by Jack Vantage
Suddenly the ground cracked all around, like the world’s biggest egg was being broken. Dylan felt the tinny tremor that followed and looked down to his feet.
What was that?” Lecodia said. The cracking and crackling was omnipresent, speeding towards them from all directions. It was like they stood on glass that was fracturing. The tarmac split in hairline cracks. Each split changed directions randomly, zig-zagging all over the floor.
Dylan looked at the ground. The ground moved harder and grouched from within, like a powerful base had played from deep. He looked back up and outstretched is arms to balance his wobbled. He turned his head and watched the sky-mobile roofs lift in the distance at the back of the vehicle park. Like a new born wave on a peaceful pool of water, the sky-mobile roofs lifted toward them and lowered back, nearing fast. Their horns and alarms rang the air, and they creaked and ached as they were lifted and lowered.
Lecodia grabbed his hand. “Dylan?”
“Hold on!”
The wave of roofs approached, along with the loud cracking and splitting of the breaking ground. Like a water ripple, the earth moved from under the parked sky-mobiles, speeding toward Dylan and Lecodia. The tarmac churned over at a meter high. It moved under their feet, lifting them up and back down. Following it was a giant split, like a vice had been put to the earth, a meter in width. It passed between them. Dylan quickly jumped to her. He and Lecodia spun and watched the split hit the medical centre as the grounds ripple disappeared under its foundations. The building cracked and snapped loud as the split shot up its face cutting its HNS name. The ground angered and moved harder with violence.
As the ground continued to split open all around them, Dylan said, “We have to get to a mobile now!” The medical centre began parting, and the grounds wound widened. All around chunks of earth began flipping and shooting upward like the earth was sitting on giant pistons. It was like broken bones protruded an open fracture. A large chunk of tarmac shot upward and smashed through the emergency entrances canopy with a crash and bang. A loud pressure hiss steamed from the chunks of Earth that splintered from the ground.
The grounds split opened fast. Dylan looked down and it was around the ten-meter mark. Dirt, dust, and earth fell inward of its dark fall. He watched a few screaming people, around the medical centre, lose balance and vanish into the ever-opening ground. People slid into the earth’s belly with a tremendously horrific scream that was matched in decibel by the vehicle’s alarms and cracking ground.
He pulled Lecodia away from the gash in the earth and quickly moved her through the stationary collection of parked sky-mobiles.
He spotted a growling red animal with a menacingly shaped body. Each angle expressed rage, while its graphics drew spurts of flame over the doors and bonnet.
Dylan placed the round gadget on the driver’s door and pressed the left button. Thankfully the doors popped and slipped upward with a hiss. The body of the beast vibrated with power as the ignition started. They jumped in.
“Right I just need to—”
Lecodia screamed with horror. “Dylan, hurry!”
He glanced through her passenger window. Rows of mobiles were falling into a widening gash. It was coming nearer.
“Power, altitude, brake—got it,” he said quietly.
“Hurry!” she whimpered.
Dylan pulled on the altitude and angled the mobile upward. He elevated quickly out of harm’s way as the split swallowed all the vehicles that had been around his.
The wound widened to a hundred metres. Jagged rocks and dirt crumbled into the abyss. Pipes and power lines sparked and leaked, some as deeply buried as a hundred feet. It was like erosion and evolution had fast forwarded a thousand years. The edges of the split fell inward, taking vehicles, people and earth down a long deep decent. It continued to widen and feast on the objects laying its surface.
Dylan turned the mobile and sped forward, towards the medical centre that had parted like a doll’s house. Its broken internal structure was falling in on itself and the growing void.
“Dylan, no!”.
“It’s the quickest way.”
He drove straight through the middle as Lecodia gasped and covered her eyes.
Layers and floors of the wards were crumbling inward like a biscuit that had been moistened by a hot drink. Patients, with faces of death etched upon all, were falling to the left and right. He spotted an old woman, holding a drip poll, topple into the earths gash from the medical centres fifth floor. Bed ridden patients dropped downward with no hope of it cushioning their fall. He could hear the screams of death ringing the air and could see hundreds of bodies spilling into the ground from all floors of the disintegrating medical centre. The buildings contents were showering into the wound, both people and equipment.
Dylan remained centre of the split. It moved forward miles ahead, swallowing areas of the suburbs. Explosions banged over the gash as it tore into Quazar.
He raised his altitude to a safe position, away from the shaking buildings. All around, the Earth’s crust began to shift. The luminescent buildings of the genetic corporations that he had admired from his apartment window shattered and fell like its legs were kicked from under it. He and Lecodia sat in stunned silence as larger fractures spread out over the terrain, taking buildings and people to their end.
The giant canyon was widening and moving forward faster and faster. Skyscrapers were dropping from their strong stance, like demolition teams had set charges all over Quazar. Some glass structures held strong against the violent ground that shook like a trembling victim before a killer. Their glass just shattered and rained.
The canyon grew as if exponentially. Dylan’s apartment building, a tall, slick-looking glass structure, was angled at forty-five degrees. It was a good distance away from the widening crack.
Monorails fell from the sky over the landscape as the rails snapped and bent. It was a crumbling landscape, a natural work of demolition.
He looked back to the fracture. It was now around a mile wide. Sky-mobiles flew to the air all around like a flock of birds that had been disturbed, and the canyon sped towards the outer city walls. One of the organ horn, cylindrical super-skyscrapers collapsed into the fracture. Its two thousand feet of glass obliterated, shattered, and subsided into the canyon. The immense, tubed building fell vertical to the grounds gash. It disappeared in ruins down its endless gullet. Its body flexed and warped with a monstrous creak, and a million pieces of glass rained from its body as it fell. The exposed internal city eyed Dylan through the new gap in the castle like walls.
The skyline was changing. The planet was dying.
As he watched the city’s buildings fall, he realised he had to stand strong against impossible forces and impossible odds. He hoped he was selected.
Chapter 27
Bruised Planet
David stood in the observation bay aboard the space station and looked out over the world from on high. He ached with mourning, could sense a billion souls shuddering with fear.
Quazar’s once unified continent was breaking and fracturing all over with the shifting of its tectonic plates. The globe had segmented like a puzzle, its landscape splitting. Each segment reached thousands of miles wide in all directions, the fractures just a few in width. The world was breaking, and there was nothing he could do. Burning red lava filled each canyon that separated the tectonic plates, like it was a work of art drawn by the rulers of the universe.
The enormous circular areas of the cities smoked with damage. The planet was an orange hue of light pollution, patterned and dotted in all shapes and sizes around the globe. The light was dimming north of the equator. It flickered and blinked around the globe. Storms flashed south of the equator, where the world’s curvature hid the pole. There, thick clouds hid the planet which sparked with electricity. The atmosphere thinly hazed the planet’s curvature like a camera shifting focus.
“Not many people will see this,” the firm voice of Helena Reeves said from beside him.
Angst and hurt rang in her tone.
“It could be the biggest spectacle of all.” David paused. “The asteroid is on its way.”
He’d been told the first had struck the inner planets. The one destined for Quazar was half its size, luckily for humanity. It would be here within the next few minutes. David looked hard in the direction it sped from but could not see it against the blackness of space.
The window he looked out of was a window to hell. The sun was dying quickly. He could see the biblical event with crystal clarity. A plume of orange-blue matter was dragged away from the sun. It glowed with a heavenly heat reaction, like angles had huddled together and put on a show. The hole was devouring the life-giving work of fusion. The black holes vortex shimmered with an aura of digestion. The inward folding vortex, swirling with more matter than it could take as it reached its horizon.
Helena said, “There is so much death out there. I never thought about it like this until now. I mean, I used to report on people’s misfortunes—a death here, an accident there—but this. What has God done?”
“Do you really believe there is a God out there? A higher being?” His stare stayed with the destruction and universal horror.
“I hope so. I think so. You don’t, do you? What chance do we all have if the scientists of the world are faithless, cold men?”
“I’m not faithless, or cold. I never really knew what to think. I have looked at science all my life, spent it trying to find the answer to everything. Where it started, how, and why. Every time I get answers, ten more questions present themselves. You work out the time, scale, power, and how of the big bang, for instance, and are then mystified by where the energy, quarks, atoms, electrons, neutrons, higgs bosons, and a million other grains of matter came from. Where did the definitive beginning come from?” He turned and looked at her. She’d been put with him for a task, but he wanted to see the asteroids impact before he started it. “I sometimes think we’re strung along attempting to work it out, just to learn we’re wasting our time. It’s like teasing someone with something they can never grasp. What’s behind it? And what’s behind whatever’s behind that?”
“Well God is behind it. You know, the man himself,” she said. Her mind was a little frazzled by the sight from the window.
David looked at her with blank eyes. “Maybe, but where did he come from. Nothing just becomes, surely?”
“Faith—you’ve got to have faith. I was a Catholic girl and my mum always said that faith was the driving force behind life, that we were all put on this planet for a reason. That God was testing us. That he would reveal salvation when man was ready. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is him taking people back, giving them salvation. Maybe this is his doing.”
“It could be. One thing’s for sure: he is a bad man to make as many people as this suffer. Why put so many people through so much pain. What is his purpose, his goal? Does he treat us like scientists would, like test subjects? Is his ambition for us, or in use of us?” David turned back to the window.
“He has his reasons, I’m sure. You must be a lonely man to think there is no God. So, when you die what do you think happens?”
“That’s it. The electrical impulses that fire your heart and brain slowly subdue with cellular aging. You pass away and the atoms that make up your body break down and float away to mix and mingle with some other worldly creation. You cease to exist,” David said. “What about you?”
“I think we get to go to Heaven.” Helena smiled with a little excitement. “If you’ve been a good person, that is. I mean all I ever did was work and find my next lay, but that doesn’t make me a bad person, does it?”
David looked at her. He wanted to laugh but just smiled.
She smiled back like she shouldn’t be. “I think we go to a place where everything is perfect. Having passed his test, we get to enter Heaven. I always pictured it as a vast, open land where you walk on clear blue water that reflects the fluffy sky. Clouds position as chairs, and choirs sing to your soul with celestial delicacy. All your loved ones stand around you. You never really know you’re there, like a dream you can’t remember, a memory that passes as deja-vu. But you know you’re safe, loved, in Heaven. You’re at peace, at one with everything, like you’re beyond the question, where eternities of people await to tell an eternity of stories.”
“I would love it if you are right, Helena. I hope we are destined for an eternity of happiness after this life of turmoil. I hope God knows what he’s doing.”
“See? A little faith is all you need,” she said. “We’re going to need some when other people start arriving here. People are not going to be so nice. They are going to do anything to survive,” Helena continued.
“If it gets out of hand, we have the orders to cut the elevator lines. Like you said, people tend to be animals when faced with death. I have your faith on my wife’s safe arrival. I have prayed.” David smiled at her again. “The first time since I was a little boy.”
“Asking for his help or thanking him for his help is the greatest free gift we have. I could spend all day at the mall and not find a bargain like it.” She laughed.
“When they arrive, we need to be ready. We need to know all routes on board the stations, the various accessible ways to each of the carriers,” he said.
Helena stopped giggling. She started to cry.
David continued. “I want to see the asteroid before we start the preparation. The people carriers on the ground are on their way, so prepare yourself. We’ll have to steward a lot of people.”
“I won’t let you down. You know, I don’t know anyone here. I have no one.” Tears streamed her attractive features and tainted them with stress. “Why is mankind dying? Why is this happening?”
David placed a hand on her shoulder. “Be thankful you are here. Thank him for the courtesy of involving you in his next master plan.”
Her face scrunched from an attempt at holding back the tears.
They looked back towards the planet, and David felt it coming. Northeast of the equator, at the edge of the planet’s curvature, a smoking volcanic eye moved. Like all volcanic eyes it was situated in a naked patch of landscape that was devoid of buildings for a hundred square miles. Tiny fractures spread outward of its centre, widening its circumference, and decorated the terrain as it kicked up dust and rustled the ground. His breath was taken away as a sixty-mile radius of pale earth collapsed inward, bowling like the planet was breathing. For a split second there was nothing. Then it breathed outward and erupted with astronomical force.
“Oh my God!” Helena said.
The volcano exploded. Its shock wave dusted outward in a ring of power. It’s lava, fire, and earth reached out like a jagged group of polymorphic quartz crystals poking the ground. It shot westward, towards David’s line of sight, in an immense act of planetary violence. It was like an artery had been severed from within the earth, and it was bleeding to death. The thunderous thump vibrated the station, and David felt its anger.
The volcano’s pyroclastic flow, of debris and flame, bellowed outward in all directions in a cloud that was as thick and black as a pool of burning crude oil. The eruption tore into the sky and reached thirty miles upward. Its shadow cloaked the globe and shaded the nearest city, Central Capital 34. The debris would fall all and cover the area with death and destruction.
David watched its clouds of pyroclastic flow obliterate the outskirt circle of skyscrapers that surrounded central capital 34. The bellowing wall ploughed through like they were twigs. They shattered and disappeared into the dark clutches of the volcano. The land was showered with deadly drops of flaming lava. The eruption dominated the worldly view with immense natural power and force.
David’s eyes were drawn southeast of the equator, where another volcanic eye shifted, fractured, bowled, and erupted.
Then came a flash from the edge of the planet’s curvature, followed by the tell-tale tail that trailed like smouldering debris. The asteroid hit the atmosphere, at the tip of th
e north east planet, with fierce speed. Its face burned red from atmospheric effects, its mass undeterred by the heat and friction of Quazar’s shield. It punched through, forcing the atmosphere to part outward for hundreds of miles. The tail streamed far behind, a white blue vapour, and it headed without mercy at Quazar. It was here to slam its name into the history books.
“I can’t watch,” Helena said. She turned from the window crying.
David saw the pain in her eyes as unbearable loss overwhelmed her. He turned back to the falling rock, where clouds thinned and dispersed from the stone’s energy. It lit up the ground below with its fiery decent. The grounds fractures cleared in his sight. The edges of each tectonic shift were jagged with unstable structures, eroding cities, and smoking devastation. The heat flash was blinding, the world’s curvature and horizon lit bright white.
David squinted, shielded his eyes, then reopened them to witness the impact. The power of the explosion shook the station with terrifying force.
It struck with immense power at the northeast side of the planet, the impact a Godly blow. Quazar’s earth lifted high into the sky in a circular motion, waving outward at three miles high, like a tsunami of earth. The eastern side of the globe began darkening as the earth and dust hurtled into the atmosphere and blew apart from overpressure. The atmosphere vanished on the north-eastern side as the land continued lifting outward. Earth, fire, and dust began to umbrella the eastern side of the planet, like the reaper had placed his hand over it, claiming it as his, taking all souls to the gates of death.
Billions of lives ended in that split moment of time. The universe had changed the structure of atoms within the system. The dark cloud dropped over the eastern half of the planet and the fiery circular shock wave spread like the planet was paper alight with flame. Not one living soul would survive. David felt sick, overpowered. There was nothing humanity could do. He felt small, like a microbe would an elephant. The planet felt smaller.
Once Quazar was the answer to mankind’s prayers, a place where they engineered as they saw fit. It was second chance at manipulating the universe for their benefit, a place they could call home.