by Lauren Esker
"Astrophysicist," Sarah said with a smile, turning back at the bottom of the stairs. The old pain was dull enough now that she could talk about it, even laugh about it, without hurting. That was the thing about childhood dreams. You imagined all kinds of wild things about your future, and then you grew up and learned to have smaller dreams, simpler dreams, the kind that were easy to achieve.
"You deserve the stars, Sarah," her father said quietly. "You shouldn't put it all on hold to take care of me and the farm."
"I'm taking classes, aren't I?" Sarah said with a lightness she didn't quite feel. Part-time, true—at the rate she was going, it would take her twenty years to get a degree—but a couple of days a week were all she could manage while still living at home, with the long drive to the university in Eau Claire. "Now I'd better get going or I'll miss the show."
She hurried up the stairs, as much to get away from the conversation as to avoid missing a few minutes of meteor-watching.
It doesn't matter. I probably wouldn't have been much of an astrophysicist anyway. I'll eventually marry some local boy just like my mom did, and settle down to raise sheep and take care of the family farm. I'll still have the stars in the evening. That'll be all right.
Small dreams, she reminded herself as she packed the telescope into its carrying case. Small, easy dreams, the kind of dreams that couldn't be upset by your mom getting a terminal cancer diagnosis when you were fifteen or your dad having a bad farm accident a couple of years later.
Just because she had once dreamed of the stars didn't mean she couldn't learn to enjoy a life on the farm. She had once imagined the universe, but now its boundaries had narrowed to the borders of a rural Wisconsin county, and that was okay too. Or so she told herself. The stars were still up there, old familiar friends keeping her company in the autumn dusk.
She trotted down the stairs with her arms piled high with her skywatching gear. She had her telescope and tripod, DSLR camera for taking night shots, night sky field guide, camp chair ... what else was she going to want? A good jacket, she thought, shrugging into the heavy sheepskin-lined one that always hung on a hook by the kitchen door. And a sandwich and thermos of coffee would probably be a good idea, too.
Her father, busy with his project, didn't seem to notice her leave. She loaded her kit into the passenger seat of the farm truck and pulled out of the driveway onto their little rural road.
The road to the lake skirted the edge of Sidonie, Wisconsin, pop. 1092. A truck laden with laughing teens roared around her, spraying gravel from its rear tires. Going to one of those bonfire parties along the lake that her dad was worried about, she thought with a smile. She'd been to a few of them as a teen, but she liked the peace and solitude of stargazing better.
She turned off the lake road onto a rutted dirt access road that took her down to the beach. This late in the fall, the lake was nearly deserted. The summer houses had been boarded up for the season, the boats pulled out of the water. Far down the beach she saw a small flicker of light and heard tinny strains of music from what was probably the end-of-season bonfire that the kids had been going to. It looked like it was the only one.
Good. Better star watching for her.
She set up her camp chair and her telescope. She had a bigger and better telescope at home, but the portable one with the carrying case was good for traveling because she didn't mind if she bumped it when she was throwing it into the truck or hauling it through the woods. She'd had it since she was a kid. Through the old plastic eyepiece, she had gotten her first glimpse of Saturn's rings. She'd watched comets and meteors, and experienced a rare view of an aurora borealis straying far enough south to light up the northern sky in shades of red and green.
"We've come a long way together, haven't we, old gal?" she murmured, patting the telescope as she looked up at the sky. Just as she looked up, a meteor flickered briefly, and Sarah smiled. That was a good sign of a nice display tonight.
The Orionids weren't the most spectacular meteor shower on the calendar, but they were the last one before the weather got cold. So far, the October night wasn't too bad. She'd been able to see her breath as she packed the truck, but the sheepskin jacket was keeping her warm. She tucked her hands into her pockets, curling one of them around the thermos of coffee she'd poked in there. It was, as she'd hoped, a good night for stargazing, clear and dark. There was some light pollution from the town off to the west, but it wasn't too bad with no cloud cover to trap and reflect it.
Another shooting star appeared and vanished in the dark sky over the lake, arcing between the stars, there and gone. Two so far, and she'd hardly been here ten minutes—
Wait—what was that?
This was a bright reddish light in a part of the sky where she knew there shouldn't be a star, not one like that. It was in the wrong place for Mars or Venus too. A satellite, maybe? Sarah reached for her telescope.
Several times in her night-sky watching excursions, she'd had the rare treat of seeing a meteor explode. Twice it was a bright flash, too high to see any details. Other times she'd gotten to see them pop like fireworks as they plunged into the Earth's atmosphere.
And there was always some small part of her that hoped to see a UFO. Not that she believed in UFOs, not in the alien spaceship sense. But if you spent a lot of time staring up at the night sky, sooner or later you might see something a little out of the ordinary, something you couldn't quite identify. That was the actual meaning of UFO, anyway: unidentified flying object. There was a lot of interesting stuff up there—space junk, military aircraft, satellites, experimental rockets, weather balloons.
Maybe this was her first UFO.
The telescope didn't make it any easier to identify; it just made it brighter. It was a vivid red flaring to yellow-white at its center, the color of an object heating up on contact with atmosphere. Through the telescope, she could make out a little of the comet-trail of hot air and debris that it would be leaving behind, but only a truncated hint of it. An object like this should be leaving an incredibly long trail, like in footage she'd seen of space shuttle reentry.
If the tail looked so short she couldn't even see it with the telescope's aid, that meant it was headed almost directly for Wisconsin.
Sarah straightened up from the telescope. The object was so bright now that no one looking up at the night sky, even in a cursory glance, could possibly miss it. As she stared up at it, the air shivered around her with a sudden, low rumble.
Sonic boom, she thought. It was going faster than the speed of sound when it hit the atmosphere. Probably still is. Just like the space shuttle.
It seemed shocking that an object this large could have slipped into Earth's atmosphere undetected. NASA tracked everything of significant size that might risk a collision with Earth, and Sarah followed several sites and message boards devoted to near-Earth objects. She would definitely have heard of anything large expected in Earth's neighborhood tonight. However, she also knew from following those message boards that new objects were discovered all the time. There was always a chance—not a large chance anymore, but still a chance—that an object large enough to cause the extinction of all life on Earth could slip through the network of official space observatories and amateur astronomers guarding the night skies to plow into the planet undetected. Space was unspeakably huge, after all.
Maybe this was that extinction-causing object.
Yet she wasn't scared. Wonder filled her instead. This was why she'd wanted to be an astrophysicist in the first place. If this was going to be the giant asteroid that wiped out humankind, she was getting to see it. She was getting to watch it land.
Possibly right on top of her. It was shockingly bright now, lighting up the trees around her, bright enough to cast shadows. Far down the beach, the music cut out, and she heard distant, startled voices.
All Sarah could do was stare. She could hardly even blink, even though it was so bright it made her eyes water. She didn't want to miss a second of this. Especially if th
ese were her last moments on Earth.
If this is how I die, what a way to go.
She could hear it now, or rather, feel it, the way she'd been able to feel the sonic boom a few moments earlier. The air around her seemed to tremble.
And then it was upon her. Heat washed over her, and Sarah belatedly realized she'd have a better chance of surviving this if she got down on the ground. All she had time to do was throw her arms over her head before the object hit the water with a tremendous CRACK!
The shockwave hit her an instant later, knocking her down. As she sat up dazedly, covered with sand, she was just in time to see a wave racing inland, topped with foam, high enough to blot out the dark line of trees on the opposite shore.
Her telescope! She made a desperate lunge for it, just as the wave caught her and she was suddenly underwater. The wave rolled her like a pinball into the woods. She tumbled into the brush with a painful crash, disoriented and terrified. Somehow she maintained the presence of mind to throw her arms around a tree trunk, stopping her from being battered to death among the trees. Water was all around her; she couldn't tell up from down. And then the wave receded, leaving her shivering and coughing at the edge of the woods.
She clung to the tree until it was clear no more waves were coming and then sat up, stretching out each of her limbs at a time. She was dripping wet and slightly bruised, but nothing seemed to be broken. It took her a couple of attempts to stand up on her shaking legs, and then she tottered out of the trees onto the beach.
High waves still lapped up the sand, but no worse than she'd seen in winter storms. Her truck was still where she'd parked it, too big and heavy to be moved. Her little skywatching nest was completely gone, telescope, camp chair and all.
Maybe the telescope had been pushed into the trees, Sarah thought dazedly, rather than being sucked out into the depths of the lake. She would have to come back in daylight and look for it. At least she hadn't gotten around to taking the DSLR camera out of the truck yet, so she hadn't lost that.
And ... there was something out among the waves, bobbing on the lake.
She walked on rubbery legs down the beach until the purling waves lapped at her boots. The lake was starting to settle down now, rocking gently like the surface of a giant tub of water. The floating thing on the lake was about thirty yards offshore. She could see it mainly because it still glowed a faint, dull red from the heat of its reentry. It seemed to have broken apart when it hit the water; she could see bits and pieces floating on the surface, sinking rapidly out of sight.
The biggest intact piece of the object was vaguely roundish and maybe the size of one of the small outbuildings on the farm, not barn-sized, more like chicken-house-sized. It bristled with oddly angled parts, although she couldn't tell if that was because it had a bunch of antennas and things poking out, or because it had been crumpled and damaged in its crash landing, so she was looking at pieces of its exterior that had been broken and partly torn away.
It was getting harder to pick out the object from the dark water. The red glow was fading as it cooled, and more than that, she realized it was sinking into the lake. In moments it would be gone from sight.
Something moved abruptly, a large section of the main body of the thing flipping up and outward. For just an instant, Sarah glimpsed what was unmistakably a figure starting to clamber out—
—and then the whole object heeled over and sank very abruptly beneath the waves. Water rushed into the space where it had been.
Sarah stood and stared, even as a higher wave of displaced water swamped her up to the thighs and made her stagger.
There had been a person in that thing.
A test pilot?
An astronaut?
Whatever she'd just witnessed, whether it was a torn-off piece of the International Space Station falling to earth, or the crash of an experimental military test plane, or something else entirely, there had been a person in it. And they weren't coming up.
Sarah threw her sodden sheepskin jacket onto the beach and kicked off her boots. She ran into the water and met the next wave head-on, diving into it.
The October lake felt like ice, even to her already chilled skin. She was courting hypothermia; she couldn't stay out here long.
But she was a strong swimmer, a legacy of hot summer days at the lake, when she and the other kids from neighboring farms used to paddle around in the water to cool off. Back in her teens she'd been a strong enough swimmer to make it all the way across the lake. Those days were behind her now, but working on the farm kept her in good shape, and she was naturally buoyant even with her soaked sweater starting to weigh her down.
She stroked hard, swimming toward where she had watched the object go down. Something jostled her under the water, a piece of floating debris that slid away from her when she reached for it; she felt a sharp edge of metal brush her fingers. In the cold water, it was slightly warm to the touch.
Abruptly, something alive and struggling broke the surface just in front of her, thrashing in a spray of water droplets and then going under.
Sarah dived after that struggling figure. She caught a fistful of what felt like hair and kicked toward the surface.
They splashed into the air together. She released her grip on the other person's hair, but he clutched at her, starting to drag them both down again.
"No!" Sarah gasped, shaking him. Her head went under the surface and she kicked up again, gripping him by a—bare?!—arm. "Relax! Try to float! I've—augh! blerk!—got you!"
She had no formal lifeguarding experience, but her gym teacher, Mr. Mancuso, had made sure that if the kids were going to spend the summer down by the lake, they'd all know the fundamentals, not just for rescuing each other but also because summer people often came out to the lake without knowing how to properly swim. He'd also warned them that drowning people could easily drag you down with them. And that seemed to be what this guy was doing. Her hands slid off his torso, catching on bits of metal or plastic; he was wearing some kind of slippery body suit that left his arms bare, which didn't give her any good purchase to grip, not like a jacket or sweater would have.
But then he went limp, as if he'd suddenly figured out what she was trying to do, or perhaps remembered his own water rescue training. It immediately became obvious that he was too heavy and dense to float on his own—guys often were, according to Mr. Mancuso, because they typically had less body fat and more muscle than girls—but Sarah got her arm under his shoulders. She felt him start to struggle again as his body tipped back in the water, then relax (kind of; he was still tense as hell), and a moment later they were drifting in a rescue position, with his head against her shoulder.
"That's it," she panted. She was starting to shiver. They had to get out of the water as fast as possible or they'd both be in trouble. "I'm just going to swim toward the shore. Float with me. Okay?"
She couldn't tell how out of it he was, but he understood enough of what was going on to let his body trail in the water as she towed him toward the beach. His wet hair rested against her cheek, his head on her shoulder. She could feel him breathing in short, shallow gasps.
"Slow breaths will make you panic less," she told him between strokes, dredging up another fragment of Mr. Mancuso's lifeguarding wisdom. She was going to have to look up her old gym teacher and thank him someday. "If you hyperventilate, it makes it worse. Try to slow your breathing if you can."
There was no answer, and his breathing didn't slow down, but he seemed to relax a little more, as if her voice itself was calming to him.
She was shivering hard by the time her feet finally touched the lake bottom. From here it was a desperate scramble onto the beach, with Test Pilot Guy clumsily helping. Together they stumbled out of the waves and fell onto the sand in a tangle of limbs.
"Oh my God, oh my God." It was half profanity and half prayer; she was laughing in relief as she unwound herself from her rescuee. Now that they were out of the water and he didn't seem too badly hurt, the
impact of the adventure was starting to hit her, leaving her dazed and giggly. It really was an adventure, the most amazing one she'd ever had, a million percent better than getting chased by the Wazlowskis' bull at age eleven or that time she got lost with Jeremy McManus in the woods behind the lake. "Oh, my God, can you believe this is happening? Can you believe you survived that? Can you believe we're actually—erk!"
In the middle of her giddy babbling, Test Pilot Guy erupted from the ground, a sudden explosive movement so fast she had no time to react with anything but a startled, strangled cry as she was slammed into the sand. The next thing she knew, she was flat on her back with his knee jammed into her chest and something sharp and hard pressed to her throat.
3
___
S ARAH STARED UP at her captor in mixed panic and disbelief. In the darkness, all she could see was a black silhouette framed against the dim glow of the lights from town.
"Are you kidding me? I rescued you! Jerk!"
... was what she would have said, had she been able to breathe. Instead, she could only squeak for air, trying to flap her hands in distress as he held her pinned.
The only self-defense she'd ever learned was how to chase off a stray dog threatening the sheep. Having a big, heavy guy kneeling on her chest, pressing a knife against her throat (and where had it even come from?) was so far beyond all her experience that her mind was a humming, panicked blank.
Test Pilot Guy, now downgraded to Potential Rapist Asshole, stared down at her in total silence. Or at least she assumed he was staring. She couldn't see anything except a faint glitter of his eyes somewhere in the shadows blotting out his face.
Black spots were starting to blot out everything. She really couldn't breathe. Just as she teetered on the edge of either total panic or passing out, the guy suddenly jerked away from her, scrambling backward in the sand and falling onto his ass.
Sarah gasped and coughed and sat up.
