In less than eight hours, they will either witness a historic lunar impact or a colossal near miss. Of course, Sam and Julia wish for the latter. Even a near miss would be an incredible sight to behold from their cabin.
The cabin is in West Lake Tahoe about 6,500 feet above sea level and less than one hundred yards from the largest alpine freshwater lake in America. From there, they will have a spectacular, unimpeded view of the night sky and, with some luck, a lifetime supply of freshwater and fish.
If there is a collision between the dwarf planet and the moon, they will need the cabin’s attached underground storage shed for emergency shelter.
Chapter 3
Indian Hills, Nevada
Meg Baker is alone in her ground-floor apartment when her cellphone goes off with a barrage of text messages. They are all from students in her eighth-grade science class. They want to know if she is watching the moon onscreen and what she thinks about it and what she thinks is going to happen next. Meg sends a text to her students.
“Y watch on small screen when U can watch real life? Going outside to stretch my eyes. U should 2.”
Meg stuffs her phone into her jeans pocket, grabs a blanket and ventures outside. The night air feels cool and crisp against her skin. On a sudden whim, she wanders back behind her apartment building and enters the cemetery for the very first time since she moved in seven years ago. She had fallen in love with the apartment itself on first sight. She loved everything about it, except for the cemetery behind it. The rental agent tried to ease her mind by telling her the Indian spirits that lorded over the cemetery would protect her. Meg had seen too many Hollywood movies about cemeteries and evil spirits. Considering how badly America had treated the Indians, she had trouble conjuring friendly, protective or well-meaning Indian spirits. Despite that, she had decided to rent the apartment anyway. Its layout helped, since the only room with a view of the cemetery was the bathroom. Meg could pull down the shade and just ignore the creepiness of it.
Until tonight, she had succeeded, too, but something about tonight is different. Meg feels herself being drawn onto this hallowed ground with its odd collection of crude markers, tombstones and memorials. The largest stone on one of the memorials is at least two heads taller than Meg as she stands next to it. It is a marble slab on a hill and the ground below it slopes away toward a shallow ravine. Meg wraps her blanket loosely around herself and lays on the ground in the shallow ravine near the stone footing. From her vantage point, it looks like the full moon is perched perfectly on top of the marble slab, with the second moon partially visible just slightly below and to the left of it. Meg feels compelled to watch from there.
Her cellphone goes off again with a flurry of text messages but she ignores it. Something tells her to just lie there in the shadow of the big marble stone and watch the incredible lunar event play out in whatever fashion destiny will have it. She is too tired to fight her sudden, inexplicable urge to be right in that spot at that moment.
Sea of Cortez, Baja, Mexico
Matias and Diego peel off their wetsuits and stow their tanks, camera and gear in the back of the van as they always do after a dive. Diego pops the hood and removes the battery from the engine compartment. He sets it behind the driver’s side front tire underneath the van, directly under the driver’s seat.
“I’ll clean the contacts and put it back in the morning,” says Diego. “Too tired to mess with it now.”
They join Matias’ wife, Mariana, son, Mateo, and daughter, Mia, plus Diego’s wife, Isabella, and daughter, Sofia, under the rocky outcropping near the van. They are still oblivious to the latest news and the space drama being played out in the sky above them, a drama they cannot see anyway, thanks to a very thick cloud cover over Baja and the Sea of Cortez.
“We saw our first whale shark today,” says Diego excitedly.
“Forty-two-footer. Bigger than your school bus,” says Matias.
“The biggest fish in the ocean,” adds Diego. “Only whales are bigger, and they’re mammals, not fish like sharks.”
“Wow,” says Mateo, his eyes widening at the thought of the whale shark he had seen once in one of his dad’s old dog-eared National Geographic magazines. “How close did you get?”
“We reached out and touched it as it swam by with its huge mouth gaping,” says Diego. “We got some good pictures.”
“Let’s see, let’s see!” Mateo almost wishes he had been there. Unfortunately, he hates the water, especially deep water, but he loves seeing marine life, even if it is only in pictures.
“In the morning after we leave. I already stowed the camera.”
“But Uncle Diego!” protests Mateo.
“It’s getting late,” says Mariana. “We should all go to sleep now, anyway, so we can get an early start.”
“Aww.” Mateo protests, too excited to sleep.
“Patience, Mateo. You can look at the pictures in the morning while Uncle Diego drives. It’ll give you something to do instead of annoying your sister and Sofia the whole way,” says Mariana.
“Okay already. Jesus.”
Mateo, the oldest of their children at thirteen, walks away in a huff and locates his sleeping bag near the rocks. He curls up inside it, still thinking about the enormous whale shark.
One by one, the others follow until all seven of them are spread out side-by-side, snugly zipped into the sleeping bags, like marsupials.
“Goodnight, Mateo,” says Mariana.
“Goodnight mom. Goodnight everyone.”
“Goodnight,” they all chime in.
Mateo closes his eyes and waits for sleep.
Interstate 50, Placerville, California
Satin Montenegro is asleep on the passenger seat while Hannibal guides his truck up the mountain road toward Lake Tahoe. This will be his last delivery in California before he heads back to New York with his empty rig.
Hannibal is not looking forward to the long drive home. He’s grown to like California. The people and the weather are more pleasant. Hannibal can sleep on the beach under the stars and not worry about getting rolled for his poker winnings. He feels more at peace and at home here after one week than he felt in forty-five years living in New York. Hannibal Morrone has grown to despise New York. He can count on one or two hands the number of days when it has really pleasant weather in any given year.
Getting into or out of New York City through traffic is nearly always an ordeal. Only bicyclists, subway riders and pedestrians stand a chance of avoiding the usual gridlock. Taxes are ridiculously high. There are too many people living on too little real estate. The politicians are corrupt and millions of New Yorkers are angry most of the time. Hannibal finds himself feeling angry most of the time when he’s there, too, but here in California, he doesn’t feel angry at all.
Hannibal drives toward his final drop wondering why it has taken him twenty years to gain enough courage to leave his birthplace, New York City, for good. He wonders why he has put up with the daily stresses of big-city life for so long, especially when there was nothing holding him back but the habit of living there. Satin doesn’t want to go back, either. She told him as much after their third day in California.
“What’s not to love? The weather? Palm trees. Cool people. It’s totally chill here, Hannibal. We can really be ourselves.”
Hannibal agrees. He decides right then that he cannot and will not go back to New York under any circumstances. He’s done with it. He will ask his brother to pack up his few belongings and ship them to California when Hannibal is settled. Hannibal doesn’t own much, anyway. He is a card-carrying minimalist. He doesn’t gather or collect stuff the way most people do. He has no use for most things and he doesn’t like feeling anchored in one place by his personal possessions. Besides, he reasons, when you die, your belongings end up belonging to someone else, so what’s the point? Everything he owns can fit inside his car. He can pack it up and be gone in less than an hour if the need ever arises.
The one thing he o
wns that has any real value to him is his truck. With his truck, he can earn a decent living. He can just as easily do it in California. Instead of hauling loads from New York to the West Coast, he will haul loads between the western states. He won’t miss the high humidity, the crappy weather and the rising sea levels that now affect everything east of the Mississippi River. The dry air west of the Rockies will do him a world of good. It is already helping his sinuses; helping him breathe easier. Helping him to relax.
Hannibal downshifts suddenly to negotiate a particularly steep grade. The truck shudders from the shifting gears and awakens Satin with a start.
“Geez, Hannibal, I was in the middle of a really good dream!” she protests.
“Sorry, but we’ve gotta get up this mountain,” says Hannibal. “Go back to sleep. Maybe you can pick up your dream where you left off.”
Satin shifts into a more comfortable position, turning away from Hannibal. She draws up her knees into a fetal position and falls back asleep. Hannibal glances at her smooth olive skin, smiles to himself.
The weight of returning to New York is lifted from his shoulders. He is in California with a beautiful, sexy young woman who wants to be there with him.
For that moment, Hannibal is in heaven.
Lake Tahoe, California
It is sunset by the time Sam Hayden unpacks his telescope and sets it up in his bedroom window, which frames the full moon perfectly. He hasn’t used the cabin much since his wife died five years ago.
After her mom died, Julia Hayden vacationed there by herself twice a year and kept up the place. The cabin is still as neat and tidy as she left it two months ago.
Julia had married young and divorced young. She had decided that marriage was not for her. When she isn’t busy working full-time as a CPA or staying home with her dad, the cabin is the only place where she feels comfortable and safe and close to her memories of her mom. She busies herself carrying supplies down into the underground storage room Sam and his wife had built under the cabin forty years ago. The shed is just large enough to sleep three people in an emergency, but it’s no bomb shelter.
Though Sam Hayden has studied the moon thousands of times before tonight, he looks at this particular moon through the eyes of a child seeing it for the first time. There are brother and sister moons now. They fill Sam’s younger self with an overwhelming sense of awe and fear, as his older self focuses his four-inch telescope on the advancing alien moon. He names the intruder.
“It’s Diablo.” Sam mutters the Spanish word for “devil.” He takes out his cellphone and tweets the name to his 50,000-plus Twitter followers. He also sends an email to President Harrison and the NASA team, proposing the name.
From Sam’s vantage point, Diablo is now three-quarters of the way between the horizon and the moon traveling in roughly the same direction as the moon, and closing fast. Sam reasons that a glancing blow might be better than a head-on collision. A head-on collision could stop the moon in its tracks and cause it to either fall to Earth in huge pieces or drop into a lower orbit. Sam knows that if the moon’s orbit shrinks to half the current distance from Earth, the ocean tides will swell to eight times their current size. He imagines the incessant pounding of sixty-foot waves and the crushing high tides. Say goodbye to beachfront property. Say goodbye to Florida and New York City.
Diablo’s present course might be better for planet Earth, too, at least in the short term, as most of the debris would likely be blasted out into space. If the moon’s orbit is pushed farther away, any number of possible Earth changes might occur. Tides would shrink. Without the gravitational force of the moon to slow Earth’s rotation, the days would gradually shorten as the speed of rotation increased. This process would take from hundreds of thousands to millions of years.
Sam is acutely aware that, without some precedent, all science could manage were educated guesses about what might happen and how long it would take for humanity to notice the changes. The climate on planet Earth is already changing faster than any time in recorded history. A moon collision could hasten the process and endanger global food and water supplies, not to mention life itself.
Sam Hayden watches as Diablo closes the gap. From the younger Sam Hayden’s point of view, it seems as if it is only a few feet from the moon. The adult Sam Hayden knows better. At 50,000 miles distance, Diablo is now only an hour away from the moon.
Dana Point, California
Deuce joins Alex on the rooftop patio near the telescope. “Diablo, Dad! They’re calling it Diablo,” says Deuce. “It’s all over Twitter and Facebook.”
“Perfect name,” says Alex. “In Spanish it means a supernatural demonic spirit. The personification of evil and treachery and the enemy of God and the human race.”
“Sounds nasty,” says Deuce, “especially the ‘enemy of the human race’ part.”
“It is nasty,” says Alex. “Remember that something just one-one-hundredth Diablo’s size wiped out eighty percent of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs.”
The evidence was conclusive. An asteroid just over six miles wide had slammed into planet Earth at the Gulf of Mexico just north of the Yucatan Peninsula. Geologists had recently found pulverized iron ore samples radioactively dated back to sixty-five million years ago. They had also mapped a gargantuan crater more than a hundred miles wide. They estimated that the six-mile-wide rock struck with the force of over one billion atom bombs, one hundred trillion tons of TNT.
Alex tries to calculate the force of Diablo hitting the moon at fifty thousand miles per hour, but numbers higher than trillions are definitely not his strong suit. He remembers reading that it would take more than 600 billion nuclear warheads to blow up the moon.
The cloud cover has finally moved away and the night sky is clear over Dana Point. Most of Alex’s neighbors are outside looking up from their driveways, backyards and rooftops. Some of them have binoculars and telescopes, but most are just looking up with naked eyes from their lawn chairs as the historic, unprecedented space drama slowly unfolds. There’s a party atmosphere in their neighborhood, much like the Fourth of July when everyone gathers outside to watch the fireworks over the marina.
Kingsbury, Nevada
Eric and Donnie are best friends. They’ve grown up on the same street, attended the same schools, loved baseball and played on the same teams. Eric is Kingbury High School’s pitching ace and Donnie plays centerfield. Eric’s dad, Tom Krueger, managed the Kingsbury Kings to three consecutive Nevada State High School titles, including the last one, with Eric and Donnie co-anchoring the team.
It has been a magical season. Eric has been dominant on the mound, pitching four no-hitters scattered among twelve complete-game wins with zero losses and a .64 ERA. Donnie leads the state in home runs and RBIs and hits .545 with a .695 slugging percentage.
Eric Krueger and Donnie Murray, who both made the varsity baseball team as freshmen, have just started their junior year at Kingsbury High School. They are in three classes together. Outside of class, Eric and Donnie are inseparable. They are blood brothers. Practically everyone in school thinks they are real brothers, possibly even twins, thanks largely to their long blond hair and ponytails combined with strong jawlines, high cheekbones and Aryan good looks.
When they aren’t in school, they do homework together on school nights and explore the caves near the base of Monument Peak, where they hike to the summit most weekends. It is less than a mile from home and their favorite place to hang out when they aren’t playing baseball.
They sit together at the mouth of their favorite cave, the one they decorated with sports posters and stocked with two backpacks full of protein bars, chips and nuts in case they get hungry, and stare up at the clearing sky.
“Dude, that’s sick,” says Donnie staring at the two moons.
“Yeah, seriously ill,” says Eric.
“You realize we’re among the first humans to witness such a colossal event?”
“Seriously,” says Eric. “We could also b
e the last. You know, like this could be the final strikeout that ends the seventh game of mankind’s World Series.”
“Dude, you should write that in your essay. Easy A.” Donnie raps Eric lightly on the arm to get his attention. “Look at us, sitting here acting all cool. Even though I’m really creeped out by this whole thing. What about you?”
“Me too.” They go back to staring at the two moons in silence. They don’t realize they are alone, the only humans currently on the northeastern edge of Monument Peak, the 10,000-foot-high jewel of the Heavenly Mountain ski resort.
South Lake Tahoe, California
Hannibal and Satin get a motel room for the night on the outskirts of town. His last delivery is set for Monday morning and it is only a half-hour away. Hannibal plans to spend the night with Satin, a bottle of tequila and a bucket of hot wings. They will watch the lunar display from their comfortable uncovered private porch.
“You think they’re gonna crash?” Satin is trying hard not to worry.
“Geez, I hope not, but whatever they do, we’re gonna watch it and drink to it.” Hannibal pours himself and Satin more tequila shots.
They sit there on two folding chairs with only a small table between them, drinking and staring up at the two moons.
Now that Hannibal has decided to stay in California, his only remaining worry is the twenty-year age difference between him and Satin. He knows he is crazy about her, but does she really love him or is she just along for the ride and whatever thrills they happen to find during the short time she plans to stay with him? After all, they’ve only been together for a year, and a year is not a lifetime. Would she still love him in thirty years when he’s turned old and frail? Would she still care about him for better or worse, in sickness and in health? Is he really Mr. Right, or Mr. Right Now until someone younger, better looking or richer comes along?
RUNAWAY MOON Page 4
