Anastasia huddled beside her mother, eyes reflecting the faint glow of the Indigo Bloom on distant hills. “Will it hurt, Mommy?”
Delara adjusted the focus on her telescope. “They say it’s like going to sleep.” The white lie left a foul aftertaste as another earthward blue streak scratched the horizon, flared brighter than lightning, then blinked out.
The girl’s voice was soft as the southern breeze. “It’s pretty.”
Delara tightened the blanket around their shoulders in the cool spring night, choking back a sob.
Let her believe.
Colonel Anton slapped the conference table. “We’re someone’s goddamn garbage dump?”
Dr. Delara Maldonado stifled a flinch, defying the officer’s intimidation tactics. “To be blunt, yes. The organism presents taxonomically as a fungus, but its biology is singular. The megaton objects, apparently extra-dimensional in origin, incinerate in the atmosphere. Only the spores survive, scattering through the troposphere and falling with the rain.”
“You mean extra-terrestrial.”
“No, from another dimension. Whoever’s doing the refuse transferrence took out of sight, out of mind one step further: out of existence. It comes from Earth, but in a universe where evolution divaricated into something unrecognizable to us. Their planet is slightly out of phase with our orbit, too, thus the parcels present as meteors.”
The colonel paced the length of the table. “What about N95?”
Delara frowned. “We have yet to identify effective PPE. At just .05 microns, the Indigo Bloom spores slip past even our most advanced filtration systems. The one blessing, to use the word generously, is how fast it kills. But for those five minutes …”
The colonel’s face paled as he dropped into a chair. “So, that’s it? We kiss our asses goodbye?”
“We’re out of options, Colonel. Make peace with that irrefutable fact and whatever god you worship.”
Anastasia shivered while peering through the telescope, her tongue jutting over her lips like it always did when she was enthralled.
Delara’s little girl wouldn’t have long to wait for another spectacle of light. Evidently, the inter-dimensional disposal business was booming. The bolide bombardment had increased tenfold in the week since the doctor had given her expert testimony before top brass at Homeland Security.
Colonel Anton had been on the news that morning, having made a twelve gauge exit in the shed behind his suburban home.
“You look cold, Ana.” Delara pressed a thermos into her daughter’s cool fingers as sapphire mycelium slithered beneath the green grass. “This’ll keep you warm.”
“Thanks, Mommy.” The girl drank her fill before wiping away a chocolate mustache. “What about you?”
Delara smoothed her daughter’s hair, imagining the woman she would never become, dreaming of all she might have achieved, envisioning the grandchildren who might have listened to her stories about the universe.
There’s no one I’d rather share this with.
Delara finished the thermos of hot chocolate while Anastasia oohed and aahed into the telescope at the blue meteor shower. The sedatives would spare them from the worst.
Cocoa had never tasted as sweet nor as bitter.