Zero 'g' (13 page)

“
The gravity is back! We did it
!” Henry screamed.

They all cheered as they moved closer to the ground.
Gravity was being restored
,
and Carly couldn’t have been happier. She felt pure happiness when
the statue moved more into the ground. She was very exhausted, and
she held David tight. Although they’d had a few hiccups, the plan
had eventually worked out, anyway. Now, she could return home to
find her Rose. She prayed that her small family was all right and
unharmed. It had been a long day, and she couldn’t wait to be
reunited with them.

“
I can’t believe it’s over
,” Linus said.

“
Gravity being restored is most definitely a good thing. We
have saved so many people’s lives on top of it. But the world has
been destroyed in the process
.
It’s not like tomorrow everything is going to be back to normal. We
have no idea how many lives have been lost or who is even in
government anymore.”

“
Yeah, I guess I hadn’t thought of that
, Carly.”

Henry piped up
. “What
are we going to do about David?”

Carly shook her head. “I have no idea. There is going to be
so much chaos now that the gravity has been
restored
, it might not be easy
to find his mother. In the meantime, he will just stick with me
until we know what’s going on.”

“
It might be
that a lot
of destruction occurred all over the world,” said a guy who was
hugging the Statue of Liberty beside Carly.

“
Yeah, well
, of course.
We have the Statue of Liberty practically on your front lawn, and
it’s supposed to be in New York City, not Washington, DC,” Carly
said.

Henry chuckled
at the
thought of Silicon Valley sliding into Mexico, as well as all the
human chains all over the world clinging to various objects. No one
had moved down from them yet. They were probably too scared they
would float away again.

The planet was not in a safe stage at that point.
Carly wondered if the madness truly
was over.

Chapter
Nineteen

The
ground below them
started vibrating, and the movement bored right into Earth. It was
a good thing they were all still hugging the statue, or they might
have toppled over from all the shaking. Carly looked at the boys,
whose eyes were wide. She wasn’t sure what was happening around
them, but she could take a guess. The asteroid must have made
contact with ground in the Bermuda Triangle and bored a hole into
the planet. The destruction would have been monumental, which was
why the whole Earth was shaking from the hit. It was like a massive
earthquake felt all over the world.

Carly hoped that there
had been no living people in the Bermuda Triangle. If they
weren’t dead before, they certainly were now. She was relieved,
however, that the plan had worked out and everything was going to
be all right for the people around them. There had been a scare for
a while there, when they’d thought the asteroid was not going to
hit at all, but it had worked out, after all. That was all that
mattered to Carly.

“
Oh
, God, I can’t
believe it’s over. I’m so happy right now,” Linus gushed. They were
tired and exhausted from the events of the day and so grateful that
the gravity had been restored. They had made a good team together,
and Carly felt great pride in the boys. They had worked together to
help her plan go flawlessly. Now, at least getting from place to
place wouldn’t take half a day to accomplish. The planet was still
dangerous until government got the army organized and deployed, but
for now, they could move around without worrying about floating off
into space.

“
Now we have to move away from clinging to
the statue. With the gravity back,
people could get hurt on top of one another,” Carly
said.

Carly’s legs felt wobbly
, as if she hadn’t used them in a while. There was also a
slow ache to them, but she chalked it up to the fact that they
hadn’t been used properly in the past twenty-four hours. They would
return to normal once the blood started circulating through them
once again. Looking all around, Carly thought that the destruction
she’d seen on-screen was nothing compared to the devastation she
now saw up close. The Statue of Liberty looked massive as it stood
in all its glory right before them. It was a miracle it hadn’t
smashed right into Linus’s house—it was that close.

Buildings were broken and crumbled around
them
, and she prayed that no
one had been inside them when they fell back to Earth. So many
lives lost in the past twenty-four hours…she feared to hear the
numbers. People everywhere were frightened and sometimes alone. It
was going to take some strong hearts and minds to get them all
through the recent frightening events. They had quite a job ahead
of them. She only could hope that most of NASA’s people had
survived so they could build a team to start figuring this all out.
She couldn’t even imagine what kind of mission it would take to
restore Earth back to the way it had been. Would that even be
possible? Or would the planet become a lesser version of itself?
They only had themselves to blame if that were the case. They had
taken their discovery projects too far, and now it had harmed Earth
and some of the humans on it.

She shook her head of those thoughts
, as they had much work to do. The three of them were
still hugging the Statue of Liberty and the massive human chain
that Carly had organized.

“
That’s truly amazing
,
Carly. I don’t even know how you thought that one up!” Linus
shouted.

She smiled back up at him. “Thank you
, Linus.” She felt good about things as well. It
was all going according to plan, and she couldn’t have been happier
about the whole thing. She was practically jumping for joy at the
thought of being reunited with her mother and Rose. It was all she
could really hope for, that they were alive and well. She knew her
mother to be a smart woman and truly believed she would do the best
job she could to protect Rose. Carly was reassured by the fact that
Rose and Annette should have been at home when disaster struck, so
there was no reason to believe that they wouldn’t have managed just
fine—as long as an airplane hadn’t crashed into their home. Carly
shook that thought out immediately; she almost threw up at the
thought that something so horrendous could happen to her family.
She needed to focus on the next step: getting down off of the
Statue of Liberty.

Carly called out, “The gravity is back
! You all need to slowly and carefully make your
way down so no one gets hurt.”

There didn’t seem to be much movement
, and she couldn’t understand why the people
clinging to the statue weren’t coming down on their own. Weren’t
they excited that it was all over with and that everything was
going to be all right? They should have been climbing down and
jumping for joy at this point, and yet they weren’t moving. A few
of them actually looked a little stressed out.

Carly wondered what she should do to help. She was limited
because David was attached to her
as if he were one of her limbs. She couldn’t blame the poor
thing; the events that had transpired could very well scar the
child for life. Carly decided to start to make her way out with
David cradled to her chest and help others coming out. She felt
weird as she started trying to move away from the statue. She felt
as if her body was changing and becoming heavier.

Henry and Linus were talking
to each other. Henry was questioning Linus about the
asteroid and the type of material it was made out of.

“
Why is it so heavy? I mean
, it was heavy enough to bring back Earth’s gravity. That’s
insane.”

Linus wasn’t answering
, however, as he was gazing at a girl who was beside him.
Both started smiling and crying at the same time. Carly and Henry
looked shocked. Carly turned to Henry, and he mouthed the word
“girlfriend” to her. She chuckled. That was the kind of moment they
needed to see after the experience that they’d had. Heartfelt
reunions all over the world, and she couldn’t wait to have her
own.

Linus waved back up at her with a grin that crossed his
whole face. He turned to his friend
. “I don’t even want to know about any of it now. I just
found the love of my life, and she is smiling. That’s all I care
about. Who knows, man? Maybe God made us lose Earth’s gravity to
remind us about what’s really important in our lives. Carly was
right; we are a selfish species.” He smiled and then shouted into
the air, “I AM SO HAPPY!”

But Carly knew something was wrong with her body. She
hugged the statue
tighter for
fear of falling. Suddenly, she could not move her legs at all, and
her hand had a terrible ache to it. She looked at the other people
around her and only saw confusion.

“
Can any of you move your
legs?”

Everyone suddenly looked frightened
, as if Carly had just confirmed his or her own fears.
There were shouts of “no” while people struggled to move their
bodies out of position. Many people shook their heads and started
crying. Carly turned at an angle so that she faced the statue.
Startled, she realized that there was something written on the
statue right in front of her eyes.

Year 1916: Artificial
-gravity generators of Earth are located underneath at
latitude and longitude 16…by AE.

She hugged the statue
,
feeling a panic rise up in her. She needed a moment to clear her
head and figure out what to do. She turned to David and kissed him
on the top of his head. Looking toward Linus and Henry, she
shouted, “Linus! Henry! We have to get back to work
again.”

Preview
of book two in
the Series

Chapter One

Carly hung on
to the
Statue of Liberty with David in her arms. Her body was growing
heavy with the exertion of it all. She couldn’t imagine what had
gone wrong with their plan. They’d had only a momentary relief from
it all, and she couldn’t figure out why. She felt so tired that it
took all her effort to not start crying right there in front of
everyone. They were up against an impossible situation, and she
almost felt like giving up. She desperately wanted to see her
family, and it was starting to look like she would never get that
chance again.

Carly knew she had to focus on the task at hand. She
couldn’t allow herself to get bogged down by
emotions
, or she would throw
in the towel. She needed to stay positive and believe that they
would be able to get through anything. They still had an
opportunity to fix things. She just needed to figure out what
effect the asteroid had on Earth when it hit. Something had
obviously shifted in another direction to cause the current
disaster. So, what was it? They had made all the calculations;
there had been very little room for error. It was up to her to
figure out what had gone wrong, and she once again wished that the
other scientists were there to help her.

She clung to the statue with the thousands of others around
her; she looked around at their desperate faces. Most of them were
looking at her and her team for answers
, and she didn’t know if she had any for them. She
knew there were chains all over the world experiencing the same
level of confusion that she was; she thought she had saved
everyone, but it had just turned into more mass
confusion.

Carly looked toward Henry and Linus
, who were awaiting her orders. She wasn’t sure what
to tell them or where to go next. Where would they go from there?
She hadn’t thought of a backup plan. The plan to have the asteroid
hit the Bermuda Triangle had been foolproof. She was deep in
thought and blocked out all the chattering around her as she tried
to formulate a new plan. It had to be something that was sure to
work this time; they could not mess up anything else. All these
lives were literally hanging in the balance, and she couldn’t
afford to have anyone be hurt.

She hung there wondering if it was all
hopeless
, her heart growing
heavy at the thought. Could they even begin to save the world? She
wasn’t too sure anymore. It seemed so impossible at times. They
were barely equipped to handle a problem of this magnitude. They
needed so many more resources, and yet those were unattainable at
the moment. She wasn’t sure that they could make it back to NASA in
time to save anything. They would need to use whatever resources
they had currently, and there weren’t many of those. Carly had been
so happy at the thought that she could finally head home to see her
family to determine if they were alive, and now she was stuck once
again. She was unable to return to them until she could figure out
how to get normal gravity back. Poor Rose must be so frightened
that her mother had not returned home yet to take care of her. She
feared for her frightened daughter and hoped that she and Annette
were safe from harm.

Carly racked her brain for the answer. She felt it there on
the tip of her tongue
, and she
believed she might have the answer they needed.