Wormwood Excerpt

The bright, falling light above Wormwood was an iron meteoroid the size of a bulky end table. Unlike most meteoroids, this one did not break up into flaming bits and disintegrate while falling through Earth’s atmosphere. Its surface did burst into flame, but this only egged the meteoroid on and the closer it came to the earth the denser it seemed to grow, and by the time it appeared above the small Nevada town it was positively leaden with gravity, every ounce of its iron composition doubling in on its self like a petulant child refusing to be dragged off to bed.

The meteoroid had been bumping along outer space for around four to five billion years, a long time by any reckoning. A hobo of the universe, the meteoroid had never settled into a particular orbit within the asteroid belt, preferring to drift aimlessly through the cold vacuum of space, allowing the few and random encounters it experienced with other objects to send it sailing off on various trajectories. And so countless years passed in this way. If the meteoroid felt heat, or light, it did not know what those things signified. If it was lost, it did not know what being lost meant. All it knew was movement, and moving on.

Yet now Earth’s gravity had finally pulled the meteoroid in, ending its hobo ways, and the meteoroid hissed down through the sky, brighter than a hundred roadside flares. Felix Hill would later claim it was blue and white Clyde Ringston disagreed, saying it was more like red and yellow. Whatever the meteoroid’s colors, the entire town heard the massive explosion as it landed in the center of town and the concussive sonic boom that followed its landing, breaking the cheaper windows all across town. A mushroom cloud of dirt rose into the night sky above its hypervelocity crater and as it lay there, nestled in the earth and unmoving for the first time in billions of years, the meteoroid became a meteorite.