Pressure (Book 1): Fall

  Dani’s hand magically appeared on Jake’s thigh. He smiled, though he doubted she’d be up for anything intimate, given recent events.

  “I’ll stay in the truck,” Charlie said, standing and pulling some cash out of his left front pocket. He searched for a ten, found one, and tossed it on the table. But then he looked at the wad in his hand and gave an ironic laugh. “What the Hell,” he said. “If Yellowstone goes Ker-Flooey, this ain’t gonna be worth a whole lot. Might as well blow it on a hotel room.”

  Mary and Dani went out ahead, ostensibly to take care of Molly as Jake paid the bill. Charlie hung back so they could make some sort of plan for the following day. They walked out into the darkness. Jake lit a cigarette.

  The sound started low - more like something they felt than heard. The three other people in the parking lot besides Mary, Dani, Jake and Charlie, all stopped and looked toward the east at the same time. No mistaking it by then. Like deep thunder going on and on, it rolled across the miles toward them, sounding like a herd of bison driving bulldozers, unforgiving and inexorable and enormous.

  Jake didn’t immediately know what it was, for certain, but he knew, nonetheless. Somewhere in the unfathomable depth of his gut, that part of the human psyche that just knows when something bad has happened, he knew.

  “Get in the truck!” Jake yelled to his mom and Dani as he raced back to the diner, Charlie right on his heels. By the time they’d gotten to the door, the women still hadn’t moved, were still staring towards the east. “Do it now!” Jake shouted again, and then flew through the door and inside.

  The TVs behind the bar confirmed the worst case scenario, as did the faces of the people watching.

  “…We repeat. The Yellowstone supervolcano has erupted…”

  Fifteen

  “Who can run the race with death?”

  Samuel Johnson

  1

  The Yellowstone Caldera

  When Mount St. Helens erupted, it spewed somewhere around two-thirds of a cubic mile of magma, ash and pumice, and so its magma chamber was relatively small. The one beneath Yellowstone, however, had the capacity to hold thousands of cubic miles, and so when the first vent erupted, it was nowhere near big enough to release all that pressure. And so a second one opened; and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and on and on, like a gigantic zipper until it had opened a fifteen hundred square mile caldera.

  Any explosive eruption is bad, and anyone caught too near it dies. There is no escape. Pyroclastic floes ripping at four hundred miles an hour and wielding a temperature of five hundred degrees incinerated everything and everyone in Jackson and Cody, Wyoming, Billings, Bozeman and Butte, Montana, and Idaho Falls and Pocatello, Idaho.

  It was only the beginning.

  2

  Winnemucca, Nevada

  “...We repeat, the Yellowstone supervolcano has erupted.”

  Jake looked at Charlie. Charlie looked at Jake.

  “Time to go!” Charlie said, and started to run. Jake stared at the TV for a moment longer, then followed.

  Sound travels at over six hundred miles an hour. In Winnemucca, Nevada, which lay roughly four hundred and twenty-five miles from what had once been Yellowstone National Park, less than thirty-five minutes earlier, Jake shoved Molly into the back seat of his SUV, feeling the distant rumble in his toes as the sound vibrated his eardrums. He tossed a glance toward Charlie, who was scrambling into his truck.

  He’d spent a significant chunk of the drive up to that place running disaster scenarios over and over in his mind. He should be ready for this, and should not be on the verge of freaking the fuck out, but having the worst case confirmed sent his balls scurrying up into his chest cavity, where his pounding heart felt like it was playing a Led Zeppelin drum solo.

  This was not good. This was so far beyond not good that they weren’t even in the same time zone. They needed to head west, and fast.

  He knew, from having watched The History Channel, and the Discovery Channel, and National Geographic, and every other damned thing shouting “the End is near” through the TV set, that if Yellowstone ever erupted, the first hundred miles in all directions would be obliterated. Nothing would survive. Tens of thousands of people gone within a matter of minutes, incinerated as super-heated pyroclastic floes scoured the landscape at several hundred miles an hour. They were beyond that hundred miles, but it didn’t - by a long shot - mean they were out of danger.

  He slammed the SUV in gear and proceeded to drive exactly like a maniac, blasting through the truck stop parking lot, dodging cars and pickups and mini-vans and eighteen-wheeled monstrosities that all had the same idea. The grill of Charlie’s big rig stayed right on their ass, filling Jake’s rearview mirror, it’s deer-catcher bumper looking like an evil grin, that for some reason made Jake think of the Stephen King movie, Maximum Overdrive, as they bounced onto the roadway and raced North up US 95. In this, they caught a break.

  Most of the escaping vehicles turned in the opposite direction once they exited the parking lot, apparently choosing the Interstate, heading west, straight toward the disaster area that was Reno. Jake and Charlie and the rest might have joined them, but to get to Gunter’s Gap, they needed to go North first, before turning West, and so US 95, it was.

  They snaked through town, past the casinos and hotels and convenience stores and curio shops, ignoring the red lights and traffic laws and basic safety practices. In his mirror, he saw Charlie clip a parked car, ripping its front quarter panel clean off. Jake didn’t stop. Neither did Charlie.

  As they cut through the night toward a future where their immediate destination was the only certainty, Jake’s mind started to tick off what the next few days were going to be like. Once people realized what happened, everybody and their grandmother, within five hundred miles would be jamming the roads headed west, or south, or anywhere but toward Yellowstone, strangling the highways with traffic the like of which hasn’t been seen since Woodstock. And this time, the people weren’t going to have all those good drugs to keep them calm.

  Soon, the eruptive column coming out of Yellowstone would be filling the sky with hundreds of millions of tons of ash shooting more than thirty miles into the stratosphere. Air travel routes crisscross the area like an aerial game of Cat’s Cradle. Any planes flying through it would start dropping out of the sky, as their engines, choked with ash, simply stopped working.

  Within a matter of hours, over half of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho were going to be buried under several feet of ash and pumice, falling like a deadly, choking blizzard, killing hundreds of thousands within a day or so and trapping however many people hadn’t managed to evacuate. For them, the end would be every bit as certain as those within the first hundred miles; it’d just take more time.

  Long before that happened, the blackouts would start. One by one the power transformers would be getting their contacts gummed up by all that volcanic crap, plunging another ten-plus million people into darkness, and with the darkness would come chaos. Darkness spawns evil deeds like locks keep honest people honest: no streetlights to reveal skulking figures, no burglar alarms to warn of intruders, no electronic locks, just shadows and free access to wherever the Assholes wanted to go.

  All those red and green and white and blue holiday lights, strung across the eaves of thousands upon thousands of houses - where children waited snug in their beds like so many Yule tide insomniacs - would be winking out. There would be no blinking, flashing trees to be opening presents under; no Hallmark store-bought Star Trek ornaments; no Mr. Spock telling people “Happy Holidays,” or “Live long and prosper.” Not this year. Maybe not for a lot of years. Maybe not ever again.

  It looked like Christmas was going to be officially cancelled.

  They made it to Highway 140, roughly thirty-five miles north, where it split from US 95 at a crossroads in the absolute middle of nowhere. There was no town, and only a single light, dim with road dirt and dead insects, to indicate the turnoff.

 
Jake took the turn far too fast, slamming his three passengers up against the passenger doors. Molly yelped as she suddenly found herself in Dani’s lap.

  “Slow down, Jake,” his mother cautioned. He thought of ignoring her, and probably would have, but he glanced in the mirror in time to see Charlie slam on his brakes and overshoot the turn. He slowed to a stop and waited at the side of the road. They were the only ones on it.

  He watched the big rig back up, then take the turn at an almost stately pace. He was about to put the SUV back in gear, when his cell phone chirped. He stared at it a bit, marveling at the idea that they still had reception. Won’t last much longer, he thought, then answered the call.

  “Jake?” Charlie’s voice spoke into his ear.

  “Yes?”

  “Please don’t do that again.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m gonna have to clean out my shorts.”

  “Sorry,” he replied, and he actually was. He needed to get control. He needed to stop panicking.

  “Shall we continue?” His friend asked.

  “Roger that,” Jake replied, and eased the SUV into gear.

  3

  Denio Junction, Nevada

  Highway 140 was pitch-black dark, but more or less straight until just south of the Oregon border. Being the middle of nowhere, there was hardly anyone else on it. When they reached the town of Denio Junction, right at the Oregon State Line, predictably, Mary, Dani, and Molly needed to answer the call of nature.

  Jake felt certain they’d have to find a discreet patch of sagebrush, because everything in the town would understandably be closed at just past midnight on Christmas morning, but the disaster and the greed bourne of it proved him wrong. The grandiosely-named Big Denio Pit Stop and Grocery stood open and selling gas - at twenty bucks a gallon. He slapped five twenties on the counter, then topped off the tank as he dutifully walked Molly.

  He lit a cigarette as Charlie joined him at the side of the road. “Do we have a plan,” Charlie asked, “or are we just driving West like insane people?”

  “Pretty much just West like insane people,” Jake replied. “Sorry about the turnoff.”

  Charlie made a show of picking his underwear out of his ass crack and grinned. “Hope your uncle has power so I can do laundry.”

  “I’ll slow it down.”

  “I would appreciate it.” Charlie looked off into the night in the general direction they were headed. “Should be a lot of hills up ahead. That’s going to slow me down anyway.”

  Jake nodded. “We turn South for a bit on the 395, then pick up the 140 again. That’ll take us all the way to Klamath Falls.”

  He looked at Charlie’s truck, parked along the side of the road. “Might find fuel there, if you need it.”

  “At twenty bucks a gallon? I don’t carry that much cash.”

  Jake looked at the station and shook his head. “Greedy bastards.”

  “You know it’s gonna get worse, don’t you?”

  “Babies in the surf?”

  “No - well, yeah, but that’s not what I meant,” Charlie replied. “From here on out, everything that was, is over. All bets are off. Dog eat dog, stick a knife in your mother, every man for himself.”

  Jake nodded. “Yeah,” he said with a deep sigh. He looked at the sign declaring the inflated price of fuel. “And the vultures are already picking at the carcass.”

  Charlie looked toward the station, where Mary and Dani were just exiting. “I don’t want to sound overly paranoid, but you remember what New Orleans was like after Katrina.” Jake nodded, ruefully, remembering the rumors of rape gangs they’d heard. “With two women, we need to assume everybody is a potential asshole.”

  4

  OR 140

  Near Warner Canyon, Oregon

  They entered Oregon about half-past midnight. Jake tried with minimal success to dial in some kind of radio broadcast without taking his eyes off the winding highway as they cut through the darkness, their world limited to the extent of the SUV’s high-beams. He heard mostly static, but every now and then he’d pick up a few disconnected sentences. The news was all bad.

  They hit the junction with 395 about an hour out of Denio, and Jake made sure to take the turn slowly. A scant five miles further on, they reached a town called Lakeview, presumably named by a blind man, because the nearest water sat five miles to the South, and well out of sight. The place was utterly dark. Not a street light, not a flicker from an insomniac’s window, nothing glowed to cut the night, except them.

  Shadows loomed from all sides, making the town look like a scene from every bad horror movie ever made. Vehicles parked on side streets looked like hulking beasts until they were right on top of them, mailboxes looked like menacing men, and a stray dog dashing out in front of the SUV made Jake think of Baskerville’s hound. They only lacked drifting fog to complete the picture.

  Jake caught sight of the sign for Highway 140 in the loom of his headlights, just before he would have missed it. He braked and turned, hoping it wasn’t too abrupt for Charlie, but he needn’t have worried. The darkness (and Jake’s vivid imaginings) made them go so slow, he could have doubled his speed and Charlie still could have negotiated the maneuver while reading a book. He picked up speed when they reached the outskirts of town.

  They rolled through the empty expanse of highway, into the darkness, into a future where nothing could be taken for granted. Charlie had spoken the truth. Life as they knew it was over, and everything they’d considered normal had gone up in an explosion of fire and rock and ash.

  There would be no more easy days of lazy irresponsibility; no more trips to the mall; no more iced mochas, or downloaded movies on demand, or checking in with the latest version of social media. No more date nights to fancy restaurants, no more Reality TV. Nothing but the endless darkness and the unchecked human capacity for evil.

  His gloom and doom reverie snapped to an abrupt close when his mind registered what his eyes had been seeing for three or four minutes: a loom of light, up ahead, beyond the next rise. He slowed to a stop, right there in the middle of the road, thankful that Charlie, behind him, had been paying attention, and had done the same. He turned off his lights and thought of the words his friend had said.

  Everybody is a potential asshole.

  Sixteen

  “I can’t understand why people

  are frightened of new ideas.

  I’m frightened of the old ones.”

  John Cage

  1

  Charlie saw the SUV’s tail lights flash red. Seeing the gap between them shorten abruptly, he downshifted and pumped the brake pedal to slow down. Naturally, of course, Jake didn’t realize just how hard it was to stop a seventy-five thousand pound truck, and so he ended up having to stomp down on the brakes to keep from slamming into his friend’s rear end.

  Fucking car drivers, he thought, repeating the notion that had come into his head a few dozen times a day, every day of the nine years he’d spent on the road. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d been cut off, or had cars merge onto the highway directly in front of him, or pull into his lane and then slow down, forcing him to brake and downshift like crazy, and resist the urge to just plow right over the suicidal morons. Won’t be happening much anymore, he mused, smiling. Maybe some good would come from the end of the world, after all.

  He popped the air brakes, heard the reassuring hiss that told him they’d engaged, then shut down his engine and turned out his lights. Darkness dropped like a bag suddenly thrust over his head, and he blinked, as if that might eliminate his blindness. It didn’t.

  He climbed down from his cab and made his way over to the SUV, groaning, as his tired leg muscles reluctantly carried him forward. This had been one long damned day, and it was still nowhere near to being over.

  Jake stood at his open door, illuminated by the interior light. He faced forward, toward the direction they’d been going. “You see that?” He said, as Charlie stopped at his side.


  Charlie saw nothing, at first, and said so.

  “The light,” Jake said, pointing toward the top of the hill ahead of them.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, seeing the glow. “Is that why we stopped?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have no idea what it could be coming from.”

  “A town?” Charlie asked.

  He shook his head. “According to the map, we’re miles from anywhere.”

  “A power plant, or something?” He was clutching at straws, mainly because he had no idea what had made his friend so cautious.

  “Maybe,” Jake said, sounding far from certain.

  “Why don’t we go find out?” Charlie said, starting forward. “Instead of freezing our balls off wondering.”

  Jake grabbed his arm and held him back. “Let’s take this slow,” he said.

  “Why?” Charlie asked. “What the fuck is going on, Jake?”

  “I second the question,” Mary said from inside the SUV.

  Her son looked in at her and said, “Stay in the car,” then started walking, this time pulling Charlie, instead of holding him back. When they’d gotten far enough to be out of earshot, he explained, “It’s like you said: treat everyone we meet like a potential asshole.”

  “Okay,” Charlie said. “I’m now officially paranoid.”

  “Then be quiet about it.”

  They walked up the rise, in the middle of the empty road. As they got closer to the top, Charlie could hear engine noises, and what sounded like... “Is that laughter?” He whispered. It sure sounded like it. To be precise, now that he thought about it and could analyze what he was hearing, it sounded like drunken laughter.

  Jake slowed and slid his way toward the shoulder. Charlie followed. Crouching as they reached the crest, they eased forward until they could just peer over the top.

  Three cars lined the sides of the road below, behind two pickups of the variety Charlie always associated with men compensating for a small penis, parked nose-to-nose, blocking the highway. Several men were milling around, tipping back cans of something Charlie felt sure had to be beer with one hand, and holding shotguns or handguns with the other. “Road block,” he said, as his brain told him what it was.