Midnight Dawn
“Wake-up, honey. Wake-up.”
“Jeff?”
“I made breakfast.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“Come on, we don’t have long.”
Chelsea smoothed her silk nightgown and followed Jeff.
They sat, on the top-deck stern, in moonlight, at a table. Crystal cups filled with orange juice stood beside white plates holding omelets. The sound of crashing waves came on the warm breeze. Across the water, the island seemed a titan frozen mid-rise. Jeff stirred his coffee.
Chelsea rested her elbows on the table. “Where’s the staff?”
“I didn’t want to wake them.”
“Darling, what’s going on? You haven’t cooked in twenty years.”
Jeff stopped stirring. He watched the little whirlpool in his coffee unwind itself into stillness. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, you’ve always hired good chefs—”
“Not about that.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“It was my idea.”
“You’re talking about—”
“Yes, I—”
“Did something happen—”
“Honey, let me—”
“What’s going—”
“Let me talk. I need to say this, okay? It’s important.” Jeff raised his coffee to his lips but could not make himself drink. He returned the cup to the table. “I don’t actually know if I was the only one who had the idea. I’m sure I wasn’t. It was so simple. So obvious. But I was the one who floated it to the others.
“They’d just figured out how to stop the damn thing. They were gonna use nuclear weapons to redirect it into the sun. It was a good idea. It would’ve worked. You should’ve seen the looks on their faces when I said that the thing we were gonna pump billions into trying to stop was probably the best investment opportunity we’d ever seen. Just think about it, I told them. More platinum and gold and iron and nickel than we could ever pull from the ground, dropped right onto the surface where we could just scoop it up by the truckload. All we had to do was nothing. Just sit and wait. When the smoke cleared, a feeding frenzy. After that? Huge swaths of new prime real estate, virgin land begging for development. Plus, nothing stimulates a stagnating economy like a little crisis. All we had to do was let the asteroid hit.
“Of course, some of them were horrified. What about the impact zone, they said. What about it? We had plenty of time to evacuate. And if we couldn’t get everyone out? Well, the rock was projected to hit somewhere in Africa. At worst it would flatten Lagos, and who the fuck would really care. In the end, convincing them wasn’t hard, and neither was convincing the governments. Some African states resisted, but it wasn’t like they could stop the thing themselves. I mean, they tried a Hail Mary mission, but it blew-up on the launchpad. Don’t look at me like that, I didn’t have anything to do with that.
“Anyway, yeah, the whole plan came about because of me. I mean, maybe it would’ve without me. Who knows? But the way it happened, it was me.”
Chelsea shook her head. “You should’ve told me.” She sighed. “But, our net worth is about to skyrocket, so—”
“There’s more. About twelve hours ago, when the asteroid passed some of our high orbit satellite telescopes, we got a new look at it. We discovered that it had an unusual profile and, because of its angle of approach, we had miscalculated its size and mass. At first, this seemed like a good thing. Even more metal! But then the eggheads plugged the new measurements into the model. The impact was going to be much worse than we had anticipated.”
“How much worse?”
Jeff sipped his coffee, frowned.
“Jeff?”
Jeff poured cream into his coffee, started stirring. “Total annihilation. Not just for us. For the planet. I watched the simulation. A molten ejection plume reaching into space. Tidal waves erasing the land. A wall of fire igniting the atmosphere. The crust cracking. The planet shattering, breaking apart. If it hadn’t been tomorrow’s forecast, it would’ve been beautiful.”
Chelsea jumped to her feet. “We need to get off this boat. New Zealand isn’t far. If we take the chopper now, we can make it to our bunker—”
“Honey, you’re smarter than that. You heard me, you know what it means. It’s over.” Jeff laid the spoon beside his cup. “And I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? You woke me up to serve me some shitty omelet and tell me we’re about to die and it’s your fault and you’re sorry? Are you joking?”
“I didn’t want to die with this on my conscience. I wanted to confess.”
“Did you find some last-minute belief in god?”
“I felt you deserved the truth.”
“Bullshit. You wanted me to forgive you. You don’t want to die feeling guilty.”
“I don’t want to die alone.”
Chelsea dropped into her seat, crossed her arms.
“I don’t want to die alone.”
“You said I deserve the truth.”
“You do.”
“Then give it to me.”
Jeff reached across the table. Chelsea slid her chair back.
“Fine, okay, you’re right. I want you to forgive me. Because I want to die with the love of my life.”
Chelsea looked to the sky. “When does it hit?”
“About an hour ago.”
“So how long do we have?”
A brightening glow pulled their attention beyond the stern to the horizon.
“Do you forgive me?”
“Is that east?”
“No.”
Chelsea rose and went to Jeff’s side, resting a hand on his shoulder. He lifted his hand to hers, but she was gone. He heard the splash and leapt to the railing in time to see her surface and swim for the shore.
“Do you forgive me?!”
Only the waves answered.
He lit a cigarette and watched her stroke toward the island, as the west glimmered with midnight dawn.