War Angel: part ten

From the Journal of Steven Keys- July 12, 2018

The last eight days have been a haze of smoke and panic, and every time I’ve tried to sit here and write in this thing, I’ve come up empty. How do you describe, with any sense of perspective, the deaths of over 100 million people?

That meteor storm sliced a path across the globe, and there was nothing to stop it. Some countries got fighters into the air and tried to blast the rocks out of the sky, and some sent missiles. Many cities were spared, millions of lives saved. But the ones that weren’t so lucky?

Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nanjing, Delhi, Tehran, Tel-Aviv, Madrid, Istanbul, Budapest, Kiev, Rome. Population: gone. Most vaporized into atoms by the energy released at impact. After impact: earthquakes, especially on the west coast here. The entire California coastline in ruins, San Francisco and Oakland reduced to rubble under water. China with the same problem, and India as well. Water supplies contaminated, animal life destroyed. Eco-systems obliterated.

And those of us that were fortunate enough to avoid an impact? Who knows precisely when we’ll see the sun again? The amount of dust and debris in the atmosphere is frightening. We’ve been told to wear a mask at all times. “Don’t walk outside without protection,” they broadcast all over the news. “Harmful particulates. Radiation. Blah blah blah.” One of the guys here at this survivor camp in Flagstaff said something that freaked out Nadine to the point where she won’t leave the building. “Breathing the air right now would be tantamount to cannibalism. How much burned human flesh and bone is floating in the air? Brother,” he paused, “You don’t want to know.”

I do not want to know.

But through all of it, I have held on to hope. Hope that we can recover. Hope that our world can rebuild from the worst catastrophe in human history. Without hope, you have nothing.

I have been kidding myself. I know this now. Today was, I suppose, the thing we have all been fearing, the one thing we were all terrified would turn out to be true.

Must have been three or four days ago, we were watching one of the cable news nets and their “round-the-clock” coverage, and they had a guy standing in front of the world map, the strike locations marked in bright red behind him. He was discussing the path that the meteor storm had taken, and how stunned that scientists and observers across the world were about the course adjustments they seemed to make as they approached Earth’s gravity well. Pressed by one of the anchors, the reporter admitted that no one could understand it when it happened, but that things were becoming clearer as the days passed. He declined to say more, saying further speculation would be “inappropriate”. It didn’t seem weird or out of place at that moment; anyone that watches the news gets used to hearing double-talk, whether it’s from politicians or from reporters.

As they continued on, I got up to stretch and get away from the continued bleakness washing across the screen. I never knew how much I would crave stupid movies and TV. I’ve always prided myself on being a pretty highbrow guy. Listen to NPR, go see all the arthouse movies, read classy novels and historical narratives. Frankly, I’ve always been a snob, and I know it. I think that’s why I chose linguistics as my profession; only the best and brightest need apply. It’s a very pure form of academia. But at that moment, surrounded by thoughts and images of death, I found myself craving to watch The Three Stooges. Dumb slapstick comedy, friends slapping each other around and falling down for maximum effect. Food fights.

God, would that be awesome. Throwing a pie at someone. Something I would never consider on even my worst day before suddenly sounds like the most wonderful activity ever. That’s what the end of the world means, I guess.

Anyway, I was wandering around the complex, pondering putting on my mask and stepping outside, when I heard a couple of the Army guys that had drawn detail at the center having a quiet conversation, and unusual for me, I decided to try and eavesdrop. I didn’t get much out of it, but they were clearly discussing a recent briefing on the meteors and their aftermath, and what stuck out to me most was one saying something about the meteors being such a frightening “surgical strike”.

I put that aside for the rest of the day, but when I woke the next morning, it was in the front of my mind.

That afternoon, I went to the library area of the complex and pulled up a map of the strikes. Fifteen cities, almost all contained within one small section of the globe, between 30-45 degrees north of the equator. Yet there had been no reports of rocks landing in the Pacific Ocean that day, no tidal waves or tsunamis. They struck the American southwest then skipped all the way across a vast ocean. Many other meteors had been shot down that day, but all within that same area. Something was just weird about that. Something… not right.

Feeling like I couldn’t let it go, I went and found Cannibalism Guy, or as I soon learned, “Ed.” He was a research scientist that had been working in San Diego. A bunch of his buddies had joined him on a party drive to Vegas, and they were on their way home when the storm hit. The other guys had already taken off to go home to their families, but Ed had nowhere else to go at this point, a feeling I understood quite well. I asked Ed to join me in the library, and pulled out the map to ask him if what I was seeing seemed correct, and he surprised me by taking it a step further.

“It’s the million dollar question, man,” he said. “How did this happen? How did it sneak up on us, when that storm was supposed to miss us with ease?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Some sort of unexplained anomaly? Cosmic malfeasance? But that doesn’t explain the strike pattern. Or why it missed the Pacific.”

He nodded grimly. “Which lays out the next question: so what else could have caused it?”

“Some sort of experimental weapon, maybe, that drew the rocks down to Earth maybe?” It wasn’t brilliant, but it was all I had.

Ed laughed. “A magnet beam?” He paused. “Ah- a tractor beam. You must like your sci-fi.”

“In my youth.”

“The problem with that is: who could do it? And who benefits?”

I had thought that one out. “Russia only had one hit, and could maybe pull it off. China shot down all of the rocks headed its way but one.”

Ed shook his head. “Then the primary target should have been the U.S. But the east coast was spared completely. That’s not the way to take us out.”

“What if it was religiously based? Rome and Tel-Aviv are gone. Two of the largest faiths in the world are in shambles. And the news said Tibet was saved by a missile shot.”

“The world has spent a great deal of time over the past twenty years blaming things on radical Islam. But no one in that area of the world even comes close to having the level of technology to redirect a meteor and send it towards a target.

I threw up my hands in defeat. “So who on Earth does have the capability to harness a meteor shower and send it at terrestrial targets?”

“On Earth?” Ed gave me a hard stare. “No one.”

For the rest of the day, I rattled around our conversation in my head. Nadine, bless her, didn’t even notice.

I wish I knew what to do or say to her through all this. The initial shock that morning in the Canyon, I thought that would wear off. But she’s become increasingly more numb as the days wear on. Her parents and siblings were in Phoenix, and as much as she had been praying that they had taken a holiday weekend in their cabin here in Flagstaff, a quick journey over there showed that no one had set foot there in a couple of months. They had been home, and they were gone.

In normal circumstances, I think maybe her faith would have carried her through. She was raised Catholic, though she got away from the church in her teens. Her parents had stayed in the faith, however, so when she went to see the priest the center had brought in, I think she had hopes of being comforted by her folks’ fate.

That didn’t quite work out, though. The poor bastard that the Army brought in was just as shell-shocked as everyone else. Rome, Vatican City- they were now just memories. And a world in which God had allowed this to happen was one he didn’t understand or comprehend. Nadine walked out of that chapel even more confused and pained than when she went in.

There might not be any atheists in foxholes, but it turns out there might be some in vestments when the world comes screeching to an end.

So I don’t quite know how to help ‘dine. She does her best to act normal when she’s with me (as I do when I’m around her) but her profound sense of shock is so overwhelming that I’m not certain she’ll every really be Nadine again.

Of course, I’m not certain how many of us will ever be ourselves again, especially in light of today’s events.

I didn’t tell her about my chat with Ed, trying to figure out exactly how this had happened, perhaps because I was in denial about what Ed had really been trying to tell me. Some things are just better off taken at face value, and that’s where I left our examination of the meteors’ paths. Of course, the shitty thing about denial is that it eventually comes back to bite you.

We were sitting at dinner this evening, enjoying the harsh lights of the complex commissary, when we heard a bloodcurdling scream erupt from the hallway. Everyone turned around quickly and saw one of the older women that was staying in the center run by in tears, a couple of her friends following. Before folks could turn around and get re-settled, one of the friends came back to the room and walked in. He was shaking and pale, tears streaming down his face. “Folks… I think you’d better get down to the TV room. You’re going to need to see… this.”

He walked back out, going in the direction of the screamer, and amidst a lot of murmuring, most of us made our way towards the TV to see what had set her off. Nadine and I walked in together, and what we saw stunned us both into silent horror. The news was showing the skyline over Washington, D.C., Peking, Moscow, and more. And across that skyline were ships. Big, brutal-looking ships, hovering in the air, menacing the ground. If you looked closely, you could see some of the ships opening up, and smaller craft dropped out, buzzing the skies like ironclad gnats.

In short order, we were informed that they had made contact with Earth’s governments within the past day. They called themselves the Omegans. They were here to take what they wanted, they demanded our complete surrender, and it we defied them… well, they had already killed 100 million people. More wouldn’t bother them in the slightest.

Nadine grabbed and squeezed my hand with all her might and collapsed into my arms. Ed slid up next to me and repeated what he had said before. “On Earth? No one.”