The combined light from the two moons illuminates her face and Hannibal sees that she has tears in her eyes.
“What’s wrong, babe?”
“I’ve got a really bad feeling about this,” says Satin. “Better keep pouring.”
Hannibal pours her another shot. She downs it quickly.
“Well, maybe this will cheer you up. I’ve decided to stay in California, and I hope you’ll agree to stay here with me.”
Satin smiles at him through her tears and hugs him tightly.
“Really, Hannibal? Of course I’ll stay with you. I love you, you big galoot. We’re good for each other. I’m looking forward to no more bad hair days.”
“So our age difference doesn’t bother you?”
“It’s just a number, Hannibal. What we have is so much more than that.”
It’s the first time Satin has really expressed her true feelings about him. Hannibal smiles and pours them each a celebratory shot. He raises his shot glass.
“So here’s to us, to not worrying about numbers and no more bad hair days.”
Lake Tahoe
Sam and Julia Hayden sit together in the bedroom close to the telescope. They hold hands, utterly mesmerized by the incredible drama playing itself out above them. What was once only a thirty-percent chance for an impact is now a dead certainty, according to Sam’s latest calculations. Despite his stature as one of the world’s leading astrophysicists, he can do nothing to stop or even alter the events that are about to unfold right in front of them.
Sam Hayden’s greatest fear, which he has kept to himself for more than twenty years, is societal collapse. In his mind, human society now has all five risk factors, overpopulation and rapid climate change combined with diminishing water, agricultural and energy resources, for a total collapse. The collective consumption, consumerism and waste created by more than eight billion humans has already stretched well beyond planet Earth’s finite resources. Sam knows the planet would be better off if we somehow lost a few billion consumers, and he wants to hate himself for imagining something so horrific. He cannot bring himself to express his feelings aloud, though on a purely practical level, he believes he is right.
He is not alone in his beliefs, either. The Chinese acutely understand the costs of overpopulation. They had recently become the first country on Earth to officially ban all new childbirths, even going so far as to sterilize their populace involuntarily by way of the drinking water supply. Now India is considering a similar ban with even more severe penalties for violators. India’s government has proposed putting pregnant women to death.
The Chinese, the Indians and Sam Hayden understand the inescapable truth that it will take four planet Earths to continue supporting humanity’s way of life.
Humans have already wiped out nearly seventy percent of the world’s wildlife population: mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, through deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting and overfishing. Instead of losing a handful of species each year, we are losing over 27,000 species annually. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.
For more than a decade, humans have been drinking water faster than rainfall or snowmelt can replenish it, catching more fish than the oceans can replace, destroying more trees than Earth can possibly re-grow and generating more carbon dioxide than our oceans and diminishing forests could possibly ever absorb. Along with the carbon dioxide from our collective burning of fossil fuels, we are breathing higher concentrations of poisonous methane and nitrous oxide and succumbing in record numbers to pulmonary disease and acute respiratory distress leading to death. The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control had recently published frightening numbers, nearly 100 million annual deaths from thirst alone, and humans all over the world have finally begun to take notice. Just as Sam predicted years ago, water has become more valuable than oil.
It is 2029 and more than seven billion of the eight billion Earthlings are now communicating on the Internet. They are better informed and connected than any previous generation and have grown into the most powerful social and political force the world has ever seen. They have begun to overthrow ineffective, unresponsive governments. They have organized massive boycotts to shutter bad businesses known to harm people and the environment. Half the planet is now running on cheap renewable energy collected from the sun and wind. Big-oil companies are losing billions of dollars in revenue and the entire chemical processing industry is dying. The emerging new world order means that cooperation for resources is finally overtaking competition for resources.
Sam, however, believes we are too late to change our destructive behaviors. We listened for too long to the business-as-usual politicians who argued against mountains of scientific evidence, and the corporate greed-mongers who wanted all the resources for themselves. We ignored those who pushed for population controls and zero population growth since the 1970s. Instead, we allowed our population to double in just thirty-five years. Man-made climate change had become a runaway freight train driving Earth’s creatures and resources headlong into what some scientists now call the Anthropocene geological epoch.
Sam Hayden knows that Homo sapiens is no better than the other animals. He also knows that we often consider ourselves above and apart from wildlife because of our perceived high intelligence and ability to manipulate our environments. Sam has personally witnessed the river of consequences that flow from that kind of thinking and our gross overestimation of human intelligence. A truly intelligent species would have protected itself. It would not have systematically destroyed its only home environment with such ignorance, waste and unrelenting stupidity.
Sam pushes away his private thoughts and turns to his daughter.
“Sorry, Jules, but there’s nothing good I can say about this. If you’re still inclined to pray, now would be a good time.”
“I know, Dad. I know.”
Julia closes her eyes and prays silently. Sam checks the time on his cellphone.
When Julia opens her eyes, she and her dad look up just in time to see Diablo’s massive shadow fall across the southern hemisphere of the full moon. The impact is no longer in doubt. Sam and Julia are virtually hypnotized as they watch the most calamitous event of the last sixty-five million years unfold in the clear night sky above them.
Moments later, Diablo slams into the moon at 50,000 miles per hour with a powerful direct impact that cracks the rocky mantle, blasting away enormous chunks of the lunar surface just below the equator. It begins with a monstrous flash of white-hot light as brilliant as the sun. As the seconds tick by, the point of impact blossoms and spreads between the two bodies, growing rapidly into a flaming red-orange crescent, an incandescent inferno that quickly engulfs the moon. At first, Diablo is a tight circle of midnight black obscuring the center of the moon. From there it grows rapidly until its fiery mass is twice the original size of the moon. Instead of exploding quickly like July 4th fireworks, the monstrous chunks of rock and debris appear to float silently off into space in all directions along with a massive cloud of burning dust headed for Earth. For Sam and Julia, whose mountain location puts them more than six thousand feet closer to the event than anyone watching from sea level, the catastrophe plays itself out in mesmerizing slow motion.
Hypnotized by a vision neither of them ever expected to see anywhere but in their worst nightmares, the only thing Sam and Julia can do is stare slack-jawed in awe.
Moments later, inexplicably, the lights go out. Sam and Julia have no way of knowing that the entire electrical grid has just shut down from North America across the Pacific to the easternmost portions of Asia.
The only possible explanation: a massive electromagnetic pulse generated by an almost immeasurable amount of energy just vaporized vast quantities of moon ejecta, transforming it into burning plasma bursting with internal lightning and static electrical charges that fill the rapidly expanding cloud of pulverized moon dust and rocky debris.
The air in the cabin feels heavier than a thick
winter quilt as the rock bombardment begins. Sam quickly yanks Julia from her chair and pulls her out of the bedroom, through the kitchen, straight toward the narrow trapdoor to the underground storage room.
He drags Julia through the darkness down into their subterranean shelter and shuts the trapdoor quickly behind them just as everything begins rumbling and shaking. The low rumble quickly grows deafening and the shaking becomes more violent. It feels as if the whole planet is being jackhammered by huge rocks and might split apart at any moment. He and Julia press themselves face down and struggle to cover their heads with their own hands.
Sam never really accounted for shockwaves. They just don’t happen in space. Sure, the Tunguska comet that exploded over Russia in 1908 had leveled eighty million trees over 2,000 square kilometers, but that was child’s play compared to this and it occurred well within our atmosphere.
Diablo’s strike force is tens of billions of times greater but it’s also well outside Earth’s atmosphere. Even the most monstrous shockwave would die in the vacuum of space long before it traversed the 221,000 miles distance to Earth. So where are these shockwaves coming from?
Why are Sam and Julia feeling the mounting weight of intense air pressure? Why are they feeling anything except the shaking ground beneath them?
Sam holds tightly to Julia in the pitch darkness, gasping for breath, fighting wave after wave of nausea and dizziness, wondering about the origin of this unexpected Earth-bound pressure burst, mentally reviewing the known astrophysical explanations until he is left with one possibility: the leading edge of the rock storm has breached Earth’s atmosphere.
All Julia can do is lie there paralyzed with fear, wishing that the intense air pressure and quaking would soon stop, praying that most of the ejecta burns up before reaching Earth, knowing that it could end her young life at any moment.
Dana Point
Alex, Jessa and Deuce are huddled together on the floor of the bomb shelter holding their ears, waiting for the ground shaking, the explosive distant airbursts and the air pressure to subside, but they do not. The Jacks had been through a few earthquakes that had lasted up to thirty seconds. Those quakes had been strong and frightening enough, but this one utterly dwarfs anything they could ever have imagined, lasting close to thirty minutes.
Though they can’t see anything outside the bomb shelter, they can hear the deafening roar of incoming rocks, nearby houses and buildings crashing to the ground, wood splintering and electrical relays and power lines exploding.
“Stop already!” Deuce covers his ears even tighter and feels like he is on the verge of losing his mind.
“C’mon Deuce, be strong, man.” Alex knows they have no choice but to hang on.
“I feel sick,” gulps Jessa. She holds tightly to the gold Buddha necklace Alex had given her for their tenth wedding anniversary and continues praying.
Deuce doesn’t know what else to do, so he begins humming to himself. He finds it oddly relaxing. He hums some random tunes until he finds one he really likes; one that fits these circumstances. He finds himself loudly humming R.E.M.’s classic 1987 rockabilly hit “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” in an attempt to drown out the sonic booms and explosions. The song choice is Deuce’s way of bringing dark humor to bad situations.
Finally, after more than fifteen minutes, the ground stops shaking, the aerial blasts diminish and the blanket of air pressure dissipates. Alex turns over and pushes himself to his feet. He starts the generator and the emergency lights flicker for a few seconds before coming on full and bathing the shelter in a cold, greenish alien glow.
As Deuce’s eyes adjust to the light, he sees that the shelter is still remarkably intact. Some cans, boxes and supplies have been tossed from their places, but nothing has broken. Most importantly, he and his family are alive and unharmed. It is a miracle of epic proportions. Alex, Jessa and Deuce have survived multiple shockwaves and the strongest earthquake in human history.
Deuce hugs his parents tightly.
“I was afraid it wouldn’t end.”
“It hasn’t ended. There will be more bombardments and aftershocks.” Alex fears an earthquake that large will have devastating effects for days, weeks or months to come. For the moment, at least, they are still on solid stable ground.
Outside the bomb shelter, the town of Dana Point has been laid flat. The homes, apartments, hotels, boutique shops and three-story office buildings are demolished. All the boats in the marina are crushed, capsized or sunken. The sea level has risen four feet in less than five minutes as the shockwaves pressed downward on the mighty Pacific Ocean, forcing it higher along the seawalls until it overran the eastern and western shorelines of four continents. The rock-covered peninsula that once protected the Dana Point marina from big ocean waves is completely submerged and the shoreline is now a mass of floating wreckage.
Chapter 4
Lake Tahoe, September 4
Sam Hayden awakens to a thin ray of light piercing through the openings between the slats in the wooden door above. In the faint light, he sees that Julia is still right beside him, still sleeping under the same blanket of dirt and debris that covers Sam. Her breathing is shallow and labored, but she is alive.
Sam breathes a huge sigh, sits up, brushes the dust and debris away and looks around. The storage room is a mess. Everything has shaken loose and there are cans and emergency supplies scattered all over the floor. He brushes away more dust from his head and shoulders and turns toward Julia.
“Jules?” Sam pushes against her shoulder gently.
She awakens, coughs violently and quickly brushes the dust away from her nose and mouth so she can breathe freely.
“What, what…?”
“We made it, Jules. We’re alive!” Sam’s sense of relief is palpable. He grins. His life has not come to the violent, crushing end he thought it would when the shockwaves hit. He and Julia have survived not just the shockwaves but the gargantuan earthquake that followed.
“What about the cabin?” Her first thought is for the cabin she loves so much.
“I’m afraid to look,” says Sam.
“Well, I’m not.” Julia sits up and brushes herself off. She stands and heads for the wooden door that opens into the cabin.
“Be very careful.” Sam cautions her but she is determined and waves him off.
Julia pushes against the door but it will not budge.
“There’s something holding it down.” She pushes again.
“Probably what’s left of the cabin.” Sam doesn’t have to see it to know that the cabin is likely damaged far beyond repair.
Julia puts her shoulder into it this time and pushes as hard as she can. The trap door opens a few inches as morning light seeps into the underground storage room. Sam joins her and puts his shoulder into it, as well. They push together and manage to open the door halfway.
Kingsbury, Nevada
Donnie and Eric crawl to the cave opening and survey the destruction outside. The small high-desert community of Kingsbury, where they had grown up and lived their whole lives, has been completely crushed and reduced to individual piles of rubble where, just yesterday, a couple of hundred single-family homes and a few strip malls stood.
“Holy shit.” Donnie’s jaw drops.
“Oh my God, our families!” screams Eric. He scrambles out of the cave and races down the mountainside. Donnie follows, gripped by fear and choking back tears. As they reach the base, they take off sprinting toward what used to be their family homes.
When they reach what’s left of their street, now identified only by a badly mangled, fallen street sign, they bolt toward their respective homes screaming as loudly as they can.
“Mom? Dad! Anybody!” No one answers. There is nothing but deadly silence.
Eric goes right to work removing large pieces of debris and peering under the collapsed walls for some sign of life, but there is nothing. The entire roof must have come down on his parents while they slept.
�
�Oh my God, oh my God!” He finds his mother and father dead, crushed together on their king-size bed. Eric falls to his knees and stares blankly at his dad’s left arm and hand and the wisps of his mom’s slightly graying hair. He can barely see the tops of their heads and his dad’s arm but nothing else. The rest of their bodies are smothered beneath the crushing weight of the roof. He tells himself they didn’t have time to feel any pain before the end came, then bursts into tears.
Four houses away, Donnie has fallen to his knees on the ground near what used to be his family’s kitchen, sobbing inconsolably. Until today, every important milestone and event in Donnie’s young life had happened in Mrs. Murray’s kitchen. He remembers each birthday and anniversary party his family held in that kitchen as if it were yesterday. His little sister was born in that kitchen. He and Eric became blood brothers in that kitchen.
Now Donnie’s mother, father and sister have died in that kitchen. All the love and warmth of yesterday has been replaced by cold despair and desolation.
Donnie forces himself to his feet still sobbing and half-blinded by his pain and tears. He runs to Eric’s and finds his best friend down on his knees staring at the remains of the Krueger house, in shock. Eric had no siblings, just his mom and dad.
“They’re gone, Eric. Everyone’s gone,” Donnie sobs. His tears leave long streaks in the grey dust down his cheeks, making it look like war paint.
Eric, still in shock, stands and turns slowly toward Donnie.
“It’s just you and me now Donnie. We’re blood orphans.”
“What’re we going to do?”
“We’re going to survive, Donnie, no matter what.”
“How do we do that? Everything’s been destroyed.”
“We call everyone we know for help.” Eric pulls his cellphone from his front pocket and powers it on. The solid white screen flashes two words: “No Service.”
“Shit, my phone is dead. Try yours.”
RUNAWAY MOON Page 5
