Impact by Douglas Preston Read Free Book Online

winter, broken lobster traps, buoys, driftwood, and rope. The tide was ebbing, exposing seaweed-covered rocks in the cove, which humped out of the water like the hairy heads of sea monsters. A smell of salt mingled with evergreens hung in the damp, cold air. Where the beach ended a dense forest of black spruce rose up. Louds was all but deserted this time of year, the island’s few seasonal summer camps shuttered. Nobody would bother them.
    “Man, it’s thick,” said Jackie, contemplating the wall of forest. “How’re we gonna find a meteorite in there?”
    “By the crater and smashed trees. Believe me, a hundred-pound rock going a hundred thousand miles an hour is going to leave a mess.” Abbey got out her chart and spread it on the sand, weighing down the corners with stones. The line she had drawn sliced across the island at an angle, intersecting the beach they’d landed at. She laid her compass on the map and adjusted the bearing, stood up, and took a heading.
    “We go this way,” she said, pointing.
    “You bet.”
    Abbey led the way into the deep spruce forest. She remembered a poem she’d had to memorize in school and recite one evening in front of the school and her parents. She’d choked up and forgotten it completely—stood there on stage for one long, agonizing minute before rushing off in tears—but now it sprang into her head unbidden.
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic.
    That was sort of the story of her life: bad timing.
    She ventured deeper into the woods, following the compass bearing. A dim, greenish light penetrated through the tall trees, and the wind sighed through the distant treetops. It was like walking up the aisle of a vast green cathedral, the trees like massive columns, the ground springy and carpeted in moss. Abbey inhaled the rich piney scent, recalling the many times she had camped on the island as a little girl with her mother and father, in the meadow on the north end. They lay in their sleeping bags under the night sky, counting the shooting stars. Back then the island was completely abandoned, the old farmhouses sagging and falling into ruin. Now retired people had started buying them up for cottages and the island was changing. Soon, she thought, all the wildness, the atmosphere of desertion and desuetude would be gone, replaced by cute summer cottages, lace curtains, and gangster grandmas shooing kids off their property.
    The forest grew thicker, and they had to crawl on hands and knees underneath a series of fallen tree trunks.
    “I don’t see any craters,” said Jackie.
    “We’ve hardly begun.”
    They soon broke into a clearing, a stone wall enclosing a huddle of tombstones. The old island cemetery.
    “Lunchtime!” cried Jackie, climbing over the wall, shucking her pack and flopping herself down. With her back against a tombstone, she began rolling a joint.
    Abbey walked around the old cemetery, reading the tombstones. The funny old Maine names were like the muster roll to a lost world: Zebediah Loud, Hiram Carter, Ora May Poland, Nehemiah Swett. Her thoughts drifted back to her mother’s funeral. Abbey remembered escaping the crowd around the open grave and climbing a hill, reading the tombstones as a way to keep herself together. At the top she looked back down on the huddled mass of people around the black hole, the leafless trees, the icy grass, the bright green Astroturf laid around the grave.
    It still didn’t seem possible, her mother gone. She could never forget that day in the clinic when she asked the doctor: How did it happen? He looked at her so sorrowfully, a good man defeated by science. “We really don’t know,” he said, “but for some reason, five or ten years ago, a cell split the wrong way and that started it . . .”
    A cell split the wrong way. Strange how such a tiny thing could