by Srujanjoshi4
Just like clockwork, all of the people hugging the statue started drifting back more deep into the ground. Carly grasped tightly to David to make sure he didn’t fall. Her heart filled with joy, as she knew exactly what was happening around them. It was the first time since the crisis happened that she finally felt like everything was going to be OK.
“The gravity is back! We did it!” Henry screamed.
They all cheered as they moved closer to the ground. Gravity was being restored, and Carly couldn’t have been happier. She felt pure happiness when the statue moved more into the ground. She was very exhausted, and she held David tight. Although they’d had a few hiccups, the plan had eventually worked out, anyway. Now, she could return home to find her Rose. She prayed that her small family was all right and unharmed. It had been a long day, and she couldn’t wait to be reunited with them.
“I can’t believe it’s over,” Linus said.
“Gravity being restored is most definitely a good thing. We have saved so many people’s lives on top of it. But the world has been destroyed in the process. It’s not like tomorrow everything is going to be back to normal. We have no idea how many lives have been lost or who is even in government anymore.”
“Yeah, I guess I hadn’t thought of that, Carly.”
Henry piped up. “What are we going to do about David?”
Carly shook her head. “I have no idea. There is going to be so much chaos now that the gravity has been restored, it might not be easy to find his mother. In the meantime, he will just stick with me until we know what’s going on.”
“It might be that a lot of destruction occurred all over the world,” said a guy who was hugging the Statue of Liberty beside Carly.
“Yeah, well, of course. We have the Statue of Liberty practically on your front lawn, and it’s supposed to be in New York City, not Washington, DC,” Carly said.
Henry chuckled at the thought of Silicon Valley sliding into Mexico, as well as all the human chains all over the world clinging to various objects. No one had moved down from them yet. They were probably too scared they would float away again.
The planet was not in a safe stage at that point. Carly wondered if the madness truly was over.
Chapter Nineteen
The ground below them started vibrating, and the movement bored right into Earth. It was a good thing they were all still hugging the statue, or they might have toppled over from all the shaking. Carly looked at the boys, whose eyes were wide. She wasn’t sure what was happening around them, but she could take a guess. The asteroid must have made contact with ground in the Bermuda Triangle and bored a hole into the planet. The destruction would have been monumental, which was why the whole Earth was shaking from the hit. It was like a massive earthquake felt all over the world.
Carly hoped that there had been no living people in the Bermuda Triangle. If they weren’t dead before, they certainly were now. She was relieved, however, that the plan had worked out and everything was going to be all right for the people around them. There had been a scare for a while there, when they’d thought the asteroid was not going to hit at all, but it had worked out, after all. That was all that mattered to Carly.
“Oh, God, I can’t believe it’s over. I’m so happy right now,” Linus gushed. They were tired and exhausted from the events of the day and so grateful that the gravity had been restored. They had made a good team together, and Carly felt great pride in the boys. They had worked together to help her plan go flawlessly. Now, at least getting from place to place wouldn’t take half a day to accomplish. The planet was still dangerous until government got the army organized and deployed, but for now, they could move around without worrying about floating off into space.
“Now we have to move away from clinging to the statue. With the gravity back, people could get hurt on top of one another,” Carly said.
Carly’s legs felt wobbly, as if she hadn’t used them in a while. There was also a slow ache to them, but she chalked it up to the fact that they hadn’t been used properly in the past twenty-four hours. They would return to normal once the blood started circulating through them once again. Looking all around, Carly thought that the destruction she’d seen on-screen was nothing compared to the devastation she now saw up close. The Statue of Liberty looked massive as it stood in all its glory right before them. It was a miracle it hadn’t smashed right into Linus’s house—it was that close.
Buildings were broken and crumbled around them, and she prayed that no one had been inside them when they fell back to Earth. So many lives lost in the past twenty-four hours…she feared to hear the numbers. People everywhere were frightened and sometimes alone. It was going to take some strong hearts and minds to get them all through the recent frightening events. They had quite a job ahead of them. She only could hope that most of NASA’s people had survived so they could build a team to start figuring this all out. She couldn’t even imagine what kind of mission it would take to restore Earth back to the way it had been. Would that even be possible? Or would the planet become a lesser version of itself? They only had themselves to blame if that were the case. They had taken their discovery projects too far, and now it had harmed Earth and some of the humans on it.
She shook her head of those thoughts, as they had much work to do. The three of them were still hugging the Statue of Liberty and the massive human chain that Carly had organized.
“That’s truly amazing, Carly. I don’t even know how you thought that one up!” Linus shouted.
She smiled back up at him. “Thank you, Linus.” She felt good about things as well. It was all going according to plan, and she couldn’t have been happier about the whole thing. She was practically jumping for joy at the thought of being reunited with her mother and Rose. It was all she could really hope for, that they were alive and well. She knew her mother to be a smart woman and truly believed she would do the best job she could to protect Rose. Carly was reassured by the fact that Rose and Annette should have been at home when disaster struck, so there was no reason to believe that they wouldn’t have managed just fine—as long as an airplane hadn’t crashed into their home. Carly shook that thought out immediately; she almost threw up at the thought that something so horrendous could happen to her family. She needed to focus on the next step: getting down off of the Statue of Liberty.
Carly called out, “The gravity is back! You all need to slowly and carefully make your way down so no one gets hurt.”
There didn’t seem to be much movement, and she couldn’t understand why the people clinging to the statue weren’t coming down on their own. Weren’t they excited that it was all over with and that everything was going to be all right? They should have been climbing down and jumping for joy at this point, and yet they weren’t moving. A few of them actually looked a little stressed out.
Carly wondered what she should do to help. She was limited because David was attached to her as if he were one of her limbs. She couldn’t blame the poor thing; the events that had transpired could very well scar the child for life. Carly decided to start to make her way out with David cradled to her chest and help others coming out. She felt weird as she started trying to move away from the statue. She felt as if her body was changing and becoming heavier.
Henry and Linus were talking to each other. Henry was questioning Linus about the asteroid and the type of material it was made out of.
“Why is it so heavy? I mean, it was heavy enough to bring back Earth’s gravity. That’s insane.”
Linus wasn’t answering, however, as he was gazing at a girl who was beside him. Both started smiling and crying at the same time. Carly and Henry looked shocked. Carly turned to Henry, and he mouthed the word “girlfriend” to her. She chuckled. That was the kind of moment they needed to see after the experience that they’d had. Heartfelt reunions all over the world, and she couldn’t wait to have her own.
Linus waved back up at her with a grin that crossed his whole face. He turned to his friend. “I don’t even want to know a
bout any of it now. I just found the love of my life, and she is smiling. That’s all I care about. Who knows, man? Maybe God made us lose Earth’s gravity to remind us about what’s really important in our lives. Carly was right; we are a selfish species.” He smiled and then shouted into the air, “I AM SO HAPPY!”
But Carly knew something was wrong with her body. She hugged the statue tighter for fear of falling. Suddenly, she could not move her legs at all, and her hand had a terrible ache to it. She looked at the other people around her and only saw confusion.
“Can any of you move your legs?”
Everyone suddenly looked frightened, as if Carly had just confirmed his or her own fears. There were shouts of “no” while people struggled to move their bodies out of position. Many people shook their heads and started crying. Carly turned at an angle so that she faced the statue. Startled, she realized that there was something written on the statue right in front of her eyes.
Year 1916: Artificial-gravity generators of Earth are located underneath at latitude and longitude 16…by AE.
She hugged the statue, feeling a panic rise up in her. She needed a moment to clear her head and figure out what to do. She turned to David and kissed him on the top of his head. Looking toward Linus and Henry, she shouted, “Linus! Henry! We have to get back to work again.”
Preview of book two in the Series
Chapter One
Carly hung on to the Statue of Liberty with David in her arms. Her body was growing heavy with the exertion of it all. She couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong with their plan. They’d had only a momentary relief from it all, and she couldn’t figure out why. She felt so tired that it took all her effort to not start crying right there in front of everyone. They were up against an impossible situation, and she almost felt like giving up. She desperately wanted to see her family, and it was starting to look like she would never get that chance again.
Carly knew she had to focus on the task at hand. She couldn’t allow herself to get bogged down by emotions, or she would throw in the towel. She needed to stay positive and believe that they would be able to get through anything. They still had an opportunity to fix things. She just needed to figure out what effect the asteroid had on Earth when it hit. Something had obviously shifted in another direction to cause the current disaster. So, what was it? They had made all the calculations; there had been very little room for error. It was up to her to figure out what had gone wrong, and she once again wished that the other scientists were there to help her.
She clung to the statue with the thousands of others around her; she looked around at their desperate faces. Most of them were looking at her and her team for answers, and she didn’t know if she had any for them. She knew there were chains all over the world experiencing the same level of confusion that she was; she thought she had saved everyone, but it had just turned into more mass confusion.
Carly looked toward Henry and Linus, who were awaiting her orders. She wasn’t sure what to tell them or where to go next. Where would they go from there? She hadn’t thought of a backup plan. The plan to have the asteroid hit the Bermuda Triangle had been foolproof. She was deep in thought and blocked out all the chattering around her as she tried to formulate a new plan. It had to be something that was sure to work this time; they could not mess up anything else. All these lives were literally hanging in the balance, and she couldn’t afford to have anyone be hurt.
She hung there wondering if it was all hopeless, her heart growing heavy at the thought. Could they even begin to save the world? She wasn’t too sure anymore. It seemed so impossible at times. They were barely equipped to handle a problem of this magnitude. They needed so many more resources, and yet those were unattainable at the moment. She wasn’t sure that they could make it back to NASA in time to save anything. They would need to use whatever resources they had currently, and there weren’t many of those. Carly had been so happy at the thought that she could finally head home to see her family to determine if they were alive, and now she was stuck once again. She was unable to return to them until she could figure out how to get normal gravity back. Poor Rose must be so frightened that her mother had not returned home yet to take care of her. She feared for her frightened daughter and hoped that she and Annette were safe from harm.
Carly racked her brain for the answer. She felt it there on the tip of her tongue, and she believed she might have the answer they needed.
“Carly, what’s going on?”
Linus broke her out of her thoughts. She had it. The asteroids had caused a shift when they fell to Earth. Earth had started rotating, and what was once noon had now become evening. Soon it would be night. Carly was becoming exhausted from hugging the statue. They needed to do something fast, or people would die there all at once.
Her breathing was labored when she shouted down to Linus, her voice carrying almost in slow motion. “Can anyone see the moon? I can’t see it from where I’m at. I need to know if the moon is still orbiting Earth.”
Carly turned to the man who was hugging the statue directly beside her. “Can you see the moon? Please, pass it along down the line. Find out if anyone can see the moon!”
He turned from her and asked the person beside him, and so it went along the line. Question after question, and so far she only saw heads shaking. Everyone was still hugging the statue while they were asking one another about the moon. That day would have marked a full-moon day, so if the moon was out, it should have been visible to someone. She watched in awe as the question went on rotating from one end of the statue to the other in one huge circular motion. The question was reaching the end of their human chain when finally, a guy who was hanging on Carly’s left turned to her and asked if the moon was visible to her.
Carly burst out laughing…
