Jayla had to get her sister to a hospital.
She had no idea where one was. How do you find something without a phone? She’d never even learned how to read a map. The map app on her phone gave verbal directions. She just followed them.
Her phone’s service stopped while they were up on the mountain at her father’s cabin, and although she half expected it to come back while they drove back to civilization, it never did.
The small road from the community where the cabin was located turned onto a highway, and she knew she needed to head south, which was down, so she turned left. That highway dead ended into a bigger highway and she remembered turning right onto the smaller road, so she made another left.
Jada just sat in her seat.
Jayla tried blasting music from her phone in the SUV and it made the highway feel less lonely, but Jada didn’t react, not even when Jayla played her sister’s favorite songs. She turned her phone off and sang instead, more to keep herself entertained and distracted than to help her sister. Her sister just sat there.
The empty highway bothered Jayla and she sang louder.
Had this area been evacuated and she simply hadn’t got the word? The mountain cabin lay in such a remote region that it was possible. Plus, with the electricity out, she’d had no contact with the outside world for a few days.
Or were they simply still in a remote area where no one lived?
She saw no houses or buildings along the highway, but she knew there had to be some up ahead somewhere. They’d passed through a community on their way to the cabin. She also saw roads with signs leading off the highway. They had to go somewhere where people lived.
They passed an abandoned car.
When Jayla finally saw a house just off the highway, she pulled to the side and turned her phone back on. She had been without power for a long time, had let it play music too long, and now the battery was almost dead. She only turned it on long enough to check for a signal. Still nothing.
She stared at the house, wondering if she should be brave enough to go knock on the door and ask where the nearest hospital was. The place looked abandoned.
What would her Daddy tell her to do?
Don’t talk to strangers. That was the number one rule.
Think.
That was always number two. Or was it number three? It didn’t matter.
Think through the problem logically.
So, what was the logic of her problem? She needed to find a hospital. She was in the middle of nowhere still, even after a couple of hours of driving down the mountain. But there was a town somewhere. She remembered it. Jada had made her stop. The girl wanted to use the restroom and buy meat sticks, as if they hadn’t had enough food in the SUV already. Jayla had plugged the SUV in at the station to top off the batteries.
If you were building a hospital in the middle of nowhere, where would you put it? It would have to be in a town, right? And wouldn’t you put it close to the highway? And have signs?
All Jayla had to do was keep going and watch for signs. She could do that. That was less scary than approaching an abandoned looking farm house sitting down a long driveway.
She got back in her SUV and started driving.
She rounded a bend on the highway, going around some hilltop or another, it probably had a name that only the locals knew, and Jayla found herself back in civilization. She saw a sign for a campground, a visitor’s center, and homes and trailers dotting the sides of the highway. She breathed a sigh of relief. There would be a hospital or a clinic nearby and she could get Jada tested and checked out.
Getting Jada tested was a priority. Everyone had to believe her that she had fought the old man in self-defense, that he had abused her sister and would have done the same to her. There were probably other victims, and they could get the old man to confess and the police would find them also. It was a grisly crime, Jayla thought, and she didn’t know how police officers dealt with that sort of thing, finding decomposed bodies in the woods. It wasn’t for her.
While she thought about that, she didn’t pay much attention to her surroundings.
She and her sister had been isolated for so long that the lack of other cars on the road didn’t register until later.
Along the way into town she read street signs and began thinking about how tiny communities like this were formed. The names of the roads held a clue. Big Wood River Road, Fox Creek Drive, Dip Creek Way.
The thing that finally got her attention was a large rock in the middle of her lane. She slammed on the brakes, jerking against her seatbelt. Jada flopped around like a rag doll.
When the SUV stopped, she stared at the thing sitting in the road. How would a rock like that get there? It would have taken a mighty huge crane to put it there. How could that have happened? And why?
Think Jayla, she told herself in her father’s voice. Think. Observe. It’s what scientists do.
She knew her father wanted her to be a scientist, but her grades weren’t that good. She didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up. But she knew she had to be smart now. Something was seriously wrong. A big rock like this shouldn’t be in the middle of the highway.
There were more rocks in the highway ahead. The words ‘a debris field’ came to mind. She looked around at the houses and now she saw rocks all over them. Rocks in the yards, rocks on top of smashed cars, rocks near downed trees. Houses had holes in them, in the roofs and the walls, and some buildings had collapsed completely. None had windows, as if someone had intentionally gone through and removed every pane of glass from every building around. Most of the trees were blown down.
Jayla had been driving through a scene of intense devastation and all she had thought of was the funny street names.
What had happened?
She finally realized that there weren’t any other cars on the highway and now she knew why. Something serious had happened here.
She suddenly worried that it could have been a nuclear bomb. Was she exposing herself and her sister to massive amounts of radiation right now? Nothing looked radioactive. But then, how did radioactive look? If it was glowing, it was probably so radioactive that Jayla would be dead already. She shook her head. There was nothing she could do if that were the case.
She started to drive slowly, negotiating the SUV around chunks of rock strewn everywhere, and she prayed she could find a hospital. They could test her for radiation.
Her tires began vibrating on the highway surface. The sound grew louder and she had to stop. There were ripples in the road.
Gray clouds darkened the sky and it must have been late afternoon. It was getting harder to see at a distance, but just ahead she could tell the highway was more and more broken up.
She reluctantly left her sister in the SUV to scout ahead on foot. The rippled highway grew worse, until it was almost like a series of small walls. She crawled over them, knowing there was no way she could drive any farther in this direction. But she kept going. There had to be something past the walls of highway material that would explain what had happened.
She could see buildings on either side of the road that had been completely ripped to shreds. If anyone had been in them, they would be dead. No one could have survived that much destruction.
A car lay upside on top of a downed tree.
She climbed the catastrophically formed walls, up one side and down the other, up the next wall and down it, until they were so close she could hop from the top of one to the next. She could see nothing over the walls but sky and hills in the distance.
Then the walls ran out.
When she saw what was past the walls, she thought she should have thrown herself on the ground in despair, tearing her clothes up and her hair out like they always did in the Bible. But she couldn’t react that way. It was as if the scene in front of her were meaningless, like looking at a pi
cture and not a real thing. She simply couldn’t believe what she saw.
Jayla had seen pictures before that were like what she saw in front of her now, but only from one place. And she knew why those things existed in that one place. She didn’t know why it existed in front of her right now.
The only time she’d seen something like this before was in pictures of the Moon.
The crater in front of her was huge, although not by geological standards. She knew craters on the Moon could be more than fifty miles across. Less than five miles diameter was considered small.
This crater wouldn’t have even been noticeable on the Moon. She could see the other side of it just a couple of hundred yards away. But there was nothing left inside of it. Everything had been vaporized or pulverized, and there was nothing left but a big moon crater.
With a tiny amount of guilty relief, she knew that nuclear bombs would not have created damage like this. It had to have been created just like the craters on the Moon had been created. A meteor strike.
But how would a meteor this big have struck the Earth? Didn’t they burn up in the atmosphere? This couldn’t be happening. What she saw with her own eyes still didn’t look real.
She returned to her sister in disbelief.
She drove the SUV back until she found a major road that turned off the highway. Signs lying on the ground said there was a ski resort that direction. Maybe there was a clinic up there.
Jayla didn’t have much hope. If anyone had survived this destruction, they must have evacuated to somewhere safer.
As she drove slowly in the dimming light, she observed that anything higher than three or four feet off the ground had been leveled, and she wondered if she could even trust the signs that lay on the ground. How far had some of them been blown?
She always hated it when reporters described natural disasters as war zones. As she looked at the wreckage around her, she knew no military would ever, or could ever, destroy a town as thoroughly as the meteor strike had destroyed this town. No war zone ever looked this bad. She had no hope of finding survivors.
Jayla followed the signs to the ski resort anyway, not knowing why, just knowing she needed to follow something. Her sister still sat unmoving in the passenger side. Jayla worried about her not having eaten anything, tried to remember when the last time she ate was. Jada would swallow water when Jayla forced it into her mouth, but Jayla hadn’t succeeded in feeding her.
She tore her attention away to look at a sign that still stood, pointing to the right. Why was this sign still standing?
It was getting hard to see in the twilight, but she stopped, opened her door, and stood up on the sideboard to see what had changed.
The small mountain where the ski resort was located had shielded this area from the meteor strike.
The road she was on went through a valley and she could see debris littering the slopes on the other side. Rocks must have been thrown high enough to go over the mountain, but the mountain had protected this bit of road.
She got back inside and took off, heading towards the resort.
Her hunch paid off. There were two ways to the resort. The road she had just taken, and one that headed south, the direction she wanted to go. Always count on commercialism. Any other location would have only had one way in and one way out.
She continued gratefully on the road, driving slowly to make sure she didn’t slam into any debris. It had grown dark and she could only see by her headlights now. She turned the brights on although that made her fret about how long her batteries would hold out. She whined to Jada about it and grew increasingly agitated, her earlier positive feelings at finding a road south gone. She finally became so upset she simply had to shut up.
Jada never responded.
Signs pointed her back to the main highway and she followed them, guessing that she would come out past the crater. She did.
She turned left onto the highway and immediately started having to pick her way through more rock and debris. At least the highway hadn’t buckled here. She wondered how far south of the crater her detour had taken her.
Then she saw something that gave her hope.
A little blue sign with a white reflective ‘H’ on it.
A hospital.
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