by David Beers
* * *
The warmth of the fire felt good against Bryan’s leg, fighting against the night air wanting to bite the four of them. They all sat within a few feet of the giant rocks outlining the flames. Two in the morning loomed near and Bryan’s buzz was crossing into drunk’s realm. Not sloshed yet, but if he didn’t stop, he would venture into that territory next. The party was dying down because most people didn’t want to sleep outside; they just wanted to get drunk and then find somewhere with a roof to lay their head down. Bryan and his three friends had brought sleeping bags, just as they usually did, and Bryan thought that he’d probably try to climb in one pretty soon.
“How are y’alls grades shaping up this quarter?” Thera asked. Bryan looked up from the flames. Thera was probably the least drunk out of the four, which was normal. She might have been buzzed or even nearing sober, but she never minded. Bryan never really understood it, why she came to these things and didn’t try to get as drunk as possible, but then again, there were a lot of things about Thera that he didn’t understand. No one did, and when asked about those things, she would just smile and shrug her shoulders. Michael might have grasped most of them, but if he did, he never commented.
“Pretty good. Three As and three Bs. How about you?” Julie answered. “The usual?”
“Yeah, most likely. Physics is harder than I’d like, but I think I’ll be okay.”
Bryan nodded. The usual. A’s across the board. “Probably all B’s.”
“He might get an A in English if he starts editing his papers,” Julie said, elbowing him in the arm. “Legit, you should have seen the last one he got back, Thera. Just red marks up and down the page. Not even for content, just grammar issues.” Her elbow had been harder than friendly, but the alcohol moving through Bryan stunted any pain.
“You serious?” Michael asked.
Bryan looked up, smiling. “I thought spellcheck would get it all.”
“Jesus,” Michael said, taking the beer from in between his knees and drinking it. “You want me to look them over for you?”
“I’ve already offered but he just tells me no, he’ll handle it,” Julie answered.
Bryan looked over at her, but she wasn’t looking up at the group anymore, rather her eyes had dropped down to the fire. She hadn’t offered that at all. She told him they had free tutors if you went to the counselor, but she never said she would look over his papers. Plus, English was her worst subject. Hell, she had a B in it too. If Julie felt his eyes on her, she didn’t look up, and when Bryan turned back across the fire to Thera and Michael, only Thera looked at him and she wasn’t smiling now. Michael had gone back to the flames.
“No. That would be good,” Bryan said. “You don’t mind giving them a read before I turn them in?”
Michael glanced up over the fire. “Yeah, man. No problem. When’s your next one due?”
“At the end of the month.”
“Sure, just forward it to me a few days before and I’ll give it a look.”
“Thanks,” Bryan said. “That’ll help a lot.” Thera still looked at him, her eyes narrow. Maybe she was more intoxicated than usual, because she hardly ever let her face show what she thought, but now it said she saw what was happening. That something across the fire didn’t add up.
The fire grew quiet, and in the midst of silence, Julie looked to Michael. “So, been accepted to any colleges yet?”
Bryan’s eyes flashed to his girlfriend, anger rising up in him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Thera looking over at her too—her eyes moving as fast as his had. He went to Michael next, who still stared at the dancing fire. Watching it speak to the wood as only such a dangerous lover could. After a few more seconds, Michael finally looked at her.
“Haven’t applied to any yet, Julie.” His eyes were flat, holding none of the anger that lived in Bryan’s own. His voice was level, as if he was explaining when he had to work this weekend.
Bryan looked back to Julie, her mouth already opening to say something else. But he wasn’t going to let her. That was enough because everyone around this fire knew what just happened. She had called Michael out, had made him admit his failing in front of the whole group. Bryan had enough. She could get as pissy as she wanted when it was the two of them, but not in front of Michael. Not in front of Thera. She wasn’t going to badmouth Michael like this in front of everyone.
“Shut the fuck up, Julie,” he said.
She looked over to him, her mouth still open but no words coming out.
“Just shut the fuck up,” he said again.
She stared at him for a few more seconds, but he didn’t drop his eyes, didn’t acquiesce like earlier. Finally, she stood up from the fire and walked off, heading down the line of bonfires. He watched her go, but didn’t get up to follow.
“Sorry,” he said, turning back to the fire, speaking to Thera and Michael, though not looking at them.
5
Present Day
The heat woke Michael.
Before he even opened his eyes, he felt the sweat on his brow. His whole sleeping bag felt like he had rolled too close to the fire, perhaps even dangerously close. He turned over and looked, but the fire was dead, not even any ash smoldering between the rocks. So then why was he so hot? It was fall and quickly turning to winter, yet he could feel sweat sticking his shirt to his skin.
He unzipped the bag and climbed out, standing up and looking across the field. None of the other fires still burned, but the moonlight illuminated a few other people sleeping, some with bags, some just wrapped in old blankets. Nothing he saw could explain the heat though, and it wasn’t just in his sleeping bag. The air out here was hot, uncomfortably so.
Michael turned around, looking at the whole field, trying to find something that could account for the temperature. Nothing. The place was dark and the air more or less still.
He turned his head upward, without any real reason.
His mouth opened an inch or two without him knowing. He’d never seen anything like it before, nothing so beautiful. A shooting star moving across the sky, fire covering it and streaming out behind before dying in the atmosphere, unable to find anything that would continue its life. He stared, a part of him thinking that he should wake the others, but unable to actually pull himself away. The fire burned blue, hotter than anything he had seen in the bonfire earlier that night, probably hotter than anything he had ever witnessed before. It moved with an almost paradoxical intensity and stillness—traveling at untold speeds, yet silent as it passed through the night air.
“Hey,” he said, not taking his eyes from the sky.
No one around him moved.
“Hey!” he said, louder but trying not to let his voice spread too far.
“What?” Thera asked, jumping in her sleeping bag.
The other two started as well, each of them saying something similar, though Michael didn’t hear them. He was looking at the falling object, and beginning to think it wasn’t a star. Beginning to think that it was getting awfully close to where they all lay. He’d never seen a falling star before, but he imagined they looked extremely different than what was above him.
The fire spread across the object almost evenly, but at some points,there was a break in its radiance and Michael could see what lay beneath. He didn’t know what rocks flying through space should look like, but a perfect white? No. That’s all he could see from such a distance, but it was unmistakable. It wasn’t the dark, space formed look that he imagined of an asteroid, but the pure white of porcelain.
“What is it?” Thera asked, climbing out of her bag.
Michael heard the rustle as Bryan and Julie climbed from their sleeping bags, all of them looking up into the sky just as he did.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think…” But he didn’t know how to finish the sentence. He didn’t know what he didn’t think, because he didn’t know what flew above them. Only that it was huge. Only that it was ablaze. Only that it was white underneath all
that blue fire. Only that it was moving closer and closer to where they stood, and at a frightening speed.
“Is it going to hit us?” Bryan asked, standing now.
No one answered.
“What should we do?” Julie asked, fear already rippling through her voice. Michael was scared too, because what could they do? You didn’t outrun something of that size, something moving that fast, burning that hot. You couldn’t outrun an atomic bomb, and while this wasn’t that exactly, it felt close enough.
“I don’t know,” he said again, unable to think of any other words.
“We need to leave,” Thera said.
“Yeah, let’s go,” Julie said.
No one moved though, because despite their fear, the novelty—the beauty—held them captive.
And it was too late, anyway. Michael saw that with a detached sort of calm, an observation. Far too late. The thing was going to hit, and while it appeared that it wouldn’t fall on them, he didn’t know if the blast could make its way to them, could send the same heat filling this air to consume him. Consume all of them.
“It’s going to crash,” Julie said.
Michael watched as the thing passed below the tree line, out of his vision, and then he waited. He wasn’t sure what he waited on: A noise? A blast wave? Death? He waited though, for five minutes at least, all of them staring out at the forest in front of them. Nothing came. No sound. No death. Just the still quiet of night.
6
Present Day
Rigley’s phone showed her something she didn’t like.
She disliked it so intensely that she stopped paying attention to where she was, where she was heading, to everything else around her really—for once forgetting completely about her surroundings. If Rigley did anything well, she was painfully aware of what happened around her, both her immediate surroundings and the greater workings of her organization. During this brief moment though, Rigley didn’t see or care about any of that, because her phone contained all the information she needed.
Impact in Georgia. Without a doubt, impact, and from what she could tell, it wasn’t inanimate matter. It appeared that whatever broached the Earth’s atmosphere had been large, and something that large should have evaporated much of the eastern coast. Indeed, the entire world should be reeling from earthquakes and tsunamis, spreading out from the crash site. None of that was occurring, though. The world continued spinning just like yesterday, as if nothing had happened.
Her phone said differently. Her phone said something very important had happened.
This could quickly spiral out of control if it wasn’t handled appropriately; Rigley understood that with a cool clarity. She should have received this information before now, before five in the morning, but there was a delay between the data collected and the data she received. Even now, she was hours behind and that was a problem, because no one knew what the impact actually was or what it contained. No one had a clue. She’d seen things like this before, if not this exact magnitude. They’d been lucky back then; luck carried them through the last couple times, if she was being honest. Luck ran out though, always.
Rigley knew who she needed.
Will. She didn’t know what he was doing, probably working for some other agency, but when she called, the other agencies understood the pecking order. Will would go where she sent him, and he was necessary right now. Rigley had to understand the situation without creating unrest, and Will was her best chance. Will would keep it silent, and that was of all importance. That and speed.
Rigley flipped through the screens on her phone quickly, and dialed his number.
“Yes?” he said.
“I need you in a place called Grayson, Georgia, as soon as possible. I’m going to send over all the details. How quickly can you be there?”
“Forty-eight hours,” Will said.
She hung up the phone, flicked to another screen, and sent all the data that she’d received.
Rigley leaned her head back against the headrest and looked out the window. There wasn’t anything else she could do for five hours, besides firebomb the whole city. It hadn’t come to that yet, though.
It won’t come to that, she thought.
Let Will do his work first.
* * *
Bryan looked at the light shining through his blinds and onto the floor. The sun was still up, so he hadn’t slept for too long. None of them fell asleep again last night; they’d sat the entire time talking about what they saw. Talking, arguing, and finally coming to a consensus that they weren’t going out into the woods to see it. Bryan was ready to run out there ten minutes after none of them had been burnt black, but he was the only one. Even Michael was hesitant about it, and when Julie got to harping, that was the end of it. Of course, Bryan still tried to convince them, but there really wasn’t any reason for him to continue trying at that point. Julie had made her mind up; it was dangerous; they could get hurt; professionals needed to go out there, not high-school kids.
Bryan let it go, went home in the morning and slept off his hangover.
It was mostly gone now and the sun shining across his room said there was still daylight left. Daylight was good, especially since Bryan planned on going out there to see what came down. He didn’t understand the physics of the thing, didn’t know if radiation was already killing every chipmunk and bird out there in those woods, but he was going to see what crashed.
Because he saw the white underneath the fire. He saw how the fire seemed to live on top of the object, but not actually burn it. Not hurting it in any way. And then when it landed? No loud noise. No blast of air rushing out from the forest. Just silence as if nothing happened, silence and the heat permeating the air. Bryan was going back out there and Julie didn’t need to hear anything about it. He didn’t want to go alone, though. That might be too dangerous. But Julie wouldn’t go and Thera was way too smart to find herself in those woods with something that came from space. Which left Michael—who hadn’t been completely against the idea last night; he’d been swayed by Julie’s ferocity, her fear.
Bryan picked up his cellphone, found Michael’s number and dialed. He listened as it rang, thinking through what he wanted to say, what he could say to convince Michael, because Bryan didn’t want to go alone, but still would go regardless of what happened on this call.
“Hey,” Michael answered.
“Yo,” Bryan said. “What are you doing?”
“About to head into work. Have a short shift tonight, four hours.”
“Hmmmm,” Bryan said aloud. In four hours, the sun would be down, which wasn’t ideal. He didn’t especially want to go out there at night, but he didn’t want to wait until tomorrow either. “You want to go back out to the field when you get off?”
“The two of us?”
“Yeah, just us. I want to see what landed out there.”
Michael didn’t say anything for a few seconds and Bryan let silence fall over the line.
“Why do you want to go out there so bad?” Michael asked finally.
Had Bryan avoided that question? Maybe, because he hadn’t asked himself, even though it seemed like such an obvious question. Something important to understand because of how much he wanted this. And now with the question before him, he didn’t have an answer. He couldn’t describe why he wanted to be out there so much. Was it just curiosity? Was it that nothing in his whole life had ever carried the magnitude of what he saw last night? A falling star, but something that looked nothing like a star? That was part of it, sure, but it felt deeper too. It felt more complex and yet simpler. It felt like he was being called out there. Like something was whispering his name, the whisper not in his ear but in his brain…Bryan, Bryan, Bryan…come see me. Come see what’s out here. Come see what dropped from the sky and managed not to kill all of you.
“I don’t know,” he said, pushing away those whispers. He wouldn’t tell Michael that, not just because he might think Bryan crazy, but because he wouldn’t go if he knew. “I just t
hink it would be cool to see what happened last night.”
Michael waited a few more seconds before speaking. “I get off around nine. You want to go out there at ten?”
“Yeah, that’ll work,” Bryan said.
* * *
“You’re insane,” Thera said. “Legitimately, this is the dumbest idea either of you have ever cooked up.”
Michael held the cordless phone to his ear, lying in his bed at the back of the trailer. He’d hung up the phone with Bryan a few minutes ago, having agreed to go back to the field. He needed to put his uniform on and get to work, but he didn’t like what he just told Bryan. He didn’t want to go out there, not fully.
“I know,” he said. “It doesn’t feel smart, at all.”
“It’s not smart. It’s idiotic. I can’t believe you told him you would go. I can’t believe he wants to go.”
“Maybe the police or someone else is already out there? Maybe we won’t even be allowed near it?” Michael asked.
“Maybe. But maybe not. What the hell is wrong with Bryan? Why does he want to see it so bad? I mean, last night was intense. Like, he wasn’t taking no for an answer until Julie started crying.”
Michael had felt it too. The drive to go out there radiated off Bryan, like heat stemming from some invisible fire. He said he wanted to see what it was, but that didn’t feel right. It felt cheap, a lie—only Michael didn’t know what else it could be, what else could make him want it that bad.
“I don’t know, but I can’t let him go out there by himself, can I?”
“Um, you can call the cops, Michael. Let them know what happened and then they’ll be out there when you guys try to find the damn thing.”
“Maybe we won’t find it,” Michael said, not believing the words as they left his lips.