“What?” Asher asked.
“This.” She hopped down to the ground, which created a wave of oohs, wows, and yikes from the tourists.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she cried out. “Please gather around!”
She motioned for people to stand at the edge of the walkway creating a semicircle around her. Families, tour groups, and individuals all lined up on the boardwalk to see what the crazy park ranger was doing in front of the large pool of bubbling water. Of the hundred or so people in front of her, at least twenty had their phones out and recording.
A little girl wagged a finger at her. “Umm! Mommy says you can’t walk out there.” A woman, probably the mom, kept an arm around her as if she might jump down and join Grace.
“She’s right!” Grace said in a friendly voice. She scanned the crowd for Misha but didn’t see him. She had to talk fast and get it all out there, on the off chance he did show up, intent on silencing her.
“First off, let me remind everyone what I’m doing is totally against the rules. Please do not leave the walkway at any point in your visit to Yellowstone’s geysers, hot springs, or other geothermal water features. I’m doing it because I know this patch is safe, and I needed to have your full attention.” As part of her probationary work, she’d done time on trash duty at the hot springs. When the tourists weren’t looking, rangers had to step off the path to retrieve garbage tossed there by careless visitors. Her supervisors always told her the rocks nearest the walkway were generally safe—how else could the construction guys have gotten out there to build it?
“Feel free to put this online, people. In fact, I’m encouraging you to record this and share it on every online channel possible. First, I want to tell you who is responsible for letting the meteors hit the Earth; it was Tikkanen Kinetic Mining.” She motioned for Asher to join her. “This man works for them; he’s a whistle-blower. He’ll explain it all.”
He jumped down, but didn’t look his best. He’d been on the run several times during the day, and his dress shirt was untucked and sweat-stained in the armpits. His hair was uncombed and gritty; he’d somehow managed to retain flecks of leaves and embers from the fire in there. Despite appearances, he seemed excited to tell his story.
“I work for TKM, uh, Tikkanen Kinetic Mining. About two days ago, there was an accident above the moon. The company PR people kept it from you, and the news has only reported what they wanted you to know. That’s why no one was ready when the meteor shower turned out to have destructive falling rocks which came down to the Earth’s surface.”
“Pretty lights!” the little girl shouted, still inside the cage of her mom’s arms.
“Correct! It was very pretty, but also very deadly, especially for people around my friend’s hometown.” Asher pointed over to Grace. “The loss of her city is why you have to believe me; another shower is coming tonight. It might contain rocks even bigger than the boulder which wiped out Paducah.”
“You said ‘might’,” the little girl’s mom interrupted. “Don’t you know for sure?”
“My source says they are still positioning the remaining big chunk of asteroid, trying to get it into orbit. Simultaneously, they are already planning contingencies as if that is doomed to fail. It could come down anywhere from upper Canada to the northern tier of states here in America. We have to assume Yellowstone will be in the path.”
Grace took a half-step in front of Asher. “I’m from Kentucky, y’all. I know from talking to my parents how bad it is back home.” She paused and breathed in and out to steady her racing heart. Even thinking about her mom and dad near Paducah sent bolts of fear into her core. “I believe this man, and so should you. Please leave here in an orderly fashion, get in your cars, and go…”
She’d been thinking where she could send thousands of park visitors to get them safe from the projected storm of shooting stars. Yellowstone was hundreds of miles from the nearest big city, so taking cover in subway tunnels or fallout shelters was impossible. Nonetheless, nature did provide a few places which might protect them.
“Go to the Gardner River bridge. It’s a few miles east of here. Park there and hike up the Gardner River canyon, which you’ll find about a mile upriver; you can’t miss it. The steep walls should give you protection.”
Nothing was a guarantee, but having five-hundred-foot barriers on two sides couldn’t hurt. Unless a meteor came down inside the canyon itself, they should find safety there. It had to be better than staying in canvas tents or wooden lodges, and there was plenty of time to get there.
Tourists along the edge were already peeling off from the crowd and running for their cars. Her message had gotten through, at least to some of them.
She watched the crowd disperse, ever vigilant for the red shirt.
Kentucky
After the trial disguised as a subdivision meeting, Ezra wasn’t going to make trouble up at the roadblock. He’d watched as six or seven men walked up the street, armed with long hunting shotguns, deer rifles, and sporting rifles like his Bushmaster. He still wanted to do what he could for the people on the blacktop, even if he couldn’t invite them down his street.
He’d left Susan at Roger’s house. They’d discussed the need to keep her rifle close, and she agreed, finally, that Babs’s behavior made it necessary. He didn’t expect her to defend the house to the death, but the weapon might make someone think twice before going in. He carried his rifle, too, as he traipsed through the woods at the southern boundary of his subdivision.
His plan was to skirt around the roadblock using the woods as cover. The route was the same one he’d feared would be used by the refugees to infiltrate the homes along the lake. It was still dense with undergrowth; the Paducah blast didn’t strip as many trees on the backside of the hill. It took him about ten minutes to cut through what was left of the thick greenery near the hilly surface. When he pushed his way through a nasty clump of brambles, he nearly stumbled into the stopped line of traffic.
A man and woman in the nearest sedan turned their heads to watch him straighten himself out and begin walking with the flow of vehicles. He intended to talk to someone, a refugee who didn’t know which direction he’d come from. Despite what Babs and the others thought of him, he wasn’t going to do anything which might endanger them. Keeping his origin secret would help protect his neighbors.
He passed some semi-trucks with box trailers, a horse trailer which was open and empty, a mail truck that seemed abandoned, and a passenger van which seemed to have children sitting inside. It all made him pick up the pace; he needed to find someone who could give him the lay of the land.
Ezra had gone about ten more cars up the road when he passed by a huge, muscular man lying on the shade-covered hood of his truck. His head was on the windshield, though he’d pulled a cowboy hat over his face like he wanted to get some sleep. He figured the guy was a farmer based on his blue jeans and well-worn cowboy boots. “Hey, excuse me. Do you have any idea what the holdup is?”
The guy lifted his hat and squinted, revealing a young face. “Are we moving?”
He was about Grace’s age, but didn’t have the slick haircut and nice clothes of the college crowd. The guy’s arms and face were red from sunburn, which was a telltale sign he’d been close to the impact. If he had to guess, he figured the young man was a local hayseed, a term he used with no animus.
Ezra chuckled. “I wish. I live, uh, around here, and I’m trying to help this line of cars get moving because the fireworks aren’t over. My daughter is a park ranger at Yellowstone, and she knows a geologist working for the company flying around with that space rock up by the moon. They messed up big time and now more meteors are supposed to fall to Earth tonight.”
He immediately sat up and slid to the front edge of his hood. To Ezra’s surprise, the man pulled out a phone and looked at the screen. “You serious, mister? I’ll have to check the news. If it’s true, we’ve got to find cover. Hard cover. I was up near Wickliffe when the shooting star came dow
n last night. It knocked me to the ground and almost blinded me, but that was the worst I got. As soon as I could, I got in my truck and headed for my mom’s place. A tree fell over and crushed her…”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He wanted to share his own story, yet the young man kept speaking.
“I hopped back in my truck and didn’t stop until I hit this traffic jam about midnight last night. Haven’t moved an inch since then, and everyone walking by has nothing but bad news. I was hoping you had good news for a change.”
“Well, I’m going to walk up ahead and see if I can figure out what’s got everyone stopped. If I solve the problem, maybe I’ll finally have some good news to share with you.”
“Don’t bother,” the man said. He hopped down from his hood, then held out a callused hand. The man was much taller than he expected when he stood up straight; every bit of six and a half feet, maybe a solid two hundred seventy-five pounds. “Name’s JJ Butcher; everyone calls me Butch.”
“Nice to meet you, Butch. I’m Ezra.” He had to tilt his head to look him in the eyes.
Butch was excited. “Like the band? That’s pretty cool.”
Ezra had heard it before. He didn’t listen to the rock band Better Than Ezra, though he at least knew they existed. Confused kids often asked if he’d been named after the band, not realizing he was born well before the band existed. It was a more exciting story than telling people he was named after his grandfather, so sometimes he let it go.
“Yeah, sure.” He pointed south, where all the cars were headed. “Why shouldn’t I bother going that way?”
“There’s a damaged bridge up ahead. Stranded drivers relayed the story up and down the line all night and day. A barge got loose during the explosion last night and it rammed the pylon of the bridge.”
He knew what bridge Butch was talking about; it was a brand-new double-span across Kentucky Lake about ten miles down the road. It was built high enough for barges to go underneath, but the two bridges side by side were meant to carry lanes in both directions. “You said it was damaged. What about the second span? Why aren’t cars using the other one?”
Butch laughed. “We thought of that right away, of course, but the way it was told to me was traffic coming from the other way tried to use the good bridge, which put the two flows of traffic against each other. In typical human fashion, the anxious commuters clogged up both directions permanently. The traffic interruption stopped traffic even all the way back here.”
“Why don’t you turn around?”
The question made Butch sigh heavily. “I’d have to hump it out of here. You see how the cars are in both lanes going south? Some of those drivers have already walked out—and those abandoned cars are now deadweights. Like the idiots on the bridge, they’ve blocked any chance of going back. And even if I could go that way, where would I go? Paducah is toast. Trust me on that one.”
Ezra started to feel the burn of acid in his stomach. The sun was extremely low on the horizon, so there wasn’t much time to solve the crisis. If the cars had no chance of moving, Butch and everyone like him was potentially open and exposed to whatever was coming down later in the evening.
“What’s around here, mister? Are there any quarries or mines? If more’s coming, and we can’t move forward or back, we’ve got to hide.”
He was struck by nostalgia for Grace. The young man reminded him of her, and not only because he was a similar age. He was fast to drill down to the core of the problem and he was anxious to get into the action. His daughter had the same can-do attitude.
Grace, I hope you’re already in a mine.
Chapter 16
Yellowstone
Grace prayed some of her audience uploaded the video to the internet so people in the rest of the park would see it. Those who had listened to her speak were already fleeing down the walkway, giving her confidence she’d done the right thing. As the first people told others, more tourists turned around and headed back to their cars. She was tempted to give Asher a high-five for a job well done. Just then, a familiar red shirt appeared in the crowd on one of the wooden walkways. Misha was conspicuous as he cut against the flow of people.
“Um, Asher. Look.”
He gaze followed to where she pointed.
“He’s headed right for us,” he whispered, even though the man was a hundred yards away. “Where can we go?”
There was nowhere to hide. They’d stepped off the walkway, which made them obvious from points all over the expanse of hot springs and pools of water. Misha didn’t hold up his fists and yell their names, but he was on his way.
“You aren’t going to like this, and neither is my boss.” She looked around to confirm the plan she’d thought up on the spot. “We’re going that way.” She pointed toward the white-crusted ground of the main part of the hot springs. Of the three parallel football fields, she planned to run right up the center of the middle one. Grace took a few steps out onto the more delicate surface, crunching the fragile rock into white chalky dust. Contrary to the image she projected to Asher, her insides expressed massive doubt whether or not it was the right way to go.
“Are you sure?” Asher asked.
“No,” she admitted. They could have run down one of the boardwalks and gone around the springs area, but Misha had already killed a cop, and probably harbored no regard for anyone else touring the grounds. Saving Tessa was theoretical; this was practical. Her split-second reasoning said her best bet was to run out in the open.
Misha kept advancing, which seemed to make up Asher’s mind. He hopped a rock and trotted out to where she was on what looked like fragile earth. Somewhere below, maybe a foot down, or an inch, the superheated water of the hot springs boiled and tried to climb to the surface. Since she’d never done an activity so stupid before, there was no way to know where the weak spots were located. Rangers left the trash if it made it that far out into the springs.
It continued to remind Grace of the top surface of a wedding cake. The oval area was almost flat, and the calcium carbonate provided the signature white styling. The far side of the swirly frosting was about a hundred and fifty yards away. Between her and the other side, she had to hop over small pools as well as tiny steam vents, which came up from the water boiling below. The oldest exposed rocks had been there for centuries, so patches of the ground were weatherworn with brown stains. She assumed they could jump from rock to rock as long as the stones were darker in color.
“Do like I do,” she called back as she hopped.
“Is this a game?” Asher replied with disbelief.
“It is now,” she quipped, trying to laugh. She’d heard the stories about visitors who disobeyed the rules and ended up in the boiling water. People had died many times over the previous hundred years of park management. Up until that moment, she assumed those people must have been mentally ill to act with such stupidity.
Or desperate.
She hopped from one of the colored bands of rock over to a lighter one, holding her breath the whole way, hoping she didn’t go right through. Thinking about those people who died made her hyper-aware she could be next. When she landed and didn’t fall through, she let out the breath, but also recoiled in horror as chunks of rock peppered her face.
A loud bang followed a second later.
“He’s shooting at us!” Asher yelled.
She only looked back for half a second. Misha was on the boardwalk near where she’d given her talk. He wasn’t more than fifty yards away.
“Don’t stop!” she screamed.
Caught between two deadly threats, she made the decision to trust Mother Nature not to screw her over. She increased the speed of her hops and ran along a long stretch of high ground when she got there. Misha fired a few more shots—none of them caused the ground to explode like that first one. A half a minute later, after total disregard for her own safety, she was almost across.
“We’re there!” she shouted with relief.
When she got to the edge of t
he hot springs, she chanced a look. The red-shirted man ran back on the walkway toward where he’d come from, but he was so far away she didn’t think he could hit them. Asher was still ten to fifteen yards away, running over the uneven rocks at his own pace. A couple of seconds before he reached the edge, he disappeared.
“Asher!”
He’d fallen through the crust.
Kentucky
Ezra did his best to seem cool and relaxed as he walked along the cars parked on the road. Butch stayed with him, for which he was grateful, if only so he had someone to vouch for him if trouble showed its face. He kept his rifle slung over his shoulder and hoped it didn’t freak people out. The refugees were from Paducah, so each one probably had as many weapons as he did, but there were likely a few who were scared of guns, too. The last thing he wanted was a confrontation.
“Look, Butch, I have to ask you to hold off telling anyone else about the meteor. I’m afraid if we blurt it out, it’s going to send everyone into a panic. I’ve got to think of where they can go…” He still hadn’t mentioned his subdivision, or his idea about the basements. It tore him up not to reveal that piece of intel, yet knowing if he created a mad rush in all directions, no one would get to safety.
“Sounds reasonable for now, but if I see a streak of light, don’t expect me to stick around. I’m going to find a culvert and dive inside.” He laughed, as did Ezra, though the idea wasn’t terrible. Surely there were drainage culverts and bridges all along the roadway. The problem was finding them. Even if they could do an orderly search for all suitable drainpipes up and down the roadway, there wasn’t enough time left in the day. Sunset couldn’t be more than an hour or two away, if he was reading the hazy skies right.
“You’ve got a deal,” Ezra replied.
He walked the road until he was within view of the roadblock to his subdivision. He stayed out of view, to further avoid unnecessary confrontation, troubled to see a group of refugees hanging out near the guards.
Inbound: Impact Book 1: (A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Series) Page 14
