Six Bullets Read Free Page B

I’d started going on about Suz…?
    Ah, right-o—the day the ’roid hit.
    An amateur astronomer was the first to spot Asteroid Shiva.
But her Chicken Little warnings went largely unheeded for several days until
amateurs by the thousands, followed by academic observatories, also began
yelling that the sky was falling. They bounced signals off the rock to
determine its distance, velocity, light output, all that mumbo jumbo. And their
conclusion? There was a twenty-five-percent chance it would hit us.
    Their collective voices hit a critical mass the day I’d been
in the McDonald’s, which was when the media finally took the threat seriously.
They demanded confirmation from NASA, which until then had remained silent. The
head of the space agency verified at a press conference later in the day that
an asteroid was indeed coming to bear on Earth’s orbit. Because it was within
radar distance, trajectory analysts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could
pinpoint its size and speed with remarkable accuracy. It was five kilometers
across and traveling at about seventy-five thousand kilometers per hour, or
about seventy times as fast as your average bullet. Their analysis of its
flight-path calculation was no less accurate, and their conclusion—the chance
of it striking the planet wasn’t one in four. It was an absolute certainty.
They could even predict the impact point to the nearest kilometer, and the
impact time to the nearest second.
    It would strike central China in a little less than
twenty-two days.
     
    ••••••
     
    I’m going to switch tracks and say
something about Suzy again—your mom, Walter, if you ever read this. It still
hurts when I think about her. Crazy, right? Billions of people are dead, and
I’m sitting around feeling sorry for myself because my wife left me. But like I
said, Walt, if you ever read this, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, like
I didn’t try to help her.
    I’m not going to get into detail about why we divorced.
Suffice it to say, part of the reason was my becoming a survivalist. Another
part was my shifts in the mines—seven nights on, seven nights off, which meant
I was either never around, or around too much. But the biggest reason we split,
I reckon, was the simple fact we grew apart, like many couples do.
    She ended up leaving me, not the other way around. She was
seven months pregnant with you, Walt. I came home one morning from work, and
she was gone. All her stuff, gone. There was a note on the table saying she
wasn’t coming back. She didn’t answer her phone, but in a place the size of
Broken Hill it wasn’t hard to find out where she was.
    Staying with a bloke named Lucas, who turned out to be a
deadbeat drug dealer living on the south side of town.
    A fucking drug dealer! Blew my mind. Apparently she’d been
seeing him for a few months behind my back. And the screwiest thing? She got
custody of your brother and yourself on the account she had a steady bank job,
and I was known to hit the bottle a bit too hard.
    Nevertheless, her opinion of me changed, and changed fast,
with news of the impending asteroid collision. Even in the weeks before the
impact, food and water were in scarce supply. People probably don’t know this,
but supermarkets only stock enough food to last about three days. And you’ve
seen what happens in blackouts or whatnot—the shelves go bare within hours. So
in the case of a world-altering catastrophe, when law and order and electricity
might not return for a year, if ever?
    Suz came by one day, full of apologies and platitudes,
asking for food and water. I made her a deal. If she gave me Sully and
yourself, Walt, I would give her food and water. She was game, and we did the
swap. I told her she could stay with us too, but she was bizarrely loyal to the
deadbeat.
    Anyway, a week before the impact Lucas rocked on by, asking
for more food and water. Now, this was a survivalist’s biggest peril.
When the shit hits the fan, people