Eruption (3 page)

Arturo was an exact copy of Tomás, only younger and with a small chimpanzee on his lap. Nicole picked the chimpanzee up and gave it a hug. It seemed happy to see her.

“How was dentist?” Arturo asked.

Chase smiled and showed his new tooth.

“
Bueno
.”

Chase pointed at the chimpanzee. “What's his name?”

“It's a she, and her name is Chiquita.”

Chiquita wasn't alone. There were two camels, a black bear, a tiger, and a good-size crowd of people gawking at the animals. Arturo had roped off the area to keep the spectators at a distance.

“You should charge an entrance fee,” Nicole said.

“I'm thinking about it. They are here from morning until darkness. I have to pay children to bring me food.”

Chase looked at Arturo's old sleeping bag and rumpled clothes in the back of the truck. Since meeting Nicole, he had thought more than once about becoming a circus roustabout when he got older. This sight took some of the romance out of
the idea. Sleeping in the back of a truck without being able to leave to get food did not sound like much fun.

“I take it you're not coming with us,” Nicole said.

“The only way I could go would be to take the animals with me. But of course that won't work. I'll wait here in case your mother shows up while you're out looking for her.”

“The clowns will be happy to see Chiquita,” Nicole explained to Chase. “Chiquita and her twin brother, Chico, are part of their act. Chiquita was under the weather when the show headed south, so we held her back. But you're all better now, aren't you, Chiquita?”

Chiquita gave her a hoot and a high five.

Two brand-new, white 4x4 trucks pulled up, equipped with crew cabs, roll bars, auxiliary lights, and power winches. Strapped down in the bed of each truck was a quad. The sides of both trucks were stenciled in red:

M.D. E
MERGENCY
S
ERVICES

The
M.D.
didn't stand for
Medical Doctor
, but sometimes the authorities thought it did and Chase's father didn't correct them. It helped get them into restricted areas.
M.D.
stood for
Masters of Disaster
. His father's little joke. But his father wasn't joking now. He climbed out of the truck all business. He didn't even ask about Chase's tooth.

“The new sat phones have GPS. Keep the phone with you at all times. I also got these.” He handed Bluetooth earpieces
to Chase and Nicole. Cindy, Mark, and Tomás already had theirs in. His father's Bluetooth flashed just above his lightning bolt earring.

That lightning is still looking for you
, Momma Rossi had said. Chase wondered if the bolt had found his father while he'd been at the dentist's. John Masters looked completely charged — and clearly
in charge
. Chase smiled.
Lightning John is a perfect name for him.

“The phones are synced to each other and will act like walkie-talkies,” his father continued. “If you answer, you'll be able to hear everyone, and everyone will be able to hear you. Just tap the Bluetooth if you want to listen in. Mark and Cindy will ride with me. Chase and Nicole will ride with Tomás. When we get closer to Puebla, we'll decide our next step. And one more thing.” He gave each of them a small zippered case. “Respirators in case we run into ash up on the mountain. Put them in your go bags. Any questions?”

No one had any questions. Or if they did, they didn't ask out loud. Mark was filming the whole thing.
That's a question killer
, Chase thought.
Who wants to ask a dumb question with the camera rolling?

Tomás gave Arturo a hug and got into his truck. Chase and Nicole climbed in after him. Chase looked back as they drove away. His father was already getting into his truck behind them. Arturo was waving. Chiquita had her hand up too.

“Was your dad in the military?” Nicole asked as they pulled onto the highway.

“Navy,” Chase answered. “But it was before he married my mom.”

“What did he do in the Navy?”

“I never asked him, and he never talks about it. Why?”

“He seems … I don't know. Organized, I guess.”

“He's certainly organized. Most contractors are.”

“Circus people are organized too,” Nicole said. “But your dad's
extra
-organized. We've been here less than five hours and he's mounted a full-scale expedition inside a foreign country.”

“Mexico is hardly a foreign country.”

“Look at this truck and all this special gear. He had to get a car dealer out of bed at the crack of dawn to get these trucks.”

Chase looked around the cab. It smelled new. The only things that weren't new were the laminated photos of Tomás's eight children and his wife, Guadalupe, duct-taped to the dash. Above them was Tomás's plastic statue of Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers.

He's also invoked against lightning
, Chase thought.
Not a problem today. There isn't a cloud in the sky. People are driving, shopping, going about their day as if —

“Popocatepetl,” Tomás said.

The “smoking mountain” was smoking. A plume of white steam rose ten thousand feet above the nearly eighteen-thousand-foot peak.

“I didn't realize it was so close to Mexico City,” Chase said.

Nicole turned and said something to Tomás in what sounded to Chase like pretty good Spanish. Tomás responded, and they continued speaking rapidly as the volcano loomed larger in the distance.

When they stopped talking, Chase asked Nicole about her Spanish.

“Circuses are international,” Nicole said. “The acts are from all over the world, but most of our roustabouts are Hispanic. I was asking Tomás about his family. They live in a village called Lago de la Montaña, or Lake of the Mountain. I guess people call it Lago for short. It's on the east side of the mountain just below the rim.”

“So, not a good place to be right now,” Chase said.

“No,” Tomás said.

They drove on in silence.

“Noon,” his father said over the Bluetooth.

Chase looked at his watch. “Exactly.”

“Pull over where the road splits.”

Tomás pulled the 4x4 onto the shoulder. Everyone got out.

“We haven't seen another car in half an hour,” Chase's father said. “My guess is nobody's getting in or out of Puebla, at least not on this road. And I don't like the look of that plume. We need to split up so we can cover more ground. I'll continue toward Puebla and see what we're up against. Tomás will head up to Lago and make sure his family's okay.”

“Then I want to ride with you, to Puebla,” Nicole said to John.

“I figured that.” He looked at Cindy and Mark. “One of you needs to go with Tomás and Chase.”

“I'll do it,” Cindy said. “Mark needs to shoot video. I'm extra baggage.”

Except for Tomás and Lightning John, we're all extra baggage
, Chase thought. He would have preferred to travel with Nicole, but he understood her wanting to go to Puebla, where her mother and sister might be. And he understood his father's
reason for going to Puebla right away. The plume — what they could see of it now so close to the mountain — had turned from white to gray in the last half hour. Tomás had told them that didn't necessarily mean the volcano was going to be a problem. The steam and ash were common. But Chase could tell he was worried about it.

Nicole and Cindy went to pick up their go bags.

John waved Chase over to the guardrail to talk to him alone.

“You okay with Nicole going with me?”

“You okay with Cindy going with me?” Chase asked.

His father grinned. “Actually, I am. Take care of her, and take care of yourself.”

“What do you want us to do when we find Tomás's family?”

He looked up the mountainside. “It's up to Tomás, but I'd get them out of here. I just really don't like the look of that plume.”

“Do you know anything about volcanic eruptions?”

“A little. I was in a bad eruption in Indonesia before you were born.”

“When you were in the Navy?”

His father nodded.

“Why were you in Indonesia?” This trip down to Mexico was Chase's first time out of the country, but apparently it was not his father's.

“I was sent there to help rescue some people.”

“From an eruption?”

“Not exactly. Look — let's talk about this another time. We need to get moving.”

“Sure,” Chase said.
Just another thing he doesn't want to talk about.

He walked over to Nicole. “Don't do anything I wouldn't do.”

She burst out laughing. “It can't be worse than the hurricane,” she said.

Chase looked up at the gray plume. He wasn't so sure.

“The bridge is out,” John said.

There were three army trucks parked on their side of the bridge and no vehicles on the Puebla side. He slowed to a stop, then consulted his GPS.

“I'll go talk to them,” Nicole said.

“I'll go with you,” Mark said.

“Ask them when the bridge went out,” John said, pulling a topographical map from the glove box to compare to the map on his phone.

The bridge had spanned a deep gully three hundred feet across. A third of the bridge was now gone. Nicole asked the soldiers when it had collapsed, but they didn't know exactly. They'd been sent from Mexico City right after the earthquake hit. When they called in and reported that the bridge was out, their commander told them to stay put until they were relieved. The sergeant asked if Nicole had any spare food or water. She sent Mark to see what Mr. Masters could spare.

“Did you see any circus trucks drive up to the other side? Or did you pass any circus trucks on your way up here?” Nicole asked in Spanish.

The sergeant shook his head. But he had heard about the circus. His cousin had gone to see it in Puebla. He'd been planning to take his family when the circus performed in Mexico City.

“That may not happen,” Nicole told him. She went on to explain her connection to the circus and gathered as much information from the man as she could.

A few minutes later, Mark and John walked up with a box of food and water and handed it to the soldiers. Nicole filled them in. “The sergeant thinks my mother and sister and the rest of the circus probably started out of Puebla, found they couldn't get far on the ruined roads, and turned back. So maybe they're safe.”
Or stranded somewhere on the road — or worse
, she thought. She continued aloud, “He says there are several roads and trails through the mountains, but they're only passable with four-wheel drive.”

“I think I've found a way around the bridge,” John said. “Ask him about the volcano.”

“I already did,” she told him. “He said the same thing as Tomás. He isn't worried about Popocatepetl either. He told me the mountain lets out steam all of the time, and it's nothing serious. He's guessing the earthquake opened a fissure in the crater, but it will close up in a couple of days. It always does, he said.”

John gave the sergeant his phone number and asked him to call if he heard anything about the circus or warnings about the volcano. Back in the truck, he showed Nicole and Mark the map, moving his finger along the road he was planning to take.

“It looks more like a trail than a road,” Mark said.

“It is a trail,” John admitted. “It swings back around to the highway on the other side of the bridge. If it's wide enough and not too steep, we should be able to make it.”

“If it's still there after the earthquake,” Mark said.

John put the truck into four-wheel drive. “If the trail's not there, we'll make our own.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “Here we go again.”

“What are you talking about?” Nicole asked.

“When we ran out of roads during the hurricane, Lightning John here and his sidekick, Tomás, decided to redefine the meaning of
off-road vehicle
. At one point we were stuck on a train trestle. I can't tell you how much fun that was.”

John smiled. “Lightning John, huh? I gather Chase told you? It's not the worst nickname I've had.” He bumped the truck off the highway and headed into the trees.