IMPACT (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Tale by Matthew Eliot Read Free Book Online Page B

largest of the three rocks, Colossus, was headed straight for the US of A. Just his luck.
    He had watched with detached, almost scientific interest as the concealed, hyper-regimented world of the facility rapidly fell apart. It happened within a matter of hours. Soldiers, researchers, scientists, technicians – all weeping like toddlers. Not only weeping, in fact. Many lost it all together. He could still vividly recall the image of a Colonel in the cafeteria who had sat quietly, watching the updates roll in on the screens and then, with no warning whatsoever, had simply smashed the glass he had been drinking from, neatly collected all its fragments but one, and swallowed them. With that single remaining fragment, he sliced his wrists open. Then he had sat upright, staring blindly ahead, oblivious to the chaos around him, until he flopped, lifeless, on the cold floors of Atlantis.
    Hierarchy collapsed almost immediately. Officers shouted orders, red-faced and shaking, while the swirling mass of people ignored them completely. Walscombe had found these specific high-ranking individuals particularly interesting. Their desperate calls for order and rationality in the face of the imminent, absolute disaster they (and the whole world with them) were about to face, had the somewhat opposite effect of making them appear utterly and totally insane.
    And yet, Walscombe too had panicked. No use denying it. Although panic, in him, was little more than a negligible increase of the heart rate, and a slight disruption of his logical reasoning. He had stood motionless, as hundreds of his colleagues and co-workers fled towards the upper levels, each carrying whatever belongings they had managed to gather. None of which would ever help them survive, or would ever prove to be of any use after the impact of a meteorite the size of Colossus.
    Walscombe had stumbled alongside the powerful torrent of human bodies, not quite knowing what to do.
    “The fuck are you doing, man?” someone had asked. He turned around and found Cliff, a senior technician he’d occasionally had a drink with, at Bob’s Bistro & Lounge, in town. Cliff was carrying a bundle of creased clothes, a gas mask, and a backpack overflowing with odds and ends. Cliff was on his way out with all the others.
    “What?” Walscombe had asked.
    “Get the fuck out of here! Come on! ”
    He had actually considered this for an instant, before coming to a surprising conclusion. I have nowhere to go , he had thought. And it was true. No family, no friends he could honestly say he cared about (if there had been any, he’d lost touch with them years before, in any case), and no woman in his life.
    This, of course, was by design. The selection process that had lead him to become Chief Safety Officer of this nuclear hell hole was aimed at limiting the chances of appointing anyone who might waiver or fail to comply should orders come through from up top. Having emotional ties was an issue when your responsibility was launching a devastating nuclear attack that could lead to the death of millions of people and, if anyone was left to fight, would result in war.
    I have nowhere to go. And guess what? I don’t care .
    In the seconds before replying to Cliff, Walscombe made the decision that would, ultimately, prolong his life far beyond that of most of those who were now fleeing.
    “I’m staying,” he had said.
    “W- what ?”
    “Yes, Cliff. I’m staying here.”
    The other man had obviously been in a hurry to leave, but his concern – which Walscombe had found rather touching, really – made him hesitate.
    “Are… are you sure?”
    “Yeah. Yeah, really. You go, Cliff.”
    “Well,” Cliff said, “maybe things won’t be as bad as they say, right? Maybe, I’ll see you out of here, when things settle down.”
    “Yes. Exactly.”
    Cliff, who Walscombe believed was as good a man as they come, had awkwardly extended an arm and shook his hand. For an instant, Walscombe feared that he