She smiled at them both.
He continued. “I’ll get over losing Susan’s Grace. Honestly, it would probably have been better to ditch her before we tangled too hard with those TKM shooters on the bridge. It was needlessly risky for me to get in a shootout with five men.” He wasn’t sure if he’d ever let go of the images swirling in his mind. Shooting those men had been necessary, especially handlebar mustache guy in the truck, but he didn’t have to enjoy it. The truth was he’d been willing to take too many risks with their lives for the sake of the boat.
A rifle shot echoed in the morning air.
“What was that?” Haley asked, sitting up.
“Dunno,” he replied, shifting so he could look out the broken window. There was nothing left in the interior of the office; it hadn’t been as obvious when they’d arrived in the dark. Now, in the morning light, it appeared as if the rock had come down in the river, splashing water or blowing air into the skyscrapers of downtown. The burst of energy pushed everything inside the building toward and out the south-side windows.
“Well, hell’s bells,” he said to himself, getting a look at the scene outside.
The people who’d lined the shores around the bend had come upriver overnight. There were hundreds of them on the bank of the lake, many with weapons. After the first person shot at the rock in the middle of the lake, it seemed to signal others to do the same. In seconds, it looked like a civil war battlefield.
Fireworks guys were out there, too, launching them on a dry slab of concrete at the water’s edge. The shots weren’t as impressive in daylight, but the shooters’ aim was more exact. The big mortar rounds thumped on the shore, then exploded on or above the mining operation.
The TKM miners didn’t shoot back, as best he could tell. Men scrambled down from the tops of cranes, hopped inside the thick-hulled barges for cover, or got inside the captain’s perches of towboats. As Ezra knew from his own experience, there was no fighting back against a raging mob of thousands of citizens.
In minutes, the towboats shucked off their ropes and departed from the unnatural island. The men hiding in the hulls of the cargo haulers made desperate runs to catch them before they left, or they dove overboard to try to swim for it. All the while, bullets plinked around them.
A few were struck and killed.
Others were injured.
“I guess the people of Kansas City have been planning this attack for a while,” Ezra remarked, as if watching a dull stretch of a baseball game.
“Does no one like TKM?” Haley asked seriously.
Butch made a pfft sound with his mouth. “They go around shooting up towns and looting stores. They probably wanted to take all this ore without giving any of it to the people who lost their homes. I bet the same thing is happening back in Paducah.”
Ezra dipped his head, afraid someone in the crowd might have spotted him. “Are you saying you want to go back home and liberate our own asteroid piece?”
“If it would make me rich, sure. Why not?”
Haley perked up. “You think we could get rich?”
Butch nodded. “Why else would they be mining it? Wasn’t that the whole point of bringing in asteroids from deep space, or wherever they got it from?”
For a few moments, Ezra worried the kids would run down the steps and join the crowd.
“Hey, look! It’s your freaking boat!” Butch pointed to the lake.
“Sure is,” he said sadly. Susan’s Grace had been salvaged by the people on the shore. He thought it was still leaning to one side, but it could have been a result of all the people on the deck. Fifteen of them stood and sat wherever they could. The engine was working again, too. The boat moved slowly out toward the abandoned rock.
“Double sorry,” Butch added. “It wasn’t going to sink after all.”
“No, but there was something wrong with the motor when we were out there. I know that for a fact. If I’d had time, and wasn’t getting shot at by those men, I might have fixed it, too.” They watched as the boat inched closer to the black orb half-submerged in the water. From their vantage point, the asteroid piece was at least a quarter of a mile away. His double-pontoon boat seemed like a tiny pebble floating next to the giant orange barges left moored around the boulder.
“Well, I guess I’m glad the boat isn’t lost, after all. Maybe when this is all over, I can come back and lay claim to it.”
“I’ll come with—” Butch began.
He was interrupted by a cracking boom from out at the dig site. The top half of the rounded island disintegrated in an instant, sending rock fragments in all directions, like one of the massive incendiary fireworks they’d been setting off. Instead of harmless flames, it sent pieces of rock into the air.
“Oh my God,” Haley gasped.
Susan’s Grace had been too close. The pieces of rock splashed on top of it, sending it and all its passengers directly to the bottom. The big barges also went down in tremendous splashes.
Debris skipped over the water like a thousand Frisbees tossed at the crowd.
Some pieces were higher in the sky, arcing his way as if fired by giant catapults.
Belatedly, he realized they were in serious danger.
CHAPTER 20
Rawlins, WY
Grace shoved the two men as the bullet cut through the air inches above her head. It clanged off a rail car behind
