At that moment a very loud boom rocked the building.
The government representative said, “Oh my Lord…”
Chapter 54
Jeff had a new girl now.
It seemed that the old one, once she determined Jeff didn’t really own the house he was living in and was pulling the wool over her eyes, left him.
Go figure.
The new girl, a striking brunette named Kayla, didn’t really care much.
She was out of work, and her bad habit of only showing up to work when she wanted to pretty much ensured her future chances of employment were rather bleak.
She was two payments behind on her car, and knew they’d be coming after it soon.
And she had scant money for food.
No, Kayla didn’t care much whether Jeff owned the house or was squatting there.
She just needed a place to rest her head and fill her belly.
Jeff, on the other hand, didn’t complain that Kayla too-readily accepted his invitation to move in.
Most men would have seen that as a red flag.
Maybe an indication that this was a girl who might never see a need to leave again.
Not Jeff.
Jeff valued the company of a warm companion late at night much more than he worried about the problems such a hasty decision might bring.
From that respect, then, the relationship seemed a good one.
Jeff and Kayla, it seemed, were made for each other.
Something else Kayla was that she’d never tell Jeff about: a kleptomaniac.
She frequently had irresistible urges to steal things she really didn’t want or need.
She wasn’t sure why she was that way.
She once went to a court-appointed shrink after her seventh shoplifting conviction.
The doctor asked her why she stole a pair of men’s size 44 Bermuda shorts.
“I assume they weren’t for you?” he asked.
She answered from her size 1, ninety pound frame, “No. I just saw them and knew I had to have them.”
“And if you hadn’t been caught and arrested what would you have done with them?”
“Probably kept them for a day or two and then thrown them into a dumpster.”
“And how many times have you shoplifted?”
“They told me this was my seventh arrest.”
“I know that. That’s not what I asked. I asked how many times you’ve stolen things without being caught.”
“Oh. I don’t know. Hundreds of times, maybe thousands.”
“And do you get any real satisfaction from it?”
“I used to. I mean, when I was a little girl and stole from a store I felt like I outsmarted the people at the store. It made me feel superior to them.”
“And you no longer feel that way after you steal something?”
“No. Now I think I do it out of habit.”
Little by little Kayla was pilfering things which belonged to Hannah and Tony.
It was usually something insignificant.
She’d overlook a gold bracelet and steal a cheap pair of ear rings instead.
She’d bypass an expensive reciprocal saw from Tony’s garage workshop and steal a rusty screwdriver.
There was no rhyme or reason to her stealing.
She just stole to steal.
She and Jeff had gotten home just a few minutes before.
They’d gone to Taco Bell for an early lunch and hit the local discount store on the way home.
Jeff couldn’t find the charging cord for his cell phone.
He’d looked everywhere except for Kayla’s backpack and finally gave up and sprung for another one.
As he sat on the couch listening to the music on his MP-3 player Kayla was rifling through the silverware drawer in the kitchen.
The good stuff was in there. The silver Hannah’s grandmother had willed her.
It was several generations old and was worth a considerable amount.
But Kayla had no interest in it.
Instead she selected a common bottle opener and shoved it into her back pocket.
She heard a loud boom, off in the distance to the north and west.
She normally wasn’t startled by loud noises, but this was different.
This was a sound unlike any she’d ever heard before.
She walked into the living room and asked Jeff, “What in heck was that?”
He didn’t hear her.
He was listening to Motorhead and had the volume maxed out.
She went over and shook his shoulder.
He took out an ear bud and asked, “What?”
He didn’t particularly like being interrupted while listening to his favorite band.
“Did you hear that? What was it?”
“Hear what?”
“It was a very loud boom. It came from outside.”
“Don’t worry about it. There’s a military base here, remember? It was probably just a sonic boom.”
“Oh. Okay.”
She’d lived in Little Rock all her life, and of course she was aware of the military base.
She’d never heard a sonic boom before, but Jeff seemed to know what he was talking about most of the time.
And it wasn’t worth arguing about.
He put his ear bud back into place and she trotted off toward the bathroom.
But she didn’t get far.
There was a loud crashing noise in the kitchen.
She screamed loud enough to get Jeff’s attention despite the music and the ear buds.
Both went into the kitchen.
There was a cloud of white dust that covered everything and permeated the air. The kitchen table was shattered.
They looked up and saw the blue sky through a large hole in the roof.
And in the corner of the room found a fist-sized rock that had come crashing down from the heavens.
Chapter 55
On a Lufthansa 747 aircraft high over the northern Atlantic Julie dozed.
Wayne was watching the in-flight movie and was enthralled. It was the latest sequel in a drama which included lots of shooting, girls in bikinis and car chases through crowded streets.
And helicopters blowing up.
A guy movie is never complete unless it has at least one exploding helicopter.
The flight path of the big airliner called for it to drop to 30,000 feet as it crossed over Ireland and the United Kingdom. It would pass within a hundred kilometers of London, then fly over Holland and Belgium before finally landing at Rhein-Main International Airport in Germany.
The flight had been rather uneventful. A bit of light turbulence about three hours in, but it passed quickly and never returned.
About four hours in the flight attendants finally realized who Wayne was and started fawning over him.
They thanked him for warning the world of the Yellowstone Event and plied him with free drinks.
It struck Wayne this was one of the most pleasant flights he’d ever had.
Then, suddenly, the sound went out on his headphones.
After a few seconds of silence a man’s solemn voice came over the intercom.
"Meine Damen und Herren, hier spricht Ihr Kapitän. Ich bedaure, Ihnen zu berichten, dass wir Berichte über eine sehr große Explosion über die zentralen Vereinigten Staaten erhalten. Das sind alle Informationen, die wir zu der Zeit haben, aber wir werden Sie beraten, wenn wir weitere Updates erhalten, bevor wir in Rhein-Main landen. "
Wayne hadn’t been to Germany in awhile. His German was rusty.
He recognized many of the words, but many others flew right past him.
He was trying to make sense of what he’d just heard, even as other passengers were gasping and crying all around him.
Not to worry.
Since it was an international flight, the captain translated his words for the benefit of the English-speakers.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I regret to tell you we are receiving reports of
a very large explosion over the central United States. That’s all the information we have at this time, but we’ll advise you if we get any further updates before we land at Rhein-Main.”
Wayne looked over at Julie, who had one eye open and was staring off into space.
He reached out and took her hand.
It was starting.
Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people had just perished.
And he knew that life as they and the other survivors knew it would never be the same again.
Chapter 56
Penny was curled up on her favorite couch napping and felt the house shake and heard the loud boom. She raised her head, let out a short whimper, then put her head back down and placed a paw over her nose. She seemed to sense at that moment her life, and the lives of everyone she loved, had changed forever.
Outside the chitlins were dealing with another crisis.
Their second dog was a loveable mutt they’d rescued the year before from another abusive owner.
His name was Bam-Bam, and for the third time in a year he’d returned from a romp in the woods reeking, after being sprayed by a skunk.
It seemed he thought they were kittens, and just couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t play with him. The kittens at home did, but these black and white kittens in the woods all seemed to have bad attitudes.
Meadow, Autumn and Samson had the dog in an old wash tub and were holding their noses while scrubbing him down with tomato juice.
Autumn was voicing her opinion that perhaps they should have named him something other than Bam-Bam.
“We should have called you Dumb-Dumb,” she said.
Samson, ever the superhero coming to the aid of the downtrodden and oppressed, took exception to the comment.
“Hey, hey, he’s not dumb. He’s just… not real smart, that’s all.”
“This is the third time,” Autumn argued. “He should have learned his lesson by now.”
All four of them, smelly canine included, looked to the north and west when they heard a rumble which sounded like thunder far in the distance.
But there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
A few seconds later the ground trembled.
Bam-Bam didn’t even notice. He was too busy trying to drink the tomato juice which made up his bath water.
Autumn’s eyes grew big. She’d felt earthquakes before, but it had been awhile.
It was Samson’s first quake, and he smiled and said, “Cool.”
Meadow was the only one among them who put two and two together and realized what they’d just heard and felt.
She thought of her Nana and started to cry.
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Thank you for reading
THE YELLOWSTONE EVENT
Book 5: The Eruption
Please enjoy this preview of
THE YELLOWSTONE EVENT
Book 6: The Aftermath
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Hannah was on the verge of tears.
Her voice was that of a frightened little girl.
She was almost begging now.
“Honey, I’m scared. Can’t we stop and rest for awhile? Or switch over to another highway? You guys are so exhausted I’m afraid we’ll go over the side of the cliff.”
Gwen could no longer watch. She’d already retreated to the back of the RV and drawn the curtains. Now she was trying her best to keep her mind occupied by reading a book.
That in itself was a monumental task.
“Honey, if we go inland we might not get through. We wouldn’t have made it this far if it wasn’t for the coastal wind.”
They’d been held up in San Francisco as road crews worked desperately to keep the Golden Gate Bridge from collapsing.
Volcanic ash is heavy. Very heavy.
The Highway Department ordered the bridge closed when its accumulated ash went over six inches.
Much more than that, they said, and they couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t collapse under the combined weight of the ash and the cars traveling over it.
As much as they hated it, and as much as it backed traffic up on both sides of the bridge, they closed the span for seven hours.
For every minute of those seven hours road crews used front end loaders to scoop up the ash one bucketful at a time and dump it over the side of the bridge into the bay.
Other workers with snow shovels cleared the pedestrian bridge in the same manner, and it was back breaking work.
For while the ash may have drifted down like snow and looked like a gray version of snow, it was nothing like snow.
It was heavier than hell.
They were stuck in the traffic jam five miles south of the bridge with no way to exit, no way to turn around.
The only bright spot was it gave Melvyn and Tony a chance to get a break from driving for a few hours.
Once the iconic bridge was reopened it took almost an hour to get over it. Vehicles were choking out to the right and to the left and very stupid people were abandoning them where they coasted to a stop.
By the time they got to the bridge it was down to one lane of traffic and more resembled an obstacle course as those with still-running vehicles dodged those getting in the way.
And they were among the lucky ones, for mere minutes after they cleared the bridge the highway department closed it a second time.
As they drove over the Golden Gate Hannah looked down into the bay and marveled.
She’d assumed the heavy ash would immediately sink to the ocean’s bottom.
And indeed much of it did.
Much more of it floated instead, and created a thick and sickeningly gray muck which rolled with the incoming tide, muting its waves and looking more like tar than water.
Now, a full day later, they were on the Oregon Coast Highway, near Meyer’s Beach.
The ash fall on the roads here was less treacherous, because an almost constant westerly wind came off the water and blew most of it inland.
The tradeoff wasn’t a good one.
One would think the dry ash wouldn’t be slippery, but it was.
And there were parts of the highway where only a galvanized steel guard rail separated the big RV from a drop down a sheer two hundred foot cliff into the rocky waters of the Pacific.
It wasn’t just the Golden Gate bottleneck that had slowed them down.
They were following FEMA’s instructions coming over the radio.
Every fifty miles they were pulling over where there was a chance to do so, and stopping dead in their tracks when there was no shoulder.
Each time they stopped Tony climbed on top of the RV with a broom and swept off the ash which had accumulated since their last stop.
Too much ash would collapse the roof, FEMA was saying.
Tony hated going up there. It was slippery and hard to breathe.
But he was younger than Melvyn, and therefore lighter and more nimble.
Melvyn had his own task to perform during the frequent stops.
He was opening up the hood of the RV, removing the air filter, and beating it against the side of the vehicle.
If he didn’t do that often and earnestly the filter would soon become so clogged no air could pass through it.
It was slow-going and treacherous.
But if there was one bright spot to be had it was that they were finally outrunning the falling ash.
At its highest point, just north of Los Angeles, Tony was sweeping off an inch of ash every fifty miles or so.
Now it was a quarter of that.
Tony had his doubts earlier.
But now he was convinced they were going to make it.
Hannah was proud of him.
He wasn’t always the perfect husband.
But he was always there when she needed him.
And she and Samson needed him now more than ever.
Melvyn called from the back of the RV, where he was comforting Gwen.
“My turn to take the wheel, if you
want to find a place to pull over.”
“Roger. I saw a sign for a rest area coming up in a couple of miles.”
They’d been switching off every two hours since they left Phoenix.
Back then the ash was just starting to drift down. FEMA was all over the radio, saying it was going to get worse in the hours ahead.
Much worse, in fact.
They scrambled, leaving most of their things behind but knowing the farther they got up the coast before the highways were blanketed with a thick layer of gray the better.
Actually, switching off every two hours was to give each of them a chance to rest, for they knew the driving would be white-knuckle and high-stress.
It didn’t work out that way, though.
Really, now, who could possibly relax enough to sleep, or even to rest, when the biggest catastrophic event in recorded history was taking place?
All four of them had been up for thirty six straight hours.
Only little Samson was getting any sleep.
They were running on adrenaline and caffeine and not much else, and they’d agreed to go as fast and as far as they could until they outran most of the ash drop.
Until the ash on the roadway was but a mere dusting.
Tony pulled over and switched out with Melvyn.
“You okay, Buddy?” he asked.
“I’m good for at least another two hours. I think by that time we’ll be in the home stretch.”
It was rough going for more than a thousand miles.
But they were going to survive.
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The Yellowstone Event Book 6: The Aftermath
will be available worldwide in December 2018.
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Coming in October 2018:
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PANDEMIC
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The Yellowstone Event (Book 5): The Eruption Page 17
