Overture (Earth Song)

by Mark Wandrey

  At the end of the hall the elevator had just arrived and a few of his fellow Portal Project workers exited. Harold quickened his pace and shoved past them into the elevator. The guard quickly leaned in and put a hand on Harold’s arm. “It’s not quitting time, Hippie.”

  Harold made a dexterous move, grabbing the soldier by the hand and giving it a viscous twist until the bone creaked. The soldier grunted in surprise and pain, unable to do anything more than bug his eyes out and grimace. Harold smiled at the man and pushed a button on the elevator before giving the arm a little more of a twist and then a push. The soldier tumbled backwards on to the floor as the elevator doors closed.

  “That felt too good,” Harold chuckled and went to work. He decided in that moment he needed to get the new information from his translation to Mindy, any way he could. One decision led to another one. “Time to leave this booby hatch,” he mumbled as he worked. Harold took out the small pocket computer he had been modifying for some time. The screws had been removed in advance so it came apart in a second. Inside the case were the normal innards of such a device, and a specially modified ribbon cable connector.

  Harold knew he didn’t have long as the elevator descended, but he didn’t need long. A screwdriver from his pocket broke the lock on the elevator control panel and exposed the circuit board. The ribbon connector fit perfectly, as planned, and Harold flipped over the computer. It displayed the elevator control program, complete with the destination of his cab. A couple taps on the touch sensitive screen and he was heading for the basement, a maintenance destination that the elevator keypad would not have allowed.

  He chuckled as he slipped the computer back into his pocket and the display over the door changed from 2, to 1, then to B. The door opened and he left in a run, low and fast. The hallway was empty so he cut to the left and ran hard down the dark corridor. Harold had studied the building blueprints and knew there was an entrance to the city sewer tunnels a short distance away. Unfortunately, so did the military.

  He turned the last corner at a run; the access panel was only a short distance ahead. Standing in front of the panel was a soldier pointing an assault rifle at Harold's head. “Fuck,” he yelled and tried to turn on a dime. The floor was slick and all he succeeded in doing was sprawling on the ground at the amused soldier’s feet.

  “Going somewhere?” asked the man.

  “Not anymore,” Harold said as he nursed an ankle that might be sprained. Instead of getting up he just sat there cross-legged on the floor and waited as the soldier used his radio.

  “Yes sir, in the basement. You were right, one of them made a try for it. The one you said would figure it out, the hippie, Harold Binder. No, he didn’t get close. What do you want me to do with him? Yes, sir, will do.”

  “So what, I get taken to this retirement hotel to await the end of the world? I won’t go; you’ll just have to shoot me.”

  “No problem,” Harold was shocked speechless. The soldier pointed his M-4 at Harold’s head.

  “But-” Harold started to say. The gun’s roar cut off his protest.

  Mindy returned to her office and found a pleasant surprise. Leo continued to deliver on his promises and left a letter for her. Inside the envelope she found a note from her husband.

  Mindy,

  I just wanted to say how much I love you and how great that day together was. I hope everything is going well at your ‘project’. Don’t worry about me, the military captain in charge of our precinct has a soft heart and took me off street duty. I’m flying a desk for the duration. Miss you, and please write back soon!

  She smiled and read the note several more times, feeling her cheeks get warm at the mention of their time together. “I have to get back to work,” she chastised herself and turned to her computer.

  Later, Mindy returned to her office to run a pair of algorithms against the numerical symbols. The computer in the Portal Dome kept choking on the data and she was getting frustrated. “The computers at SETI never had this trouble,” she grumbled, then immediately frowned when she remembered that all those people were dead and the building burned to the ground.

  Wait, she thought, Harold has a copy of the translation algorithm he was running on the signal! Smacking herself in the forehead with the heel of her hand. “I’m such an idiot!” she said aloud. She’d just picked up her phone to call him when she looked out the door. People were running down the crowded hall of the modular office making the floor shake. She got up to see what was going on and asked the first person who looked in her direction.

  “Lebowski!” was all the scared looking man yelled and ran by.

  “What do you mean?” she yelled after him, but he’d already turned the corner. Mindy ran after him and quickly came upon a crowd cramming into the tiny lunch room at the far end of the structure. The TV was showing a rough-looking news broadcast. That was becoming more commonplace as the end drew nearer. The anchor hadn’t even bothered with a tie and his shirt was half unbuttoned as he spoke into a handheld microphone, his voice shaking and his eyes big.

  “-asteroid isn’t due to hit the Earth for four more days. Civil unrest has reached pandemic levels around the world. Our correspondent in the Russian Republic was covering an incredibly violent uprising when they caught this footage.”

  The view changed to an even jerkier image taken from a handheld camera. It was night and the cameraman was shooting a crowd rushing across what was once a picturesque square, now a shattered ruins. Flaming rags stuffed in bottles of gasoline lit the night as they flew in one direction while tear gas canisters flew the other direction. It was a scene that had played out all over the world in the last few days. Sometimes the police won. This time the rioters overran the sparse police line. In vivid high-definition color they watched the police have their clubs taken away and used to crack open their previous owner’s skulls. Guns were taken and the tableau began turning into a true bloodbath.

  The crowd suddenly slowed and stopped. The street, formerly lit only by Molotov cocktails, was growing quickly brighter. The view swayed dizzyingly for a moment before focusing on the sky. A ball of light, bright enough to wash out the screen into static, was crawling across the sky. The crowd began to scream and run, their rage forgotten as they blindly rushed to find whatever shelter they could. The cameraman was knocked over; his camera rolled on the ground and came to rest where it recorded only running feet. “There is more in a moment,” the anchorman’s voice intruded. The lunch room was quiet as a funeral.

  The camera was eventually picked up and the view focused back on the sky. The object was no longer just a bright point but a racing fireball. With the discipline of a seasoned journalist, the cameraman followed it all the way to the horizon where it streaked into the side of a mountain. The screen was washed out but the picture quickly returned. One entire side of the mountain had been blown away and huge pieces of rock propelled into the air by the impact arched with a slowness that betrayed their true size. Mindy was reminded of scenes where high explosives were used to blow up a hillside, and how the Earth would suddenly lift up and away in one huge piece, and then shatter as the blast carried it up. Only this wasn’t some small hill, this was a mountain, and the chunks of rock were each the size of buildings.

  “It’s hit already!” some technician cried out.

  “No, it’s just a fragment!” Mindy yelled over the growing panic.

  “How do you know?” another woman screamed.

  “I’m an astronomer, what do you do for a living?” she stared the woman down and relative calm returned. The anchorman was already speaking again.

  “-more than five hours ago. Our correspondent had great difficulty uploading these images to us. NASA has not commented yet, but Global Data Services stated that several of its satellites in orbit are not responding to orders. We have similar reports from all over the planet. One of the experts we were able to reach told us under condition of anonymity that these are likely fragments from LM-245, blown away when the Ar
ies mission detonated its nuclear weapons. They have been propelled toward Earth faster than the asteroid and have arrived days early.” The woman who had spoken to Mindy looked at her for an instant then looked away in embarrassment.

  “We repeat, this does not appear to be LM-245.” No sooner had he finished his statement than the screen went to static and was replaced a moment later with a test pattern. The door to the office opened and soldiers moved in.

  “Attention everyone, those of you who do not have scientific duties directly linked with the Portal are to return to your quarters immediately, on orders of General Hipstitch. You will be summoned when work is to resume. Let’s move it, NOW!” There was a great shuffling of feet as the people left the room under military escort. Once the majority was gone, the soldiers then went around and checked the ID that each of them wore around their necks. Another third were shown to the door. “Good, now the rest of you return to your jobs.”

  “I need to speak to Leo Skinner,” she told the soldier in charge.

  “You need to get back to your office, miss.”

  “This is urgent.”

  “Please, don’t make me tell you again.”

  She almost argued then thought better of it. Leo would contact her later anyway. But when she got to her office she found a nasty surprise. Her phone was no longer working. That brief freedom had once again been cut off. “Bastards!” she screamed in frustration and slammed the receiver down on the base hard enough to crack it. A solution might be within reach and she couldn’t make a phone call.

  Mindy fished a soda from the little fridge and slowly drank it. By the time the can was empty, she was calm again. She tossed the empty into the trash and opened her computer to continue working on the code manually. It was all she could think to do.

  As the planet turned, the bombardment moved with it. The pelting followed the sun bringing death around the globe. Most of the fragments burned up before ever hitting the ground, but the ones bigger than a hundred kilos mostly survived reentry. A fifty pound meteor hit with the force of a ton of TNT, just like a precision-guided two thousand pound bomb. One the size of a house hit the city of Hamburg in the European Union, destroying the town and killing more than a million people. Another, closer in size to a small hill, broke up on reentry and England was subjected to an orbital shotgun blast of multi-ton bombs. A reporter looking over the burning remnants of London harkened it to the German bombing of WWII, all delivered in one night.

  Impacts scattered across the Atlantic and, as dawn approached America, it brought death. Residents of the Eastern Seaboard looked on in fear as the morning sky grew light and the horizon sparkled with brilliant flashes.

  “

  It’s kind of beautiful,” one retired man on Long Island said as he watched the show from his porch. A two hundred pound rock hit his garage and vaporized him a second later. It was America’s turn.

  May 18

  Chief Edward Masciler jumped into the helicopter, which instantly leapt into the air from the Seattle bureau’s roof. Once he had a set of headphones on, he could speak with the other occupants. “Give me a report!” Behind them, Seattle was alive with flashing lights and sirens. The people knew what was coming steadily westward, and the city was bursting into flames.

  “Military broadcast a mayday from the Chelan Bunker,” said his most senior agent as he handed him a bound briefing, “they’re reporting uncontrollable riots underway and are screaming for help. They say they haven’t begun admitting anyone yet because supplies are still arriving.”

  “With that meteor storm on the way this morning I’m not surprised the civilians are freaking out,” said Masciler as the helicopter gained altitude and turned east. “How many men did we dig up?”

  “We have two borrowed Chinooks from Camp Murray full of agents behind us. Seventy-three in all, that’s the best we can do. Fully a third of the bureau didn’t report for duty this morning.”

  Masciler was secretly surprised that many showed. Of course, he didn’t say it out loud. His wife practically begged him on hands and knees not to report in. The images of fire raining from the skies over Europe were burnt forever into their minds, along with the knowledge that the same fate was only hours away.

  “We’re losing control of this,” said one of the other senior agents.

  “No shit, do you think? Just get this heap over the mountains as fast as possible.” Masciler put the briefing aside and massaged his temples. He’d been nursing the same headache for two days.

  It was a hundred and fifty miles to the Chelan Bunker. The Blackhawk copter they flew met up with the two venerable Chinooks over Bellevue and proceeded up into the foothills of the Cascade Mountains as fast as the lumbering dual rotor copters could follow.

  As they crossed the snowy peaks, Masciler listened to reports from the military as well as civilian law enforcement. The crowd panicked early that morning and successive waves of people tried to breach the perimeter. It wasn’t until they were made to use deadly force two hours ago that they pushed the panic button and called for help.

  “Look down there,” the pilot said over the headphones and pointed out the window. Far below them was Interstate 90, the principal freeway over the Cascades. A typical four lane interstate that was only busy during sunny summer days when Seattleites left their usually cloudy homes to enjoy the sunnier side of the state. All four lanes were packed with eastbound cars slowly crawling along. Masciler could see that every tiny side road was equally overrun with crawling headlights, as were all the small towns along the way. Basic services would be all but exhausted in those sleepy towns as thousands of refugees from the coast, many with broken-down vehicles or out of gas, descended like locusts.

  “It’s like something from a third world country,” someone said. The others just nodded their heads. This wasn’t America, at least not how they remembered it. It was complete panic.

  “A lot are from Northern California,” someone said in the headsets. “We’ve been seeing them for days. The San Joaquin Bunker has a much better perimeter; people without invitations were turned away miles before they could even see the staging area. These people must have heard a rumor that the Chelan Bunker wasn’t going to be full, and was a lot easier to get near.”

  “What rumor is that?” Masciler asked.

  “My aunt is from San Diego, she called trying to see if I could get her and her dog in.” There were a few chuckles and shaking heads. The agent who’d spoken just shrugged his shoulders. “Seems like everyone knows someone who’s gotten in.”

  “Sure does,” Masciler agreed. He’d had a funny feeling about the whole setup from the beginning. At least fifty people from his bureau had gotten notices. He’d tried making inquiries to Washington but was told to mind his own business. Just yesterday, he got a call from someone who wouldn’t say who they were, or how he knew Masciler’s private number. The man offered favors, extra admissions to the bunkers. All he had to do was somehow get his people to continue reporting for duty and help maintain order. Masciler pushed a button on his desk that would automatically initiate a trace of the call and the person instantly hung up. The trace department reported the line went to a coffee shop in New Delhi, India. When you considered that New Delhi was now volcanic caldera, that was one impressive phone call.

  The flight across the Cascades took less than an hour, even with the sluggish military copters struggling to keep up. As they drew close, Masciler ordered his pilot to pull ahead and swing around the area so he could get a better look at the situation. The Blackhawk roared ahead and the pilot brought them lower to the ground. The final peaks fell to their rear and the Chelan Bunker complex came into view.

  Lake Chelan spread for fifty miles in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains but never more than two miles across. Created when the Stehekin River was first dammed in the 1890’s, it was one of the deepest fresh water lakes in the world. Now the city of Chelan, once a small settlement of less than a hundred thousand, was overrun wi
th more than two million refugees. Federal agencies flew supplies in daily and worked around the clock to remove abandoned cars and squatters from people’s yards. A short distance away, near the dam, was the two mile perimeter of the bunker. They found it by following the huge fires which lit the sky.

  “Oh my God,” someone said. Few people ever saw a million people in one place, much less several million desperate refugees. They pushed toward the massive concrete and razor wire barricades of the bunker like a human tide, only held back by intermittent gunfire from the defensive towers. To one side, a multilane road was filled with a seemingly endless river of semi-trucks. On another road a mile away, tractors without their trailers drove away. “It goes beyond my ability to believe,” another man said. The night was alive with fire and death.

  Suddenly, bullets winged off the bottom of the helicopter and one broke the pilot’s windshield. “Get us over the perimeter before they hit something vital!” Masciler yelled. The pilot nodded his head and juked from side to side. In a few seconds, the shooting stopped as they roared over the wall and into the massive landing field of the bunker.

  “We have three wounded on the Chinooks,” one of the pilots said over the headphones as they were landing. “They don’t have armored bellies.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Masciler growled and jumped from the helicopter even while it was still setting down. His assistants ran after him until they were out from under the rotor wash where they could talk. “Get the men together when those choppers land, see to the wounded. Do not let them be deployed.”