by Lou Cadle
“It’s the truth. And you’ll get the big fires one day. I know that’s what really interests you.”
“It was,” Chad said. He’d been thinking about it the long drive here, about the dead bodies, about the worried people and about having no good answers for their legitimate worries, about those he couldn’t even convince to leave for their own good. He could still see cars and houses sitting in ruinous mud. “Maybe I don’t want to witness people lose all their things and be hurt. Or die of heart attacks in the ambulance.”
Francie studied him for a long moment. “Maybe you don’t.” She adjusted herself in the bed again. “Close your eyes for a sec while I get this fixed. Damned hospital gowns.” A few seconds later, she said, “okay” and Chad opened his eyes to see her looking at him with concern. “You do whatever you want. I know you’d be good for the department, but if it’s not what you want to do any more, I know you’ll be good at whatever else you decide to do instead.”
“Anyways, I have time to think.”
“Whatever way you go, you’ll be fine. And I hope you won’t lose touch with me.”
“I won’t. You’re like—I don’t know, like the older sister I never had.”
“Thanks for not saying ‘aunt.’”
“You’re younger than that.”
“You’ll call me any time if you want to talk about it, right? About what you saw, or what we did, or whether you want to be a firefighter or not.”
“I will.” But he thought he’d be able to work this out on his own. It was a little frightening, not having the dream of being a firefighter in his head any more, not like it was, at least, all shiny and exciting like a just-polished engine ready to tear out of the firehouse bay.
But he had something else instead: an accurate vision of the work. And he had the sense of himself as a person who could function in an emergency, who could keep moving forward despite pain. He was a different man than he had been 24 hours ago. Or maybe, he was a man now, but 24 hours ago he’d still been a kid.
It was scary, yes, not seeing the future as simply as he once did. But it was good, too. He felt free.
A girl stepped through the door, an amazing-looking young woman with lots of curves and a head of wavy red hair that cascaded to mid-back. “Hey sis,” this vision said, swinging a laptop case up and onto the empty bed.
Chad turned to look at Francie, who grinned at him. “Shut your mouth, kid.”
He realized he was gaping a little.
The redhead came in and kissed Francie on the cheek. “I know, we look nothing alike. I took after Mom, Francine took after Dad. I’m Beryl, by the way.” Turning, she stuck her hand out and Chad shook it.
Francie said, “This is Chad.”
Beryl’s eyebrows shot up. She dove over, threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek, too. “You saved my sister.” She backed off and smiled dazzlingly at him.
He could feel he was blushing. “Well no. I didn’t. She would have been fine, at worst lonely for a little while on that porch until someone else got to her. It was nothing.”
“I could’ve died in the lahar or gone into shock, Chad. Like I told you on the phone, Beryl, he got hurt doing it,” Francie said.
Beryl’s face, very expressive, turned to concern. “What’s the doc say?”
Francie said, “I doubt he’s seen one.”
Beryl said, “What? He hasn’t?”
Chad hesitated, mostly because he didn’t think he could slide a word in edgewise. When they both waited longer than two seconds for him to speak, he admitted, “Two part-time jobs. No insurance.”
“That’s easy to take care of.”
“It is?” It sure hadn’t been up to now.
“Sure,” said Beryl, pointing at her laptop case. “I’ll simply get a website up. Five dollar donations, help out the hero.”
“I’m not a hero.”
“Bullshit, ” said Beryl cheerfully.
“But—” Chad began.
Francie waved him silent and laughed. “One does not stop the engine named Beryl when it comes tearing down a mountainside with a head full of steam.”
“One doesn’t,” agreed Beryl.
“I can’t take charity.”
“Whyever not?” said Beryl. “It will only cost people a few dollars each. It adds up. It’s like a tax, but only taxing the people who are willing to pay it. Best system ever.”
“I,” said Chad, and stopped, confused. She wasn’t a steam engine, she was a force of nature, a beautiful and benevolent one. I’m smitten, he thought, and smiled that he had come up with that word.
Francie laughed as if she knew how he felt, and he narrowed his eyes and gave her a look of warning. She held up her hands, grinning: I won’t say a word.
“Maybe,” he said, “after visiting hours, we can talk about it over coffee.” It may have been the smoothest line he had ever delivered to a girl.
“Sure,” she said. “Now let me have some time alone with my sister.”
He got up in a daze and left. His Achilles still hurt like a son of a gun, but in a strange way, he wanted to kiss the thing for giving him an excuse to talk more with Francie’s sister.
He passed a nurse arguing with a Chinese kid in the hall and found a chair by the nurses’ station. Easing down in it to wait, he felt more cheerful than he had any right to. A sour-faced old man in a wheelchair looked at him, and Chad grinned back. Eventually, the sour face softened, and the man nodded back at him. Life, thought Chad, was going to be all right.
32
Under the mud.
The body of the waitress from the café, Sylvie, is buried under a ton of mud, mud that will never be moved by bulldozers. In an environment without oxygen, something amazing has begun to happen to her. The mud that fills her mouth, that touches her teeth, is made of minerals. Molecule by molecule, minerals in the mud begins to replace the minerals of her teeth, preserving every detail of their shape, turning them to stone. Over a few thousands of years, the process will continue through her bones, and finally, Sylvie will achieve a state only one in a million of us can hope for: she will become a fossil. The lahar’s mud will be compressed into rock. Geology is patient, tenacious if slow. Rain and snow will weather that rock away, and seventeen million years in the future, Sylvie’s fossil will be revealed. Perhaps intelligent creatures will be there to see, to carefully chip her fossil out of the rock and name it. They’ll be able to tell that she was female, a young adult who had never had babies, and something of her diet. Sylvie the young diner waitress will achieve the closest thing to immortality we can imagine. Fossil Sylvie will represent us all.
Downwind.
Tens of thousands of beef cattle have been suffocated by ashfall, as have thousands of sheep and hundreds of wild horses. Antelopes and bears have died, choking on ash, and many more will starve in a ruined landscape. Eagle nests and henhouses are gone. Hundreds of farmhouse roofs have collapsed. Had the wind been from the east these first two days, the devastation of Portland would have produced tens of billions of dollars in damage and hundreds more people would have died. As it happened, six downwind farm children with asthma died, in addition to the 389 people who died nearer the mountain on the first day of the eruption, including Jackson Bellew, the ski rescuer, who was searching for hikers on the timberline when the mountain went off, and the thirty-seven who died the following day, including two looters who were shot to death in downtown Camas by a shop owner who had refused to leave when the fire department told him to.
The 432 total people who died had family, had friends, had spouses or lovers; all had people who mourned them for years to come. In many cases, like three of the snowboarders who had been in the Riverside Bar and Grille irritating Sylvie with their jokes, their parents did not know for sure that they had died in the eruption. They feared so, logic told them so when the fourth boy’s body was finally identified with DNA, but they could never know for certain. More than one parent would secretly hope that a son had taken this ch
ance to run away and start a new life, that maybe one day, in ten or twenty years, the telephone would ring, and it would be him. But those calls would never come. Their children were gone.
Downwind of Mt. Hood in a fan shaped shadow of ashfall, farming will be impossible for the next few years. But volcanic ash is also one of nature’s best fertilizers. In a generation, the land under the inches of ash will come back better than it was. Wild mustangs and antelope will roam the eastern foothills again. The blasted trees on the mountaintop will grow back quickly, and two years from now, the spring wildflowers will put on a brilliant show against the gray ground, the red Indian paintbrush, the white and yellow avalanche lilies, purple saxifrage and magenta shooting stars springing out of the destruction, more beautiful than ever. Life renews itself, always.
The Mountain.
Mount Hood is quieting now, relieved of its burden of explosive rising magma. Ash continues to rise over the mountain, but it will begin to taper off this evening. The newly shaped mountaintop will emerge, and people will begin to become accustomed to the altered form. Everyone on the slopes—including Norio—is safe from more pyroclastic flows. In a week, only a bit of steam venting will remain, troubling no one, providing scenic backdrops for the television reporters.
Deep within the mountain, though, there are more magma chambers. The North American tectonic plate continues to drift westward, while the Juan de Fuca plate subducts under it, melting at depth, this magma feeding the Cascade mountain range’s twenty-five active volcanoes.
In a month, Mount Hood will be sleeping again.
But only for now.
The End
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Keep reading for the opening to my post-apocalyptic novel series, Gray.
Gray
Lou Cadle
Chapter 1
The midmorning sun lit her way as Coral pulled in near the cave’s entrance. She parked, climbed out of the cab of the motor home, and looked around the small clearing. An evergreen forest stretched down the slope ahead of her and back up to the distant mountain ridges. The woods were eerily still, not a bird singing or insect buzzing.
She shook off a vague sense of unease as she walked over a pad of fallen pine needles to the cave’s entrance. She could see inside to curved walls marked by horizontal striations, carved patterns of water cutting through the rock in centuries past. Beyond the first few feet, the darkness of the cave beckoned.
Returning to her brother’s aging 20-foot motor home, which he kept for hunting getaways and had reluctantly let her borrow for this trip, Coral found a flashlight in the glove box, shoving it into the daypack she always kept ready on the passenger seat for spontaneous hikes. Hauling the pack with her, she crawled back between the bucket seats to the living area. In the propane-powered mini refrigerator were two one-liter bottles of cold water. She made sure the cap of one was tight and tossed it in the pack, then, thinking better of it, grabbed the other, too. From the closet, she pulled her gray sweatshirt off a hook and tied it around her waist.
She had nowhere to be and no one to report to until July 1, when her summer job started. Over the past ten days, she had lost track of days and calendar dates, a loss she found made her nearly giddy with relief after the past year of a rigid and packed freshman schedule at the University of Michigan. She was pre-med, and the classes were tough. This month was her well-deserved reward for a freshman year spent working while most of her friends had spent theirs partying.
At the cave’s low entrance she stooped to peer inside. The floor was flattened by time and wear. She hesitated. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, or of small spaces. And the website had said it was a safe beginner’s cave, right? But caving alone, she knew, was a risk. Maybe she should leave a note on the windshield of the motor home, with the date and time she went in.
Then something—not a sound, but some other sense—made her look up into the sky.
A dense black cloud was boiling up in the southeastern sky. It rose high and fast, like a time-lapse movie of the birth of a thunderhead. But it was no rain cloud. Deadly black, it reached up and loomed over her, blocking out the sun.
What the—? She stood and gaped. The menacing cloud was nothing like any Coral had ever seen before. Nothing natural. Four mule deer crashed through the clearing, running to the west. They disappeared, and Coral stood alone again, staring at the coming blackness.
She had no idea what it was. It looked like some Renaissance vision of the world’s end. It looked like death itself coming, silent and swift. And damned fast, she realized. Coral’s shock turned to fear. Logical thought fled. She stooped and dove into the cave’s maw.
The sky outside went dark. Blackness covered all the world around her. A hissing wind whipped through the clearing, whistling at the cave entrance.
She dropped to the ground, covering her head with her arms. Her bare arms were stung by tiny pricks as pebbles rained down outside and bounced inside. Coral scrambled away from the barrage and farther back into the cave, scuttling like a beetle. She escaped the rain of rocks and curled into a tight ball, her eyes shut, hoping desperately she was having a bad dream.
Her panic may have lasted only a minute. It might have been as long as ten. When she forced herself to raise her head and look around, the world to her right was a bit lighter than to her left. The cave’s entrance was barely visible.
Groping to the sides, she touched a rock wall, rough and cool to her fingertips. That reassured her. Anything solid—anything normal—was reassuring. The outside world had just gone crazy, or maybe she had just gone crazy, but rock walls in a cave were a comforting link to the real world.
She dug out her flashlight, flipped the switch, and a thin beam of LED light came out, enough to illuminate the ground before her feet, to see the sloping ceiling. She crept toward the entrance, shining the beam outside. The flashlight beam reflected back at her, like headlights bouncing off fog.
Black, menacing fog.
What was going on out there? A memory pushed its way forward—a television show on Mt. St. Helens erupting in 1980, clouds of ash, a downwind town turned to twilight at midday.
Was that what this cloud was? A volcano had erupted to the southeast? Something dark and solid was falling in the sky—hanging there and falling both. Not rain. Not hail. So ash?
But the Cascades, the only collection of volcanoes in the lower forty-eight states, were far to her west. What, then, was this black cloud that had come from the southeast? Yellowstone was due east of her, so it couldn’t be that. Her mental map of the country didn’t have any volcanoes in the right direction. But couldn’t new volcanoes pop up? Maybe, but she didn’t think they popped up like this. Not in an instant, without warning, and not this vast.
…to keep reading, click here
Also by Lou Cadle
Gray, a post-apocalyptic series
Gray, Part I
Gray, Part II
Gray, Part III
Stand-alone natural disaster novels:
Erupt
Quake
Storm
Dawn of Mammals:
Saber Tooth
Terror Crane
Hell Pig
(and more coming)
