by Nick Thacker
“Sorry,” he said, shrugging. “I’m trying to stay off the larger park roads — it should be abandoned, but we can’t be too careful. Just hang on;, the lake’s coming up in a few minutes.”
She groaned, but didn’t argue. Instead, she opened her laptop and connected to the wireless internet tethered from her cellphone. For a few minutes, she checked for new emails, updates on the spreading virus, and sent a few emails up the chain of command at the CDC. They both knew it was a long shot, as the CDC was already doing everything they could to stop the spread of the virus, and their ability to provide research support had been extremely stifled by Stephens’ work before. After a few minutes of clicking around, she closed the computer.
“Try calling again?” Ben asked.
“There’s no point,” she replied. “Anyone there is already deployed at a waypoint or helping with disaster relief. We need to get to an actual location, then —”
“Julie, we’ve talked about this,” Ben said. “We can’t risk it. Like you just said, most of your teams are going to have already been deployed, or will be. And we don’t have the time to drive all the way there.”
“I know, I know,” Julie said, exasperated. “It’s just… frustrating. I feel so helpless. I’ve always been the person to rush in, take charge, you know?”
Ben smiled from the side of his mouth. “I do know. And what we’re trying to do out here is much more helpful than just driving to a CDC branch and talking to the office staff. There’s nothing that needs to happen back there yet. Let’s get this bomb taken care of, and we can go from there.”
“But how do we even know where the bomb is?”
“It’s under the lake,” Ben answered, his voice confident. As he said the words, a sign flew past on the right side of the road with the words “Yellowstone Lake - 1 Mile” printed on it.
“Ben, Livingston’s already checked there. Remember? He sent a team of geologists and excavators through most of the caves in the region, and found that tunnel. If there was something there, he would have —”
“Julie, Livingston didn’t tell you that.”
“He did! He called, and —” she suddenly remembered what Ben was hinting at.
Livingston hadn’t called — Stephens had.
She bolted upright in the seat. “Stephens called, not Livingston. He only said Livingston had sent the team in, and he didn’t have any reason to be communicating with Livingston, which means…” She thought for a moment. “Which means he was lying. Ben, if he was lying, we could be heading in the wrong direction.”
“But we’re not. We’re going exactly where Stephens told us to go. So far he’s double-crossed us at every step, but it’s been his information that’s gotten us this far. He even told us why — he wanted to watch us try to figure it out.” Ben looked at Julie. “If that bomb is actually somewhere in Yellowstone, we’re going to find it exactly where Stephens told us to look.”
Julie knew he was right — it had to be right. “Yeah, why wouldn’t he just tell us exactly where it is? As insane as he was, he believed it was too late to do anything anyway.”
She hoped Stephens wasn’t right about that.
“So where is this cave, anyway?” she asked.
Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. But there’s only one cave I can think of that’s long and deep enough to be a good spot. It has to be close enough to the surface that an explosion would penetrate, but deep enough to affect the magma area below the caldera. It’s a few miles around the lake, once we get there, but the cave isn’t terribly long.”
“But he cut a tunnel into the side of it, right?”
“Right, and we have no way of knowing how deep that is. But it’s wide enough that we can crouch or slide most of the way through, and there aren’t any major forks. We’ll know right away if we see a manmade tunnel.”
Ben pulled the truck to the left as the road took a dogleg turn, then he sped up again. This section of the road was considerably better than the one they’d been on, with a gravel base and fewer potholes and bumps. As he aimed the vehicle down the center of the one-lane drive, he couldn’t help but notice the immense beauty of the surrounding country.
This land had been his only home for over a decade. Diana — his mother — had tried for years to bring him and his brother together again under one roof, but she’d failed.
Or, rather, he’d failed her.
After his father died, Ben did the only thing that felt right. He ran away. At the time it hadn’t felt like running away, though, as much as it felt like running toward something. This something was staring down at him as he drove through it.
The trees, pine and spruce, scraping at the ceiling of the sky, their tops ripping into the vast blue and white. The forest floor, which had acted as his bed for so many nights he couldn’t count them, and the soft prickle of the needles that littered the ground and crunched when he walked.
And the smell.
That forest, deep-green, fresh, alive smell.
The smell was the biggest reason he’d settled here, and he swore he’d never live another day without it. Whether it was a mountaintop in Colorado, the sweeping forests of Yellowstone, or his secluded cabin in Alaska, as long as that smell was there when he arrived, he could live anywhere.
But it saddened him that he wasn’t there now — home — wherever it was. Even though he was in his own backyard, driving like a madman over roads he was intimately familiar with, he wasn’t truly home.
He wasn’t sure what was missing, what had changed.
He looked again at Julie and saw her gazing back at him.
What’ was missing?
The question rose again.
What’ was missing?
He silently tried to answer it, to make it go away. But it didn’t — it wouldn’t. He tried again, and failed.
Ben suddenly realized it wasn’t a question he as asking about his own life — that question had already been answered. Instead, this question was about their mission, about the task at hand.
What’ was missing?
As he posed the question again, emphasizing different beats, different syllables of each word, the answer struck him at once.
The reason.
He turned his head sideways, chewing on that answer. The reason was missing.
The reason Stephens had done it. He wasn’t being paid — he’d given his life for the cause. It couldn’t have been about money, at least not for him. And he wasn’t just a murderer, a basket case with a chip on his shoulder.
There was something more.
Something, Ben realized, they should have already figured out.
A chill came down the back of Ben’s neck as he gripped the steering wheel tightly, all of the possible solutions to the problem suddenly pouring through his mind.
The plan was, Ben had to admit, all but perfect. If Stephens hadn’t fed them every scrap of information they currently knew, they’d be no better off than the CDC and the rest of the population. They’d be lost, looking for a needle in a haystack.
No, they wouldn’t even know to look — Stephens was the one who’d told them there was a second bomb. Why had he gone through all the trouble to stage a massive terrorist plot against an entire nation, to then simply die alone?
Even if he was working with a larger organization, as Malcolm had suggested, why make it a point to have witnesses for his suicidal last stand?
To simply die alone?
“Shit,” he whispered. He whipped the truck around, barely coming to a stop. Gravel flew out from the truck’s tires, spraying the trees and bushes growing next to the road and sending birds clamoring out of the way.
The computer on Julie’s lap slammed against the car door as she shrieked and grasped at the ceiling-mounted handle.
“What the hell?” she shouted, trying to fight the centrifugal force of the truck’s rotation. “Ben, what’s going on?”
To die alone.
That was the reason. That had always been th
e reason.
No, the answer.
That had always been the answer.
Stephens was talking to him, communicating to them still, from beyond the grave.
“Ben?”
He wanted them to feel his pain — the very real, human, pain. Isolated, gripping, terrifying pain.
Alone.
48
“THE LITHOSPHERE OF THE EARTH, consisting of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle, is normally just under one hundred miles thick. The outer shell of crust makes up what our entire planet lives on, either on land, in the air, or beneath the sea.”
The Indian man’s voice crackled through the station’s tube TV, the color long since faded. Officer Darryl Wardley wondered why no one had bothered to change it out, or at least have it fixed.
Could you even fix tube TVs?
He thought about the question, finding it genuinely more interesting than this dark-skinned man with glasses on TV talking about stuff he’d long since forgotten. He’d pulled the desk shift this evening, but with the mass hysteria keeping everyone insanely busy lately, it was a welcome rest. He blinked, once again concentrating on the TV.
“This shell is typically between three and five miles thick beneath the Earth’s surface, and closer to thirty-five miles thick on land.
“The crust section of the lithosphere below the Yellowstone Caldera in Yellowstone National Park is less than two miles thick, meaning that the upper mantle, full of molten rock and magma, is extremely close to the surface. This ‘hotspot’ is one of only a dozen on Earth, and means that the extreme temperatures found within the Earth are much closer to the surface.”
Again, boring. He wondered if there was a game on — maybe baseball, since they always played. If not, there might be a decent hockey game rerun on ESPN, but he’d have to get up to change the channel. Why can’t we afford a Universal Remote Control? He’d been around long enough to know that it wasn’t anyone’s job, so it had probably just never gotten done. He made a mental note to pick one up at Walmart the next time he was there.
“The last time this caldera erupted was over 640,000 years ago, and the blast was large enough to send ash as far away as the Pacific coast, some of the plains states, and even the Gulf of Mexico.” As the man spoke, the station had superimposed a slide showing a map of the western United States, covered by a red oblong shape — the volcano — and a lighter shaded section labeled “Ash Zone.”
“Yellowstone has experienced a massive volcanic eruption just about every 600,000 years, and the prior eruptions — 1.3 million and 2.1 million years ago, respectively — were even larger. Actually, because of this fantastically large land area, the Yellowstone Supervolcano is considered to be the largest active volcano in the world.”
Officer Wardley frowned. Volcanoes were huge smoking mountains, he thought. But as he considered the park’s many geologic features, including geysers, hot springs, and smoking fissures in the ground, he changed his mind. Maybe there was a volcano under there after all. His family — wife and three kids — and he had spent many summer vacations there, since it was so close. Only a few hours away, and they’d had numerous friends over the years to travel with.
The Indian man, Dr. Ramachutran, continued explaining the seismic activity that could be found at the park. “It was extremely lucky that this bomb went off where it did, and not closer to the caldera’s center, and that it was not larger. The right explosion could do more damage than a simple blast — it could potentially fracture the already delicate infrastructure of the plates holding the magma below at bay. In fact, since many scientists believe that Yellowstone is due for an eruption, a blast of a certain size could jumpstart this timeline.”
Wardley sat up in his chair, no longer daydreaming. He saw for the first time another person on the television, this time a woman in a red dress, obviously the interviewer. She asked a few questions, which the man answered one at a time.
“To put in perspective how large this volcanic eruption will be, consider the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980, which we no doubt all remember. Yellowstone’s volcano would be on a force magnitude of 2,500 times that size. It would send ash more than thirty miles straight up into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun and most likely causing the planet’s global temperature to plummet.
“But this ash would be a long-term problem. For the people within five to six hundred miles of the actual eruption, all life will be either incinerated instantaneously or consumed by pyroclastic lava flows that move at high speeds. The western half of the United States might simply cease to exist, but the effects to the global economy and that of humanity in general will be devastating.”
The woman made a remark about the man’s dire explanation, calling into question the confidence he had in his prediction.
“This is not speculation, mind you. It is scientific fact. Volcanologists and geologists have long been hard at work predicting not if this eruption will take place, but when. There is a strong possibility that we will be without an eruption for the next 1,000 years, and even 10,000 years, but there is no definitive way to understand the dynamics at play beneath the surface of the Earth.”
The woman turned away from the man and spoke to the camera.
“You heard it yourself. Dr. Ramachutran is an esteemed volcanologist and the author of numerous books on the subject. With the increased interest surrounding the explosion at Yellowstone National Park only days ago, and of course the terrible virus that is spreading throughout the United States that is believed to have been initiated by that same explosion, we wanted to bring you a special edition feature for tonight’s newscast that examined the Yellowstone Caldera.
“In a moment, we will return to your regularly scheduled programming after a brief update from our disaster relief team regarding the enigma strain virus.”
The woman’s face was replaced by a handsome man in his mid-fifties, with perfectly combed salt-and-pepper hair. He was smiling, but Officer Wardley had worked with people long enough to know the man on the television was holding in a certain amount of fear. Possibly panic.
“The enigma strain virus is still eluding the nation’s best researchers, though we are told that a breakthrough is imminent. As you have no doubt already heard, please stay indoors, lock your house, and do not venture out for any reason. Stay isolated, and do not physically interact with anyone other than your immediate family…”
Wardley scoffed at the man on TV. The anchor was stuck at work, just like him. How many others were out there, stuck at their jobs, explaining their own demise to the rest of their species? Wardley had already fielded calls from three of his fellow officers — two accounts of looting and one small riot gang making its way up and down the main street of town. Even for a small city, the crazies somehow seemed to be the majority.
He got up to refill his coffee — he’d need another pot of it before the night was over — when the phone rang.
He growled, then sat back down. “Officer Wardley, Sheridon County Police, how may I assist you?”
He frowned as he heard the explanation on the other end of the line. “Excuse me, you’re going to need to slow down. You said you’re in Yellowstone right now?”
The voice yammered on. “Son,” Wardley said. “You need to get out of the park. There’s a virus —”
But the voice continued. Wardley’s heartbeat rose slightly. He was not fond of being yelled at, especially by a civilian. “Listen, Bennett, I don’t care if you’re a park ranger or not — you need to get out of that area.”
He started to explain their protocol regarding a refugee from a disease-infected area as he pulled out a regional map that had the quarantine checkpoints and stations marked in highlighter, but the man on the phone interrupted him again.
He was starting to get really angry.
“Bennett, I’m not going to ask you —”
He paused.
“Sorry, what?”
Bennett spoke again.
“There’s another b
omb? And you’re sure of it?” He listened to Bennett explain, for the third time, what he wanted Wardley to do, and then he slammed the phone down onto the receiver.
49
OFFICER DARRYL WARDLEY’S POLICE CRUISER, a 2006 Dodge Charger, raced down the highway at ninety miles an hour. He would have gone faster if it wasn’t for the handful of stray vehicles disobeying the now government-mandated house arrest for every citizen spread out on the open road.
Wardley’s comm had squawked out just about every excuse in the book as he’d listened in on his fellow officers’ 11-95s. Most of the civilians were heading to and from the supermarkets for last-minute supplies, or checking in on family and friends who hadn’t responded to their phone calls. One deranged man had even admitted he was on a joyride; he’d never seen so little traffic on the highway, and he wanted to take advantage of it.
Most of the civilians, with the exception of the wannabe race car driver, were let off with nothing but a warning and a stern reminder that they were supposed to be inside. The federal government, after all, hadn’t issued a formalized process notice explaining what the local officers were supposed to do with 11-95s out and about against mandate. Wardley’s comrades were driving blind, simply pulling people over, asking them for their license and registration — nothing but a formality these days, anyway — and then letting them go after they heard the driver’s excuse.
Wardley was glad he wasn’t on patrol duty tonight. Nothing but a bunch of crazies and nut jobs taking advantage of the fact that most of the United States government was busy trying to figure out this virus.
Still, driving ninety miles an hour down an almost-abandoned highway felt an awful lot like being on duty, and he sighed as he checked his reflection in the rearview mirror.
Disheveled salt-and-pepper hair, deep-set brown eyes, and eyebrows that could use a trim were part of the face staring back at him. Wardley tried to understand why he looked so exhausted. Maybe it was age. He’d slept just before his shift, no more than five hours ago. But he felt physically, emotionally, and mentally drained.
