Rain of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  “Kyle.” Wyatt’s voice was soft yet intent.

  Small sparks of light exploded like fireworks as she lifted her fists and rubbed them against her eyelids. She didn’t want to see, but…

  She opened her eyes and took a jagged breath.

  From across the length of sofa, Wyatt reassured her with his dark eyes. His free hand shushed across the sleeping bag and settled over her cold fingers. “You going to tell me about it this time?”

  She acted on long-established instinct. “Tell you what? That any thinking human being would be scared sitting on this powder keg?”

  “I am,” he agreed.

  Though no further tremors shook them, a shudder went through her.

  “Would it help if I built a fire?” Wyatt asked.

  She looked at the hearth and nodded. Not wanting to think, she focused on him bringing in firewood along with a gust of chill.

  “This’ll fix you right up,” he promised, laying the kindling with care and piling on a small log.

  She had the presence of mind to toss him Nick’s lighter. As the flames caught and shadows brightened, he came back, slid under the sleeping bag and tucked it snugly around them. Sitting thigh to thigh, his warmth seeped into her.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world when he put his arm around her and drew her against him. Together, they watched the flames while his question remained between them.

  “Wyatt…”

  “Right here.”

  Yet, after being alone with her secret for nearly a lifetime, she pressed her lips together.

  He squeezed her shoulders. “You’re the strongest woman I know. You can do anything you want.”

  “No … no.” Darkness, black water, and a dead moon stifled her.

  “Kyle.” Wyatt pulled her head down so her ear rested over his heart. “For God’s sake, talk to me.”

  Held warm and solid against him, feeling his pulse, she actually began to consider letting someone into her private nightmare. If she shared her burden, perhaps it might weigh less.

  “It’s bad,” she warned.

  “We can take it.” He bent his head. Something that might have been his lips brushed her temple.

  She took the plunge. “I was in Rock Creek Campground the night the mountain fell. Both my parents died.”

  From the back room, Nick’s soft snoring continued.

  “My dog Max … he was the sweetest Golden. I’ve never had another dog.” She felt tears rising. “I spent the night in a tree. Climbing higher and higher to keep from drowning. The lantern went out… the moon was covered by dust clouds.”

  Once she started, she found she wanted to talk about that long-ago night. About the ground roll, the strange sensation of near weightlessness when the earth lifted, and the constant battering of aftershocks. For a long time, she talked and Wyatt listened.

  “When you think about what happened,” he asked, “what scares you the most?”

  Was it the first shock that had torn through the earth and dropped the Rambler? The sight of her father seized by the shock wave and tossed like a straw man? Max’s frantic barking silenced by an avalanche of sound?

  “When I couldn’t hold on to the tree anymore, I fell into the black water. I managed to make it onto the slide, and I was taken to a hospital. Franny and Zeke drove up from Arizona to get me. Ever since then, what scares me the most is the nightmares I have of finding my family dead … and the fact that I have no idea if they are real.”

  “Anything I could say,” Wyatt pressed his cheek to hers, “would be inadequate.” He gestured toward the bunkroom. “Does Nick know?”

  She shook her head. “Stanton figured it out, back when I first came to Utah and refused to take a fieldtrip to the slide. I’ve never told anyone else.”

  With his free hand, Wyatt smoothed her tousled hair. “I’m the first?”

  “I haven’t talked about it because I couldn’t bear to think about it. Even though I’ve worked on Yellowstone, I’d never been back to Earthquake Lake or Madison Canyon … until I met you there. I tried to put it all away in a corner of my mind as dark as that night, and I’ve always kept the lights on.”

  Wyatt glanced at her candle lantern.

  She looked toward the bunkroom. “I once thought I loved Nick with everything in me, but I could never imagine telling him. He’s such an adrenaline junkie he’d probably tell me to buck up or some other jolly cliché.”

  Wyatt touched the purpling skin below his eye that was forming into a real shiner. “Is there anybody really home?”

  “He’s in there, all right. He just doesn’t let people get close.”

  “A lot of us are like that… me, you …”

  Kyle smiled and dashed at the tears on her cheek. “I guess with my secrets, I’m one to talk.” Settling back into the sofa, she ignored a spring pressing her back. “When you asked me to meet you at the Visitor Center, I honestly thought if I went back, I’d see a weathering landslide and be able to tell myself it no longer frightened me.” She scooted down and settled her head on his shoulder. “Since the trouble started up here, I’m like those Vietnam veterans flashing back, or a guy who stormed the beach at Normandy.”

  “In the last few weeks, you have been different.” He waved his hand to indicate a progression of ups and downs.

  “Crazy?” she asked bitterly.

  His face changed to a look of determination. “I’ll fight anybody who says you’re crazy.”

  “Well, try this on. We all make fun of Brock Hobart making predictions. Yet, now I wonder if he isn’t on the right track. He’s certainly as serious in his beliefs as I am when I say we need to alert them at Headquarters about more big earthquakes. At the very least.”

  Wyatt nodded.

  “Better be sure you want in on this,” she advised. “If we put out a warning and nothing happens, for days or weeks or months, everyone will say we’re nuts.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  SEPTEMBER 28

  How domestic.” Nick’s voice startled Kyle awake. He stood in the door of the bunkroom, a cowlick in his hair. Morning light grayed the windows, and his breath steamed.

  She was shocked to realize she was still in Wyatt’s arms. A bad taste in her mouth from the cigarette and a crick in her neck warred with the languid sensation of waking up next to someone warm. Wyatt stirred, and when she would have leaped to her feet, he placed a restraining hand on her arm beneath the sleeping bag.

  “Oops,” he drawled, not sounding the least sorry. “Must have fallen asleep watching the fire.”

  As Kyle got up slowly and took the few steps to the bunkroom to dress, she wasn’t sure she was sorry either. Fairy tale wisdom had it that one cared for one man at a time, the way she’d once wanted Nick with everything in her. In the field, things weren’t that simple.

  In one of her late-night talks with Franny, her grandmother had told Kyle of her own experience as a young woman in Wyoming. While she was working at the Jackson Hole ranch, two men had courted her, brothers, and she’d confessed to the very real dilemma of loving them both. In fact, the outcome had been so difficult it had caused a family rift so deep that one branch had moved to Texas.

  At least in Kyle’s case, there was no question of having to choose between Nick and Wyatt. Nick’s overtures must have originated in a brandy bottle, and as for Wyatt, he had Alicia.

  Yet, as Kyle’s hand mirror revealed her hair to be a rat’s nest over her shoulders, she could still feel the soothing way Wyatt had smoothed it back from her face when she’d confided in him. Had he kissed her temple or had that been her imagination?

  Breakfast was a strained affair. Nick set plates with such precision she wished he’d plunk them down. The silence went on so long, she finally couldn’t stand it.

  “Last night before we … fell asleep, Wyatt and I were talking about what to do.”

  Nick’s head came up sharply and his eyes shifted from her to Wyatt and back. “I daresay.” His voice was edged with
the kind of violence that had already led to Wyatt’s black eye.

  Kyle slapped her hand on the table. “Oh, for God’s sake! We were talking about the mountain.” With all her heart, she wanted to suggest they go back to civilization, but wasn’t that the coward’s way?

  Wyatt spoke. “I think we should leave this morning, before things get any worse.”

  She expected anger from Nick, derision at the very least. Instead, he pressed his lips into a line and nodded.

  Wyatt cleared the table and started cleaning up. Nick had cooked, and though by their system he was technically exempt from doing dishes, to Kyle’s surprise Wyatt helped with that task as well. They were to leave the patrol cabin as they’d found it: clean, blankets and rations in place, and a fire laid in case someone in need of warmth and food sought shelter there.

  “I think we need to send a new message to Radford Bullis,” Kyle suggested as she booted the laptop. “Wyatt and I talked about warning folks about what’s happening up here.”

  Nick cast another measuring gaze at both her and Wyatt. “I guess you think I’m opposed to that after what I said about our false alarm at Long Valley Caldera.”

  “You’re not?” Wyatt asked.

  “Of course not.” Nick dried a coffee mug. “I’m all in favor of keeping people abreast.”

  “Then let’s do it.” Wyatt polished a spoon.

  Relieved that the two men were willing to accept a truce to discuss the work at hand, Kyle opened a mail file. Fingers poised, she tried to figure out her opening. Short and sweet, or long on jargon?

  She began typing.

  We are leaving Nez Perce Peak this morning due to high heat flow and the danger of hydrogen sulfide gas seeping up a fault along the north side of the mountain. Fields of new fumaroles have appeared on the summit for which we have no gas analysis. Our seismic readings indicate that the park will probably experience more and possibly stronger earthquakes before this cycle of activity subsides.

  A low whistle came from Nick’s pursed lips as he watched over her shoulder.

  She couldn’t read his mood. “What would you say?”

  Nick set aside his dishtowel, pulled out a chair and sat down facing her. “You might have thought I was snoring the night away, but sometimes I do my best thinking by not thinking. This morning when I woke, I had a gut instinct something was even more wrong than we’ve thought.” He gestured toward the computer. “Let’s have a look at the GPS data.”

  While Kyle accessed the information, Nick went on, “I got to thinking about David Mowry being killed miles from here. We’ve been looking at the local GPS stations, but…”

  Wyatt put the last dish into the cabinet and joined them at the table. “You mean what if this thing is bigger than just Nez Perce Peak?”

  “Precisely.”

  Kyle plotted the differential data showing the elevation changes since the New Moon quake on a map. Staring at the large contoured bull’s-eye that covered a quarter of the park and centered on Nez Perce, she said tersely, “You’re right, Nick.”

  He looked at the screen. “About your message to Radford. I think you’d better make it stronger.”

  Alicia entered the Resource Center at eight-thirty to find a wide-eyed Iniki Kuni behind the reception desk. Black bellbottoms and a matching cropped top looked out of place against the scientists’ Park Service uniforms and Alicia’s own jeans and flannel shirt. Before she could ask for news of Wyatt, Iniki thrust a trembling sheet of paper at her.

  We are leaving Nez Perce Peak this morning due to high heat flow and the danger of poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas. Examples of dead wildlife have been found along a previously unmapped active fault that is a conduit for rising magma. Our seismic readings indicate that the park will undoubtedly experience more and stronger earthquakes, without warning and at any time. There is also a definite possibility of a volcanic eruption with Nez Perce Peak as its focus.

  Along with Wyatt, Kyle Stone and a Nick Darden were listed as senders.

  “More earthquakes,” Iniki wailed. “A volcano! Do we need to get out of here?”

  Alicia studied the message again, this time trying to focus on something other than the fact that Wyatt was coming out of the field, which was fine with her since he wouldn’t be spending nights around Kyle Stone anymore. On the second reading, the words ‘poisonous gas’ and ‘dead wildlife’ stuck out.

  “If we needed to get out, they would tell us,” said Alicia. Wouldn’t they?

  “More and stronger earthquakes. Without warning,” Janet Bolido said to Radford Bullis. “What warning does an earthquake ever give?”

  She slapped the printed email onto her cluttered desk. Somewhere in those piles of paper was the approval she was ready to sign for the Wonderland advertising campaign.

  Radford shifted his broad body in the straight-backed wooden guest chair.

  “What does their gibberish mean?” Janet crossed her arms. “A definite followed by possibility of a volcanic eruption? What am I supposed to do with this?”

  Radford tented his fingers and studied them. “You get what the mountain gives you, Ms. Bolido.”

  Janet whacked the offending paper and her French manicured fingernail poked a hole in it. The Chief Scientist was another of those Ph.D.s, a dime a dozen around here. Doctor this and that.

  Her office door opened without a knock and Chief Ranger Joseph Kuni’s tall form filled the frame.

  “Joseph, I need a head’s up opinion instead of the wishy-washy crap the scientists are shoveling.” She passed him the email. “Before he mounted this expedition, Wyatt Ellison told me geologists couldn’t make this kind of prediction!”

  Kuni glanced at the chair beside Radford’s and stayed on his feet. He read, his brow creasing by the time he was done. “This doesn’t look wishy-washy to me. Looks like something changed Ellison’s mind.”

  Radford’s chair squealed against the floor as he got up. “At the very least, we need to issue a press release.”

  Her gaze located the Wonderland campaign papers.

  “I agree,” Kuni said. “The season is winding down, but maybe we should consider closing the concessions in the center of the park early.”

  “No,” Janet argued. “You remember … some guy predicted a big earthquake in Missouri on a certain day?”

  “Iben Browning, New Madrid Fault Zone, December 3, 1990,” Radford said.

  “Scared a lot of folks and nothing happened,” she remembered.

  “We’ve learned a lot since 1990,” Radford countered.

  Kuni nodded.

  Seconds ticked past while Janet considered. Before coming to Yellowstone, she’d known scientists carried more weight here than in an urban park setting.

  She stood. “I didn’t sign on to be a disaster manager, but go ahead and draft the release.” Then, thinking better of giving away too much control, “I’ll look it over before it goes out.”

  When Radford and Kuni were gone, she sat staring for a long time. A lot was riding on her ability to increase revenue at Yellowstone, most notably her rise to the top of the ladder at Interior. She’d never get a Cabinet post, those were political appointees, but she could be the one feeding the Secretary his or her cues.

  Craving a jolt of caffeine, Janet pushed back her chair. She could ask somebody to bring coffee, but she decided to walk over for Kuni’s daughter’s gourmet selection. While she was there, she could look over Radford’s shoulder as he composed the release.

  When she shoved open the door of the Administration Building, the Billings Live Eye van was parked in front of the Resource Center. On the front porch, Iniki Kuni’s hands fluttered as she talked to a reporter.

  Wondering what the media folks wanted with a secretary, Janet decided to evade an interview and turned back toward her office.

  At her desk, she sipped the bitter brew that passed for coffee in the Administration Building and flipped through snail mail with her eyes and ears pealed for the new email signal. Half a dozen
false alarms later, the draft from Radford came through.

  The purpose of this press release is to alert the public and employees of the National Park Service to the recent earthquake activity in Yellowstone. Historically, the most persistent earthquake swarms have been on the west side of the Park. This is where the 1959 Hebgen Lake Earthquake and landslide killed thirty people.

  1959 sounded sufficiently long ago, if not far enough away.

  Other swarms occurred in 1985 and 1986, as well as 1999. This fall’s most recent two-week series culminated in the September 26th magnitude 6.1 event. Following the quake, there has been an unusual lack of aftershock activity. The Utah Institute of Seismology, the USGS, and the Park Service will continue to monitor the situation.

  Janet smiled. No layman would take the time to finish reading this, much less find anything alarming about it.

  Scientists in the field from the above agencies have reported reactivation of dormant faults, along with seepage of poisonous gas. It is their opinion that further earthquake activity will take place, along with the potential for a volcanic eruption in the vicinity of Nez Perce Peak. All park visitors and employees should educate themselves as to the emergency preparedness precautions in the attached file.

  The list included storing water and food, inspecting for hazards like unsecured bookcases. She glanced up at six wide shelves of books towering behind her desk.

  “Bullshit,” she muttered. There was no way to predict earthquakes or volcanoes with any kind of precision. There were plenty of examples of people crying wolf; she’d seen some of the TV shows about false alarms in different parts of the world.

  It would take only a year or so to see results from the Wonderland Campaign. Once it was rolling and she could take some credit, she’d angle for the next promotion back in Washington. All she needed was a little luck.

  With a few clicks of her keyboard and mouse, Janet deleted the paragraph with the warning, along with the emergency-precautions attachment.

  She hit the send button.

  Alicia prowled the aisle of the Pic and Sav Shopping Center in Gardiner. Wyatt was a meat-and-potatoes man, so she’d already picked up some bakers. Now she frowned at the steaks.