“Siberian Traps …” Matt frowned. “That caused—”
“The Great Permian Extinction. The biggest extinction event ever,” Erin replied.
A moment of shocked silence was followed by simultaneous grabbing for phones. Kevin took the remote from Matt. With a few clicks, he had CNN up on the screen.
The TV showed a view of a large fissure with lava flowing from it. The caption below it read “YELLOWSTONE LIVE.” The scene was being shot from a helicopter with maximum magnification—it had that shaky, won’t-stay-in-focus look so common in extreme-distance shots. Off-screen, a commentator described the scene and regurgitated quotes from the USGS and the governor’s office.
“They’re too close,” Erin muttered.
“What?” Monica said.
“The helicopter. They’re too close if it erupts.”
“How far would be far enough?”
“Um … If I was there, I’d want a hundred miles minimum.”
Coverage of the event was extensive, cutting back and forth between live views, recorded scenes, public reactions, and interviews with various experts.
In the middle of an interview, one of the anchors interrupted the latest talking head. “We’re taking you back to Yellowstone, where our reporters have informed us that volcanic activity has dramatically increased.”
The station cut to the same uber-magnified view of the park, but there were now a lot more cracks and fissures opening up and oozing lava. In several places, explosions threw large masses of rock through the air. As the reporter tried to describe what viewers were already seeing, there was a sudden blinding flash. The TV image saturated, while screams and curses were heard from the chopper.
Then the feed cut out.
The station cut back to the news anchors, who were all staring off-screen with their jaws hanging. There was dead silence for several seconds before one anchor put her hands to her mouth and started to sob.
The camera immediately cut to the other anchor, who said in a neutral voice, “We seem to have lost our signal. We’ll keep you informed as we receive updates.” She looked to the side and began to say something as the picture cut to a recorded interview with another expert.
Monica was the first to speak. “Did what I think just happened, just happen?”
Erin said nothing for a few seconds, blinked twice, and said, “What time is it, someone? Exactly!”
Matt looked at his phone. “2:32. Why?”
“We have”—Erin stopped and looked up in thought—“between two and five minutes to get ourselves to a safe spot. There’s going to be an earthquake.”
“How severe?” Monica cried.
When Erin didn’t respond, Bill piped up, “It goes all the way to eleven, man!”
“Not the time, Bill,” Richard said.
“Sorry.”
“He’s not necessarily wrong, though,” Erin said. “That was a full-on eruption, not just a lava bomb or landslide. It took out the helicopter, and that was a couple of miles away from what they were filming. I’m hoping the distance to Lincoln will temper it a bit, but I think we’re still going to be looking at a lot of property damage. Best we not be inside when it hits.”
“Okay, everyone up,” Richard said, once again taking charge. “Assume this building is coming down. If you have anything you need to save, grab it now. Matt, here are the keys. Move the van to the middle of the parking lot. Everyone else, run to the middle of the parking lot.”
The crew got moving. As soon as they were all out of the warehouse, Richard secured the delivery door, then ran to catch up with the rest.
Erin put her phone to her ear and instructed it to call home. She noticed out of the corner of her eye that all the others except Richard also had their phones out.
The phone rang, then went to voice mail. “Mom and Dad, it’s Erin. Yellowstone has erupted. If you’re screening your calls, there’s going to be an earthquake within a minute or two. Be ready. Otherwise, when you get this message, pack necessities and get in the truck and get out. Do not worry about me. Do not try to make plans to find me. You have to get at least a thousand miles away from Yellowstone. If your passports are still good, go north across the border to Winnipeg then head west to Vancouver. That’s outside of the path of the ash. If you can’t do that, head east. Try for something on the shore of one of the Great Lakes. But do it fast. Bye. I love you.”
“Don’t you want them to pick you up or something?” Bill said.
Erin stopped and rounded on him. “You still don’t get it. If this is anything near as bad as it could be, they won’t be able to find me. They won’t be able to get into Lincoln for all the people trying to get out. There will be no cell service. I want them out of Nebraska entirely.” She stopped and swept her gaze across the group. “This isn’t a little inconvenience like a power failure. This is more like Katrina. Possibly Katrina times ten. Start taking this seriously.” Without waiting for a response, she wheeled and resumed marching to the middle of the lot.
The van was parked near the center of the parking area, away from any light poles. The group gathered near it. “Let’s move away from the van, all right?” Richard said. “Things start bouncing around, you don’t want it on top of you.” Looking shocked, they milled around for a few seconds, then somehow formed a group decision and moved about a hundred feet from the van.
“Time?” Erin said.
“2:35,” Matt replied.
“Okay then. We’re now in the envelope.”
They stood, looking at each other. Then without warning, the ground heaved. Everyone went down. The earthquake continued for perhaps a minute, with the ground moving back and forth and a loud grinding and thudding sound assaulting their ears. Car and building alarms went off all around. Something exploded in the distance. Cracks appeared in the pavement. Bill caught glimpses of the van bouncing around on its suspension.
After what seemed like forever, the shaking stopped. A few alarms were still going off. In the distance, sirens began to wail. The group slowly picked themselves off the ground. They looked at each other, each person’s eyes showing a lot of white.
“Everyone okay?” Richard said. There were nods, a few grunts. Even Bill was silent, except for a muttered comment about ACME earthquake pills.
“Well, that wasn’t so bad …” Erin said. The looks from the others suggested she had lost her marbles. “No, seriously. Those were Rayleigh waves, and they are slower than the P and S waves, so that’s about as bad as it’s going to get. I’d bet there’s a lot less damage overall than there could have been.”
The mention of damage brought things back into focus. “I need to check the equipment,” Richard said.
“I’ll check the warehouse,” Bill added.
Matt went with Richard to the van. Bill headed for the warehouse, with Kevin, Erin, and Monica right behind him. Upon inspection, the building did not appear to have any obvious structural damage. There were cracks, a couple of awnings had fallen down, and the outside lights were off, but the structure itself was intact.
Bill unlocked and attempted to open the delivery door, but it refused to budge. Erin moved to give him a hand, followed by Kevin and Monica. They managed to get their fingers under the skirt of the door far enough to get a grip. Bill said, “1, 2, 3, lift,” and they all put their backs into it. The door resisted for a fraction of a second, then rose with a squeal of rubbing metal.
As a group, they entered the now-dark warehouse. Emergency lights were on but were only good for finding the way to an exit, not for getting anything done. Kevin went to the kitchen and retrieved the emergency flashlights from the electrical outlets where they had been charging. He handed one to Monica and turned his on.
Bill examined the interior of the warehouse. Again, it looked like they had been lucky. The pallets of equipment and supplies were in disarray, with many items having spilled to the floor. However, since nothing had been stacked very high in the first place, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity fo
r things to fall.
The van pulled up to the warehouse door. The engine died, and Richard and Matt got out.
Coming in to the warehouse, Richard said, “We need to have a discussion about what to do now. Erin, you’re the expert in this situation. What can we expect next?”
“First, do we have any communications or anything?”
Matt checked his phone, shook his head. “No signal.”
Kevin went and checked the TV. “No power …”
“Okay, then,” Erin began. “Assumptions: We’ve just had a volcanic eruption. That’s a pretty safe bet. The question is, how big? Given the scale of the earthquake from seven hundred and fifty miles, I’m guessing very big. Possibly supervolcano level. Now for the bad news.” She tried to smile but gave up after a moment. “The last couple of times Yellowstone erupted, this area was in or at the edge of the heaviest ash deposition. The jet stream goes east from Yellowstone, right over us. A supervolcano eruption will put a minimum of two hundred and forty cubic miles of crud into the air, and most of that will fall within a thousand miles downwind. That’s us. We could be buried several feet deep.”
“They could clear it with snowplow equipment,” Kevin ventured.
“Sure. That’ll work, assuming they can figure out where to dump it, right up until the fine dust in the air destroys the vehicle engines. My bet is they’ll run out of pistons before they run out of gas. And that’s not to mention what the dust will do to lungs. Mortality rates—animal and human—are going to be close to 100 percent for anyone or anything still in the zone with no protection.”
“Seriously? From dust?” Bill was shocked. Like most nonprofessionals, he thought of danger from volcanoes in terms of staying out of the way of the lava.
“One hundred percent?” Matt echoed in disbelief.
“Let me put it this way: everyone in town right now is as good as dead. Period. Think Pompeii. Unless they have a working vehicle, and the freeways are still navigable, and they have some kind of breathing masks and goggles, they’re all dead. Or they stay in their homes for weeks and don’t go out at all. The smart ones will be getting into their cars right now. There are no other options. Everyone’s got to breathe. Everyone needs water.”
“How long until the ash gets here?” Matt asked.
“One to two hundred miles per hour jet stream,” Erin said. “Seven hundred and fifty miles to Yellowstone. Average it out, it’ll be starting to come down by the time it gets dark. By morning you won’t be able to move out in the open.”
“Holy—” Bill said.
“—shit,” Richard finished.
Part 2 – We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
43. In the News
MSN News Special Report:
Yellowstone plateau has burst at the seams with an explosion of up to one hundred gigatons of energy. Hundreds of cubic miles of rock, magma, ash, and dust are being blown into the air. The entire Yellowstone plateau—the part of it that hasn’t just been vaporized—has fallen into the now-empty magma chamber. The billowing clouds of smoke, ash, water vapor, and poisonous gases are rising more than 30 miles into the sky, lit by lightning storms, burning rock, and the reflection of the bright red hell below. Pyroclastic flows at temperatures of 1800 degrees Fahrenheit and more, racing outward at 500 miles per hour, will reach as much as 100 miles away. Jackson, Cody, Powell, Rexburg, Idaho Falls, and Livingston are within this circle of peril, and are under emergency evacuation orders.
Radio and phone communications are being disrupted as electrically charged ash creates a maelstrom of interference. In the upcoming hours and days, we can expect ash to clog air filters and abrade metal parts. Turbines, cooling equipment, and engines—unless specially protected—will fail within hours of exposure to the toxic, abrasive brew.
CNN headlines on the hour:
In a statement from the White House, officials have assured the public that FEMA, with the full support of the National Guard and other military, is prepared to handle the growing emergency. A spokesperson noted that the primary danger for the public from this point is breathing the ash and advised that citizens should stay at home, keep doors and windows closed, and turn off forced-air heating and air-conditioning systems to avoid having ash particles sucked inside.
The governors of Wyoming and all surrounding states have declared a state of emergency and called out the National Guard. All law enforcement and emergency personnel have been called in to active duty.
In response to earlier reports, military teams are being organized to travel to cities close to the explosion and search for survivors. We asked the White House for an estimate of possible casualty numbers, but have not yet received a response.
There has been no contact with individuals or organizations closer to the eruption than about 100 miles. One eyewitness who contacted us from Billings, Montana, said, “The column of ash is rising higher than anything I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s smearing to the southwest partway up, then bending to the east at the top.”
Our meteorology expert, when asked about this, explained, “The prevailing winds and the jet stream aren’t necessarily going in the same direction at any time. This means there will be at least two major downwind ash-falls.”
44. Rescue Operation
“Well, we can go across to Outland to get away from the eruption,” Matt said.
“Assuming Yellowstone hasn’t also blown on the other side,” Bill said. There was a moment of silence as everyone absorbed that thought. Several heads turned to look at Kevin.
“Why does everyone keep looking at me?” Kevin said in exasperation. “Open the portal!”
“Sorry, Kev,” Richard said. “Bill, we’ve got a generator, right?”
“Sure, but we don’t even need to pull it out. I’ve got the portal equipment on an uninterrupted power supply full-time just for power conditioning. It’ll run it for probably up to half an hour.”
“How will we tell whether or not it happened on that side, too?” Matt asked.
“We’ve got stuff stacked up over there and a partly assembled shed,” Bill said. “I think a glance will tell us if things have been shaken up.”
It took Bill only a few moments to bring the portal back up. He and Matt stepped through, looked around, and stepped back to Earthside.
“It’s all good,” Bill reported to the others. “Nothing’s trashed. Even the animals seem unperturbed.”
“Okay, that’s great. I’m not really surprised, though,” Erin said. “The earlier eruption in Outland should have long since knocked things out of sync with Earthside.”
“So to what I was saying earlier,” Matt said, “we can go across to get away. But we can’t evacuate a whole city. Even ignoring what we’d do with the refugees on the other side, we only have a couple of portals.”
“And a couple of hours at most,” Erin added. “I think this is one of those cases where you have to pick your battles.” She looked around at the others. “What can we do with what we have?”
“Where’s the biggest concentration of humans in the area?” Kevin said.
“The university,” Richard replied. “Summer sessions are lightly attended, but I don’t think all the spring session students necessarily leave.”
“Should we take all three portals?”
Richard shook his head. “We need to get the warehouse contents across quickly. That stuff is critical now, if we have to live over there for days or weeks. I don’t see us succeeding at the Daniel Boone thing, you know?” He looked around for an argument before continuing. “Kevin, Erin, and I will take the van and two sets of portal equipment to campus, set up a gate in as public a place as possible, and start getting people through. It’s about a forty-five-minute walk here to there in civilization, so maybe a couple of hours on the other side, assuming there aren’t any deep streams or rivers that we don’t know about. We’ll have to set up the second gate on the other side, then go back through that, shut down the first one, and bring it through. Then h
ike over here with however many people we’ve been able to round up.”
Richard opened his arms wide, taking in all the warehouse contents. “Meanwhile, Bill, Monica, and Matt should work on getting everything to Outland and set up. We’ll need something ready for the refugees we bring over.”
“If we get a bunch of people, that’s just a big traveling buffet lunch to anything on the other side,” Matt pointed out. “The campus group is going to have to take a major inventory of weapons and hand them out to whoever says they can use one.”
“Also,” Monica added, “and not to put too fine a point on it, but do we actually know that we can open the gate from Outland? And if we do, will we get to our Earth or something else?”
There was dead silence as the question sank in. No one wanted to open a gate to Greenhouse Earth. Or worse. They all turned to Kevin.
“First,” Kevin said, “it should work from any Earth. There’s nothing special about our Earth. We aren’t Earth Prime or anything like that. Second, if we just invert the parameter values, we should get this Earth from there.”
Without another word, everyone started moving. They loaded a couple of crates of weapons and ammo back into the truck. Bill thought for a few seconds, then grabbed some boxes labeled “Night Vision Goggles” and put them in the van, followed by several packages of batteries.
“More paranoia?” Richard said.
Bill grinned in reply and tapped his temple.
Matt grabbed some walkie-talkies and tested them. Then he handed Erin a relief map of the city and a compass. He started to describe to her how to find her way to the warehouse on the other side, but Erin stopped him. “Hello? Geology student. Field trips. Camping.”
“Right,” Matt said, smiling at her and trying not to look concerned. “Just be careful and make it back, okay?” Erin squeezed his hand and kissed him.
“And listen,” he added, “if you can’t make it there by road, come back and we’ll try from the other side. That’ll be slower, but you work with what you’ve got.”
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