Rain of Fire (33 page)

Superintendent Janet Bolido’s desk leaped up and landed with a thud.

What in the name …?

She watched her computer monitor go over backward and heard it smash. A rising rumble came from all around her. With a white-knuckle grip on the arms of her chair, she managed to stay seated and upright.

From the hall outside, she heard someone shout, “Get outside!”

The floor continued to roll, and she wondered if she could walk.

A book fell from the shelves and hit the floor beside her. And another. Then one hit a glancing blow to her shoulder. An ancient copy
of How to Lie with Statistics
that she’d kept because she liked the concept.

Janet struggled to her feet. If you couldn’t get out, a doorframe was supposed to be safer than the middle of the room. A book hit her elbow, square on the funny bone. The corner of another crashed into her cheek. She brought her hand up and rubbed the place where it smarted.

She needed to move, but her desk slid toward her. Blocked in a triangle formed by the L-shaped workstation, she decided get back in control by climbing over.

An avalanche of books began.

Janet raised her arms to ward off.

From the corner of her eye, she saw six shelves worth of solid oak come loose from the wall, fully loaded with the office’s collection of park history, lore, and goddamned science.

As the shelves swept down behind a hail of sharp-edged hard covers, Janet dove into the kneehole of her desk.

“See you next time, Kelley,” Alicia told the owner of the Pic and Sav while she pushed her cart away from the checkout. In addition to some staples, she’d bought more than she’d intended for her and Wyatt, fresh oranges, premium bacon, and $6.99-a-pound baby spinach. Now all she needed was to stop at the Firehole Inn and talk Edith out of a couple of well-marbled rib-eyes.

Suddenly, it felt like the store jumped up and then crashed down. The lights flickered.

Though she tried to clutch the handle, her cart rolled free. A bag she’d balanced in the child’s seat tumbled to the floor.

With the next shock, Alicia fell to her hands and knees. Above a grinding rumble, she heard the thud of falling canned goods and the sharper shattering of glass.

God, not again
. Even with the thought, she knew this was not a repeat of the tremors they’d been having. More and
stronger
earthquakes.

Her kneecaps went numb from repeated impact with the worn linoleum floor. She cut her palm on a broken jar of Major Grey’s Chutney, the sticky brown concoction of mango and ginger mixing with her blood.

It sounded like a train was passing close. Above the din, people yelled.

“Kelley, you okay?” called the owner’s husband from where he hung on to the checkout stand.

“Everybody out!” Kelley bellowed in a voice that didn’t match her small stature.

Harry the hoarder stood braced in his coveralls, struggling to hold onto his plastic water jugs. He lost one, the tap smashing to spread liquid with rhythmic
glugs
.

The power went. Daylight grayed the area near the automatic doors, and auxiliary lighting came on toward the rear.

The store looked like one of those video clips of a California earthquake taken from the supermarket security camera. Pickle jars fell from the shelves and smashed, cans of corn landed on edge and dented, toilet-paper towers toppled. An unappealing mix of sour odors rose.

Harry watched his water jug drain as though he wished he hadn’t paid for it.

Kelley made a staggering run for the exit.

The pregnant woman Harry had jumped line on sat with her arms protecting her stomach.

Alicia had never felt so helpless.

Kyle clutched Strawberry’s reins as the horse continued to surge. Ground waves rolled down the canyon. The trees shuddered, then began to whip. She heard the snapping of their trunks over the ghastly grinding of the earth.

“Get off the horse, Kyle.” A faint shout. She caught a glimpse of Wyatt on hands and knees. He held Thunder’s reins, but hooves sheathed in steel pawed the air.

A brimmed hat went flying. Thunder reared and plunged and she could no longer see Wyatt.

Kyle dismounted on the uphill side and the ground came up to meet her. Without the steadying pressure of her knees, Strawberry went berserk.

The reins tore from Kyle’s hand. Despite the treacherous footing and the hysterical animal, she tried to grab onto the saddle, anything to try and get the animal under control so she would not go into the canyon. Her hand snagged the loop of her climbing rope beneath the saddlebag and it came free.

With a shrill neigh, Strawberry went over the edge.

Thunder either fell or leaped, but in a heartbeat, he too tumbled into the canyon.

The ground began to slide. From up the hill came an ominous rumble that didn’t belong to the earthquake. Clutching her rope, Kyle scrabbled sideways and got onto an outcrop of volcanic scoria.

Making a last stand on the crumbling shelf, Wyatt stood with his hand stretched toward her. Then the trail collapsed and in dreadful slow motion, he went into the canyon.

Perched on her island of rock, Kyle’s vision darkened from the edges. Sound assaulted her, rumbling and clacking over a low vacuuming roar. All she could see was a jumbled mass of rock and earth before her face, with tree roots protruding.

The ball looked identical to one she had once grabbed hold of in Rock Creek Campground. Using the slick muddy roots for a handhold, she’d pulled herself from the filthy flood. There she had crouched and gripped the rough rock while aftershocks rumbled through.

That wasn’t right, though, was it? Hadn’t she always remembered dragging herself from the water and crawling up onto the slope?

On Nez Perce Peak, Kyle knew there was something about that long-ago morning that she wasn’t seeing. With a sob, she knew it was right there, just beyond her wall of darkness.

She didn’t want to know what it was.

A
s it finally had when Kyle was six, the ground on Nez Perce stopped moving. It brought the same sense of shock … that such chaos could turn to normalcy in a heartbeat. And along with it came the disbelief that she’d survived once again.

Quiet descended, along with a faint rushing of water. Dust choked her throat and gritted against her teeth and tongue.

Her tunnel vision began to clear; swimming bright sparks floating above the jumbled slope. Although she knew all was still, things kept tilting to her left. With a shaking hand, she pushed against the rock. Her shoulder protested and threatened to collapse, but she struggled up and stared out over the slide.

Clouds of rock flour obscured her view of the stream at the canyon bottom, down over a hundred feet. Though boulders still clacked against each other, she cupped her hands and cleared her throat. “Wyatt! Nick!”

It came out a croak.

The only answer was the clatter of collapse as more of the hillside tumbled into the abyss. God, where were the guys … the horses?

She cried out again. What had she gotten them all into, asking Colin to send help and getting Nick here, forcing herself to overcome her nightmares and take Wyatt along into the backcountry?

“Strawberry! Thunder! Gray!” She couldn’t see them at all, and that had to mean …

Her chest heaved, and a sob tore through her throat. If the horses were buried, then Wyatt and Nick …

Alone, she was alone with no radio or anyone who knew where she was. No, it couldn’t be … somebody had to be down there.

When she’d cried as a child for her parents she’d been destined to failure. This time, she determined to find the others if she had to tear aside every boulder and grain of sand.

Looking down, she saw at her feet the climbing rope she’d pulled off Strawberry. Though she didn’t believe in divine intervention, for that matter, in divine anything, this piece of good fortune made her scalp tingle.

Quickly, she picked her way off the outcrop onto the slope where trees were still firmly rooted. Selecting a stout pine, she looped the rope around the trunk and secured it with a bowline knot. Without any climbing equipment to slow her descent, and no gloves, Kyle wrapped the rope around her body and placed her already scarred hands around it.

She planted her feet on the hillside with the rope between her legs, held on tight and started to edge backward down the slope. A few feet down, she crossed onto the uncertain footing of the slide.

Every few feet she stopped and looked around. Each time, she shouted and heard no reply, saw nothing but the ruined canyon wall.

Wyatt lay in the shelter of a pine trunk. Skiing on top of the slide, he had almost managed to stay upright. Then his feet had sunk in and he’d sprawled headlong. For what felt like forever, boulders the size of his head had bounded past or leaped the pine trunk over him. He saw them vaguely, for in his plunge down the hill he’d lost his glasses.

As the rain of rock subsided and things got quiet, all his body parts seemed intact and he felt no pain to suggest internal injury. For a long moment, he lay disbelieving his good fortune. Then the bubble of detachment burst.

He’d seen Thunder and Strawberry tumble end over end in the landslide, screaming in a way that tore at his gut until the raw earth covered them. He prayed they had died cleanly rather than suffocating slowly.

Wyatt tried to stop panting and breathe evenly, but it took another minute before he could croak, “Kyle.”

The last he’d seen Nick and Gray, they’d been holding their own. “Nick!” he tried, his throat still too dry to raise his voice.

There was no answer save the whisper of wind through the trees and the shushing of the creek. He tried not to think of being the only survivor out here. Though Nick was a volcano junkie who’d been gung-ho to get to Nez Perce, Kyle hadn’t really wanted to go to the mountain. She’d gone along to be game, and if Wyatt’s decision to pack in with horses rather than work harder at getting a chopper had gotten her killed …

Desperation surged in him. “Kyle!”

All was quiet, except that up the slope somewhere he heard the skitter of gravel. Recalling that the quake had been preceded by the same precursor, he went still and prayed it was too soon for a decent aftershock.

When no rocks came careening down, he tried to push up and found his right ankle strangely without sensation.

“Wyatt?” The vice that had seized his chest backed off a half-turn.

“Kyle? Thank God!” He thrust a hand up, the same muddy color as the rest of the slide. “Here. I’ve lost my glasses.”

There she was above, roping down like a fuzzy mountaineer in his nearsighted view. As she clambered closer, his heart swelled at the welcome sight of her jeans-clad fanny smeared with earth. From the cleaner look of the rest of her, her hair still half-braided, she had not been caught in the slide.

She arrived at his side in a small avalanche of stones. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m not sure … Nick?”

“I saw him go off the shelf, like you.”

“God,” he said. They stared at each other for a moment.

Then she shouted, “Nick!” with an edge of hysteria.