by Jesse Wilson
As the plume spread tephra into the stratosphere over the next eight hours, it triggered torrents of volcanic ash rain through which lightning jagged ferociously, kindling fires among felled trees throughout the park.
Beneath the ugly bruise of the sky, relief efforts began in the seared zone around the blast area, and prevailing winds off the Gulf pushed the ash toward Mexico City, where fifteen centimeters soon coated cars and streets, exacerbating the accustomed smog and causing multiple deaths from respiratory failure and collisions. The day after the eruption, the sun never shone on the capital. During that ominously long night, citizens were urged to remain indoors at all costs. Private automobiles were prohibited from circulating.
The seventh day after Popocatepetl’s quickening, the flow of magma suddenly ceased. To investigate, a CENAPRED technician named Julio Quintero Flores guided a drone over the smoking caldera. Its camera captured something truly inexplicable.
Buoyed by black slag was a huge ovoid stone, two hundred meters from tip to tip.
The director general of CENAPRED, Miguel Ramos Zepeda, immediately reconvened the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, and initial hypotheses were put forth in a barrage of data-driven speculation as members drew on their own expertise and robust webs of research connections.
None of them could have possibly guessed at the truth.
At 7:49 a.m. on the third day since the explosion, as the committee watched in silent horror, the massive stone split like a cocoon. Wedging themselves into the crack came six sapphire talons the length of pickup trucks, glinting in the half-light as they slowly pried the ellipsoid open. Then, through that gaping crack, something unspeakably massive clawed its way out into the pumice-choked, steaming air.
The drone caught a quick glance at a white-hot impassive eye before the signal went dead.
Lords Of The Earth is available from Amazon here.
