THE YELLOWSTONE EVENT
Book 5: The Eruption
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Julianna was frightened now.
No, not frightened.
She was outright terrified.
Until this moment, the whole concept of an eruption in her lifetime had seemed like such an inconceivable fantasy.
Yes, she’d heard the scientists and their predictions.
She’d been leery of them, as had most of her friends.
It was more wishful thinking than anything else.
No one wanted to die before their time.
And no one wanted their friends and family members to die either.
No one wanted the landscape of the United States to be permanently altered. Permanently scarred.
And certainly, no one wanted to deal with the aftermath of a changed planet earth for many generations to come.
Humans have a natural tendency to doubt anything they don’t want to have to deal with.
Until, that is, they have no choice but to deal with it.
From the beginning Julianna tried to convince herself that if the Yellowstone Event really did happen it would be long after she died.
Most likely long after her children died, and their children and grandchildren as well.
“There’s no way it’s gonna happen while I’m still around.”
Deputy Dave was puzzled by that line of thinking.
He responded, “Well, it’s gonna happen while somebody is still around. Might as well be us as anybody else. What makes you think we’re exempt?”
She’d laughed and said, “It won’t happen while I’m alive because I’m special, so there.
“Stick with me and you’ll be safe too.”
Now she wasn’t so sure.
There was another explosion a couple of miles ahead of them and a bit to the east, this one more powerful than the one before.
Even in the moving truck they could feel the earth shake ominously.
That was unusual, for they both knew people typically didn’t feel earthquakes while they were driving. Normally the motion of the vehicle masks the quake.
“For us to feel it while we’re moving means it’s a big one,” Dave said. “I’ll bet it was a five or better.
“We need to get the hell out of here.”
They could see the trees swaying on both sides of the highway.
Something about them told them it wasn’t the wind. The branches were relatively calm, yet the trunk was swaying first one way and then the other.
Another explosion five hundred yards directly in front of them blew rocks half a mile into the air.
Other rocks pounded their vehicle, one shattering their windshield.
One of the men jumped off the back, convinced that they were driving directly into the area where the fissures were opening.
He thought he might be safer parting ways with the deputy and the ranger; that at any moment an explosion directly beneath their truck would send them all sky high.
In tiny pieces.
In reality, the entire region was exploding with new vents and fissures. Some spewed steam high into the air, others dry air.
In reality, there was no safe place to run, no place to hide.
He didn’t know it yet, but the pickup truck was his only chance to getting out alive, as slight as that chance was.
By jumping from the truck he’d doomed himself to certain death.
But he couldn’t see what was right in front of his face.
Inside the cab Dave and Julianna didn’t know he’d gone over the side.
If they had their humanity would have forced them to stop, against their better judgment and against the other men begging them to go on.
They’d have stopped and tried to coax him back into the truck, even as he ran pell mell into the forest.
It would have been a wasted gesture, for there is no reasoning with a terrified and confused man.
Maybe it was better they didn’t see him.
Now there was a chance, ever so slight, they might make it out before the Yellowstone Caldera’s version of Russian roulette took them out.
“Oh my God,” Julianna shouted and pointed.
A couple of hundred yards ahead of them, fifty feet off the side of the highway, a newly erupting geyser was spraying superheated steam into the air.
Much of it was blowing onto the roadway, blocking their view of what was ahead.
And their safe passage.
“That’ll be hot enough to scald them, maybe even kill them!”
“Jules, we’ve got no choice. This highway is the only way out of here. If we go back we’re all dead.”
He stopped dead right in the middle of Highway 22.
Julianna got out and addressed the men in the back.
“We’re going to drive through the steam. Cover yourselves as best you can.”
She jumped back in and Dave punched it, driving toward the steam cloud at sixty miles an hour.
He couldn’t see the highway beyond the steam. Didn’t have a clue whether it was clear, or if the steam had disabled other vehicles which might lie in wait on the other side.
He had no choice.
He had to go.
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The Yellowstone Event Book 5: The Eruption
will be available worldwide in August 2018.
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Coming in October 2018:
Darrell Maloney’s New Series
PANDEMIC
Here’s A Preview…
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Scientists knew it was coming for decades.
At least they claimed to.
And perhaps some of them did.
Most of them, though, were as surprised as everyone else when the ice packs started to melt.
Thus began the great debate on what was causing it.
Those with a certain political leaning claimed it was greenhouse gases, the exhaust from machines and smokestacks, which was causing global temperatures to rise.
Others, with different political agendas, scoffed and said it was a natural occurrence of the earth, going through its normal heating and cooling cycles.
An American vice-president used a poorly thought out choice of words and the term “global warming” was born.
The term made him a laughing stock with nay-sayers when winter temperatures dropped to all-time records all over the globe.
A Nobel Prize winning geologist named Martin Sorenson noted that if he’d used the term “global climate change” instead of “global warming” he’d have been taken more seriously and not set a program to combat the problem back many years.
In any event, and regardless of who was right and who was wrong, the earth was indeed changing.
The rising of ocean waters, which all reputable scientists agreed would be a major problem, would happen gradually.
There was plenty of time for seaside communities to build sea walls or elevate homes close to the water.
The climate itself would also change slowly, allowing human beings a chance to adjust.
In short, there was no real need to panic.
Everybody agreed that clean air was important, and the world community continued to work to that end. But the “sky is falling” attitude some had was largely unfounded.
Dr. Sorenson also famously stated, “We’ll just have to get used to harsher winters and more hurricanes and tornados. But mankind will adjust, just as it always has.”
Dr. Sorenson maintained that, although some might die from stronger hurricanes and tornados, no one would die as a direct result of climate change itself.
So followed many years of climate change occasionally making headlines, but largely being placed in the back of one’s mind.
Meanwhile, the ice packs started to shrink.
The thaw in Antarctica wasn’t a problem to the global community.
And least not in ways that would be noticeable.
The polar bears and sea lions in the area had to change their migration and mating habits, and some had to relocate to colder locales.
But none of that affected Juan Sebastian in Spain or John Smith in Pittsburgh so it wasn’t given much thought.
The real problem was in the Arctic.
Specifically in northern Greenland and Siberia. And at various other places north of the Arctic Circle.
Ice there was melting at more or less the same rate as the Antarctic, but there was a difference.
A difference a few scientists and geologists had always warned might be a problem, but which was largely ignored.
With the thaw, more and more of the permafrost was seeing sunlight for the first time in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years.
For the first time in recorded history spores and allergens once thought to be extinct were being exposed to the open air.
But not just any spores and allergens.
Some were super spores and allergens, having gone dormant before man’s very existence.
Spores and allergens which man had never been exposed to before.
Never grown accustomed to.
Never formed a resistance to.
Spores and allergens which were deadly to man.
As more and more attention was focused on rising sea levels and longer hurricane seasons, the real threat was largely ignored.
The ice pack slowly receded, exposing more and more greenery beneath it.
The greenery felt the warmth of the sun for the first time in forever, it seemed.
It slowly dried out, and occasional wind gusts carried it away.
Some of it made its way into the winds which periodically whipped across the ice pack and was driven south from the Arctic, north from the Antarctic.
In northern Alaska, a couple hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, an Inuit tribe lived the way their ancestors lived for centuries.
Each year the spring thaw came. The snow melted, the earth grew green with life.
The villagers immediately started preparing… for the next winter.
It was the way of the Inuit, for the season of the thaw was short-lived and labor intensive.
And if they failed to gather enough provisions to get them through the following winter they’d have to leave their home and scavenge from other villages farther south.
Villages which had done a better job of preparing.
This tiny village didn’t even have a name, but its members were a proud people. The elders remembered a time several years before when the green season was far too short, the winter came much too early.
And the winter was particularly brutal that year.
They’d run out of seal and muktuk completely. The caribou was down to just a few pounds. They were in danger of starving to death and there was no sign the thaw was coming anytime soon.
They’d had to dispatch two strong men to another village twenty kilometers away. It was a treacherous journey in near-whiteout conditions. But they were able to return with two hundred pounds of whale. Enough to sustain them until the ice finally melted.
It was a humbling and humiliating experience, and one which the elders didn’t want to repeat.
And so it was they drove their people hard to collect the berries. To cast their nets and capture as many hundreds of fish as they could.
To take not seven caribou, but eight or nine if they could find them.
It was a lot of work and they had a limited amount of time to complete it before the first freeze.
But this was life in northern Alaska.
And pride in one’s abilities to survive… and the blow to their collective pride when forced to beg for food from others… was strong.
They’d do whatever it took, work as many hours as it took, to prevent that humiliation from happening again.
If you enjoyed
THE YELLOWSTONE EVENT
Book 4: Any Day Now
you might also enjoy
ALONE: Book 1
Facing Armageddon
Dave and Sarah Anna Speer had been preparing for Armageddon for years. They thought they’d covered all the bases, and had planned for everything.
It never occurred to them that the single thing they had no control over was the timing.
Sarah was on an airplane with her young daughters when solar storms bombarded the earth with electromagnetic pulses. Everything powered by electricity or batteries was instantly shorted out and would never work again.
Dave was suddenly alone.
He was also unsure whether his family was dead or alive. He assumed that the airplane stopped working and plunged from the sky. But it was scheduled to land in Kansas City at almost the exact time everything stopped working.
Had they landed in time? Was it possible they survived?
This is the story of a man facing Armageddon alone. It chronicles the things he does to survive in a newly vicious world.
It also includes Dave’s desperate and poignant diary entries to his wife. Just in case she did survive, and somehow makes it back to him to find he didn’t make it himself.
From the author of last year’s best sellers “Final Dawn” and “Countdown to Armageddon” comes a new tale of one man’s journey through hell… alone.
Chapter 1:
Dave couldn’t get the tune out of his head. He’d heard it all morning long, off and on, playing quietly in the back of his skull. And it was driving him crazy.
Oh, it wasn’t unpleasant. It was a happy little ditty. At least it sounded that way. It sounded more like sunshine and smiles, rather than rain clouds and foreboding.
Finally, he’d had enough.
“Okay, let’s play a game,” he announced while looking in the rearview mirror at Lindsey and Beth.
“I’ll hum you a tune, and the first one to guess the tune gets a candy bar when we get to the airport.”
Sarah looked at him from the passenger seat. With that look.
“Excuse me, mister? You’re going to get the girls all hyped up on sugar just before I take them on a four hour plane ride?”
“Not both of them, honey. Just the one who guesses the name of the song.”
“Uh… no. If that song is still bugging you, just hum it. If any one of us guesses it, you can buy each of us a cinnabon.”
The girls laughed. Beth gave Lindsey a high five. Lindsey said, “All right! Go, Mom!”
Dave coughed. At first he had no words.
Then he found some, and stated the obvious.
“Why is it okay to get all three of you hyped up on sugar but not okay to do it to just one of you?”
“Because you know I have a thing for cinnabons. And I’m the mom. So that makes me the boss.”
Lindsey broke out in uncontrollable laughter from the back seat, and Beth said, “Ooooohhh, Dad, you just got owned.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth it. I mean, those things aren’t cheap, you know.”
“Oh, we know, don’t we girls?”
Two heads nodded up and down behind her.
“But, Dave, they are soooo worth the price. And I’ll give you a bite. And think how sweet I’ll taste when you kiss me goodbye.”
Beth made a gagging sound.
“Besides, if you want us to help you with that song, you have to pay the piper. It’s only fair. And if you don’t, it’ll continue to drive you crazy for days. Maybe even the whole week we’re gone. And we’d feel so bad for you if that happened.”
“Yeah, you’re just oozing with sympathy for my plight.”
Sarah smiled and blew him a kiss. She was even more gorgeous now than the day they’d met thirteen years before. It suddenly dawned on him that he was an incredibly lucky man, to have such a beautiful wife and family. And that the price of three cinnabons wasn’t that great, in the grand scheme of things.
In other words, he played right into Sarah’s hands. She knew he would, as soon as she let
the kiss fly.
“Okay, here goes.”
Dave started humming the tune that had played in his mind a thousand times since the previous evening.
It took the three of them no more than ten notes. They’d have been “Name That Tune” champions in another era.
All three of them blurted out, almost simultaneously, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”
Then Dave felt incredibly stupid.
“Of course. How could I have not known that? The old Mr. Rogers theme song. Sheesh! Now I really feel dumb.”
Sarah said, “Did you know that Fred Rogers was a Green Beret in Vietnam, and wore his red sweater to hide all of his tattoos?”
Dave scoffed.
“Where did you hear that?”
“On the internet. Why?”
“That story’s been going around for years. It was debunked a long time ago. Mr. Rogers was a fine man, but he was never a Green Beret.”
“Oh, yeah? Where did you hear that?”
“On the internet.”
It was too much for Lindsey.
“Gee whiz, would you two stop believing what you read on the internet? Nearly all of it is garbage.”
She turned to her little sister.
“Do we have to teach these old people everything?”
Beth said nothing but nodded her head decisively. She was in firm agreement.
Dave was a man of his word, and after the family checked in at the ticket kiosk and Sarah and the girls got their boarding passes, they made a beeline to Cinnabon.
“Daddy, are you going to walk us to the gate?”
“No, honey, I can’t go through security without a boarding pass, so I’ll walk you as far as I can and then you can give me a great big hug and a kiss.”
“I wish you could come with us.”
“I know, sugar. I wish I could too. But with two of the guys being sick at work, they just can’t let me take vacation right now. Uncle Tommy will understand, and we can go fishing another time. And you’ll be so busy helping Aunt Susan get everything ready for the wedding, you won’t even have time to miss me.”
Any Day Now Page 18