After a moment: “Very well. Have it your way. You will give the statement to the press. I expect you to be on a plane within the hour.”
“I will do no such thing,” he replied, and Maggie’s respect for the man shot through the roof.
“You, sir, are a public employee. I am the Secretary of Homeland Security. You will do exactly what you are told to do, when you are told to do it, or you will be seeking employment elsewhere.”
Dr. Morgenstern just laughed. “Sir, if this thing goes like we think it’s going to, then the last thing I need to worry about is my future employment status.” And so saying, he jabbed the button disconnecting the call. “Putz,” he added, as if punctuating the action with a verbal exclamation point. All of the Senior Staff, including Maggie and Dr. Golatta, and the two communications technicians in the Comm Center, gave him a rousing round of applause.
When it died down, he looked to one of the technicians and said, “Get me the Governor of Wyoming. We are changing the alert level to red.”
2
Yellowstone National Park
That was four hours ago, and now Maggie was back on watch in the Seismic Center, with a Dr. Rick Golatta who was so subdued, he hadn’t even laid a single hand on her - not even once. She almost welcomed the sleazy gesture, just to have some sense of normalcy returned to her world. Instead, he kept urging her to evacuate.
Half of the park staff was already gone, and most of the other half were scheduled to leave in the morning. People were scared, and looking at the information crawling across her computer screen, Maggie understood why. Perfectly. Which was more than she could say about why she was still there, still on watch, still engaged in the process, even though common good sense was screaming for her to go, right now.
Her father had always admonished her to Use your head for something besides a hat rack, and she tried to live by that principle. She did have a good head, on top of her good body, and while the latter had a habit of trying to get her into trouble, the former kept her out of it - for the most part. But now her body was saying leave and her head was saying no. Whether from some misguided sense of duty, or adventure, or just because she’d worked so damned hard to get here and didn’t want to leave so soon, her head kept telling her to stay. But her body was on the verge of telling her head to shut the Hell up.
Another tremor registered on the graph. “Three point one,” she reported. “Harmonic.”
“Epicenter?”
“Upper Geyser Basin,” she replied. That meant Old Faithful was taking another hit. It also meant the tremors were ranging all over the park.
“Depth?”
“One point six miles.” Shallow. The magma chamber went deep, the top of it being for the most part three miles down. If harmonic tremors were shallow enough to be above the chamber, that meant the magma was moving upward. Toward eruption. Toward them.
Dr. Galotta stared at her for a moment, his face ashen and serious. “You need to evacuate,” he said for the fifth or sixth time. Maggie was losing count.
She was also starting to think he was right.
3
Las Vegas, Nevada
Jake dragged Mary’s butt out of bed at that special time of the morning he always referred to as, Oh-My-God-It’s-Fucking-Early. He knew they wouldn’t be going anywhere for at least a little while, because he also knew his mother was absolutely not a morning person. He woke her early so that her lagging didn’t delay them more than a couple hours. Something told him time was not an abundant resource.
There was nothing definite in this, no information to tell him bad things were coming and they better get going. It was just a feeling. Call it intuition. Call it his Spidey Sense tingling. Call it a firm belief in Murphy’s Law. But the feeling was there, and he wasn’t going to ignore it.
When she’d finally finished her shower and other first thing in the morning ablutions, Jake had shoved her, a few pieces of luggage, three boxes of Christmas presents, and Miss Molly Noodle into his black Cadillac Escalade and headed out. He wanted to get to Gunter’s Gap just as soon as possible, before things got as ugly as he was pretty damned sure they were going to get.
He’d packed a wide assortment of items, not normally associated with a short family visit at the holidays, including every bit of his work clothes, plus steel-toed, insulated boots, but only one decent pair of slacks and a nice shirt and dress shoes. He’d brought a large hunting knife he’d purchased on a whim, years before, but had never used, because he never went hunting, his entire tool box; the contents of his medicine cabinet, including all the vitamins he kept meaning to take, but never did; all of his coffee supplies, including filters and grinder, and all of the canned goods in his cupboard.
He’d briefly considered asking his mother to do the same, but dismissed the idea as requiring far too complicated an explanation for so early in the morning. Instead, he did it himself, sweeping whatever he could find out of her cupboards while she showered.
Before leaving his own house, he’d also briefly considered breaking into The Shrine and removing the leather case and its medal, but dismissed that idea, as well. Not sure why he’d even thought of it. It wasn’t like they were never coming back. Right?
Right?
He did, however, take his dragon-covered, lacquered box of herbal goodies. Something told him he’d be needing that, as well.
He’d also gone to one of those desert toy stores filled with sand buggies and ATVs and the like on his way home the night before, and picked up two five-gallon jerry cans, which he had filled, along with the Escalade, just to be safe. Mary asked him about those as she was tossing her bags into the back of the truck.
“We’re heading into a disaster area, Mom.”
“I talked to Ian last night. He said everything was fine,” she said with a half-asleep voice, never a morning person.
“In Gunter’s Gap, sure. It’s the middle of nowhere. But we gotta drive through eight hundred miles of wreckage to get there.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad!”
“You obviously haven’t been watching the news.”
He’d been up since about midnight. Nothing new, there. Between the bizarre hours the Coast Guard made him keep and the schedule that was no schedule involved in concrete construction in the sun blasted furnace of Las Vegas, he’d gotten used to getting up in the middle of the night, whether or not he’d had anything vaguely resembling a “normal” amount of sleep.
The nightmares didn’t help, either. He averaged two to three a week, ranging in magnitude from the mildly disturbing to the wake up screaming. The last happened rarely, for which he was immensely grateful, and thus far had never happened while he was sharing a bed with anyone else, which was either good (eliminating the need for explanation and possible institutionalization, complete with massive doses of Thorazine) or bad (being pathetic and lonely). For the most part, he’d gotten used to it.
For the most part.
If the military had taught him nothing else, it’s that he could get used to anything – even Pork Adobo made in large greasy quantities while the ship was rocking and rolling in heavy seas. After that, the rest of life seemed a piece of cake.
Between that experience and a growing paranoia about what would happen in the wake of so massive a catastrophe, sleep had seemed at best a secondary concern. And so he’d spent his time fueling his deprived body with guaranteed to curl the toes coffee and taking advantage of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. It had proved to be an eye-opening experience. One by one, reporters from across the western United States added their two cents (and casualty lists) to the growing story of seismic apocalypse. Some kept it together, relaying the facts in a calm and reasoned voice. Others were visibly stunned by it all, their normally wind tunnel-tested hair mussed as if they weren’t able to keep from running their hands through it, just to make sure their heads hadn’t exploded. And one jerk looked as if he was actually enjoying himself with a sick kind of glee. Jake had felt like reaching throu
gh the TV screen and slapping him.
And then had come the truly sphincter-clenching news that the Governor of Wyoming had issued an evacuation order for the entire state. Jake had seen all the gloom and doom hype about the Yellowstone “Supervolcano,” and he’d always classed it as one of those entertaining, yet not to be worried about natural calamities he’d never see in his lifetime, like a meteor striking the Earth. Such things made for great disaster movies, but the odds against them happening were virtually nonexistent.
Until now.
And so, with a growing sense of the potential scale of this madness, he had arrived at her house at four in the morning and let himself in with his key. Molly met him at the door with furiously wagging tail in spite of the early hour, and he sent her straight into Mary’s bedroom to perform the wake up call. It was safer that way. His mother kept a gun in there.
He’d heard Mary mumble some unintelligible curse and throw the covers off, as he discreetly waited out of sight in the hallway (no one needs to see their mother crawling out of bed, after all). She told Molly to “get out of the way,” then stumbled into the bathroom.
Jake took the opportunity to surreptitiously retrieve the .357 Magnum and a box of shells out of her bedside table.
The notion of his mother “packing heat” had always cracked him up, and in the past he’d taken advantage of every opening to give her a hard time about it, but now he was damned glad she had the thing. Something told him they were going need it. Again, nothing definite. But then there was Murphy and his damned Law...
As he heard the shower come on, he’d slipped outside and stashed the gun in his truck.
4
US-95
Middle of Nowhere, Nevada
Freddy Perdue (Rat Fuck Son of a Bitch) was confused. Not about what he was doing, of course. He knew exactly what he was doing. At the moment, he was driving north on Highway 95 in the middle of fucking nowhere, Nevada. And he knew exactly why: because he, by God, wanted to. In spite of what those doctors had said about bad wiring and toxic chemical imbalances and reuptake inhibitors, and every other Goddamned thing they’d told him, over and over again, until he’d been ready to take the nearest baseball bat to their pointed skulls, he knew what was what.
His confusion lay in the mixed emotions he was feeling about it all. He was excited, of course, and aroused. That last had been the end result of the drugs they’d forced on him: a limp dick, for years and years and years. Well, that was over, now. He felt elated at the power. And the hard cock.
This was to be expected, of course. A powerful man like him should feel powerful, and those women - those bitches - should be awed and impressed by it. And grateful. And aroused. His power should turn them on like nobody’s business, but it didn’t, and that made him angry. And so he’d had to kill both of the pig farmer’s daughters.
Couldn’t have been helped, of course. And what couldn’t be helped, should be accepted. Isn’t that what the Serenity Prayer said? Accept the things I cannot change? They’d jammed that particular nonsense down his throat almost as often as they’d jammed the drugs down his throat. But all that was over. They’d set him free, and said he was no longer a threat to himself or to society.
He knew that was all bullshit, of course. He knew how to listen, and listen he had. And so he’d heard what the nurses and the staff had been saying about budget cuts, and the need to get rid of all but the truly crazy. And so he’d been a good little patient, laid dormant, as it were, and it worked!
He’d forgotten why he’d been stuck in that Hell hole, except that it was the Air Force that stuck him there. The Fucking United Fucking States Fucking Air Force. But he had fooled them all, had gotten released, had beaten the bastards. And the first thing he’d wanted to do once the drugs (which he’d sworn up and down on stack upon stack of Holy Bibles that he would keep taking, only to toss them in the first trash can he came across after they’d dropped him in town) had worn off, was to find himself some pussy.
And so he had.
But one had not been enough. Neither had two. After all those years he’d been stuck in that place - what was it? Five? Ten? More? He didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he’d needed to get laid: to fuck and fuck and fuck and fuck to make up for lost time.
And so he had.
He hadn’t had any money of course, so he’d found himself some, and he’d taken it. Somewhere along the way, he found a gun, and had taken that, too. And then he’d found the motor home, just sitting there on the side of that damned pig farmer’s house, so he’d taken that, too.
And the guy’s life.
And the guy’s two daughters.
He’d buried the guy, nice and deep, and then closed up the house, nice and neat, and stashed the asshole’s car in a ravine. It would be weeks, maybe even months before they found it. So it looked just like they had all gone away for the holidays.
His daughters weren’t around to tell anybody anything - ever again. They had been the ones who gave him the most trouble. What other choice did he have, but to kill them?
And so he had.
But now all he had was one left: one stupid, whining bitch, trussed up and gagged in the back of the motor home, who cried every time he took her up the ass. Stupid bitch. What else was she good for? She should be grateful he even went to the trouble to lubricate first. But was she? Hell no!
Still, he couldn’t get rid of her. Not yet. One was not enough, but it was better than none. He’d need to find another - two others - before he could toss her in the trash where she belonged. And of course he did! After all he’d been through, after all he’d been denied by those bastards at the hospital, by the United States Fucking Air Force, he needed this, was owed this, deserved this. It made perfect sense.
So why did it feel somehow wrong? Why did it feel like he had gotten lost somewhere along the way, and had simply gone too far? That was what made him confused, and he didn’t like it one bit.
So he had, essentially, two problems: he needed to figure out why he was confused, and he needed more pussy. The first, he couldn’t do anything about, at least not right that moment. The second, however, he could. And when he saw the sign for Tonopah, Nevada, and saw it was only ten miles up the road, he knew where to go.
5
Tonopah, Nevada
Dani was pissed. She stood outside Henry’s Car Repair, in the dark. It was cold, but her coat was open. On top of everything else, the zipper had broken this morning, and she had to hold her coat closed by shoving her hands deep into the pockets and wrapping it around her.
The mechanic had told her they opened at “six o’clock sharp!” He’d lied. It was now six-twenty, and not a creature was stirring, except for the occasional truck slicing its way up or down Highway 95 at thirty-five miles an hour. She should just say to Hell with it, go back to the motel, and warm up with a cup of bitter Free In-Room Coffee.
She could see the motel from where she stood, just across the highway. Its Vacancy sign blinked erratically in the darkness. Like many of the places along the way, it sported seasonal decorations. Some places had them all lit up, some, like the repair shop, did not.
Christmas Eve, and the place was festooned with decorations, including several strings of lights. Happy Holidays! But since the shop was closed, the lights were dark and cold, as was her mood and her body.
Bah Humbug!
She felt sorry for herself. That’s where the dark mood came from. She needed to get over it. She had chosen this life, and choices had consequences. This was one of them.
Okay, so maybe the life had chosen her in the beginning, but she was the one who decided to stay with it. She could have done other things. She had a degree in English Literature, after all. She hadn’t wasted all her time, just lying on her back. Of course, a Liberal Arts degree barely qualified her to flip burgers in this economy, but she could have gotten her Master’s, could have become a teacher, could have done a lot of things, but she had chosen to rema
in a whore.
And whores don’t have boyfriends.
Why the Hell couldn’t she stop thinking about Jake? Why did she feel like she should just go back to Vegas and see what happens? For that matter, why didn’t she just go back to the hotel, instead of standing outside freezing her butt off?
She was obsessing, and she knew it. She had somehow and for some reason latched onto Jake like a life-preserver; had transferred her desire to be done with this life onto him. And why? What made him so different, so special? And yes, okay, she somehow felt right when she was with him. How crazy was that? It had to be some kind of psychological disconnect. The guy was a client! Not a boyfriend. He paid her for sex.
But that had been secondary, kind of like dessert. He seemed to really want to be with her, to have her around, to laugh and to joke and to snuggle on the couch, in the dark, watching slasher movies into the wee hours. And then they’d have sex. Good sex. Really good sex.
And then he’d pay her.
She looked at her watch, a thin, gold lady’s Rolex she’d gotten from an older gentleman who had never actually had sex with her. He’d been lonely, his wife had recently died, and all he’d wanted was company. It had all been rather sweet and domestic. And then his daughter found out, confronted him, and he’d been embarrassed. He’d given her the watch on their last evening together. So sorry. Can’t keep consorting with a whore. Here’s a lovely parting gift.
She groaned aloud and said, “Enough!” to no one and everyone. It was six-thirty. She was cold. And the guy still hadn’t shown up. I’ll give it five more minutes, she said to herself, and shivered.
And then headlights rounded the corner, slowly, and a motor home came into view.
Eight
“Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily”
William Shakespeare
Henry IV
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Pressure (Book 1): Fall Page 10