The Yellowstone Event (Book 5): The Eruption

by Maloney, Darrell

  The producer wanted him to get out his gear, put it together, turn it on and focus it on the action.

  In eight seconds.

  Right.

  That particular footage was lost forever.

  After a few seconds of stunned silence they made their way to the edge of the outcropping and looked down into the ravine.

  Several things were obvious.

  Wally was definitely dead.

  There was no way someone with such a twisted and broken and bloody body could have survived such a fall.

  Even if he’d been running three times as fast, he still wouldn’t have made it to a softer landing in the Lewis River, for the river was at least twenty feet beyond where his crumpled body lay.

  The bear was in the same sad condition and was no longer a threat to anyone.

  “Odd how he didn’t scream as he went past,” the cameraman said.

  “Yeah. I guess he was kinda busy.”

  “So, what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know. Let me think.”

  “Should we try to get him back up here?”

  “How? We have no rope. And he’s beyond help. He’d be just as dead up here as he is down there.”

  “Right.”

  The truth was, Wally was a colleague but not a friend.

  Neither man liked him much.

  “I’ve got an idea,” the producer said.

  “Do you think you can roll about forty seconds of tape? Zoom in on the body. Don’t get the bear in the frame. The bear is our little secret.”

  The cameraman took the pack off his back and set it on the ground. He unzipped it and reached inside for the camera.

  He said, “From here? Sure, piece of cake. But how come you want me to leave the bear out of the shot?”

  “Because, the bear won’t fit our storyline.”

  “What storyline?”

  “We’re gonna open tomorrow night’s show with breaking news that the federal government, working in conjunction with the big oil companies, caught Wally watching them in the park and threw him off a cliff to shut him up.”

  The cameraman smiled.

  Maybe his job wasn’t in jeopardy at all.

  It took them a couple of hours to iron out the details.

  The conspiracy theory racket lives and dies on controversy. New ones are hatched on a regular basis to feed the never-ending desire for the tin hat crowd to debate the newest and most mind-bending of them.

  This new one would do nicely to further the cause and make a lot of money for Wally Williams’ successors.

  The next night the late night cable TV version of Wally’s program, Of Course the Government Did It was simulcast with his nationwide radio broadcast.

  In the TV version, video of Wally’s body played in the background on a continuous loop as the new announcer, Wally’s understudy, wove a tale of great deception and murderous behavior by big oil and its government henchmen.

  The radio version described at great length the moment at Yellowstone National Park when the producer and cameraman came upon Wally’s body, crumpled and lifeless, after being thrown off a cliff by government agents.

  The tin hat crowd went nuts.

  The producer and cameraman were set to make a fortune off of this one.

  Of course they reported finding the body to the park rangers. It was the proper thing to do, after all.

  But they said they were confused, had gotten lost wandering around all those millions of acres.

  The location they gave the rangers was on the directly opposite side of the sprawling park. They were counting on the rangers never finding Wally’s body. At least not until the buzzards picked all the bones clean.

  And, in fact, the way-overworked rangers never really had much time to go looking for it.

  They were rather busy with other things.

  Chapter 35

  Time marched on, as it inevitably does, and the next day Tony and Hannah rolled into Phoenix to hang out with their good friends Gwen and Melvyn.

  Gwen met them on the front porch with open arms. Hugs and tears were exchanged, and all were careful not the mention anything having to do with the scoundrels at the Department of the Interior or the Department of Homeland Security.

  That was a part of their lives they all wanted to put behind them, and there was no better time to start doing that than the present.

  Gwen invited the three of them in, the baby still sound asleep in his car seat, and they had a second reunion with Melvyn.

  Five minutes later the men were, predictably, drinking beer and watching and talking sports. In this instance the World Cup, and wondering whether the United States would ever become a powerhouse or love the sport the way the rest of the world did.

  The women, also rather predictably, were at the dining room table with coffee in their hands, talking about more important things.

  Like the state of the world in the wake of the Yellowstone Event.

  They also talked of Tony and Hannah’s plans to relocate to the Great State of Alaska, and what they wanted to do when they got there.

  “So tell me,” Gwen said, “about this great scheme of yours to sell your home and move to Alaska.”

  “Funny… that’s the same word Tony said when I told him about it. My ‘scheme’ to move up north.

  “I see it more as a way of running away from what the United States is getting ready to become.”

  “My, you make it sound so ominous. How do you think the country is going to change?”

  “I think we’re in for major problems.

  “I mean, if Wayne Hamlin is right most of mainland America will be covered with ash. It’ll kill the plant life and poison the soil so that even when the ash is cleaned up nothing will grow there for quite some time.

  “I think there will be a worldwide famine. Perhaps even a shortage of drinkable water as well.

  “And I think all that will drive an economic depression that’ll make 1930 look like a walk in the park.

  “Not to mention the overcrowding. The survivors will try to cram themselves into those parts of the country which are relatively free of ash. It only makes sense.

  “And again, if Wayne Hamlin is right, there won’t be that much of it. Places like Phoenix and San Diego will be overrun, not with volcano evacuees but with evacuees fleeing the ash cover.

  “I was able to convince Tony that we have to get out and beat the rush. We need to get to Alaska and start building our home there now, before the building materials are impossible to get. Before the recession sets in and the banks no longer loan money to somebody who’ll buy our house.

  “Before people start showing up on all our doorsteps desperate for a bite of food or a bit of water to drink.”

  “Honey,” Gwen said, “Melvyn and I have checked into it too. We were curious when you first spoke of selling your home and moving to Alaska.

  “Have you priced homes up there?

  “They were always very expensive. But they’ve doubled in price over just the last few months. The experts say they’ll go up even more. That if it takes two years for Yellowstone to blow they’ll double again by then.

  “Yes, we can get a great price by selling our homes now.

  “But we’d still need twice as much as we’d make from the sale just to buy a smaller house in Alaska.”

  “Oh, Tony and I have a solution for that.”

  “Do tell…”

  “The government originally planned to give each family two acres of arable land adjacent to a water source for each family who wanted to relocate up there.

  “The only stipulation was that they had to live in one of the two evacuation zones, they had to sign over their current property to the federal government, and they had to move to Alaska within twelve months.”

  “Ah, but there’s the problem, dear. You and Tony don’t live in the evacuation zones. You’re in the safe zone.”

  “Correct. But Congress added several other things to the original bill.
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  “One opens the program up to others outside the evac zones… provided they sell their home in the safe zone to someone evacuating from the evac zones.

  “The government is also buying eighty thousand recreational vehicles and positioning them in various places in the safe areas. They’re loaning them out to what they call the early birds – the people who move up there before housing is available.

  “If we sell our house in the next couple of months and move up there, we can borrow one of their RVs and live in it for up to a year while we’re building our house.”

  “Well, that sounds like a pretty good… wait a minute. Did you say while you’re building your house?”

  “Exactly. We found a company that will deliver all the supplies we need to build a log cabin except the trees. All the wiring and outlets and fuse boxes, all the pipes and plumbing fixtures and insulation. All the fasteners and concrete and mortar.

  “The same company will send a representative out one day a week to advise us on how to cut down the timber, how to move it around, how to notch it so all the pieces fit together. And they’ll assist us when we need help.

  “They guarantee we’ll finish completion of a four room cabin, complete with indoor plumbing and electricity, and even a wind turbine to provide power, for less than we expect to sell our house for.”

  “Hannah, that’s an awful lot of work.”

  “I know,” Hannah giggled like a little girl. “We can’t wait!”

  Chapter 36

  The slow-moving front parked over Yellowstone was still there, still obscuring from view what was going on in the park beneath it.

  Satellite cameras couldn’t penetrate the thick cover.

  Crews on the ground had trouble seeing because the ground fog… just as thick and growing larger by the day, hid the lava which was now flowing from a hundred different vents

  A year before, an official National Geological Survey study registered 481 official geysers in the park.

  That number doubled in recent days, and few people outside the Department of the Interior knew it.

  Moreover, these weren’t the kind of geysers park visitors were used to.

  Cone geysers like Old Faithful typically erupt every forty to ninety minutes or so, as pressure in the earth builds and forces water and steam out into the open air to vent itself.

  Pressure released, typical cone geysers go into standby mode, waiting for water to rush back into the void made by the eruption. The water is then heated and turned into steam by the magma pool far beneath it.

  The cycle is thereby continually repeated. The water is superheated and turns to steam, which causes the pressure to rise, which causes the geyser’s next eruption.

  That’s what tourists were used to seeing.

  These new geysers were nothing like that.

  These new geysers were under such extreme pressure their eruptions were constant. There was no time to go on standby mode.

  They were blowing steam into the air at a never-ending pace. And most of them went far higher than the 110 to 180 feet Old Faithful blew.

  Some were spewing four hundred feet into the air.

  Almost as high as the lowest hanging rain clouds.

  And they were adding to the visibility problem in two ways.

  First, they were creating their own fog, separate and apart from the lava-created fog.

  The steam, combining with the much cooler surface air, was creating massive clouds of the stuff.

  And, just as atmospheric conditions in the winter time create lake-effect fog, cooling steam vapor created its own rain.

  Again, that was separate and apart from the drizzle falling from the sky.

  All that combined meant that huge swaths of Yellowstone National Park were not only shrouded in fog, they were shrouded in mystery as well.

  The worldwide panic everyone was worried about never really materialized.

  That was partly because the typical American is a skeptical soul.

  They’ve been lied to by their government over so many things for so many years they no longer believed anything coming out of the bowels of Washington.

  If a Congressman or Senator went on national television to announce the sky was up and the ground was down many Americans would look to see for themselves.

  Paradoxically, another reason the panic didn’t come was because scientists hired by that same lying government were doing a pretty good job allaying citizens’ fears.

  They, Americans, thought they had plenty of time.

  Everybody in the know knew the eruption process had started.

  But not even those in the know knew how bad it was.

  As more and more pressure was released from the upper magma pool via geysers and lava flow, the expanse of dense rock dividing the upper and lower magma pool would be more and more susceptible to pressure from below, and less and less susceptible to pressure from above.

  And that, whether it took years like some scientists predicted, or hours or days like Wayne Hamlin maintained, would inevitably trigger the next phase of the eruption.

  The swelling of the rock buffer would begin.

  Wayne Hamlin’s “pimple” was getting ready to pop.

  Chapter 37

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Honorable Ron Johnson.”

  “Good morning to all of you, and thank you for coming.

  “This will be brief, but I will be happy to take questions after I’m finished.

  “House Bill 626, The Greater Alaskan Land Act, has passed and is ready to be signed into law.

  “I want you all to know that this bill was a hard pill to swallow.

  “No one, on either side of the aisle, was keen about adding almost half a trillion dollars to our national debt.

  “But every last one of us, also on both sides of the aisle, realized we had no choice.

  “To vote down this bill would be to refuse to save a fifth of our citizens. It would mean we would ignore the devastating impact of the largest natural disaster in the history of mankind.

  “It would mean this country would be divided. Not on financial or moral or racial lines. But by something more elemental. If we refused to pass this bill this nation would be divided between those fortunate enough to live in the safe zone, and those unfortunate enough to live in the blast zone.

  “We are Americans. All of us, no matter where we call home.

  “We will not ignore those who are in danger. We will not abandon them to fend for themselves.

  “We will do what we’ve always done in times of crisis. We will work together for the benefit of all.

  “We did have naysayers.

  “Every member of Congress saw the marchers, the protestors.

  “Every one of us was bombarded by phone calls and blasted by pundits.

  “Why should our children and grandchildren carry the debt of today’s evacuees? Why should they incur a share of the burden for relocating millions of Americans?

  “Why?

  “My friends, I’ll tell you why.

  “Because they are Americans.

  “Americans take care of one another.

  “Americans share their joys.

  “And they share their miseries as well.

  “My fourteen year old son and my eleven year old daughter came to me to ask how they could help the people who were fleeing the park.

  “I told them to pray for them. And to remember, when they were grown and complaining that taxes were way too high, that those dollars they’re paying off not only helped people move.

  “They helped people keep on living.

  “Today I am proud to announce that I have selected my esteemed colleague from the Great State of Oklahoma to chair the distribution committee for the largest funding project ever undertaken by this great land of ours.

  “Walter, come up here and join me.

  “Ladies and gentleman, my good friend and a darned fine congressman, Walter D. Renniger
.”

  One crooked congressman stood up in the crowd and joined another crooked congressman at the podium.

  On the face of it, they didn’t look much different from all the other crooked congressmen in attendance.

  Only these two crooked congressman had more power than anyone else in the massive room.

  One led the group of 435 people who managed the purse strings of the most powerful nation in the world.

  The other was charged with dispensing funds from the largest purse in the history of the United States.

  Each had the power to make or break men.

  To turn some into multi-millionaires and others into penniless paupers.

  Family and friends would be blessed with riches. Political enemies would be ruined.

  It was the way of the beltway. It had been that way for a very long time and had no chance of changing anytime soon.

  Renniger gave a short speech.

  It was mostly BS, but he got applauded anyway.

  He knew how to turn a pretty phrase, and he knew the words worried Americans longed to hear.

  For the foreseeable future he’d be viewed as America’s savior.

  The man who’d oversee everyone’s path to safety.

  And inside he was laughing.

  Chapter 38

  It was official.

  Renniger had been named to the chair of the committee.

  Let the graft begin.

  The following morning he entertained a man he’d known since college.

  A man who not only knew how many times Renniger had cheated on his wives, he also knew about something much darker.

  For he was with Renniger that night, thirty one years before, when the two were coming home from a bar and Renniger plowed into a bicyclist on a dark country road.

  Neither was sure how bad the cyclist was hurt.

  They’d felt a sickening thump as the car rolled over… something, but they both hoped and prayed that night it was only the bicycle frame.

  Had they bothered to stop they might have saved the young man’s life.

  But they were both well over the legal limit and were on the cusp of budding political careers.