She also hoped that this was all some sick dream; that she’d wake up in bed with a headache and only fading memories of the nightmare that had unfolded. But she knew that was probably an even longer shot than getting out of this alive.
“How’d you know, anyway?” Ben asked from the driver’s seat of the truck.
“Know what?”
“Which cave it was in. How did you just guess the right one?”
Julie paused a moment before answering. “That’s what I worked out with Randy, right after you left the first cave. He got me a map of the seismic activity below the lake, and how the hotspot’s moved every year.”
“Moved?”
“Well, like less than a centimeter, but yeah, over the course of millions of years, the hotspot has moved slightly northeast. Or to be more specific, the plate we’re on has slid southwest, while the hotspot’s remained stationary.”
“And this hotspot,” Ben began, “is what’s caused all of the eruptions in the past, right?”
“Right. But it’s also the reason there’s a Yellowstone park at all. It’s the source, generally, of all of the park’s geologic activity. The Earth’s crust is very shallow directly above it, and the lake is over a portion of that section. All I did was find where the crust was thinnest, where there was a known cave through that area, and then mapped those variables on top of the hotspot.”
Ben was nodding along, trying to follow her logic.
“I just figured that Stephens, or whoever he was working for, wanted to take the smallest risk of failure as possible, and that they’d want the location of their bomb to be directly above the most vulnerable section of crust.”
“Preferably underground, so no one would see it,” Ben added.
“Well, that, but also because the deeper it is, the more likely it’ll cause a fracturing quake that would rip up the crust and cause the volcano. It turned out to be the only reasonable option when I looked at all the data, so I sent you down there.”
“That all sounds pretty nerdy,” Ben said. He shot a quick smile toward her.
“Yeah, well, it saved your butt.”
Ben turned the truck onto a larger camp road, probably a main road toward the gate, and Julie saw him check his watch.
1:30.
6:30, if the bomb’s countdown timer was accurate.
She noticed the truck’s speed, how close they still must be to the lake, and wondered exactly how large this bomb blast would be.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
“Everyone behind the wall!” Julie heard Officer Wardley shout.
There were seven others at the rest stop when they pulled up, including Wardley, Randy, and the officer he’d ridden with.
A few stragglers made their way over to the rest stop’s building, a simple men’s and women’s restroom with an outdoor water fountain, covered by a slanted roof. A brick wall stood at the other end, forming a short breezeway area that Wardley and a few other men and women were now huddling behind.
Ben followed Julie as she stepped up onto the concrete floor of the pavilion and restroom.
“Glad you made it, you two,” Wardley said as they approached.
With two minutes left, Julie thought. Maybe less. She wondered if it would have been wiser to just continue driving, see how far away they could get. But she knew it was irrational. Nothing they did at this point was going to change the outcome — either the bomb detonated with or without causing a cataclysmic eruption as well.
A few other officers were wide-eyed, as if they were staring at an apparition, and Julie knew they had questions — question about the bomb, where it was hidden, how Ben knew it would safely erupt over the water, and more. But Ben didn’t seem interested in entertaining questions. He waited for Julie to press in to the group and stood stoically right at the edge of the pavilion.
She moved back a few steps to join him, and her hand found his. He turned to meet her gaze.
“You think this will work?” he asked.
“Stephens — they — seemed to have it all pretty well figured out,” Julie said. “But I can’t imagine the bomb’s blast being enough to open a major fissure in the Earth’s crust. This place has been here for 600,000 years without a major catastrophe like that, so I have to believe it’s stronger than that.”
“Yeah,” was all Ben said.
“I have a question for you, now,” Julie said. She noticed a few officers, as well as Randy, slowly making their way over to the pair at the edge of the concrete step.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“How’d you know about the single occupant campsites? Why did it just suddenly hit you that Stephens or his cronies would be stashing the payloads at those sites?”
Before Ben could answer, Wardley spoke up. “Yeah, and why not just dump the powder in the woods, where no one would ever find them?”
Ben looked at each of the others in turn before he answered. “It was a guess, really. A hunch. But I was thinking about my — about Diana Torres — one of the people this Stephens guy murdered. She was alone, ever since my dad… left.” Julie understood how emotional this must have been for him, and how he was surely not ready to bare the truth in front of these other people.
She also began to understand where he was going with it all. “And Livingston…”
“Right,” he said. “Livingston was the epitome of ‘alone.’ Even surrounded by the people he worked with, he had an estranged family and nothing but fancy toys to keep him company. Charlie Furmann was alone, too. Worked with Diana, but otherwise lived by himself.”
One of the officers stepped forward, looking confused. “That’s a pretty wild guess, Bennett. I don’t mean to sound accusatory, but I wouldn’t be able to stand trial with evidence like that.”
He seemed to be waiting for a response, as did everyone else, and Julie was surprised when he gave them one. “I know. I thought about it long and hard, and the reason it was so compelling to me is that it lines up perfectly with my theory about this virus. About how to beat it.”
Everyone’s eyes, if they weren’t already, were now riveted on Ben. Julie stared at him, too. They all waited for him to reveal his theory, but he wasn’t given the opportunity.
A flash of light washed over Julie’s eyes, and she took a stumbling step backward. She tried to blink the light away, but it was almost immediately replaced by the loudest noise she’d ever heard.
The cracking sound was like standing on a lightning bolt as it ripped open the earth, but it lasted longer. Her eyes must have been bleeding, and there was no way her eardrums could be intact after a sound like that. She tried to reach up and cover them as her vision returned.
Through the white haze, she saw the treetops of the forest bending and crunching under some unseen force, followed closely by a massive shockwave of dust and debris. Her face was glued to the scene, unfolding front of her as if it were an action movie in slow motion.
She felt something pulling at her, and her body was yanked backwards just as the force smashed against the brick wall. The roof above her was gone in an instant, and she saw the blue sky above her head. Dust filled every bit of the empty air in front of her face, and she felt it mingle with the saliva at the back of her throat, causing her to hack and cough.
Still, the force beat down on them. The bricks at the very top of the wall were the first to go, then she watched in horror as a larger portion of them flew away, like birds fleeing from a predator.
And just as quickly as it had started, it was over. She felt a heavy arm covering her, and it relaxed a little as the owner also realized the blast was finished.