America didn’t exist anymore.
It was almost as bad everywhere else. Coastal cities and any lowlying countries seemed totally wiped from existence, and the Baikal Rift, another supervolcano at the edge of Russia and China, had erupted as well, blanketing wide swaths of Asia under a thick layer of ash. No electrical infrastructure had survived, and all satellite communications had ceased.
“We are six survivors,” Giovanni said into the radio. “In mountains outside the Chianti region.”
Six people: her and Giovanni and Hector, Leone and his teenage workers, Lucca and Raffael. Their family was in the south, past Rome. Of course they were desperate to try and get to them, but there was nothing to do right now. The lucky six.
Or maybe not so lucky.
She watched the Earth in her next simulation, spinning out past the orbit of Mars, slowly freezing.
Crackle. Hiss. Giovanni twiddled the dials on the radio but shook his head and sighed. “That’s it, can’t raise them anymore. Maybe we’ll get them later.”
Jess nodded, hitting reset on her simulation, adjusting the trajectory of Nomad once more. She slid her foot closer to the wood stove. Outside it was freezing, but deep in these mountain caves it stayed warmer. Still chilly, but not freezing, and the wood stove brought a cozy feeling.
Giovanni had stocked the place well.
They had water, food rations, and survival gear of all sorts. A comfortable nest in the heart of a mountain. The only problem was toilets. Even after just two days, and a musky permeated the caves despite their best efforts to use buckets and clean up. Six human animals made a lot of mess.
How long could they survive? Giovanni had stocked up bunker-style supplies of food: rice, chick peas, cans, survival bars, and he kept one of the massive, fourteen-foot-high wine barrels intact and filled it with almost forty thousand liters of water. They could live down here for three years or more, if it came to that.
Three years.
The walls closed in, crushing the air from Jess’s lungs. She gasped involuntarily, trying to push the space back open in her mind.
Spinning the dials, the radio hissed. Then a voice—loud, clear: “God’s will has been done, as in the time of Noah and Abraham, as it is now. The great Devil of America has been wiped from the Earth, the scourge cleansed. The Caliphate will rise from these ashes and repopulate the Earth—”
Giovanni clicked to a different frequency. “Enough of that,” he muttered.
Propaganda broadcasts from an Islamic fundamentalist sect. Not that the airwaves weren’t full of religious zealots, crying and screaming, asking why God left them behind. But there were also the extremists, both Christian and Islamic. To them, this was a new beginning, ordained by God, and the shortwave broadcasts were full of these rants as well.
On her simulation, Jess lobbed another Nomad through the solar system, then paused it on yesterday’s date. She zoomed in to Earth point-of-view, spinning to look at the northern celestial hemisphere.
“Hello, hello, this is Station Saline, does anyone copy?” Giovanni said into the radio microphone.
Jess’s eyes went wide. She sat bolt upright. “Giovanni, you’ve got to look at this.”
“What?” He clicked the microphone with his left hand again, his right hanging in the sling. “Hello, hello—”
“GIOVANNI!” Jess yelled, pointing at her screen. “Look!”
Frowning, he put down the microphone and, wincing in pain, adjusted himself to slide sideways toward her.
Jess turned the screen to him. “Look at that.”
All Giovanni saw was a screen full of stars and the arcs of planets, the Sun glowing bright in the middle. “What am I looking at?”
“Venus, it’s right in the middle of Leo.” She pulled out the diagrams she scribbled the night before. “Look, it matches exactly. And Mars.” She pointed at the left side of the screen. “It’s almost perfect.”
Giovanni shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“This simulation I just ran. It puts Venus and Mars in exactly the right places, as viewed from Earth last night.”
“And…?”
Jess stared at him incredulously. “Don’t you see? Those two points constrain the solution. This is it.” She pointed at the line showing Nomad’s trajectory. “This is the path it took, the right mass, the direction. It matches observation.”
“And what does that do for us?”
Her hands shaking, Jess lifted one finger over a button. “If I push that, the simulation will run forward in time, show us where the Earth is headed.” The climate modeling window was open in the right corner of the screen, the average global temperature at 14.8C with the simulation paused. “We’ll see if we’ve been ejected into deep space, or will drop back into the sun, or if Mars will crash into us—”
“So hit the button,” Giovanni urged. She had his attention now.