The End of Eden (Water Worlds 1)

Chapter 14

14

Despite the most intensive tracking of any body ever, we didn't have much warning in the end. 

I felt the boom in my lungs and stomach. Just a rumble, really, but it rattled the picture frames hanging on my bedroom wall. I should have gotten up then, but it was still dark and I had no idea what was happening, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. 

I should have known better.

The night before, we had stayed up late, sitting together in front of the large wall screen in the family room, watching the approach of Apophis. It was on practically every wave. At first it was interesting. The track of the larger pieces would be hard to pinpoint until they were already entering the upper reaches, compressing and pushing superheated air before them. It would literally put a dent in the outer atmosphere.

They presented sims of how it might look, but no one yet had a clear idea of where they were heading or whether they would burn up safely, and we wouldn't know for sure until it was too late to do anything about it.

The talk became serious and experts discussed complex computational readings, all in English. I got bored. Joo Chen went to his room. Shortly after, so did I, but Father and Mother stayed up.

Within thirty minutes of the boom, every device in the house woke up and began to blare alarms. Every screen, pad and com link, every fire alarm and timer in the whole house, on or off, awoke to the alert with an emergency override, and began to sound.

It was an evacuation order. 

Ancient civil defense klaxons, forgotten for generations and nearly hidden on steel towers bristling with modern repeaters, sounded the alert from neighborhood to neighborhood with an insistent wail that hadn't been heard in decades.

Father called to gather us up. I was already awake from the shriek of the alarms.

"Wake your younger brother and gather your things. Now!"

I went into his room but Joo Chen was still asleep, his ear buds dug in deep, as usual. I shook him and he woke with a start. 

"Whuzzup?" he said in slurred English, sitting up and blinking his eyes. He had told me recently he even started dreaming in English now. I began to believe him.

"Tsunami. We're leaving," I said. "Now!" 

"But we're thirty miles inland," he protested.

I started to do the math in my head to convert the non-sensical American system into metric, but caught myself.

"There's no time. Father has the car running. Move. Now!"

He jumped out of bed and threw on his jeans. He was slipping into his shoes as I ran to my room to throw a few items into my pack.

The twenty-year-old, petrol-powered monster of a Toyota utility vehicle was now idling in the garage. Father insisted on buying it on credit just three months ago. I remember Mother was very annoyed with him. 

Father had packed it with food, survival gear and extra plastic containers of precious petrol he had been hoarding. If anyone had known, he could have been fined or jailed. The garage door was only half open in fear of vandals.

Mother had our important things already packed in bags. I didn't know whether it had been prepared long in advance, out of habit, or not, but I remembered that, in the past, she always had us ready to move on a moment's notice. 

And now was that moment.

We threw our bags in the back with the piles of gear and strapped in as Father wheeled the boxy vehicle out of the quiet Bethesda neighborhood we had moved into just two years earlier.