The Yellowstone Conundrum

by John Randall

  “Good luck.” Then she tried one more time. “That cloud is filled with poisonous gas from the center of the Earth. The top of the mountains are black with volcanic ash. If it comes here, you all are going to die.”

  A pause, then one of the vacant-eyed 60-year old woman, dressed in her night shirt and covered with a parka, replied “When do you think the lights will come back on?”

  It was two minutes to Wapner.

  Penny turned and headed back toward the middle of town. Three blocks—and now in the middle of town—she turned and could see the group of citizens talking to themselves, no animation. They really didn’t have an idea of what to do. The earthquake had removed all of their axis points.

  Still schlepping her skis, with a lightweight backpack over each shoulder, Penny became increasingly aware of how tired she was. She looked back to her left up toward the pass. The Black Cloud had over-rolled the top of the mountain range. Penny knew there was nothing but chinka-chinka-chinka underneath.

  Penny walked back toward Broadway, US 212, and turned north—downhill. The snow was too ratty to ski. She needed a vehicle. She stopped dead in her tracks. People in this part of the country were used to leaving their cars unlocked and the key in the ignition; there was virtually zero crime; what crime there was came from drunken tourists.

  Penny stopped at every car that possibly could start up without having to dig it out from fallen rubble.

  She heard noise; yelling, actually; a surprise noise considering the circumstances, loud enough to be heard across the town, like a go-team-go during a football game, or a community surge when a wrestler, beaten for two periods starts a classic comeback against a superior but gassed opponent. The clock is relentlessly ticking and the home town boy is on the bottom, being ridden hard, needs an escape to tie to send it to OT. The fans were going crazy.

  Except this was Red Lodge, Montana on February 20th after an end-of-the-world earthquake and the smoke monster was spilling over the side of Beartooth Pass.

  Sweet Jesus, what the hell?

  High-pitched female voices carried the day; shrieks and yells were heard across the valley. Guys didn’t yell, they said oh shit, and then ran.

  It wasn’t a large group, no more than twenty, mostly female, a mixture of ages; school teachers who were ready for first period at 8:00, an administrator, the assistant principal (detention), a couple of cheerleaders, several 50s and 60s year-old women who didn’t belong in school, alongside several old men who didn’t belong in the group as well.

  It was like the final scene from the 50’s B-movie The Blob, Steve McQueen’s first; when everyone ran out from the movie theater as the horrible flesh-eating thing that looked like a giant wad of Bazooka bubble gum ravaged the town, then sat on the diner and waited for the writers to figure out the ending.

  The people were running straight at Penny.

  Three blocks on a clear day isn’t very far. You see and smell the fear. Behind the running townspeople was a scene that could only be considered as bizarre, if the boundaries of Bizarre hadn’t already been crossed—several times.

  When the earthquake struck six hours ago, the animals had all known what was coming; and had started to behave very oddly, and in some cases badly. The unfortunate caretaker/owner of the Beartooth Nature Center; a facility used by the Federal and state wilderness rangers to bring injured wild animals for short- or long-term care before being returned to the wilderness had, like so many been severely injured in the collapse of her apartment within the Center.

  Now truly free, eight grey wolves, some limping from previous injury, had started loping along N. Haggins Avenue in a pack, curiously looking inside an occasional home not completely damaged. The largest of the dog family, the wolves were each 125-150 pounds, 45-50 inches high and carnivores by instinct. Two of the wolves had started to fight when an unfortunate Lhasa Apso, someone’s pet that had managed to escape the collapse of its owner’s house, yap-yap-yap, yip-yap scrambled its way through the rubble, then into the street only to be confronted with Dog Nightmare on Haggins Avenue, now playing on the Haggins Avenue near you. The unfortunate Lhasa Apso had been a mere snack for the victor, hardly worth the workout.

  The lead wolf, human nickname Apache, had stopped in the front yard of Mr. and Mrs. Charles K. Hauser (recently deceased).

  human noise blood food

  Out of Apache’s throat came the bowel-watering, rubber-knees howl humans had feared since the dawn of mankind. The howl was followed by two others, behind and on each flank.

  follow human noise blood food.

  Led by Apache, the pack of eight wolves turned as one and slowly began to carefully cross through the rubble between Haggins and North Cooper Avenue, the physical edge of town—beyond to the East were a creek, a greenbelt, and then the hill leading to the plateau.

  With Cheyenne and Levi on both flanks, Apache led the pack through the remains of two destroyed homes, carefully but surely cutting their way over to N. Cooper. In the distance behind the, a series of gas explosions erupted on North Broadway, sending flames into the mid-day air. Three homes began to burn, a fire that by the end of the day turn the casual, friendly, little mountain town of Red Lodge, Montana into the history books.

  Turning onto Cooper the wolves were met by four lumbering, fully-grown black bears, known as Bo, Buster, Bonnie and Bluebeary (yes, correct spelling). Bo, the aggressive leader, had escaped his wire mesh cage, which was appointed with an old bowling ball attached to a chain. Poor Bo had never been able to figure that bowling ball out; but nevertheless had provided hours and hours of entertainment for kids and adults alike.

  No longer on Bowling for Food, Bo led the Big Bs away from the Beartooth Nature Center and down North Cooper. Fully grown, each bear was five-foot six long, 40 inches high and weighed between 300 and 500 pounds, Bo the Burly topping the group at 560 pounds. While not true hibernators, black bears don’t eat, urinate, defecate or drink during the winter months; unless they are awakened. (Like during a 11.2 earthquake)

  Finally, there were the kitty cats; a fully-grown Mountain Lion named Sacajawea, a Lynx named Robin and a bobcat named Lamar. In the middle and bottom of the food chain were ducks, owls, geese, foxes and a shit-full of little animals that didn’t count. Sacajawea was the worst of the worst. Nobody wanted to fuck with Sacajawea. Mountain Lions—also carnivores—would chow down on just about anything tasty and warm. The mountain lion let the wolves and bears lead the way toward the High School where there was fresh meat abounding.

  At Red Lodge High School, the survivors were trying to triage. The lucky ones had only been standing on the ground, then shaken several times, then re-shaken several more times. The brick façade of the school was destroyed, just like virtually everything else in the town. But, there were classrooms in the interior that hadn’t been wrecked. It didn’t matter. Nowhere in town was there flat space in abundance except near the High School. The football field with its four-season track surface; everything seemed normal as could be; go, team go.

  After two hours the townspeople decided that the High School was the place to meet. Backpacking tents started to pop up on the football field as people understood they would need a place to stay. Unstated was there ain’t going to be no TV tonight, darling. Initially, people were reduced quickly to where am I going to stay and where can I take a shit. Everything else would take care of itself.

  Within an hour of the shake, some professionals had appeared at the High School, along with the early-rising students, and two Assistant Principals—one the Detention Manager, the later having two surly pimple-faced tenth-graders ready for gum patrol—cleaning chewing gum off of the concrete pathways of the school. If it was a really bad day, the miscreants would be cleaning the boy’s bathroom starting with the commodes.

  My mid-morning the crowd had grown, as had the number of skilled volunteers; a vet to take care of the sick (no sight of Dr. Roberts or Mz. Bennett); a small kitchen had been started using what could be salvaged from the Hi
gh School. Nobody could get a signal from anywhere, either on radio, TV or cell.

  The first round of food was gathered and distributed.

  Several of the leaders suggested that they try to contact the various neighborhoods of Red Lodge with survey teams since nobody on the outside gave a rat’s ass about Red Lodge. This was quickly agreed to by the Assistant Principal for Detention in conjunction with the second-shift manager of the Best Western.

  “Jesus, Fucking Christ!” someone had shouted. All eyes pointed to the north, downhill from the High School.

  Advancing toward the school were eight grey wolves led by Apache, a handful of black bears led by 550-pound Bo, and in the rear a lithesome muscle machine name Sacajawea, an adult mountain lion.

  No one said, “Shoot the fucking bastards”. No, the reaction was RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN! High-pitched screams of the females filled the air.

  “Mountain lions!” Penny heard someone shout; mountain lions, wolves and bears; oh, my. It was time to get out of Dodge. Need a car. As the senior salesman would say to the rookie; if you don’t ask for the order, you don’t get it.

  The third vehicle she passed had been bounced into the middle of the street by the earthquake, landing in a stop-look-at-me position. In a Pixar cartoon, it would have been smiling. It was a dirty 1995 Toyota pickemuptruck with multiple dents and a rear bumper that had been the victim of too much towing; the standard white finish was coated with eighteen years of dirt and wear. The cool thing about the truck was that its owner hadn’t washed it on purpose, which is the way all trucks should be treated. It had clearly done lots of Manly Men Work, hauled tons of shit, and had been a good friend.

  The other cool thing about the Toyota pickemuptruck was that its owner had left the keys in the ignition, just as he had since the day he bought it.

  Penny looked around. Except for the group of people running toward the center of town and the wolves, bears and mountain lions oh my behind them, no one was around to claim the vehicle. Penny gratefully pitched her skis, poles and backpacks into the flatbed cargo area, alongside several gallons of paint, rags of all kinds and an aluminum step ladder, all behind the owner’s seven-foot wide Skil toolset box which was mounted in the rear area beneath the sliding widow, enabling the driver of the vehicle to grab a wrench or a beer (or a gun?) without having to get out of the truck.

  Hopping into the driver’s seat, Penny was rewarded with ignition on the first turn; then sent to the penalty box when she popped the clutch, quickly realizing the truck had a standard transmission. Beggars can’t be choosers her dad had told her once, which when paired with never look a gift horse in the mouth, had told her to accept good luck gratefully and gracefully when it comes your way and don’t look past it for something better. She’d never been sure about the “in the mouth” part of the homily, or why anyone would want to look inside a free horse’s mouth; maybe the horse needed a vet, had bad teeth, or simply had stinky breath. Free was free, no matter how bad the teeth were.

  How hard can this be, anyway? I’ve seen people drive a stick shift, except this one was on the steering column. OK. OK. The noise down the street was becoming more urgent. Press in the clutch thingie and start the engine; which she did, resulting in something sounding more like a purr than a motor. Let’s try straight. She released the clutch and of course the truck spazed and the motor went out. Probably bad technique Penny thought. Make sure the gearshift is in drive 1, and then do the clutch. In the next moment Penny was in motion, heading straight for the crowd. Brake, cough, cough, clutch, OK, straight, cruising, a little fast, stop, OK. Motor still running.

  Townspeople ran past her, turning north onto Broadway.

  One woman in her 40s, in complete disarray, pointed back to the animals slowly advancing down the street.

  “Shoot ‘em,” Penny shouted at her.

  “They’re endangered species!” was her reply.

  And you’re not?

  And it was with that realization Penny understood she needed to leave the movie set before things got totally out of control; she let the clutch up and gave a little gas, turned left and slowly drove north on US 212 out of Red Lodge, Montana. She shifted into second when the truck told her to, then into third, finally into fourth.

  In her rear view mirror the Death Cloud had advanced down onto the northern side of the ridge—the entire ridge line was covered. It was coming northward, but slowly; but more surely to the south.

  Penny felt comfort in the knowledge there was nothing she could have said to anyone in Red Lodge that would have made a difference to their behavior or expected outcome.

  “Come on, gift horse,” Penny muttered as she slowly drove downhill and out of town on US 212 toward the vast emptiness that was Montana.

  Mayoworth, Wyoming

  10:30 MST

  Cameron Hedges, independent long-distance driver, had slept through the most violent earthquake in the history of mankind. He woke up and found that instead of being horizontal on his bed in his “Super Sleeper” cab, an upgrade he’d made eight years ago, his legs and lower torso were nearly in the driver’s seat. What the hell? Peeking out of the side window he noticed that like himself, his 60,000-pound Peterbilt was facing North instead of West.

  It had been a tough bout, but in the end Jim Beam had won the battle. Since there was no interstate between Minot and anywhere, he had waited to start drinking until he’d hit I-94 in Montana at Glendive. His contract was to haul parts and whatever the Air Force wanted moved between Minot Air Force Base just north of Minot, North Dakota to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, finally to Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

  Cam, 43, a big guy at 260 pounds, six-three and slightly balding, was dressed in a triple XL Denver Broncos Peyton Manning short-sleeved t-shirt jersey; worn to thinness because it rarely left his body; night shirt, day shirt, party shirt. If someone was starving, he could lick at least two meals off the front of the shirt. Every month or so he’d do a wash, normally at the Roadrunner Travel Center in Lemitar, New Mexico; a place a guy would call “full service.” The ladies were pretty and the prices reasonable. He covered his thinning hair with a black and red Budweiser cap that rarely left his head.

  Long distance hauling was a weary, monotonous, job; but it paid OK and Cam made a profit on every trip, but the margin verses the effort was hardly worth it. When diesel prices spiked, he’d come close to bankruptcy several times. The government didn’t want to shave his left nut because they needed the service, and he was appreciative; regardless, it was his job to keep His 1992 Peterbilt, his old girl running. Any breakdowns and repairs were on him.

  He’d normally start mixing his Beam with a Sprite or a Coke, then as the bottle got lighter, to straight Beam. He’d chew aspirins by the handful to knock out most of the hangovers that followed. He had no family, no one to love or be loved. He was a man on a dead-end course to an early heart attack and/or cirrhosis of the liver.

  By the time he’d reached Buffalo, Wyoming; where I-90 meets I-25, he had pretty much had enough fun for the day, singin’ along with whatever country station he could catch. The stop at Mayoworth at exit 254 was a park-and-sleep only; not a park and pee, but a park and sleep; in other words, for real truck drivers only, drivers with wussy sleeping quarters need not apply.

  Oblivious to the end of the world to his west, Cameron started south on I-25, a dull headache behind his eyes. Orange Juice; should have me some orange juice. Unfortunately, his cooler was empty.

  In his driver’s rear view mirror he saw an unbelievable sight; headed southbound toward Cheyenne was a pack of at least 10 cars of all sorts, all driving the heck out of Dodge. There was nothing between him and them but wide open Wyoming I-25. These cars weren’t going fast, they were going really fast; 110 maybe. Here they are; they’re coming; Jesus, what the hell are they going to do?

  The pack of cars came up behind Cam’s Peterbilt and zoomed past him in an instant, three of the cars on the right size of the road,
the rest—zip, zip, zip on his left.

  Cam’s eyes locked on the passenger side of one of the passing zippers and in a nanosecond saw a woman’s wide-eyed expression of fear; like in the Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,000 feet (they flew low in those days) or the 1983 one where John Lithgow’s character Mr. Valentine has a window seat and watches in horror as a monster only he can see starts to tear apart the wing of the plane, or the home of the episode in 1963 when a pre-Star Trek William Shatner’s Bob Wilson, recently released from a mental institution, wigged out from the same monster.

  The woman’s eyes locked on and followed him for the two seconds it took to pass.

  I’m so scared the woman’s eyes shouted her face contorted into an Edvard Munch Scream.

  When Cam looked to his right he saw for the first time why a pack of cars might be headed south at 110 miles an hour; the eastern edge of the Black Shit That Is stopped twenty miles west of I-25.

  “Shit!” Cameron’s body jerked as if someone had jabbed him with a Taser. It was an awesome, bowel-emptying sight; made more so by the simple treeless expanse of the high grassland of central Wyoming. You didn’t have to be a kid laying on his back looking up at the sky trying to find alligators and birds and buffaloes in the cloud formations; today it took no imagination to visualize that God had awakened and He was really pissed.

  The cloud had multiple intensities of blacks, grays, whites and cancerous sections of nasty red glop. And the fucking thing moved like it was it was the Black Finger of Death, the fluctuations in the jet stream caused a wiggle-waggling, no-no fashion. Cam looked at the advancing cloud and had his own Scream moment. It wasn’t hard to hear the cloud preaching READ WHAT I SAID! THIS IS WHAT YOU GET, ALL OF YOU FOR ALLOWING HOMO-SAX-U-ALS TO POISON MY EARTH! Add as many exclamation points as you want. Praise Jesus.