by Jon Davis
Brand got a ViaSoft Phad. He sent me pictures he took with his cell phone. The thing was a two-sectioned unit pulled apart with a paper-thin screen that unrolled from one side. He showed me how all the touch sensitive buttons on the screen worked, and before he signed off, Brand sent me one last picture of him watching a new movie.
Jealous, me? Never!
Bastard…okay, maybe I was a little jealous. Of course, he wasn’t playing the game I’d bought him, but I was sure he would…eventually.
With presents opened, and family calls made, I watched the news while Mom started cooking dinner. Although it would be just the two of us, Mom liked to cook. And because I loved the chocolate chunk and coconut cookies she always made this time of year for the desserts, I got out of her way and stayed in the living room.
Watching television, I channel surfed the cable news networks. Any other time, it would’ve been boring. That wasn’t the case right now, as the pictures of the asteroid and those who reacted to its appearance was more fun than a science fiction movie. And the Christmas theme lent an air of cheeriness to all the scenes of panic.
Continuing to surf, I found an update about what happened to the asteroid on the night it passed over us. From what the NASA experts could tell, the asteroid had aerobraked across the upper atmosphere of the Midwest until it left the atmosphere above Lake Michigan near Chicago. Meteorologists were in a controlled panic about that part of the event. They were having trouble trying to figure out how this would affect the weather over time.
While that news segment was playing, I glanced outside, saw the sunny weather, and shrugged. With the crazy weather from global warming, I wasn’t going to worry too much, yet. Bored, I switched channels to a documentary about who won prizes for this year’s showiest decorations. I noticed there were a lot of meteor themes for some strange reason.
Because it was between elections, the politicians stayed quiet on how they would handle the emergencies developing from this near hit. Up until the interviews started, only the President had gone on national television to help calm people. Congressmen and Senators, however, waited until they were on Sunday news shows to answer critics about why the budget to find dangerous asteroids was so limited. Blustering, the politicians promised to increase the NASA budget to make sure we had better warning in the future. Even the interviewers looked openly critical about those claims.
I only watched moments of an interview about how much the asteroid slowed after the aerobraking it did through our atmosphere. Not only had it slowed down, it was now in a permanent orbit around the planet and moon. But while people were still celebrating, others just didn’t feel comfortable explaining as to why it had slowed down so much. One scientist's claim was that the atmospheric drag simply hadn't been enough to slow it down to such a low speed. I didn’t understand the numbers he was using to get his point across, but the man was acting almost insulted by his own results. For a moment, I wondered why it was bothering him so much, then I just shrugged it off, and shut off the TV.
Still wanting something to do, I went back to texting Brand to bug him about his new toy. Christmas dinner was great, Mom is a fantastic cook, and with that finishing off the day, I finally started pushing the asteroid news to the back of my mind.
The world couldn’t do that so readily. And because Mom was serious about grounding me, I ended up watching more television. The big news, one morning, was that while the IAU had originally cataloged the asteroid with a string of numbers and letters, the asteroid was quickly renamed Yama by the public and the media. After some debate, the International Astronomical Union let that stand because they agreed with the argument that it almost killed us. Yama was the Hindu God of Death. India didn’t argue about anyone using the name of one of their religious deities. Given its size and the density, Yama would have devastated the planet, including them.
However, despite the panic, some good news did come with Yama. Tests on the meteor fragments showed several unusual heavy metals not normally found in meteorites. It wasn’t the nickel-iron type of space rock that Earth normally gets from space. The various heavy metals discovered were enticing enough to get Planetary Resources Incorporated to consider going out to it. Their interest grew when NASA announced that studies of Yama through spectroscopy, as well as from tests done on the meteor put its elemental worth at around nine-hundred trillion dollars. I wasn’t even sure how anyone could even imagine that level of money. But after hearing about the study results, there were even more industries wanted to mine it.
Mom made a joke about how Iowa should make a grab for mining rights since it had flown over the state. In spite of being grounded, life began to feel good. Everyone seemed to feel good about things. After all, we escaped near death, on a planetary scale.
We should have hunkered down.
It turned out that the two hundred and forty square miles of asteroid wasn’t going into any sort of orbit after all. Somehow, it sped up and changed in its trajectory. So instead of going around the Moon to enter into a stable orbit, it would now come around to smack into the planet. The scientists looked pole-axed by the change in the asteroids behavior. One-tenth of a degree away or towards the moon, and Yama would have stayed harmless. But some unknown factor had changed the trajectory of Yama’s original course into a perfect killing shot. On the second day of the new year, we all found out that Yama was going to hit just north of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada.
Moments after the announcement, YouTube had the simulations. People in the government got very tense when that bit of news came out. I don’t think they much appreciated the scientists for passing on the message. The desk reporters harshly demanded answers to their questions. The first question being was how they could have missed seeing this possibility in the first place. The astrophysicists sounded confused. They just couldn’t explain the odd increase in the asteroid’s speed, and even argued openly about its changed orbit. As for the rest of the kids on the planet, well, all seven billion promptly lost their minds.
No, people didn’t react well to hearing that, finally, Doomsday was coming. Time was up, life was done, and don’t bother turning out the lights. The asteroid would do it for us. Oh, and school was canceled. Yay!
Overnight, people began to fight for food, water, and gas. They fought over everything they could get their hands on in some effort to find a path to safety. To my shock, even Brand disappeared. The day after the apocalyptic announcement, I called him and no one picked up. My texts went unanswered, and he never appeared on the messenger service we used regularly. So, early the next morning, while Mom was asleep, I walked to his house.
The Housemans were gone. Looking through a window, I saw papers, blankets, and a broken suitcase on the living-room floor. It wasn’t hard to figure out that they had abandoned the house after they heard about the change in Yama’s trajectory. I walked home to give Mom the bad news. We hugged, we talked, and it helped. But it didn’t stop the sense of hurt and surprise about their absence.
I knew these people since I was a kid. Karla and Mom had been friends since high school. That they did this showed me how frightened people could—and would—get. I thought that Mom and I wouldn’t be alone when the world ended. I thought we were that close as families went. Now I knew we weren’t. My mistake. But Mom and I’d already talked about leaving. Mom decided not to try. She knew what would happen when Yama hit Earth. And her decision was the right one. And that was because, in the end, Dad came home.
When he’d heard about Yama, he dropped everything and headed here. It took him longer than he expected, thanks to the panic. From the sounds of it, he’d done some things he wasn’t proud of, and I later noticed that the car he’d driven here in wasn’t the one he owned when I last visited him. When I asked him about it, he admitted that it wasn’t his. But he didn’t elaborate on the subject. And we didn’t ask.
When he first entered the house, Mom and I were watching news about the exodus. Mainly, the news channels were showing looping vide
os of cars in long lines. I was only sure of some locations by the signs they showed with city names on them. What made it even worse was that the looped videos were on every news channel. And with them, came repeating phrases about panic over what was going on. Yet, we kept watching to see if there was any change in Yama’s path.
The first moment we saw Dad was when we heard a floorboard creaked behind us. We both looked up and stared. We forgot all about the news when we saw the dark-haired forty-year-old standing there, in the dining room. Mark Hagen had been a well-built man, just starting his construction business in Chicago, when Mom had met him. He still had the rock like hardness to him when Mom and I nearly bowled him over in a hug.
Mom once told me that they had a whirlwind romance that ended with them marrying three months later. They did love each other, but they had a more pressing reason for marrying. I was already on the way. But I wasn’t enough to keep them together. They divorced five years later because they had grown apart. But Dad was here now. He told us he belonged with us and not somewhere else, alone, wondering how we were making out. I’m not ashamed to say it; there were tears.
Dad let us know that things were bad in Chicago. Businesses were closing everywhere. And, obviously, Chicago wasn’t the only place. Every city had its very own exodus going on. It was while we were catching him up on the news he missed—while driving here—that I began to understand that humanity was ready to destroy civilization for staying alive in the short-term. Ironically, on television, news people kept pushing that nothing bad was going to happen. Given the amount of panic going on, nobody really believed them.
I think that was because there were too many scientists agreeing with earliest assessments about what Yama had done. They gave a clear view of what would happen physically. One well-known news anchor promptly quit and walked out of the studio after the scientist finished with his explanation. No, no one was happy with the continuous talk about the subject, but that trajectory did give the military a short window they could use. And they did.
Announced by the leaders of the G20 nations, billions of people prayed for the success of the one thing we could use against such a monster. Nuclear missiles flew from silos and submarines all over the world, aimed and timed to explode to push Yama onward, when it reached the point where it would begin to swing back toward Earth. Together, we watched as the days and hours counted down to that final moment. They told us that only half the missiles launched actually reached that point.
Don’t get me wrong; the missiles had been the best option we had. If there was one thing this planet was good at, it was the ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, missiles designed to come back to Earth from a low orbit made it hard to take out an asteroid almost the same distance away as the Moon. Still, we did our human best.
On the night it happened, videos popped up on YouTube showing the flashes from the explosions near the Moon. It was during Iowa’s daytime, so all we could do was hear about it and look at the pretty pictures. The military told us that it would work. The asteroid was at just the right point that, when that much force was unleashed, the nuclear warheads blast waves should have pushed it outward.
To the world’s horror, Yama’s trajectory didn’t change by one single degree. It fascinated the scientists, of course. They kept saying that the pressure waves from such firepower should have worked. A few hoped to solve the problem by the time the rock hit us. Why? Because they wanted to know, and Armageddon or no, at least they would die having cracked that mystery. They knew that it would be the last cosmic mystery they would ever have a chance to solve.
Physicists kept describing the very bad day we would have. They did it so incessantly, that I muttered something about them looking forward to it. I was thinking that often about scientists since the start of this insanity. And the more I heard their talk, the more I was beginning to be convinced I was right. But Mom said something that made me think twice. She said they were scared too. So scared, that they could focus only on the job at hand, talk about Yama, or go insane with fear and desperation as the rock closed in.
Thinking about that point, I realized that everyone was only doing exactly what they knew how to do. Scientists did research to stop this or explain the failure. The religious prayed, hoping that a God or Gods would answer before the coming ‘Day.’ And the politicians promised. Everyone else did his or her best to run and find a way to survive. And some of us just accepted it, as Mom had.
Dad though, Dad had tried finding ways to get us down to Mexico. But Mom knew what the impact numbers meant. She wasn’t a super genius or anything, but she could figure out what would happen after the first blast. Calmly determined, she ticked off all that would happen after the impact. She brought up slow starvation, burning forests, the freezing of the northern hemisphere, and the likelihood of an ice age after the fires.
Then it would get nasty.
Dad would argue about Riverlite being inside the asteroid’s blast radius. Mom would come back with facts about the fate of the survivors in increasing detail. After hours of denial, of anger, and every effort he could come up with to convince Mom, he slumped on the couch in the living room.
Okay, there was a lot more fighting, and he did a lot more to try to save us. He made calls and tried calling in favors. He lost friends trying to get us on a fast flight to safety. Either people didn’t return phone calls, or they would tell him he was out of luck. Finally, Dad had to accept that it was just not going to happen.
In the end, we didn’t run. Instead, we watched from our living-room windows as townspeople abandoned Riverlite. It frightened me, and the only thing that kept me from freaking out was thinking about my friends, especially Brand, and hoping they would get far enough away, to be safe. Intellectually, I knew they wouldn't be.
To my surprise, while watching the lines of cars going south, I found that I still could hope. I didn’t feel the despair I was seeing on television or in Dad’s eyes, when he thought no one was looking. I don’t know why, but while I accepted Mom’s explanations and backed up her arguments, a part of me—a deep part of me—still couldn’t wrap itself around the possibility of dying. At least, not right then. It would come, I was sure. But way down at the pit of my soul, I kept feeling as though something would stop this. Maybe I believed we'd have a miracle or that a last minute rescue would come.
But no miracles came, and the asteroid continued coming. Still three days from Earth, Yama showed up in the night sky as a bright moving light amongst the stars. The world shuddered at the sight.
And here, in Riverlite, people leaving, went, and those passing through, passed. But after days of watching all this, I found I needed some time outside. Mom was reluctant though and it took some effort to convince her to let me go. By this point, it wasn’t about the beer. She just didn’t want some random crazy person hurting me. I think it was more an extension of the worry that we’d be house-jacked by crazy people.
I wasn’t worried too much. Sitting where we were, not many people driving by would take much notice of our home. We sat back from the edge of a cliff-side left over from Ice Age glacial melt. The house’s isolation kept us safe from all but the most determined thief. And nothing like that ever happened. But now, it was a problem. Because of the isolation, I was going stir crazy. Television wasn’t showing much more than repetitious scenes of panic and rioting. And even if I had all the comics and video games in the world, they wouldn’t be enough to distract me from what was just plain cabin fever.
After a long session of whining, I managed to get Mom to let me go out. She was still edgy, but Dad stepped in to help me convince her. I think he wanted some time alone with her. Once outside, I cut across the neighbor’s garden area and started walking towards Brand’s house. I knew he wasn’t home. The Housemans had left town and had not once gotten a hold of us. But I realized that I just wanted something—anything—that reminded me that Brand and I were like brothers.
I’d grown up with him, a
nd while it hurt that he and his family hadn’t told us they were taking off, it didn’t end years of a friendship that saw as much as Brand and I had. He once had a big brother. And I’d been there when they had reported that Kyle had been killed in Iraq. I’d helped Brand through many hard times after that, and he’d helped me through the times when Mom and Dad argued over which parent I would live with during the summer and winter months. They were surprised when I told them to let me decide that. Surprisingly, they did, and both got roughly equal time with me. Hey, I like my parents, even if they couldn’t handle living together. I never told them it was Brand’s idea in the first place.
I reflected upon a lot of this as I headed to their home. I had to take the roads. While snow had fallen since the coming of Yama, the cars and trucks had packed it down on their way out of town. That was good, because the sidewalks still had heavy drifts of snow that would have been too tiring to walk through.
Spooky. I had grown up in this area of town, and sidewalks were usually clear of snow by the next day. And seeing the emptiness of the homes sent a cold feeling down my spine that had nothing to do with the weather. It could have been much worse, though.
In the news, I had watched riots and mobs actually destroying homes and businesses. One extreme example was where some crazies had torched their entire town as they left it behind. But nothing like that had happened in Riverlite. At least, not from what I could see in the short distance I was walking.
So imagine my surprise when I got there and saw James Houseman, Brand’s father, pulling a box full of canned food from their blue SUV.
I said, “What the hell?”
James Houseman was tall, with hair almost as white as Brands. But that was where the resemblance ended. Brands dad was a Marine whose body still showed those years of constant physical training. Brand wished he could have that kind of build, but he took more after his mother’s lithe frame. And, because James Houseman still played football with friends, and hunted annually, he kept in shape.
