Tetra scowled. “Hell no!”
“I didn’t think so. Where’s your phone?”
Tetra put his hand in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out his phone.
“Good,” his father said. “Keep it with you at all times. Don’t leave it on the kitchen table and then go to the bathroom or anything, you understand? And if anything’s the matter, just give me a ring, okay?”
Tetra nodded and slid the phone back into his pocket.
“Come here, you.” His father pulled Tetra towards himself and gave him a long, tight hug. “Don’t you worry, it’s going to be all right. I won’t be long. Just a quick ride down to Kettering. I’ll grab your sister and rush right back. And you can always track the car and myself on your phone, okay?”
“Okay.”
His father kissed him on the head. Then he broke away from their embrace, turned around and left. Tetra followed him to the front door. There he watched his dad get into the car and take off. On the driveway that led to the alley through the surrounding woods, his dad opened the window, stuck his arm out and waved. Tetra waved back until the car disappeared behind a bend. Then he took his phone out of his pocket again and opened the Autotraxx app. A map appeared on the screen, with two little dots. The red dot was his dad’s car, the blue one his dad’s mobile device. Together they were moving slowly across the screen, along the A4300 down to Kettering. The town was only thirty minutes away—forty-five, if the roads were really busy, but according to the TV they weren’t. Most people were already in the public emergency shelters or getting ready to get into their own shelters at home. Thirty minutes to Kettering, and thirty minutes back, plus thirty to pick up Olivia, because his silly, clueless sister probably wouldn’t start packing a bag until their dad showed up on her doorstep. So if everything else went smoothly, his dad would be back in ninety minutes. Tetra decided not to spend that time staring at the two dots on the map. Surely, time would pass quicker if he kept himself busy.
“All right,” he said to himself. “Chair.”
He went into the kitchen. Two of their four kitchen chairs were already down in the basement—he had carried them down there himself earlier. Of the two remaining chairs, Tetra went for the squeaky one and chuckled. Olivia hated that chair because she couldn’t stand squeaky noises. She would probably refuse to sit on it, but that didn’t matter. Tetra could use it himself and produce just enough squeaking to keep his sister on the edge.
After he had carried the chair down to the basement, he made his way up to what used to be his parents’ bedroom on the first floor. Now it was just his dad’s bedroom, but his mom’s bed was still there. Just the frame and a naked mattress and pillow, though. His dad used it as a place to store his dirty clothes. There was a big wicker basket for dirty clothes in the bedroom, but his father never used it, nor had he ever used it when Tetra’s mom was still living with them, and it had always made her mad. As Tetra grabbed his dad’s dirty clothes from the bed and threw them into the wicker basket, he wondered if it had really been people who had driven his mother mad, or if she’d gone mad all by herself. There had always been something weirdly obsessive-compulsive about her.
On the TV—on all the TVs scattered throughout the house—a lone reporter walked through the deserted streets of Casablanca, more than a thousand kilometers north of Fat Boy’s estimated impact site. “Less than ten seconds after the impact,” he said, “a ball of fire thirty-three times the size of the sun will light up the sky over Casablanca. It will be visible for more than fifty minutes and ignite wood, paper, clothing, trees, and grass. If I were still here at the time, I would suffer third degree burns all over my body and almost certainly die within a few minutes …”
“Well then you better get out of there, mister,” Tetra said. He grabbed the mattress and dragged it all the way down to the basement where he rearranged the two mattresses he and his father had carried down earlier so that his father would serve as a human buffer between himself and Olivia. Another potential source of mayhem eliminated.
As Tetra made his way back up to his father’s bedroom, the reporter continued fleshing out the Casablanca doomsday scenario. “Three and a half minutes after the impact, a seismic shockwave will reach the city, creating a magnitude eight earthquake that will destroy most of the historic buildings and severely affect the structural integrity of the newer ones …”
Tetra knew that the same shockwave would continue to travel north and reach England some seven minutes later, but weakened by its three-thousand-kilometer journey across the Mediterranean, continental Europe, and the English Channel, the earthquake here would be no stronger than magnitude three or four. Most experts agreed that the seismic effects would really be the least of their problems.
Tetra opened the bedroom closet and picked a particularly ugly pillowcase and duvet combination for Olivia. With her rather peculiar taste in fashion, she was probably going to like it, but that didn’t matter as long as he didn’t. Extremely pleased with himself, he went back down to the basement.
“Five minutes after the shockwave, the so-called ejecta material will start raining down on Casablanca. Ejecta material contains ash, debris, and tektites—little droplets of rock molten in the extreme heat of the impact. The ejecta will cover this beautiful city three feet deep. Now that may be not quite as bad as the twenty feet of ash and pumice that buried the ancient city of Pompeii back in 79 AD, but you have to keep in mind that we’re not talking about a single city here. The entire north and northwest of Africa, a vast area, will be covered in ash and dust this high.” To illustrate, he held his hand up to his hip before he ominously added, “And the worst is yet to come.”
Tetra dropped the pillow and duvet on Olivia’s dedicated mattress, sat on the squeaky chair, and looked at the TV. His dad had installed it in their makeshift shelter for entertainment and so they could keep up with what was going on outside when Fat Boy devastated the planet.
“Fifty-two minutes after the impact,” the reporter continued, “the city will be hit by an air blast traveling at the staggering speed of fourteen hundred kilometers per hour. During our entire existence as human beings on this planet, we have never seen wind speeds like that. Fourteen hundred kilometers per hour, four hundred meters per second. We can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like. The strongest winds we have seen in recent years, hurricane Millie which hit the east coast of the United States a few years ago, came with wind speeds of up to four hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. We have all seen the horrendous devastation caused by Millie. Now imagine what winds three and a half times as powerful will do to this ancient city you see behind me, a city that by the time those winds hit will have been set ablaze by the heat from the impact, shaken to its core by the seismic shockwave, and sandblasted by thousands of tons of ash and debris. And then the winds straight out of hell will come and blow it all away, just like that. In its almost three-thousand-year history, the city of Casablanca has been besieged, destroyed, and rebuilt multiple times. In a few hours it will be destroyed once again, but this time we don’t know if it can ever be rebuilt, or if there will even be any people left to rebuild it. Casablanca might be history once and for all, and by this time tomorrow we’ll possibly not even have Paris anymore.”
Tetra sighed and switched off the TV. Like most people, he was uncannily addicted to the media’s coverage of the apocalypse, but in the last few days he had become increasingly annoyed with it. He understood that information about Fat Boy’s impact and its aftermath was vital—the more you knew about it, the better were your chances of survival. But he failed to see how the terrifying minutiae of the destruction of some African city he had never even heard of was going to help anyone two thousand kilometers away in the middle of the English countryside. Rather than trying to help people prepare for the looming disaster back home, some of these media people seemed to revel in their pre-game coverage of the biggest natural disaster in sixty-five million years. It was a big news story all right, but
some of its harbingers seemed to enjoy it a bit too much.
Tetra made his way back up to the kitchen. He was thirsty. There were two hundred liters of bottled water down in the basement, but no fridge, and he was craving a big glass of cold milk. Tetra took a glass from the cupboard, placed it on the counter, and opened the fridge. There were two liter-cartons of milk left. One was still sealed, the other was half-empty. He unscrewed the plastic cap, and just as he was about to pour the milk into his glass, he stopped. His father always scolded Tetra when he drank milk straight from the carton because of that one time he had found a foreign particle in his milk that he had identified as a cookie crumb that must have had come straight from Tetra’s lips. But his dad wasn’t here now, and if he was going to empty the carton, it wouldn’t matter anyway, so he put the nozzle to his lips, tilted his head back and started to drink. As the cold, smooth liquid rand down his throat, Tetra closed his eyes. He had always enjoyed the taste of fresh, cold milk. It was almost as if it satisfied one of his most primal, subconscious urges. He started suckling on the nozzle to drink faster while at the same time squeezing the carton with his hand. After a few seconds of pressure fueling his body, the carton was empty. With a contented sigh, he put it back on the counter. He placed the unused glass back in the cupboard, threw the empty milk carton into the rubbish bin, and glanced at the clock above the kitchen door. His father had been away for forty minutes now, so he should be in Kettering by now. Tetra sat down on the remaining kitchen chair and pulled his device out of his pocket. When he switched it on to check on his father’s position, the two tracking dots were gone.
With a slight feeling of apprehension, he refreshed the Autotraxx app, but the map remained empty.
“What?” he muttered to himself. “This can’t be.”
He switched the device off and on again, and that’s when he noticed that the signal bars were missing too. This was odd. He had never experienced a signal failure before. Not at home anyways. The next base station was only three hundred meters away—he could see it towering above the treetops from his bedroom window. Tetra switched the TV back on. A different reporter was standing in front of the Palacio Real in Madrid with its boarded up windows to protect it from the air blast which would be less than half as fast as down in Casablanca, but at over six hundred kilometers per hour still destructive beyond belief. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen didn’t explicitly mention the mobile communications grid in Northamptonshire, but there was a general warning that phone lines all across the country weren’t able to cope with the immense number of calls people were trying to make, and viewers were urged to use their phones only in an emergency.
Tetra decided that this was an emergency. He was all alone and a sixteen-kilometer asteroid was about to fall on his head. He needed to make sure that his dad was a) all right, and b) on his way home. He made his way into the living room where they had an old-fashioned landline phone. He had never used it, and for years he had been under the impression that it only served as a piece of nostalgic decoration. Then one day he came home from school and found his father talking on the ancient thing to an old friend, a man named Higgs whom Tetra imagined riding in circles on his penny-farthing while listening to music coming from a gramophone.
Tetra picked up the receiver and was relieved when he heard a dial tone. This was reassuring. Hastily, he dialed his father’s number. He knew it from memory—it was the same number as his own, only the last digit was a 3 instead of a 4. Nothing happened.
“Come on!”
Tetra put the receiver down, picked it up again and started over. The line remained silent. There was no ringing tone, no voicemail, no recorded message telling him that the phone grid was experiencing difficulties, just dead silence. This time, Tetra slammed the receiver down on the ancient apparatus and ran outside. On the porch he stopped and stared down the driveway towards the main road in the distance, looking for a sign of his father coming back, but there was nothing—no movement on the road, no noise of distant traffic sounding across the treetops. A feeling of loneliness grazed Tetra’s shivering body like a chilly wind. He turned around. From his bedroom window on the second floor he’d have a better vantage point, but as soon as he reentered the house, the artificial light reminded him that he and his father had spent the entire week boarding up the windows with polyurethane boards to prevent them from shattering. Here, the air blast from Fat Boy’s impact wasn’t going to be as intense as down in Madrid or even in Casablanca, but at two hundred and eighty kilometers per hour it was still a force of immense destructive potential, especially if the wind carried debris from the impact with it. Tetra and his father had done a very thorough job protecting the windows, and there was no way he could remove one of the boards all by himself. Instead, he went back into the living room and tried the phone again—to no avail.
“We have breaking news coming in from the Home Office,” a voice on TV said. “The Home Office has just released a statement saying that effective immediately, the national phone grid is blocked for all non-essential communication. What that means is that unless you’re working for a government agency, police, fire fighting, medical, or military services, you won’t have access to the national phone grid until after the impact. When exactly public access to the phone grid will be restored, whether it will be hours or days after the impact, the statement did not say.”
“That’s a bit rich,” Tetra murmured to himself. For months and months, the government had encouraged people via public service announcements to prepare for the impact on their own as best they could and to rely on the government’s emergency evacuation and crisis management plans only if absolutely necessary. It was the reason why Tetra and his father had turned their rural home into a fortress. It would have been easy for them to save a lot of time and money, to not take any precautions at all and just show up at the next emergency shelter on the day of the impact. Early on, they had decided not to do that. They didn’t want to spend the greatest disaster in human history herded together with dozens, possibly hundreds of potentially panic prone people in a muggy, dark, claustrophobic emergency shelter, so they had decided to take the official advice and take care of themselves. And this was the thanks they got. They were left to fend for themselves, and they probably couldn’t even complain about it because it was what they had chosen to do.
Tetra tried to find comfort in the phone situation because it provided a reasonable explanation why he couldn’t get through to his dad, one that didn’t necessarily involve some kind of accident—or worse. Moreover, it explained why his dad hadn’t called to tell him why he was running late. Surely there had to be a reasonable explanation, and it was probably one that was so simple it didn’t even cross Tetra’s mind. For a while, while commuting between the TV in the kitchen, the phone in the living room, and the front porch, he tried to come up with plausible scenarios that would explain his dad’s delay, but no one of them provided a great deal of comfort because they all employed varying degrees of tragedy that Tetra would rather not think about for too long. As the hours went by, he found it increasingly difficult not to feel a sense of abandonment. How could you not feel abandoned if a few hours before the end of the world your dad got into his car and made off without you? At least Tetra had been left in the comfort and relative safety of his own home, and he knew exactly what he had to do even if his father didn’t return by the time of the impact. They had been rehearsing their response to the fateful event for months, and even if he remained on his own, there wasn’t going to be much deviation from the original plan. His sister Olivia, on the other hand, was alone and scared and in all likelihood completely clueless as to what she was supposed to do. It looked as though unlike Tetra, she had actually been abandoned by a careless parent who seemed to seek her own spiritual self-fulfillment in the impending apocalypse with no regard for the needs of her own daughter or anyone else. As much as he hated being left alone in the final run-up to the apocalypse, the longer he thought about it, the clea
rer it became that his dad had had no choice other than go and find Olivia and get her to safety. Tetra liked to think that if their roles were reversed, his father would have dropped everything to come and rescue him, too. If anything, it showed that the man loved both his children, and he had simply decided to go and help the one who needed his help the most, whereas the other one, Tetra, though only thirteen years of age, could be trusted to take care of himself if and when he had to. Seeing things that way made him feel somewhat proud and provided a much-needed boost to his self-confidence which he found rather soothing. Nevertheless, having to watch the apocalypse on TV all by himself, not knowing where his family was or whether they were all right, sucked.
At 11:15 p.m., nineteen minutes before the impact, Tetra took a last peek out of the front door. The main road lay quiet and dark in the distance. There was no point in waiting any longer. His father would never make the journey if he couldn’t be sure he could make it home with at least half an hour to spare. If he wasn’t here now, he wasn’t going to come home before the impact. He was probably somewhere safe, in some public emergency shelter or somebody’s basement, trying to calm down a hysteric Olivia and confident that his son was mature and smart enough to take care of himself, to stay calm and follow the procedures exactly the way they had rehearsed them, and to keep himself safe. If this really was the end of civilization, the end of life on planet Earth even—and nobody knew that it wasn’t—then the last thing Tetra wanted to do was to disappoint his dad. He locked the front door, switched off the lights in the kitchen and living room, and made his way down to the basement. He sat down on his mattress, turned on the TV, and then he waited.
* * *
The impact of Fat Boy in the Sahara desert eight hundred and eighty kilometers north of the Malian city of Timbuktu at 11:34 p.m. GMT as observed by the Tyson-C satellite was the single most watched live event in the history of television. Eleven billion people looked on in shock and awe as the giant four-trillion-ton space rock ploughed through the Earth’s atmosphere at twenty-five kilometers per second, turning into a fireball by the entry heat and singeing vast areas of land before it even hit the surface. When it hit, it bore itself deep into the sedimentary rock of the desert that had lain undisturbed for millions of years, sending a gigantic plume of ash and molten rock up into the outer reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere like a nasty wound gushing blood. From here it started to rapidly sprawl into all directions, a thick, brown blanket masking the countenance of the planet until, after a few minutes, the TV pictures died.
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