“Duh!”
“And you’d scold her if she looked like she was about to step out of line and do something stupid.”
“Of course.”
He switched to scratching the dog just above her wagging tail. “Get where I’m going with this?”
“Shut up.”
“Uh huh,” he replied, knowing he’d gotten his point across. His mother could be stubborn - no denying that - but she wasn’t stupid. He decided to cut her some slack and change the subject to something guaranteed to get her mind off her brother. “Have you heard anything about the RFSOB?” The letters stood for Rat Fuck Son Of a Bitch, also known as her ex-husband, Freddy Perdue.
“No,” she replied, scowling. “No word at all.” She sighed. “And in this case, I suppose, no news is good news.”
“How so?”
“It probably means he’s gone.”
“Probably?”
She grimaced. “Okay . . . Maybe I’m clutching at straws. But thinking he’s probably gone is better than thinking he’s hiding in the shrubbery.”
“If you say so.”
She replied with her single-handed talk to the paw gesture.
Jake was about to retort with something filled with sarcasm, when Molly’s ears pointed straight toward the ceiling, as she gave a sharp yip and backpedaled. He and Mary both stared at her as if she’d lost her doggy mind, and Jake was about to pointlessly ask the dog to explain herself, when they heard the clatter of plates in the cupboard. The floor rumbled, the windows rattled and the house felt like someone had taken it by the shoulders and given it one good shake. And then it stopped.
He was about to make some other sarcastic, yet pithy comment, when the TV flared an angry red as the words Breaking News shouted at them from the muted speakers. Mary reached over and turned up the volume.
“…A 9.2 magnitude earthquake has rocked the West Coast, causing massive destruction from Juneau, Alaska to San Francisco. Authorities at the United States Geological Survey say…”
Jake looked back at his mother as she stared at the staggering images of smoking wreckage shot from a helicopter over Seattle. “My God . . . ” she swore, with her voice just above a whisper.
“Looks like we’ll be driving to Oregon.”
6
Medford, Oregon
Everything in the restaurant seemed to turn sideways, including Bobby Drummond. The ground and everything on it shook, rattled, rolled and did the Macarena, as dishes shattered and plaster crumbled and picture frames flew off the walls and picture windows imploded to crash upon the floor filled with screaming, shit-scared people. And then it stopped.
He gingerly got to his feet, checking himself for injuries. He’d landed on his bad shoulder and it hurt like Hell, but otherwise, he seemed intact. His shirt, however, had seen better days. A glop of what he assumed had once been his baked potato decorated the right breast pocket, and what appeared to be steak sauce had smeared across his flat belly. But other than the ruined shirt, he was fine, and so he did the natural thing for any ex-Marine and current Law Enforcement Officer to do, and ranged around the room, checking the other diners.
Everyone was pretty-well freaked. One rail thin women with shoulder blades he probably could have used to cut his steak, had dissolved into hysterics, but was being tended by one of the waitresses, so he ignored her. He helped an elderly man and woman to their feet, received a mumbled “Thanks,” and moved onto a man huddled in the corner near an overturned table who was cradling his right wrist. A redheaded woman in far too much makeup was clumsily attending him.
“I think I broke it,” the man whined.
Suck it up, Bobby thought, but didn’t say. He grabbed the guy by his other arm and helped him to stand, then did the same for the woman.
“Head outside,” he told them. “There might be aftershocks.”
This seemed to unnerve the guy, who frantically looked in every direction, including up, as if the building might fall on him at any moment. He whimpered. The redhead looked at Bobby and rolled her eyes. “Get him out of here,” he told her with a sympathetic smile. The couple were probably on their first date, he thought. He doubted there would be a second.
He looked at the structure around him. The guy might have been right to be worried. He took a deep breath, and in his tried and tested Sergeant’s voice bellowed, “Can I have your attention, please!” He waited until everyone seemed to be looking at him. “We need to evacuate the building. Please proceed to the exits in a calm and orderly manner.”
They got it half right, he mused, as he waited for the chaotic scrum at the front entrance to clear, and then followed. He needed to get to the police station.
Guess I’ll be checking in a day early.
7
The Western United States
When they rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 quake, they started out following the building codes, specifically engineered to withstand at least some of the more destructive effects of earthquakes, but that soon went out the window as the need for immediate housing became apparent. And so, they began building out of unreinforced brick on landfill - pretty much the worst kind of building to be in during an earthquake.
The same thing happened after Seattle burned to the ground in 1889. And so, at 7:02 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, when the Cascadia Subduction Zone (after building pressure for three hundred some-odd years) finally let loose, Seattle’s Pioneer Square, Qwest Field, Safeco Field, the waterfront district, Harbor Island and the industrial district were all effectively obliterated.
Prior to the quake, the northwest corner of Portland, Oregon, sat wedged between the Columbia River on the north and the Willamette River on the south. The entire finger, from the Expo Center to Kelly Point Park, including the University of Portland and the Portland International Raceway, ceased to exist. It disappeared - sucked out to sea with the ebbing tide, which would soon be coming back in again in the form of a gigantic tsunami.
As if God grabbed one end of the continental plate about halfway between Seattle and Portland and snapped it like a bed sheet, the Earth rippled to the northeast, east, and southeast, triggering fault lines at all points. Earthquakes did more than rattle pots and pans in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, where the fifteen patrons of the Moose Jaw Diner died when the roof collapsed, and in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where a fire started by a ruptured gas line at the Western Canada Aviation Museum killed twenty-three.
At the Dakota Zoo in Bismarck, North Dakota, three badly frightened Great Northern timber wolves, were released when the plate glass display window of their enclosure shattered. They took shelter at the Wal Mart in the Kirkwood Mall and scared the crap out of all the last-minute holiday shoppers.
The windows they’d just replaced in the Courthouse Museum and Haybale Church in Arthur, Nebraska, imploded, showering the cleaning lady, Mrs. Henrietta Tomlinson, with glass. It took thirteen stitches to close the cut above her left eye. They could have saved themselves the trouble. She would be dead a day-and-a-half later when the roof of her neat clapboard house collapsed under the weight of wet volcanic ash and finished the job the earthquake started.
In the Peaks Ice Arena at the 7-Peaks Resort, just south of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, six of the twenty-three members of Charlene Waters’ junior skating class (ages 9-11) were injured when a twelve inch crack bisected the ice just as they were executing the line-abreast maneuver they’d been practicing for two weeks in preparation for the city finals. They’d been the odds-on favorite to win.
At the American International Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, three people suffered snakebite when a number of live specimens got loose. One woman died of cardiac arrest after reaching the hospital.
In Lubbock, Texas, the Buddy Holly statue was decapitated when a 4.2 tremor knocked it off its base. Two people sustained minor injuries and a third needed to be taken to the Emergency Room at the Texas Tech University Medical Center following a four-car pileup caused when the deceased singer
’s head rolled into traffic. Once more, the music had died. Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.
An estimated one thousand three hundred people sustained injuries in the greater Reno-Sparks area of Nevada. At the Four-Aces Casino and Hotel in Reno, sixty-three people were injured by tumbling slot machines, including one gentleman who died. He’d just hit a Royal Flush when the video poker machine he’d been playing for three solid hours fell over and crushed his skull. It hadn’t been his lucky night, after all.
Vast areas of Northern California, as if Mother Nature laughed at their greater adherence to the building code, were just flat destroyed. The Hayward Fault near San Francisco, which hadn’t had a “big one” for over one hundred and forty years, and over which two-point-five million people lived, let rip with a magnitude 8.1, toppling buildings, collapsing roadways (even though retrofitted after the quake in 1991), and causing an estimated twelve hundred fatalities.
Not to be outdone, that part of the San Andreas cutting through Santa Clara Valley and most susceptible to liquefaction (which causes loose soil to act like water rather than ground) cracked with a 7.4, turning the soil to goo with a staggering level of mayhem.
Another three thousand names in Santa Clara were added to the casualty list. Four thousand more were created in Sacramento (including fourteen members of the Governor’s staff), as well as three hundred in Redding, eleven hundred in Eureka (including forty-three students at Humboldt State University in nearby Arcata, who died when the lecture hall in which they were studying seismology collapsed), six hundred in Lodi, eight hundred and fifty in Modesto, eighteen hundred in Stockton, sixty-eight in Merced, and on, and on, and on.
But if all this wasn’t bad enough, and if Mother Nature hadn’t already given the people of the Western United States the whole fifty-five-million gallon barrel of apocalyptic whup-ass, she had one more trick up her sleeve. As if She’d taken the Snake River Valley and cracked it like a whip right at Yellowstone, a 7.9 ruptured the ground from the Norris Geyser Basin to the Fishing Bridge at the northern tip of Yellowstone Lake, right across the top of the behemoth caldera which had been waiting and building for six hundred and forty thousand years.
Seven
Murphy’s Law:
Whatever can go wrong, will,
at the worst possible moment.
1
Observatory Seismic Center
Yellowstone National Park
“Latest GPS scan shows another fourteen centimeters uplift at the Salt Creek dome,” Maggie reported to Dr. Galotta. They were back on duty in the Seismic Center after yet another sleepless day, although now the room was a chaotic jumble that looked as if it had been the scene of a particularly bad frat party, held by Neanderthals on crystal meth. One of the monitor stacks, six and a half feet tall, had toppled over, smashing a chair that had been sitting next to it. Papers were strewn all over the floor, three coffee cups had shattered onto the ground, and Maggie herself had a distinct pain on her right buttock she just knew would result in one Hell of a colorful bruise.
The testing out at Yellowstone Lake revealed nothing but bad news. The PH level of the water had skyrocketed into the acid side of the graph, and the temperature had gone up a full degree Centigrade. The ground temp had gone up more than two, and the microprobe readings had shown marked increases in all the usual gasses.
“What about Mallard Lake?” Rick asked.
She checked her computer screen. “Up eight centimeters.” Salt Creek and Mallard Lake were Resurgent Domes within the park that had shown more or less steady uplift since they started measuring for it in the Nineteen Twenties. They’d gone down a bit now and then, but the trend had generally been upward. Now it seemed as if they’d both gotten massive injections of anabolic steroids – or, rather, magma.
The earthquake swarms had resumed, coming in as little as every three minutes, and at most every eight. And the last two had been harmonic, rather than tectonic tremors. That meant magma was moving. That meant eruption.
This is bad. This is all bad, she thought. Toss in the fact that she still hadn’t been able to reach her parents in Seattle, and this day could be marked as the worst of all time. But there was more.
Communications to pretty much the entire West Coast, from the Canadian Border, all the way down to Northern California were virtually nonexistent. Phone lines were down, cell towers were down, WiFi and Internet were down, power lines were down, fiber optic cables and DSL lines had been severed in a dozen different places. Critical facilities, such as police and fire had radios, but that was about it. Maggie had been trying all of them with no success.
Finally, in a gesture she would have never expected, Dr. Galotta suggested they try the SatComm. At fourteen dollars a minute, in the budget-starved atmosphere of everything but Defense, the SatComm was only to be used in extreme emergencies. And while Maggie certainly believed her situation to be one, she doubted anyone else did.
He’d escorted her to the Communications Center, as she clung to what was literally her last hope, but they’d found the Center in use. Dr. Morgenstern, surrounded by a handful of the Senior Staff, stood huddled around a triangular speaker phone, set atop one of the consoles. They had not been having a pleasant conversation.
“...Mr. Secretary, with all due respect, there are three possible scenarios, any one of which would be highly destructive.”
“Go on,” the deep and sonorous and utterly distinctive voice of Secretary of Homeland Security, Conner Donovan came through the speaker. Even Maggie recognized it, having heard him speak on a variety of news programs over his three-year tenure in office.
“One: Hydrothermal,” Dr. Morgenstern began. “Super heated pressurized water released with explosive force. Two: Minor Eruption, somewhere on the scale between St. Helens and Pinatubo. And Three: Multiple Eruptions, throughout the entire system. None of these would be good. The third would be catastrophic.”
“You’re forgetting a fourth option,” the voice said.
Morgenstern and the assembled Senior Staff all looked at each other, confused. “What would that be?”
“Nothing at all.”
The room fell utterly silent. Maggie held her breath. Even she knew how stupid that sounded.
After a full minute of silence, the Secretary’s voice said, “That is a possibility, is it not? That nothing will happen?”
Dr. Morgenstern vigorously shook his head, to no avail, as it couldn’t be seen by its intended target. “Frankly, sir,” he said at last, “the odds of that are too small to calculate.”
“But it is possible, right? After all, the volcano has been dormant for hundreds of thousands of years, right?”
“Not dormant. Just not erupting.”
“Okay. Fine, if you want to quibble about semantics,” the voice said, irritably. “In that case, what can you do to keep it that way?”
“Excuse me?” Dr. Morgenstern looked to the rest of the staff, but none of them had understood it, either.
“What can you do to keep the thing from erupting?”
“Nothing, sir. Absolutely nothing.”
“There has to be something. Some way to drop a nuke down its belly and seal it up. Something,” the Secretary insisted. “Because the President can’t go on TV and tell the American people that their government is helpless.”
“What a moron,” Dr. Galotta had whispered in Maggie’s ear.
She couldn’t help but agree, even though she understood the source of the politician’s ignorance. Disaster movies were a mainstay of Hollywood, especially in recent years, with all the advances in digital effects. And every one of them had the inevitable misunderstood and quirky rebel using some utterly improbable miracle technique, who managed to save the world at the last possible moment. But this was the real world. There would be no Armageddon-like heroic effort. If Yellowstone decided to go, their goose was well and truly cooked.
Dr. Morgenstern rolled his eyes toward the heavens and said, “What the President does or does not say, is
n’t my responsibility, sir. My responsibility is to give you the facts, which I have done.”
After a time, the Secretary said, “Fine. Then we’re back to the possibility that nothing will happen.”
Maggie could see the Staff do everything it could to keep from groaning aloud. One of them, a woman she did not know, actually bit her knuckle. Dr. Morgenstern just buried his face in his hands.
“That is possible, right? It is within the realm of possibility that nothing will happen, yes?”
The Doctor blinked and shook his head again, then sighed and said, “Minutely. Microscopically.”
“But a chance is a chance. And we’re going to tell that to the American people.”
Maggie looked at Bob, and the Senior Staff looked at each other, all of them incredulous.
Obviously angry, and through gritted teeth, Dr. Morgenstern replied, “The American people need to be warned. And the State of Wyoming needs to be evacuated.”
“The entire state? Preposterous!” the Secretary roared. “It would cause mass panic, and the markets would implode. Hell, they’re already jittery.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Dr. Morgenstern began, having clearly had enough of this gasbag of a human being. “I don’t give a good God damn about the markets. If you don’t start evacuating, then hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of people could die. In fact, you should add parts of Montana and Idaho to the list. And you need to do it now.”
After a static-filled full minute of silence, the Secretary said, “You’re not the actual person in charge, are you?”
“I am until Dr. Godstein returns.”
“And where is he?”
The Doctor looked at his watch. “Somewhere over the South Pacific, I expect. He was in Tahiti.”
“Then we’ll wait for his return.”
“By then it could very well be too late.”
A shiver of cold fear had run down Maggie’s spine at this last comment.
Pressure (Book 1): Fall Page 9