The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  “Central monitoring,” came the voice—a real human female voice, not a tape.

  “Ruapehu. She’s blown,” Jami replied breathlessly.

  “Which services are you requiring?”

  “All services,” she said, trying to remember the right codes. “Level 5, Red alert.”

  “State your name and location please.”

  “Jami Shastri. Whakapapa Monitoring Station. Number 3788810. Confirm. We have a Level 5 Volcanic event going on here...”

  2. UNCONSCIOUS COLLECTIVE

  The cloud had already extended beyond the blown-down zone, beyond the monitoring station, beyond the valley and the lake, beyond the mountain range itself. A black snowfall, fiercely hot, centimetres deep, began to pockmark the landscape. The debris that tumbled into the many rivers and innumerable creeks that flowed from the Tongariro National Park rushed downstream in all directions with ferocious turbulence until it was blocked by the dams it formed itself.

  From the three craters on the plateau, a black pall of fiery rock, lava and ash soared far into the sky. Casualties occurred up to ten kilometres away although mostly due to peripheral accidents—cars running off roads in the sudden black fog, people crushed by falling objects or caught in the flooding as the mud surged down the mountain sides. Within a kilometre, people, animals and trees simply vanished, scorched out of existence. The fiery, hot ash blanketed the terrain, suffocating everything, and with it a hail of boulders and mud rained down upon the shocked world below the mountains.

  In the nearby town of National Park, the end of a sunny day suddenly turned totally black, as the towering cloud, billowing and flat-topped, deepened the gloom that spread across the land. Lightning burst from the cloud continually as the ground was veiled in the fallout from the pall. Its hurricane wave of scalding gases and fire-hot debris travelled at 200 kilometres per hour as it swept down upon Ohakune. The pillar plumed eastward into a widening dark cloud.

  At Napier, 150 kilometres away to the east, a spectacular sunset was suddenly obliterated by unrealistic blackness and with that unscheduled night came a fog of choking ash. A third of the North Island of New Zealand was brought to a complete stand-still by the ash fall. Days later, the silt would reach the ocean via the rivers after causing devastating floods, closing the waterways to deep-draft ships. The cloud crossed the Pacific to South America in four days.

  *

  Within an hour, the rescue teams were moving in—by road, by helicopter, on foot. Up to a kilometre from the craters, the 1000 degree ash and the atmospheric heat made the air unbreathable. On the first night they could get no closer but there was more than enough for them to handle at that distance. Dozens of people, injured by fallen buildings or trees or crashed vehicles, were picked up and conveyed to nearby hospitals. Dazed and injured people walked out of the fog of ash into the hands of rescue teams. They knew that over fifty people remained in the critical quadrant, most of whom would surely be dead. Deaths already amounted to thirty on the periphery of the blast area, and injuries over a hundred.

  Jami Shastri was found, dazed but unharmed, at the monitoring station two hours after the eruption. She thrust a satchel containing the print-outs and data disks into her rescuers’ arms, refused to leave, refused medical assistance, and demanded her data be taken directly to Auckland University where it could be analyzed. Her demand proved impossible for the moment since Auckland was coincidentally fogbound at the time and all traffic was being directed south. Soon the white cold fog from the north collided with the black hot fog sweeping up from the south and a black rain began to fall constantly on the towns right around the Bay of Plenty to North Cape.

  In a deep coma and suffering multiple broken bones, Kevin Wagner arrived at the emergency medical centre being established in the town of Turangi on neighbouring Lake Taupo, brought in five hours after the blast by the men who rescued him from the surging river that had once been a trickling stream. Theirs had been a terrifying journey through a smoke-filled night on treacherous roads. The flood waters from the rising river had forced them to divert and they found the road broken by landslides and fallen trees. Along the way, they had picked up four other casualties as they forced their way through a chaotic and unfamiliar landscape.

  Wagner’s condition was critical but stable, and he was soon dispatched by helicopter to Wellington which, lying south-west of the thermal zone, escaped all of the worst effects of both the meteorological white fog and the volcanic black one.

  By morning, the ash pall that veiled the ground from the air began to dissipate and fall to earth. The rescue helicopters probed deeper into the zone, searching for survivors. Beneath them now was a world that only knew the colour grey. All along the plateau between the three peaks, felled trees lay in sweeping rows like scattered straw, stripped completely of their leaves and branches. The entire plateau was a desert of grey mud.

  Wayne Higgins was flying a Hughes 500 four-seater helicopter that he used to provide joy-flights for the tourists, but now the seats had been dragged out. Air Rescue had allocated him a crewman, Jim Rogan, who squatted in the doorway, the yellow helmet on his head his sole protection from the downdraft, his visor failing to keep the dust out of his eyes. As they swept around the steaming slopes of Ruapehu, Rogan spotted the glimpse of colour far to the left.

  “Over there. Turn 60 degrees left,” he shouted into the intercom over the constant crackle of interference.

  The colour was gold and green metal protruding from the broad pool of ash and as soon as he saw it, Rogan guessed it was a helicopter. As the chopper banked in toward it, Rogan could see it was a section of fuselage, but there was no evidence of rotors or tail as he might have expected. There was no other wreckage visible that he could see, the rest was swamped in the grey layer of ash that had settled upon the snow.

  “It looks soft,” he said to Wiggins. “Better not land.”

  It had snowed the night before, and the effect of the layer of hot grey ash on top of the powder snow was likely to cause all manner of strange effects. Officially, there had been eleven centimetres of snow and about five centimetres of ash, but in a drift ravine like this, there was no telling how deep either might be. The effect of heat on cold might have melted the surface briefly then refrozen it as ice creating an illusion of firm footing when in fact you could slip ten metres below the surface and be lost.

  Rogan hooked himself to the winch cable as Wiggins brought them in to a point where he hovered without quite touching the ground. The rotors set off a blizzard of black snow, blotting out all visibility. Into the midst of it, Rogan stepped out onto the landing strut and then jumped blind.

  His landing was unreasonably soft, as if jumping into a bed of feathers. He righted himself but still couldn’t see anything—had no idea which direction the wreckage lay.

  “Okay, take it up slow, Wayne.”

  He waited while the chopper moved away; carefully ensuring that he had plenty of slack on the cable. The ash was heavier than most dust or snow and settled immediately the wind was off it.

  Rogan, wading almost knee deep in the ash, plunged toward the wreckage unsteadily, the cable dragging behind him like a long tail. It was a section of the side of the fuselage that he could see—beyond he could make out a furrow where the wreck had slid almost a hundred metres downhill since impact. The rest of the helicopter might be anywhere. Rogan pushed his way forward, shovelling ash with his hand, in the direction in which the fuselage seemed to widen, and where he hoped he might find a door.

  Eventually, he had to clamber up onto the body, where he discovered that the door handle had been melted. He had a screwdriver hanging from his belt and levered in a place where the door had buckled, and finally wrenched it open.

  He manoeuvred around and peered in, grabbed his torch and directed the beam inside. There was an almighty tangle of seats and people. Five people he guessed, twisted and bloodied. He pulled off his glove and reached for the nearest flesh he could see, the arm of an over-weight
woman of fifty or more. The coldness was that special kind he knew only too well.

  He was obliged to stretch further in, knowing there was no hope. The warmer air inside the mangled cabin was escaping. A fog was settling in there. His own breath, coming in blasts of whiteness, was enough to obscure his view. Then he realised—it wasn’t just his own breath. There were other puffs of whiteness appearing momentarily. Rogan reared back and looked toward the hovering helicopter.

  “Jesus, Wayne! Drum up some help! There’s people alive in here!”

  *

  Only with the coming of daylight, more than twelve hours after the eruption, did the various rescue teams begin to penetrate the main area of devastation. The fifty or so rescue workers who had already arrived on the scene were divided into teams of a dozen and equipped with whatever was to hand.

  A group of firemen wearing heat-proof suits and with breathing equipment were attempting to make their way up the ridge to the Ruapehu Chateau where they knew the greater number of victims in the quadrant of destruction would be found. At one kilometre from the epicentre, there was over a metre of ash in low places, forcing them onto higher ground.

  Soon, they passed beyond the newly created edge of the forest—even there the trees were stripped of their leaves and twisted and laden with ash. Ahead, the logs lay in a weirdly orderly fashion, as if felled by human hands. As far as they could see, the rows of denuded trunks carpeted the earth, and they could make their way forward only by traversing the logs like lumberjacks.

  On the low ridge ahead, they should have been able to see the chateau but there was no trace of it, not even the chimneys that usually stood after fires. Beyond that, the smoke pall from the crater still ascended skyward even though there had been no more eruptions. The firemen, led by Del Shannon, worked their way up until they came to the bottom of the ski-slope that led directly to the chateau, but there the logs ran out and they were faced with snow and ash drifts metres thick. That might have been the end of their attempt, had not Jerker Teasdale spotted a strange shape away to their right.

  “What’s that?” he asked in puzzlement.

  It was a curved metal shape about two metres long with four short feet sticking upward, like a dead cow chopped off just below the shoulders. Shannon laughed.

  “It’s a bathtub. Lou had them old type ones installed right through the chateau. Cost him a bloody fortune.”

  Because they didn’t want to think where Lou might be now, they made their way across to the object. Anyway, they needed to go sideways to see if they could find some way of climbing closer to the chateau. At least that was how Shannon justified it in his mind.

  The bath, its enamel belly painted duck-egg blue, had obviously tobogganed all the way down the ski-slope to this point, over-turning at the end of its run and the ash was heavy enough to slip away from most of its surface.

  “Maybe there’s someone in it,” Jerker laughed. “Let’s turn it over.”

  Shannon surveyed the scene—there wasn’t really time for this nonsense.

  “We’ll keep moving this way. Maybe we can make our way up along the ridge over there.”

  But the irrepressible Jerker and two cronies were heaving on the short steel legs of the bath and tilting it.

  The smooth dark brown arm flopped through the opening.

  They all stared.

  “Shit, don’t drop it!” Shannon ordered.

  Barely recovering themselves, Jerker and the others heaved the bath clear. The men stood around, spellbound by what they saw. Andromeda Starlight’s flesh contrasted stunningly with the area of white snow where the bath had prevented the ash from falling.

  “Shit,” Jerker gasped. “She’s burned to a crisp.”

  “No she ain’t, you fucking dickhead,” Shannon snapped. “She already was black. Don’t you know a darkie when yer see one?”

  “Never seen one in a bath before,” Jerker blubbered. “But I always wanted ta.”

  The men chuckled, not so much at Jerker’s sadistic humour as from an hysteria to which none of them would have wanted to admit. They were all possessed by a paralysis, the vision before them seemed to have arrested them completely.

  “Well, don’t just stand there gawking,” Shannon snapped at them. But he was still standing and gawking himself.

  It was finally left to Jerker to reach and delicately touch her, seeking vital signs. He pulled his hand back as if bitten.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” he breathed. “I got a pulse.”

  *

  “Chopper coming in!”

  The orderly appeared only momentarily at the door, and Felicity Campbell’s senses were not up to identifying him. She was moving before she was thinking. Her body seemed to know the right way to weave around the clutter of ICU beds in the room such that she did not trip on cables nor upset consoles. Instincts carried her out into the corridor and into the lift before she really knew she was there.

  She switched to the service lift on Level N, running with that shuffling, oriental gait of legs too tired to fully raise her feet off the floor. Earlier, she remembered instructing an orderly to mop up the blood splattered all the way along here—it had not been done. The helicopters kept coming and there was no time, not even for basic hygiene, not to mention safety.

  As the lift doors breathed open to the rooftop, she was surprised by the bright light that savaged her eyes. At first, she thought it was the landing lights of the helicopter—only vaguely did she realise it was daylight. Throughout the night, she had done this more than a dozen times, and still they came. The hospital was filled beyond capacity, but the helicopters kept coming and coming.

  Desperately, she strove to pull her exhausted brain into order. She ploughed out into the chill of morning before she realised she had gone too far. It was totally exposed up here on the roof of the clinical services tower, and the view was stunning for those who had time to look. The stiff wind off Wellington Harbour—blue and serene beyond the city skyline—grabbed her and shook her. She had passed the nominated examination point in the rooftop hut where the waiting medical teams could shelter from the constant wind; where she had idiotically observed the blood but seemed to have forgotten why it was there.

  The helicopter was still way up in the air, on approach to the pad. Felicity Campbell pressed her inner pause button and halted in the middle of the tower roof. A herd of orderlies came by her like a rugby team, racing to meet the helicopter. Felicity gulped the air and it refreshed her and got her brain going again.

  The helicopter wobbled down onto the pad, and the crewman jumped into the pack of waiting orderlies and they had the first patient on a trolley and rolling toward her with blinding speed. Felicity backed off into the hut, where another collection of nurses and orderlies were gathering to heed her orders.

  All through the night, the helicopters kept coming and coming and Felicity had met them all. She had placed herself at the first line of assault and now carried a knowledge of the overall situation at Wellington Hospital that was so complex and fluid that it could not be passed on to anyone else. She was here to stay until the last helicopter came.

  The chatter of the rotors had come to haunt her, and as she heard each approaching helicopter, she abandoned whatever she was doing and raced upward to the helipad. As each victim was rolled in and the paramedics gabbled out what was known of their condition, Felicity made hasty assessments and barked sharp destinations to the orderlies.

  “This one straight to theatre 64... Run her up to ward 29... Okay, get him into radiology... Can’t do anything here without a cat scan—stick him in the queue.”

  With each instruction, her picture of the chaos within the hospital expanded. They were under extreme pressure at every level, but the staff, she had observed, remained calm. Just do the work in front of you and treat it like a normal day, had been the general instruction. Felicity had been on her feet for twenty hours and there was no end in sight.

  The galloping mob propelling the trolley drew
to a halt beside her and she lifted the cover. They had to shout above the wind and chatter of the rotors. “What have we got?”

  “Female, black, unidentified, comatose, all vital signs, no apparent injuries.”

  Felicity gazed down at the face of Andromeda Starlight and saw an incongruous picture of absolute calm. The woman might have been sleeping peacefully. If so it was the first peace Felicity had seen for many hours.

  She looked back at the harried face of the paramedic, a young man, splattered with blood, pallid with exhaustion. The helicopter had carried this one victim alone, and now waited impatiently to return. Bewildered orderlies hung about the helipad, unable to believe there weren’t three or four more casualties as had been the case on every other helicopter throughout the night.

  “What were her circumstances?” she asked, returning her attention to the patient, as if she doubted there was nothing to look for.

  “Not sure. There was some yarn that she was in a bath which protected her from everything.”

  “Exposure?”

  “About twelve hours. But she was apparently sheltered throughout. No frostbite. The ash kept the bathtub warm. No burns. No contusions that I could find.”

  “Okay,” Felicity breathed, and turned her attention to the orderlies. “Comatose. Down to CT. Start with a scan for head injuries. Go.”

  The orderlies whisked the trolley away, and the paramedic was striding back toward his impatient helicopter. Felicity had to run to keep up with him. She did not want to allow her body nor mind to rest until she was sure the initial chaos was passed.