When he was finished shuddering, she stood back and took a handful of dust-covered paper towels from a roll hanging beneath the cupboard, grinning at him as she wiped her fingers clean. “Too bad you’re not coming along,” she said. “That’s as easy for me as shaking your hand.”
He finished buttoning his pants and stood looking at her. “You know it’s a one-way trip,” he said helplessly. “You have to know that?”
“Go ahead and consider that my thanks for what you’ve done for us.”
“Shannon, think about this. Seriously.”
“Already have.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, grabbing his carbine from the table and walking out of the house. Without saying a word, he walked past where Marty stood in the yard, got into the Jeep and shut the door.
“What’s his problem?” Marty asked as Emory came walking out with a self-satisfied smile on her face.
“He’s got a crush on a lesbian,” she said. “What about you? You need a crank before we go?”
“Stop it,” he said, turning away, but she grabbed his jacket.
“I’m a practical woman, Marty. You need one or not?”
“Not today,” he said quietly, embarrassed. “But thank you.”
She bumped him on the shoulder. “We’re buddies, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “We’re buddies.”
“Okay then. Me and you stick together.”
“Of course. What about Sullivan?”
“Sullivan . . . well, he’s sorta fucked,” she said with a laugh. “ ’Cuz I play dirty.”
Two days later Sullivan slowed the Jeep and came to a stop in the middle of a back-country road twenty-five miles north of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The boulder resting in the center of the road was over ten feet tall and twice as wide. “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered.
“See what I’ve been telling you guys!” Marty said, jumping excitedly out of the Jeep and running up to the monolith.
Emory and Sullivan got out and stood looking at the rock.
“That flew up in the sky and then came back down, right?” Emory said.
“Sure as hell did!” Marty answered, running around the side of it, trying to calculate the weight. “Definitely igneous rock,” he muttered. “Hey, either of you guys know the unit weight of granite? I’m not sure—no, wait—about a hundred pounds per cubic foot.”
They followed him around it and were shocked by what they saw in the distance.
“Now that’s a goddamn debris field!” Marty shouted.
For as far they could see to the north, the barren landscape was scattered with boulders, though not all were as big as the first one, and there were great gashes in the earth where they had come to land, inexorably altering the landscape with their presence alone.
“See those cars out there?” Marty said, pointing far off the highway where a dozen vehicles lay scattered like broken toys. “That’s where the blast wave threw them. Which means we can cross over to the interstate now. It should be mostly clear.” He turned and paced off the size of the boulder. “Finally, some numbers I can work with.”
Sullivan looked at Emory. “He doesn’t have his head on right.”
“Let him go,” she said. “He’s a got a thing for numbers.”
“Just look at it, Sue,” Marty was muttering. “Just look at it, honey!”
He came back over to them after nearly fifteen minutes of mumbling to himself and stood scratching his growing red beard.
Okay,” he said. “Judging from the size and estimated weight of this monster, speed and angle of attack, we shouldn’t be much more than five hundred miles from the point of impact.”
Sullivan looked at him disbelief. “You’re telling me the explosion threw this fucking thing five hundred miles?”
“That’s an estimate.”
“Well, shit, how close can we get to the crater before the road’s all blown away?”
“That won’t be the problem,” Marty said. “The road will be buried. But that’s what the Jeep is for.”
They were towing a trailer now loaded with fuel and food, so they were set for a long drive.
Emory smiled at Sullivan. “You have to admit, it’s kinda cool.”
He nodded grimly. “My parents were up in Montana.”
“Well, for what it’s worth,” Marty said, “they never knew a thing. It was instantaneous.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” Marty said. “That thing hit with a force equal to five or six teratons of TNT. That’s five or six trillion tons.”
“How did we even survive a blast like that?” Emory wondered.
“Shock cocoons,” Marty said. “Small areas of limited damage within a broader area of mass devastation. That’s how they explained those firemen surviving the World Trade Center falling on top of them. Shock cocoons even allowed for a few buildings to remain standing after the Hiroshima blast. There can be all sorts of reasons for their occurrence. In our case—meaning Arizona—I’m guessing the Rockies had a mitigating effect on the pressure wave no one ever anticipated. Maybe the Grand Canyon did too. We could probably study this impact for decades and still not know everything. You know, it’s kind of like finding a living Tyrannosaurus rex and realizing we were only half right about what they looked like . . . God, I wish Susan were here!”
“Well, can we get going, Mr. Scientist? We’re burning daylight.”
“Why not?” Marty said. “It’s only going to get more interesting.”
They crossed back to the interstate, and it turned out that Marty had been largely correct about that too. There were hundreds and hundreds of cars, but most of them had been blown well clear of the highway.
The trip to the Canadian border took another four days and nights of driving over rough and rocky terrain. The interstate was completely covered by the blanket of ejecta that fell from the sky after the impact, obscuring the landscape. Most of the highway signs had been leveled by the blast wave along with every other man-made structure north of the Wyoming border. They kept track of their progress by stopping to brush off—or in some cases to dig up—fallen or buried highway signs.
At last, Sullivan stopped the Jeep and they sat gaping at a massive hole in the earth extending well beyond the horizon north, east, and west, stretching like an empty ocean basin for as far as the eye could see. “Holy Christ,” he whispered, awestruck.
Marty and Emory got out. Neither said a word as they walked the thirty yards to the crater’s edge and stood looking nearly a mile down into the empty chasm blown in the earth’s crust, its sloped and rocky walls lined with the same colorful striations as the Grand Canyon. They saw no sign of a past civilization, heard no sound but the cold breeze in their ears.
There was a tremor in the earth then, and they hurried back from the edge as rocks broke away and tumbled down, hitting speeds of sixty mph before finally reaching the bottom far below, well out of view. The tremor did not last long, and when the earth stood still again they returned to the rim and watched the last of the tumbling rocks and boulders careening out of sight.
“This wound will take a very long time to heal,” he said quietly.
“Marty, what’s that?” Emory said, pointing roughly three-quarters of a mile around the rim at an orange dot.
Marty trotted back to the Jeep with her on his heels, grabbing his carbine and finding the orange splotch of color through his scope. “It’s
a tent!”
“You’re kidding,” Sullivan said, getting out of the Jeep and raising a pair of high-powered binoculars. “Who the hell else would be stupid enough to . . . you’re right.”
Emory had her own carbine now and was glassing the site as well. “It’s an encampment, all right. Is that a truck of some kind in defilade to the right of the tent, dark green maybe?”
“I think so,” Sullivan said. “Let’s mount up and get a little closer. Everybody keep your fucking eyes peeled for an ambush.”
They drove to within four hundred yards of the encampment and Sullivan climbed up onto the roof with the binoculars.
“John, somebody could blow your ass right off there.”
“Not worried about me, are you, Shannon?”
She looked at Marty and rolled her eyes.
“Looks deserted,” Sullivan said. “There’s another tent. It’s green.”
Emory raised her weapon. “Let’s get over there before it starts getting dark.”
Marty drove the Jeep slowly along, with Emory and Sullivan walking twenty and thirty yards out in front to guard against ambush. When they drew within fifty yards of the encampment, Sullivan signaled Marty to halt and stay in the Jeep as he and Emory advanced into the site, weapons ready.
“Hear that?” Sullivan said.
“Yeah . . . sounds like gas.”
They looked around the corner of the tent and saw a small aluminum camp table with a Coleman stove resting on it, a large propane tank beneath it on the ground. A blue flame hissed beneath a red enameled coffeepot. Emory trained her weapon on what turned out to be a four-door, hybrid Chevrolet SUV. Sullivan advanced on the big orange tent and looked inside, seeing the limbless torsos of a man and a woman, their eyes open, staring sightless at the ceiling of the tent.
“Christ!” he said whipping around. “Look sharp, Shannon! We got bodies!”
Emory dropped into a crouch, never taking her eyes from the SUV. “I got movement, John! Around the truck! Moving to flank us on the left!”
Sullivan moved forward, unable to detect any movement on the uneven, rocky terrain. “I got nothin’.”
They advanced together on the truck, drawing close enough to read the words UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY stenciled in dirty white lettering on the door. “You gotta be shitting me,” he said.
“The government did not send them out here!” Emory said. “Did it?”
“Fuck if I know.” Sullivan crept carefully around the front of the SUV, finding a cleft in the earth on the other side. The fissure was as wide and as deep as a man, a trench running from the edge of the crater and winding off across the uneven landscape for what could have been miles.
Emory came around the back of the truck and looked down into the trench. “That’s what I saw. Somebody jumping in.”
Sullivan slid down into the ditch and poked around until he found a boot print then climbed back out. “Better get Marty in here.”
She turned and beckoned Marty into the camp. He drove up to the orange tent, killed the engine and got out. He walked over and lifted the lid from the coffeepot. “It’s boiled dry,” he said, turning off the flow of propane.
He and Emory had a closer look at the bodies inside the tent, finding their clothes in a pile in the corner.
“Must’ve taken their arms and legs for food,” she said.
“Doesn’t make sense,” Marty said. “There’s backpacking food over there by the stove in a box. Why eat the people?”
Sullivan threw back the flap and stepped inside. “Because you eat the perishable food first. The dehydrated shit will keep.”
Marty looked at him.
“People are perishable,” Sullivan said, pushing a digital video camera into his hands. “Found that in the other tent. How’s it work?”
They stepped out of the tent, and Marty sat on a rock fiddling with the camera while the other two rooted through the surveyors’ equipment, searching the truck and the immediate area near the encampment.
“Where are you going?” Emory called.
“To find their latrine,” Sullivan answered. “It’ll tell us how long they’ve been here.” Shortly, he found a small slit trench about four feet long dug behind a small boulder nearly forty yards away. Near the trench were three rolls of toilet paper in Ziploc bags and a small spade stuck in the ground. He used the spade to uncover the buried excrement, then went back to the encampment where Emory was sorting through the backpacking food.
“Find it?” she asked.
“Either those two were here for at least a week, or there’s some people missing . . . probably two or three.”
“There’s only two sleeping bags.”
“Well, there’s a lot of shit over there. Maybe somebody swiped the other sleeping bags.”
“Three!” Marty called, getting up from the rock and coming over to them. “There’s three missing and they’re down there.” He pointed into the crater. “They apparently died in an avalanche. Check this out.”
He played a video clip of two men and a woman preparing to descend the escarpment in full rock-climbing gear. They were happy and excited, all in their early thirties, one white male, one black, and a small Asian woman. The blond woman from the tent was in the video too, but she was not dressed for climbing, and the man with red hair was probably the person holding the camera.
The next clip showed them descending out of sight a hundred yards or so down the face.
After that, the clip showed an avalanche much worse than the one Marty and company had witnessed upon their arrival. The blonde was screaming in the background, and the man holding the camera kept saying, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” over and over again for nearly a minute until the avalanche ended. From the look of the video, it did not appear that anyone below could possibly have survived.
“Unbelievable,” Sullivan said. “Who in their right mind goes down there?”
Marty shrugged and tucked the camera into his pocket. “Maybe they figured there was nothing else left to do with their lives. They were rock hounds . . . and this is the ultimate experience for a rock hound.”
“And now it’s their grave,” Sullivan said. “So, okay, we camp here tonight. In the morning we’ll load this food back into their truck and head south. That hybrid will get better mileage than the Jeep. Anybody got a better idea?”
“Don’t forget our cannibalistic underground dweller,” Emory said.
“We sleep in shifts anyway,” Sullivan said. “Nothing’s changed.”
Thirty-Seven
It was pitch-black by eight o’clock that night, and Emory sat against a rock with one of the sleeping bags wrapped around her shoulders, unable to even see her hand in front of her face. They had pulled the SUV away from the fissure so they could see the trench unobstructed, and every ten minutes or so she would scan 360 degrees around the encampment through the NVD looking for movement or heat signatures.
A woman’s scream split the night, and Sullivan came instantly awake, grabbing the carbine resting across his belly. “Shannon!”
“Here!” she said to the darkness. “It wasn’t me.” She turned on her night vision device and got to her feet, scanning the trench line.
Sullivan pulled on his helmet and scanned through his own NVD. “How far? Could you tell?”
“Hundred yards maybe.”
“What’s going on?” Marty said in the inky blackness.
“Ruck up!” Emory told him. “A woman screamed out there.”
/> “Probably a trap,” Sullivan said, shrugging into his harness. He could see Marty fumbling around in the dark looking for his equipment, pulling a flashlight from his pocket. “If you turn that fucking thing on, I’ll stick it so far up your ass you’ll have light comin’ out your ears.”
“Well, how the hell else am I supposed to find my shit?”
“Try remembering where you put it!” Sullivan said, walking over and picking up Marty’s gear from behind him and shoving it into his arms. Then he grabbed Marty’s helmet from a rock and jammed it down on his head. “Try not to forget your dick.”
Emory smiled to herself. “He remembered his weapon, John. That’s the important thing.”
“Hark, his guardian angel speaks.”
She laughed. “We’ll walk the trench line above ground. Me and Marty on the right, you on the left.”
“I say Marty walks down in the trench.”
“Sully, fuck off . . . anybody seen my goddamn gloves?”
They covered roughly a hundred yards before Sullivan spotted anything telling down in the trench. His fist went up and the other two stopped in their tracks, crouching low to the ground. He peered carefully over the edge of the fissure for a better look, to see what appeared to be a human being lying on the bottom, zipped up in a mummy sleeping bag. Switching to infrared, he saw that it was indeed a trap.
The person in the mummy bag gave off a strong heat signature, so was alive, and there were additional heat signatures as well . . . two sets of footprints glowing eerily in his viewfinder even as they cooled away to nothing, leading away from the bag into a split in the wall of the trench.
“You two in the cave,” he called out, not knowing what else to call the little hidey-hole. “Come out with your hands up.”
No one answered and no one came out.
“What is it?” Emory asked.
“A goddamn ambush,” Sullivan answered. “I think it’s the girl from the video down there in the bag . . . Come out, for the last time!” he shouted.
He heard what sounded like someone beginning to dig in, so he aimed his M-203 and a fired a 40mm grenade into the opening, blowing it apart and showering the person in the mummy bag with dirt.
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