The Apocalyptic Comet
Apocalyptic Comet: After fourteen years without a single drop, it finally rains torrents as it will never stop.
The red dirt is so dry it’s nothing but dust and like the raindrops, it makes the color of rust.
The comet came close and flew by with a scream and it twisted the earth, I thought it a dream.
The oceans rose up way out of their beds and came crashing back down and billions were dead.
Cities washed away as if they never existed, whole states disappeared as land heaved and twisted.
As the world settled back it was plain to see what we called civilization could no longer be.
No phones, no electricity, no water, no food. The world once again became very crude.
For fourteen years we had nothing but sun, when the earth shifted we knew we were done.
The temperature rose to incredible highs and it became so hot that people started to die.
Then came the hot winds as the clouds went away and the terrible heat that cooked you all day.
So little water was soon to be had that people were killing each other it was really bad.
A few hundred thousand may still be alive and it was pretty clear the U.S. didn’t survive.
The world suffered the same death and losses. Funny what hell a little rock passing by causes.
I’m getting soaked and it feels so good but I best get inside as I know I should.
If we survive and now I think that we will, we can rebuild the world for good or for ill.
I go back into my cave, so nice and warm…I’ll start planting my seeds right after the storm.
Like it Merle. Like it a lot. 😀
Gruesome though it may be, nicely done.
i would like to have enjoyed this as I enjoy both sci-fi/apocalyptic stories. I found the disassociated monologue created a tell not a show, so I was never drawn into the story. Scientifically, a comet large enough and passing close enough to the Earth to tear away the atmosphere, be heard in passing or cause a drastic temperature change would destroy all life at that time. The shock wave alone from a massively sized body, so large that it cannot break up, passing by at 20,000mph, is unimaginable.
I based it on a rouge planet found a few years back and the theory of what it would do on a near miss. Granted, I did not want to knock the earth out of orbit, the story would have ended there.
Astronomers have discovered a rogue planet, apparently wandering the cosmos without a star to orbit. The rogue planet is also just 100 light years from Earth, which is fairly nearby in interstellar terms.
The odds of a near miss are calculated as well.
There are a lot of rogue planets. In the study, they say there are very roughly as many of them as there are stars in the Milky Way. Let’s call it 200 billion.
Second, the volume of the galaxy isn’t hard to estimate. I’ve done it before, and the details are there if you want them. Let me cut to the chase: the Milky Way has a volume of roughly 2 x 1013 cubic light years: that’s 20 trillion cubic light years!
That’s a lot, too. Dividing them to find the density, we get:
2 x 1011 planets / 2 x 1013 cubic light years = 0.01 planets per cubic light year
In other words, We’d expect to find one of these wandering planets in a volume of space encompassing 100 cubic light years. That’s a cube about 4.6 light years on a side (or, if you prefer, a sphere about 3 light years in radius).
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/05/19/are-we-in-danger-from-a-rogue-planet/#.Uoi78lx6JhE
Anyway…I write stories in both tell and show. I do NOT follow the mantra that it should be all show. According to James Scott Bell, “Sometimes a writer tells as a shortcut, to move quickly to the meaty part of the story or scene. Vital in a short story.
According to Orson Scott Card and others, “showing” is so terribly time consuming that it is to be used only for dramatic scenes and my story has few of them.