No one spoke for a full two minutes. There was nothing anyone could say or do to make this situation palatable.
Finally, Bryan spoke. “Those of you who are on medication, start stocking up now. Go to different doctors. Don’t tell them you’ve been seen by anyone else. Merely tell them you’re a new patient who hasn’t been to the doctor in awhile. Let them do labs on you and prescribe you medications. Ask for a 90 day supply. Get them filled at a local drugstore, and then see a different doctor to do the same thing again.
“Get as much medicine as you can. You won’t be able to get enough, but the more you get, the slower we can wean you off of them. And the more time we’ll have to try to find a non-prescription substitute.”
Mark said “We’ll come for you a few days before the meteorite hits. Pack lightly. No more than a couple of suitcases per person. Bring your precious memories and your medicines. Leave the jewelry and valuables behind. They won’t be of any use to you anymore.
“And please, I can’t emphasis this enough. You cannot tell anyone, no matter how much you want to. All it takes is one person knowing our secret to put us all at risk.”
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NOV 21, 2015 7 WEEKS UNTIL IMPACT
President Sanders cleared his throat as he took the podium.
“My fellow Americans, I want to give you an update regarding Saris 7 and our mission to divert it from earth.
“Our best and brightest NASA scientists, and technical experts from the United States Air Force, are now on the ground in the People’s Republic of China.
“Our NASA experts concluded that they simply do not have time to build and prepare a rocket to do what we need it to do.
“China, on the other hand, has a three stage rocket on their launch pad. They were planning to use it to launch a new military satellite before we found out about Saris 7. Now, they have consented to allow our technical experts to retrofit the rocket and mount a 20 megaton warhead onto it.
“It will take a top team of experts and scientists from each country, working together, to make this happen.
“The rocket is scheduled to be launched on January 14th, one day before impact. It cannot be launched before then because the rocket will use liquid rocket fuel, and has a limited fuel capacity.
“Once free of the earth’s atmosphere, the rocket will travel to a point 112,000 miles from earth, where it will be directly in the meteorite’s path.
“The best computer in the world will be on board, and it, not man, will determine the optimum time to detonate the warhead.
“It will have a very small window, but our experts, and the experts on the Chinese side, have assured me that it will be successful.
“Now, my friends, I must ask for your help. We are losing control of our streets. The rioting going on in our cities must stop. The looting must stop. Our police forces are becoming overwhelmed.
“I have asked the Department of Justice to appeal to district and county court judges across the country to stop granting bail to looters and rioters. We want to send a very strong message to those of you who will steal from your neighbors, and your neighbor’s businesses, that if you are caught, you will sit in jail until your trial date. That may be weeks or months. That pound of hamburger, that case of water, that television set, is not worth several months in jail. Trust me, it just isn’t.
“The same holds true for rioters. Now is the time to be calm. Running rampant through the streets in an effort to cause chaos and anarchy isn’t going to do anyone any good. If you are jailed for rioting, you will also be jailed indefinitely.
“I have also talked to each of the governors across the country and given them authorization to use their military bases, and military policemen, to help house prisoners if their civilian jails and prisons get overcrowded. We simply will not let our streets be taken over by hoodlums and thieves.
“Lastly, an appeal for hope. We are all in this together. This government works for you. We are not, contrary to wild rumors, going to protect ourselves and let others perish. We have a handle on the situation, and no one is in danger.
“Please, please, do not lose hope. Do not take your own life, or the lives of others. To do so would be to die needlessly. And that would be an awful shame.
“Thank you very much for being patient through this crisis. Please continue to be strong. Please continue to pray for our people who are in China working on this problem. Pray that all goes well, so that on January 15th, we can watch Saris 7 go flying by in a new, harmless orbit.
“Thank you. And God bless you all.”
Before he introduced the President, his press secretary had informed the press that the President would take no questions.
But the press was having none of it.
As Sanders left the briefing room, flanked by six heavily armed secret service agents, the reporters shouted questions behind him.
“Mr. President! Why does the military still have control of all the observatories? What is it you don’t want the world to see?”
“Mr. President! Why hasn’t the first family been seen in over two weeks? Are they already in the bunker?”
“Mr. President! What about the all of the hundreds of trucks that have been coming in and out of the area around Arlington National Cemetery? Can you give us any information about them?”
“Mr. President! What if the warhead misses? Then what?”
But he was long gone.
“Well, what did you think?” Mark asked the group.
Hannah spoke up first. “I think he’s full of crap. He’s lying through his teeth to buy himself time.”
Bryan countered “Hey, none of us know what the Chinese are capable of doing. What if their technology is better than ours? Maybe they really have the capability of pulling this thing off, of knocking Saris 7 off track.”
“No.” Sarah said. “It’s not possible. There are too many things working against them. Just getting there is iffy. And getting the nuke out of the earth’s atmosphere without it burning up is iffy. They are not protected the way a rocket to the moon is, for example. They weren’t made to be. They weren’t made to ever leave the earth’s atmosphere.
“If it is retrofitted and enclosed in heavy steel to protect it from burning up, will that protection interfere with its operation? Will it prevent it from firing? Will going through the atmosphere damage the electrical components, or the computer that tells it when to explode?
“There are a million things that would have to work in order for this to happen, and only one thing that would have to go wrong to prevent it.
“As far as I’m concerned, he’s full of crap. This is just a red herring. It’s only meant to get the country off his back until Saris 7 hits. And by that time he’ll be safe and sound in his bunker and there won’t be a damn thing anyone can do about it.
The other three all looked at Mark, who was the only one not to voice his opinion.
“I agree with the girls. I think the whole reason they supposedly moved the problem to China is because the government controls the media there. China can say whatever the hell they want to say, and there won’t be any reporters to contradict them.
“Hell, there may not even be a rocket at all.”
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Hannah and Sarah sat at a table in the back corner of Burger King with Mark’s sister Karen, and her husband David.
David had been a dentist for several years, and was a good one at that. He’d developed a family of loyal patients in and around San Angelo, and was earning a reputation as one of the sharpest young dental implant specialists in Texas.
He knew his stuff.
But he didn’t know beans about physics, or the forces of nature.
David and Karen had met the girls for lunch so that he could give Hannah a list of things to order for the mine’s dental clinic. He, as a registered physician, would have no problem getting a good supply of anesthesia and painkillers. But there were a lot of other supplies he’d need as well to pull and fill teeth, buil
d crowns, and make and fit dentures.
Hannah had bragged about her procurement skills, so David decided to put her to work.
Hannah didn’t mind, of course. Her list of things she was ordering for Mark and Bryan was dwindling down and she had more time on her hands. So much time that she was going crazy, puttering around the mine all day.
So she was the one who suggested, and Sarah quickly agreed, that they were going to get out of the mine, and feel sunshine on their faces one last time, before they were locked away for years.
This was that one last time.
After David had passed his wish list on to Hannah and given her a couple of recommended dental supply sources, talk turned to Saris 7.
“What I don’t understand,” David said, “is why you say a nuclear weapon doesn’t have much of a chance of working. I mean, that’s one hell of an explosion. It seems to me that, even aiming at a moving target, with an explosion that big, that you don’t have to score a direct hit. That all you have to do is come close.”
Hannah and Sarah, in perfect harmony, each uttered “the atmosphere.” at the same time.
Then they looked at each other and chuckled.
Sarah explained to David, and to Karen, who was also listening very intently.
“Okay, if you were going hunting for a bird, and the bird moved very fast, and you weren’t a very good shot, would you have better luck using a shot gun or a .22 rifle?”
“A shotgun, of course. You’d have a much bigger spread, and much more chance of hitting your target.”
“Okay, good. Now let’s say a shotgun wasn’t available. You have no choice but to use the .22. Only you couldn’t lead the bird, and you couldn’t aim at him. All you could do was aim the gun at a point where you thought the bird would cross and then pull the trigger when you thought he’d pass by. Do you think you’d hit the bird?”
“Probably not.”
Hannah took over for Sarah. “Okay, when you set off a nuclear explosion on earth, it’s the oxygen-rich atmosphere that allows the explosion to spread. Air moves out of the way very quickly. It moves out of the way and lets the explosion and its shock waves happen.
“But in space, there is no atmosphere. No oxygen at all. No air to give the explosion a place to expand. So you don’t have a mushroom cloud, and a huge fireball. You have the same amount of energy, yes. But it is much more compact, and in a much smaller area. And it would go bang, and then quickly dissipate into space. So it wouldn’t have like a shotgun effect.
“The other thing is the shotgun and the .22. Both of them, the shotgun shell and the bullet, have roughly the same amount of gunpowder, and therefore the same rough amount of force. Shotgun pellets don’t travel as far, but have a greater killing field, so they’re great for close or medium range. The bullet travels much farther, but in a single straight line. It can do much more damage than a single shotgun pellet, but you only have one shot so you better be on target.
“Theoretically, if you were trying to shoot a meteorite out of the sky, the shotgun would be your best option because you have a much better chance of hitting it. But, the force of a shotgun if you do hit it isn’t as great as the force that would be concentrated in that one single bullet.
“In space, because of the lack of atmosphere, that shotgun blast becomes almost the same as the .22. What I mean is that the nuclear explosion, instead of being widespread like a shotgun blast, would be very tightly concentrated, more like the bullet.
“And with a meteorite that’s flying at 38,000 miles an hour, you’d better be a damn good shot.”
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DEC 27, 2015 19 DAYS UNTIL IMPACT
Christmas had been different this year in houses all over the world. Celebrations were much more subdued.
Shopping between Thanksgiving and Christmas eve was only a third what it was the year before. The television hacks argued over the reason. Some maintained that Americans had resolved themselves to the fact that they were going to die, and didn’t feel like celebrating. Others believed that Americans had already spent their money on survival supplies and extra food, and simply had no more left to spend. Still others said that people were just holding back, waiting to see what happened. And if Saris never hit and they survived past January 15th, then they’d find time to celebrate.
The Macy’s annual Christmas parade was cancelled for the first time since the war years. There was just too little interest in putting it on.
One thing certain was that Christmas got back to being about families, and close friends and other loved ones. It wasn’t commercial. It was traditional. It was about being together. For the first time in a long time.
America, like most of the rest of the world, hadn’t changed much over the previous couple of weeks. There were still two very distinct frames of mind regarding Saris 7. Naysayers continued to scoff, and to laugh at those who were prepping for disaster. The believers continued to spend every waking moment fortifying their homes against looters, and stockpiling whatever food and supplies they could find and afford.
Churches continued to do a bang-up business. God’s casual followers continued to come in droves, suddenly deciding it was time to be saved. Catholic churches had to call in extra priests and set up additional confessionals. All occasional catholics in the country, it seemed, wanted to be absolved of their sins.
The same thing happened at protestant churches. Mass baptisms were happening daily, six days a week. Some churches were even doing them after Sunday morning services.
And the church coffers were overflowing. Many pastors were already contemplating the new renovations they’d make to their churches with all the money that was flowing in. If, indeed, they were still around to make the changes.
The Pope took the official position that his followers need not worry. God would prevent Saris 7 from happening. He said that man had not yet finished their work for God. And that God would allow them to continue it.
But not all good catholics shared the Pope’s optimism. Suicide rates were skyrocketing all across the world. Many morgues across the country were resorting to desperate measures to keep from getting overrun. Some were shipping bodies to mortuaries for cremation if unclaimed for 24 hours after completion of autopsy. Others weren’t even waiting that long.
Others leased refrigerated trucks and parked them adjacent to the morgue, to hold all the bodies until they got around to them.
One funeral home in Mississippi was under indictment for taking forty John Doe bodies from the county coroner, accepting internment fees for burying them, then throwing them into a huge mass grave and bulldozing dirt over the top of them.
And police all over America were responding to “foul smells” coming from eerily quiet houses.
City landfills were finding large quantities of dead animals which had been killed and tossed into dumpsters. Apparently some families chose to euthanize their pets instead of watching them starve to death.
Others chose to keep their dogs around as long as possible. They might need them as food later on.
Most schools’ enrollment was at fifty percent or less by this time. Many families simply stopped sending their children to class. They wanted to keep them at home, and spend as much time with them as possible, before the end came.
Other families had moved to different parts of the country, where they thought it would be easier to survive. And simply didn’t bother to enroll their kids into the new schools.
Businesses felt the pinch as well. Hard-core believers simply stopped going to work by the millions. The government stopped tracking unemployment numbers. It just no longer seemed to matter.
In the mine, it was business as usual. Hannah continued to order last minute supplies. Bryan continued to sit at the old feed store three days a week waiting for deliveries, then driving them over to the mine.
Sarah continued to mine the internet, copying anything and everything she could find that she thought might be of any future interest to one of the forty.
She was also building a music library by downloading hundreds of songs per day. There was a rumor that the largest music download site was going down any day now to ride out the storm, and she wanted to collect as much as possible until then.
Hannah was ordering a truckload of bottled water from the Coca Cola plant in San Antonio every day, and would continue to do so until they sealed the mine.
The water came in 20 ounce bottles, stored 24 bottles to a case, in brown boxes marked “Dasani” on all four sides. Thirty six cases to a pallet, stacked in six layers of six boxes.
Bryan was lining the pallets up wherever there was space in the mine.
All agreed it was probably overkill. After all, if they calculated correctly, they already had enough water to fulfill their needs.
But hey, they had the money, so why not add a little insurance?
Bryan finally figured out that Hannah wasn’t going to order the truckload of beer and spirits he’d asked for, so he took matters into his own hands.
He borrowed Mark’s Explorer and made a trip to a package store in south San Angelo one Friday morning.
He filled it full of Bud Light. In cans. They had a longer shelf-life than bottles. And he bought a few liters of Jose Cuervo as well. It would still be good when the beer ran out.
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JAN 8, 2016 7 DAYS UNTIL IMPACT
The three of them convoyed to the only mall San Angelo had, and met on the edge of the west parking lot. Hannah drove one of the RVs from Bay 3. Mark drove another. Bryan drove one of the small trucks and followed close behind.
At 9 a.m., as planned, the last seventeen of the forty met them there. Everyone else had been gathered up and taken to the mine a few days before.
Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon Page 14
