“Fifty Tunguskas? Do you mean all the pieces burned up in the atmosphere?” If the rocks had all disintegrated, it would mean he’d have nothing to recover. That would be devastating for his bottom line, and probably fatal for his company after news organizations picked up all the pieces of how it happened. Far down the list of concerns, he found one that might be suitable for Dorothy’s ears. “And does it mean lives were saved?”
Dorothy stood next to his dining room table. It was made of expensive white Carrara marble. A personal gift from the prime minister of Italy, another one of his close friends. She motioned like she wanted to sit down, but she waited to make sure he was all right with her intrusion. He needed the information, so he gestured for her to take a seat.
“No, to both questions. The pieces didn’t burn up. The key difference between 586001 Tuonela and the Tunguska explosion is your meteorite was made up of solid metal. The blast in 1908 was mostly ice, they think, like a comet. But the comet’s ice exploded when the superheated atmosphere piled up in front of the falling rock until the pressure ripped it apart. That thing hit in the middle of the forest of Russia, so it didn’t kill any save for a few tree herders. It did, however, knock down almost eight hundred square miles of forest, and set a good chunk of it on fire.”
“And what happened with mine?” He almost couldn’t ask the question. The answer was what he’d been dreading since arriving at the island.
She flashed a cautious smile. “Sir, some of the small pieces did blow up, causing considerable damage to terrain and local structures. The larger rocks survived the pressures and made it to the ground, mostly as a result of Captain Davis blowing up his ship and pushing the debris sideways. The shallower trajectory allowed what I predicted in my thesis: the big fragments bounced.”
“Meaning what?” he asked, knowing what he wanted to hear, but willing to let her say it.
“Well, it means all the valuable ore is now here on Earth. If you thought mining on the moon was going to be easy, you ain’t seen nothing yet. It’s going to be lying there for the taking.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeppers,” she replied happily. “I’ve been able to see satellite data from one of your orbital platforms.” TKM’s early space program was devoted to satellite reconnaissance of more terrestrial matters; they had several pointed at Earth to help with exploration of new sources of mines. “And I’ve seen live feeds from helicopters and local TV stations who are now on scene at the disaster sites.”
“Dorothy, consider this your approval for the suitcase full of gold. You can have a truckload of it if you can tell me where the biggest viable piece of my asteroid is now located. We’ve got to move fast if we want to stay ahead of the blame train.”
“It would go a lot faster if you’d give me the codes for accessing the satellite feeds. It slows me down to have to keep hacking them.” She smiled broadly.
“Yes, whatever you need. Just get this done. I’ve got to call my friends in the federal family…”
I can save this.
Chapter 5
Yellowstone National Park, WY
After all the effort to get the convoy moving, Grace had only gone a mile before she was forced to pull to the shoulder. The road split in two directions, and each one had implications for those behind her.
“We have to get out and give people a choice which way they want to go.” She slammed her creaky door shut, and when she walked around the front, she caught the all-too-familiar whiff of burning wood. The nearby trees were mostly tipped over, always facing north, but the giant forest fire was to the south, as if the impact had both blown over the trees miles away and set them alight closer to where it fell. The people at the end of the convoy were still by the visitors’ center; they were closer to the fire than she was.
There was no time to have a big powwow with all the drivers. The first truck was a snow-white Chevy Suburban with chrome wheels and deep-tinted windows; it was a mirror image of her own truck, though hers was a mess by comparison. She waved it over, frantic for what to say.
“What’s up?” the male driver asked.
“Decision time. You can go north to the smaller towns of western Montana, or you can go east toward the larger city of Billings, Montana. From there, you can drive to the more distant cities of Rapid City, Sioux Falls, and maybe Denver.” Denver was to the southeast; once they got around the burning forest, those people should be safe to drive south again.
The man turned to his wife and they shot words back and forth. Then, he turned back to her. “We’re going east. We live in Milwaukee, so that’s the direction we want to go.”
Grace pointed to the right fork in the road. “Go toward the mountains. There’s a little town about fifty miles up the road called Cooke City. Wait for us there, okay? You’ll have people coming behind you, I’ll tell them to wait there, too.”
“You said we’re going to Billings. Why do we have to wait?”
She yanked off her hat and wiped sweat from her forehead. The guy had a point; he could drive on and never look back. Her role had been instrumental in getting everyone out of the congested Mammoth Springs area. Maybe she wasn’t necessary on the open road. It wasn’t like normal people had a hitman after them.
That stopped her cold. She was convinced Misha was still out there. She reflexively looked all around, as if the act of remembering the guy would summon him. It was comforting to believe Asher and accept the bad guy had been blown away by the blast, but the simple fact was people survived, despite being outside. The travelers in her convoy were proof.
Grace refocused on the man, aware the other cars waited impatiently behind him. “You don’t have to stop if you don’t want to. I figured there’s safety in numbers is all.”
The guy started to roll up his window. “We’ll think about it.” He accelerated around the turn heading east.
The next car went north; the woman driver barely needed a second to make her choice. After that, it went quick. Most cars needed ten or twenty seconds to make the call, then they were gone. As the minutes dragged on, the smoke in the air became thicker. For a short time, she wondered if she should wave everyone north, but most people chose to go east, toward their hometowns, so she didn’t think they’d listen to her.
Asher stood nearby, waving cars through. “We’ve got a problem,” he called out to her when she let another one go.
She glanced over to find him pointing to some toppled trees about fifty feet from the intersection. A small fire had taken hold. As she watched, the breeze made the embers hop along the ground until they started another fire in the pine needles.
“We’re out of time.” She ran to her truck and pulled out the CB handset. “Tessa, you back there?”
Tessa and Chester rode in a second park service truck at the tail end of the procession. “I hear you, over.”
“How are things back there?” Grace asked, praying for good news.
“The roof of the police station is on fire and the road to the south is blocked off by flames. We’re still here at the visitors’ center waiting for all the cars to clear out. Why are things moving so slow? I’m not anxious to get moving, I’m just asking for a friend.” She spoke dryly, obvious at being sarcastic.
“I’ve been talking to people about which way they wanted to go at the junction, but we’re getting some flames up here, too. I’m going to let people decide on their own from here on out. We’re moving again, okay?”
Tessa was all business. “We understand. We’ll push people on this end. Out.”
When she hopped in her truck, the next car in line raced up so a woman could yell out the passenger window. “Why aren’t you pine pigs moving us? You’ve got to tell us which way to go.”
Grace knew the park police sometimes had rude names called at them; she figured it was a badge of honor to be mistaken for real officers. She spoke in her friendliest and cheeriest voice. “Do you live north or east of here?”
The woman was taken aback. “How the hell should
I know? I live up by Mercy, Montana.”
It seemed incredible the woman didn’t know which direction she’d come from, but she remembered the important advice about how stupidity didn’t end at the park boundary. The lady was obviously upset, and willing to chew Grace a new one. She also didn’t know a thing about direction. As much as she wanted to bark back, Grace kept herself composed.
“You’ll want to go north, ma’am. That way.” She pointed toward the Montana border, which couldn’t have been more than a few miles away.
“Aren’t you going to lead us? Our GPS isn’t working. We need help getting home.”
Grace wanted to unload on the rude woman, instead maintaining her hard-fought professionalism. “Sorry, ma’am. I’m going this way.” She pointed toward the mountains to the east, which were still shrouded in dark clouds. Grace started the motor, which drowned out the cursing woman.
She spoke to Asher out of the side of her mouth. “We can’t hold up the entire line for one Code W, you know?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea what that is.”
The woman still hadn’t moved. She continued to berate Grace from the adjacent car, as if it was going to change her mind.
“It means a park visitor is acting like a little baby. It’s called a Code Wimp.”
The two of them laughed together, when, for the first time, she experienced a strange premonition not everyone was going to make it home.
Kentucky
Standing on top of the municipal water tower gave Ezra and Butch a top-down look at the entire region. The town of Fairdealing was a high point in the landscape, which was probably why the planners chose to put the water tower there in the first place. It would all flow downhill to people’s homes.
“This is even worse than I thought possible,” Ezra lamented.
The thick cloud cover made it difficult to see more than ten or so miles away, but he had a line on two important landmarks of Kentucky Lake. The dam was to the north, socked in under the drifting clouds of black smoke coming in from Paducah. The water had risen so high the giant concrete structure wasn’t even visible. The lake in front of the dam was filled with dead trees, pieces of houses, and numerous escaped barges. A half-mile pile-up seemed to choke off the spillway along the middle of the dam, which made it appear as if the lake was an infinity pool, with water going over the top of the structure.
“That’s why the water’s so high.” He pointed to the dam. “Not only was there ten hours of monsoon over the lake, the water couldn’t go through the dam because of all the detritus.”
“De-what-us?” Butch replied.
“Junk. Garbage. Dead trees. Anything floating in the water that can clog up the spillways.”
Butch didn’t seem worried. “Looks like it’s spilling over the top, though. That means it can’t get any higher down by your house.” Other than not wanting his neighbors to get flooded out, he had no personal interest in what happened in the Happy Cove subdivision. Susan was safely buried up the hill, well out of any potential flooding. His home was gone. Roger’s home was ruined.
“Yeah, there’s that,” Ezra said mechanically, before turning to the right. “What’s it look like down there?”
The Eggner’s Ferry Bridge remained intact to the south, but it probably still had vehicles piled on it. Beyond it, and everywhere on the shore to the east, heavy rain clouds unloaded on the broken forest. Usually when it rained over there, it brought out the green of the trees in contrast to the blue of the water. Now, it was all brown. The greenery had blown into the lake and flowed down to the dam. Toppled trees and a few upright stumps were the only things left. It was almost the same for the twenty miles between the bridge and dam.
Butch pointed east. “The thing hit in that forest, or maybe over by Barkley Lake on the other side of the LBL.” Land Between the Lakes was the wilderness running in a hundred-mile north-south strip between Kentucky and Barkley Lakes. There were no houses and few roads on the five-mile wide recreation area; prior to the meteorite, the place was all trees.
“Let’s check out the other way.” Ezra motioned for him to follow as he walked around the water tower until they faced west. The land in that direction didn’t appear to be on fire or totaled from the impact of a meteorite, though many trees leaned toward the west. They found a good view of Interstate 69, which ran from Paducah in the north to Tennessee about forty miles to the south. The lanes in both directions were packed with vehicles, and none of them were moving. It was a carbon copy of his small county road almost directly below the tower. An irrational feeling of being trapped hit him out of nowhere.
“Butch, you’ve been a real help to me, but I made a promise I intend to keep. I’ve got to get to my daughter out in Yellowstone, and to do it I need to get far from this place as fast as I can. North is not an option, nor is east. It looks like west is nothing but stopped cars, which undoubtedly means trouble. My only option is to go south.” He walked a few paces around the tower and faced the only direction still retaining some semblance of normalcy. Murray was down in that direction, where Grace had gone to college; he had plenty of experience driving the route and was confident he could make it down there again, even if he needed to take horse paths.
“Yellowstone, huh? Mind if I come with?”
Ezra did a fast double-take, looking up to the taller man. “Are you serious? It’s going to be dangerous; I can see that already.”
“Well, you gave me this rifle. I reckon these make us the two toughest hombres out on the highway. I have distant family up in the Northwest, Seattle or Spokane—I can never remember which. Besides, looking at Paducah, I’m positive I don’t want to go see what’s left of my mom’s place. There’s no way anyone is alive around there.”
He studied the guy like he might glare at Grace when he suspected she was going into the city without his permission. “You don’t owe me anything, son. You know that, right?”
“Well, actually I do; you saved my life by pulling me and the others off the road and putting us in your basement.” He snapped his fingers as if solving a riddle. “Thanks, E-Z, you gave me the perfect excuse. I’m going with you until I can pay you back for your kindness. Then, once I do, I’m going to drop you like a bad memory.”
He shook his head, sure he was going to regret being responsible for the young man, but also secretly pleased he didn’t have to go out on the road alone. Safety in numbers was a maxim only a fool would refuse, and the raw strength of the giant of a man would also be a bonus.
“All right, I guess you aren’t terrible to have around. You remind me of—” He caught himself, not yet willing to share the comfort he experienced when around him. While it was true, he reminded him of Grace, Ezra didn’t want it to cloud his judgement. It was also true he’d pulled Butch off the highway pretty much at random; he didn’t want to place too much trust in a stranger. Not yet.
Butch sensed his hesitation. “I remind you of the dude who changes your tires and checks your oil.”
His words caught Ezra by surprise. “No, that’s not it at all. Why would you say that?”
The young man chuckled. “When I came back from my tour in la-la land, I went to work in a garage. There weren’t many opportunities to haul around an automatic machine gun, so I put my other skills to good use by working on cars.”
Ezra couldn’t believe his luck. “I worked for the post office for twenty years. You’ll never guess what I did there.”
“Uh, delivered mail?”
He shook his head. “Nope. I was a mechanic.”
Butch stood up straight and extended a hand. “Well, from one grease monkey to another, I accept the offer to join your party. Let’s get out of Dodge.”
Ezra took it, glad to have a plan.
Chapter 6
Yellowstone National Park, WY
“I forgot my suit back at the police station.”
Grace looked over to Asher. He’d taken off his hat, so his curly locks blew wildly in the breeze created by
all the broken windows. His face was hard to read; she assumed he was being silly. “Should I turn the convoy around to go get it?”
He flashed an icy glare. “I’m being serious. I can’t wear this uniform any longer than necessary. What am I going to do once we leave the park, walk around in my boxers?”
She drove with one hand on the wheel, glad to have the wind whipping through the cabin; it meant they were moving in the right direction. Tessa reported she’d picked up some lingering stragglers as she left the tourist village, but the end of the convoy had finally cleared out of Mammoth Hot Springs. All was going well. “Are you really so worried about how you look?”
His mood lightened. “I’m not comfortable being mistaken for a ranger. I mean, I know it helped get some of those people moving, which was great. Once we leave the park, this really will be a Halloween costume. I’ll have no authority at all.”
Grace never thought of herself as an alpha female. Her peers in high school led all the cliques, headed the cheer squad, and ran student council. She liked to lay low and blend in. Her dad was a big part of that mindset; he said it was possible to be a leader without being showy about it. Regardless, in some circumstances, a show of force was necessary. She realized Asher might have been good at geology, and he seemed to be a decent human being, but he left some things to be desired in leadership. “Stick with me, okay? I’ll help walk you through it. Being a ranger is easy, and you’ll be surprised how many people come up to you when you aren’t in the park. Most people love us; in fact, now that I think about it, I’d even say people love us more when we aren’t in the park.”
“I can’t wait. Did you know I actually got spat on back when we were rounding people up?”
She acted surprised, though she wasn’t. One out of a thousand visitors treated her like garbage. Usually, it meant that person was having a bad day, or was stressed at being far from home. However, some people were nasty wherever they went.
Impact Series Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 24
