Rain of Fire (19 page)

She opened her hands.

When she landed, her legs sank calf-deep into muck. She struggled to free her uphill foot. When she tried to lift it, her other leg went in to the knee. Stretching up, she just missed being able to reach the door handle.

Kyle listened to the growl of the diesel and the river’s rush. Transferring her weight from one foot to the other, she wriggled to try and free them. First one and then the other shoe and sock were sucked off in the mud as, inch by inch, she drew her legs and feet out.

The RV shifted, slipping farther down the hill. Praying it didn’t roll and crush her beneath it, she grabbed for the door handle. Her stinging hands gritty on the metal, she yanked and it gave in her hand.

Kyle tumbled inside and smelled styrene from the paneling and carpet. She dragged herself up using a captain’s chair hanging from what was now the ceiling. The RV sloped at a high angle, and in the light from the dash, she made out an elderly couple in matching jogging suits, kept from rolling back by the ceiling box containing the air conditioner. A dark smear in the man’s silver hair might be blood.

“Hello!” Kyle called.

The woman gasped, “Thank God.”

“Can you slide down to me?” Kyle called over the engine noise. “We can get out the door.”

Before she finished speaking, the RV gave another shudder and lost at least five feet of freeboard. She wondered if this was it, but the vehicle hit another sticking point and stabilized with her up to her waist in cold river water.

The engine died.

“Come on,” Kyle urged. “It may go any second.”

Slowly, the vehicle began a sickening roll downhill onto the passenger side. The woman screamed. Kyle braced herself and went with the movement, realizing they would not be able to get out the door that had just been buried in the slide.

Now on its side, the RV stabilized once more.

“Halloo!” someone called from the front. A flashlight beamed in.

“Kick in the windshield,” Kyle called.

She heard a sharp thud, then another. Nothing happened.

“I think you can push ‘em out, but not in,” said the RV’s owner.

Kyle realized that the window behind the driver’s seat was an option. She used the seatback to drag herself up and managed to shove up and out a two by two foot section of glass. Then she hung back and motioned to the trapped couple.

The woman shook her head, and Kyle realized that neither she nor her husband likely had the strength to pull up through the opening. As she cast about for an idea, Kyle recognized that the person outside was unfurling a rope and tossing it through the window.

The woman grabbed it and held on while her rescuer pulled. First her body and then her legs disappeared through the window. The pitch of the vehicle grew sharper, as it continued its slide into the river. Her husband managed to hold on to the frame and get out the window.

Another shift of the RV and Kyle lost her grip. She fell back down the steeply sloping ceiling into black water that was over her head …

Dawn had not brought relief to six-year-old Kyle. Trapped in the tree by the Madison’s floodwaters, she could see no sign of the Rambler, not even its roof. Tatters of yellow nylon decorated a nearby tree, suggesting the rush of wind ahead of the landslide had blasted her parents’ tent from its moorings. The only familiar thing was the Coleman Lantern dangling from a rope in a tree canted at an extreme angle. As she watched, rising water covered it.

Despite the surrounding silence, she screamed and screamed until her throat was raw.

All night she’d held on, just like Mommy and Daddy would have wanted her to, knowing they would find her with the promise of light.

The waters touched her toes. She clutched the high thin trunk that already bent beneath her weight. Holding her breath as though that would make her lighter, she tried to shinny up a few more feet.

With a lurch, the tree bowed and deposited Kyle in the flood.

Never had she been in water this swift or foul, filled with boughs that brushed like writhing snakes, and tasting of earth when a great mouthful washed down her throat.

The current caught and carried her tumbling. The awful desperation for air forced her mouth open and she gasped in water. Choking, she drew in more and flailed wildly for the light.

Something solid hit her back and she came to a stop, pinned against something by the water’s force. It shoved at her shoulders and dragged at her legs. Scrambling, clawing, sobbing, she flailed until she found purchase.

Gasping and fighting for every inch, she emerged from the flood onto the jumbled mass of landslide, where she lay on her stomach coughing and spitting up water. Morning became a lighter gray as she shrieked once more for Mom and Dad, Max, for somebody … anybody.

W
hen Kyle surfaced inside the drowned RV, her chest muscles seized. Splashing ineffectively in her soaked clothing, she fended off floating sofa cushions that refused to support her weight and tried without success to find a handhold. A big mouthful washed down her windpipe.

A shout from above. “Grab the line!”

A wet splash. She floundered until her fingers found a rough coil. “I’ve got it,” she gasped.

Slowly the rope went taut. One tedious inch at a time, Kyle began to come out of the water. Her sore and stinging hands protested, but she was not going to let go.

Just another foot to get purchase on the lip of the opening and she pulled herself painfully through to slide down the windshield.

She landed hard on rocks and mud. Barefoot, she hobbled onto the rocky slope away from the slide. Just as she was thinking of dropping and kissing the solid earth, the RV gave a final shudder and slid into the river.

Kyle did go down then, onto hands and knees. Nausea came in hard waves, and she bent forward while a gush of river water poured from her mouth. The night spun around her.

A hand touched her shoulder. “You all right, ma’am?”

The uniformed Park Ranger who had answered her distress call helped her to her feet.

Though she wanted nothing more than to lean on him, she saw the shell-shocked look of the older couple. “I’m okay, but those folks …”

As the ranger assisted the RV’s owners up the hill, the rain’s pounding renewed. Kyle managed to make her way slowly back up to the road and retreated inside the van. Her khakis were soaked to a dark brown. Beneath her jacket, she was a candidate for a wet T-shirt contest.

After thanking the ranger and telling him she was staying at the hotel, she started the van and backed away from the slide. Up the hill at Wyatt’s house, she stopped and picked her way carefully across the rocky lawn to the front door.

But though she rang his bell, knocked politely at first and then beat with her fist, no one came to the door. For good measure, she went around the darkened back of the house to the window she thought might be his bedroom. Using her keys, she rapped on the glass.

“Wyatt,” she called through chattering teeth.

“Help you?” yelled an angry male from the front yard. His torch’s beam was as bright as a headlight.

Thankful she hadn’t been caught trying to open the window, Kyle turned to him. “There’s been a big landslide in the canyon. I was trying to wake Wyatt to tell him.”

The man took a few steps closer.

“I’m Dr. Kyle Stone of the Utah Institute, in the park to do some fieldwork with Wyatt.”

The interrogation light lowered and she made out a heavyset man, barefoot and wearing a plaid robe. He carried an umbrella she would gladly have wrestled him for.

“You look like you’ve got the field all over you.” He gestured at her sopping, muddy clothes. His expression softened to one that seemed more kindly. “I live in the other side of the duplex. Guess Wyatt’s not here.”

“Do you know what time he left?”

“I don’t keep track. I was asleep when you started up a racket.”

With her cell phone DOA, she drove as fast as she could back to the hotel. There were no telephones in the rooms, part of the ‘charming ambiance’, but there was a pay kiosk in the lobby.

Her feet leaving a blood-tinged trail on the polished floor, she went to the phone in a hall at the rear near the hotel desk. She drew a credit card from her wallet and dialed directory assistance, getting more blood from her cut hands on both the card and the phone. “In Gardiner, Montana, please. I need the number for an Alicia Alvarez.”

After a moment, the operator came back, “I’m sorry, but that number is unlisted.”

Hanging up, Kyle backed against the opposite wall of the deserted hall and tried to stem the rising tide of panic. Wyatt could be buried under tons of rock and not be discovered for days. She had to sound an alarm, get the road equipment out there in the middle of the night … she needed …

Behind the registration desk, a lone young woman in jeans and a crocheted top played Solitaire on the computer.

“Nicholas Darden,” Kyle said. “Give me his cabin number.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but…”

“Look, this is an emergency. I’m going to have to insist.”

The clerk took in Kyle’s disheveled state and wet clothes. “I guess I can get one of the guards to walk over there with you.”

Nick couldn’t sleep. He’d awakened around twelve-thirty, thinking maybe he felt an earth tremor. He’d also heard some kind of sound after he sat up, like a dump truck dropping a load somewhere in the Mammoth area.

Now that he was awake and thinking about quakes, he couldn’t help but recall Brock Hobart and his press conference. Both earthquake seismology and volcanology had their folks that nobody seemed to take seriously. Yet, over beers and dinner that Nick had bought even though Brock’s new moon was almost a week away, he had to admit that he had been intrigued.

Brock was correct in his observation of the large quakes he had listed for the press, including Hebgen Lake. It was a fact that the gravitational and tidal forces he claimed as a catalyst profoundly affected all manner of earthly phenomena.

Nick himself believed in the reports of animal disturbances before humans detected a quake. He also knew tidal forces caused people to act strangely, when there was a full moon. ERs were always full that night with the victims of everything from cars running off the road to incidents of domestic violence.

One thing Nick had argued with Brock was his prediction of a quake as large as a 6.0 in the park. The movement of magma in most volcanic terrains did not spawn quakes that large unless there were some unusual circumstances like a superimposed active fault system.

Even so, after talking with Brock, the possibilities in Yellowstone looked exciting. The seismic records showed a definite ramping up of activity, enough that Colin had decided to send him here. And the unfortunate death of David Mowry, whose books Nick had devoured, made it somehow personal.

Seeing Kyle again after all these years brought it damned close to home.

The last week of field camp, he and she had been mapping partners. With over ten square miles of mountain to cover, they set out to identify the geological formations. On their second day out, Nick discovered a small overhang of pink quartzite cliff in the Jurassic Nugget Formation, where a small spring had encouraged aspen. It started out as just a shady place to rest, until he tugged at the knot of Kyle’s halter-top.

For the rest of the season, they took their lunch break in the cool privacy.

Nick stared at the dark wood ceiling. Could this cabin be the very one where he and Kyle had stayed? It seemed to him that the rustic box had been on the end of row like this was.

A nostalgic ache spread through him. He’d been smitten enough to carry her across the threshold, and at that perfect moment in space and time, he’d meant everything the gesture implied.

Someone knocked on his door. Nick sat up in bed, thinking nobody could get his room number … unless Kyle had eavesdropped when he checked in. Warmed by that possibility, he shoved back the covers and headed for the door.