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fall. As I watched the fireball plummet, I became convinced that it would not burn up in the sky like the ones before it. Sure enough, it sped across half the sky and while it shrunk smaller and smaller, it struck the frozen ocean in the end. Looking at it from 30,000 feet, the point of impact was just a small white dot. But that white dot immediately spread into a white circle, rapidly expanding across the ocean's surface.
    “Is that a wave?” Kayoko asked me, her voice quivering.
    “It is a wave, a hundreds of feet high wave,” I answered. ”But the ocean is frozen. The ice cover will soon weaken it.” I had concluded with the last part, trying to calm myself, no longer looking down.
    We soon landed in Honolulu, where the local government had already arranged to take us to a subterranean city. Our bus traveled along the shore, giving us a glimpse at a sky covered in meteors. From here it looked as if a legion of fiery-haired demons had all at once burst from a single point in space.
    One meteor hit the ocean not far from the shore. There was no column of water; instead we saw steam rise to form a giant white mushroom cloud above the impact site. The swell of it surged to the shore under the frozen surface as thick layers of ice shattered with loud thunder. The ice rolled like waves, as if a school of giant, sinuous sea monsters was swimming under the surface toward the shore.
    “How big was that one?” I asked the official who had come to pick us up.
    “Less than a dozen pounds, no bigger than your head,” he told us. “But I have just been informed that a twenty-ton one is going down over the ocean five hundred miles north of us.” His wrist communicator began beeping. He glimpsed at it and then immediately told the driver, “We won't make it to Gate 244; just head for the closest entrance!”
    The bus turned a corner and stopped in front of an entrance to the subterranean city. As we got out we saw a group of soldiers at the entrance. They stood motionless, staring into the distance, their eyes filled with dread. We followed their gaze to the horizon where the ocean joined the sky. There we saw a black barrier. At first glance, it looked like a low layer of clouds on the horizon, but its height was far too even for it to be a “layer of clouds”. It was more like a long wall lying across the horizon. On longer inspection, we could make out a gleam of white on top of that wall.
    “What is that?” Kayoko asked an officer, a soft fear in her voice.
    His answer made every hair on my body stand on end. “A wave.”
    The tall metal gates of the subterranean city were shut with a rumble. About ten minutes later we felt and heard a low rumble emanate from the surface, as if a titan was rolling about on the ground far above. We looked at each other, our faces blank with dismay, for we all knew that a 300-foot wave was now rolling over Hawaii. Before long it would impact every continent; but the shocks that followed provided for an even greater terror. It was as if a giant fist had reached from the heavens and had begun pounding the Earth. Underground these shocks were faint, hardly noticeable, but each tremor shook our very souls. It was meteors, unceasingly striking the Earth without mercy.
    This brutal bombardment of our planet continued intermittently for an entire week. When we finally left the subterranean city, Kayoko shouted, “Heavens, what happened to the sky?”
    All above us was gray; gray because the upper atmosphere was filled with the dust that had been kicked up as the asteroids impacted the dry land. Sun and stars had disappeared behind this endless gray, as if the entire universe had been covered with a dense fog. On the surface, the water left behind by the billowing waves had frozen solid, covering those lonely buildings fortunate enough to survive with long veils of ice. The falling impact dust had also covered the frozen ocean, leaving a monochrome world. A world of gray.
     
    Kayoko and I