EMMA GRIPPED THE SEATBELT at her right shoulder. An irrational act as she knew it wouldn’t improve survivability in a collision, and it annoyed Quill–good. He stupidly insisted on night driving east from Winnipeg on the unlit Manitoba Highway 15, not the Trans Canada, because of his out-of-date licence.
The endless undulating prairies bored some, but Emma delighted in its simplistic beauty. She derived the same serenity from huge skies and distant horizons as others did from sitting staring at oceans. The hypnotic beat of telegraph poles strobing past made her smile. Maybe Quill used the effect to make her fall in love with him. Forget his bad points. It might work.
She twisted round, and pulled back her long red hair to check on their two-bed trailer, fishtailing behind them.
“Slow down, Quill. It’ll turn and take us with it.”
“Only doing sixty and the road’s straight for friggin’ miles.”
“Road’s straight but your driving isn’t.”
“I can’t help the cross wind.”
“It was dead calm when we left.”
Another glance behind her caught the sight of a shooting star. Maybe it was a good luck sign.
She bit her lip to avoid her nth appeal for deceleration. He accelerated in direct proportion to her nagging. Only another twenty miles to the campsite. She put her hand out to try the radio. To shorten the journey.
The crashing, yet strangely rhythmic, hiss of interference obliged her to shut it off.
Willing him to focus on the road, even though it remained featureless, she worried about his driving, and yet… All right, she derived a buzz from the danger, but she had the urge to reach old age too. Lately, it was as if his Dodge resented him, and it tried to reject him by disobedience, like a rodeo horse bucking its rider. She looked at Quill. Bucking her wishes he’d shaved his head. He looked far older than his twenty-five years. The car lurched making her once again grab the seatbelt. She had an abrupt premonition his edgy driving will put them upside-down in a ditch this time. Was she over-reacting? Her stomach convulsed and her hands shook as she rummaged in her purse for an antacid lozenge.
Quill took life chances while she planned to avoid disaster. In spite of her science major, while he fled school as soon as a pay-packet beckoned, they complemented each other, but was it more folie a deux than love? This holiday determined their future. To get married, if he asked, to be together, or not…
Failing to discover dyspepsia soothers, Emma sucked on the bittersweet taste of a licorice stick. She stared at the yellow cones of the headlights seeking rolling cola cans and nervous coyotes with their reflected white eyes.
Without warning, something punched through the roof of the Dodge. Emma screamed, and then again as her seatbelt cut into her fingers, then chest.
“Don’t brake, you idiot,” she shrieked. “The trailer will smash into us.”
Quill accelerated to compensate, but too late. He yanked the wheel over to the right. Another mistake.
Emma wet herself as the trailer pushed into the car. She fell against her seatbelt when the rear wheels lifted amidst screeching then whining as they lost contact with the road. Through stinging eyes over her left shoulder, she watched the aluminium trailer overtaking their car. Except it couldn’t. They pirouetted, pulled around by the trailer. A loud bang announced the descent of the rear wheels followed immediately by the engine stalling.
“We’re fucked,” Quill cried, his eyes wide and staring at Emma.
She knew he meant the trailer would roll and their jack-knifed vehicle would revolve with it. As if on a roller coaster, her body was yanked around. Emma’s screams matched Quill’s shrieks.
Abruptly, their car halted. Miraculously it hadn’t rolled. They both stared out of the windshield. They’d turned one eighty so faced the dim glow of Winnipeg’s beyond-the-horizon lights reflected in the low clouds.
Emma’s hyperventilated breathing sucked in the acrid odour of burning rubber.
“Are we on fire?” Emma said.
“Just friction burns in the tyres.” He batted the steering wheel with both hands. “Hell, we were on fire then, Baby, weren’t we?”
Her whole body fibrillating, she looked at him. “More excitement than I needed, thanks. We still attached to the trailer?”
“The bouncing uncoupled it. What the hell happened, Em?”
It took brain-squeezing seconds for her to recall the initiation sequence. “Was it a stone?”
He pulled at her arm and pointed at the melted plastic fabric around the hole in the car roof. “See, the fucker zapped down through the floor?” A neat hole, the diameter of a finger, stared at them. “Bullet hole.”
A relief laugh escaped from her. “Yeah right, a lone gunman miles from anywhere managed to point a gun down at our speeding roof.” Her nostrils pinched at a whiff of burnt plastic.
“It could’ve been from a ranch. Someone fired their weapon up in the air. They don’t go into orbit. All those bullets come back down.”
“A Beirut wedding? Out here? Sorry, Quill, I don’t buy it. I think it’s more likely a meteorite.”
Quill looked up. “You watch too much TV. Hey, like that Deep Impact film? Don’t they have to be as big as New York?”
She creaked open the passenger door. “Smaller. Let’s find it.”
Visibly shaking but otherwise with an admirable bravado, Quill got out and joined her. “Nine millimetre, I bet.”
“Probably a metallic lump.”
“God, we’ll never find it in this dark. Not enough moonlight..”
“Only last week I read a pullout on meteor showers.”
“I bet there are millions of spent bullets all over. I give up. Hey, Emma do your legs feel like jelly?” He crumpled on the grass, and then rolled to lay on his back.
Realising Quill, like her, had been denying their trauma, Emma joined him on the grass. Just for a minute to ease the headache-making tension, and let the adrenaline dissipate.
The cloud cover fragmented allowing stars to say hello. In Manitoba’s big sky, the clouds alone were magnificent, but the window out to space enhanced the view and Emma’s exuberance.
“Look, Quill, there’s the Big Dipper over to the west. Keep a watch out and we might see some of the Perseids shooting stars. Hey, there’s one, and another. Loads. Always gives me a buzz. Maybe one made it through to ground. It is August twelfth, when they’re due, isn’t it? Quill?”
She turned on her stomach, waving away a nose-twitching stem of cotton-grass, but Quill wasn’t there. Still affected by ordeal aftershocks Emma peered into the gloom in case he’d gone for a pee, but no sign. Standing, she couldn’t see him in the car either. Alien abduction? Anything seemed possible.
“Get your ass over here,” Quill yelled, walking round from behind the trailer. “There’s holes in the road, look.”
“Oh, great. There was I marvelling at shooting stars and all you can find fascinating are potholes.”
“Not your normal potholes–more like moon craters.”
A whack announced another hit on the car. Quill ran over to it and peered over the roof. “It’s a hail storm,” Quill said.
Emma had to agree that when a storm brewed, a few large spots of rain presaged the full fury of a storm. She couldn’t remember whether that happened in a hailstorm. But it couldn’t have been a lump of ice that had gone through both roof and floor of their car.
“There another, watch out!” shouted Quill.
A loud crump kicked up grit from the road a yard from her.
“It’s not hailstones. Look.” She picked up the black stone then dropped it. “Damn, it’s hot.” She pulled her denim jacket sleeve over her right hand and picked up the object. “It’s like metal. Molten slag from a steelworks. Not for real, Quill. See they are small meteorites.”
“That means we’d better hightail it outta here. We’d better anyway, the trailer will get smashed by coming traffic.”
Emma shot looks in both directions. Her pulse quickened when she saw a pair of headlights in the distance coming from Winnipeg. “Hurry up, Quill.”
“The trailer has a flat. Back the Dodge up to the hookup.”
“It’ll be quicker if we both push it off the road onto the verge.”
“The flat will make it harder. Come on, Emma, or do you want to hold up the hook while I back the car?”
She wasn’t the world’s best at reversing but then she didn’t like the idea of standing behind a Quill-driven vehicle. She climbed into the driving seat, checked neutral and pushed the starter. Nothing. Her pulse throbbing in her chest she looked up to see the oncoming headlights looming larger.
“Have we got a warning triangle?” she called, then thought of their emergency flashers. Switched them on. She heard them tick and the red button steadily winked at her.
“Turn them off, stupid. You might need all the battery juice to turn the engine.”
“Have you seen that vehicle heading for us? It’s frigging huge.” Not normally a user of profanity, her desperation degenerated her character. She turned off the flashers. Checked the ignition key. Pressed the starter. She’d no idea how sweet the sound of a roaring engine could be. Close to orgasmic. Was this how men felt with their automobiles?
“Reverse over to here, Babe. Tonight would be cool.”
She turned the emergency flashers on, and then the headlights. Full beam for a long three seconds before off, on, off, then dipped. Surely they’d see that?
“Stop playing Christmas lights and get over here.”
As she reversed, she had to place the Dodge across the middle of the highway to line up with the trailer. She put the parking brake on when she felt the slap Quill gave the rear windshield. She dared herself to look at the oncoming vehicle and scared herself with its closeness.
“Quill, is there a torch in the trunk?”
“Give me a hand.”
“That vehicle must be a wagon, and it isn’t slowing.” She expected Quill to lose it under this pressure, needing her loving support. But maybe three months wasn’t long enough to know someone. He was cool. Impressive. But too cool. Maybe that last cigarette…
“You had a joint?”
“We’ll be fine. Just help me hook the trailer.”
“Is there time? Oh, let’s go for it.” She heaved with Quill to lift the trailer then screamed with pain when he let go with one hand to fiddle with the hook mechanism.
Quill groaned.
Emma let go. “It’s not my fault. I can’t do it. I’ve pulled all the damn muscles in my arms. “
“I’m not complaining about you. The ball socket is broken. Look.”
“Great. Never mind about me,” she said, rubbing both arms. “I can’t help you push it out of the way, now. Are you gonna drive the Dodge out of the way? That truck’s nearly here.” He must know that, she thought, from the oncoming headlights casting alternate brightness and eerie shadows. It must be weaving about on the road.
“Must’ve been when I braked… the jack-knife… “
“OK. I’ll try and drive it. No–too late.” She should run for the verge. She should be dragging stupid stoned Quill with her, but her legs refused to cooperate. Too close for her to run away, the truck roared. She suspected blood surging through her ears amplified the sound. Her fear exceeded itself. Emma’s legs refused to move.
“Oh, shit,” Quill said, “It’s coming straight at us. Run!” He grabbed her arm, but then stopped. “What?”
The vehicle attempted an emergency stop with a terrible screech and tyre smoke. “Thank God they’ve seen us,” Emma yelled, but instantly realised two mistakes. First it was a Ford pickup, not a mighty truck. Headlights belie vehicle sizes. Second, it hadn’t stopped. The front wheels stopped rotating, but the vehicle skidded towards them. Foreboding increased as the back of the vehicle reared up. Sparks flew as the fender hit the tarmac. Like a nightmare, the pickup travelled on its front grille.
Emma clamped her hands to her ears as the pickup started a forward roll amidst an ear-hurting metallic screaming. The cacophony increased as her arm was yanked by Quill, pulling her out of the way of the oncoming disaster. The stench of burning rubber and spilling gas assaulted her nose as the cartwheeling pickup hurtled inches from her. Wooden crates floated in the air, travelling with the rear of the pickup, even if no longer contained. Something hard bashed Emma’s left arm as Quill continued pulling her to the verge. She closed her eyes yearning for the bad-movie to finish. She’ll open them when The End flashed up.
“Stay here,” Quill said.
A thump on the trailer’s roof grabbed her attention for a fraction before gasping in horror at the pickup now upside down, and about to crash onto their Dodge. The adrenaline buzz seemed to slow her perception of time. Tensing her muscles for a potential explosion, her heart raced. She could see the pale shirtsleeve of the driver. Tears smeared her vision as she imagined his helplessness as the collision continued. Through the horror she had to admire the solid construction of both vehicles. Although a tyre exploded on the Dodge, as it skidded sideways, neither roof collapsed.
“He needs to get outta there,” Quill said. “Spilt gas everywhere, all those sparks.”
“But there’s no sparks now.”
“Our engine’s still running. I should go help him.”
“No—if you think it’ll blow, then—hey, did you hear that?” Up the road another detonation reminded her of the trailer, and their car before. Meteorites. Had she read that article wrong? It said the shooting stars didn’t reach the ground. Quill stepped towards the crashed cars. Emma grabbed his elbow. In pain they both uttered gasps.
“Bummer, what’s that?” He held out his arm to show a tear in his black leather jacket sleeve. Raspberry oozed out. Wincing with pain, he let Emma undo the cuff’s metal press-stud and pull back the sleeve. Her nose caught a whiff of charred fabric and her eyes took in the seeping gash, spoiling a dagger tattoo. Then downwards to a wisp of smoke from the grass between them.
“Must’ve been debris from the pickup, or one of your meteorites,” he said. Silently, she turned her attention to her own left arm. Just a bruise.
“I can’t not help him.” Quill pulled from her but stopped as another projectile slammed into the pickup’s upside-down base sending both vehicles shaking. Another hit the road beside Emma. She pulled Quill around to look at a saucer-sized crater in the tarmac, and then the corona of another formed as they watched. Percussions hammered around them.
“Get inside the trailer, now!” he said.
“That won’t protect us. Aluminium roof isn’t it? One went through our steel car roof. We should get under a bridge.”
“Yeah right. The nearest one is—”
“So we’ll have to make do with getting under the trailer.”
“Good point. Get your head under the trailer’s axle, while I help that driver.”
“No, get under with me, I’m scared.” She didn’t want to show her terror unless such a confession dragged Quill away from getting himself killed.
As she stooped to crawl under the trailer, Quill shuffled his feet. He looked at her then at the pileup. Standing again, she shook her head at his dithering. But at least he was trying to decide between doing a good deed and doing another good deed. Maybe, in spite of his masculine assertiveness his feelings were getting in touch with him, or her. She smiled at the thought but lost it when she spied the light of a flame in the Dodge. Before she could yell, a whoomph of a fireball engulfed both vehicles. Quill staggered back and joined Emma. He put his arm around her, a rare phenomenon, but one she appreciated.
The roar of the flames made conversation a waste of breath. Agonising over the driver burning to death, Emma threw up, spewing partly digested fast food over Quill’s shoes.
“Jeez, Emma.” But before he could kick off the sludge, the sky lit with hundreds more incoming shooting stars.
Emma, grateful for a distraction from the death said, “Like the aurora borealis.”
“Yeah, cute, but how long before that lot hits us? It’ll be like machine guns.”
“They’re not supposed to reach us, they’re only the size of sand grains and burn up—that’s what we’re seeing.”
“So what’s with the pummelling we’re getting? They joining up out there?”
“Something else must be happening. Hey, Quill, look at our car.”
A man staggered from the other side of the pileup. Quill ran to him and helped him to their trailer. As another wave of stones hammered down around them, the three crawled under the trailer.
“R-radio,” the man said.
“Quill, and this is Emma.”
“What about the radio?” Emma said.
“A-aliens.”
Quill whispered to Emma, “Nutter.”
She put her hand over his mouth. “Freaked out, stress, that’s all. Grief, he must be in shock from that accident and still managed to get out before it caught fire.”
“Heard it w-when I left Win-Winnipeg.”
“What’s your name, buddy?”
“Stop pestering him, Quill.”
“Mister,” she said, putting a hand on the man’s arm. “What did the radio say?”
She noticed the soot on his face, shocked forehead lines, bloodshot eyes like miniature roadmaps. He nodded at her. “N-NASA says a spaceship used Earth for a slingshot. It’s played hell with the Percy?”
“Perseids–what, did the ship get too close to the meteor swarm and sent it off course?”
He repeat nodded.
“We’re being invaded?” Quill looked out at the shooting stars now down to only one every few seconds. “They’d have to do better than that.”
“Ignore him, Mister. Maybe it’s one of our own spaceships–European, Japanese, Chinese–there’s lots of countries. And NASA use slingshots to gravity assist ships. Apollo Thirteen flew around the moon in order to get back to Earth.”
“You and your obsession with astronomy,” Quill said. “So, buddy, is the whole Earth being bombarded with rocks?”
“No, it’s bad for a narrow band a few miles wide and a hundred miles long from about Winnipeg, southeast to Chicago. Worst, bad luck, just here, within the next hour.”
Quill, emboldened by the relative silence, crawled out and stood. “Looks like it’s over. You got your listening wrong, pal.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Emma said, looking to the man for support but a shrug was his only response. Her science expertise needed backup. “The Perseids lasts a few days. So we’re getting bigger chunks because of the close pass of the spaceship. There must be more to it?”
“I only know what the radio said, Miss. And then one of them rocks must’ve gone through the hood.”
“And I thought you done an emergency stop to avoid us,” Quill said.
“Was gonna go round you. Needed to get away. Suppose we still do.”
“We’ll have to hitch or stop a bus,” Quill said, looking towards Winnipeg.
“Where exactly is the nearest bridge?” Emma said. “Even one on this highway going over a farm track, ‘cos we’re going to need one.” She pointed at the sky.
A swathe of coloured lights splattered the night sky to the northwest.
“It’s like the best firework display, ever,” Quill said, as cascades of greens and incandescent oranges sprinkled several miles above Winnipeg. “Hey, those lights show up the wheat thrashing up in the distance.”
Emma narrowed her eyes as if that helped with telescopic vision. The shooting stars enabled her to see dense clouds of wheat chaff thrown into the air maybe three miles away.
“Quill, you’re right. It looks more like an avalanche, and it’s heading this way!” She bit her knuckles knowing they’d nowhere that’d protect them from such a battering. Quill grabbed her arms and tugged her backwards.
“Don’t worry, honey. Under the trailer again.”
Emma stopped. Her curiosity making her peer at the oncoming crashing. Tornado-chasers must feel the same. She brushed a red hair from her face. Several replaced it, making her aware of a fresh breeze–like those before a heavy storm. She rushed after the two men.
Minutes later the metallic storm arrived. Like an intense hailstorm but more deadly. The trailer danced on its suspension steel bands. Emma was certain the trailer’s roof must have been ripped apart by the hammering sounds inches above her. Arghh, one got through and punched through her right calf. She twisted to investigate with her hand. Sore, with surprisingly little pain, but her hand found a warm sticky wound. Her nerves must’ve been severed. She tore a strip off her shirt to improvise a bandage. She could feel it become sodden over both lesions.
Down the road Emma saw the convoluted black smoke from their vehicles, making monster shapes against the sky, but as soon as her brain manufactured ugly meanings, she looked away. She could see they’d lost the Dodge’s headlights. Probably shorted by the fire whose flames were dying. The air filled with the pungent odours of burning rubber, gas and an odd electrical smell like at fairgrounds. Ozone? Must’ve come from static as the meteorites disrupted the air. There was enough light from stars, and a quarter moon to see the hundreds of tiny craters and debris littering the highway.
A lull. Her leg now throbbed. She sought Quill’s face in the pale blue gloom to comment on the metallic odour but he looked asleep. Before she could put a hand out, a white-tangerine light flooded from the sky, washing under the trailer. A scream of shrill whistling pierced her ears forcing her to squeeze shut her eyes. The following barrage of grape-sized meteorites pummelled the ground. Several ricocheted under the trailer battering her arms protecting her face. Her back was protected by the axle where Quill insisted she stayed, but occasional stings told her she’d taken hits on her legs and arms. Quill was definitely the one for her. Because of this ordeal, her doubts evaporated.
Then it was over. She must have passed out. Soft dawn light reached for her. She wriggled on painful arms and knees, but before she emerged, she caught the odour of fresh blood, urine and shit. “Quill, is that you? Quill?”
Several lines of light shone through holes above her in the wrecked floor. Mid-August and yet cold air crept under her shirt, proliferating goosebumps.
The pickup man’s face was a bloody mess. A gash on his forehead oozed grey matter spilling on to the floor mixed with dark blood.
Tears flooded her eyes even though she’d only known the man for hours. Pity she’d stopped Quill from finding out the poor man’s name. Quill wasn’t there. He must have crawled out while she dozed off.
She had the urge to get out from under the trailer. Compassion didn’t travel as far as wanting to spend another minute with death. Now her body was racked with pain–mostly dull, or dulled. Her leg hurt the most. She groaned when she foresaw how much an impediment it’d be for running, walking, crawling to safety. Using elbows, she wriggled her head and shoulders into the open. Quill sat on the verge a few yards away among shattered fragments of the trailer and the vehicles.
The smoke from the ruins of the two vehicles had reduced to reluctant wisps, but on the western horizon, two thick columns of black smoke found their languorous way upwards entwined as if to reinforce each other in search of revenge.
“Must have hit the gas tanks at the airport, or that cow pie factory,” Quill said, between coughing, his voice low and rough.
“Yeah, I heard those cow pies are hot.” Emma, pushed herself up to her knees. From her new vantage, the desolation hit her. The trailer was now a colander. How had he survived? “You OK, Quill? Where are you hurt?” She pulled herself vertical by pulling on a surviving fragment of trailer superstructure. She found she could hobble better than expected.
Fearing she’d find him in a terminal condition, Emma stopped in front of him.
“Only flesh wounds, Babe. I got lucky.”
But all she could see was blood, not that the embryonic dawn light helped.
“Is that dislocated or broken?” she asked, reaching for his right arm.
He waved her away with his good arm, which was the bad one when all it had was a gash. “It’s not over is it?”
“Hard to say, Quill. The Perseids are at their most on the twelfth this year, but could go on a few days. I guess NASA might know if the extra showers of larger stuff are coming in waves or if that was it. One lump of comet or a snared asteroid breaking up on entry and finding us. I wonder if it’ll make them think twice about using sling shots around other planets and moons? I don’t suppose they gave a monkey’s about this kind of consequence.”
“Who, the alien spaceship or NASA?”
“If there was an alien spaceship, it’d be long gone. With no idea what it did to us.” She heard a bang on the road and saw dust. Just like the after drops in a dying rainstorm. “Anyway, how about finding a bridge as a bomb shelter in case more comes? Pity we didn’t stick to the Trans Canada Highway. There’d be ambulances and taxis rushing around on that one by now.”
“I’m not nimble enough,” Quill said, patting his leg. “Anyway a chopper will be on its way soon.”
She thought maybe Quill had become unhinged. It wouldn’t be surprising. More astonishing was that he survived and fantastic that he’d made sure she had. She heard the reverberations of a helicopter from out of the rising sun. Quill was talking. She looked at the black plastic he had in his hand.
“They got my arms, legs and few other bits but they missed my cellphone.” As he grinned, she noticed two of his teeth were missing. But it didn’t matter, they can be replaced. The horrors of the last few hours had allowed her to experience aspects of his character transcending the superficial. Now if only that chopper was really for them.