Under a Broken Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

so hard.  We’ll have you over the cliff in-”  I stopped short.  My mom’s eyes were gone, her skin a thin leather covering like rotting tissue paper, her mouth and teeth exposed in a grin that burned into me. 
    “Mom?” I said.  The car reached the cliff ledge and continued forward, teetering at the midway point.  I put my hand on the driver’s side door.  “Mom?” I asked again, crying.
    The skeletal thing lunged forward, grabbed me, and yanked me into the car as it tumbled over the side.
     
    I woke up with a muffled scream, sweat on my brow despite the cold.  I knew that I died in that dream.  I could feel it, and it felt like a premonition.
    Water dripped on my head.  The sun rose as it normally should, but against a strange assortment of colors in the background:  purples usually reserved for cloudy mornings, even streams of a pale green luminous light.  A fog floated above the ground like some cheesy rock concert or bizarre special effect.
    I listened for birds but didn’t hear any.  No traffic either.  No planes flying overhead, only voices murmuring and fires crackling drifted about like the fog.  An occasional explosion jarred the monotony, but nothing else.  It’s hard to describe a world gone still.  I'd never experienced absolute, true silence like that before.
    Marilyn slept next to me, and Ashley lay curled up in a ball on my other side.  So much for scoring with Marilyn with that little third wheel around.
    I got up.  The heat was already climbing.  I could feel the slow, cold drip of sweat roll down my back.
    I took out the papers from my back pocket that I had printed out, just as Marilyn stirred awake.  I sat down on the ground, reading and trying to ignore the growling in my stomach.  Yesterday I had a bowl of cereal for breakfast and a black coffee, plus the cheeseburger at lunch.  Today, I’d be lucky to find a piece of fruit.
    Three pages.  The first had UC Berkley’s logo on it, the whole Latin phrase under a shield that said something about light and knowledge and wisdom and shit like that.  Gave Dad an air of authority.  Underneath it was the title: “The Electro-Magnetic Pulse Effects of a Massive Solar Flare”.  It had Dad’s contact information, but that was all.  Useless.
    The next page read “Abstract”, and listed out all the things that could happen, and they all were happening.  Marilyn saw it as she crept over my shoulder.  It continued on to the next page, the last one.
    “What’s that?” she asked.  “'loss of life support systems, 90 plus percentage fatality rate'…what the hell?”
    “My dad sent it to me, right before all this happened.”  I told her about the airport and the email.
    “He knew this was gonna happen?” she asked.
    “Yeah.  But he was a little late.  Anyway, I dunno what good it’s gonna do now.  It’s only two pages, and the deed is done.”
    “Is there anything we can do?” Marilyn asked.  I just shook my head. 
    Ashley stirred awake with a groan.  “What happened?” she asked, eyes half closed.
    “We’re still here,” I said.
    “What’s that?” Ashley now moved over towards me to get a better look.
    “Something my dad left me,” I said as I read down a list of impacts: fires, starvation, hospitals shutting down, riots and looting, financial meltdown.  All the money in the world is tied up in electronic records.  Wealth suddenly became dictated by the cash you had in your wallet.
    Cheerful stuff.
    He listed something about a magnetosphere, in terms that someone would’ve had to translate for a layman.  I understood it though.  My dad pointed out all this astronomical crap to me as I grew up, like another class in school.  He’s been bugging me to study astronomy since I could remember.  Not directly, but in a more passive-aggressive kind of way.  “You have such a talent for studying the stars” and “you could really go far with this.”  Compliments meant to steer me in his