The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [215]
"In spite of us, the news got out. Dozens of reporters and camera crews swarmed to the field. Cal had to confirm the story, but he begged them not to kill whatever chance we had. 'Kiss your wives goodbye,' I heard him tell them, 'kneel in prayer, or just get drunk.' I don't know what they reported, but all the TV and radio stations soon went silent.
"We were still on the ground when the asteroid came down in the Bay of Bengal, south of Asia. We had too little time to get into the air before the shockwaves got through the Earth to us at White Sands. The P waves first, just a few minutes ahead of the more destructive surface waves.
"Navarro and Linder got in from Iceland. Dr Wu landed in a chartered jet. The work crews loaded what they could. We made it, but barely. We were hardly a thousand feet off the pad when buildings around the field began to crumble and yellow dust came up to hide everything. "Earth died behind us."
2
"But you got away!" Pepe was round-eyed with wonder. "You were heroes!"
"We didn't feel heroic." My robot-father's voice was solemnly slow and low, almost a whisper. "Think of all we'd lost. We felt very lonely."
His naked plastic body quivered with something like a shudder and his eye lenses slowly swept us all.
"Christmas Day." He went silent, remembering. "It should have been a happy time. My married sister lived in Las Cruces, a city near the base. She had two kids, just five years old. I'd bought trikes for them. She was making dinner, baked turkey and dressing, yams, cranberry sauce—"
His voice caught and he stopped for a second.
"Foods you've never had, but we liked them for Christmas. My father and mother were coming from Ohio. He had just retired. She was in a wheelchair from a car accident, but they were going on around the world. A trip they had planned all their lives. They never knew they were about to die. My sister called, but I couldn't tell—" He stopped again, and his voice seemed strange. "Couldn't even say goodbye."
"What's a trike?" Arne wanted to know.
My father just stood there, looking up at the iron-stained Earth, till Pepe nudged his plastic arm. "Tell us how you got away."
"I hadn't been on the survival team. Cal brought me in place of an anthropologist who was on a dig in Mexico. I guess we should have been glad to get away. But there on the plane, looking back at the terrible cloud already hiding half the Earth, none of us felt good about anything."
He looked at Dian.
"Your mother opened her laptop and lay crying over it till Dr Wu gave her something that put her to sleep."
"She lost her nerve." Arne made a face at Tanya. "My father was braver."
"Maybe." My father made something like a laugh. "Pepe's father was our pilot, and cool enough. He took us all the way out to orbit before he gave the controls to Cal. He'd brought a liter of Mexican tequila. He drank most of it and sang sad Spanish songs and finally slept till we got to the Moon."
"It's dreadful to see." Dian stood gazing up at the Earth, speaking almost to herself. "The rivers all running red, like blood pouring into the oceans."
"Red mud," my robot-father said. "Silt colored red by all the iron that came from the asteroid. Rain washes it off the land because there's no grass or anything to hold it."
"Sad." When she looked at him I saw tears in her eyes. "You had a sad time."
"Tell us," Tanya said. "Tell us how it really was."
"Bad enough." He nodded. "Climbing east from New Mexico, we met the surface wave coming around the Earth from the impact point. The solid planet was rippling like a liquid ocean. Buildings and fields and mountains were rising toward the sky and dissolving into dust.
"The impact blew an enormous cloud of steam and shattered rock and white-hot vapour up through the stratosphere. Night had already fallen on Asia. We passed far north, but we saw the cloud, already facing and flattening, but still glowing dull red inside.
"Clouds had covered