The Forensic Geology Box Set

by Toni Dwiggins

  He cleared his throat. “I was trapped in town, along with a good many others. I was waiting my turn to go out. Perhaps the wait was too long. It gave me time to think, and I was at a very low point, and the two made a persuasive combination. I simply felt that—now that I was trapped—I should stay. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic but I decided to do as she would. I came up here to wait and watch. To see what the volcano was going to do.”

  I let out a sound.

  “I had no intention of dying, Cassie. I still don’t. That’s why I came all the way up here. This provides the safest vantage point. And all the comforts of the Inn.” He forced another smile.

  “How did you get here, sir?” Eric asked.

  “I appropriated Bill Bone’s station wagon. He’d been evacuated. He had no further use for it.”

  “How’d you start it?” I asked. “Every car I saw on 203 was locked and the keys were gone.”

  “I broke the window and hot-wired it. Something I learned in my undergraduate days. Then I drove up here and settled in. I parked the wagon in the garage by the gondola, where they keep the snowmobiles. Keeps the ash off it. It is, after all, Bill’s property, and I intend to replace the window.”

  I gaped. Nothing stops him. He’d survived on vandalism, like me. “How’d you get in here? Break a window?”

  “No, I used a credit card to let myself in the service entrance around back—the same way I opened the garage lock.” He squeezed my hand. “A trick Lindsay taught me, the time she locked herself out of her office.” He cocked his head. “By the way, Cassie, I had a thought on my drive up here. Bill could use a nice CD player for the wagon.”

  “What?”

  “The gift,” Walter said. “For Bill’s birthday.”

  I was afraid Walter might crack open.

  He lifted his eyebrows. “As I’ve told you all, I don’t intend to die. Thoughts do creep in. Large and small. About this and that. Like Bill’s gift.”

  Eric said, finally, “Sure, I’m in. Mike too—right, man?”

  Mike said, “I already paid.”

  Walter turned a cold look on Krom. “Adrian? Are you in?”

  Krom returned the look. “You bet your life.”

  The fire popped. Silence fell.

  Walter broke it. “And so, my friends, here I am. Yesterday I hiked partway up the mountain and found myself a view. Stupendous.”

  And here he was. Here, not in a ditch or her office or the lab or mired in the muck of her half-finished escape route. Now Eric didn’t have to worry about my running off. Now Mike didn’t have to whine. Now Krom had one less thing to use against me. I tensed. No. I’d got that wrong. Now Krom had one more thing to hold over me. He had Walter. Because there was clearly something between them. Something had happened. Maybe something down at the 203 crater during the evac. Maybe something in her office. I considered the open safe. The love letters. I thought over Walter’s story, trying to read it coldly—without the intense rush of relief and worry and anger and pity—and something was off. There was something he wasn’t telling us.

  I said, probing his story, “Why’d you have to take Bill’s wagon? Why didn’t you take your Explorer? I saw it out on 203.”

  Walter met my look. “I left my car in the expectation that people would assume I had evacuated. I left it hoping to avoid the very thing that occurred. You coming in here after me, dear.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Had there been the slightest indication that the sky was clearing, had the quakes stopped, we would have been content to sit tight at the Inn and wait for choppers.

  But it was a grim dawn. Standing on the porch, stamping my cold feet and stirring up ash, I stared up the mountain. Bridgeport reported that USGS remote sensing indicated intermittent eruptions from Red Mountain and the moat, which had reawakened sometime in the night. Still phreatic eruptions. I could not see either eruption—I’d have to climb up to Walter’s viewpoint for that. Mammoth Mountain, which protected us, also blinded us.

  Quakes talked, though, loud and clear. Magma’s on the move.

  Eric and Mike came out carrying Krom. Walter followed. Walter was no longer in the mood to wait and watch. He wanted out, badly as I did. Walter’s priorities shifted, with me on his hands.

  Whatever it takes.

  We wore yellow survival suits. Eric’s pack had carried three extras; he’d known he was coming after two survivors when Krom called; he’d also known Walter was missing, so he’d come prepared. His pack held suits, rations, flashlights, ropes—nearly as much stuff as I’d brought—but he’d come equipped for rescue, not arrest. I’d watched him repack his gear. He had no handcuffs, no gun.

  We clumped down the front steps to the snowmobiles Eric and Mike had brought around from the garage. Krom, wrapped in one of the Inn’s fine quilts, was lashed onto the sled; the sled was attached to Eric’s snowmobile with ropes. We lashed packs and skis to the vehicles, Walter waving off attempts to help him load his bulging pack.

  Eric said “one last check” and went machine to machine.

  These were sturdy machines, used by crews to crawl all over this mountain, but I had limited faith in them. They have box filters meant to keep birds from being sucked into the engine but they have no defense against ash. I waited until Eric was squatting to check the front runners of his machine and then I squatted beside him. I leaned in close as I could, bulky suit to bulky suit, and in a whisper told him about Krom. He slid a glance back at the sled then continued fiddling with the drive-chain. He said, to the chassis, “You certain?”

  “No proof.”

  “But you believe it?”

  I nodded.

  He rose, passing so close to my ear that I felt his breath same time I heard his words. “Count on me this time.”

  By the time I’d got to my feet Eric had his goggles and mask on. I pulled on mine, veiling my face, gamely pretending I did not want to hide in his arms.

  The others finished suiting. We all mounted. We were bright tropical creatures with goggle eyes and plastic beaks and neon yellow plumage astride squat metal beasts. We were absurd, but against all logic my hopes rose.

  Engines started smoothly. Headlights shone. We passed our lone Guard jeep in the parking lot and took the chute up to the unplowed continuation of Minaret Road. Eric broke trail, slow. We followed in line, at a distance, spacing ourselves so as not to eat each other’s ash.

  The road wound through mountain hemlock, burred in ash, the drooping tips like fingers trying to shake themselves clean.

  Plan is, we round the north slope for about a mile and then reach Minaret Summit, the low point in the Sierra crest. From there, another five miles as the road drops down into the deep canyon of the San Joaquin River and heads north to the campground of Agnew Meadows. Primitive facilities, but space for a rescue chopper to land when the air clears.

  Could be days. Could be weeks.

  We crawled. Ash was shallow but Eric’s runners kicked up twin plumes that flanked the sled. There was no apparent movement in there. Krom could have been dead and frozen as Georgia on her litter ride down from the glacier.

  Walter followed, as he’d followed Georgia’s sled over two months ago.

  I followed Walter, eyeing his pack. Last night, when the two of us went to his room to collect his supplies, I’d asked about the open safe, the love letters. He’d shown surprise; he’d said he didn’t realize I’d known about the letters. He’d agreed that the letters were what drew him to her office, that he’d collected them on the way up the mountain. Her office was empty, he’d said. There was nothing between him and Krom, he’d said. I eyed the bulging pack lashed to his snowmobile and thought, that’s a whole lot of love letters.

  We rounded the corner, and Eric and Krom up ahead rounded the next.

  Ash worked under the edges of my dust mask and burrowed into my skin. Already, ash was scratching and frosting my goggles. My snowmobile sucked in ash and the particles were surely incising their way through the engine.r />
  I began to worry about avalanches. Not so much here, but over the summit—once we started our descent we’d be at risk. I came around the bend and saw Walter’s and Eric’s snowmobiles and it was a moment before I realized what was wrong. They were not spouting ash. Eric was twisted on his saddle gesturing at Walter. Krom was sitting bolt upright.

  Avalanche? I neared them, getting a better view. There were boulders in the road. Maybe a rock avalanche, from quakes. Please be that.

  I drew up behind them, and Mike behind me. We left our engines running. Eric and Walter and I left Mike to tend to Krom, and we set out on foot.

  The road was strewn with rocks—boulders, stones, chips, gravel, like a mad quarry crew had been at work. I examined the mountain. Where there should have been a scar, some indication of the source of this rockslide, there was nothing. I felt sick.

  We picked our way through the field of rocks until the road turned the next bend.

  There was devastation, far as we could see. Bigger boulders here, some large as snowmobiles, and the pulverized remains of others, and where the ground showed through it was no longer the familiar coating of ash but a congealed mud, and everywhere there were branches and limbs and stumps of trees, and those trees that had escaped dismembering were dead anyway, killed a decade ago by carbon dioxide, for this was one of the old tree-kills. Slightly upslope was a crater with fresh rock showing, like a tooth that had lost a filling. Steam issued from the hole.

  I fought to get my glove off my bandaged hand and bent to touch rock, mud, splinters of trees. Cold. Walter scooped a handful of rock chips. We looked, heads together. “Old stuff,” I said. He nodded. Quartz latite, basement rock. I eyed the crater, a few tens of meters across. It had spat out old stuff.

  We moved around the next bend and it was the same, rock and steam.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Eric said and we all three broke into a run.

  Mike was shouting “what, what?” as we hauled up.

  Eric pulled down his mask, fighting for air. “Some kind of eruption,” he got out.

  “Phreatic,” I gasped.

  Walter was bent double.

  “What?” Mike’s voice rose.

  “Steam blast,” Krom said. He alone breathed easy.

  Eric said, “What now, Cassie?”

  I shoved aside my mask and wiped my face. I tried to think. What’s setting off steam blasts up here? Compared to the eruptions in the caldera and on Red Mountain, this was a little guy, like someone had set off a charge of dynamite. But you wouldn’t want to get closer than a football field to something like that. Is this puppy going to vent again? Are there others? What’s the alignment? I looked at Walter. He shook his head. Years of Lindsay pouring this stuff in his ear, years of Lindsay drilling it into my head, and she hadn’t made a volcanologist of either one of us. “Let’s go back,” I said, already moving, because we surely could not go forward.

  Krom gave a brusque nod. Both of us, momentarily, in alignment.

  We retreated two abreast, in double line. I kept looking back, although if that thing vented again we’d feel it before we’d see it. My snowmobile died. I moved my gear to Eric’s machine and doubled up with Mike. Walter’s machine died not an eighth of a mile later. He put on skis and saddled up his pack. We paced Walter, creeping, and then Mike’s machine crapped out and then Eric’s. We all saddled up with gear. We had to abandon one pack. Eric dragged the sled and Mike and I took turns pushing from behind. We ran on adrenaline but that crapped out too. We took forever and a day to cover the last quarter mile.

  When the lifts showed above the hemlocks, I let out a sob. We’d made it. And then I sank to the snow. Where to now?

  Georgia whispered in my mind. No way out.

  CHAPTER 48

  We dragged into the roundabout. We didn’t have the strength to unload Krom and climb the steps to the Inn, so we took shelter beneath the porch overhang and sat in ash. We pulled off goggles and masks. At last, Mike got out a water bottle and passed it around.

  The earth shook.

  Mike said, “Now what?” He was looking at me.

  “Call Bridgeport,” I said.

  Eric was already unpacking the field radio. He got a lot of static but he got through. No, they had not been aware of the blast on the north slope. Static. Still activity at the moat and Red Mountain. Bridgeport told us to maintain position while they investigated further.

  Eric said, “Okay, people, we need to get indoors and...”

  “It’s not okay,” Mike said. His head was bent. He was digging at his thumbnail. “We should go down and take Pika.”

  Eric said, “We just got the official word to stay put.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  We stared at Mike. Whatever happened to his allegiance to the official word? He was caked in ash, he had a two-day stubble, and he humped his stringy frame over his knees and worked furiously at his thumbnail.

  Eric said, evenly, “We asked for advice.”

  “Then who’s in charge?”

  “Whoever’s in position to call it.”

  Mike squared his frame. “You want her.” It was not a question. “If it weren’t for her, we’d be out of here already.” He turned on me and put his hand on my arm, second time he’d ever touched me. “You’ll tell us not to go down, won’t you?”

  I hesitated. Waiting, I guessed, for Walter to jump in. Walter clutched his pack, and gave me a nod. You’re doing fine.

  “Won’t you?” Mike said.

  I licked ash off my lips, and nodded.

  “Because? Tell them why.”

  “Because the moat’s in eruption. Because Red Mountain might progress. Because nobody survives a pyroclastic flow.”

  “What about Pika?” He shot a look at Krom, a plea.

  Krom smiled at Mike. You’re doing fine.

  “What about it?” I said. “You want to take Adrian by yourself? You can’t handle the sled alone.”

  “I know that,” Mike said, “that’s why we all go.”

  I said, “Pika’s a trap. Maybe a deathtrap.”

  Mike turned to the others. He still gripped my arm: got her, exhibit A. “You all heard that, and that’s just what she said yesterday. Don’t go out Pika, she said, because it’s too slow. We might get stuck. Something terrible might happen.” He lifted my arm, extending it; my jacket sleeve jerked back and exposed my watch. “Ask her how many hours ago that was. Ask her where we’d already be if we’d gone out Pika yesterday when Mr. Krom, who knows about what’s safe, wanted to go. Ask her if we had enough time we could have crawled out on our bellies and still made it. Ask her if she can tell time.”

  Eric said, “It was my call on Pika too.”

  “Yeah but she made us go up here.” Mike’s voice rose. “To find Walter.”

  I fixed on Mike’s hand, on the red angry skin around his thumbnail. He had a killer grip for such a runt, such a little shit. Only a real shit would sit here and say I risked us all to come up here after Walter. I hadn’t. I was surprised as anyone when he appeared. But it was clear enough that if we’d gone out Pika we would not have found him. Everybody had to be thinking it. Nobody said it. I said, tight, “I stand by my call.”

  “After what happened up the road?”

  Eric said, “Shut up, Mike.”

  The words hung in the air. Walter broke the silence. “Cassie couldn’t have predicted that.”

  I was rigid. Lindsay might have. I was racking my brain for the old lessons.

  Mike muttered, “We should’ve gone out Pika.”

  Eric snapped, “Shut up, man.”

  “You be quiet, man.”

  Eric started to move and I caught his arm. “Let him finish it.”

  Mike placed his face inches from mine. He was sweating furiously and his eyes brimmed. “Say we should have gone out Pika.”

  “There’s no point.”

  “Say it.”

  “No.”

  “You better say it.” />
  “We...should...not...have...gone.”

  “Say it.”

  “Grow up Mike.”

  “Say it!” Mike screamed. “Say it’s your fault, you bitch.”

  Walter hissed “that’s enough” but Eric already had Mike in a headlock and forced him down into the ash.

  I was shaking. You reap what you sow.

  Krom looked away. “We’re wasting time.” He undid the strap across his hips. He reached for the other straps—across his knees and ankles—but they were out of reach. He was grimed as the rest of us, worn in pain, and above and beyond that he’d endured his exile up the mountain. He regarded his bindings a moment, then folded his arms and took us in. “Let’s get it under control, chums. Mike, you’re out of line. Eric, calm down. Cassie, you’re overwrought. Listen to what he said, not how he said it.”

  Krom was right. I was overwrought. Quite suddenly, I found an icy calm. I said, “Stop hiding behind Mike.”

  Krom’s pain-glossed eyes went flat.

  “Everything Mike knows about evac he knows from you. Everything you tell him he believes. You tell him we can spread our wings and fly out of here and he’ll start flapping. Why don’t you tell him the truth, for once? Tell him who’s responsible for the mess we’re in. You’re the man. You’re it.”

  “You’re overwrought.”

  “You’re the only one with a reason to blow up the 203 evac route.”

  There was a gasp—Mike. Eric got him under the arms and hauled him upright, shooting a look at Krom. Walter’s eyes never left me.

  I said, “That night I followed you, Adrian? You stopped on 203. Right at the bridge. Like you were checking it out. That when you decided where to plant the explosives?”

  Krom laughed. “That’s right,” he said, “I sabotaged my own evacuation.”

  I didn’t laugh. “Yeah, that’s absurd. Except that only 203 got sabotaged. Explosives on Pika were wired wrong. So all of a sudden Pika’s the only way out. You’re going to get us out, all right, but it’s going to be on your road. You fought Lindsay for it. You beat her. And now you have to finish the fight. Your road, against her volcano.” I stared at his slick yellow arm, where the scar hid. “I get the sacrifice thing now. The elders who offered themselves up to save the tribe—it’s a symbol for you. You won’t take it as far as they did, you don’t want to die, but you have to personally intercede with the volcano on behalf of the tribe. That’s why you built your road. That’s why you blew up 203. You had to have the tribe in your hands. If they escaped on 203, you didn’t save them, you didn’t win. It could have been done without you—all the planning and drills could have been done by computer sims. Any good manager could have run that show. But that’s not what happened with the tribe. That was personal. And you know what? I think you’re still in a mano-a-mano with the volcano. And the only way you can win is to get us out on your road. And maybe you’re even ready to risk the ultimate sacrifice, if it comes to that.” My hands, I found, were closed into fists. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to show he couldn’t take the pain. “We all go out your way or we die trying.”