So dark. I’d never seen such darkness with my eyes open.
I clawed at the snow, digging until my fingers stung.
Oh you fool, which way is up?
Well flip a coin. Just dig, what else can you do? I clawed one side of the cavity, fingers on fire, then clawed the other. I put my fingers in my mouth and tasted blood. And a thought came, a gift. I dug out a chunk of snow and put it in my mouth and mashed it, melting it, then opened my mouth and let it out. Snowmelt ran down my right cheek. I’m lying right-side down. Up is to my left.
I dug. For minutes—hours? although it couldn’t have been hours because there wasn’t enough air to survive hours—I dug, and the cavity filled with loose snow and I compacted it into the downhill wall. Trying not to breath too much, trying not to think. And then came a time when I was digging mechanically, hope long since gone, just digging because it was something to do. Finally it hurt too much to continue.
Fear got me around the throat and I cursed myself for that note to Jimbo—such a clever note making sure he wouldn’t worry—and if he could have heard my scream right now I’d scream my head off.
I did not have the air to scream.
So cold. So dark. There was a part of me that was already so cold and tired I thought I was approaching an accommodation to death.
You fool, you reap what you sow.
Fear seized me again, and I began yanking my right arm, which was pinned to my ribs. The arm moved, snow scraping the back of my right hand. It moved, millimeters at best, but that was something and I yanked and yanked and my arm moved back and forth. Skin stung. I yanked, and torqued my body just enough to give the arm clearance. I moved it up my breastbone and felt my heart pounding on the other side of that hard wall. Arm was coming free.
Two hands free. One was on fire and the other was numb.
Shifting my shoulders, I placed both palms against the snow roof and shoved. Pounded. Nothing moved. I screamed, clawing and digging, calling myself every name in the book and foolish was the kindest of the lot.
There was a rumbling and my icy bed was ever so gently rocked.
Quake. I froze. What’s the effect of a quake on snow? Loosen it, right? I began to pound again, digging now with my knuckles.
Snow avalanched onto my face.
The roof had cracked and there was light. I cried out and reached up to widen the crack and more snow came loose and I was laughing and crying and, now that there was light, finding it very funny that I had drooled my way to digging in the right direction.
Cold dry powder drifted in. Snowing outside. How long had I been buried? I enlarged the fisthole that had let in light and snowfall. Indeed it was snowing and the flakes landing on my raw hands tickled uncomfortably. The light was dawn gray. How long? I tore at the remaining snow roof and pushed up onto my right elbow, trying to see above ground.
And then I screamed for Lindsay.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Ash peppered into my mouth.
In a thin and silky rain, ash was falling, ash so finely scattered that it appeared to have been sieved, and it seemed that this sieving could never cover the ground, but it had, for the ground and snow and trees and rocks were all the uniform pearl gray of that desiccated rain.
There was noise, the fitful roar of a faraway crowd. Ash congealed in my mouth like paste.
Dreams do come true.
There’s blood everywhere and I’m tearing at the ground and fighting the snow. My hands are finished but I’m out, and I get to my knees and then to my feet. My legs are mush but I can stand on the rigidity of terror.
This looks like a dream world in which the sun is in eclipse and trees and rocks have familiar shapes but no definition, as though they are in danger of dissolving and disappearing from sight altogether.
I couldn’t find a horizon.
My parka was gone. My cell phone was gone. My watch was gone. My yellow sweatshirt was wet and gray, growing woolly with ash. My hands were gray and ash clumped where the flesh was torn and it looked as though I’d grown thick gray scars.
An observation formed itself like a cloud at the top of my head: this is a very light ashfall. This ash is the consistency of dust. This ash is cold, light gray. There is no yellow tinge of sulfur. What do I do now, Lindsay?
She says the obvious: Find shelter, honey.
I took a few steps upcanyon but upcanyon was veiled in ashfall. Can’t walk through this to the car. Too far. Ash veils everywhere. Where’s it coming from? Red Mountain. I stood stunned, in the helicopter’s flight path, waiting for the worst.
But the ash above Red Mountain was the same as the ash everywhere else.
What’s erupting?
She won’t say.
I decided to go find Walter.
There was no trace of skis or poles, nothing but an annular depression in the snow where I had lain. I set off on foot downcanyon. The ash was shallow; I’ve skied deeper powder than this. Ash kept falling and I couldn’t keep it out of my mouth. I turtled inside my sweatshirt, setting my hands on fire, and got my bra free and tied it like a surgical mask around my face. I descended through the dream world and when the ground shook I braced for another avalanche, but here the canyon had broadened and its walls held their cover. There was just the incessant feathering of ash, blurring the topography, turning hemlocks into people. There was no reason Walter would have come this way, so far from Pika Canyon. Nevertheless, I scrutinized each hemlock as I passed. The forest thickened, and in time I came to a great round empty field. Lake Mary: site of the 20K biathlon race, site of Krom’s evacuation drill. What foresight. I didn’t need a drill. I knew the way. Three miles to home. I hugged the lake’s shore, coming around the east side until I hit the wide gray ribbon that was the Lake Mary Road. As I have done a thousand times, I headed down the road toward town.
The road edged the eastern slope of Mammoth Mountain, which humped its ash-softened shoulder at me: still here?
The faraway roar lowered in pitch.
Ahead, I could make out chairlifts in the sky. Beginner runs there. Watertank, Christmas Tree, Lupin. Skied them almost before I could walk. The road ahead tucked into a tunnel that cut beneath the ski runs. There is a viewpoint just before the tunnel, from which one can see all the way down into Long Valley, into the caldera. I turned, thinking maybe the ashfall will be thick enough to block the view.
It wasn’t.
I had known, of course, that the ashfall originated somewhere but I couldn’t believe in the eruption—not fully—until I saw. You can’t believe there is a snake in the sleeping bag with you until the hissing starts, and even then you aren’t willing to believe but finally you have to look and you find in raw shock the very thing you knew all along was there.
Through the screen of ash, I saw. Boiling clouds of black and white, black metamorphosing into white, black lobes splitting open like mouths and breathing white puffs. The white clouds climbed and the black fell.
I saw the core, a black column that anchored earth to sky. It swelled, contracted, swelled, and pulsed. The snake. Not creeping on the ground but risen to strike.
I saw how the thing was put together, snake cloaked in clouds. The vertical black jet threw off black clouds and as they rose and split, dark rock debris fell back to earth and the white water vapor rose higher. Steam white.
The noise, which pulsed with the column, was the roar of a giant.
Nothing for me to worry about. Not yet. It’s down there, I’m up here. The larger heavier stuff was falling in the south moat, and downwind the clouds strung out and appeared to be dragging a curtain of ash over the caldera. All I was getting up here was drift from the winds.
I watched the eruption, growing giddy at the sight. I know just what this is. Heard about it from Lindsay, saw the evidence laid down by ancient beasts just like this one. Phreatic, a steam-blast explosion. That hot tongue of magma in the south moat had pushed all the way to the surface where it met ground water, flashing the water into steam.
And now the steam is pulverizing old rock, grinding it to pebbles and ash, and shotgunning the lot into the sky. I know this is probably a prelude. I know what happened here hundreds of thousands of years ago and what can happen again tomorrow, or a week from now, or today even, but I can’t seem to make myself move. I can’t stop looking. This is astonishing. This isn’t like my dreams. The ground isn’t rotting, and right now I’m more dazzled than scared. I know I should be getting out of here but this is incredible. This is like watching fireworks in the meadow behind my house when I was little enough that fireworks took my breath away.
Lindsay you should be here to see this. The Survey alert level WARNING does not do this justice. They need another level. HOLY SHIT.
Even for this, she would not come.
And it was her silence that brought me out of my slack-jawed gawking. I started downhill, looking constantly over my shoulder to see if the sight was still there. I took shelter briefly in the tunnel to clean ash off my face, out of my ears, from the folds of my lingerie mask.
Hightailing it down the Lake Mary Road, I kept replaying the image of that snake. I went over every detail, turning that eruption column around in my head wondering, is this big? Small? How is this going to progress? I wanted to go back and look again and at the same time I wanted to get as far away as possible. I was buzzed. I was scared again, but looking that thing in the eye had kicked me into a kind of thrill-ride fear. I wanted to scream and close my eyes and then look and see it all again. You’re nuts, I told myself, you’re crazier than the guy who challenges the volcano but I had come to this weird space where I felt that because I’d looked it dead on, that I was free. I was above it. I had come out of an avalanche and seen this and here I was free to go on my way. I was alive.
I was a cat with nine lives.
I came to the outskirts of town and cut off the Lake Mary Road, toward Walter’s neighborhood. The streets, the houses, were gray. Everybody gone but me. Me and the houses with their coatings of ash like sheet-draped furniture in unused rooms.
Walter’s house was dark. I pounded on the door. He didn’t answer so I got the key he hides behind the rain gutter. Dim inside. I flipped a light switch. No power. Okay; ash had shorted out the transformers. I yelled for him. Silence. I ran through his house, tracking his carpet with ash, knocking into his captain’s chair—and why hadn’t he moved that to storage, one more good chair left behind. He wasn’t home. Okay. I knew now where he was. At her office.
Outside, the ashfall had thickened.
I hesitated. I’d promised her not to do anything foolish. I decided to go home first and gear up.
Stuff’s getting deep, I thought as I walked it. Get skis.
My street was like the others, my house like Walter’s. Dark. I broke into a run, cutting up the empty driveway past the lawn chairs. Keys were in my purse; purse was in the pack. Gone. I got the snow shovel that Jimbo left last time he cleared the path to the woodpile, and smashed the kitchen-sink window. Nothing stops me. I climbed onto the sill then stepped into the sink. Glass crunched. I leaped to the floor, crunched across the kitchen, and grabbed the flashlight from the catch-all drawer.
I shone the light. Cabinet doors stood open. The floor was a sea of broken glass and crockery and dented cans and supine boxes.
I ran to the living room and found the phone table tipped over. Phone was dead.
It’s okay. Just gear up and go.
I ran upstairs to the bathroom and rooted through the stuff spilled out of the medicine cabinet and found bandages and tape and Neosporin. I turned on the faucet and was glad to find that quakes hadn’t ruptured the water pipes. Water sluiced gray mud from my hands and it hurt like hell. My right hand was raw, my left fingertips chewed. The wounds were clotted with dark stuff; ash, blood, I couldn’t tell. I looked in horror. I wanted Lindsay here to bandage my hands. No, I wanted someone alive. Walter.
There was a small earthquake. I bandaged myself, making a mess of the job.
I went into my parents’ room and ransacked Mom’s drawers and fumbled out of my wet clothes and put on hers. Too big; I added layers. Cold as shit in here and getting darker outside.
I moved downstairs. Walk, don’t run. Don’t fall and break an ankle.
Down in the garage, everything was on the floor. I waded in, striking gold again and again. Folding snow shovel. Rope. Pitons—take them, who knew? Water bottles, backpacking stove, very good. A compass—yes, yes, good, great. Flashlights. I chose three. Batteries in the kitchen drawer. I shone my light over the helmets and found Jimbo’s old spelunking hard hat with the caver’s headlamp. Pure gold. I reached for skis, then reconsidered. Snowshoes more versatile, take those. What else, from my father’s emporium? I moved to his workshop and selected knife, duct tape, two screwdrivers, flat and Phillips head—who knew? A new appreciation for my father’s skills flooded me. Walter can’t change a water filter. Walter wouldn’t know where the water filter is. I hunted for my father’s dust masks. Couldn’t find them. Come on, he’s got a million of those things. Buried somewhere. Shit.
The garage shook.
And then like a gift I knew what to do, mind leaping ahead. Nothing stops me.
Back into the kitchen, crunching glass and kicking cans. Ash coming in through the broken window. What a mess. I dropped my gear and went to the catch-all drawer. Batteries, matches, safety pins. I took them all. An old windup watch; I took it. I dug around. Ahhh, rubber bands. I moved to the counter and found the nesting coffee filters, beautiful just beautiful. I put together two coffee-filter-rubber-band dust masks and packed the materials for more. I filled the water bottles.
I ran upstairs and took the first-aid supplies and carried the stuff back down.
Done?
Breathing hard, I swept the flashlight around the kitchen. Must be something else. I hefted the pack. Weighed a ton. I wanted more.
Food.
Nearly blew that. Cans, packages, bags on the counters, on the floor. I started to grab. Wait, prioritize. I emptied a box of granola bars into my pack. Dried apricots, there’s a prize. A package of Oreos. My mouth watered. I spun to the freezer and there was the sweet potato pie. Hard luck, Jimbo. Then my heart sank. No power to nuke it.
I opened the fridge. Empty as Siberia. Bottle of catsup on its side and a sponge. My stomach growled. Back to the cupboard and I found an open sack of pretzels and crammed them into my mouth. Stale. Salty. Wonderful. I drank long and deep from the kitchen faucet, eschewing a glass. I’m alive, I’m surviving, I have no time for such niceties as a drinking glass, should one be left intact.
Now go.
I got Jimbo’s caving helmet and, thank you very much, found batteries to fit. I strapped on the helmet, put on goggles, fitted the dust mask—a success—and put on heavy work gloves. That hurt. Pain didn’t stop me. I got into the pack. Lord in heaven, heavy. I grabbed the snowshoes and went out the door. Didn’t lock it, didn’t look back. I’m outta here.
And I walked into night.
Three in the afternoon and the street was gone. Jimbo’s headlamp caught ash like infinitesimal insects, and beyond that, nothing. Blackness. How am I going to find Minaret and Lindsay’s office if I can’t find my own driveway?
You fool, I thought, you fool with a coffee filter on your face and everything but the kitchen sink on your back.
I went back inside and slammed the door.
My pack weighed a ton. My legs weighed twice as much. I got out of my gear and would have curled up on the floor but for the breccia of glass and ash. I took a water bottle and the bag of pretzels and headed into the living room. I dropped into the big corduroy armchair by the fireplace. From here I could see out the front window, should light return. I considered shutting off Jimbo’s headlamp, to save batteries, but I didn’t want to sit in the dark.
I thought about Walter, unable to change a water filter.
I let my head drop to the arm of the chair and cradle there, knocking Jimbo’s light askew. I thought about th
e pie defrosting in the kitchen.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
It’s morning in the High Sierra, Lindsay, but this place looks like Los Angeles on a bad smog day.
You hear what I’m saying? Air’s ash dirty. Everything’s coated. You know the term ghost town? When I was a kid Dad took the family over to Bodie to see a ghost town and I was disappointed—just a bunch of old mining buildings, no ghosts. Guess what? This, here, is a ghost town. Buildings are here but the people are gone. It’s silent. Far as I can tell, the south moat’s not in eruption anymore so there’s simply no sound. It’s gray. No color, Lindsay, you’d hate that, although gray I realize is one of your colors. This gray is nobody’s color. This is the color of ghosts.
I just came out of the lab, Lindsay. Had to break the storefront window to get in. Walter’s not inside. It’s so spectral in there I sensed him, though.
There’s more ash on the ground today so I’m assuming the eruption continued last night. I can’t say for sure—I was asleep. You hear that? I curled up in that corduroy armchair of Dad’s, the chair you once called too ugly for Goodwill, and I slept through part of your eruption. I’m assuming this beast is still in its phreatic phase, judging from the type of ash. Don’t know when, or if, it will progress to the next stage, erupting fresh magma.
If you were here you’d no doubt get yourself down to the moat while nothing’s going on and whack off a fresh sample close to the vent.
I don’t really care to do that.
When I say nothing’s happening, I mean visibly. There are still quakes. Low-mag, little bumps. Not doing any damage. Here, anyway, I suppose they’re tearing up rock somewhere, magma trying to clear itself a path. You hear what I’m saying, Lindsay? These quakes of yours are getting on my nerves.
No, you don’t hear me. You’ve just packed your ghost bags and gone where the real ghosts go. So I’ll be on my way.
I trudged up the road. I’ll go talk to Walter.
I passed the Ski Tip then came to the building that houses Lindsay’s office. I dropped my gear, tried the heavy glass main doors, and they were unlocked. I went inside, switching on my light. The crime-scene tape was gone from her door. I prepared to knock, then paused. Door was just off-plumb. I angled my light; latch bolts jammed open. Adrenaline shot through me. He is here. And he didn’t have a key so he broke in. “Walter,” I yelled, pushing inside.
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