METEOR STORM

by David Capps

“I don’t have a family,” he replied. “They have a place for me inside the facility as part of the security team, but I won’t be there. I’ll be joining John in the mountains.”

  At the café we parted ways and drove back to where John’s Learjet 45 was waiting.

  * * *

  On our flight back to Denver Tia sat next to me.

  “Okay,” she said looking over at me. “You know something personal about me. It’s your turn.”

  I suspected my learning about her hacking skills and her experience in junior high school was going to come back to bite me. “My turn?” I looked over at Ed. He grinned and looked out the window.

  “Yes. Something personal, something no one else knows.”

  I thought for a moment. This needed to be something Ed already knew but she didn’t. I pulled the medallion out from under my shirt.

  She looked at the medallion. “What is it?”

  “It’s a key,” I said. “The only one like it in the world.”

  “It doesn’t look like a key. It’s round.”

  “It opened the cave in Tibet and turned on NETCOMM.”

  “You did that?” she asked.

  “Actually the old Buddhist priest did that, but this is the key he used.”

  “And how did you end up with the key?”

  I looked at her, waiting for it to sink in.

  “The Buddhist priest was the guardian, wasn’t he?”

  I couldn’t help but grin.

  “And he passed the key on to you. That’s why the robot recognizes you as the guardian.”

  “It is.”

  “Oh my God,” Tia said. “And there’s only one guardian at a time, isn’t there?”

  “One continuous succession of more than 1200 guardians, stretching back for over 63,000 years,” I said.

  “Oh my God,” she said again. “Does it have any magical powers?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, but it does have some kind of life-sustaining energy.”

  I leaned over and placed the medallion over her heart. I could have removed the necklace, but this way it gave me a chance to get closer to her. She was wearing that sensuous perfume again. As I leaned close to her I breathed in the scent of her hair. The feeling of closeness returned. It was exciting and seductive at the same time.

  “You feel anything?” I whispered.

  She looked at me and smiled. “Yes, I do,” she replied quietly. We looked into each other’s eyes. I couldn’t help smiling. She glanced down at my lips and then made eye contact again. Her breathing seemed more rapid than it had been. We sat there, sharing each other’s air and personal space, locked eye to eye. I was getting up the courage to kiss her when she glanced over at Ed.

  “Did you know life has its own frequency?” she asked.

  I sat slowly back in my chair, the necklace pulling the medallion back with me. She reached out and held the medallion in her hands.

  “It’s a cluster of frequencies, actually,” she said. “I’ve been studying it for the last two years. Each organ system in the body has its own frequency.”

  “So you walk by a radio station and your kidneys go into the crapper?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “it’s not like that. The body frequencies are all extremely low, single digits, actually. It’s biological, not radio, but it does show up on the very low end of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

  “Fascinating,” I said as I looked into her eyes.

  “Isn’t it,” she replied looking back into mine. She glanced over at Ed again.

  “I have some equipment that senses the body frequencies back at my place,” she said.

  “We should go there,” I whispered.

  She smiled again.

  “That’s really not practical, given what’s going on,” she said quietly. “I can have my aunt send the equipment to John’s. We can test the medallion there.”

  “Sounds like a date,” I whispered.

  She giggled and her face flushed slightly. “It’ll take a few days,” she said quietly.

  “I can hardly wait,” I whispered back.

  * * *

  Several days later a package arrived at John’s cabin. Tia came running down into the communications room.

  “It’s here,” she said excitedly.

  I looked around the room. No one else had noticed her entrance. “Okay,” I replied quietly and we both headed up the stairs.

  We went into her room. She closed the door and opened the package. Her room was constructed like mine, with all natural wood décor, but she had arranged her things to give the room a definite feminine feel to it.

  She set a small laptop computer up on her desk and attached various cables and probes. She booted up the computer and we waited for the main screen to appear. The computer was dedicated to this program, so it came up automatically. She selected the testing section of the program, grabbed the probe and held her hand out, palm up, motioning for me to give her the medallion. I pulled the necklace from under my shirt and over my head and handed it to her. She set it on the desk top next to the computer, design side up.

  She paused, deciding where to start. “Any suggestions?” she asked.

  “Well,” I replied, “there are twelve bumps on the medallion plus one in the center. Why not start with the center one?”

  She touched the probe to the center bump and looked at the screen. It indicated a frequency was present, but it didn’t correspond to anything the program recognized.

  “Huh,” she said, “I expected it to be one of the life frequencies.”

  “It’s in the general range,” I said, “What about one of the other bumps?”

  She placed the probe on the bump at the twelve o’clock position, based on where the necklace attached to the medallion. The program immediately registered the frequency as associated with the heart and circulation system.

  “Okay,” she said, “now we’re making progress.”

  She began moving from bump to bump in a clockwise direction.

  “Liver meridian, kidneys, lungs, brain and nervous system, muscles and connective tissue, bowels and elimination, bones and structural system, all of the body systems are there.” She continued around the medallion. “But there are five bumps, each with different frequencies that have no known body system associated with them.” She looked perplexed.

  “Maybe they are for systems we don’t know about yet,” I replied.

  “Like what?” she asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “This was a civilization that colonized Mars and was mining minerals on the moon. They might know a little more about the human body than we do.”

  She frowned, pursed her lips and stared at the medallion. She was challenged by things she didn’t yet understand. I could relate. I also felt the irresistible urge to dig into and discover hidden things. It was that urge that landed me in prison.

  “Some things are better left alone,” I whispered to her.

  She flashed an angry look at me. “I don’t think so,” she replied defiantly. “There are no mysteries we cannot understand.”

  “Perhaps,” I replied, “but some of those mysteries come with a profoundly high price tag.”

  “Like what?” she demanded.

  “It’s just a personal observation,” I replied.

  She wasn’t buying it.

  “Like what?” she repeated. “Tell me.”

  I had stepped into a subject I wasn’t prepared to discuss. She looked into my eyes and moved closer to me. I looked away and stepped back a little.

  “I’m sorry. I said something I shouldn’t have said. Can we please let this go?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Look, I really like you,” I said. “I don’t want to spoil this by getting into things from my past. That part of my life is over and I don’t want to bring it up again.”

  “I really like you too,” she said. “If we are going to have a relationship, we need to be honest with each other. Good and long-lasting relationships
are built on trust, and trust begins with complete honesty.”

  I knew she was right. I hadn’t had a real relationship with anyone since high school. I wanted this to work. I just didn’t know if that was even possible. I hung my head, trying to think of what I could say. The silence was crushing me; with my brain frozen and my heart aching, I felt paralyzed. She stepped closer to me and placed her hands on my shoulders.

  “It doesn’t have to be today,” she said gently, “but this is standing in the way of what I think will be a wonderful and rewarding relationship for both of us. I feel like you have to release this burden you carry before you can love me or anyone else. Please don’t wait too long. I can bear whatever you have to tell me.”

  I paused and looked at the floor. “Okay,” I said, “I promise I will tell you.”

  “Okay,” she said. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I could feel my face flushing and looked away. She smiled and turned back to the medallion.

  “This is 63,000 years old?” she asked.

  “At a minimum,” I replied.

  “So what kind of power supply lasts for 63,000 years?”

  “At this point, the longest-lasting power supply we have is the Plutonium power supplies in the voyager satellites, and they’re good for only fifty years.”

  “John has a Geiger Counter down stairs,” she said as she rushed past me and out the door.

  I stood there, trying to calm the inner panic I was feeling and the creeping numbness that threatened my own emotions. I had experienced the darkness and terror of the emotional abyss during my time in prison, and fought against its return from time to time. These bouts with the darkness seemed connected to any feelings of closeness with another person. Okay, not just another person. A woman. That kind of closeness inexorably drew me to it and terrified me at the same time.

  Tia came back in, holding an old yellow Civil Defense radiation meter. She clicked the knob to the test position, zeroed the meter and switched over to the most sensitive scale. She held the meter directly on top of the medallion.

  “Nothing,” she said. “No radioactivity.”

  “So I won’t glow in the dark from wearing it?” I said jokingly.

  “No, you won’t,” she replied thoughtfully. “So what is powering it?”

  “Didn’t you say that the life frequencies were everywhere?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied slowly. “Your point being?”

  “What if the medallion isn’t generating these frequencies, but reacting to them?”

  “You mean like a tuned receiver rather than a transmitter?” she said.

  “Exactly,” I replied.

  That look of excitement and intrigue returned to her face. She looked so beautiful in this mood; I wished it could go on forever. She looked absolutely alive, engaged and focused. No wonder I was falling in love with her.

  She placed the probe on the heart and circulation bump on the medallion and switched the program over to the energize function, where the computer supplied that particular frequency back into the body to rebalance the inner system. After one second she switched back to the sensing function. The strength of the heart and circulation signal from the medallion was pegged at the top of the screen.

  “That’s it!” she shouted. “It’s a resonator. Life itself powers the medallion, and the resonant frequencies balance and empower the body. It’s brilliant.” She was so excited. Just watching her melted the darkness and the fear and brought me back to life.

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s try something a little different. Here, put your hand on the round sensor.”

  It was a half sphere, plastic mostly, with metallic sensors placed around the curved surface.

  “Does it matter which hand?” I asked.

  “No, it doesn’t,” she replied.

  I placed my right hand on the sensor. She activated the program and in a couple of seconds several charts appeared on the screen.

  “Oh, look at this,” she said. “Your kidney meridian is too high. That usually means that you are upset, or literally pissed at someone. I hope it’s not me.”

  “No,” I said, “of course not.”

  “Then who?”

  “Well, my old boss at NASA would fall into that category.” So would General Strom and a few others, I thought, but she really didn’t need to know that just now.

  “Uh,huh,” she replied. “How about we try something else?”

  She placed the medallion on my chest and moved my hand to support it.

  “I’m thinking it was this bump for the kidney system.”

  She placed the probe on the bump on the medallion, checked it in comparison to the bump next to it and then back to the original bump.

  “Just as I suspected,” she said. “Your kidney meridian is high, so the medallion is compensating for that by resonating and creating a weaker field at that frequency. Your heart meridian is strong so the medallion is resonating with less intensity at the heart frequency.”

  She touched the probe to the center bump on the medallion and looked at the field strength on the computer display.

  “Whatever the center node is for, you’re really weak in it. The medallion is really strong at that frequency.”

  “Well,” I replied, “whatever it is for, I presume we will find out once it becomes strengthened by the medallion.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know we will.”

  She picked up the medallion and placed the necklace around my neck, smoothing my shirt down over the medallion.

  “There,” she said. “My guardian.”

  She placed her wrists on my shoulders with her hands gently touching the back of my neck. I looked into her eyes; she was looking back into mine. I glanced at her lips and back to her wonderful two color eyes. We leaned forward and kissed. It was a soft, gentle kiss, tentative, questioning and hopeful at the same time. There was a sense of mild electricity running through me, creating an excitement I hadn’t felt since high school. I looked into her eyes. From the expression on her face, she felt the tingle, too. She smiled. I couldn’t help myself; I smiled as well.

  This was a huge step for me toward a real relationship. The excitement I felt was counterbalanced by the fear of being stretched too far out of my comfort zone. I instinctively pulled back. I could see the disappointment in her eyes, but I couldn’t stop the fear rising within me. I excused myself and left her room.

  CHAPTER 14

  The following day, after lunch I was sitting in my room, pondering the coming meteor storm. A gentle knock on my door pulled me back to the present moment.

  “Carl? It’s Tia.”

  I opened the door.

  “John wants us down in the great room,” she said. “He has a new visitor that he wants us to meet.”

  Her voice was cool, more business-like than before. I had obviously hurt her, something I never wanted to do. My inner struggle with the terror and darkness wasn’t only hurting me, now it was hurting her, too. Like it or not, I was going to have to deal with my inner demons. My only hope was that she would be patient with me long enough for me to overcome the fear within me. The other fear I had was that I was never going to be able to overcome the terror within, and I would lose her along with everything else in my life.

  As we joined the rest of the crew in the great room there was a rather distinguished gentleman standing in front of the main windows. He was around six four and thin, with dark bushy hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, a goatee, and horn rimmed glasses. He wore brown dress slacks, a light tan dress shirt, and a brown tweed sport coat with soft leather elbow patches and brown loafers.

  “Everyone, this is Dr. Hans Ublecker, astrophysicist and research astronomer from the observatory in Quito, Ecuador,” John said. “He has analyzed the information we have and has some important comments that can help people survive the meteor storm. Dr. Hans?”

  “Thank you, John. Based on the information you shared with me, this is what we are facing. Some of the smaller meteo
rites will burn up in the atmosphere, but most of them will strike the ground. Many of the meteorites striking the ground will be the size of a pea or a marble and will be slowed down by air resistance. They are unlikely to cause any significant damage on their own. That does not mean they aren’t dangerous. They will be very hot from their descent into the atmosphere and are very likely to start thousands, if not millions, of fires.”

  I glanced at Tia. She seemed intent on listening to Dr. Hans. She didn’t look at me or break her concentration on the presentation. I wondered if it was the information from Dr. Hans, or if she was just ignoring me.

  “The largest of the meteorites will be the size of large beach balls. These meteorites will impact the ground at very high velocities and will destroy an area the size of most city blocks. Fortunately, meteorites of this size will not be the rule, but rather the exception. You can expect several thousand meteorites of this size. Because the surface of the Earth is two-thirds water, only one third of those impacts will strike the land.”

  I quickly surveyed the faces of the group listening to Dr. Hans. These were skilled people with a greater understanding of science than the vast majority of people. They understood from the beginning that the meteor storm was going to be bad. But whatever they had imagined, Dr. Hans was bringing reality to their imagination, and reality was starkly worse than they had imagined.

  “The bulk of the meteorites will fall somewhere in the middle, with the vast majority being the size of a hard ball to a soft ball. Because of their speed and density, these meteorites will penetrate every style of building currently constructed. Wood structure houses, common in this country, will be penetrated by all of these meteorites. The likelihood of a residential building catching fire from a single meteorite strike is very high. From the data I reviewed, the average home will suffer from four to seven meteorite strikes and will burn to the ground. Commercial buildings will not fare any better. The meteorites will penetrate all known roofing and wall materials, including cinder block and poured or prefab concrete. None of these structures will withstand the onslaught of the meteor storm.”