Chapter 1

It was called Comet Fenwell. Named for the eighteen year old English amateur astronomer who first detected it as an out of place smudge of light just past the orbit of Saturn, it was an irregularly shaped chunk of frozen methane, ammonia, and water mixed with a scattering of rock. Preliminary calculations revealed it would pass alarmingly close to the Earth after its spin around the sun, as it headed back towards the deep space beyond Pluto from which it had come. This led to a fever of religious conversions and mass hysteria in those first few days as reputable scientists gleefully went on television to explain just what this mass of ice was capable of doing if it actually struck the planet. Though Fenwell was not a huge comet - it was just a hair over two miles long and just a hair under a mile wide - the velocity at which it was moving was enough to cause a global catastrophe, particularly if it struck the ocean.

But after those first tense days things calmed down considerably when, by unanimous agreement of scientists from across the globe, it was announced that while Fenwell would be close, it would still pass more than three thousand miles from the Earth. These same scientists who had stirred up the hysteria in the first place calmed it by explaining that the course they predicted the comet to take was based upon Newtonian laws and was absolute. They assured the people of Earth that there was no guesswork or speculation and no possibility of error. Fenwell would provide perhaps the most spectacular celestial show in recorded history and would then leave them in peace.

And so while everyone on the small blue planet settled in to watch the glowing tail of the close encounter that October, none of them realized that their coveted scientific community had made a terrible, lethal miscalculation. It was just a little error, easily attributed to mankind's lack of knowledge about the exact makeup of these strange travelers, but it was enough.

Just past the orbit of Mars, solar radiation began to bombard Fenwell with enough energy to vaporize the outer layer of its surface, sending it outward behind it in the spectacular tail that was indicative of such objects. Night after night the tail grew longer and brighter as the amount of radiation striking it increased until finally it trailed across more than ten degrees of the night sky. Fenwell disappeared briefly as it reached the extreme of its orbit and was pulled around the sun, reappearing later on the other side, this time with the tail facing towards the Earth. Night after night, all over the planet, people clustered outside of their homes to see the strangely beautiful show that was being staged for them. As Fenwell grew closer still it became possible to see the tail even during the daylight hours under favorable conditions.

When it was just past the orbit of Venus a few scientists began to note that Fenwell was not exactly where they thought it should be. Though the discrepancy was minute, there really was not a lot of margin for error when you were talking about only a three thousand mile difference in orbits. The scientists did not raise any sort of alarm at this time since their calculations still showed the comet passing more than fifteen hundred miles from Earth's atmosphere. Instead, they tried to figure out just where their careful and supposedly ironclad calculations had gone wrong. Why wasn't the comet following the basic principals of Newtonian theory? What had thrown its orbit off?

The answer, though they would never know it, was thrust. As the comet slowly turned on its axis while under the influence of the sun's rays, pockets of methane and ammonia would periodically explode, releasing pressure. These explosions were not noticeable by the many peering instruments that kept watch on the comet. They were very small and they always occurred on the sunward side. Individually they did little to move the large chunk of ice. But collectively, day after day, hour after hour, they nudged Fenwell further and further off of its projected course and closer and closer to a lethal intersection with Earth.

Two days before the pass-by, the scientists began to become seriously alarmed by what they were seeing. Their calculations now showed that Fenwell would pass less than five hundred miles from the surface of the earth. That was almost close enough to skip through the thin layer of upper atmosphere! And still they had no idea why the point of passage continued to grow closer. On the surface of the comet itself pockets continued to intermittently ignite and by twenty-four hours prior to closest approach it became apparent to anyone with the ability to perform the equations that, barring a miracle, a collision was inevitable.

The scientific communities of the various nations on Earth all informed their various governments of the coming impact. Inquiries were made in each case as to whether anything could be done to either destroy the comet or nudge it to a safer course. In every case the answer was a firm no. Fenwell was simply too large and moving too fast. So while the various government leaders and wealthy insiders of Earth tried to make a mad dash to whatever underground place of safety they had access to, it was decided that there was nothing to be gained by informing the general public of what was to come. There really was no place for them to hide even if it was possible to get them all there. Had there been even a little more time, the secret undoubtedly would have leaked. A secret as horrible and as far-reaching as this one could not have been kept. But there was not more time.

On October 12 - a Thursday in the western hemisphere - Comet Fenwell, moving at approximately 100,000 mph, impacted the Pacific Ocean 600 miles off the coast of Oregon. Its trip through the atmosphere took a mere eight seconds to complete, during which time friction heated its surface to nearly thirty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. This superheated mass slammed through the water and buried itself in the very mantle of the earth. The release of energy that resulted was so powerful that the entire world's stock of thermonuclear weapons being detonated at once would have seemed a child's firecracker in comparison. Rock and sludge from the sea bottom was exploded outward before falling back to earth hundreds, even thousands of miles away. An actual hole, more than a hundred miles in diameter, appeared for nearly twelve hours in the Pacific Ocean as the tremendous heat boiled billions of tons of seawater into steam sending thick, gray clouds into the atmosphere. As more water rushed in to fill this void, it too was boiled away to vapor. Aside from this hole in the ocean, the impact sent huge tidal waves outward, tidal waves unlike anything ever seen before. The first set was more than two hundred feet high and moved at nearly the speed of sound. They would keep moving until they struck something.

The first catastrophic effect to be felt by the inhabitants of the earth came from the shockwaves of the mantle impact. They traveled outward along the planetary crust, circling the globe in less than twenty minutes and releasing the pent-up energy from every fault line they crossed. Everywhere along the surface of the planet, earthquakes erupted on a scale hardly even imagined. In nearly every country, buildings and bridges crashed to the ground, underground fuel storage tanks exploded, dams burst. Those that died quickly in this initial disaster were perhaps the lucky ones.

At impact+45 minutes the west coast of the United States became the first to be struck by the tidal wave. It rolled in at a height of two hundred feet and moving at 684 mph. As it crossed the continental shelf it doubled in size and when it reached the actual coastline, it reared up to nearly a half mile in height. The coastal cities and all their inhabitants - those that had lived through the earthquakes - were obliterated in an instant as the massive wave destroyed everything in its path for nearly one hundred miles inland. The great metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, home to nearly a thirty million, were erased from the landscape in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but a clogged mess of debris and shattered bodies near the wave crest. The breaking of this great wave atop them similarly destroyed the cities further inland - Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. In the great central valley of California, where water was already rapidly rising due to the smashed Shasta, Oroville, and Folsom dams, water rushed up the Sacramento and San Joaquin River channels, funneling into a destructive force that swept away the cities of Sacramento, Stockton, Bakersfield, Fresno, and the many other small farming communities that dotted the landscape. Some of the most fertile land on Earth quickly became an inland sea upon which the bodies of millions of humans and livestock bobbed and floated.

The west coast of the United States was only the first to be struck. Eventually, every sea coast area in the world would be hit in a similar manner several times as the great waves traveled back and forth across the oceans of the world, bounding and rebounding like ripples in a bathtub. Most of the major metropolitan areas of the planet were located either on or within a hundred miles of a coastline. The earthquakes and the tidal waves alone killed off a sizable fraction of the planetary population.

But the death and destruction, as horrific as it was, did not stop there. If it had, perhaps civilization could have been rebuilt eventually. After all, many of the inland cities, though heavily damaged by the earthquakes and dealing with out of control flooding in some cases, were still standing when the waves finally equalized. Unfortunately for the human race, the greatest catastrophe was still forming over the impact site and spreading across the globe.

From the hole made by the comet in the Pacific Ocean, immense clouds of seawater continued to boil away into the atmosphere. In all, before the seawater finally closed the hole by quenching the tremendous heat, more than five percent of the total volume of water on Earth was vaporized and sent aloft. These clouds quickly spread out and covered the globe like thick blanket, dumping rain virtually everywhere and blocking out the sun. The rain promised to continue for months, killing all crops, flooding every low-lying area, and disrupting the planetary food chain in ways that would guarantee the extinction of all but the very strongest species.

Sierra Nevada Mountains - 40 miles northeast of Auburn, California
Impact+5 days

Brett Adams trudged slowly along through the thick mud on the top of the ridge. With each step he took his hunting boots plunged four inches into the syrupy muck the ground had become, forcing him to pull upward to take the next. His camouflage hunting clothes were saturated and covered with mud and pine needles. He had not been dry since the rain started and he was on the verge of hypothermia. He was tired beyond belief. Every muscle, every joint throbbed like a rotten tooth. He was weak from hunger, having eaten nothing in the last five days but a chocolate bar and some trail mix. He had no idea where he was going or why he was even bothering to continue on. He constantly shifted the Remington .30-06 rifle on his back from one shoulder to the other, thinking quite often of simply sitting down, putting the barrel in his mouth, and pulling the trigger. Why shouldn't he? Everything that he cared about was gone now. Why was he bothering to keep propelling himself forward?

But somehow he did keep going, his survival instinct a little too sharply honed to allow him to simply give up. Brett, at thirty-five years of age, had lived through five years as a street cop and four years as a helicopter cop. Before that he had flown Apache attack helicopters in Desert Storm, striking targets deep behind Iraqi lines while anti-aircraft gunners tried their damnedest to bring him down. He had once been in a gunfight on the streets of Stockton during his rookie year with the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department. He had once had the engine of his helicopter die on him, forcing him into an auto-rotational landing. His mindset was geared to keep him alive as long as possible, under whatever conditions or situations he encountered. Though he was racked with grief, cold and miserable, and quite probably going to die within the next twenty-four hours no matter what, he kept going. He lifted one foot and placed it in front of the other. He did it again. He kept moving through the purgatory that he found himself in, wondering why he couldn't have been with his family when the end came.

The rain had slacked off some in the past six hours. Of course, when you were talking about this sort of rain, slacked-off was a very relative term. It was now only slightly worse than a torrential downpour of the sort that was normally only seen at the height of a severe thunderstorm. Visibility was now almost a hundred yards or so. The wind had died down to something like a moderate gale, no longer packing the power to sweep him completely off his feet, no longer blowing pine cones and tree branches through the air like deadly missiles. During the first twenty-four hours of this biblical-like event, the rain had been so thick it had been difficult to breathe at times. Lightening strikes had flashed and exploded all around the mountaintop like an artillery barrage. Trees had toppled in the hurricane force winds and then been washed downhill by the mud like toothpicks.

It had been a mudslide that had taken Carl, his best friend. Carl was a San Joaquin Sheriff's deputy, just like Brett. They had met six years ago, when Brett had still been working uniformed patrol. Carl had been like a brother to him, closer in fact than Brett's own brother had ever been. Their wives socialized together, their children attended the same schools. The night before the impact, he and Carl had driven up to nearby Castle Point in Carl's Toyota Four-Runner to set up camp for their annual deer-hunting trip. They had been happy, full of life, contemplating bagging a nice trophy to take home to their families. That first night of the trip they had stayed up late, often staring at the night sky, which had been overly bright with the beautiful, gossamer tail of the approaching comet. They drank beer and cooked their simple meal before retiring to their tents for the night. At 6:00 AM the next morning, they had set off into the woods to make their kills. That now seemed a different lifetime. Had that really only been five days ago?

After the earthquake, and after the barrage of flaming rocks and mud had fallen throughout the forest, setting it ablaze in many spots, they had immediately started back towards camp, concerned not so much for their own safety as for the safety of their wives and children back in Stockton. They had intuited that the comet had struck the earth at that point but they had been completely clueless about just what the ramifications of that were. Global catastrophe is on a scale that mere humans can hardly fathom. As they huffed and puffed their way through the woods, dodging fires here and there, hearing the impacts of rocks slamming into trees, they saw the clouds to the west of them for the first time. A thick, black, angry front was swelling into the sky, moving rapidly towards them. By the time they made it to camp, the wind and the lightening had started, toppling trees and igniting more fires.

They dove into the Toyota, not bothering to pack up camp, terrified at the fates of their loved ones, and started to head back to Auburn, which would in turn lead them back to Interstate 80. The road they were on curved slightly upward from Castle Point before twisting and turning its way down to the foothills below. From the summit of this peak was a clear line of sight out over the Sacramento Valley. Usually it was one of the most impressive views that Brett could imagine. This time it was a glimpse through the gates of hell itself.

When they first topped the rise they were able to see the city of Sacramento and its suburbs some fifty to sixty miles away. Already they were able to see huge areas of flooding caused by the breaking of Folsom Dam and the release of nearly a million acre feet of stored water. This first glimpse of isolated devastation was horrible but it did not destroy all of their hopes like what happened next. From the southwest, in the direction of the San Francisco Bay area, a huge wall of water appeared. It moved forward at what seemed a slow rate from their vantage point in the mountains but it advanced steadily. It swallowed up everything in its path, burying the valley and turning it into a brown, muddy sea. They watched in horrified fascination as the city disappeared and the water reached the fringes of the foothills twenty miles below them.

Any illusions they might have had about the possible survival of their families disappeared at that moment. Though Stockton was forty miles south of Sacramento and well out of their line of sight, it was in the same valley and at the same elevation. It had been slightly under an hour since the earthquake had occurred. That was nowhere near enough time for Julie and Summer, Brett's wife and daughter, or Sandy and Kevin, Carl's wife and son, to get to ground high enough to save them. Nor was there any way any human could have lived through what they had just witnessed.

Soon after this, while they were still staring at what had once been the home of more than a million people, the clouds overtook them. The sun was blotted from the sky, making the early afternoon daylight fade to an inky twilight. And then the rain began. It did not gradually develop from a drizzle to a downpour like a normal rainstorm, it simply started. One moment it was dry and the next it was raining harder than either man had thought possible. Visibility dropped to less than ten feet and the dirt road quickly turned to an impassable sludge of running mud. As they'd sat there, trying to cope with the loss of their families, wondering what to do next, the Four-Runner began to move on its own, propelled along by a river of mud pouring down the hillside above them. They picked up speed and finally fetched up against a stand of trees, at which point the mud began to pile up against the driver's side.

Brett made it out, climbing through the passenger side window and up a small rise to safety. He didn't stop to help Carl out of the car, not out of fear, but because he hadn't thought it necessary. The situation had seemed under control at that point. It was a decision that would haunt him later. When Carl was halfway out, a huge glut of mud suddenly buried the truck like a breaking wave, knocking the trees it had been resting against flat. The entire mess had continued down the hill and over the edge of a ridge, landing in a creek bed that was already raging with brown runoff. Tons more mud quickly landed atop it, burying Carl and the Four-Runner for all time. Brett had not even bothered trying to rescue his friend. It would have been beyond futile.

That first night, while the rain continued to fall and the wind continued to blast and the lightening continued to explode against the ground every ten to fifteen seconds, he had huddled against the base of a tree on the upside of a ridge. This had put him at high risk for a lightening strike but kept him safe from being buried alive by a mudslide. Though he was even then seriously considering ending it all with his Remington, he had no wish to endure the same hellish death that Carl had.

Since then he had been walking north, inching along through the mud, keeping as close to areas of thick vegetation as he could to avoid the rivers of mud that continually washed down from the mountains. Despite these precautions he had almost been swept away several times when slides passed over a spot where he had just been. As the lightening strikes grew fewer and farther between, he worked his way onto higher and higher ground, staying out of potential flooding. He lived off of nothing more than the two candy bars and the small bag of trail mix he had in his shirt pocket and his body began to grow weaker and weaker.

At night, with the thick cloud cover blotting out the moon and all the stars, the blackness was absolute, broken only occasionally by the odd flash of lightening. During the day it never got brighter than early dusk or late dawn as the clouds blotted out most of the sunlight. He sensed that, survival instinct or not, the end was near for him. Either hypothermia or starvation would soon cart him away to join his family and the billions of others that had undoubtedly died with them. This was not a particularly unpleasant thought. He almost welcomed the coming oblivion.

Now, five days after the end of the world, running on the very last reserves of strength he had, he sat down on the leeward side of a pine tree and ate the last of his trail mix. It was unsatisfying and unfulfilling but it was all he had. Would it be safe to end it now? Could he concede that further survival in this terrible new world was an impossibility?

The sound of a gunshot startled him out of his suicidal thoughts before he could bring them to a conclusion. It was not terribly loud but with the damping effect on sound that the wind and the rain inflicted, he knew that it had to be close. He looked around him, trying to gauge just where it had come from. He wasn't sure, and what real difference did it make anyway? So someone was nearby, shooting at something? What of it? Granted, it triggered his cop's instincts, but he wasn't a cop anymore, was he? There really wasn't any such thing as a cop anymore.

Another shot rang out, a sharp crack void of any echo. This time he was able to tell where it had come from. It had issued from just over the ridge above him - a ridge topped with a stand of old growth pines that had so far managed to survive all that the comet had thrown at them. Two more shots quickly followed and then a prolonged burst of what could only be an M-16 rifle on full automatic. He knew that sound from his basic training days in the army. It was very distinctive. Another, shorter burst followed this and then, faintly though clearly, came a blood curdling scream of anguish.

It was the scream that got him moving. That had been a woman! Though he was weak and on the verge of ending his life, though he was no longer a cop in a suddenly lawless world, he could not deny the cries of a woman in trouble. What the hell was going on over there?

He pulled himself to his feet and unshouldered his Remington, checking to make sure the safety was off. It was. Next he checked the .40 caliber pistol strapped to his waist. It was his duty weapon, issued to him by the Sheriff's department to carry at work. He had packed this pistol through five years of service on the streets and through four years as the pilot of the northern San Joaquin valley's primary law enforcement helicopter. On hunting trips he carried it both for self-protection and to finish off any deer that might have managed to live through the initial rifle round. It was a weapon he was much more comfortable with at close range than the bulky rifle. It was seated neatly in its nylon holster. He gave it a pat and then put the rifle at port-arms position. He began to move up the hill.

He moved tree to tree, rock to rock, keeping a close eye before him and to his flanks as he moved. He saw nothing unusual and heard no further gunfire although he did hear a few more faint screams and once a barked male voice telling someone to "shut the fuck up, bitch."

As he got closer to the top of the ridge he dropped down to his belly and began to inch his way forward, crawling along the ground as he had been taught in the army. He wedged himself against the base of a tree on the summit of the hill and let his head edge slowly to the side. What he saw down there made him forget his hunger and his fatigue.

About sixty yards down the hill, resting against an outcropping of large rocks, was a camping trailer. It was about thirty feet long and sitting upright, almost perfectly level, with only a small mound of mud pushing against the uphill side. That it had come from the public camping area two hundred feet up the next hill was obvious. Also obvious was the fact that it had been swept down there when that portion of the hillside had given in to the erosion of constant rain bombardment. Just beyond the trailer was the telltale swatch of bare, torn-up hillside that bespoke of a recent mudslide. But how had this single trailer been separated out and spared? Looking at the path it had made in its journey it appeared it had somehow become aligned forward during its trip down the hill and had managed to roll out of the flood of mud, where gravity then propelled it downward until it encountered the rocks.

But the trailer itself, despite its almost miraculous existence in the first place, did not hold Ken's attention for more than a second. In front of the trailer was a group of four men and two women. The men had M-16s in their hands and sidearms attached to their muddy clothing. They had long hair and beards and looked, to Brett anyway, like methamphetamine snorting biker types. He had seen such people many, many times in his career and had taken many of them to jail for various offenses. They could be very dangerous even when living in a society ruled by civilized law. Now that the factor of civilization was removed from the equation they had become infinitely more dangerous, as was evidenced by what he was seeing below him. He wondered where they had come by automatic weapons? It wasn't like fully automatic M-16s could be found just lying around.

The bikers were training these weapons on a group of two women and a young boy that were cowering in fear before the trailer. The oldest of the women looked to be in her late-thirties. The youngest looked to be a teenager. The resemblance in the facial features of the two told him they were mother and daughter. The boy, who had his arms protectively around the younger woman, was about fourteen and obviously a son. The father of this particular family was no longer in the picture. This was apparent by the fact that he was lying lifelessly at the foot of the trailer, a pistol next to him, his body riddled with bullets and covered with blood. That must have been the bursts of M-16 fire.

"I'll give you anything you want," the mother of the group pleaded with the men. "I'll do whatever you want. Just let my kids go. I'll... I'll go with you."

This struck the bikers, and even their women, who were unarmed and lagging in the rear, as deliciously funny. They laughed for the better part of thirty seconds before one of the men said, "Oh, you're both coming with us, mama. We might get around to doing somethin' with you after we're done with this little sweet piece." He jerked the barrel of his rifle towards the teenager.

"I'm gonna tear me a piece off a that shit right now!" one of the other men declared. "Look at that shit. I bet she got some nice titties!"

"No," the first one to have spoken said after a moment's reflection. "I get her first. Y'all can have sloppy seconds. Let's all take a quick piece of her and then we'll see what kinda goodies they got in that trailer for us."

"No!" screamed the woman, trying to get up. She was forced to sit back down again by four rifles swinging towards her.

"Take it easy, baby," the apparent leader of the group warned mildly. "We wouldn't want to have to kill you before we had our fill now, would we?"

"You can't do this!" the teenaged girl cried hysterically. "You just can't do this!"

The leader chuckled a little. "We can do anything we want now, sweet piece. The law done blew up with the comet. Ain't you figured that out yet?"

"What about the little shit?" one of the other bikers asked, pointing at the young boy. "Think we oughtta just kill him now? He ain't good for nothin', is he?"

While the boy in question trembled in fear and his terrified mother and sister moaned in terror, the leader seemed to consider this question very carefully. Finally he answered, "Let's keep him for now and take him back to camp. Zipper and Turbo like to slam little dudes once in a while, don't they? Reminds 'em of when they was in Folsom."

"I guess you're right."

"I can think of a few uses for him too," said one of the women with a lascivious grin.

"Shut the fuck up, bitch," the leader said, casting an evil glare at her until she dropped her gaze. He then turned back to the teenage girl. "You ever give a blowjob before, sweet piece?"

Brett watched all of this, unseen from his perch up the hill from them, his mind whirring as he tried to think of what he could do. He certainly had no desire to stand by and watch a young girl get raped by a gang of bikers in front of her mother and brother, but he had nothing more than a hunting rifle and a pistol and they had automatic weapons. He hardly had a chance against that, did he?

But on the other hand, he had just been willing to take his own life a few moments ago. So when you came right down to it, what difference did it make if these biker assholes were the ones to kill him? Wouldn't dying in a firefight to save a helpless family be preferable to blowing his own brains out? What could be nobler than that?

Chapter 2 »