Natural Disaster (Book 1): Erupt

by Lou Cadle

  “I’ll radio it in,” the pilot said. “Someone’s gotta get them.”

  The eruption was out the wrong window now for Norio to get shots, as the helicopter hovered with its nose pointing just east of due south. He turned and looked back at Akroyd, pushing the headset off so he wouldn’t be yelling over the pilot’s radio call. “You feeling okay?” he called back.

  Akroyd pulled down his mike too and yelled, “Worried about my hearing. But I’m okay. Sorry about puking,” he said again.

  “Didn’t hardly notice,” Norio said, which was true. Once he saw the eruption, every other sensory input had been shoved to the back of his brain. Akroyd could have puked right on Norio’s back and he probably wouldn’t have cared. He turned to the front again and put his headset back on.

  The pilot finished up on the radio. “Okay, I’ve reported the hikers. Let’s go,” he said, increasing their altitude, and they turned back west.

  To the right, Norio could see the line of the Columbia River in the distance. Ahead of them, the mountain fell rapidly away to foothills.

  Another explosion, to their rear and left. Norio leaned over trying to see around the pilot. “What do you see, Akroyd?”

  “East flank, a lateral eruption, behind us a couple miles. Right where the glacier was melting, I think.”

  Ah. The pattern of activity today was making more sense to Norio. Now that the magma had erupted, the last two months fell into place for him. His mental movie of the mountain’s cycle was complete. “How big’s the secondary eruption?”

  “Small, compared to the vertical. Small, compared to St. Helens. At least, so far.”

  “Fuck it,” said the pilot, and turned.

  “What are you doing?” Norio said.

  “Going back to get those people we saw. Can’t leave them there. What if it erupts right under their feet?”

  “There’s no sign of that happening.”

  “I don’t like you very much.”

  Norio shrugged. He literally could not care about what the pilot thought of him, except insofar as it got him cooperation. He wanted to remind the pilot that he had said the fuel was low, that they had to get back, but he thought the pilot wouldn’t react well to that. People. Give him the predictability of a volcano any day.

  Five minutes later, they were coming down into the hovering layer of ash. Norio waited to hear the sound of the engine coughing. Ash was dangerous to engines. And with a helicopter, he wondered if it wouldn’t also get into the bearings of the rotor, mix with the grease, keep it from rotating freely, grind down crucial parts. Moreover, the ash was grit, pumice stone in miniature, so it could and would grind away working parts of any machine with every second. In too many ways, flying through the ash could kill them.

  He looked over at Corey’s face, but it was grim and set. He might be making a choice that would kill them all by descending into the ash, but Norio could see there was no way he was going to talk the man out of rescuing those people. So be it.

  As they dropped into the fuzzy world of ash, he smelled sulfur. Norio waited for the engine to cut out, but it didn’t. The pilot circled once, found a place to land, and got them onto the ground. Fine ash billowed up around the windows as they landed. The slowing rotors kicked up more. Norio helped Akroyd with opening the door, and he jumped out, kneeling down to look at the ash.

  The two people ran over. Let Akroyd deal with them. While he was down here, he’d take a sample of the ash on the ground. Fresh nuee ardente ash—he tried to think if he’d read any papers on its composition before. Maybe he’d find something new.

  In two minutes, the two hikers were loaded into the helicopter, the woman sitting on the man’s lap in the fourth seat, two backpacks stored behind them, and Norio jumped back in his seat, tucking away his sample. He glanced back and saw Akroyd had cleaned up his vomit. Not that these passengers were likely to complain about the amenities.

  The pilot got them into the air again and turned to the north, radioing in a cancellation of his rescue request. “Five souls on board now,” he said, and signed off. They were five hundred meters from where they picked up the hikers, a couple hundred off the ground, and that’s when the engine lost power.

  “We have to get out of this ash,” Norio said.

  At almost the same time, Akroyd said, “We have to get on the ground.”

  The pilot took Akroyd’s advice and got lower, skimming the surface only twenty meters up. He headed them northwest, away from both eruptions. Below them, the swath of destruction from the nuee ardente gave way to trees again. Dust-covered trees, but upright and living trees, unlike those mowed down by the pyroclastic cloud. The helicopter rose up above the treetops.

  “There’s a road!” yelled the ash-covered man in the back seat.

  “I got it,” said the pilot. He swung them to the left, over a patch of short green pine trees that still had all their branches, aiming for the dirt road. And then the engine was gone altogether, dead quiet.

  Norio could hear the distant roar of the volcano and the sound of his heart pounding in his ears, but from the helicopter, there was only silence. He expected the woman to scream, but she didn’t. None of them made a noise.

  Norio heard branches snap as the helicopter coasted down and hit the tops of the pine trees. He clung to the seat harness as they tumbled over onto the left side, caught a branch, snapped it off, and lurched down again. The helicopter smashed against a trunk—Norio’s teeth clacked together painfully—and fell again, on its side, the pilot and new passengers lower, Norio and Akroyd higher.

  At the end, it turned over a little more, canting towards upside down, but not making it all the way. With a final bang, it came to rest on the forest floor.

  Norio held his seat back as he turned to get a look at those in the back. They were alive. He caught sight of the undamaged COSPEC and sighed in relief. Somehow, the hiking man had kept hold of the woman in his lap. As Norio watched, he let her go carefully and she slid down until she came to an upright position, perpendicular to the rest of them, sitting on what had once been the left interior wall.

  He turned back to Akroyd. “You okay?” Akroyd nodded. “Get the COSPEC safe. We need to check outside that the DOAS is okay, too.” Thankfully, it had been bolted to Norio’s side so wasn’t crushed under the wreck.

  “How’s Corey?” Akroyd asked.

  Norio popped his seatbelt and slid his legs over until he was braced against the side of the pilot’s seat. The man was not moving. Eyes closed. But he was still strapped in snugly. Norio squatted down, grabbed the pilot’s seatback to hold himself off the man’s body, and reached in to feel his neck. A healthy pulse pounded there. The pilot moaned. His eyelids fluttered.

  “He’s alive,” said Norio. “Can you get the door open?” As Akroyd moved to do that, Norio said to the pilot. “Hey, buddy. Corey. You hurt?”

  Another moan. Norio wondered if the fuel left in the helicopter’s tanks could explode. In the movies it would. But in real life? Maybe not. Still, he didn’t want to hang out in here and find out the hard way. He jostled the pilot’s shoulder. “Wake up.”

  “Five more minutes,” the pilot said.

  “Can you move? Does everything work okay?” Norio said,

  The pilot’s eyes finally opened and focused on Norio. “My leg,” he said.

  Cautiously, Norio crawled forward, trying not to put his hands anywhere on the pilot’s body until he knew more about the man’s injuries. The pilot’s left leg was twisted and caught somehow in a crumpled section of metal down where the floor and wall met. “Can you move your arms? Head?”

  The pilot gingerly tested those parts. “I’m okay. I think. But my leg isn’t.”

  “Can you move it?”

  The pilot tried. His lips pressed together and his eyes filled with tears. “I think it’s broken. No power in it to push.”

  The door finally slid open above him. Norio said to the hikers, “You two get out and walk away from here to a safe distance
. I’ll call you back if I need you. And Akroyd, look at our equipment out there and make sure we can save the data.”

  “Where’s my pack?” the woman said. As the three of them fumbled around getting out, Norio cautiously made his way down into the well at the feet of the pilot’s seat. The pilot’s foot was jammed under a folded piece of the wrecked chopper. Norio reached in and felt around. The foot wasn’t pulped, at least. He checked his own hand—nope, no blood. Should be relatively easy to free him.

  “Hang on,” he told the pilot. He grabbed the man’s ankle and started to pull. The pilot shrieked.

  Norio let go and backed away. “Sorry.”

  “Leg’s broken. Tibia, I think.”

  “You have a tool box in here? I think we can pry open that bit of crushed metal and get your foot free. But it’s going to hurt pulling you out.”

  The pilot’s face had broken out in sweat. “Tool box is bolted in, behind the rear seat.”

  The others had climbed out. Norio crawled to the back, found the toolbox, and dug through it. The longest flat screwdriver. Channel locks. A vice grip. Good quality tools, too. A crowbar would be better, but he could make do with what was here.

  It wasn’t a pleasant procedure for either of them, but, prying and pulling at the bent metal, Norio finally freed the pilot’s foot. “Open your seat belt,” he told the pilot. “I’ll pull you up. Going to hurt, but I don’t know how else to do it.”

  “Can you manage alone?” The pilot looked at him doubtfully. His face was pale.

  “Easier than trying to fit two people in here. There’s not enough to hang on to for leverage. I promise not to drop you.”

  He kept the promise, but barely. The pilot outweighed him by forty pounds, easily. But Norio’s legs were strong from so much time hiking up and down the mountain, and he braced them on the side of the seats and used them to power them both up toward the open door. He got the pilot up to the passenger’s seat and had him hang tight there. Norio climbed onto the outside of the helicopter and looked around for the others.

  “Hey, fella,” he called to the hiker. “What’s your name again?”

  The man jogged over. “Ty.”

  “Give me a hand here.”

  From outside the doorway, there was more room to maneuver, and the two of them got the pilot pulled out and onto the rounded side of the machine. Norio held him in place while Ty jumped off, and Norio slid the pilot over to Ty, who braced him while Norio clambered down. Together, they leased the pilot onto the ground.

  Ty yelled over to the woman, “Bring me my pack.”

  The woman and Akroyd both came over, the woman toting both packs. Norio still wanted to keep them away from the helicopter in case of fire, but he saw the futility in that. He didn’t smell fuel.

  Ty pulled off his sleeping bag and unrolled it onto the ground next to the pilot “You feel faint at all?” he asked.

  The pilot shook his head. “Just stupid for breaking my damned leg.”

  “Not your fault,” said the woman. She took a bottle of water off her backpack and offered it to the pilot who toasted her and took a swallow.

  “We’ll get you down the mountain, no problem,” said Ty. “There are four of us. We’ll improvise a stretcher, use my sleeping bag for that, and carry you out.”

  “No, leave me. Send back help.”

  “You’re crazy,” said the woman. “You risked yourself getting us out of that mess, even sacrificed your helicopter to it. No way are we leaving you here.”

  Ty took charge of the pilot, and that was fine with Norio. Ty sent Akroyd off to find two sturdy branches to use as poles for the stretcher. He got his girlfriend down on the ground to distract the pilot with talk. He took a folding knife from his pack and slit the pilot’s jeans from the knee down. Norio went over to look at the leg over Ty’s shoulder.

  Ty glanced up at him. “Not open, not compound. He can’t walk on it, but he’ll be fine.”

  “If the wind changes. Or if the eruption kicks up—”

  “I know,” said Ty. “Believe me, I know.”

  Akroyd called over, “How did you guys stay alive? The track went right over you.”

  “We’ll tell you as we walk down,” said Ty. “Let’s deal with this first. Do you know where we are? We saw a road from the air, right? Just a little fire road, narrow track, but you guys saw it too?”

  The woman and pilot agreed they had. After a brief discussion, they decided it was downhill and off to their left. “Mind going to look for it?” Ty said to Norio.

  “Not at all,” said Norio, happy to get away by himself for a few minutes. He took off cross-country through the trees. When the others were still in sight, he stopped to make a trail marker for himself so he could get back here with no trouble. It took him a little more than ten minutes to find the road, which he then tracked back up, trying to find the shortest path back to the wreck. He hiked back up to the others, who were finishing up the construction of a stretcher for the pilot. The hiking couple had changed clothes and cleaned their faces of the worst of the ash.

  Ty had sacrificed his expensive-looking sleeping bag by cutting slits at the toe end to weave the poles through. He had cannibalized some wires from the crashed helicopter to lash the thing tidily together. Norio was grateful he had managed it so quickly and efficiently.

  “Got the road,” Norio said. “All we have to do is follow it. It’s sure to merge into a wider road.”

  “As long as it doesn’t turn back into that pyroclastic thing,” said the woman.

  Norio had a thought. “Has anyone tried the radio? In the ‘copter, I mean?”

  They all shook their heads. Norio climbed back into the wrecked aircraft, realized he didn’t know what to do to get electricity to the radio and went back to ask the injured pilot.

  “If there are no lights on, it’s dead. There’s a battery switch in the center console. Labeled clearly. Just flick it off and on, and if you don’t get lights, you’re out of luck.”

  Norio went back and tried, but the onboard radio was definitely dead. He got out his own radio and tried to raise Vancouver. He wasn’t surprised when he got nothing but faint static. They were in the middle of nowhere, maybe behind a ridge from the nearest antenna, in a forest of tall trees. He tried his cell phone, got the search signal and, after watching it fail to find a signal for fifteen seconds, turned it off. He reported back, “No communications,” to the others.

  They had a discussion over their gas testing equipment, which Norio did not want to leave. Finally, he convinced them it was valuable, that he’d haul the heaviest piece, and they had to take it. Or he wore them down on the point—it didn’t matter to him if that’s all it was. The woman spread her sleeping bag over the pilot and tucked it in around him, causing the pilot to blush and stammer an objection at the attention, but he was thoroughly ignored by the woman.

  It took Norio and Akroyd another twenty minutes to unbolt the DOAS with the pilot’s cache of tools. He convinced the hikers to give up their backpacks so that he and Akroyd could haul the gas testing gear in there, and the woman grumbled but acquiesced. She tucked in a few extra items from her pack at the side of the stretcher and filled her jacket pockets with others. By the time they were all ready to pick up the stretcher, it was after two o’clock by Norio’s watch. But with the solstice only days away, they’d have light for six more hours. It might be just enough time to get down to a main road—if the volcano had no more surprises in store for them.

  20

  South flank, forest road 309, 11 a.m.

  Jim Yang trudged up the road. It wasn’t the slope of the hill that was slowing his pace; it was his reluctance to see his father. He knew that his running off as he had was rude, but more than that, his father would see it as proof positive that Jim’s soul was in worse trouble than ever. It was going to take nasty herbs and more shaman visits and probably sacrificing a whole pig to fix that.

  That meant money spent, money he’d rather see be spent on fun
things. It meant risking getting into trouble with the authorities over the pig sacrifice. Jim’s father had come to the States as a teenager and wasn’t as steeped in the old ways as some Hmong fathers, but whenever something went wrong, whenever there was something he couldn’t understand or control, he reverted to the old ways.

  Jim knew that whatever was coming his way next would be his own fault. If it took a weekend of the shaman, a whole week of sacrifices, a month of gagging herbs, he had no one to blame but himself. He wished he could explain himself to his parents, explain what school was like, what his friends were like, what he was interested in, the ways in which he wanted to be more American than Hmong. But anything he said would either hurt them or confuse them.

  So the whole trick to ending this cycle was keeping better control of himself. He tried, really he did. But sometimes, the pressure inside him built and built and just needed to burst out of him. Hell, maybe it was a demon, a dab. He felt possessed sometimes, felt a roiling turmoil inside that seemed hardly a part of himself.

  An explosion split the air, making him duck. He turned around and stared down the road. WTF? Maybe a car exploded or…? The ground beneath him was rumbling, like he was standing next to a fleet of idling school buses. Then he saw the dark cloud rising in the sky. He knew what it was, the volcano. They’d learned about volcanoes in eighth-grade science. The volcano he was standing on was erupting. His family! He turned and raced back up the road.

  Within seconds, he was panting. He forced his legs to keep pumping. He gasped for air. His calves burned. His steps were ridiculously slow, cartoonish.

  And then the rocks fell. Pebbles fell on him, like someone had picked up handfuls of hot gravel and had thrown it at him. They smacked him on the head, bounced off his shoulders, drummed on the road around him. Where they touched bare skin, they pricked like hot needles. The gravel grew smaller and then it was a cloud, a storm of tiny hot particles that stung as they hit. Jim couldn’t see. His eyes watered. He had to close them. The taste of the stuff—bitter—filled his mouth, and he spat.