Baptisms of Fire and Ice Read online

  Baptisms of Fire and Ice

  Copyright © 2019 by Nadia Sheridan

  Cover Design by Silvia Frost at http://thebookbrander.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

  For more information:

  http://www.nadiasheridan.com/

  To contact the author, email [email protected]

  Contents

  I. The Girl, Undrowned

  Radio Roadstead

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  II. The Girl, Unburned

  Radio Roadstead

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  III. The Girl, Undaunted

  Radio Roadstead

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  Radio Roadstead

  To Be Continued

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  About Nadia Sheridan

  Radio Roadstead

  “I’m really sorry to interrupt the smooth jazz tones of K.P. Jackson, but I have some unsettling news coming through the wires. Social media reports are flooding in by the thousands from every corner of the map, and they’re all saying the same terrifying thing: that there’s a major global meteor shower in progress, and no one, not even NASA, saw it coming.

  “Streaks of bright, burning light are cutting across the sky. Hundreds and hundreds of them. From tiny white pinpricks to enormous chunks of flaming rock. And numerous observers from here to Japan are claiming that the majority of these meteors are becoming meteorites, are crashing down to earth and leaving fiery destruction in their wake.

  “If any of you listeners out there are witnessing this phenomenon, I would highly recommend you take cover immediately. A big enough rock hits the ground near you, it’ll be like a bomb going off. Find shelter. Buckle down. And don’t come out until the sky goes quiet.

  “That’s what I’m about to do right now. I’m heading to the basement shelter of the broadcast building with the rest of the station’s staff. If the building’s still standing when this craziness is over, I’ll be back ASAP to report on the aftermath of this cosmological nightmare. But until the smoke clears, godspeed, everybody. Godspeed.

  “This is Jolly Jace Jones at Radio Roadstead, WPZK, signing off.”

  Chapter One

  Adara Caine woke to water and ash, and found she could not breathe. She was lying face down in a murky pond, her loose hair beaded with dead bugs, her clothing streaked with slimy algae the color of baby vomit. Her mouth and nostrils were full of water, and it was already halfway down her windpipe, bringing with it the repulsive reek of decay that always wafted from the city park ponds after a summer storm on a warm day.

  She stopped her throat mid-inhale, just in the nick of time, and expelled the water with so much force that a spurt of nose blood came with it, staining the pond a slightly darker shade of brown.

  Flailing her arms and legs, Adara heaved her head up from the surface and sputtered the last drops of rancid water from her mouth. She took a gulping breath then, only to find the air wasn’t as fresh as she wanted it to be. The air was hot, hotter than it should have been in March in Massachusetts. Oven hot. And like an oven left on too long with a foil-wrapped dinner tucked inside, the air smelled thickly of smoke and ruined plans.

  Confused, Adara tilted her head toward the sky.

  The sky responded by spitting ash in her face.

  Fat flakes stuck to her cheeks, her brows, her chin, but Adara didn’t bother to wipe them off. Because the ash was falling thick as snow, coating the lush grass and trees in the park around the pond with a film of sallow gray. Through the ash fall, Adara could just make out the sky. And what she saw of that sky baffled her even more than waking up in the middle of a pond with no recollection of going for a swim.

  She’d expected to find a giant cloud of smoke rising from a nearby building. A sign of a normal disaster, maybe a gas explosion or, god forbid, a bombing. But there was no cloud, no fat, curling mass of gray she could track back to some neighborhood of Edgerton with which she was familiar.

  Instead, the sky was filled with straight streaks of smoke that were slowly dissipating at the edges as the wind ate them away. These streaks were not the result of a fire or explosion that had started from the ground.

  Something had come down from the sky.

  Adara’s already racing pulse ticked up. Missiles? Were we attacked? Is it war?

  A deluge of these awful thoughts tumbled over one another before she smacked the side of her head with a slime-streaked hand and knocked them all away. Adara had never prepared herself for a war or whatever this was, but she had prepared—or rather, been prepared—for a personal crisis, courtesy of her father.

  Before the cancer, her dad had been an avid hiker, and as soon as Adara was old enough to walk in a straight line, he’d taken her along on his many extended hiking trips. At the start of each and every trip, even the hundredth one, he’d always reiterated the same critical advice: what to do in case of an emergency.

  The first step was to stay calm.

  The second step was to assess the situation.

  Adara wasn’t sure she could slow her pounding heart, or stop the buzz of anxiety from crawling through her twitching muscles. She could, however, collect herself enough to get her arms and legs in working order and paddle over to the edge of the pond. The pond wasn’t deep, but the bottom was made of dense mud, the kind that liked to steal shoes and get people’s feet desperately stuck.

  So instead of dropping her feet and walking out of the pond, she crawled like some creature emerging from the primordial ooze. When she finally hauled her body onto dry land, she was covered in mud from the neck down.

  On any other day, she would’ve been gagging at the smell alone.

  But right now, she had more important things to worry about than hygiene.

  Climbing to her feet, she took unsteady steps toward a brick pathway that curved around the pond. There was a bench situated between two stout trees on the other side of the pathway, and a memorial plaque on the back of the bench sported a name in etched calligraphy, a name that Adara recognized. It was the name of a recently deceased calculus professor who’d donated part of his estate to establish a scholarship fund for math and science students. Adara was in the park between the library and the mathema
tics building of Edgerton College.

  That’s right, she thought. I was heading to the library.

  The memories came back to her in a rush. She’d finished up with her last class of the day, a grueling two-hour lecture with the ancient Professor Murphy, and headed to the library to review some of the primary sources she intended to use for her thesis, which had recently arrived via the interlibrary loan program. She cut through the park despite its stench to shave off a few minutes of travel time, because she planned to meet up with Enzo for a late lunch at two, and then…and then…

  A great force had slammed into her back as she was skirting around the pond.

  A shockwave, maybe? From an explosion?

  She shrugged her soiled jacket off, let it drop to the ground in a damp, heavy heap, pulled up the hem of her shirt, and examined herself for serious injuries. But besides a few weeping cuts and aching bruises, she didn’t notice anything amiss. Which was odd.

  If she’d been hit by a shockwave strong enough to throw her ten feet into a pond, surely she should have suffered a slew of broken bones, if not a serious concussion and a shattered ribcage. At the very least, her eardrums should’ve been perforated by the concussive force, but her ears weren’t even ringing.

  All in all, she felt fine. Which ironically perturbed her even more.

  Something about this situation was…off.

  Don’t freak out, she reminded herself. Assess the situation with a clear head.

  There was nobody else in her immediate vicinity, so she took a right on the path and strode in the direction of the library. She didn’t bother picking up her ruined jacket, but rather hugged her bare arms to suppress a building shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with what she was afraid she would witness when she reached the edge of the park.

  It felt like she was walking toward the end of a nightmare.

  Or the beginning of one.

  Chapter Two

  The first body lay sprawled at the base of the large stone fountain in front of the library’s main entrance. A gangly guy with a brown mop of hair, whose skin was scorched black in random patches, most of his rock band T-shirt burned away. His body was half in, half out of the fountain’s basin, his head hanging just beneath the surface of the water.

  So much ash had fallen now that the water was no longer clear, and Adara was glad for that. She didn’t want to see the look on the man’s face. Because she knew him, vaguely. She’d had a few English courses with him during her undergrad years. Trevor was his name, and he’d enjoyed loud metal music and extremely spicy Indian curry.

  Trevor was only the first in a long line of dead students. Past the fountain, on the eastern side of the library, was a quad of thick green grass now painted gray, and like a battlefield, the quad was strewn with bodies. Many of them were clustered together, students who’d been having lunch or study groups before…whatever had happened.

  A few, however, had seen disaster coming. They’d run. They’d tried to run. But none of them had made it far before something landed smack-dab in the middle of the quad and violently exploded.

  There were little fires everywhere, swatches of tall grass like tiny torches. A few trees lining the quad had caught fire too, and some of their leaves were still smoldering. At the epicenter of the impact was a massive scorch mark, a rippling star pattern stretching across the grassy field and two different walkways. All the grass in its grasp had been burned to ash, and all the bricks broken.

  Strangely, there was no crater, which implied the object that smacked the earth was small or light. But the amount of damage it had done—there were at least thirty dead that Adara could see, and half the library’s east-facing windows were shattered—implied an object of great size or power. Something that should’ve left a huge dent in the ground as a permanent sign of its strength.

  Adara gazed at the sky again, at those massive gray streaks. One of them curved sharply downward at an angle that corresponded to a collision on the quad. But what was it? Some kind of special missile? A meteorite with some weird composition?

  She would be the first to admit that she didn’t know enough about science or engineering to answer all the questions that were splayed out before her in the shape of death and destruction. She didn’t know enough to do much of anything, other than bite her tongue and stifle her gasps and stare at her muddy shoes instead of the corpses of her classmates.

  The shiver from earlier was now a full-body tremor, and it was all Adara could do not to fall to her knees and scream. I have to keep a cool head. I have to keep myself together until I’m sure all the danger has passed and I’m safe. I promised Dad I would always do that, no matter what happened, no matter how awful. And I’m not going to let him down.

  She spun on her toes and set off for the wide walkway that would take her to the edge of campus. Her studio apartment was in a block of grad student housing three blocks west of campus, and the gate to her building required a code to unlock. It was a secure building. She’d be safe there.

  She would go home, clean herself up, watch the news to learn what had happened, and call her friends and family and find out who was fine and who was not. After that, she would wait for instructions from the government, or the police, or the National Guard, or whoever was in charge of handling this disaster.

  Yes. That’s a good plan. That’s a…

  Adara made the horrible mistake of glancing at Trevor’s body again as she was shuffling around the fountain. Her gut twisted into a knot, and she barely managed to stumble over to a trashcan before everything in her stomach came rushing out. She vomited four times in a row, expelling her breakfast in a bitter mix of acid, and then dry heaved for another few minutes.

  When the attack was over, she was on her knees, rough bricks digging into her skin, hands grasping the rim of the trashcan so hard that her knuckles were ready to pop. She took deep, shaky breaths, in and out, in and out, until the worst of the panic faded. Then she used the heavy trashcan to pull herself to her feet, wiped her mouth with one of the cleaner spots on her shirt, and put herself back on the path to her apartment building.

  She refused to look at Trevor again. She refused to look at any of them.

  At the low brick wall that separated the Edgerton College campus from the city proper, Adara paused. Because it took her mind a great deal of power to process the level of carnage beyond the campus gates. The carnage of a city in total disarray.

  Crashed cars sat in the middle of the streets, on the sidewalks, stuck inside brick walls. Bodies were slumped over dashboards inside those cars, some of them not quite dead. Survivors of…the event paced in circles on the sidewalks, trying to get ahold of loved ones across overburdened cell networks, or sat quietly on the curbs, eyes vacant and hands bloody. From a distance came the steady din of sirens, and undulating within their wails came the cries of injured people, the screams of children, the curses of those who couldn’t think of anything better to say.

  The air was so thick with suffering that it was hard to breathe.

  Or maybe that was just the ash still falling from the sky.

  Adara took in the surrealism of it all. For a moment, she felt like she was an outsider looking in at a world that wasn’t her own. But she tamped down on that feeling of dissociation before it overtook her—she could have a mental breakdown later, when she was safe at home—and forced her feet to move.

  She took the usual route home despite the heavily altered urban landscape, the streets and sidewalks strewn with charred debris and glittering glass. She only had to make one detour, to circle around a light pole that had been knocked over by a truck and smashed through the display window of a hair salon. She did have to step over a few people, some of them dead, some of them simply too stunned to stand, and she made her best effort not to feel guilty about doing nothing of value to help them.

  Adara knew basic first aid and had learned CPR for a lifeguarding job she’d held for a couple summers. But she didn’t
have the skills, or the state of mind, that was needed to truly help people in this kind of situation. The problems were too numerous, too vast, too complicated. She was afraid that if she reached out and touched someone, they’d end up more broken than they already were, and it would be her fault.

  Did that make her a coward?

  She didn’t know. And right now, she didn’t care.

  Her building peeked through the gap between two adjacent apartment complexes, and Adara picked up her pace, sped around the corner, practically ran up to the gate. She was elated to find that the electricity was still on, the gate still operational. She punched the four-digit code into the pad, rattling the whole gate. The pad let out a loud buzz, and the door unlocked.

  Adara pulled the gate open, hopped through, and slammed it shut behind her. Next, she darted up the exterior stairs to her narrow balcony, so quickly and so sloppily that she lost her footing. She barely managed to grasp the railing and stop herself from falling back into a neck-breaking tumble.

  Breath caught in her throat, she scolded herself for not being more careful. In the same tone of voice that her dad would’ve used had he been here and not in a grave three hundred miles away.