She didn't lose consciousness. That was one of Hollywood's great myths. In the movies, John Travolta takes a direct kick to the head and wakes up hours later, capable of yelling about his headache and planning his escape. Hawk hated to break it to Hollywood, but John Travolta's characters would be lucky to remember most of their vocabulary, let alone how to use two words at once, if they’d really been knocked out for hours.

Instead, she vomited as her ears rang and her gut sang Hey There, Deliliah, only it was Hey there, Hawk, and more about the number of creative ways a stomach could reject its contents. Retching, she wiped her mouth off and chose not to look too closely at the reeking puddle—she was pretty sure part of what she'd just puked on had once been Mrs. Cummings' end table. It was now mostly dust and a memory of carved molding, and a shell of expensive lacquer.

It blew me into the house, she thought, as the organic fragments of a photograph dissolved inside its frame. Pinched between metal and glass, the paper and the cardboard backing supporting it only had the final, molecular descent left to go. It was something still un-defined, her mind not yet caught up to explosive outbursts of physics. She did not know what force or being or explosive nonsense threw her in here. She was having enough issues with the house, understanding it, comprehending what it meant.

She looked up, and a large chunk of ceiling fell on her. It was far less frightening than it sounded. The drywall was light and little more than powder, its surrender to gravity just the sigh before slumber. That was a troubling detail, something that Hawk would have to save for later. Even the dry-wall was affected. She crawled through the bits of ceiling and siding, wincing as she found the more permanent remains of Mrs. Cummings' life: The nails, the staples, the tacks jammed into wood by furniture makers. She crawled over them, and they clawed into her. Metal. That was immune to the energy, or radiation, or magical life-ending whatsis. Did it matter what this stuff was, right now? Because...because was this happening to Mrs. Cummings, right now? Had she died already?

She'd been old, she'd been worn thin by life and cellular degradation...This stuff would burn through her old skin and muscles like flame through charcoal. It would make short work of osteoporosis-riddled bones. Only the efforts to keep her alive and mobile would remain, medical memorials buried in less than ash. Here's the fillings, and that's all that's left of a thousand meals, eighty-odd birthday cakes, a million words, whispered, spoken, and screamed. Every romance and hatred. The only witness is here, in the third-right molar. Here's the heart collapsing like an abandoned cathedral, antechamber of ventricle falling brick by brick, veins that once were pathways now blocked, and the blood that gave the body its oxygenated mass now turned to heretic, working against its oath, and here is the pacemaker still continuing its mindless work, shock, and the cathedral is battered to nothing, shock, the blasphemy of death erased, shock, manifest truth turned to something less than primordial ooze. Shock, and silence, and shock, and silence, until someone remembered the idiot machine, shock, and silenced its unthinking loyalty.

What happened here? Dust, screws, nails, and a few bits of plastic wainscoting. That was all this explosion left of Mrs. Cumming's house. It was coming down, now, and the only blessing was that it came too broken to hurt Hawk. Life. That's what happened here. That’s what she was finding only in absentia.

The aurora was gone. As was the garden, and the fence, and most of the surrounding houses. But there was no doubt as to where this substance had come from: rays of destruction and dust were smeared across the ground, radiating perfectly from where the tomato plants had been.

"Impact," she whispered. Except there was no crater. There was no vast up-thrust of earth. There were signs of explosion, of air pushed wave-like across the yard. But there was no sign that anything had hit the ground.

But the aurora was gone. And as Hawk rose and scrambled through the glass-like ashes of Elizabeth Cummings' home...it felt different. Better. Safer.

It's done, she thought. And then immediately dismissed that thought because she had no way of knowing this. She wasn't a radiometer, measuring sieverts and declaring, this is safe and this is not. It was all psychosomatic...wasn't it?

And then her brain kicked back in. The boom. The bang of closure...or whatever the hell that had been. That had been big. It'd have been very visible...and it might have been what Kaiser Willheim and his team were waiting for. And if they hadn't known it was happening before, if they had ears and a pulse, they were on their way now.

She got up, this time ignored the pain and stiffness in her body, and rushed to the middle of the garden. The tomato plants had been destroyed. They left green smears on the lifeless dirt, a last spread that formed an "x" of red and green, all marking a spot that had just become of magnificent importance. Epicenter. Point of impact. All big fancy words a child could imitate with two strokes of red crayon: Dig here.

Hawk did not bother doing much scientific work. They weren't going to have a lot of time. She took one of her ant-collecting tubes and filled it with soil from the middle of the "X". Reached for a cotton ball. Discovered that all of her cotton was obliterated. It had dissolved into nothing, into glass-like ashes in the bag. Hours of exposure. And oh, glee, here was a new void to summon Nietzschean metaphors into so she didn't have to think about her own tissues crisp-frying like the cotton in that bag. Maybe that's all human philosophy was; something you can grip in your teeth, like a goddamn belt, while life's barber-shop quartet sharpens up both the knives and the harmony. What mattered wasn't thought, but getting the sample into the bag.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

It was in. The bag was closed.

Well. She thought. And then, Fuck. And because there really wasn't much else to say, she kept digging through the bag until she found a crumpled up bit of clear plastic. She jammed the tube into it, stretching the clear polymers until they created their own seal.

"Hawk. Are you alright?" Alex's voice, from another part of Mrs. Cummings' house.

"Yeah. But I'll bet my next grant, this was what they were waiting for." She jammed the hotter-than-hell test tube down into the bag. Next year's bag, if she had a next year, was going to be lead lined. "I think we need to move."

"Alright. Gimme some tubes, we're gonna grab what we can," and he held out a hand. Funny. Her husband could give her the serious hots on the lip of a volcano. Hell, that'd be giving him lips to work with. His sarcastic quips would have her doing him on Pele’s bed of magma. She handed over the test tubes and watched him scrape dust off various surfaces. And his instincts were good. The only surface he ignored was about to collapse, anyway. He grabbed samples of the colored remnants first, and then a scraping about once every ten feet, done quickly and without waste of motion. He stopped at eight tubes of dust.

"How are you going to mark them?" she said.

He looked up at her, confused...and then utterly lost, as he realized how useless his carefully spaced samples had been, without labels to explain why each tube was different.

"Hawk, I wasn't thinking," he said.

That got a smirk, a smile. "You're the dumbest smart guy I know, you know that?" She said.

"Should be. All I learned from my Daddy is how to wipe my ass with poison ivy. Should I just..." he motioned to toss.

"No. We'll see if there's a measurable difference between samples. It'll still be important." She got very quiet, listening for any signs of human traffic. Was it just her, or did she hear the distant, expensive sounds of a car engine? Maybe one attached to a car that looked like a high tech weapon? Maybe she did. "Let's go."

***

The walk back was far less fun. First, because Hawk, having come in this way, could compare it going out. A basis for comparison; one could argue that's the foundation for science. It's one thing when that's insects in a test tube. It's another thing entirely when you're looking at a tree in someone's backyard, and it could even be your backyard, and there's less tree now than there was an hour ago. The difference lay the passage of time and the movement of air, and the conclusion so far was "We're fucked" in large red letters. It was the sort of thing you saved big red sharpies for.

But there were patrols, this time.

They timed the first part of their escape perfectly, and were maybe ten minutes down the neighborhood road when there was a burst of light and sound from behind them, and this time it was completely human in origin. Flashlights. Angry voices shouted into radios. Recognizing, maybe, that someone had gotten to their rift before they did. Alex looked back, paused for a moment to study the road, and then pointed wordlessly into the darkness of a backyard. She nodded. Get off the road. Hopefully they wouldn't run out of decayed, vault able fences anytime soon.

Five minutes later, the first moving spotlight played over the yards. Front yards only; as long as they stayed in the shadow of the houses, they'd be safe.

You know. Unless they were using infrared cameras.

No one came over the fence, howling for them to drop to hands and knees in the radioactive ashfall. But that didn't mean that no one would, so that made the slow trek back to life a bit livelier. Hawk personally found herself listening for breaks, twigs in the grass. The scary black vehicles driving past, ferocious in their affect and merciless in their approach, still had bad break pads. They squeaked. It was almost reassuring; if Kaiser wasn't paying that much attention to his cars, what else was he ignoring? A break in the fence, a void for escape. One missed exit. That'd be the ideal. But then Hawk remembered, her and Alex's shenanigans aside, this was the guy who was supposed to be saving the world, and he wasn't even saving his break pads. But that sound gave her a plan to hold to. A car, seeing them, would break. She'd hear the squeak. And then the framework dissolved into flight, and animal grunting, and the inevitability of capture. But what mattered was the squeak would happen, and at least what followed would be something she could do. So she just listened for the car breaks the way one reaches for a lifeline. That sound was where logic ended, so if that sound did not happen, she'd be fine.

They passed the first death line. The Glass Line, she named it. The point at which nothing can survive. She hoped she'd never need the name again, never see this phenomena again. It'd go down in history like the Marfa lights or explosions over the forests of Siberia. She'd tell student interns about it from the safety of time and a mass of new Ph.D's. She hoped it had slowed. Please, god, let it slow. The Glass line, where the tan of death changed to a fragile green. Sickly looking. Of course it was. It sat on the cusp of death, the last rind of life, as it were. True death, the moment where this grass was doomed no matter what, that line was somewhere up ahead. This point here, this was just where you stopped lying to yourself. But still, that was better than the alternative. Knowing you're going to die is different from being dead. Knowing you won't exist, soon, is different and worse than non-existence. One has to say it's preferable, because the alternative is nothing. It's not even there. A moment of life, even one of suffering, is better than nothing. She crossed that line, where life becomes denoted by its suffering and brevity, and did not know where or when. And then the line where insects had fallen, where they were falling now. Dead mosquitoes and no-see-ums, dead dragonflies and damselflies and moths. Dead butterflies and bees. Dead pollinators, and soil aerators and cleaners. They're usually the last thing to go, and they were all dead, dead, dead, dead upon the ground. And people should have been screaming. That's what Hawk did not get. They should look at a bowl of soil so dead, the springtails are gone, The bacteria is gone, and they should feel fear in that handful of dust, they should fucking resonate with existential terror because the problem isn't that the life is gone, it's that they might not be able to put it back.

A neighborhood worth of earth, soil effectively sewn with salt. Not so bad, if it is only one neighborhood and only a week. Or one month. Or even one year. But how long was this soil dangerous? How long before its lethal sterility gave way to life's messier promise?

And what if this happened elsewhere? More places? More often?

How much could we lose?

The parade of dead things finally ended, closer to the perimeter than it had been before, but still quite far.