Chapter One

Sometimes when I look at the night sky, I see them as clearly as if it were still happening.  Streaks of light shooting through the darkness as far as the eye could see, trailing gray smoke which spiraled into contrails destined to dissipate in the moonlight.  Even though they moved so quickly I’d caught nothing more than a glimpse, the closest ones were so low the details were seared into memory. The chunks of space rock at their core burned like giant cigarette embers, pulsing orange and red between coral-like patterns of black as spark peeled away, reminding me of my grandfather sharpening a lawnmower blade against his electric grindstone. Cigarettes, coral, and grindstones: once, my editor would have had my head for using so many similes in close proximity.  But when witnessing something completely foreign, the mind scrambles for the familiar, for something to help put it into perspective.

Are the stars falling, Daddy?

Go back to the tent, princess. Everything’s going to be all right.

In a distant valley, the lights of a small town twinkled.  I’m still not sure whether I actually heard a faint air raid siren crying out or if it was simply my imagination; before I could listen more closely, my wife was at my side. She held my hand so tightly the little bones in my fingers ached and tremors passed from her body into mine. For a moment, we stood in complete silence, listening to the chirps and peeps of all the little insects hidden within the dewy grass. Something rustled in the undergrowth, probably a raccoon or possum waddling toward the creek that burbled close by. Neither of us spoke. We didn’t have to.

There was a flash of light in the valley so brilliant it seemed as if a sun had briefly popped into existence before erupting in a geyser of flames. The boom echoed off the hills, sounding like a distant clap of thunder, and the twinkling lights of that nameless town were gone, drowned in a lake of fire whose shores rapidly spread. Close to the epicenter, entire trees were silhouetted in the flickering glow. Surrounded by fiery halos, their trunks shriveled and charred, like matches that had been allowed to burn down to the quick.

Further out, pines and oaks toppled like dominoes  uprooted by the same shock waves that trembled the earth beneath our feet.  Soon after, we were buffeted by a hot gust of wind that smelled like ash and the tent flaps fluttered as the first of my little girl’s sobs cut through my paralyzing haze.

As she ran to us, the horizon was peppered with pillars of flame mushrooming into the sky. 

Mommy!  Daddy!

Meteor strikes engulfed the landscape in all directions, raining down in biblical proportions and creating constellations of fire. We scooped Paige into our arms and huddled as a family, each of us trembling and crying.

I wanna go home, Daddy, I don’t like this anymore,  I wanna go home…

I expected to feel the heat of an approaching fireball at any moment.  My imagination tortured me with a trio of charred skeletons, embracing one another upon a bed of cinders and ash. I tried to blink it away, to drive it out with a mental chant of no, no, no. But the worst fears are tenacious and not so quick to release their hold.

Jim… Jim, what are those? What the hell are they? April’s voice was shrill, the words staccato bursts tinged with hysteria.  

Her index finger jabbed the air, punctuating every other word, and my gaze followed it down into the valleys below. Pinpoints of fire zigged and zagged erratically through sections of forest not yet engulfed by the inferno, winking in and out of existence as trees momentarily blocked them from sight.

What the fuck are those, Jim?

I told April I thought they were animals.  Deer and bear, wolves and rabbits,  each desperately trying to outrun the fire engulfing their backs and haunches.

I wanna go home….

So did I. But something told me we didn’t have a home anymore.

That none of us did.

Welcome to Hell, I thought. Welcome to Hell.