Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  “Zero point two miles per second. So the center is at least twenty miles away?”

  Nathaniel paused in the process of grabbing a sweater and the seconds continued to tick by. Thirty miles. Forty. Fifty. “That’s . . . that’s a big explosion to have been that bright.”

  Taking a slow breath, I shook my head, more out of desire for it not to be true than out of conviction. “It wasn’t an A-bomb.”

  “I’m open to other theories.” He hauled his sweater on, the wool turning his hair into a haystack of static.

  The music changed to “Some Enchanted Evening.” I got out of bed and grabbed a bra and the trousers I’d taken off the day before. Outside, snow swirled past the window. “Well . . . they haven’t interrupted the broadcast, so it has to be something fairly benign, or at least localized. It could be one of the munitions plants.”

  “Maybe a meteor.”

  “Ah!” That idea had some merit and would explain why the broadcast hadn’t been interrupted. It was a localized thing. I let out a breath in relief. “And we could have been directly under the flight path. That would explain why there hasn’t been an explosion, if what we were seeing was just it burning up. All light and fury, signifying nothing.”

  Nathaniel’s fingers brushed mine and he took the ends of the bra out of my hand. He hooked the strap and then he ran his hands up my shoulder blades to rest on my upper arms. His hands were hot against my skin. I leaned back into his touch, but I couldn’t quite stop thinking about that light. It had been so bright. He squeezed me a little, before releasing me. “Yes.”

  “Yes, it was a meteor?”

  “Yes, we should go back.”

  I wanted to believe that it was just a fluke, but I had been able to see the light through my closed eyes. While we got dressed, the radio kept playing one cheerful tune after another. Maybe that was why I pulled on my hiking boots instead of loafers, because some part of my brain kept waiting for things to get worse. Neither of us commented on it, but every time a song ended, I looked at the radio, certain that this time someone would tell us what had happened.

  The floor of the cabin shuddered.

  At first I thought a heavy truck was rolling past, but we were in the middle of nowhere. The porcelain robin that sat on the bedside table danced along its surface and fell.

  You would think that, as a physicist, I would recognize an earthquake faster. But we were in the Poconos, which was geologically stable.

  Nathaniel didn’t worry about that as much and grabbed my hand, pulling me into the doorway. The floor bucked and rolled under us. We clung to each other like in some sort of drunken foxtrot. The walls twisted and then . . . then the whole place came down. I’m pretty sure that I hollered.

  When the earth stopped moving, the radio was still playing.

  It buzzed as if a speaker were damaged, but somehow the battery kept it going. Nathaniel and I were lying, pressed together, in the remnants of the doorframe. Cold air swirled around us. I brushed the dust from his face.

  My hands were shaking. “Okay?”

  “Terrified.” His blue eyes were wide, but both pupils were the same size, so . . . that was good. “You?”

  I paused before answering with the social “fine,” took a breath, and did an inventory of my body. I was filled with adrenaline, but I hadn’t wet myself. Wanted to, though. “I’ll be sore tomorrow, but I don’t think there’s any damage. To me, I mean.”

  He nodded and craned his neck around, looking at the little cavity we were buried inside. Sunlight was visible through a gap where one of the plywood ceiling panels had fallen against the remnants of the doorframe. It took some doing, but we were able to push and pry the wreckage to crawl out of that space and clamber across the remains of the cabin.

  If I had been alone . . . Well, if I had been alone, I wouldn’t have gotten into the doorway in time. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered despite my sweater.

  Nathaniel saw me shiver and squinted at the wreckage. “Might be able to get a blanket out.”

  “Let’s just go to the car.” I turned, praying that nothing had fallen on it. Partly because it was the only way to the airfield where our plane was, but also because the car was borrowed. Thank heavens, it was sitting undamaged in the small parking area. “There’s no way we’ll find my purse in that mess. I can hot-wire it.”

  “Four minutes?” He stumbled in the snow. “Between the flash and the quake.”

  “Something like that.” I was running numbers and distances in my head, and I’m certain he was, too. My pulse was beating against all of my joints and I grabbed for the smooth certainty of mathematics. “So the explosion center is still in the three-hundred-mile range.”

  “The airblast will be what . . . half an hour later? Give or take.” For all the calm in his words, Nathaniel’s hands shook as he opened the passenger door for me. “Which means we have another . . . fifteen minutes before it hits?”

  The air burned cold in my lungs. Fifteen minutes. All of those years doing computations for rocket tests came into terrifying clarity. I could calculate the blast radius of a V2 or the potential of rocket propellant. But this . . . this was not numbers on a page. And I didn’t have enough information to make a solid calculation.

  All I knew for certain was that, as long as the radio was playing, it wasn’t an A-bomb. But whatever had exploded was huge.

  “Let’s try to get as far down the mountain as we can before the airblast hits.” The light had come from the southeast. Thank God, we were on the western side of the mountain, but southeast of us was D.C. and Philly and Baltimore and hundreds of thousands of people.

  Including my family.

  I slid onto the cold vinyl seat and leaned across it to pull out wires from under the steering column. It was easier to focus on something concrete like hot-wiring a car than on what ever was happening.

  Outside the car, the air hissed and crackled. Nathaniel leaned out the win dow. “Shit.”

  “What?” I pulled my head out from under the dashboard and looked up, through the window, past the trees and the snow, and into the sky. Flame and smoke left contrails in the air. A meteor would have done some damage, exploding over the Earth’s surface. A meteorite, though? It had actually hit the Earth and ejected material through the hole it had torn in the atmosphere. Ejecta. We were seeing pieces of the planet raining back down on us as fire. My voice quavered, but I tried for a jaunty tone anyway. “Well . . . at least you were wrong about it being a meteor.”

  I got the car running, and Nathaniel pulled out and headed down the mountain. There was no way we would make it to our plane before the airblast hit, but I had to hope that it would be protected enough in the barn. As for us . . . the more of the mountain we had between us and the airblast, the better. An explosion that bright, from three hundred miles away . . . the blast was not going to be gentle when it hit.

  I turned on the radio, half-expecting it to be nothing but silence, but music came on immediately. I scrolled through the dial looking for something, anything that would tell us what was happening. There was just relentless music. As we drove, the car warmed up, but I couldn’t stop shaking.

  Sliding across the seat, I snuggled up against Nathaniel. “I think I’m in shock.”

  “Will you be able to fly?”

  “Depends on how much ejecta there is when we get to the airfield.” I had flown under fairly strenuous conditions during the war, even though, officially, I had never flown combat. But that was only a technical specification to make the American public feel more secure about women in the military. Still, if I thought of ejecta as anti-aircraft fire, I at least had a frame of reference for what lay ahead of us. “I just need to keep my body temperature from dropping any more.”

  He wrapped one arm around me, pulled the car over to the wrong side of the road, and tucked it into the lee of a craggy overhang. Between it and the mountain, we’d be shielded from the worst of the airblast. “This is probably the best shelter we can hope
for until the blast hits.”

  “Good thinking.” It was hard not to tense, waiting for the airblast. I rested my head against the scratchy wool of Nathaniel’s jacket. Panicking would do neither of us any good, and we might well be wrong about what was happening.

  A song cut off abruptly. I don’t remember what it was; I just remember the sudden silence and then, finally, the announcer. Why had it taken them nearly half an hour to report on what was happening?

  I had never heard Edward R. Murrow sound so shaken.

  “Ladies and gentlemen . . . Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to bring you some grave news. Shortly before ten this morning, what appears to have been a meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere. The meteor has struck the ocean just off the coast of Maryland, causing a massive ball of fire, earthquakes, and other devastation. Coastal residents along the entire Eastern Seaboard are advised to evacuate inland because additional tidal waves are expected. All other citizens are asked to remain inside, to allow emergency responders to work without interruption.” He paused, and the static hiss of the radio seemed to reflect the collective nation holding our breath.

  “We go now to our correspondent Phillip Williams from our affiliate WCBO of Philadelphia, who is at the scene.”

  Why would they have gone to a Philadelphia affiliate, instead of someone at the scene in D.C.? Or Baltimore?

  At first, I thought the static had gotten worse, and then I realized that it was the sound of a massive fire. It took me a moment longer to understand. It had taken them this long to find a reporter who was still alive, and the closest one had been in Philadelphia.

  “I am standing on the US-1, some seventy miles north of where the meteor struck. This is as close as we were able to get, even by plane, due to the tremendous heat. What lay under me as we flew was a scene of horrifying devastation.

  It is as if a hand had scooped away the capital and taken with it all of the men and women who resided there. As of yet, the condition of the president is unknown, but—”

  My heart clenched when his voice broke. I had listened to Williams report the Second World War without breaking stride. Later, when I saw where he had been standing, I was amazed that he was able to speak at all. “But of Washington itself, nothing remains.”

  Biographies

  Kate Dollarhyde

  Kate Dollarhyde is a Nebula Award-winning game designer and writer of speculative fiction. Her stories have been published in Fireside Fiction, Lackington’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other magazines. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of the short fiction magazine Strange Horizons. She is also a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment, where she’s written for The Outer Worlds and the Pillars of Eternity series. She is represented by DongWon Song of Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. She lives in California.

  Brandon O’Brien

  Brandon O’Brien is a performance poet, science fiction and fantasy writer, media critic, teaching artist, and game designer living and working in Trinidad and Tobago. His short stories, essays and poetry has been published in in publications such as Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and sx salon, as well as anthologies such as Sunvault, Ride The Star Wind, and New Worlds, Old Ways.

  His work is focused on using speculative lenses to reframe marginalized and Atlantic realities, imagine radical futures, and prescribe togetherness, awareness, and rebellion as forces for positive change leading into uncertain times.

  P. Djèlí Clark

  Phenderson Djéli Clark is the award winning and Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy nominated author of the novellas The Black God’s Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. His stories have appeared in online venues such as Tor.com, Daily Science Fiction, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Apex, Lightspeed, Fireside Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in print anthologies including, Griots, Hidden Youth, and Clockwork Cairo. He is a founding member of FIYAH Literary Magazine and an infrequent reviewer at Strange Horizons.

  When not writing speculative fiction, P. Djèlí Clark works as an academic historian whose research spans comparative slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World. At current time, he resides in a small Edwardian castle in New England with his wife, infant daughters, and pet dragon (who suspiciously resembles a Boston Terrier). When so inclined he rambles on issues of speculative fiction, politics, and diversity at his aptly named blog The Disgruntled Haradrim.

  Rhett C. Bruno

  Rhett C. Bruno is the USA Today Bestselling & Nebula Award nominated Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author of the Circuit Series (Diversion Books, Podium Audio), Buried Goddess Saga (Aethon Books, Audible Studios) and the Children Of Titan Series (Aethon Books, Audible Studios), and the Audible Original, The Luna Missile Crisis. He is also the co-owner and founder of Aethon Books, as well as the creator of the popular SF/F promotional platforms, Sci-Fi Bridge & Fantasy Bridge.

  He’s a full-time author and publisher living in Connecticut with his wife and dog Raven. Rhett also recently earned a Certificate in Screenwriting from the New School in NYC, in the hopes of one day writing for TV or video games. He is represented by Ethan Ellenberg of the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.

  A. T. Greenblatt

  A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work has been nominated for Nebula Awards, has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Fireside, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt.

  Alix E. Harrow

  Alix E. Harrow has been a student and a teacher, a farm-worker and a cashier, an ice-cream-scooper and a 9-to-5 office-dweller. She’s lived in tents and cars, cramped city apartments and lonely cabins, and spent a summer in a really sweet ’79 VW Vanagon. She has library cards in at least five states.

  Now she’s a full-time writer living with her husband and two semi-feral kids in Kentucky. Her short fiction has appeared in Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Apex, and other venues, and The Ten Thousand Doors of January is her debut novel. Find her wasting time and having opinions at @AlixEHarrow on Twitter.

  Sarah Pinsker

  Sarah Pinsker is the author of over fifty works of short fiction, including the novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road,” winner of the Nebula Award in 2016. Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” was the Sturgeon Award winner in 2014. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Uncanny and in numerous anthologies and year’s bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages, and have been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, Eugie, and World Fantasy Awards.

  Sarah’s first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories was published by Small Beer Press in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, was published by Penguin/Random House/Berkley in September 2019.

  She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels (the third with her rock band, the Stalking Horses) and a fourth in the works. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland and can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.

  Brooke Bolander

  Brooke Bolander writes weird things of indeterminate genre, most of them leaning rather heavily towards fantasy or general all-around weirdness. She attended the University of Leicester 2004-2007 studying History and Archaeology and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, the Theodore Sturgeon, and the World Fantasy awards, much to her unending bafflement. Her debut book with Tor.com Publishing, The Only Harmless Great Thing, was
released in 2018. She is represented by Michael Curry at Donald Maass Literary Agency.

  Tina Connolly

  Tina Connolly is the author of the Ironskin trilogy from Tor Books, the Seriously Wicked series from Tor Teen, and the collection On the Eyeball Floor and Other Stories from Fairwood Press. Her stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Tor.com, Analog, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Women Destroy SF and more. Her stories and novels have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Norton, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. Her narrations have appeared in audiobooks and podcasts including Podcastle, Pseudopod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. She is one of the co-hosts of Escape Pod, and runs the Parsec-winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake. She is originally from Lawrence, Kansas, but she now lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

  Andy Duncan

  Andy Duncan is a writer of fantasy, science fiction and horror. He’s won a Nebula Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and received three World Fantasy Awards. His 2000 debut collection Beluthahatchie and Other Stories was published by Golden Gryphon Press. His second collection is The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, from PS Publishing in 2012. His other books include Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic (co-edited with F. Brett Cox), and his stories also have appeared in such magazines as Clarkesworld, Conjunctions, Light speed, Realms of Fantasy and Weird Tales; in such original anthologies as The Dragon Book, Mojo: Conjure Stories, Wizards and the Eclipse, Polyphony and Starlight series; and in 14 year’s-best volumes. He is a graduate of the creative writing programs at North Carolina State University and the University of Alabama and of the Clarion West writers’ workshop in Seattle.