01: There Wasn't a Cloud in the Sky

An excerpt from the “History of the New World”, a chronicle of the events which changed the story of human existence, and the central event which triggered it:

The Great Death: A term used to describe the great pandemic which destroyed human civilization in year 1PA (“Post Apocalypse”).

The actual date of this event is unknown. Although time has been recorded ever since based on that date, most people started recording time from when they recovered, not from the occurrence itself. Few wanted to remember the event. The pandemic also took a while to unfold, even though it was said to have swept over the world in record time.

Despite the widespread loss of electricity, there were clocks that continued working, but the survivors refused to keep track using the older Gregorian calendar. Most went so far as to stop recording their birthdays, listing the date of their birth as day 1, the day their lives restarted. Since everyone recorded day 1 from the day they recovered, whenever two survivors met, whoever had been conscious the longest claimed the right to record keeping, although it was suspected many individuals lied about the date to inflate their status.

We know many of the events that led up to the Great Death, but no one has been able to pinpoint how close to the other recorded events the Great Death occurred.

“And then she said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’” Alice related her story with the enthusiasm only a young teenager can conjure, over a drama only a teenager could take so seriously. David Scott, her father, nodded patiently, even though he had no clue who she was talking about. But he was encouraged she was so enthused, whatever the topic. He was especially pleased that she was opening up to him in a way he realized he’d lose in only a few years. He was taking her to his house for the weekend. He was taking her home.

David had worked for a major corporation for years, punching numbers and doing analysis. He’d graduated near the top of his class and planned to accomplish great things. He’d made a lot of money, but hated what his job. He realized, after having worked hard at his career, that the only ones benefitting from his work were the large corporations that used his efforts to shortchange the typical American.

He developed and patented a new mathematical process which helped those corporations do away with thousands of jobs, making them a boatload of money. But David earned enough from it to retire early. That wasn’t the problem. The problem, and the reason he only had access to his daughter every other weekend, was that he stopped making money.

He instead dedicated himself to building a ‘monstrosity out in the middle of nowhere’, as his ex-wife called his home. David undertook building a house as far from the modern world as he could stand. He built it in the side of a mountain in the small remote town of Fowler’s Crossing in West Virginia. His ex, Linda Evers—since she resumed her maiden name—thought that too extreme and assumed he was simply ‘withdrawing from the world’. She’d resented being removed from society, yanked out of the city and forced to do without. She saw it as him losing his drive. She claimed he no longer had the motivation to succeed and she couldn’t live with someone with no ambition anymore. He’d tried arguing with her, but it hadn’t helped. They’d divorced shortly thereafter. David hadn’t fought it, figuring if she was that unhappy then she deserved her freedom, but he missed his daughter, Alice.

That was why he treasured every other weekend so much. When forced to discuss child custody arrangements, Linda argued he’d chosen to live too far away from everything a young child needed to thrive. The judge, whom Linda insisted on involving, agreed. So instead of having equal time, he only got twenty weekends a year. Linda got the major holidays as well.

But Alice loved the little time she spent with her father. He wasn’t concerned with ‘mundane events’ like dance class, soccer lessons and the many activities her mother scheduled her for every day. Whenever she visited her father she got to actually play in the woods like a wild woman. She could climb trees, scale the mountain behind the house and skinny dip in the nearby pond. While she wasn’t quite a tomboy, she was when she visited her father, and enjoyed the ability to relax the demeanor her mother insisted she continually maintain.

She’d helped her father build his house, so now felt it was partially hers as well. After all, she worked hard building it, just as he had. She knew every inch of it, and felt possessive of it. She could point out the stair railings she’d installed, the tile she’d help lay, the plumbing lines she assisted with. She’d learned a lot; all things her mother would never allow her to do.

Linda was, in a word, obsessed with her role in life. At least as far as Alice was concerned. “If you want to get ahead, you have to play the roles you want to assume,” she’d tell her daughter. Thus Alice was never able to dress in jeans and let her hair down. She always had to wear dresses, and she had to have her hair maintained all the time. She could only associate with the kids of other upwardly mobile professionals. Most of the activities she was scheduled for were designed to allow her to meet “important people”, which she already recognized meant rich people who could give her a “boost up” in life. Thus she enjoyed the occasional chances to escape them with her father.

But now her father was asking about school, and as well as she did in school, she felt it was yet another duty she had to do for her mother. She had to maintain her grade point average, she had to take part in science fair projects, she had to do volunteer work for several ‘service organizations’. It was too much for her, so when he asked her about school, she simply talked about her day-to-day interactions with the other kids. She knew he hated it, and she knew he never really listened, but he was always very patient and would never interrupt for fear of alienating her.

“So then Betty says she doesn’t really like him,” she explained, not even sure if she had the right people in her story. She wasn’t quite this caught up in the lives of everyone at her school. Well, she was. After all, her mother insisted she knew everyone who was ‘important’. She just never enjoyed the whole ‘social networking thing’ very much. But if it kept her father from focusing on whether she was improving her GPA or not, she’d rather talk nonsense as long as she could.

Alice really loved her father, just as she loved her mother, but her dad was much easier to take, and he didn’t qualify his love based on how well she did in a wide variety of tasks. Sure, dad liked to work with her around the house, but if she got bored and wandered off to stare at the clouds he wouldn’t reprimand her. He’d insist that she do a good job, that whenever she did a task she do the best she could at it, even if it wasn’t a great job, but when she was ready to quit he’d let her, knowing she’d worked hard while they were at it. She always felt she deserved the breaks when she eventually took them.

“But everyone knows that isn’t true,” she continued with her story, “because she talks about him all the time. Just this past Tuesday, she was going on and on about what he looked like while he was working...” she stopped speaking mid-sentence as her attention was diverted by something she saw out the window.

“Uh ... Dad ... what’s that?” she asked, pointing up at the sky to the left through the windshield ahead.

David looked up, taking his eyes off the road where he’d been concentrating. As long as he’d worked in the city he’d driven the long daily commute through the heavy traffic, and while he was still good in heavy traffic, it still made him nervous. There was too much that could go wrong since there was so little that he could control. At home he controlled everything, aside from random acts of nature. Here, there were dozens of possible risks, none of which he had any control over.

It took a second, since he didn’t see anything at first, but then...

“There it is again,” Alice cried.

“Damn,” David said, forgetting his promise to his ex-wife not to swear in front of their daughter, “That’s a meteor. At least I think it is. It may be a meteorite. No, wait, actually it’s a meteoroid when it’s out in space, a meteor while in the atmosphere, like that one, and a meteorite when it hits the ground, if it survives that long,” he explained, going overboard in his explanation of something Alice was more interested in observing herself. “But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a daylight meteor shower before. You should pay attention since these don’t occur very often.”

“Man, that is so neat,” Alice exclaimed. “Did you know this was scheduled for today?”

“No, I didn’t,” he admitted. “Believe it or not, nature doesn’t always remember to schedule everything with me like she does with your mother. Sometimes she likes to have some fun of her own by surprising us.”

“There are more of them. They seem to be increasing. I thought those only happened at night?”

“Well, technically they can happen anytime, since they’re just objects in space that enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The only reason we associate them with nighttime is because they’re hard to see in full daylight, whereas at night they’re easier to see,” he said, launching into his ‘education mode’, as he called it. He tried to make education fun for Alice by bringing up odd facts and little scientific or history minutia to entertain her. He knew she resented the education that his ex forced on her, and he wanted her to have her own fascination with life, science and the world at large.

“So why are they so bright?” Alice asked.

“I guess it’s because these are bigger than the ones you typically see at night,” he told her. “I didn’t see anything in the paper about a meteor shower,” he continued. “Normally they report events like this so us ‘country folk’ can go out at night and stare at the sky.”

Alice giggled, since they were both aware of what her mother thought of his decision to live out in the country. Alice figured he was one very intelligent member of the ‘country folk’, as he held a couple of degrees and seemed to know something about just about everything.

“Look, they’re coming down faster now,” she observed, pointing at the sky as the trails of the meteors began to fill the sky.

“Here, let me turn on the radio and see if anyone is reporting on this. Maybe they’ll tell us what it is,” David replied. He liked teaching Alice to research things and to keep herself informed. He didn’t harangue her about it, but he wanted her to know how to learn things on her own so she could develop her own interests.

He turned the radio on and jumped from station to station, but no one seemed to be talking about it at the moment. “Guess we’ll have to wait for the news to come on. I’ll turn on NPR. They’re more likely to report it than anyone else since they like to remind everyone how smart they are,” he teased, since he was so educated as well. What he didn’t need to mention was that he didn’t have any of the premier channels found on satellite radio, believing the free AM/FM was fine for his parents and it was fine for him.

Needless to say, NPR didn’t have anything about it either. “Guess we’ll wait for their news on the hour,” he said, giving up on the radio.

When he looked up again, he saw it was indeed getting much heavier. The sky was alive with motion and the red of high altitude fires. David began to get nervous and started thinking this might become more serious than just a brief science lesson. Shifting his gaze from the road to the sky, he observed that the meteors seemed to be moving towards him. Not that the trails were heading towards him, but they seemed to be getting more numerous the farther they drove.

“I think you’d better get into the back seat, Alice.”

“Why? This is fun. I’ve never seen something like this,” she argued.

“Just humor me and do it.”

“But you always say not to climb around in the car while it’s moving,” she said as she did it anyway. She was young and thin, so scrambling over the center console and through the narrow gap between the seats was no problem for her.

“We’ll make an exception in this case,” he told her. “It’s probably nothing, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

Alice heeded her father’s advice. He didn’t normally carry on about perceived dangers. That was her mother’s specialty. Linda would stress about random men on the street, about vans that drove through the neighborhood when she was younger, or about germs on door handles. However, if her father casually mentioned she should watch out for something, there was usually a very good reason to be cautious, as she’d learned many times while working around the house. He never tried to scare you into doing something, instead he always understated everything.

But he was right. The streaks in the sky were getting much more common, until soon the sky lit up like a Christmas tree display. The sky literally rippled flame, only faded because of the sunshine washing it out. Not only that, but David observed occasional nearby streaks. He glanced back and saw Alice still staring up at the sky out her side window.

“OK, you’d better move away from the window. Listen carefully, I want you to climb down in the footrest area between your seat and the front seat,” he explained.

“Really? Why?”

Just then the answer was made clear, as there was a brief flare and a loud bang as a small meteor slammed into the ground a ways from them. The ground shook as the shockwaves rolled across the ground.

“Wow, it’s getting closer than just a pretty display,” Alice observed. “Are you afraid we’ll be hit?”

“No, I don’t think we’ll be hit. The chances of us being hit from something falling from the sky are pretty remote, but what I’m afraid of are ricochets. When a meteor hits the ground it’s likely to throw remnants into the air. Meteors can be travelling at thousands of miles an hour. The atmosphere actually slows them down, but even small rocks can do a lot of damage traveling at those speeds. The rocks, dirt and fragments they throw off when they hit can travel at hundreds of miles an hour. Again, the pieces are likely to be small, but those pieces can be moving at a high rate of speed, so they’d actually be more dangerous than the original meteor.”

“Really?” Alice asked as she struggled to do as her father asked her. “Why would that be?”

“It’s trajectory, honey. A meteor is coming more or less straight down, whereas anything it throws up would be more likely to travel out to the sides.” Just as he said this, they both heard a loud crack as the back window broke. They both glanced back and saw a small hole in the glass. That was when Alice decided it was probably a good idea to keep her head down as her father had originally suggested.

“I’m going to drive hard now,” he explained patiently, stepping heavily on the gas as he did so. “I want to cover as much distance as we can before we’re forced to stop. We’ll likely have to pull over before long, but if we get hit I don’t want to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”

“You’re scaring me now, Daddy. I’m gonna call Mom,” Alice replied. He knew she was scared when she referred to him as ‘Daddy’, like she had as a young girl.

“I think that’s an excellent idea, honey,” David told her.

Normally David hated his daughter’s cell phone. Her mother complained she was addicted to it, and he was aware of how much she used it. While she didn’t use it much while she spent weekends with him, she’d always talk on it on the way back to the city, calling her mother, her friends and schoolmates. It always drove David crazy listening to her prattle on while he watched their little remaining time drain away.

“Hello, Mom? Yeah, it’s me, Alice. Mom, Dad and I are caught in the middle of a meteor storm and...” Here she paused for a bit as she listened to what her mother was saying.

“No, really, there are meteors all over the place. The sky is filled with them.”

“Really, I’m not teasing. They’re— Mom? Are you there, Mom?” Alice asked as she lost contact with her mother.

“I lost her. Damn phone,” she said as she fell into repeating David’s oft used phrase accidentally. She tried dialing the line again.

David was concentrating on the road now, not having the luxury of listening to his daughter’s conversation. The other cars on the road were either driving slowly as the occupants glanced out the windows at the show unfolding around them, or they were stopped, either by the side of the road or in the middle of the road, so David found himself weaving in and out of traffic as he tried to get as far as he could before he finally had to stop.

“I’m not getting anything,” she said after a few minutes. “The phone says there are no bars out here. I’ve never had that happen before. Usually I get good reception until we get closer to the house.”

“That’s because the satellite the phone uses is probably down,” David told her without glancing back. “If it’s this bad here, it’s even worse in outer space. Most of what we see are the larger pieces, since the smaller rocks are burned up in the upper atmosphere. That’s why the sky is so red. However, all those small rocks must be all over beyond our atmosphere.”

“Wait, why would that damage the phone? I thought they used towers?”

“They do, but because of the volume of traffic, and the distances involved, the majority of calls and data are relayed via satellite. So when the satellite does down, most nonlocal calls will be affected,” he explained.

“Oh. Well then, what about the Russian Astronauts? If the satellites were damaged, then what about them?” Alice asked. As part of her school she’d been involved in following the latest joint mission between Japan and Russia as they’d just sent a short mission to the International Space Station a few days before.

“The Russians call them Cosmonauts,” her father replied, falling back into his teacher mode.

“Fine, what the hell is happening to the Cosmonauts?” Alice replied a bit testily.

“Chances are they’re fine,” David said, not at all sure even as he said it.

“How can they survive when the sky is on fire?” she asked, not at all unreasonably.

“Remember, space is a big place, sweetie. They could very well be on the other side of the planet right now. Meteor showers don’t usually last very long, so chances are it’ll be clear when they swing around again. Plus it might only be hitting us at this particular latitude.”

“But if they’re not...” she said, not wanting to finish the thought.

David sighed. “If they’re in the middle of the storm, then they’re history,” he answered shortly. He really didn’t know of any better way of telling her they wouldn’t survive such an encounter. She was silent after that.

The traffic was a bit easier now, as most of the cars were either ignoring the light show, or were pulled all the way over. Still, David was paying close attention to everything around him besides the sky.

“I still can’t reach her,” Alice told him. “Apparently the phone is out. Mom’s going to be worried that the phone call ended like that.”

“Undoubtedly,” David answered, knowing how his ex always liked to panic over things that usually had very simple explanations.

Just then he saw a little cloud of dust kick up as something struck a little distance away, but he also noticed when something almost too small to see streaked across the front of his SUV. He knew it was only getting more dangerous to be driving, and it wasn’t looking like a brief storm either. This was looking like it was going to last for some time.

“Alice, listen carefully. OK?”

She stuck her head between the seats to listen, but David didn’t correct her. He figured she was safe enough where she was.

“If anything happens to me, don’t get up. Don’t try to help me. Chances are I’ll be beyond help if I’m hit by something. Instead, just stay down there where you are and don’t get up or go outside. Understand?”

“Daddy, you’re making me really scared,” she replied.

“Well, Daddy is pretty scared himself,” he told her.

There were strikes hitting the ground around him more and more frequently now. Although he hadn’t been in the military, he’d read enough and spoken to enough friends who had to know that when you’re in a firefight, that you stay down and run like hell until you find some shelter. They might not be in a war zone, but with projectiles flying by at hundreds of miles an hour it was just as dangerous. What’s more, the cheap plastic they used to make cars out of nowadays wouldn’t be likely to provide much protection.

Unfortunately, there weren’t many places you can hide from meteors. But that wasn’t what was worrying him, it was all the little rocks and particles thrown up by the crashing meteors that did. A building might not protect against a direct hit by a meteor, but a concrete or possibly even a heavily built wood structure might provide protection. However this section of highway didn’t have a lot of exits along it.

The radio was still playing, but so far there was no mention of any problems being broadcast, and David wasn’t about to start searching for any news on the subject. Apparently the storm was localized, which was good news as they might be able to drive out of it.

The ground shook unexpectedly, so David knew there was a nearby strike of some size, but it clearly wasn’t a huge strike. Chances were, unless it was a long ways off, it was only something the size of a basketball traveling at a high rate of speed.

As they came around a corner they saw a good sized crater before them with a car stopped in front of it. David knew they couldn’t drive over it, at least not at the speed they were currently driving, and he knew that meant they’d have to finally stop.

“Alice, listen carefully.”

“Yes, Dad?” she asked nervously.

“I’ve got to stop,” he replied as he was applying the brakes. “When I do, I want you to get out quickly and run as fast as you can to the right. There’s an open field over there. Keep running until you’re away from the elevated road. Find the lowest spot you can find in a level field and lay down flat. Don’t look up or look back for me. It looks like the woman ahead of us might be in trouble. If I call, don’t look up. Just call out and I’ll find you. OK?”

“Yeah, Daddy,” she said, even more scared than she’d been before. But she trusted her father. Whenever they’d gotten into trouble before he always knew what to do, and he always kept his head in an emergency, unlike her mother. So she knew enough to listen to everything he told her. If he said she’d be OK, she likely would be as long as she did exactly what he said.