by Byron Tucker
“If we had been any closer, we'd be dead,” Jimmy said.
Sam didn't answer, wishing that his son wouldn't be thinking such morbid thoughts. But it's true, we almost got obliterated just then. Suddenly wanting to get the heck out of there, he sped up, rumbling over the broken section of highway. He looked at Jimmy and said, “We've still got the shock wave from the volcano to deal with, don't we?”
Jimmy pointed to the northeast. “Look, there's another one! And another!”
Pushing the motorhome to a higher speed, Sam saw three flaming balls of fire drop out of the sky in front of him, smashing into the ground over the curve of the distant horizon. A double-barreled explosion rocked them from behind. “I don't know if we can get out of this.”
“Drive faster, it's all we can do,” Jimmy said, flipping his head back and forth as he continued to look outside. “We just have to hope we don't get hit by one of these.”
Sam floored the gas pedal as the road smoothed out in front of him. “No kidding!”
* * *
Once again, Ryan tried dialing Sam's number. Not knowing what was happening to him and his family was excruciating – he could think of nothing else until he could get back in touch with them again. Although much of the Internet was jammed to the point of near-collapse, he had a live satellite feed of the eruption, in addition to a continuously updated simulation of the super-eruption. Across the map of western North Dakota, he saw the flashes of light where ejected chunks of landmass, blasted fifty, sixty, seventy miles into the atmosphere by the force of the ultra-cataclysmic eruption, came crashing back to earth. He just could not fathom what it would be like driving through there, if they could even drive at all.
Ryan experienced a horrible sinking feeling in his stomach, and noticed a much brighter light appear just south of I-94 – the route through western North Dakota. That was one of the biggest chunks yet, enough to destroy a whole city. The reporter speaking in a monotone on the shortwave announced major damage from an impact in Salt Lake City. Ryan dialed the phone yet again, desperate to know if his brother and his family were still alive.
Miraculously, he got an answer. It was his nephew again, sounding highly relieved to be able to speak with him. “So you guys are okay now?” He asked in a trembling voice.
Jimmy's reply came in loud and clear over the phone. “Yeah, it was just really scary, and there was all this fire and everything. The road was all busted up too, but it's smooth now. Dad's doing eighty.”
“Tell him to floor it. The main shock wave is less than ten minutes from you guys.”
“Should we stop, like we did for the first one?” Jimmy asked.
“No, no, no. You need to be going as fast as you can, since it'll be coming from behind. There will be a gust of wind over two hundred miles per hour. Moving away from it at high speed is your only chance to keep the motorhome intact.”
Ryan listened as he heard Jimmy instruct his father to go as fast as possible. Then he heard Sam's voice. “I'm not sure if I can keep this thing on the road if a big shock wave hits.”
“Think of it as a big gust front, pushing a wave of air out in front of it. I'm already getting reports of whole towns being blown apart by this. What's your location? I need the next mile marker you see.”
A few seconds later, Sam replied, “Fifty-seven. Coming up to Dickinson.”
Ryan groaned. Not far enough. He just had to hope his little trick would work. “Sam, you've got about four minutes before it hits. Is the road clear?”
“Yes, pretty much. A few cars going past even faster than me, but that's it.”
“Keep that pedal all the way down. I mean it. How fast are you going?”
“Ninety.”
“Keep that pedal to the floor. And tell everyone to put their heads in their lap, with their eyes closed.”
Ryan paused, hearing Sam shout the commands to his family. If they wreck... “Sam? Sam, are you still there?”
“Yeah, we're coming up to Dickinson. Are you sure we should keep moving?”
“Yes, max throttle! It's the only way you can survive this!”
For the next few seconds, Ryan heard the roar of the wind over the phone, indicative of their high rate of speed. Then he heard Sam shout, “Okay, I see it coming up behind us. It's a wall of dust coming up on us very fast. Oh my God –” The phone went quiet.
Ryan held the phone in front of him, the device yielding only silence. Realizing the shock wave would probably knock out the cell towers to well east of Bismark, there was no point in trying to re-establish communication with them, at least not for a good while. He just had to hope they made it. It would be a miracle, but he wasn't about to let go of hope, not now. Not ever.
No longer able to withstand the stress, Ryan headed down to the stores in the cellar. He made a beeline for the freezers, which were filled mainly with cuts of beef as well as dozens of wrapped, whole chickens. There was another commodity he had stored in there as well, for trading purposes. Cigarettes.
A couple minutes later, when he extracted a single cigarette out of a pack of Winstons and lit it up with a lighter that he had handy, taking the first drag he'd had in eight years, he didn't even feel guilty. The world was ending, he had no idea of what happened to his brother – it was little wonder he was smoking again.
Ryan took another drag, deeper this time, letting the smoke out slowly through his mouth and nose, savoring the relaxing feeling it was giving him, which he knew would be ever so brief...
* * *
His ears were still ringing from the shockwave that had nearly swept the motorhome off the roadway, Sam struggled to keep the ungainly vehicle in a straight line, quickly slowing to a halt.
Looking at him with a dazed expression, Jimmy said, “I can't believe we just survived that. It felt like being next to a nuclear bomb.”
Sam twisted his body to look at his wife and daughter in back. “Are you two okay back there?”
Irene stared at him with shell-shocked eyes, with Eliza clinging onto her, whimpering. “I think so. I honestly thought we were goners when that thing hit, whatever it was.”
“It's the shockwave from the eruption itself. It just now caught up with us.”
“So does that mean we're out of danger now?”
Sam shook his head. “I honestly have no idea.” He undid his seat belt and slowly stood up. “You guys stay put while I take a look at the motorhome.”
”Yeah, it sounded like the front right tire went flat just when you were stopping,” Jimmy said.
“If that's the case, let's hope it's the only flat tire, as we just have the one spare. But stay put while I check, okay?”
Stepping out of the motorhome onto the pavement of the litter-strewn highway, he took a moment to survey his surroundings, recalling they were passing through the oil boom town of Dickinson when the shock wave hit.
It didn't take him long to determine that Dickinson was no longer a city by any reasonable definition. Panning his gaze from left to right, he took in the panorama of pure and utter destruction: smashed houses, overturned cars, trees lying on the ground like splintered toothpicks, commercial buildings blown completely apart. How he had managed to keep the motorhome upright in the midst of such incredible force was nothing short of a miracle, and not something he wished to dwell upon. He and his family was alive, and that was the only thing that counted at the moment.
Glancing back at the motorhome, he discovered his son was right about the front right tire being flat. It would take some effort to get it changed out with the spare, but it certainly wasn't the end of the world.
He waved at his son peering at him through the window. “Come on out, Jimmy. I'm going to need your help in changing this tire.”
Bounding down the steps onto the pavement, Jimmy asked, “Where's the jack and spare?”
Sam pointed to the rear of the vehicle. “In the back. Let's get this done so we can get moving again as quickly as possible.”
Jimmy pointed at
the scene of destruction around them. “But what are we going to do about all these people? There's probably tons of people trapped and hurt.”
Sam shook his head. “We're not qualified for that kind of thing. Leave that to trained individuals, such as the police and fire departments. The best thing we can do now is to get out of here, clear the road for emergency vehicles.”
Although Jimmy didn't seem pleased with his answer, he kept silent as they went to the back and proceeded to retrieve the jack and the spare tire. With Jimmy's help, Sam was able to position the heavy jack in its proper location for lifting and, within moments, he was able to get the flattened tire clear off the ground.
Pointing at the oversize lug nuts, Jimmy said, “Those are going to be a bitch to get off.”
Sam smiled at him and said, “Not with the two of us working the lug wrench. We'll have this thing off in no time.”
Just as Sam and Jimmy got the final lug nut loosened, enabling him to remove the ruined tire, Jimmy pointed a finger over his shoulder.
“Dad, there's somebody walking in our direction. I think he's hurt.”
Turning around, Sam saw a man stumbling in their direction, nearly doubled over. When he got a bit closer, he saw what the problem was: the poor guy had a piece of splintered wood impaled through his chest, its bloodied ends sticking out both in front and back of his body.
Frozen like a deer in headlights, he watched Jimmy sprint over to the wounded man, wrapping his arm around him for support.
“Dad, you gonna help this guy?”
Finally able to move again, Sam made his way over to his son and the injured man, bile quickly rising in his throat as he fully grasped the extent of the man's injuries. In addition to the spike of wood impaled in his chest, one eye was a bloodied mess, and a huge gash in his right thigh bled freely. It was a wonder the man was still alive, let alone being able to walk.
“Dad, what are we going to do?” Jimmy cried. “We've got to get him to a hospital immediately.”
The man straightened up slightly and slowly moved his hands onto the bloodied wood sticking out of his chest. “Help...help me get...this...out,” he said in between strained, gurgling breaths.
Before Sam had a chance to react, Jimmy wrapped his hands around the stick and yanked mightily, succeeding in pulling it free from the man's body. Fresh blood spurted from the yawning hole left behind, spilling onto Sam and Jimmy's shoes. He looked directly into Jimmy's face and mouthed the words thank you and froze. Seconds later, the fatally wounded man let out a final, ragged breath and collapsed to the pavement like a rag doll, still and lifeless.
Looking at his son with a mixture of horror and anger, he said, “You just killed him.”
Jimmy looked at the crumpled form lying in front of him for long moments before replying in a tone devoid of emotion. “I think he was about to die anyhow.”
Sam heard a high-pitched scream coming from the doorway of the motorhome. Eying Eliza standing on the steps, he rushed toward her and held her against his chest.
“Oh God, you didn't need to see that, Eliza. You didn't need to see that at all.” He set her down on the couch, looking at Irene staring at him as if she was still in a state of shock, which she most likely was. Adopting a tone of authority, he said, “You two stay put right here and don't look outside. We'll be done in five or ten minutes and we'll be on our way.”
“But what about the dead people, Daddy?” Eliza cried.
“Let's be thanking God we're not one of them.”
Jimmy's Journal Entry, August 1st, 2019
I decided to go ahead and do an entry now, for one, I have a huge amount to talk about, and two, there's no way I'm going to get any sleep tonight, regardless of how Mom and Dad are pushing me to sleep. As I type, we're somewhere in the north woods of Minnesota, heading toward Duluth. We won't be stopping there, though, since Dad wants to keep driving all the way to Uncle Ryan's, which will probably take all night.
Oh boy, where to begin. I could write a book on what happened in the last twenty-four hours. We had a hell of a time getting out of Yellowstone, and everybody was going nuts in Billings, but that was nothing compared to what happened when we finally got out of Montana. I can honestly say that I've personally witnessed the greatest volcanic eruption in human history. The sheer scale of it is like, more than the mind can comprehend. My mind, anyway. And the mountains falling out of the sky, man, we were so close to getting hit by one of those. My ears are still ringing from the biggest of those explosions.
But really the worse part came when the main shock wave of the eruption itself hit, which nearly got us killed. We were on the phone with Uncle Ryan, and he told us that we were about to be hit with this thing, and he told Dad to go as fast as possible. But the thing that saved us was when it hit, the road jogged a bit to the left as we were going around Dickinson, which meant the wind came directly from behind. A blast wave of dust came up super-fast, like being inside a tornado, but with straight-line winds. That's what it was like for about ten seconds, a tornado wind that actually lifted the rear end of the motorhome up IN THE AIR. Yes! It crashed back down and Dad had to really fight to keep us upright, and he did, I dunno how, but he kept the thing going. But right after that, we had to come to a complete stop, as we had a flat tire.
When we got out to check things out and to change the tire, that's when we realized how bad the shockwave blast was, which pretty much flattened the whole city like a nuclear bomb blast. I don't think there was a single building left standing.
The worse thing of all, though, was when this man came walking to us, with a spike of wood impaled in him. The thing is, I was only trying to help him when I pulled the wood out of him, so how was I supposed to know that'd kill him? Man, this is going to weigh really heavy on me for a long time to come, watching that man crumble up and die at my feet.
In spite of us seeing that, Dad made me help finish putting the spare tire on, and we got going again, even though we could see other badly injured people along the road that needed help. Dad kept insisting that there was nothing we could do, and maybe he's right, but damn, I thought it was pretty cold of him to keep going like that.
Anyhow, we soon got back out into the country again, where we didn't see that much damage, and I suppose it was a relief leaving that horrible scene of death and destruction behind us.
By the time we got to Bismark, we could see a lot of damage there too, like if a small hurricane had hit, but it was nothing like Dickinson. So I guess that's about where the shock wave began losing its power. But we were like 450 miles away from Yellowstone at that point, so it's mind-blowing how far out it went.
Even past Bismark, the whole west half of the sky was BLACK, like a really nasty storm, but way worse, and it covered like half the sky, all the way up. But going east, it was all nice and pretty and blue, so it was like being under two different skies, cut in half over our heads. It made me dizzy just looking at it for a long time. That's when Dad became like a zombie, as he just kept staring ahead, not looking at us, or saying anything. I guess he was in shock from when we nearly got blown to bits by the shock wave. But we just kept going, and we didn't even stop until we came to a town called Detroit Lakes, in western Minnesota. By this time, there was no impact from the shock wave, and the whole town was pretty relaxed. We had to wait about twenty minutes to get gas, but was okay as we had no problem filling the whole tank, which was huge relief to us, as that'll be enough to get us to Uncle Ryan's place. Then we found a diner open for business and it wasn't crowded at all, and the waitress was really nice to us, she listened to our crazy stories about escaping Yellowstone and everything. She said she was scared for what might be coming, but she thinks that we'll just muddle through somehow. Maybe in that town, they will, since it's so small and out of the way.
Oh yeah, that's when we were able to call Uncle Ryan again, and boy, was he relieved to hear that we were safe. He must have gone on for ten minutes about how happy he was to hear that we had made i
t past the shock wave. I guess he thought we were goners. I made my Dad give me the phone so I could tell him that the Durants are survivors and we'll let nothing stop us, I don't care what it is. Dodging mountains falling out the sky, tornado winds trying to blow us off the road, it doesn't matter. Dad was able to handle it all, and we get to live to see another day.
Well, I suppose I should give the ol' man upstairs some credit too, because things had to be just right for us to have survived, I mean, talk about threading the eye of the needle. Whew! Makes my bones shake just thinking about it. So yeah, I'm giving credit where it's due, no doubt about it.
We should be out of danger now, however, at least until the big freeze hits, and that won't be for weeks or months. Uncle Ryan did say that there will be food and gas shortages developing immediately, but he says not to worry, as he's got more than enough food for us, enough to last a long time.
I guess it's pretty awesome that I have an uncle who's a prepper, huh? He's a real die-hard, too, he's been ready for Yellowstone to go off for over a decade. That's why he's got all kinds of food and supplies put away, and the guns and ammo, and being able to run the house off-grid. We're gonna be set at Uncle Ryan's house, for sure. Of course, we'll go back home to Chicago once things settle down and they get things moving again. But for right now, we'll just have to take it a day at a time and see what pans out. I sure hope Grammy will be okay too. At least she has lots of friends and neighbors to look out for her.
Wouldn't you know it, I'm nodding off to sleep here. Guess I'd better get some shut-eye, and I'll write more tomorrow, after we get to Uncle Ryan's.
Chapter 10
Sam caught himself nodding off, easing the motorhome away from the shoulder of the two-lane blacktop, quickly jerking back awake again. In the process of thinking how he needed to pull over to take a nap, especially since the rest of his family was sleeping, he saw the sign for Highway 26 going toward Mass City. From previous trips to the UP, he knew he had reached the home stretch, for this was the road that led up into the Keweenaw Peninsula, where Ryan had his eighty-acre spread.