He stopped for gas at every all-night convenience store along the way.
Not because he needed that much gas.
But because he needed that much coffee.
At just before dawn he pulled into the sleepy town of Norwood, Missouri.
He’d always hated Missouri. He’d always considered it a backwater state. His first impression, when driving into the state, was the bizarre system they used to number their highways.
Many of the highway designations weren’t numbers at all. They were letters.
He’d thought his GPS was on drugs when it told him to follow Highway N for thirteen miles, then to exit onto Highway LL.
It turned out that his GPS wasn’t on drugs. The people who’d designed and designated Missouri’s highways were.
He pulled into the Sleepy Side Inn, which looked exactly as he’d remembered it from the year before.
The transmission in their old car had finally given up the ghost, and chose a busy street in Norwood to do so. They’d found a transmission shop which gouged them a bit but not too much.
And they’d been lucky to have found the Sleepy Side Inn, where they stayed for four days and nights while their transmission was being overhauled.
Lucky in that, like many independent roadside motels, this one was actually clean and comfortable.
And it had a Cracker Barrel restaurant right next door.
In Tony’s mind, the only thing better than a good night’s sleep was breakfast at Cracker Barrel.
So yes, their previous visit to Norwood had cost them a fortune. But it was a nice little getaway.
The motel was used to drivers who pulled all-nighters on the road, then found themselves too tired to go on past sunrise. So the clerk didn’t bat an eye or bother to ask why he was asking for a room at five a.m.
Luckily, there was a room available.
“It’s right over the pool,” the clerk announced as though he were doing Tony a special favor.
Tony just smiled in appreciation.
He had no intention of going swimming, though. He hadn’t even thought to pack a swimsuit. All he wanted to do was sleep.
Still, he did have a pleasant memory of the pool from his first visit. The first time they stayed there their room was on the other side of the pool, right outside their door.
On their third night at the motel, Hannah hadn’t been able to sleep and shook Tony awake at three a.m.
“Let’s go swimming,” she’d told him.
He sat up in bed and groggily said, “But we didn’t bring bathing suits.”
She said, “So?”
And that got his immediate attention.
Nothing gets a man’s attention faster than the chance to go skinny-dipping with a beautiful woman.
Hannah had already checked out the pool and discovered that the pool lights weren’t working. The pool area was completely dark, save the light from the stars overhead.
And the only person who seemed to be on duty was the night clerk, who spent most of his time glued to the front desk watching television.
The water was cool but not uncomfortable. And the swim was enjoyable.
Until all the lights inexplicably came on half an hour after they dove in.
The entire pool area was brightly lit. So were the underwater lights beneath them.
Giggling like school children, the pair exited the water and sprinted to the bath towels they’d thrown haphazardly over a couple of lounge chairs halfway to their room.
They didn’t take the time to dry off, but rather used the towels to wrap around them to hide their nakedness.
And they would have gotten away with it, had Hannah’s towel not slipped off and fallen to the ground while she was fumbling and trying to get the key into their door lock.
At the exact same time the motel’s maintenance man walked around the corner, on his way to clock in for his four a.m. shift.
The maintenance man had been half asleep to that point, but woke up immediately at the sight of a naked woman trying to get her door open, while her husband stood sheepishly nearby.
Hannah turned to see the man and blushed profusely, trying to cover up and slinging the room key ten feet away in the process.
The maintenance man picked up the key and opened the door for them, telling Hannah, “You look good in red.”
The comment puzzled her for just a moment, until she realized he was talking about her face.
The maintenance man’s day was made. It simply wouldn’t get any better than that.
Tony and Hannah dried off and crawled into bed, laughing for hours. It was an adventure they’d never forget.
Tony looked dismally at the pool this time. The lights were all working and he was a bit disappointed.
But he doubted they’d have much time for swimming or frivolity anyway.
Chapter 18
The thing which had helped kept Tony awake and alert during his night-long drive, and which worked even better than the coffee, was his worrying about Hannah.
Hannah was a scientist by training, and not prone to jumping to conclusions or making unsubstantiated assumptions.
She was as level headed a person as Tony had ever known.
For her to be so upset about… whatever she and Gwen had talked about, he knew she thought it to be serious. Very serious.
And for her to have been so mysterious about the whole thing told him she was worried about their safety and well being.
But why? What could possibly be so troubling it would require him to drive all night to meet her in an out-of-the-way motel room? Why the secrecy? Why tell him not to use his cell phone? And who in heck was she talking about when she said if he used his phone “they” could track him?
Right now he had more questions than answers. And Tony was an inquisitive sort by nature. He didn’t like it when some of the puzzle pieces were missing and beyond his grasp.
He’d been tempted several times during the night to turn his phone back on and to call Hannah. But he’d resisted, partly because he didn’t want her to yell at him for failing to heed her warning.
And partly because he kept hearing her voice. Her plaintive pleas, wrought with worry and fear.
So he’d kept the phone off, just as she’d asked.
He showered to knock the road dust from his body and to relieve some of the tension he was feeling, and finally crawled into bed about seven a.m. He expected to be awake for several hours, tossing and turning with worry about his wife and what she’d gotten herself into.
But the long hours on the road and their toll on his body overruled the stress his mind was going through.
He was sound asleep within minutes.
Tony had the oddest of dreams as he slept. Actually, it was more a memory from long before. A memory from those days when he was a carefree high school student, stumbling through life trying to find his way. A simpler time, when he didn’t have to worry about earning a paycheck or paying bills or traveling for several hours to meet his wife in a tiny town on a ridiculous lettered highway.
He dreamed of an incident he’d long before forgotten. A night at a local carnival, when he and Hannah treasured every Friday night as though it might be their last.
He dreamed of an old gypsy fortune teller, whose name was long gone from the reaches of his memory. She’d seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. Tony was not fazed at the time, assuming it was an old gypsy trick.
Hannah, on the other hand, was certain something evil had happened to the old woman. It had troubled her so much she’d gone into a funk for days. Had snapped at him for the littlest thing. Had demanded of him that he never, ever, take her to another carnival.
“But what about our children,” he’d asked. “It wouldn’t be fair to deprive them of all the fun a carnival has to offer just because some stupid old woman pulled a vanishing act.”
“I don’t care. You can take them yourself.”
Then, after she’d thought about it, she realized she was ju
st being silly. That there was a perfectly rational explanation for the old woman’s disappearance. And perhaps Tony was right. Perhaps it was a trick to get them to return to the tent later in the week, before the carnival packed up and went off to another small town.
Tony awoke in the early afternoon when the maid knocked on the room next door and shouted loud enough to wake the dead, “Housekeeping!”
He wondered why she had to be so loud when she was standing two feet from Tony’s own door. Tony’s door had a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the knob, but apparently that didn’t matter much.
Now that he was awake he pondered his dream. He didn’t dream often, but when he did he could usually trace the dream back to something significant which happened in his life not long before.
He hadn’t been to any carnivals lately. Nor had anyone he knew or knew of abruptly disappeared without a trace.
The only link between recent events and the dream seemed to be Hannah’s state of mind. She didn’t get frightened and illogical often. But she appeared to be now, just as she was that night at the carnival.
It was the only link he could find, so he considered that good enough and stopped looking.
At a quarter past three, Hannah finally knocked on the motel room door.
Tony opened it, expecting his wife to fall into his arms and smother him with kisses.
Not quite.
Hannah stormed past him, furious about the desk clerk’s attitude.
“She didn’t want to give me the room number,” she said. “She said when you checked in they registered you as a party of one. I think she thought you were shacked up with your girlfriend and I was the jealous wife trying to track you down and murder you. I told her if she didn’t tell me the room number I’d pound on every door until I found you.”
He patiently waited for her rant to subside, then smiled and said, “Hi honey.”
“Hi baby.”
“How did you get here? I was expecting the phone to ring to tell me what time to drive to Springfield to pick you up at the airport. Please don’t tell me you took a cab all the way from the airport.”
“No. I changed my plans to keep the government guessing. I called the rent-a-car company and had them change me from in-state to multi-state. Then I drove. And I don’t mind telling you I’m beat.”
“Are you too beat to eat?”
“No, actually I’m starving.”
“Good. Me too. Let’s walk over to Cracker Barrel and get some food, and you can tell me what this is all about.”
Chapter 19
In hushed tones over an early dinner, Hannah recounted the meeting she’d had with Gwendoline and the conversation they’d shared.
Every time the waitress walked near their conversation came to an abrupt halt.
Had the waitress been a bit more paranoid, she might have wrongly assumed the pair was talking about her. But while curious, she wasn’t the conspiracy theory type, so she just chalked this pair of diners up to being nuts.
“So what does Gwendoline expect us to do, exactly?”
“We’re going to do exactly what she asked. We’re going to check her data and analyze her team’s work a second time, and hope we can find a hole in it.”
“Tell me again why this is so important?”
Because if they analyzed the data correctly, it means the Yellowstone Caldera is getting ready to blow.
“So? Mount St. Helens blew in 1980 and it didn’t seem to have affected the world too much. Just evacuate the park and let nature do its thing.”
“You don’t understand, Tony.”
“Then explain it to me, honey. Explain to me why this is so gosh-darned important. And please, stop with the words like caldera and moisture changes. Use good old fashioned layman’s terms that I can understand.”
She thought for a moment and said, “Because Mount St. Helens was a firecracker. The Yellowstone Caldera is a nuclear bomb.”
The smile left his face and he started to turn white.
“Holy cow. How far away from it do we have to be to be safe? Are we safe here?”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Well, how big was the explosion the last time it blew?”
“Well, it’s hard to tell, since the last eruption was three hundred thousand years ago. There aren’t any survivors around to talk to. But it’s thought to have wiped out all life in the western third of what would later become the United States. And they’ve found debris from the eruption as far away as New Jersey.”
Tony’s jaw dropped. “Did you say one third of the United States?”
“Roughly, yes.”
“Wow. But hey, wait a minute. You said it’s been three hundred thousand years. That’s a very long time. How do you know for sure it’s gonna happen now, instead of another three hundred thousand years or so?”
“We won’t know for sure until we double check the team’s data.”
“Well, I personally think that after that long, the odds are pretty short it’s gonna blow in our lifetimes.”
“Maybe. I hope you’re right. But then again, the guy who was here three hundred thousand years and one day ago might have said the same thing. And it didn’t work out well for him.”
“You know me, baby. I don’t know a data point from a meat burrito. How am I gonna help you?”
“You’re going to write me a computer program that’ll take a plethora of data from a variety of sources. Core temps, water temps and pressure at different levels, sulfur readings at different levels. Soil and rock densities. All the stuff that’s in the Geological Survey’s main computer system, I want you to duplicate it as best you can.”
“Okay, but why?”
“So we can compare the data we collected against like data from previous surveys.”
“Pardon me for being a Debbie Downer, honey, but won’t we need all their data to do the comparison? I mean, a program don’t do you any good if it doesn’t interface with the system which holds the data.”
“That’s what’s in the boxes. All the data points we collected, and similar data points from previous years’ surveys.”
“Wow! That’s got to be a lot of data. And you say it’s on paper?”
“Mostly. But there are a handful of disks and thumb drives in the boxes as well.”
“And all of that paper data has to be input by hand? That’s gonna take a lot of time.”
“Days, probably. Good thing I have you to help.”
“Wait a minute. I can’t just write the program and then sit back and look pretty? That’s not quite fair.”
“Nobody said life is fair, Tony. And this could be the most important thing you’ve done in your lifetime.”
“Why?”
“Because the lives of millions of people could hang in the balance.”
Chapter 20
Tony drew a deep breath. Normally he’d have assumed she was punking him. Playing a practical joke.
But this was far too elaborate. She was far too frightened.
This was for real.
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Write me a data record. One which records all of our data points. Our core temperatures at different levels and different locations within the park. Our water to soil ratios. Our sulfur ratios. Ground pressure changes at each depth and at each location. Basically everything we collected and recorded at Yellowstone. Everything.
“Then I want you to write a data comparison program. I need for it to compare all the data points we’re going to put into it, year by year. I want it to be able to establish a trend for me. A trend that will allow us to determine at its present rate, how much time we have before that thing blows.
“I don’t know beans about computer programs, Tony. But you do. So you tell me… is that possible? Can you write me programs that will do all that?”
“Yes. But it’ll take me a couple of days.”
“Good. That’ll give me a chance to do my research.”
“What
research?”
“I need to assemble all the data points from each year and sort them, then put everything in a file that we can export to your system once you’ve finished the program to analyze it all. It’s not hard, but it’ll be time consuming. I also need to go on the Geo Survey site and collect information about the geysers that we didn’t look at.”
“What about the geysers? They were still blowing. We stopped to see ‘Old Faithful,’ remember?”
“Yes. But we stopped as tourists. Not as geologists. We didn’t measure the pressure within the geyser, or how high it blew in relation to previous years. The Geo Survey site tracks that data as well, but it’s done in different years on a different schedule by a different contractor. I can pull that data from their secure website and we can use it too.”
“Honey, how sure of this are you?”
“I haven’t looked at the data yet. But I am sure that Gwendoline is the best in her field, and that what she saw terrified her.
“Once we double check her team’s work, if we see what I think we’ll see, it’ll terrify you too.”
For five days the young couple rarely left their motel room, except to grab sodas and snacks from the vending machines in the motel lobby. Only twice did they walk over to the Cracker Barrel to eat. The rest of the time they ordered in. Pizza one night, then Chinese, then back to pizza again.
“We’re gonna have to get this done,” she finally told him. “Otherwise I’ll have so much soy sauce and pizza sauce in my bloodstream the baby will be born addicted to them.”
On the sixth day the deed was done. Tony had worked the bugs from his new program and had tested it several times with pseudo-data to make sure it worked as intended.
Hannah had consolidated the data. It was sorted, tagged and loaded onto a flash drive.
The two just had to be married together.
Hannah stood over her husband’s shoulder as the results flashed across the screen, then began printing.
He had no clue what it meant, so he turned his head to watch Hannah’s face.
What each of them saw terrified them both.
Tony patiently waited until the printing was done, and Hannah had laid out all the pages on the bed in front of them.
The Yellowstone Event: Book 1: Fire in the Sky Page 6