The Extinction Series | Book 1 | Point of Extinction

by Ellis, Tara

  Devon, the only lab assistant devoted enough to hang out with her on a Friday he would normally have off, spun around in his chair to face Peta. “We uh, had lunch about an hour ago and Max’s won’t be delivering for dinner yet. You know, as much as I enjoy all the intrigue, I wasn’t planning on being here that late.” He hesitated when he saw her face. “What’s up?”

  Peta chuckled, an uncharacteristic show of emotion, and then laughed harder at Devon’s reaction. “Don’t worry, Dev. I’m not losing my mind.”

  He appeared skeptical. “That’s up for debate. What exactly have you been looking at?” the younger man asked, his brows furrowing. “Because I’m beginning to suspect it’s not the same mineral database Doctor Crane assigned me to. Come on, Doctor Kelly. Help out a fellow Aussie?”

  Peta avoided his intense stare and glanced at the clock on the wall. Devon was right, it was too early to order dinner, except she was really in need of the distraction. Henry was known for being eccentric, and his insistence the unscheduled dive happen that day wasn’t unusual. He even flew out to the Outlander the night before. While Peta was irritated with the doctor for demanding she stay behind and finish up on the research, she still made sure to be in the lab early so she could get updates on his expedition. Exasperating or not, he was her friend, mentor, and a brilliant scientist. His reason for the additional dive was likely to gather some pivotal information to support one of his growing theories.

  It was a shock to discover the matching organism in the very first group of slides. It was almost too easy. Peta tapped a foot and stuck her hands into the pockets of her jeans. She’d have to wait until Henry got back to confirm her suspicions. She could use the time to go ahead and begin the tedious documentation of the new lifeform. “It’s best if I let Doctor Crane explain his special project,” she said to Devon, adding a small smile when his frown deepened.

  As the young man continued to glare at her, Peta self-consciously pulled the hair back out from behind her left ear in a practiced move, allowing it to fall down over a prominent scar that traced her high cheekbone. Although she knew his gaze had nothing to do with the disfigurement, she couldn’t stop the reaction.

  Devon crossed his arms over his broad chest and huffed, seemingly resigned to his lower level of involvement. “The doc should be getting close to the bottom by now. Think he’s got the new pilot indoctrinated yet?”

  Peta felt a brief flash of guilt. Though it wasn’t a direct insult, the joke had merit. Henry had a unique ability for getting people to do what he wanted. Devon was another of Doctor Henry Crane’s protégé’s, much like herself. Prior to his retirement, he’d taught Dev the first four years in the same Marine Biology doctorate program at the University of California that Peta had taken. Six months ago, Henry pulled Devon from his final year to come work with them on the MOHO project, promising it would catapult his career despite the setback in obtaining his degree.

  It wasn’t unreasonable for the scientist to want in on the priority work. If for no other reason, Devon had earned the right. Resigned, Peta gestured for him to follow her as she led the way to the cooler in the back of the room. “Tell ya what,” she said, opening the top of the freezer. Bending over, she reached in and selected another prepared slide from the same sample she’d just studied. Turning back to Devon, she held it out. “You figure it out by five, and the pizza is on me. Trust me, it'll be worth it.”

  The young researcher didn’t even think about it. “It’s a deal.” Devon took the slide, stepping in a bit closer than necessary.

  The guy really was quite handsome when his face lit up. Her wall slamming solidly into place in reaction to the thought, Peta quickly sidestepped around Devon, avoiding his eyes. She was struggling to come up with a coy response when she realized the radio was squawking.

  “Mauritius Base!”

  Peta froze. Henry sounded…panicked. Her heartrate accelerating with the realization, she ran for the radio.

  “Peta, if you can hear me, get out of there! Remember Fossil Island. It’s happening, Peta. It’s--”

  Peta yanked the handset from the base as he broke off. “Henry! I’m here. What’s happening—”

  Before she could finish the sentence, the pressure in the room suddenly changed, causing her to feel like she was falling, and her ears popped painfully.

  The island of Mauritius was a lush, tropical paradise located two thousand miles off the coast of South Africa. The lab sat on one of the taller mountains that made up the forty-by-twenty-mile island, and the main lab was lined with windows to take in the expansive views. Some were currently open, and Peta had been enjoying the prevalent birdsong without even realizing it, until they fell silent. It was like all the sound was sucked into a vacuum created by the change in pressure. Peta’s mind raced as Devon grabbed at her arm.

  “What did he mean?” he demanded, clearly spooked. “What’s happened?”

  It’s happening, Peta. The two of them had sat up for countless hours, theorizing what the original seafloor collapse, the submarine volcano, and more recently, the crevasse, could all mean. What it might be leading up to. She never believed Henry’s radical hypothesis could actually materialize.

  It’s happening, Peta.

  The change in pressure.

  Peta jerked her head up, and her eyes widened as she sought out the general area on the horizon of the ocean where the newly formed MOHO Island continued to grow. There was an odd rippling on the water. Though her brain couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing, Peta reacted.

  Spinning around, she latched onto Devon’s shoulders and threw all of her weight into him, taking them both to the floor. As they hit, the air exploded.

  “Oomph!” The breath was knocked from her lungs at the same time Peta’s head was filled with an overwhelming and indescribable sound. She felt the percussion throughout her whole body and the floor beneath her resonated with the power.

  The windows imploded, showering them with glass, and Peta’s eardrums vibrated painfully as intense pain radiated through her face. Gasping for air, she pressed her hands to her head and curled into a fetal position, even as a profound silence engulfed her in the wake of the boom.

  “Peta!” Devon was shaking her. His voice was muffled, sounding far away. “Are you okay?”

  She had no real concept of how many minutes had passed. Peta’s head throbbed and it felt like a weighted blanket was draped over her body. Forcing herself to acknowledge Devon, she undertook the monumental task of raising a hand up. “I’m alright,” she mumbled. Her voice sounded odd, like she was talking with a bucket over her head. Her thoughts cleared, and adrenaline surged, lending her more strength. Peta thought she knew what had happened and if she was right, they didn’t have much time.

  Pushing herself into a sitting position, the room spun momentarily as she got her bearings. Her nose was bleeding. There was blood on her hands. Reaching tentatively to her ears, Peta confirmed they were bleeding, too. The pressure wave had ruptured her eardrums.

  “Krakatoa,” she whispered while Devon helped her to her feet.

  He nodded in understanding. “MOHO island must have exploded.”

  Her hair billowed out from a warm breeze blowing in through the missing windows. Peta pointed in the general direction of the site. “More than that,” she shouted, hoping Devon could hear her through the ringing in his ears. “The lifeform I just identified confirms the crevasse does reach the MOHO.”

  Devon’s jaw slackened and he squinted at the horizon where a black plume was already rapidly forming. “Then it isn’t just the island that’s collapsed into the magma chamber.”

  “It could be miles of seafloor,” Peta confirmed. She didn’t need to say more.

  The eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 was one of the deadliest in recorded history and had a similar mechanism of sudden seawater intrusion into a caldera. The MOHO eruption had the potential to dwarf it.

  “How long will it take for the pyroclastic flow to reach us?” Devon ask
ed hollowly, still staring out the gaping windows. The churning clouds were growing larger by the second.

  Peta stumbled forward on weak legs, glass crunching beneath her feet. The resonating echo in her ears made her feel removed from their reality, her senses still in shock and disconnected. Reaching for the nearest table, Peta used it to help center her equilibrium. She’d suffered from vertigo before and had learned some skills to help with balance.

  Reaching the front wall of the building, Peta leaned out through the space where the window used to be, ignoring the sharp pricks from the remaining glass under her hands. What had been nothing more than a distant black smudge moments before was already forming into what looked like a mushroom cloud from a nuclear blast. Though it obviously wasn’t an atomic bomb, the resulting explosion would be something on the scale of fifty-thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima.

  Devon was forgetting about the massive tsunami that would be racing behind it, and she didn’t know if their present elevation of around a thousand feet would even be enough. Peta choked back a sob as she stood looking out over the beautiful island. It had a population of well over a million people. Most of them would be dead by the end of the day, and there was nothing she could do to help them. There wasn’t time.

  The wind shifted, and a shadow began to creep across the ocean. “The basement,” she breathed, thinking out loud. “There’s emergency gear stored there and the walls are thick cement. It’s our best chance.”

  “Shouldn’t we try to—”

  Peta clawed at the man’s arm and pointed outside. The pyroclastic cloud was a flowing current of hot gas around a thousand degrees. It could travel over four hundred miles per hour, but she suspected this one was faster than any other observed. “We don’t have time.”

  The building shook as seismic waves emanated through the island, emphasizing her words. If Henry was right, the destruction would reach far beyond Mauritius Island. Peta tried not to think of Henry. The only consolation was that he would have died quickly. They might not be so fortunate. And the eruption was only the beginning.

  The building shuddered again as she tugged at Devon. Peta’s voice was hoarse with a raw terror that threatened to overwhelm her.

  “Run!”

  Chapter 2

  TYLER

  Antisiranana, Madagascar

  750 miles NW of Mauritius Island

  The second-hand on the generic school clock dragged slowly around, bouncing slightly in cadence with Tyler’s heartbeat. He could hear it in his head, though it wasn’t enough to drown out the voice of his science teacher. Normally, Tyler was a star pupil, hanging on every enticing word. That particular afternoon, he had an overwhelming desire to be released from class and hit the beach, and he’d already heard so many endless lectures about the MOHO he could recite the details in his sleep.

  “After decades of failed attempts, a year ago the Mohorovicic Discontinuity was finally breached via the thinner oceanic crust in the Atlantis Bank.” Mr. Suthers paused long enough to draw a rough diagram of the Earth’s layers on a whiteboard at the front of the classroom. “Who can tell me what happened then?”

  Tyler allowed his head to drop to his desk with a loud “thunk”. Ten minutes. Ten more minutes of torture and then he and his best friend, a local Malagasy named Mikael, could escape.

  “Tyler.”

  Tyler jerked upright in his chair and avoided Mr. Suthers stern glare. Though he was a favorite student, it wouldn’t give him a free pass for rudeness.

  “Perhaps you can share your astute wisdom with the class, and explain what your mother and her colleagues have been studying from their perch on Diego Garcia.”

  Tyler winced. For the first time in his sixteen years of life he’d found a school where he felt he belonged. Ironically, it was in a small foreign town on the island country of Madagascar. While his father was a very white, lanky chemistry teacher at the same school, his mom was African American and her genetics leant Tyler the features needed to blend in with the other Malagasy students. However, having his mom’s vital position as an intelligence officer with the US Navy pointed out was a stark reminder he’d never really belong anywhere. Not so long as she continued to drag him around the world.

  “It hasn’t been a year.”

  “Excuse me?” Mr. Suthers arched his rather bushy eyebrows.

  “Since they hit paydirt,” Tyler said with exaggerated tediousness. He gestured at the whiteboard. “It’ll be eleven months next week. I know, because it’ll be ten months since my mom got assigned out at Diego Garcia and I moved here.” When his teacher continued to stare at him, unmoving, Tyler sighed, resigned to his final task of the day. It had been a long week.

  Going all-in, Tyler leapt dramatically to his feet and ran up to the board. Grabbing a red marker, he drew a crude cluster of lines coming from the X Mr. Suthers had made in the middle of the illustration. A subtle giggle from the front row bolstered his confidence and he dared to glance at Anja, a beautiful girl he’d been trying to build up the nerve to ask out for weeks. “To everyone’s surprise and alarm, the drill bit into some sort of caldera and this massive submarine volcano spewed out of it, creating the MOHO island. I heard some billionaire is going to be opening a park there soon with tours in Hummers.”

  Another giggle overshadowed the increasing frown from Mr. Suthers. Tyler got really brave and drew a new, jagged line away from the X in the other direction from the eruption. “Now this,” he said, waving the marker for emphasis, “is something new most people don’t even know about. My mom told me when she was home this weekend,” he explained to his teacher. “You know, ‘cause it’s what she does with her buddies out there. Study secret shi – stuff.” Tyler fiddled with the pen and glanced again at Anja before turning back to the drawing. She was watching him intently and perspiration sprang to his forehead as he struggled to talk. “It’s some sort of crack. I think she called it a fissure, like what you’d see in the ice on a mountain. There’s like warm water with strange stuff coming out of it or something.”

  Tyler’s voice dropped off as he thought of how angry his mother would be if she ever found out he’d stood in front of the class and shared what was likely classified information. She hadn’t told him. He’d learned it from a whispered conversation he eavesdropped on between his parents five days earlier. The same conversation where she announced they were moving after school let out, in less than a month. Tyler wouldn’t even get the summer there.

  Less than a year after leaving D.C., where his mom worked in the Pentagon for three years, Tyler was being uprooted again. His dad had gotten mad when she told him. It was a rare occurrence for his parents to argue, which was why Tyler hung out in the hall outside their bedroom door a little longer. He only caught bits and pieces of the quarrel, but in the end, it came down to some BS about her being afraid and how it wasn’t safe there anymore. His mom’s justification didn’t make any sense to Tyler. Sure, they were one of the closest land masses to the MOHO eruption, but it was still around a thousand miles away. No way anything could happen from that far, so he figured it was a political thing. There were always a couple of groups wanting to kill each other at any given time, and Diego Garcia had been a point of contention for years. The United States military’s involvement in the MOHO disaster wasn’t well-received.

  Not that the reason mattered much to Tyler. He turned seventeen in a couple of months, so one more year and he could go back to Madagascar on his own. Mikael’s parents owned a beach resort and they both had jobs whenever they wanted. It would freak his dad out, though Tyler still had every intention of going to college, except it’d be on his own terms, when he wanted to.

  The marker being yanked from his hand brought Tyler back to the present. Mr. Suthers pointed at his desk with it. “I think I’ll take it from here, Mr. Kelly. I’m sure your father will be proud to hear of your lecturing abilities.”

  Tyler would have blushed if it were possible, and his head began to throb as he scooted bac
k to his seat, thinking about the shitstorm he was in for. Like creeping on his parent’s fight wasn’t enough…he had to go and tell the whole class and Mr. Suthers something he shouldn’t even know. He was so dead. Time to grovel.

  “Mr. Suthers, I’m sure you don’t want to waste your time talk—”

  As Tyler struggled to come up with a convincing plea, his head was filled with a strange pressure that spread to his ears and then resonated there, vibrating. His eyes widened and his mouth formed an O as Tyler stumbled sideways toward his desk, confusion mingling in with his overwhelmed senses. The floor felt as if it were pushing against him like on a carnival ride, only there was no way to get off.

  Someone near him started screaming, her voice muffled, but it was drowned out by the loudest, most bizarre sound Tyler had ever experienced. A large row of windows lined one side of the room and they all cracked at the same time, punctuating the pressure wave spreading through his body.

  Gasping spastically and doubling over, Tyler slid from the desk to the floor and instinctively covered his head with his arms. The explosive sound was already gone, a heavy silence following in its wake, but Tyler was slow to react. It was like his brain was a step or two behind processing what was happening around him and he was left to cower on the floor in shock.

  Random sounds were the first thing he registered, though none of it made any sense. A scraping desk, screaming, the school bell ringing, several kids crying.

  “Stay down!” Mr. Suthers yelled. “Stay down!”

  Tyler had no idea if anyone was staying down or getting up and he didn’t think the teacher knew, either. The older man sounded just as confused as Tyler felt.

  Deep breaths.

  Tyler squeezed his eyes shut for a moment longer as he fought to gather his wits. He recalled the times his mom forced him to endure various survival training scenarios. He’d always thought it was stupid. The fire drills, camping trips, bug-out bags and first-aid classes. But as Tyler lay there in the midst of something inexplicable, he drew upon the breathing technique she’d taught him to control anxiety and what she called “taking in the big picture”.