The Yellowstone Event (Book 5): The Eruption

by Maloney, Darrell

  “Oh, baby, you got the chair! I’m so proud of you!

  “When can we go celebrate?”

  “Not quite yet. It won’t be announced for a couple of days. It has to be hush hush until then.”

  “Well, can I at least go out and buy a new dress? That’ll be the next best thing, and then I’ll have something nice to wear when we do go out.”

  “Honey, I think you should go out and buy a dozen new dresses. This is gonna be a big thing for us.”

  She actually giggled on the other end of the phone, this fifty four year old woman who had way more money than morals.

  “You coming home early tonight? I’ll have Charlotte whip us up something nice.”

  “No, sorry. House business. I really need to stop working so hard. I should be home by eleven.”

  “Is it okay if I don’t wait up?”

  She knew him well. His “eleven” would probably be closer to one.

  “No, my dear. You take your pretty little self to bed whenever you get tired. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She giggled again.

  Maybe she’d see him in the morning, maybe she wouldn’t. She might be in the midst of a shopping spree by the time he crawled out of bed with a hangover.

  Chapter 28

  Our two traveling writers, Rocki and Darrell, weren’t dining on broiled lobster tail and filet mignon.

  They sat at a table at McDonald’s in Clovis, New Mexico, finishing up his and her quarter-pounders while listening to a man named Henry tell a tale about little green men.

  It didn’t take long to see that Henry was either delusional or trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

  “So, you say you’re a doctor at the psychiatric hospital on Cannon Air Force Base?”

  “That’s right. I’m a major colonel in the medical corps. I have eight hundred and seven patients.”

  “That’s a lot of patients.”

  “Yes, I know. I only have one helper, too. She sees half and I see the other half.”

  “Is she a doctor too?”

  “Oh, no. She used to be but her doctor license expired. She couldn’t afford to go to medical school again. So she went to jet pilot school instead and became a pilot. She flies the C-55 plane. The big one. The really big one.

  “But the Air Force stopped flying on the weekends to conserve gasoline, since the Russians came in and stole most of it. So on the weekends, when she isn’t flying, she helps me out at the psychiatric hospital.”

  “So she has… four hundred patients that she sees in her spare time on the weekends…”

  “Well, not all at once. That would be stupid. She sees two hundred on Saturday and two hundred on Sunday.”

  Darrell decided he’d better tread lightly with Henry.

  “Henry, I need to get one of my prescriptions refilled. Does your hospital have a pharmacy, and do they have a pretty good supply of medications?”

  Henry jumped at the chance to brag about his pharmacy.

  “Oh, yeah. They have lots of good medications.”

  As proof he opened his backpack and took out a pill bottle, which he set down on the table between them.

  Then another.

  And another.

  After placing seven bottles on the table Henry sat back and beamed.

  “It’s a real good pharmacy,” he proudly announced.

  Darrell resisted the urge to pick up the bottles and see what was in them. That would be an invasion of Henry’s privacy, and he seemed like such a nice fellow.

  He did, however, recognize the red warning label on a couple of the bottles.

  It was the one military and Veterans Affairs pharmacies placed on controlled substances.

  He stopped taking notes then.

  Any further investigation would be fruitless.

  Instead the three made small talk while they finished their food.

  “So what are you gonna do?” Henry asked them with all sincerity. “Are you gonna go catch those aliens I seen?”

  “We’ll continue our investigation, Henry. If the aliens are still there we’ll try our best to catch them.”

  “Call the FBI. They got teams that are trained special to catch those little critters.

  “Will you come back and tell me if you catch any of ‘em?”

  “Well, we’d love to, Henry. But you know about government regulations regarding capturing aliens. They’ll make us release them into the alien holding tank and then make us swear to keep it all top secret and confidential classified and all that.”

  Henry nodded in agreement.

  He certainly understood.

  But he was a bit disappointed.

  One certainly hated when one went through the trouble of finding and reporting creatures from another planet and didn’t even get to see them being captured.

  They finished their dinner, said goodbye to Henry, then got back on the road.

  It was unfortunate but it happened occasionally.

  Henry lived in his own little world but meant no one any harm.

  He certainly wasn’t dangerous. He just had a very overactive imagination.

  They walked out into the night air and across the parking lot to where they’d parked their Winnebago.

  Penny Fourpaws was already up in the passenger seat, tail wagging a hundred miles an hour, eagerly awaiting her treat.

  Penny was like most dogs and pretended not to understand a lot of English. Truth was, though, that she was very smart.

  She knew all the really important words, like “treat,” “snack” and “ice cream.”

  Moreover, she could read at least as well as a lot of humans.

  Or at least recognize signs.

  One of her favorite was the golden arches which formed the letter “M.”

  She loved it when her humans stopped there, for they always brought her back her own dinner: two hamburger patties, minus the buns.

  Plus cheese. The cheese part was very important.

  Every dog connoisseur knew a burger wasn’t a burger without a slice of American cheese.

  They’d recently put her on a diet, which she didn’t particularly understand and didn’t particularly appreciate.

  They’d stopped giving her bacon and cut back on her ice cream treats. They switched dog food brands to one with a blue label. One she didn’t like quite as well but which was supposed to be healthier.

  But she still got her two cheeseburgers once or twice a week. That was something, anyway.

  It started not long after they’d stopped outside of Salt Lake City, at that place where she saw another sign that looked vaguely familiar.

  It was a sign she didn’t particularly like. A sign for a place where she never received cheeseburgers.

  It was a place with a sign which read V-E-T, and she’d long associated such a sign with strangers in white coats who poked and prodded and gave her medicines which tasted nasty.

  All in all, she thought as she wolfed down her dinner, she liked the golden M sign much better.

  Chapter 29

  Mike and Marty Sorenson thought sneaking onto Yellowstone would be difficult.

  After all, it had been all over the news for days that the Department of the Interior had declared both parks: Yellowstone and its little cousin to the south, Grand Teton National Park, closed immediately and permanently.

  They couldn’t play dumb.

  Well, Marty could, because he played a very convincing village idiot. At least in brother Mike’s mind.

  But in this case, probably not idiot enough to convince any law enforcement officer they came across they weren’t aware they were treading where they weren’t supposed to be.

  As they drove up Rockefeller Parkway, though, toward Yellowstone Lake, it occurred to them they hadn’t seen a single vehicle coming in the opposite direction for at least ten miles.

  However, they’d seen a black bear and her two cubs, a bison, and several things which flashed past them in the heavy brush they assumed were probably dee
r or elk.

  They also saw a raccoon, but decided it didn’t really count as wildlife since it was in the mouth of mama bear.

  It used to be wildlife but was no more.

  Now it was lunch.

  The thing was every living thing they saw was going in the opposite direction.

  That, Katie said, was just a little bit creepy.

  Mike said he felt like a salmon swimming up stream.

  Katie suggested that perhaps animals knew better than man how to read the danger signs.

  Maybe they should turn back, she suggested.

  But she was outvoted.

  Mike and Marty, both former Marines with tattoos to prove it, were fearless.

  And they liked to project that.

  “Don’t be silly,” Mike said. “If the animals knew they were in danger they wouldn’t be walking nonchalantly along the side of the road. They’d be panicked and running. Probably stampeding. They’d probably run right over us in their quest to get away.”

  Marty backed him up.

  “Yeah, you saw the news. They’re leaving the area not because they sense danger but because they can feel the earth rumbling beneath their feet. They know there’s something going on that they don’t understand so it’s making them nervous.

  “That’s why they’re leaving the area.”

  Katie took their cue and tried to talk herself into being brave.

  “Yeah. That makes sense, I guess.”

  They got to the Grant Village turnoff and took it.

  According to their map, there were several clusters of cabins there.

  After a quarter mile they could drive no further. A heavy gate had been swung across the road and locked with a heavy duty padlock.

  A sign said simply:

  CLOSED

  They parked their vehicle and went ahead on foot.

  Their new plan was to find a cabin which had been abandoned, hopefully with provisions still inside, and to make that their base camp for several days.

  It would give them a place to return to each evening after they spent their days hiking around the park, seeing the sights and trying to find some of these new geysers they were talking about on the news.

  They’d be the envy of their friends when they posted all the photos on their social media pages.

  Everyone would be impressed they’d had the guts to go into a restricted area to take photos of things no one would likely ever see again.

  Unless, of course, the whole Yellowstone Event thing was proven to be a hoax and the Parks Service eventually opened the park back up.

  The scientists would sheepishly go back on television to say, collectively, “Our bad. Never mind.”

  It would serve them right, after putting the entire planet through an unnecessary scare.

  Marty said, as they walked past one abandoned cabin after another looking for one that fit their fancy, “Y’all watch out for ATVs or quad-runners.”

  “Why? You too lazy to hike?”

  “Hey, why hike if there are wheels available?”

  Katie looked at Mike, who shrugged and said, “I agree with him. I’m already tired.”

  “I can’t believe you two lazy sissies.”

  Katie weighed in at ninety one pounds and was three months pregnant.

  And she was shaming these two big bad former Marines.

  It made her feel invincible.

  Chapter 30

  They found what they were looking for at a cabin with four Honda quad-runners parked outside.

  On the front door the resident had posted a sign.

  PLEASE DON’T BREAK IN.

  DOOR IS UNLOCKED.

  HELP YOURSELF TO FOOD AND WATER.

  PLEASE LEAVE EVERYTHING ELSE

  IN CASE WE COME BACK.

  “Well, that’s pretty generous of them,” Marty said.

  Mike gave a differing opinion.

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe they were just hoping that by offering food and water we wouldn’t trash the place.”

  “Well that sounds like a reasonable deal,” Katie said. “How about you two be good guests and respect the owner’s wishes?”

  They made themselves at home, even finding heavy rain gear they could take with them as they explored the near-empty park.

  The boys needed a rest break, for after all they’d hiked almost a mile since they had to desert their vehicle at the Grant Village gate.

  Katie held her tongue. She’d already told them they should be ashamed for letting a pregnant woman show them up.

  No sense rubbing it in.

  She didn’t want to hurt their fragile egos.

  Instead, she turned on the television to see if the weatherman could shed some light on the slow-moving storm front overhead and how long it would be before it blew off.

  The satellite dish wasn’t working.

  Katie had had satellite TV before.

  She knew it sometimes went out in bad weather.

  “Damn it! The wind’s not even blowing. You guys suck.”

  She wasn’t talking to Mike or Marty. She was talking to the satellite TV company.

  She didn’t know it wasn’t the weather which had knocked out the signal.

  It was the satellite company itself. They’d shut down their local operations two days before and closed up shop.

  Their employees were like most others now, scrambling to find a place in the safe zone to ride out the blast.

  She found a radio and tuned it to the weather channel.

  This time she found success.

  “The slow moving front parked over Idaho, Montana and Wyoming is creeping to the east at a whopping four to six miles an hour,” the announcer said. “Meanwhile more clouds are building to the west and making the front even larger.”

  “By nightfall we expect the front to encompass most of Washington State as well.

  “In other words, although we’re not expecting any significant rainfall, the area is getting, and will continue to get, a slow-motion drenching.

  “Don’t abandon your umbrella and rain gear anytime soon. You’re gonna need them for awhile.”

  “Peachy,” Katie said. “Just peachy.”

  The rain was still really little more than a moderate drizzle.

  But it was still enough.

  It was still keeping the forest from catching fire from the dozens of small rivers of lava coming out of the ground.

  Instead of setting everything it touched instantly ablaze, the lava wrapped itself around the soaked tree trunks and cooled and hardened against them. It was enveloping them and entombing them.

  The trees would go on living, though they wouldn’t be as healthy since their root systems would no longer be able to rely on surface moisture. The hardened lava rock would ensure that.

  The roots would have to crawl deeper underground in a desperate attempt to locate and soak up more and more water from beneath the ground.

  But then again, no they wouldn’t.

  They wouldn’t have time.

  They’d be vaporized long before they had a chance.

  The lava, as it rolled across wet grass and mud, created a cloud of dense fog which covered several square miles.

  It’s hard for fog to exist in rainy conditions. A harder rain would have made it dissipate.

  But this was a drizzle. This was different.

  The fog and the drizzle co-existed in this environment, more or less co-equals.

  If it weren’t for the dreadful circumstances which created the conditions, it might be considered quite pretty.

  In fact it was, by Katie, when she saw the fog rolling across a meadow.

  “Hey, how cool is that?”

  The fog bank was only a few feet high, and rolled as a wave rolls into a beach.

  Only much slower.

  Mike, had he known how rare such a sight was, might have been a bit more impressed.

  As it was, though, not so much.

  “Yeah, so? It’s bad enough we have to slog thro
ugh under those black rain clouds. Now we have to walk through fog too?”

  “Yeah,” brother Marty agreed. “So it’s fog. Big deal. It’s not like you’ve never seen it before.”

  “And what’s that putrid smell, that’s what I wanna know.”

  The putrid smell he was referring to was sulfur dioxide gas, which was sweeping across the area slightly faster than the rolling low-lying fog.

  It wasn’t as pretty as the fog, and was a lot more dangerous.

  Chapter 31

  The media, like the rest of the world, was now calling the pending eruption “the Yellowstone Event.”

  They were calling Professor Wayne Hamlin’s gloom-and-doom prediction “the press conference heard around the world.”

  They were all clamoring to get him face to face on their news shows. Any shows. He could have picked and chosen his favorites.

  They went so far as to do something they always say only tabloid television does… they were willing to pay him, and pay him very well, for a thirty minute segment.

  Some of them, quite honestly, wanted to embarrass him. They’d found experts who rebutted Hamlin’s claims and wanted their program to turn into a shouting match.

  Drama helped ratings, and even when the earth was on the cusp of its biggest disaster in recorded history, ratings ruled everything.

  The problem was, Wayne Hamlin wasn’t biting.

  One media scheduler stood on his front porch and shouted, to whoever was inside, “Dr. Hamlin, we’re prepared to pay you a hundred thousand dollars plus travel expenses for a half hour spot.”

  Like a grouchy old man yelling at neighborhood kids to get off his lawn he yelled back through the wall, “Get off my property.”

  “I’m authorized to go as high as one twenty, but you’ve got to sign the contract today.”

  Wayne ignored him.

  They came all day, every day, one or two at a time.

  Ignoring them was all he could do.

  They all knew he couldn’t call the police.

  All the police would do was escort them off the property and issue them a No-Trespass Order. It was a form listing the person by name, telling him if he stepped on the property again he’d be arrested for trespassing.