Jess slung the rifle over her back, tightening the strap snug. Keeping low she shuffled behind the Humvee on her knees and kept going until she reached the cover of fallen wall on the other side of the street. Stopping, she listened and peered into the gloom before getting to her feet and making for the drainpipe going up the side of the three-story building. She took off her gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of her parka, then blew on her hands and gripped the pipe to climb, pulling herself up onto a snow-covered ledge.
How many days now? Seven since the destruction, since the Earth’s near-miss with the passing Nomad black holes repaved its surface, churned its oceans to submerge the continents and tore the crust apart to belch a miles-thick layer of dust and vapor to blanket the globe. America was gone, the Midwest torn apart and covered in a chest-deep blanket of ash from the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, the coasts blasted by thousand-foot tidal waves and rocked by apocalyptic earthquakes. Sea levels surged up as the glacial icecaps tipped into the oceans, drowning anything left behind. The Baikal rift had detonated, wrecking Asia’s interior, along with dozens of secondary-but-massive eruptions around the Pacific Rim and mid-oceanic ridge. In just days Europe—and the entire planet—had been plunged into a shadow world, the dawn of a dark new ice age.
Nomad ripped the solar system apart, threw most of the planets into radical new orbits or slung them away into interstellar space—but because of the lucky geometry of the encounter, Earth’s orbit had only shifted slightly into an elliptic orbit around the Sun.
Pulling herself onto the second floor balcony, Jess paused to catch her breath.
Lucky.
This stinking hell was lucky. A mass extinction event as the Earth hadn’t seen in two hundred and fifty million years. Nothing survived. The plants, the animals, everything was dead or dying.
But not everything.
Like warm-blooded cockroaches, humans couldn’t be stamped out so easily, not that quickly. Everywhere, from the gloom appeared bloodied and battered human animals. Electric grids and most electronics were fried in the intense barrage of solar irradiation during the event, but some older solid-state electronics, like shortwave radios, had survived. Giovanni had already contacted dozens of survivor groups, and they started passing growing enclaves of people with generators buzzing, tiny dots of artificial light appearing like luminous mushrooms in this fractured underworld.
Jess reached the second floor balcony and stopped, straddling the railing to pull her gloves back on to warm her hands. Leaning out, she saw one of the scavengers coming out from the pile of car wreckage to take a pot shot at her Humvee. Almost everything was dead, yet we still seemed determined to kill whoever was left. Pulling off her gloves, she stuffed them back in her pockets and pulled herself onto the railing. Good thing she was an expert climber; a talent now more practically useful than she’d ever imagined it would be.
“In position,” Giovanni’s voice whispered over the walkie-talkie.
Jess hauled herself onto the roof, scanning it for signs of movement. Nothing. “One second,” she whispered back.
Reaching the edge of the roof, she pulled her rifle from her back and unscrewed the cover of its sight, dropping to her knees and then flat onto her stomach. She sighted down the rifle, focusing on the lead scavenger who had almost reached her Humvee. “Okay, in position. Drop those grenades.”
Slowing her breathing, Jess steadied herself, zeroing the crosshairs on her target. He turned, almost facing her, and her breath caught. Just a boy, not more than sixteen or seventeen. She gritted her teeth and centered herself. Still, he was trying to kill her, to hurt her family. From the corner of her eye she saw the shadows of Giovanni and Raffa lobbing what she assumed were the grenades. The crosshairs on the boy’s chest, Jess’s finger twitched, but she released.
Never give up, but never lose your humanity—her father’s last words to her echoed in her head. How many had she killed already? Jess shifted the sight down, at the boy-scavenger’s leg, and pulled the trigger just as a flash of light lit up the scene.
A whomping concussion was followed by a second one moments later, the windows of the building in front of her flashing as the grenades exploded. Glass shattered.