by Noah Mann
“Someone really didn’t want people going this way,” I said.
“They were trying to barricade the airport,” Schiavo suggested from the back seat.
Long ago, likely when the worst of the blight was ravaging Portland and the surrounding area, some functionary had come up with the bright idea to shut down travel, or restrict it severely. Denying road access to a major transportation hub had been the purpose of what rose in the swirling ash before us.
“We can cut across the golf course,” Carter said. “My buddies and I used to sneak onto it at night to watch the planes. It’s right at the end of the runway.”
Following his directions, we turned north, then cut through the parking lot of a business whose building had been reduced to a collection of walls folded in upon a collapsed roof, all of which was being buried by the black grit falling from above. A battered wooden fence at the rear of the property gave way with a nudge of the Humvee’s stout bumper. We rolled over it and drove on.
“You sure about this?” I asked Carter as I drove blindly forward.
“You can’t see it, but the airport is straight ahead,” he assured me. “Not far at all.”
Not far, though, turned out to be too far.
Ten
The Humvee gave out as we crossed the golf course that bordered the western edge of the airport. It sputtered and lurched, then rolled to an easy stop in the foot-deep accumulation of ash, the engine finally choked of the oxygen it needed for combustion.
“The last air filter is shot,” Carter said.
I looked to the private riding shotgun and nodded. We’d run through all our spare air filters, and now the fine particles of ash had worn through any protection the last one had once offered the engine. The inner workings of the motor were likely clogged by the infiltration. Our only transport was about to join the millions of other vehicles abandoned across the landscape.
“The airport is just over there,” Carter said, pointing from the passenger seat to the swirling blackness cut by the still burning headlights. “Less than half a mile.”
In the back seat, Schiavo looked to her husband. Genesee sat on the opposite side of Martin and was doing the same.
“I can make it,” the man said, trying to allay any fears as to his wellbeing.
But it was clear that he wasn’t well, and wouldn’t be for some time. He needed rest. That wasn’t possible where we sat, though. Only death would result from remaining in the Humvee.
“We should move,” I said. “The quicker we get to the airport the quicker we can get out of this.”
“The terminals should be built to hold up under this,” Carter said. “This is earthquake country.”
Building codes to deal with seismic dangers would dictate reinforced structures be the norm, especially in any facility open to the public. Safety, for us, lay across the once green fairways and beyond the runways we could not yet see.
* * *
We unloaded and geared up, carrying all that we could. As we left the Humvee behind, the twin beams of its headlights grew dimmer and dimmer, until, glancing behind, we could see them no more.
“Stay close,” I reminded those trailing me, waving my flashlight to mark my position through the relentless rain of ash. “Keep in sight.”
Directly behind me, Schiavo and Genesee walked, with Martin between them, each offering a supporting hand to help him through the knee-deep drifts of singeing ash. A few yards to their rear, his own flashlight sweeping left and right, Carter followed.
“Should we rope up?” Genesee asked through his dust mask.
Connecting ourselves like climbers ascending some alpine peak might be a safer way to travel, but it could very well slow us down. And we couldn’t chance that. We had to get to shelter.
“No,” Schiavo said, of the same mind as I was. “Just keep moving.”
We pressed on, reaching the airport perimeter thirty minutes after setting out, the only marker of the boundary a breached length of chain link topped by razor wire. Beyond it lay wide concrete aprons and runways, buildings and hangars.
“They would have come in on this runway,” Carter told us as we crossed a wide expanse of featureless terrain. “This is Twenty-Eight left.”
I looked back and saw the private pause briefly, sweeping the piled ash clear of a spot, revealing roughened concrete beneath.
“It’s eleven thousand feet,” Carter said. “Longest one at PDX.”
“You sure you joined the right branch of the military?” Martin asked the young soldier.
“Long before I used to sneak onto the golf course with my buddies, I’d watch planes land from our apartment when I was a kid,” Carter shared as he got moving again, pointing in a generally south eastern direction. “Over that way.”
“It’s not here now,” Genesee said. “That’s for sure.”
As we’d entered Portland, the understanding that Air Force One would have departed as soon as there was a threat had been accepted. The first indications of an eruption would have forced its pilots to leave the affected area behind. That didn’t mean, though, that there would not be some message waiting for us. Even some personnel left behind to meet us and instruct us on what to do next.
First, though, we had to reach someplace where those individuals, or that message, might be.
The first wispy features of the terminal building became visible through the ash fall a few minutes after we’d crossed the facility’s longest runway. I could make out the straight lines of walls, and openings where windows would be, though there was no guarantee that any glass remained after so many years of certain vandalism and neglect. As we drew near, I did see that there were only frames where windows had once looked out upon aircraft arriving and departing. There was also more.
Much more.
Debris. Mounds of concrete and steel filling the interior of the structures, much of it collapsed all the way to the ground, pancaking floors that lay below. We moved left, along the southern spur of the U-shaped building, our lights sweeping over burned out planes and more of the structure, its rubbled, charred interior pointing to some catastrophic fire having destroyed it long before the eruption of Mt. Hood.
“There’s nothing left,” Carter said.
What he was really saying was that there was nowhere that we could take refuge.
“Ma’am...”
“Yes, Private?”
Carter showed her something in his hand. A plain wall thermometer, unremarkable and common.
“I took this from the bank building,” the young soldier explained. “It felt like it was getting hotter while we were there, and I wanted to see if it actually was.”
“And?” Genesee asked.
“It’s ninety-eight degrees at head height,” Carter said. “A hundred and fifteen at our knees near the ash.”
“It’s only going to get hotter,” Martin said.
Everything, it seemed, was trying to kill us. The air we breathed. The earth we walked on. And now we were, slowly, being baked alive. Standing there and discussing it, though, would do nothing to protect us.
“Keep going,” Schiavo ordered.
Behind, I could see that Martin was moving on his own, his wife and Genesee close by, ready and willing to assist him. But he was summoning some inner strength, some deep will, so that he did not become a burden, though none of us would see him as such.
“This is getting deep,” Carter pointed out.
It was. As the point person of our unit, I was trying to blaze a trail, high stepping and kicking the hot ash clear of the path as best I could. But as the gritty rain continued, doing so became more difficult, even verging on impossible. Soon, we would not be able to move at all. And even as we did push on, the heat of the freshly fallen volcanic ejecta was beginning to affect the skin beneath our thick clothing.
“There’s a parking structure,” Carter said. “It’s beyond the terminals.”
A multi-level concrete structure would certainly have held up under the
ash fall, and would not have burned. That had to be our destination now that the terminals were unusable as shelter.
Five minutes later, after crawling over a jagged pile that once had been the northern end of the passenger buildings, we reached the lower level of the road that wound through the airport, the upper deck having, for some reason, pancaked down upon all that was below it. Years ago, cars and vans would have filled the lanes, picking up and dropping off. Now there were only the tops of wrecked vehicles that we crawled over to reach the parking structure.
“No...”
Martin was the one who gave voice to our collective frustration as we came within view of our destination, the nearest edge of the parking structure. But it, too, had collapsed, deck upon deck having fallen, bringing the entire mass of concrete down upon itself.
“What happened?” Carter wondered aloud.
Schiavo stepped close to the rubble, focusing on a stout support column, the rebar exposed from its failure twisted and, in some places, severed completely. She reached out and touched the incredibly strong metal with her gloved hand.
“This is blast damage,” she said, looking back to us. “This was taken down.”
“Why?” Genesee asked. “Who would do that? For what purpose?”
The captain shook her head.
“I don’t know.”
I looked past the fallen structure, a bit more visibility here in the scant shelter of the broken decks overhanging the similarly destroyed roadway. Perhaps fifty feet ahead were more cars, and more bits of the parking structure that had fallen out onto the roadway and now protruded from the drifts of ash like grey icebergs in a sea of steaming black.
“We can’t stay here,” I said.
“Private...”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“What’s down that way?” Schiavo asked, pointing through the slightly cleared air I’d just scanned.
“Some buildings, hangars,” Carter answered. “And another runway to the north. Out past that you have Marine Drive and the Columbia River.”
“Buildings,” Genesee said. “Maybe a hangar.”
Schiavo nodded and pointed. I led off again, guiding us past rubble and over cars, some beginning to smoke in the building heat that was enveloping them up to the door handles. We passed a collection of short buildings whose walls were all that remained, the roofs having fallen from fire long ago, or collapsed in the last few days from the combined effect of earthquakes and the weight of accumulated ash. Taller hangars had been flattened, just one left with a meager, partial structure after its rear portion folded inward upon a forgotten Lear Jet.
“There has to be some shelter,” Schiavo said.
“There are more buildings ahead,” Carter told her. “Across a parking lot.”
Schiavo squinted through her goggles toward the blacked-out sky above.
“Get us there, private.”
Carter gave a quick nod and took the lead from me, high stepping through the thickening ash.
* * *
Twenty minutes later we came to a light pole rising out of the steaming black drifts. The smoking hulk of an abandoned sedan nearby confirmed that we’d reached what had, at one time, been a parking lot, presumably for airport workers.
“Private, hold up,” Schiavo said.
Carter stopped, though it was doubtful he, or any of us, would have been able to press on much further in this direction. The mounds of ash, rising by the minute, were becoming too deep to navigate. Martin, too, was struggling, though he fought mightily against letting his condition show.
“You okay?” I asked him, already knowing the answer I would receive.
“Hanging in there,” he assured me.
He was. That was no lie. But he would do so until he dropped, something that was bound to happen. Soon.
“I’m just going to take a breather,” Martin said, taking a position next to the light pole, one arm planted against it, propping his body up like a bike’s kickstand.
“The buildings should be right there,” Carter said, suddenly doubting himself. “They should.”
“They might have been at one time,” Schiavo told him.
Implicit in her words was a fear she wasn’t expressing directly—that we’d come this far for nothing. That, I knew, mirrored a greater worry that was certainly weighing on her, as it was on me—that we’d made it to Portland, to the airport, escorting Schiavo to the place she’d been instructed to be, only to find nothing. And, worse, to know that reaching our destination only cemented the act as a one-way trip.
There was no going back. Not through the hell surrounding us.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Carter said.
Schiavo looked to the newest member of her garrison and shook her head, absolving him of any responsibility for our situation. But she said nothing. None of us did.
And it was at that moment, as the reality of our situation began tilting us toward a collective feeling of desperation, that the world around us exploded.
Eleven
The blast wave hit us just before the sound, and the shaking. It was less an earthquake than a crack of the loudest thunder one could imagine that announced a new, and more violent, eruption, the tremor seeming to roll through our bodies, not just beneath our feet. The wall of ash which blocked any direct view of the mountain swirled suddenly, rushing toward us as we struggled to stay upright on the jittering earth we stood upon.
“Watch out!”
Genesee’s warning was instinctive, and pointless. The blast wave had traveled forty miles from the mountain, or what was left of the mountain, a pressurized front of air pushed away from the explosive eruption, slamming into us with the force of some unseen and angry beast taking down its prey. Martin was tossed against the light pole we’d stopped near, his face bouncing off its solid surface as he fell into the burning ash. Carter and I were knocked flat. Somehow, Schiavo and Genesee, shielded somewhat by the edge of a high drift of ash, were able to stay on their feet.
“Ahhh!”
Carter’s scream drew me to him. I grabbed the young soldier and pulled him free of the scalding ash which had almost swallowed his crumpled form. He swatted at the sleeve of his thick shirt, the material torn open, the exposed skin beneath red and burned from direct contact with the simmering black drift. Genesee and Schiavo hauled Martin up from where he’d fallen, saving him from any serious burns.
“What’s happening?” Genesee asked, grabbing onto the swaying light standard for support.
“The mountain blew,” Martin said, his body tipping, right arm instinctively pressing against his side as a wave of pain rolled through him.
Schiavo shifted a shoulder below his arm to steady her husband, and I did the same on the opposite side, mindful of the patch job Genesee had completed less than a day earlier.
“Blew?” Carter asked, grimacing at the blistering burn on his arm. “I thought it already erupted.”
“This was different,” Martin said, coughing through his mask.
“Like Mt. St. Helens,” I suggested.
Martin didn’t have to think long on that possibility before nodding.
“We need to get to cover,” Schiavo said, an urgency in her voice now.
“We’re forty miles away,” Martin told her. “If the west face let go completely, the pyroclastic flow could be here in ten minutes.”
“There’s nowhere to hide,” I said.
Schiavo, though, wasn’t letting those facts of geology and physics stop her search for some semblance of safety.
“What if it’s the south face, or the east face?” she asked, already knowing her response to any answer. “If that’s the case, we still need to get to some shelter.”
Genesee let go of the light pole as the shaking stilled. He scanned the area we’d reached after traversing the runways and searching the crumbling hangars.
“That hangar,” he said, seizing on structures we’d passed by less than twenty minutes earlier.
Schiavo, though, w
asn’t enthused about that suggestion.
“Every single one of them was rubble or close to it,” she said.
She wasn’t wrong. Years of decay and vandalism, weathering, ground shaking their foundations, and now hundreds of tons of volcanic ash dropped on their roofs, had brought every one of the cavernous structures down, folding once sturdy metal walls inward and collapsing steel rafters and beams upon what remained.
Every hangar but one.
“That small one with the wrecked Lear Jet,” Genesee said.
“The entire back half was pancaked down on the plane,” Schiavo reminded him.
“And the front could go at any second with this ash still coming down,” Martin added.
“We don’t have a lot of options,” I said.
Almost none, I knew. The terminals and every other structure within walking distance had been burned to the ground long before our mission to Portland was even conceived. All that was even remotely close that might provide us some modest shelter from the increasing rain of burning ash was what Genesee had suggested.
“Ma’am,” Carter said.
“Yes, private?”
“The temperature is up to a hundred and eight,” Carter reported, wiping the grit from the thermometer in his hand.
“That’s ten degrees in thirty minutes,” Genesee said. “We have to get out of this.”
Some decisions were made. Others were forced upon a leader. Schiavo knew the latter was the reality here.
“All right,” she said. “Private, we’re backtracking. Get us there.”
* * *
It took us fifteen minutes to reach the remnants of the private plane hangar across the runway, trudging through feet of ash, Private Carter Laws leading us, the beam of his flashlight sweeping left and right like a blind man might wield a white cane.
“I can’t see anything!” the young soldier shouted through his mask, the white filter material caked black.
“Stay on course!” Schiavo instructed him.
We’d set out on a bearing, one based upon memory and dead reckoning. Compass needles were jumping wildly with the static charge in the air, and any signal we’d hoped to receive using the GPS provided by the SEALs was hopelessly scrambled this deep in the ash fall. We had to rely upon an unseen fixed point to guide us through the hell raining down all around.