Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

“Did you see that, Pete?”
I nod.
“Just another rocket from Abaella.”
Said on the news it’s going to be in range of Earth for another month.
“It’s bigger than that, Pete.”
Amanda sounds unhappy. I wander out onto the porch in time to see a stray moon level Sacramento.
While the ground heaves we cling to each other, then scream and crawl as a wind that roars like a thousand storms tears our roof to tatters.
The silence after the impact is eerie – and brief. Unbeknownst to us, a bigger stray moon hits Las Vegas a few minutes after Sacramento got hit. The wind from that blast tears into the opposite, exposed, side of our house and lifts the whole building. The stars spin crazily as I fly through the air and land in the creek.

I wake with a scream, grab my scarred thigh, then fall back onto my bundled coat as phantom pains recede. I landed in the deep part of the creek. Amanda didn’t get so lucky. It took a day to find her, and a week to motivate myself afterwards.
What happened? It was a question a lot of people were asking. Details came piecemeal, and the picture wasn’t good. Some stray moons had landed in oceans: shores abutting them had been scoured clean. A few of the stray moons split on impact, massive chunks hurtling sideways to slam down elsewhere. Watching them describe an almost flat arc across the sky must have been breathtaking – unless you were anywhere about to be hit.
In the aftermath things got worse. Earth had been blitzed by twenty to thirty moons hurled away when the meteor they orbited collided with a bigger meteor. Despite the devastation, it was fortunate for humanity, because the bigger meteor hitting Earth would have caused an extinction event. As is, we’ve ‘only’ suffered a survivable apocalypse.
The stark realities of coping proved too much for many of the survivors. Within a few months of Impact Day, every township had a designated suicide point where those unable to cope could go and remove themselves from the grim equations of survival. To this day, pickup crews still make morning runs out to those places to collect any who left us overnight.
There’s a small subset of survivors who can’t trust the sky anymore. To our minds, staying anywhere invites further disaster. We roam the transformed landscape, talking to ourselves or less dishevelled wildlife, eating whatever we can find, and working for short-term lodging at places we come across.
People say we’re ‘looking for Abaella’ like it’s a funny thing. As far as I can work out, the whole Abaella story was foisted on the population to explain the early arrivals from that monumental collision: it was nothing but a fabrication to keep the peace.
Looks like those who invented it didn’t survive, because I’ve not seen any attempt to rebuild anything more than townships. Then again, since other countries might as well be our Moon as far as getting news goes, I suppose there could be civilisation somewhere.
Most people are busy surviving, filling their days with farming and suchlike. I can’t do that. It strikes me as giving up. Not that I could tell you what they should be doing. My life is an endless meander, punctuated by days of blinding rage or paralysing grief.
Somebody lied and the love of my life died. I’ll never know the truths behind it all. Hope I can get over that, one day.
Until then, I’ll walk.