Her mouth ran dry, her face was growing hot, her fingernails digging into the flesh of her palms. The earth was falling away around her, leaving her in a vacuum, no sound, no air.
Take up arms and join me.
It felt like the atmosphere was changing, and she was so disoriented that, for a split second, she thought she had imagined the blast that came from outside.
The noise startled her out of her stupor, and before she could wonder if they were under attack, a shock wave followed, shattering two of the north-facing windows, glass singing and clinking as it fell down like waterfalls, tiny shards ricocheting off the blinds. The few white-collars sitting near the windows screamed and fell away as the object that had created the blast shot overhead.
Stunned and ears still ringing, Cora slowly approached the window, now with no barrier between her and a hundred feet of open air. The object that had caused the blast had already disappeared, leaving only a bright white vapor trail in the blue-brown sky.
“Is that another meteor?” shrieked one of the women who’d been sitting by the window, now brave enough to approach it.
It sure looked like one. Its trail hung in the sky like a 747’s, and where she’d sworn she’d seen it engulfed in flames as it shot overhead, the glow had dulled as it disappeared into the distance. Its trajectory was taking it northward, like it was following the 110 all the way to Pasadena.
In the same direction as the Ampersand Event.
Six minutes ago, a second meteor landed in the Angeles National Forest. It shot right over my location, so I want to get this eyewitness account down before they can censor it. We don’t have precise geodata, but there are several witness accounts stating, yes, it landed very close to Altadena.
That’s right. Meteor 2, right next to Altadena, and less than a month after the Altadena Meteorite, code-named the “Ampersand Event” by the CIA.
For the event code-named “Ampersand,” we didn’t have a sense of direction on the day the “meteorite” landed. The Broken Seal didn’t leak the Fremda Memo until one day after the Event. We didn’t understand its significance on the day that it happened, and by the time we really understood the hugeness of the Event, how deep the conspiracy ran, the dust had already settled. The feds had already cleaned it up.
This time, we know better. This time, we have the upper hand. Are you in the Los Angeles metro area? Don’t be a good citizen. Don’t be lied to and just take it. Follow the noise.
In the words of Ortega: Truth is a human right.
Gerrard, Eli. “Follow the Noise.” DeceptiNation (blog). September 20, 2007.
2
Cora all but fell upon her front door, fumbling out her keys in a frantic bid to shut herself inside and lock the world out. If traffic was forgiving, it took about half an hour to make it the ten miles home from downtown LA. By bus, it was closer to ninety minutes, but panic on the roads had put today’s journey closer to two hours. Cora hadn’t been the only person to cut out of work early.
An initial panic had resulted in several fender benders both downtown and on the 110, although by the time Cora made it to her house, it seemed that the traffic was now back to boilerplate rush hour, perhaps slightly exacerbated due to a higher-than-normal number of car crashes. On her way from the Kaiser building to the bus stop, she saw dozens of people tearing by in their vehicles, clogging the streets and one of them nearly hitting her in their fervor, although what they were running to or from, she wasn’t sure, and she suspected neither were they. It wasn’t like there were any fifteen-mile-wide spaceships hovering over the U.S. Bank Tower that they needed to get out from under.
Despite the time passed, Cora’s hands were still shaking as she struggled to get her key into the front door. The Sabinos lived in a three-bedroom house that had been illegally converted to four when they moved in, and that had been the only renovation the house had ever gotten in the forty years since its construction. It still had the same old peeling linoleum, the same old swamp-brown carpet, the same 1960s wallpaper that had been bleached by the sun through the windows. Before they had moved in four years ago, it had been a rental unit owned by Nils’s mother that was adjacent to an active oil well. Since the late ’90s, most of the oil wells in the South Bay area had dried up and been replaced by million-dollar McMansions, although the McMansion that had gone up on the dried-up oil well next to the Sabino home was probably worth closer to a million five.
Cora made it inside the house, shut the door, and slammed her back into it, exhaling a massive breath. The two family dogs, Thor and Monster Truck, had been whining at the door before she’d even gotten the key in the lock and were happily pawing at her thighs, but her nerves were still too fried to give them any real attention. She was so preoccupied that she didn’t even notice that she wasn’t the only person in the house.
“What are you doing here?” Cora nearly screamed when she noticed that there was a person on the couch, and that said person was playing her copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
“What are you doing here?” Luciana countered, not even pausing the game or turning to look at her. Luciana had a head of rusty-red tight curls that on a good day would be anyone’s envy, but lately, she hadn’t been taking care of it, and right now, it looked like a crown of drunken tumbleweeds.
Cora’s purse slid off her shoulder and fell to the floor. “I live here,” she said. It wasn’t at all unusual for her aunt to use her spare set of keys to arrive home ahead of Cora or Demi, usually to babysit. It was weird that she was here alone. Playing Oblivion. She’d thought Luciana hated that game.
“How did you get home?” asked Luciana. “I saw your car still outside. Did you get off early?”
“Our antiquated public transportation system,” said Cora, ignoring the second question as she lowered herself into a crouch to give her dogs their desperately sought attention. Monster Truck, a wall-eyed pug who looked older than her eightish years, had already lost interest and returned to the couch next to Luciana. On the other hand, Thor, a mutt who, as best anyone could tell, was a chihuahua-dachshund mix, was insatiable.
“Weren’t you supposed to work until six?” asked Luciana.
“Yeah … most of the windows shattered on the floor where I was working. So I just left.”
“Really?” said Luciana. “I heard that happened in really tall buildings. Downtown is apparently a mess. You took public transportation? All the way from downtown?”
Cora stood up, eyeing her aunt. She had figured that between the confused chaos of a meteor event and Nils making the news with his “I’m fighting for my children” proclamation, Luciana would have reacted with a little more than, you know, nothing. “Yeah, did you not see my car out front?” she asked. “I think it’s done for good.”
“Oh, yeah, I had wondered about that.”
Cora moved herself between the television and Luciana, studying her, starting to humor the idea that her aunt might have been replaced by a body snatcher.
Luciana just leaned over and kept right on playing. “How was traffic?”
“It was really bad,” said Cora. “Seemed like more doomsday preppers than usual were heading for the hills.”