by Brent Reilly
REGOLITH
by
Brent Reilly
The paperback version is available at www.BrentReilly.com.
REGOLITH: Asteroid impacts have buried the surfaces of Mars, Mercury, and the Moon under meteorite ejecta called regolith. Regolith comes from two Greek words that mean “blanket” and “rock”. Now, the biggest impact in 65 million years threatens to do the same to Earth.
DEDICATION: The author dedicates this book to his beautiful wife Liz and their two wonderful sons, Brian and Lucas.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: The son of a magazine editor, Brent Reilly has a master's degree in counseling and lives with his family in the Caribbean island of San Andres, just south of the Caymans, where he builds oceanfront condos that can be seen at SanAndresCondo.com. His first book was “How To Kick Republican Butt!” and his next novel is “Raptors v. T-rex”.
Copyright © 2010 by the author, Brent Reilly.
Published by Brent Reilly, Smashwords edition.
This story is fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental. All rights are reserved. Except for book reviews, no more than four paragraphs can be reproduced without written permission from the author.
1
January 7th, 2012
“So, dad, when is the next president gonna get here?”
Henry Jackson snapped awake like he suddenly snorted smelling salts. Looking up from his black laptop, he saw his precocious sixteen year old daughter Lisa posing casually at the door of his new basement.
Jackson smelled trouble like a fart in the shower.
Lisa was like most teenagers, only more so. Ever since she got the bug to get into acting, singing, and modeling, Lisa never simply stood when she could instead theatrically pose. Even her casual poses seemed overly thought-out. Since she sucked at acting and hated singing, Lisa hung her hopes on modeling.
Given her talent for fucking with people, Jackson thought his daughter should follow him into politics. As a nympho for mind-fucks, Lisa took to politics like a pig to mud.
“What’s my little girl doing up so early?” he asked, knowing better than to give her simple question an honest answer. Despite working all night, Lisa’s unexpected intrusion jolted him awake. He planted his big feet on the hard metal floor and sat up straight in his cheap plastic chair to face her, a bull looking for red. After exhausting himself preparing for an asteroid strike that could exterminate humanity, something warned him that this final day before the impact would be the longest.
Lisa did not get out of bed before noon without a damn good reason. So why was she up before sunrise? From long experience, Jackson assumed Lisa was guilty, then looked for evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.
Things weren’t always this way, however.
His daughter used to be everything that he ever wanted in a son. Until Lisa hit puberty – late as usual – she was daddy’s little girl, and she made him love her more than he ever wanted. She gave away affection like Santa gives away toys. Her hugs felt so good she could have charged for them. Whereas his son made him feel like a failure as a father, Lisa made Jackson feel like the champion of daddies. She called him her hero so sincerely it unnerved him. They shot hoops, played poker, went parachuting together – hell, he even taught her how to fly his prototype heloplane. She made him feel young, which kept him afloat when he unexpectedly became a grandfather six years ago. No one understood him like his little girl. She could read him like a book and quote chapter and verse. Jackson frequently joked that his daughter was the son he always wanted -- which really pissed off her older brother.
Then puberty struck viciously and she transformed like the metamorph from the movie X-Men. When Lisa hit puberty, puberty hit back. This delighted her Colombian mother, who unknowingly poured salt into his wound by helping Lisa get breast implants while vacationing in South America. At 15 fricking years old. Lisa joked that two great things have come out of Colombia, and she had both of them.
Like far too many teenagers, Lisa then started acting her age. Big tits made Lisa behave as if she had more hormones than neurons. Her wardrobe changed faster than a Broadway play. She and her cousins pillaged shoe stores like Vikings. Not since Bush and Cheney have so few spent so much so fast for so long for so little. A blind man couldn’t mistake Lisa for a tomboy now. The more attention men fed her, the hungrier she became. She began paying men compliments as if she expected a receipt. Lisa quickly turned to modeling to feed her insatiable appetite for attention. Jackson watched helplessly as the son he always wanted turned, Kafka-like, into a wannabe reality star. The favorite “son” once anchored in his heart floated away with life’s tide.
As Lisa later put it: “I was a buoy, but I drifted.”
Jackson had no idea last year that his wife was getting their 15 year old a boob job in Medellin. A dozen cops with tasers couldn’t have stunned him more. His daughter’s big tits crippled him as if she had inflated them with kryptonite. No Marine suffered a more humiliating defeat than Jackson watching his little tomboy vanquished before the onslaught of puberty. He hardly recognized his own daughter. She spent more time with the pretty-boy hotties wallpapered in her room than with her own damn father. He flew from hero to has-been at warp speed. Jackson went from feeling like the World’s Greatest Dad to the World’s Closest ATM. It was a bitter defeat for a guy unaccustomed to losing.
Girls keep getting older, younger.
Jackson knew he lost her for good when her boyfriend gave her a million dollar engagement ring two weeks ago on her 16th birthday. On Christmas, of all days. His cherished “Christmas girl” turned into a lump of coal in his stocking. He had even given her the high speed driving lessons at the Bondurant Driving School in Phoenix that she had always wanted, yet this was how she repaid him. By getting fucking married. Jackson couldn’t get over losing her so soon. The Grinch couldn’t have planned a worse Christmas. The holidays couldn’t have been a greater disaster if FEMA was put in charge of them.
His daughter’s eagerness to flee the nest gave birth to a Category 5 middle-age crisis as intense as it was unexpected. As a 50 year old grandfather in excellent shape, Jackson overnight felt decades older.
Why did his personal life always go to shit exactly when his professional life started taking off?
Always a lousy loser, Jackson hadn’t felt this bummed out since his mom “accidentally” ran over his favorite dog. For a guy who could otherwise outlast the Energizer Bunny, he lost energy like a leaky tire lost air. He now watched golf instead of football. Like the Aerosmith song, his get-up-and-go just got-up-and-went.
Jackson wanted to keep her for as long as possible. Lisa was the only one in the family for whom political discussions were not a sleep aid. Now who was he gonna talk shop with? No one but his enemies would appreciate what he did and, really, who gave a fuck what they thought? Now who was going to validate him? Certainly not the voters. Those fuckers could turn on you faster than a teenager blindsided by puberty. Jackson fell into a funk when his daughter turned into a girl. He lost more energy than the battery in his father’s ancient Ford F-150 pickup. Not even Methuselah ever felt this old.
Although freezing cold, Lisa dressed for her morning jog with skimpy white Lycra shorts, a blue tight-fitting half top that showed off her six-pack abs, and her long blonde hair in a ponytail. While she hated the cold, she loved to show off her hard abs, because they contrasted nicely with her now big boobs. It seemed just yesterday that Lisa lost her braces and found her breasts.
Ever since an ex-supermodel told her that she should see modeling as what she is, not just what she does, Lisa annoyingly stayed in modeling mode all day, every day. Which is why she posed when normal people simply stood.
To her father, Lisa was a singer who did modeling in order
to get into acting. Or whatever they do in reality TV shows. The thought of Lisa becoming the next Paris Hilton made his bowels freeze. He suspected she knew this, and therefore played it for all that she could.
Jackson coldly examined his daughter like a forensic pathologist eyeing a corpse, searching for clues as to why she stood before him at dawn. He couldn’t have been more suspicious if she came home early on a Friday night. His artic blue eyes looked into her artic blue eyes, which stood out on her very Latina face. It was like looking into one of those weird carnival mirrors.
While he instantly realized that Lisa was fucking with him again, it took him a while to figure out how why. And she generously waited for it, too, patiently letting him catch up, like that old cartoon guy with the cane desperately trying to cross the street before getting hit by an 18-wheel Mach truck.
Something was not right, but it took him forever to see it. But when he did, he felt sucker-punched: Lisa was wearing makeup! Once again she reminded him that she wasn’t his little girl anymore. Once again he felt his age, and then some. Not even the French lost this many battles.
He quickly realized she was going to ambush his special guest, Texas Governor Daniel Cooper, the ungrateful bastard he was desperately trying to get elected president. His guest was the reason he was up all night, plotting, planning, positioning. His future would be determined by how well this meeting went. Billions of dollars and, more importantly, his reputation, were on the line. Lisa then was half-dressed not to actually jog, but to momentarily capture the undivided attention of what could be the next president of the United States.
Ah shit!
Ever since Lisa got hooked on politics several years ago, she talked openly of scoring a sweet post in the White House. Not a job, per se, but more of a “presence”. Not because she wanted to change the world. That would take, like, idealism and hard work. No, like other pretty teenagers obsessed with hotter girls in the gossip rags, she just wanted to stand out and be noticed (Paris Hilton-itis), and working at the White House did that.
Boy, he thought, Governor Cooper is screwed.
“I just want to help my daddy,” Lisa said with a fake smile, her tone telling him exactly the opposite. She was just toying with him now, generously throwing him clues like she tossed scraps to his ugly hunting dog, Chucha. “Chucha”, which means “body odor” in Spanish, only covered one of that dog’s many defects. Father and daughter had a long history of matching wits, yet he clearly remembered a time when he won most of the time.
Jackson was not surprised that his daughter wanted to stick her finger in the most exciting presidential race of his lifetime. Since President McCain died in 2010 after just a year in office, the country obsessed over the rematch between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to determine which would challenge President Sarah Palin in the 2012. Many saw war with China over its threatened invasion of Taiwan inevitable if Palin won, so the stakes were huge. War with China would make Iraq look like Afghanistan.
Many Democrats believed that Barack Obama would have won in 2008 if the financial crisis started in, say, September instead of just after the election in November. But instead of letting Lehman Brothers fail in September, Bush propped up the collapsing investment bank with secret Federal Reserve discount loans until just after the election. By concealing his administration’s massive incompetence, ignorance, and negligence, Bush delayed the financial crisis and subsequent trillion dollar bank bailout until after voters elected another Republican to succeed him. If Bush let Lehman Brothers collapse in September, Republicans probably would not only have lost the presidential race by several points and several million votes, but lost another eight senate seats and twenty-plus congressional seats. Hence many voters thought Obama deserved another shot. Even though he lost in the most favorable Democratic environment since 1964.
Another third of Democrats believed that only a woman like, say, Hillary Clinton, could take on a likeable telegenic female Republican president. Otherwise, white women would have to choose between a personable white female that they could identify with, and an aloof, professorial black guy with an odd name and foreign background. Pundits salivated over this dream match.
But other Democrats wanted a third choice, arguing that Barack lost when all the indicators predicted a landslide, and that Hillary proved an inept manager of her 2008 campaign, even if she ended the race ten times the campaigner than when she started. Losing in 2008 to a disorganized John McCain disillusioned many blacks, who feared getting jilted again. It was like thinking you were going to take the hottest chick to prom, only for her to publicly no-show on your sorry ass.
Polling among Democratic primary voters was all over the place, so Fox News didn’t know who to slime.
Any combination was ratings heaven, despite 2008 fatigue. A rematch with Obama, Hillary rising to challenge the first female president, or a dark horse Democrat overtaking them both sold commercials better than sex. That this election would probably determine whether America went to war with China over Taiwan only fueled passions across the ideological spectrum.
Then Daniel Cooper shocked them all. With Jackson’s help, Cooper out-raised both Hillary and Barack by raising $116 million in 2011, then scored surprise second place victories over Hillary in Iowa and Barack in New Hampshire. Even Garth Brooks reportedly asked, “Who the hell is Daniel Cooper?”
Democrats, used to their favorite candidates getting shot down by old, white Iowa and New Hampshire voters, now had three exceptional candidates to divide them. Even John Edward’s bastard children finally had someone worth rooting for. And polls showed all three blowing away President Palin, herself the most exciting Republican candidate since Reagan. Seeing the four of them slug it out every night was like watching reality TV with actual reality. It was stranger than non-fiction.
All while China staged the largest amphibious exercises in their long history of large amphibious exercises. Until large asteroid fragments threatened to sink every ship on the seas and wash away every coastline in the world. And bury the planet in trillions of tons of meteorite ejecta called regolith.
The only thing the pundits could accurately predict was that nobody could accurately predict this election. Like giving inmates Viagra, it was fucking wild.
Governor Cooper turned an exciting rematch into an even more thrilling three-way contest that was ratings fucking magic. His message was a tranquilizer, his presence an aphrodisiac, his touch a suppository. For four years Barack and Hillary planned their rematch, only to see some Texas nobody bitch slap them at the polls. Four exciting applicants fought for the world’s top job.
But Cooper was no match for a teenage girl at the top of her game. Girls teach each other how to manipulate men every time they migrate as a herd to the bathroom, and the harder the challenge, the greater the victory. Or, as Napoleon once put it, glory may be fleeting, but failure is forever.
“Thanks for the offer, honey, but Governor Cooper and I have a busy morning discussing how to beat the Chinese. You know, how we can save trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. Nothing that would interest you. But maybe later you can file some paperwork,” Jackson said coldly to dash her hopes of sticking around. She may love politics – at least the manipulation of people -- but policy couldn’t hold her attention.
Oddly enough, what he told her was true. America was about to get its butt kicked by China over Taiwan, and he was determined to prevent it while President Palin visited Belgium to bully the Europeans into joining her-- or else. Which is why he stayed up all night preparing for this meeting the day before the biggest asteroid in 65 million years threatened Earth. Jackson hadn’t tensed up this much since his last prostrate exam.
James Chiang, the grandson of Chiang Kia-Shek, won the presidency in 2009 and planned on changing Taiwan’s official name from “Republic of China” to “Republic of Taiwan” on the 100th anniversary of their founding by Sun Yat-sen in 1912. In response, China prepared the Chinese version of D-Day to invade.
Pundits called it C-Day.
When China fired missiles off Taiwan in 1996, military experts, noting the lack of transport ships, referred to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as “a million man swim.” Requisitioning thousands of civilian “junk” ships for this year’s exercise shut them up. For the first time ever, the communists Chinese had a credible invasion fleet. Not a great one, but a credible one.
If this crisis degenerated into war, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was going to lose four aircraft carrier groups when China dropped 100 kilo rods of enriched uranium from their new military satellites. Nothing could be less friendly than the sympathetic explosions as the uranium rods detonated fuel and munitions, deck after bloody deck. The U.S. Pacific Fleet would sink faster than a tax hike proposal on the elite superrich.
China did not even need to use their new supercavitating torpedoes with micro-nuke warheads, their so-called “Carrier Killers.” This was not an idle threat, either, since in 2006 a Chinese diesel sub got within five miles of the Kitty Hawk. A supercavitating torpedo, which envelopes itself in bubbles to reduce drag, was the equivalent of an underwater missile. “Micro-nukes” yielded less than a kiloton -- enough to devastate a 15-ship aircraft carrier battle group, but small compared to the 20-kiloton suckers that blew away Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II.
And if America intervened, China could drop uranium rods on American military bases in Japan, South Korea, Alaska, Hawaii, and the squadrons of multi-billion dollar stealth bombers at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam. From orbit, the $100 billion in stealth bombers at Guam were more vulnerable than a half-naked teenager sucking up to a charismatic presidential candidate.
America could lose more troops in an hour than in every single conflict since the Korean War combined. The American dead in Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Somalia, the Balkans, the Gulf War, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined would not equal the loss of American life if China dropped on them. And that didn’t include the millions they could kill with the rods China reportedly held in geostationary orbit above major American cities.