EIGHT
THE CAMERAS
How many cameras around the world were kept running, trying to capture every moment when Apophis hit?
Well before it even got within fifty miles of the surface, advance shock waves had flattened whole forests, created mountain-sized wave surges, triggered violent shifts in geological plates worldwide as tsunamis erupted in all the world’s oceans, water and land rising madly to greet the asteroid as it came close.
And still … it had not yet hit.
Some people burrowed, some went to high ground. Some got drunk, some made love amidst tears. Others took their own lives before anything happened.
Many did nothing.
And those waiting cameras? Most stopped working well before impact. But a few—specially built and placed in fortified steel bunkers with the same portholes found on the deep submersibles—kept recording and transmitting up to the very last moments.
Apophis had become three asteroids, yet its power had been diminished.
A direct hit could trigger shifts in the undersea mountain ranges, the mid-Atlantic ridge rising as plates violently moved and new volcanic fissures sprouted everywhere.
A direct hit could destroy cities, even entire countries, instantly killing all life for hundreds, even thousands, of miles while changing the very terrain of the planet.
A direct hit could trigger mammoth fissures and cracks in the volatile plates of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Nearly a third of the earth’s crust would swell and crash together in just a few violent moments, matched in violence only by the original fiery formation of the planet itself.
Still—a few cameras resisted the first shock waves, the massive blasts of winds that dwarfed hurricane speeds.
They continued to record right up until the moment of impact.
Sending their images out via satellite until that communication link ended, all the satellites rendered useless.
And then at last the cameras would be turned into powder, dust.
Like the billions of people.
Like the millions of buildings.
Like the continent-size swaths of land that, in an instant, turned much of Planet Earth into a landscape that resembled the moon.
Desolation, devastation.
Those last cameras finally vanishing along with it all.
It seemed like the end of the world.