2012
By Ted Stetson
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Ted Stetson
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*****
2012
By Ted Stetson
Jim stood in his backyard looking up at the night sky, the moon to the west and to the north was the rogue asteroid. Now scientists were saying it was the same one the Mayan ancestors saw long ago, that they had predicted would collide with earth. The world had known about the mountain-sized asteroid for weeks. Why the scientists hadn’t figured this out long ago when there was time to maybe do something about it, no one was saying.
He and others had fired their weapons at the night, at the stupidity, at the futility of it when the missiles streaked across the black night like a row of exclamation points. All the personalities who filled the TV with endless noise stopped talking. The world became silent as the missiles streaked to their targets. Horizon to horizon the night sky filled with red slash marks.
Freaking missiles.
It wasn’t going to be an earthquake, a flood, or a disease ending life as we know it. It was going to be a mountain-sized rock slamming into earth.
The freaking missiles weren’t going to help; they needed to hit it before it got this close, but it didn’t matter now. All the world leaders had their excuses, the politicians were hiding in deep underground bunkers, praying it broke up and hit any other country but where they hiding.
Now everybody in the world could see it. You didn’t need TV, didn’t need the internet. You could see the missiles hitting it, explosions like little suns. The people in Times Square froze. All the guns stopped firing as everyone watched the missiles exploding.
Jim picked up a bottle of champagne and wondered how long he had left. A few hours? A few days? How long do you have to live when a rock the size of a mountain crashes into earth?
Didn’t make a whole lot of difference now. He put down the shotgun and proceeded to get stinking, blinding drunk.
When Jim woke the world wasn’t over and the missiles had worked or they hadn’t. No one knew.
The religions said God intervened. The scientists came up with new theories every time they spoke; gravity did it, Einstein, astrophysics. The politicians acted like they knew it all around. But no one knew. Maybe it was God, maybe it was gravity, and maybe the asteroid was hollow: no one knew, but they were all instant experts.
Sure the electricity was off for a few days and the water too and the world was so screwed up it made the Stock Market meltdown look like a minor glitch. But nobody cared; we were alive. They had been given a second chance and were too busy laughing at the world leaders who said, in many different ways, that they had planned for it to happen like that.
Yeah right. A billion dollars in bombs went off and they didn’t do a damn thing and they had planned it. Who were they kidding? God?
The only damage done was from the missiles knocking off a few chunks of asteroid and those rocks, meteors coming down, hitting a ranch in Texas, the Great Wall in China, and a few more things.
All anyone really knew is that earth had a second moon.
A smaller moon. Not so round. Not as far away as the good old moon. Some scientists have said in five thousand years the old and new moon’s orbits would cross and there could be a problem, but that is five thousand years away and we could mark it on our calendar like the Mayans did and maybe by then we’d figure out what to do.
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About the Author
Ted Stetson was born in Brooklyn and attended Seton Hall H.S. and Hofstra. He graduated from the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. He lives in Oregon with his wife and son.
Find out more at http://www.tedstetson.com
Other work by Ted Stetson:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=ted+stetson