Natural Disaster (Book 1): Erupt

by Lou Cadle

  5

  Timberline Lodge, south side of Mount Hood.

  Ellen’s stomach growled as the waiter set a steaming bowl of cheese-broccoli soup in front of her, next to the napkin-covered basket of mixed grain rolls.

  “Another tea?” he asked

  “What the heck, it’s vacation. Give me a glass of wine instead. Nothing bankrupting. Whatever you think will go with the soup.”

  He smiled. “You trust me that much?”

  “You must know a thousand times as much as I do about wines.” She had maybe a glass a month, usually whatever was around at a dinner party, and she could never remember the details, what tasted good and what didn’t, much less brand names.

  The waiter returned to the bar and said something to the bartender. A man at the bar turned to look at her. He had dark hair and eyes and a lean but strong build. A mafia hit man, she guessed, or the local vet or, no, a traveling ski wax salesman. He stood up, a head taller than her waiter. Then he walked toward her, carrying a thick white mug.

  She was surprised when he stopped at her table. “How’s the soup?” he asked.

  Ah, must be the restaurant manager. “Haven’t tried it yet.”

  He gestured to a chair. “Do you mind company?”

  “Don’t you have some work to do?” she asked.

  He frowned then seemed to understand and said. “Oh, no. I don’t work here.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “I’m not very good at this, am I?” he said with a shake of his head.

  “Until I know what ‘this’ is, I can hardly judge.”

  “I’m trying to chat you up, as the British say.” He smiled ruefully. “I’ve never been great at it.”

  “Why?” She clarified. “Not why you aren’t good at it—who is, right? But why me?”

  “Besides that you’re attractive? What you read. I noticed it when you walked in.” He pointed to the book she had bought at the gift shop that she had been paging through since she sat down. The Natural History of the Cascades. Half trail guide, half science.

  She hesitated, but after all, she was on vacation. She wanted new and different. Take a chance, girl. “Sure, sit,” she said.

  He did as told, a nice quality in a man. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Want something to eat?” she asked, as the bartender arrived with a glass of blood-red wine.

  “Pinot reserve. Patricia Green,” the waiter murmured, and then walked away.

  Ellen supposed that must mean a vintner—or maybe she was being mistaken for this Patricia Green person. “Do you need the waiter back?” she asked the man sitting with her.

  He shook his head. “I ate. Coffee here’s good, though, if you want some.” He took a sip from his mug.

  “I’m Ellen,” she said, reaching out a hand.

  “Ty,” he said, shaking.

  “For…. Tybalt? Tyrell? Tyrone, after the old actor?”

  “Older than him, even,” he said. “Tycho.”

  “No kidding? After Tycho Brahe?”

  “You are a reader.” He sounded pleased.

  “School librarian,” she said. “We tend to know a little about everything. We only know a lot about a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Harry Potter and the Dewey Decimal System.” She took a sip of wine. “That’s good.” She took the basket of rolls and offered it to Ty, but he shook his head. She took a rye roll, fragrant with caraway, and pulled off a piece. She smiled at him when she asked, “What sort of parents name their child after Tycho Brahe?”

  “Danish ones, I bet,” he said, “but in my case, amateur astronomers. They met over a telescope, they fell in love over a telescope, they claim they created me under an open sky of glittering stars.”

  “Poetic,” she said, smiling. “And possibly too much information.”

  “I thought so myself, whenever they mentioned it. Sorry.” He toyed with the rim of his mug. “Who were you named after?”

  “I’m afraid my mother got me out of a name-your-baby-book.”

  While she ate, they went on to talk about families, where they grew up, and their jobs. He made her laugh more than once. It was all very comfortable and natural, thought Ellen, but I’m not going to hook up with some random man simply because I’m on vacation. Right?

  6

  North Face Mount Hood. 2:45 p.m.

  Norio followed the loose rope upslope, breathing fast in the thin air. Jackson was an orange and black patch ahead of him, blurred in the fuzzy white. The weather was not cooperating, and the cloud they were climbing into made everything look like an impressionist painting, hazy and pastel.

  “Wait,” called Jackson, holding up a hand like a traffic cop. Norio was happy to wait, to catch his breath and take a swipe at his runny nose with the back of his glove. Jackson called back, “This sucks. The footing is getting iffy with all this choss. It’s like it’s July or August up here.”

  His wind recovered, Norio was able to take deeper, slower breaths. He believed he smelled a hint of sulfur. His hands itched for the equipment that could tell him if any were here, but it was back in the office. He turned around in a circle, hoping for a break in the cloud, hoping to see a possible source for the smell. Nothing but mist. “Can we go on safely?” he called up to Jackson.

  The man hesitated, tested the snow at his feet. “We go slow, and you stay well back of me and to the side, if you can. I don’t want to kick a rock fall onto your head.” He muttered something more to himself as he pressed on.

  Norio trudged upward, the snow feeling mushy under his feet, now that it had been pointed out to him, and soon they reached a ridge that should have line of sight to the first missing monitoring station. Norio called a halt, caught his breath again, shrugged off his pack, dug out the binoculars and slid them over his neck. He got out the GPS and turned it on. Two satellites, good enough. He got a reading, aimed himself roughly in direction of the station, and marked an arrow to it in the soft snow. He stuck the GPS back inside and dug out the heat gun. It worked best close up, and he began scanning by aiming just upslope, then checked his alignment again and aimed out into the empty fog towards where the station should be.

  “So?” Jackson asked.

  “It’s warmer. Warmer than it should be in June, right there in particular.” He pointed. “Can we make our way along this ridge over there?”

  “Wait,” Jackson said. He coiled the rope and played it back out as he picked his way along. Norio donned his pack again. After thirty meters, Jackson called back, “come along.”

  Norio caught up. Jackson said, “I think I saw something up there. The mist almost cleared for a second.”

  Through his binoculars, Norio scanned in that direction but saw nothing. He smelled something, though—definitely sulfur. “What did you see?”

  “Something that I’d swear isn’t supposed to be there.”

  Norio was digging out the heat gun again. “Like what?” he snapped, impatient with the vagueness.

  “Like there’d been a rock fall or something.” Jackson stared ahead intently. “Bare rock. Or a sinkhole?”

  Norio walked several feet nearer and triggered the heat gun. 12.3 C. Whoa. Definitely heat ahead. The scent of sulfur, heat. “Maybe we have new fumaroles,” he said.

  “Like down on Crater Rock? Here?” Crater Rock, on the south side, was dotted with fumaroles, venting steam and other gasses steadily. Once a year or so, a hiker ignored the warning signs, got too close and asphyxiated himself there. A southern flank eruption centered there would be aimed away from the areas that put Portland at risk. A northern eruption, or a western one—that would be very bad news for people. A northwestern flank eruption with westerly winds—that would be the worst, a true disaster for people in the urban area around Portland.

  Any eruption would be interesting to him, good for understanding volcanoes in ways that would eventually save many more people not yet born. And yes, good for his career, too. But today, there were people ali
ve down in that river valley, and he was aware they were there, a target for any eruption that started here.

  The mist cleared for a second, and he caught a glimpse in the distance—dark rock amid the glacier, and a wisp that may have been a steam vent or just another patch of cloud. Then the mist closed back in.

  He repacked quickly. “Let’s go.”

  “Up there, or you need to see the other place? I don’t love these conditions, but….”

  “We can’t see anything in this cloud cover.” And the footing was getting dangerous. He’d rather be in contact with the CVO when and if the satellite images came in than to spend another two hours on iffy snow getting to another blind spot up here. Remote imaging was going to have to be their eyes for now, until these clouds cleared. He was shouldering his pack again, debating to himself, to go up, or to go down, when the earth trembled.

  The ice under Norio cracked. He slid down ten meters. He dug his heels in, wished his ice axe were in hand instead of where it was, on his pack. The rope jerked and his slide stopped. “Shitshitshit,” he muttered. His heart was pounding, hard.

  “You okay?” Jackson called.

  Norio glanced up. Jackson was braced in the snow, both hands on the rope. “Good. Thanks, man, for catching me. Let’s get away from here.” He felt giddy with relief. That quake would have registered on the surviving seismos, but damn, he wished the two right here were still functioning. As he struggled up, his eyes filled with tears, stinging. Psychosomatic? Or was this SO2 or, worse, HCl or HF? The Cascades had the capability of producing some nasty gasses. He looked at Jackson, who wasn’t red-eyed or coughing. He hoped his own tears were imaginary, then, the product of too much knowledge. But the gasses might be real. He dug out a small plastic zipper bag, opened it, swung it around until it inflated, and zipped it up, collecting an imperfect sample of local atmosphere. He tucked it into a second bag and sealed that one, too. He snapped open the metal sample box and tucked it inside. If he was lucky, it’d stay intact until he got it back to the CVO. The tears were cooling in his eye sockets. He wiped them away. “Let’s get going.”

  “Which way?”

  “Down. We can’t see, and we can’t hike safely. Let’s get out of here before one of us gets hurt. I know more than I did.”

  After forty-five minutes of descent, he stopped Jackson and got out his cell phone. Despite the lack of signal, he typed in a text to Kate. He’d leave the phone on from here on, and as soon as it caught a signal as they drove down the mountain, the text would go. It said. “New fumaroles? Patchy heat. SO2. Rec. ^ avi alert.”

  Once they were off rope, they booked it back to the car.

  7

  Firehouse 42. Camas, Washington. Evening.

  Chad was scrubbing the firehouse dinner table when Francie walked in, holding a green hanging file folder bulging with paper.

  “Heya, Chadster, how’s it going?”

  “Always good when it’s Tuesday.” Until he could be a firefighter, he did a shift as a volunteer every Tuesday, noon to eight p.m., end of the A shift for the firefighters and beginning of the B shift. It was always the highlight of his week, unless he was getting regularly laid, which he wasn’t right now, with no prospects in sight on that. “What you reading?” he asked Francie, as she opened up the folder.

  “Emergency plan for the county.” She sat and held up a thin bound booklet, showing him the official county seal on the front. “Walt asked me to review it after I finished my on-line class, see if there was anything new I learned that should change this.”

  “A class on what?”

  “This. Emergency response. Class was sort of lame, tell you the truth, but the city paid for it, so who am I to complain? More terrorist stuff than we’re likely ever going to need.”

  “We are next door to Portland.”

  “And Port of Portland, or container shipping, Port of Vancouver, or maybe the bridge, that’s where the terrorist issues would no doubt be, but I doubt it’d drift up river to us. We’re too small a town.” She set out a yellow legal pad and pen. “We might get some emergency with the paper mill, though, some chemical spill. Or Burlington Northern coming through with a hundred cars of something toxic, derailing. That’d be bad. More likely, a wildfire or flood. Maybe earthquake. Mt. St. Helens thing.”

  “Bathtub race disaster,” he suggested. “That’s coming up next month.”

  She grinned. “Yeah, could happen. I’ll make sure it’s covered in the plan.”

  He went back to cleaning and was almost done when the alarm rang, echoing off the concrete walls downstairs. Francie jumped up, whipping out of the room so fast he felt the breeze of her passing. Chad’s whole body quivered as the sound continued, calling to the firefighters. He longed to join her, to be her for the next few hours. For now, he could only go downstairs to the door, stay out of the way, and watch the crew, moving fast and with purpose, getting suited up and mounting the rig. The engine growled to life and the last man jumped on, then the red truck was gone from sight, its siren rising to a thrilling wail.

  After the siren had faded, he went down to the communications center. Kane, a skinny middle-aged guy with ancient acne scars, was on duty there, and held up a finger to silence Chad. “Yes, they should be arriving in less than three minutes.” He lifted the mouthpiece from his mouth. “Do something for you?”

  “What’s the alarm?”

  “Kitchen fire, Woodlawn area.” His focus drifted away while he listened through his earpiece and, after a moment of being ignored, Chad left.

  With longing, he touched the side of the EMT van as he passed it and then rubbed out his thumbprint with his shirttail. He went back up to the dining room. Francie’s papers were still sitting there and, to distract himself from thoughts of the fire he couldn’t fight or even see, he sat down and began to read. By the time he heard the engine pull back into its bay, he had read a good chunk of one document and scanned a second. He was flipping through the loose papers in the file when Francie came back upstairs, her face flushed and happy.

  “How was it?” he asked, standing.

  “Minor grease fire. Elderly woman forgot the stove was on.”

  A.J., one of the older firefighters, came in the door behind her. “Always hungry after a call,” he said cheerfully, moving back into the kitchen.

  “Much damage?” Chad asked Francie.

  “Limited to the kitchen. She called it in pretty quick. As wet as it has been this spring, the fire wouldn’t have spread far. On her way out she tried to put it out. Grabbed a canister off her counter and tossed it on the pan.”

  A.J. came back in with an apple and finger of string cheese, hearing the last. “Yeah, she grabbed the wrong thing.” He sat at the table and bit into his apple.

  Francie shook her head, grabbing a chair and turning it to sit backwards in it. “Sugar, not flour. Place is going to smell like burned sugar for a while.”

  “Reminds me of Christmastime around my mother’s house,” A.J. said. “Mom never could keep from burning her candy.” He and Francie grinned at each other, and Chad felt odd. Included in the conversation, but left out of the feeling of a job well done, missing the adrenaline and shared satisfaction. Feeling like an unwelcome guest, he remained standing and shifted his weight from leg to leg, listening to their banter.

  He waited until A.J. had left, then asked Francie, “You still wired from the fire?”

  “Naw.” She studied his face. “Something wrong?”

  “No,” he said. He was not going to whine that he felt “left out.” How lame would that sound? “I had some questions about this file here.” He pointed to it.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  He flinched, worried he had crossed some line. “Sorry if I wasn’t supposed to see it.”

  “No, that’s no problem,” she said. “Just a little surprised it interested you. What questions do you have?”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem a plan so much as a list of what might go wrong. Except for saying th
e police are lead in most cases, it isn’t, you know, a plan.”

  “Maybe that’s why Walt wanted me to look at it. But there should be an emergency operations plan—list of equipment and responsibilities and so on. You didn’t see that?”

  “No. It talks about Portland’s plan, like they have something detailed. Maybe you can call and get a copy of that if you need it. You know, like a model to copy.”

  “Hey, thanks, Chad,” she said. She pushed a stray bit of hair from her face then sniffed her hand. “Need a shower before I get back to this.” She left.

  Alone again, Chad went back to the main bay, intending to help put the rig back in order. On the other side of the truck, he could hear Kane talking to A.J. “—auxiliary shit.”

  A.J: “How it’s done, man.”

  Kane: “He’s just in the way, stupid kid.”

  Chad froze, realized Kane was talking about him, and felt his stomach drop. He stayed still and held his breath.

  A.J: “Yeah? He seems real careful about that to me.”

  Kane’s answer was too low to hear. But he could hear venom in the tone.

  “Well, take it up with the battalion chief then.”

  Chad backed away, went back up to the dining room, realized he didn’t want to see Francie when she came back from the shower—or anyone—and he padded back into the kitchen, keeping the overhead light off as the swinging door closed behind him. Feeling his way down the center island to the far wall, he found the stove and turned on the hood light. He grabbed a sponge and wiped the already clean stainless steel countertops, cleaned for something to do, for distraction. He could feel his face burning and he kept it turned away from the door, in case someone came in.