Rain of Fire (48 page)

A few minutes ago he’d seen Kyle up on the crater rim, something he could not imagine her doing for mere curiosity. After redoubling his effort in case she’d found Nick, he lost sight of her as the wind brought a cloud of steam into his line of sight.

The tremors ramped up from a shudder to several sharp jolts that nearly threw him off the path. Gaining his balance, he tried to hang on while a ground roll of at least magnitude 5.0 went by. He hoped it wasn’t worse for Kyle up higher, but suspected it was. Wanting to rush to her side, he knew that if this level of quaking kept up, he’d be stuck in place no matter what happened.

Crouched in the center of the trail, it was amazing how quickly he went from overheated to trying to turn his face away from the frigid air blasting at his cheeks and nose. With the ground this unstable, there was no way he could climb. Much as he hated to admit it, Nick must be dead … probably had been since the first eruption at 1:12.

Above the rocky spine, up in the trees, wisps of smoke rose from a wildfire set by the lightning thrown off by the eruption or a falling volcanic bomb.

Hearing a faint whopping, he looked up to see a helicopter circling. He waved and hoped to attract Deering’s attention, but this was a different aircraft. Painted olive drab, it looked like surplus from the Vietnam War. Even at a distance, he could see it was packed with passengers, their cameras trained on the reborn volcano. If this group, and there, a fixed-wing appeared from behind the peak… with them in the air, then Deering should still be able to fly.

Wyatt craned his neck, but saw no sign of the Bell.

As the arctic front’s assault grew more feral, he considered the merits of warming before a crackling fire. Hot beef stew, Kyle’s recipe. Hell, he’d settle for canned, even welcome blankets of coarse, scratchy wool.

Down the slope sat the Nez Perce patrol cabin.

Wyatt snugged the hood of his parka closer around his face until he peeked out through a narrow tunnel. Though he wanted nothing more than to sprout wings and get off this powder keg, he had no choice but to try and survive until help arrived.

He prepared for the effort of getting to his feet, but before he could move, a low frequency rumble began to be audible. Accompanied by renewed tremors, it sounded as though the Devil rolled barrels in the bowels of the earth.

Larry filmed Carol as she spoke into the satellite phone. Then he panned around and up the long slope toward the fuming peak. Fine ash created a hazy effect, but she was right about this being a wonderful vantage point. With the wind holding the steam back, he could see the crater rim through his viewfinder.

He could even zoom in and make out a tiny figure, practically skiing down the loose surface of the upper cone.

Behind him, Carol said into the phone, “We’re watching the rescue effort from the last known position of USGS scientist Dr. Nicholas Darden. There is no sign of him here, so it is assumed he headed up the peak. Right now, we can see Dr. Kyle Stone near the mountaintop searching for her colleague. Formerly of the Utah Institute, Dr. Stone appeared yesterday morning on
America Today
to predict just such a debacle as has occurred.”

Larry watched Kyle run, hoping she didn’t fall for the ground was shaking constantly. The dull resonance he’d sensed beneath the howl of the wind rose.

“Standing here is like riding in the back of a truck on a rutted road,” Carol reported. “There have been several larger shocks in the last few minutes …”

All at once, the sound surged upward into a shriek that made Larry imagine the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. A sharp shock of earthquake struck, the sensation of an elevator dropping a few feet and jerking to a halt. He braced his feet and kept the camera running.

Through the LED screen he watched the crater rim dissolve. Then an explosion tore the peak apart in eerie silence.

“My, God,” Carol screamed. “It’s going up.”

Out, thought Larry, as a boiling mass that looked and behaved like an avalanche of gray snow poured down the mountain. Glowing, incandescent, shot with electricity. As the jet-like sound subsided, Larry heard the flow. Hugging the lows on the mountain’s face, it gave forth an animalistic growl, mixed with an ominous clacking.

Beside him, Carol’s mouth was open; she appeared to scream. He staggered up and shouted, “Run!” but she stood frozen.

He grabbed her arm and gestured to a man-high stack of boulders up the slope. They needed to get behind it or they would have no chance.

Still, she did not move. Unable to manage holding the camera and dragging Carol, Larry let the video unit drop. It bounced off a twisted chunk of lava rock, landing soundlessly amid the clamor.

The flow came on, billowing, surging; enveloping everything in its path.

F
rom the upper end of the mountain’s eastern spine, Kyle watched the crater’s side collapse. Impossible to think she’d stood there only moments before with the faith of a child in Santa.

As the nuée poured over the rim, her throat constricted. She knew she could never outrun this fiery gathering of broken rock and ash, tumbling particles that threw off lightning spears and charged the air with ozone. It thrust forth from the mouth of the declivity and spread over the slope with a horrible energy. Constantly shifting, forming new shapes, it sprang down the mountain like a leopard dropping from a branch onto prey.

Knocked to her hands and knees by a quake, Kyle watched annihilation wing toward her, furious, alight with a reddish glare.

She struggled to her feet; half running, half sliding down the gravel slope on the east side of the spine and into the forest. With no time to escape, she sat with her back against the nearest large pine and pulled her pack up to protect her head. Knees drawn to her chest, she unzipped Wyatt’s parka and ducked her face inside, creating an air pocket in case part of the nuée crested the ridge and dropped down over her.

Her ears already ringing from the piercing note preceding the eruption, she flinched at the cacophony of the surging current. It managed at once to whoosh, roar, and clank, like a flash flood she’d once heard in a desert wash.

She took a big breath, wondering if it would be her last, and wished she had let Wyatt get out of the helicopter with her so he’d be here to hold her … but no, if she were going to die she’d want him to live.

Listening with horror to the uproar, she suddenly realized it had reached the peak of its crescendo and began to lessen. When no roiling cloud overtook her, she inhaled with care.

On a puff of foul air, she tasted the taint of burned matches. Hugging her knees, she tried to tell her knotted muscles to relax.

When the sound and the sulfur fumes diminished, she decided to climb back onto the spine and see if she could see Wyatt. Leaving her pack at the base of the tree, she dragged herself back up the slope to the ridge top. Though the wind shoved her shoulders and tore at her hood, she planted her feet against the earth tremors and looked down the west valley.

Ash coiled like smoke in the air above the dying avalanche. The path of newly deposited gravel and sand size material formed a meandering path down the lowest downhill route. It had passed close to the ridge where Kyle had hidden out and even closer down near where she’d last seen Wyatt. But what chilled her even more was that the place they’d left the journalists beside seismic station four had been overrun and buried.

It was time to get off this mountain. Her watch read 5:55; with the lowering ash cloud, a premature darkness began to fall. The thought of night sent an arrow of alarm through her. After the violence of the last surging flow, she had to accept that she might be the only person left alive down here.

As she faced the mountain’s ruined summit, another glowing avalanche poured over the edge like fumes from an acid-filled beaker. After a moment, the eerie combination of rumbling, hissing and clacking once more assaulted Kyle’s ears. Flying rocks burst from the expanding cloud. Beneath her feet, the ridge heaved and shuddered.

Then, deep in her chest came a vibration so low and ominous it was felt rather than heard. Her bones trembled.

The mountaintop exploded.

She had no more than an instant before a shock wave hit, a great thunderclap that lifted her like a huge hand and thrust her back off the ridge. Tumbling end over end down the scree, she felt her shoulder, hip, and one knee impact the ground. Her momentum halted by a thick tree, her vision narrowed to what was before her face. Her escape options must be as thin, for if the helicopters and the plane she’d seen had escaped the blast, they’d be winging on a prayer for clear air.

Kyle shoved to her feet and ran, headlong down slippery evergreen needles, and over exposed roots. Her heart raced and her breath came in hitches. More than once she tripped over deadfalls and went sprawling.

Somewhere nearby must be the lava cave Nick had told her about. If she could make it there … wisdom had it that one of the few survivors of Mount Pelée’s 1902 eruption on the island of Martinique had been in a stone jail, while the rest of 27,000 citizens died.

On their way to the cave, before she and Nick were distracted by the fumaroles on the cinder cone, they were near a cairn of boulders on the ridge. He’d pointed it out as a landmark. He had also said they would need a climbing rope so as not to get trapped.

She didn’t have a rope now or a choice.

The approaching flow crested the ridge, puffing like a locomotive. If she were overtaken, she could be surrounded by material as hot as 1,500 degrees.

There must be some clue to the cave, rather than this monotonous high-angle slope studded with pines. As she dared a glance over her shoulder, a bolt of St. Elmo’s fire radiated off the front of the flow, causing her to duck and swerve.

With heat assaulting the back of her head, she saw a ring of rock to her left that might surround the cave’s opening. Sliding toward sanctuary with stones peppering her skull, she didn’t think she could make it. Then she saw the sinkhole in the mountainside, where jumbled rocks had collapsed beneath an arch of smooth, dark rock.

Kyle dove like a base runner. If she landed hard enough to break bones, so be it.

The filthy cone of last season’s snow came up to meet her, capped in places by the sugary white of this winter’s beginning. The impact caught her on the chest and she slid down, shushing over cold crystals. She felt as though she rode a roller coaster into the dark.

She tangled in something that felt like tree branches and came to a jolting halt. Her head just missed smashing into the rock floor.

Flush with adrenaline, she staggered up, fought her way free of the dead pine lying against the snow cone, and plunged into blackness. The light from the entrance shone farther than she had imagined, a silvery glow that suffused the rocky walls. Every few steps, she looked over her shoulder toward that beacon, gradually watching the illumination recede.

She hadn’t realized how much she was counting on that dwindling spark until she turned to find total blackness and knew the ash cloud was upon her. The hot blanket seared her exposed face and neck until she burrowed deeply into the parka’s hood. Holding her breath against the fumes, arms out before her, she continued her blind flight.

Fifty feet, perhaps a hundred, she ran. Her gloved hands hit first, a warning, but not in time to prevent her crashing chest-first into a solid rock wall. She twisted wildly, feeling the urge to suck in a lungful of air, sweet or foul.

God, what did it matter? She was surely surrounded by poison gas, she couldn’t see, and her hair and clothes were probably about to burst into flame.

Still, she fought the rising impulse to inhale. Shoving off the rock, she tried to recall which direction was away from the cavern opening, and moved in that direction. God, let this not be a dead end.

Light, she had a flashlight in the inside pocket of Wyatt’s parka. How stupid of her to have panicked and not remembered. The snaps ripped and she fumbled inside, then removed her gloves so her fingers could find the metal cylinder and drag it out.

She pressed the switch.

Nothing happened.

For a moment, she thought she was blind. Then she shook the light and heard the sifting of the broken bulb inside.

Kyle gasped. She dropped the useless flashlight and heard it roll away over rock. Hot air rushed into her throat, sulfurous and heavy with dust, so thick that she choked.

Yet, the furious sound of the beast that pursued her had abated, for she had not only heard the tinkle of glass in the flashlight, but now she registered her own rough breathing.

She continued to inhale and exhale rapidly. Time to get out of here, but as the air quality continued to improve, she realized the tunnel she had run through must have curved round a corner and she’d lost the light. Her eyes strained into utter darkness, while the earth began to heave and shudder once more.

Kyle’s legs folded and she went down. Her chest rose and fell in an ever-increasing tempo that merely sipped when what she needed was a long drink of pure sweet air. Curling into herself, she hugged her knees against her chest.