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over
them, knowing there was no way she could drive any farther in this
direction. But she kept going. There had to be something past the
walls of highway material that would explain what had
happened.
    She could see buildings on either
side of the road that had been completely ripped to shreds. If
anyone had been in them, they would be dead. No one could have
survived that much destruction.
    A car lay upside on top of a
downed tree.
    She climbed the catastrophically
formed walls, up one side and down the other, up the next wall and
down it, until they were so close she could hop from the top of one
to the next. She could see nothing over the walls but sky and hills
in the distance.
    Then the walls ran out.
    When she saw what was past the
walls, she thought she should have thrown herself on the ground in
despair, tearing her clothes up and her hair out like they always
did in the Bible. But she couldn’t react that way. It was as if the
scene in front of her were meaningless, like looking at a picture
and not a real thing. She simply couldn’t believe what she
saw.
    Jayla had seen pictures before
that were like what she saw in front of her now, but only from one
place. And she knew why those things existed in that one place. She
didn’t know why it existed in front of her right now.
    The only time she’d seen something
like this before was in pictures of the Moon.
    The crater in front of her was
huge, although not by geological standards. She knew craters on the
Moon could be more than fifty miles across. Less than five miles
diameter was considered small.
    This crater wouldn’t have even
been noticeable on the Moon. She could see the other side of it
just a couple of hundred yards away. But there was nothing left
inside of it. Everything had been vaporized or pulverized, and
there was nothing left but a big moon crater.
    With a tiny amount of guilty
relief, she knew that nuclear bombs would not have created damage
like this. It had to have been created just like the craters on the
Moon had been created. A meteor strike.
    But how would a meteor this big
have struck the Earth? Didn’t they burn up in the atmosphere? This
couldn’t be happening. What she saw with her own eyes still didn’t
look real.
    She returned to her sister in
disbelief.
     
    She drove the SUV back until she
found a major road that turned off the highway. Signs lying on the
ground said there was a ski resort that direction. Maybe there was
a clinic up there.
    Jayla didn’t have much hope. If
anyone had survived this destruction, they must have evacuated to
somewhere safer.
    As she drove slowly in the dimming
light, she observed that anything higher than three or four feet
off the ground had been leveled, and she wondered if she could even
trust the signs that lay on the ground. How far had some of them
been blown?
    She always hated it when reporters
described natural disasters as war zones. As she looked at the
wreckage around her, she knew no military would ever, or could
ever, destroy a town as thoroughly as the meteor strike had
destroyed this town. No war zone ever looked this bad. She had no
hope of finding survivors.
     
    Jayla followed the signs to the
ski resort anyway, not knowing why, just knowing she needed to
follow something. Her sister still sat unmoving in the passenger
side. Jayla worried about her not having eaten anything, tried to
remember when the last time she ate was. Jada would swallow water
when Jayla forced it into her mouth, but Jayla hadn’t succeeded in
feeding her.
    She tore her attention away to
look at a sign that still stood, pointing to the right. Why was
this sign still standing?
    It was getting hard to see in the
twilight, but she stopped, opened her door, and stood up on the
sideboard to see what had changed.
    The small mountain where the ski
resort was located had shielded this area from the meteor
strike.
    The road she was on went through a
valley and she could see debris littering the slopes on the other
side.