Sheila sensed the desperation in his hug and returned it, then pulled back. Lines of exhaustion and defeat, chiseled deep in his face, told her he'd lost the race against history's harshest deadline.
“When will it hit?” Her pecan-brown eyes were clear and calm and unafraid.
“Sometime tonight. As best we can figure a little after three.” A church bell tolled in the small town west of the landing strip. With their arms around each other they walked away from the plane to her father's pickup.
“Dad’s been stocking up,” she added. “So we should be okay.”
Harry hugged her to him and cried...unable to answer any other way, for no man in history ever wanted to be wrong more than Harry Garrison.
*
Colorado
On yet another in a succession of gray and stormy days following the President’s announcement Jim and Jill Cantrell countered the gloomy weather by spreading smiles and cash with equal abandon everywhere they went in Denver. From the bellman at the Brown Palace to a waitress at Tivoli Square, they wanted everyone to share their happiness. And what the hell, Jim thought, it's only money.
If there was one thing becoming wealthy had taught him it was that the value of money lay solely in the freedom it purchased. And the toys. He couldn’t forget the toys. Already he'd shipped a tiny two-seat gyrocopter to the Freeholds, not to upstage Michael's Pegasus, but so they'd both have different toys to fly. He’d also shipped acoustic guitars and a couple of antique Fender amps that used tubes instead of transistors.
Jill tugged him over to a window, momentarily jerking him out from under the umbrella and getting him wet. “Look,” she beamed, glowing with excitement. Inside was a crib, Birdseye maple by the look of it, beautifully detailed and carved, and polished until it gleamed like hope. Ten minutes later, the transaction complete, delivery instructions meticulously noted by the sales clerk, the Cantrell’s were on their way back to the Presidential Suite for their own private end of the world as we know it party (which neither actually believed was coming).
There, over a candlelit, surf and turf dinner, crystal-chimed toasts and soft-eyed looks, they built a desire that carried them to the bedroom. Later, they lay in bed finishing off a bottle of Great Western Extra Dry Champagne from the Finger Lakes district of New York. Jill was indulging herself for the first time in months and, she swore, for the last time during her pregnancy.
They'd left explicit instructions that they were not to be disturbed under any circumstances short of a bomb threat, so both were startled when the phone rang. Jill slopped champagne over the rim of her Waterford crystal onto her bare breast as she leaned over to answer the phone.
“Hello,” she said, then hissed, “Quit that,” and giggled at Jim, who was licking off the spill.
“Queet wat, cheri?”
“Not you, Jacques--Jim!” She squealed and shoved him away. “It's for you.”
He took the receiver and snapped the cord across her slightly distended belly, earning himself a warning look. “You're timing sucks, Piano-man.”
“So do yours, Mon. You suppose' to meet Denise an' me at de Rose tonight, nes pas?”
“Shit man,” Jim apologized. “I completely forgot.” He had promised the owner of the Grizzly Rose, a man who had done the band numerous favors before they were discovered, that he would try out a few new tunes for the Friday-nighter's. Jim loved to preview new music in front of country western crowds. “Tell, Andy I'll be there ASAP. And tell him I'm sorry I spaced this out and I'll make it up by doing an extra set, okay?”
He hopped out of bed and started grabbing his clothes, asking Jill hopefully, “You coming?”
“No, sweet. It's been a long day and I need to rest for two.” She knew he missed seeing her in the audience, performing for her, but she was too tired for crowds.
“I'll be back early,” he said as he headed out the door.
She smiled and looked at her watch, 10 p.m. Early, by her man's standards, would mean closing the bar at two and shooting the bull with Andy for another couple hours. In fact, if he wasn't back when she got up she'd be mildly concerned, but not upset.
Jim liked to drink and party, not that he was a drunk, or out of control, though he had been drinking heavier than usual lately; but when he got wound up, parties took on a life of their own. And he, of course, lost all track of time.
She chuckled to herself as she settled down in the covers, hoping he would try out his newest song, “I'm Late.” It fit him better than his faded old jeans.
She needn't have worried. Thirty minutes later Jim was up on stage at the Rose with the Lachelle’s, belting it out a-cappella.
I'm late,
Gotta head'em on out,
Cause I got me a date,
with a high class gal that I'm wild about.
I'm late,
fallin' behind,
Kickin' myself 'cos I got spaced out
and wasted my time.
If she'll wait a minute,
with some luck she'll wait for ten
I'm hopin' she'll wait thirty
'cos I'll get there…
about then…
The crowd roared, and Jim knew he had another hit single to build a country-flavored CD around. Like Jill knew he would, Jim started drinking and having a good time. Consequently, it was after one before he headed back to the Brown Palace. Dimly he recalled that he and Jill were supposed to be back at the Freeholds by now, but it was a two-hour drive and he was tired. They could always go in the morning.
*
At the Freeholds, mother nature was throwing a party of her own. Lightning flashed in sheets, dancing eerily among the peaks like Saint Elmo's fire. Thunder rattled windows and hammered eardrums. Torrents of rain spilled from the sky, running off already saturated ground, swelling too-full creeks beyond their banks. Power lines from the hydroelectric plant were down and the phones were out. With the phones went their Internet connections, and cable TV, and in the mountains phone lines or satellite dishes were the only options. Both satellite and radio reception was ruined by the storm. Since the sun had been hidden behind dense rain clouds for the past four days, most homes in the Freeholds were running off battery backup power from their solar PV systems or propane fueled generators.
Michael Whitebear adjusted the tuner and winced at a blast of static before shutting the radio off. He couldn't even raise 85 KOA, the 50,000 watt Denver station that called itself “The Blowtorch of the Rockies.” The last Michael had heard, a flash flood warning had been issued for Park County and some Satanist cult was under siege in Denver. The lamp at his desk flickered and died and then, after a brief dark moment, came back on as the gasoline powered generator fired up automatically.
Always have a backup for your backup, he thought, as he stepped into the hall and checked the gauges on his home power system. The gasoline generator would run low on fuel within six hours. Of course he had about fifty gallons in storage he’d only intended the gas for short term use. He counted on the propane generator for longer term emergencies since propane didn’t deteriorate like gasoline did. It was housed in a storage shed a few feet from his garage and he wondered how long the emergency fuel stores would last. He’d refilled their thousand gallon tank the previous week.
Maybe he should start thawing and cooking the meat in the freezer. No, not yet.
Their old four wheel drive Ford pickup, a ’67 F250 he’d purchased and restored because pre-1974 vehicles didn’t have computer chips that could be fried by an EMP, pulled up in the driveway and the garage door opener whirred into action. A few minutes later, Ellen stepped into the laundry room that separated their garage from the kitchen and hung up a dripping poncho.
“How’s the meeting?” he asked. The Freeholders were holding an emergency session at the community center.
“It’s going well.” She shook her head and her long blonde hair danced in the lamplight. “Any luck?”
“Just static,” he replied, turning the radio do
wn. “What about Aaron Goldstein’s shortwave?”
“Antenna took a lightning strike so it's out of commission. But Randy and Mariko are organizing a flash flood watch and I volunteered us.” She pecked him on the cheek as she entered the living room from the kitchen.
“Good. What shift?”
“I'm on 9-10 and you're on 11-12.” They couldn't serve on the same shift because one of them had to watch their two-year old son--which was also why they both hadn’t been at the meeting house. “Not bad,” he nodded in appreciation. “I expected something around 3:00 or 4:00.”
“We were the first volunteers, so we got first choice,” she explained. “Getting hungry?”
“There's chicken fried rice and honey-garlic green beans in the micro.” It was his turn to cook and he liked oriental food. “Jim and Jill back yet?”
Ellen shook her head, no, grabbed a bite and left to start her shift. Michael fussed with the radio and worried. They’d heard just this afternoon that the asteroid (he still couldn’t believe they were calling it Havoc) would hit sometime tonight--and all he could do was wait.
He went out into the garage and re-checked their stores of freeze dried and dehydrated food, the emergency cache he called it. For his entire adult life he'd never felt comfortable unless he had a cache of nonperishable food, including staples such as flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, honey, rice, beans, canned goods (especially canned meats), beef jerky, some bottled water, a dozen full propane tanks, fifty gallons of gasoline in five gallon cans, a few guns and several boxes of ammo and reloading items. Even though he lived up in the mountains where water tended to be pure he’d invested in several different water filtration devices, an AquaRain 400, a Big Berkey, a Sawyer whole house system and several Katadyn and LifeStraw backpacker-type microfilters. No sense coming down with Giardia or some other bug because of carelessness. He’d stocked emergency medical supplies, including a battlefield surgery kit. He even had an emergency toilet and a year’s supply of Charmin.
Friends used to kid him about being a closet survivalist, but that never deterred him, and now everyone in the Freeholds had a survival stash. Just looking at his soothed his nerves.
He hoped the Cantrell’s would get back before all hell broke loose.
*
DC
“Helms,” Monica answered her hands-free phone while steering around a double parked limo.
“It’s me,” Carl said.
Something about his tone puzzled her so she decided to play it light. “Hey, Don Quixote, tilted at any good windmills lately?”
“More than you know, baby.”
There is was again. That I-have-the-weight-of-the-world-on-my-shoulders tone. “You okay?” she asked, easing her Lexus into the right lane.
After a long pause she heard, “Not sure if I’ll ever be okay again.”
Before she could respond he continued. “I can’t join you at the station like we planned. I have to go to California tonight.”
“I thought all flights were grounded,” she said, her heart sinking.
“Orders from the President,” he said. “Military hop out of Andrews. I don’t suppose you’d consider ditching work and bugging out to sunny California with me, would you?”
Her merge onto the 495 was wobbly enough to start horns blaring. Hard to see though eyes full of tears. “Carl,” she blinked to clear her vision. “I can’t, honey. Not everyone heeded the President’s warning. There are still thousands of people in the DC area who need to know what’s happening tonight.”
“I need you,” he whispered. Then again, stronger, “I need you,” he cried.
She almost sideswiped a taxi and pulled over onto the shoulder. “I need you too, Carl. I love you and I want to be with you, especially tonight, but I...”
This time the pause lasted even longer. She heard an intercom calling his name through her phone.
“I understand, darling,” he said finally. “I love you more than life, but duty calls.”
Chapter 15: Impact
Cape Hatteras, North Carolina: 3:17 am
From the near absolute zero cold of outer space Havoc began its death plunge. Whittled down by Sunflower to slightly less than six miles diameter, burning along at 43,000 mph, it zipped through the last 100 miles of Earth's atmosphere in eight seconds, vaporized the waters of Albemarle Sound and continued unchecked through this thin crustal zone until it slammed into the Mohorovic Discontinuity (that impenetrable boundary between the Earth's crust and mantle also known as the Moho.) There Havoc atomized in the most devastating explosion mankind would ever witness. For the briefest of instants a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky.
The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as middle-Earth quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls.
A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.
From Siberia to Patagonia, Mexico to Australia, dogs howled, monkeys screeched and lions roared, as if the Earth itself was screaming from a mortal wound. On the plains of the Serengeti herds of zebra and wildebeest milled or stampeded. Elephants lifted their trunks to test the air, fanned their ears, and bellowed. Elsewhere, frogs and turtles, with genes ancient enough to recall the last impact, grew quiet and began burying themselves in the mud. Spiders hurried to strengthen webs, and ants reinforced the walls of their nurseries.
In the oceans, fish normally found in schools dispersed at high speed, octopi sought holes, clams hid in their shells and humpbacked whales began a mournful song.
Air parted by Havoc's passage slammed back together like the hands of Titans, generating a sonic wave so intense it shattered living flesh for hundreds of miles around. People and their pets exploded like marshmallows in a microwave. Flocks of birds rained from the sky.
A blast of air so powerful it shredded storm systems and disrupted normal weather patterns circled the globe. In Europe people clapped hands over their ears and eyed each other fearfully as glass splintered into shards. In Asia, bustling populations stopped cold for a heartbeat then resumed moving with a renewed sense of urgency. The Appalachian Mountains bore the brunt of the shock wave from the blast. The East slopes were denuded of forests, towns and cities, while deflecting much of the energy back up into space where it tore gaping holes in the growing cloud of magma, saving several areas around the globe from the devastation to follow.
Fire-hot magma shot into the stratosphere and, like an oven on broil, flash-dried cities, forests and grasslands all over the world, before falling to the ground like showers of lit matches. Smoke from countless burnings roiled up into the atmosphere, adding to the dust and debris of impact.
The waters of the Atlantic rushed back into the caldron that had been Albemarle Sound, flashing into steam as it met magma welling forth to heal the monstrous wound. The hellish heat added to the low pressure area formed by the blast and a storm larger and more violent than any man had seen began to form.
Tectonic plates, those turtle-slow bearers of continents and oceans, slipped like a race cars on an oil slick. Seismic waves born in the depths and harmonically amplified rippled parts of the surface like a flag in a breeze, dropping bridges and buildings, annihilating roads, and breaching gas mains which ignited, adding to the infernos raging everywhere.
Oceans sloshed like water in a washbowl sending mountainous tsunamis racing back and forth across the seas of the world slamming into coastlines, smashing their way far inland. From Holland to Bangladesh, low-lying nations were swallowed by the hungry waters.
In Antarctica, the
Ross Ice shelf cracked and slid into the sea. Pacific atolls dropped beneath the waves. Hong Kong and Singapore were swept away. Athens, Amsterdam, Rio, Naples, London, Sydney, Tokyo--gone, along with almost every coastal city in the world. So complete was the devastation that when one-third of the island of Hawaii split off and plunged into the ocean raising a thousand foot tsunami that slammed into Australia only those aboard the ISS noticed.
In the United States, most of Florida vanished along with much of the Gulf Coast. At the northern tip of the Gulf of California a crack appeared and widened, running east and north to the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah. The Pacific rushed in as Death Valley, Las Vegas, and much of western Utah dropped beneath the waves. Kingman, Arizona and Nephi, Utah became beachfront towns.
From Vermont to Illinois a new mountain chain thrust skyward building steadily as its volcanoes spewed toxins and lava with abandon. The Great Lakes drained like a flushing toilet and that fresh water tsunami caught the residents of Chicago very much by surprise. In the days and months to come Eastern Texas, Oklahoma, and much of Kansas would sink beneath the waves. Parts of relatively sheltered Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, much of Los Angeles, Houston, New York, Boston surrendered to the raging seas.
No nation, no city, no society or people escaped the apocalyptic violence. Nations dissolved and civilization vanished along with its roads, bridges, dams, and power lines. In the entire world only six prepared shelters remained intact and those had all been designed to withstand a direct nuclear blast. The FEMA camps in the interior of the continent were incinerated by fire balls raining from the sky.
Aboard the ISS the members of the Genesis Project watched in horror as the world tore itself apart. They remained glued to their view screens, unable to tear themselves away until a smoky pall formed over Earth, a funeral shroud for civilization, as skies darkened like a fadeout at the end of a movie.
The Dying Time (Book 1): Impact Page 12
