Comet Hansel-Edelman was discovered early in January, a blurry streak, barely distinguished from the surrounding field of stars.

The amateur American who would eventually be credited along with the German (the American being the Edelman) almost tossed the photos from that cold night. Two years hunting for near-earth objects and every night coming up blank and Joseph Edelman was ready to quit.

Then the streak, and life on earth was irrevocably altered. Nearly destroyed.

Edelman never enjoyed his notoriety. Not that it mattered, for he died along with nearly 1 billion others in the ensuing catastrophe. But he never enjoyed it, because Matthias Hansel in Bonn was awake that night as well. Matthias Hansel had a few million Euros funding his near-earth object search, and a doctorate in Astronomy from the University of Berlin. So Hansel announced the discovery, Edelman only receiving credit after professional American astronomers from the Mount Palomar observatory verified his claim.

Dr. Matthias Hansel and avid amateur Joseph Edelman received mutual credit in the naming of Comet Hansel-Edelman.

Dr. Hansel lived long enough to understand what a terrible thing it was to lend your name to the thing that nearly killed mankind.

Dr. Hansel lived long enough to know that his discovery was, aside from being on a direct path toward Earth, unlike any other known comet in the heavens.

It was carrying cargo.

First there was the impact. It came in broad daylight in North America. Approximately 3:35 p.m. in New York City, Lima, Nassau in the Bahamas, Washington, D.C.

Jimmy Bargin, a Laotian-American boy playing in his backyard in Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, looked up to see what looked like a second sun blooming in the sky to the north. Jimmy smiled in wonder at the sight, something lifting in his heart. His father had just spanked him that morning for being disrespectful, and he'd been kind of down all day.

Within moments the sound reached him and his eardrums burst. The pain didn't last long, as the blast wave came next.

Comet Hansel-Edelman struck a direct blow to North America, it's actual point of impact being Lake Erie, one of the smaller great lakes. Though much of the body of the comet was indeed melted by it's entrance into the Earth's atmosphere, it's core was still the size of a small mountain when it struck Lake Erie. The lake virtually evaporated, and the shockwave swept in minutes down across Ohio, Pennsylvania, through Kentucky and Tennessee. The Smokey Mountains in Eastern Tennessee actually blunted the shockwave some, but not enough to save Northern Georgia, down through Atlanta.

The impact killed 35 million Canadians and Eastern Seaboard Americans. The aftermath killed the rest. Slowly, and surely.

The aftermath brought the endless snow. The aftermath brought a nearly worldwide dark.

The aftermath brought the shadows in the drifts.

"Reg, fuckin' shortwave's off again!"

Reg Miles groaned. He picked up a poker and stirred the fire, enlivening the coals once more. They pushed away the dim with their comforting vermilion glow. He considered the poker for a moment, thinking of the woman in the next room, knowing full well he was the last guy on earth who'd willingly kill anyone.

Last guy on earth. That was too fucking funny.

"REG!" she shouted again.

"Amber, what the hell am I supposed to do about THAT?" he yelled back, exasperated.

Silence. She could harangue HIM all she wanted, but the moment he bit back she sulked. What a wonderful way to be stuck in a house while the unceasing snow piled on itself over and over again outside. Hell of a way to live out the end times. He shook his head. End times. That was funny too. As if anything the Holy Bible said mattered anymore. Had those bastards been wrong about Apocalypse or what? Sure, it started with fire, but they said nothing about it ending with winter.

Reg went in to see what the deal was with the shortwave.

Amber lay on top of the layers of quilts in her red and black flannel gown, curled in a fetal position, staring at the heavy drapes.

Reg was farting with the radio, but she was sure the voices wouldn't come crackling back anytime soon. She listened to him turn the handcrank, that familiar ratcheting filling the room.

Los Angeles in the snow. There was a vision she could never have imagined growing up there. Yet outside you could look down into the L.A. basin and see 30 lights where there once were a million, and unending whiteness. Welcome to the blizzard of Armageddon. She often wondered why anyone bothered anymore. And indeed, on the shortwave there was plenty of news about survivors of the first blast deciding an endless winter wasn't worth the wait and offing themselves, occasionally en masse. Never mind that the scientists who were still alive and could get their news out said the awesome post-impact winter would pass. That in a few decades weather patterns would return to normal. Los Angeles would be balmy again.

Trapped in your house with no electricity and a man who somehow managed to still seem lazy even as he bartered with neighbors-the few who were still riding it out-and kept things going.

Reg wasn't lazy. He actually spent endless hours making sure the cracks were sealed, pushing snow off the roof, tunnelling through the drifts, travelling on the cranky snowmobile as far as the enclave 10 miles down the road to barter for food and fuel for the fires.

Amber turned over and watched him as he cranked the radio stubbornly, pausing to listen for babble on the shortwave. She could tell him the problem wasn't the power-the crank worked just fine juicing up the thing for a couple of hours or so. The problem was the odd side effect that came with the comet's killing blow to Lake Erie-the decimation of radio waves. VHF and UHF bands, the television airwaves, and FM and AM were all but non-existent. Shortwave worked, and many of the media outlets that survived in some form had gravitated to shortwave bands to keep the engines of information alive. By all rights you should still be able to find just about anything you wanted on either shortwave or ham radio channels. The infrastructure that had kept the internet and cable television running vanished in the comet's shockwave-the death of New York city among many other places had seen to that. She heard in various reports on the most consistent shortwave bands that overseas some places were returning to fairly normal operations in power supply and even the internet. It saddened and angered her to think that somewhere someone was already able to log on, to sit by an electric heater, to watch a TV show. The part of her mind that kept her in their bed too many days wrapped in her flannels in a way wanted the whole world to be as dead as snowbound L.A. She knew it was nihilistic, that it reflected her deep depression. In life before the comet she was a pretty successful therapist with a goodly share of well-to-do patients hailing from Beverly Hills. Now she was in her own mind a kind of living wraith.

Reg was faring better, and she almost hated him for it. A popular writer for the L.A. Times before the disaster he was likely to even be called back to work soon. The presses-well, a single manual press heisted from a museum, but who could quibble?-still ran, producing a paper a week. Reg might only be paid in food at first-which would be great-but at least he'd have something else to do with himself.

Amber closed her eyes.

(...the sunlight. my god, that pristine southern california sunlight. she was sitting in the gazebo in her parent's back yard in orange county, watching the sycamores sway in the steady breeze. behind her there was a strange sound, like a broom sweeping across a concrete patio. she turned to see what it was and was confronted only with a shadow. only a shadow. she tried to tell herself this.

her father spoke to her.

"baby, you always wished for snow."

his voice was a little hollow. she turned to see him sitting beside her, big hand wrapped around a heineken.

"daddy, aren't you dead?" she asked. not frightened, just curious. her father had died of an aneurysm the day she graduated from usc.

"baby, you know that don't matter." daddy, his thick tennessee accent never leavened by life in southern california. she'd loved that about him. "baby, you need to watch the shadows."

"what?"

the steady breeze seemed to curl around her ankles and shiver up her spine. the sycamores bent further in the wind.

"shadows, baby. they came with the thing."

"daddy, what are you talking about?"

but her father was gone.

now she was on the beach. it felt like any beach she'd laid out on in her life. there were people milling around, but the normal beach sounds were not there. the burbling radios, thumping out beats here, patter there, sometimes in spanish in one place, in english a few feet away. amber turned, watching everyone pass.

"they all pass, amber."

again, simultaneous with the voice, came the brushing sound.

it repeated.

"who?"

she turned, and standing between her and the pounding pacific was frank.

more dead people, she thought. great.

"everyone, amber." frank was her first boyfriend. he got into an argument with a gangbanger, thinking his bronzed bulk, so perfectly honed for this beach, would carry him through. the gangbanger was carrying a glock that won the argument.

"everyone passes?"

"into the shadows."

as she watched, the brilliant familiar light, the perfect blue sky she remembered so well faded, and was filled with swirling clouds. beach umbrellas began to blow down and the waves began to kick. people ran past, clutching broadbrimmed beach hats to their heads.

"frank, what are you talking about?"

"the shadows. in the drifts."

now, as the sky over him seemed to whirl, white to gray to black, frank's face fell from his finely made bones. he was beginning to look exactly as she'd imagined when she heard that the gangbanger shot frank in his handsome face.

the cold suddenly enveloped amber, a giant dead hand thrust out of the grave. wildly she looked away from frank's awful face to see the beach was covered in snow.

the brushing noise. repeated.

"no."

she turned in all directions, looking for a blanket, something to wrap her body with. nothing. only dunes turned to towering snow drifts. the cold black shifting pacific ocean, slashes of white shifting here and there marking whitecaps. the brushing sound, now rhythmic. no matter where she turned it was still behind her.

she couldn't see.

it's the sound the shadows make when they come inside, she thought.

then she screamed.)

Reg heard Amber start to and scream. He dropped the book he was reading and bounded across the living room to the bedroom door, heart pounding.

"Reg, turn on the lights!" she said, her voice tremulous.

"Amber?" he was at her side now, arm around her shoulders.

"Turn on the lights, please!" her eyes were wild.

"Amber, we don't have normal lights. You had a bad dream. Settle down, sweetheart."

In fact there was a light on, the old Coleman lantern he'd bartered from Bryce Jepson down the road, trading his good manual drill for the thing. It gave off a low mellow glow that Reg actually liked at times.

"Bad dream. Yeah. I did." she was shivering. The fire was low and he'd shut off the kerosene heater in the bedroom after she fell asleep. The last temperature reading he took had been 20 degrees fahrenheit and in the 8 months they'd been in this cataclysmic winter 20 degrees had become fairly tolerable. Amber never had less than 2 layers on for that matter. So the shivering he knew was from fear.

"What was the dream about?" he asked.

She looked at him, her eyes steadier, but still fearful. "I dreamed about my dad. And Frank."

Reg nodded. Dreaming about dead loved ones could be either sad or frightening, or both. "And?"

"They...gave me some kind of warning."

Reg squeezed her arm a bit, urging her to go on. "What about?"

"Shadows."

Reg didn't let the little jolt he felt show. Why should he? The new awful world they lived in bred superstitions and fears in a way unimagined before. Still.

"What did they say?"

Amber's brow furrowed. Already some of it was fading. "Something about shadows in the drifts."

Reg kissed her cheek gently. It occurred to him as he did this that they had done precious little kissing or anything else in the last 8 months. "Just a dream." he whispered.

They lay down facing one another. Already Amber looked sleepy again. Reg felt sleepy too, and in a way being able to comfort her provided him with enough comfort to relax some. He slept very little compared to Amber, but at the moment it looked pretty good.

The shadows in the drifts. That did bother him, though.

If he thought about it too much, it bothered him a lot.

Reg slept so little because for much of the last 8 months, his dreams had been anywhere from discomforting to terrifying.

All of them, it seemed to him, about shadows. Unfurling terribly from the hanging drifts as snow blew sideways across his vision.

Shadows that came down with the core of Comet Hansel-Edelman.

Reg squeezed his eyes tightly shut, ground his teeth together. He opened them, and looked at Amber's face. Strangely enough her eyes were closed, and her pretty, pale face looked relaxed. She'd fallen asleep again.

Gently, he stroked her smooth cheek with his thumb.

Willing his own thoughts of shadows away, Reg soon was asleep, hand resting on his lover's cheek.

Outside, true dark lowered. The interminable winter that fell in the aftermath of the impact at first seemed to many survivors of one shade-black, slashed by unending snow squalls. After a while, though, night and day returned in a fashion, usually just variations that equalled the light differences in the moon's phases prior to comet fall.

But when night fell it fell with a great heaviness, and seemed...denser.

Snow blew, swirling up into ghostly whirlwinds here and there, then fading away.

In the lee of Reg and Amber's house drifts warped and curled. The part of the world covered in snow nursed towering hills and drifts everywhere, sculpted and then often as quickly obliterated by the constant winds.

There was no one to hear the soft brushing sound that was pushing itself against the low moan of the wind while Reg and Amber slept.

...to be continued...