The day after: An apocalyptic morning

by Jessy Cruise

  The day after

  An apocalyptic morning

  Jessy Cruise

  A comet crashes on earth. Most of the humanity is gone but for those who have survived nothing will ever be the same. The world has changed, the people have different ways of life, the morals are shifted. A new world is at our doors: what are we gonna do? Who will survive? For how long?

  Copyright© 2015 by Jessy Cruise

  Part 1

  It was called Comet Stendell. Named for the eighteen year old English amateur astronomer who first detected it as an out of place smudge of light just past the orbit of Saturn, it was an irregularly shaped chunk of frozen methane, ammonia, and water mixed with a scattering of rock. Preliminary calculations revealed it would pass alarmingly close to the Earth after its spin around the sun, as it headed back towards the deep space beyond Pluto from which it had come. This led to a fever of religious conversions and mass hysteria in those first few days as reputable scientists gleefully went on television to explain just what this mass of ice was capable of doing if it actually struck the planet. Though Stendell was not a huge comet - it was just a hair over two miles long and just a hair under a mile wide - the velocity at which it was moving was enough to cause a global catastrophe, particularly if it struck the ocean.

  But after those first tense days things calmed down considerably when, by unanimous agreement of scientists from across the globe, it was announced that while Stendell would be close, it would still pass more than three thousand miles from the Earth. These same scientists who had stirred up the hysteria in the first place calmed it by explaining that the course they predicted the comet to take was based upon Newtonian laws and was absolute. They assured the people of Earth that there was no guesswork or speculation and no possibility of error. Stendell would provide perhaps the most spectacular celestial show in recorded history and would then leave them in peace.

  And so while everyone on the small blue planet settled in to watch the glowing tail of the close encounter that October, none of them realized that their coveted scientific community had made a terrible, lethal miscalculation. It was just a little error, easily attributed to mankind's lack of knowledge about the exact makeup of these strange travelers, but it was enough.

  Just past the orbit of Mars, solar radiation began to bombard Stendell with enough energy to vaporize the outer layer of its surface, sending it outward behind it in the spectacular tail that was indicative of such objects. Night after night the tail grew longer and brighter as the amount of radiation striking it increased until finally it trailed across more than ten degrees of the night sky. Stendell disappeared briefly as it reached the extreme of its orbit and was pulled around the sun, reappearing later on the other side, this time with the tail facing towards the Earth. Night after night, all over the planet, people clustered outside of their homes to see the strangely beautiful show that was being staged for them. As Stendell grew closer still it became possible to see the tail even during the daylight hours under favorable conditions.

  When it was just past the orbit of Venus a few scientists began to note that Stendell was not exactly where they thought it should be. Though the discrepancy was minute, there really was not a lot of margin for error when you were talking about only a three thousand mile difference in orbits. The scientists did not raise any sort of alarm at this time since their calculations still showed the comet passing more than fifteen hundred miles from Earth's atmosphere. Instead, they tried to figure out just where their careful and supposedly ironclad calculations had gone wrong. Why wasn't the comet following the basic principals of Newtonian theory? What had thrown its orbit off?

  The answer, though they would never know it, was thrust. As the comet slowly turned on its axis while under the influence of the sun's rays, pockets of methane and ammonia would periodically explode, releasing pressure. These explosions were not noticeable by the many peering instruments that kept watch on the comet. They were very small and they always occurred on the sunward side. Individually they did little to move the large chunk of ice. But collectively, day after day, hour after hour, they nudged Stendell further and further off of its projected course and closer and closer to a lethal intersection with Earth.

  Two days before the pass-by, the scientists began to become seriously alarmed by what they were seeing. Their calculations now showed that Stendell would pass less than five hundred miles from the surface of the earth. That was almost close enough to skip through the thin layer of upper atmosphere! And still they had no idea why the point of passage continued to grow closer. On the surface of the comet itself pockets continued to intermittently ignite and by twenty-four hours prior to closest approach it became apparent to anyone with the ability to perform the equations that, barring a miracle, a collision was inevitable.

  The scientific communities of the various nations on Earth all informed their various governments of the coming impact. Inquiries were made in each case as to whether anything could be done to either destroy the comet or nudge it to a safer course. In every case the answer was a firm no. Stendell was simply too large and moving too fast. So while the various government leaders and wealthy insiders of Earth tried to make a mad dash to whatever underground place of safety they had access to, it was decided that there was nothing to be gained by informing the general public of what was to come. There really was no place for them to hide even if it was possible to get them all there. Had there been even a little more time, the secret undoubtedly would have leaked. A secret as horrible and as far-reaching as this one could not have been kept. But there was not more time.

  On October 12 - a Thursday in the western hemisphere – Comet Stendell, moving at approximately 100,000 mph, impacted the Pacific Ocean 600 miles off the coast of Oregon. Its trip through the atmosphere took a mere eight seconds to complete, during which time friction heated its surface to nearly thirty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. This superheated mass slammed through the water and buried itself in the very mantle of the earth. The release of energy that resulted was so powerful that the entire world's stock of thermonuclear weapons being detonated at once would have seemed a child's firecracker in comparison. Rock and sludge from the sea bottom was exploded outward before falling back to earth hundreds, even thousands of miles away. An actual hole, more than a hundred miles in diameter, appeared for nearly twelve hours in the Pacific Ocean as the tremendous heat boiled billions of tons of seawater into steam sending thick, gray clouds into the atmosphere. As more water rushed in to fill this void, it too was boiled away to vapor. Aside from this hole in the ocean, the impact sent huge tidal waves outward, tidal waves unlike anything ever seen before. The first set was more than two hundred feet high and moved at nearly the speed of sound. They would keep moving until they struck something.

  The first catastrophic effect to be felt by the inhabitants of the earth came from the shockwaves of the mantle impact. They traveled outward along the planetary crust, circling the globe in less than twenty minutes and releasing the pent-up energy from every fault line they crossed. Everywhere along the surface of the planet, earthquakes erupted on a scale hardly even imagined. In nearly every country, buildings and bridges crashed to the ground, underground fuel storage tanks exploded, dams burst. Those that died quickly in this initial disaster were perhaps the lucky ones.

  At impact+45 minutes the west coast of the United States became the first to be struck by the tidal wave. It rolled in at a height of two hundred feet and moving at 684 mph. As it crossed the continental shelf it doubled in size and when it reached the actual coastline, it reared up to nearly a half mile in height. The coastal cities and all their inhabitants - those that had lived through the eart
hquakes - were obliterated in an instant as the massive wave destroyed everything in its path for nearly one hundred miles inland. The great metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, home to nearly a thirty million, were erased from the landscape in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but a clogged mess of debris and shattered bodies near the wave crest. The breaking of this great wave atop them similarly destroyed the cities further inland - Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. In the great central valley of California, where water was already rapidly rising due to the smashed Shasta, Oroville, and Folsom dams, water rushed up the Sacramento and San Joaquin River channels, funneling into a destructive force that swept away the cities of Sacramento, Stockton, Bakersfield, Fresno, and the many other small farming communities that dotted the landscape. Some of the most fertile land on Earth quickly became an inland sea upon which the bodies of millions of humans and livestock bobbed and floated.

  The west coast of the United States was only the first to be struck. Eventually, every sea coast area in the world would be hit in a similar manner several times as the great waves traveled back and forth across the oceans of the world, bounding and rebounding like ripples in a bathtub. Most of the major metropolitan areas of the planet were located either on or within a hundred miles of a coastline. The earthquakes and the tidal waves alone killed off a sizable fraction of the planetary population.

  But the death and destruction, as horrific as it was, did not stop there. If it had, perhaps civilization could have been rebuilt eventually. After all, many of the inland cities, though heavily damaged by the earthquakes and dealing with out of control flooding in some cases, were still standing when the waves finally equalized. Unfortunately for the human race, the greatest catastrophe was still forming over the impact site and spreading across the globe.

  From the hole made by the comet in the Pacific Ocean, immense clouds of seawater continued to boil away into the atmosphere. In all, before the seawater finally closed the hole by quenching the tremendous heat, more than five percent of the total volume of water on Earth was vaporized and sent aloft. These clouds quickly spread out and covered the globe like thick blanket, dumping rain virtually everywhere and blocking out the sun. The rain promised to continue for months, killing all crops, flooding every low-lying area, and disrupting the planetary food chain in ways that would guarantee the extinction of all but the very strongest species.

  Sierra Nevada Mountains - 40 miles northeast of Auburn, California

  Impact+5 days

  Skip Adams trudged slowly along through the thick mud on the top of the ridge. With each step he took his hunting boots plunged four inches into the syrupy muck the ground had become, forcing him to pull upward to take the next. His camouflage hunting clothes were saturated and covered with mud and pine needles. He had not been dry since the rain started and he was on the verge of hypothermia. He was tired beyond belief. Every muscle, every joint throbbed like a rotten tooth. He was weak from hunger, having eaten nothing in the last five days but a chocolate bar and some trail mix. He had no idea where he was going or why he was even bothering to continue on. He constantly shifted the Remington .30-06 rifle on his back from one shoulder to the other, thinking quite often of simply sitting down, putting the barrel in his mouth, and pulling the trigger. Why shouldn't he? Everything that he cared about was gone now. Why was he bothering to keep propelling himself forward?

  But somehow he did keep going, his survival instinct a little too sharply honed to allow him to simply give up. Skip, at thirty-five years of age, had lived through five years as a street cop and four years as a helicopter cop. Before that he had flown Apache attack helicopters in Desert Storm, striking targets deep behind Iraqi lines while anti-aircraft gunners tried their damnedest to bring him down. He had once been in a gunfight on the streets of Stockton during his rookie year with the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department. He had once had the engine of his helicopter die on him, forcing him into an auto-rotational landing. His mindset was geared to keep him alive as long as possible, under whatever conditions or situations he encountered. Though he was racked with grief, cold and miserable, and quite probably going to die within the next twenty-four hours no Micker what, he kept going. He lifted one foot and placed it in front of the other. He did it again. He kept moving through the purgatory that he found himself in, wondering why he couldn't have been with his family when the end came.

  The rain had slacked off some in the past six hours. Of course, when you were talking about this sort of rain, slacked-off was a very relative term. It was now only slightly worse than a torrential downpour of the sort that was normally only seen at the height of a severe thunderstorm. Visibility was now almost a hundred yards or so. The wind had died down to something like a moderate gale, no longer packing the power to sweep him completely off his feet, no longer blowing pine cones and tree branches through the air like deadly missiles. During the first twenty-four hours of this biblical-like event, the rain had been so thick it had been difficult to breathe at times. Lightening strikes had flashed and exploded all around the mountaintop like an artillery barrage. Trees had toppled in the hurricane force winds and then been washed downhill by the mud like toothpicks.

  It had been a mudslide that had taken Carl, his best friend. Carl was a San Joaquin Sheriff's deputy, just like Skip. They had met six years ago, when Skip had still been working uniformed patrol. Carl had been like a brother to him, closer in fact than Skip's own brother had ever been. Their wives socialized together, their children attended the same schools. The night before the impact, he and Carl had driven up to nearby Castle Point in Carl's Toyota Four-Runner to set up camp for their annual deer-hunting trip. They had been happy, full of life, contemplating bagging a nice trophy to take home to their families. That first night of the trip they had stayed up late, often staring at the night sky, which had been overly bright with the beautiful, gossamer tail of the approaching comet. They drank beer and cooked their simple meal before retiring to their tents for the night. At 6:00 AM the next morning, they had set off into the woods to make their kills. That now seemed a different lifetime. Had that really only been five days ago?

  After the earthquake, and after the barrage of flaming rocks and mud had fallen throughout the forest, setting it ablaze in many spots, they had immediately started back towards camp, concerned not so much for their own safety as for the safety of their wives and children back in Stockton. They had intuited that the comet had struck the earth at that point but they had been completely clueless about just what the ramifications of that were. Global catastrophe is on a scale that mere humans can hardly fathom. As they huffed and puffed their way through the woods, dodging fires here and there, hearing the impacts of rocks slamming into trees, they saw the clouds to the west of them for the first time. A thick, black, angry front was swelling into the sky, moving rapidly towards them. By the time they made it to camp, the wind and the lightening had started, toppling trees and igniting more fires.

  They dove into the Toyota, not bothering to pack up camp, terrified at the fates of their loved ones, and started to head back to Auburn, which would in turn lead them back to Interstate 80. The road they were on curved slightly upward from Castle Point before twisting and turning its way down to the foothills below. From the summit of this peak was a clear line of sight out over the Sacramento Valley. Usually it was one of the most impressive views that Skip could imagine. This time it was a glimpse through the gates of hell itself.

  When they first topped the rise they were able to see the city of Sacramento and its suburbs some fifty to sixty miles away. Already they were able to see huge areas of flooding caused by the breaking of Folsom Dam and the release of nearly a million acre feet of stored water. This first glimpse of isolated devastation was horrible but it did not destroy all of their hopes like what happened next. From the southwest, in the direction of the San Francisco Bay area, a huge wall of water appeared. It moved forward at what seemed a slow rate from their vantage point in
the mountains but it advanced steadily. It swallowed up everything in its path, burying the valley and turning it into a brown, muddy sea. They watched in horrified fascination as the city disappeared and the water reached the fringes of the foothills twenty miles below them.

  Any illusions they might have had about the possible survival of their families disappeared at that moment. Though Stockton was forty miles south of Sacramento and well out of their line of sight, it was in the same valley and at the same elevation. It had been slightly under an hour since the earthquake had occurred. That was nowhere near enough time for Julie and Summer, Skip's wife and daughter, or Sandy and Kevin, Carl's wife and son, to get to ground high enough to save them. Nor was there any way any human could have lived through what they had just witnessed.

  Soon after this, while they were still staring at what had once been the home of more than a million people, the clouds overtook them. The sun was blotted from the sky, making the early afternoon daylight fade to an inky twilight. And then the rain began. It did not gradually develop from a drizzle to a downpour like a normal rainstorm, it simply started. One moment it was dry and the next it was raining harder than either man had thought possible. Visibility dropped to less than ten feet and the dirt road quickly turned to an impassable sludge of running mud. As they'd sat there, trying to cope with the loss of their families, wondering what to do next, the Four-Runner began to move on its own, propelled along by a river of mud pouring down the hillside above them. They picked up speed and finally fetched up against a stand of trees, at which point the mud began to pile up against the driver's side.

  Skip made it out, climbing through the passenger side window and up a small rise to safety. He didn't stop to help Carl out of the car, not out of fear, but because he hadn't thought it necessary. The situation had seemed under control at that point. It was a decision that would haunt him later. When Carl was halfway out, a huge glut of mud suddenly buried the truck like a breaking wave, knocking the trees it had been resting against flat. The entire mess had continued down the hill and over the edge of a ridge, landing in a creek bed that was already raging with brown runoff. Tons more mud quickly landed atop it, burying Carl and the Four-Runner for all time. Skip had not even bothered trying to rescue his friend. It would have been beyond futile.