal,” Ezra replied.
He walked the road until he was within view of the roadblock to his subdivision. He stayed out of view, to further avoid unnecessary confrontation, troubled to see a group of refugees hanging out near the guards.
Ezra pointed. “What’s going on up there?”
Butch craned his neck, though he was already tall enough to see over most of the vehicles. “Oh, it looks like they have guns, now. I saw those guys earlier. Even talked to a few of them. Nice enough folk, but they only stood up there to remind us to keep moving along.” He turned sarcastic. “As if we have a choice.”
“And the guns?” Ezra asked innocently.
“Dunno. I guess some of the other car people pressed them to get in. I don’t blame them for having guns. Not everyone out here is a happy-go-lucky ex-soldier like me.”
“You’re military?”
“Yep,” he said while shrugging. “Army. One tour in Afghanistan. It was all the fun I could stand. I prefer surfing, and even though there were a million miles of sand, there wasn’t a single beach in that godforsaken country.”
“You surf?” he asked as if it were impossible.
“What? Don’t think someone like me would ride the waves?”
Ezra didn’t know what to think. The man was a giant. Could he even fit on a surfboard? He’d never touched one, so he had no idea. “So, you moved here?” Ezra went on. “There’s no surfing beach in Kentucky, either.”
“I grew up here. I just got back to my mom’s place when this happened. Never got the chance to go down to Gulf Shores and ride some of them hurricane waves.”
The boy was so young. If he’d already done a tour and was back stateside, he had to be at least twenty, but he barely saw his own twenty-two-year-old daughter as a full-grown woman. She was still his little girl…
Ezra shook off the recurring feeling of nostalgia; it kept knocking him off his mission. As he stood there not knowing what to do, he had a premonition to get out of Happy Cove as soon as he could. The feeling made him uneasy about staying on the roadway, so close to the neighbors on the roadblock. If Babs happened to see him, she’d never let up until he was gone from the subdivision.
Why not help that along?
“Well, thank you for your service. I’ve got to get back to where I’m from. I want to try to talk to my neighbors about an idea I have for helping guys like you up here on the road. Will you hang out…” Ezra scanned the area like he was looking for a suitable meeting spot. “I guess over there by the guys at the roadblock. It’s easy enough to find. I’ll be back as fast as I can.”
“Can you bring some water? I had a few bottles, but I gave them to some kids in a van. They were burning up in today’s heat.”
“An excellent idea,” he replied.
He had a notion about what he was going to do, he just wanted to talk it over with Susan before he did anything drastic on his own. After meeting Butch, and making the youthful comparison with his daughter, he wanted to believe someone would help out Grace if she were in a similar pinch.
He chose a random stretch of roadway, then stood there bouncing from foot to foot, like he really had to pee. Anyone watching would think he was there to do his business, but once he jumped into the vegetation, he ran for home.
Each minute brought the rock closer.
In flight to TKM Pacific Launch Facility
Captain Davis said it again, since Petteri hadn’t responded. “Sir, we could nuke it.”
“I was told that wasn’t an option. Nuclear missiles would simply blow off the outer shell, like firecrackers on an open palm. How would it be done?” If he could snap his fingers and have all his problems disappear, perhaps it was worth exploring.
“While we were still out by Mars, the geology team took the liberty of drilling a hundred-foot shaft into the Tuonela big enough for a bomb, so we’d have a fallback plan if the rock skipped off the moon without staying there. It seemed like a low-risk proposition, and we had nothing but time out there.”
Petteri spoke slowly as he put the pieces together. “You mean you cut into the core without reporting it? We could have blown it up right away? Why did you wait until now to tell me?”
Davis flashed a fatal smile. “Because up until two minutes ago, I thought we were safely parking this thing in Earth’s orbit.”
He didn’t need a PhD in astrogeology to know the buffoons had unwittingly changed the characteristics of the whole body of rock. It suddenly made sense why it unexpectedly broke apart near the moon. It also made him realize his worst fear was coming true: Davis and his crew were at fault. It wasn’t only the moon’s gravity, or unusual interior characteristics of the asteroid. It had been the TKM flight crew and their illicit borehole.
The press will blame me.
Davis replied with hope in his voice. “Sir, there’s still time. We can detach one of our pocket reactors, dump it in the hole, and blow this pig into a billion parts. If we can’t park it in orbit, like you’ve indicated, we have to try this. Otherwise, it’s going to make a skid mark of epic proportions on someone’s home down there.”
He was livid. Angrier than he’d ever been in his life. He had to squeeze the armrests of his chair to control his mouth from spewing out the curse words he’d cued up.
“Captain Davis, listen. Closely.” He tried to breathe in and out, his chest wound tighter than the lid of a snare drum. He wanted to order the man to drive his ship into the sun—that would take care of the blame game in a nice, nea
t way. “We’ll deal with your crew’s insubordination when you get back to Earth. Right now, I need you to do exactly what I tell you to do. Nothing more. Nothing less. Are you ready to listen?”
The captain’s face was hard to read. He wasn’t cowering as expected. “Go ahead.”
“I want you to move it according to the data I sent up.” Dorothy said the rock was going to break apart upon approach to Earth and make a mess in northern Canada. Of all possible scenarios of where it could land, that wasn’t so bad.
Petteri almost jumped from his seat when Howard touched him on the shoulder.
“I’m busy,” he snapped.
“Sir, I know, but you’ve got to see this right now. It changes everything.”
He shot daggers at his executive, but the look on his face conveyed a dread he’d only seen on the man a few times before. He set the tablet upside down, so Davis’s face wouldn’t distract him. “What the hell is it?”
Howard handed him another tablet as he tapped a video to begin playing. “Watch this. My man caught up to Asher Creighton.”
“He better be detained,” he replied anxiously.
The scene showed a young female park ranger and a curly-haired man who looked like he’d run out of his own wedding. His suit pants were covered in black stains and his white shirt wasn’t much better. Petteri watched the first seconds of the video as tension balled up his insides like spun spaghetti. What the woman said was bad enough, then Howard pointed to the tablet when the man began to talk.
“I work for TKM, uh, Tikkanen Kinetic Mining. About two days ago, there was an accident above the moon. They’ve kept it from you—”
After watching the whole thing, he spoke mechanically. “And this is on the internet, I assume?”
“Yes, sir,” Howard replied with the gravity the situation deserved. “We’ve got people scrubbing it, but worldwide power outages and intercontinental connectivity issues are making it impossible to keep up with it.”
I know what I have to do.
He had to steady his shaking hands, and regain his composure, but he calmly picked up the other tablet and made sure Davis was watching.
“Don’t disappoint me, Captain Davis. This is not a drill, or a test, or a simulation. I’m telling you right now, on this channel: We’re going to let it fall.”
It had to come down. If he blew it up and started from scratch, the inquest about the loss of Paducah could tie him up in litigation for decades. If it landed in Canada, a few people might die. On the other hand, he’d still be able to mine the contents. Sure, the PR would be a mess, but the overall value of the rock would more than make up for a few lost lives and toppled maple trees. He could buy out the entire Canadian parliament and put a Tim Hortons on every street corner in North America if necessary.
Two kids in a video weren’t going to stop him.
Chapter 17
Yellowstone
No training video producer ever imagined a National Park ranger would need guidance on how to pull a man from a caved-in section of hot spring while also dodging bullets from a hitman. Grace had run back to the crack where Asher had fallen through, ready for a replay of other things she’d seen on those videos, such as scalding skin lesions from third-degree burns.
“Asher!”
She ignored the sound of Misha’s gun, which continued its pop-pop-pop as he tried to put a bullet into her body. When she leaned over the dangerous section of weak stone, she imagined herself falling through, too. The vision made her get on her belly to distribute her weight, and scoot to the edge like she would on ice. She caught sight of his fingers still gripping a second layer a few inches below the first.
“I need help!” he shouted.
She shimmied farther toward the edge, enabling her to reach over and grab his arm. While doing so, hot mist rose up through the new air hole, giving her a face full of sulfurous odor reminiscent of rotten eggs. “I’ve got you!”
“Don’t drop me,” he said with a mix of fear and courteous reminder.
Grace wrapped her hands around his thick wrist watch, which helped steady him, but she wasn’t strong enough to lift him straight up. “Can you use your feet? You’ve got to help me lift.”
She couldn’t help glimpsing the chamber below. It was part of the water transfer system flowing beneath the Mammoth Hot Springs. Water rushed from one dark tube on her left to another on her right. Asher must have found the exact weak middle between the two. If he fell, he’d likely get sucked into the downspout.
“Come on, let’s get you out of this sauna,” she said hurriedly. “I can barely hold your sweaty arms.” One thing they taught her in park ranger school was to use humor to keep a shocked person from losing touch with the rescuer. If Asher wasn’t shocked while hanging over a burning river, he wasn’t right in the head.
“Ha ha,” he called up. Asher struggled to get his dress shoes against the wall in front of him; when he did find purchase, they made a little progress getting his head above the rock crust of the surface. A second later, his right hand slithered out of hers and he appeared like he might tumble away.
“Whoa!” he screamed.
She frantically gripped his sweaty left wrist with both her hands to hold him there for a few more seconds. “I’ve got you!”
He’d gotten a foot onto a small ledge; it was the only way the loss of his grip didn’t send him tumbling all the way down. Grace firmed up her vise-grip hold on his wrist watch. That allowed him to use his free hand to assist in steadying himself and preparing for the next try.
Grace glanced over to Misha to see if Asher would be shot when he came out, but the assassin was on the move.
“We have to hurry,” she urged.
“Don’t let go,” he wheezed. “I’m not up.”
“I can see that,” she groaned as she pulled at his arm.
He managed to get his top half out of the pit and took a second to rest from the exertion. It gave Grace another chance to look for Misha; he ran along the boardwalk behind the bulk of the fleeing tourists. Since she and Asher were on the do-not-disturb portion of the springs area, he had to take the path in a circular route around them. If they didn’t move soon, he would get behind them, and she did not want to run back over the fragile rocks.
“Time to go. He’s still coming after us.” She lifted him by the shoulders until he got himself off the ground. She brushed off some of the crushed rock from his shirt, then spun around and hopped to a stable rock at the edge of the steep front edge of the Mammoth springs. There was only one way down the thirty-foot wall.
Asher pointed to the right. “We should go that way.”
“No,” she stressed, “we have to go straight down. We’ll run into the tourist village and get the truck. We can’t take any other route, or he’ll catch up to us.” If the tourists hadn’t been there, Misha might have caught them anyway. However, there were too many people going down the stairs ahead of him—the gunman was forced to follow along. His red shirt helped her keep tabs on his progress.
No ranger had ever done what she was about to attempt.
“Do like I do,” she warned, hoping what she was about to do wouldn’t embarrass her.
She got down on her bottom, like it was a slide. The incline was about thirty feet high, but it wasn’t straight up and down. At some point in the geologic past, water had poured over the top and washed down into the ground below. It made enough of a curve she believed it wouldn’t break her leg going down.
“Here goes nothing,” she gulped.
When she first arrived at the park, she wondered why all the rangers wore long pants, even in the summertime. As she tipped over the edge and worked up some speed on the slide down, she understood why. She used her hands to steady her descent; the rough rocks tore at her thighs and palms.
In seconds, she was at the bottom.
Grace got off the ground and spun around to see Asher do it. He’d started out the same way as her, except he wasn’t nearly as coordinated, so by the
time he’d made it halfway down he was spinning sideways like a runaway soda bottle.
Asher screamed his way to the bottom, and Grace did her best to slow him before he rolled over the flat ground, with mixed results. He crashed into her shins, sending them both into a heap.
“Ow,” he graoned after he’d come to a complete stop.
“He’s coming,” she said in a panicky voice. “You have to get up!”
Asher’s suit was even more of a mess. A rip appeared where his shirt sleeve met his shoulder, and there was a splatter of blood on his lower leg. Still, there was no time for first aid. She pulled at him until he got to his feet. “Remind me never to take this tour again,” he said dryly.
She let herself laugh to burn off some of her fear. There was no sign of Misha as they ran into the crowds at the bottom of the boardwalks and went into the parking area. She got him to run constantly as they backtracked the half a mile by the visitor center and back to the police station. When she saw the truck still parked in front, she knew they were going to make it.
“Get in! We’re taking my truck.” Asher had fallen a few paces behind, but she lost a few steps getting her keys out. They both hopped in and slammed their doors at the same time.
She glanced over to him. He breathed in and out making chuffing noises like a little train engine. “We’re outta here,” she said as she turned the key.
The motor sounded at the same instant her back windows exploded.
“What the—”
Asher ducked in his seat.
She didn’t look back. Another gunshot cracked more glass in the cargo area and her hat popped off her head like someone slapped it away. A round hole appeared in the front windshield.
I almost died.
Grace put the gas pedal all the way down, causing the tires to let loose on the sidewalk. She didn’t let off until she was back in the street, the tourist village still in turmoil from when Misha shot the traffic cop. No cars were moving.
Their big escape led them right back into traffic.
Impact Series Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 15
