I kept running the numbers in my head after the radio finally, finally reported the news. It was easier than thinking about the big picture. About the fact that we lived in D.C. That we knew people there. That my parents were—
From D.C., it would take a little over twenty-four minutes for the airblast to hit. I tapped the dashboard clock. “It should hit soon.”
“Yeah.” My husband covered his face with his hands and leaned forward against the steering wheel. “Were your parents…?”
“Home. Yes.” I could not stop shaking. The only breaths I could draw were too fast and too shallow. I clenched my jaw and held my breath for a moment, with my eyes squeezed shut.
The seat shifted as Nathaniel wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. He bowed his head over me so that I was sealed in a little cocoon of tweed and wool. His par ents had been older than mine and had passed away some years ago, so he knew what I needed, and just held me.
“I just thought … I mean, Grandma is a hundred and three. I thought Daddy was going to go forever.”
He made a sharp inhalation, as if he’d been stabbed.
“What?”
Nathaniel sighed and pulled me closer. “There were tidal wave warnings.”
“Oh God.” Grandma lived in Charleston. She wasn’t in a beach house, but still, the entire city was low-lying and right on the coast. And then there were my aunts and uncles and cousins and Margaret, who’d just had a baby. I tried to sit up, but Nathaniel’s arms were too tight around me. “When will it hit? The meteor struck a little before ten. But how big was it? And the water depth … I need a map and—”
“Elma.” Nathaniel squeezed me tighter. “Elma. Sh … You can’t solve for this.”
“But Grandma—”
“I know, sweetie. I know. When we get to the plane, we can radi—”
The shock of the explosion shattered the car windows. It roared on and on, vibrating through my chest like a rocket leaving a launchpad. The oscillations pressed against my skin, filling every part of my consciousness with roaring waves and then secondary and tertiary explosions. I clung to Nathaniel, and he clung to the steering wheel, as the car bucked and slid across the road.
The world groaned and roared and wind howled through the empty window frames.
When the sound died away, the car had moved halfway across the road. Around us, trees lay on the ground in tidy rows, as if some giant had arranged them. Not all of them were down, but the ones that remained standing had been stripped of snow and whatever leaves they had left.
The windshield was just gone. The driver’s side window lay on top of us in a laminated sheet of spiderwebbed safety glass. I pushed it up, and Nathaniel helped shove it out the door. Blood trickled from little scrapes on his face and hands.
He lifted a hand to my face. “You’re bleeding.” His voice sounded like he was underwater, and he frowned as he spoke.
“You too.” My own voice was muffled. “Ear damage?”
He nodded and rubbed his face, smearing the blood into a scarlet film. “At least we can’t hear the news.”
I laughed, because sometimes you have to, even when things aren’t funny. I reached over to turn the radio off and stopped with my hand on the dial.
There was no sound. This wasn’t a matter of being deafened by the blast; the radio was silent. “They must have lost their broadcast tower.”
“See if there’s another station.” He put the car into gear and we crept forward a few feet. “No. Wait. Sorry. We’re going to have to walk.”
Even if the car had been in pristine condition, there were too many trees down across the road to drive it very far. But it was only two miles to the airfield, and we hiked it in the summer sometimes. Maybe—maybe we could still make it to Charleston before the tidal wave hit. If the plane was okay. If the air was clear. If we had enough time. The odds were against all of those, but what else could I do except hope?
We got out of the car and started to walk.
Nathaniel helped me scramble over a tree trunk. I slipped in the slush as I stepped down, and if he hadn’t had my arm, I would have landed on my rump. I kept trying to hurry, but it wouldn’t do anyone any good if I broke my neck or even just an arm.
He grimaced at the melting snow. “Temperature is rising.”
“Maybe I should have packed a swimsuit.” I patted his arm as we kept going. I was being flippant in an effort to keep up a brave front, which would help Nathaniel worry less about me. In theory.
At least the exertion meant that I had stopped shaking. I hadn’t been hearing any birdsong, but I wasn’t sure if that was due to the hearing damage or because they weren’t singing. The road was blocked in most places, but it was easier to orient ourselves if we stayed along it than if we tried to go cross-country, and we couldn’t afford to get lost. It was slow going, and even with the warm air from the blast, we weren’t dressed for an extended stay outside.
“You don’t really think the plane will still be there?” The cuts on Nathaniel’s face had stopped bleeding, but the blood and dirt gave him an almost piratical appearance. If pirates wore tweed.
I picked my way around the crown of a tree. “All other factors being equal, the airfield is closer than town, and—”
There was an arm on the road. No body. Just a bare arm. It ended at a rough and bloody shoulder. The specimen had probably been an adult Caucasian male in his thirties. The fingers were curled delicately up to the sky.
“God.” Nathaniel stopped next to me.
Neither of us were squeamish, and the successive shocks had created a sort of numb haze. I stepped closer to the arm, and then looked up the hill. Only a few trees were standing, but their crowns, even denuded of leaves, masked the landscape in a tracery of branches. “Hello?”
Nathaniel cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, “Hello! Is anyone there?”
Except for the wind rustling the branches, the hill was silent.
I’d seen worse things than a severed limb at the front when ducking in to pick up a plane and transport it. This wasn’t a war, but there would be that many deaths. Burying the arm seemed fruitless. Still, leaving it seemed … wrong.
I sought Nathaniel’s hand. “Baruch dayan ha’emet.”
His rough baritone joined mine. Our prayer was less for this unknown man, who probably wasn’t Jewish, and more for all the people he embodied. For my parents and all the thousands—the hundreds of thousands—of people who had died today.
That was when I finally began to weep.
It took us another four hours to make it to the airstrip. Understand that in the summer we often hiked that route in about an hour. The gentle Pennsylvania mountains were little more than hills.
This trip was … difficult.
The arm was not the worst thing we saw. We encountered no one living on our way down to the airfield. More trees were standing here, although anything with shallow roots was down. But I felt the first hope since the light of the blast, because we heard a car.
The purr of an automobile idling crept through the trees to meet us. Nathaniel met my gaze, and we started to run down the road, scrambling over trunks and fallen branches, skirting debris and dead animals, skidding in the slush and ash. All the while, the car got louder.
When we burst free of the last obstruction, we were across from the airstrip. It was really just a field, but Mr. Goldman had known Nathaniel since he was a kid, and kept a strip mowed for us. The barn was twisted at a weird angle, but standing. We’d gotten incredibly lucky.
The airstrip was just mowed grass, set between the trees on a gentle plateau. It ran roughly east to west and was enough in the direction of the airblast that most of the trees had been pushed down parallel to it, leaving it clear.