passengers.
A virus? A terror attack? A mass suicide?
And now this.
She wanted Zack and Matt home. She wanted them here with her right now. She wanted this solar occultation thing to be over with, and to know that she would never have to experience this feeling again. She looked up through the filtered lenses at the murdering moon in all its dark triumph, worried that she might never see the sun again.
Yankee Stadium, the Bronx
ZACK STOOD ON HIS SEAT next to Matt, who stared at the eclipse with his nose scrunched up and his mouth hanging open like a driver squinting into oncoming traffic. Fifty-thousand-plus Yankees fans wearing special collector’s pin-striped eclipse glasses, on their feet now, faces upturned, looking at the moon that darkened the sky on a perfect afternoon for baseball. All except Zack Goodweather. The eclipse was cool and all, but now he had seen it, and so Zack turned his attention to the dugout. He was trying to see Yankees players. There was Jeter, wearing the same exact specs as Zack, perched on the top step on one knee as though waiting to be announced to hit. Pitchers and catchers were all outside the bullpen, gathered on the right-field grass like anyone else, taking it all in.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Bob Sheppard, the public address announcer, “boys and girls, you may now remove your safety glasses.”
And so they did. Fifty thousand people, nearly in unison. An appreciative gasp went up, then some ballpark applause, then full-out cheering, as though the crowd were trying to lure the unfailingly modest Matsui out of the dugout for a cap tip after slugging one into Monument Park.
In school, Zack had learned that the sun was a 6,000-degree Kelvin thermonuclear furnace, but that its corona, the outer edge, consisting of superheated hydrogen gas—visible from earth only during totality—was unexplainably hotter, its temperature reaching as high as 2,000,000 degrees Kelvin.
What he saw when he removed his glasses was a perfect black disk edged by a thin blaze of crimson, surrounded by an aura of wispy white light. Like an eye: the moon a wide, black pupil; the corona the white of the eye; and the vivid reds bursting from the rim of the pupil—loops of superheated gas erupting from the edge of the sun—the bloodshot veins. Kind of like the eye of a zombie.
Cool.
Zombie Sky. No: Zombies of the Eclipse. Zombies of the Occultation. Occult Zombies from the Planet Moon! Wait—the moon isn’t a planet. Zombie Moon. This could be the concept for the movie he and his friends were going to make this winter. Moon rays during a total earth eclipse transform members of the New York Yankees into brain-slurping zombies—yes! And his buddy Ron looked almost just like a young Jorge Posada. “Hey, Jorge Posada, can I have your autograph … wait, what are you … hey, that’s my … what’s wrong with … your eyes … gah … no … NOOO!!!”
The organ was playing now, and a few of the drunks turned into conductors, waving their arms and exhorting their section to sing along with some corny “I’m Being Followed by a Moon Shadow” song. Baseball crowds rarely need an excuse to make noise. These people would have cheered even if this occultation were an asteroid hurtling toward them.
Wow. Zack realized, with a start, that this was exactly the sort of thing his dad would have said if he were here.
Matt, now admiring his free specs next to him, nudged Zack. “Pretty sweet keepsake, huh? I bet eBay’ll be flooded with these suckers by this time tomorrow.”
Then a drunk guy jostled Matt’s shoulder, sloshing beer onto his shoes. Matt froze a moment, then rolled his eyes at Zack, kind of a What-are-you-going-to-do? face. But he didn’t say or do anything. He didn’t even turn around to look. It occurred to Zack now that he’d never seen Matt drink a beer before, only white or red wine on nights at home with Mom. Zack got the sense then that Matt, for all his enthusiasm about the game, was essentially afraid of the fans sitting around them.
Now Zack really wished his dad were there. He dug Matt’s phone out of his jeans pocket and checked again for a text reply.
Searching for signal, it read. Still no service. Solar flares and radiation distortion messing with radio waves and orbiting satellites; they said that would happen. Zack put the phone away and craned his head toward the field, looking for Jeter again.
International Space Station
TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES above earth, astronaut Thalia Charles—the American flight engineer on Expedition 18, along with a Russian commander and a French engineer—floated in zero gravity through the vestibule joining the Unity module to the aft hatch of lab mod Destiny. The ISS research facility orbited earth sixteen times each day, or about once every hour and a half, at a speed of seventeen thousand miles per hour. Occultations were no great feat in low earth orbit: blocking the sun with any round object in a window revealed the spectacular corona. Thalia’s interest therefore was not in the alignment of the moon and the sun—from her fast-moving perspective, there was indeed no occultation—but rather the result of this phenomenon upon the slow-rotating earth.
Destiny, the primary research lab on the ISS, measures twenty-eight by fourteen feet—although the interior working space of this cylindrical module, due to the amount of equipment tied down to the squared-off sides, is tighter than that, measuring roughly five humans long by one human across. Every duct, pipe, and wire connection was directly accessible and therefore visible, such that each of Destiny’s four walls looked like the back of a panel-size motherboard. At times Thalia felt like little more than a tiny microprocessor dutifully carrying out computations inside a great space computer.
Thalia walked her hands along the nadir, the “floor” of Destiny—in space there is no up or down—to a broad, lenslike ring studded with bolts. The portal shutter was designed to protect the integrity of the module from micrometeoroids or collisions with orbital debris. She maneuvered her sock-covered feet against a wall grip and manually opened it, revealing the two-foot-diameter optical-quality window.
The blue-white ball of earth came into view.
Thalia’s duty assignment was to point and shoot some earth photos with a hard-mounted Hasselblad camera via remote trigger. But when she first looked out on the planet from her unusual vantage point, what she saw made her shudder. The great black blot that was the shadow of the moon looked like a dead spot on the earth. A dark and threatening flaw in the otherwise healthy blue orb that was home. Most unnerving was that she could see nothing at all within the umbra, the central, darkest part of the moon’s shadow, that entire region disappearing into a black void. It was something like viewing a postdisaster satellite map showing devastation caused by a mighty fire that had consumed New York City, and was now spreading out over a broad patch of the eastern seaboard.
Manhattan
NEW YORKERS CONGREGATED in Central Park, the fifty-five-acre Great Lawn filling up as though for a summertime concert. Those who had set out blankets and lawn chairs earlier in the morning now stood on their feet with the rest, children perched on their fathers’ shoulders, babies cradled in their mother’s arms. Belvedere Castle loomed purple-gray over the park, an eerie touch of the gothic in this pastoral open space dwarfed by the East and West Side high-rises.
The great island metropolis ground to a halt, the stillness of the city at that hour felt by all. It was a blackout vibe, anxious yet communal. The occultation imposed a sort of equality upon the city and its denizens, a five-minute suspension of social stratification. Everyone the same under the sun—or the lack thereof.
Radios played up and down the lawn, people singing along with Z100’s spinning of the seven-minute Bonnie Tyler karaoke favorite “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
Along the East Side bridges connecting Manhattan to the rest of the world, people stood next to their stopped vehicles, or sat on the hoods, a few photographers with specially filtered cameras clicking from the walkways.
Many rooftops hosted early cocktail