He choked up again. “You’re going to have to stop that,” he said softly.
She stepped forward and lifted herself up onto her toes, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you.”
On his way back to Launch Control, Forrest passed Michael in the corridor. “Thanks for the heads up, fucker.”
Michael stopped and turned. “You didn’t tell her no, did you?”
“Yeah, douche bag,” he said without looking back. “I told her no.”
Michael chuckled and stood watching as Forrest turned the corner. “Sorry, Jack, but you brought this on yourself.”
Twenty-Five
When the asteroid struck the Earth’s atmosphere, it was traveling at nearly a hundred thousand miles an hour and burning at nearly one million degrees Fahrenheit. Jack’s wife and the horse ranch were vaporized before they were ever aware of its arrival. It struck near the Montana-Canada border with a force three-quarters of a million times more powerful than the Soviet Emperor bomb, the most powerful man-made bomb ever detonated. It blasted a crater nearly a mile deep and fifty miles wide in the Earth’s crust, hurling millions of tons of dust and rock into the atmosphere and sending out a blast wave hot enough to kill every living creature aboveground for six hundred miles. Winds traveling at thousands of miles an hour flattened trees and buildings for at least half that distance, pulverizing them. A massive heat wave spread out from there, setting fire to large swaths of land within a radius of fifteen hundred miles.
All of which took place in seconds.
Within the next few seconds massive earthquakes emanated from the epicenter for a thousand miles, triggering lesser quakes all across North America and down into Mexico. Massive cracks appeared in the Earth’s crust over Yellowstone National Park, and the geysers there shot giant plumes of boiling water hundreds of feet into the air even as the park was devoured in flames. Rivers shifted and changed direction, giant landslides occurred all across the northern Rockies, and a dark cloud of smoke and dust began to envelop the continent, fed by the ash borne up from flame-driven winds.
The continental power grid began to fail immediately, and a massive blackout spread across both the United States and Canada in all directions, killing the power to every city within minutes after impact. Cities at the outer edges of the blast zone were set ablaze, and rescue workers were hard-pressed to even breathe in the heat, much less fight the fires. Three hundred million Americans and Canadians were dead within sixty seconds of the asteroid hitting the atmosphere, at least half of whom had been obliterated by the initial blast.
Tremors were felt the world over within the first half an hour, and though the asteroid did not strike the sea, tsunamis occurred as fault lines along the ocean floor shifted and distorted the water depths to send twenty-foot waves across the ocean surface, swamping the coasts of Europe, Africa, and Asia within the first few hours.
Horrifying satellite images were beamed down all across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and South America as the ring of destruction spread across North America, and the continent was blotted out over the first couple of hours. Everyone watching now understood with absolute certainty that the shroud of darkness would soon blanket the world. Theirs would be a less cataclysmic end, a slow and methodical procession of starvation and disease, a horrific return to the Dark Ages on a global scale.
The long winter had not quite begun, but it was coming.
Twenty-Six
Marty and Susan were in the basement making love, wrapped in one another’s arms at the moment of impact, but they felt a sudden tremor in the concrete floor, vibrating as if an eighteen-wheeler had been dropped in the street right in front of the house from twenty stories.
“Sweet Jesus!” Susan said, sitting up.
“We’re still here,” Marty said. “Holy shit, we’re still here!” He scooted across the mattress to turn on the television, but there was only static, and a few seconds later the power went out.
“That’s it, Marty. We’re dead in the water.”
The wind began to pick up outside the house, and soon it sounded as though a storm had blown in. When they heard a cannonade of massive thunderclaps, they quickly dressed and went upstairs to see a raging dust storm outside the kitchen window. In the living room, they peeked through the curtains, and the houses across the street were completely obscured, the wind now howling like a freight train. They watched in fascination as the dust continued to blow past the house, all sorts of debris soaring by.
“We’d better be careful of the windows,” he warned.
“How long will it blow like that?”
He laughed. “I’ve got no idea,” he said, lifting his arms and letting them fall. “Think of it, Sue. This is what killed the dinosaurs!”
“I am thinking of it, Marty. It’s why I’m ready to shit a brick!”
He put his arms around her. “Don’t worry, I am too.”
A softball-sized meteor struck the roof and shattered the clay tiles.
“What was that?” He looked back outside and saw stone-sized meteors striking down all across the neighborhood. “Oh, shit! The ejecta’s coming down. Let’s get back to the basement.”
After half an hour the worst of the meteor shower seemed to have passed and the winds at last began to abate, but the dust in the air took hours to settle, and by then the sun had begun to vanish behind the veil of smoke and dust in the upper atmosphere. They went back upstairs and watched as the neighborhood was slowly revealed, everything coated in fine brown dust.
“I don’t suppose there’s any point in going outside,” she said.
“We’d only leave footprints to show that we’re in here.”
“So what now?”
He stood looking at her. “This is it, honey. I’m sorry.”
“Damn.” She sat on the couch and peered through a gap in the curtains. “I thought I was ready for this, but I’m not.”
He sat down and took her hand. “How could anybody be?”
“Look at you. You’re calm as a cucumber.”
“I’m only being calm for you. Inside I’m shitting bricks too, believe me.”
She touched his face and tears formed in her eyes. “I don’t really deserve you.”
He shook his head. “Not true. That’s my decision.”
“But…” She sat looking at her hand in his. “You deserve to be with someone who loved you… who loved you before this.”
“Hey, if you love me now even a little bit, I’m a happy guy.”
“I do,” she said with a smile. Then she took his hand in both of hers. “I want to tell you something, and then I don’t want to talk about it ever again. Okay?”
He nodded.
“It’s up to you,” she told him. “It’s up to when we… when we quit.”
“Susan, it’s too soon to be—”
“Shush! Sometime between now and when the food runs out—before it runs out, Marty, because I don’t want to see it coming—I want you to take care of it. That means from this moment on, whenever you decide is fine. I just don’t want to know when it’s coming. I know that’s a lot to ask because I know how much you love me, but I’m asking you to promise me.”
His eyes started to water. “Susan, I can’t promise that, not like that. There may—”
“You have to!” she insisted. “Because all I want to do from here on is eat, sleep, and make love. That’s it. And I won’t be able to enjoy our time together unless I know you’re going to take care of it when the time comes. Promise me, Marty. Please. If you love me like you say you do, promise me.”