Gray tufts stitched a bleeding horizon. The urban landscape stretching around him had grown steadily under Walker’s leadership, yet he knew nothing would ever be quite the same again. A habit of holding his billed cap at his side while massaging a tired jaw made him feel better, if only for the moment, but the weight of a five year struggle to survive could not be lifted so easily.

He put on the cap, then joined the small gathering ahead as the sun rose.

***

After the asteroid hit, communities sprang up quickly, much faster than many had imagined. People helping people, that’s all it took. There was a moderate amount of scuffling, some tussles over positions of power, but mostly the rebound had been a smooth development into informally organized groups.

It was the arguments over the impact itself that got people really riled up. Just one asteroid, and not even a particularly big one. That’s what pissed them off. With all the decades of concern over nukes, pollution, overpopulation, and climate change, Nature had once again proven who the real boss was; in this case by sending an insignificant rock to Earth at just the right time, just the right angle, and just the right spot. A triple whammy. The damned thing had barely registered on the global monitoring system before it went kerplunk in the ocean off Madagascar.

“What the hell’s the point?” seemed to be the most common frustration. “If it was so easy for the Universe to kill most of us, why even try to rebuild?” But others pointed out the unlikely confluence of several factors that had led to humanity’s near annihilation. Experts had not predicted the combined effect of large masses of displaced water weighing on tectonic plates and powering storm systems. The result was earthquakes, volcanos, and hurricanes unlike any seen before. Surprise, surprise.

***

“Tear it down! Bring it down!” chanted the anarchists, or “Stachotics” as they had started calling themselves. “Rock, rock, rock the house!” they continued. Facing them on the other side of the community rotunda, the reconstruction teams waited calmly, tools at the ready. Compact plank houses filled in the backdrop, mostly still unpainted, some as yet unfinished.

The Stachotics had been less violent lately, yet more prone to vent in public, so everyone else usually waited for them to release their frustrations before moving ahead with plans. But this time was different. Overnight several houses had been demolished, not far from a rally earlier in the evening.

“Anybody see anything?” Walker raised his voice enough to be heard, trying not to sound demanding. No need to rile the protesters even more. Anarchists and reconstructionists alike, virtually indistinguishable by appearance, ignored him or only briefly acknowledged his presence.

“No one?” he asked a minute later. Great. Either they’re not talking out of sheer stubbornness, or it really was a surprise to all of them. In any case, he needed to start his investigation before work could continue.

He left the crowd and headed towards the debris of several framed structures. Bending over a broken wall, he pulled away at the timber by hand, then looked for a shovel, but found only a stiff sheet of hardwood, which he broke in half lengthwise. With a grunt he began digging away at the chunks of turf and loose rock encasing the base.

After an hour he used his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his brow, then threw the make-shift tool aside and put his hands on his hips. Nothing. Not a single thing out of the ordinary. He had just started stalking back towards the central committee to make his report when a little girl brushed past him in the opposite direction.

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“Hey, Georgie,” he called out, “what’s got you in a rush?”

She turned and ran back to him. “Come look at what I found, Mr. Walker!” She took his hand and led him to an open area behind the site, hidden from his view during his earlier search. Here, the barren sod seemed to have sloughed off, exposing gray rock underneath. Humps protruded in low mounds, like lumpy oatmeal.

“Well, I’ll be.” Walker removed his cap and scratched his head. Leave it to the kid to see what I couldn’t. “Ok, let’s get some of this to the professor, alright?” She nodded, and watched him squat down next to the outcrop. He poked the outer edge with his pocket knife before reaching out to it with a forefinger. Soft, and warm, too. A thick slice of the tar came off easily with his blade. It pulled away like taffy with bits of dirt sticking to the surface.

As he held it in his hand, Walker noticed the piece seemed to shrink a bit, and flat spots formed on the surface. When he squeezed it the strange substance felt solid.

“That’s...weird.” He motioned for the girl to follow him.

***

“So, it’s aliens, right Doc?” Walker joked with the scientist. “Some aliens put a magical goop underground when they visited us in ancient times?” He watched as Professor Alsop chipped away at the sample, soil crumbling off around the edges.

“No, sorry,” she replied. “It’s basically basalt, which is commonplace in the top geologic strata, especially undersea.” The geologist held up what was now a wedge of sharp-edged stone, turning it in the light while she squinted. “But its rapid hardening is quite unique,” the scientist continued, “as well as finding it at a shallow depth on a land mass with no active volcanoes.” She set the piece down and looked at Walker. “Additional samples would be very useful. Especially a full canvas of the entire territory.”

After a heavy sigh, he said “Sure. Whatever you need.”

Walker chose a group of his best workers. Each was assigned a square kilometer of surrounding terrain to collect from, and within a week they had plotted the locations of all outcroppings. They returned home with a wagonload of evidence.

“I’ve uncovered the material’s unique characteristics,” Alsop stated when the group was back, with Georgie tagging along behind. “Because of slightly more water than normal, and the addition of some petroleum from the asteroid’s impact deep under the continental shelf, the heating and cooling of the basalt as it gets pushed up to the surface results in a kind of crystallized structure which solidifies at air temperature.”

“Well, that is, um, interesting,” Walker said.

“Isn’t it? Oddly enough, it’s not unlike the way a chocolate bar was created in the days when such things were around,” the professor continued.

“What’s a chocolate bar?” Georgie asked.

“A kind of dessert, young lady. The ingredients of the bar were identical to the softer version, but a particular method of timing during the cooking process resulted in a lattice of firm material.”

“I had no idea,” Walker said, stroking his chin.

“And from the map you created,” Alsop went on, “it does indeed seem to extend throughout this territory, perhaps beyond, with each node expanding in an amazingly short period. If unimpeded, what we’re potentially witnessing is a brand new continent being born. Topsoil will completely shear away and wash into the oceans. We’ll have to move farther and farther outwards, eventually running out of habitable ground to live on.”

“So it sounds like the anarchists are winning after all,” Walker said. “We’ll be up to our necks in the stuff if we stick around here too long.”

“Is this like when the dinosaurs lived?” the little girl asked.

“What do you mean, Georgie?” he asked.

“I dreamed I was a dinosaur once. I was stuck in the mud, and was trying real hard to pull myself out. Some other dinosaurs were standing around the mud pit, and I yelled at them to help me out but they were too far away. I drowned. It was sad.”

Walker said, “I’ll bet it was. But maybe your bones got turned into fossils and someone found you a long time later, eh?”

She looked up at him. “Are we gonna be fossils, Mr. Walker?”

Goddammit, kid.