Volcano Watch

by Toni Dwiggins

  I fell. I snapped out of my skis and continued on foot. The ground was rotting beneath me and the rain of thin cement poured in a curtain off the rim of my helmet. The gloom had become so thick, so Stygian, that it was hopeless.

  I could not find my way back. I could not help them down below. I could do no good.

  Wandering, aimless, I smacked into concrete.

  It made no difference to me, but my gut led me inside. I closed the door and sat in a circle of light made by Jimbo’s headlamp. My mind dulled. I had no more terror, no thoughts really, save one. I can do no good.

  The noise outside was formless, sounds of wind and explosions and pelting ashfall merged to a monochromatic din.

  *****

  Sometime later, I thought to call Bridgeport. I could raise nothing but static. I cracked the door and peered out. It was lighter outside than inside. I changed from ski boots to hiking boots, shouldered my pack, and trudged outside.

  The sky, in every direction, was a damp gray-white fog. It seemed the output of ash had lessened, or the capricious winds had driven the bulk of it elsewhere. I heard no roaring, saw nothing but fog.

  Once again, I climbed the knoll. The footing was tricky—everywhere a crust of ash, ice, cinders, and mud, and in places I could tread upon it and in places my boots punched through to a slurry like setting cement. I reached the vista point and started down Dave’s Run, which disappeared below in fog, but as the angle steepened the stuff beneath my boots began to slide. I scrambled backward, sinking into it now. Couldn’t get free. Here was the old nightmare, only I couldn’t run and I didn’t scream because I no longer felt any need to escape. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled back up and anchored there at the summit.

  I’d wait. In time, the stuff would congeal enough for me to go down and search. I had nothing better to do than wait.

  *****

  Sometime later, the mountain tried to shake me off.

  There was a screech, another class of roar in my growing catalog of beastly sounds, and I thought, here it comes. But the mountain did not explode. The sounds grew and the ground shivered and I knew, regaining enough of my senses to recognize the quirks of this latest of beasts.

  The flanks of the mountain seemed to heave. Far down as I could see, the entire pack of muck was in motion, fluidized, slopping downhill and disappearing into the fog, and what was left behind was ground stripped raw. This beast was named lahar—a landslide of volcanic debris made fluid by steam-wetted ashfall and melted snow. What this debris flow did farther downslope as it picked up boulders and trees and chairlift pilings and speed was beyond my sight and desire to know.

  Within the gray avalanche below, for a moment, I thought I saw a flash of neon yellow plumage, but the color disappeared so quickly I knew it must have been a hallucination.

  I knew only that they were dead down there.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  I waited until the rumbling abated, then started down.

  Where the downslope side of the knoll steepened, its crust had crevassed and sheared off, and so I waded out of the mucky stuff onto a hardened mudcap. I descended slowly, automatically scanning for loose rocks and cornices but I saw nothing left capable of avalanching. I looked up; the gondola towers just outside the station stood. Downhill, they were gone.

  It was primeval and I wandered lost down the landscape.

  As I walked I chafed at the skin of cement which coated every exposed inch of flesh. It came off in chips and left my face burning.

  I came to a rise and far down the flank of the mountain I saw shapes. Towers? No, stumps. I tried to pierce the ashy fog. I looked up, saw how far I’d come, and calculated that the stumps must be the remains of the mid-station.

  Then something was left standing. A brick or two. Not enough, though, to shelter four fragile packages of flesh and bone. Too far down, anyway. Even had they struck out for shelter at the first sight and sound of the cataclysm, they surely could not have reached the mid-station.

  But I had nowhere else to go.

  I got all the way down to the mid, and I would have kept going except the lumpy remains reminded me of something I’d read in the manual—Mike’s bible. I’d been reading about the mechanics of the gondola, wondering if we dared risk riding it again, but there was more to the pages, including a maintenance map of the mountain. I closed my eyes and saw the page, saw the green square near the top of Ricochet run. Just at the patrolled boundary, a green square indicated a maintenance shed. I thought this over. Mike had devoured the manual; Mike would know about the shed. If they had come far enough up Dave’s Run when Red Mountain went pyro, they might have struck out for the shed and reached it before the lahar hit.

  I angled back up the mountain.

  Once, I raised my eyes from the strange pitted asphalt-clad ground to look beyond, eastward. There was no horizon, no caldera, nothing below the mountain but bands and layers and eddies of ash. There was no town down there, certainly. But the scalped mountain was real enough.

  I began to cry, plodding uphill, the caustic ash in the goggles washing into my eyes.

  In time, through the fog, something took shape. Should be the shed. I traversed the fall line, and as I drew nearer the shape resolved into walls and a bit of roof. The shed’s high enough on the mountain, I saw dully, that the lahar had not yet gathered enough force to obliterate. It had merely torn the building in half, and one half was gone.

  No door to enter so I clambered over mud-caked bricks. Inside looked like outside. Rubble and muck. A twisted I-beam. In the corner where the two standing walls met, where there remained a semblance of structural integrity, there was a body.

  I stood rooted. Please, not Walter. Not Eric. I let out a sound and the head slowly turned. He’s alive, and everything changed and I scrambled forward yelling but as I knelt and struck my knee on hard metal I recognized this body—body and sled united. Krom. I tore around the rest of the room, finding nothing that could be human. They were gone, then. Krom, in the corner, groaned. Krom’s survived, on pain. I will be forever stumbling across his body.

  I came over. “Where are they?”

  “Get it off.” The voice was muffled, nearly unrecognizable.

  He lay supine on the sled, wedged into the debris as if the sled had burrowed to escape the lahar. But his body was clear; nothing on top of him, save the same muck that coated everything. I bent closer, angling my headlamp. Cement covered his head like a hood. He wore a mask. There were the crude contours of a face but it was masked in cement. No hair, no ears, no eyes. There were the slopes of cheeks and the rise of a nose, and on the underside was a hole where something, perhaps a sneeze before the stuff was set, had cleared a nostril. Below the nose was a break in the mask where the cement had been clawed away to free a mouth. The skin that showed was black, and it was only when I looked still closer that I saw it was dried blood.

  I removed a glove and touched the mask. It was a hard seamless casing; crack it and it would come apart like the halves of a mold. I stared at the scabbed skin around his mouth. No, the stuff was glued to him.

  He lay so still, his arms in line with his body, that at first I thought the cement had glued him to the sled, but then I looked more closely, running my fingers along one runner, and I found a cement worm that bunched and crawled across his midsection to bunch at the opposite runner.

  I shoved back. “Who tied you?”

  His head turned.

  Eric did. Had to be Eric. I stared at the worm; Eric had done it before the lahar. He didn’t have cuffs but he had rope. I went cold. “What did you do? Why are you tied?”

  Shallow breathing through crusted mouth.

  “Who got the stuff off your mouth?”

  He whispered, “don’t know.”

  They did. After the lahar. They’re alive. They cleared his mouth and then went to get first aid supplies. Their packs were swept away so they had to go to the summit. Should be back by now. But no. They didn’t find me at the summit s
o they kept going. Search and rescue; it’s what they do. It’s a big mountain. All of them had to search. Even Walter. Especially Walter; he wouldn’t be left behind.

  I scrambled up.

  He heard me. “Get it off.”

  “You can breathe.”

  I stumbled through the fog, yelling, and then I moved downhill because that’s where they would be searching for me, thinking I’d been swept downhill. I took a different route this time, descending until I reached a drop-off. I thought I knew that drop-off. I peered over the cliff but could see nothing below. I began to traverse, searching for another way down, because if I remembered right there was a ridge below the drop-off, angling off to the south, and if the ridge was high enough to channel the lahar north then someone could have survived to the south. But the fog had lowered and the ash had thickened and the puny beam of my headlamp was not enough to lead me down. I kept going, searching for a way down. After a time, I knew I was lost. I headed back uphill, thinking I’d go all the way up to the station for lanterns, but I seemed to climb forever without reaching the summit. Didn’t care, really. I wandered until at last I came upon the shed. Whole mountain’s lost in black fog and here I come, back to Krom, like he’s put out a beacon.

  It had darkened so much since I’d left that I could not make out details. I moved inside cautiously, navigating the wreckage, sweeping my beam to the corner where Krom lay. No sound came from him and I thought he’d lost consciousness. No demands to get it off. Perhaps he’d died. And then there was a sound, a cough, but it did not come from Krom. I spun and my light fell on a body slumped against the I-beam.

  I let out a cry.

  His eyes opened. He squinted against my light. He hunched his shoulders as though to rise, then abandoned the effort. I didn’t move. I was afraid I had assembled him here out of hope. I wanted so badly to believe in Walter that I just held my breath. Finally, I was assured of the existence of this old man with his face chipped raw and a blackened dent in his skull. “Are you all right?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, then with an effort asked, “are you all right?” I nodded. We let that sink in. He said, “I had lost hope.” I nodded.

  He told me his head hurt. I rushed to him, unslinging my pack.

  Rudimentary first aid. I cursed myself for not learning more. All our trips into the field, where anything can happen, and I never learned more than to treat hypothermia and snakebite and splint a broken bone. In horror and ignorance, I applied antibiotics and bandaged his head. Ashy scabs; no fresh blood. He was not convulsing, or vomiting, or seeing double, or talking nonsense about birthdays. But he sagged beneath my hands, he had no rebound. I gave him water and when he had drunk his fill I checked his vital signs. “Eric?” I said, finger on Walter’s pulse. “Mike?”

  His pulse skipped.

  “Neither?”

  “We went to find you.” His voice was thin. “Eric and I. Couldn’t see.”

  I knew. The Stygian dark. I could not breathe.

  “We came back. Mike was gone. Adrian said Mike went to hunt for you. We didn’t believe him.”

  “Then Eric was still with you.”

  Walter nodded at the ropes binding Krom. “Eric did that. Said he promised you.”

  I whispered, “What did he do then?

  “He went in search for Mike.”

  My eyes stung with acid tears.

  “I remained behind.” Walter made that coughing sound. “I was spent. I was of no use.” He took another drink. “After the lahar hit, after I regained myself, I found Adrian like this. I cleared his mouth. Then I went out in search.”

  I whispered, “You were hurt. You said you were spent.”

  “It no longer mattered.”

  I said, tight, “It’s a big mountain.”

  “Yes it is, dear.”

  I stood and shouldered my pack. “I’m going to look.”

  “It’s too dark.”

  I moved outside and outside was dark as inside, I needn’t have moved at all to know that but I had to go look. I could see ahead a couple of yards along the beam of my headlamp but beyond that stunted reach it was pitchy black. I was a nearsighted creature, and beyond the very near I was blind. Blind as Krom beneath his hood. I swiveled, sweeping my lamp, carving a tight circle of light. “Maybe lanterns,” I said, although I didn’t know how many more visible feet lanterns would buy me, “there’s lanterns in the station, Walter, it’s not far,” although I wasn’t sure if I could find my way.

  “You leave, he kills me.”

  I froze. It was Krom’s voice. I simply clamped down my muscles, some animal instinct. Freeze and listen. Walter, I saw, had stiffened as well. He had come up onto his hands and knees and he was looking at Krom. My beam caught Walter in sharp profile and cast a long wolfish shadow upon the rutted ground. Had I missed something in my rush to nurse him? I’d been watching so keenly for the trauma signs—vomiting, convulsions—when I should have searched for something more fundamental. I watched now for a signal. Some predatory tic. What sign would Walter give if he intended to commit murder? I didn’t know. That wasn’t in my world view. “Walter?”

  Walter said, “I didn’t know he was still alive.”

  I moved back to Krom and pitched to my knees. “You didn’t check him, Walter? When you came back from your search?” No. I knew how it felt to end up at the shed, used up, ready to drop and die here if that’s what’s in store. No thought to Krom. Nearly comatose himself. So what’s changed? I watched Walter get to his feet and come settle down opposite me, a new lithe purpose in him. What’s changed, I realized, is water. Rehydration. He’s regained himself, and all that is inside him.

  He touched the mask.

  I pushed his hand away. “I’ll do it.” I tried to find an edge of the mask, a fracture where the mouth hole had been made, but the stuff was thick and set and of a single piece from jaw to scalp. I got Walter’s knife from my pack and probed the jawline. “I’ll try not to cut you, Adrian.”

  He whispered, “Water.”

  I got another bottle from my pack and touched it to his encrusted lips.

  His head jerked. “Use water.”

  Of course. You ungrateful bastard out of hell. I poured a trickle onto the cement around his mouth. Rivulets skittered across the hard surface.

  “Use the knife,” Walter said.

  I froze.

  “Abrade it.”

  Of course. I put the blade to the mask and scraped, then drizzled water over the abraded cement. “Needs to soak in.” I sat back. “We’ll be needing more water, sooner or later. And supplies from the station. But first I’m going to search.” I thought, I’ll pick up where I left off, down below the drop-off. South of the ridge. If I could remember the ridge, I was damn well sure that Eric and Mike could remember it. “Soon as it’s light enough,” I said, “I’m going to search.” I watched Walter. “What will you do when I leave?”

  He held my look. “Don’t worry.”

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

  He waved a hand.

  “Okay, while I wait for it to get light, we’ll talk about what you know. I found the volcano monitor in your pack. Tell me what that means, Walter.”

  “Leave it alone.”

  “You took it with you to the Inn, you were going to haul it over Minaret Summit, what’s it mean?”

  Stony silence.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what I think I know. Night of the evac you went to her office and found it in her safe. I assume it’s not what you expected to find. What were you looking for? Not love letters.”

  “Something of hers,” he said. “Something I might want.”

  “Well you found something. You took it. What’s it tell you?”

  “Leave it alone.”

  “I can’t.” I peered at Walter. He was in there somewhere, inside his own stony mask. What does he know? Enough to prove Krom killed Lindsay?

  I bent to Krom. “You better help me, Adrian. You better tell me what he knows.”

 
; Nothing, from beneath the mask.

  I put the blade to the mask and began to scrape, at the jawline. Water had done its work. The mask was pliable, some kind of thick gray skin. Rhinoceros skin. “Okay, let’s start with what we all know. The monitor was in Lindsay’s safe.” I peeled a length of rhinoceros hide. “She was pissed at you Adrian, wasn’t she? You’re monitoring her volcano, you publicly humiliate her, and she somehow gets hold of your monitor. The two of you, humiliating each other. Some kind of playground game?” I moved the blade back to Krom’s throat where the mask met raw skin, and probed for a new edge. “So you went to her office and demanded she return it and she wouldn’t. That’s why you killed her?”

  Krom breathed audibly.

  “But you didn’t find it, did you? Because if you had, it wouldn’t have still been in her safe for Walter to find.” The knife slipped in my muddy hand. A bead of blood showed at Krom’s throat. He sucked in his breath and brought his head down. I put the knife aside.

  Walter eyed it.

  “What brought you to her office, Adrian? This time.” I could not finesse this job; I dug with my fingers. “You saw Walter at the window? And you surprised him and he had the safe open and there was the monitor. But no. If you killed Lindsay for the monitor, you would have killed Walter.” I sat back. The mask bore long grooves, like an animal had clawed at it. “And I still don’t understand—what’s so important about it? Was there something special about the Hot Creek footage?”

  Nothing from beneath the mask, not even a plea to get it off.

  I looked up. “Walter?”