The Yellowstone Event (Book 3): A Nation Gone Crazy Read online

  A NATION GONE CRAZY

  The Yellowstone Event

  Book 3

  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 2017 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  The real Wayne Hamlin.

  A true friend.

  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…

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

  THE STORY THUS FAR…

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

  Tony and Hannah knew they’d always be together.

  When Hannah was eight she practiced signing her first name and Tony’s last a million times, just to see how it would look when they finally married.

  They were one another’s firsts for everything.

  First kiss.

  First dance.

  First love.

  They’d pushed their limits many times in high school but never quite crossed the line.

  Then, in college, they became first lovers as well.

  Hannah worried it would change them. That Tony would somehow love her less.

  But he loved her so much more.

  While still in high school they happened upon an old gypsy fortune teller in a traveling carnival.

  She told them of a coming calamity, but wasn’t very specific.

  Something about a volcano… and Yellowstone National Park… and the destruction of the United States of America.

  She told them it was their destiny to tell the world of the coming catastrophe. They had a unique opportunity to save many millions of lives, she said.

  It would have been easy for the teens to write her predictions off as pure fantasy.

  Except that she vanished before their very eyes.

  That got their attention.

  As the years passed, though, they pretty much accepted the disappearance as some kind of trick, her dire warnings as an act.

  Hannah became a geologist; Tony a computer programmer.

  It wasn’t until Hannah took a job with a company called Geo-Dynametrics that they got to see the majestic beauty of Yellowstone National Park with their own eyes.

  Hannah was sent by her employer to gather data at the sprawling park. Soil samples and core temperature readings and the like.

  “It’s a contract for the National Geological Survey,” she was told. “It’s something they’ve done every ten years since Eisenhower was in office. Strictly routine.”

  Tony asked, “What’s an Eisenhower?”

  As it turned out, the survey was anything but routine.

  The data they collected was unmistakable.

  Pressure was building beneath the park. The Yellowstone Caldera was super-heating.

  It was in the early stages of a cataclysmic eruption.

  But that wasn’t all.

  The people who had access to the data and knew how to interpret it were disappearing from the face of the earth or dying in horrific accidents.

  It wasn’t a coincidence.

  Hannah’s co-worker and friend, a woman named Gwen Lupson, took the time to search the internet and discovered the same thing happened after the previous survey.

  And the one before that, and the one before that.

  Gwen and her husband went on the run to a trusted friend in Canada.

  Her last message to Hannah was one of concern:

  “Be very careful.”

  Hannah and Tony thought they were safe. They’d gone separately to the tiny town of Norwood, Missouri to double-check Gwen’s data and to confirm her results.

  But the Department of Homeland Security was way ahead of them.

  They took Hannah, seven months pregnant, hostage. They tortured her and questioned her unmercifully in an attempt to make her disclose Gwen’s whereabouts.

  Hannah didn’t know, and wouldn’t have told them if she did.

  Her baby was born while she was unconscious and immediately taken away.

  “What have you done with my baby?” she pleaded.

  “He is alive and being cared for. You can have him back when you divulge Gwen’s whereabouts.”

  Meanwhile Tony meets a rather odd man in Norwood named Bud Avery.

  Bud is many things. An attorney, a bail bondsman, a private investigator.

  More than anything else he becomes a trusted friend to Tony.

  Bud’s been around for a long time. He knows the ropes. And he knows exactly where to take Tony in Washington, D.C. to demand the return of his wife.

  Bud and Tony have been dealt a pretty good hand. They’ve got something the Department of Homeland Security desperately wants to keep under wraps: the data which shows Yellowstone is about to blow.

  “Why on earth are they keeping it a secret?” Tony asks of Bud.

  “They know the citizens would demand they do something, and there’s little they can do,” Bud responded.

  “Instead of admitting that to the public and facing the consequences, they’d rather just let it happen and pretend they never knew.”

  “But that’s insane!”

  “That, my young friend, is the federal government. What they do doesn’t have to make sense, and it damn sure doesn’t have to benefit the citizens of the United States. It benefits politicians and the lobbyists and campaign contributors who own them. It’s been that way for a very long time and anyone who tells you otherwise is either crazy or one of them.”

  “That’s awfully cynical of you, isn’t it Bud?”

  “It’s fact, son. You’ll soon see for yourself.”

  Tony saw for himself when both men were taken into custody, called threats to national security and tortured by the same group of thugs terrorizing Hannah eight hundred miles away.

  But the DHS didn’t know about Bud’s secret weapon: his good friend Wayne Hamlin, who’d been given a copy of the Yellowstone data and told to release it worldwide if Bud disappeared for ten days or more.

  Hamlin was a highly-respected professor at the University of Missouri at Springfield.

  He understood what the data represented and was only too happy to comply.

  When we last checked in, Hamlin released the data and the cat was out of the bag.

  There was no longer any need to hold Hannah. She was released from an abandoned Air National Guard base outside of St. Louis and told she’d be reunited with her baby.

  But the baby never showed.

  Tony and Bud were released about the same time and flew back to their respective homes: Tony in Little Rock and Bud in Norwood.

  Tony wanted more than anything to find Hannah and baby Samson at home awaiting his arrival.

  Instead he found a house which had been trashed by Department of Homeland Security agents and a ringing phone.

  On the other end of the phone was a hysterical Hannah, still in St. Louis.

  “They still have Samson. They never brought him. Honey, what do we do?”

  “What hotel are you staying at?”

  “The Airport Executive in St. Louis.”

  “Stay there. I’ll be there as
soon as I can. Don’t you dare go anywhere, even if they show up with the baby. Now that I finally know where you are, I don’t want to lose track of you again.

  “Honey, you have to promise me you’ll stay there until I get there.”

  Between sobs she managed, “Okay. I promise.”

  And now, the third installment of the series:

  A NATION GONE CRAZY

  Chapter 1

  It wasn’t the first time Marilyn Petty had gone against the system.

  She’d been fired from her job at a big branch bank for opening fraudulent accounts, then passing hot checks all over town to shop for her shoe and purse obsession.

  When the checks first started bouncing she went ahead and honored them, using the bank’s money. Eventually she had to close them down, causing real people to wonder why bank accounts they never had were being charged off and ruining their credit.

  She could have gone to prison for that, but she had an ongoing affair with the bank’s auditor.

  He found evidence she only did it once and she was given a break.

  In fact, she’d done it over a hundred times over a two year period.

  She was fired two years later from her job as a home improvement store manager.

  It seems she had several friends who were dopers and always desperate for cash.

  She had a habit of leaving expensive tools outside the back door on an unlit dock.

  Her friends would take the tools and bring them back to the store one at a time during regular business hours.

  “It was a gift,” they’d say, “and I don’t really need it.”

  Or, “I bought it and my wife told me to bring it back.”

  “Yes, sir. We can take care of that. Do you have the receipt?”

  “No. I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “Then we won’t be able to give you a cash refund. The best we can do is give you a gift card for the full amount.”

  “That’s fine. I shop here all the time anyway.”

  The doper would take the gift card for, say, two hundred dollars. He’d peddle it to any number of unscrupulous contractors or laborers for half its face value: one hundred dollars.

  He’d then split that amount with Marilyn. She’d get fifty dollars and he’d spend the other fifty on heroin.

  She only got caught because one of her doper friends was busted on an attempted murder charge and needed something to bargain with.

  Despite a very blemished record she was able to get a job with the federal government. Sure, she had a spotty past. But so did a lot of others who did under-the-table contract work for this particular agency.

  They asked few questions because the less they knew about their contractors the better. It was more important they find people who’d do anything they were asked to do.

  Regardless of who got hurt.

  Marilyn once had her own son, who fell victim to SIDS ten years before.

  She was so distraught she gave in to a friend’s suggestion she turn to drugs to ease her pain.

  For a long time she relied on anti-depressants to help her want to get out of bed every day and keep trudging on.

  The anti-depressants led to an addiction to pain pills.

  Then pain pills and alcohol.

  She overdosed once but made it to the hospital in time to be saved.

  And she made the mistake of telling an emergency room nurse she wished she had just died; that it would have been better for all concerned.

  She was taken to a mental health facility as a suicide risk, and not released for six weeks.

  By that time she’d gone through withdrawals and had taken a big step in defeating the pills.

  But she’d convinced herself, during the process, that she was worthless as a human being.

  She didn’t care whether she lived or died. In her mind she was the worst human being ever to haunt the earth.

  So perhaps there was some damage to her psyche which caused her to do what she did.

  Maybe a lingering hole in her heart that had to be patched.

  Or maybe she was just a bad seed who wanted something she couldn’t have, and never really accepted it until the right opportunity came along.

  Marilyn herself didn’t even know why she did it.

  She just did.

  When she was given her outbrief by Rebecca, she was told this particular job was over. She’d never see Rebecca again, as was usual protocol, since the contractors never worked with the same team twice.

  “We’ll sever all ties as soon as I walk out that door,” Rebecca told her. “Your final paycheck will be deposited in forty-eight hours. The agency will contact you when they have more work for you.”

  She slipped Marilyn a piece of paper which contained an address.

  “Your final task is to deliver the baby to this address. It’s a hotel near the airport. The baby’s mother will be in the room waiting for you.

  “Don’t answer any of her questions. Don’t provide her any information. Simply hand her the baby and walk away. Any questions?”

  “No ma’am. Piece of cake.”

  At first Marilyn fully intended to accomplish her mission.

  Then it dawned on her.

  This might be her one and only second chance to be a mother.

  The baby’s real mom had already been severed herself.

  She had no way to contact Rebecca again, even if she tried.

  And she’d been warned that trying would mean serious prison time.

  Chapter 2

  All the way to the hotel Marilyn pondered her chances of getting away with it. She went back and forth.

  On the one hand was the chance to have another baby to replace the one she’d lost years before.

  On the other hand, kidnapping was an offense that could send her to prison for the rest of her natural life.

  In the end it was the truck driver who made the decision for her.

  He cut in front of her just before she took her exit to the hotel, forcing her to stay on the highway.

  She took that as a sign from God Himself.

  Oh, sure, she could have taken the next exit and circled back.

  But she was convinced this was her destiny.

  By the time Hannah finally realized she’d been had; that her baby wasn’t coming after all, Marilyn was already out of Missouri and headed for Michigan.

  Looking forward to being a mommy again.

  But it wouldn’t be all candy and roses.

  She was getting tired and it was getting late.

  The baby was hungry, crying and cranky.

  They’d only given her the things she’d need for a few hours.

  “The mother has everything he’ll need once you drop him off at the hotel. In the diaper bag are three bottles of formula, a bottle warmer you can plug into the cigarette lighter, and three diapers.

  “That’ll be plenty to last you the two hours you’ll have him.”

  And it was.

  Enough for the first two hours, that is.

  But she’d driven all day. The bottles were empty. The diapers were all gone.

  She needed to stop.

  She needed to get more of… everything.

  Most of all she needed to hold him. To love him. To bond with him.

  To convince him that Marilyn, and not some unnamed woman at a hotel in St. Louis, was the baby’s true mother.

  She pulled her Chevy into a Walmart parking lot just as the sun was setting, then took the crying baby from his car seat and held him close.

  “Shhhh… it’s okay, sweetheart. Mama’s here… let’s go get you something to eat, okay?”

  Half an hour later the two were back in the car, the baby in a dry Pamper and sucking on a bottle of formula.

  She’d spent most of the money she had left, but that was okay. She had a tank that was almost full, three twenties and a credit card with a little room left on it.

  That would get her to her sister’s house in Grand Rapids.

  She might hav
e to skip a meal or two, but she was used to doing that.

  As long as Jacob’s needs were taken care of, she didn’t mind. Truth was she could afford to lose a couple pounds anyway.

  She’d been doing contract work for the DHS for almost two years now. The job paid very well, but was agonizing for a woman who wanted desperately to be a mother again; who’d lost her only child and so wanted another one.

  Each time she was charged to care for someone else’s child it had gnawed at her. Made her wonder why God hated her so. Why He took her own child from her.

  Whether He’d let her have another one someday.

  Of course, she’d made her own decision to swear off men a couple of years before. She’d done that, not God. And that, of course, had made the chances of her having another child considerably less likely.

  She’d tried going the adoption route.

  But although there were babies out there in need of a good home, she just wasn’t a good candidate.

  She was a convicted felon, for one. And not just once. She had a rap sheet as long as her arm.

  Not necessarily a show stopper. There were other convicted felons who’d been allowed to adopt children.

  Of course, they were married, with money and influence.

  Then there was the income thing.

  Although the DHS paid her well for taking care of the children of the people they had in temporary custody, it was spotty. Sometimes she went for weeks at a time without work.

  Alone, she was able to handle that by relying on her sister or her friends for help.

  But adoption agencies didn’t like adoptive parents who sometimes couldn’t make their rent payments. Who sometimes had trouble putting food on the table.

  Who sometimes had to hustle to make a few extra bucks.

  And then too was the problem of her non-disclosure agreement with DHS.

  Even if her pay had been more consistent it wouldn’t have mattered.

  She was prohibited from reporting the income to the state adoption agency anyway. It was what they called “black money.” The kind of money no one talked about.