The Yellowstone Event (Book 5): The Eruption Read online

  THE

  ERUPTION

  The Yellowstone Event:

  Book 5

  By Darrell Maloney

  This is a work of fiction. All persons depicted in this book are fictional characters. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Copyright 2018 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  John and Tina Koslowski

  Great friends are hard to find. I’m lucky to have found you. Thanks for being there every time I’ve needed you.

  Here are some fun facts about the

  Yellowstone Caldera:

  - It’s a real thing. It really does exist

  - It’s a super volcano simmering just beneath the surface of Yellowstone National Park

  - It has erupted in the past, and will erupt again

  - Scientists believe that when it erupts again it will destroy 20 percent of the United States

  - You do NOT want to be in that 20 percent

  Bearing all that in mind, enjoy the book…

  *****************************************

  A BRIEF RECAP…

  *****************************************

  When we last checked in with Tony and Hannah they’d finally gotten their son back from a rogue operative with the Department of Homeland Security.

  The DHS wasn’t innocent in the kidnapping. They were culpable in that they’d asked Marilyn Petty to care for the baby, knowing she had a shadowy past.

  To their credit, though, they tried to make things right by tracking Marilyn down and facilitating little Samson’s safe return.

  Now Hannah and Tony could finally put behind them one of the ugliest experiences of their lives.

  They could be a family, and could finally fade from the public eye.

  They could finally be normal again. Whatever “normal” meant in a country preparing to be blown to pieces.

  Gwen and Melvyn were back at their home in Phoenix, still worried the government might be coming after them.

  Gwen tried to laugh off the worry, but cringed every time the phone rang, every time she heard a knock on the door.

  Darrell and Rocki, two traveling writers who cruised the country in an RV collecting first-person accounts of UFOs and ghosts, were cooling their heels in Las Vegas.

  They’d tried to go to Yellowstone National Park to interview a park ranger but had to turn back.

  Their dog Penny Fourpaws got more and more sick as they got closer and closer to the park.

  They’d been so alarmed they visited a veterinarian to find out what was causing her nausea and making her throw everything up.

  The vet’s waiting room was filled with other dogs and cats, their owners concerned about similar ailments.

  “My best advice is that you get her away from this area. The problem is that dogs, and animals in general, are more finely attuned to the earth than we are.

  “They’re getting motion sickness from rumblings deep beneath the earth that we can’t feel.”

  It wasn’t just dogs.

  The ranger at Yellowstone, Julianna Cervelli, was seeing the same thing. Animals were leaving the park in droves.

  Bison were reported walking the freeways in California. Black bears were shot to death in Albuquerque. Deer as far away as the suburbs of New York City.

  And skunks, raccoons and rats seemingly everywhere.

  They were turning up dead by the thousands along every highway within two hundred miles of Yellowstone, killed by motor vehicles.

  They didn’t understand what was going on beneath their feet.

  But they were afraid and trying to get away from it.

  The park was closed in anticipation of a massive eruption.

  Julianna and her fellow rangers were assisting nearby sheriff’s departments to find and evacuate hundreds of “off-the-gridders” and isolationists living in the area surrounding the massive park.

  That in itself was a daunting task.

  The Yellowstone Caldera, a huge lake of magma beneath the park, hadn’t erupted in over three hundred thousand years.

  And it was once again active.

  Scientists couldn’t agree when it would erupt.

  Some said a couple of years.

  Some said twenty.

  And while they couldn’t agree on the timeframe, they all agreed that the eruption would cause more destruction than any other natural disaster in recorded history.

  One man, Wayne Hamlin, was considered by many the premier volcanologist in the country. He just went on national television to tell the country the other scientists were wrong.

  “According to my calculations, the eruption isn’t coming ten years from now, or even two.

  “It’s coming any day now.”

  And now, the fifth installment of the series:

  THE

  ERUPTION

  Chapter 1

  Just a few years before the world had been mesmerized by the slowly unfolding eruption of the Kilauea volcano on the big island of Hawaii.

  One cable news channel called it “an eruption in slow motion.”

  Over the course of several weeks lava seeped slowly out of the ground.

  It consumed everything in its path, including an abandoned Ford Mustang, and either melted everything it touched or entombed it forever in the black and porous lava rock it left behind as it cooled.

  The event was a tourist attraction, and many came from near and far to take selfies with the red hot lava in the background.

  Such photos were the rage on Facebook, and those who couldn’t go see the spectacle themselves were envious.

  Of course, those who lived in the neighborhoods surrounding Kilauea saw things differently.

  They lived on the big island because of its unspoiled beauty and because they were off the beaten track.

  The eruption drew newsmen and camera crews by the hundreds.

  They in turn trampled the area and left tons of trash behind.

  To the kama’aina, or native Hawaiians, the media and tourists did far more damage to the natural beauty of the area than the volcano ever could.

  That’s not to say the lava didn’t take its toll.

  Houses burned down, roadways were ruined.

  For a time access was cut off to wide swathes of land.

  And in the process the landscape was changed forever.

  As Kilauea had done periodically for eons, it added to the size of the island by working its way to the sea.

  There it produced what scientists called “lava bombs” as the red hot lava met the cool sea water with explosive results.

  Pieces of lava exploded hundreds of feet into the air.

  And, as everyone knows, what goes up must come down.

  As the lava bombs returned to earth they crashed through the roofs of nearby houses, broke the windshields of nearby cars, and broke the cameras of news crews who’d ignored the warnings to move back.

  The locals empathized for their neighbors with roof damage.

  They felt bad for those who incurred damage to their vehicles.

  To the newsmen they felt no pity.

  “It’s your own fault, brah. You shouldda moved back when they tol' you to. Pele don’t cut no slack to no haoles or their cameras.”

  Pele, it should be noted, is the Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes. A haole is a slightly derogatory term for a white man, an outsider, or a non-native.

  By this time the locals were getting tired of news crews tramping through their yards, stomping down their flowers and shoving microphones into their faces.

  After a few weeks they mostly went away… the news crews and touri
sts, that is.

  The locals stayed put, rebuilding what they’d lost and moving things out of the way of the still slowly oozing lava.

  Over the course of weeks and months the big island slowly grew just a bit bigger.

  And that, in the minds of most people, was what a volcanic eruption looked like.

  Mike Sorenson was there.

  Not as a newsman, but as a tourist.

  Mike was a United States Marine and was stationed at Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station on the nearby island of Oahu.

  It was said that if one was in Hawaii and looking for nightlife or for action, Oahu was the place to be.

  And that was largely true, for Oahu was not only the home of Honolulu and Waikiki.

  It also sported twenty times the bars and restaurants on all the other Hawaiian islands combined.

  It was also said that Oahu wasn’t the real Hawaii. That to see the real Hawaii one must get away from Oahu and go to a place that was left untouched by development and unspoiled by tourism.

  Maui was nice. So was Lanai.

  But nothing beat the unspoiled beauty of the big island of Hawaii.

  Mike had been at Kaneohe for three years, and would finish out his enlistment there.

  He’d signed up with his twin brother Marty, fresh out of high school.

  They’d wanted to follow in the footsteps of their father and grandfather.

  Dad was a retired gunnery sergeant who saw action in Vietnam.

  Grandpa David lied about his age to enlist in the waning days of World War II.

  Had they known he was barely sixteen they’d have booted him out.

  But his patriotism was stronger than his sense of self-preservation and he managed to make it to Europe just in time to help mop up the carnage.

  He arrived the same day Hitler finally did the world a favor and shot himself.

  Grandpa Dave served with distinction and later saw action a second time, in Korea.

  It was there that he suffered a wound which gave him a purple heart and put him back on the streets of Bedford, Ohio, where Mike and Marty grew up.

  Mike always considered himself the lucky one of the brothers.

  He smiled when he drew orders to Kaneohe.

  Not because he knew anything about it.

  But because it was Hawaii.

  And because his twin brother Marty was sent to Newport, Rhode Island.

  In January.

  Chapter 2

  The brothers were out of the service now, having fulfilled the terms of their enlistments shortly after Mike returned from his ten day leave to see Kilauea’s fireworks show.

  They were still Marines at heart, for one never stops being a Marine until the day he dies.

  They each had the requisite tattoo to prove it, Mike with the “USMC” emblem on his right bicep, Marty on his left.

  But legally and officially now they were civilians again and as such were leaving the Corps behind them.

  Mike was the more responsible of the pair and was starting his third year as a diesel mechanic at a garage which repaired big rigs for truckers passing through Bedford.

  Marty had always been the lackadaisical one. The one who went from one job to another to another as the mood struck him.

  It so happened he was currently out of work at the same time Mike had earned a two week vacation.

  “I want to see Yellowstone before it blows,” Marty stated aloud over beers at their favorite bar.

  “It’s not gonna blow,” Mike countered. “Don’t believe any of that nonsense you’ve been seeing all over the TV.”

  “I don’t know, those scientists seemed pretty sure of themselves.”

  “Look,” Mike insisted while slurring his words just a bit. “How many people in this bar, right here, right now, have seen an erupting volcano? I’m not talking about on the TV. I’m talking up close and personal, close enough to take pictures of it on my phone.”

  Marty sighed, envious for the thousandth time that his brother spent four years in Hawaii and he didn’t.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Only you.”

  “And did I get blown to bits, or am I still here talking to you and buying you beers?”

  Marty sighed again.

  “You’re still here…”

  “You’re darned right I’m still here. That’s because all those know-it-all scientists don’t know nothing. When a volcano erupts it don’t blow up. It just oozes lava out of the ground. That’s it.”

  “So let’s go see it then.”

  Mike cocked an eyebrow.

  He suddenly realized he’d been had; he’d been bested by his mooch of a brother, who was always keen on going places and who seldom had any money to travel on.

  Still, Mike had always wanted to see Yellowstone too.

  And now that the park was officially closed he probably never would. Unless the Department of the Interior and National Parks Service came to their senses and realized the scientists were all full of it and there was no reason to close the park to begin with.

  “Well, if you’re so sure of yourself, and that all we’re going to see is lava oozing out of the ground, why don’t we go?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Hell yeah, I’m serious. I’m out of a job right now. And you’re going on vacation. Why not go to Yellowstone?”

  “But it’s closed.”

  “So what?”

  “So they won’t let us in, that’s what.”

  “So we get as close as we can and park your jeep in the woods. Then we hike in. What are they gonna do if they catch us? Slap our wrists before they let us go?”

  “Marty I just got married. I’m gonna be a father, remember? I just can’t up and leave Katie behind and run off to Yellowstone.”

  “Then bring her along, you dope.”

  “What part of three months pregnant do you not understand?”

  “Mike, she’s in better shape than you are, pregnant or not. She walks two miles every morning. When’s the last time you walked for two miles?

  “And I’m not talking back and forth between your couch and your refrigerator.”

  Mike said nothing.

  It was partly because his brother was right.

  Katie was one of the fittest women he knew.

  Getting pregnant didn’t slow her down a bit.

  It seemed to light a fire inside of her.

  She stopped smoking when she found out. She stopped drinking.

  She even stopped her habit of smoking a little bit of weed occasionally to help her relax.

  She started eating better and she took to the streets… literally.

  Her morning walks and better eating habits helped her lose those extra pounds she’d been trying to shed since she and Mike became a couple three years before.

  Mike, on the other hand, was no longer the rock hard manly man he’d been in the Corps.

  His abdomen had gotten flabby. His biceps had shrunk a bit.

  He was spending far more time on the couch watching sports than actually participating in them.

  His gym kept filling his mailbox with reminders his membership had expired, and Katie had been trying without success to get him to go walking with her.

  He’d become, he had to admit, a slug.

  “Look, just ask her,” Marty urged.

  “You guys used to go on adventures all the time. I’ll bet if you ask her she’ll want to go. Then it’ll be two votes against one.”

  “Okay. If she’s still up when we get home I’ll ask her.

  “Happy now, brother?”

  “Yes. Supremely so. I’m so happy I might get up and dance. You think that hot chick over there will dance with me?”

  Mike turned and looked.

  “No way, Jose. She’s way out of your league. And she’s waiting for somebody.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, duh… she ordered two drinks. The foo-foo pink drink in front of her and the bottle of beer on the other side of her table.”
/>
  “Oh. Yeah. Okay.”

  As they watched the girl a hulk of a man came into the bar, sat down across from the woman and took a swig from the bottle of beer.

  “Looks like tonight’s not your night, lover boy.”

  “Shoot, I guess not. Let’s get out of here.”

  Chapter 3

  In Las Vegas Darrell looked over Rocki’s shoulder as she typed a review of one of the downtown hotels.

  Despite being directly across the street from the Clark County Detention Center, the Rainbow Vegas can match the amenities of any of the big named hotels on the strip at a third of the cost.

  And its breakfast buffet beats any in town hands down.

  And who knows? If you imbibe just a bit too much during your Vegas stay, the close proximity to the jail might be beneficial. You won’t have to hail a cab back to your hotel after you make bail.

  Rocki was a talented writer who always found a way to inject just a little bit of subtle humor into the books she wrote.

  She believed that finding a new reader was easy. If they were looking for a certain topic and the cover caught their eye they’d buy her book.

  However, keeping a reader and making him want to come back for her future books was a bit harder.

  “You have to entertain them, not just inform them,” she always said. “If you show them a good time they’ll want to come back for more.”

  She was right.

  She was always right.

  They’d been in Las Vegas for eleven days now.

  They’d stayed most nights in various hotels on and off the strip.

  Not the big names, for the purpose of their book was to tell their readers how to visit the city and to have a great time without spending their children’s college money.

  No, they stayed at the smaller hotels. The ones without huge fountains out front. The ones who didn’t pretend they were in Europe or Egypt or in Fairy Tale Land.

  Some of the places they stayed in were standard fare and barely worth the money they charged.