Celeste grew up Catholic, her mother and father devout followers of the Pope. She’d gone to church on Sundays, read the Bible, but it had faded as she got into college, more so after she met Ben. Passing the Vatican four days ago, hearing that the Pope was going to speak, she had to admit she felt a thrill, wanted to join the crowds.
The destruction of the Vatican had an effect on her she hadn’t expected. Terrified, of course, horrified at the carnage she’d witnessed. Now she found herself praying, to a God she’d abandoned, to a God humans seemed determined to destroy.
But she’d lived a good life, hadn’t she?
She just wished she’d spent more of it with Jess. And Ben.
Celeste took a red marker and drew hash marks from Lebanon to Iran to Egypt, her guess at areas already destroyed.
When Nomad passed, major fault lines were sure to slip. She circled the Pacific Northwest of America, drew a thick line down the San Andreas and across the New Madrid fault running through the Midwest. Staring at America, with her thick red marker she circled the supervolcano under Yellowstone.
She looked at Europe, then stared at the view in front of her. Italy had its own recently active volcanoes. In the distance, a flat-topped mountain—Monterufoli—was ten miles away, maybe fifteen? A volcano almost next door.
A wind rustled the leaves above her, and she could have sworn it whistled her name. She listened hard, but heard nothing more. Sitting back she refilled her coffee and dried her tears. It was a beautiful day for the end of the world.
Ben leaned his head out of the farming truck’s open window, looked up through the olive trees at a beautiful blue sky. The truck bounced along a gravel road, climbing up the side of the mountain. The farmer had picked them up in the morning, after they'd spent last night walking five miles off the main A1 highway that ran from Milan to Rome. Roger sat beside Ben in the back seat, on a long bench of torn green plastic in the back of the old Chevy. Wedged between them was Ben’s backpack, the one with the tape spools and CDs of old data. Roger had a bandage taped over his right eye, and a bloody cloth tied around his left arm.
They’d managed to salvage Ben’s laptop from the wreck when their car slid over the railing. Roger was still upset about Ben trying to rescue the backpack before saving him. They walked the last five miles, over the top of Gotthard Pass out of Switzerland, and then managed to hitchhike their way down the other side where the highways started into Italy.
They had their cell phones, but there was no service, not since Switzerland. Ben sensed it was more than just overloaded circuits. While half the world burned from riots and war, the other half had gone home to loved ones. Communication networks still needed humans to maintain them, and the humans were gone. Not there today.
And probably not tomorrow or ever again.
A clearing opened in the olive trees. Stone walls rose into the sky. “Castello Ruspoli?” he asked the driver.
“Si,” the old farmer replied, his face tanned and creased old leather. He held out a shaking hand. “Ruspoli.” He stopped the truck.
Ben could hardly believe they made it. Still twenty-two hours to Nomad. Time enough to talk to Celeste, to talk to Jess, to get ready. Could they survive it? Maybe for a few days. That was all he could hope for right now.
“Can you walk?” Ben asked Roger.
Roger nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Ben knew he wasn’t fine, but nodded and got out of the truck, grabbing his backpack with his laptop and the data spools. Roger jumped out behind him, wincing as he hit the ground, shouldering his own bag. The farmer waved and put the truck into gear to crunch off across the gravel. Ben started walking up the roadway to the castle walls, a closed entrance not more than a hundred yards away.
“What’s so important about that old data?” Roger asked. “Christ, I almost died back there.”
“You almost killed yourself getting your own bag. I could ask you the same thing.”
Roger dusted himself off and shrugged. “Just reflex, I guess. But you practically crawled over me to get to your pack.”
Ben kicked a pebble from the packed earth underfoot. He looked into Roger’s eyes, studied him for a moment. “When we were in Darmstadt, I said not all the data was in that paper I published thirty years ago, the one you read…” He looked down and kicked another rock. “I made a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“I was just a grad student, still learning the ropes. I didn’t transform the coordinates of the location of the flashes properly in the paper I submitted. I realized it after I sent it in, but when it wasn’t accepted for publication…”
“You didn’t make a correction.”
“I didn’t see the point at the time.”