Six Bullets

by Bates, Jeremy

  I was glued to the tube for the rest of the day. The reporting got more and more surreal as new and more alarming stories broke one after the other. It’s hard to describe how I felt. It was almost as if I was getting sucker punched in the gut once a minute, every minute. I couldn’t get my head around what I was hearing. The only time I felt remotely like this was when my sister, Leanne, died two and a half years before. She was one of the rare souls who left Broken Hill and made something of themselves. She studied at the University of Adelaide, earned a degree in environmental sciences, and became some sort of consultant to Big Business. She married an executive, had three kids, and moved to the suburbs. Every Christmas she made the five-hour drive back to Broken Hill to spend time with me and Sully (whom Suz dropped off for a couple hours in the afternoon). On Leanne’s final trip—she’d been ecstatic to see Walter, who was only a few months old then—her husband Jeb was driving along the A32, a hypnotically long, arrow-straight stretch of highway. Police couldn’t say anything for certain given there was no animal carcass, but they suspect Jeb must have swerved to avoid a goat or ’roo, or maybe a wombat. The SUV collided with a tree. All five of them died on the spot in a mess of blood and severed limbs. I got the call later in the day—and felt how I did when the news pundits were telling us we had three weeks before we would experience the worst natural disaster since the age of the dinosaurs. The difference between the two scenarios, however, was that I could accept the death of Leanne and her family, or at least rationalize it. People died, loved ones died, that was life. But I couldn’t accept or rationalize an asteroid the size of Mount Everest careening into the planet. It was like trying to visualize what existed before the Big Bang. It was beyond my comprehension.

  I felt despair. I felt denial. I felt an irreversible sense of loss.

  I wasn’t grieving for a single family. I was grieving for the entire human race.

  Our time was up. We were done. Given our humble beginnings in the trees of Africa, we had a good go, we made something of our species, we almost really made something of our species, we were on the verge of greatness, perhaps godliness in another century or two, but like they say, “All good things come to an end.”

  My hand is tiring—I’m not used to using pencils—so I’m going to take a break.

  ••••••

  I just performed an inventory of the fallout shelter with my hand-cranked flashlight. Still have plenty of the basics such as sugar and salt and oil, but down to about half my stock of canned and freeze-dried goods. I have plenty of heirloom seeds, which are disease-resistant crops that continue to produce seeds season after season. But without sunlight they’re about as useless as an ejection seat in a helicopter.

  Water, thankfully, is not a problem. I haven’t had to open any of the five-gallon bottles. We’ve been drinking the water from the freshwater tank. It’s not fresh anymore; it’s filled with acid rain. But one gallon of liquid chlorine bleach disinfects three thousand gallons of water, killing all the pollutants and pathogens that might be bathing in it.

  Walter and I had soup and crackers for dinner. Sully made an appearance, but only to take his bowl into his room.

  I still have no idea what he does in there. He doesn’t let me in. But he never used to be an indoors kid, never read books or magazines, so he doesn’t have any of that stuff in there. Most weekdays you would find him at the skateboard park with his mates. On weekends he played rugby and basketball. He has the body of an athlete. He’s only sixteen but six feet tall, lean, with broad shoulders. He probably would have made a good rower—well, if he hadn’t grown up in the middle of the Outback, that is.

  He’s a handsome kid too. Dark shaggy hair, dark eyebrows and eyes. He definitely got his looks from his mom. She was something, Suz. I fell for her back in high school. It took me weeks to work up the nerve to ask her out. She said no. But I was persistent, and I finally got her to go with me to the movies. That was the year I dropped out of school, started in the mines—and started making money. I was the first one of my mates to own a car, which probably helped me win her over. Not to mention all the gifts I used to buy her. Mostly jewelry and shit but I also got her

  This is stupid. This diary. Why the fuck am I writing about the Suz? Fuck Suz. Who the fuck cares about her? I’m going to throw the fucking thing out.

  ••••••

  Been three days since I last wrote in the diary. I’m reneging. I don’t think I’m going to throw it out. I was watching Walter sitting in his crib earlier. He was in one of his happy moods, smiling and sucking on everything, and I had a terrible premonition I’m not going to see him grow up. Actually, I don’t know if that’s a premonition, or simply common sense given the state of affairs of the planet. But if something happens to me before the sky clears and some sort of order reasserts itself, and if Sully gets his shit together enough to raise Walter on his own, then the diary might be the only thing the boy has to remember his old man by.

  ••••••

  I’m on the roof. The sky’s the usual otherworldly gray, turbulent and rumbling. My face is numb from the cold. I’ve just rubbed some warmth back into my hands so I can pick up the pencil.

  Where was I before I’d started going on about Suz…?

  Ah, right-o—the day the ’roid hit.

  An amateur astronomer was the first to spot Asteroid Shiva. But her Chicken Little warnings went largely unheeded for several days until amateurs by the thousands, followed by academic observatories, also began yelling that the sky was falling. They bounced signals off the rock to determine its distance, velocity, light output, all that mumbo jumbo. And their conclusion? There was a twenty-five-percent chance it would hit us.

  Their collective voices hit a critical mass the day I’d been in the McDonald’s, which was when the media finally took the threat seriously. They demanded confirmation from NASA, which until then had remained silent. The head of the space agency verified at a press conference later in the day that an asteroid was indeed coming to bear on Earth’s orbit. Because it was within radar distance, trajectory analysts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could pinpoint its size and speed with remarkable accuracy. It was five kilometers across and traveling at about seventy-five thousand kilometers per hour, or about seventy times as fast as your average bullet. Their analysis of its flight-path calculation was no less accurate, and their conclusion—the chance of it striking the planet wasn’t one in four. It was an absolute certainty. They could even predict the impact point to the nearest kilometer, and the impact time to the nearest second.

  It would strike central China in a little less than twenty-two days.

  ••••••

  I’m going to switch tracks and say something about Suzy again—your mom, Walter, if you ever read this. It still hurts when I think about her. Crazy, right? Billions of people are dead, and I’m sitting around feeling sorry for myself because my wife left me. But like I said, Walt, if you ever read this, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, like I didn’t try to help her.

  I’m not going to get into detail about why we divorced. Suffice it to say, part of the reason was my becoming a survivalist. Another part was my shifts in the mines—seven nights on, seven nights off, which meant I was either never around, or around too much. But the biggest reason we split, I reckon, was the simple fact we grew apart, like many couples do.

  She ended up leaving me, not the other way around. She was seven months pregnant with you, Walt. I came home one morning from work, and she was gone. All her stuff, gone. There was a note on the table saying she wasn’t coming back. She didn’t answer her phone, but in a place the size of Broken Hill it wasn’t hard to find out where she was.

  Staying with a bloke named Lucas, who turned out to be a deadbeat drug dealer living on the south side of town.

  A fucking drug dealer! Blew my mind. Apparently she’d been seeing him for a few months behind my back. And the screwiest thing? She got custody of your brother and yourself on t
he account she had a steady bank job, and I was known to hit the bottle a bit too hard.

  Nevertheless, her opinion of me changed, and changed fast, with news of the impending asteroid collision. Even in the weeks before the impact, food and water were in scarce supply. People probably don’t know this, but supermarkets only stock enough food to last about three days. And you’ve seen what happens in blackouts or whatnot—the shelves go bare within hours. So in the case of a world-altering catastrophe, when law and order and electricity might not return for a year, if ever?

  Suz came by one day, full of apologies and platitudes, asking for food and water. I made her a deal. If she gave me Sully and yourself, Walt, I would give her food and water. She was game, and we did the swap. I told her she could stay with us too, but she was bizarrely loyal to the deadbeat.

  Anyway, a week before the impact Lucas rocked on by, asking for more food and water. Now, this was a survivalist’s biggest peril. When the shit hits the fan, people come to you. That’s why I never blabbed about my pet hobby, or joined some community of like-minded individuals. Do you know who I’m talking about? The blokes who yakked about the end of the world with a naïve glee, who envisioned themselves in firefights with incompetent government troops, feasting on rabbit, sleeping under the stars, the ones who spent thousands of dollars on camping equipment and a battery of weapons, the ones who thrived on the illusion of security.

  I wasn’t one of those guys, Walter. Those guys are likely all dead. Because when things get down to running and gunning, your prospects for long-term survival are slim. Even elite forces like the Navy Seals avoid running and gunning. They operate from a base. And that’s why I spent years hardening the house, building the fallout shelter. It’s the safest place for us to bug out. It’s not only stocked, it’s unassuming, and that’s our most powerful asset: concealment. Look at the animal kingdom. Reptile, insect, mammal, herbivore, carnivore, whatever—the first line of defense is always camouflage. That’s the hard truth of life. If you want to survive in a kill-or-be-killed world, your best bet is not to draw attention to yourself.

  So that’s why I never blabbed about my hobby, and why I asked Suz to keep her lips zipped. And she did. Not to appease me, I don’t think. But because she was embarrassed that her husband was a doomsday prepper. Even so, she ended up telling deadbeat Lucas. She had to, didn’t she? One day her kids were gone, and in place she had a trunkful of food and water when such commodities were more precious than gold.

  Anywho, to get back to what I was saying, a week before the impact Lucas rocked on by, wanting to leech my supplies. Long story short, I gave the greedy bastard what he asked for. Then I waited. Three days after the impact, with the world completely off the grid, I left my house in the dead of night with nothing but a pair of night-vision goggles and a .357 Magnum. I picked the lock to Lucas’s shitty house and searched it room by room. I found your mom, Walt, I found Suz, sitting in a recliner in the living room. I thought she was sleeping until I noticed the stains on the carpet around the chair.

  The back of her head was crushed. It looked as if it had been smashed with a hammer. There was nothing I could do for her. I reckoned she’d been dead for a few days by then.

  Lucas was in the bedroom, sleeping on his back on the bed, snoring. I pressed the barrel of the revolver between his eyes. He came immediately awake. I didn’t need to ask him why he killed Suz. He wanted the food and water for himself. Instead, I asked him whether he told anyone else about my little secret. He said he didn’t, and I believed him. A grasshopper like him likely had plans on killing me and taking my stockpile for himself.

  I blew his brains out.

  ••••••

  Note to myself: maybe I’ll tear out those last couple pages. Maybe it’s best if Walter doesn’t know what happened to his mom after all.

  ••••••

  I’m not Nostradamus. I didn’t foresee the end of the world as we know it (or TEOTWAWKI to blokes like me). I was simply preparing myself in case something terrible happened. I didn’t know what that “terrible thing” might have been. A global financial meltdown? A nuclear holocaust? A zombifying plague? A rogue asteroid? Ironically, an asteroid strike was always at the bottom of my list.

  Anyway, why am I mentioning this? Because more and more I’m thinking you might one day get your hands on this diary, Walt, and I don’t want you to think your old man was a nutter. I wasn’t. I just started to see things differently than other people. Like when I went to the supermarket, for example. I didn’t see aisles and aisles of food. I saw crops imported from all over the world, delivered by a fossil-fueled supply chain, managed by electricity-powered computers. When I walked down the street, or had dinner in a restaurant, I saw people addicted to excessive consumption and waste. I saw people who didn’t care about tomorrow as long as they were fed and pampered today.

  And so I began asking myself “what if” questions? What would I do if I could no longer buy food from the supermarket? If I couldn’t turn on the stove, or the lights? If I couldn’t leave my home for months or years?

  My answer to these queries: stop mindlessly consuming and learn to be self-sufficient, learn to think outside the box, to create. Society became so specialized it reached a point where no one could do anything for themselves any longer. You needed a doctor to diagnose that you were sick, a cook to make you food, an accountant to tell you how much money you owed the government, a seamstress to fix your pants. Fuck it, Walt! You ask me, specialization is for insects. People should be Jacks of All Trades. It’s liberating. It really is. Everyone should be able to set a bone, butcher their next meal, build a wall, fight efficiently, mend clothes, sharpen a knife.

  So don’t think your old man was crazy, Walt, that’s all I’m asking. I only wanted to be able to protect myself, as well as Sully and yourself, if something like what happened ever happened.

  ••••••

  The asteroid! Goddamn, it’s taking a long time getting around to explaining what happened. I guess I have more to say than I thought.

  There was pure pandemonium in the lead up to the impact. There was twenty-four/seven coverage on the news channels. The Russian, Japanese, and European space agencies quickly confirmed NASA’s calculations. The public’s response was loud and unified: develop a way to knock Asteroid Shiva off course.

  Unfortunately for us, we knew how to identify NEOs, but we didn’t know much about changing their trajectories. We had theories. But viable technologies to do so were still years away. According to NASA, to successfully change the course of Shiva, they would require advance warning numbering in the decades. If they had this, all that would be needed would be dusting the surface of the rock with chalk or charcoal, or perhaps white glass beads, or sending a solar-sail spacecraft that ends by collapsing its reflective sail around the ’roid.

  But we didn’t have decades. We had twenty-two days.

  The G8 governments turned to the experts, demanding solutions. But there were no solutions. There was nothing we could do.

  The Chinese didn’t accept this reality. Because while most countries would survive the initial impact (what happened after that, nobody could say for certain), China would be wiped off the face of the planet. Literally. There would be nothing left of their country but a crater.

  So they declared they were going to go the Bruce Willis option, repurpose a deep-space rocket to carry nuclear warheads, and detonate an explosion in space to reroute the asteroid’s trajectory. The US immediately vetoed this proposal, saying at best it would do nothing, and at worst it might fragment the rock, and the consensus was that that a million Barringer-level events could bring the world closer to mass extinction than one Nordlinger-scale one.

  Nevertheless, a defiant China launched their rocket regardless. Before it got much off the ground, the US shot it out of the sky with anti-satellite weapons. Under different circumstances, this action would have ignited a Third World War. But of course China had much more immediate p
roblems than starting a war they couldn’t win—namely evacuating close to two billion people in less than three weeks and counting.

  ••••••

  It was an impossible endeavor. The estimated cost of evacuating Europe in the case of a catastrophe had been commissioned in the past, and the number was a staggering five trillion dollars. Given China had five times the population of Europe, and its infrastructure lagged decades behind, nobody was going anywhere. Still, the average Chinese citizen tried. It was the biggest mass exodus in human history. Highways and roads became clogged. When the traffic didn’t move, people abandoned their cars, turning the highways and roads into congested parking lots. A lot of folks headed for the borders on foot or bicycle, while a lot simply gave up and accepted the inevitable.

  ••••••

  There was an instant collapse of house prices in China. I chuckled when I heard that on the news. I couldn’t help it. An asteroid was barreling down on the fucking country, and when it struck, the temperature at Ground Zero would momentarily match that of the surface of the Sun, and some wise-guy reporter thought he had to point out that the doomed houses were no longer worth the paper the deeds were written on.