[Anthology] Killer Thrillers

by Nick Thacker

  “Right,” she said. “A bomb too small won’t destroy the underground structure enough to cause an eruption, but a bomb too big will just incinerate the payload.”

  “So,” Ben said, thinking aloud. “To make sure you get both the volcanic eruption and the virus to be spread, you have to place the viral payload far enough away from the initial blast that it’s safe from that explosion, but close enough to the caldera that the resulting eruption will send the payload into the atmosphere.

  “And Stephens is the viral payload.”

  Julie sighed. “Like I said, he’s part of the bomb.”

  “Then I need to find that bomb,” Ben said, “and you need to get out of the park.” He pushed the accelerator to the floor, and the truck swerved, barely missing a deep hole in the road.

  She looked over at him. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. I’m not letting you get anywhere near that eruption.”

  Julie stiffened her jaw, annoyed.

  “Ben, listen to yourself,” she said. “You’re not making any sense. You explained it to me, remember? If that bomb goes off, it starts a chain reaction. There’s no place in two hundred miles that’s safe.”

  Ben shrugged. “Still —”

  “No, Ben. Stop. Forget it. Where are you going to drop me off? Ten miles from here? Twenty? How much time are you going to waste trying to get me away from the blast zone? And how long do you think you have before the bomb actually goes off?”

  Ben started to answer, but instead turned the radio on. The news report was already in progress, and he turned up the volume. It was a computerized message, reading a pre-written response.

  “…Local police and SWAT teams on high-alert for riot activity, including looting. Please stay indoors, and remain out of contact with anyone outside of immediate family. Contaminated areas include as a southern border Las Cruces, New Mexico. Western border, Kansas City. Eastern border Reno, Nevada. CDC and FEMA have prepared quarantine stations at many metropolitan areas. Please visit www…”

  He turned the volume down again as Julie spoke.

  “It’s not true,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The report. The CDC can’t mobilize that many quarantines that fast. They’re just not set up for it. And FEMA… There’s just no way.”

  “At least they’re doing something,” Ben said.

  “What? What could they possibly be doing?” Julie asked, her voice growing emotional. “Stephens kept me in the dark the entire time, and he murdered the man who’s supposed to be at the front of this thing, keeping the investigation moving forward.”

  “Okay, well what do you want to do, then?” Ben asked. He slowed the truck.

  Julie thought for a moment. “We’re it, Ben. We’re the only people close enough to do anything about it. We’ve got to find that bomb, and fast. And don’t get any ideas about ditching me on the side of the road somewhere.”

  Ben looked at her for a minute, considering the offer. He nodded, then sped up again.

  47

  “How many potholes are on these roads?” Julie asked. “I’m seriously thinking about getting out and walking.”

  Ben smiled, for a moment forgetting the massive predicament they were in. “You know, you’ve got a fantastic ability to ignore the present circumstances and joke around.”

  She shot him a look. “You think I’m joking?” She made a show of readjusting herself on her seat, wincing in mock pain.

  “Sorry,” he said, shrugging. “I’m trying to stay off the larger park roads — it should be abandoned, but we can’t be too careful. Just hang on;, the lake’s coming up in a few minutes.”

  She groaned, but didn’t argue. Instead, she opened her laptop and connected to the wireless internet tethered from her cellphone. For a few minutes, she checked for new emails, updates on the spreading virus, and sent a few emails up the chain of command at the CDC. They both knew it was a long shot, as the CDC was already doing everything they could to stop the spread of the virus, and their ability to provide research support had been extremely stifled by Stephens’ work before. After a few minutes of clicking around, she closed the computer.

  “Try calling again?” Ben asked.

  “There’s no point,” she replied. “Anyone there is already deployed at a waypoint or helping with disaster relief. We need to get to an actual location, then —”

  “Julie, we’ve talked about this,” Ben said. “We can’t risk it. Like you just said, most of your teams are going to have already been deployed, or will be. And we don’t have the time to drive all the way there.”

  “I know, I know,” Julie said, exasperated. “It’s just… frustrating. I feel so helpless. I’ve always been the person to rush in, take charge, you know?”

  Ben smiled from the side of his mouth. “I do know. And what we’re trying to do out here is much more helpful than just driving to a CDC branch and talking to the office staff. There’s nothing that needs to happen back there yet. Let’s get this bomb taken care of, and we can go from there.”

  “But how do we even know where the bomb is?”

  “It’s under the lake,” Ben answered, his voice confident. As he said the words, a sign flew past on the right side of the road with the words “Yellowstone Lake - 1 Mile” printed on it.

  “Ben, Livingston’s already checked there. Remember? He sent a team of geologists and excavators through most of the caves in the region, and found that tunnel. If there was something there, he would have —”

  “Julie, Livingston didn’t tell you that.”

  “He did! He called, and —” she suddenly remembered what Ben was hinting at.

  Livingston hadn’t called — Stephens had.

  She bolted upright in the seat. “Stephens called, not Livingston. He only said Livingston had sent the team in, and he didn’t have any reason to be communicating with Livingston, which means…” She thought for a moment. “Which means he was lying. Ben, if he was lying, we could be heading in the wrong direction.”

  “But we’re not. We’re going exactly where Stephens told us to go. So far he’s double-crossed us at every step, but it’s been his information that’s gotten us this far. He even told us why — he wanted to watch us try to figure it out.” Ben looked at Julie. “If that bomb is actually somewhere in Yellowstone, we’re going to find it exactly where Stephens told us to look.”

  Julie knew he was right — it had to be right. “Yeah, why wouldn’t he just tell us exactly where it is? As insane as he was, he believed it was too late to do anything anyway.”

  She hoped Stephens wasn’t right about that.

  “So where is this cave, anyway?” she asked.

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. But there’s only one cave I can think of that’s long and deep enough to be a good spot. It has to be close enough to the surface that an explosion would penetrate, but deep enough to affect the magma area below the caldera. It’s a few miles around the lake, once we get there, but the cave isn’t terribly long.”

  “But he cut a tunnel into the side of it, right?”

  “Right, and we have no way of knowing how deep that is. But it’s wide enough that we can crouch or slide most of the way through, and there aren’t any major forks. We’ll know right away if we see a manmade tunnel.”

  Ben pulled the truck to the left as the road took a dogleg turn, then he sped up again. This section of the road was considerably better than the one they’d been on, with a gravel base and fewer potholes and bumps. As he aimed the vehicle down the center of the one-lane drive, he couldn’t help but notice the immense beauty of the surrounding country.

  This land had been his only home for over a decade. Diana — his mother — had tried for years to bring him and his brother together again under one roof, but she’d failed.

  Or, rather, he’d failed her.

  After his father died, Ben did the only thing that felt right. He ran away. At the time it hadn’t felt like running away, though, as much a
s it felt like running toward something. This something was staring down at him as he drove through it.

  The trees, pine and spruce, scraping at the ceiling of the sky, their tops ripping into the vast blue and white. The forest floor, which had acted as his bed for so many nights he couldn’t count them, and the soft prickle of the needles that littered the ground and crunched when he walked.

  And the smell.

  That forest, deep-green, fresh, alive smell.

  The smell was the biggest reason he’d settled here, and he swore he’d never live another day without it. Whether it was a mountaintop in Colorado, the sweeping forests of Yellowstone, or his secluded cabin in Alaska, as long as that smell was there when he arrived, he could live anywhere.

  But it saddened him that he wasn’t there now — home — wherever it was. Even though he was in his own backyard, driving like a madman over roads he was intimately familiar with, he wasn’t truly home.

  He wasn’t sure what was missing, what had changed.

  He looked again at Julie and saw her gazing back at him.

  What’ was missing?

  The question rose again.

  What’ was missing?

  He silently tried to answer it, to make it go away. But it didn’t — it wouldn’t. He tried again, and failed.

  Ben suddenly realized it wasn’t a question he as asking about his own life — that question had already been answered. Instead, this question was about their mission, about the task at hand.

  What’ was missing?

  As he posed the question again, emphasizing different beats, different syllables of each word, the answer struck him at once.

  The reason.

  He turned his head sideways, chewing on that answer. The reason was missing.

  The reason Stephens had done it. He wasn’t being paid — he’d given his life for the cause. It couldn’t have been about money, at least not for him. And he wasn’t just a murderer, a basket case with a chip on his shoulder.

  There was something more.

  Something, Ben realized, they should have already figured out.

  A chill came down the back of Ben’s neck as he gripped the steering wheel tightly, all of the possible solutions to the problem suddenly pouring through his mind.

  The plan was, Ben had to admit, all but perfect. If Stephens hadn’t fed them every scrap of information they currently knew, they’d be no better off than the CDC and the rest of the population. They’d be lost, looking for a needle in a haystack.

  No, they wouldn’t even know to look — Stephens was the one who’d told them there was a second bomb. Why had he gone through all the trouble to stage a massive terrorist plot against an entire nation, to then simply die alone?

  Even if he was working with a larger organization, as Malcolm had suggested, why make it a point to have witnesses for his suicidal last stand?

  To simply die alone?

  “Shit,” he whispered. He whipped the truck around, barely coming to a stop. Gravel flew out from the truck’s tires, spraying the trees and bushes growing next to the road and sending birds clamoring out of the way.

  The computer on Julie’s lap slammed against the car door as she shrieked and grasped at the ceiling-mounted handle.

  “What the hell?” she shouted, trying to fight the centrifugal force of the truck’s rotation. “Ben, what’s going on?”

  To die alone.

  That was the reason. That had always been the reason.

  No, the answer.

  That had always been the answer.

  Stephens was talking to him, communicating to them still, from beyond the grave.

  “Ben?”

  He wanted them to feel his pain — the very real, human, pain. Isolated, gripping, terrifying pain.

  Alone.

  48

  “The lithosphere of the Earth, consisting of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle, is normally just under one hundred miles thick. The outer shell of crust makes up what our entire planet lives on, either on land, in the air, or beneath the sea.”

  The Indian man’s voice crackled through the station’s tube TV, the color long since faded. Officer Darryl Wardley wondered why no one had bothered to change it out, or at least have it fixed.

  Could you even fix tube TVs?

  He thought about the question, finding it genuinely more interesting than this dark-skinned man with glasses on TV talking about stuff he’d long since forgotten. He’d pulled the desk shift this evening, but with the mass hysteria keeping everyone insanely busy lately, it was a welcome rest. He blinked, once again concentrating on the TV.

  “This shell is typically between three and five miles thick beneath the Earth’s surface, and closer to thirty-five miles thick on land.

  “The crust section of the lithosphere below the Yellowstone Caldera in Yellowstone National Park is less than two miles thick, meaning that the upper mantle, full of molten rock and magma, is extremely close to the surface. This ‘hotspot’ is one of only a dozen on Earth, and means that the extreme temperatures found within the Earth are much closer to the surface.”

  Again, boring. He wondered if there was a game on — maybe baseball, since they always played. If not, there might be a decent hockey game rerun on ESPN, but he’d have to get up to change the channel. Why can’t we afford a Universal Remote Control? He’d been around long enough to know that it wasn’t anyone’s job, so it had probably just never gotten done. He made a mental note to pick one up at Walmart the next time he was there.

  “The last time this caldera erupted was over 640,000 years ago, and the blast was large enough to send ash as far away as the Pacific coast, some of the plains states, and even the Gulf of Mexico.” As the man spoke, the station had superimposed a slide showing a map of the western United States, covered by a red oblong shape — the volcano — and a lighter shaded section labeled “Ash Zone.”

  “Yellowstone has experienced a massive volcanic eruption just about every 600,000 years, and the prior eruptions — 1.3 million and 2.1 million years ago, respectively — were even larger. Actually, because of this fantastically large land area, the Yellowstone Supervolcano is considered to be the largest active volcano in the world.”

  Officer Wardley frowned. Volcanoes were huge smoking mountains, he thought. But as he considered the park’s many geologic features, including geysers, hot springs, and smoking fissures in the ground, he changed his mind. Maybe there was a volcano under there after all. His family — wife and three kids — and he had spent many summer vacations there, since it was so close. Only a few hours away, and they’d had numerous friends over the years to travel with.

  The Indian man, Dr. Ramachutran, continued explaining the seismic activity that could be found at the park. “It was extremely lucky that this bomb went off where it did, and not closer to the caldera’s center, and that it was not larger. The right explosion could do more damage than a simple blast — it could potentially fracture the already delicate infrastructure of the plates holding the magma below at bay. In fact, since many scientists believe that Yellowstone is due for an eruption, a blast of a certain size could jumpstart this timeline.”

  Wardley sat up in his chair, no longer daydreaming. He saw for the first time another person on the television, this time a woman in a red dress, obviously the interviewer. She asked a few questions, which the man answered one at a time.

  “To put in perspective how large this volcanic eruption will be, consider the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980, which we no doubt all remember. Yellowstone’s volcano would be on a force magnitude of 2,500 times that size. It would send ash more than thirty miles straight up into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun and most likely causing the planet’s global temperature to plummet.

  “But this ash would be a long-term problem. For the people within five to six hundred miles of the actual eruption, all life will be either incinerated instantaneously or consumed by pyroclastic lava flows that move at high speeds. The western half of the United
States might simply cease to exist, but the effects to the global economy and that of humanity in general will be devastating.”

  The woman made a remark about the man’s dire explanation, calling into question the confidence he had in his prediction.

  “This is not speculation, mind you. It is scientific fact. Volcanologists and geologists have long been hard at work predicting not if this eruption will take place, but when. There is a strong possibility that we will be without an eruption for the next 1,000 years, and even 10,000 years, but there is no definitive way to understand the dynamics at play beneath the surface of the Earth.”

  The woman turned away from the man and spoke to the camera.

  “You heard it yourself. Dr. Ramachutran is an esteemed volcanologist and the author of numerous books on the subject. With the increased interest surrounding the explosion at Yellowstone National Park only days ago, and of course the terrible virus that is spreading throughout the United States that is believed to have been initiated by that same explosion, we wanted to bring you a special edition feature for tonight’s newscast that examined the Yellowstone Caldera.

  “In a moment, we will return to your regularly scheduled programming after a brief update from our disaster relief team regarding the enigma strain virus.”

  The woman’s face was replaced by a handsome man in his mid-fifties, with perfectly combed salt-and-pepper hair. He was smiling, but Officer Wardley had worked with people long enough to know the man on the television was holding in a certain amount of fear. Possibly panic.

  “The enigma strain virus is still eluding the nation’s best researchers, though we are told that a breakthrough is imminent. As you have no doubt already heard, please stay indoors, lock your house, and do not venture out for any reason. Stay isolated, and do not physically interact with anyone other than your immediate family…”

  Wardley scoffed at the man on TV. The anchor was stuck at work, just like him. How many others were out there, stuck at their jobs, explaining their own demise to the rest of their species? Wardley had already fielded calls from three of his fellow officers — two accounts of looting and one small riot gang making its way up and down the main street of town. Even for a small city, the crazies somehow seemed to be the majority.