If Elyse had been home Hans would have left the ringing phone for her to handle.
But at that moment she was at the local bakery, perusing a wide selection of breads and rolls and trying to determine which would go best with the zigeunerschnitzel she was preparing for dinner that night.
Hans sighed and put down his tiny shovel, then picked up the receiver on the kitchen phone.
“Ja?”
“Hans, it’s Wayne Hamlin.”
Hans switched easily to English. It was a language he was comfortable with, for he too was well traveled.
Americans visiting Germany are frequently surprised to find that all Germans know a limited amount of English.
That’s because all German students are required to take two years of English in high school. It’s been that way since the close of the Second World War, and makes it much easier for British citizens and Americans to communicate with Germans.
Typically, between the Germans’ limited use of English and Brits’ and Americans’ limited use of German, communication is relatively easy.
With a good portion of pointing, gestures and hand signals thrown in.
Hans had taken that base of required English and expanded it by taking two additional years of English at University and now spoke the language fluently.
That was good, for he was much more comfortable using English than Wayne Hamlin was in speaking Deutsch.
“Wayne, my good friend! How are you?”
“I’ve been better, Hans. But I can’t complain. It does no good to complain. No one cares or even wants to listen when I complain.”
“Ah, yes. I discovered the same thing years ago when I met Elyse. She once told me there was no room in the haus for complaints. That if I had any complaints I should stand in the middle of the yard and shout them to the heavens.
“And I’ve found, by the way, that the heavens won’t hear them either.
“How is Julie, the second love of my life?”
Hans had always been a shameless flirt who insisted that if he hadn’t found the love of his life in Elyse he’d have worked to take Julie away from Wayne.
It was all bravado, of course, but made for an interesting line of ribbing between the two couples.
“She’s well, but she’s been twisting my arm to get away for awhile.”
“Why hesitate? Send her here. You can come along if you have to.”
“Funny. No, actually, not so much.”
“Wait a minute, Wayne. What time is it in Missouri?”
Wayne looked at the clock.
“It’s just after four a.m.”
“My. You’re up rather early, are you not?”
“Actually, Hans, I’ve been up all night. This whole Yellowstone Event… it’s ruining our lives. No one wants to believe me that it’s getting ready to blow. And they’re actually blaming me for trying to warn them. I’m getting death threats.”
“Are your passports up to date?”
“Yes.”
“Then get over here. You can stay with Elyse and me while you’re getting settled. I happen to know the University in Berlin is in need of a noted volcanologist. You’ll have to work on your German, but they’ll supply a translator until you get up to speed.”
“Thank you, Hans. And thank Elyse too, will you? We’ll start making travel plans.”
Hans hung up the phone wondering if perhaps he should have checked with Elyse before inviting friends from abroad to come and stay with them.
Nah, he decided. She’d get over it.
Chapter 48
The sun went down, as it generally tends to do, and then came back up again.
It did that several times.
Americans, like ants, ran here and there and everywhere, with seemingly no rhyme or reason.
Most went away from Yellowstone.
Some went toward the park, either not believing or not caring that they might be endangering their own lives.
Others, like Julianna and Deputy Dave, were already there, doing what they could to inform everyone about the pending eruption and to talk them into leaving.
In the park itself Mike and Katie Sorenson looked with wonder from a high bluff overlooking a small body of water called Riddle Lake.
“Marty,” Mike called out to his brother, who was still climbing the hill. “Get up here. This is incredible!”
And incredible it was.
From the center of the lake spewed a geyser that wasn’t there when they’d gone fishing at the lake a couple of days before.
It was spraying two hundred feet into the air, and wasn’t intermittent like Old Faithful or the other geysers they’d seen in other areas of the park.
No, this geyser was huge and never stopped to recycle or catch its breath.
And there was more.
Mike looked at his feet to see a rotting rainbow trout.
“What the hell?”
It was a valid question, for they were far from the banks of the lake.
And trout are not exactly known for their ability to walk.
Perhaps a bear had caught it and then been scared away by the geyser.
Perhaps the bear was a scaredy-cat.
Then he noticed another fish skewered on a branch in a nearby tree.
“One of those booms we heard yesterday,” Katie surmised, “must have been an explosion when the geyser opened up at the bottom of the lake.
“It must have been so powerful it blew fish all the way out here.”
“Oh, come on,” Marty argued. “We’re a quarter of a mile away from it. How could it throw fish that far?”
“You got a better explanation?”
“Well… give me a minute. I’ll make up something.”
It would have been a pretty sight, were it not for what it implied was on the way.
The geyser was water, yet created a great amount of steam from the upward stream and the lake water below.
The lake around the geyser appeared to be boiling, or at least was very choppy.
Katie bet on boiling, based on the amount of heat it was generating.
A gentle breeze was blowing in their direction, carrying some of the water from the geyser with it.
Occasionally they could feel water upon their faces.
It was no longer hot, but not yet cool.
And despite the water’s help to cool them off they could feel the tremendous heat.
Even from a quarter mile away.
“Well, I guess we won’t be doing any fishing today,” Mike said.
“Not here, anyway.”
“Wanna look somewhere else?”
Katie said, “Mike, I’m frightened.”
Mike reached out for his pregnant wife and held her as they watched the majestic scene playing out in front of them.
They were mesmerized.
“I think I’ve seen enough of Yellowstone,” she said. “I think I want to go home.”
Mike didn’t need much convincing.
The scene before them scared him as well, although he’d never admit it.
“Hold on just a few minutes,” Marty countered. “Let me take a few photos. They may be worth some money.”
Marty had dabbled in photography and had made a few dollars in the past selling his photos.
But he and photography were an odd couple.
He just lacked the patience to wait for the perfect shot, when the sun was at just the right angle and conditions were right.
He was more the “This is good enough, I don’t have all day” kind of photographer.
But this… a geyser coming out of a boiling lake, surrounded by a thick screen of steam… this was something photographers almost never witnessed.
Surely a national magazine or TV network or… somebody… would pay big money for such photos.
It so happened that when they left their squatter cabin that morning Marty took an almost-new Canon PowerShot camera with him.
“I just want to try it out, that’s all,” he’d said to Katie when she rais
ed her eyebrows.
Truth was, though, Marty was a man who was seldom burdened with things like morals or scruples or guilt.
He had no plans to return the camera, and they both knew it.
“Hurry up,” Mike said.
“We’re starting back down the hill. You can catch up with us.”
He turned back to Katie and brushed the long hair from her face.
He said, “I agree, babe. It’s time to get out of this place and go home.”
The Canon came equipped with a 50X zoom, which enabled Marty to get a close-up view of the area where the geyser emerged from the lake.
With the zoom he could tell that the water really was boiling.
“Wow,” he said as he clicked shot after shot.
His brother and sister-in-law didn’t hear him, though.
They were already a hundred yards ahead of him.
He shot a dozen more photos, including close-ups of the fish in the tree and on the ground, then scampered down the hill to catch up with Mike and Katie.
And then the most curious thing happened.
Everything went dark and silent.
Chapter 49
Julianna heard another explosion to the east.
A fist-sized rock pounded against the side of the pickup.
“Well, that’s gonna leave a mark,” Dave said in a futile effort to lighten the mood.
She was frightened now.
No, not frightened.
She was outright terrified.
Until this moment, the whole concept of an eruption in her lifetime had seemed like such an inconceivable fantasy.
Yes, she’d heard the scientists and their predictions.
She’d been leery of them, as had most of her friends.
It was more wishful thinking than anything else.
No one wanted to die before their time.
And no one wanted their friends and family members to die either.
No one wanted the landscape of the United States to be permanently altered. Permanently scarred.
And certainly, no one wanted to deal with the aftermath of a changed planet earth for many generations to come.
Humans have a natural tendency to doubt anything they don’t want to have to deal with.
Until, that is, they have no choice but to deal with it.
From the beginning Julianna tried to convince herself that if the Yellowstone Event really did happen it would be long after she died.
Most likely long after her children died, and their children and grandchildren as well.
“There’s no way it’s gonna happen while I’m still around.”
Deputy Dave was puzzled by that line of thinking.
He responded, “Well, it’s gonna happen while somebody is still around. Might as well be us as anybody else. What makes you think we’re exempt?”
She’d laughed and said, “It won’t happen while I’m alive because I’m special, so there.
“Stick with me and you’ll be safe too.”
Now she wasn’t so sure.
There was another explosion a couple of miles ahead of them and a bit to the east, this one more powerful than the one before.
Even in the moving truck they could feel the earth shake ominously.
That was unusual, for they both knew people typically didn’t feel earthquakes while they were driving. Normally the motion of the vehicle masks the quake.
“For us to feel it while we’re moving means it’s a big one,” Dave said. “I’ll bet it was a five or better.
“We need to get the hell out of here.”
They could see the trees swaying on both sides of the highway.
Something about them told them it wasn’t the wind. The branches were relatively calm, yet the trunks were swaying first one way and then the other.
Another explosion five hundred yards to their left blew rocks half a mile into the air.
Other rocks pounded their vehicle, one shattering their windshield.
One of the men jumped off the back, convinced that they were driving directly into the area where the fissures were opening.
He thought he might be safer parting ways with the deputy and the ranger; that at any moment an explosion directly beneath their truck would send them all sky high.
In tiny pieces.
In reality, the entire region was exploding with new vents and fissures. Some spewed steam high into the air, others dry air. Some molten lava.
In reality, there was no safe place to run, no place to hide.
The man didn’t know it, but the pickup truck was his only chance to getting out alive, as slight as that chance was.
By jumping from the truck he’d doomed himself to certain death.
But he couldn’t see what was right in front of his face.
Inside the cab Dave and Julianna didn’t know he’d gone over the side.
If they had their humanity would have forced them to stop, against their better judgment and against the other men begging them to go on.
They’d have stopped and tried to coax him back into the truck, even as he ran pell mell into the forest.
It would have been a wasted gesture, for there is no reasoning with a terrified and confused man.
Maybe it was better they didn’t see him.
Now there was a chance, ever so slight, they might make it out before the Yellowstone Caldera’s version of Russian roulette took them out.
“Oh my God,” Julianna shouted and pointed.
A couple of hundred yards ahead of them, a few feet off the side of the highway, a newly erupting geyser was spraying superheated steam into the air.
Much of it was blowing onto the roadway, blocking their view of what was ahead.
And their safe passage.
“That’ll be hot enough to scald them, maybe even kill them!”
“Jules, we’ve got no choice. This highway is the only way out of here. If we go back we’re all dead.”
He stopped dead right in the middle of Highway 22.
Julianna got out and addressed the men in the back.
“We’re going to drive through the steam. Cover yourselves as best you can.”
She jumped back in and Dave punched it, driving toward the steam cloud at forty miles an hour.
He couldn’t see the highway beyond the steam. Didn’t have a clue whether it was clear, or if the steam had disabled other vehicles which might lie in wait on the other side.
He had no choice.
He had to go.
He made it through the steam and came out the other side, unscathed but very frightened.
He laughed and took Julianna’s hand.
“See? I told you it was a piece of cake.”
She scoffed.
“You most certainly didn’t say that.”
Then everything went dark and silent.
Dark and silent, you see, is what death looks and sounds like.
Chapter 50
It was a big day at Mamie Sellers’ house.
Her two little neighbors, Amy and Amanda Rogers, had been bugging Mamie of late to teach them how to bake cookies and candy.
Their mother Linda was a wonderful woman and an amazing mother.
Unfortunately, she just wasn’t blessed with the baking gene.
Oh, she tried.
But each time she tried her baked goods came out burned.
Or overcooked on the outside and undercooked on the inside.
Or too sweet or not sweet enough or just flavorless.
“I’ll tell you what,” Mamie told her. “You’re much better at gardening than I am. You’ve got a green thumb to beat all green thumbs. You share the vegetables from your garden with me and let me do the baking. I’ll bake you whatever you want whenever you want, as long as we can get the ingredients.”
It was a little white lie meant to spare poor Linda’s feelings, for in reality Mamie was as good a gardener as she was a cook.
Linda didn’t know that, though, and beamed at Ma
mie’s contention she was a whiz when it came to growing things.
Still, Linda hated to ask Mamie for anything. The woman was older than Linda’s mother when her mother passed on several years before. In Linda’s mind Mamie should be resting in her golden years, not baking food for five additional mouths.
She wasn’t old enough to know that seniors have a desperate need to feel useful, for society frequently writes them off as no longer being able to contribute.
And that’s like a kick in the teeth.
Linda also didn’t realize that seniors have a wealth of knowledge and talents which often go untapped.
Simply because younger people either don’t know about those talents or don’t recognize their value.
And that’s like a second kick in the teeth.
Seniors are seasoned with all kinds of talents. They can sew, they can bake, they can repair things, and they can heal wounds when medicines aren’t available. If they can’t program a cell phone or find their way around the internet, so what?
That’s what they have grandkids for.
Linda didn’t mean to be rude when she overlooked all of Mamie’s talents. She was just trying not to burden the older woman.
But the older woman was wiser and outsmarted her.
“I don’t know,” she’d replied to Mamie’s offer that day. “I can’t bear to think of you hurting yourself or wearing yourself out cooking for us.”
Mamie reached into the oversized bag she carried with her everywhere and pulled out a small plastic container.
“Here, honey. Taste this.”
Linda opened it and followed instructions, for she was raised to do what her elders told her to do.
“Oh, my God, this is amazing. What is it?”
“That’s my cinnamon zucchini bread. Well, actually not mine. It’s a recipe passed down by my great-great-great-grandmother. She and her Aunt Tillie used to use it to feed the confederate troops who came to her back door looking for food.
“Back then they baked it without yeast. It held up better and lasted longer and the troops could put some in their ruck sacks for later.
“I understand she always cried when they left, because many of them were mere boys and because she knew she’d just served some of them their last meals.”
The Yellowstone Event (Book 5): The Eruption Page 15
