Baptisms of Fire and Ice Read online

  Steadying herself, she walked slowly up the rest of the stairs, dug her key out of her back pocket, which was practically glued shut by the mud, and finally, blessedly, stepped into the front hall of her apartment.

  As soon as the door was secured behind her, she collapsed and began to cry.

  Oh god, she thought between chest-racking sobs, I think I just saw the end of the world.

  Chapter Three

  Adara allowed herself to cry for the better part of twenty minutes before she wiped the tears and snot from her face and returned to the tasks at hand. She peeled off her waterlogged shoes and dropped them onto the dirty old towel next to her front door reserved for wet coats and umbrellas, then stripped down to her bra and underwear.

  She padded across the hardwood floor to the laundry nook, tossed her soiled clothes into the hamper, and made a hard left into the bathroom. Testing the water at the sink, she found it clear—the event hadn’t damaged any nearby water mains—and turned on the shower. She stripped off her underclothes while she waited for the ancient water heater to make it an acceptable temperature.

  The delay gave her an opportunity to look at her body in more detail. She turned her back to the mirror above the sink and craned her neck over her shoulder. Her back, like her abdomen, was covered in scattered scrapes and darkening bruises, but there was one stark difference between the two sides. In the center of her back was a large rippling bruise whose starlike shape almost looked deliberately designed.

  It reminded her far too much of the star-patterned scorch mark on the quad.

  The quad filled with bodies.

  Adara turned away from the mirror. It’s a coincidence, she told herself. You just got hit by a piece of debris, and it left a somewhat similar bruising pattern. There’s nothing more to it. Nothing at all.

  Unsettled, she hopped into the shower and doused herself with the overly hot spray. It hurt, but she withstood it, and let the rush of water strip the bugs and mud and bits of bile from her body. Once the bulk of the muck was gone, she shampooed her hair and scrubbed her skin down with a shower gel that smelled like lavender, a scent she’d always found calming. Today, the thick scent didn’t even take the edge off the stress that was gradually building into a migraine behind Adara’s eyes.

  When the last of the soap suds ran down the drain, Adara shut off the water, grabbed a towel from the rack above the toilet, and stepped out onto the bathmat. The tiny bathroom was filled with rolling steam, and the mirror was fogged over. All the better, Adara figured. She didn’t want to see her back again.

  In the corner of her studio apartment that was designated the bedroom, Adara patted herself dry with the towel, wrapped her damp hair in a mock turban, and grabbed a simple outfit from her closet. Sweatpants and a loose T-shirt, both emblazoned with the Edgerton College logo. Finally comfortable, at least physically, she made her way over to the kitchenette and grabbed a bottle of water, which she chugged down in under a minute.

  At the sight of the empty bottle, a thought struck her. She popped open the doors of her fridge and cabinets. Assuming the power didn’t go out, she had enough food to last roughly two weeks without rationing. Depending on how badly the city’s local businesses had been damaged by the event, that might be enough to tide her over.

  She really didn’t want to go grocery shopping after a disaster. It wouldn’t be safe. There’d be looters, and even those who weren’t looting would get possessive over supplies, some to the point of physical violence.

  Adara had experienced such behaviors firsthand on more than one occasion when she was a child. She and her father had lived in South Carolina until Adara was twelve, and they’d suffered through a handful of strong hurricanes. The first week or so after the storm hit was always a perilous time. Devastation made people panic, and panicked people did stupid things, violent things. So the longer she could stay holed up in her apartment, the better—

  A shrill sound nearly made Adara jump out of her skin. She whirled around, blindly groping the countertop for her knife block. Only to realize that the sound wasn’t the calling card of an intruder but merely the ringtone of her landline phone, which sat on the side table in the living area.

  Heart sputtering, Adara loudly swore. Stop being so jumpy. The door is locked. The lights are on. You have food and water. You are safe.

  Adara marched across the living area, passing her coffee table in the process. Her laptop and cell phone were on the table, along with a stack of printed notes she’d been reviewing the night before. Professor Murphy didn’t allow modern technology in his classes, and if you got caught with a phone or a computer, you’d be kicked out of the lecture. So Adara usually left all but her notebooks and course texts at her apartment on the mornings she had Murphy’s class.

  Most of the time, it irked her to be without. But now she was glad the old man had been so austere. When she left this morning, she’d had a backpack with her. A backpack that was now presumably at the bottom of that nasty pond and would never see the light of day again.

  The phone rang a second time, and Adara jogged the last few steps to the side table, swiping up the handset. She hit the answer button and held the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Adara? That you?” came a voice behind a crackle of static.

  “Enzo?”

  “Finally!” Enzo said with a deep sigh. “I called your cell about thirty times.”

  “I didn’t have it on me. I had Murphy’s class today,” she said. “Also, the cell networks are jammed. Even if you’d gotten through to me, the call probably would’ve dropped.”

  “I know.” His voice held a shaky edge. “I’ve been having problems talking to anyone for more than thirty seconds at a time. Hudson finally pointed out that the landline in his office might work better, and that’s when I remembered that you have a landline.”

  “You’re at the bar?”

  “Sure am.”

  Enzo worked part time at Hudson and Grail’s, a bar five blocks past the north end of the Edgerton campus, popular with grad students and the younger employees who worked in the corporate suites in the office park just down the street. He usually clocked in around three on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, after he wrapped up one of his many onerous history classes.

  A quick look at the clock hanging above the side table told Adara it wasn’t even two, so why was Enzo already at the bar? Had he gone there for refuge after the event? If so, why? His apartment was slightly closer to campus, and like her own, it was secure.

  “Why are you at the bar?” she asked.

  “I have nowhere else to go,” Enzo said sorely. “My apartment’s on fire.”

  “What?” Adara took an involuntary step back and almost tripped over the edge of her area rug. “What happened?”

  “One of those rocks hit the roof of my building and set it ablaze.” He spoke with such a thick air of annoyance that it was obvious he was trying to hide how upset he was. “The whole thing is nothing but a bonfire now. A total loss, along with everything inside it, including everything I owned other than my wallet, the clothes on my back, and a thousand-page textbook about the Spanish–American War.”

  “Oh god.” Adara braced her free hand on the table for support. Her legs suddenly felt very weak. “Were you hurt?”

  “I wasn’t there at the time, thank Christ.” He sucked in a sharp breath. “I was in office hours with Professor Prescott when the impact event started. One of the smaller rocks hit the side of the building and blew out the office window, so both of us hunkered down under his desk until it was over. Once everything went quiet, we ran outside and found…Well, I’m sure you know.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Adara said softly. “I saw them too.”

  They let a long moment pass in silence.

  “Anyway,” Enzo picked up. “Prescott and I roamed around campus for a bit, looking for anyone who needed help. But it seemed like people were either straight-up dead or just bruised and confused. There was no in-between. No ser
ious injuries. Don’t know why, but…I’m rambling. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine. I can barely form coherent sentences right now.”

  He let out a raspy laugh. “I know what you mean.”

  “So I’m guessing you and Prescott parted ways after a while?”

  “We did, yeah. He couldn’t get through to his wife or kids, so he went off to find them. I attempted to go home after he left, because I couldn’t stand hanging around all those…bodies. Only to discover that I no longer have a home.”

  “So you went to Hudson’s.” The bar was only a short walk from Enzo’s apartment complex, but there were enough gaps between the buildings and streets that it should be safe from the fire.

  “Hudson says I can crash in the lounge for as long as I need to,” he said, with no small amount of distaste. There was a fold-out sofa bed in the employee lounge next to the back office in Hudson’s bar, and both Enzo and Adara knew from experience what often occurred on that bed. “Not keen on staying here more than a day or two, however.”

  “You won’t have to. You can come to my place. I’ve got a camping bed I can dig out of the closet. And I’m sure I can find some clothes that fit you. I’ve still got…” Her tongue failed to form the final words.

  My dad’s stuff.

  Stuff that he didn’t need anymore because he was no longer alive.

  Enzo understood. “Thanks for the offer. But I don’t feel safe walking the streets today, not with so much going on. Maybe I’ll come over tomorrow morning. Once the initial panic passes and people calm down and start to organize the recovery effort. Of course, that’s assuming we don’t get another round of impacts. Latest news says that astronomers all over the world are still scouring our orbit for more debris. They don’t know if we’re in the clear yet.”

  “Hold up. You keep saying ‘impact’ and ‘rocks.’ So this was some kind of meteorite event?”

  “You haven’t seen the news yet?”

  “I just spent the past half hour scrubbing myself clean in the bathroom. I, uh, had a run-in with that pond in the park between the library and the math building.”

  Enzo was silent for a second, before he groaned out, “I hope you didn’t swallow any of that water. It’s probably contaminated with the plague.”

  She thought it’d be better not to mention she almost drowned. “I’m fine. Just a little banged up.”

  “Aren’t we all?” he drawled. She could picture him shaking his head. “Well, to answer your question, the news is saying that it was some kind of freak mass impact event. Maybe an asteroid or comet that broke up as it was coming past Earth. Something like that. But whatever the origin of the event, a whole bunch of places were hit by meteorite fragments. Not just Edgerton.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “No way to tell yet. We’re in that confusion stage of a disaster. It’ll be a few days before the scope becomes clear. I’m sure it’s not apocalyptic or anything, but it’s going to be a right mess. Billions in damage. Thousands dead. Something on par with a major tsunami, I think.”

  Adara hung her head. “This sucks. This really, really sucks.”

  “Yup,” said Enzo in a rueful tone, his thoughts no doubt drifting to the inferno that used to be his home. “It sure does.”

  Chapter Four

  Enzo was right. The news was bad, but it wasn’t apocalyptic.

  Adara sat curled up on her couch with a sandwich in one hand and the TV remote in the other, flipping through the various news channels in between each bite of her ham and cheese. Each station showed video clips that people had taken on their cell phones during what was being dubbed the Global Impact Event.

  Some of the clips depicted nothing more than chunks of bright white light with tails like comets hurtling through the sky. Others showcased impacts from a distance, faint flashes followed by deafening booms and the rocking of the earth. Only a handful had caught the impacts up close and personal, and those few clips were honestly more baffling than terrifying.

  As Adara had surmised earlier, the strange meteorites hadn’t collided with the earth in the usual way. Instead, they hit roads or buildings and exploded into luminous plumes of white light interspersed with tiny glowing fragments that faded out in seconds, like dying embers. Most of the damage resulted from shockwaves and brief flares of intense heat, which shattered glass and scorched the earth respectively.

  It appeared that anyone outside the reaches of those short-lived blinding plumes only suffered minor force injuries from the shockwaves or minor burns from the heat. But if you were unlucky enough to take a direct hit from one of the plumes, you wound up like the people on the campus quad.

  What kind of material would cause an explosion like that? Adara wondered. It couldn’t have been a standard element, surely. If it was a regular metal or some kind of stone, the damage to the ground and the buildings would’ve been a whole lot worse.

  For the first time, Adara lamented her decision to skimp on science courses in her undergrad years, in favor of various fun electives that hadn’t taught her anything important. She wanted to get a better handle on the facts surrounding the impact event, so she would know what to expect going forward.

  She had questions. A lot of questions. So many that her head felt heavy, a thousand question marks piling up behind her bloodshot eyes, creating a dull, persistent buzz.

  Shaking her head, she hit the power button on the remote and idly stared at her reflection on the darkening TV screen as she finished the last few bites of her sandwich. While she chugged half a can of ginger ale to wash the lingering bits of ham down her throat, she thought that perhaps it was for the best she hadn’t chosen any sort of science track.

  If she had, she might have been one of the scientists tapped by the government to work on untangling what were bound to be vast, confusing puzzles surrounding this bizarre event.

  Hundreds of the world’s best scientists would likely spend the next few months with little sleep for no reward. And the next several years, if not the rest of their lives, trying to chip away at some aspect of astrophysics that human science hadn’t yet conquered.

  For all Adara knew, this event could be some kind of cosmic first, never before observed. Today could go down in the history books as one of the biggest mysteries of the twenty-first century.

  Adara Caine had no desire to be at the center of something so important. She wanted to finish her PhD program, get a professorship at a decent university, and maybe write a handful of novels. That was it. She wanted to live a simple life with a normal, respectable job, and have just enough money and time on her hands to take a vacation every once in a while.

  That wasn’t too much to ask, she’d always thought. Until today. Until she’d seen all those bodies. Until she’d seen chaos.

  Maybe normal is too much to ask for, she thought now, in a world where this kind of disaster can occur.

  Crumpling her empty soda can, she rose from the couch, crossed to the kitchenette, and tossed the can and her soiled napkin into the overflowing trash she’d forgotten to dump this morning. With a sigh, she lugged the full bag out of the plastic bin, tied it off, and set it aside. Then she went digging around under the sink until she found the box of trash bags hidden underneath a pile of household cleaners.

  As she was trying and failing to open the bag, a text message notification sounded off on her cell phone. Adara jogged back over to the couch and peered down at the coffee table. But the phone screen went dark before she could read the name of the message’s sender.

  After her chat with Enzo, she’d used her landline to call a few of her relatives—including her Aunt Ellen in Biloxi and her cousin Steve in New York City—and found that all was as well as it could be with her extended family. No one had been close enough to an impact zone to be directly affected, with the exception of Adara herself.

  She hadn’t told them about her personal suffering, and she never would. They didn’t need to know about the awful things she’d seen at the Edge
rton campus. Nobody needed to know. She would lock those images away in a place where they couldn’t be used to hurt anyone else. And she would remember them, from time to time, under her own terms. Whenever she needed a stark reminder of how lucky she was.

  Adara tapped the home button on her phone to wake the screen again. And discovered that the text wasn’t a stray message from a family member that had gotten through the glut of network traffic. Rather, it was an emergency alert sent out by the city. The alert was short and perfunctory, giving a summary of what had happened to the best of everyone’s knowledge, and detailing which areas of the city had been worst affected by the impacts. Adara was not surprised to find Edgerton College on the list.

  On her return trip to the kitchenette, she finally managed to open the new trash bag and shove it into the can. Then she grabbed the old bag, slung it over her shoulder, and hauled it to the front door. Through the peephole, she scoured the landing of her balcony, the narrow patch of grass between her downstairs neighbor’s patio and the security wall that her lease considered to be a yard, and the street beyond.

  Everything seemed quiet and peaceful. As long as you didn’t focus too much on the scattered plumes of smoke rising from distant buildings on fire. Or the overhanging gray streaks still unraveling in the sky. Or the layer of ash that made it seem like a volcano had recently erupted.

  Yeah, everything was fine. There was no danger here. None at all.

  Taking a deep breath, Adara unlocked the front door and exited her apartment. The dumpster for the apartment complex was tucked between the east wall of the building and the security wall, out of sight and out of mind until it was moved onto the street for trash collection day once a week. All she had to do to get to the dumpster was walk down the exterior stairs, along the paved walkway that led around the side of the building, and exactly five feet to the dumpster.