The Yellowstone Conundrum

by John Randall

  Jake found the boy to be a worthy adversary as they struggled to kill each other, Jimmy for self-protection, Jake for everything that was wrong in the world. Jimmy was a 4-letter football and track-and-field for Crow teams that excelled in performance and endurance; if not performance, then endurance first. The fight spilled into the street; Janice stood oddly aside, hand over mouth, the taste of Jimmy’s semen on her lips.

  The first five minutes were rock-em-sock-em body blows, tackling and slug-fest. Blood dripping off both, the contest turned serious; neither having to say anything about who-what-where-when-why. A knife appeared in Jimmy’s hand and a service revolver in Jake’s. Two minutes later they were both dead on Edgar Avenue, surrounded by a ring of on-lookers. No county or reservation police were called until later. When they arrived later the on-lookers had retreated to their homes; two men lay dead on the street, and the whore of Big Horn County was asleep in her bed.

  It didn’t matter that Janice bore twins from her encounter with Jimmy; she was not welcome on the reservation. She’d taken the future of the tribe, destroyed it with her cunt, and her laziness. Come back on the reservation and you won’t be arrested. Come back and you’ll be tied to a rock and buried in sand.

  So Janice and her babies moved out of “downtown” Edgar to a place she could afford to live on her government pension from her soldier husband; food stamps, booze, a single-wide trailer in nowhere south-central Montana where the wind blew 24/7 and you could never get the grit out of your teeth.

  Penny Armstrong, every part of her body in pain, turned and walked out of Pam’s Bar and Grille, side-stepped the fallen sign, and returned to the beaten-up Toyota pickemuptruck with the Skil toolset in the flatbed in back. Wordlessly, she put the truck in gear, did a 180 and headed back west out of town. The sign said Billings 22. To her left the mid-day sky was like a piece of blue posterboard that had been dipped in ink. It was so fucking strange. Instead of heading across the Crow Reservation, she turned north toward Billings. To her right Jason and Amanda sat unnaturally still, eyes wide open; both children had blond hair and a blended darkish skin color, yet with dark eyes. Both had a let Mikie eat it look on their face.

  The further Penny drove, the more bewildered she became; tears welled up behind her eyes. She’d made love to Jimmy this morning, then left him because he couldn’t keep up, skied over a mountain pass, left a townful of dazed people to their own fate to save her own neck, rescued two moppets from certain death by wolves, then beat the crap out of a woman she didn’t know. Now she was driving north on US highway 212 toward I-90, then onto Billings. She had a half tank of gas and her own wallet; two credit cards and seventy-seven dollars in cash.

  It was going to get dark in another two hours. There was no electricity anywhere. Power lines were down, houses were wrecked, roads damaged.

  And there wasn’t much hope Billings would upgrade the day.

  Fuck me. Just fuck me.

  The White House Situation Room

  “Are we still thinking about nuking parts of Idaho?”

  “No, sir; events seem to be escalating faster than we assimilate the information.” The first to speak was Abe Liebowitz, Secretary of the Department of Energy. “Mr. President,” no mistaking Abe Liebowitz was from New York, New York; not New Jersey, but New York. “We’ve had a catastrophic event at the Richland, Washington nuclear plant within the last hour,” Liebowitz bit his words like he was chewing sourball candy. “The earthquakes caused the plant to be separated from Bonneville Power’s grid; physically separated, as in no electrical power in or out of the plant.”

  Johnny Goodwin, Secretary of the Air Force, controlled what was seen on the three video panels at the front of the room.

  “Satellite photos of Hanford,” there were several shit, oh shit, and mother of God exclamations, including the President’s. “Pipelines leading to the reactor’s cooling towers have been severed and contaminated reactor water is spilling uncontrolled directly onto the desert floor. There is no emergency power to the plant. While the reactor core was disengaged within the first few seconds, as it was supposed to, there are fires in the plant, natural gas lines ruptured, and currently there is no way to cool the core, short of diverting the Columbia River.”

  The lines on Liebowitz’s face went from rigid to chisled; his color from rosy pink to grey; similar to the expression of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan wore when he left the Senate Office Building in October 2008 after being told of the impending doom that was going to strike the world; that his life-long belief that when it came to money, bankers knew best, was nothing more than believing in the tooth fairy.

  “Sir, there have been multiple ruptures of the nuclear storage tanks in both the West-200 and East-200 areas on the Hanford reservation.”

  “Ruptures?” the President asked, his face in a deep frown.

  “These are single- and double-shell tanks that contain, sorry, contained, one million gallons of radioactive waste material, stored there since the 1950s and decades later.” Liebowitz paused. “Some of them have exploded.” The right-hand screen showed an ever-closer sequence of satellite shots.” The president’s right hand went to his mouth and nose in an oh no instinctive reaction. On the screen were large shoots of purple, red, orange and yellow clouds, like huge Cheetos, puffing their way into the sky high above the Tri-Cities. The satellite held onto the final position as the gross, deadly clouds slowly began to drift eastward. As the President watched the satellite blipped as a violent explosion occurred at 200-West. Six seconds later the camera re-focused. What had been metal, concrete and dirt was now a mess of unknown material. Above the explosion another plume of toxic, poisonous radioactive gas shot into the air.

  “Is this my Kobayashi Maru?” the President asked. No one laughed, including the President. A long twenty seconds passed. The President asked “Where is that going to go?” Along the east wall of the small, downsized room, small because of the limits of the White House itself, a Secret Service agent spoke into his wrist watch. By magic, the Nation’s Weatherman appeared on screen. The agent spoke quietly, then Charley Spann spoke.

  “Yes, we agree. Private conversation only.” Spann looked at the monitor in front of him. “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Charley, there’s been a nuclear explosion at the Hanford Reservation in Richland, Washington. A great deal of radioactive material has been thrown into the atmosphere. Where is it going to go?” Spann looked like he’d been whipped with a rubber hose, but he responded quickly.

  “Sir, the clouds will drift to the east across Washington State. The higher they go, the worse it will be. If there was no wind the clouds would drop their load quickly on the other side of the Columbia River; but, unfortunately the jet stream today flows right over central Washington,” Spann went to the map of the US. “The air currents will take it to roughly Spokane, then up the neck of Idaho into British Columbia, around Waterton National Park and into western Alberta, then shoot back down the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Montana and be carried south to…” Charley Spann paused.

  “Yellowstone,” the President added.

  “Yes, sir. Yellowstone.”

  The President’s neck throbbed in tune with his headache.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “You mean before the material from Hanford reaches Yellowstone?”

  “Yes,” the President replied simply.

  “Five, maybe six hours, about the time the volcanic ash has taken to get from Yellowstone to the Denver area.” Spann explained.

  “Is there any good news? Anything a reasonable person could do?”

  “You mean, you, sir?”

  “Yes, I mean me, us.”

  “There is nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, I could say positive about the possibility of radioactive volcanic ash following the current jet stream. The outflow from Yellowstone is unabated. The clouds from Hanford will merge with the effluent from the explosion and be carried around the world.” Spann was near tears
.

  Wiping his eyes with his shirt sleeve, he drew an electronic path across the Deep South, then up the Eastern Seaboard, across to London, then back down across the heart of Europe, the Middle East, then Afghanistan, India, China, Japan and out across the Pacific, rising to Alaska, then falling back to Washington State.

  “Mr. President,“ Spann paused. “There’s one other thing. The explosion of the Yellowstone caldera has started massive forest fires in northwest Wyoming which appear to be spreading into southern Montana. Most of northwestern Wyoming is on fire. The smoke generated is as deadly as the volcanic ash. It will travel the same path as the jet stream.”

  “And the good news?” The President asked.

  “I don’t have any, sir. I’m sorry.”

  Charley Spann dropped off the left screen.There was silence in the room. Fifteen seconds passed.

  “So, I guess I don’t need to worry about mid-term elections,” the President added in a dry voice. One-by-one chortles were stifled, but couldn’t be contained. Then Secretary of the Department of Transportation gafawed loudly, like the laugh was an alien trapped inside a pod. This was followed by Anne Hastings from FEMA, the agency that took all the shit from other agencies when the rubber met the road. (it’s not my job, that’s for FEMA) (let Mikie eat it) Soon the Situation Room was filled with the release of nervous laughter, every person knowing they were in deep ca-ca.

  The laughter started slowly, then grew into deep belly-laughs, the tears-in-the-eyes-did-you-hear-that-one kind of laugh. The gathered leaders of the most powerful country in the world—including the President of the United States—simply let emotions out. There was nothing they could do. They were helpless.

  After a few minutes the laughter slowly died down.

  “Should we do Letterman tomorrow night?” the President asked.

  The laughter was more than going down the dark alley, it was I don’t even know what the fucking question is.

  The group quickly came back to reality. It wasn’t that they were happy, it was that the news was so inconcievably bad that no combination of reasonable people could put a happy spin on it.

  “Sir, the next series of photos comes from the International Space Station; from the ‘Disaster Cam’ as it has been refered to. What you are looking at is the breech of the Jackson Dam south of Yellowstone at the headwaters of the Snake River,” Air Force Secretary Johnny Goodwin explained.

  The images that followed were gruesome. Jackson (Hole) had been wiped out. The series of pictures was in crisp, high-definition detail, as if someone was hovering twenty feet above the rushing water. There was no way to stop it. They had seen pictures earlier in the morning with the milkman getting wiped out, but this was terrible. A wall of water fifteen feet high had smashed through the popular ski resort, killing everyone in its path. The villages of Hoback and Alpine were next, then the Palisades Dam in western Idaho.

  “This is a seqence of shots of the Fort Peck Dam in eastern Montana. It’s an earthen dam, as are all the dams on the Missouri River. Notice how fast the liquification process went before the breech.”

  The pictures were in such detail that the President, his Chief of Staff, many cabinet members, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various ades could see a man running for the eastern edge of the dam.

  “Who is the man running?” asked the President.

  “We don’t know, sir. What we do know is in the next thirty seconds the Fort Peck power plant was wiped out.” The pictures showed the mile-wide dam dissolving in slow motion as the impounded water was freed. “This is the current position of the Missouri River downstream from the dam. The river takes a serpentine route through eastern Montana and then enters North Dakoka. Right now the water is at Wolf Point. It’s going to flood everything in its way from there to Williston. The river will spread out until it fills the entire valley, then slowly-ever so slowly, go downstream. It will hit the upper portions of Lake Sakakawea by morning, and,” Johnny Goodwin’s face twisted into a grimmace. “And there’s nothing we can do about it.” He shook his head in a shit-I-don’t-have-a-recommendation fashion. “There’s a hundred and thirty-four miles of Lake Fort Peck water that is following this!”

  The assembled power players had a supply of cotton balls in their collective mouths to fill a bathtub. This was a natural disaster on the scale of well, Biblical. God was pissed. Damn homo-sax-u-als.

  The President shook his head. This was beyond imagination.

  “Sir,” his Chief of Staff asked for speaking time. He was breathless with the volume of information he needed to add. “IBM, Apple, ATT; we have managed a triage here in the White House, but nobody is calling. We did talk to the Governor of Washington from her home in Olympia. Seattle, all of the state is without power; Seattle has been hard hit with significant structural damage to the downtown area due to earthquake damage. Portland the same. Several bridges in Portland are reported down with a large loss of life. Power is out--”

  “I want to know where we DO have power,” the President demanded.

  “Yes, sir.“ added Abe Liebowitz. “Most of Texas and northwest Louisiana. Half of Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I can’t explain why, but western Tennessee and Kentucky have power, so does New England, shut solid at the New York border. And, of course, we have power.”

  Nice timing.

  The lights went out for a second time in the White House, flickered and came back on, gradualy increasing in strength as the new energy-efficient bulbs slowly lit the room. The President turned to Army General Hugo DiNiro, current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a program first developed in 1942 to match the well-organized British military forces in World War II. In 1947 the National Security Act was passed which established the JCS. The first use of joint military operations was in the War of 1812 when the Army and Navy joined together to defeat the British at Lake Champlain in New York. Fifty-one years later General U.S. Grant and Admiral David Porter combined their forces to defeat the Conferderate Army at Vicksburg, the first major nail in the coffin of the Confederacy.

  Then war became too complicated and the US became lazy because there were no threats to the homeland; and had no impact in WWI.

  “General Goodwin, I want to know if Putin, Amadinjadad, or that in-bred Korean son-of-a-bitch even breathes. This is a time when our enemies can become even more stupid than they are.”

  There was silence in the room, finally broken by George Johnson, Secretary of the Office of Homeland Security. Johnson reported directly to the President and was unable to get to the White House in time for the morning meeting.

  “Mr. President, I’ve asked Anne (Hastings, FEMA) to begin to address issues that will negatively affect the safety of our fellow citizens with the Yellowstone explosion and the massive damage to infrastructure in the Pacific and Mountain states. If this was contained to the Northwest, we would have a better ability to put our arms around the problem, determine possible solutions, gather resources and implement programs.

  “The on-going volcanic activity in Yellowstone presents us with a problem that is larger than any agency, or any government can solve. The volcanic ash has already buried 75% of the population of Wyoming—Cody, Powell, Buffalo, Jackson, Casper, Thermopolis, Larmie and Cheyenne. We have no idea where the citizens of these towns have gone. The ash is currently settling over I-25 cities in Colorado; Fort Collins, Loveland, Greely, Westminster, Arvada, Thornton and the city of Denver. It appears as if Boulder and other cities west of Denver have been saved, by the luck of air currents.

  “Rescue operations can’t start until the ash stops falling; troops, logistics—people and equipment—can’t go into the danger zone. Seattle, yes. We can go into Seattle, assuming SEATAC and Fort Lewis are available, or Boeing Field. Are there any Air Force pictures of Seattle?”

  Sounds of some shuffling of papers and fingertaps tapping on the computer.

  “No. It’s raining. No pictures.

  “So, there are no ove
rall pictures of Seattle; yet we know the city has experienced a 9.45 earthquake and tsunami of the downtown area. Where would you like us to start supporting the poor people of Seattle?

  “Richland, Pasco and Kennewick, Washington. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation has turned into a worst-case scenario. The sky is filled with puffy clouds of radioactive nuclear waste; not just your everyday industrial nuclear waste, but shit that won’t be safe for a thousand years!

  “The city of Portland, Oregon has seen the collapse of the two most-used commuter bridges with over 100,000 vehicles combined per day.

  “Salt Lake City has experienced the collapse of the Morman Temple, the Salt Palace, the Wells Fargo tower and other office buildings; and continues to receive aftershocks from the on-going explosions at Yellowstone. The city and surrounding mountain communities are in shambles.

  “Every city in Idaho is in ruins. Mountain Home Air Force Base is out of commission. Johnny, don’t we have some pretty big planes there?” George Johnson already knew the answer. He wasn’t waiting for the Secretary of the Air Force to respond. “Dams have collapsed on the two most important rivers in the Western US; the future of other dams is uncertain. For certain is the loss of electricity at a minimum to the western half of the United States; at worst, to every place without a tie into the big network. Joe’s Electric Company has its day in the sun. Rates will probably go up,” he added sarcastically. “Our electric companies, freed from regulation in the 90s and 00s, under the same assumption that Republican administrations allowed the bankers to make their own rules,‘Well, we’re the electric companies, we know best, have perpetuated a New World of transferring power from one place to another, creating pricing infathonable to regulators, much less the average man. It’s no different than the packaging and bundling of mortgage debts in the mid 00’s, to the point where banks were betting on slices of billions of dollars of bad debt, up or down—fucking the average person in the ass.