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Unfortunately, there
weren’t many more people near our age around for him to hang out with; so after
talking a few more moments, we continued walking down the hall way. We turned
down a smaller hall to head towards the school gym. Inside, we saw some guys
and a couple girls setting up for a final session with guitars, drums, and a
fair number of instruments that, normally, just didn’t belong in a band.  Tubas?  No, thank you.
    We went back to the hallway and continued walking. We stopped
again at the guidance counselor’s office where we saw that people were watching
a television. A big plasma screen showed a live-feed from the ISS with some
newswoman speaking about a last minute nuclear attack failing to move the
asteroid off course.
    That we were even hearing about this surprised me as I had
thought all the cable news stations  had been shut down .
But I guess one or two had decided to go back on the air once they they’d
gotten wind of the last ditch attempt to take out Yama. Then I was startled
when a time clock popped up at the bottom of the screen. It was set at
fifty-nine minutes…and counting down.
    There it was. Our doom was less than an hour away. Given where Yama
would  impact , we’d have a perfect view when it
slammed into the atmosphere. I had that thought just as one of the people
watching mentioned that the ISS was in orbit above us for a final record of the
impact.
    Someone else whispered that one of the astronauts on the ISS had
killed himself by stepping out of an airlock. And another astronaut was
uploading all the history and knowledge he could get from NASA’s database and
the Internet to store on the space station. Volunteers around the world were
assisting with the upload. If this  was  going
to be our last hurrah, at least we would leave a message for some aliens to
find.
    Someone in the room commented on NASA attaching booster
rockets to the ISS. When it was time, the astronauts would send it into a
higher orbit to keep it from falling to the dead Earth below. Solar panels
would keep a signal going for centuries. I sighed. That would be sheer bad
luck—not to mention ironic to the extreme—if aliens discovered Earth after we
died out.
    Okay, depressed again.  But
if the idea of leaving a message in a bottle made people feel good,  then  I didn’t want to spoil it for them. So gesturing
for Brand to follow, I walked away and continued down the hall. As we walked,
the announcement that they were serving lunch came over the intercom. Brand and
I just looked at each other and shrugged. We weren’t very hungry. To me, it
felt like the last meal of the condemned.
    Continuing down the hallway, we turned a corner to walk the
halls of the oldest part of the Riverlite High School. Built in the 1930s, the
old school was three stories high. Though most classes  were
held  in the building that had been built onto this one in the
1960s; this building still housed the music and art classes on the lower floors
and storerooms on the top floor. I’d never been up to the top floor since
it  was locked  normally.
    I told Brand I wanted to check it  out .
It was a last-minute thing to do before the world ended. Brand shrugged and
agreed with a simple nod. But as we headed toward the stairwell, he came to a
sudden stop behind me, the rubber on his shoes skidding on the wooden floor. I
looked back to see him staring down the hallway near a set of stairs that led
to an exit out of the building.
    He muttered, “Oh hell no…”
    I turned and looked, and my jaw dropped open with shock. There
was a tall guy with short blond hair and blue eyes holding a gun on two girls
kneeling in front of him. A blonde and a brunette, both girls were our age, and
they were holding each other, frightened out of their wits. I didn’t know
either of them right away, and they didn’t see us.
    That was a good thing though, because it meant we could get help
before things got out of hand. I started moving to get out