West

In the distance, I heard what sounded like a sonic boom, and hot, dry air roared by me. I was no longer standing but floating, upright yet unable to reach the ground with my feet.

A second boom went off, followed by the strange crack of a baseball smacking into a concrete wall.

The heat was suddenly gone, along with the light.

Gasping for air, my eyes flew open, and I flung my arms wide, too fevered to touch my own skin.

Cold rain poured from the skies, shocking me at first. Lightning tore through the night, brilliant and bright, before it vanished and just as quickly plunged me once more into darkness.

The world smelled funny, like the area in Tombstone where a man had been super heating and blowing glass by hand. Raindrops pelted my face. The surface beneath me was hard, cool, and smelled of dirt.

I was definitely not in bed, and the sensations were too real for me not to be awake. I was on my back, gazing up at a night sky. It took a moment for the fast moving clouds to take shape beyond the sunspots left over from the brilliant light.

Disoriented, I pushed myself up and looked around. I lay in the bottom of a steaming crater, right at its center. At first I thought I was surrounded by water, until I recognized the glassy, green rock.

"Moldavite," I recited. "Occurs when dirt and dust are thrown into the atmosphere after a meteorite hits the earth."

Moldavite was rare - and sold for a huge price. If I took some back to my aunt, I knew her jeweler could make me something from it and I could sell the rest to pay down my student loans. A thrill went through me at the discovery and I stretched towards the nearest pile. It was still soft. The weird sensation of malleable glass made me withdraw. Wiping my hand self-consciously on my wet yoga pants, I took a second look around.

How did I get to the center of a crater? Beneath me was earth, and surrounding me, moldavite. As if I had been there when the meteorite struck.

As if I were the meteorite. I touched the edge of a thick chunk of moldavite near one foot. It was still soft enough for me to push an indent into but cooling rapidly. No longer super heated, it had not yet frozen into its permanent shape yet, either.

This shit is worth a fortune. And there was a ton of it. If I weren't somewhere I shouldn't have been, I would have been calculating how to transport the rare rocks to the hotel before someone else found them.