Chapter 14

'Cold. Dark. I can feel my eyes blink, but there's no light. Absolute blackness.'

Inhaling, Miranda coughed, surprised by the acrid stench. At the sudden sound, she felt something warm and sticky moving, pulling away, pulling itself apart from where it had been lying on her legs and stomach.

"Nnuugh..." Murielle mumbled as she sat up, stiff and sore from lying on cold, hard limestone. "Humh," she added, blinking and stretching. "Why'd you wake me up?" Her voice was dry; she was unused to talking, unused to ... doing ... anything.

"Thought..." Miranda forced the word out, her throat dry and raw as Murielle's. "Heard somethi..."

"Go back t' sleep," Murielle grumbled, curling down to embrace her sister, searching for the meager warmth she'd lost a moment ago. "Wanna fuck Roger..."

"No," Miranda insisted. "Wake up. I heard something." Dim, flickering light occurred, barely illuminating their subterranean surroundings. The flickering came from dozens of tiny creatures as they stirred, awakened by the twins' voices, magical wings radiating ethereal light. The sparklies, as the twins called them, began to chatter among themselves as they awoke.

"You prob'ly heard those damn sparkly things," Murielle whined. "Let's go back to the dream. I wanna fuck."

"We can fuck each other any time," Miranda replied, rubbing her face with her hands as she tried to awaken herself further. "Something woke me up, and I wanna find out what it was. And it wasn't the sparklies, 'cuz they were all asleep. I know, 'cause it was pitch dark and that only happens when they're not moving."

The twins sat up and looked around. The dim light from all the flickering wings made it difficult to focus, but their surroundings were distressingly the same as they had been for ... she didn't know how long. Years.

Murielle and Miranda were sealed in an underground cavern. There was breathable air, there was safety, relatively speaking, from the ash and the icy darkness above. Above, on the surface, there was little air, and what there was, wasn't breathable. The lack of air pressure had caused blood blisters to form on the girls' skin, and their blood had literally boiled in their bodies, causing them to succumb and die in the moments following the impact.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of extraterrestrial impacts over a small area a few hundred miles wide had blown the atmosphere off from at least a third of the planet in every direction. It was as though the earth itself had been shotgunned with asteroid-sized pellets that blew craters deep, penetrating the fragile surface to allow great gouts of magma to rupture skyward.

The earth shuddered and bled red. Shock waves ripped across the land to collapse mountains and valleys into choking, blinding dirt and powdered stone. The oceans rose, roiling and expanding as sea beds ruptured and blew out beneath the water, sending Earth's life-giving sustenance skyward. In the vacuum created by the initial blast, much of the water vaporized. Some fell back to earth, some escaped into space.

It took years for the land to settle. If there had been anyone to look, the air was so thin that stars were easily visible even during the brightest daylight. The sun's radiation baked the earth, evaporating much of the remaining oceans and even causing the rocks themselves to release trapped oxygen. Gradually, a viable atmosphere returned, years too late for most of Earth's precious life forms.

The sulfuric gasses released during the cataclysm provided something of an atmosphere for a brief period of years, but as weather returned, along with water vapor, nitrogen and oxygen, torrential rains drove the poisons back into the ground. Life gradually emerged from where it had hidden in shallow pockets where breathable air had somehow been left behind.