Apocalypse Machine

by Robinson, Jeremy

  When Holly and I pass Diego, he forces himself to follow.

  “Move it, you old codger,” I say to Phillip, but he just waves me off.

  “Need another—”

  The ice beneath us quakes. Some unseen and distant part of the glacier cracks open, the sound like a gunshot, rolling over the icy plane.

  Phillip groans and brings up the rear.

  We move like this for more than an hour, stopping just twice to drink, breathe and stretch. Both times, we’re propelled back into action by the rumbling volcano. It’s no longer beneath us, but it’s still capable of killing us instantaneously, with poison gas, glacial flooding or good old fashioned pyroclastic flow—a mix of 1000-degree gas and powdered stone that rushes away from a volcano at 450 mph, enveloping everything in its path. It’s a horrible, yet very fast way to die, as the residents of Pompeii discovered when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

  The sun is low in the sky ahead, forcing our eyes to the ground as we trudge along, our energy nearly sapped. My legs ache, but not nearly as badly as my lungs, which feel blistered and torn. With every step, I feel lower to the ground. I fight off thoughts of stopping and laying down to sleep by picturing Ike, Ishah, Mira and Bell. They become my world. My goal.

  Stay alive.

  Get home.

  “Stop,” Phillip says. “I can’t go on.”

  I turn my eyes forward without lifting my head. Phillip stands a few feet away, his legs teetering like pine trees in a storm. He’s pitched forward, hands on knees, head dipped toward the earth, which I notice is dark gray now, not glacial white.

  Where are we? I think, and I look beyond Phillip. I see Holly ten feet ahead, smiling back at us, and Diego further on, leaning against something solid, black and cast in silhouette, thanks to the setting sun. Diego tilts his head back, draining a water bottle.

  “Phil,” Holly says. “We’re here.”

  “Here, where?” Phillip says, standing and staggering until I reach up and catch him. We stumble a bit before balancing and lifting our hands to block the sun. With the sun blocked, the superjeep is easy to see. Its bulky frame fills me with relief.

  “Thank God.” Phillip staggers past Holly and collides with the vehicle’s side, arms outstretched to embrace the vehicle. He flinches back when the engine roars to life. Kiljan is already behind the wheel, waving us on. Despite the long, exhausting trek, the man hasn’t lost his sense of urgency. And with good cause.

  It feels like we’re half a world away from the melting ice and churning subglacial caldera, but in geological terms, we’re still at ground zero. Pompeii was a little more than six miles from Vesuvius, and it would have taken the pyroclastic cloud just forty-eight seconds to envelope the city. At five miles from the caldera, we’d have even less time, assuming the eruption jettisons material in our direction. Most models predict Bardarbunga’s ash and gasses will travel east to west, descending on the UK and Europe. But that doesn’t mean we’re safe. Not remotely. Even if six miles is considered the standard ‘safe zone for habitation.’ Tell that to the residents of Pompeii, and the more than 25,000 people killed by volcanoes since 1980.

  Kiljan juices the gas, prodding me along with the engine’s roar. I hobble to the tall jeep and open the back door, where Phillip and Diego are already waiting, looking half asleep. Holly has a hard time climbing in, so I shove her from behind and close the door behind her. I have my own struggle climbing in to the tall, front passenger’s seat, but Kiljan reaches across, grabs my arm and hauls me inside.

  Blessed heat rolls over my exposed skin. I lean forward, melting the frozen moisture from my face.

  “Buckle,” Kiljan says.

  “I will, I will.” The vehicle’s heat, despite just starting to warm up, feels like a hot flame against my skin. But I can’t pull myself away.

  “Buckle, now!” Kiljan shoves the transmission into Drive and hits the gas. I’m flung back into my seat, lost in the chaos of the moment. And then I see it, out the windshield and then the side window, as the superjeep peels around in a circle; a cloud of ash and smoke launches skyward on the horizon.

  Bardarbunga has erupted.

  And we all know what’s coming next.

  Ignoring the pain wracking my whole body, I yank my seatbelt down, and after three frantic tries, I clip it into place. As the superjeep peels back onto the path that brought us to the glacier’s edge, I look back again. I see a wave of distortion—kicked up snow and stony grit—rolling toward us. Gripping the armrest to my left and the ‘oh shit’ handle above me on the right, I shout, “Hold—” but my voice is cut short by the shockwave’s impact and a cacophonous boom.

  4

  I’m looking down at the gritty, rock strewn ground through the superjeep’s windshield. The back end has lifted up, propelled by the shockwave. Holly tumbles from the back seat, falling between Kiljan and me. My left hand snaps up from the armrest and catches the thankfully lithe woman’s shoulder, keeping her face from crashing into the dash, but stretching my muscles to the limit, and then beyond. I shout in pain as sinews snap, but no one notices because all of us were already screaming.

  Just when it seems the superjeep will hit a 90 degree angle and topple onto its roof—a death sentence for all of us even if we survive the crash—Kiljan slams his foot on the gas. The big front tires of the four-wheel drive vehicle are still in contact with the ground, and when they churn against the rough surface, we’re launched forward. The forward motion pushes the back end down, and keeps us from flipping, but we remain upright for several horror-filled seconds, until the rush of air dies down and the back of the superjeep slams back to the earth.

  The vehicle’s oversized tires and forgiving shocks absorb much of the impact, but Kiljan quickly pushes the superjeep to its limits. He’s plowing over rocks and crevices large enough to stop most trucks in their tracks. I watch the speedometer needle move steadily clockwise. I attempt to convert kph to mph, but give up when the needle nears the numbers in red. Our trajectory takes us downhill, and will continue to, until we leave the mountainous region. On one hand, that’s a good thing. Our retreat will be a speedy one. On the other hand...

  I squish my face against the passenger seat’s burning cold window and look back, up the steady grade. Gray stone catapults into a clear blue sky. My sigh of relief catches in my throat when the gray horizon rises up higher. What I thought was more barren stone is actually a pyroclastic cloud.

  “Kiljan...” I say.

  He glances in the rearview. “I see it.”

  The cloud is churning up into the air, but also rolling down the incline. It’s still miles behind us, but it’s massive and shoved steadily outward by the world’s most powerful combustion engine.

  Pebbles flung by the initial explosion rattle off the roof and the hood of the vehicle, falling like hail. It’s loud enough to keep anyone from talking. We clear the falling debris quickly, putting more miles between us and the volcano, but not the expanding cloud.

  As Kiljan maneuvers around a boulder that even the superjeep can’t tackle, we drive perpendicular to Bardarbunga once more, and I get a clear view of the eruption. Gray smoke, soot and earth rises several miles into the air, spreading out wide in a mushroom cloud that dwarfs any created by man. Orange streaks of lightning crisscross the sky as dust and debris generate enough static electricity to power a city.

  “This has to be the largest eruption in recorded history,” Holly says, hands pressed against the window, eyes wide with a mix of fear and admiration. Every volcanologist dreams of being this close to an eruption. The downside of that dream is that most volcanologists close enough to witness an eruption like this, don’t survive to tell the tale.

  I place my hands against the glass, sharing Holly’s awe. As soon as my right hand touches the glass, I yank it back, hissing through my teeth. I look at the glove, wondering what the burn across my palm looks like now. A slave to curiosity, I pull the glove from my hand and look at the wound, now bright red. It had been bla
ck, and I had mistaken it for frostbite at first. But the spike had been hot, not cold.

  No, I think, that’s not right either. It had been cold to the touch when I first reached out for it. It was even covered with a thin film of ice that my body heat had melted. But when I snapped out of that vision, or whatever it was, the spike had become scorching hot. A coincidence, I tell myself, but it’s hard to believe. The alternative is that physical contact with the spire triggered the reaction, and as a result, the subsequent eruption. But that makes no sense either, because Kiljan had the thing jammed in his toe and nothing happened. That pretty much leaves me with some kind of supernatural explanation, which is to say, no explanation at all.

  Beeping pulls my attention away from the view and my thoughts. Kiljan has the satellite phone in his right hand, dialing with his thumb, while he steers with the left.

  “Two hands on the wheel,” Phillip insists from the back seat. “Ten and two, for God’s sake!”

  Kiljan puts the phone to his ear, glancing at me for a moment while he waits for whoever is on the other end to pick up. The look in his eyes, determined but full of doubt, chills me. We’re roaring away from the volcano now, easily twelve miles out, but the big man still isn’t convinced we’re in the clear. I twist around and look out the rear window. The massive pyroclastic flow, lit in hues of orange by the setting sun ahead of us, rolls steadily downhill behind us. It’s not moving at 450 mph, but even at a fraction of that speed, it will eventually overtake us. Perhaps within minutes.

  Kiljan’s conversation is loud, fast-paced and completely unintelligible, as he’s speaking in his native Icelandic. When he hangs up, he looks simultaneously defeated and more determined.

  “Who was that?” Phillip asks. “Who were you speaking to?”

  “Airfield,” Kiljan says, and I find myself nodding. The small airfield is the fastest way out of the region. If we could get airborne, it would be our best chance of survival. Perhaps our only chance. “There is one plane remaining.” He glances at each of us. “But no pilot.”

  Phillip looks frozen in horror.

  Diego sags forward a little bit. “Mierda.”

  “But...” Holly starts, and then just shakes her head and looks out the window.

  “I can fly.”

  The words escape my mouth before I’ve really considered them. I have a pilot’s license. I got it three years ago, when writing a piece about how easy it is to do so. Took all the classes. Passed the tests. And flew a plane for the required number of hours, while a Modern Scientist photographer snapped photos of me. It was a popular piece, and part of why I get to go on expeditions like this one, but I haven’t flown a plane since. Nor have I had any real desire to. I put on a good smile for the camera, but I hated every second of it, knowing that one wrong move could send us plummeting to our doom.

  Phillip scoffs. “You?”

  “Unless you have wings or a teleporter,” I say. Part of me screams at myself to shut-up, to withdraw my claim and tell Kiljan to keep driving. But I know where that path ends. We all do. Even Phillip, who crosses his arms, but swallows his complaints.

  Kiljan tosses the phone into my lap and puts both hands on the wheel. My head slams into the headrest, when he shoves his injured foot down on the gas pedal. The superjeep roars even faster, fueled by hope. Possibly false hope.

  I turn my eyes down, zoning out as I imagine a thousand different scenarios involving the plane and our deaths. A jarring bump rattles my thoughts, and I suddenly see the Sat phone resting on my lap. I lift it up and turn to Kiljan, “Do you mind?”

  He looks at me like I just passed gas with a volume and stench only attainable by a hippopotamus on a fiber-rich diet. I take that as a ‘yes,’ and dial home. There are several clicks as the signal shoots into space, bounces across a network of satellites and then zips down into the landlines leading to New York. Five shrill rings are followed by the sweet, still high-pitched voice of an eight year old boy. “Hello?”

  “Ike, buddy, is that you?”

  “Dad?”

  “It’s me.” There are too many things I want to say to him. About his birth. His life. My failings as a father. About his mother. And about the future. But there isn’t time for all that, so I just say, “I love you, Ike.”

  The boy laughs. I can picture him rolling his eyes. In public, he’s not affectionate. At home he’s all hugs. But even then, getting him to say those words every parent wants to hear, it’s like the rarest gift. So when he says them now, “Love you, Dad,” I start to cry.

  Working my damnedest to not become a blubbering fool, I say, “Can I talk to mom?”

  I hear a muffled, “Mommy!” on the other end, followed by, “Dad is on the phone!” Then his voice is clear and loud again. “She’s coming.”

  There’s a ruffle of movement and Mina’s voice threatens to make me weep again. She’s normally reserved and quiet, but not now. “Where are you? Tell me you’re not there.”

  The eruption must have made news already. Most of the world might not know about it yet, but Mina keeps track of where I am and what’s going on around me when I’m away.

  “We’re about to get on a plane,” I say, feeling guilty for glossing over the truth. I look in the side view mirror. The wall of smoke rolling closer calls me a liar. I keep my eyes on the view as I talk, watching the billowing formations, laced with lightning and lit by the sun. Seen through a television, it would be beautiful. “I was just calling to...” Shit. To what? Say goodbye? Just in case? There goes my ‘getting on a plane’ story. “...to tell you both that I love you.”

  “There is no plane, is there?”

  “There is,” I say. “I promise there is.”

  “But you’re not there yet.”

  “We’re on our way.” An aberration at the bottom of the churning cloud catches my attention. A line of undulating white separating the gray earth from the gray smoke streaks toward us, outpacing the cloud.

  “Can you give me to Sabella?” I ask. When she pauses, I add, “Hurry.”

  “Love you, too,” she says, and I hear knocking. The house is a duplex. On one side is my wife of twelve years. On the other is my, for lack of a better word, mistress of eight years. It’s a long, complicated story around two impossible pregnancies and what has become a polyamorous relationship. We’re not polygamists, or part of a religious cult. Far from it. But when a series of unintended circumstances resulted in both women carrying my children at the same time, I couldn’t abandon one of them, and neither of them wanted me to. While they don’t love each other in a romantic sense, we are all one family now, and Ike and Ishah are the closest brothers—or half-brothers—I’ve ever seen.

  During the transition, I tap Kiljan’s shoulder and hitch my thumb backwards a few times. While he looks in the rearview, the three scientists in the back seat crane around to see what I’m motioning toward.

  On the phone, I hear a door open. “Hey Min—” Bell’s voice cuts short. “What’s wrong?” That Bell can see that normally hard-to-ruffle Mina is upset means she really looks upset.

  Mina starts to talk, “Abraham is—”

  Then Bell’s voice is loud in my ear. “Baby, what’s happening?”

  I smile at the obvious differences between the women. They even speak at different volumes. “Volcano. No biggie.”

  “Don’t play,” she says. “Mina looks worried. Like, really worried. You always said you’d give it to me straight if you were ever in trouble.”

  She’s right. I did. But I never thought I’d be in trouble when I said that. Still, total honesty is how a relationship with two different women works. “I’d put my odds of getting out of this at sixty percent.”

  “Dear Lord Almighty,” she says. Bell, unlike Mina and me, is a church goer. A true believer. Despite our strange familial lifestyle that she freely admits is ‘living in sin.’ And while I don’t share her beliefs, her earnest love of God, the Bible and all the things that go along with that, have helped me realize th
at Christians aren’t nearly as bad as the politicians who have hijacked the religion.

  “Bollocks!” Phillip shouts. “It’s glacial flooding!”

  “It’s gaining on us!” Diego adds.

  “Who was that?” Bell asks. “Who did I just hear?”

  “Colleagues,” I say.

  “Why are they shouting?”

  “Because our odds just reversed.”

  “Oh, Lord Jesus.”

  “Listen, baby. I love you.”

  “Love you, Abe.”

  “Give the phone to Ishah.”

  “Ishah!” Bell shouts, and I can hear the warble in her voice. “Daddy’s on the phone!”

  I hear his small voice asking questions as he approaches, but it’s lost in a burst of static. “Daddy...you...where...”

  “Ishah?” I say, and then I shout into the phone. “Ishah!”

  “—addy?”

  The signal cuts out. “God damnit!” I start to dial the number again, but Kiljan stops me with a tap on the shoulder. He points ahead where a small hanger and landing strip emerge at the center of a valley. I recalculate our odds to fifty-fifty, and then look in the side view mirror again. I realize they’re not remotely that good. A churning wall of water, just a mile back, cascades down the hill behind us. I clutch the phone in my hand, heartbroken over not being able to speak to Ishah, who is perhaps the most sensitive and intuitive person I know.

  Goodbye, Ishah, I think, hoping that if Bell’s God is real, he’ll convey the message for me. Love you, son.

  5

  “You have got to be joking,” Phillip complains, and this time I wholeheartedly agree with him. The superjeep kicks up a trail of dust as it roars down the side of the runway—a stretch of compressed, unpaved earth—headed for a small hanger at the far end. It’s not the runway’s condition or the hanger that’s disconcerting, it’s their positioning. To take off, we’re going to have to fly toward the flood water and cloud of ash rolling at us.