“Whoa, Nelly!” Larry yelled when the shaking started. Getting down was a good idea, because Kelly knew she couldn’t have stayed on her feet. She’d wondered what the Richter reading for a supervolcano would be. It was enormous, or whatever one step higher than enormous was. She’d put all this distance between herself and the epicenter, and she was still getting tossed around like a rag doll.
It didn’t want to ease up, either. Like the Energizer Bunny, it kept going and going and… How much energy was being released all at once? The calculator inside her head said TILT.
Windows in the airport terminal broke. One of the helicopters that had flown the geologists out of Yellowstone went over onto its side. Luckily, the pilot was still in his safety harness, so he might be okay. Even more luckily, neither copter had started refueling. Everybody’d stopped to gape at the cataclysm off in Yellowstone.
The ground was still shaking when the wind came. Blast from an atomic bomb could wreck things far away from the actual explosion. The roar came at the speed of sound. It had had plenty of distance to attenuate, and had gone around and over a couple of mountain ranges on the way. That meant it was just far and away the loudest thing Kelly had ever heard in her life.
Somewhere she’d read that artillerymen yelled to help equalize the pressure on their ears. She tried it. It couldn’t possibly hurt. And she felt like screaming any which way. She blew twenty or thirty feet down the runway, picking up more bumps and bruises and scrapes. If she hadn’t had her hands up to her face, that would have been worse, too.
Part of the terminal did fall in on itself about then. Knocked down by the wind roaring around and through it? Flattened by the unending quakes? Wrecked by nothing more than the vibration from the great roar? Kelly would have checked all of the above on a multiple-choice test.
The green Ford didn’t flip over. That was something. How much, she wasn’t so sure. Could they make it to Missoula? She’d traveled I-90 before. As she did in many parts of the country, she’d noticed how spindly the supports for the overpasses were. Building codes hereabouts didn’t mandate anything like the quake resistance required in California. So what would happen when something bigger than the Big One hit, even if it was a long way off? They’d find out.
That cloud in the sky swelled and swelled. It hadn’t blotted out the sun-not yet, not here. But how much of Wyoming and Montana and Idaho had seen night fall in the middle of the day? More every minute, as the long, long shadow went on stretching. It reminded Kelly of the blast from Mount Doom when the Ring went into the fire in The Return of the King.
But Sauron proved impotent in the end. The hot spot under Yellowstone was anything but. How many millions-or was it billions? probably-of tons of pulverized rock did that cloud represent? Not all of it would be thoroughly pulverized, either. How far could the biggest explosion in the past 75,000 years throw boulders big enough to squash houses and cars? How far could it throw rocks big enough to smash skulls? People in a broad swath of the Rocky Mountain West were finding out right this minute, sometimes the hard way.
And, for the ones too close to the supervolcano, flying boulders and ash in the sky would be the least of their worries. Good, old-fashioned lava was pouring out of the caldera along with all the junk going straight up. So were pyroclastic flows-mud and boiling water mixed into a hellbrew. When Vesuvius blew in 70 AD, a pyroclastic flow was what buried Pompeii. But, like Krakata, like Mt. St. Helens, like, well, everything, Vesuvius was only a hiccup next to this.
West Yellowstone, Montana, a tacky tourist town, would be gone, off the map. So would Gardiner, Montana, at Yellowstone’s north entrance, and Cooke City and Silver Gate, Montana, to the park’s-the ex-park’s-northeast, and Cody, Wyoming, a little farther east. South of Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons were going to get another layer of volcanic tuff pasted on. And it would be tuff-and tough-on Jackson, Wyoming, too.
And all that, of course, was only the beginning. Only the tiniest fraction of the beginning.
Larry managed to make it to his feet. His denim jacket had a hole in one elbow. His jeans were out at both knees. One knee was bleeding into the blue denim. He didn’t seem to notice. Well, Kelly had hurts she hadn’t started reviewing yet, too. One thing at a time.
The ground went on rolling under them. Normally, you wouldn’t feel aftershocks from a quake that far away, but that was a big quake, and these were big aftershocks. Still, they did roll instead of jerking, as they would have done closer to the epicenter. You could-Larry could-stand up while they were going on. The wind blasting out from the eruption was still fierce, too, but not fierce enough to knock him over.
He could even yell through it and make himself heard: “Let’s haul ass while we can. The farther we go before ash starts falling on us, the better. I don’t know how the car’s air filter will like all that grit, and I don’t know how the engine will like the crud the filter lets through.”
Kelly had known him for a while now. He was low-key, unexcitable. She translated what he’d said into what would have come from most people. He figured the air filter wouldn’t like volcanic ash for hell, and the motor would go queep and die once it inhaled enough grit.
How many cars-and trucks, and fire engines, and ambulances-across how many states would go queep and die when their engines seized up from overdosing on ash? One more interesting question, in the Chinese sense of the word.
She’d seen the maps that showed how far the supervolcano threw ash in previous eruptions. Most of the Midwest and big pieces of the West were in deep, deep kimchi. And all that also was only the beginning.
Can I stand up, too? she wondered. Only one way to find out. Ruth had already made it to her feet by the time Kelly did. Daniel also did it, though he limped as he went over to the Ford. Knee? Ankle? Whatever it was, he could, after a fashion, walk on it. That would do for the moment.
Larry tried the driver’s door. It opened. He looked inside. “Key’s in the ignition,” he reported. “The pilot wasn’t lying to us.”
They got in. The guys took the front seats; the women sat in back. It was fair-Larry and Daniel were taller than both of them. As Kelly fastened her belt, she noticed she’d barked her right palm. Ruth had a nasty scrape on her forehead and a bloody ear. All that was stuff they could worry about later.
Only after the belt clicked tight did Kelly start giggling. Ruth, who was also buckling up, sent her a curious look. She explained: “It’s the end of the world, and I’m fastening my stupid seat belt. So are you.”
“Oh.” Ruth managed a sheepish nod. “Force of habit.”
Larry started the car. He’d also used his belt. So had Daniel, who said, “We may need them. If it is the end d, people will be driving like bats out of hell.”
If that wasn’t a mixed-up metaphor-well, simile-Kelly’d never heard one. Being mixed up sure didn’t make it wrong, though.
Larry drove around the battered terminal building. People, some of them bleeding, were coming out through windows and doors. “I don’t like to pass them by, but…” he said. No one tried to change his mind.
By Montana standards, Butte was a good-sized town: it held about 35,000 people. It had banks and offices and apartment buildings and fast-food joints, just like a real city. Some of them had stayed up; some had fallen down. Glass from countless broken windows sparkled in the sun like snow. Some of the glass sparkled on Harrison Avenue, the street that would take them up to the Interstate. That wind hadn’t been fooling around.
“A flat would be all we needed right now, wouldn’t it?” Ruth said.
“Bite your tongue,” Kelly said sweetly. “Hard.”
Some of the locals were helping others who’d been hurt. But lots of men and women stood on the sidewalks-or sometimes in the middle of the street-staring and pointing at the cloud swelling up and up and out and out from the supervolcano. Kelly couldn’t blame them. She kept twisting to stare back at it herself. How high? How wide? How close? More of each every second-that was the only thing she was sure about.