They were towing a trailer now loaded with fuel and food, so they were set for a long drive.
Emory smiled at Sullivan. “You have to admit, it’s kinda cool.”
He nodded grimly. “My parents were up in Montana.”
“Well, for what it’s worth,” Marty said, “they never knew a thing. It was instantaneous.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” Marty said. “That thing hit with a force equal to five or six teratons of TNT. That’s five or six trillion tons.”
“How did we even survive a blast like that?” Emory wondered.
“Shock cocoons,” Marty said. “Small areas of limited damage within a broader area of mass devastation. That’s how they explained those firemen surviving the World Trade Center falling on top of them. Shock cocoons even allowed for a few buildings to remain standing after the Hiroshima blast. There can be all sorts of reasons for their occurrence. In our case—meaning Arizona—I’m guessing the Rockies had a mitigating effect on the pressure wave no one ever anticipated. Maybe the Grand Canyon did too. We could probably study this impact for decades and still not know everything. You know, it’s kind of like finding a living Tyrannosaurus rex and realizing we were only half right about what they looked like… God, I wish Susan were here!”
“Well, can we get going, Mr. Scientist? We’re burning daylight.”
“Why not?” Marty said. “It’s only going to get more interesting.”
They crossed back to the interstate, and it turned out that Marty had been largely correct about that too. There were hundreds and hundreds of cars, but most of them had been blown well clear of the highway.
The trip to the Canadian border took another four days and nights of driving over rough and rocky terrain. The interstate was completely covered by the blanket of ejecta that fell from the sky after the impact, obscuring the landscape. Most of the highway signs had been leveled by the blast wave along with every other man-made structure north of the Wyoming border. They kept track of their progress by stopping to brush off—or in some cases to dig up—fallen or buried highway signs.
At last, Sullivan stopped the Jeep and they sat gaping at a massive hole in the earth extending well beyond the horizon north, east, and west, stretching like an empty ocean basin for as far as the eye could see. “Holy Christ,” he whispered, awestruck.
Marty and Emory got out. Neither said a word as they walked the thirty yards to the crater’s edge and stood looking nearly a mile down into the empty chasm blown in the earth’s crust, its sloped and rocky walls lined with the same colorful striations as the Grand Canyon. They saw no sign of a past civilization, heard no sound but the cold breeze in their ears.
There was a tremor in the earth then, and they hurried back from the edge as rocks broke away and tumbled down, hitting speeds of sixty mph before finally reaching the bottom far below, well out of view. The tremor did not last long, and when the earth stood still again they returned to the rim and watched the last of the tumbling rocks and boulders careening out of sight.
“This wound will take a very long time to heal,” he said quietly.
“Marty, what’s that?” Emory said, pointing roughly three-quarters of a mile around the rim at an orange dot.
Marty trotted back to the Jeep with her on his heels, grabbing his carbine and finding the orange splotch of color through his scope. “It’s a tent!”
“You’re kidding,” Sullivan said, getting out of the Jeep and raising a pair of high-powered binoculars. “Who the hell else would be stupid enough to… you’re right.”
Emory had her own carbine now and was glassing the site as well. “It’s an encampment, all right. Is that a truck of some kind in defilade to the right of the tent, dark green maybe?”
“I think so,” Sullivan said. “Let’s mount up and get a little closer. Everybody keep your fucking eyes peeled for an ambush.”
They drove to within four hundred yards of the encampment and Sullivan climbed up onto the roof with the binoculars.
“John, somebody could blow your ass right off there.”
“Not worried about me, are you, Shannon?”
She looked at Marty and rolled her eyes.
“Looks deserted,” Sullivan said. “There’s another tent. It’s green.”
Emory raised her weapon. “Let’s get over there before it starts getting dark.”
Marty drove the Jeep slowly along, with Emory and Sullivan walking twenty and thirty yards out in front to guard against ambush. When they drew within fifty yards of the encampment, Sullivan signaled Marty to halt and stay in the Jeep as he and Emory advanced into the site, weapons ready.
“Hear that?” Sullivan said.
“Yeah… sounds like gas.”
They looked around the corner of the tent and saw a small aluminum camp table with a Coleman stove resting on it, a large propane tank beneath it on the ground. A blue flame hissed beneath a red enameled coffeepot. Emory trained her weapon on what turned out to be a four-door, hybrid Chevrolet SUV. Sullivan advanced on the big orange tent and looked inside, seeing the limbless torsos of a man and a woman, their eyes open, staring sightless at the ceiling of the tent.
“Christ!” he said whipping around. “Look sharp, Shannon! We got bodies!”
Emory dropped into a crouch, never taking her eyes from the SUV. “I got movement, John! Around the truck! Moving to flank us on the left!”
Sullivan moved forward, unable to detect any movement on the uneven, rocky terrain. “I got nothin’.”
They advanced together on the truck, drawing close enough to read the words UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY stenciled in dirty white lettering on the door. “You gotta be shitting me,” he said.
“The government did not send them out here!” Emory said. “Did it?”
“Fuck if I know.” Sullivan crept carefully around the front of the SUV, finding a cleft in the earth on the other side. The fissure was as wide and as deep as a man, a trench running from the edge of the crater and winding off across the uneven landscape for what could have been miles.
Emory came around the back of the truck and looked down into the trench. “That’s what I saw. Somebody jumping in.”
Sullivan slid down into the ditch and poked around until he found a boot print then climbed back out. “Better get Marty in here.”
She turned and beckoned Marty into the camp. He drove up to the orange tent, killed the engine and got out. He walked over and lifted the lid from the coffeepot. “It’s boiled dry,” he said, turning off the flow of propane.
He and Emory had a closer look at the bodies inside the tent, finding their clothes in a pile in the corner.
“Must’ve taken their arms and legs for food,” she said.
“Doesn’t make sense,” Marty said. “There’s backpacking food over there by the stove in a box. Why eat the people?”
Sullivan threw back the flap and stepped inside. “Because you eat the perishable food first. The dehydrated shit will keep.”
Marty looked at him.
“People are perishable,” Sullivan said, pushing a digital video camera into his hands. “Found that in the other tent. How’s it work?”
They stepped out of the tent, and Marty sat on a rock fiddling with the camera while the other two rooted through the surveyors’ equipment, searching the truck and the immediate area near the encampment.
“Where are you going?” Emory called.
“To find their latrine,” Sullivan answered. “It’ll tell us how long they’ve been here.” Shortly, he found a small slit trench about four feet long dug behind a small boulder nearly forty yards away. Near the trench were three rolls of toilet paper in Ziploc bags and a small spade stuck in the ground. He used the spade to uncover the buried excrement, then went back to the encampment where Emory was sorting through the backpacking food.