tmp_f59497a75d8ceb820dc0aeddc2b436a0_SyoNZl.fixed.tidied

by Regolith (mobi)

  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 over 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.

  This would prove crucial because it was the sulfuric clouds and the smoke, not the dust, that caused the nuclear winter that exterminated 65% of all species 65 million years ago. And a planet-wide rainstorm quickly extinguished most fires before their smoke blocked off all sunlight. A fraction of the poisonous ash, soot, and gases from volcanoes meant less sunlight got through, and only a fraction of the acid rain fell.

  Still, with a few billion people dead, and another billion soon to die, the end was just beginning.

  39

  “Full speed ahead!” Captain Wili, wearing a ridiculous pirate’s hat, y
elled into the ear of the helmsman who visibly winced. “Between the two aircraft carriers. Make sure you hit the swell dead on or we’re dead.” Wili put the fingertips of one hand against the palm of the other like the letter “T” to signify a perpendicular course. The navigator at first thought he was calling a time out before realizing that one hand was the wave and the other the ship.

  Wili took little comfort that his ship was only three in the world of its size designed to practically fly over the ocean rather than cut through it. His ship, the Lina, was half a kilometer in front of their sister ship, the Lorena. At full speed, minimal ballast, and lightly loaded, it skimmed over the surface water rather than bogart its way through. Until Jackson, nobody ever designed a surface-effects ship this large for commercial trade.

  “More to port,” the captain insisted after studying the scariest radar return of his life. He grabbed the wall mike. “Attention all hands. This is the captain. We are about to drive up a hill of water a couple hundred meters high. Not a wall of water, and not a cresting wave, but a giant swell like a big speed bump, and we are going to 4x4 our way up and over it. All hands to their stations,” which better be redundant given the circumstances.

  The Southern Ocean is freezing, so they all wore wet suits over thermal underwear. Wili also wore his good luck hat, which he knew must look funny, which is why he didn’t put it on until the vet left on the heloplane. He looked like an otter, right down to his bushy mustache. Still, better safe than dead. He even made sure everyone had a water bottle and several protein bars in zip lock bags. As his boss frequently put it, the best way to survive is to prepare for the worst.

  The Fidel Fragment actually hit several hours ago. Even moving faster than a passenger jet, the tsunami still took a while to travel from the Caribbean to the Southern Ocean where they sat on top of six kilometers of water. Like an iceberg, most of the tsunami would stay underwater. They had already survived dozens of smaller waves from other rocks that hit closer, which gave them a good idea of what to expect.

  Unfortunately, those waves toppled dozens of ships.

  Some expert on the news even claimed they were relatively lucky the Fidel Fragment didn’t hit deeper water because then there would have been that much more water flying at them. The Caribbean is relatively shallow, so Fidel displaced relatively little water, and much of that water was immediately corralled by North, Central, and South American coastlines. A strike in the middle of the Atlantic would have sent a wall of water several times taller across coastlines around the world. It would have washed away the American eastern seaboard all the way to the mountains. 250 years earlier, it would have basically wiped out the thirteen colonies. As it was, a series of mega-tsunamis wiped coastlines around the world clean, including Wall Street on Manhattan Island, the White House, and America’s capital.

  Wili figured that various waves colliding in mid-ocean probably made his job easier by sapping each other of strength. By the time the Big One reached him, it had to overcome dozens of smaller tsunamis flowing against it. Smashing against so many islands and coastlines helped. Yet it was still pretty fucking big.

  “Hijo de puta,” he whispered when it came into view.

  Like dozens of other ships that survived, Wili traveled in circles to have some speed when it arrived. He not only had the smallest surviving ship, but also the fastest. Plus, he didn’t have to worry about his fuel supply since he could split seawater into hydrogen gas. Quite literally, he sat on an ocean of fuel.

  All non-essential crewmembers flew on the heloplane, which had enough fuel to reach New Zealand if they capsized, in which case it would drop them inflatable rafts with motors. That foxy veterinarian was filming them, in any case.

  The two of them spent hours searching for that fucking baby raptor. He was shocked as she explained the danger so matter-of-factly. They put on a Kevlar vest, a helmet, and then more Kevlar around their legs because the little ones will sink all four claws into them, then quickly go for the throat or eyes once the person falls to the ground. Her tone of voice didn’t even change as she described previous “episodes” where the little vicious fuckers attacked full grown people like ninjas.

  Wili felt comfortable with weapons, but it quickly became obvious that she knew a lot more than he did. He offered, but she insisted on taking the lead. Being smaller, she fit into tighter spaces. Being apparently fearless, she ventured into much darker spaces as well. He never knew a woman with such balls. Scared shitless, he nevertheless followed her, egged on by her great booty. He wished she had granny panties instead of a tiny thong because it distracted him like hell.

  They never did find the damn thing. Wili nearly blew away his first mate with a 12-guage when he surprised him. God knows where that dinosaur hid.

  Searching in small spaces in this freezing cold made them both sweat, so Wili invited her to shower in his cabin while he made them some fresh coffee. He turned up the temperature, and sure enough, she was lightly dressed after her shower. Just shorts and a t-shirt as she fixed her fair. Thinking they may not survive, she finally talked to him without open contempt or outright hostility, which was refreshing. All while he got to check out her little booty and small titties. Again, she wasn’t any better looking than most of the whores who often accompanied him, and certainly had smaller breasts, but she had something extra. Something fucking sexy.

  Wili usually wasn’t attracted to women so obviously smarter, especially highly educated professionals, but she was an exception to many rules. As they shared his sofa, knees lightly touching, her eyes came alive as she told him about her amazing “kids” and how they were going to revolutionize paleontology and genetics. He had never seen her so animated. She liked to gesture as she described them, often touching his arm to emphasize something, barely touching her kick-ass Colombian coffee. Then she showed him her scars, pulling up her shirt to show how a raptor tried to disembowel her, and pulling up her shorts so he could see how one dug all four claws into her.

  It was all he could do to hide his raging boner. This little PhD girl spent hours searching for a deadly monster, even after suffering traumatic attacks in the past. Thank God she and his non-essential crew had to board the heloplane to search for the super-tsunami. No sooner was she in the air than he masturbated in his shower because a man can’t think clearly with his balls full.

  40

  The professor was the first to recover. Jackson had no idea how long he had been knocked out. Head pounding and ears ringing, Jackson could still hear his dad frantically calling Lisa’s name in the darkness. Not calling to check on his firstborn son, but his granddaughter. Not that Jackson was surprised by his father’s priorities. Everyone preferred Lisa to him.

  Even with earplugs, he could hear a battle raging above. He could even tell the difference between smaller explosions close by and larger ones far away. The shelter shook differently. It sounded like King Kong and Godzilla duking it out to the death. The main body already hit, so this barrage must be pieces that broke off upon the main body’s entry.

  It seemed to take him forever to get his head on straight. Claustrophobic, Jackson tore off his helmet and, breathing heavily, tried to orient himself. Through squinted eyes he saw his wife’s flashlight. The mattresses on top of him suddenly weighed him down like slabs of concrete. He burrowed towards his wife and carefully took off her helmet. Jackson tried calling her name, but found his mouth and throat inexplicably scratchy. Why the hell didn’t he pocket some gum? She looked asleep. Impatiently he shook her awake, willing her to live.

  Chava came over with his ever-present light and camera. At least, Jackson assumed it was Chava. With the motorcycle helmet still on, it could have been a bald alien.

  Lorena opened her eyes with a yelp, totally disoriented. The first thing she saw was the bald faceless alien blinding her with a bright lamp. Jackson moved his head into her line of sight so they could at least make eye contact. She tried to sit up, but didn’t have the room. Jackson could see the panic build
ing inside her. He quickly pulled her towards the wall so they could stand up like normal people. He sensed others moving under the mattresses and someone, a voice he didn’t recognize, screamed in terror.

  Once his feet planted themselves on the floor, he wrapped his wife in his strong arms and whispered that everything was okay. Lorena hugged him back and he heard her call his name. Then he saw Lisa’s foot stick out between the mattresses and squeezed his way forward. He lifted the mattresses to see his father holding terrified Lisa and patting her hair like a dog. Chava then got there and killed any sense of privacy. With his helmet on but the face plate up, the professor gave his son a relieved thumbs up, then pointed his finger so Lisa would turn her head. It seemed to take a lot of effort, but she slowly adjusted her position to reach out to her parents who dove at her in a fierce group embrace.