Read A Long Road Back: Final Dawn: Book 8 for Free Online Page A

for the most part. Had stopped being engaged in the world around them. Had been way too busy walking around with their attention focused on their cell phones and tablets to care one way or the other what earth-shattering events might be unfolding.
         Facebook replaced the nightly news, Twitter replaced human physical interaction, and Americans at large relied on Government agencies or the media to force-feed them information they really needed to know.
         Like NASA, for example. Before Saris 7 was discovered, most earthlings forgot that space even existed. Most didn’t know the difference between a meteorite and a comet, and couldn’t really have cared less.
         If NASA scientists Hannah Jelinovic and Sarah Anna Speer hadn’t sounded the alarm in the media, most citizens of the world would never had known what was coming. Until the skies were covered with a thick mass of dust and the temperatures started to drop.
         In the chaos that followed, NASA shut down like virtually every other government agency. Later on, after the thaw, FEMA tried to get the government running again. The Department of Defense was now operational, though in a limited capacity. So was the Federal Housing Agency and the National Security Agency. The FBI was working again, although there were damn few criminals left to pursue.
         In the finest display of irony, though, NASA pretty much ceased to exist. FEMA’s efforts to revive it were met with a lackadaisical attitude among the movers and shakers in Congress.
         “We won’t have the resources or the inclination to go back to the moon or anywhere else for decades. Maybe longer. Why should we bother bringing NASA back to life?”
         They wouldn’t have been able to anyway. Nearly all of the qualified scientists were dead. So were the technicians who knew how to compile data from the heavens, or the analysts who knew how to interpret it.
         NASA these days was nothing but a bunch of rusting and looted abandoned buildings spread throughout the country.
         For all practical purposes, NASA was dead, except in the recesses of the memories of the few people left alive who cared.
         And that was too bad. Because with the demise of NASA was also the demise of the NASA contractors who once employed hundreds of astrophysicists to watch the heavens.
         Like the one Hannah and Sarah once worked for.
         And since there were no contractors watching the movements of celestial bodies, no one knew about Cupid 23.
         Cupid 23 was a misnomer if there ever was one. For the class two meteorite slowly tumbling through space had no love at all for the people of earth or anywhere else.
         Cupid 23 was once a part of Saris 7, until Saris 7 collided with another meteorite and broke into pieces. It was that collision which changed the course of Saris 7 and sent it speeding toward the planet earth years before.
         NASA’s computers noticed the chunk that broke off of Saris 7 and assigned it a new designation: Cupid 23.
         But they went no further than that.
         Their sights were so much set on Saris 7’s new collision course that the slower Cupid 23 was overlooked as nonconsequential.
         Except that it wasn’t.
         Yes, it was rather odd shaped. Most heavenly bodies are after they survive collisions with other bodies.
         And Cupid 23 moved at a much slower pace than its mother Saris 7. It tumbled through space, rather than shooting through it.
         But that didn’t make it any less dangerous.
         The problem with Cupid 23 was that it wanted to follow Saris 7, not unlike a baby who trails in a straight line behind its mother.
         Hannah was the one who first discovered that Saris 7’s course had been altered and it was headed straight for earth.
         Or so she thought.
         It turned out that her superiors already knew about the pending collision, but were