(HSSC2) The Collision of Object X, page 1

Disclaimer: This story is in no way based on sound science. I haven't done any research into the actual effects of a moon-sized object impacting the Earth, but I tried to write the story as I imagined things would happen.

I could have done a lot more with this story, but I'm happy with the way it reads.

With that said, I give you The Collision of Object X, an idea I've had for a story and finally decided to write down.

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The Collision of Object X

“They say it won’t hit for another couple of days,” Charles told his son, Todd, as they stood outside their farmhouse late one bitter cold and clear autumn evening, gazing with terrified awe at a strange glowing object in the night’s sky.

Todd was 12, and could barely understand what was going on. In a lot of ways, Charles himself was clueless. Would this thing striking be the end of it all, as far as life on earth is concerned? It was massive, about the size of the moon in the night sky, and not much larger than that in reality. The thing was barreling through space toward Earth at speeds he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Charles was from a large family with a tradition of farming. From the time he was his son’s age; he was driving tractors and old pick-up trucks and working on his father’s field. His son had been doing the same, up until the beginning of this season when the end of the world put life on the farm on hold for a little bit.

Charles had always been a stargazer, spending hours looking up in the night sky at all of the constellations and trying to begin to imagine the enormity and complexity of space. He’d tried his best to educate his son, Todd, on the wonders of the universe as seen with the naked eye, and together they had shared countless meteor showers and hours of just watching the spectacular night sky.

It was now late October, and on any other year the hard work of the harvest would be finished for the season and the family would be getting ready for the winter. They’d be preparing the farm for the chilly months to come, and also preparing for Christmas season. But this year was different. There would be no Christmas this year, 2012.

When the news first broke that a large, strange mass in space, now dubbed Object X by the main-stream media, was headed Earth’s way, Charles never gave it much thought. Although he had more than a passing interest in the objects in the night sky, like much of the world’s population, he had better things to worry about than some comet in the sky, which at the time was barely visible as a tiny star on even the clearest night.

That was two years ago. As weeks turned to months, more and more news started to come out about the Object, first believed to be a comet, now known to be something much larger and more like a frozen, rocky planetoid.

As the Object began to get closer to earth, it started to get brighter in the night sky. Within a year of the story breaking, the Object was officially classified as the brightest object in the night sky, aside from Earth’s own moon. People started to get worried, as computer models generated by astronomers at NASA began to show that an Earth-Object X impact was a near-certainty.

The religiously inclined took the Object as a sign of the End Times, and people began to go to war with one another. Countries were invaded, bombs were dropped on American soil, and blood was spilt.

But amid all the chaos, millions of people were living their lives. To them, the Object was a terrifying thing, but unavoidable. Those last few months before impact were peaceful and horrific; the war had ended as abruptly as it had started when Governments realized they were obliged to spend their resources and manpower protecting their people and themselves from this thing barreling towards them like a cosmic bullet.

NASA, along with the European Space Agency, had tried several times without success to bomb the Object off it’s trajectory with Earth. These efforts were in vain, as the object was so massive and of such a dense and solid material that it resisted all the brute force mankind could throw its way.

The Object’s collision with Earth became an inevitability, and people were being quickly rounded up and put underground, where supposedly they’d be safe from the effects of collision.

To Charles Thompson, the National Guard boys who came to the farm talking about a mandatory evacuation could shove it. His family would be no safer underground in some mine shaft with thousands of other people like cattle in a barn during a tornado. Death was a near certainty, and Charles Thompson didn’t like the idea of facing his in a mine shaft.

The National Guard boys didn’t care to put up much of an argument, either. They were bright enough to know what Object X would do to the planet, and they themselves didn’t put much stock into this whole idea of going underground.

So as their neighbors and friends paraded out of town in drab-olive military vehicles toward some deep, dark mine shaft, the Thompson family opted to stay behind where they felt safe - on the family farm, to wait for this terrible thing from the sky they could barely understand to do it’s damage.

It wasn’t only the Thompson family who had decided to remain above-ground during the collision. Scientists the world over scoffed at the US Government’s plan to send people belowground - those scientists theorized that the Object would have a scorched earth effect, burning every bit of material from the surface of the planet with impunity and turning all rock and metal near the surface molten

Life as anyone knew it on Earth would cease to exist, and the best thing anybody could do, they said, was accept it and try and live out their last weeks alive as well they could.

Two nights had passed since Charles and Todd Thompson had last stood outside the farmhouse and contemplated their fate and their future. Life on Earth had come to a standstill, with a portion of the world’s population belowground in mine shafts and more still in deep, secret bunkers. The most powerful and influential families were whisked away to the International Space Station, now complete and seen by many as humanity’s last ditch hope for survival. The ISS had been quickly completed and expanded to accept some several hundred of the Earth’s most powerful people. Some on Earth saw the ISS as the last hope for humanity, assuming they managed to survive the aftermath of Object X with no supplies from what was once Earth.

It was just minutes now before impact, and Charles and Todd Thompson once again stood outside their farmhouse, late one evening, watching the most beautiful and terrifying thing they’d ever seen in their life. As Object X, roughly the mass of Earth’s moon, got ever closer, it began to do strange things to Earth’s gravity. Tides rose higher than ever before, and costal regions along the eastern seaboard of North America were devastated. The Canadian provinces on Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and PEI ceased to exist as the ocean overwhelmed them. The Object struck in the middle of the North Atlantic, almost exactly between Canada’s East Coast and Western Europe.

When Object X struck the Earth at Midnight, Oct. 31, 2012, Charles and Todd Thompson watched in awed horror as an object slightly larger than the Earth’s moon, visible to them as a giant, blazing halo, lighting the night as if it were day, bored into the earth far below the horizon.

The Earth’s atmosphere was almost instantly changed dramatically as the North Atlantic boiled and vaporized. Thick, black clouds blanketed the globe and the only light on the Earth’s surface seemed to be a large, growing fire to the East.

To Charles and Todd Thompson in North Dakota, thousands of miles away from Object X’s Ground Zero off the Grand Banks in the North Atlantic, it was a matter of seconds before they were knocked off their feet by a violent shudder from deep within the Earth. The planet moved as if a giant slumbering beast deep beneath them had been awakened and was thrashing violently. In that instant, mountain ranges were created and destroyed as Object X wreaked its havoc upon the Earth’s fragile stability.

In those few seconds before their tragic and violent death, Charles and Todd Thompson held one another, and were afraid. It was a sort of fear that wasn’t panic, because a sense of panic implied a sense of escape. There was no fight or flight reaction to this sort of fear, for this father and son pair it was a fear not of Object X, and they certainly didn’t worry about the ultimate fate of the Earth as it was destroyed and changed in horrible and wonderful ways around them. They feared only the uncertainty of death, what it would bring to them and whether it would hurt.