Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  “I just said that,” Lisa answered reasonably.

  “What do you mean, he isn’t gay?” her father demanded.

  “You told your father I was gay?” Chava looked horrified.

  “Well,” Lisa considered, “not exactly. I told him you weren’t interested in girls so he would hire you as his personal blogger and tech guy. If he thought you were straight, you couldn’t spend so much time alone with me.”

  “So you told him I was gay?”

  “No,” Lisa corrected him. “I told him you weren’t interested in girls, which was true. How long since Stacy left you? How long since you’ve had a girlfriend? Since you got laid? Not counting the hookers in Mexicali.”

  “I’m going to school full time and working full time. You know how I obsess over politics. I don’t have the time or money to subsidize the materialistic lifestyle of some superficial bitch.”

  “Lucy liked you, but you didn’t ask her out.”

  “She’s a fricking model!” Chava really couldn’t believe this. “She drives a Ferrari, her brother plays professional football, and her parents are loaded. They’re like a talented version of the Kardasians. She’s totally smoking hot! Way out of my league.”

  “I once overheard some guys say Lorena was smoking, so I lectured her on the dangers of cigarettes,” Jackson joked to liven up the dead silence and, apparently, show why he wasn’t a comedian.

  “Yet Lucy still wanted to go out with you.” Lisa insisted.

  “You never told me that,” Chava argued.

  “Dude, she listened to you babble about politics for frickin’ hours, and it’s not because you’re so brilliant.”

  “So you thought I was gay?” Chava asked Jackson.

  “You think you could otherwise sleep over when I’m not home? And you do look in the mirror a lot. And wear a lot of jewelry for a guy who isn’t a rapper. And flashy clothes. And hair gel. And your Volkswagen Beetle is a little gay. And you like to say an entire sentence as if it’s a single word. Do-you-hear-what-I’m-saying? Do-you-know-what-I-mean? Wha-sup-wi-dat? But, for what it’s worth, I trust you more than I trust her.”

  Well, fuck, Chava didn’t know what to make of that. All this time his boss thought he was gay?

  “Don’t worry, dad. The faggot never tried anything.”

  Lisa sounded disappointed, which Jackson didn’t like.

  “Your boyfriend threatened to kick my ass if I tried anything!” Chava said in defense. “He threw me up against your bedroom wall while you were taking a shower.”

  “For real?” Lisa seemed pleased. “When?”

  “Right after the boob job.”

  Lisa knew instantly what that meant. “Rance caught you checking me out! Admit it.”

  “You were throwing them,” meaning her new titties, “into everyone’s faces. I’d have to be blind not to notice.”

  That, too, pleased her. You didn’t go through fucking surgery to get big tits to go unnoticed. Besides, just because a girl doesn’t want to fuck you does not mean that she doesn’t want you to fuck her. Girls may be simple, but women are fucking complicated.

  “Kids, kids,” the professor interrupted them. “As important as these things are in the big scheme of things, a few billion people are about to die, and maybe humanity itself. We may face a nuclear winter that lasts for centuries. The world may end with a bang rather than a whimper after all. So may I continue?”

  “The world is going to end on a Monday?” Lisa asked.

  “One last thing. We are all scared. Please do not cry, lose control, or fall apart. I can’t stand basket cases.” The professor looked directly at the guests. The pregnant lady was already whispering hysterically to herself. “The last thing I want to do in life is die well. Dying is literally the ultimate experience. If life is a school, then death is the final exam. As Montaigne put it, it takes greater moral courage to die well than live well. So don’t fuck it up by whining. Please don’t make me knock you the fuck out. Life is hard, not fair. These are the cards we have been dealt. All you can do is play them as best you can. Complaining won’t make you feel better and it will really piss me off. Any questions?”

  The professor glared at Lisa who wisely held her tongue. No one seemed to doubt that a thin, 70 year old great-grandfather could kick their asses. Chava wasn’t drinking his bottle, so Lisa borrowed and downed it before her mother could take it away.

  “Is everyone ready for the Great Perhaps?”

  “Maybe,” Lisa answered.

  “All right, then,” the professor said, pleased to end his last lecture. Months of work was about to be judged by Mother Nature, who does not grade on a fucking curve. “I’d like to say a group prayer to thank God for all of his blessings. Feel free to add your own, then I want to lead you in some stretching and relaxation exercises because the slower you breathe, the faster time will pass.”

  Lisa unexpectedly burped loudly.

  “I bet $20 that Lisa pees herself,” Jackson offered.

  “You’re on, man!” Lisa roared back.

  38

  The trillion-ton space mountain spinned on its long axis like a football going long, while leaving an exhaust of dirt, gas, and rock thousands of miles behind it. While most asteroids turn head over tail several times a day, this one spun several times as fast, but never head over tail. The Sun boiled the hydrogen off its head, leaving mostly hard rock. Asteroid means “starlike” while disaster means “bad star”, so it should not be surprising that an asteroid would cause so much damage.

  Beyond it followed thousands of boulders, millions of rocks, and billions of pebbles, mostly hidden inside a cloud of dust and gas. It would have been beautiful if it didn’t threaten to kill several billion people. Other asteroid “farts” trailed this one, like the white lines of a one-lane road at night. Because Earth travels 2.5 million kilometers every day, most of them would not intercept the planet this orbit. From Earth, the debris made the Sun look like it had bad acne.

  The slingshot around the Sun gave it a big burst of speed. Because space is a vacuum, nothing slowed it down. Now, with its beautiful blue-and-white target tantalizing close, the Rock increased speed, firing off the largest fart yet. Much of that exhaust would soon bitch-slap the Moon, adding a few thousand more craters to the millions it already had, while the rest would pound Earth. While the meteorite that exterminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago had a similar mass as the swarm, this one approached Earth nearly twice as fast.

  In just three seconds it punched through Earth’s atmosphere like a brick thrown into a bucket of water. A white-hot ball briefly shined several times brighter than the Sun, turning night into day, and blinding anyone dumb enough to look at it. The afterglow from atmospheric heat transfer could be seen around the world, just like Europeans could read newspapers at midnight after the 1908 Tunguska airburst several thousand miles away in Siberia. The friction from so much mass pushing aside so much air heated up the stratosphere and generated an ear-drum-popping pressure wave that pounded everything below it. Surface water boiled into steam while dry forests burst into flames.

  It squashed Kitt Peak and buried itself within the mountain in just a blink of the eye, expanding down and out at several miles per second. The mountain itself turned into a liquid, like a fat guy getting stomach punched. A big zit grew in the center of the crater, only to collapse upon itself, just like the upper walls did all around the rim. The nearly perfect circle that swallowed Kitt Peak became 25 kilometers deep and nearly 100 wide, surrounded by a mountain range to its southwest and relatively flat desert to its northeast. The rim rose several thousand feet high and a few hundred feet wide. A second after the impact the asteroid itself vaporized, either painting the inside of the still-growing crater or shooting hundreds of miles into the sky. Asteroid-dust would soon blanket the planet like cocaine traces on a Benjamin.

  The pressure wave pulverized Tucson, before broiling it at temperatures that melted steel and cement. The heat exploded the gas tanks
of the thousands of vehicles fleeing up the freeways, the mother of all IED’s. The land itself rose dozens of feet like a ripple in a pond before collapsing as rock temporarily behaved like a fluid. Millions of people in Maricopa County were thrown against their ceilings, then fell hard to the floors before being buried by their roofs and walls. Then the impact buried Tucson, Phoenix, and Green Valley a thousand feet deep in regolith, totally obliterating them from the surface of the planet. It would be easier to find a needle in a haystack than Tucson under a mountain’s worth of earth.

  The explosion was many times greater than all the nuclear weapons possessed in the world. A plume of superheated gases, dirt and vaporized rock shot up and outward in a mushroom cloud, picking up and throwing trillions of tons of earth into the atmosphere. Pulverized limestone rocks turned into carbon dioxide gas that billowed upward. For the second time in seconds, something alien roughly pushed aside many cubic miles of atmosphere, triggering another pressure wave that cooked thousands of square miles of Earth’s surface to thousands of degrees. Nothing on the surface survived. Even cockroaches, which can tolerate a million RAMs of radiation, roasted like the people around them.

  Of the 100,000 cubic kilometers of earth that the main body excavated, most fell within a thousand miles. Phoenix, continuously inhabited for 1500 years, was instantly depopulated at a cost of a million lives. Biosphere 2 became uninhabitable too. Paradise Valley was a hell hole, Tombstone a graveyard. Ironically, the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona got buried by an alien rock. Finding Surprise, Arizona, northeast of Phoenix, would now be surprising. The largest stand of Ponderosa pine in the United States burned briefly before getting toss like toothpicks by a pressure wave thousands of times greater than the one that devastated Hiroshima.

  Ejecta covered Arizona, New Mexico, northern Mexico, eastern California, western Texas, and southern Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. The Sonoran Desert covers 100,000 square miles in America and Mexico, and regolith basically buried it all. Around 10%, or 10,000 cubic kilometers, however, attained suborbital ballistic trajectories and traveled several thousand or more miles to strike Asia, Africa, and Europe. And a few thousand cubic kilometers reached orbit, sparking a global meteor shower that blanketed the planet with Arizona.

  The impact’s kinetic energy rippled as a deafening shock wave through air, land, and water, triggering earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes. The thousands of people fleeing on the freeways were first blinded, then deafened before the impact squashed, burned, and/or vaporized them. An earthquake hundreds of times stronger than anything ever recorded would soon be felt worldwide, messing up every animal, from ants to birds to elephants, that used Earth’s electromagnetic field to navigate. Every earthquake California would have had over the next millennium took place all at once, collapsing buildings and sparking urban infernos. On the bright side, California would not have another major earthquake for centuries.

  Volcanoes in Alaska, Iceland, and Washington State exploded, sending billions of tons of smoke, soot, and ash towards Europe. This kept European aircraft grounded for weeks since ash is nearly invisible to a pilot, hard to detect on radar when spread out, and re-solidifies inside jet engines, shutting them down.

  The sonic boom deafened everyone above ground within a few thousand miles. Racing out from Ground Zero at eighteen miles per second, it compressed the air before it into an expanding wall of fire. It lifted up everything above hard bedrock -- like Tucson and Phoenix-- and threw it hard. Entire mountains crumbled and collapsed before being buried and disfigured. The Chiricahuas, Tucson, Santa Catalina, Santa Rita, Rincon, Santa Cruz, McDowell, White Tank, Superstition, Phoenix, and the South Mountains shook like sand castles that stripped them of height and weight. The doomsday fools celebrating on top of Humphreys Peak, at 12,633 feet the highest point in Arizona, were smacked, burned, and blown, before the peak lost a few thousand feet of altitude. The vaporized remains of millions of people would be blown to kingdom come for the survivors to later inhale.

  Several seconds after impact, the gaseous plume punctured the cold, hard vacuum of space, destroying precious ozone. It quickly grew thousands of miles across, the mother of all burps, as if Earth was a freezer that sprung a leak. Its outer shell froze into smooth ice crystals which fell into orbit like hail freezing over. Millions of cubic kilometers of vaporized seawater filled the skies. A cloud of gases larger than the planet engulfed Earth. From the Moon it must have looked like Earth swallowed a smoke grenade.

  Over the next few hours, falling dust, dirt, and rock turned the blue sky blood red. Gravity pulled the trillions of tons of dirt and molten rock back to Earth with a vengeance. Friction from falling at several miles per second heated up the atmosphere around the globe. The fire in the sky radiated down, cooking the surface and boiling surface water into steam. The billions of fools who ignored expert advice to watch the meteor shower outdoors cooked like kabobs. The molten rocks started forest fires and burned billions of homes. And the people in them.

  The meteors and ejecta broiled the atmosphere, forming nitric acid which mixed with water vapor to fall as acid rain. Sulfur from vaporized rocks and water vapor baked in the atmospheric oven to form giant clouds of sulfuric acid that circled the Earth, blocking sunlight like on Venus. The planet would be cold for years until the sudden doubling of greenhouse gases released from vaporized limestone, volcanoes, water vapor, and fires more than made up for the blocked sunlight.

  The fragments that struck open water vaporized millions of cubic kilometers of water, enough to cover the continental United States a few hundred feet deep. Within a day they would form rain clouds that circled the world, much like dust storms cover Mars for months. Like a monsoon that wouldn’t stop, the constant rain would eventually overwhelm dams while rivers flooded their banks. Dirt started falling as mud. Raindrops collected all the dirt and dust they hit, becoming a hail of acidic mud pellets and dirty, salty slush water. Worse, in the sun-less sky, it became impossible to distinguish between the mud pellets that just hurt from the pebbles that killed.

  Months of rain would clear much of the dust and ash and put out most fires. Much of that moisture fell as snow, reversing decades of melt from global warming. The next several winters would grow ever colder as more snow and ice reflected more sunlight. So much seawater falling as snow temporarily rebuilt glaciers and the poles. Snow and ice reflect sunlight, which reduces temperatures, which increases snowfall, which grows glaciers, which reflect more sunlight in a vicious cycle. Mean temperatures would soon drop thirty degrees as the atmospheric thermal radiation dissipated.

  The super-heated atmosphere would warm up the planet for a few weeks before it dissipated. Then Earth would grow colder for a decade or two, before gradually warming up as the increase in greenhouse gases overwhelmed the reduced sunlight. Then a vicious greenhouse gas cycle would increasingly trap more radiant heat for the next several thousand years, the poles would melt, and coastline would disappear.

  Much of the outer main body broke off entering the atmosphere and, like the exhaust that trailed it, followed the main body across the southern United States. No other region in the world would suffer from so many impacts as southern America. Adding insult to injury, no sooner did trillions of tons of earth from Kitt Peak land across America than hundreds of home-size rocks smacked into it. The South, Southwest, and Midwest took the brunt of it, while the far north, from Seattle to Maine, suffered the least. Many exploded several kilometers above land, sending shock waves that devastated the areas beneath them. Hundreds of others created their own craters, sending billions of tons of earth for many miles around them. Forests burned like Hell.

  A few hours after the main body impacted, the swarm arrived to punish the survivors. Thousands of boulders the size of homes survived the atmosphere to wipe out cities. Larger ones devastated entire countries. The largest, the Fidel Fragment at one kilometer, sent a tsunami a few kilometers tall that swept over the Caribbean and crossed o
ver the Florida peninsula to the Gulf of Mexico. It washed away everything from Fort Lauderdale to Fort Myers. Much of Havana ended up floating to Miami while much of Miami washed up in Cuba. Eastern Mexico, Central America, and northern South America were wiped clean. Not thirty kilometers above the Panama Canal landed a space hill large enough to create a crater that re-united the Atlantic with the Pacific in a weird inter-ocean lake. The impact not only destroyed the Panama Canal, but made it irrelevant. For the third time in sixty million years, North and South America physically disconnected.

  Thousands of rocks rained down upon Asia, from Indonesia to China, then the various “stans” of Central Asia. A big one struck Kashmir, between India and Pakistan, before the Middle East, northern Africa, and southern Europe got their asses kicked. Israel, along with its neighbors, was wiped from the face of the Earth by a big direct hit. The nations around the Mediterranean up to France got pelted. Oddly enough, Russia, the largest country in the world, suffered little by virtue of being so far north. Like Russia, the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland escaped direct bombardment, as did northern Canada and Alaska. Ironically, if it weren’t for the main body and its immediate exhaust trail, America would have been largely spared.

  Sea levels dropped a few meters because so much seawater was lost to space, rained down into inland lakes, or washed ashore as tsunamis, soaked up by coastal deserts, valleys, and Antarctica. Without so much blocked sunlight, the doubling of greenhouse gases would have raised temperatures to disastrous levels several decades earlier. As it was, humanity had a generation or two before global warming reached a tipping point, followed by several thousand years of escalating heat. Sea levels would rise 300 feet within a few centuries, ironically returning to where they were 65 million years ago.

  This asteroid strike differed from the one that killed the dinosaurs in several important ways. Gabrielle’s main body struck land, so much of its energy radiated quickly out into space. Although it triggered volcanoes, they were far fewer than before. And Earth had far less brush and trees to burn. Every forest in the world burned 65 million years ago, when Earth had several times as many trees. The K/t Boundary had enough soot to suggest that 90% of the planet’s biomass burned all at once. Plus, today’s meteorites vaporized far less sulfur, so the nuclear-like winter would not last as long.