According to the same wise guy, there was also an unprecedented flight of capital not just from China but from the entire eastern hemisphere.
Human nature, I suppose. Watching our dollars and cents until the very end.
••••••
At 9:20 a.m. I was outside the house shoring up fortifications when I heard a thunderous sonic boom in the sky. I looked up and saw a large fiery object coming from the southeast and trailing a long thick plume of smoke. A few moments later there was a blinding white flash, as bright as a dozen suns, which carved the landscape into stark shadows. The collision with the ground produced a brilliant yellow-orange explosion. The sudden heat was intense. The shockwave seemed to last forever. It knocked me to my ass and set off car alarms. Roofs rattled and windows shattered.
I didn’t move for a long time. I just sat there, numb with fear, until everything became quiet again.
••••••
That wasn’t Shiva. It was one of the thousands of car-sized rocks that began pelting Earth in the days preceding the main event.
••••••
You might be wondering about the difference between those show-off comets I mentioned earlier, and asteroids. I never used to know one from the other, but I quickly become a bit of an expert on the matter. Everyone did. Everyone wants to know the face of their killer, so to speak.
In interplanetary space—this was how the TV guys explained it—both comets and asteroids are large rocky bodies in orbit around the Sun. The only difference between them is that comets are active and asteroids are inactive. In other words, comets are covered in dirty ice, and when they approach the Sun, their ice vaporizes, releasing the embedded dust particles, which cause the trails you see behind them. Asteroids, on the other hand, have exhausted their supply of ice near the surface and are nothing but barren rock.
Now if you want to take it a step farther, the dusty debris of comets, or fragments of rock that occur when asteroids collide, are called meteoroids. Once a meteoroid enters the atmosphere and vaporizes due to atmospheric friction, it emits light that is called a meteor or “shooting star.” And if the meteor makes it through the atmosphere all the way to Earth’s surface, then it’s called a meteorite.
So the question I have is this: Was Asteroid Shiva really an asteroid when it struck us, or was it a meteorite? Unfortunately, I doubt I’m going to get an answer to that any time soon.
••••••
I can’t tell you how the rest of the world reacted after Shiva struck, but I can tell you what happened in Australia, or at least in my neck of the woods. People became animals. Howling-in-the-night, true-to-God animals. For the first seventy-two hours all you could hear were unholy screams, gunshots, squealing tires, breaking glass, drunken cursing, even braying laughter—the sounds of a frightened, dying species, I guess you could call it.
Gradually, however, much of this madness petered out. I’m not sure why, but I reckon part of the reason is a lot of people left Broken Hill, stupidly heading to the cities.
Why do I say stupidly?
Let me back up a minute and say Australia was probably one of the best places to be in the world when the asteroid hit. It’s a huge swath of land with a proportionally tiny population, which means if you don’t draw attention to yourself, you stand a good chance of being left alone. And let me go further by saying Broken Hill was probably one of the best places to be in Australia, because geographically speaking, it’s in the middle of nowhere, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the big cities—places you don’t want to be.
Think about it. Millions of panicked people fighting over limited resources. Civil disobedience on an unheard of scale. Martial law so strict you’d be shot on sight if you were caught on the streets past curfew. Stadiums turned into concentration camps.
Nevertheless, the folks who left Broken Hill wouldn’t have thought about that, or cared, because without food or water, they wouldn’t have had any choice but to leave.
••••••
I’m tired and cold. My hand hurts from writing, and my body is telling me it’s late, so I’m going to catch some shuteye. Also, this might be my final entry for some time. I only have a couple pencils left. They’re not going to last much longer.
••••••
Fuck me fuck me fuck me FUCK ME
••••••
Buzz is dead. He and his wife too. I killed them both.
••••••
Buzz was a week older than me. I’d known him since we were kids. We grew up on the same street across from Sturt Park, and we both went to Willyama High School. He started in the mines two years after I did because he stayed in school to get his diploma. He was one of those sharp tacks I was talking about who never left town not because they couldn’t, but because they didn’t want to. Suz and his wife, Jenny, didn’t get along, but this didn’t matter much to us. We spent most of our free time at the pubs, drinking and betting on the horses and greyhounds. We usually lost. On good days we broke even. But the mines paid well enough, and we needed something to spend our money on out here. We sure as hell weren’t going to operas and celebrity-chef restaurants and paying big-city mortgages. We played squash sometimes at the YMCA, and we were on the same lawn bowling team. Life was good, simple, like our friendship. Then about ten years back Buzz got sick. Doctors told him he had something called silicosis from inhaling too much rock dust underground. The diagnosis was grim: his days in the mines were over.
He ended up driving a taxi for a few months while moonlighting as a bouncer outside the town’s only nightclub, the Night Train, or the “Fight Train,” as you often heard it called. When no better work opportunities arose, he became depressed over the direction in which his life was heading and ended up buying a thirty-thousand-hector station some forty K north of Broken Hill, land which was once part of the original Mount Gipps station, on which Broken Hill’s line of load was first discovered. He didn’t want to farm merinos—they were too much hard work for too little profit—so he started running two South African breeds, dorpers and damaras, which are better suited to the desert climate.
Am I surprised old Buzz survived so long post-impact? No, not really. Not only was the station about as remote as you could get, the entrance to it was an unmarked dirt road perpendicular to the highway that disappeared into a barren red landscape of rocks and scraggy vegetation. Most people would drive right on by it without batting an eye, and even if you knew the turnoff was there, Buzz could have easily erased evidence of it altogether. So, no, I’m not surprised he lasted so long, especially with all those sheep to eat.
I spotted Buzz around what I suspected to be midday. Although my eyes had become well-adapted to the permanent dark, I didn’t know it was old Buzz until I put on the night-vision goggles. And sure enough it was Buzz all right. He stood across the road, behind a parked car, staring at my house. He didn’t know I was a survivalist, didn’t know about my stockpile of goods. So I’m not sure what brought him here. Maybe he was simply lonely. Maybe he’d been going around town stopping by all our old mates’ homes. Maybe the pump-action rifle clasped to his chest was just for self-defense.
And maybe cows could fly.
In this new world, friendship didn’t mean shit. It was all about survival. All that mattered was food, water, shelter, and staying alive.
Buzz made the first move. He crossed the street, slowly, limping, favoring his right leg. He was thinner than he used to be, gaunt.
He stopped when he reached the sidewalk adjacent to my property.
“Burtsy?” he called. His voice was hoarse, oddly high-pitched.
I didn’t reply. He couldn’t know I was home. I’d dressed up the house to appear deserted.
“Mate,” he said. “I need to talk.”
I didn’t reply. He stared at the house, assessing it. Sully, I noticed, was coming up through the trapdoor to the roof. I motioned for him to keep low. He moved to the edge of the roof and peered out from behin
d a parapet.
“Mate,” Buzz went on. “Jenny’s sick.” He paused. “I know you’re there, Burt.”
He pushed open the metal gate. It squeaked in the still, suddenly charged air. As soon as he stepped on my dead lawn, I said, “Stop right there, Buzz.”
He froze. I think despite what he’d said, he was surprised I was indeed home.
“Burtsy?” His voice became animated. “Burtsy? Bloody hell! I reckoned everyone was dead!”
He took another step forward.
“I told you to stop right there,” I said.
He put on a hurt expression. “It’s Buzz, mate.” He was scanning the roof, the parapets. He could hear where my voice was originating from, though I didn’t think he could see me, at least not clearly. From his vantage point all that would be visible would be the barrel of my Remington and maybe the top of my head. “How’d you last so long, you son of a bitch?” he asked.
I didn’t reply.
Buzz still held his pump-action rifle clasped tightly against his chest. “Look, I know times are tough, I know that, whatever you’ve been eating, whatever you’ve got stashed away, I don’t want any of that. But Jenny’s sick, mate. She needs help. I’ve been wandering this fucking graveyard for days looking for someone who can help her.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“At the station.”
“You drove here?”
“Yeah.”
“You have petro?”
“Bloody right, and I’m happy to share some, if that’s what you need.”
“You left Jenny alone?”
“I didn’t have any choice, mate. She’s so bad she can’t move.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know. I not a fucking doctor, and there aren’t any doctors left, are there? But she can’t get out of bed. Has a fever too. I’m scared, Burtsy. I’m fucking terrified I’m going to lose her.”
“What do you think I can do?”
“You got any medicine?”
“Sorry, mate,” I said.
“What about food? We’re starving. We haven’t eaten for days. Just a little something, you know?”
I raised the rifle so the scope’s crosshairs aligned with the center of Buzz’s forehead. I took a deep breath, counted to three, and squeezed the trigger. The sharp, toneless report echoed loudly. Buzz’s head disappeared in a spray of bone and brains. He dropped to the ground.
Sully whirled toward me, his face white with surprise.
But I wasn’t paying him any attention. I heard footsteps, someone coming in one heck of a hurry. When you spend all day listening to nothing, you get very good at hearing everything.
Ten seconds or so later Jenny stumbled into view, skinny and out of breath but definitely not bed-ridden. She didn’t see Buzz lying in a big pool of blood until she was nearly to my yard. She let out a pitiful moan and threw herself down next to him. She was silent for a long time. Then she began to cry softly. It was a heart-gutting sound.
After about a minute of this she went abruptly silent. She eyed the house warily, as if realizing if I could shoot Buzz in cold blood, I could do the same to her. She got to her feet, rubbing tears from her cheeks with the back of her frail hand.
She retreated cautiously, one step, two. She bumped into the iron fence. This gave her a start. She yelped and turned, about to run.
I put a bullet through her head too.
••••••
I expected Sully to flip out after witnessing me murder two people I used to know. Yet Buzz’s and Jenny’s deaths didn’t seem to faze him in the least. When he asked me why I didn’t let them go, it wasn’t accusatory; it was simple curiosity.
This was a talk I’d been meaning to have with him for some time, and the conversation went something like this:
“One of these days I might not be around, Sully,” I said. “It’s just going to be you and Walter. And there are three things you need to know. Three rules to live by.”
I studied Sully to make sure he understood the seriousness with which I was speaking. His dark shaggy hair was long and tousled, his face smudged with dirt, and there was a maturity in his green eyes I had never seen before.
“The first rule is you have to stay put,” I continued. “I know you don’t like it here. I know there’s nothing for you to do. But you’re safe. You have food, you have water, and you have shelter. You go out there, you go to the cities, you’ll die. That’s a fact, Sully. The people out there, they’re animals, Sully. Starving animals. Desperate animals. Intelligent animals. There’s nothing more dangerous than that, and nothing out there but death. Your only chance—and Walter’s only chance—is to stay here, bug out, and wait this thing through.”
“What if it never ends?” he asked. “What if things never go back to normal?”
“They will, Sully. Maybe not back to normal. That’s going to take a while. But I’ll tell you this. A lot of powerful people, the ones who used to run the world, they will have survived, and they’ll be working to restore…whatever it is they have to restore to get things working again.”
Sully stared at me. I didn’t know if he believed me. I didn’t know if I believed myself.
“So that’s the first rule: stay put,” I said. “The second rule is you have to remain concealed. You can’t bring attention to the house. You can’t let anybody know you’re in here. Because if they know you’re in here, they know you have food. And they’ll do whatever is in their power to take that food. You following me, boy?”
He nodded this time.
“Good,” I said. I reached out my arm, to pat him on the shoulder. He flinched away. I lowered my hand awkwardly and cleared my throat.
“What’s the third rule?” he asked.
“If somebody comes around, even somebody like Buzz, someone you might have known once, and they look like they might want to get inside, forcing you to reveal yourself, you can’t negotiate with them. You got that, Sully? No matter what they say, you can’t negotiate, you can’t trust them, you can’t let them in. And just as importantly, you can’t let them leave alive.”
“Because they’ll come back?”
“That’s right. They’ll come back. As sure as Earth spins, they’ll come back. They might come alone, or they might bring others. So you can never, ever let anybody leave alive.”
••••••
Sully and I carried the bodies of Buzz and Jenny to the backyard. I told Sully to go inside, but he knew what I had planned, and he wanted to participate, and I suppose he had to learn this sometime too. So we carved the flesh from Buzz and Jenny into fat strips, rinsed and salted the pieces to kill off the microbes and fungi, then hung them on hooks out back to dry. Cannibalism isn’t something you ever want to do, but we’re living in a world where we’re forced to do a lot of things we don’t want to do anymore, and salted meat can last for years.
••••••
Sully joined me on the roof tonight again. We had a good talk. I told him some stories from the mines, some history of Broken Hill. He had never been interested in any of this stuff before, but he was listening and responsive. He even told me about a girl he’d been seeing before Shiva. I’d had no idea about this. I mean, I knew he hung out with girls and everything. Like I’d said, he’s a handsome kid. He would have had no problem getting a girlfriend. I guess he was just embarrassed to bring her around the house. He was only fifteen then. But, yeah, her name was Amy Wellington. I knew her father, Scott. He used to run the kitchen of one of the pubs in town. The pub was losing customers because it was a hole in the ground and the food was shit. So Scotty, who used to be a chef in Adelaide, struck up a deal to run the kitchen provided he got a seventy percent take on all the receipts. It didn’t work out and the pub ended up shutting down—leaving Scotty in debt to the local grocer who’d let him run up sixty grand in credit. Anyway, Scotty’s daughter, Amy, was two years older than Sully and a part-time lifeguard at the Y. Sully was on the school’s
swimming team, so he ended up seeing a lot of her at the pool. They’d been together for about three months when NASA verified that Shiva was on a collision course with Earth. Scotty took the wife and Amy to Adelaide a week before the rock struck, believing they’d have a better chance surviving down there. Amy spent most of her last day in Broken Hill with Sully. He didn’t come out and say the two of them shagged, but the way he was talking about her, I got the feeling they did—I hope to hell they did. Nobody should have to witness the end of the world as a virgin.
••••••
I was rereading this diary from the beginning today for something to do, and I realized I’ve left out an important part of the narrative, namely how we missed such a big asteroid hurtling through space toward us.
I guess to answer this you have to understand how NASA and Spaceguard worked. They didn’t randomly aim their telescopes at different parts of the sky in the hopes of spotting near-Earth objects. Like planets, asteroids are arranged in a flat disk around the Sun, similar to the rings around Saturn. This is called the ecliptical plane. All celestial bodies on this plane orbit the Sun in a predictable pattern. Naturally, this was where NASA focused most of its attention. They picked out the most threatening rocks, performed calculations to determine when in the future—fifty years, five hundred, a thousand—their orbits might be at the same place and time as Earth’s orbit, then catalogued the data.
The reason we didn’t see Asteroid Shiva until the last minute was because it had an unusual orbit that cut a path at a forty-degree angle to the ecliptical plane, placing it in a region of sky that wasn’t often searched. Moreover, Shiva didn’t move at a constant velocity. It spent ninety-five percent of its time outside the inner solar system, where it moved slowly, was a faint dot, and hard to spot. When it returned to the inner solar system, the Sun’s gravity sped it up, making its jaunt past Earth very brief, and making the window for discovery very small.
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