by Lou Cadle
The noise went on and on. She understood that this was a volcano going off, but she didn’t understand the sound. Everything around her vibrated. Her eyes were open but she could see nothing in the darkness. Her teeth rattled against the rock and it hurt her skull.
Finally, the noise lessened. She wondered how long it had actually been. A minute? Seemed like much more.
A dim light returned to the cave. She wriggled and Ty rolled off her.
She lifted herself on her elbows and turned her head to ask, “What was that?”
“Pyroclastic flow,” he said. “The column of ash collapses during a fluctuation, and it flows down the mountainside.”
She had read about that somewhere—curse of the librarian again, she thought, a little knowledge about everything.
“It’s like a hurricane, with rocks, but faster,” he said. “And maybe a thousand degrees, or even two thousand.”
“Oh,” she said.
“We would have been incinerated. Or people have their blood come to an immediate boil and their skin splits and their skulls rupture—”
“Stop,” she said. “Too much info.” She collapsed onto one arm, lying on her side, facing him. “You saved me.”
“You saved yourself by trusting me and running.” He sat up and shook his head. “No one outruns a pyroclastic flow.”
“But we just did.” She sat up, too, rubbing life back into her arms.
“Had we still been up at McNeil point, we’d be dead. Or down at the car. Dead. This was dumb luck.”
“It was dumb luck being where we were, but it was you thinking fast that got us inside the cave.”
The light was continuing to brighten. She looked back at the entrance and saw a yellow-gray glow. “Is it gone?”
“This one is.”
“This one? I wish you hadn’t said that.”
“Depends, I guess, on the eruption if there’ll be another.”
“So, we could still die.”
“We’re going to die one day, for sure,” he said, reaching out to push a strand of hair off her cheek. “Eventually. But we’ll try not to make it today.”
“I wish we had made love last night,” she blurted, embarrassed as soon as the words were out of her mouth. But he grinned at her, and she felt better. Emboldened. If this were the last ten minutes of her life…. “You aren’t in the mood right now, are you?”
He looked down at his crotch and shook his head, ruefully. “I don’t think I could.”
She patted his knee. “Oh, that’s okay, honey. That happens to every man once in his life after a volcanic eruption.”
He laughed. “You know something? I really like you.” And he pulled her into a kiss.
Her first thought—this is a crazy time to be doing this—was overridden by a rush of desire. Zero to sixty in a second. She pulled him in and kissed back with a desperate passion. She wanted him, wanted him naked. Wanted him without the condom she had tucked in her backpack. She pushed up against him, trying to shrug off her pack. Wanted him inside her, wanted him now. Wanted to be pregnant by him. Shocked, she pulled back. Pregnant? What the hell was that all about?
He looked quizzically at her.
And then she understood. “It’s life,” she said, in wonder. “It’s life, just trying to stay alive.”
“We’ll stay alive,” he said.
Of course he didn’t know what she had been thinking. And she was glad he didn’t, embarrassed now by that longing, wowed still by its force, though she believed she understood what created it. Her biological clock had come to life all at once, for she had never been fixated on having children immediately, having plenty of surrogate ones at work. But now its alarm was shrilling at her, insistent. She felt her empty womb as a painful void, a literal, physical ache. It was astonishing, new, something strangely marvelous in the midst of danger.
Enough time later to think of that. Enough time later—she hoped—to follow up on that kiss. She said, “What do we need to do now?”
“No idea. Let’s figure it out together.” He stood and led her toward the front of the cave.
She could hear a ticking sound. Little pops and cracks, like static or—no, like hail. Outside, the world was sepia toned, a photograph from 1910. A shower of ash, a sort of yellowish gray, fell exactly like snow, like the tail end of a Great Plains blizzard. A bigger rock streaked through this and fell, bouncing and rolling to the cave entrance. She reached out.
He touched her arm. “Don’t. “It’ll be hot.”
Cautiously she moved her hand toward it, and she did feel heat radiating from the rock. Wild. “In other words, we can’t go out.”
“Not right now,” he agreed.
“When?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ellen. I just don’t know.”
“At least we ate well yesterday,” she said. “And thank you for filling the water bottles.”
“I could tell you thought I was being a little bit obsessive.”
“I’ll never doubt you again. Ever.”
He gave her a wry smile. “Don’t promise that. Doubt me when I’m an idiot.”
“Noted,” she said. She looked back outside at the ashfall. “I want to do something.”
“We could play twenty questions,” he said. “Or make out some more.”
“Now I don’t know if I can,” she said. “I feel queasy. What’s that smell out there? It’s nauseating.”
“Sulfur. Magma is full of sulfur. It boils out during an eruption. That’s the yellow color, too. Now, it’s interesting why it’s yellow.”
“You could lecture me on the properties of various chemicals, I guess,” she said. “That’d be different.”
“Or we could just sit and talk,” he said with a smile, pointing back into the cave. “The smell will be weaker back there.”
They went down the slope again and sat. Ellen needed something useful to do, so she inventoried their food and water. They had nearly a gallon of water between them. Dried apricots, a fresh apple, nuts, and two more granola bars. Enough for a day. A second day stuck in here? They’d be hungry and thirsty.
“So the volcano has to quiet back down. And soon,” she said.
“Or a strong wind could come up,” he said. “Blow it all away from us.”
They sat side by side, watching the entrance, and talked.
“Did you ever think about how you might die?” she asked him.
“Hoping it would be quick and painless,” he said. “Like most people. And a long way off in the future.”
“I always wanted to die at sea and have my body tossed overboard for the fishes. It seems so ecologically sound.”
“Take many cruises?”
“Never.” She laughed. “No idea how to sail, even.”
“Ever wanted to learn? Do you have one of those before-I-die lists, and is there a lot left on it?”
“I want…” She had to think. “Honestly, I don’t care about sailing. I don’t want to keep my job, I know that much now. I want a different career, or, no, I love books. I want to live in some more liberal place where I don’t have the problems I have back home, maybe work with older kids or in an alternative school. And I want to retire early if I can. And still help humanity somehow. Normal, stuff, isn’t it? Or trite, even.”
“It’s nice,” he said.
“How ‘bout you? You have a list?”
“I used to want to discover a comet when I was a kid. You get your name on them. Then when you die, your name lives on.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“It’s not that easy. And these days, it’s all done with big sky surveys and computers that compare images over time. Only a few guys, mostly in Japan for some reason, find them the old fashioned way, scanning with binoculars. But mostly, I moved to Portland, and there are clouds 200 nights a year and light pollution the rest. You need clear, dark skies. It’s not that important, anyway. It was a childhood dream.”
“Any dreams from adulthood?”
/> “I’d like to travel, weird places, mostly. Like, I’d like to visit Los Alamos, and the Trinity site, where they set off the first bomb—it’s still a secure site, only open to civilians once a year, and you need reservations. I’ve never gone. And I’d like to go to the museum in Nagasaki. The bomb’s a horrible thing, but it was sort of a wonderful thing, too, physicists’ moment in the sun. Remaking the sun, in fact, in a time where the greatest minds got together and took this amazing leap forward.”
“You make it sound amazing.”
“I’m a nerd on the topic,” he said. “I’ve read every book, every novel on Los Alamos, popular works and academic ones. Poems, even. I don’t know entirely why I’m so fixated. The beauty of the innovative thinking and the evil of human warfare, I guess, such strange bedfellows. How they thought the first test might unwind all of the matter in the universe but they went ahead with it anyway. Oppenheimer coming to his senses too late, and ‘I am death, the destroyer of worlds.’ It’s a grand tragedy.”
“Is the bomb more powerful than the volcano?”
“What a good question—you must have been a wonderful student. But not even close. Mother Nature has much more power.”
“You said you were raised an atheist. So you think if we die today, there isn’t anything after?”
He took her hand and squeezed it. “We’re not going to die today. But no, there’s nothing after for me. All the more reason to fight to live, as long and as well as we can.” His fingers stroked hers. “You think there’s something after?”
“I have no idea. I like some of the ideas I’ve read, like reincarnation. That’d be fun, especially if I could fly in my new life. And there’s something satisfying in the belief that assholes will be punished and the virtuous rewarded, isn’t there? Doesn’t happen in this realm often enough. So I could come back, fly, and crap on their heads.”
He laughed. “So you don’t think we’re being punished for something now, I take it?” His tone was teasing.
“For being too lazy to get going earlier this morning, maybe. Nothing more mystical-universal-karmic than that.”
He dropped her hand. “Hang on.” He walked to the front of the cave again and looked out. He thrust his hand out and drew it back. He came back to her and said. “Not yet, but it’s getting better. Another hour, and if we wrap our faces up, I think we could risk walking down. If we can get down.”
“Why mightn’t we?”
“It’s a mess out there. Trees are down. We won’t be able to drive, if the car is drivable, which it won’t be if it was in the way, too. We’ll have to walk down, climbing over downed trees—probably it would be smarter to walk over, to get out of the destruction, and then down.”
“Maybe we should stay here overnight.”
“I’d rather not risk a second eruption. Or a flank eruption on this side. Magma could come blasting through right there.” He pointed at the end of the cave.
Ellen gaped. “Seriously?”
“Not there in particular. But anywhere. We need to get off the mountain if we can, and the sooner, the better.” A few minutes later, he said, “Let’s look outside again.”
Outside, the snowflake-like ash—ashflakes—were smaller, falling less densely. No more chunks of rock came speeding down as she watched. In a crazy way, the ash could have been restful to watch, like a light snowstorm, if she were inside and looking through a window. “Ugh, the smell,” she said, and backed away. If she had to walk through that smell, she’d be puking in no time.
They went back in and sat once more, sharing a drink of water, saying a few words, but mostly waiting in increasing tension. In another few minutes, he said, “Let’s look again.” He uncrossed his legs, stood. And fell to his knees with a moan.
18
1:15. Below McNeil Point, eastern flank of Mount Hood.
Ty swayed on his knees. He fell forward onto his palms.
Ellen was at his side in a flash. “Ty? What’s wrong?”
“Can’t,” he said. He shook his head as if trying to clear it. “Must be gas. Get out.”
Huh? Ellen realized her brain wasn’t working any too well either. Gas. The sulfur smell. Were they being asphyxiated down here? She held her breath, got up, and pulled at Ty, trying to get him to his feet.
He outweighed her by a good thirty or forty pounds. She couldn’t carry him. She let go, his eyes closed and he hit the floor, unconscious. She slapped him and he didn’t react at all.
What should she do? She sprinted toward the opening of the cave. She stopped there, taking long deep breaths. She was sure she could feel her head starting to clear. Relatively sure. She was so frightened, it was hard to assess her own mental state. It wasn’t going to be good breathing out there, not with all the ash floating around. But here at the entrance, whatever was making her woozy farther back seemed to be absent.
She looked back at Ty, still unmoving, down the slope of the cave. If a dangerous gas was flowing down that slope, it could be collecting down there. So it’d be better air up here, right? Wasn’t that possible? Yes. As her head cleared more, she was sure of it. So she had to get him up here. She took a last deep breath and ran back down the cave’s slope. No way she could hold her breath the whole way back up, too. Shit. She had to breathe normally. And somehow manage to not pass out.
Pack off the shoulders. Grab your bag. Unroll it next to Ty. Roll him over. Get his pack off. That took a few seconds to fight it off his limp body, and the whole time she was trying to take shallow breaths. As if that would help. She should have listened to any chemistry lecture he had offered her. Maybe she’d know better what to do. There. Pack finally off. Roll him onto the bag. She squatted down with her back to the cave entrance, took the bag in one hand, Ty’s shirt collar and the bag in the other and pulled. Pulled. Finally, his body moved. Another step. Another step. There was no choice about controlling her breathing now; she had to breathe hard with the effort. Another step.
Slowly, she dragged him twenty feet, then thirty feet up the slope. Her head started feeling odd again, her thoughts slowing and twisting in circles. She hated to, but she dropped the bag to jog back to the entrance and get better air. A minute passed that she resented spending just breathing. Her head cleared. Then back down to Ty, get him centered on the bag again, and more pulling, and more. He was dead weight, conked out totally. How long did it take for someone to get brain damaged? How long had it taken her to get him this far? She had to hurry. Ty lay there, helpless, and she had to move him. Pull. Pull. Focus only on that.
Finally, she had him at the entrance and dropped to her knees beside him. She shook him. “Ty?”
Damn it. She slapped him, really hard. “Wake up!” she shouted.
He groaned. Relief washed over her. Not dead, at least.
She swept a leg across his torso and put both palms down to push on his belly, trying to force his lungs clear of whatever was in there. In with the good air, out with the bad. A distant memory of that phrase. Some cartoon? Old movie? Goofy thing to think of right now. Maybe her mind wasn’t all that clear, after all.
His eyes popped open. “Wha—?” he said.
She sagged with relief. “You passed out. Is it some sulfur gas, Ty?”
“Doubt it. SO2 rises,” he said.
That was good news—not what he said about the gas, but that his brain was able to toss up chemical formulas and properties. No brain damage, she thought. Hoped.
“Why did you faint then, lower down?”
“CO2,” he moaned. “Or something worse. Aww, shit.” He blinked. “My head hurts.”
“Did you hit it?” she asked, worried. A concussion? How would they hike out if he had a concussion?
“No,” he said. “Hurts inside. Sharp headache.” He rubbed his temples with a knuckle. “I think it’s fading a little.”
“If there’s gas trapped in this cave, we need to get out of here.”
“Yeah.” He pushed himself up to a sitting position. “It’s probably fil
ling up with CO2. From the bottom up. Even if we wanted to stay in here, we couldn’t for long.”
She felt better at hearing those complete sentences. “I was so worried,” she said, feeling belatedly shaky.
“You did great. You got me up here, didn’t you? Saved me.”
“You saved us getting us in here before we got fried and our heads exploded. So if you need to keep score, we’re even,” she said, more sharply than she intended. Worry was getting to her, making her edgy. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. It’s just, I don’t see how we can stay. And I don’t see how we can leave.”
“Help me stand up,” he said, offering her his hands. With her help, he stood. “Better.” He ducked his head to look outside. “I think we can leave. It’s a thinner ashfall all the time.” He looked back at her with a worried look and said. “We need the packs, though. We need the water.”
“You stay in the good air. I can get them in a flash.” Before he could stop her, she took a deep breath, sprinted down the length of the cave, grabbed a pack strap in each hand and hurried back. His pack, with the tent attached, was heavy. Her held breath lasted half way up the slope. Good enough, for she didn’t get dizzy again before she reached him.
“We need something to cover our mouths and noses,” he said. “And eye protection.”
Ellen always kept a red bandana in the outer compartment of her backpack. She unzipped the compartment, pulled it out and tied it around her face, stagecoach-robber style.
Ty dug a pair of lightly-tinted goggles from his backpack. “Still in here from the last cross-country ski trip. Damned good thing they are. You use those.”
“What about your eyes?”
“I’ll squint. My hat will do good enough to keep most of the ash out of them,” he said.
“I should have worn a hat.”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. We’re good.” He had his T-shirt from yesterday in his hand, and he tied it around his face. It looked like something from TV news footage, like people disguising themselves to loot an electronics store. Or fleeing from poison gas. As indeed they were. He put on his hat. “Let’s go.”
