Final Dawn: Escape From Armageddon (2 page)

     She told Mark she set the program to run before she left for home on Thursday night. It would run throughout the night, scan hundreds of millions of
bodies in the sky to determine which were fixed and which were moving. Then it would chart a projected course for any moving object for the next three years. Any that were coming within a worrisome distance to earth would be flagged, assigned a tracking number, and show up on Hannah’s report when she printed it out on Friday morning.

     “I printed the report.” Hannah continued.
“And right there at the top of the list it said “Flag critical. Saris 7. Collision Imminent.”

  
  That didn’t mean anything to Mark, and he gave her a “so what?” face.

     “We’ve known about Saris
7 for years. Most meteorites are relatively tiny, but Saris 7 is huge. It’s a football-shaped asteroid about three and a half miles long. Its orbit carries it past the earth every 41 years. It’s never gotten closer than 310,000 miles from us before. And there was no reason to believe it would be a problem.

     “But sometime since its last pass, on the backside of its orbit, where it was out of our sight, something happened.”

     “What do you mean, something happened?” Mark asked. He was starting to feel nauseated.

     “It’s got a new course, baby. It must have collided with something out there. Or the gravitational pull of a black hole pulled it off its normal track. I don’t know. All I know is that it isn’t just going to wobble past the earth like it’s always done in the past.

     “This time, my model shows it impacting. With earth.”

     Mark first met Hannah Jelinovic on the campus of Baylor University. She was an astrophysics major. His major changed depending on the weather and which classes sounded cool in the course handbook, but he’d pretty much settled on engineering… something.

     Hannah was drop dead gorgeous, with model good looks and an ability to turn heads
. Literally. That’s how she met Mark. They passed each other on campus and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He walked off a curb and his books went flying. She saw something in him she couldn’t quite explain, and stopped to help him pick things up.

     Later, after they were dating, he’d tell their friends how he fell for her.

     Hannah’s friends used to tell her constantly that she should be modeling. And she would have made good money at it. But to her, beauty was just one of those nice-to-have things that didn’t really count for much. Her head was in outer space.

     She’d loved astrology as long as she could remember. It was her passion. When she was four, her mom had asked her what she wanted for Christmas. Hannah said she wanted Pluto, and even wrote Santa Claus a letter telling him so. Sat in his lap at the shopping mall and reminded him.

     Sure enough, on Christmas morning, she opened up a box and found an orange dog. With black ears. The Disney character Pluto. Stuffed.

     Outwardly she smiled. Inside her heart was broken. When you’re four years old and want your own planet, you just assume that it’s doable.

     By the time she was six, Hannah could name all of the planets. And each of their moons. And their chemical compositions and orbital anomalies as well. She wasn’t a typical child.

     Hannah’s parents were both killed in a car crash
when she was twelve. She was raised by her aunt Sandy, who died of cancer the day before Hannah’s seventeenth birthday. There was no one else, no other family to hold her back. The stars became her only family. And they would always be there.

     Her passion for everything celestial was still there when she graduated at the top of her class in high school. Several schools clamored to get her, and she chose Baylor because it was close to home.

     She heard all of the typical jokes that a beautiful astrophysicist hears. Usually from guys who tried to make clever pick-up lines with them.

    
“Oh, you’re an astrophysicist? I could tell. You have a heavenly body.”

    
“Baby, you don’t need a degree for that. I can take you to heaven.”

    
“Want to climb aboard my rocket ship and take a ride? You’ll see stars.”

     They were old and tired, sure, but Hannah was as sweet as she was pretty. So she pretended each time that it was the first time she’d heard the lines. And she smiled and pretended they were funny. She became an expert at shooting guys down gently.

     One of the things that attracted her to Mark was that he dispensed with the usual crude pick-up lines. He didn’t try to make funny jokes. He treated her as a woman and an equal, and not as a mindless plaything.

    
At first she thought he was gay because he never made a pass at her. Later on in their relationship she found out that she was wrong. Boy, was she ever. He wasn’t gay at all. He was a gentleman. And gentlemen were a rare thing at Baylor at the time.

     They had fallen in love almost immediately. She found him funny, and driven, and a bit of a cornball. He found her highly intelligent, and sweet, and genuine. They became so close, so quickly, it was almost scary for both of them. Neither, after all, was a person who fell in love
easily.

     Even before they were intimate for the first time, Mark knew that this was the girl for him. She was perfect. Why would he want anyone else?

     So he stopped looking. And he decided that this girl was going to marry him someday.

     He just never told her. Not yet.

     Hannah had told him once, early on, that the whole concept of family scared her a bit. He was no psychologist, of course, but he assumed it was because she had lost everyone in her life at such a tender age. Perhaps she subconsciously linked the concept of family with death. That would certainly be understandable.

     So he’d put the marriage thing on the back burner until the right time.

     Later on in their relationship, when the couple did decide to become intimate, it wasn’t clumsy. It was natural, and right. It was as though they had been together forever. And yes, he made her see stars.

    
When he made love to sweet Hannah the night she made the discovery, he did so with a desperate abandon. He wasn’t sure why, exactly, but with every thrust of his body into hers, he felt a desperation, almost like it was the last time they’d be doing this. He was certain she felt his desperation too. He could almost sense it in the way she held him, and screamed as they rocked back and forth as one. She made love with him quite literally like there was no tomorrow.

-4-

     On Saturday morning, Hannah went in to work. It was something she’d never done on a Saturday morning before, and she caught the security guard sleeping at his desk. After rapping on the office door several times, she finally got his attention and he stumbled to the door.    

    
She brushed past him and hurried to her office. No one else was there, of course. No one else in her office was dedicated enough to work on a Saturday, so she didn’t have to worry about interruptions.

     She dove into her work. First she examined the new computer scan from the previous night. It showed the same result as the night before. She already knew it would. Then she started exa
mining anything and everything she could think of that might make the computer produce flawed data, or interpret data incorrectly.

     She found nothing.

     When Hannah left her office just before lunchtime, she carried a copy of the new report, and a series of graphs that showed the projected path of Saris 7 in what would be its last hours, as it sped through the cosmos, entered the earth’s atmosphere, and was sucked toward the earth at thirty two miles a second.

     She, and Mark, and everyone else she knew, had a little over two years to live.

     Hannah stopped at Freebird’s and got each of them a burrito for lunch. Then she called Mark to tell him she’d be home in a few minutes. She didn’t want to be greeted by a gun as she had been the day before.

     Mark, of course, had no clue what he was looking at, so she had to explain e
xactly what all of the numbers meant. He did have a hundred questions, though. She answered each one in layman’s terms.

    
Mark started with the obvious. “So what happens when it enters the atmosphere? Won’t it just burn up, like all of the old satellites you read about in the papers?”

     “No, baby. This is made of sterner stuff than flimsy satellites. Rock, and not just regular rock, but rock that’s some of the hardest in the universe. The only thing that will burn off of it when it enters the atmosphere
are the dust particles it carries.”

    
He was grasping at straws. “There was a movie, a few years ago, where they sent a nuclear weapon into outer space and it exploded next to a meteorite and changed its course. Do you think they could do that?”

    
Hannah hated to be blunt, but didn’t want to get his hopes up. “They’ll probably try.” She said. “But it would be a major long shot. With something moving that fast, they would have to time the blast perfectly, like within a hundredth of a second. If they were off by just the tiniest bit, the meteorite would fly right past them and they’d miss. And they would only get one chance unless they sent multiple rockets.”

     “Any chance it would break up into pieces when it entered the atmosphere, pieces to
o small to do any damage?”

     “That’s possible,” Hannah said.
“but very unlikely. And it wouldn’t matter. Even if it broke up into a hundred pieces, it would still hit the earth at the same velocity. And you’d still have the same amount of tonnage hitting it.”

     Mark was getting more and more desperate for a ray of hope. “You said it’ll hit in remote
China, right? So all they have to do is get all of the villagers out of there and then put out the fires when it’s done, right?”

    
Hannah reached out to Mark and held him close. She couldn’t stand to look at his face when she told him.

     “Baby, it’s not that simple. The people at the impact site will be vaporized immediately, yes. But they’ll be the lucky ones. Everyone else on the earth will die a slow and painful death.

     “It’ll be like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. The impact will send millions of tons of dust and dirt into the atmosphere. The sun will be hidden for years. The earth will grow cold. Very very cold. Like the harshest of winters. Only this winter will last for five to seven years.

    
“When the dinosaurs died, the only animal species that survived were those which lived in the oceans, or could live in burrows, or caves. And they had a miserable existence. They had to eat snow or ice because there was no water. And to keep from starving to death they had to forage all day long for dead roots and grass and anything else they could find to sustain them.

     “Baby, the same thing will happen this time, only with humans. No one will survive unless they go underground. And they’ll have to forage for whatever food they can find to stay alive until the thaw comes. F
or five to seven years.

     “No, the ones at the impact site will be the lucky ones. The rest of us are going to suffer terribly.”

     Mark said “Honey, there must be a way. I’m not letting you go through that. I refuse to. We’ll find a way to survive, I promise you that.”

     Mark and Hannah
talked long into the night, and finally drifted off into a fitful slumber in each other’s arms.

  
-5-

     Hannah sat in the office of Harvey Unwin, her Operations Manager. She’d bypassed her supervisor because he took a three day weekend to go fishing. Harvey was his boss, and a man Hannah despised. But he was the next in the chain of command, so he’d be the one who got the news.

     “So, what is it you’re in such a big hurry to tell me that you wouldn’t even wait for me to get in my door?” he asked.

     “Mr. Unwin, I’ve been concerned for some time that Polaris II only tracked moving objects for the next six months. I thought it would be nice to have a greater view, so I rewrote the program to capture more data.”

     “You did what?” Unwin suddenly looked alarmed.

     “I rewrote the program. And I found a large meteorite, Saris 7, on a collision course with earth. It’s projected to impact on January 15, 2016.”

     Unwin rose from his desk and said “Stay here.”

     There was something in his voice that Hannah neither liked nor understood. It was something other than shock, or fear. It was more like anger.

     Through Harvey Unwin’s offic
e windows she watched him as he went into an empty cubicle and made three phone calls. Then she watched him pace back and forth in front of his office.

     She saw the elevator open on the far end of the room, and she saw the
Director and his Chief of Staff meet Harvey Unwin outside the office. They conferred for several minutes, and each of them occasionally stole a glance at Hannah through the office windows.

     She was confused by
the looks on their faces. They all looked agitated.

     The Director, Anthony Pacheco, turned and returned to the elevator, and Unwin returned to his office. The Chief of Staff, Tom Mize, stood outside the office door, almost as though he were guarding it.

     Unwin said “We’ve got an appointment with Mr. Pacheco in twenty minutes.”

     He took the computer printouts that Hannah brought with her and started reviewing them. He never once looked Hannah in the face.

     Hannah was getting increasingly worried. And a little bit frightened.

     “When did you print this report?” Unwin demanded without looking up.

     “This morning.” She said.

     “And did you share this information
with any of the other analysts this morning?”

     “No sir.”

     “Why in the world would you think it’s okay to rewrite a program to gather more data without checking with anyone first?”

     “As I said, I thought it would be helpful if we had more reaction time in cases such as this.”

     Unwin’s phone buzzed and he picked it up.

     “Okay, we’re headed up.” He said into the phone.

     He told Hannah “Okay, follow me. And don’t talk to anyone on the way.”

     Harvey Unwin led Hannah to the elevator. Tom Mize foll
owed closely behind, but didn’t say a word to either of them.