The Day Gibraltar Fell

The door opened with a click and light shone red through Paul’s closed eyelids. He squeezed them closed in a futile effort to recall the darkness. How he hated that she turned the lights on when she arrived.

“I knew you’d still be here,” said Tori. She set down a large medical bag on the table beside his bed and began efficiently preparing syringes and vials as though this were any other Tuesday and not the day that many on Twitter--when there still had been Twitter a few days ago--were calling simply The End.

“Where else should I be?”

“Don’t get smart with me, Paul,” said Tori without any edge in her voice. “You should really have left the city by now.”

Millions of people had left Manhattan, but the truth was that there was really no place to go. And even with his billions, Paul couldn’t have gotten anyone to take him anywhere at this late date. It had taken twelve firefighters to get him on a stretcher the last time he was hospitalized. No, he had come home to die, even before the rest of the planet received the same prognosis.

Tori was fiddling with his IV. “Where’s Donovan?” she asked.

Paul gestured to the door.

She made a sound of disgust. “And where did he think he could get to, now, I wonder? Higher ground?”

Paul smiled. Actually, Donovan had said he was going to try and steal a yacht from one of the untended marinas and ride out to meet the wave head on. Not a bad plan, except that Paul was terrified of death by drowning. Even the idea of asphyxiation was enough to make his poor, overtaxed heart start to flutter. Not that it took much these days.

“I believe it would have been better to just let it hit. A big flash, a big boom, and it would have been all over. Who would have thought that a giant rock smashing into the Moon would do the same thing anyway?” She uncapped a hypodermic and plunged it into a glass vial.

“It might have worked,” Paul offered.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “A sixty-three percent chance. I’ve heard it all. The Redentor with its brave crew, going out to save the world with fancy equipment and chutzpah.” She withdrew the needle from the vial and attached it to his IV feed line.

“But they didn’t save the world, did they?” she asked. He saw now that she was pursuing something, keeping the conversation moving in spite of his lack of participation, the way people with an agenda always do.

His fingers were tingling. So were his toes. A warning bell went off quietly in the back of his mind. He eyed the syringe as she withdrew it and put it into a second vial.

“When they lost contact with the Redentor, no one imagined it had exploded,” she said. “Until that first video surfaced online.”

He watched the heart-shaped locket around her neck swing as she leaned forward to depress the plunger and put whatever she wanted into his IV. He couldn’t feel the backs of his legs or his arms. It felt like he was starting to float, to rise ever so gently from his bedsheets.

“Put a camera in front of a telescope with the right capabilities, plug it into your computer, and voila!” She stood and flung an arm out in a grand gesture. “You can track the moon. You can track the ISS. You can track the Redentor on her historic mission to save all humankind.” She dropped her arm. “You can watch it as one of the many high explosive devices on hand goes off prematurely, just as they sidle up alongside. A flash so bright, it had to be nuclear, creating a short-lived new star in the sky. Did a number on the asteroid, even altered its course away from the Earth. Just… not enough.”

Paul looked at her through milky eyes. His brain felt like an achy tooth being packed with gauze.

“I heard you on the phone yesterday,” she said, as though commenting on the weather. “You thought I was gone, but I wasn’t. I heard everything. I know what you did.”

He tried to speak but found he was at a great distance from his mouth. Some drool escaped one corner when his lips parted, but that was all. He found that he couldn’t move at all.

“No, no,” she said. “Don’t bother. You won’t be able to move or speak. I didn’t want to hear you talk.” She waved the syringe gently back and forth. “I thought about letting you explain yourself at first,” she said, drawing the small, sleek .38 special he knew she carried in her medical bag. “I thought about holding the gun on you and letting you have your say before I gave you the paralysis cocktail. But then I thought… what’s the point?”

He mentally relaxed at the sight of the gun. His eyes flicked to the wall clock. Twelve hours later, New York City would be underwater anyway. His penthouse here on the 112th floor would likely remain above the direct effect of the waves, but the power and running water would be gone, even if the windows didn’t blow in and expose him to the mega storms predicted to follow the impact.

“Ah,” she said with a small smile that he didn’t like. “The gun doesn’t bother you.” Her eyes flashed. “I was watching when it hit, you know. They said it would be a glancing blow, but I think now that was either reckless optimism or an outright lie. I swear I saw it shudder, and the cracks… My God, the cracks,” she trailed off, lost in thought.

It had been horrifying to see. The Fourth Horseman, as the Internet had branded it, had smashed directly into the Moon at better than fifty thousand miles per hour and completely obliterated itself, cracking the Moon into a million pieces. Had it happened around any other planet in the solar system, it would have been an occurrence of incredible scientific and astronomical interest; playing out in real time in the night sky only a quarter of a million miles away, it meant only death.

At first, the consequences were actually quite beautiful. As the debris field descended, communications satellites started to go down. Meteor showers danced across the night sky, and as larger pieces became increasingly more common, they began to be visible during the day as well. After a few weeks, rocks the size of cars were surviving reentry to impact the surface. Now, a massive chunk of the Moon the size of Gibraltar was going to impact the North Pole nearly dead center, flash boil the ice caps, and, to put it bluntly, end the Northern Hemisphere’s experiment in human civilization.

“I was also watching when San Andreas swallowed ten million people. All the people who had evacuated to the hills and the high ground to avoid the tidal wave from when the Bertha fragment hit in the Pacific. I watched the hillside my Shari was sheltering on slide right down into the blackness, live on television. Did you know that?” There was no emotion in her voice. He felt a cold chill run through his mind. She was simply reciting truth, and when people got to that point, it meant the show was almost over.

“I heard you on the phone yesterday,” she said again. “I heard about the explosives you and your friends had planted on the ship. Did you think I had left? I wonder if you intended me to hear it.”

He had lost control of his jaw muscles. His mouth was gaping stupidly open as he listened to her speak. Humanity had sent a state-of-the-art ship laden with half a dozen different ideas to divert the rock that was speeding towards them, ranging from simple bombs to nuclear-powered experimental thrust engines. They were to try the least destructive methods first, but it all came down to timing. Many believed that doing anything other than lobbing nuclear bombs at the side most likely to push it off course was a waste of time they didn’t have. After all, changing the trajectory even one degree when it was still far enough away would be all it would take. But the closer it came, the bigger the course correction needed to be.

Paul and other like-minded people were of the opinion that this was no time to fool around with setting up nuclear reactors on the surface of a freezing rock. Too many opportunities for failure. What they needed was an explosion with a force multiplier--like, say, every explosive on the Redentor going off at once, rather than the methodical, one-at-a-time prescription laid out by the mission plan. So, they made sure that was exactly what would happen.

It hadn’t worked, of course. But if the big boom didn’t work, nothing would have, so it didn’t matter. He had done nothing but act in humanity’s best interest. He smiled foggily in his mind. She had overheard, as he had intended. She would shoot him and save him the agony of ending himself, a task he was not looking forward to in the least

She was staring at him intently, and it took him a moment to figure out what her expression was. Disgust, he decided. But not disgust for a twelve hundred pound man, no. He knew that disgust, and didn’t care. This was disgust saved by humans for trespassing invertebrates, for a rotten, oozing bunch of asparagus at the back of the fridge, for a portapotty left un-pumped for the entirety of a hot summer. “It occurred to me last night that you were worried you might not have the courage to do it yourself, at the end. You wanted to stack the odds. You wanted me to do it for you.”

He was unsettled by her insight into his thoughts, and something in her tone made him uneasy as well. He wished that he could scratch a phantom itch on his face, but his hand might as well have been made of marble. He couldn’t move a muscle.

“I want you to have this,” she said, reaching both hands around the back of her neck and undoing the clasp. She held it out in the air in front of his eyes. “Shari had one just like it. I know she was wearing hers that day because we FaceTimed right before the end.” She was gazing at the locket as it hung in the air above Paul’s unmoving face with a faraway expression.

She let some of the chain unspool from her hand and lower towards his face, to give him a closer look, he assumed erroneously, but then it kept coming. It touched his lips, and then she lowered it further and it slipped into his open mouth. It slid coolly down his tongue and lodged at the top of his throat.

Panic came screaming into his mind like a runaway train. He could not move, could not even cough. Unmercifully, the thick haze that had lain over his consciousness for the past ten minutes was gone. He screamed in his own mind, shrieked incoherently as he watched Tori rise without looking at him and simply walk away. His vision began to narrow. His heart was thudding very loudly in his ears. His lungs burned, screamed with the desperate imperative for oxygen that wasn’t coming. He closed his eyes against the grayness and heard the door click shut, and with it experienced the singular feeling that only the dying can truly know--the complete absence of hope.

She left the lights on, said a voice in his mind. I hate it when she leaves the lights on.

Then he was gone.