Bombardment

9 Hours to Thunderbolt

They felt the first impact before they heard anything.

“Cynthia, get down,” David said. “This is it.”

He crouched behind the seats on the podium, reached up and pulled Cynthia close. She wrapped her arms around him, buried her face in his chest. He held her tight.

The first meteorite fragment crashed onto the grounds outside the still-packed auditorium. David could see it scored a direct hit on one of the television broadcast vans. The uplink had been severed twenty minutes earlier, evidence of satellite destruction some twenty-four thousand miles out. He figured the speed of these things must have been about seventy-five thousand mph when they hit the atmosphere, where they broke into thousands of smaller fragments.

The lights flickered, but held for the moment.

“Oh no,” Cynthia said. “Where’s dad?”

“He’s over there behind the front row of chairs,” David said.

Cynthia lifted her head to look just as another fragment came down, only this time it hit the building. It crashed through one of the large east windows. Most of the remaining audience had moved toward the center of the building, away from the windows.

Several women screamed. The exploding shards of glass and frame flew into the crowd, propelled like a bomb blast. The meteorite fragment slammed into the floor of the auditorium at about a forty-five degree angle, digging a hole the size of a soccer ball.

The lights in the auditorium went out at the same time. Another fragment must have hit a transformer on the campus. The street lights were still on. The television broadcast van burst into flames.

The eerie glow of red and orange flames danced through the now empty window frame, highlighting a scene of terror and confusion.

“David, some of those people are hurt,” Cynthia said.

“I know, but we can’t move yet. Keep your head down.”

David reached back and put his hand behind Cynthia’s head, pulling her face back into his chest. He felt her trembling. He wished they had something more for protection.

“There’s more?”

“After they break up in the atmosphere, these things come down in swarms of dozens, sometime hundreds of pieces at a time.”

He looked toward the window at the end of the hall, the one over the main entrance, just in time to see another meteorite hit. This one angled more from the southeast, larger than the first one to enter the building. An unusual blue glow accompanied the shock.

Not only did this fragment decimate the window as it entered the building, it also blew out a chunk of the surrounding structure.

Glass, rock from the building and the meteorite, now shattered by the impact, sprayed the crowd with devastating precision.

David watched in horror as dozens of people were hit by the flying debris. The chairs behind which they hid were no protection.

Pieces of rock and glass ripped through them as if they weren’t there. There was no way even he could comprehend the enormous power of something travelling at the atmospheric drag reduced speed of thirty-thousand miles per hour.

Cynthia screamed, along with just about everyone else in the auditorium. The sound of the crashing glass and rock drowned them out. Pushed by the force of the blast, David rolled backward off the end of the podium, Cynthia still in his arms.

The curtain behind the podium came partially down, enveloping them as they fell the five or six feet to the floor. David winced at the impact, grateful for the falling curtain cushioning the impact.

Like bullets from a machine gun, shards of debris ripped into the remaining curtain above their heads, right where they had been crouching just a split second before. The rest of the curtain fell on top of them. David didn’t dare move.

In the dark, the moans and groans of the injured agonized David’s ears. He wanted to get up and help them. These were his colleagues, his friends. But Cynthia needed him more. She had landed on top of him, wrapped in the fallen curtain. David felt her body quiver. He heard her cry out, her breathing hard and shallow.

“Will it never stop, David?” He felt her arms tighten around his neck.

David didn’t have time to reply. Another meteorite fragment hit the building, again from the east. Although he couldn’t see it, David could tell this piece was bigger than the others. His ears rang from the deafening sound of the impact. It must have hit at least one more window, or maybe it was so explosive it blew out all the remaining windows.

Glass and rock rained down on them. The curtain had bunched up in such a way they could only feel the largest pieces as they fell after hitting the wall above them. They were well protected in the small space between the podium and the wall where they had fallen.

Just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Sirens wailed from police and fire trucks all over the city. The sounds seemed surreal and unrealistic to David. His ears still rang from the many explosions. He felt something wet on his leg, wondered what it was. His heart beat fast.

“Cynthia, are you all right?”

“Yes, I think so.” Her voice trembled, but David was happy to hear it.

“We’ve got to find Dad,” she said and began the struggle to untangle them from the curtain. Pieces of rock and glass were mixed in with dust and, something wet and…fleshy.