The Eruption

by E S Richards

  THE

  ERUPTION

  ESCAPING DARKNESS

  Book 1

  By

  E S Richards

  Mike Kraus

  © 2019 Muonic Press Inc

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  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

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  Special Thanks

  Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great. Thank you!

  Escaping Darkness Book 2

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  Prologue

  Turning back one final time to look over the park before she boarded the small airplane that Texas A&M University had hired for them, Mia swore she felt the ground shake beneath her feet. Miniature earthquakes had been growing in frequency over the past few days, leading to the research trip to the supervolcano, which had more than paid off in the amount of data she had collected.

  Things seemed off in Yellowstone, no matter how you sliced it. There shouldn’t be so many microquakes, no matter how small each seemed, and even the geysers were hotter than usual. Plus—although Mia couldn’t back this up with evidence—she could swear the ground had risen slightly since she’d last been there just under a year ago. After the state senate allowed fracking and drilling operations to commence in small sections of the park, Mia’s trips had grown more frequent as researchers grew worried about the environmental effects on the national landmark.

  “Did you feel that?” Mia asked Tyler, one of her research partners who had yet to climb the few steps up to the plane, which waited for them at the small Yellowstone airport. Jorge, the other researcher they’d traveled with, was already in his seat, settling down with a bag of peanuts and a bottle of iced tea plucked from a small cooler.

  “Yeah,” Tyler furrowed his brow slightly, “I’m sure it’s nothing though. We’ve got all the data we need already. Let’s just get back home.”

  It made Mia laugh that Tyler referred to Texas as his home now. From hearing him speak she would never have guessed he’d even set foot in the state, let alone lived in Houston for the past seven years. He’d come over to the university on a research scholarship from England and stayed there ever since, but try as he might, he still couldn’t get rid of the British accent that had girls falling at his feet every night. Even if that was the complete opposite of what he wanted.

  “All right,” Mia smiled, admitting to herself that she was desperate to get home, too. Her niece and nephew were expecting her and she couldn’t wait to see them again.

  “Are you guys coming or what?” Jorge called just as Mia resumed climbing the stairs to the aircraft. “I’d like to get back sometime this century!”

  Shaking her head, Mia pulled herself through the door and shot Jorge a sarcastic eye roll. He smirked in response, kicking off his sneakers and stretching his legs out in front of him. Looking past her friend, Mia could see the pilot up front making the final checks before takeoff. Once everyone was aboard, the pilot flicked a switch over his head, bringing in the stairs and closing the plane door.

  “Seats for takeoff,” he called out. “Belts on, blinds up.”

  Mia took her seat by the window, choosing one where she would still have a view over Yellowstone as they took off. She had always disliked flying and her hatred had only grown after what happened to her brother just over a year prior. She tried not to think about it as the engine started to rumble and the plane jerked forward, but it was impossible to get her brother’s face out of her mind. He’d been such a brilliant man, taken from the world far too early.

  With the plane quickly picking up speed along the short runway, Mia gripped the armrests of her seat. She squeezed her eyes shut as she felt the plane rocking beneath her, more so than it usually seemed to do. The pilot was skilled—she’d flown with him before—but this takeoff didn’t feel like any of the others she had experienced.

  Forcing herself to open her eyes, Mia looked out of the window just as the plane’s wheels left the tarmac and they began to soar up into the sky. She stared at the rolling hills of Yellowstone in the distance, marveling at how beautiful it was in spite of the dangers lurking just out of sight. Their flight would take them right over the park, giving her one last chance to admire its beauty that year.

  Mia’s research had, for years, been focused on Yellowstone’s supervolcano and the potential risks it posed to future generations. Tucked away beneath the surface of the Earth, it was quite active, but never so much that it would breach the surface. Yellowstone’s famous geysers, dangerous pools of superheated water, and rich, diverse landscape all grew from side effects of the supervolcano’s presence.

  Experts predicted that the supervolcano would erupt at “some point” but despite ebbs and flows in microquake activity, geysers popping up in new locations all around the area and other odd activity, the same “experts” assured any interested parties that there was no danger of an eruption anytime soon.

  As with so many other situations, however, Mother Nature had a mind of her own.

  As Mia gazed over the peaceful, breathtaking landscape of the park, a flurry of trees sinking into the ground caught her attention. As she watched, the ground in the center of the park split open and swallowed the trees and rocks alike. It took Mia less than a second to understand what was happening. The rock roof of the Yellowstone super volcano collapsed and, with an ear-splitting bang, a violent gust of bright orange lava and ash shot upwards into the sky, filling the clouds with terror.

  Immediately the alarms inside the small plane started blaring. The scanner was recording the eruption as a large collision point, something that would be nearly impossible to avoid. Lights flashed in the cockpit and along the small runway between the seats. Jorge was up and into the co-pilot’s seat in an instant, his few years spent training to be a stunt pilot in his youth filling his body with a need and an instinct to help control the plane. They were only a few hundred feet up but Mia kept her eyes glued to the eruption in the distance.

  A gorgeous view of Yellowstone had, in mere seconds, been completely covered by the dark ash cloud with the occasional spit of lava shooting out from the side. She could already feel the plane rocking from the force of the blast and the ensuing winds. The ash cloud was vast and as it grew the density of it quickly changed the surrounding air pressure.

  “We need to land!” Tyler screamed, terror etched behind his eyes as he swung his head between the view from the window and the two men wrestling to control the aircraft in the cockpit.

  “We can’t land!” Jorge called back, his demeanor completely
changed from the happy-go-lucky man he had been ten minutes ago. “We need to get as far away from here as possible!” As he spoke, Jorge took the controls and yanked the control wheel as far to the right as possible. The plane echoed his movements, turning in a large arch away from the pit of fire they had been heading toward.

  Mia shook her head in disbelief, her eyes growing wide. The impossibly tall ash cloud was already rolling out thick and fast, a blanket of death that would utterly destroy their plane if they couldn’t somehow outrun it, though paradoxically that was the least of her worries. She knew how far the pyroclastic flow could reach, how far the ash cloud would spread, how far the lava could flow and how far the jet streams would carry the debris from the eruption. She’d read all the papers and written countless ones herself. All theory—supposedly. Scientists smarter and more experienced than she was were confident that it wouldn’t happen in her lifetime. The supervolcano begged to differ.

  “We need to outrun it!” Jorge encouraged the pilot from his new seat beside him. The two of them concentrated hard as they began guiding the plane in its arch back down to land. “We need to get as low down as possible. Stay under the cloud and keep powering forward. Until the engine gives up.”

  “But then we’ll fall?” The pilot questioned. The possibility of them dying in a plane crash did not escape him as he struggled to keep his voice steady.

  “Yes,” Jorge replied, “but we’ll have a better chance at surviving. It’s our only option. We can’t land here and we definitely can’t stay at this altitude. We need to try and outrun the ash.”

  Mia ran through the equations in her head. She didn’t know anything about flying, but she knew enough about science to understand what Jorge was suggesting. They didn’t have any other option. She had to trust him and believe that he would get them out of the kill zone before it was too late. Visions of her family flashed through her head. She had to get back to them. There was no way she was going to let her niece and nephew lose anyone else.

  Twisting her body in her seat, Mia turned her attention back to the window. The plane was rapidly approaching the ground as they sped away from the airport, whipping over trees that seemed an arm’s length away. Mia’s mouth dropped open while she watched the fiery epidemic in the distance. Bright orange lava bubbled up and spat into the sky from beneath the dark cloud of ash, illuminating it with hellish reds and oranges. The cloud was growing larger every second, never once seeming farther behind despite the growing distance between the plane and the volcano. It was chasing them, like some primordial beast awoken from its slumber and hungry for its first meal. Sooner or later, it would catch them. Tyler had worked himself up into a full-on panic attack but Mia had no time to focus on him. She wanted to help somehow, but besides watching what was happening outside and praying for survival there was very little else she could do.

  Her eardrums pounded from the different noises that assaulted them, the alarms in the plane continuing to go off, releasing a monotonous but panicked flurry of beeps throughout the craft. Tyler continued to mutter and moan while Jorge and the pilot spoke rapidly to one another. Both men had firm grips on their controls as they brought the plane closer to the ground, closer than Mia had ever flown before outside of landing and takeoff.

  Beyond all the noises inside the plane, it was what Mia could hear outside that was the most terrifying. That initial explosion was louder, deeper and more bone-rattling than any she had heard or imagined before. As the eruption continued, more bangs and cracks from the splintering rock echoed unrelentingly through the sky. Images of thousands of park visitors flashed across Mia’s vision, and in her mind she could hear their brief screams of terror before they were snuffed out.

  “Oh God,” Mia muttered to herself as she pressed her face closer against the window, watching the ash cloud behind them. It was getting closer and it didn’t look like they were escaping it by flying closer to the ground at all.

  “Jorge!” Mia cried out as she glanced over her shoulder to look into the cockpit. “It’s getting closer!”

  “I know, Mia!” Jorge shouted back. “I’m doing everything I can!”

  The cloud chased them with a ferocious speed, gaining by the second no matter how hard they pushed the plane’s engines. It was getting more difficult to fly the closer they came to the ground, with hills and tall trees appearing almost out of nowhere.

  Mia’s body contorted to give her the best view of the ash cloud possible while still remaining strapped into her seatbelt. What had once been the vast expanse of the national park was now completely obliterated by the dark cloud that followed them. It consumed everything in its path, covering buildings and open plains alike, leaving nothing without the blanket of darkness.

  Jorge and the pilot strained to keep the plane steady but with the turbulence of the ash cloud behind them it was a near-impossible task. The engines wouldn’t be able to function much longer with the rock fragments and thick dust that were thrown out of the cloud, and if a particularly large piece of debris were to hit the engine, they’d have zero chance of surviving a crash landing.

  “Brace yourselves!”

  The pilot’s cry filled Mia’s head mere seconds before the black cloud of ash engulfed the plane. It forced them into darkness and trapped them inside, no light visible in any direction. The plane groaned under the pressure and the alarms somehow started blaring out even louder. Mia noticed the change in direction immediately. They were no longer flying, but falling, at the mercy of the terrible beast that had finally snatched them up between its gaping, ferocious jaws.

  Mia gripped the armrests of her seat until her knuckles blanched from the pressure. Her eyes darted from one side of the plane to the other, searching for any glimpse of daylight outside. The lights in the plane gave out next, followed by only the rushing wind and swirling debris outside as the alarm stopped and the engine died.

  “Prepare for impact!”

  There was barely time for Mia to react to the order before the plane smashed into the ground. Her head was flung forward and cracked sharply on the seat in front of her, forcing her eyes to close and her body to give way to a whole new type of darkness.

  The beast, it seemed, had won.

  Introduction

  0.00014%.

  It’s a small number—almost infinitesimally so. It also happens to be the chance that the supervolcano in the heart of America could erupt in any given year. Even if it were to erupt, scientists are largely in agreement that the chances of it being a civilization-changing eruption are even lower. It would more than likely be a small one, if it were to happen. A bit of smoke, a bit of magma, and that’s it.

  One could say the same about an asteroid hitting the Earth, our financial system being completely wiped out overnight, a nuclear war, a solar-based EMP, or any number of other disaster scenarios. There is still a chance, though. A chance that it could be the Big One, that it could wipe out thousands of square miles in the blink of an eye and cause a catastrophic change to the globe not seen in eons.

  The eruption would start with multiple smaller earthquakes across the breadth of Yellowstone itself—weeks of this build-up would cause the rock to shift prior to the eruption. The ground would slowly start to rise as geysers reached their boiling point, their water becoming increasingly acidic. Then, in a flash, the rock roof of Yellowstone would crumble and lava and ash would shoot 20 miles up into the sky.

  Pyroclastic flows would roll off the main eruption in every direction, masses of superheated ash, rock fragments, lava, and gases. Capable of moving at over 400 miles an hour, the flows would kill anything in their path up to several miles away from the point of origin. Lava flows from the two-step magma chamber would reach out to a 100-mile radius of the volcano, traveling slower than the pyroclastic flows, but still deadly in their own right.

  The instant death zone: a 100-mile radius from the eruption point. An area where nothing would be able to survive.

  The ash cloud, though, would be the mo
st decimating factor in a supervolcanic eruption. Ash would be pumped into the atmosphere and carried on jet streams for days, circulating through the stratosphere and around the planet. Heavy rain immediately mixing with this ash could cause rapidly moving cement-like slurries and landslides, but the worst part is what the ash would do while still in the sky.

  The amount of ash that a Yellowstone eruption could create is capable of killing people, plants, animals, and even crushing buildings. Just a few inches of ash—a depth which would likely blanket most of the northern hemisphere—can destroy farms, clog roadways, cause serious respiratory problems, block sewer lines, contaminate water supplies and even short out transformers. All crops would be destroyed, and along with breathing problems, starvation would be the main killer long after the initial eruption.

  Finally, as if that wasn’t enough, the ash cloud would effectively block out the sun and cause an elongated winter. Sulfur aerosols in the cloud would reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere and cool the climate, so combined with the density of the ash cloud, very little heat and light would be able to break through. Ten-year-long winters have occurred in the past following eruptions of supervolcanoes like Toba—and if Yellowstone were on the same scale or larger, the following winter could last for generations.

  The chances of such an event happening are small. Incredibly so. But if the improbable—one could argue, if the impossible—were to happen, the world would never again be the same. And after all, it’s happened before…so who’s to say it won’t happen again?

  Chapter 1

  “Is it snowing?”

  “What? Don’t be stupid, Riley. It’s the middle of July.” Chase looked at his little sister, her face pressed up against the window in the kitchen. At thirteen, she was only three years younger than him, but as Chase watched her now, he could understand why many people thought there was a much larger age difference. She took after their mother: bright blonde hair and a tiny frame, much smaller than all the other kids in her class. Chase, on the other hand, was built like an ox. At sixteen, he was already the same size as the guys playing varsity lacrosse and once the new school semester started, he was determined to try out and join them on the team.