“You are all interrupting my dying process!” the Professor wanted everyone to know.
But he was chuckling at his own gallows humor. The morphine drip attached to his wheelchair might have had something to do with it.
“It’s good to see you again,” Chuck said with relief.
“Then we must really be in trouble,” the Professor guffawed.
He looked through the glass, over the heads in mission control, and up to the monitor views.
“Look at them,” he said, using his cane to point. “My space flight team! Like Thoroughbreds stomping at the gates waiting for the starter pistol. They can’t believe it’s finally going to be their turn!”
If the launch succeeded, and if the rocket’s nose cone successfully separated to deploy the HYCIV spacecraft, then the space flight team had to steer the craft on a collision course with comet UD3 and detonate its nuclear payload on target.
Amy stepped around the Professor’s wheelchair to touch Chuck on the arm and lean in.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Yuri and Julie are watching Ben for me. They’ll be there if he wakes up.”
Amy looked to Zhen and managed a smile.
“Skin armor,” Zhen told her.
“That’s right,” Amy agreed. “Time to be tough. We’ve got a fucking rocket to launch.”
A voice from the room’s loudspeakers echoed, “T minus five minutes.”
They looked at one another and listened to nervous chatter that vibrated the glass partition.
“I wish Ben was here,” Chuck sighed.
The Professor agreed and said that in all the simulated impact scenarios that Ben had played out in the past, he still couldn’t have predicted the remarkable chain of events leading them through to the uncharted future.
“He’ll come back to us,” Amy insisted.
She took Zhen by the hand and led her away from the partition, toward the rows of chairs in the back of the room. The crowd parted and two people jumped up to offer their seats. It was a nail-biting relief to be a seated bystander now that the work of the HYCIV team was finished. The Effort was in the hands of the launch team, then the space flight team, and then fate itself.
“T minus one minute.”
The VIP room fell silent. Amy, usually fearless, grabbed Zhen’s hand and held it tight. They looked to the countdown on the monitor.
T-minus 41 seconds.
Zhen whispered that Amy’s grip hurt. Amy looked down and forced her clenched fingers to loosen.
T-minus 8 seconds.
In the next few moments, operations would execute automatically, and there was nothing the human species could do. The only choice left was to either shut their eyes or leave them open. Zhen left hers open, even as flare from the rocket boosters left negative imprints on her vision.
“Liftoff!”
The Ariane 5 rocket launched up into the blue sky and over the open sea. Zhen watched, quaking with fear as her mind made a running list of all possible malfunctions. The Ariane shed its rocket boosters and payload fairing and continued to soar with the power of its cryogenic main stage. The upper stage ignited next and burned hydrogen in order to reach speeds of 21,000 miles per hour.
It started as a murmuring as heads turned to look at one another and ended as a deafening blare of screams and cheers. Bystanders lifted their arms in victory. Zhen stood on the seat of her chair to see over all the raised fists. Her eyes caught the Professor, banging his cane against his metal wheelchair and hollering to get Chuck’s attention. The rocket would deploy the HYCIV twenty-seven minutes after liftoff. He had to get to his space flight team.
The Professor probably knew his body wouldn’t last to the time of intercept with the comet, but he would cling to life as long as he could, as all do. As soon as Chuck got behind the wheelchair and pushed it through the crowd like a steamroller, the Professor smiled. He smiled so wide that his ancient face looked ready to shatter into a million pieces.
THIRTY-ONE
¡Reza!
Mexico City
August—February
AFTER THE DISCOVERY of UD3, Enrico and his parents drove every night from their high-rise condo in Mexico City to the basilica to pray. Hail Marys went to the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint to the Americas, and now Saint Medard, patron saint of protection against bad weather—which was the closest they could get to a cosmic impact. Priests handed out prayer leaflets with an eagle hovering above the young Saint Medard, sheltering him from rain.
“But the eagles have drowned,” Enrico whispered.
He read science blogs that described beaches blanketed with drowned birds washing up with the tides. Enrico’s mother hissed for him to be quiet. Her pleading eyes never left the fabric shrine of the Virgin hanging behind bulletproof glass. Enrico crumpled his prayer leaflet and tossed it to the floor of their pew; he had no patience for false promises.
When the basilica became overcrowded, Enrico’s family prayed at home. The city already had over 20 million people in a country of a quarter billion. As a first comet trajectory and then a second hit the news, Catholic pilgrims flooded in to reach the shrine. Enrico stopped going to school. His father stopped going to work. The armored car that waited for them in the mornings stopped coming.
For a time, Enrico basked in the beautiful novelty of spending time with his father, who was a virtual stranger to him. Enrico was ten years old and well above his peers in math, sciences, and reading comprehension. Eager to show off, he located UD3 through his telescope from the balcony of their fifty-fifth-level penthouse. It was a faint pinprick of light between Mars and big, banded Jupiter.
“Looks far away,” Enrico said, which seemed to please his father.
Together, they went online and researched the growing momentum for an international defense effort. The world’s best engineers were sent to South America to design and build an intercept vehicle that could knock UD3 from its trajectory. Military aircraft passed overhead on their way south, like a long migration of metal birds.
“What if the Effort’s a lie?” Enrico’s mother asked, as they watched from their balcony.
She didn’t bother to whisper. His parents no longer tried to hide the truth that everyone could already see.
“Just for show,” she added, “to keep us from killing one another?”
Enrico’s father shrugged. He found the Effort comforting, even if a deflection proved impossible.
“Then it’s a nice lie.”
“Lies are lies,” Enrico piped up.
But he believed in the engineers on those planes and their mission. He believed in the power of science ever since he saw one of his own cells under a microscope, stained blue and giggling in saliva. Now that was a miracle that had nothing to do with the saints.
When the power went out, the family lost their air-conditioning, hot water, oven and microwave, internet access, phone chargers, and television. Enrico’s mother wept on the sofa, clutching her remote control. A few weeks before, celebrities from her favorite telenovelas had joined in a televised prayer vigil for the global crisis. Each of the celebrities read from prayer cards as favorite character clips spliced into the visuals. Enrico’s mother kept the channel on 24/7 until the screen went dark.
“They were like my friends,” she told Enrico. “Now I’m cut off and alone.”
“You still have us,” Enrico said. “And we’re real.”
She locked her arms around him and sighed into his hair. Enrico inherited her dimples, but not much else. She was a beauty queen with gold skin and hair. Marriage proposals came the day of her quinceañera, but she waited. Sure enough, Enrico’s father spotted her while traveling on business. He was the president of a national bank, slight in stature but immaculately dressed in a pressed linen suit and wire-rimmed glasses.
Marriage, Enrico’s mother proclaimed happily, was just like her quinceañera todos los días—but better. Who needed costume jewelry when you had a three-carat engagement ring and credit terms at designe
r shops? Who needed a tacky party at a hotel in the suburbs when you dined with the mayor and his wife in Polanco? Enrico’s mother maintained that it was all a fairy tale.
Except that life never is, Enrico’s father always replied. His job was very stressful and gave him insomnia. He encouraged Enrico’s love of science because he had imagined life as a field biologist until familial duty pulled him toward finance. Dream while you’re young, he whispered to his boy.
But it was difficult to dream as the comet grew closer. Its slow increase in size was both terrifying and too predictable for a ten-year-old. Enrico pulled his drone out of his bedroom closet and carried it to the balcony. When he strapped on the goggles, he saw his unrecognizable city through the darting and hovering eyes of a hummingbird. More and more pilgrims arrived at the basilica every day. Parked cars and RVs clogged streets and highways. Thieves crept along the line of vehicles at night, siphoning off any fuel they could find with hoses and canisters. Such stealth was unnecessary. All eyes, except Enrico’s, were trained ahead and looking for salvation.
When the drone’s batteries died, Enrico switched the lens on his telescope and trained it down instead of up.
“Looks like we’re back to spying the old-fashioned way,” his father called out.
He always hated the drone.
Enrico named the city Tent Town after pilgrims spread fat-caterpillar sleeping bags onto the ground and hung a colorful patchwork of bedsheets for curtains. They lit prayer candles after dusk. Looking down from his balcony, Enrico thought of the firefly sanctuary east of the city in Tlaxcala. Only the prayer lights didn’t blink in syncopated rhythm; they burned steady, illuminating the hands and faces of God’s faithful.
Enrico’s mother stood by him at night. She either waited for a turn at the telescope or leaned over the rail and into the updraft, shaking gold strands of hair out of her eyes and the crease of her full lips.
“So pretty,” she whispered.
It was such an awe-filled, confused statement that it almost sounded like a question. The lights were lovely, but there was a putrid smell on rising gusts. There was hysteria in the echoes of collective prayers from below.
The pilgrims’ candles burned out by the end of September, leaving only darkness. About that time the water and sewer systems both failed. New arrivals to the city increased, but not all were convinced that God was watching. Cartel gangs, always the scourge of Mexico, came armed with machine guns and machetes. They pillaged the last of the pilgrims’ food and water.
Enrico’s mother stopped joining him on the balcony. She retreated to the master bedroom and prayed with her grandmother’s rosary beads for her family first and the pilgrims second. Enrico’s father said nothing as he emptied the mixing bowl she used for a chamber pot out the window.
Residents in Enrico’s building were still better off than most. They were rich and connected and had longer access to scarce food and supplies. But being better off could be dangerous, which was nothing new. Enrico always had armed chaperones when he ventured beyond the building gates and small security details at each of his birthday parties. Being the only child of a wealthy power couple made him a bigger target.
Enrico helped his father pile all their furniture and belongings into the condo’s fire exit stairwell. Everything but their beds and mattresses was used to create an impassable obstacle. Anyone intrepid enough to scale the twelve-foot walls surrounding their building, break through steel doors to the lobby, and climb fifty-five flights of stairs would still have their work cut out for them.
“But what about the neighbors?” Enrico asked. “What if they need our help?”
He thought about the widow Padilla Hernandez and her Chihuahua, Sancho, who lived two flights down. The frail woman kept doggie treats in one pocket of her purse and Pica Fresa candies for Enrico in another.
“We don’t have neighbors anymore,” his father muttered.
“Then what about us?” Enrico asked.
He dragged a light aluminum-tube chair from the balcony to the interlocking mesh of objects.
“How will we get out?”
“We’ll take the elevator like we used to do,” his father replied.
“But what if we don’t get power back?”
Enrico’s father said nothing, just as he said nothing about his bedbound wife or the gunshots from the streets below. Instead, he went for his Bible. Enrico joined his father as he sat cross-legged like a child in their empty living room. His glasses had smudged lenses, but their metal frames still shone in the window light. As a bank executive, he had never looked so unkempt, with his growing beard, running shorts, and sweat-stained undershirt. Both parents, once larger than life, were now looking desperate and mortal.
It was all prophecy, he explained to Enrico: hunger, swords, blood, and death as the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind…Enrico fidgeted as his father read Revelation aloud. He fingered impressions in their wall-to-wall white carpet, where there used to be custom furniture.
“What happens when our food runs out?” Enrico interrupted.
“Then we pray,” his father snapped. “Can’t you see what I’m showing you? If you’re so smart, why do I have to spell it all out?”
His father stood up too quickly and almost fainted. He staggered into the master bedroom. When he emerged hours later, his arms were full of empty containers. Back when the family still had running water, they had filled up their Jacuzzi and every type of makeshift vessel: mugs, glasses, bowls, vases, detergent bottles, both halves of a Chanel sunglasses case, and so on. All but the Jacuzzi were now empty.
Father and son transported the empty vessels to their balcony. Enrico placed his lucky Cruz Azul football club cup in a good spot but didn’t bother to hope. The city would get a centimeter, maybe two, of rain in a month, if they were lucky. The whole exercise was, as his mother said about the defense effort, probably just for show to keep from killing one another.
Enrico whined about his cramping belly because he couldn’t help it. His father added Saint Monica to the receiving end of his prayers, patron saint of disappointing children. When the crying began, Enrico’s father couldn’t take it. He always said it was a woman’s weapon.
“No llores,” he screamed at his son’s tearful begging. “¡Reza!”
Don’t cry, pray!
He tried to hide his own tears and pointed up to the ceiling. Pray! But God wasn’t floating up in the clouds. Enrico knew because he looked with his telescope. His father retreated to the master bedroom and locked the door for good. Enrico tried praying, but it was just a repetition of words. His mind was too free and obsessed over memories of food. Every time he knocked on his parents’ bedroom door, there was either silence or shouting.
In his loneliness and need for distraction, Enrico gravitated to his telescope. He didn’t need its powers of magnification at night. UD3 was now visible to the naked eye. Instead, Enrico lowered his sights from the heavens down to the hell on earth. There he witnessed a man use a machete on another, swinging it like a baseball bat. Enrico ran into the living room in a fit of screaming.
His father opened the bedroom door but didn’t step out. He waited at its threshold for his son’s nonsensical noises to calm into something intelligible.
“We have to help them!” Enrico finally managed.
Tears ran down his cheeks. His hand shook as it pointed to his father’s desk against the bedroom wall. There was a loaded magnum revolver in a locked drawer that he wasn’t supposed to know about. It was too late for one poor, blood-covered pilgrim, but that revolver could save the next.
“We don’t have bullets to spare,” his father said.
“But we have to help them.”
Enrico’s father gripped his son’s arm, tight enough to bruise, and dragged him to the adjoining bathroom. The Jacuzzi tub was nearly empty.
“Save your tears,” his father said, and went back to his praye
rs.
Enrico crawled under their bed, shivering. He couldn’t shut out the images locked in his head. He said prayers in rapid, jittery bursts. Nothing happened. He listened to his parents pray on the mattress above him. His mother whispered Hail Marys. His father confessed his sins aloud to Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes. He said the things no one wanted to know, least of all his family.
By morning, Enrico crawled out from under the bed. The walls of his mind were still blood spattered, but he was restless. Enrico returned to the balcony. He looked into his telescope. In the age of the internet, most preadolescents knew more than they should. Enrico had peeked at images of death and pornography. What Mexican boy with a computer hadn’t looked at cartel videos of chainsaw beheadings? But those horrors were recordings. By their very nature, they happened in the past and could be stopped with the click of a button. Enrico never watched to the end—but he did now. After dry heaving over the railing, Enrico’s empty stomach settled. The hours passed. Then days.
It’s amazing what one can get used to. Not only could Enrico watch the carnage over time, he couldn’t tear his sick-curious eyes from it. Enrico watched gangs plunder Tent Town. Some pilgrims fell to their knees to pray and ask for mercy, but it just made the process easier with a sweeping slash to the throat or face. The things they did to the young women were the worst of it. What would happen to Enrico’s beautiful, golden mother if their barricade failed?
Gangs cut away muscle and severed thick limbs to pile onto bedsheets and sleeping bags from Tent Town. They hauled away the meat and left bowels, bones, heads, and shit in the streets. Enrico realized that what his parents always told him as a child was true: there were people like monsters, lurking out in the world, ready to gobble him up if he wasn’t careful.
The Effort Page 27