“Hit the gas,” he tells Gibbons over his suit radio. “They’re shooting at us.”
Gibbons speeds up. The street ahead is carpeted with a layer of loose ash maybe two feet deep, but Gibbons ploughs through it anyway, sending up swirling black clouds that make everybody on the open deck close the faceplates of their suits in a hurry. Beyond the ash is a stretch of crunchy cinders and other sorts of tephra, so that they all grab hold of each other and hang on tight as the truck clanks and jounces onward, and then a little newly congealed lava in the road makes the ride even rougher; but after that the street turns normal again for a while and they can relax, as much relaxation as may be possible while you ride in an open truck through territory that no longer looks like just a suburb of Hell, but the Devil’s own back yard.
There have been repeated outbreaks of tectonic activity here before, early on in the crisis—that much is obvious from the burned-out houses and the black crusts of old lava everywhere and the ashen landscape—but something new and big is apparently getting ready to happen. The sky here is dead white from thick upwellings of steam and sulfurous fumes, except where the fumes are coaly black. Streaks of lightning keep jumping around and the ground trembles continuously, as if a non-stop earthquake is going on. The sidewalks are warped and bulging in many places and some little red tongues of lava can be seen beginning to ooze from cracks in the pavement. Every few minutes a dull distant boom can be heard, a muffled sound that definitely gets your attention, something like the fart of a dinosaur that might be sauntering around a few blocks away.
Three or four weary-looking fire crews are slowly taking up positions in the street and getting their gear into order; some of the biggest pumps Mattison has ever seen have already been hauled into place for the lava-cooling work; police helicopters are whirling overhead, booming down orders to whatever remaining population may still be living here to evacuate the area at once. It is a truly precarious scene. Mattison is ever so happy that he traded the horrors of substance abuse for the privilege of visiting places like this.
The same thing is occurring to some of his companions, evidently. Blazes McFlynn lays his hand on Mattison’s right arm and says, “I didn’t sign on for any goddamned suicide missions, Matty. Let me off this fucking truck right now.”
“Let you off?” Mattison says mildly.
“Fucking A. I want out, this very minute.”
Mattison sighs. McFlynn always makes trouble, sooner or later: if only he had known that this San Dimas operation was going to be tacked on to the day’s outing, he probably would have opted to leave McFlynn behind at the outset. McFlynn is, of all goofy things, a bombed-out circus acrobat and pensioned-off movie stunt man, strong as a tow-truck winch, who over the course of time has found relief from stress in a whole smorgasbord of addictive substances and now, having very badly broken his leg while winning a moronic barroom bet that involved jumping off the top of a building and developed a severe limp that makes it hard for him to practice either of his professions, draws generous compensation pay from a variety of sources while undergoing one of his periodic spells of detoxification and Citizens Service. His first name is actually Gerard, but if you call him anything but Blazes he will react unpleasantly. He is the only man in the house for whom Mattison would feel any reticence about decking, for McFlynn, though five inches shorter than Mattison, is probably just about as dangerous in a fight, gimpy leg and all.
“Are you saying,” Mattison asks him once more, “that you don’t want to take part in the current operation?”
“The whole street is going to blow any minute.”
“Maybe so. That’s why we’re here, to get things under control if it does. You want to walk back from here to Silver Lake? You think you’ll catch a bus, maybe, or phone for a cab? The option of your departing this operation simply does not exist at this moment, okay, McFlynn?” McFlynn tries to say something, but Mattison talks right over him, although keeping his voice mild, mild, mild, as he has been taught to do all the time when addressing the inmates, no matter what the provocation. “You find this work not to your liking, well, when you get your cowardly ass back to the house tonight you can tell Donna that you don’t want to do volcano work any more, and she’ll take you off the list. You aren’t any fucking prisoner, you understand? You don’t have to do this stuff against your will and in fact you are perfectly free, if you like, to pack up and leave the house tomorrow and go back to your favorite substance, for that matter. But not today. Today you work for me, and we work in San Dimas.”
McFlynn, who surely was aware when he began complaining that this was where the discussion was going to end, is just starting to crank up a disgruntled and obscene capitulation when Gibbons says, over the radio from the truck cab, “Volcano Central wants us to start setting up the pump, Matty. Satellite scan says there’s a lava bulge about to blow two blocks east of us down Bonita Avenue, which is the big street straight in front of us, and we’re supposed to dam it up as soon as it comes our way.” So they are going to be right on the front line, this time. Fine, Mattison thinks. Hot diggety damn.
They all get off the truck, and seal up their suits, and set about getting ready to deal with the oncoming eruption.
Because the pump they will be using this time is a jumbo job, just about the biggest one Mattison has ever worked with, he designates not only Prochaska and Hawks, once again, for the pumping crew, but also Clyde Snow and Blazes McFlynn, who will be up front not only because he’s strong but also because Mattison wants to keep a close eye on him. In any case he’s going to need all the muscle-power he can get when it becomes necessary to swing that big rig around to keep the shifting lava penned up. He puts the generally reliable Paul Foust in charge of the controls that operate the pump itself. The rest—Randegger, Herzog, Evans, and the three women, Doheny and Perez and Gulliver—Mattison deploys at various points along the line to the standpipe, so that they can keep the hose from getting tangled and cope with any other interruptions to the flow of water that might arise.
Everybody is in place none too soon. Because just as the signal arrives from the rear that the water connection has been made, there comes an all too familiar bellowing and groaning from the next block, as though a giant with a bad bellyache is about to cut loose, and then Mattison hears five sharp heavy grunts in succession, oof oof oof oof oof, followed by an eerie crackling sound, and suddenly the air is full of fire.
It’s like one of the Yellowstone geysers, except that what is being flung up is a lot of tiny bits of hot lava, riding on a plume of bluish steam, and for a couple of moments it’s impossible to see more than a few feet in front of your face-plate. Then there is one single booming sound, not muffled at all but sharp and hard, and the bluish geyser of steam in front of them triples or quadruples in height in about half a second, and the pavement ripples beneath their feet as though an earthquake has happened precisely in this spot. Mattison comprehends that there has been a terrific explosion a very short way down the block and they are all about to be hurled sky-high, or maybe are already on their way up to the stratosphere and just haven’t had time to react yet.
But they aren’t. What has happened is that an underground gas pocket has blown its head off, yes, but it has done it in one single clean whoosh and all the pent-up junk that is being released has taken off for Mars in a coherent unit, the steam and mud and lava bits and whatnot rising straight up and vanishing, clearing the air beautifully behind it. A couple of good-sized lava bombs go soaring past them, fizzing like fireworks, and come down with thick plopping thunks somewhere not far away, but don’t seem to do any damage; and then things are quiet, pretty much. The whole blurry geyser that was spewing straight up in front of them is gone, the ground they are standing on is still intact, and they can see again.