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  He pointed up.

  She nodded.

  Ezra kicked to the surface to check it out before Susan could do the same. If it was too dangerous, he’d keep her from going all the way. When he hit the air, he took a deep, desperate breath, before realizing the futility of his chivalrous intent. No matter what he found up top, Susan couldn’t stay under there for another second. Just as he’d done, she came up and seemingly inhaled her body weight in air.

  He’d lost all his bearings, and it didn’t help he was still fighting the glare in his retinas. Where previously there was a placid lake lined by huge oaks and pines as part of a silent evening, it was now an apocalyptic nightmare. Century-old trees had been knocked over like so many bowling pins, while those that had survived were being burned alive. Orange flames danced on their canopies, and the smell of smoke blew across the water. The wind had kicked up, too, though instead of a refreshing nighttime breeze, it was warm and dry, bits of cinder and ash hissing out into nothing as they touched Ezra’s skin. The lake, a smooth, calm pane of glass a moment earlier, looked like a child had done a can-opener dive into a half-full bathtub as large waves kicked against the shores, the water sloshing side to side wildly in all directions.

  I’m on Kentucky Lake, he reassured himself, remembering everything that had taken place over the last minute and a half.

  The sky over Paducah thirty miles to the north looked like someone had ground up the city into a powder and tossed it thirty thousand feet in the air. The billowing dust storm was as large as a towering cumulus cloud harboring the worst thunderstorm in history. Lightning flickered in the distant formation, right up to the top of the still-rising mass. Fires burned around it, lighting those clouds from below with the orange glow.

  “I think we got hit with the mother of all meteorites,” he shouted. The fact they were alive spoke volumes about its size. He’d read articles about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and he’d seen movies about big impacts on the Earth. If they were still alive to complain about it, it couldn’t have been a planet killer. However, it didn’t diminish the damage between Paducah and his home.

  Ezra bobbed on top of the debris-strewn water as high as he was able, so he could get a look across the lake to his house. Even through the thick haze, it was apparent one of his neighbor’s houses was on fire, as were many of the cultivated trees in their neighborhood. His immediate concern for his and Susan’s safety was eclipsed by their intermediate-term survival prospects. They had nothing except the clothes on their backs, but the house had everything necessary to keep them alive, as long as the fires didn’t spread.

  He couldn’t help but remember that all their worldly possessions were neatly stacked in highly flammable cardboard boxes.

  Texas

  Petteri Tikkanen walked into the smelly operations room and cringed knowing such a place existed inside his state-of-the-art space launch facility. Twenty men and women sat around the page-strewn conference table, toking on e-cigs and chugging coffee as they pored over data and jotted notes. They’d been in there for the past forty-eight hours, and they looked as bad as the place smelled. The sweat-soaked faces all turned to him as he strode in. “Tell me we made it through this,” he said as he found his meticulously clean seat at the head of the table.

  Despite the disheveled state of the room, the people were the best money could buy. Engineers. Astrophysicists. Geologists. PR gurus. They were all brought together as part of his task force. They were the brightest minds on Earth who could help him minimize the foul-up perpetrated by the idiots on Petteri-2.

  Two days ago, the Petteri-2 astro-miners had failed to secure their towed asteroid and get it onto the moon. He’d held his breath over the ensuing two days as that space debris headed toward Earth. His reputation depended on the words of his public relations hotshots, and, up until that moment they’d been worth every dollar he paid. Photogenic faces and soothing voices showed up on every cable channel, every news program, and every radio broadcast, explaining how the pieces coming down were going to be too small to pose any danger. They downplayed government reports about the large size of the most dangerous shards and instead invited citizens to come out and watch for themselves; it was billed as the meteor shower of the millennium.

  One of the mission engineers replied. “Sir, it looks like all the hits were minor, except for the one over Paducah, Kentucky. It caught one of the big ones.” Most of the planning over the past two days was devoted to the worst-case scenario for the sixty-meter rock, which was an impact on a populated area. The fact that it didn’t land on New York, London, or anywhere else he recognized, left him elated.

  “Podunk, Kentucky?” Petteri replied with sarcasm. “Sounds like a nothing town. Will anyone even notice?” As the top dog in his self-named mining company, he had known there would be some casualties almost from the moment the asteroid named 586001 Tuonela broke apart. If there were fatalities, he’d have to invest huge sums of hush money and additional publicity pushes, so Tikkanen Kinetic Mining wasn’t seen as the culprit. That task was going to be easier knowing the rock fell in flyover country.

  The engineer strained to chuckle with his boss. “According to the internet, there are one hundred thousand people in the region.” The man held up a phone, showing the data.

  Petteri’s eye twitched at the number; it was higher than he expected. He then glanced over to Claus, his PR guy. The man nodded and spoke with cool indifference. “That’s manageable.”

  “What else do we know?” Petteri continued, as if to get beyond the discomfort surrounding that revelation. “Any other big hits anticipated? There were only two dangerous pieces to worry about, right?”

  A geologist spoke up. “We know there were at least two big rocks that broke from the captured asteroid—it looks like the second big one skipped off the atmosphere. We had some much smaller strikes in a line from Idaho, through Wyoming and Kansas, over to Missouri and Kentucky. It was like a knife slashing across the country. They all came in at a shallow angle, which took away some of their energy. Still, a few were locally intense, and the one over Paducah was almost certainly locally catastrophic. We need to wait for morning to see the full, uh, pardon my pun, impact.”

  Petteri gritted his teeth. He’d done his best to keep those two big pieces out of the press, and, more importantly, out of the crosshairs of government investigators, including those snooping dolts from NORAD. His team had explained how it wasn’t two large rocks coming down, only a pair of dense clumps composed of smaller rocks. Now he’d have his hands full explaining how Padunka, wherever it was, wasn’t his fault. The people in the room with him were the only ones on Earth who knew exactly what happened between the accident and the time of the meteor shower. Unfortunately, there were a few stragglers on the outside who knew a bit more than they should. “And have we put a lid on those variables who…” he had to phrase it carefully, even to his trusted inner circle, “know about the next phase of our operation?”

  His security chief was a retired Army major named Howard. They’d worked together for such a long time, he’d forgotten if that was his first or last name. “Over the past two days we’ve tracked down over a hundred threat variables and brought them in-house for their own safety until the dust-up is over. There are a few still outstanding, but we should be able to grab them in the next twelve hours.”

  Petteri was amazed at the early success of the operation. Even for him, it was a masterpiece of sleight of hand over the snooping media. He loudly supported all the important social and environmental causes to keep himself in the good favor of the press, ensuring they never asked him any tough questions.

  Now that the rocks had fallen, a unified message was more important than ever. Any one of those remaining “variables” could trash the entire well-orchestrated cover story if they were inclined to do so. A single phone call or text message was all it would take.

  He thought Howard was done, but the man swiped open a data tablet. “Uh, looks like there ar
e four of them left to be collected. We have two guys almost caught in Toronto. A woman on an oil rig in the North Sea; we’ve cut all comms out of there. And we have one geologist in a PKM affiliate office in Montana. We expect to have him next.”

  “He’s here in America? Who is he?” Petteri expected it to take longer to grab those overseas, not someone in his own backyard.

  “Asher Creighton. Geologist. MIT.”

  Petteri scowled at Howard, knowing the man would get the message. “You know where he is? Why don’t we have him already?”

  “Sir, my team went there on day one. He wasn’t in the main office. We think he’s out in the field.”

  His frown only got more severe. “And he knows?”

  Howard gulped dramatically, which pleased Petteri. “We believe he does. We intercepted and discarded some of his email. It mentioned phase 2 quite clearly.”

  He cracked his knuckles, which was one of his few bad habits. “Make him your only priority, okay? I want him brought in tonight, before sunrise over Paducah. Use any resources you need. No excuses.”

  All his PR expenditures would be for nothing if one of his employees was working from a different playbook. It burned him to still have loose ends after forty-eight hours of the team’s effort, but the next twenty-four would either make or destroy his entire company. All lose ends had to be sewn up.

  Petteri leaned back, satisfied to see everyone’s faces conveyed the amount of grave concern he required.

  “Get to it!”

  Chapter 3

  Yellowstone

  At first, Grace had been disappointed to get the call to drive away from the main action at Bridge Bay campground, but by the time she’d walked through the chaos there, she’d changed her mind. Randy and a few other rangers were stuck directing traffic, talking to confused and angry campers, and dealing with numerous minor injuries caused by the crazy winds. When she made it to the parking area and had her truck started, the solitude of the road seemed pretty good.

  Once on the main two-lane highway, her anxiety at being alone on her first serious mission made her talk to the Chevy Suburban truck like it was alive. “Maybe this is nothing to worry about. It’ll just be a troop of cute European guys who got lost while hiking the Continental Divide trail. They need a little help from a top-notch American park ranger, like me.” She took her job too seriously to consider dating a random tourist, though she couldn’t deny that after all she’d been through, it calmed her nerves to think of mundane, everyday things, such as simple romance.

  She kept watch as she drove along the empty highway for the next half an hour. The source of bright light on the horizon had become quite muted, making her wonder if the giant fireball came down to earth, or shot back out into space. The AM and FM bands were pure static, as was her CB radio, providing no clues about what had taken place. A few falling stars popped into the atmosphere high above, and they burned out in seconds, more like traditional meteoroids. As best she could tell, the big show was just about over.

  She tried to dial her parents on her smartphone, but she couldn’t even reach their voicemail. Neither of them had mobile phones, which she found infuriating. Thankfully, they were good about checking the messages on their landline. That said, they were supposed to move tomorrow, so she figured her mom had already packed the answering machine.

  “Think Europeans,” she joked. Grace would drive herself crazy worrying about her mom and dad, so she allowed herself to indulge the hiker fantasy a bit longer. By the time she’d gotten to the gravel road, the diversion had done its job. She’d stopped fretting about her parents. Instead, she resolved to call them first thing in the morning. It would allow her to wish them luck before they started the drive to Wyoming.

  She put the truck in four-wheel drive and started into the woods. Like most of the forests of Yellowstone, the one around her was thick with tall pines and stuffed with undergrowth that often looked like an overgrown Christmas tree farm. It was about twenty miles to the alpine hut, and the wide forest valley would get narrower and steeper as she neared it. There were also numerous clearings and pullouts, which allowed her to see the sky higher up the trail.

  A wildfire raged up there.

  Grace, you shouldn’t be doing this, her mom would say.

  The alpine hut sat at the top of the valley on a saddle between two mountain ridgelines. It was still miles ahead and out of her view, but sparks and flames filled the sky behind the high point where it was located, suggesting a big fire consumed the forest on the other side. Her mom hadn’t wanted her to move to a different state, much less work deep in the forest. She would be less than happy seeing her baby girl choose to drive toward a fire.

  She slapped the steering wheel with a free hand. “No turning back, now.”

  Grace recited some of the advice she’d been given by more experienced rangers. “Check things out if you can. Help people if you’re able. And stay safe at all costs.” Park visitor safety was paramount, but she wasn’t expected to risk her life, either. The flames lighting the sky ahead certainly suggested she was heading toward danger, but she didn’t think it was anywhere close to a risk to her life to proceed. She’d always be able to turn around if things got bad.

  She continued forward into the night, though the fire’s orange pallor made the headlights nearly optional. The extra light made it easier to drive up the steep inclines and over rock gardens masquerading as the road. It also reassured her it was okay to divert a little attention to the CB, although no one replied to her repeated callouts.

  Without the comfort of a voice on the other end of the CB, the drive seemed to take place a billion miles from civilization. At some point, she gave up on the radio and drove in silence, startled back into the moment by the stirring of evergreens on the right side of the road ahead. She slowed, to avoid hitting whatever animal or human might emerge from the cluttered forest, exhaling in relief when she saw it was a bison. The large beast pushed over a few bushes and walked next to the road in the opposite direction as her.

  Bison, sometimes mistakenly called buffalo by visitors, were spread far and wide across the park, and aside from a few times a year when a particularly brainless tourist would try to take a selfie next to one, they were generally docile and friendly. After the initial shock of seeing one passing by on a dark road subsided, the hulking creature felt more like a familiar friend, and she smiled, admiring it as it waddled by. “Watch where you’re going, you big lug,” she muttered to herself, shaking her head in amusement. While laughing it off, a second bison came out of the woods. However, it didn’t follow the leader down the shoulder. Instead, it came directly at her and slammed its head into the passenger side of the truck.

  “Oh my God!” she howled.

  The black eyes were impossible to read, but hair stood up on the back of her neck, as if her subconscious knew she was in danger. The menacing look and aggressive assault against a metal truck was totally out of character for the species. It began to roar and chuff, which seemed to be a signal for more of the herd to emerge from inside the surrounding forest. The new ones came on the run, as if wolves were nipping at their heels. While she watched the first one posture next to the truck, more giant bison rammed themselves against the frame as if the truck had been invisible to them.

  “I’m a friend!” she shouted with futility. Grace honked the horn to get them to back away and get on the proper course, but she now recognized the actions of a spooked herd. They were running from the distant flames, acting without rational thought, and she was just an obstacle blocking their path.

  The Suburban jerked sideways as a few more one-ton monsters rammed the side. Even as the truck slid out of the main path, and some of the bashing bison moved on down the road, more ran up and struck her because of the herd mentality.

  She kept her foot on the brake, not wanting to hit any of the dozens of innocent animals blocking her way, but she almost lost her dinner when she realized the truck was moving too far. A quick glance out
her window convinced her it would be a disaster if the truck kept going; a twenty-foot ravine ran along that side of the road.

  “No, please, no,” she blurted as more bison shoved themselves head-first into her truck. Moments before sliding over the side, Grace laid on the horn and hit the gas a little, praying she wouldn’t hit any of those in front. The truck tires spun on the rocks as she got away from the edge. The sudden motion made those on the passenger side take a step back. A big one clipped the front corner of her truck, causing it to jump a couple of feet off the ground in fright. A few crossed in front of her and went down into the ditch.

  “Sorry, friend!” she yelled to the injured one. If she had the will, she could plow into the cow-sized monsters and shove them out of her way. Nevertheless, despite the danger of being along the edge of the road, she had no desire to hurt them unnecessarily. Grace stopped and started the truck several times to scare them out of her way, rather than strike them. A few rammed her nonetheless, although it became difficult while she was in motion. The flow of beasts turned behind her, rather than into her side, at least until she had to slam on the brakes for a little one standing in her path.

  The young calf looked up at her like she was a big, scary beast. Its ears perked up for a second, and its black eyes seemed to dart all around, perhaps searching for its mother. It made like it was going to jump over the edge to her left, then it hustled to the other side again and went back into the woods. Grace looked all around to see if it would come back out; she didn’t want to hurt it, even by accident.

  While she’d been turned around, another adult came out of the forest ahead and came to a stop in the middle of the road. It was backlit by the fires and appeared almost as big as her truck. It seemed lost, and she imagined it heard its herd running down the mountain behind her. Her hands were soaked with perspiration on the steering wheel as she held on, not sure whether to stay still or give the truck some gas. The bison charged before she could make up her mind.