RUNAWAY MOON

by Howard Brian Edgar

  Runaway Moon

  © 2015 Howard Brian Edgar

  Published by Howard Brian Edgar

  ISBN# 978-0-9741576-7-2

  First Edition License Notes:

  This ebook is protected under the US Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. You have licensed this ebook for your personal enjoyment. If you would like to share it with another person, please buy an additional copy for them. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Disclaimer:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, businesses or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design: Gregory Trueblood

  Visit: runawaymoonbook.com

  “It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town ... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.”

  ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part One – The Crash

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two – The Jakes

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Three – The Flood

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part One – The Crash

  Chapter 1

  Dana Point, California, August 29, 2029

  Some days Alex Jacks hates waking up. It doesn’t happen often. He can count those days on one hand in any given year. Today is one of them.

  It is late-August hot, fifteen degrees hotter than usual in the quiet Southern California coastal town of Dana Point. The normal layer of clouds and fog that typically keep Dana Point and the marina so comfortably cool and grey even in summer are nowhere to be seen today. The blazing sun has chased the massive wall of clouds off the coastline and far out to sea.

  Alex Jacks wakes up sweating. It is one of the five things he hates most in the world. The other four are violence, hatred, greed and racism. That’s how much Alex hates this morning sweat.

  “Dammit,” is his first word.

  “So it’s not a good morning?” After ten years of marriage, Jessa Jacks knows her husband too well. She eyes him with a mixture of pity and dread. She can feel his discomfort as she watches him grab a face towel and mop from his dripping brow to the back of his neck. Her sense of dread comes from knowing that his mood doesn’t usually brighten until long after the sun goes down and the cool ocean breeze returns.

  “Not really,” mutters Alex. He pushes himself out of bed and practically tears the case from his pillow. He holds it up so Jessa can see the big dark sweat stain.

  “It’s lovely.” Jessa adjusts her man-tailored shirt collar in the mirror and finishes dressing for work. “I’ll do laundry later.”

  “I could just burn it.” Alex holds the pillowcase at arm’s length in front of him pinched between two fingers as if it is some kind of biohazard and heads for the laundry hamper.

  “If you burn it, it’ll make you hotter,” says Jessa matter-of-factly.

  “Five thousand years of Chinese wisdom and that’s the best you can do?”

  If today were like the other 360 days a year when he awoke in a cheery mood, he might have made her late for work. Today is different. It is one of his rare grumpy days. Not even his beautiful Asian wife can make him smile today.

  California Institute of Technology, Palo Alto, California

  Sam Hayden scans a half-dozen computer screens inside what was once the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. Dr. Hayden, a professor of astrophysics at Caltech, has been working with NASA’s Near-Earth Object, or NEO program and JPL for nearly forty years and is close to retirement.

  Today, however, retirement is the last thing on Dr. Hayden’s mind. His work has become dramatically more interesting these last five years as a virtual flurry of objects the size of school buses or larger performed close high-speed fly-bys between the Earth and the moon.

  Instead of a few incidents each year, he and his team are now identifying NEOs almost weekly, including some the size of football fields. Fortunately, only one such object entered Earth’s atmosphere over populated land. It caused an impressively huge fireball over Russia back in February 2013. It was seen by thousands of people and recorded on hundreds of cellphones and dashboard-mounted cameras. It was accompanied by a powerful sonic boom and a shockwave that did billions of dollars worth of damage and sent more than a thousand people to the hospital.

  Hayden’s team sends data for each new object they identify to the Minor Planet Center, the official worldwide clearing-house for all NEOs. Once the MPC receives a report, they coordinate all observations of newly discovered NEOs and give them unique designations, like license plate numbers, authorized by the International Astronomical Union. If MPC calculates that an NEO could potentially impact Earth within thirty days, they alert NASA and the White House.

  Today, Dr. Hayden’s screens are quiet. There is nothing to report. So Hayden turns to his laptop and works on his unanswered emails and expense reports, occasionally glancing up at the computer monitors. It is already late afternoon. Soon, he’ll head home for dinner with his daughter.

  Dana Point

  Deuce Jacks crouches low on his skateboard and flies down the long hill with a look of utter joy on his face, the wind blowing his long, jet-black hair straight back away from his face. He is long-limbed, lean and athletic like his dad. His face, however, is all Jessa though not quite as pretty.

  Deuce rides super-low using his long arms for balance and careens down Canyon Road like a crazed kamikaze.

  There is a small traffic circle at the bottom of the hill where Deuce straightens up, stops, then kicks the tail of his board so it flips smoothly up into his waiting hand. He pulls his cellphone from his back pocket and calls his mom.

  “So what’s for dinner?” While Deuce listens to the menu, something else catches his attention. There is a blindingly bright flash of light in the sky overhead. He almost drops the phone as he stares at the streaking fireball.

  “OMG!”

  “Not exactly the dinner response I was hoping for,” says Jessa.

  “Mom, you gotta see this! Look out the window, up in the sky!”

  Jessa runs to the kitchen window and looks up at the sky, still holding the phone to her ear. It is close to sunset. The object, a tiny ball nearly as bright as the sun, is streaking toward the distant horizon.

  “Looks like an asteroid or a comet.”

  “Can’t be a comet, Mom,” says Deuce, “Comets are mostly made of ice. It would have melted away by now and disappeared. I’ll check my news feed. Maybe they know something.”

  “Half the time they don’t know anything. They’re just guessing, making stuff up. You come home now.” Jessa ends the call and taps into her local news feed. They’re showing live video of an objec
t streaking across the sky as the science editor comments.

  “We’ve seen an ever-increasing number of space objects doing Earth fly-bys in recent years. There was an asteroid back in 2014, a forty five-mile-wide space rock that temporarily obliterated Earth’s view of Regulus, one of the brightest stars in the night sky, an asteroid the size of Rhode Island.”

  “Rhode Island?” Jessa repeats it to herself. She has never really paid much attention to asteroids or UFOs or outer space stuff. Jessa is infinitely more interested in terrestrial life right here, right now. Astronomy? That’s Alex’s territory. He can spend hours watching the night sky with or without his telescope.

  Palo Alto

  Sam Hayden rivets his attention to the six monitor screens in front of him. They are ultra-high-definition 4D monitors with fifty-inch screens. Each one tracks two different NEOs on split screens in real time. Sam Hayden stares hard at eleven unidentified streaking objects, an event unprecedented in recorded human history. Nothing else in his professional experience can possibly match eleven objects in near-Earth proximity simultaneously.

  He grabs his cell without taking his eyes off the big screens and barks, “Call Jules.”

  “Hi Dad, dinner is almost ready.” Julia Hayden answers the phone cheerily.

  “I need you to pack yourself an overnight bag and bring dinner to the lab.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “NEOs, Jules. Eleven NEOs. Please, just bring everything here. You’ll be safer here. In case things get crazy.”

  Julia “Jules” Hayden doesn’t need an explanation of NEOs. She knows exactly what they are. She’s never heard so much gravity in her father’s voice before.

  “Okay, Dad, I got it. See you in twenty minutes.” The condo they share is just seven minutes by car from Hayden’s Palo Alto lab.

  Twenty minutes later, Julia Hayden arrives at the lab. She removes two covered plastic containers from her backpack and sets them on the table in front of her father. She pulls up a rolling chair next to him and eyes the big screens. Some of the objects have already disappeared, either burning up in our atmosphere or vanishing into space.

  “This is quite good, Jules.” Hayden digs into his dinner.

  “It’s beef Stroganoff, your favorite. So what about these NEOs?”

  “Probably the result of a much larger event somewhere else in our Solar System, a disturbance in one of the asteroid belts or the remnants of an exploding star in a neighboring galaxy light-years away. Whether it’s random or coincidental, something out there sent eleven asteroids streaking toward Earth all at once. So far, not even the geniuses at NASA know why.”

  “Wow, eleven! It’s a miracle none of them hit us.”

  “We’re still waiting for seismographic readings from East Africa. This is not over yet, Jules.”

  South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, California

  The largest shopping mall in Southern California still has three hours left before closing time. Yet the mall appears deserted. The remaining shoppers are all gathered outside the Apple store where a dozen computer screens are streaming live news reports from around the world. Cameras in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney are all trained on the unprecedented astrophysical drama playing out in the skies above planet Earth. Hundreds of millions of people stare at the images, seemingly overcome by mass hypnosis.

  Ironically, no one is buying at the Apple store. To attract a horde of shoppers this large, Apple would have to give away iPhone 12s. The twelfth-generation icon had reclaimed Apple’s worldwide dominance in smart phone technology, sales, utility and performance.

  A stocky, black leather-jacketed skinhead type stands with his younger female companion. They are standing just outside the Apple store entrance peering at the flat screens in the window display along with a huddled mass of onlookers. He’s not a skinhead in the neo-Nazi, white supremacist sense but more in the personal style, nonconformist sense. Now he’s part of a big event. Hannibal Morrone loves big events. He turns to his companion, who looks twenty years younger.

  “Hard to believe. It’s like something from a freakin’ movie for chrissakes. So whaddya think, babe? Is this like your next Star Wars movie? We could call it Princess Satin’s Assteroids.” He smacks her on the butt playfully, trying to lighten things up.

  “Geez, Hannibal, why do you have to be so crude?” Satin Montenegro is a sultry, twenty-something Puerto Rican beauty. She is so young and so beautiful that people wonder how she ever managed to hook up with Hannibal, unless, they speculate, she is his daughter or his kid sister. Hannibal is a long-distance trucker born and raised in New York City. They have been together for nearly a year, and she is traveling with him to see America. Satin likes older men, especially swarthy, tough, truck-driving Italian men from New York.

  “I think it’s an alien invasion,” blurts out a little kid nearby. The other kids around him nod in agreement. Satin hears him, too.

  “You think they’re aliens, Hannibal?”

  “Nah, they’re just kids,” says Hannibal.

  “I’m talking about the UFOs.”

  “I think they’re assteroids.” Hannibal sounds too confident as he whacks her butt again.

  “Geez, Hannibal, there are children around,” she complains.

  Whatever the objects, they are all on straight-line trajectories with no sudden directional changes like you’d expect from alien spaceships. So far, not one of the eleven objects being tracked has struck Earth. Yet, in the minds of hundreds of millions of Earthlings who are glued to screens in shopping malls, restaurants, sports bars, offices and homes all over the world, there’s still the possibility.

  Alex Jacks is relieved to be home eating dinner with Jessa and Deuce. It has been a long, hot, historic day. Eleven known objects passed by Earth within a few hours – a first in recorded human history. Three of them had come close enough to break the sound barrier, causing shockwaves that crushed buildings and shattered billions of dollars’ worth of glass from Beijing, China all the way south to Sydney, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand.

  “Some kind of day, eh Deuce?”

  “I thought it would be my last day,” says Deuce.

  “Scary stuff,” chimes Jessa.

  “Well, the good news is we dodged eleven bullets. I doubt we’ll ever see anything like that again in our lifetime.”

  “I don’t know,” says Deuce, “We didn’t think it would happen the first time but it did. So why wouldn’t it happen again?”

  “Let’s just say it’s mathematically unlikely. Hey, you want to stargaze with me later? Super moon tonight.”

  “It’s at perigee, too. That means closest to Earth, Mom.”

  “Perigee? Sounds like a fruit.”

  “It’s still two hundred twenty-one thousand miles away. Nothing fruity about that,” says Deuce. He turns to Alex.

  “So why do all the other moons have cool names like Europa and Demos and Callisto and Titan? It’s sad. Our only moon is just like this generic moon. It really deserves a better name, don’t you think?”

  “I asked that exact question when I was your age,” says Alex.

  “What was the answer?”

  “Our moon is an only child, like you. We didn’t need to tell it apart from any others. So we just called it what it is, the moon.”

  “If it was up to me I would have called it Scion, the prodigal son of planet Earth,” says Deuce.

  “I like it.”

  It’s a clear, cloudless night over Dana Point. The moon at perigee is big and bright and mid-high in the sky. The marina is bathed in its cool light, and the boats rock gently in their moorings. Alex Jacks focuses his six-inch telescope until the moon reveals itself in sharp contrast, perfectly framed in his viewfinder. They are standing on a flat section of roof that forms a balcony over the garage. There is a solar-powered barbecue grill in one corner away from the house and an umbrella table with four outdoor chairs in the opposite corner.

  “Check it out.�
� Deuce sets his high-powered binoculars down and peers into the viewfinder.

  “Perfect shot.”

  “Let me see,” says Jessa. Deuce gladly steps aside. He wants her to see the moon up close and appreciate it the same way he and his dad appreciate it.

  Jessa peers into the telescope viewfinder.

  “Bad skin. It needs a dermatologist.”

  “They are impact craters, not pockmarks.”

  “Are you sure?” Jessa toys with him. “They look like acne to me. The man in the moon has a serious case of zits.”

  Deuce runs to the umbrella table and grabs the saltshaker.

  “Truthfully, Mom, it’s been a-salted!” He shakes salt at her and they both giggle while Alex looks on, smiling contentedly. Sometimes, all the stars line up and life’s simplest moments suddenly turn picture-perfect. Alex is having that kind of moment, the kind of moment that makes his life utterly and completely worth living. It’s a moment of pure happiness.

  Huntington Beach, California

  Hannibal Morrone’s big-rig is parked at the far end of the sprawling lot closest to the Huntington Beach pier. He and Satin are groping one another hot and heavy like horny teenagers in the moonlight. The radio is playing an early Miley Cyrus’ mega hit called Wrecking Ball. Satin abruptly pulls away from him.

  “She’s singin’ about you, Hannibal. You’re my wrecking ball.” She laughs.

  “She’s singing about herself. She’s the wrecking ball, or maybe she just likes breaking guys’ balls. I don’t know, but she ain’t singing about me.”

  Satin gazes up at the moon dreamily.

  “You know what we should do? We should take a romantic walk on the beach. I can tell all my friends in Brooklyn that we took a romantic walk on the beach and then skinny-dipped in the Pacific Ocean under the light of the full moon.”

  “Skinny-dipped. I like the sound of that.”

  She practically drags him down from the truck cab. Hannibal has just enough time to grab the half-empty bottle of tequila and two plastic cups from the floor of the cab. They stagger down to the beach together, bumping into each other playfully at every other step. They get as close to the ocean as they can get without leaving the dry sand, strip off their clothes and sprint playfully into the pounding surf.