K.R. Nilsen

THE YELLOWSTONE TRAPS

NUMBER 1

For my daughters, Shyloah and Willow, who share the wonders of this small planet with me.

MAP

The geological chaos depicted in the pages of this novel is based on scientific research regarding two volcanic super-eruptions of the 1,500-square mile Yellowstone caldera inside Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, one that overwhelmed the continent 2.1 million years ago, and a similar catastrophic event that occurred 640,000 years ago.

A tourist map of Yellowstone National Park, circa 1900.

Prologue

Earthquake Swarms Rattle Yellowstone National Park

By Colin Bradendon, United Press International

CHEYENNE, WYOMING – Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey at Yellowstone Volcano Observatory reported over the weekend the re-emergence of frequent earth tremors within the 1,500 square mile volcanic caldera that lurks under much of Yellowstone National Park, similar to the unusual outbreak of earthquake activity the week of Christmas-New Year’s, 2009.

Officials monitoring the park’s geology also report pronounced geothermal activity, specifically the upwelling of great volumes of superheated water into the depths of Yellowstone Lake, the largest high-elevation freshwater lake in the continental United States.

Yellowstone Supervising Geologist Wesley Crouch issued a statement yesterday indicating that the frequency of seismic activity is substantially above customary background levels. The strength of the earthquakes is near or exceeds levels that can be sensed by people within the parklands, the largest measuring 3.8 as recorded by seismometers along the eastern margins of Yellowstone Lake just before midnight Saturday. He said that although tremors well below the threshold of human senses were quite common in the parklands, multiple tremors that could be experienced directly by humans were rare.

Yellowstone’s park-wide caldera is the largest non-marine volcanic structure on Earth. Scientists believe the caldera erupts violently at intervals of between 600,000 and 800,000 years. According to park officials, no volcanic eruption of any sort has been recorded within the Yellowstone caldera for 70,000 years and the caldera has not erupted catastrophically for at least 640,000 years. Small, localized hydrothermal steam explosions do rock the park on average once a year, and large steam explosions that can produce shallow craters in the earth occur about once every other century.

Pressed about the potential dangers posed by the increased seismic activity, experts express little concern about the return of elevated earthquake chatter to Yellowstone and have issued no warnings to the public. However, park officials have closed additional acres of land in and around the popular Norris Geyser Basin because of elevated surface temperatures. Some areas of Norris have been off limits for more than a decade. Now, additional property and thermal features have been added to the list of closures.

Meanwhile, internet forums and chat rooms are rumbling with speculation about Yellowstone’s latest behavior. Armageddonline.org is bristling with messages that call Yellowstone earthquakes precursors to a civilization-crippling super-eruption. Other sites and blogs post text from those who see Yellowstone as a triggering mechanism that could bring about worldwide tribulation this decade, as foretold by the Mayan long-count calendar, by the prophesies of the medieval seer Nostradamus and as foretold in Revelations in the New Testament of the Bible as well as in passages in half a dozen other sacred texts around the world.

“I won’t speculate about such things,” said geologist Crouch when asked about the popular prattle on the internet. “But I can assure you, the public has about as much chance of being harmed by an eruption at Yellowstone as being flattened by a hunk of space junk.”

PART I

Chapter One

Earth’s neighbor swelled as it breached the horizon over Yellowstone Lake. In full phase, the moon saturated the landscape throughout Yellowstone National Park with chalk white. The midnight shine reflecting off the high-elevation lake waters was piercing enough to make a nocturnal mammal squint.

Elizabeth Embree slipped along a game path out to Plover Point, on a southern peninsula jutting into the lake, taking care to scramble over a washboard of fresh shallow fractures in the earth’s surface. At the water’s edge, among otter tracks, she nestled down on the weathered rock and surf rubble and raised her nose to sniff the chilly atmosphere. She pulled long slow drafts of air into her nostrils. Somewhere in the ether she sensed a wisp of stinking hydrogen sulfide. Born female, she could detect smells twice as readily as her male counterparts. She knew that the otter playing and fishing at the water’s edge had an olfactory sense a hundred times more acute than her own. The otter, she suspected, could tell her a thing or two about what was going on somewhere in the moonglow over the grand watery expanse.

Liz’s olfactory apparatus was the first instrument she would employ on her new assignment. The supervising geologist at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory made calls to the Bureau of Mines, the University of Utah at Provo and the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington to see if the institutions could recommend someone who specialized in working in aquatic hydrothermal environments. The geologist and the park’s resident biologist had plenty of reason to suspect some sort of anomaly was beginning to affect the health of the 136-square-mile lake. The men concluded that someone with specialized talent ought to come down and spend time in and around the largest body of water in the two million-plus acre park. Officials recommended a professor of geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whom some were already familiar with. Liz got the call.

The dew point passed and a film of moisture collected on cooling surfaces. Liz rubbed the slick into her facial skin and into the corner of her eyes where the few hairline wrinkles were becoming more persistent now that she was approaching forty. The woman was as tall as any man alive during the American Revolution and as sinewy as pioneer women walking in the wheel ruts of Oregon-bound wagon trains. She pulled her lean frame forward on her stomach, flipped her coal black ponytail behind her, blinked her ice-green eyes clear and extended a hand into the lake water.

Wyoming winters could pull temperatures down to frightening lows, as abysmal as minus forty. The cryogenic days always left an indelible mark on the lakes and rivers of Yellowstone; they ran as cold as the devil’s blood everywhere, except where a few were warmed by geothermal hot springs and effluent from the geyser basins. Yellowstone Lake always averaged a frosty forty-one degrees Fahrenheit. Liz expected her long slender fingers to plunge into ice water and be throbbing within the minute. The cool caress of June-warm pond water was not expected. She raised an eyebrow. “Huh.”

The geophysicist sniffed the night air again and began a methodical scan of the near shores of the twenty-mile-long lake. Trying to focus her eyes in the glare of reflected moonlight, she fixed her gaze on the forests to the southeast. Along the shoreline of the lake basin in all directions, the evergreens built a bootblack wall of shadows. Far to her right, to the south, the trees cast the silhouettes of skeletons.

Northward, the lake ran to an infinite horizon more than a dozen miles away. She could make out nothing distinct over the distance. The light seemed to be scattered and diffused, while the dark images a few miles directly across the lake exhibited razor-sharp outlines. She studied the dull mirage intently. On such a clear, cool fall night, with no ground fog and on the edge of a lake of deep, frigid waters, she thought she ought to be able to see much farther. In a few days, she speculated, she might know why her vision was truncated. For now, her hunch would do: heat! The northern expanses of the lake, she thought, were even warmer, perhaps much warmer, than where she was perched.

The geophysicist ran her tongue into the space where a wisdom tooth had been extracted. Working the tooth hollow absentmindedly, she slithered into the wet gray memory banks stored in her skull. There she tiptoed up to a geyser under the Vatnajokull glacier in Iceland, sitting right atop the tectonic rift in the Atlantic’s mid-oceanic ridge. It was an impossible, steam-soaked sight in the headlamps, standing in hot geyser rain at the bottom of a vast amphitheater of dirty glacier ice, which, in turn, towered over 1,000 feet in elevation above the ice cavern. Maybe Yellowstone Lake, like the Icelandic ice sheet, was playing host to a new submerged geothermal feature near the north shore.

In the depths off Storm Point more than a dozen miles to the north, United States Geological Survey scientists had discovered a mile-long, 120-foot tall bulge in the lake bottom strata that they dubbed the inflated plain. It oozed superheated water. Maybe the inflated plain needed a second look. With an array of shallow sediment thermal probes, she could, she thought, determine what was underway beneath the lake.

Liz stood up from her sedge bed and took one last glance at the gleaming ocean of moon water. Tomorrow, she promised herself, she would download the most recent global positioning satellite, gravimeter and Landsat thermal outflow data from the park network and compare it with earlier data. Maybe it would reveal some clues. She scanned down to the dead forest in the southeast corner of the lake. Perhaps some data would shed light on the forest die-off there.

As she rolled her plans about in her cranium, her eyes detected a distant blur in the utter silence of the night. She squinted and raised a palm over her eyes to shield them from the bright lunar photons. Wolves—three, no, four, six, and moving away toward the deadwood—running like demons, as if committed to chasing prey. Liz could see nothing ahead of them in the void.

Homo sapiens, she knew, was not the top predator in the park. That distinction belonged to the grizzly bear, a species that would take down a human from time to time. The cougar could do the same, particularly young children walking out of view from their parents or a small adult woman. Rarely did a big cat attack an adult male. Wolves were of no concern. There was no record anywhere of wolves troubling a human, even though folklore everywhere was riddled with the blood fear of fanged attack.

On the trek back to her Plover Point research station cabin, Liz was more concerned with the possibility of running into a bull moose. The rut was underway, now that the days were shorter and crisp with fall cold. Big males were roaming all over the park day and night, looking for  mates. On a full moon night in autumn, there was always the possibility of wandering along a path only to find a moose moving on it, too.

Amidst the patchwork quilt pattern of light and dark along the trail, there was nothing stirring, no pops or snaps to perk up an ear. Liz drifted into a rhythmic cadence as she moved rapidly through the forest near the lake. She always felt strong, on top of her game, at the start of a new project. Fresh problems, new material to work with, the buzz of data, matching intellect against intellect—all of it was an opiate, a high. Opportunities like this always triggered a manic-like state. When she was immersed in it, she wished nothing more than for the heady sensations to stay, to make themselves at home permanently. But they never stayed. Endorphins decayed. The mood slipped and would usually give out completely after waking in the morning. Liz often said she could wash her good spirits down the drain with a hot morning shower two weeks into any new project.

Mood was complicated by the duration of time she was away from her ten-year-old daughter, Pelee. The child was safe with her father and busy at the new intentional-community farm in western Minnesota, the place her ex-husband founded and called Independency. They would reunite soon enough after the work at Yellowstone. Liz was always sick with longing for her daughter’s voice and antics by the second week on the job. Still, Pelee so loved the life at Independency farm that she complained vehemently when confined with her mother in a small apartment near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston.

Liz reached the small research cabin after midnight. The two-room log building had been built a century ago by cavalry troops as one of six remote outposts in the park. All six still existed, and two of them, including the South Arm cabin, had been converted into remote walk-in or float-in research stations for scientists. The cabin’s solar panels gleamed under the moon in stark contrast to the raft of ebony antennae sprouting from the roof. She entered the lunar-frosted front workroom, felt her way to the bunkroom door and slipped through. She kicked off her boots and tossed her knit wool skullcap and parka into the inkwell of night. Feeling for her sleeping bag, she zipped it open, rolled in and curled into a fetal ball to conserve body heat until the bag’s interior warmed. The devil with data retrieval tonight.

The confines of the arctic sleeping cocoon worked its magic. Within minutes, the little body pocket was a warming oven, perfectly comfortable for easing the night traveler off on the sweet voyage of nod. Liz could sleep the sleep of ages. Chained to the gears of hummingbird metabolism by day, she went into torpor within minutes of closing her eyes at night. Down she would fall through the sedimentary layers of sleep’s deepest canyons only to splash into fathomless and weightless dream oceans. The falling and floating, Liz tried to hold onto them and not let the sensations out of her grasp. They were such simple yet exquisite pleasures.

Liz drifted out of the reach of dreams. The endless hours of travel the day before, the early briefing, the long boat ride and trek to the research station and her late foray out to the lake had conspired to rob her of consciousness. She slumbered as deep as coma.

The earth would not sleep. Deep in the night the cabin timbers encompassing the sleeping woman rattled and chattered quietly as persistent shallow earth tremors infiltrated the foundation stones and pylons.

Chapter Two

“Shhh, shhh, look, have a look. Don’t move now.” Abel Whittemore, peeking through circular prescription lenses, pointed a finger toward an expanse of greenhouse glass. Two ten-year-old girls beside him turned to the windows and slapped their hands over their mouths and giggled.

“Shhh. See it?” whispered the forty-five-year old.

“Mmm hmm.”

Beyond the glass, a yellow ochre form, all legs and head, was sniffing at the building. A moose fawn stretched its neck as far as its vertebrae would allow, reaching over a protective fence. The black nose of the young animal twitched close to the glass. The man smiled as he watched the two children react to the comic face of the young creature just a dozen feet way. It seemed to be longing for the lush vegetation growing inside the building.

Abel rose early every morning and headed uphill to the greenhouse complex to await the sun. There were crops to check and temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide levels to record in the dozens of sprawling glass and polycarbonate grow-houses at Independency village, arrayed along the ledge-riddled glacial moraine country of Prospect Bluffs Township, Minnesota.

“Dad, can Jen and I go up to the CC? We want to help Penny make breakfast.”

“Sure, go ahead. Go quietly out the far door so as not to startle the young moose, okay? And watch for its mother. She should be close by. Stay clear of her.”

“Okay.”

Rays of early sunlight topped the trees and illuminated the greenhouse. In minutes the temperature in the glass enclosure soared. Abel went through the large structure and lifted hinged glass panels off cold frames and row covers off crops on the floor. A sea of Dutch mache, Swiss chard, beet tops, mizuna, komatsuna, bok choi and radicchio lettuce—all young, tender greens—greeted the light. He went from greenhouse to greenhouse for an hour, lifting glass, pulling poly covers and bringing to light a riot of edible greens and herbs.

The complex of thirty-six growing houses was the cornerstone of the new town and one of its larger financial hearts. Each morning, dozens of people from the little village converged on the enclosures and went to work tending the plants, sowing new seeds, harvesting mature crops for wholesale market and picking free food for lunch and dinner.

The great greenhouse array was the culmination of Abel’s pioneering research into the development of indoor year-round food production. Most of the structures produced copious crops in every season without so much as an added BTU of heat. So productive and cost-effective was the nested coldframe/greenhouse system that agronomists from temperate climates around the world flocked to the Minnesota bluff country to observe Abel’s agricultural complex and practices so that they might be duplicated elsewhere. Advocates for sustainable culture and environmentally sound development badgered him constantly to travel and lecture about his work. He had just returned from a three-day weekend of seminars at Davis, California, where he’d been the primary attraction.

The man finished his rounds and walked out into the slanting white October sunshine. It was chilly, down to twenty-six degrees Fahrenheit, but the patriarch of the experimental community reveled in the cool temperatures.

On the greenhouse knoll above the community center, Abel turned to survey the forest and grassland domain along the bluffs. He pushed fingers through his auburn hair, its strands long enough to turn up at his collar. The hair had gone gray in a streak. His sideburns were the color of flu ash already. He needed his glasses at times now.

Abel exploited a vibrant physiology. He jogged most days along the bluffs and worked in the greenhouses tirelessly. His love of teaching brought him into the village’s school classrooms on occasion for lessons with the youngsters. Not a day went by when he was not teaching several courses any time the adult education center, the Institute for Total Life Skills, was in session. At night, he would sit hunched over his computer and write for several hours.

The founder of the village watched the sun swab saffron pigment across the eastern-most plains of South Dakota and ebony Big Stone Lake, resting below at the foot of the glacial debris that gave form to the bluffs, before turning to descend to the community kitchen below.

“Good day to you, my liquid friend,” Abel called to the thirty-mile-long finger lake.

“Hello, Abel,” chimed a woman twenty years Abel’s senior, as the village founder entered the kitchen of the Independency village Community Center, the facility all in town called the CC.

“And a good morning to you, Ms. Markham,” smiled the man.

Penny Markham was in the great kitchen most mornings. She loved the company of people who loved her food.

“This morning I made your daughter and her new friend very, very happy.”

“Oh, you did? And what magic did you perform for them this morning?”

“I started them off with stewed raspberries in warm goat’s milk, then I gave them a hot biscuit and honey from Oleg’s new hives.”

“How many other courses did you feed my little one, Penny?”

“Well, Pelee helped me make quiches.”

“Any left?”

“Of course, Abel. Sit down and I’ll get you a slice.”

“Coffee on yet?”

“What kind of a foolish question is that?”

“I can’t live without coffee. It’s the one vice I cultivate.”

“A little vice now and again will keep you young and frisky, Abel. You don’t look like a Puritan to me.”

Abel gnawed away at the edge of his lower lip. “I feel like a Puritan, Penny.”

Penny leveled her eyes over the rim of her glasses and surveyed the visitor. “I know this will sound awfully old-fashioned, but you need a companion.”

“Who would want an old radical like me?” The man eyed a fly on the ceiling.

“I’m plumb serious, Abel. You’re a decent fellow. You need a good woman.”

“Okay, Penny, you’re my woman from now on.”

“I’m old enough to be your grandmother and you know it. Here, take some of my quiche, you middle-aged fool.” Penny placed a heaping plateful of quiche in front of Abel and slipped a warm biscuit alongside.

“You can call me middle-aged anytime, Penny. But fool? That’s going too far.”

“You do need female companionship, Abel. It’s the natural order of things.”

“I need a few pounds less of your calories, Penny. That’s what I need.”

“You won’t have a serious conversation with me today, will you?”

“No, ma’am. I’m too well fed to be serious.”

“If you come in tomorrow, I’m going to whack you with an iron skillet. Maybe then we’ll have a serious conversation.”

“If you hit me with a skillet, Penny, that’s the last conversation I’ll ever have.”

Both of them laughed heartily.

“Hear from your ex, Abel?”

“Yes. She calls Pelee every few days. Liz is at Yellowstone National Park, conducting a study of sorts. She says there are odd things going on there. She was called in by the Park Service to sort it all out.”

“What things?”

“I don’t know, really. Apparently some areas in the park have heated up a good deal. The Park Service had to close several popular tourist spots because the ground is too hot. There’s a large lake in the park, too, you know. Liz wants to study what is happening on the floor of the lake. She says some odd feature could be dangerous sometime.”

“Dangerous?”

“I guess so. Maybe it could create a new geyser. That’s all I know.”

“Is she coming back this way soon?”

“She’ll be back east for a week at Thanksgiving and then again through the holidays. She hates being away from Pelee for so long.”

“Well, of course she does. But you take good care of Pelee. She can’t mind that.”

“No, she doesn’t mind in the least. She thinks this is the best place on the planet for Pelee.”

“It is indeed.”

Abel nibbled the quiche. The wedge was light and saturated with delicate flavor.

“What are you up to today?” asked the overlord of the kitchen, booting up her laptop computer on a counter in the large community kitchen.

“The new wave comes in for the Total Life classes. I’ll jump in, greet everybody and get everyone motivated, as always. You’ve got your work cut out for you tonight.”

“We’ll put on a fine meal.”

“I have no doubt about that.”

“How does this sound, Abel? I’ve got it up here on the screen.” Penny went to the computer, leaned over and began reading from a list. “Let’s see. We’ll have spicy white bean and cabbage soup with hot whole-wheat biscuits and chutney. Then we have our big salad with a little of everything we grow. Our entree will be the sampler from around the world: one small corn tortilla with refried beans and our bell and hot pepper salsa, a breaded tilapia filet, a curried egg and lentil ball and, oh, grilled shitake mushrooms topped with melted cheddar.”

“May I come to dinner, too?”

“You’re the master of ceremonies, you middle-aged fool.”

“Easy, Penny.”

The lady chuckled. “All of it, with the exception of most of the wheat in the biscuit, a few spices and the lentils, we grow right here.”

“Perfect. What’s for tomorrow night, bread and water?”

“I told you I’d hit you with a skillet!”

Abel smiled and ate more of his breakfast. “Do you have everything you need here, Penny?”

“Yes, all organized. The troops will rally here in an hour. We’ll have all the ingredients we need by noon. Registration is over forty-something people this round, right?”

“Forty-eight. Full house. We even have a guest booked for one two-week session and another double this winter. She’s going to take a whole raft of seminars.”

“That’s wonderful. Where is she from?”

“Ah, let me think. Kansas City, I believe.”

“Have we ever had someone come for four weeks?”

“No, not that I recall. I think it’s a first, Penny.”

“We’ll have to make her a special award if she does all four weeks.”

“Mmm, that’s a good idea.”

Chapter Three

A blister of superheated rock plasma, three miles deep in the earth’s crust, beneath the south rim of Yellowstone’s ancient and long-buried Lava Creek caldera, was busy consuming the rock ceiling above. For several centuries, the blister had been adding degree upon degree of Fahrenheit, a bubble of white-hot purgatory at the edge of a monstrous reservoir of roiling magma that had been expanding and stretching and flexing its aged muscles for thousands of centuries.

Scientists throughout the West were very much aware of and at ease with the constant low-magnitude earthquake swarms that emanated from Yellowstone on a continuous basis, most of them rumbling beneath the threshold of human senses. The seismic chatter recorded from Canada to Mexico and from Chicago to California had been swinging the ink plotters on seismographs as long as the instruments had been employed in the field. The swarms were background noise generated by the slow inflation and deflation of the vast magma sea below almost the entire length and breadth of Yellowstone, a cauldron that powered all the park’s famous geysers and hot springs. The seismic noise was something geologists and earthquake researchers were very comfortable with; in fact, they regarded the swarms as normal Yellowstone behavior.

At 12:47 a.m., Liz scrawled in longhand in a field notebook propped on her knees. She sat tilted back in a chair, legs up, feet planted squarely on the edge of a desk. There she teetered, writing, absorbed in the task of getting the last thoughts about her first full day’s work on the lake down in her journal.

Away to the north, a crustal roof atop the magma chamber, nearly ninety square miles in size and centered below Frank Island in the lake, buckled and slumped along an ancient fault line, pulling the lands above downward fourteen inches. The collapse displaced millions of tons of hot plasma. Vast volumes of the plastic magma lurched to the east, rifling shock waves through the rock strata above. The energy release tripped a long-dead slip fault that sliced along the four-mile west inlet near Plover Point, ran under the lake and exited the park to the northeast. The lands on either side of the fault sheared up, then down, spiking with seismic frenzy. East of the collapse, the land lurched upward, driven by the titanic forces moving beneath. In the vicinity of Yellowstone Lake, the forests tilted southeast and downward a fraction of a degree.

Racing outward from the epicenter at jetliner speed, the wave shocks found in seconds the stone and mortar foundations of the research cabin where Liz sat writing, a mile south of Plover Point. The seismic waves turned every fiber of wood in the little building into symphonic instruments in the hands of lunatics. The beams, ceilings, walls and floors screeched, drummed, whistled, hooted and howled as the cabin vibrated violently. Pitched back on just two legs of the chair, Liz lost her balance and tipped backward, landing with a bone-rattling crash on floorboards thumping with newfound seismic energy.

In an instant, responding to her mind’s hardwired flight response, the geophysicist rolled to her knees. Pushing off with her toes, she crab-crawled as fast as her body could muster across the main room and out into the moonlight. The woman dove off the cabin steps and plunged her fingers deep into the soil as if trying to stabilize the earth itself.

Forty-six seconds into the tremor, the land exhaled and lay still. Liz was spat out of the vortex of noise and convulsion into a catatonic silence. It took her long moments to loosen her grip on the earth at her fingertips. She rocked back on her knees and sat on her rump.

“Whew,” she uttered slowly into the night chill. “That was something.”

For a moment, nothing audible infiltrated the night. Then something—a hushed tone. Liz’s ears captured muted waves of sound at the edge of human hearing, akin to the purr of steam issuing quietly from an old radiator. The volume of the noise increased, swelling, marching toward her.

“Oh, my God!” the geophysicist croaked. She whirled about looking for anything to climb, but the trees stood limbless up dozens of feet in the air. Frantically, she bolted for the porch of the small building she had just rolled away from. She leaped onto the porch, sprinted through the main room and scrambled onto the upper bunk of one of the double bunks affixed to a wall.

As the scientist threw herself onto the bunk, the structure shuddered. White foam, reflecting the dim night photons, washed into the room, a foot over the floorboards. The froth sloshed against the back wall and again the cabin shook. Now the room gurgled and bubbled as if the place were caught in the drain of an old clawfoot bathtub.

Within minutes, the room drained its burden of water. Liz climbed down off the bunk, rushed through the main room again and out onto the porch. Instead of grasses and low forest growth before her, a shallow sheet of black water was running, slipping west. As she watched, the fluid from a freshwater, tsunami-like seiche wave became shallower, slowed its forward motion and stopped. Imperceptibly at first, the wet reversed direction and began to recede to the northeast, back to the lake.

Chapter Four

Data research analyst Winifred Deschaines finished work on a lengthy report for a dossier a few minutes before midnight. The 90-page document, she felt, could just about stand on its own. The subject of her writing, Abel Whittemore, could be seen for what he was, an anti-mass culture utopian with a gift for getting his message out to a small but explosively growing legion of the disenchanted. That consumers across the country were buying up his books in ever-escalating numbers had finally, after nearly a decade, brought him to the attention of federal authorities.

Winnie scanned her material in the confines of what she called the Florida room at her home in Parkville, Missouri, a hilly northern suburb of Kansas City hard by the banks of the Missouri River. Sitting bolt upright in silk nightwear, Winnie keyed the finishing touches on the draft. On a side table beneath a window, the detritus of her work on Whittemore lay in haphazard piles, but there was one item she kept by her computer, Whittemore’s recent best-selling book, Independency. She found herself picking up the tome almost daily and rereading a passage or a chapter.

The thirty-five-year-old information technology professional poured a dram of Courvoisier XO cognac. It was so pricey, but she bought a few bottles a year and treated herself to a nip now and again. She could relax a little now that she had completed the lion’s share of the draft for her contractor, Midlands Research Group Inc. Midlands was a firm that specialized in collecting and analyzing hard and digital information left in the wake of fringe political and religious organizations and specious manufacturing, service and financial enterprises. Scores of clients contracted with Midlands, but its cash-cow contracts were those tendered by a host of federal agencies outsourcing data collection. Winnie specialized in sniffing out the digital trail left by suspected domestic terrorist cells, hate groups and rogue citizen militias. Midlands coveted her skills and knocked on her door often.

Yawning, Winnie raked fingernail nubs through her heavy, wavy hair. It was as dense as wire. The strands were one of the few things in her life she could not control, that and her incessant nail biting. She ran five miles three days a week, rain, snow or zero degrees. A diet of whole grain products, three fruits a day, three vegetables, two raw and one cooked, was mandatory fare. She peeled the skin off her chicken, kept a juicer on the counter, took a host of herbal supplements, drank copious amounts of water to flush toxins from her body and had one glass of red wine each evening for her heart. The cognac was a token but oh-so-necessary treat.

As a student at the University of Missouri at Columbia, she had studied political science and became enthralled with the nature of radical politics—terrorist activity, western survivalist groups, separatist movements, white supremacists, ultra-orthodox religious sects and spiritual cults. For her graduate work, she designed computer file-sharing programs for state investigative agencies and wrote worm software for infiltrating targeted hard drives. She was poised to enter federal investigative service but chose the heftier salaries from the private sector instead. Her uncanny aptitude for extracting precious nuggets of information from computer databases helped her pay down a heavy burden of college loan debt.

When Abel Whittemore began to rise from below the mass-culture radar, once his books reached the upper brackets of nonfiction best-seller lists, Winnie devised an assignment to infiltrate his life and study the evolution of the radical movement he was nurturing. She managed to convince her superiors into giving her the green light to pursue Whittemore directly in his lair.

As she combed through Whittemore’s many written works and downloaded background material on him, she became enthralled with his profile. The man, she discovered, was promoting an atypical brand of survivalism, antigovernment sentiment and anti-consumerism. Unlike survivalist groups under federal watch in Montana, Michigan, Texas and elsewhere, Whittemore’s brand of defiance shunned violence. While survivalists in the West were virtually all heavily armed and spewed anti-federal government rhetoric onto the airwaves, Whittemore’s Independency movement was a complete departure from that model. The man was a student of the towering figures of nonviolent resistance: Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King and the anti-apartheid revolutionary, Nelson Mandela, from South Africa.

Whittemore’s popular appeal, Winnie hypothesized, came from his post-New Age units of small, exceptionally self-sufficient and highly productive technical-agrarian hybrid communities, where citizens shared equally in the bounty of a micro-society’s work. The central tenet his readers gravitated to, she determined, was his declaration that average citizens, following his example, could create alternative and sustainable communities that were fortresses against gluttonous consumerism, predatory capitalism, pop-culture crassness, and other mass-culture ills.

America, he declared, had become a continent of isolated, completely dependent and ultimately desperate consumers living in quiet but very real terror of losing a job or health care or shouldering great debt. That simple mantra seemed to resonate with citizens from many walks of life. It was as if some fraction of the middle class was seeking a panacea in Whittemore’s message. He had his own brand of snake oil for them.

Sitting in her cozy Florida room, Winnie nursed the Courvoisier. She was enthralled with the central character of her report. Unlike survivalists, who simply stockpiled food and weapons in cabins in remote areas, the author of Independency had created a full-fledged counter-society, a new small town on a 400-acre chunk of isolated Minnesota bluff country.

The experiment was, by many accounts, successful. A dozen other communities based on Whittemore’s work had already sprung up across the nation and more were planned. Powered by his best-selling books, Abel was injecting doses of his philosophy into the veins of mainstream culture.

Winnie perused satellite images of Whittemore’s new hamlet. One close-up photo of the compound revealed five or six-dozen structures, mushrooming into existence in just ten years after the very first buildings went up. The most striking feature about the compound was a large cluster of glass-glazed buildings all facing south. These were great banks of greenhouses, Winnie decided.

Also in the image were several community buildings whose function she did not know for certain. Based on Whittemore’s writing, she thought they were likely a community center, studios for the arts, some sort of commerce building, a school/training facility and a clinic. Small homes ringed a New England-style town square while others were clustered close by in the nearby woodlands.

All this was well and good, thought Winnie. She had information and photography, but she did not have Abel Whittemore in the flesh. The utopian was an emerging public figure because of his best-selling books and popular lecture series. He spent considerable time on the road promoting his vision of the future and assisting other emerging Independency-like self-sufficient communities. Now it was time to meet the man, Whittemore, to go to him and observe him in his lair.

Winnie planned to enter and circulate inside Independency village simply by enrolling in sequential sessions at the community’s Institute for Total Life Skills. There she could see for herself what this man had built with a band of modern-day pioneers and could uncover a great deal more about the future intentions of this post-New Age pitchman.

Winnie felt smug, excited by the prospect.

Chapter Five

At first light, Liz sprinted to the lake beach south of Plover Point to check on the Park Service boat she had piloted the day before and several marine sediment probes she had brought with her from the East and stowed aboard the craft. She had pulled the boat out of the water onto a ribbon of sand and rock. As she approached the lake waters, she sensed the narrow, rough shoreline beach was wider, much more expansive than when she had come ashore. The scientist studied the terrain for some minutes. There could be but a single explanation for what she was seeing: Plover Point, jutting out from Flat Mountain Arm into the lake like the beak of a bird, had thrust upward during the earthquake, had lurched a foot or two higher than when she first made landfall. After the rogue seiche wave subsided, the lake’s waters retreated to the east and southeast, leaving the beach wider and stretches of lake bottom exposed.

The boat, its low-horsepower outboard motor still attached, lay at the base of the shoreline trees. It had been hurled off the beach by the wave and hammered against the forest ramparts. Liz thought it seaworthy, but there was no sign of the probe equipment. She’d have to wait for a shipment of custom-built probes to arrive from MIT to commence her subsurface research.

The narrow foot trail back to the South Arm cabin bore her quietly along. She was eager to unpack her notes, data CDs and other things and boot up the research station’s solar-powered systems, provided they had survived the quake. The geophysicist felt energized despite the frightening late-night tremor and the loss of the equipment. Now she could dig into the latest seismic data, find out something about the night tremor and begin to monitor Yellowstone Lake’s vital signs.

Approaching the small clearing where the research cabin stood, Liz spotted a pile of material in the trail. It was full of grass fiber and rodent fur—scat, a great mass of it, fresh and still steaming with the internal heat of its owner. Grizzly excrement. Indistinct marks of the animal’s feet and claws were imprinted into the sopping soils and slipped away toward the little building just visible through the trees.

A wave of fear surged through her veins. She scanned the forest growth, the trees tall, trunks straight and without low branches to grip. There was no way to climb into them. The only safe haven anywhere nearby was the cabin, with its reinforced door and heavy bars on the windows. Bear or no bear, she had to get to it.

One deliberate step. Two. Liz crept along, taking pains to avoid twigs and step silently. She strained to hear any telltale sound, but the woods were filled with the quiet fluid trill of bird chatter.

On the edge of the clearing, Liz stopped to monitor the opening in the forest. The cabin porch beckoned just fifty feet away across the meadow. She stood perfectly still for several minutes, but nothing materialized. Taking a deep breath, she sprinted from the edge of the woods for the cabin steps, clamored up them, and threw the door latch. Once inside and feeling secure, she turned back onto the porch and surveyed the meadow once again from her new perch.

Luminous early morning sunlight slipped under the porch roof and cut friendly lodgepole-pine shadows across the wild lawn. Liz soaked in the golden aura. It was heavenly. She leaned against a porch post, crossed her arms and closed her eyes, basking in the pleasure of the moment and delighting in the banishment of her fears.

Easing her eyelids open, the color of cinnamon greeted her retinas. Along the margin of the forest, a large creature stood erect, its nose raised, nostrils sniffing the air intently. The rich warm color of the fur was pleasing to the eye, but the form of the grizzly triggered alarms in Liz’s soul.

The woman stared transfixed as the heavy animal lowered its head and faced directly toward her. The eyes of the two beings met and locked on one another. The bear’s orbs were a warm bronze, beautiful and awful to behold all at once. The human stood motionless and did not take her eyes off those of the great mammal. The beast stood its ground, too, unblinking.

In the confines of her skull, a high-pitched whine of tension sounded, but she stood as still as a cadaver.

The bear could not quite decipher what it was seeing. It snorted through its nose, then dropped down onto its front paws. The creature brought its great head down to the ground, raised a paw and scratched behind one ear. When it was done scratching, it shook its entire body, as if drying itself after a swim, then turned and shuffled to the spot where the trail entered the clearing. The great omnivore sniffed the ground there and swung its massive head back to glance at the cabin and the odd-smelling thing standing on the porch. Again the creature snorted, lazily turned away and lumbered up the path that Liz had just raced down. It was gone.

The scientist sat down on the porch steps and watched after the bear. A sensation of ease soon enveloped her, as if she had been awarded a blessed token from the gods. When in life, she pondered, did one ever have such a rendezvous with so grand a wild creature? Being in the presence of an adult grizzly? What would be analogous to that in the hurly-burly world of humans?

Liz flipped on the solar-powered lighting in the little research office and booted up her laptop. She plugged into the cabin’s satellite uplink technology. Systems were working well. She began a search for seismic data from the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory system tied to the University of Utah, from the United States Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory near Portland, Oregon, and from UC Berkeley. Within half an hour, she had ferreted out a ream of data.

Triangulating the fresh figures, Liz pinned the epicenter of the new earthquake to Frank Island in Yellowstone Lake, seven miles north of the South Arm cabin. Preliminary figures placed the tremor at 6.6 on the Richter scale, nearly an order of magnitude larger than the 1975 quake at Norris Geyser Basin but of considerable less intensity than the massive Hebgen shock of 1959 that killed a dozen souls and dammed the Madison River to form grand Hebgen Lake. This new tremor, Liz mused, had been powerful enough to shift the eruption patterns of Yellowstone’s world-famous geysers and create or destroy thermal features all over the park.

More worrisome were the sudden uplift of the lands around Plover Point and the withdrawal of the lake waters from the shoreline. The geophysicist suspected the quake had caused the entire lake basin to tilt a few tenths of a degree. Tiltmeter data should back up her hunch, so she sought to retrieve it. Such immense forces might jeopardize the integrity of a massive, unstable geothermal dome that had been growing like a malignant tumor on the floor of the lake two mile south of Lake Village              .

The mile-long formation—the inflated plain—bled superheated water into the lake depths, causing surface waters directly above to roil furiously. Liz wanted to drop thermal probes down into the massive swelling on the lake bottom. It was, she calculated, more than capable of a catastrophic blowout, similar to Holocene explosions that had created the well-known lake bottom deformations known as Mary Bay crater and Elliott’s Bay crater.

Nearby, the buried southern rim of the 640,000-year-old Lava Creek caldera lay restless. As Liz worked the data, minor tremors shimmied about the floor. She ignored the shaking but not a low rushing sound. She pulled her head away from the computer screen to listen. There it was, the hush of air moving, the voice of breath, lungs inflating and deflating in a mammoth torso.

Liz’s fingers went white on the keyboard. She trembled in her seat, then forced herself up from the desk and went to the door that stood ajar. Slowly, she brought an eye around the edge of the cabin door and gazed over the porch.

Cinnamon color again. The grizzly had returned. Its powerful body slung over its four massive clawed feet, the creature sniffed the cabin steps, pulling drafts of air into its body and releasing them in a rush. Liz inched back, trembling, and ever so slowly eased the door shut. Two heavy metal bear-bars leaned in brackets near the portal. She lifted one and set each pronged end into a metal receptacle on either side of the door. She put the second one in place, as well, then stood back from the wall.

Chapter Six

Raw red in the face from heat-soaked summer months under the South Dakota sun, Harland Sven was in no hurry to get the last loads of soybeans to Sweetly Growers Cooperative weighed and offloaded. In his dust-caked Ford F-150 pickup, he followed an old board-sided GMC farm truck, the one that last saw a sales lot in the late-seventies. Driven by a neighbor’s boy, the rig groaned and rocked under the weight of a load of soybeans as it wheeled south along old Route 212 first thing in the morning just a few feet west of the lapping waters of Big Stone Lake.

The lanky Swede, hair chopped to stubble in the fashion of cut silage-corn rows, ruminated on the lousy price his beans would fetch. Squinting through eye slits, lashes and brows bleached permanent white by the sun, he figured he’d give Coop manager Jim Bottomly a piece of his mind. He had to needle someone this morning. Might as well be Bottomly.

On the edge of Sweetly village, the farm truck pulled left off 212, ran the entrance lane past the defunct Sweet Spring Brewery to the agricultural coop and rumbled onto a weigh-station platform. Harland parked his F-150 in front of the simple corrugated steel-sided office, hunkered down beneath massive cylindrical concrete grain silos. He pushed through the steel door to find Jim Bottomly seated at an ancient wooden secretary, poking a manual adding machine with the blue-tinged fingers of one with emphysema.

“Christ, Jim, where the hell is the bottom, eh?” growled Harland as he entered the tight confines of the office.

“Well, hello to you, too, Mr. Sven,” chimed the portly coop manager, wheezing a bit through lungs corrupted by decades of cigarette smoking.

“I work a whole goddamn year for these prices? Damn! I’d be better off dumping the beans in the Minnesota River.”

“You do that, Harland. Lookee here, farmer, the market’s in the toilet. So the price is the price. You want me to dry your beans and put ‘em in the silo or don’t you?”

“I ain’t got no other choice. Write that teeny weenie check. But I don’t like it one damn bit.”

“Harland, you never like it. Best price, piss price, you say the same thing every year. Your daddy said the same old thing right up to the day he died.”

“It ain’t like it used to be. How many people come banging on your door now, Jim, eh? Use to be the whole county was farmers. How many now? Fifty?”

“I can’t argue with that, Harland. Tell it to those suits at the Chicago Exchange, will ya.”

“Small guys get forced out at these prices.” Harland hissed. “Pretty soon this town has one farmer and everybody else is selling Mary Kay wrinkle cream.”

The general manager of the Sweetly Growers Coop grain elevator complex, a middling grain storage facility of six concrete silo towers built in the ‘50s, spit a swig of coffee across the room and blew out a fitful laugh just as far.

“Ha, Harland, I could use some of that Mary Kay. I don’t look so good, and my wife, hell, she ain’t the blushing bride I married thirty-seven years ago.”

Harland glared out the window of the dust-filled Coop office, down the rail tracks toward the signal crossing on Main. “Think I’ll go down to Ester’s and get some breakfast. We’ll bring the last of the loads by late this afternoon.”

“You do that, Harland. Have a coffee in my honor, will ya, now that I sprayed mine all over this place.”

As the farmer turned for the door, it swept open to admit another. Harland scrutinized the new arrival, a fellow sporting more hair than he had a right to and wearing a white broad-brimmed field hat hand-fashioned by Amish hatters.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” crowed the newcomer.

Jim Bottomly peered over his glasses and waved a hand. “Well, Mr. Whittemore, fancy hat you got there. What brings you so far down off the bluffs on this fair morning?”

The farmer eyed the younger man, scowling beneath his bleached eyebrows and his ConAgra ball cap. Before Abel could respond, Harland interrupted.

“I understand, son, you posted your land along the lake.”

Abel turned to the farmer and nodded. “Yes, we did that.”

“What for?” Harland’s delivery was curt. “People ‘round here have been shootin’ pheasant and waterfowl out there for 100 years.”

“Yes, sir, I know that. But we’re not picking up one more beer can or chasing one more four-wheeler off the property. After ten years of it, we’ve had our fill.”

“Nobody I know goes up your way to trash your land, young man.”

“Oh,” the man beneath the Amish hat uttered. “Does the name Andrew Regas ring a bell?”

The name made Harland flinch. The farmer and his wife had taken Andy Regas on as a pre-teen foster child and saw him through his teenage years, teaching him the myriad skills necessary to tend a modern farming enterprise. The minute the boy reached his eighteenth birthday, though, he left the place without so much as a wave goodbye.

The coop manger leaned forward in his chair, sensing some discomfort bubbling up in the room.

“What about Andy?” snapped Harland.

“You know,” Abel said slowly for effect, “I can put up with a lot. That’s my personal nature. But every man has limits. I reached mine. You should know Regas.”

“I do. Why?”

With his emotions on a short leash, Abel offered, “Next time you see him, let him know, if you would, that if he rams that four-wheeled thing over the property again, or if we have to clean up after one more of his jacked deer, he’s going to have to baby-crawl one long way to get home.”

Jim let out a laugh to take the edge off the exchange. “Ha! Most nights he’s so pickled he can’t stay on his feet anyway.”

Harland wasn’t laughing. The farmer shot Bottomly a stern glance, then stepped out the coop door and into the fall chill.

The needle-sharp light of the September morning sun caught Harland as he stormed to his Ford F-150 parked beneath the grain bunkers towering above the cottonwood. The fourth generation farmer, with a fifty-seventh birthday just two weeks away, slammed the truck door, flipped the key and ran the lane onto Main. As he made the turn, the signal lights at the crossing pulsed to life, flashing and clanging. Harland peered down the steel rails to the west. He calculated he might beat the train to the crossing, but thought better of it.

A quad-header was laboring on the flat, coming fast. The lead locomotive’s headlight, 10,000 candlepower bright, cut through the morning shine. The Burlington Northern was a big train, just shy of a mile long, but nothing unusual along the line through Sweetly. The farmer knew well it was a fat grain snake, all covered hopper cars loaded to the gunwales with corn, wheat, soybeans, oats, millet and rye.

The four GP-30s roared through the crossing at sixty miles an hour, blowing diesel smoke, enough to dwarf an empire of semi-tractor trailers. The inside of the F-150 filled with the sonic rumble of heavy steel on steel. The freight was bound for the railyards in Minneapolis and the mammoth storage silos and industrial baking mills that lined the tracks in the Twin Cities.

Ester’s had been pouring weak coffee for Big Stone Lake region farmers since Sweetly’s main street was first paved. The farmer parked the F-150 out front next to half a dozen other farm pickups.

“Hello, farmer,” called a face under a Skoal chewing tobacco cap as Harland entered. Harland sat on a stool at the long lunch counter and greeted men like himself who had been harvesting soybeans and corn and who, most days of the year, came down to Ester’s for at least one cup of coffee.

“Pour me some of that swamp water, will you, hon?” Harland called to a waitress in her sixties. “Ain’t you gettin’ your Social Security yet, Karen?”

“No,” shot back the matron, “but I won $100 on the scratch tickets, Harland.”

“Well, then,” called out a face under a Dow Chemical fertilizer cap, “Harland will be wantin’ you to take him to supper, Dutch treat, there, Karen.”

“That’s right,” pitched in Skoal chewing tobacco cap. “What with the price he’s gettin’ for his beans, somebody’s going to have to feed him.”

Light laughter bobbed about the room. The farmer poured milk in his java and looked down the row of farmers hunched over the counter. “You know who showed up at the coop this morning, eh? That fellow from the freak farm.”

“You mean up on Prospect?” asked the waitress.

“Yeah, on the bluffs.”

Dow Chemical cap burped, “That’d be Whittemore. Old New England money.”

The woman behind the counter chirped, “No, he got his money from writing books. He’s the closest thing we got around here to a celebrity.”

“We don’t need his kind around here,” Harland scowled. “Liberal horde is what they are up there.”

“Oh, take a breather, Harland,” puffed the waitress. “You need a stiff drink rather than my coffee.”

“I hear you, Harland,” the man under the Skoal cap said. “We work our ass off for a dollar, and he sits around and waits for big royalty checks to arrive in the mailbox.”

In a black mood, Harland motored a few miles north along the western shore of Big Stone Lake toward his South Dakota farm. Out the east window the surface of the thirty-mile finger reservoir was full of chop blown up by a rising morning breeze. The bluff country, across the waters and up the lake on the Minnesota side, stacked up like layer cake against a blinding solar glare.

It would be touch and go for him financially, Harland knew, until the crops were in the ground next spring. What good was bringing in another record harvest from the fecund Minnesota River Valley earth if the market paid in nothing but dust?

Chapter Seven

On the broad promenade of the former Company M cavalry barracks of Fort Yellowstone, Wesley Crouch stopped to sample the budding day. He peered across the century-old army parade ground at the heart of the buttoned-down park headquarters compound at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Horse soldiers had built the red terracotta-roofed structures that the Park Service’s Yellowstone National Park administration called home. To the west of the two score buildings, the air shimmered with moist heat wafting from travertine mineral terraces, the first grand geothermal features that tourists encountered upon entering the park through the great stone Roosevelt Arch spanning the highway at the north entrance.

The morning dawned cold, well down in the twenties. Pins of frost infested the grasses and shrubs, coating everything with sparkling titanium armor. The burly park veteran, Yellowstone’s supervising geologist, welcomed the clean cold of fall. It bothered the tourists and kept them away. Just as well. He could imagine the chaos had the Frank Island quake and the rogue wave it spawned struck during the tourist crush.

Wesley slapped his right hand against the molding on the door to the geology staff office in the former barracks. The stout fellow, sporting tightly-cropped thinning red hair and a severely trimmed mustache, had given his office door trim a tap each morning for twenty years. This day, the trim board fell away from his fingers.

One to keep his office immaculate and orderly, Wesley had trouble with the untidy habits of earthquakes. The wall and ceiling plaster finish in the office, in the whole building, for that matter, was riddled with cracks and the room was lousy with plaster dust, reminders of the colossal power of the Frank Island quake and its aftershocks.

The headquarters building was muffle-quiet. Most staffers and Yellowstone Volcano Observatory researchers were away for the weekend or burning off pent-up personal days so contractors could work unimpeded in the halls and offices, repairing earthquake damage.

Wesley booted his computer, brewed a pot of coffee and settled down to read a backlog of emails and sift through quake data.

The most recent posting was from Elizabeth Embree. He opened it immediately, knowing the geophysicist was sequestered at the South Arm research cabin and would be analyzing Yellowstone Volcano Observatory seismic-array data for Frank Island quake tidbits. She intrigued him and annoyed him at the same time. The woman was tireless, a no-nonsense professional, but her incessant, kinetic metabolism grated upon his aging soul. He was glad, relieved really, that she thrived when working alone. The woman insisted on manning the new research cabin. He obliged by arranging the use of a Park Service outboard so she could reach the tiny facility at Plover Point and use the craft to disperse her instrumentation.

He read Liz’s posting, sent just after 2 a.m. “First Richter six-plus in the caldera since ‘75 Norris quake. Locus: Frank Island. Aftershocks have low frequency harmonic signature and are a magnitude greater than pre-quake background seismicity. Their source nonspecific: old Pleistocene vents likely, eastward trending.

“UU-Provo InSar radar data should show pronounced topo inflation. Plover Point shoreline margin twenty meters wider than pre-quake. Can the university pull InSar maps pre- and post-quake?

Wesley put his coffee mug down on the desk and lowered his head toward the computer screen.

“Whoa,” he muttered to himself, “twenty meters.”

Liz had typed a final paragraph: “Lake surface at Plover Point 14 Celsius. Very warm! Exceptional convection in the water column. Magma intrusion likely mechanism. Threat of hydrothermal explosion elevated at inflated plain-Mary Bay region. Recommend closing the lake highway, Bay Bridge to Fishing Bridge over the winter so we can assess the threat once we have marine instrumentation in place.”

Wesley slumped in his chair, vacillating between emotional poles. His first reaction to the email recommendation was to chuckle and dismiss it. Without marine thermal probes in place, and hobbled by a dearth of lake-floor data, why would a professional make a recommendation to close access to the northern shores?

But the larger picture had Wesley neglecting his coffee. Elizabeth Embree was no rookie, he knew. Such a recommendation would have the weight of years of field research behind it. She had examined the same data he had skimmed since the quake struck. The sudden rise of harmonic tremors and the increased intensity of seismic signals had surprised Wesley and others in the geo offices. The twenty-two seismic stations arrayed about the park were recording a host of anomalies. Now a colleague had visual observation of the sudden recession of southern lake waters to match tilt-meter and global positioning data.

What had the Frank Island earthquake wrought, Wesley wondered? In an instant, the familiar seismic profile of the park had flip-flopped. Short, high frequency ground oscillations—the stuff of fault-line quakes—had, in a matter of hours, been largely overwhelmed by low-frequency harmonics from multiple locations throughout the park. Yellowstone’s pulse had taken on the heavy beat of emerging volcanic dynamism.

Wesley downed his mug of coffee in a gulp and typed a reply to the geophysicist.

“Concur, emergence of harmonics. Will have the university run InSar maps on their plotters. I’ll let you know when the bulk of your probes come in from the East. See you soon. Also, I see no need for Parks to close down the lake communities now that the tourist traffic is gone. Keep me posted on what you find.”

The supervising geologist pocketed his insulin med-kit, left the administration warren and found his way to his service vehicle. He motored for Lake Village, Bridge Bay and south to have a look at the lake himself. The grand scenery of the Yellowstone plateau, glowing ochre and shadow blue in the morning sunlight, flooded through the windshield as Mammoth Hot Springs receded in the mirrors.

In a few minutes Wesley entered Golden Gate Canyon along Glen Creek and swept southward onto the curvilinear stone bridge built tooth-to-jowl into a towering cliff wall of welded volcanic tuff deposit. The geologist knew the formation well. He considered the rocks to be some of the most dramatic and storied geology in all of North America.

The cliff, the whole of it, hundreds of feet from top to bottom, was a single deposit, laid down in a matter of days two million years in the past. He loved the name of the material sliding by the window: Huckleberry Ridge tuff. Nearly two decades earlier, colleagues had discovered that the precise material that built the canyon wall could be traced to the edge of the submerged continental shelf off the California coast, to well above Montana’s border with Canada, to eastern Iowa, to the Texas-Mexico border, and out into the Gulf of Mexico 200 miles southeast of Morgan City, Louisiana. The deposit materials had once pressed down mightily upon the West. The volcanic cement that now swept by the speeding truck had once snuffed out the life of Pleistocene flora and fauna large and small over half the continent.

Chapter Eight

Winnie Deschaines dropped two suitcases on the back seat of her Jeep Liberty and rolled north from greater Kansas City on I-29. Pushing six-cylinders of Detroit iron for ten hours, she reached the Milbank, South Dakota exit and turned east toward Big Stone Lake, crossed the south flowage to Ortonville, then banked north on Rural Route 7. Beyond the junction with Route 28, she looked for a sign spelling out the Institute for Total Life Skills. She found it near the head of the long finger lake.

The vehicle threaded a narrow wash in a ridgeline angling north/south, bumping along slowly over two miles of narrow, uninviting gravel-base lane. A cluster of structures and farm fields nosed through the silver maple and black walnut. A registration sign and an arrow appeared pointing to an eight-sided structure with a cone-like roofline. A placard announced the name of the building: First Day Hall.

Entering the octagonal creation, Winnie wandered into a gallery lobby crammed with riotous, polychrome artwork, paintings, photos, batik pieces, sculpture and mobiles. The dimensions shimmered with festive color warmed by recorded acoustic guitar and flute music drifting in the airy interior spaces. A handful of people milled about at a set of tables. “Hello, my good lady,” said a middle-aged man seated before an array of folders, papers, and nametags. “Are you here for the institute classes?”

“Yes,” nodded Winnie. “I’m Winnie Deschaines, from Kansas City.”

“Winnie, welcome to you. Let’s see. Ah, here you are. Here is a packet of information for you. There’s a map of the community in there as well as a schedule for the week, right down to your meals. It’s all very comprehensive.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you here for the week?”

“No, actually, I’m going to be here for a two-week session now and have enrolled in another this winter.”

“Oh, that’s right. You’re the one. You’re a bit of a celebrity around here already. I think they say you’re the very first person to enroll in four sessions.”

A young girl burst into the room and raced to the table. “I’m ready for someone else, Elton.”

The man introduced the new arrival to the youngster. “Ms. Deschaines, this is Pelee, the daughter of the gentleman who founded this town.”

“Are you Pelee Whittemore?” asked Winnie.

“Yes. Do you know what my name means?”

Winnie smiled at the spunky little one. “No, I don’t. Will you tell me?”

“Of course. I’m named after Pele, the goddess of volcanoes in Hawaii. Pele had hair of red-orange fire and gold eyes. I have an extra ‘e’ in my name, though.”

The woman from Missouri grinned broadly. “I like your name.”

“Okay, what’s your name?”

“Winnie, short for Winifred.”

“Okay, let’s go, Winnie.”

Winnie and her young guide pulled luggage from the car and walked across a broad village green to a row of small cottages. They entered one with the name Rough Diamond on the door plaque. Inside a small common room were a couch and stuffed chairs, a wood stove glowing with heat, a bookshelf, a few cover-worn titles and little else. Beyond the common room were two other small spaces. Each contained two double bunks, two trunks and pegs to hang clothing. There were no bathroom facilities visible.

“Pelee, where’s the bathroom?”

“It’s outside, through this door.” Pelee opened a door onto a narrow catwalk deck that ran sixteen feet to a small structure that looked like a large outhouse. “There it is.”

“Ahh, does it have a shower?”

“Nope. It’s a composting toilet. If you want to take a shower, you have to go to that building down there, the one that’s made of stone. It’s got everything in there.”

“Everything?”

“Mmm hmm. Showers, big baths, one for women, one for men and one for everybody. Dad says it’s like a Roman bath.”

The explanation sank into the flesh like a fishhook. “You mean, Pelee, that it’s a community bath? Everyone bathes together?”

“Yes, everybody.”

“Oh, I don’t think I brought a bathing suit.”

“Bathing suit? Nobody wears a bathing suit. If you don’t want the boys to see you, you can go in the women’s bath. No boys can go in there.”

Winnie smiled warmly at the youngster. “Which bath would you recommend, if I may ask?”

“Well,” said Pelee, “sometimes I like the common bath, sometimes I like the women’s bath. Some people are shy and don’t want to jump in with everybody. I’m not shy at all, are you?”

Winnie stood quietly for a long moment pondering the question. “You know, Pelee,” she said finally, “I guess I’ll have to find out.”

Pelee waved her charge goodbye, jumped out of the cottage and ran in full stride back across the village green, but this time to the CC, the village’s community center.

At 6:30 p.m., in the company of three other women who had taken a bunk in the cottage, Winnie walked into fall darkness and crossed the village green. Halfway along, the women stopped to admire the glittering stars and the gossamer Milky Way shroud wheeling above rural Minnesota.

A crowd mingled in the main hall of the center. The great room had the aura of a nineteenth-century meeting hall, right down to a vintage potbelly caboose stove in one corner. Most of the students who had come to the institute for the week were on hand. Servers offered samples of this goodie or that. Winnie sipped a glass of sparkling cider punch laced with floating strawberry slices.

The space pulsed with conversation. Winnie got caught up in rapid-fire talk when a fife and drum corps marched into the room in 1776 minuteman costumes. Their little tune and their thumping step jimmied the crowd to each side of the room, and the little troop moved steadfastly to a bank of doors at the north wall. At the portal, they halted, banging their heels down loudly on the floor. The doors swung open to yet another hall. In the doorway stood a tall lean man, wearing glasses that sported small circular lenses. He was dressed in blue jeans, a black collarless shirt and dusky wool tweed jacket. His ears were entombed in bushy sideburn hairs all flushed white. There was a light gray streak in the dark brown hair on his forehead. Strands spilled over his jacket collar. He had the countenance of a young, underpaid college professor laboring on a small campus.

The man raised his hands high and smiled. Suddenly, behind him, a dozen white greasepaint mime faces filled in the doorway opening around him. The mimes cranked their heads back and forth in exaggerated gestures, surveying those in the crowd.

“Welcome one and all to Independency, Minnesota. Welcome to the Institute for Total Life Skills. And welcome, most of all, to dinner.” The mines rubbed their tummies with both hands.

“It is that time, ladies and gentlemen.” Singing now, the man rang out, “Praise the Lord who praises me, it’s time for dinner, now let’s go eat!” Picking up the lyrics from an old Lyle Lovett honky-gospel tune, the fife and drum corps boomed: “We got some beans ‘n’ some good corn bread. Listen to what the preacher said.”

With that the corps commenced their marching and playing and slipped into the next hall. The whiteface characters motioned for everyone to follow.

The mimes helped the forty-eight students to reserved seats in a modest dining room and descended on each table with glasses and a heavy ceramic bottle. They poured a glass of amber nectar for each person. One mime brought a tumbler to a small podium at the head of the room and handed it to the man who had welcomed the guests.

The figure tapped his glass and the room fell silent. The mimes gathered to one side, each holding the left hand to the left ear as if trying to hear a bit better.

“Hello to you all and thank you for coming to us, to be with us and to learn with us. My name is Abel Whittemore. I will be your host tonight, but there are 110 of us here at Independency, and we will all be your hosts in the days ahead. Should you need anything, anything at all, please be sure to ask any of us.

“For the next thirty minutes, I will try to give you a capsule view of this small town. On the walls behind me will be projected images of its people at work and at play. While you enjoy your homemade soup and salad, I will try to reveal to you why this place thrives and why the courses you will be taking may work for you in the future.

“So let’s get started. The simplest way I can illustrate what we do is to toast you with a glass of spirit. It is a tasty example of our industry and our philosophy.” Abel raised a glass. “The liquid in your glasses is applejack, hard cider that has been frozen to remove some of the water. It has a real kick to it. It is as old a beverage as the nation is old. Europeans in the New World made it nearly four centuries ago. We make it here just for occasions such as this from cider pressed from apples grown in our own orchard. We ferment the cider and bottle it. And we drink it, too, you know.” All the mimes about the room burst into action, guzzling from make-pretend bottles, smiling, grabbing their heads, and losing their balance. They fell to the floor one after the other.

Laughter swept the room.

“The glass you are holding was blown here. The glass material itself is simply recycled, discarded glass. We put it to use.”

As Abel talked, the greasepaint crew brought bowls of white bean and cabbage soup to each person. Winnie took a spoonful into her mouth. It was heavenly, saturated with flavor.

“You are about to eat a meal the likes you have never experienced. It is unlike anything people in the Western world consume today. The food is simple, it’s good and much of it is familiar, but it is a meal from the distant past. People in the United States can’t eat like this today. We have lost the ability to do so. The food you are about to eat is grown right here, almost all of it. At Independency, we do what our forebears did and what all humans once knew how to do. They knew how to grow their own food, to process it, to store it for a year or more, to save the seeds for the next year’s crop. Such skills served humankind for 12,000 years, since the end of the Ice Age and the dawn of agriculture. But we as a nation have lost those skills and severed our umbilical connection with the land. We have lost our essential spiritual link to the land, as well.

“So tonight, and all week long, you will eat meals that do not exist in the broad culture any longer—homemade, home-grown meals. You will learn to do things that have been discarded by the mass culture, things that are absolutely critical to the health, welfare, and true freedom of human beings everywhere.”

A great wooden salad bowl was brought to each table, each brimming with colorful greens, two-dozen different varieties of vegetable matter.

Abel clearly enjoyed the master of ceremonies role. He was animated and toyed with the volume and intensity of his voice, always mixing in a bit of humor to keep the proceedings light, playing to and off the mime troupe.

“Tonight you will eat salad. Tomorrow you will meet your salad. We will introduce you formally. You will shake hands with it and talk to it. And you will learn to call it by its many first names.”

Chuckles erupted from the diners.

“We will take you on a tour of our great bank of greenhouses, the orchards, farm fields, and barns before classes begin. But now, I’m going to take you on a fifteen-minute tour of this fully sustainable community we call Independency, juxtaposed against the bloated, vulnerable, mass-consumption society we call the ‘Bud-Lite Culture’ beyond these forests and fields. Then, I think, you will understand something about this place and where your classes may take you in the days ahead. So let’s get started.”

The mimes covered their ears.

The metronome banter from Whittemore began to make Winnie uneasy. His creation sounded so good right out of the box. It sounded too good. She propped her chin on her hand and settled in for a long journey into Abel’s utopian nether world.

“To begin, I will use the illustration of a stool standing on a floor. The floor under the stool is called self-sufficiency. As much as humanly possible, we make or grow everything we can here in this village for our own use. We have a large surplus from our labor that we sell into the mass economy.

“One leg of the stool is agriculture. Most of us engage in agriculture at some time during the week. In the United States, just one person in 400 works directly on a farm, growing and harvesting food. Thanks to vast inputs of fossil fuel, synthetic fertilizers and complex farm machinery, farmers are an endangered species. Here we feed ourselves and we sell fresh organic produce, specialty dairy products, root crops and, believe it or not, strawberries all year ‘round here in Minnesota.

“The second leg of the stool is manufacturing. We sell manufactured products, including a packaged meal-in-a-bar sold wholesale to health food distributors. We make almost everything you see around you, from building materials to parts for cars and equipment.

“The third leg is communications. We sell information. You are the result of that industry. You are here to receive information from us. You paid a fairly steep tuition price for that privilege. We sell books, manuals, seminar CDs and DVDS, music, all sorts of things.

“The final leg of the stool is energy. We actually manufacture energy—electricity, methane, ethanol and firewood—and are almost self-sufficient, with the notable exception of gasoline.

“Finally, now, the top of the stool, the seat, is conservation. We recycle most everything at Independency and compost the rest. We generate almost no solid waste but utilize waste products from the society at large, from glass to scrap metal, to the sawdust that fires our powerhouse boiler.”

The mimes cleared away the salad bowls. As one, they turned to Abel, covered their mouths, and held up a hand as if to say, “Stop.” The audience howled.

“I only have a little more to go, troupe,” Abel teased the mimes, who gestured in mock disgust. Winnie smiled to herself as Abel explained the social complexities of the little society. The speaker sounded as if he were trying to stitch king capitalism and pauper communism together into a social comforter. That, she postulated, was a recipe for disaster somewhere down the road in this community’s future.

“Now, I’ve said enough,” Abel exclaimed, closing his remarks. The mimes reacted with unbridled joy, hugging each other and waving the host goodbye.

“Now, it’s time for a wonderful entree. I have only one request of you right now. I get lonely when I have to eat by myself. I would be most grateful if someone would be so kind as to ask me to dinner. I promise to keep quiet.”

The diners erupted in applause, not polite, but heartfelt.

The mimes brought the four-entree sampler that kitchen czar Penny Markham had been planning. A fruit wine was offered. Stoneware plates arrived filled with cheese selections. Baskets of piping hot biscuits followed. As the diners ate, the mimes attended to their every wish and cleared the table of excess items. The people relished the attention and the performance.

Soon the hall filled with loud chatter. Abel knew from experience that the conversational buzz was a good sign. The ice had been broken early.

Winnie, seated one table over from Abel, watched him intently. She marveled at how well thought-out the proceedings had been. This, she reasoned, was not a sloppy, back-to-the-land hippy commune from the sixties. This was something else entirely. Somehow, he had just preached a sermon demonizing Western culture and lauding a new social and economic experiment, and all the people around the tables, all strangers and spanking new to this brand of radical fervor, seemed enthralled. It was as if he had led a band of children into a candy store run by the mob and given each a $10 bill.

Between snippets of conversation with those at her table, Winnie examined Abel’s body language. He was relaxed, gesturing constantly, talking with his hands. He smiled often and laughed often, too. She studied his features. All rolled into a visual package, the man wasn’t handsome in the manner that she found attractive. But he was pleasant to look at, she thought, much like a favorite old dress is pleasing to the eye but not a knockout when slipped on and viewed in the mirror.

Cups of mint tea arrived, followed closely by a strawberry tart sweetened with honey. Small bowls of roasted sunflower seeds were placed on the tables, too, and more wine offered. It was too much. Winnie waved away the dessert.

Abel rose from his seat, reached the podium once more and spread his hands before the audience.

“Independency is not about me. It is about us. Before we adjourn from this dining hall, I want to be sure that you meet some remarkable people. The mimes’ eyes flared wide, toothy smiles erupted on their faces, and they waved come in toward the door. In walked two-dozen townsfolk, women and men, children, elderly. They all had aprons on emblazoned with a big strawberry print.

“Now, I want you to meet the very people who lovingly fashioned this marvelous creation we all enjoyed, called dinner.” At that Abel began to applaud, and the diners joined in. Soon they were rising from their tables in a standing ovation.

“Thank you, noble chefs, for a remarkable feast, a most splendid repast here tonight. And thank you, mimes, for giving us an evening of raspberries. Now let’s go to First Day Hall and have a little fun.”

Chapter Nine

At 4:44 a.m. in the frost-riddled October predawn darkness, a shallow rolling tremor rocked the South Arm research station cabin in the forests south of Plover Point on Yellowstone Lake. Liz did not stir when the vibrations rippled through the building. Two miles from the lake’s northern shores, at a watery depth of nearly 200 feet, the bulging inflated plain strata slumped southward. The movement destabilized the long humpback formation that had fascinated the geological community since sonar soundings discovered it two decades earlier. Fissures bleeding super-hot water lubricated the swelling’s underbelly; the bulge began to slide and fracture. The rock blister was a loaded cannon, primed with superheated water and under fantastic pressure. As the colossal formation shifted, great chucks of unstable material broke away. The breakup freed seething, bottled-up vapors. Liberated from its weighty cork, tens of millions of gallons of superheated water in the strata below expanded a thousandfold, flashing to steam in an instant.

The heavy overburden of sediments and stone layers more than 200 feet thick on the lake bottom disintegrated before the force of a stupendous steam explosion and ballooned through the surface of Yellowstone Lake with a hellfire roar. The shattering noise of the explosion radiated out in all directions of the compass and reached the cabin where Liz slept within forty seconds. The concussion shook the building and shattered windows.

The geophysicist awoke with a shout and stumbled away from her bunk, somehow avoiding the glass shards strewn across the floorboards. Clattering noises and the sound of heavy raindrops managed to get through to her senses. She raced out the door of the cabin and onto the porch to see sand, tiny pebbles, small chucks of stone and dark rain cascading from a bright night sky. Watching the debris fall, she understood in a moment that the inflated plain swelling must have ruptured. Fear seized her.

The explosion was a shrill signal. The lake bottom to the north had to have been violently displaced, Liz knew. Surely there would be another tsunami-like seiche wave generated, but this one would likely be monstrous. She calculated quickly and decided there was no safe haven. Sprinting back inside, the woman scrambled up on a second level bunk bed and reached overhead to a trap latch to open a small door into the eaves of the building. She threw the door back on its hinges, stood up on the bed and hoisted herself up out of the room, into the cramped quarters under the peak of the roof.

The cascade of falling material and moisture on the metal roof sounded a drum roll. Through the din came the loud crack from a tree rent by great force. Something was stalking through the forest, the noise of it growing louder than the slapping on the roof. Liz braced herself against the structure’s timbers just as the cabin shuddered violently. Glass exploded inward and the door was ripped away. The porch roof collapsed and the porch floorboards splintered and floated free. The little structure lurched to one side as a surge of lake water threw its weight against the building and overtopped the roof. The cabin pivoted around on an axis, cut free from its mortar and stone foundation to rotate in the flood. Rising water lifted the building. It floated free of its moorings and drifted three dozen feet across the small grassy plot it had been built in. The cabin rammed into the trees along the edge of the clearing, then settled to the ground, water and skim lake ice draining from the main room.

Chapter Ten

Benjamin White Elk sensed the herd migration at first light. Slumbering in his tiny hardscrabble camp beside Otatso Creek, he detected the low-frequency vibrations and rhythmic cadence of big animals on the move. He lay in his bunk, rubbing the morning crags and crevasses out of his ruddy face.

The elder never tired of this, hearing the ponoká, the animals the Europeans had called elk, moving at dawn. Cursing the arthritic swelling in his knees, White Elk pushed the bunk covers aside, placed his calloused feet on the floor and shuffled slowly to the front door. He opened it quietly and slipped out onto the narrow camp porch.

The Blackfoot elder stood as rigid as square-faced Chief Mountain towering in the west along the eastern boundary of Glacier National Park. Before him, quadruped monarchs paraded as they made their way southward, their muscled yellow rumps facing away from Canada. The great herd was moving down from the glacier moraines, out of the mountains. Night temperatures in the high country were already brittle cold. The increasing briskness and the dwindling light of fall was the only timepiece the great cadre of ungulates needed to tell them it was time to descend to the valleys for the winter.

“Oki-ni-kso-ko-wa,” muttered the elder under his breath, the words an ancestral greeting, spoken this time to the mammalian friends of the Blackfoot’s South Piegan tribe and to the animal for which he was named.

When he was a youth, White Elk, following the initiation customs of his ancestors, ran into the forests to be alone and to fast for many days. On his final day without sustenance, as he knelt by a small stream for a drink of glacier meltwater, a mammoth ponoká the color of snow and adorned with soaring antlers came to the opposite stream bank to watch the human. The young brave could not decide if the beast was a vision or bone and flesh. The fasting ritual was supposed to encourage visions, and they were to etch the path to the man’s future and provide him with a new name by which the tribe would know him until his death.

The white beast spoke to him in the tongue of the Blackfoot.  “You are young now. When you grow to a great age, you will guide the people. You will do well by them. There will come a day of great suffering, when the land will tremble and all will wither before a fierce conflagration. But you, you will be the strength of the people. You will spirit them through the time of hardship. You will be revered. A thousand generations hence, they will speak of you, White Elk.”

The young man, in awe of the beast, spoke to the animal in turn, but the elk lifted its massive head, turned and marched off through the bitterbush.

For half a century, White Elk had hoped to see among the many in the herd a great white elk like the one that came to him at the stream bank. The animals moving before him in the lustrous ground fog had coats of umber and burnt sienna, but there was no albino creature among them.

Along the murmuring river, a big young bull was badgering a healthy female elk at the start of her estrous. The male kept nuzzling her genitals, raising his head and curling his muzzle, exposing his square scraping teeth in the lower jaw. The bull had resumed nudging the female along when he stopped suddenly and reared his head as a trumpeting whistle from one of the patriarchs of the herd cleaved the morning silence. Now the young bull sounded and volleys of throaty bugling ricocheted off the mountain escarpments. White Elk, watching from his weathered porch, flashed a smile of stained teeth as the piercing trumpets stimulated the hairs on his neck to stand erect and sent a welcome shiver through his every sinew.

Heads high, eyes bulging, the bulls began a slow shuffle, sizing one another up, looking for an advantage, an avenue of attack. The timeless ritual was one the older bull knew well. He had fought successfully for mating rights for more than a dozen years now. White Elk was trembling. He knew that if the bulls engaged in a fight, he would have a front row seat to a great spectacle. The Blackfoot people greatly anticipated the bouts each year, but few people actually witnessed them.

The two massive forms circled cautiously, setting up a head-to-head confrontation. Slowly, so slowly, both bulls contracted the muscles at the back of the neck. Each head rose on recoiling neck, muzzle flaring, mouth wide, disgorging blasts of platinum vapor into the chill. White Elk rubbed his roughened hands together in anticipation. He did not have to wait long. In a rush, the great heads came down, antlers thrust fully forward. Massive muscles in the thighs propelled the elk headlong at one another. The craniums of the two animals closed. Crack! came as an explosive report, antler slamming against antler with Herculean force.

The young bull was vigorous and heavy, almost equal in size and weight of that of his senior. Where the younger had stamina and raw strength, the older bull had inertia and experience. The senior bull meant to hold his ground, giving up none, and simply push his young adversary out of the sparring field. He wanted to be sure to keep the youngster’s antlers engaged and locked in the battle so that the spry animal could not lunge and get his full weight moving. The older bull would wait for the younger bull to exert maximum force. The patriarch knew that he could then simply twist his head quickly left and down. The move could throw the younger elk off balance.

Two minutes into the struggle, the older bull executed the maneuver flawlessly, left and down. The young elk swung its right rear leg out to steady itself but the hoof dropped over the stream bank. The youth lost his footing and stumbled, disengaging from the other bull. The older animal, his blood acid with adrenaline, reared back and charged, striking his adversary with his antlers in the face and neck. The force tipped the young foe backwards, toppling the creature down the bank and into the cold stream. Victory!

Upon his porch, White Elk pranced on bare feet and shook his hands aflutter, thrilled at the sight. The big male lifted his head and sounded a victor’s bugle call into the atmosphere. Seven seconds later, an echo off the high country stone reaffirmed the triumph. The great bull now sought the female that the younger elk had been worrying. He sniffed her out, came alongside and escorted her from the meadows.

Despite the battle for mating rights, the herd kept up its slow, deliberate pace across the Otatso flats. When at last the stragglers ambled by, White Elk stepped off his porch and peered south, watching the yellow rumps waddle away into the ground fog. He turned to Chief Mountain and confronted the sacred peak, guardian of the Blackfoot nation.

“Old Chief,” White Elk called with a laugh, “did you see that? Ha, ha, did you see that? They fight just for you, Old Chief. They fight just to amuse you.”

Chapter Eleven

Perched above the ruin of the research station interior, Liz could see little in the predawn gloom. The bunks had fallen and been swept out of view. To get down, she flopped on her belly, slipped over the trapdoor edge, hung from her hands and dropped onto splintered and soaking floorboards. Seeking any light filtering in from the dying night sky, she pushed her way to where the door had been and looked out. The porch roof was missing, the porch deck a memory.

It was much too dark yet to leave. She’d have to wait an hour, shivering in wet clothing until dawn arrived, then work her way out to the shoreline of the lake. There would be a day-long trek out to Grant Village, unless providence guided her to the leased Park Service boat, now lost, no doubt, and crumpled somewhere in the forest or drowned in the lake.

In limp light oozing into the sopping forest, Liz examined the little meadow where the cabin had stood. Hundreds of trees had come down in the flood. Others were tilted at crazy angles. The cabin had floated forty feet from its useless stone and mortar foundation pilings. She slipped a bottle of water and a dented can of peanuts into her wet pack, donned the carryall and left the ruined building.

The familiar trail north was obliterated. Drifting among the ghosts of trees bathed in ground mist, Liz picked her way cautiously through the shattered forest and uprooted trees that once stood tall at the shoreline margin. In every direction lay debris that had floated with the retreating wave out of the woods and into the lake or onto the rubble-strewn shore. South Arm was choked with logs, branches, and forest floor litter. The pristine lake was now foul, ugly, uninviting and stank of sulfur. The little motorized skiff had vanished.

It would be a slog without the boat, making the long hike on foot out to Grant Village far to the west. Following the shoreline the entire way to habitation meant a full day push. She had little choice but to make the journey.

As anemic sunlight filtered through colorless vapor rising from the waters, a shimmering column of white steam materialized, towering over the northern lake horizon. Liz need not consult a compass to know that the steam rose above a new underwater crater precisely where the inflated plain had been.

The scientist tucked her head down and turned west. She moved a few hundred feet when she noticed a large object spilled on the beach. She recognized it as her grizzly companion, its fur the color of cinnamon. The creature lay sprawled on its back, belly to the sky, motionless. Dropping to one knee beside the huge corpse, the human female reached a hand out and touched the cool dense fur of the leviathan.

Walking with constant shallow tremors underfoot, Liz managed to reach Grant Village by 4 p.m. The little community, with its two stores, ranger station, visitor center, gas station, post office and lodge, was intact. Minor lake debris had washed about the foundations of the near-shore structures, but there was no serious damage. She was relieved. The narrow channel between Pumice and Breeze Points, walling off the West Thumb basin from the main body of the lake, had buffered the force of the steam explosion and blunted the impact of the great waves.

Liz walked to the backcountry office where she had signed out the skiff. The little emergency facility, operated by the Division of Resource Management and open late into the fall, was deserted. She retrieved her rental car, parked alongside the now-closed gas and repair business just off the village. It started.

Gunning the vehicle’s accelerator, Liz raced the lake highway, built tight to the margin of the shoreline. She traced the asphalt around the knob at Pumice Point and opened the throttle on the flats along the lake margin, occasionally swerving into the left lane to avoid wave-wash debris. At the bend at Rock Point, she turned the car north and swept down on picnic area Number 19, only to slam a foot down hard on the brake pedal and skid to a stuttering stop in the lane. She rammed the door open and ran ahead to a jagged gap in the road where fluid teeth had chewed away the macadam.

The landscape of the moon could look no less barren. The beautiful sweep of the northwest shoreline of Yellowstone Lake was a running pus sore. A vile monster had visited in the night and wallowed in the land and the lake, utterly violating the familiar topography. The forest was down, horizontal, leveled by the explosion’s shock wave and rocketing stone rubble. The seiche waves came ashore, toppled more timber and pushed well inland before retreating and pulling the forest with them. Thousands of trees floated in the lake, a vast evergreen mat obscuring the surface waters. The shoreline and flats nearby were reduced to eroded mire, oozing mud and rippling gravels. Nowhere in the vision was there a gram of highway asphalt.

What had become of Bridge Bay and Lake Village, Liz feared? They had been close to the explosion, to the new hydrothermal crater hidden just a few miles out into the lake. There must be nothing left of them. The detonation alone would have staggered the little communities, she reasoned, and the waves would have erased them from the land. Thank God, she muttered to herself, tourists didn’t flock to Yellowstone National Park in November.

Liz backtracked to West Thumb and turned her car northward toward the famous geyser basins and the park headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Chapter Twelve

Offstage, Abel prepared to present his hallmark lecture on the evils of mass-consumption culture. He picked up a small colorful box housing a commercial frozen dinner and walked out onto the stage of the small auditorium in First Day Hall. Agent Winnie followed the man with her eyes and triggered a pocket recorder.

“Hello, my tired, my poor,” Abel began, speaking through his infectious grin. Some members of the audience chuckled.

“We certainly have put all of you through a steeplechase, haven’t we, in your short time here?” Nods of agreement bobbed about the audience. “Well, I wanted to have one last crack at you before you leave us. So, let’s get underway,” Abel said, turning from the audience to pick up the frozen dinner box from the podium. He held it aloft.

“I will begin this talk—I call it ‘Mass Culture: The Death of Whole Human Life’—with a prop. This is a Bonfleur microwave chicken nuggets dinner. You can buy this in any supermarket in the United States.”

Abel opened the brightly colored box and slipped out the small plastic tray inside. He held up the tray to reveal chicken strips, a few French fries and a chunk of frozen chocolate cake batter.

“This,” insisted Abel, “this is a mass market miracle. It is the very distilled essence of the mass culture that is the United States of America. It seems like a simple enough product. It’s one meal for someone. The emphasis is on one. One!

“Well,” the lecturer paused for emphasis, “this little product that I bought for $1.79 is as dangerous and debilitating to society as anything that has ever been produced. A chicken nuggets dinner.”

Several people in the audience chuckled, and Abel smiled to arrest the seeming absurdity of his remark.

“Let me tell you exactly what this chicken nuggets dinner is for. This food product is not about food. Not at all. The primary purpose of this product is to make money. It is a thing, a thing designed to make as much profit as humanly possible as can be wrung from a $1.79 purchase price.

“To wrest maximum profit from one cheap meal, you need to have at your fingertips a new type of human being, a wholly new creature. This animal is called a hyper-consumer, a carefully-engineered consumptive biological phenomenon. What will this new hyper-consumer be like? The answer is simple. He or she will be completely isolated, alone within a mass society.  An isolated mass-culture being is one who must buy every single thing, in single-serve portions, that he or she needs to maintain a singular existence. This consumer has virtually no real life skills with which to fashion much of anything tangible anyway. This creature is also so pressed for time, working impossible hours and often two and even three jobs, that he or she can’t take the time to prepare much of anything, either. So the single-serve product was invented. It saves time and effort and is, by far, the most profitable way for a corporation to wring high profits out of any given ounce of anything, in this case, food.

“This mass culture approach to almost any product we can buy is a systemic attack on the very roots of our ages-old collective human culture, our human heritage. Our hyper-consumer—the crowning achievement of mass culture—is a fabricated construct, a thing, absolutely ideal for moving money from Jack and Jill Citizen to the coffers of mass-culture corporations and the pockets of that hyper-wealthy tiny fraction of the global human population: the ultra-rich.

“Just two hundred years ago such an individual didn’t exist on earth. Today, there is no one left standing. We are, all of us, that consumer. That being the case, we are all, right now, the most at-risk souls in all of human history. We are in grave danger as a culture and as a species. I will tell you why that is.”

Winnie’s tiny digital tape recorder whirred, picking up his every word and filtered out the background din. Now in the den with the wolf, she was thrilled with her good fortune.

After the ninety minutes of continuous banter, Abel concluded his remarks. The small ensemble filled the little theater with thunderous applause. A few stayed behind to talk as the theater emptied. Winnie joined them. Within a few minutes, she was alone with her host, as she had planned.

“You should take that show on the road, Mr. Whittemore,” said the analyst, speaking through a cheery smile.

Abel smiled back and laughed quietly. “Hmm, I do quite a bit of road work, but it wears on me. I don’t much care for life on the road.”

“There must be great demands on your time now that your work is selling everywhere.”

“Yes, but I do try to limit my time away from here somewhat, except during the winter. Then it’s four months nonstop.”

“I must say, Mr. Whittemore, you’ve given all of us a look into the window of your world here, but you haven’t told us anything about you.”

“I don’t like to bore people with my personal history.”

“You wouldn’t bore me.”

Abel took the measure of that last remark. He felt a bit disarmed that this female was showing an interest in him. He did know that he wanted to continue talking with the woman from Kansas City.

“Well, then, Ms., ah… ”

“My name is Winnie.”

“Yes, I guess I do know that, Winnie.” He looked about the lecture hall, avoiding her eyes, then turned to her and made her an offer. “I’ll tell you what, Winnie. I will reveal to you a little about myself if you tell me a little about you. Fifty-fifty.”

The Missourian accepted. “Fifty-fifty.”

Cups of herb tea in hand, the two made their way to Abel’s modest office on the third floor of First Day Hall, a space filled with native woods and stone. Behind the man’s sparse Shaker-style oak desk loomed a floor-to-ceiling mural reproduction of the cave paintings at Vallon Pont d’Arc, France. The grand image depicted ancient renderings of ibex, mammoth, bison, wooly rhinoceros, steppe horses and many other creatures of the Pleistocene, once painted with ochre earth, charcoal, berry extracts and animal fats on cold walls of rock.

Winnie had been juggling thoughts about how to get Abel to open up, but the cave painting image overwhelmed her as she entered the room. Her host noticed her eyes flare wide and her jaw free fall.

“Not to worry, Winnie, they’re all extinct,” joked Abel.

Winnie took a moment to reflect on his little aside. “That is something!”

Abel pulled up a chair and motioned to his guest to have a seat in a second one within a comfortable distance.

“Okay,” he said, “you first. Start from the very beginning.”

Winnie rattled off her personal history, complete with a farm family childhood, college years and interests. She said nothing about the nature of her employment. Abel listened politely, then broke in.

“Okay, you’ve given me the A-B-Cs of your youth. In the theater, you said that I hadn’t revealed to anyone who was attending the classes who I really was. But you haven’t told me who you are. You told me how you were assembled up to this point. But who is the real Winnie, ah, Winnie, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Winnie. I see where you’re going. I came here to learn how to get my hands dirty,” she explained.

Abel nodded and let his guest freewheel.

“Being an IT manager isn’t much fun, Abel. I’ve been the person you spoke about in your lecture, the person at work at a computer all day alone who doesn’t do anything really tangible. I want to be something else entirely. I’ve made some money, so now I’d like to get some earth under my fingernails.”

For fifteen minutes, Winnie wove a tale of a gregarious youngster who spent summers on her grandparents’ farm near Jefferson City, Missouri. Those days were the happiest days of her life, she explained, and she wanted to return to that experience and relive it as an adult.

Abel listened quietly, studying her gestures and intonation. Winnie concluded her long monologue and then looked directly into Abel’s eyes, admonishing him to believe every word of it.

Abel took a sip of his cooling tea. “You know, Winnie, you would be a good candidate for an Independency community.”

“Really. You think so?”

“Mmm, I do. You say you have exceptional computer skills, and you have had life experience on a farm, even if it was during summers. An Independency community might be a good match for you.”

The woman uttered a low “hmm.” An awkward silence infused the office space as each studied the other. She nibbled a fingernail. After five long seconds, Winnie piped up. “Your turn.”

Abel produced his patented grin once again. “Fair is fair.”

“What about this, this image of animals?” asked Winnie. She gestured toward the mural. “Does that say anything about you?”

Abel glanced at the immense print spanning the wall behind his desk. “That image is truly a treasure of the first order. It is, in my way of thinking, the most important work ever created by humans.”

“Why is that?”

“It is one of the very first artistic works we know of created by people just like us, but people living more than 30,000 years ago. It is a window into the minds of humans standing just over the threshold of truly modern thought. I keep the mural here because it reminds me every day how precious the spark of real consciousness is to each of us.”

“Tell me why that spark is so precious to you,” Winnie probed.

“I first saw this image on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when I was a young teen. I was stunned by it. All around me were the giant bones of mastodons, mammoths and saber-toothed cats, and here, here was a snapshot of that lost world painted by the people who lived it. It made an immense impression on me. It was a turning point.”

“There must have been other turning points.”

“Oh, yes, certainly.”

“Tell me.”

“Let’s see. I did some volunteer work as a young man, in food pantries for the poor and at homeless shelters. But it was a political event that put me on the course to where we are now.”

Now Winnie was where she wanted to be. She sought to excavate his political mind.

“What was it? What happened?”

“When I was in college, I went to see the president speak. I was with a group of student activists when we walked into the lobby of the municipal auditorium. Just as I entered I was hit, blindsided, a body blow. I don’t remember much, but I do have a sense of sailing right back out the door through the air and coming down hard on the limestone steps. I come to my senses and I’m on my back in the middle of the steps. There were scores of people sidestepping me, staring down at me, walking right by, as if I were litter on a sidewalk.”

“You’re joking.”

“Oh no, not joking. It took us some time to sort out what happened, but we concluded that we’d been forcefully denied entry, by party operatives I suppose, so that we would not get into the main hall where the president was to speak. I soon picked up my pen and put it to paper. I was angry. But anger is really a useless emotion. Better to channel anger into creativity.”

“How did that experience equal Independency, Minnesota?” Winnie prodded.

“Well, I worked with the hungry and homeless, as I said. Both were utterly helpless. They did not have a meaningful connection to the broader society nor to family. The most basic elements that keep a being whole and secure had been stripped away by any number of misfortunes and by an uncaring mass culture. Did they ever suffer.

“A few years later, I was studying scientific papers that described paleolithic living arrangements in a newly-discovered cave in France. Carbon dating placed artifacts in the cave at 37,000 years before the present. Here were people with brains and bodies really no different than our own, who had stitched together an enormous body of information about their environment and who would pass that information orally down the long chain of generations almost, but not quite, to the present day. These humans had mastered skills absolutely essential to their survival. Everyone in their paleo-community knew a great deal about those critical tasks and how to perform them well.”

Abel turned, reached over and behind his desk, and grabbed something. He held it up for Winnie to see. It was a human skull. She was startled by it.

“Fear not, Winnie. This is an acrylic resin model of an extraordinary human being. It’s someone we could not possibly have known. But, she’s just like you, Winnie.”

The woman flashed a puzzled look toward Abel, her eyes glowing incandescent.

“She’s a female. She was your age. This particular gal would be 35,000 years old if she were alive today. She never ate a chicken nugget, I can tell you that,” Abel said with a comedic flourish. Winnie let out a nervous laugh at the silly remark, then seemed to relax, settling back in her chair. She examined rough fossil features of the model skull.

“What does this have to do with soup kitchens, or homelessness, or getting your rear end kicked out of a building?”

“Just this, Winnie,” Abel said, as his grin faded flat. “Many thousands of years ago this woman lived in a tightly-composed social group. In a terribly harsh ice age climate and in a world filled with huge four-legged predators, she thrived because all her clanmates worked together as a unit. They knew their environment intimately. Most importantly, they cared for each and every one of the members of the tribe—all of them, all the time. It was either that or perish. Single mothers and soup kitchens were impossible then.

“They had mastered real world skills and had woven together an immensely strong social fabric absolutely essential to their survival. We, on the other hand, have found a way to break completely the link between the environment and ourselves and to discard the essential skills and bonds that kept our human lineage alive and thriving for untold millennia. We even go so far as to denigrate those who still know and use those skills. The Asian peasant farmer, for instance, the Australian aborigine or the Borneo bush people. We see them as backward simpletons. Of course, they have in their possession a vast treasure house of knowledge that we can no longer fathom. We think it’s useless and not applicable to our modern world.

“So there’s a yawning gap now in the human knowledge chain. That gap is invisible to us on this side of the 21st century, but the chasm is unfathomably deep and fraught with danger. Any destabilizing event that greatly slows or breaks down the machinery of modern technological world culture will cripple the individual. Every one of the eight billion humans on the planet will have nothing to fall back on, no buffer against global tribulation. We can no longer fend for ourselves. We no longer know how. That makes us extremely vulnerable, more so than at any time in our 200,000-year history.

“Independency, then, seeks to restore those lost skills and create an alternative culture, one that….”

Through the door of the office a flying creature zoomed and landed squarely on top of Abel. As it landed, it screeched: “Hello my pop, pop, pop.”

Abel’s daughter, Pelee, managed to land in her father’s lap without breaking bones or disabling the chair he was seated in. He wrapped both arms around her and squeezed tightly. The child squealed with delight. “You’re hurting me!”

“Oh, I’m not hurting you and you know it.”

“I know.”

Pelee nestled into her father’s arms and glanced at the woman seated nearby. “Hello, Winnie.”

Winnie was startled that the youngster recalled her name. “How did you remember who I am, young lady?”

“You’re going to be here for four sessions, right? You’re the first one to stay for that many. That makes you special. I remember you because you’re special.”

Chapter Thirteen

In late night darkness, Winnie returned to Abel’s vacant office, laptop computer in hand, to carry out a simple task. She removed a tiny electronic device from her slacks pocket and rolled it between her fingers. The minute unit was a keylogger made by KeyGhost, a bit of electronic wonderment designed to capture every single keystroke that anyone sitting at a computer keyboard typed out.

Fishing behind the computer tower tucked under Abel’s office desk, Winnie inserted the unit between the keyboard port and the keyboard line. It was inconspicuous and, to anyone going about their usual business in the room, invisible.

In seconds, she had access to everything Abel might type over the next few weeks and months, including much sought after passwords, internet addresses and any computer code he chose to write. All she had to do was remove the device later, attach it to her laptop and download the information.

Her clandestine work was not finished. Winnie retrieved her laptop computer from a chair, ran a line to the computer tower and set up a network connection. In a minute, she was rummaging through file folders and pulling copies of any contents that seemed promising. She took particular note of folders labeled Elections, Alternate Futures, New Towns and one titled Revolution.

For half an hour, Winnie worked behind the mask of darkness, looting Abel’s intellectual treasures from his computer. Satisfied with her digital stash, the agent was about to flip her laptop closed when she decided to check on recent false background information about her prepared by Midlands Research Group. Buried in cyberspace were fabricated documents created in the event someone became curious enough to want to learn something about her past. She wanted to familiarize herself with the material. Pulling the internet cable from Abel’s machine, she inserted it into the laptop and went online. She googled her name. A list of dozens of web entries materialized in seconds.

Opening one listing, the woman came face to face with a phony newspaper article about her winning a pie-eating contest when she was a pre-teen. Perfect!

Winnie floated out of the office, down the stairs and out of First Day Hall into a brisk Minnesota night. Under the dim light of a crescent moon, the Missourian trotted across the village common to the Rough Diamond cabin. Not a soul in the community was awake to notice her passing, and she moved silently into the cabin so as not to wake the other women conference-goers who were housed in the little domicile with her.

Chapter Fourteen

A pane of fractured window glass in the foyer of the main lobby entrance of Yellowstone Lake Inn fell to earth and disintegrated. Everything along the rambling facade of Yellowstone National Park’s crown jewel hotel—splintered wood, shingle, clapboard, glass and trim, fixtures—was at the mercy of gravity.

Liz contemplated the slow rain of materials peeling from the once-majestic structure. The geophysicist could see through the building to the lakefront. The lower floor walls had been crushed and swept away by the brute force of the waves generated by the hydrothermal explosion bounding off the bottom of the lake. The few remaining undamaged supporting timbers and walls were losing their bid to remain standing, unable to bear up under the great weight of the rambling upper floors. The building groaned, its death rattle audible up and down the shore.

Liz drifted before the carnage, expressionless, arms folded across her chest as if to comfort herself. To step in any direction was to slip and slide in flowing silt and rubble or to trip over a veranda chair, a mattress, shattered china or a coffee urn.

Lake Village gave up its life to the inland freshwater ocean. The ranger station, clinic, store, post office and the inn’s smaller cousin, Lake Lodge, had been torn from the landscape, their foundations filled in with gravel and mud. Splintered remains of the waterside hamlet floated in the lake, its crystalline waters fouled, replaced by fluid the color of raw sewage.

Two miles southeast of the inn, out in the lake, lay ground zero, its location marked by a glistening tower of steam vapor drifting to the heavens. Beneath the column of mist, the lake water concealed a geological bomb crater where the bulging inflated plain had broken up thirty-six hours earlier. In an instant, the early morning explosion disemboweled the lake bottom. Tens of thousands of tons of rock shrapnel and sediment rocketed up through the waters. Liz retrieved tiny shards of rock missiles and pocketed them for later study.

The Lake Village buildings sustained a cataclysmic rock bombardment moments after the steam blast. Then the first of half-a-dozen twenty-foot waves came ashore and pulverized structures, all but the hotel. Its sheer size and the girth of its timbers saved the grand dame from complete destruction. Mortally wounded, it was losing its struggle to remain erect before Liz’s eyes.

North, in the direction of Fishing Bridge, figures appeared at a great distance, picking their way southward along the shoreline and stopping often to examine debris and to scan the bay waters. Keeping pace with them but hundreds of feet offshore were two others, putt-putting along in a small open boat with a low-power outboard motor attached. Liz thought the band must be a search team, and she decided to join them.

Supervising geologist Wesley Couch scrambled over debris, followed by park biologist Jamie Hebert and a park ranger. The men had organized a party in the hopes of tracking down park superintendent Orin Thresher, the geophysicist from Massachusetts, and several late-season hikers who had obtained backcountry camping permits but were now overdue.

Someone waved in Liz’s direction.

“Hello. Hello.”

Liz returned the wave and quickened her pace toward the figures at the shoreline.

“Who are you?”

“Liz Embree,” the scientist yelled.

“Ms. Embree?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We’ll be right there.”

The trio hustled south to close the gap. Liz recognized Wesley as the men approached.

“Is that you, Wes?”

Wesley waved. “Yes, Mr. Hebert and Ranger Kirchofer, too. You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m happy to see you, Ms. Embree,” Wesley remarked as the men reached her. “We thought you might have been isolated by the explosion or lost.”

“I’m all right, Wes. South Arm station is a ruin, though.”

“I can just imagine. How did you get here?”

“I walked out to Grant Village. I came this way but I couldn’t get through with the car. The lake road is severed. I backtracked through the geyser basins to Mammoth and came down here first thing this morning to see the effects of the hydrothermal event.”

The park ranger advanced.

“Ms. Embree, have you seen anyone in a Park Service uniform down here?” the man asked.

Before Liz could respond, a shout swept in over the lake waters. The group turned and focused on the small boat.

“What have you got?” yelled the ranger.

A few seconds later, a voice reached them. “There’s a body here.”

Chapter Fifteen

In a clearing at the edge of the broad marches of Big Stone Lake Wildlife Refuge, a Minnesota Fish & Game officer set out a decoy. Abel marveled at the machine, fabricated to look exactly like a buck whitetail deer. Once the life-size model was in place, the men retreated to an elevated spot on the lower slope of the snaking glacial moraine and outwash sediments that formed the bluffs supporting Independency village a hundred feet above. Their vantage point overlooked the clearing. Officer Patrick Moody handed Abel a small wireless remote-control device with two levers attached to it, something like a computer game joystick.

“Flip the switch, Mr. Whittemore, and play with the levers. Now watch the deer.”

Abel, the gadget in hand, did as instructed. He moved the right lever and the mechanical deer’s head rose in elevation and turned as if scanning the environment. The man pushed the lever in the other direction and the head retreated toward the ground.

Tugging at the other stick, Abel activated the decoy’s tail. It swished back and forth, as if shooing flies.

“You think you have the hang of it?” asked the officer.

“Mmm, very easy. Does it fool people?” Abel wondered.

“Yes it does, so much that folks will shoot at it two and three times, then sit dumbfounded wondering why the deer didn’t collapse or run.”

Abel operated the device once more and nodded his head as if pleased.

“So you think tonight’s a good bet, Mr. Whittemore?”

“Yes. The moon’s almost full. It should be a fine night to drive without lights. I suspect he’ll be out tonight or the next few nights.”

“And the decoy, that’s on your land, right?”

“Yes, just over the line a few hundred feet.”

“Okay, I’ll be here. Remember, stay well clear of the target and out of sight. The others, make sure they do their job and get the hell out of here. Are you straight on that?”

“Perfectly straight, Pat. We’ll do exactly what you say.”

Chapter Sixteen

Men in a Park Service boat 300 feet offshore of the crumbing Yellowstone Lake Inn attempted to fish something heavy from the water without capsizing the small craft. There was a considerable struggle, but they managed the task. Ten minutes later, the boaters pulled the little vessel onto the shore rubble.

Arrayed about the gunwales of the aluminum craft, Liz and members of the search party stared speechless at a corpse in the bottom of the boat. The body that had been lifted out of the water was dressed in a Park Service uniform. The clothing had been savaged as had the man’s flesh. Swept up in the powerful waves that came ashore following the blast, the man had been slammed against structures and trees, then tumbled and ground to pulp in the retreating surf. He had been partially scalped by collisions with debris and bones in the face had been crushed and displaced. It was difficult to discern the facial features of the man, but his shoulder patch left no doubt who he was.

“Mercy,” Wesley mumbled and looked away.

“What in the world caused those injuries?” the park ranger gasped, pulling his hat down slowly from his head.

“The violent energy release from the explosion,” said Liz in monotone. “The great waves and their retreat back into the bay would account for such injuries. He took the brunt of what happened here.”

Wesley scanned the area for something to cover the body. He strode off and returned a minute later with a soiled throw rug.

“Why don’t you boys take the boat and Orin out to Fishing Bridge,” Wesley suggested. “See if you can get your second-in-command to get the county coroner in. We’ve still got hikers out, so there’s still a search to conduct.”

Wesley and Liz stayed behind at Lake Village in awkward silence while the park employees ferried out into the lake with Thresher’s body and motored north. The two ambled west and stopped before the hulk of Yellowstone Lake Inn.

“I’ve got the CVO alerted, Ms. Embree,” Wesley said after a long verbal drought. “The director, Fred Womack, is going to fly in for a look.”

“What about the park?” the geophysicist queried.

“Parks has closed Yellowstone for the time being, until they can assess the damage and the threat to the public.”

“The phreatic explosion released pressure, Wes. That danger is behind us.”

“I know that, Ms. Liz, but we’ve got to assuage the concerns of the powers that be and the press, too. Besides, Parks has a good deal of ruined infrastructure to contend with.”

Wesley turned his attention to the historic inn, studying its crippled form, shaking his head all the while. The sweeping manicured lawns and flowerbeds were a desert of stone rubble, sand, mud and trash. The familiar graceful white columns at the entrance were nowhere to be seen and the roof they supported had smashed down, rafted through the lobby, and was afloat somewhere in the lake. The lower exterior walls gone, nothing prevented the waves from removing every last article that had once graced the interior.

“Nothing to salvage here,” Wesley said with a shrug. “Not a damn thing.”

Chapter Seventeen

Two hours after sundown, Abel detected the hum of a vehicle engine approaching the Big Stone Lake marshes from the south along an abandoned wheel treadway used as a snowmobile trail in winter. Fish & Game officer Patrick Moody heard it, too, from his hiding place in the reeds across the rough lane from the clearing where the decoy deer stood. By the sound of it, the vehicle was creeping along. It did not show itself with headlamps.

A 4x4 pickup truck advanced directly in front of Moody’s position and stopped in the darkness. A roof-mounted lamp switched on, its glaring white light drenched the clearing. A deer at the far end of the opening raised its head.

Officer Moody stepped from his blind of reeds and cattails, slipped around the rear of the truck, crouched down, and inched forward along the passenger side. A rifle barrel rammed out of the passenger side window and a blast rent the air. Another followed.

“What the hell?” a voice barked from inside the cab.

Half a mile away, on the south end of an old plank bridge over Pheasant Creek, two ringers heard the gunshots. The reports were a cue. The men swung a heavy-dimension timber gate closed, slipped a chain around a post, and ran off on foot to the north.

Officer Moody, with the deftness of long experience dealing with wildlife poachers, reached both arms up from his position, seized the barrel of the gun and yanked it down out of the truck. He pitched the weapon over the bed of the truck and into the wetlands to the west. As expected, the driver of the truck shifted gears and the vehicle lunged forward and away.

At the bridge half a mile ahead, the 4x4 pickup slid to a halt. The driver leaped from the rig and went to a gate blocking the way forward. He pulled frantically at the chain that kept the barrier pinned to an upright post. As he struggled with the links, a black state van rambled up behind the pickup and stopped.

A hulking male, caught in bright headlights, lumbered on heavy boots from the bridge and pushed through brush and small trees at the edge of the track. A warning shot from a small arm crackled in the darkness.

“Get back here,” howled Moody, “we’ve got men posted ahead of you. You have nowhere to go.”

The officer knew what to expect. He slipped around the gate, crossed the bridge quietly and settled down to wait, gun drawn. He did not have to wait long. Something large splashed into the creek and worked its way up to the bridge, using the span as cover to cross the stream. A character with massive features appeared, slipping and stumbling on the wet terrain beside the bridge. When the man stood up, Moody pointed the firearm at the fellow’s expansive chest.

“On your knees. Now lie on the ground, feet wide apart, hands straight out to the side.”

Footfalls sounded on the bridge.

“Stop,” yelled Moody, not taking his eyes off the man sprawled on the ground.

“It’s me, Abel,” the new arrival called from the span.

“Stay where you are, Mr. Whittemore. You’ve done your part.”

“I want to see this man.”

Officer Moody pounced on the back of the character on the ground, rammed a knee into the small of the back and one at the base of the neck. He reached for the man’s thick right hand, pulled it down and back behind the torso. With a swift, deft move, he clicked a handcuff in place. He did the same to the left hand, pushed off, and stood back from the would-be poacher.

“Up,” commanded Moody, holstering his pistol.

The handcuffed man struggled to his knees and stood.

“Turn toward the headlights so we can get a look at you.”

The suspect rotated into the light, revealing a thick jaw set and heavy brow.

Moody marveled at the facial architecture of the man, studying him for some seconds. He addressed Abel. “You know this man?”

After a pause: “To some degree. That’s who we thought we’d find.”

“Mr. Regas?”

“Yes, Andy Regas.”

The officer read his captive the Miranda warning, then marched him to the state wagon for transport to Ortonville.

“Anyone you want to get a hold of, Mr. Regas?” asked the officer.

No answer.

“You want to call someone when you get to Ortonville?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“The old man.”

“Who would that be?”

“Harland. Harland Sven. Sweetly farmer.”

“Okay, then.”

Chapter Eighteen

A Big Stone County holding cell disgorged Andrew Regas. He was removed to the Ortonville municipal courthouse for arraignment before Justice Peter Hinckley on charges of intent to destroy wildlife, hunting game out of season, hunting with a firearm half an hour after sundown, and hunting game from the confines of a vehicle.

The judge scanned the charges, but before asking the suspect for a plea, he settled back in his robes behind the bench and leafed through a folder full of papers. The judge peered over the top of his glasses and pulled on his lower lip.

“Mr. Regas, you’ve been before this court on more than a few occasions. This isn’t the first time officers have brought you before me on similar charges. So, here you are once again. Would you like the court to appoint a lawyer to represent you?”

“No, sir.”

“All right, then, how do you plead?”

Regas turned and glanced at Fish & Game Officer Moody standing over his right shoulder. “Not guilty.”

“All right, not guilty,” mumbled Judge Hinckley. He penned a few notes before addressing the man. “I’m going to recommend that you be housed in the county facility until such time as the state of Minnesota acts upon these charges or unless you or a citizen of good standing posts bail. Figure for said bail shall be $2,000.”

Officer Moody and the bailiff escorted Regas from the municipal courtroom. Harland Sven, one of the very few people in the chamber, approached the bench to ask if he could post the bail figure. The judge directed Harland to see the court clerk to carry out his wishes.

Abel, too, moved to the front of the courtroom. Regas, under escort, sneered at the resident from Prospect Bluffs. Abel sought out Harland, someone he chanced to meet just a few times because Prospect Bluffs, on the Minnesota side of Big Stone Lake, lay across waters and a dozen miles north of Sweetly, South Dakota.

An Amish field hat planted on his head, Abel waited patiently for Harland to finish his business with the court. When Harland turned to leave, Abel flagged him.

“Mr. Sven, my name is Abel Whittemore.”

The farmer eyed him coldly. “I know who you are.”

Harland pushed by Abel and strode quickly out of the courthouse. Abel caught up with him and turned to face the farmer.

“Mr. Sven, what is it about this fellow, Andy Regas?”

“None of your business.”

“It is my business,” Abel protested firmly. “That man has been a good deal of trouble to us on the bluffs. What is the reason for it?”

“Why are you asking me? I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

“With due respect, Andy Regas was in your charge as a youngster, was he not?”

“What do you care?” burped Harland, acid welling in his throat.

“I thought you might be able to intercede and stop….”

Andy’s a grown man, for heaven’s sake,” snapped Harland, his voice escalating in volume. “You got a problem with him, take it up with him. I see you already have.”

“This isn’t the first time he’s jacked deer on the bluffs.”

“Well, damnation, if you go and post the land, land people have been hunted for generations, you’re bound to get some heat, mister.”

Harland’s personal restraints frayed. Damn this eastern elitist. He rammed his nose against Abel’s and hissed in his face. “I’m a dirt farmer, freak. I work like the devil himself. Andy helped me for ten years before he turned legal age and was free to go. He might not have been the best of foster kids, but he worked hard, toed the line. We did right by him, Sugar and me. Who the hell are you to think otherwise?”

“Can you get through to him?” Abel shot back, giving no ground.

“Let me get this through to you, freak.” Harland trembled with hostility. “We raise crops down here, sometimes good crops, sometimes poor. Sometimes we raise good kids, sometimes not. Been that way forever. But I know this much. You and your playschool can’t raise much of anything in the sand and gravel on that bluff of yours. When your book royalties dry up, so will you. You’ll be gone, and then you won’t give a good goddamn if someone jacks a deer for his dinner.”

Harland’s slur burrowed beneath Abel’s skin. He leveled one of his own. “That playschool, as you call it, supports 110 people—110! You don’t have a monopoly on working hard and feeding people, farmer. We’re not going to sell out, I can assure you. We’re not going away.”

Chapter Nineteen

“Will you look at that! You can see the whole park breathing,” marveled supervising geologist Wesley Crouch as he scrutinized a twenty-eight-inch flat monitor displaying a time-lapse graphic model of Yellowstone National Park. The image of the modeled landscape, representing eight decades in time, rose and fell as if it were a respiring human torso.

“Mmm,” murmured Liz as she scanned the digital wizardry on the liquid crystal display in the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory lab at the Mammoth Hot Springs complex. The computer modeler, Germaine Yardley of the U.S. Geological Survey Volcanic Hazards Team, flailed at his workstation keyboard, his warm coffee-colored fingers a blur. On the screen, a three-dimensional digital matrix, skewed to greatly exaggerate recent elevation inflation in the region around the lake, rotated slowly so the professionals could study the graphic representation from every angle.

Seated beside Yardley was a trim, athletic man. The director of the Cascades Volcano Observatory, Frederick Womack, had just arrived from Vancouver, Washington to assess the Lake Village-area steam explosion and the extent of harmonic tremor activity. He had been consulting with Wesley and Liz since his arrival and had settled down with Yardley to watch the digital graphic master at work as the day waned.

The modeler pointed a pen to an area of several square miles just north of the western bulbous, finger-like projection in the lake known as West Thumb. “That’s the Mallard Lake resurgence dome now,” the graphic virtuoso noted. He directed his pen to a second area on the screen to the east of the lake.  He said matter-of-factly, “That’s Sour Creek dome there.”

Yardley let the computer program work its pixel magic as the foursome conversed, ate microwave pizza and drank tepid coffee and Mountain Dew well into the evening. In the false color graphic image, the two regions Yardley had pointed out appeared as true bulges, as if they were hematoma swellings of the skin after a bruising punch.

“So, Ms. Embree,” asked Womack as he chewed a slice of chilling pizza, “now that we’ve gone through all the data, you think the old Mallard Lake and Sour Creek, those resurgence zones, are really just separate old real estate riding a much larger and evolving structure? We should be focusing on something bigger that’s affecting the whole region between the domes.”

“Uh huh. That’s what I think is the case.”

“And you think the steam explosion in the lake was a symptom of the developing phenomena and that it is having an adverse impact on the lake?” Womack turned to look directly at the tall woman behind him.

“That’s what I believe, yes.”

“Would you give us your grand view, Ms. Embree?” Couch asked.

“Okay,” she replied. “We’re seeing a continuous harmonic tremor sequence spanning the entire lake region at and between the domes and to the east as well. Data indicate magma is on the move, we all agree. It’s shallowing and flowing laterally, influencing surface heat outflow and effluent runoff. Tremors are trending eastward toward the park boundary in step with heat flow. Things are trending hot, hot as the Norris Basin from the old domes, down the Firehole, under the lake strata to the Brimstone Basin area, particularly Brimstone. Also, from Brimstone and Park Point to the eastern park boundary, we have rapid topo inflation. That’s touching off the old faults in the uplands above Brimstone and near the eastern shore of Southeast Arm. They’re jittery. Same with the old Sedge Bay and Lake Butte faults to the northeast. Water and air chemistry is undergoing a pronounced shift, and water infiltration into the low country from Park Point to the Yellowstone River inlet is well-documented. We’ve got lots of noise, folks, some of which we’ve been feeling.”

“Now, Germaine,” asked Liz, “could you overlay the seismic profile over this image?”

The modeler turned to his computer and snapped a few keys. The graphic changed instantly, its surface covered with a swarm of small dots, some colored but most black, representing epicenters of hundreds of low-level earthquakes over the recent decade. The target zone was saturated with dots.

“There,” motioned Liz, “overlay the seismic data and you can see that much of the recent swarm activity and heavy harmonics are massed at the resurgence domes, the lake terrain and Brimstone eastward. It coincides with the Mallard Lake and Sour Creek formations and the Mary Bay and Frank Island regions under the lake. Yet the swarms extend, there, to the southeast into the old fault zones at Brimstone and to the northeast to the east entrance. Surface topography is rising, except in the region from Park Point through the Southeast Arm to the river inlet. Those lands are being tilted, pitched to the southeast.”

The hydrothermal specialist tingled with delight over the power of the graphic technology. The digital display, she felt, was a work of fine art, backlit colors set dancing by bits and bytes that could reveal in seconds what might take hours for her and her colleagues to ferret out of hard data. She urged Yardley to pull up overlays of the earthquake fault line grid of the park and the University of Utah’s surface heat outflow data.

Several more keystrokes and the bulging regions on the graphic were suddenly heavily laced with spidery fault lines and shimmered with blistering tones of red, orange and yellow, representing subterranean heat finding its way to the surface at levels far above that of the surrounding country. On the screen, a yellow amoeba-shaped line traced the heavily eroded or buried rim of the huge 630,000-year-old Lava Creek caldera at the very heart of Yellowstone. The hot tones of the computer model encompassed four-fifths of the old caldera boundary and spilled over into other regions. The great geyser and hot spring fields at Norris glowed scarlet. Other areas, not associated with the steamy basin, were also pulsing with warm hues. The modeler punched more keys, and Celsius temperature readings displayed across the graphic.

“No wonder the place is breathing,” said Wesley, enthralled by the computer graphic. “It’s one hot-blooded thing.”

“It’s the beast,” Yardley marveled. “She looks hot. She is hot, compared to ten years ago,” he added. “The beast is getting a little restless, all right.”

Liz was drawn to a shallow crescent of brilliant vermillion on the monitor that rested within an image of a depressed plain between the folds of mountainous uplands east of the lake. The narrow shape was as searing red as any area on the digital topography and it snaked toward the eastern lakeshore. She pointed to the bright color streak. “What do you think is going on there?” she asked the men. All three studied the hot spot for a moment.

“I’ll tell you,” said Wesley slowly, “that’s where we’ve got the big band of forest die-off going on. The fumarole fields have been extremely active of late. Run-off reads increasingly acid and hot. In fact, very hot. We’ve recorded near boiling point in the streams there.”

The modeler flailed away, banging the keys, retrieving data into the park’s computer center at Mammoth Hot Springs offices, a system tied to one of the most advanced and extensive seismograph arrays on earth, the Yellowstone Seismic Network. The University of Utah, in partnership with the Park Service and the US Geological Survey, maintained and helped monitor twenty-two recording stations equipped with sophisticated instrumentation designed to be sensitive to volcanic and subsurface processes at Yellowstone. Yardley was playing with the data that had been relayed around the West and was now being downloaded from the campus of the university at Provo.

CVO director Womack studied the graphic images as they changed in response to Yardley’s deft strokes, then posed a question. “Not since the Pleistocene has a volcanic vent opened here. It’s been 630,000 years since the caldera blew out and collapsed. We know the great eruption events in this neighborhood occur at roughly similar-duration cycles. Topographic rise is at historic highs right now as are thermal readings in some basins. For argument’s sake, do you think the conditions we’re experiencing right now are precursors to some inordinately large eruptive event, or is Yellowstone simply misbehaving a bit more than usual?”

“Too bad we don’t have more historical data. No one has ever been on hand for the awakening of a caldera of this scale,” Liz noted.

“I’d say,” Yardley piped up from his workstation, “Yellowstone is entering a very cranky stage in its customary behavior. The place is like some spoiled brat acting up because mom didn’t give him a cookie.”

“Some kid,” chuckled Liz. She gave Yardley a playful cuff on the shoulder.

“Just how cranky?” asked Wesley, fiddling with his moustache.

Yardley tapped the screen and pointed to the hot zones on the graphic. “Carbon dioxide and SO_2 levels are unhealthy around the old resurgence domes. The infrared data is convincing. Are we seeing conditions where we might eventually see an avenue for magma to reach the surface? I think that’s possible. ”

“No volcanic vent of any size has opened here for 70,000 years, Germaine,” Womack pointed out matter-of-factly.

“I think there’s cause for concern,” argued Liz, “but I don’t think the domes are our concern. They’re emitting robust signals, yes, but no more so than half a dozen other points. You’ve got a thousand square miles singing. I’ve never observed anything quite like this over such an immense area.”

“So, where do you think all this may be heading, Ms. Liz?” asked Womack.

“I concur with Yardley to some degree. In the near term, I think there’s a very real potential for additional phreatic explosions, perhaps near one of the domes or in Brimstone Basin. We’ve had wholesale spikes in surface temperature readings across the park; that’s driving the unusual hydrothermal phenomena. It speaks volumes about conditions in the magma chamber. I think we’re at the threshold where we see magma crystallization underway. Water vapor is being driven out of the melt, supercharging everything.”

“Could you imagine the consequences of an eruption in the park?” Wesley wondered aloud.

“I’d be very uneasy about the larger consequences of such an event,” said Liz. “Let’s say, just for sake of argument, the Sour Creek dome area deforms, then blows out. Well, then, we’d have a new vent on our hands. Fine. But what’s terrifying to consider is the potential for caldera-wide decompression should a vent open.”

“Decompression of the magma chamber,” Womack said, rounding out Liz’s thought.

“Yes, the lid comes off.”

“And?”

“Think of it. Billions of cubic feet of CO_2 in suspension uncapped. Vents open everywhere. More gas expands. What does that say to you, Frederick?”

“Worse case? Catastrophic collapse!”

“A truly ominous thought.”

Wesley threw up his hands abruptly, scoffing. “Ah, spare me. I’m not in the catastrophist’s camp, and I never will be. A new volcanic vent—I could entertain that remote possibility. Yellowstone has had its share of them in the past and there will certainly be more in its future.”

“We’re not confined to a run-of-the-mill chamber beneath a single peak, Wes,” Liz countered, raising the decibels of her voice.

“I know full well what we’ve got below us,” Wesley sputtered, as if annoyed. “And I know that magma reservoir has resided below us here for eons, and single vents have opened and closed over the chamber dozens of times.”

“In your experience, Wes, have you ever witnessed what we’re seeing over such vast terrain?”

“Will you let me finish?” scowled Wesley. “If we’re going to see some activity, it’s probably going to be there,” he said emphatically, pointing to the computer screen.

Liz scoffed, “What about Norris?”

“What about it?”

“And the Firehole, Brimstone….”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” yodeled the CVO director, cutting the conversation off. “It’s time to say goodnight to our little mental exercise. It’s late. Folks are tired. We can speculate all we want, but we need to let our instruments do the talking quite a bit longer.”

Liz deflated, and slumped in her chair. Wesley closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with the palms of his hands.

Womack cracked a wry smile, downed the last of a Vitamin Water and took an abrupt conversational detour. “Tell me something. Have any of you read the theories of David Keys?”

Liz rocked forward in her seat beside Womack and looked over the man with the Spartan physique. “Keys? Does this have anything to do with, what, dendrochronology studies?”

“Yes, tree rings. That, ice core samples and the global social upheavals after 535 A.D.”

“I’m familiar with a smidgeon,” Liz said.

Womack eyed the others. Wesley wrinkled his face and squinted at Womack.  “I haven’t read any papers by anyone named Keys,” said Wesley. “Is he in vulcanology?”

“He’s a science writer, not a field scientist. His specialty is archeology, I believe, not the earth sciences. But he’s come up with some compelling ideas.”

“Such as?”

“There’s a good deal of evidence coming to light about a truly massive eruption in the Sunda Straight between Sumatra and Java in 535 A.D.”

“Sunda? You mean of Krakatoa fame?” Yardley queried.

“Yes, our old nemesis, Krakatoa,” said the CVO director, nodding with a great sweep of the head. “Tree ring data from Siberia, California, Canada, and Scandinavia indicate forests stopped growing in high temperate latitudes for half a decade—stopped cold, literally. Ice core samples from Greenland, from the same period of time, show a wild spike in volcanic sulfides. Something substantial happened, and the evidence points to the continental plate subduction zone in Indonesia, and specifically to the Krakatoa archipelago.”

“How massive an event?” Wesley wondered.

“According to estimates from the Icelander, Siggurdson, and Krakatoa specialist Ken Wohletz, we’re talking an eruption the equivalent to millions of Hiroshima-size bombs.”

“Ooo, not small change!” blurted Yardley.

“Whatever it was, it was massive enough to profoundly affect cultures the world over. Empires collapse and new nations rise from the ashes. Mind if I divulge a few of Keys’ suppositions?”

Liz perched at the edge or her chair. “Enlighten us.”

“Well now, according to Keys, people of all cultures everywhere record that the sun grows dark in early months of 535 A.D., and remains so for some years. The term ‘Dark Ages’ may very well have its origin in these written observations. Deep cold descends and crops fail for many summers in the temperate zones. Red rains fall in Asia. Yellow snows are recorded in China. Weather patterns swing wildly out of sync. Catastrophic droughts strike repeatedly at Central America, Africa, the Middle East and China for some thirty years.”

“What about humankind?” asked Liz.

“For starters, Constantinople, the world’s wealthiest city and the last great heart of the Roman Empire, undergoes a thorough shakedown within three decades, thanks to famine, plague and strife brought on by cold conditions. A world away, in Mexico, something similar is going on. The New World’s largest city, Teotihuacán, is besieged by a crushing decades-long drought. Once 125,000 people strong, the world’s biggest city at that time is abandoned completely within a generation. In England, Celtic tribes are decimated by cold, hunger and disease, setting the stage for Anglo-Saxon newcomers who build the united England we know today. In Asia, the Mongolian Avars suffer terribly on the freezing steppes of Central Asia and soon gallop off on a 4,000-mile migration to the west. Brutal warriors and the world’s most skilled horsemen, they terrorize populations from China to the Balkans.”

“A single volcanic event is the agent that triggered all those horrors?” Wesley crowed. “Can you imagine that?”

“That’s the position Keys stakes out,” Womack replied.

Yardley snapped off his computer. He looked like he’d had enough for one night. All were haggard, faces hangdog after a long day consulting and crunching numbers.

“Yellowstone could inflict that sort of trauma, and then some,” the CVO director offered.

“Oh, so that’s why Yellowstone’s nickname is ‘the beast?’” Liz muttered.

The fellow with the graphic Midas touch shoved his chair away from his computer and glanced at Liz. “Oh, Yellowstone is the beast, all right,” noted Yardley.

“We all call it by that moniker,” Womack explained, “and have for quite some time.”

“Sounds fitting,” Liz opined.

“That it is. The beast. Huh.” Yardley paused for a second, massaged his eyeballs, and turned to Liz. “One fine day, Ms. Embree, old man Yellowstone is going to kick, ah, beaucoup derrieres. Please, pardon my French.”

Chapter Twenty

Scraping lichen from rock at the foot of Head Smashed-In cliff, Benjamin White Elk stuffed a wad into his mouth. He moistened the coarse growth with saliva and let the mixture bathe his inflamed throat. The old remedy concocted millennia ago and handed down by generations lost in time was all the curative White Elk would accept.

Before the snows came to lock down the country for the winter, the Blackfoot elder crossed the border into Alberta, Canada, and motored north a few miles, entering the territory of the North Piegan tribe, one of the four major branches of the Blackfoot Federation. Through a whistling wind he drove, bumping about on the prairie, heading toward a sixty-foot escarpment chiseled out of the landscape by relentless prairie zephyrs and line storms uncounted.

White Elk returned to Head Smashed-In each year to restore himself to spiritual wholeness. He pulled off the dirt lane and brought the old truck to a halt. On legs stinging with arthritis, the Blackfoot elder walked to the base of a sandstone drop.  The tribe’s ancestors had relied on this sacred spot, this buffalo jump, for their existence long before the horse was introduced to the North American plains.

White Elk collected more lichen and ran his hands over and under the rocks, feeling for relics of old. He touched something sharp and paused to unearth the object. It was an obsidian spear point, buried under rocks tumbled in a soil slide sometime in the deep past but now eroded out of its burial chamber by recent rains. He held it to his face and examined it at length. The edges were as keen as the day it was fashioned.

The spear point conjured images of what the cliff floor must have been like during the autumn buffalo drives. Panicked by the native peoples, and funneled through a corridor of stone cairns and men and women waving flaps of buffalo hide, the burly buffalo stampeded, many animals breaking rank along the fringe of a vast herd carpeting the plains to the horizon. Each creature, blindly following the one in front, ran up the gentle sloping incline to the edge of the jump, tearing up the tough prairie sod as it went. One stride too many and the earth dropped away completely. The great animals hurtled into space and fell to the killing floor far below. Many died on impact, their armored skulls crushed, their neck vertebrae separated. A few survived the tumble, landing on the bodies of the first bison to fall.

Men, women and children ran into the pile with lances and knives. Every animal that was injured had to be dispatched quickly. The people feared that if even one buffalo was able to get to its feet and run, it would tell the members of the great herds about the secret of the jump and the bison would no longer come to area to graze for fear of being stampeded and killed by the two-legged ones.

White Elk had only the vivid words of oral history to sketch out the details of the ritual work that followed the buffalo jump. All day people gathered among the dead and dying buffalo. They hefted knives to lance an artery in the throat of each beast to drain the blood. Great pools of scarlet stained the earth and the feet of the Blackfoot. They hurriedly slit the skin along the belly and down the inside of each leg, then laboriously peeled the hides from the carcasses, pulling the heavy robes clear and out to the grass so they could be flensed, cleaned of flesh residue and fat.

The meat from the dead beasts was jerked, pulled in thin sliced strips from the carcasses and draped over long drying racks of branch wood. Other strips were placed on racks built over cool smoky fires kept going for many days. The clouds of smoke dried and cured the meat to ensure a steady supply of protein in late winter and spring. Bones had to be cracked, shattered and pulled apart and the marrow inside scooped out and processed. It was much prized, being full of rich fat energy and divine in flavor.

The work was strenuous. The Blackfoot labored deep into the evening each day and arose early each morning to begin anew. No work that they could take on during the year was more important. Their lives were inexorably linked to the beasts. The meat had to be dried down. The hides had to be scraped and worked so they would be supple. Sinew and gut had to be carefully cut, stretched and dried. It could be used for every purpose imaginable, from sewing leggings and footwear to stringing bows and stitching teepee coverings tightly together to keep out cold and damp weather.

Within a week, the great task was complete and the food removed to the temporary village, hauled in to the buffalo jump just for this purpose. Now the meat could be stored for winter and the fall and grasslands near the village exploited for tubers, roots, late-year greens, seeds and herbs.

The buffalo jump had served the Blackfoot well, White Elk knew. His people, little beings standing erect but only on two feet, had been masters of the great buffalo herds, of animals ten times heavier and infinitely more powerful. It seemed unimaginable to him that for over 100 years now the skills his people had once possessed had evaporated as if campfire smoke. The buffalo had vanished, killed to feed an insatiable fur trade, killed for sport, and killed to rid the native peoples of their critical food source. Without the buffalo and facing starvation, the indigenous ones could be moved off their ancestral lands so that the whites could establish farms and towns.

White Elk was too far removed from the native holocaust to feel the full pain of his ancestors. He was of the modern world; he understood that well. He could take delight in driving a vehicle wherever he wanted to go. There was no need to heat a home with dried buffalo dung. He and his children learned of cultures from the other side of the world.

White Elk pocketed the spear point and shuffled away from under the cliff. He worked his way along the escarpment to where the plains smoothed away the raw cut in the earth. Intent on climbing to the top of the ridge, he slowly, deliberately threaded his way along the edge of the drop, rising higher and higher still until he reached the upper edge of the jump. Exposed at the top of the bluff, his clothing chattered in the teeth of the wind. His leathery skin had weathered many thousands of days exposed to the cold, so he paid the chill no mind.

From his perch, White Elk surveyed the limitless grasslands, undulating as if waves at sea caught in a lusty gale. In all directions, prairie and sky bonded at the horizon in an inseparable embrace. Only in the southwest was there a smudge of tone. White Elk recognized the distant cube-like apparition as Chief Mountain, his old friend.

The sixty-foot drop of the buffalo jump at his feet, and the sacred mountain on the periphery of his vision, White Elk was overcome with the desire to speak his mind into the wind.

“Napiw, old one, do you hear me?” The rush of the buffeting winds was the only reply. “In the dawn time, you taught us how to hunt. You taught us to drive the iinii here to die so that we could live. We had everything we needed.

“How do you want us to live now, Napiw? I ask you for my people. I ask you for the Lakota, Crow, the Flathead, too. I have forgotten how to live. Maybe I need to make a tea of bitterroot to restore my memory. Do you think so, Napiw? Maybe some milkweed for the arthritis.”

White Elk bent over and plucked a hollow blade of grass from the turf. He nibbled on it, bit a clean edge, and massaged his gums with the stiff plant.

“Where is our mother now, Napiw? Will you tell me? She is all around us, but we can no longer find her. She brings forth everything, but we forget how to nurse at her breast. We eat from cans and plastic. She sends the rains, the ice, and the snow, but we drink soda and beer. Liquor, too. Our mother calls down the thunder, but we listen only to that country music now. She commands the lightning and the rainbow and the full moon, but we watch, what, television day and night. Is that what you want of us, Napiw?”

A small tuft of grass and soil dislodged from under the weight of White Elk’s frame, and it tumbled over and over to the rocks below, disintegrating as it went. The elder watched passively, then continued his rant.

“A century ago now, we fell off this jump, just as the iinii did. We fell and were broken. It has taken a century to mend, old one, but the wounds haven’t healed well.”

White Elk clenched his teeth and strained his sore larynx to call above the wind. He raised his eyes and his hands toward the scudding skies and howled, “Why has it taken so long for our wounds to heal, Napiw? You tell me that, huh!”

Spinning away from the cliff ledge, White Elk ambled east. He wanted to make a complete circuit of the jump, as was his custom, before heading back to his truck. At the base of the escarpment, White Elk’s truck took on the appearance of a small locust-skin husk lost in the grass. The elder walked into the bully wind, the force of it slowing him down.

White Elk halved the distance between the jump and the truck and came upon a depression in the grass. In the hollow, the white calcium of bone glinted in the light. There wasn’t much of it, just a few large vertebrae, the projecting dorsal prominences gnawed rough by scavengers. The vertebrae ended at a large block, a skull. White Elk recognized it immediately. It was the skull of a buffalo, tipped upside down, its jaw missing. He slipped over to the bone, reached down and grasped it firmly, rolling it.

White Elk sat down in the grass, folding his legs next to the object. He stroked the skull. The tough horn sheaths had been chewed by small creatures, but the skull still had a look of considerable strength, thought the old man.

The empty orbits, once the domain of the beast’s black eyes, glowered at him. The thin ribbons of bone in the nasal cavity whistled now that the wind could tunnel into the skull. White Elk pulled at the huge grinding molars to see if he could pry one loose, but they were immobile. He tugged at the skull and rolled the heavy cranium onto his lap.

“Will you talk to me, iinii?” White Elk whispered, speaking the animal’s name in his native tongue. “Napiw isn’t talking today. Maybe you will do the talking for him.”

Cradling the bison skull, White Elk sat motionless in the rolling grass until he noticed the light of day departing. The clouds were thickening and drawing down close to the prairie expanse. The first scouts of an approaching snow squall swept by the elder. White Elk rose from his seat, yanked the skull from the ground, and hoisted the burden up onto his shoulders. Using both hands, each grasping a horn, he stooped, lifted the skull onto the bridge of his shoulders and made off for the truck.

As White Elk approached the vehicle, the squall overtook him with a dizzy dance of whirling flakes. The snow brought a smile to the old man’s face. The precipitation was lively and quick, adding a bright sheen to the dull prairie.

The truck was a welcome respite. White Elk carefully lowered the buffalo skull down from his shoulders into the bed of the old pickup and turned the bone face toward the tailgate. The man stood contemplating the chalky skull, crafting a plan in his head.

“You are my little secret, iinii,” whispered the elder to the bone. “You are the future of our people. We need you and you need us.” White Elk reached into his pocket and pulled out the spear point he had found. He placed it alongside the skull.

“If we raise you at Chief Mountain, like our North Piegan brothers do, I think you could grow strong in numbers like in the early days. We could grow together, you and me. We could learn to live as we once did. We could roam the plains together again and be free. What do you say, iinii, huh? Let me know.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The snow line on the mountain heights advanced steadily toward the huddled valleys along the Yellowstone River. Crystal precipitation arrived to stay on the 7,000-foot-elevation plateau at the close of the first week of November.

On rigid clear mornings, white steam cloudbanks swept the land, the ghostly spires of lodgepole pine appearing and disappearing as the thermal curtains drifted with the prevailing westerlies. Buffalo and elk, encrusted with delicate coats of ice precipitate, stood like stone, conserving every calorie of energy to keep the long months of cold at bay. The great bison, their internal engines idling and puffing thunderheads of lung exhaust into the sharp air, kept an eye on lean wolf apparitions loping through the ethereal thermal smoke.

With the approach of the winter solstice, Yellowstone Lake locked solid in an armor coat of rough ice. Liz was anxious to get out on it, bore through it, and set out newly arrived marine probes designed to drop into the depths and burrow into the lake bottom sediments.

Early morning light sliced sharply, slanted and welding torch white. Two snowmobile sleds skimmed upon the lake-ice plain in five-degree cold, towing technological cargo. Liz straddled one mechanical sled dog, racing along beside a craft piloted by Wesley Crouch. Nearing retirement, the veteran Yellowstone geologist rarely spent much time by himself out in the Wyoming winter. But this morning he decided he would slough off his bureaucratic skin, help the woman set out her instruments and enjoy a clean, bright, cold mid-December day in the sun.

A burly fellow and prone to put on pounds, Wesley struggled to stay active. His cardiovascular system was strong, but the recent onset of diabetes plagued him. He packed his insulin; he wasn’t going to let his personal malady get in the way of a fine winter day spent gliding through the park.

The sleds speeding eastward across the frozen expanse of Yellowstone Lake slowed as the two riders neared the eastern shore, several miles to the west of pulsating Brimstone Basin, lately shrouded in a sea of thermal fog. The shore terrain rattled with the bones of dead trees. Wesley switched off his engine. Liz followed suit. Instead of the grand silence of the lost places of the West stealing in, the air hissed, filled with the unscripted music of superheated steam. The ragged symphony played relentlessly, rising from a colossal subterranean orchestra pit lined with untold miles of rock fractures snaking through Brimstone strata.

“Sounds like the devil, doesn’t it, Ms. Embree?” Wesley remarked.

Liz nodded in agreement.

“It shouldn’t. This place should be graveyard quiet.”

“We’re running a fever, Wes.”

“That’s the Gods’ honest truth.”

Well to the north, a shimmering white vapor column, the sole remnant of the catastrophic hydrothermal explosion, drifted high over the lake expanse. Liz’s hunch that first night in September had played out in dramatic fashion. The two earth science veterans watched the steam tower dance in the hard light. The ruptured inflated plain far below the surface was still belching prodigious heat, feeding a column of water hot enough at the surface to keep the lake immediately above it free of ice. The hole in the lake’s frozen jacket was the dimension of a major league ballpark. No matter the temperature of the air, the hole refused to seal shut.

Manhandling a gas-powered ice auger, the two scientists bored twenty inches through the ice layer and set out thermal probes in a long straight line, east to west. A transponder was activated on each probe, cabling attached, and each tipped into its allotted hole to sink away out of sight. A second instrument segment covered over each boring, its antennae pulled vertical and a tiny solar cell tilted toward the southern sun. If drifting snows didn’t bury the surface probe segments, thermal and position data could be retrieved from the lake bottom.

At noon, the little party stood on the rippling ice expanse, gazing at a wide ebony opening in the iron-hard surface. At the rim of the vast ice-free hole, lake ice piled up heavily in the margins as turbulence from below sent upwelling surges of fluid to the surface. The water crowned, slumped and washed out to the edges where it froze into chaotic slush piles.

Wiping ice rime from his mustache, Wesley offered, “I’m always amazed at how this place changes. We’ve got open water. It should be frozen solid everywhere three feet thick.”

Liz pondered the configuration of the great gap in the ice, saying nothing, her hands busy with the probes.

Wesley grimaced, unable to mask a wistful mood. He continued stroking his trim moustache to relieve festering anxiety. “I’ve never seen the place like this, Ms. Embree. I don’t like the feel of it.”

“A veteran like you, Wes?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Ask away.”

“Do you remember the eruption at Mount St. Helens?”

“In terms of what?”

“It fooled everybody, you know.”

“It did, indeed.”

“The best minds in the business were studying that peak months and months before the 1980 eruption.. And what did the mountain do? It absolutely stunned all of us in the geological community. Everyone expected an eruption, of course. No doubt about that. But nobody expected that huge lateral blast. It made us all look like kids with our thumbs in our mouths.”

Liz scrutinized the man’s face, wrinkled into an expression of unease.

“What are you telling me, Wes?”

“I don’t know, Ms. Embree. I hitched my wagon to this place half a lifetime ago. I’ve gotten used to it, the way it behaves, its idiosyncrasies, quirks, you know. It was so familiar. But she’s not familiar anymore. Like Mount St. Helens, you see? I really don’t know what to expect.”

The team moved off to the west to set more instruments, the sun low on the winter horizon. By early afternoon, they passed the small hump of Dot Island, slipped through the narrows at Pumice Point and were into West Thumb, a long finger of water that swept west of the main body of the lake. A dozen probes in place, they pulled off the lake just to the north of the tiny hamlet of West Thumb with its little cluster of thermal features and picked up the snow-covered loop road to Old Faithful, seventeen miles distant. With the probes now resting in the lake, the sleds were lighter and they could make better time. To reach the headquarters back at Mammoth, they still needed to cover more than sixty miles.

On the flats surrounding the site of the famous Old Faithful geyser, the sun settled into the tops of the lodgepole pine. Long black needle shadows fanned out over the snows, creating a stroboscopic effect as the riders motored along. The scientists glided into the Upper Geyser Basin and found the access into the visitors’ center complex built to showcase Old Faithful geyser. The team stopped before the Old Yellowstone Inn, a soaring log-construction hotel. Liz was enchanted with the monumental 700-foot-long building and its soaring seven-story height. No log structure on earth could match its girth.

Wesley didn’t pause a moment to eyeball the familiar hotel. He launched himself from the motorized sled and hurried into the environment on foot.

“Doesn’t look right, Ms. Embree,” he called over his shoulder.

“What? What’s not right?” she shot back, squinting into needles of light.

“This old spout shoots a lot of water, freezes this time of year before it reaches the ground. There’s usually an awful lot of ice and sleet-like deposits downwind, depending on the weather. You get glazing in the trees, ice buildup on everything. There’s little of it. It’s certainly been cold enough long enough. I’m surprised Parks or the snowmobilers haven’t reported this.”

“You think the geyser has gone cold, Wes?” Liz asked as she caught up with the big fellow lumbering toward the geyser cone.

“Could be. I’d hate to think she’s shut down. Damn, that’s a public relations disaster in the making if that’s what’s going on.”

Wesley trudged to the maw of the geyser, a mound of siliceous sinter deposits built up over many centuries. Thin threads of water vapor rose from the wide throat of the thermal marvel. Little ice crust buildup surrounded the opening and there were few signs of the customary snow and ice load well downwind of the thermal giant.

“Looks like Old Faithful’s changed her old habits. My goodness, this doesn’t look good for ol’ Wyoming,” Wesley grumbled.

Liz stood beside the older gentleman at the mouth of Old Faithful and peered into the throat of the thermal beast. There was nothing before her to signify the grandeur of the park’s geothermal treasure.

“The plumbing must be choked shut, Wesley. The quakes of the last few weeks may have pinched off the plumbing system.”

“That’s entirely likely, Ms. Embree. Parks isn’t going to like this. No sir, they won’t like this one bit.”

Wesley knelt down and placed a hand to the geyser’s dense geyser rim deposits. He slowly arched his head around and cast a glance at his companion.

“What kind of a world is it going to be without an Old Faithful in it?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

In the dressing room of the Independency community bath, Abel stripped his clothing off, picked up a bath scraper fashioned after a 2,000-year-old Roman model and used for removing daily grime, and went to the main pool to sit up to his neck and relax in the warm public waters. With the half-light of dawn slipping through the windows, he nodded to his neighbors, sank into the pool, and closed his eyes.

The face of the woman from Kansas City floated through his frontal lobes. She was entering the last week of her second session already, and he found himself seeking her out and talking with her at every opportunity. He was, he could now admit to himself, physically attracted to her, and she did not seem to be put off by his attentiveness.

Abel heaved a sigh. All around him were the bricks and mortar of counter-culture success. Independency was thriving, but he built relationships with women like one builds a house of cards. Despite his outward charm there was also a glare of intensity about him. Most women could not adapt to his nonstop pace, so they drifted out of his life.

How, he pondered, might he actually find common ground with the woman from KCMO? With the unpleasant reality of recent relationship failures silting over his thoughts, Abel ducked beneath the surface of the water and stayed down until his oxygen gave out. He squeezed excess water from his hair, looked up and caught a glimpse of someone approaching. Crossing the terra cotta tile from his right was a female wrapped in a towel. Instinctively, in an instant, he scanned her form, looking for those primordial evolutionary cues signifying age, health, reproductive potential—all of it. The woman dropped down a step beside him, pulled the towel aside, and submerged. When she surfaced, the institute attendee turned to him and smiled. “You’re an early riser.”

Abel could only manage a mumbled greeting. “Good morning.”

Now what? He was awkward suddenly, a fifties teenager on a first date. Winnie sensed his loss of candor. She sought to remedy that.

“I thought I’d try the coed bath this morning. The women’s bath is wonderful, but most of the women in there are institute guests. I thought I’d come in here and see how the great unwashed Independencians come clean.”

Abel laughed heartily, the vocalization echoing the length of the flooded chamber. It relieved his tension, so he settled back to chat.

“Your first experience in coed bathing, Winnie?”

“No, not really. In my senior year in high school, a friend of mine threw a wild party after graduation. We drank some beer, got into the pool, and the kids challenged each other to go in the skinny. So we did. How about you? I mean, other than here.”

Abel smiled and shook his head at a fond memory. “I landed a summer job at a college one year. There was a jumble of boulders nearby called Rock Pool in the Gale River. It was, I found out, a time-honored skinny-dipping hole. When I got there for the first time there were already two-dozen people on the rocks with their dogs. They were sunning themselves like turtles. It was wonderful. In some ways it even changed my way of thinking.”

“Oh, come on,” said the woman with an air of feigned distrust. “Why would skinny dipping change anything?”

“Like I said, there were two dozen people on hand. On the great rocks around the pool, they all looked identical, the men and the women and the little kids. Identical. They all looked like tiny, helpless little humanoid ants sitting on the rubble left behind by some long lost glacier. It taught me that we are all, men and women, male and female, one and the same fragile little creature.”

“Is that why you built this bath?”

“Oh, it may have something to do with it. The bath, though, is really strong glue that holds this community together. In the dead of winter, it really is an oasis against the dark and the cold.”

“So, radicals like their creature comforts, do they?”

“Oh, yes, yes, we do.”

Saturday was a day of rest. There were few classes and no lectures on this day. Abel sought to prolong his time in the company of the woman, so he advanced a proposal.

“Winnie, my daughter and a new friend and I are going to hike up to Table Rock this morning. It’s a bit of a trek, but it’s wonderful if you like a 200-foot cliff drop and a chilly wind. Would you care to join us?”

“This sounds conspicuously like a date,” said Winnie.

“Well, okay, consider it a date, that most ancient of rituals,” Abel nodded.

“That would be fine.”

The expedition of four climbed to the height of land on the bluffs, passed a summit building the community christened Lakota Lodge and snaked along the ridgeline to the northern tip of Big Stone Lake.  Abel and his daughter shouldered daypacks filled with snacks and water and signaled everyone to button up against the fall cold. Pelee and her new pal Jennifer bolted along the exposed track. The adults followed at a more leisurely pace.

The air was colder high on the bluffs, running unimpeded off the South Dakota plains below. Winnie pulled a borrowed wool cap down low over her ears and down the back of her neck.

The footpath suddenly dropped down a short chute and came to a set of rough rock steps. The children were already up and over the steps and gone. Abel climbed up and stood at the top. Winnie scrambled up and faced him. Abel smiled and simply turned to one side. As he pulled away, Winnie was greeted with a tightrope walk on a knife’s edge. The scrub growth disappeared and in its place was a narrow rock gangplank.

“Look straight ahead, Winnie,” Abel instructed, “and walk just as you would normally.” Winnie threw a quick glance at Abel then quickly paced out into the void to show him she had the mettle. On either side, the drop was unchecked for hundreds of feet, and at the base of the cliffs the soils sloped away at sharp angles. There was no way to get a level bearing. The eyes and the brain simply could not adjust to the disfigured landscape.

The children were crawling now, Pelee in the lead and shuffling along at a good clip on her knees. She wanted to be the first at the very end of the pinnacle, where another step was a step into the realm of dust motes, summer bottle flies and falcons. Her friend Jennifer could only manage an inch each time she moved. She was terrified.

Abel hung back watching the trio with amusement as each tried their luck on the narrow ledge, a glacial erratic stone remnant anchored precariously in loose sediments and fractured rubble that composed the bluffs. Beyond the hikers stretched a yawning 200-foot gulf where the bluffs died away suddenly and only the splinter of stone held up suddenly clumsy feet.

Winnie made the trek out to Pelee’s friend on foot, but she felt she could go no farther standing up. The path was narrower still. A wrong step could be fatal. She was now trembling lightly. She knelt down and touched the rock surface. Instantly she felt relieved. Now she could look about at the skewed lands and try to enjoy the view, now that some stability had returned.  Abel made his way, walking at his ease, to the woman and the youngster.

“You can make it. Look only straight ahead and you will be fine. Everyone has a problem with the heights the first time out.”

Abel slipped by the two figures huddled in the middle of the way and strode out to sit down with his daughter, their feet dangling over the very edge of the precipice. Winnie gathered up Jennifer and together they crawled the remainder of the way out to the drop-off. When they all clustered there, there were high fives and congratulations all around.

“Okay,” Pelee said, asserting herself, “you can’t say you’ve been on Table Rock until you put your feet over the edge. You have to do it. It’s the rule.”

Jennifer squealed. She cowered into a ball and would not move.

“That’s okay,” said Abel, “we’ll throw the rule book out this time, Jennifer. You can sit on my lap.” At that, he grabbed hold of the little one, held her tightly in the grip of his arms and sat her down as he said he would. The child was speechless. “You’re not off the hook, though,” he said to Winnie.

“Winnie has to walk the plank,” Pelee cackled with laughter.

Winnie took a deep breath, managed a half-hearted smile and swung her legs out over the edge of the cliff. “There. If you can do it, I can do it.”

The woman exhaled and peered down into the chasm. The sense of great peril was intense. She felt light as a feather and insecure enough to blow off the perch with the slightest puff of the breeze.

Father and daughter opened their packs and extracted treats for everyone which they ate in celebration. Even Jennifer’s stark fear slackened and she, too, took a seat on her own at the edge of the cliff.

As they nibbled their snacks, a whiskey jack flew across the void and landed behind them. The Canada jay, in its silver gray feathers, hopped close to the human strangers. Pelee took a bit of granola bar and held out her hand to the creature, the morsel on the end of her fingers. The jay studied it for a moment or two, rocking its head back and forth to try to determine what it was. Then it hopped again and came down on Pelee’s digits. It picked up the food in its beak and flew ten feet off to eat.

Jennifer instantly wanted to repeat the event. She reached out with her hand and, in a second, the jay alighted on her fingers, as well.

Suddenly another jay appeared, then another. Winnie was in a state of wonder. “I can’t believe this. They’re so tame.”

Pelee chimed in. “Whiskey jacks come to see me all the time. They love me and I love them.”

“I love them, too,” said Jennifer, the first words she had spoken since crawling out onto the ledges.

Winnie watched the children as they patiently coaxed the big gray jays to sit in their hands while the birds nabbed a morsel and gobbled it down. In her adult life, she had not once shared a private moment like this with little humans reveling in the joy of being alive in so magical a setting. The apparent danger of sitting on the cliff ledge no longer troubled her. The rocks were stable enough. This was one moment she was not going to let dribble away unappreciated. She savored the seconds.

The woman leaned over to Abel and sought his attention. He pulled his eyes away from the kids and the birds and glanced over at her.

“You know, Abel,” Winnie purred, stretching her arms out and dropping her hands atop her head, “I haven’t had a day like this in a dozen years. This has been a delight. Thank you for inviting me.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

The cell phone next to Liz’s bed jingled to life. Startled awake, she slapped the device down to her covers. She fumbled with it, flipped it open and stared at the illuminated call panel as if in trance. Grunting, she answered: “This is Liz.”

“Ms. Embree, it’s Jamie Hebert. Sorry to wake you,” rasped the voice of the park biologist.

“Jamie? What is it? What time….”

“Things are happening here.”

“Where’s here?”

“I’m on the lake below Signal Point at the outflow from Brimstone Basin, down where the ice has gone out. I’ve been on the lake for several days monitoring a big fish kill here.”

“Why did you call me at this hour?”

“Listen, something big is underway. I set up a spike camp on the point three days ago, on the shoreline. I had to move the tent today. The lake shore is drowning.”

Liz shook her cranium to loosen the film of sediment in her brain. “Jamie, you have water in camp?”

“I went to sleep Tuesday night and things were fine. When I awoke yesterday morning, water was up to the tent flap. All around me, water was infiltrating the grasses, the sedges. I’m telling you, I could see the water creeping eastward. It’s been going on all day. I’ve moved my spike camp back fifty feet into the pine, maybe a vertical foot or two higher.

“That’s, ah, that’s remarkable?” Liz rocked out of the bed sheets and placed her feet on the cold floor.

“There’s more to it. I turned in tonight once the sun went down. Liz, the water is now at my feet.”

“What?”

“You have to get down here and have a look at this lake. There are some big new fumaroles steaming away a quarter of a mile from here. They’ve just opened up with a bang. There’s a dense fog over the water. The place reeks like hell and it’s heating up underfoot. The ice is going out like lightning. We’ve never ever had ice out at the end of March.”

“Okay, okay, Jamie, let me get myself together here and get down to you. Where exactly are you?”

“I’m at the lake below the new research outpost, just off the Thoroughfare trail, near Alluvium Creek.”

“I can’t get down the Thoroughfare with the car.”

“You can four-wheel, can’t you?”

“Yes, but….”

“You can get through, Ms. Embree. The pack trail was widened a little last summer so researchers could get to the cabin more easily, now that it’s outfitted with equipment. The trail is packed hard right now by snowmobile groomer. It will support you.”

There was silence on other end, then a low hum. “Jamie, Jamie, you there?” A modest shaker passed under Liz’s feet.

“Tremor!” the biologist exclaimed.

“That’s Flat Mountain fault, Jamie. It’s been making noise day and night. You’re in that newly discovered fault extension. It’s running right under you.”

“I guess. This place has been shaking all day. When I try to get some sleep, I can make out the tremors very well. Poor man’s massage.”

“Harmonics, Jamie,” Liz said, drifting with fatigue.

The roar of a small ordnance explosion rifled through the receiver.

“Jamie, Jamie, what was that?” yelled Liz into the mouthpiece. A jolt passed under the woman’s feet.

“What in the hell was that?” the biologist yodeled through the hiss of a dragon. “Got something here, lots of steam. God, we’ve got something big.”

The thunder of the explosion spun the park biologist around. As he turned, a white superheated genie materialized, swelled and rocketed into the heavens, 100, 200, 300 feet. In the lake, countless splashes pocked the surface, as rock fragments, violently blown away from the terrain, were ejected away to the northwest.

“Look at that!”

Yammering into the phone: “What do you see, Jamie?”

“What’s going on? I have never!”

Funnels of steam erupted along a fissure, marching toward the northeast. As the biologist stood stuttering, the horizon coughed out a parade of ghosts, boiling up out of the crust and flashing into the atmosphere in columns. Close to the shore of the lake, upwelling water burped massive opaque steam bubbles. The man dropped his phone and slammed his hands to his ears as the screech of superheated steam burrowed into his head.

The wail of roaring steam in the phone earpiece catapulted Liz into action. She didn’t remember dressing, hastily shouldering some gear and diving in behind the wheel of her car. She rammed her foot down on the accelerator but the vehicle promptly spun out and pivoted one-eighty degrees around on black ice that had accumulated under the rear tires late the day before.

“Whoa. Careful, careful!”

Liz piloted the Forester away from the restored officers’ quarters of old Fort Yellowstone and motored into the cavern of the night east toward Tower Junction and south. As she drove, the car bounced over fracture cracks in the road surface and rocked occasionally as fresh, moderate tremors swept through the landscape and undulated beneath the road like a serpent on its belly in a hurry to get somewhere.

Yellowstone was galloping. Against the night sky, the tops of the evergreens swayed as pulse after pulse of earth tremor rippled through the surface of the park. South of Park Point and stretching eastward toward the Absaroka uplands, lake water infiltrated new fissures being wedged apart by upwelling magma below. In the depths of the cracks, lake waters percolated down to meet the fires of Hades. As biologist Jamie Hebert made his phone call, superheated steam from the depths blew away earthly shackles in a small but violent hydrothermal explosion. Plumes rocketed into the night sky, first one, then two more, then what seemed like a dozen, all in a linear plane, pulling way to the northeast toward the little explored Brimstone Basin thermal fields.

The biologist blanched at the spectacle. As the seconds stumbled over themselves, the near horizon disintegrated, foamed and writhed as the giant steam columns launched themselves in a parallel line, building a skyscraping bridal-veil curtain shot through with white moonlight brilliance. The atmosphere shrieked with the whine of fighter jets, so loud that the park employee could not tolerate the crushing decibels. He had no choice but to cover his ears and try to leave the area.

Boiling with heat, the geyser-like columns billowed in the freezing air. The atmosphere quickly loaded with thick cloud vapor. A heavy cloak of fog descended and masked out features in the landscape with its flat silver dazzle. Suddenly the biologist was enveloped by an altogether unknown phenomenon, a warm air whiteout. Dimensions disappeared in a shining ocular blindness. His senses betrayed him. There was no way to orient, no logical course to take. Panicking, the biologist decided he must strike out in a direction he thought would be toward his snowmobile and away from the geological gladiators about him.

Hunched over and arms outstretched, the man shuffled through the opaque mist on his snowshoes, grabbing spruce boughs as they materialized suddenly before his eyes. In the next instant, Jamie felt pressure and the sensation of flying. A steam explosion eighty feet away blasted quartz and gravel shrapnel through the thicket. Particles stabbed into his temple and cheek, left shoulder, arm and hip. The pressure wave of the blast lofted him into the forest.

For several minutes, the biologist lay on his back in a bed of dense sapling evergreens staring blind into the heavens. Sensation did not come to him, although a spray of drizzle and rivulets of blood were soaking through his clothing. Shock was deep and comforting even as facial swelling closed off his sight. Blisters erupted on any exposed skin in response to the drizzle. It was scalding hot. In the womb of shock, the biologist could not know that the precipitate was hot enough to boil flesh.

The old service road into the Lake Butte region was abandoned during the winter, but it was smooth, conditioned by snowmobile groomers opening the terrain for the first time so scientists could reach the newly outfitted Park Point research cabin. The snows in the lane were packed tight by a tide of snowmachine enthusiasts who had discovered the corridor.

Rather than wake someone in the wee hours of the night to borrow a snowmobile, Liz decided she would trust her Forester’s four-wheel drive and chance crawling over the elevated terrain at Lake Butte, slip over the old caldera lip, and descend the several long miles downhill toward Park Point.

At nearly 7,500-feet elevation, Liz nudged the Forester to the height of land on the ridge. The going was good but slow. The car slipped across the flat at the top of the ridgeline and approached the ancient caldera rim and the descent. She stopped the vehicle, opened the door and stepped out onto the snow. Her chin dropped away as she took in the view. At the edge of night, the white ice and snow cover of the vast lake was lost under a sweeping fog blanket that glowed quietly with lunar reflection. At the eastern edge of the lake and marching toward her was a white inferno.

“My word!” said the scientist, blowing the words out into the frosty ether.

Liz stood transfixed, seismic activity wriggling up her legs, generating mild vertigo. The car rocked and squeaked on its springs. The geologist lifted her nose into drifting ice crystals and sniffed in long drafts of air. Sulfur! Just of hint of the common element tiptoed through the night atmosphere.

The woman fell behind the wheel, eased the car over the height of land and descended the long grade toward the valley. She put the rig in the lowest gear to keep her speed turtle slow but constant and steered straight down the wide, groomed snowmobile corridor.

Seismic vibrations channeled up into the chassis every minute or two, causing the car to skitter on the surface. Unease infiltrated Liz’s steady demeanor. Her hands clutched the wheel like Vise-Grip pliers. Her foot on the accelerator shuddered.

A violent tremor kicked the car askew. It hopped, bounced on its tires and shimmied around in the lane, the shaking all-encompassing. Every joint in the car cried out. The car skidded, rotating on an invisible axis until it was sideways in the track.

With a final jolt, the land fell still. A hush clamped down on the forest. Liz loosened her death grip on the wheel. She felt claustrophobic and bolted out into the snow, whirling around, looking at the dark environment, trying to gain some assurance from the straight, strong trunks of the trees and from the quiet snows.

Bang! The car door slapped against her and knocked her to the ground. Another fierce tremor sank its teeth into the forest’s flanks. Liz kicked her boots into the snows in the lane to wrestle herself away from the car. The vehicle bounded and slid about above her.

A shriek knifed through the black followed instantly by a blast furnace glow. Prone on her back, Liz peered south down the lane where the trees were parted on either side of the snowmobile corridor. Her eyes dilated, flaring as wide as nature would permit. Beyond the black spire forms of the spruce and pine, the distant horizon flashed nuclear red. Crimson beams of light raced through the woodlands.

Rolling to her knees, Liz managed to get to her feet. Through the limited field of vision in the lane, she watched the low forest four miles away flare red for a moment, go dark, then flare again in brilliant, hot-pigmented bursts. Along a fissure line running north toward her, fiery light bursts coughed to launch flames dozens of feet into the night air. Jets of fire danced among the fumarole curtains, building a narrow drapery wall, a meandering, ever-lengthening sheet of liquid scarlet.

The scientist studied the pulsing vision with a professional varnish. She had witnessed new vents and lava fountain eruptions on the great island of Hawaii and elsewhere. Fountains were spectacular, particularly at night, but they were rather placid volcanic events. Such eruptions ejected modest amounts of gassy material and lacy streams of lava. Yellowstone, seized by heavy seismic labor pains, seemed to be giving birth to a new lava fountain infant, the first volcanic eruption of any sort on the plateau in 70,000 years.

A child from hell grew rapidly in length before Liz’s eyes. The fire line in the valley marched into the lake and was obscured by a cauldron of steam. The brooding clouds of steam in the lake and the line of steam columns swirled pink, yellow and red with reflected light, as if the aurora borealis had been roped and dragged from the heavens and staked down to earth.

But the flitting fires in the valley exhibited none of the characteristics of volcanic activity she had ever witnessed. Yellowstone’s geology was nothing like Hawaii, so lava fountain eruptions were highly unlikely. No thunderous explosions accompanied the bursts of light below, so some other phenomenon was at work, but what?

The geophysicist slipped back into her car. Carefully, she jimmied the rig back and forth to align it with the snow track. She got it squared up and rolled south, continuing into the valley for a closer look. The odd, jittery light show of flame and steam fired her imagination. Go down and witness the chaos first hand, she admonished herself. Retrieve some air and water samples. And try to find Jamie Hebert in the maelstrom.

Off the ridge, the landscape leveled out. Liz could see less terrain now, caught within the narrow funnel of the snowmobile trail. Ahead the landscape flashed on-off-on with color. The pathway, though, was filling in quickly with fog, a pinkish semi-transparency that whittled images down to blurs.

The Park Point log cabin loomed out of the fog. Liz stopped the car, switched off the lights, and plunged into stroboscopic red soup. Everything about her was bathed in eerie steamy broth. She squinted into the brew. In the lane stretched a narrow bridge just wide enough to permit packhorses to pass. A vapor-choked stream ran beneath. Now to work. Pulling a backpack out of her vehicle, she checked for a compass and fished for her GPS unit in the many pockets and folds. A satellite reading at the hood of the car gave her a base coordinate. She stored the number in the little pocket system’s memory.

Liz took a deep breath, slipped under the pack, and left the wide, groomed snowmobile surface, striding southbound on an old pack path, the Thoroughfare Trail. It exhibited a single narrow snowmobile track in the snow. The forest was all ghosts and no substance. Rivers of heat ran unseen through the trees. For five minutes she walked in March cold, then suddenly entered an invisible channel of eighty-degree air. Seconds later she was back in the chill. Hot, cold, hot, cold.

Visibility decayed along the ground despite the glowing incandescence in the void.   Liz kept on. The color bursts were masked by the tight growth of trees and by the fog, but she could now hear the whoosh of pressure somersaulting through the woods, something, she thought, like propane sputtering from a barbeque grill valve each time a flare ignited. The bursts had to be gas fires, methane in origin, she guessed. Subterranean heat was the engine driving the billowing fumaroles; it must be forcing methane from lake sediments, bog environments and from long-buried organic deposits. Somewhere, somehow, it was being touched off by an ignition source, turning the forest into a stage inhabited by dancing fire goblins.

A leather boot struck a hard object. Liz fell forward, her belly coming to rest on a seat cushion of a machine. She had stumbled upon a snowmobile in the fog but had not noticed it. It was a Park Service sled that had to be Jamie’s.

Drifting away from the snowmobile was a snowshoe track. If she concentrated, she thought, she could follow it. Liz tested the trail. A hard crust glazed the snows where the snowshoes had passed. Off came the backpack to lighten her footfalls. The crust supported her weight. She took a few steps. Still the snow held.

Wind direction shifted. Where there had been no breeze to speak off, wind began to blow across the great expanse of the lake and into the forests south of Park Point. The lake fog remained thick soup, but an occasional puff from the southwest cleared it out, enhancing the visibility considerably. Liz got her bearings quickly and pushed down the trail before the fog closed in again and made her slow to a crawl.

For a quarter mile, she followed the snowshoe track toward the lake. Now, through the backlit tree trunks, she could see fumarole steam columns writhing. It appeared as if the forest to the south was engulfed in a steam inferno.

The snowshoe trail tipped west directly toward the lake. As she made the turn, the geophysicist sensed something in the trail ninety feet away. As she advanced, a flash of fear raced along her nervous system branches. There was a person down in the trail. She broke into a run, cracked through the surface of the snow and fell up to her hip. To extricate herself, she rolled on her back, bent the knee and pulled the leg out of the crusty snow trap.

A few more seconds along the trail and she sank to her knees beside the form of a man lying face down. The fellow was dressed well for the cold, but the left side of the parka was chewed through with holes. Blood saturated the garment. One shoulder of his parka displayed a Park Service patch. Liz had found Jamie Hebert. She peered down the trail toward the lake. There was bloodstain smeared along its visible length.

Liz reached beneath the torso and rolled the biologist over. In the bright red light of the lava fountains, Jamie’s face turned toward her.

“Oh, lord!” Liz wailed into the night air.

Cruel blisters had erased the man’s facial features. All the skin had ballooned up to shut the eyes, seal off the nostrils, and swell the lips to frame a round hole for a mouth.  There was no evidence of searing by flame. These burns were made by water, scalding water. Liz could not imagine a more horrible fate. The geologist pulled her gloved hands to her mouth to quell an urge to be sick to her stomach.

Chapter Twenty-Four

After midnight on the second evening of her last Total Life Skills session at Independency village, Winnie stole from her cabin and hustled to First Day Hall, bundled against a winter wind off the Great Plains. Up two flights of stairs she tiptoed and found her way in the darkened halls to Abel’s office door. He never locked it.

Once in the room, she crossed to the man’s desk, kneeled down and probed the back of the office’s computer. The keylogger was still in place. She settled on the floor, disengaged the little unit, and plugged the keyboard wire back into its allotted slot. Between her fingers, she rolled the bit of technological gadgetry. Its cold silicon microcircuitry had recorded several months of keyboard activity, every number, every letter. What tales would it tell? Down what sparking avenues might the keystrokes lead?

Never had she felt she was trespassing on the private life of an individual she was tracking for a client. Somehow now, though, the thought of pocketing the keylogger was a breach of etiquette, would be an assault on someone who fascinated her rather than repulsed her. The on-the-job killer instinct she could always rely upon drained away into a sinkhole she could no longer plumb.

A light bulb flared somewhere in the building. The sound of steps echoed from a stairway, bounding sounds, coming fast. Winnie leapt off the floor and pitched toward the office door in the dark. The footsteps stopped. Whoever was in the building was one flight down, on the second floor where the video and recording studios were. In a minute, the sound of recorded audio drifted up to the third floor. Someone had ventured forth to work on something late in the evening.

To stay was to invite discovery. Winnie decided she must leave, and she waited until she felt certain that whoever was in the studios was absorbed in some task. Descending to the second floor silently, she approached the door to the video warren. Cautiously, she peered around the door molding. A man with a shaven head and a well-trimmed beard was seated at a control board but operating a computer, eyes fixed on monitors on the walls opposite the door. The agent recognized him but couldn’t recall his name. He was the one with the odd nickname, she thought.

Late night news broadcasts were rolling on two of the monitors, but on a third was what appeared to be a newspaper clipping, scaled up to fill the screen. Something about it looked familiar.

Winnie swept by the open door noiselessly but paused just a moment to try to decipher the headline in the image of the clipping from her vantage point in the hall. She could just make it out. It read, ‘Local Girl Champ in Pie Eating Contest.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

The carbon slick of early morning smothered the stately sandstone buildings of old Fort Yellowstone, standing in thigh-deep snow to one side of the former military parade grounds. Electric light from a few fixtures tumbled out windows in the geo offices. Elizabeth Liz’s Subaru careened headlong toward the illumination. Surely officials had scrambled from their beds in outlying communities and descended on Mammoth Hot Springs. But there were no cars in the lots. People hadn’t made it in yet.

Liz’s boots clattered in the halls. She slammed through doorways, scanning frantically for any observatory inhabitant. Germaine Yardley, standing hunched over a computer and shouldering a phone to his ear, heard the commotion and turned to behold the geophysicist as she barreled the observatory office door aside with a crash.

“Sweet Jesus, woman.”

Liz grabbed for the computer wizard. “Germaine, do you have a handle on what’s happening?”

“Yeah. We’ve got numbers popping. I’ve alerted CVO in Portland. I managed to wake Wes. He’s on his way down.”

“Good.”

“Do you want to see what we’ve got, Liz?”

“See it? I’ve seen it. I just came from the lake.”

“You did?”

“We’ve got methane at the surface.”

“Methane?”

“Get your head out of the computer, Germaine.” Liz grabbed Yardley’s arm and yanked him through darkened halls to a south-facing window. She pushed his body up against the glass and gestured for the man to see for himself. Through the black forest spires, the low southeastern horizon pulsed crimson against pinwheeling stars.

Yardley’s head jerked back suddenly from the window frame. “Holy mother!”

“That’s not all of it, Germaine. We need a recovery team in here.”

The man flattened hands and face against the glass. “Huh? A what?”

“A recovery team.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The biologist was down below Park Point cabin. Jamie Hebert, the biologist.”

Yardley peeled his face from the window. “What about him?”

“Jamie’s dead, Germaine.”

“Jamie?” The statement didn’t sink in.

“Scalded to death.”

“Oh, Jesus.” The man stumbled from the window. “Somebody’s got to know about this.”

Liz left the YVO lab and paced quickly along the lanes to an alley behind the Mammoth Hot Springs village inn. Cheerless and frigid in the off-season, the hotel stood in angular relief against the glowing smudge on the horizon. A small hotel annex around to the rear exhibited a single porch light.

Numb from the shock of discovering the biologist’s disfigured body, and spent from emotional hand-wringing on the journey out of the valley of fire, Liz made for the porch light beacon and pushed into the heated annex. She found her way in the dark to her modest room and went to the bathroom to run warm water and wash her face.

Under the glare of cool florescent light, she studied her image. Now forty, she felt fortunate that nature had been kind to her features. But in the hard light, the weariness of her being etched itself along every tiny line and wrinkle on her face.

Liz left the bathroom and went to the bed to lie down. If only she could just ease her tension for a moment, that might be enough for her to rebound and get to work. She dropped her head back on the pillow, joints snapping and creaking as the padded mattress relieved the burden of gravity. In seconds she was asleep.

Slanting sunlight, flooding across Liz’s shuttered eyes, woke her. She had no concept of how long she had slept or what the hour was, but she mustered enough energy to retrieve her cell phone and dial Minnesota.

“Hello,” a child’s voice answered, Pelee’s voice.

“Hi, honey, it’s mom.”

“Hi, mom, where are you?”

“Oh, I’m calling from Yellowstone as always, honey.”

“You know what I did yesterday, mom?”

“What, sweetie?”

“I helped tap maple trees all day. We made lots of maple syrup. We put it on snow and ate it. It’s called sugar-on-snow. It was great, mom. I made really good syrup, really good.”

Liz managed a little smile despite her weariness. Pelee sounded so effervescent, so enthusiastic. “Much snow there still, Pelee?”

“No, it’s almost all gone. It’s getting warm now. There’s some in the woods, though, so we had plenty for making sugar-on-snow.”

“Pelee.”

“What, mom?”

“Pelee, I’m going to make flight reservations this morning. I’m going to come home the first thing in May. I miss you.”

“Oh.” Pelee’s voice tailed off. “Does that mean I have to go back to Boston? I don’t want to live in Boston. I like it here.”

“Honey, we’ll talk about that when I get there. You sound like you’re having such a good time, I don’t want to spoil it.”

Today there would be no conflict. She wanted only to listen to her child. The two talked for an hour. When Pelee finally put the phone down and ran to find her father to bring him to the phone, Liz sighed through a thin smile. Her demons had been exorcised, banished from her soul by a ten-year-old. What power, she thought, a little child has.

“Hello, Elizabeth?” Abel’s voice resonated in the earpiece.

“Hi, Abel, thanks for coming to the phone.”

“Happy to. I heard of some sort of trouble coming out of Yellowstone? Bobcat caught it on the wire this morning.”

News travels like electric current, thought Liz. She did not want to talk shop. Not now. “Look, Abel, I want to come back east in a few months, maybe by the first of May.”

“Great.”

“I’ll call you when I’ll be in Minneapolis. I hope you’d let me stay at the farm for a few days before I take Pelee back to Massachusetts.”

“Of course you may stay.”

“I appreciate that, Abel. Take care of my Pelee.”

“She’s in good hands.”

“I know she is. Thanks.”

“Liz, you take care of yourself. How bad is it there?”

“I don’t know.” Liz paused and brought her fingers to her forehead. Her mouth was dry. “We lost a colleague here.”

“Lost?”

“I’m not worried about my safety. I’m quite a ways from it.”

“What happened?”

“I’ll be fine. See you before too long. Bye.”

Liz folded the phone, rolled out of her bed, and stretched. She couldn’t get over the discovery that she was still wearing her parka. Off came the coat as she went to the desk where she had piled her tote bag and her laptop computer. She plugged the digital device in to the wall, slipped in the dial-up line, and flipped the lid open. A one-way flight from Bozeman, Montana to Minneapolis-St. Paul, that’s what she wanted. One stop at Denver, maybe. That would work.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Two bundled figures clamored up steps onto the decking fronting a small three-story building, part viewing tower, part creative retreat, teetering on edge of the highest point of land on Prospect Bluffs. The wooden deck expanse at Lakota Lodge sparkled and flashed with starlight mirrored by crystals of frost.

Beneath the red-granite-block tower, Winnie and Abel stood in sharp relief against a brilliant indigo sky. Leaning on deck railing, Winnie was transported by the sweeping visage of limitless plains, its infinite dimensions held in check by the imperceptible curvature of earth at the edge of the distant western expanse. In the farthest spaces, the horizon glowed with lustrous clarity.

“Stay here one minute, and I’ll be right back,” said her companion for the evening. “I’ll build a hot fire in no time. Take the chill off.”

Abel lit a pellet stove, an automatic device that burned dried corn kernels. Within a few minutes, a blaze was roaring. He rolled a small sofa before the fire to create a pocket of warmth on the first floor, and returned to the deck and to his night companion.

“Do you come here often?” asked Winnie.

“Yes, I do. Particularly when the moon is full, in any season.”

“It’s so beautiful.”

“I come up on snowshoes in the winter when a great snowstorm is underway. I like to immerse myself in the theatrics of one of Mother Nature’s great dramas. Makes one humble, you know.”

“You stay the night during the storms?”

“Often.”

“How do you stay warm enough?”

“I don’t know if you noticed when you took the tour, but there are several Norwegian cabinet bunk built-ins in the study above us in the tower.”

“Cabinet bunks? What are they?”

“The easiest way to stay warm in a cold climate is to sleep in a confined space under a big pile of blankets. In this case, the space is a human-scale cabinet with a door you close on yourself. Not only do the blankets keep you warm, but the space is small enough to trap and hold body heat quite well. That’s perfect for warming up the little cubbyhole, even during nights of terrible cold.”

“How cold?”

“Thirty-five below.”

“No! You’re kidding.”

“I’m not exaggerating. My daughter and I have slept like mice in a mitten up here during severe weather.”

Winnie smiled broadly, pleased with the whimsical expression.

After a half hour marveling at the million pinwheeling stars overhead and a lesson in constellation recognition for Winnie, the two hustled indoors and took up a position tight by the roaring corn pellet stove. The isinglass window on the fire cast a bright vermillion glow over the interior space.

“You know,” said Winnie, “I’ve enjoyed myself here. I haven’t had as pleasant an experience as these past two weeks in, well, in some time.”

“I’m delighted that you’re delighted. It’s been a pleasure having you here among us on the bluffs.”

“You jest.”

“No, no. I confess, I found myself seeking your company.”

Winnie looked into the man’s face, red-orange with firelight. Here was an enigma in human form. It was impossible for her to reconcile the nature of his philosophy and work with the reality of her employment. But she wanted to kiss him.

Abel looked into the eyes of the woman peering at him, the side of her face glowing, eclipsing the fire. He fixed his gaze. Reaching out with both hands, he framed her face with his fingers, touching her skin lightly. She closed her eyes, tilted her head into his left hand and let his palm support her head.

She was lost now. Abruptly she launched herself forward and surrounded the man’s neck with her arms. She reached for his mouth with her lips and found them. Abel returned the embrace, pulled her to him and was engulfed by the power of a kiss of passion so long removed from his life.

Winnie broke the embrace suddenly and thrust backwards, pushing him to an arm’s length. She stammered, “I can’t do this.”

She stood up, a silhouette against the windows reflecting firelight. Abel followed her with his eyes. Her hands trembled. She pulled fingers into her mouth and bit down. Her flesh was strangled by her mind’s indecision.

Rocking back a step, Winnie glanced about the room, blinking away the glare from the stove. The fire crackled with ancient voices and its heat massaged her shoulders and spine. She exhaled loudly, puffing out her lower lip.

“Abel.”

“Yes.”

“Ah, the cabinet bunks of yours, upstairs….”

“Yes.”

“Could I, could I see them?”

PART II

Volcano Threat Prompts Yellowstone Park Evacuation

By Jonathan Bellingham, contributing science editor

The New York Times

CHEYENNE, WYOMING–  U.S. Geological Survey scientists at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory issued a volcano advisory at 9:15 a.m. MT for Yellowstone National Park, prompting officials to order the evacuation of nonessential personnel from the nation’s largest park and nearby communities.

According to Yellowstone Volcano Observatory Supervising Geologist Wesley Crouch, increasing seismic activity, accelerating thermal outflow at the surface, changes in gas and water chemistry and rapid uplift of broad regions of the parklands signal the potential for future volcanic activity within the park.

The official statement read, ‘Deteriorating surface conditions within Yellowstone have rendered much of the parkland unsuitable for recreation at this time. Rising ground and water temperatures in many areas have forced the closure of most of the geyser basins and park villages. The threat of hydrothermal explosions due to increasing steam pressure within the rock strata is elevated.

‘Of particular concern,’ the document continued, ‘is the escalating incidence of low-frequency seismic signals, known as harmonic tremors, long associated with the movement of magma beneath the world’s active volcanoes.’ At Yellowstone, there are no known active volcanic vents at the surface and the tremors are not confined to a single area within the park.

Scientists are concerned about the potential for eruption at Yellowstone because of the dramatic geological history of the caldera and volcanic hot spot that underlies the park. It is well known among geologists and vulcanologists that Yellowstone periodically erupts, on occasion with catastrophic force. Some twenty or so eruptive events have occurred over the past 15 million years in the Yellowstone region and west along the Snake River Valley.

Yellowstone National Park lies within the boundaries of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Wyoming Governor Randall Seifert is reportedly upset with USGS officials over the issuance of the volcano advisory. He could not be reached for comment, but an aide to the governor said he would be calling on the governors of the Mountain states with the intention of having the advisory killed.

A volcano advisory is the first part of a two-stage warning system designed to inform and protect the public. An advisory is a general warning indicating that volcanic activity is possible within the coming days, weeks, or months. It may or may not be accompanied by a general evacuation order. The second stage, a volcano alert, indicates that a volcanic eruption is imminent and full measures must be taken to insure that all citizens are evacuated from the hazard zone, including the evacuation of residents who reside in river and stream valleys subject to dangerous volcano-spawned mud flows known as lahars.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

At the edge of a picnic area parking lot at Norris Geyser Basin, a young couple sleeping in the bed of their Dodge Ram 4x4 pickup truck awoke suddenly just after 5 a.m. The illegally-parked vehicle was creaking, rocking on its springs. In the gray light of a late-April dawn, the roar of a jet engine sliced through the thin metal skin of the cap. Terrified, the young man and woman scrambled from the pickup bed, scurried into the cab and raced away north on the loop road toward Mammoth Hot Springs.

Steamboat geyser awoke violently from a decade-long slumber. The tallest, most majestic geyser on the planet, Steamboat exploded from its confines, shearing away rock shards that pelted the boardwalks and trails. Majestic jets of water thrust up and fell in rapid succession. As the turbulent liquid cleared the throat of the thermal marvel, pressure dropped in the creature’s gut, permitting superheated water below to flash to steam. Steamboat launched a river of water and jets of volatile vapor high above the basin, topping out at nearly 400 feet.

On the flank of the Roaring Mountain five miles north of Norris Geyser Basin, a Park Service employee was out early to inspect Yellowstone’s roads for winter frost, wave and earthquake damage, now that most of the park’s miles of highway were free of their winter burden of ice and snow. Crossing the flank of the low peak, the man slowed his truck and stopped before a sprawling fumarole field peppering the ridge’s slopes. Named in the late 1800s for the upland’s continuous loud steam rumbling, Roaring Mountain quieted down to a hush over the decades of the 20th century. Now, howling screams from the earth prompted the Park Service driver to apply the brakes. He rolled down a window and glared at the throbbing ridgeline. A minor thermal feature in the park, Roaring Mountain was now seething, billowing moist smoke. It seemed to the driver, who rarely gave the steam fields a glance, that the entire mountain was ablaze with thick smoke from unseen fires.

The weekend was fast approaching. The Geological Survey staff, graduate students and researchers, spellbound by and yet weary of poring over the seismic data flooding in from the seismic array, tilt meters, GPS recorders and other field instruments across Yellowstone, wanted to get away.

Liz longed for May to arrive, when she could finally catch her flight from Bozeman and fly off eastbound to see her daughter. She had been away for nearly ninety days over the last six months and was punch-drunk from the long hours of work. She needed to bid Yellowstone goodbye.

Still, there were four long days ahead of her. Although she felt like King Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder uphill in Hades for eternity, these were heady times at Yellowstone National Park. The beast was disgruntled, now wildly unpredictable, and monitoring its vital signs was intoxicating.

Throughout the month of April, Yellowstone beckoned the scientific community with a siren song of continuous tremors. Harmonic disturbances rattled park headquarters offices and soon-to-reopen village stores, campgrounds and inns. For the first time since the dawn of the millennium, when the Park Service closed many of the foot trails in Norris Geyser Basin because of ground temperatures as hot as boiling water, there was talk in the offices and down the halls about closing great stretches of terrain in the park for the tourist season, and not just the heavily damaged Bridge Bay marina compound and shattered Lake Village.

Every day brought new surface anomalies. The dormant spigots at largely forgotten Monument Geyser Basin were howling for the first time anyone could remember.

At Hell’s Half Acre along the Firehole River, sprawling Excelsior geyser blew out rocks and sinter debris from its football field-size crater and roared to a spectacular 300-foot eruption, the likes of which had not been recorded since the Hayden exploratory expedition took blurry tintype photographs thirteen decades in the past.

Away to the southwest, Fishing Cone, perched low in the water at the very edge of the shoreline, was unapproachable. Where anglers once caught fish in the lake and cooked them in a minute by dangling them into the little maw of the hot spring, violent, spasmodic jets of boiling water spiraled into the atmosphere.

The flooded realm beneath Yellowstone Lake was not at peace, either. Liz and her colleagues were now convinced that magma was upwelling, invading strata very close to the floor of the lake. All her probes, from West Thumb basin to Elk Point, were registering extraordinary heat levels. Data left no doubt that the lake bottom basins were bleeding torrents of superheated water into the depths. As troubling to researchers and Park officials as the surface thermal features was the propagation of miles of concentric ring fractures snaking through the landscape and slowly defining a vast convoluted oval shape nearly seventy miles across. Geologists, park employees and backcountry hikers stumbled upon the fractures with greater and greater frequency, yet it was only in the last few months that the true extent of them became known.

But it was Friday and the YVO lab staff and researchers were leaving for watering holes at Jackson Hole and Cody. Liz decided to vacate the headquarters offices and try for the Park Point cabin for an overnight or two to pick up notes, data CDs and some other things that she had left behind on several trips to the outpost.

Wesley Couch paced about the halls outside his office, reluctant to pack for a scheduled trip to Washington, DC. He was agitated, blood pressure medicine doing little to relieve his tension. He was tormented by the devil of indecision. All the data, all the withering seismic activity pointed to the onset of volcanic activity. But the seismic signals were so diffuse and covered an area of such grand scale that neither Wesley, the YVO team nor university geo-lab personnel across the West could decide precisely where the greatest danger lay.

He and others thought it prudent to recommend a general volcano advisory, the first such warning ever issued. But he balked. What areas of the park should be closed? Should he insist the administrators shut down the park altogether? If he authored an advisory now, with the summer season approaching, there would be hell to pay internally, within the park hierarchy. There was sure to be fallout from the region’s governors and from the congressional troika. Who would be called on…?

“Wesley.”

Wesley’s startle response shook him like a sock in a puppy’s mouth, he was so taken aback by the sudden call of his name.

“Wes, there’s some trouble at Obsidian.”

The voice was that of Liz Embree.

“God, you scared me, Ms. Embree.”

“Sorry, Wes. Parks is looking for you.”

“What for?”

“There’s been an untimely death. Several, actually.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Benjamin White Elk was road weary, his spinal ligaments stiff as cold highway tar at the end of a seven-hour drive south from the border country. He pulled his eighties-vintage GMC pickup into the lot beside the county nursing home in Livingstone, Montana. The severe rectangular building rambled across the prairie, its red brick facade unbroken by even a single decorative feature.

It was dinner hour at the nursing home. White Elk found his way to the dining hall and peered in. Under the flood of cheerless florescent lighting, the Blackfoot elder knew just where to look, across a sea of gray heads to the west corner, to a table that always captured the last rays of the setting sun at dinner. There he could see her, facing away from the room interior and out toward the prairie expanse. He could make out the features of his tiny mother, chewing her food in silence, watching the solar disc disappear into the folds of distant peaks.

White Elk crossed the room to the table where his mother sat. He seated himself without saying a word. For many seconds, the elder gazed at the profile of his centenarian mother. Great age served Native Americans well. The march of the years chiseled elaborate, sharp-edged features into the skin, valleys and ridges, canyons and steep slopes. Each reflected light or swallowed it up to create a face of stony contrasts. Fellow Native Americans saw these features as badges of wisdom, hard won and proudly displayed. To White Elk, it was an honor to be in the presence of his mother, a being who had lived a full century and whose grandparents had witnessed the Plains holocaust at the hands of white cavalry soldiers and land-hungry European immigrants.

Stretching his left arm, White Elk reached out to his mother and touched her lightly on the forearm. He said nothing. His mother did not turn to acknowledge her son’s touch, but a smile spread across her lips and she reached out with her right hand and placed it over his.

“Benjamin, my son,” said his mother very quietly.

“Hello, mother.”

The centenarian smiled yet sat as still as rock. “Benjamin.”

“Yes, mother.”

“I have a story to tell you.”

“You do, then?”

“Yes, I do. You must listen carefully. I have seen things.”

“Seen things? What is it you have you seen, mother?” White Elk asked softly.

The aged woman grasped the shawl about her shoulders and pulled it tight under her chin as if to ward off cold. Finally, she turned to look into the eyes of her son.

“Benjamin,” the old woman began in a voice little more than a whisper. “Your namesake visited me yesterday.”

“My namesake?”

“The white elk, Benjamin, the white ponoká, it came last evening while I ate dinner. It came to the window here.”

White Elk leaned forward to hear better, folding his hands before him.

“Last night, the earth moved again. It has moved many times now, many times since the fall. Last evening, the earth shook for a long time. Did you see the ceiling tiles? The cracks?”

“I did see, mother. The building has not done well.”

“Many tiles fell last night. Many of the people in the dining room were frightened. Some cried.”

“Yes, mother.”

“I did not. At the end of the shaking, a dozen ponoká came to stand by the building, right by the window where I was sitting. They were seeking shelter from danger, I think.”

“Yes, that could be.”

“The last one to come to the building was white, Benjamin. It was the great ponoká you saw as a young man.”

White Elk could see that his mother was completely serious. He had no doubt that she had seen what she said she had.

“Benjamin, the ponoká, the white one, he spoke to me. No one saw him but me and he spoke to no one but me. He spoke with his beautiful eyes.”

“What were his words, mother? Tell me.”

“The old man, Napiw, he is unhappy, said the ponoká. There is no bond between the earth and its people any longer, he said. There is no kinship between the people and the animals. People no longer respect the animals and no longer pay homage to the earth that suckled them and nurses them still.”

“The white one, it said all this to you, mother?”

“Yes, Benjamin, and much more. Much more.”

“Yes, go on.”

The aged matriarch turned to the window. She pointed out the glass to the south.

“Do you see the mountains, Benjamin?”

“Yes, of course, mother.”

“Do you see the valley between the mountains. The mountains follow the valley on both sides. Do you see?”

“Yes, mother.”

“The thunder in the earth, it comes from there, in the distance, in the valley between the mountains as far away as you can see.” She turned away from the window and looked her son in the eye. “The white elk, he said that he was fleeing the valley and going far away to the north. He was going to the ice country, where you live, Benjamin.”

“Why would he want to do that, mother?”

“This is why. This is what the white one told me. He said the mountains will rise up and touch the sky. The valley will turn over and disappear beneath the mountains. Then the mountains will fall down. This will happen soon, very soon.”

White Elk sat still. He did not think his mother’s words to be the rant of a withering mind. He knew his mother’s words to be true, always. Since his childhood, she had taught him that no honor would come to a Blackfoot who did not speak truthfully at every juncture. To speak an untruth would lead to the undermining of a man’s credibility. People would begin not to trust words and deeds, actions, everything. Honor would be lost forever.

“The ponoká, he said the sun will sink into the earth and not rise again. The land will burn and turn to dust. The people in the land, the white people who took our homelands, they will burn and turn to dust, too.”

“Do you say, mother, that all people will die? What will happen to our people?”

The woman bowed her head and held a hand to it to comfort her soul. “Son, the animals and the first people in the land, they will suffer terribly when the mountains rise up. He told me that a great Blackfoot elder will come forward when the day turns to night, and he will carry the suffering of the people on his shoulders.”

The ancient soul cast her eyes on her son. She held her gaze. “Benjamin, the white one was talking about you.”

“Mother, how do you know this?” Benjamin said in a tone uttered to brush aside her assertion.

“Son, the white ponoká came to you as a young man. You bear his name, White Elk. He has come to me, because I am here and he is here. He told me this so that I may tell you. I am only an instrument. I am only passing his words on to you. He is talking through me to you. I am just the air through which the words travel. He is talking to you, Benjamin.”

Low vibrations slithered through the room. All the objects in the living space rattled quietly for ten seconds.

“That is the white one talking, too, Benjamin.”

“That’s a small earthquake tremor, mother.”

“Yes, but it is speaking about what is to come.”

“What did it say to you, mother?”

“You must leave tomorrow, after you rest. You must go home to Otatso Creek. Do not delay.”

“I cannot go tomorrow, mother.”

“You must. You have to tell our people to ready themselves, to prepare,” the aged one insisted.

“Prepare? What would I have them do to prepare, mother?”

The matriarch scowled at her son. She raised a frail hand and pointed a finger into his face.

“Before there was food in metal and plastic and paper, there was food that walked the plains and grew every year in the mountains. Before there was gas fuel for the stove, there was firewood at every turn. All we had to do was pick it up. We knew everything. We knew how to live well. The earth provided everything. We needed to buy nothing.

“You go home and tell our people to prepare in the old ways, to hunt and fish now. Dry the meat and the fish now. Harvest every green thing that sprouts, every fruit that ripens in the sun, and dry it, preserve it. You must do this. You have no time. You must go. Go. Get some rest and go home.”

“Mother, I came to see you for a few days and to go to a gathering tomorrow.”

“You do not have a few days.”

“How do you know that, mother?”

“When the white ponoká spoke to me, son, he told me that when the full moon next rises, it will rise covered in blood.”

“Blood?”

“It will be the color of blood.”

“Tomorrow, I want to take you out so that we can be together.”

“I will not see you tomorrow.”

“That’s crazy.”

“It is not crazy, Benjamin. You have to leave right away. If you do not leave, the anger of Napiw will swallow us all.”

“And what about you, mother? If what you say comes to pass, what will happen to you? I can’t leave you here.”

The elderly woman frowned and her voice rose in anger.

“What I said are not my words, Benjamin! They are the words of the white one. I told you that. What I said will happen.” She pouted and reached for her son’s hand.

“Benjamin, there is no point in my leaving here. I do not want to travel a whole day in a car to the Otatso. I am too tired. If my life ends here, I will be content. I will know that you will see our people through to a new life, one like our people once enjoyed.”

“I cannot leave you, mother.”

“Oh, yes you can, Benjamin,” the old woman muttered quietly. She smiled at her son. “When you were a young man, you left your mother, as all young people do. Now you must do what you were raised to do, what our people expect you to do. Now go.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Hundreds of identical polished black columns soared above Route 89, dwarfing Wesley’s truck as it sped south. The formation, bunched together in the hands of ancient gods and set down roughly, unceremoniously, at the head of little Beaver Lake, stood twenty miles south of Mammoth Hot Springs headquarters.

The stone columns were dark, glassy, volcanic obsidian, a material much prized by vanished American native peoples. Chips of the obsidian glass made exquisite spear and arrow points and cutting tools. Paleolithic peoples traded in it extensively, so much so that the glass points and utility objects unearthed by scientists and amateurs alike as far away as Indiana and Missouri had the telltale chemical composition of Yellowstone obsidian mined from the outcropping that bore the rock’s name: Obsidian Cliff.

Wesley thought nothing of the rock formation. He was concerned with a jumbled rockslide across the highway and a cluster of people on the lip of the eastern shore of Beaver Lake, the waters billowing clouds of silver vapor. Something was in the water—a small truck. Burrowing in among the men on at the water’s edge, Wesley found them idle, talking rapid fire but doing little.

A man in a Park Service parka recognized Wesley and hailed him.

“Wesley, come down here, will you?” said the fellow.

“What have you got here, Lucky?”

“We’ve got kids in the lake. Careful, watch the water.”

“Why?”

“It’s boiling hot. See for yourself.”

A Dodge Ram pickup truck rested on its side, all but the passenger-side-rear tire and quarter panel submerged. The truck’s flank had been crushed by the impact of falling rock tumbling from the face of Obsidian Cliff, the impact strong enough to catapult the vehicle off the road, over the guardrail and into the water.

The body of a young woman was visible, floating at the surface but the lower torso confined to the truck’s cabin. A second body, a young man, floated face down in the waters and was drifting away from the wrecked vehicle.

Thick bands of water vapor flashed from the surface of the small lake. Wesley kneeled to the water’s edge and immersed a fingertip into the fluid.

“Yeow!” he yelped as he launched his hands up and away from of the surface.

“What’d I tell you, Wes?” said a voice behind him.

The electric shock of scalding heat rattled Wesley’s constitution. He knew the little lake to be nothing more than a shallow, frigid pool, just one of many of the park’s minor cold bodies of water that were pleasant to motor past but which attracted little attention. Overnight, the waters had metamorphosed into a lethal bath.

The geologist riveted his gaze on the body of the woman, floating just a dozen feet from shore. The exposed skin on the victim was the color of boiled chicken, ghostly white and puffed up, plump. The body was no more than cooked flesh. The realization sent a shudder along Wesley’s vertebral column.

“What are you going to do with these people, Lucky?” Wesley called over his shoulder to the Park Service employee.

“Well, somehow we’re going to have to fish them out of there.”

“They’ll fall apart.”

“What?”

“The bodies, they’ll fall apart. The flesh will come off the bones.”

Chapter Thirty

After 2 a.m., Winnie finished compiling a final report for her employer on Abel Whittemore and the Independency community he’d founded. Kansas City’s lights a dozen miles off pulsated through her darkened Florida Room but did nothing to chase the chill from the cool spring night air. With a click of the mouse, she sent the document from her Parkville home to her firm’s downtown office.

An electric space heater at her feet, Winnie fidgeted in a futile attempt to warm up and squirmed with melancholy over the contents of the report. Abel was not to be considered dangerous, she wrote, in that violence wasn’t in his tool kit, but he could certainly be seen as an emerging social activist with grand plans. The man’s computer files and the keylogger device had yielded comprehensive plans for Independency-style hybrid communities in most of the fifty states. More remarkable was the fact that Abel was amassing a war chest with dollars from Hollywood filmmakers and producers, from several high-profile alternative technology firms and from a few wealthy Wall Streeters possessed of a social conscience forged in the sixties and seventies. Funds were already being used to lay the groundwork for supporting political candidates for state and national office who supported environmentally sound technologies, renewable energy policies and sustainable development and lifestyles.

The take-him-down mindset Winnie fostered when she first arrived at Independency had atrophied. She had been keen to get at the man, Whittemore, and get under his skin so that her data and reports could be made available to intelligence professionals. Now she understood that the portrait that she and Midlands’ clients had of fulminating phantoms in the northland was well off the mark. Still, the information she had gathered might soon lead to the disruption of his full-blooded social experiment, one she now felt strongly should be left free to prosper and mature.

Winnie soaked in the heater’s BTUs, pretending she might tire and go to bed, but her nervous system was pulsing with the energy even as her thoughts descended to nadir.

Her training had been designed to wall her off from emotional attachment to subjects under scrutiny. The drill was to approach everything from a diamond-hard professional perspective. Fascination with a target was fine, but sympathy, adoration or complicity was impossible. Then why, Winnie chided herself, had she let her emotions derail her efforts? She got close to Abel, too close. Was it a lark and nothing more or was it a fundamental misstep?

Quandary, that’s what it was. She thought she had some inkling how Abel might present himself in the flesh, but his personality had confounded her and then pulled her into his orbit. He brandished a biting and calculating pen. Yet in person, he could set his weighty message aside and take delight in the lives and thoughts of others. Face-to-face, he relished simple pleasures, a friendly chat, a walk along the bluffs, a glass of homemade wine.

Winnie ran a hand through her wiry hair, trying to wring out the static in her head. The gesture didn’t work. Reaching across the computer desk, she gripped a coffee mug full of pens and pencils. In a single motion, she jerked the container off the desk and hurled it across the room.

The woman whistled loudly through her teeth and went to work hammering on the keyboard—something about a rendezvous in Sioux City. Meet at Buffalo Alice Restaurant for a $10 pizza and good beer. Get a room overlooking the river.

Winnie finished her keystrokes, sent the e-mail she just typed to a computer on a desk in Prospect Bluffs, Minnesota and loosed a volley of words to the darkened Florida Room. “God, I didn’t think I’d actually like the man.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Leaning against the window trim, arms folded tightly across his chest, Wesley stood laboring as if he were out of breath. Stroking his moustache, he gazed on funnels of loud mineral spring steam bellowing from the Mammoth Hot Springs thermal terraces just above and behind the headquarters. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Liz entered his office suddenly and stopped. She looked Wesley over. He did not look altogether well.

“Are you okay, Wes?”

The geo office veteran ran a hand over the bridge of his nose to clear it of accumulating moisture. “I need to make a decision. I’d like your professional opinion, Ms. Embree, before you vacate the premises for the weekend. I’ve been asking any and everyone their thoughts.

“At no time in my tenure here have I ever recommended to the park administrators that they close the park to the public during the summer season. Close certain terrain, yes, like Norris, but not all of Yellowstone. But I’m terribly concerned about the data stream. I need your input. Please don’t take this lightly. If an advisory hits at the start of the tourist season, it’s likely to impact the Park Service terribly and bring caustic responses from everyone, from the chambers of commerce to the halls of government.

“This place is the cornerstone of the economies of big portions of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, you must understand. But it’s my duty to insure that the Park Service has the information necessary to safeguard the public. Nothing is more important than that.

“So, Ms. Embree, do you think there is, right now, a real danger to the public or don’t you, given what we’re seeing?” asked the supervising geologist.

Liz hesitated not a second. “Absolutely there’s danger, Wes, and it may get more so. I think you should insist that Parks close the park down—all of it, every square foot. The whole region from Norris to Park Point and the Brimstone is sweltering. The lake villages are uninhabitable and the lake itself is positively dangerous for recreation.”

“You’re afraid of another phreatic explosion in the lake?”

“That and the rapid accumulation of CO_2 at ground level and in the water column. I think it would be criminal not to close access to the entire lake and its environs. Then what have we? Not a soul can walk into Norris geyser basin now. Other basins are really too hot for safe tourist access.”

Wesley rotated away from the window and took a seat behind his desk. “And what about the Brimstone, Ms. Embree? It’s looking very ugly.”

“I’ll bet we haven’t seen the last of our trouble out there, Wes.”

“No, I think not.”

“Have you talked with Fred Womack at CVO?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What does he have to say?

“We’re all on the same page, Ms. Embree. We should pull the plug on Yellowstone.”

“Then do it, Wes.”

Wesley nodded. “Thank you for your opinion.”

“You’re welcome. Good luck, Wes.”

Liz left the office, leaving Wesley slumped at his desk, framed by stacks of data printouts. Ah, technology, he thought, grumbling, He shoved the data pile aside. Papers spilled on the floor. What remarkable tools to work with. What a blizzard of information to sort through and interpret. Maybe there was too much data, too much of every damned thing. No seat-of-the-pants flying anymore.

Wesley picked up the phone and dialed Parks. Throngs of tourists had to be kept away for the summer season. No families with young children were going to perish because the geology community failed to act. Yellowstone would not be another Mount St. Helens. Not on his watch. No, sir! He rang the emergency management offices in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho and called ranking U.S. Geological Survey officials, the CVO and FEMA as well. He recommended the Park Service and state emergency management officials place employees on standby. Only those with official business should be permitted to move through Yellowstone. Park officials were to prepare to clear Yellowstone of workers and contractors should things escalate to a full evacuation order—a volcano alert.

It would not take long, Wesley calculated, for the phone to ring off the desk, once word made the rounds of state and federal emergency management agencies. He did not expect to receive Montana Governor Randall Seifert on the line within minutes, particularly late on a Friday afternoon. Seifert always worked a long full day on Fridays, not one to waste a single penny of the taxpayers’ money. The retired Army major tuned politician wasn’t happy at this hour.

“What the hell is going on down there?” roared the governor through teeth as large as those in the mouth of a horse. His raging words crashed from the speaker on Wesley’s desk system and ricocheted about the room. “And what gives you the right to screw with our parklands, huh?”

Wesley stiffened and responded succinctly, but the governor would not back off.

“You know what you just did, mister?” the governor fulminated. “You just yanked the happy tooth out of every tourist’s head. We need every one of those yahoos in that park. They bring in money, you understand, from Frisco to Philadelphia. You put the dagger of doubt in everyone’s back.”

“Governor,” Wesley retaliated, distraught over being assaulted over the phone, “it’s my responsibility to protect the public. Your citizens, mind you. I’m doing just that. As for tourists, an advisory will push your tourist business through the roof. Everyone will want to come to the Yellowstone country this summer to see what the commotion is about. You remember Mount St. Helens?”

“What about it?”

“An advisory turned southern Washington into a Woodstock rock concert, so many people wanted to get to that volcano to have a look at it. That mountain killed people, remember, lots of people.”

Seifert’s voice did not trail away. He kept up the verbal fusillade. “Where the hell is the big volcano in Yellowstone National Park, will you tell me that? There’s no god-forsaken volcano east of Mount Hood, for chrissake.”

“That is not true, governor.”

“Yeah, tell me how I’m wrong.”

“The entire park is a volcanic structure, governor—the whole thing. All of it! You know that.”

“Bullshit. I’m not buying this. I’ll be back with the big boys from Wyoming and Idaho, and we’ll get this thing turned around. We’ll take your volcano advisory, whatever you call it, and cram it and your federal paycheck down your throat.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Liz left Mammoth Hot Springs, leaving Wesley to struggle with the volcano advisory fallout. She contemplated spending her last weekend in the park in solitude at the Park Point research cabin on the eastern margin of the lake. There she could tidy up her research, collect her things and examine the vast new fumarole clusters where biologist Jamie Hebert had met his death. If there was time, she was determined to make the trek into the heart of Brimstone Basin to see the expanding steam fields for herself.

As she engaged the ignition of her Subaru, moderate tremors wriggled though the terrain. The woman shrugged off the rumbling and ran the car out of the lot. In the rearview mirror, long extinct Liberty Cap cone, poised on the grand mineral terraces that gave Mammoth Hot Springs its name, gagged, coughed and disgorged a boiling flood of calcium carbonate-laced water.

The geophysicist avoided Route 89. It would take another week for contractor crews to clear the rockslide and open the road beyond Obsidian Cliff, so she detoured eastward to Tower Junction and turned south for Canyon Village and Fishing Bridge. At the junction of the upper loop roads at Canyon Village, she drove to the north rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. On a whim, she deserted the car and descended the short path to Lookout Point.

The scientist reached a railing at the lip of a twenty-mile chasm near the very heart of the vast park. The canyon was a gothic cathedral in reverse. Instead of vaulting overhead, it soared below, more than 1,200 feet beneath the soles of Liz’s boots. At the far reaches of the divide, a silver wave of Yellowstone River water cascaded 300 feet from the heights and plunged into the yellowing depths, filling the recesses with spray and vapor. In the 1800s, artist Thomas Moran stunned patrons in the cities of the East when he unveiled his wall-size oil on canvas of the majestic canyon and falls, an image so fantastic that critics dismissed it as a dream fantasy hatched in the painter’s mind.

In her hands, the protective railing holding back her body from plunging into the chasm shimmied. Gripping the rail tightly, feeling the seismic pulse of the land, she promised herself that she would return to this dynamic landscape soon. But next pilgrimage, she would bring Pelee with her. The trip would be atonement for having neglected her daughter for so many months. She and the child could share in the mystery and marvels of the vast plateau.

More road miles south, the Subaru approached the Mud Volcano territory. Inside the car’s cab, thudding acoustic poundings gained access. On the windshield, brownish gray spatters slapped, a few thick, ugly drops at a time.

“I’ll be darned,” Liz muttered to herself as she geared down the car and brought it to a stop in the road.

Cautiously, she emerged from the vehicle and scanned the forest margin as booming reports rolled across the road. The highway surface rippled with heat and smelled of heated sealing tar. Tall evergreens to the west bobbed, their branches peppered with a vile-colored substance coursing through the canopy.

Liz had heard tall tales of Mud Volcano. Not a soul since the first Yellowstone explorers had witnessed the thermal monster flinging surges of pulverized rock mud into the surrounding woodlands. The massive mud pot was now doing just that, bubbling furiously, vomiting a heavy slick and pumping loud steam volleys into the atmosphere.

The drizzle of hot mud intensified, drops enlarging to the dimension of dimes and quarters. Liz ducked into the car and gave the accelerator a kick. The car lurched south, speeding through a hail of earthly excrement. When the rig emerged into the clear, it dripped with a steamy slime of filth, the windshield smeared to near opacity.

Running in four-wheel drive down the narrow access trail to Park Point, Liz reached the newly appointed research cabin. Rather than mount the stairs and go inside, she walked west instead, downhill to the shores of the lake.

The diamond gem of all North American mountain waters lay brooding, moody. Rotten spring lake ice coated the waters and framed massive rafts of forest debris. Sky and ice were as one, the color of backwater scum, except where vast black openings in the ice unmasked plumes of boiling water upwelling from gapping fissures and steam craters on the lake floor. The spruce and pine along the shore were black scarecrows, branches brittle, roots baked.

A stone bench took Liz’s weight. Head in her hands, she studied an impoverished environment before her. It seemed she was seated at a sick bed, unable to comfort a chronically ill patient. Her first night on the lake many months earlier, under the spell of the full moon, the waters had been fresh, cool, the forests vigorous. The watery basin was just beginning to run a fever then. Now the disease was advanced.

She had been correct to admonish Wesley to close the park for good. What would tourists find once they came, besides campgrounds ruined and inns destroyed, the lake road a rough, hastily-bulldozed gravel strip, more geyser basins closed, most of the lake off limits and constant tremors that banished sleep from the weary. Why put thousands in jeopardy? For safety’s sake, it would be best to shut down the park for the whole season. An advisory was the right thing to do. She hoped Wesley had made the call.

Early the next morning, the odor of rotten eggs seeped through the Park Point cabin floors. Liz threw the door and windows open letting the chill in, but the smell would not leave. Stuffing a granola bar into her mouth, she donned her pack and ran from the cabin southward down the Thoroughfare Trail.

It took nearly an hour to reach Alluvium Creek, the liquid avenue pointing the way to Brimstone Basin. The area lay smothered with mineral film and rock mud vomited from countless fumaroles large and small. Liz cracked deposit samples from the margins of the flows, then struck off to the east, climbing uphill, hiking over tremulous ground. The sulfurous stench increased as she ascended and the forest shone of lifeless bone, bark sloughing from the tree trunks in sheets.

At once the dead forest stands fell away and a stark black and white desert loomed. Naked, steaming thermal fields expanded to the horizon, filling a broad valley and sweeping into the low foothills fronting snow-crowned peaks on the eastern park boundary.

Brimstone Basin was a forbidding ruin, Liz’s feet, nose, eyes and ears telling her so. High heat permeated the souls of her boots. Her socks soaked through with sweat. The reek of volcanic elements soiled the air and the basin rumbled from the exhaust of hundreds of steam vents. The ground was a curmudgeon, trembling as if with Parkinson’s disease.

The brow of a low sprawling dome blocked the advance into Brimstone. Liz picked her way uphill with care and crested the rise, coughing as she went. She stopped on unstable ground at the edge of a drop. The hillock fell away, leaving an appalling wound in the landscape. Dozens of fissures snaked through the slumped terrain, all shrouded in thick clouds of poisonous steam. At the base of the depression, a black smoldering dome filled the lowest terrain, a miniature version of the lava dome housed in the crater at Mount St. Helens. Little or not, it was a small cancer, being fed from below by a magma bloodstream.

The whole of it—the blistering heat and vapor, the constant rumbling noises, the ground fractures, and the smell of the place—reeked of peril. Active volcanic summits and craters Liz had studied all presented similar portraits. Brimstone Basin, she now understood, was a high hazard zone wedded to a hair trigger. Brimstone was fast becoming the most dynamic if dangerous block of real estate in all North America.

Chapter Thirty-Three

A fully restored Dodge Dart turned onto Fourth Street and motored into the heart of the historic commercial district of Sioux City, Iowa. Abel sought Buffalo Alice Restaurant, one of the Midwest’s best-kept pizza and beer joint secrets.

He parked the car and took to the street until he saw a big yellow sign emblazoned with the full-size image of a bison’s head. He ogled the sign for a moment and scanned the boulevard.

“Hello, stranger,” called a female voice from behind him. Abel turned to see a familiar face crossing the street toward him.

Winnie approached quickly, cleared the curb and went straight for Abel. “I thought we might stage some sort of grand Hollywood greeting, but how’s this for starters?” She kissed him gently on the lips, and then stroked the side of his face. He leaned in and kissed her in the same manner. He swept a strand of hair from her face and uttered a quiet greeting: “Hello, young lady.”

“Hello, young man. I thought you would never get here.”

“Just a little tardy.”

The couple entered Buffalo Alice pizzeria, filled with young professional people down from the offices in the business district surrounding Fourth Street. Winnie found them a small booth to squeeze into. In short order, they had Alice’s famous “Works” pizza before them and mugs of Rogue Dead Guy lager.

“I must say, Winnie, thank you for the invitation.”

“My pleasure.”

“You look divine, good lady.”

“And you, sir, are dashing.”

“Aren’t we something?” Abel laughed. “We have a middle-age mutual admiration society underway here.”

“I admire what you’re doing.”

“What I’m doing?”

“What you’re doing at Independency, it’s remarkable.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“At first, I thought your work was that of some New Age charlatan. When your latest books became best sellers, I thought you were cashing in on some eco-trend, like a diet fad doctor.”

“I’m amazed at the success. Somehow, I tapped a nerve among the masses. There is such enormous discontent there, bottled up with no place to go.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Don’t get me started, Winnie, I can’t turn off my mouth when I’m given free rein.”

“I’ll stop you when it’s my turn, remember?”

“When it’s your turn?”

“Yes, but it’s your turn now, Abel. You go first.”

“Okay, I remember the rules of the game.”

“So, why do you think your average Joe and Jane are so uptight?”

“Well, at the very core of it is the notion of helplessness, of being unable to control virtually any facet of one’s life.”

“I can vouch for that,” Winnie agreed.

“The average American lives in a culture of dependency. If you can’t meet your own needs yourself, you’re dependent on others to fill those needs. The only thing the vast majority of the people produce for themselves is an abstraction called money, in the form of wages. It gives them the honorary title of consumer. They’re consumers, nothing else. Two hundred years ago, it would have been just the opposite. They would have been producers of local goods first and very poor consumers, by our standards, second. They relied upon themselves and their families to supply a great many goods and services. They would have been quite independent in a sense that we no longer understand. Now, today, any and all avenues other than obtaining money to sustain life—the many skills and practices that humans took for granted for eons—have been closed off.

“My solution to this conundrum has been to try and create a whole new way of looking at how society goes about its life and work. The idea is to build a culture of independency, the exact opposite of dependency. To do that, we need to turn the culture on its head. We must turn the dependent consumer into a hybrid beast, a consumer-producer. Someone who is both. We have to create small, human-scale systems that are sustainable, productive, humane and that insure personal as well as community independence. Such systems would be quite the opposite of the emerging global mass economy where every individual is tied to and dependent upon a gargantuan, monolithic economic system and labor a world away.”

“How does your culture of independency make inroads against the global system?” Winnie probed.

“In order to prosper, the Independency movement, like all other social movements, needs a populace that is under terrible stress. Think of the civil rights movement. In order for the civil rights movement to succeed, it needed an entire people to get behind it, to lend it critical mass. For the idea of Independency to really catch fire, you need a population that is hurting and wants to explore an alternative to the existing social structure. I think some fraction of the middle class is already there, already ripe for change. They’re certainly buying my books.”

A waitress arrived at the table to see if they wanted a refill. They ordered another round of ale.

“Now the question is,” Abel continued, “are you ripe for change?”

“Me, change?”

“It’s your turn now. I’ve said my peace.”

“Do I need changing?”

“What I mean is, would you be attracted to a life at Independency, Minnesota?”

“You mean leave cosmopolitan Kansas City for the wilds of the north?”

Abel chuckled. “It’s not that wild. We tamed the West some time ago.”

“Oh, I’ve entertained the idea once or twice. My stay at your little town was more than a little inspiring. But to be honest with you, I have a career in K.C. I have obligations, of course, and several big projects to undertake at work. And, you know, we’ve known each other for a few weeks, really. We seem to have an attraction for each other, but we don’t have a relationship, at least not yet.”

“You’re brutally honest,” Abel sighed, as if  crestfallen.

Winnie let fly a little laugh. “Besides, Abel, I’m going to be gone for a month.”

“Where are you off to?”

“I’m going to Montana on assignment.”

“Really. What are you going to be doing there?”

“There’s a large religious organization based there. I’m going to be working with them.”

“Who would that be?”

“Some sort of New Age Christian hybrid.”

“You’re not talking about the Ascendant Church of the Earth, are you?”

“Wow. Do you read minds, Abel?”

Abel launched his trademark grin across his face. “No, I can’t mind-read, but I have read a great deal about new spiritual communities and the Seer empire out there. Now that’s a curious mixture of New Age idolatry, evangelical Christian hard lining, survivalist rhetoric and flower power.”

“Thank you for that wonderful portrait,” Winnie said with playful sarcasm.

“What sort of work will you be doing for them?”

“They’re a good-sizeed far-flung organization with more than a few tentacles. Their data systems are from the dark ages. They can’t do what they want when they want it, so they’re seeking help, lots of it.”

“So you’re their salvation?”

“Mmm hmm.”

“So you work on a contractual basis?”

“In this case, yes.”

“What other sorts of clients do you work with?”

“Sometimes it’s a Fortune 500 firm, sometimes it’s Uncle Sam. It doesn’t matter to me, really, as long as the money is good.”

“Who in government?”

Without skipping a beat. “Many agencies, but I specialize a bit in criminal databases.” Winnie took a swig of her beer to hide her white lie.

Abel nodded in thought.

“Sometime in the fall, Abel, I’ll have quite a bit of time off. Would it be possible to pay an extended visit to Independency then?”

“That would be wonderful.”

“All right then, I’ll plan on it.”

Abel seemed pleased with her and with himself.

They left Buffalo Alice, strolled the city’s new riverside parklands and retreated to the Riverfront Marriott a mile away. Winnie led Abel to a river-view hot-tub suite on the top floor and immediately brought forth a fresh bottle of Courvoisier and two small cognac glasses. She poured out a dram each and they toasted one another.

“To one intriguing man,” Winnie purred.

“To one unconventional woman.”

They kissed, lips loose, mobile.

“This is a good night for this,” Winnie suggested.

“Why is that?”

She kissed Abel again, applying a bit more pressure. “Women are seawater, their hormones rise like the tides under the full moon. Eternal, moody, playful, daring.”

“I hadn’t heard you were a poet laureate or a Madison Avenue advertising copywriter.”

“Poets love a full moon. That’s why I chose a full moon weekend for our little rendezvous. We ladies, you have to understand, can get a bit randy under the full moon. We dress a little louder, tend to put on too much perfume, too much eye shadow, higher, sharper heels.”

“I thought women dressed for one another.”

“Well, yes, that’s true. Women look at other women and men look at women. But when we’re in the mood, you know, when the moon is full, we could scratch out any woman’s eyes. If we have a favorite man in mind, well, we run up all the signal flags.”

“And men? What do you think we do when the moon is up?”

Winnie laughed playfully. “You get it up with the moon.”

“Just with the moon?”

“Well, I’d have to say that for men, the moon doesn’t really matter so much. But when we girls are feeling the tug, you boys can’t be oblivious to it. Am I correct?”

“Mmm, yes and no. It depends on the age of the male.”

“How so?” Winnie sipped her cognac and gave Abel a peck.

“Well, if he’s sixteen, anything will trigger a response, anything at all. Never mind the moon. A glance at a certain girl in ninth grade math class will create pandemonium below the belt. You’ve got boys walking down hallways in every American school right now holding their math books close to the hip, shall we say.”

Winnie squealed with laughter. “Covering up?”

“Yes, covering up.”

“That’s hilarious.”

“In some tribal cultures in Africa, where strutting around naked is just how things are done, young men parade their little creations around for all to see.”

More laughter.

“But in western cultures, we hide our good upstanding intentions when we’re young. Girls have to guess the size of their man’s little marvel. In Africa, they can size them up right then and there. And size matters.”

“I’ve heard that.” she smiled.

“There was a study done—imagine writing a grant proposal to get funding to study penis-size preference?—that resulted in some interesting conclusions.”

“Oh, I’ll bet. Please tell.” Winnie went to the hot tub, seated herself on the edge and ran a hand into the warm brew.

“In many tribal cultures, women prefer to choose mates who are well endowed. Now imagine, this has been going on for 200,000 years. The girls have been selecting for larger penis size for 10,000 generations. Over time, more male babies are born with larger penises. Overall penis size in the species increases. And, voila, there you have it, humans are the primate with, by far, the largest such organ of the whole hairy bunch. And it was all the girls’ doing.”

“Of course it was. We know a good thing when we see it.”

It was Abel’s turn to splinter apart with laughter. He joined her on the edge of the hot tub, placed a finger to her neck and stroked her lightly.

“Now, I’ll fast forward ahead twenty-plus years, and I can tell you from experience that the hair trigger of the sixteen-year old is a thing of the past.”

“Oh, really. What does it take to get a man of your sophistication aroused?”

“An intelligent woman like you engaged in a rutty conversation like this.”

“And what about you?”

“Me?”

“Mmm, what does it take to get a woman of your persuasion aroused?”

“Oh, a clandestine rendezvous with a favorite radical. Good conversation over a drink, a little music, Courvoisier. And a dip in this hot tub. That might do it.”

“Well, we’ve got most everything behind us except getting into the tub.”

“Disrobing would probably be advisable, unless you bathe in your pants.”

“Not lately. May I help you from your encumbrances?”

“I would be receptive to that.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

Burning throat tissues drove Liz out of Brimstone Basin and away from the Park Point research station. Rather than bunk over Sunday night, she hastily packed the car and motored north for the return run to Mammoth Hot Springs. At Fishing Bridge junction she wheeled north toward Canyon Village, only to discover a boiling, oozing mudflow two-feet deep across the highway in the Mud Volcano terrain. Advance was impossible. She reversed direction.

The lake drive had been bulldozed clear of debris and a rough gravel lane built up just a week earlier so traffic could bridge a twelve-mile gap in the paved highway. Thankful for a surface to underpin her car’s tires, Liz’s Subaru bounced southwest on the rough gravel strip through the remains of Lake Village. Demolition excavators had been at work on the grand but mortally wounded Yellowstone Inn, tearing it down. The drowned marina at Bridge Bay flashed by the passenger-side window as the woman pushed the Subaru at a hasty clip on to West Thumb and the intersection with the lower grand loop road.

Toward Old Faithful and Madison she steered, slowing only to see if anyone was about in West Thumb hamlet. Liz floored the Forester and winged the eight miles to the continental divide, rammed through Craig Pass and descended to the Firehole River and the great steaming geyser basins beyond. The road was empty, the parking lots and turnoffs to various features barren. Liz dismissed the geyser flats. She was hell-bent on getting through to Mammoth Hot Springs headquarters when washboard ripples in the pavement forced her to gear down within earshot of Firehole Falls.

The going got worse. Wide cracks appeared, severing the asphalt. Across the bridge over the Gibbon River, the pavement disappeared. Liz braked the car to a halt. Before her, the uninviting cliffs of the old Lava Creek caldera rim glowered 300 feet above the highway. Stopped just south of the eroded battlements, she could not move an inch more. The pavement ahead slumped and fell away, falling into fissures deep enough to thwart passage of a military tank. Massive fracture rings, Liz realized, radiated along the margins of the old caldera boundary. They had to be new, maybe a day or even hours old. The land knew no rest. The cracks could have appeared unheralded. Maybe she was the first to come upon them.

The severed highway was a trap; every avenue north was blocked. With no prospects, she turned the vehicle around and drove south. Rather than push over the continental divide once again, Liz pulled off the highway at Old Faithful compound to seek out a warm soul. Some of the facilities at Old Faithful had been slated to open in a week’s time, but the advisory had put off the opening. Perhaps some staff member or two was on hand and, like her, was trapped inside the loop road with the only remaining exit far to the south through Grand Teton National Park.

Seven stories tall, the Old Faithful Inn dominated the skyline in the Lower Geyser Basin. A monumental rustic structure, it was the largest building in the world constructed of round peeled logs. Its dramatic earthy design influenced national and state park facilities all across the country.

Liz jogged into the building, finding its doors open, the towering lobby unlit and the interior air cool. Marooned on an acre of highly polished plank floor, she revolved in place to survey the stunning enclosed space. The lobby ceiling vaulted to timbered recesses eighty-five feet above the floor. Massive cross timbers supported upper floors, an intricate lattice of roof support logs and freeform railings fashioned from peeled branches and small crooked trees. Glass domed lights nesting in the timbers were cold, doing nothing to illuminate the vast interior dimensions.

“Hello.”

The salutation from Liz echoed in the cavernous expanse, the wood failing to soak in the sound waves.

“Anyone here?”

“Anyone here?” The identical response bounced off the walls.

No human voice ventured from the halls, main desk or open floors. No soled shoes clattered on the acres of polished floor. Without the banter of guests and the flow of foot traffic, the immense scale of the American landmark was unfriendly, eerie. The sense of isolation was profound, exaggerated by the enormous emptiness.

A heavy thump sounded along the length of the floor. Low vibrations followed, skittering down the planks, running up the timber support columns and braces, and infiltrating the ceiling rafters and finish boards. The wood—perfect for augmenting acoustic waves—hummed, giving voice to the seismic prattle rising from the earth.

The vibrations increased, setting the walls in motion. The moving timbers gave voice to low-frequency moans and bellows, interspersed with pops, snaps and whistles. The air became saturated with the noise, growing louder as the tremor increased in intensity, as if suddenly a pod of humpback whales had somehow paddled into the enclosed atmosphere over the lobby.

Jabbed by a growing sense of alarm, Liz twisted on her heels and ran from the great room, burst through the great lobby doors and sprinted away from the building to open terrain in the direction away from dormant Old Faithful geyser. The shaking continued, the ground dancing a wild jig, the tempo increasing, the steps faster, faster. From the great inn came the sound of crashing and clatter as unseen objects fell, tipped over and shattered.

A sonic shriek rifled up from the earth. The volume of it punched the breath from the geophysicist’s lungs, hobbling her. Through the air, solid particles hissed by at bullet speed and were overtaken by the scream of steam. Old Faithful, on the opposite side of the great inn, roared to life, but not as the familiar hot water geyser trailing fans of fine mist. Its plumbing ruptured, the geyser had lost its water supply, and pressures had found ways to reroute fluid through the subterranean catacombs far below. The continuous shaking tremor, however, managed to clear out some lost silica-lined pipes and open new channels to ground level.

The tremor gave back to Old Faithful its thermal powers, but now only in the form of raw, visceral, super-pressurized steam. The sound of cannon shot boomed through the land as Old Faithful launched fountains of white scalding vapor hundreds of feet perfectly straight up into the reddening late day light. Rock shrapnel blitzed the log walls of the hotel and machine-gunned away the window glass. The structure shielded Liz from the blast but not from a monstrous vision rising lightning–quick, far above the grand gabled roofline. A tornado on end, it seemed to Liz, a skyscraper-high boiling fury. Awestruck by the sight and banshee scream of the thermal monster, she could only stand dumb before it.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Shivery dawn etched spidery filaments of frost on window glass. The geophysicist awoke in the safety of her car, seatback prone, sleeping bag unzipped but pulled up to the chin. Much of the night she had laid awake, tense, startled every time the new incarnation of Old Faithful roared to life—each cycle just thirty-five minutes apart. Tremors were unwelcome bedfellows throughout the long night, shaking her awake if she did nod off.

Liz was desperate to communicate with someone, anyone. Rummaging in her pack, she failed to locate her cell phone. Try the landline in the hotel, she instructed herself. Sprinting to the hotel lobby, she found the hotel lobby in shambles, the electricity down. Glass shards littered the floors. She tried numerous phones in the lobby and experimented with the switchboard. All were silent.

Defeated, she resolved to drive Route 89 south through the Grand Tetons and run the half-day loop east and north through Riverton, Thermopolis and Cody to Cooke City and the northeast gate back into Yellowstone. Living on peanuts and water, she could at least keep hunger pangs at bay a while.

Backtracking over the continental divide toward West Thumb, the scientist kept her speed down, knowing that elk, bison and moose would be out in some numbers in the cool early morning hours, foraging near the highway at Duck Lake. As the Subaru descended the thousand vertical feet off the divide toward the small body of water, she imagined the stress the animals must be under, going about their lives on ground that would not keep still. The creatures were far more sensitive to a whole array of stimuli than humans. Could they get used to it? What being on earth could get used to constant tremors?

As the highway leveled out on the in-run toward Duck Lake, Liz rounded a wide switchback turn that opened out onto a broad panorama of Yellowstone Lake and the encompassing lake basin plateau and mountains. The view did not grab her attention; a herd of elk did. The large creatures stood at attention in the road and on either side of the asphalt. Every one of them had its head up, ears forward. They peered eastward, away from the approaching car. Liz stopped the vehicle, but still the many elk stood fast, immobile, not one acknowledging the hum of the engine.

Across the vast sweep of the lake waters rolled the deep rumble of artillery shell bursts from a far distant battlefield. Underfoot unrelenting seismic pulses shook the soils. Liz ran a hand over her face in a gesture to relieve tension when as one the entire herd of elk pivoted to the west and bolted, their speed turning them to blurs as they raced over the road away from the lake vista.

The elk’s flight behavior spooked the scientist. A student of ancient Chinese accounts depicting bizarre behavior on the part of animals that could sense the onset of violent earth movements, Liz knew the elk’s panic could be a precursor to unforeseen geological trauma. The animals were gone at once, leaving her alone. She felt abandoned. It was unsettling. She pushed in behind the wheel to find the image of her daughter’s face in the windshield.

Chapter Thirty-Six

A few steps from the water’s edge of Yellowstone Lake, Wesley pulled a water sample from a smoking seep stained uranium-salts orange by the living bodies of billions of thermophilic bacteria. As he capped a vial, he was startled by a piercing squeal of tires on pavement. A Subaru Forester charged into view, skidding to avoid his service truck parked in the highway on the edge of West Thumb Geyser Basin. Apparently the driver didn’t notice the truck until it was almost too late. The car swept by within inches of the parked rig, throwing up clouds of dust from the shoulder. The speeding vehicle shuddered to a stop.

Liz materialized on the road, legging it toward the diminutive geyser complex tight by the shores of Yellowstone Lake.

A voice reached the supervising geologist. “Wes, is that you there?”

Wesley waved.

Liz jogged up to the older gentleman. “What are you doing here, Wes?

“I was about to ask you the same thing. Ms. Embree.”

“I thought you had gone to D.C.”

“I was on my way, up to the very last minute. I cancelled the trip.”

“Why?”

“The advisory…it may not be enough. The other morning, you’d gone down the Thoroughfare; I was supposed to get to the airport. But things changed dramatically overnight. It’s remarkable what’s happening. All the data is suddenly far outside even recent parameters on everything we’re monitoring. Data or not, when you’ve worked the park as long as I have, you just know in your bones that people are at risk now. So I called the shot.”

“The advisory?”

“Yes, yes, and we went so far as to evacuate all but the most critical personnel.”

“No wonder no one is around.”

“The Park Service is in lockstep with it, the Interior Department, FEMA, everyone except Montana Governor Seifert. He’s one angry beast. But it’s done. It’s time to clear people out.”

Liz nodded her head repeatedly.

“They’ve instituted a fifty-mile buffer around the park. A few YVO veterans have stayed on. Some gung-ho graduate students in the office wanted to stay, but I sent them out; told them to get far away from this place. I was worried sick about them. About you, too.”

“How did you get here? I couldn’t get through to Mammoth.”

“I got caught below Canyon, probably the same as you. I couldn’t go north, so I came down here to Grant Village and spent the night. Didn’t sleep much. I thought I’d go out the south entrance and backtrack via the Tetons.”

“We could go together.”

“Sounds like a plan, Ms. Embree.”

The geophysicist surveyed the West Thumb inlet waters out to the white-capped Absaroka Range peaks glistening on the edge of the world, listening for the concussive sounds she had heard earlier among the elk herd. “I just came from Brimstone, Wes.”

“You did? Did you see anyone on your way out?”

“No, not a soul.”

“We wanted to get people in there yesterday but couldn’t get through. What did you see?”

“The basin is heavily deformed and cut through with fissures. It’s blowing off prodigious heat. Those air bursts, they have to originate at Brimstone.”

“The data stream, everything, it all points that way, Ms. Embree.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Vehicles running in tandem, Liz and Wesley sped for the south entrance of the park twenty miles away, crossed the southerly continental divide rise and descended toward the shores of Lewis Lake. At the south tip of Yellowstone’s third-largest body of water, at a pullout for Lewis Falls, the highway lay in ruins, just as it had been near Madison junction under the ancient caldera escarpments.

Lewis Falls tumbled down the last eroded and lava-flow-buried remnants of the south rim of the lost caldera, providing a chattering backdrop for the humans surveying geological mayhem. Great cracks hacked down through the road and zigzagged through the surrounding terrain, some twenty-feet wide, steep sided and nearly as deep. The great gashes in the earth belched white sulfurous vapor. Ten car lengths away to the south, across a half dozen fissures, stood a Park Service pickup truck sideways in the road, blocking the way through to the north. Someone was signaling, a park ranger. His voice sailed across the divide.

“What are you doing there? Where did you come from?

Wesley cupped her hands around his mouth and yelled. I’m Wesley Couch with the USGS. Ms. Embree here was at Park Point cabin, doing research.”

“Didn’t you hear?”

“What? Hear what?”

“The evacuation order.”

“Yes, well aware of it.”

“You need to leave the park.”

“Look, I was hoping to help Ms. Embree get across to you. Can you take her out? She needs to get back to Mammoth.”

“I can’t leave this post.”

“Very well, just radio to reach someone to get up here.”

“Why don’t you drive north?”

“How?” Liz scoffed. “The lake access is covered by mudflow. The junction at Madison looks like this, but this is much worse.”

A single wrenching jolt punched the earth’s surface, causing Liz, Wesley and the park employee to jump. All fell silent for a few seconds, shrouded in clouds of vapor, anticipating more violence.

“Can’t you get through the geyser basins and up to Norris?” the man in the Park Service uniform yelled.

“I’d have to leave the car near Madison Junction.”

“Can you hike through?”

“Possibly.”

“That’s your best bet. There’s no way for you to get through this country here, unless you take your life in your hands. I’ll try to locate someone to help you.”

Liz felt caged. She dreaded running forty miles on crumbling roads all the way back to Madison. Once across the tortured terrain there, that is if she could get through on foot, it was more than a dozen miles just to reach the west entrance of the park. Mammoth was thirty-five miles in the other direction. If no one were able to reach her, she’d be two full days’ hike from assistance. But what choice did she have?

“I’ll make it happen,” Wesley reassured the geophysicist. “I’ll have someone from the YVO waiting for you when you get to Madison.”

“What are you going to do, Wes? How are you going to Mammoth?”

“I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about you. You need to be on your way. Have someone in the office take you up to Bozeman so you can catch your flight. I’ll let them know that’s what I expect of them. Okay? ”

“I feel as though I’m abandoning you,” Liz fretted.

Wesley grinned behind his trim moustache like a friendly grandparent. “This place and I, we can take care of ourselves. We may be old timers, but we’ve got some years left in us.” The grin didn’t leave his face. “Now get yourself to Mammoth and then home to your daughter. She needs you. Get back here as soon as you can.”

“I’ll do that, Wes. You take care of yourself.” She reached for the big man and embraced him. “I mean it.”

“You betcha, Ms. Embree. You best be going.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

At the edge of a jagged fracture in the earth’s crust between the Gibbon River and the loop highway at Madison junction, Liz left her vehicle for good. Crumbling slopes at her feet dropped a dozen feet below grade. There were multiple lacerations in the land ahead of her, but nothing as imposing as the chaos at Lewis Falls. Upstream, clouds of water vapor boiled from the fractures and warm fog bobbed in the channel in lockstep with the river. Sulfur fumes seeped from the cracks and stole through the meadow flats washed with the fresh green and gold pigments of spring.

Liz balked. If a quake rumbled while she was at the bottom of one of the fissures, the sides could slump and entomb her or the gash could close and seal shut. There was nothing to do but leap, to go as hard as humanly possible until she bridged the gaps and reached the highway on the far side. She took a breath and held it.

Bounding jumps brought the scientist to the bottom in seconds. The ground in the pit was uncomfortably hot to the touch. A mad scramble up unstable soils on the opposite bank brought her to the surface again faster than she had estimated. Good! One down, two to go. Sweat burst from her pores. Just another ninety seconds and she’d be clear of the hazards. Holding another breath, she repeated the maneuver in the second trough, its depths as hot as the first. At the edge of the third tortured rip in the landscape Liz arrested her progress. Below, the bottom soils were masked by filthy bubbling water, the surface flashing lively with vapor.

How wide was the leap across the polluted swill below? Six, seven feet? On level ground she should make it easily, but on sliding earth on a steep incline, that was another matter. Along the fracture lip she ran searching for the narrowest possible point to cross. When she found an avenue, she eased down the pitch and descended to the water’s edge. There she couched and brought a fingertip to the surface film. She tapped the fluid, flinched, then relaxed. Like a hot tub, she thought; hot, yes, but not dangerous. It was another sensation—tiny needles in the flesh—that was more troubling.

The fluid in the channel at her feet ran with acid. Some of the thermal features in the region were deadly. Sulfur Caldron up the line and many bubbling mud pots, too, had pH levels only slightly sweeter than battery acid.

No time for dallying. The sulfurous atmosphere in the trench was hellish. Without a moment’s indecision, Liz sprang from the fracture wall and landed true on slick soil on the opposite bank, but the footing gave way beneath her. She plunged down to mid-thigh in the water.

“Damn it.”

Flailing at the bank, the woman clawed and kicked out of the muck. With superhuman effort she slithered up the bank, rolled on the surface, sprang to her feet and sprinted to the drainage where the Gibbon River emptied into the Madison River.

“Aaa-eeee.”

Liz’s high-pitched scream ricocheted along the ancient caldera rim. The Madison, fueled with effluent from the Firehole thermal fields to the south and from the blistering terrain at Norris Geyser Basin to the northeast, usually ran warmer than most Yellowstone streams. The geophysicist splashed into hot shallows that were at the threshold of human tolerance. Knives of liquid heat stabbed into her legs, yet she stood fast in the current up to her hips for a minute letting the river dilute and carry away the sulfuric acid solution that had saturated her pant legs and gnawed at her flesh.

The loop road macadam radiated warmth absorbed from solar radiation flooding into the broad greening meadows and from the earth below. Liz stretched out on the blacktop like a turtle sunning itself on a log afloat in a cool pond. She stripped her pants down, kicked off her boots and examined her legs and feet. The acid and hot water had etched them red; they were a little tender, but serious injury had been averted by the excruciating immersion in the river.

Basking in the road heat, her pants and socks dried within two hours. Still no one had come to assist her. She laced her still-moist boots and stood up dead center in the highway junction. Something was coming westbound along the highway paralleling the Gibbon River, obscured by fog generated by hot vapor rising off the water and mixing with cool spring day air. Liz hoped for a vehicle. It didn’t sound motorized, though. It sounded like living things moving.

A massive black head parted the fog, then another and another, short horns on each. Bison were on the move, plodding with purpose in single file right down the centerline and on a course to knock the human down. Liz inched off the highway and watched enthralled as a long parade of beasts emerged one by one from the vapor curtains. They were unconcerned with the presence of the scientist as they forged ahead through the junction and westward. Dozens of the creatures trudged by. Liz could only imagine they were evacuating Yellowstone National Park, marching toward the west entrance some fourteen miles distant.

Massive black rumps waddled away. Engine noise replaced the buffalo. Liz spun about to see a pickup break from the river fog. A hand the color of coffee waved. Germaine Yardley, the volcano hazard team’s computer graphic modeler, had made the thirty-five-mile run from Mammoth.

Liz bounded to the driver’s window and grabbed the man by the arm. “You made it, Germaine. God, it’s good to see you. I thought no one would get through.”

“Buffalo don’t do the speed limit, Liz,” joked Germaine. “And it takes some doing moving rocks out of the road.”

“Rocks?”

“Come on, get in. We’ve got to make time. It was a real adventure getting down here.”

When the fog pockets cleared, Germaine gunned the truck. Flying around a bend, he spun the wheel trying to maneuver around a coyote darting across the lane. The pickup slammed into the canine’s ribs, crushing them and hurtled the creature twenty feet off the road.

“Oh, no,” wailed Liz, watching the lean body sail into the brush. Germaine brought the truck to a stop. The animal lay still.

“The animals are going crazy,” Germaine moaned. “Fox, coyote, wolves, mule deer, bear—everything.  I just missed running over every one of them coming down here.”

“Yellowstone must be driving them mad,” Liz replied.

“It’s not a happy place for them, not any longer.”

On the flats approaching Norris Geyser Basin, both occupants of the truck leaned in toward the windshield. Over the tops of weather-bleached snags burned to match sticks in the great fires of 1988, thunderheads of boiling steam vapor wrestled in the atmosphere. The famous thermal basin shimmied with heat, all of its geysers roaring in steam phase, pumping scalding clouds skyward. Steamboat and Excelsior geysers stood as flashing silver skyscrapers, their majestic gossamer crowns bending to the breeze nearly 400 feet above the terrain.

“I’ve never seen Norris this wild,” said Liz in awe.

“I’ve never seen the road like this,” groaned Germaine.

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“The oil is coming out of it.”

Subterranean heat saturated the loop highway. Asphalt aggregate, bound together with oil tar, was so hot it slumped and flowed. The truck tires cut down into the surface and picked up chucks of hot pack; the black mix slapped against the wheel wells and undercarriage. Germaine rammed the accelerator to gain speed so the truck might float over rather than dig into the surface.

As Norris’ roaring thermal monsters receded behind the truck, Liz fought off the desire to retreat into an internal safehouse where she could bask in the illusion of safety. At every turn in the road, Yellowstone sewed a pox upon the land. Twin Lakes boiled furiously, their shores withering from new spring green to dry rattle brown. Roaring Mountain shrieked with the voices of a thousand madmen, the sprawling hillside completely lost in a shapeless caldron of steam. Big hexagonal slabs of black volcanic glass lay in the road beneath Obsidian Cliff. Germaine slowed to a crawl and deftly avoided razor-sharp obsidian shards as bits of falling stone pelted the road. In the forest and meadow patchwork quilt of Willow Park, thousand-pound moose scampered back and forth in the road, unable to decide upon a direction to take.

Neither rider uttered a word as the truck passed directly under the yellow ochre-colored cliff face at Golden Gate. Liz’s mouth dried to tack, her upper lip sticking to her teeth. The narrow curvilinear bridge beneath the two-million-year-old Huckleberry Ridge Tuff formation was littered with rhyolite rubble large and small.

“I had to move rock here on the bridge on the way down,” Germaine confessed. “I couldn’t get through. Know what I was thinking when I was clearing the way?”

Liz glanced at the driver. “No, what?”

“I was thinking that, if I got hit by a rock falling from this cliff, I would be the first and only human being ever killed by tephra fall from the monster Huckleberry Ridge eruption.”

Liz laughed nervously, but nipped it short. “Let’s not tempt fate.”

The pickup cleared the bridge and raced for the hoodoos just south of Mammoth Hot Springs and the park headquarters. Vertical stone pillars, many of them dozens of feet tall, stood in the land, each a petrified goblin. The forms, grotesque and whimsical, had been chiseled over millennia by unrelenting wind, ice and rain.

Among the hoodoos, the roadway heaved with seismic waves as a fresh earthquake rumbled across the plateau. Germaine braked hard to stop the truck on the oscillating asphalt. Fifty seconds of shaking brought down loose rubble into the road, some of it pinging off the truck’s side panels.

The land stopped seizing. The quiet of the vast spaces returned.

“Whew.” Germaine shook his head side to side.

“What’s that?” asked Liz, as the sound of rusted hinges opening surrounded the truck.

Liz and Germaine both focused at the base of a towering hoodoo loitering thirty feet to the north on a steep slope to the left and just off the highway. It appeared to be cleaving in two, one side rigid, the other tilting away from its mate. A gap opened between the columns. It grew wider. At the base, fractured rock crumbled under shifting forces.

“Run,” screamed Liz. In a single motion she was out the door and sprinting back in the direction of Golden Gate. Germaine sat transfixed as the massive split pillar peeled away and exploded in the road directly in front of the truck’s grill. Rock shrapnel blasted the windshield and massive bounding boulders spun like kids’ glass marbles into the gorge below.

“Germaine,” Liz hollered, scrambling back to the truck. Germaine pitched from the truck door, feel on all fours and vomited.

“Are you okay, Germaine? Talk to me.”

“Okay. I’m okay.” He swallowed hard. “Scared me to death.”

“You hurt? You’re bleeding.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve got glass all over me. Must have cut me.”

The truck door slammed with a bang as new earthquake waves swam through the road. Liz grabbed Germaine, yanked him to his feet, and roared in his face. “Let’s go. Go!”

The two bolted as if pursued by predators through the hoodoo debris field, stumbling on ground that shifted and jumped under every footfall. A massive cap rock dislodged from a towering pillar and slammed into the highway two-dozen-yards ahead, punching through the road surface and lodging there to form a titanic roadblock.

The mad dash continued to the edge of the hoodoo forest. Germaine could no longer get his breath, conditioned as he was to run computers, not races. Hands locked together atop her head, Liz walked in circles trying to shake out leg cramps.

Mammoth Hot Springs lay only a few miles to the north—walking distance. Make haste, Liz told herself. She collared Germaine, turned him north and set a fast pace. They walked in silence for a mile, when Germaine found his voice. “You’re leaving tonight?”

“Tomorrow. I’ve got a flight out of Bozeman.”

“I’ll take you up there tonight. My car’s at Mammoth.”

Liz nodded.

“What are you going to do, Germaine?”

“Finish up, pack equipment and get out. We can’t function. The quakes are wreaking havoc with the equipment, the buildings. We have to set up somewhere else. We’ll probably go to the campus at Provo.”

“What do you think is ahead for us?”

“I’d like to think we’re going have a brand spanking new volcano to play with in a few weeks. But I don’t believe my own happy horseshit any longer.”

Liz blinked dust out of her eyes. “What do you believe?”

“Oh, you know West Thumb?” asked Germaine.

“Of course.”

“It’s a crater within a bigger crater, Liz.”

“We all know that.”

“I think Norris goes ballistic, or maybe Brimstone. One of them blows out big, like the shot that created the lake thumb a few hundred thousand years ago.”

Germaine puffed trying to pull down enough oxygen to keep up the pace set by his companion. “And you, what do you think, Liz?”

Liz pondered Germaine’s inquiry as the steaming travertine terraces above Mammoth hove into view in the distance. She was troubled by her own thoughts and did not answer the question for nearly thirty second.

“God, I think Yellowstone is capable of the unthinkable.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Sweat beads pooled on the forehead of Cascade Volcano Observatory Director Frederick Womack as he scanned topographical position data from ground laser and GPS installations on the Yellowstone plateau just after 6 AM.

“Wow. Wow!”

The lasers were recording ground creep in real time at rates far exceeding anything Womack had ever witnessed. The terrain within the margins of Yellowstone’s caldera was stretching west to east. He went over fresh GPS, laser and tilt-meter data streaming in from the high country. Same thing. Most of the surface terrain in the park was bowing upward at remarkable velocity.

His mind sparked and sputtered, trying to grasp the scope of what was evolving in the geological wink of an eye in the northwest corner of Wyoming. Hair on the back of his neck stood at rigid attention as he watched the numbers scramble.

Turning to the computer, the director sought out real time readouts from instruments monitoring chloride levels in ground water and geyser basin discharge temperatures. He compared the levels with those seven days and thirty days earlier. What he saw sent an electric current through his flesh.

“What in holy hell is going on?” he uttered to the walls of the lab.

He auto-dialed the supervising geologist at the geo office in Yellowstone National Park.

“Hello this is Wesley Crouch. I’ll be out of the office today, May 1, on my way to Washington. If this is….”

Womack dialed Wesley’s private cell phone. It was busy. “Who in the hell is he talking to at this hour?” he fumed in disgust.

The luminous ruby LCD counter on a digital wall clock rolled second by second. Marching time turned Womack’s head. 6:08:23, 6:08:24, 6:08:25.

“Got to get to Yellowstone.” He uttered his words to the clock. He frantically punched at his smartphone to bring up a Northwest Airlines phone app. When the number rang through, he booked a seat on the next flight out of Portland to Salt Lake. Reservation confirmed, the director sprinted from his office, not taking so much as a pen with him.

Chapter Forty

On the bluffs above Big Stone Lake, in the confines of his office at Independency village, Robert ‘Bobcat’ Catten was up at dawn, monitoring the news, as he did every day. Roll out of bed, wrap in a robe, step into rubber boots and plod to the video studio on the second floor in First Day Hall—always the same procedure and always up before anyone else in Independency village.

Bobcat was the news go-to guy, the community’s town crier with a headline addiction. He had to have his wire service fix. Abel couldn’t get through a morning without consulting with the man about state, national and world affairs.

Monitors brightened, audio spilled from the speakers. Bobcat hunkered down to surf television news channels and the worldwide web. The New York Times wouldn’t arrive for half a day.

Among the usual images of U.S. troops on patrol, the White House and crime scenes, stock video of a spouting Yellowstone geyser bobbed into view, background footage behind a talking head. Bobcat brought the volume up on that monitor while he sat back and gave his bearded morning face and shaven head a thorough scratching.

“…out to a fifty-mile radius of the national park boundary. The evacuation order could affect dozens of communities in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.”

“Whoa!” Bobcat switched channels looking for similar content and found it.

“…have closed all entrances to Yellowstone National Park. Public safety officials report elevated hazards due to frequent earthquake activity, dangerous ground and water temperatures and the possible threat of volcanic activity. Evacuation orders have been issued for portions of three states surrounding the park. Citizens, travelers and park employees are being asked to leave an area within fifty miles of the nation’s first national park. Among the nearby communities affected are Cody and Jackson, Wyoming; Rexford and St. Anthony, Idaho, and Livingston, Montana. In Montana, facilities at Montana State University in Bozeman as well as emergency shelters at Billings and Butte are being readied to receive evacuees. In Wyoming, the cities of Worland, Thermopolis and Lander have been designated as safe havens. And in Idaho, officials at Idaho Falls are readying city buildings, schools and other buildings to receive residents fleeing the evacuation zone.”

Bobcat had scratched his neatly trimmed beard more than enough. “I’ll be damned,” he mumbled to the monitors.

Chapter Forty-One

Backtracking from Lewis Lake, Wesley’s truck crested the continental divide on the in-run to Yellowstone Lake. With Liz on her way, he thought he might try his luck getting to the far side of Fishing Bridge and out along the east entrance road.

South of Grant Village, the front end of Wesley’s truck leaped and bounded down, the suspension severely tested by intense seismic tremors heaving under the road. The veteran geologist slammed the brake pedal and brought the rig to a skidding halt, but it was not still. The chassis bounded and rocked as massive shocks from a major quake pummeled the vehicle. The radio leaped from its saddle and cracked against the dash. Beyond the windshield, the straight road rose and fell as if caught in great ocean swells. Wesley sat transfixed by the sight of undulating land, held in the clutches of a seismic monster, behaving like a flapping flag in a stiff breeze.

The rippling pavement broke up into chunks. Lodgepole pine whipsawed back and forth. Birds of every species broke from cover and winged for the safety of the sky.

Suddenly the land stopped its grand mal shaking. Wesley stumbled from his vehicle and stared at it as if it were a venomous snake. He turned away from the truck and hustled out to an open rise above the tourist compound of Grant Village. Below he could see a dozen buildings, all suffering heavy structural damage, and across the expanse of Yellowstone Lake to the majestic Absaroka Mountains, royal blue on the eastern horizon.

Wesley planted his feet and turned an ear out of the breeze to listen. The earth beneath his feet fell quiet, as still as a photograph. Below, cluster flies that had waited all winter for a noontime frolic on the warm south side of the buildings alighted on splintered clapboards, logs and the broken masonry of the Grant Village facilities. They hastily sought out any crack or crevasse to wedge into to try to escape geological torment.

The earth had gone stone deaf. Light currents of air through the valley puffed themselves out. There, now, there was a noise: thump-whoosh, thump-whoosh. The geologist held his breath and listened. He flinched when he realized he was listening to his own circulatory system hammering away.

Audible wavelengths went extinct. Wesley panned his head in darting motions to view the surroundings. The country had become foreign ground, wholly unsuited for human presence. At the east corner of Hamilton store, several people materialized suddenly, huddled together, scanning the environment and keeping clear of the buildings. It was as if the earth had become a moonscape. The moon has no atmosphere. There can be no sound waves transmitted on the moon. The lunar surface was a sound graveyard. Yellowstone was one and the same.

In his cerebral cinema, the image of a Kansas twister rolled. Survivors of tornadoes often spoke of unearthly quiet preceding the approach of a vortex menace. The thought drained into his spinal cord and infected his nervous system. Wesley gritted his teeth. The continental silence filled him with dread, yet he could not venture a step or make a gesture or a shout to the fellow humans below. He was spiked in place, straining to hear anything at all.

Chapter Forty-Two

Beyond the trees low on the horizon, Wesley thought he could detect a hand drum roll, as if a dust-dry cowboy was thumping lightly on a saloon bar, rapping out the rhythm of a jukebox tune. A quiet earth rattle joined the light staccato beat and tickled the soles of his boots. He peered eastward to see where the rapping sound was originating from, squinting into the yellow spring light.

The beat stopped and the intolerable silence returned. He revolved slowly toward the west when he took a seismic sucker punch and lost his feet. As he fell, the masonry in the buildings 200 feet away disintegrated and toppled. The ground vaulted up to meet the geologist, leveling a punch to ribs and hip. The jolt knocked the breath from his lungs. He collapsed into a fetal position, gasping.

The man bounced and flopped about, as if saddled to a newly-roped mustang bronco just captured and being forced from a life of freedom on an open range. The eerie silence of the last seconds was banished forever, replaced by banshee wailing and thunderclaps from the soil and rock. Titanic shocks swept through the resilient log and timber-frame buildings nearby, splintering wood, flipping clapboards away like playing cards and toppling the last of the chimneys.

At the Cascade Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington, pens riding the roll paper on old seismograph drums rammed side-to-side, leaving angry, jagged sweeps of ink on the paper. Real time global positioning satellite readings, measuring elevation at dozens of points about Yellowstone, galloped upward in centimeters of rise per second, not centimeters per year.

At the southeastern horizon twenty-five miles distant, a flash of arc-welder white light zippered the cloudless blue sky apart. The blinding rays pierced Wesley’s eyes. Blinking wildly to try to clear his vision, he thought he saw an Everest peak appear out of the spring day far to the east at the flanks of the Absaroka Range peaks. He blinked again and the vision metamorphosed into a rising super-column of red heat, ash-laden smoke, pumice and pulverized stone.

At Brimstone Basin, well east of the shores of Yellowstone Lake, the earth’s crust fractured, cleaved apart and uplifted thirty feet in a broad ring-like arc. Super-pressurized gases saturating the viscous rock at the top of the magma chamber expanded violently as deep new fissures opened access to the earth’s interior. In seconds, the pressure blew away the rock layer above, freeing more gas and giving the magma ocean below an express route to the surface.

The initial explosion obliterated the thermal fields that had expanded during the winter months. Hellish materials from earth’s catacombs rocketed into the atmosphere. Pressures below plummeted, setting the stage for eruptive chain reactions. As pressures in the magma chamber fell, gases trapped and building force for millennia in the seething magma ocean three miles down suddenly had a geological pressure relief valve opened. In the vicinity of the initial fissures, where frothy magma and steam found an avenue to the surface, trapped gases flashed to full volume, much like the gas in a liter of warm and agitated soda with the cap just unscrewed. The volatile mix deep in the earth expanded instantaneously and violently. The colossal expansion heaved at the strata above, sending waves of fractures through the rock. Cubic miles of crust, like the cork in a champagne bottle, jetted away from its confines, atomized and launched vertically into the atmosphere, climbing, climbing, climbing—straining to leave the bonds of earth’s gravity.

The explosion opened a half-mile-wide chasm in the earth at the shoreline of Yellowstone Lake. The surrounding strata collapsed toward it. Suddenly, Yellowstone Lake had no floor under its southeastern expanse. Millions of gallons of lake water flooded down toward the magma chamber inferno far below. Moments later, steam explosions shattered the surrounding rock layers and disgorged fission-like blasts of steam and sound.

Booming sound waves arrived twenty seconds later and savaged Wesley’s eardrums. He screamed in pain, slamming his hands to his head.

Shock wave after shock wave skimmed through the lake waters, pushing into the old shoreline below, sweeping a surge flood before each one. Shattered lumber and furniture from the ruined buildings were swept up, floated and rafted inland. Even as the waves came ashore, the waters of the lake began to pull away from their historic boundaries.

Hellish seismic activity continued without abating. Wesley simply could not find his feet. Frantically he scanned the lake’s western, southern and eastern horizons, praying that the blast to the east might be a final one.

The eruptive column filled the southeastern horizon and climbed mile after mile into the heavens. Within the boiling folds of the ash cloud, lightning flashed spasmodically. Upper level winds, toying with the top of the cloud column, sheered away fine ash particles and draped the sky to the north and east with a veil of inky darkness.

West of the region where Brimstone Basin had crumbled, at Flat Mountain Arm, the old caldera boundary rocks cleaved apart as the basement strata beneath began to float upward on a wave pulse of magma and the expansion of billions of cubic feet of gas. Sonic boom-like reports rolled over the lake in rapid succession. Wesley, holding his head, on his knees, turned his wide eyes toward the mayhem. The horizon appeared to peel back like the curling lid on a sardine can. As the land lifted up and lay over, an opaque wall of black ash launched vertically for miles, blotting out the eastern horizon.

More than 1,500 square miles of Yellowstone surface terrain was now on the move. The whole central core of the region, caught in a volcanic whirlwind, liberated itself from the surrounding landscape as yawning fractures radiated outward, intersected with old fissures, and began tracing an immense oval. Yellowstone was unzipping, the massive cracks defining the boundaries of a new caldera.

The geologist stumbled and crawled to the truck and fumbled for the radio. He dropped it. Where was it? There. He hoisted it to his face, flipped it on and radioed headquarters. “Mammoth, Mammoth!” He was screaming into the device.

Someone was monitoring the frequency. The instant he heard a response, Wesley howled into the mouthpiece: “Mammoth, Mammoth, this is it. It’s underway.”

The transmission crackled with white noise, breaking up Wesley’s voice. “Mammoth, major vent southeast. Out of Brimstone, most likely. Other activity along the old caldera boundary….” The transmission stopped.

A nuclear flash banished the horizon, swallowing the eruption cloud.

Throughout the vast magma sea beneath Yellowstone, billions of cubic feet of trapped gas expanded a thousand fold, releasing prodigious forces many orders of magnitude greater than all the weapons arsenals on the planet. Three and four miles of earth strata capping the caldera cauldron, still acting as a lid, forced the explosive mixture below to seek out weak points in the hundreds of miles of massive fractures now rippling around and ringing the vast central basin of Yellowstone National Park. Along these fracture zones, skyscraping fountains of blistering, frothy magma jetted through new vents, clawing up, up, up toward the stratosphere.

Under Wesley, 4,000 cubic miles of Yellowstone basement rock was freed of its bonds with the surrounding mountainous terrain and pulverized by the caldera’s newfound fury. In all directions of the compass, volatile material spouted, giving dimension to the new volcanism. Slabs of rock the size of city blocks rocketed from the earth followed immediately by incandescent fountains of liquid stone.

Thrown to the ground, Wesley was seized with the sensation of riding an express elevator toward the heavens. An area seventy miles long and thirty-five miles wide began to rise as the superheated liquid rock in the upper core of the magma chamber, powered by the expansion of gas, flashed to rock froth.

Caught in the maelstrom, Wesley’s body flooded with a toxic mix of endorphins and adrenaline. An all-encompassing panic drained away and a sense of great calm washed over him. Somewhere in the quieting recesses of his mind, he resolved to experience this, to watch and learn and witness the destruction of an entire environment.

Gigantic upward forces in the first eruptive columns kept the massive volcanic clouds above Yellowstone aloft. But the mass of the column soon overcame the rising forces and the black super-hot veil collapsed, turned in on itself and fell at the speed of an airliner.

Wesley watched in rapt fascination as the roiling folds lost their grip on the atmosphere and tumbled toward earth, millions upon millions of tons of vaporized rock dust falling, a storm of atomic mushroom clouds in reverse.

Pyroclastic energy surged from the base of the eruption columns. Fluidized rock, unable to coalesce because of the super-hot temperatures within, flowed like a mile-high tsunami wave of water in every direction. The wall of broiling horror radiated outward, consuming the land, burying it, erasing it utterly.

The pyroclastic surge cloud raced over the blackened waters of Yellowstone Lake, flashing the surface to steam, rendering the path of the cloud frictionless. In seconds the boiling headwall swept into Grant Village. The buildings were as tissue paper before a flamethrower.

The pressure wave streaming before the pyroclastic hell lifted Wesley from the ground, his body sailing as easily as a leaf on the wind for a moment before being overtaken, obliterated by the 2,000-degree atomized-rock super storm. A last sensation of fission heat flashed through Wesley’s consciousness. Much of his big body vaporized, cells reduced to their base elemental atoms and seeded through the volcanic hurricane.

The surge wall raced across the boundaries of the park in minutes, a seething apocalyptic force sweeping everything away before it. The ferocious cloud fronts roared deep into Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, powered by a colossal eruptive monster the planet had not witnessed in 630,000 years. The flows kept coming, kept moving, swallowing a 100-mile radius, 200, 300 and more, and stabbing into northern Utah, western Oregon and Washington and across Colorado’s mountain fastness to the Front Range.

As initial blasts radiated outward across the West, the upward inflation of the Yellowstone plateau slowed. For hours, a two-thousand square mile raft of earth some three and four miles thick, riding atop the magma ocean, hung suspended, the moorings tying it to the adjoining landscape snapping away.

At the fringes of the vast earthen raft, gaping fissures sank away toward the fiery abyss. Up through them roared blast-furnace fountains of gassy ejecta that solidified into mountain-swallowing pumice flows. A ring of glowing crimson heat encompassed the great plateau, shielded from the outside world by impenetrable ash and smoking darkness. Rock and pumice bombs fell from the boiling heavens over three states, falling harmlessly into airy pumice avalanches hundreds of feet thick spreading across thousands of square miles of intermountain topography. Vents spewing lava opened one after the other over the newly-forming caldera, spreading molten rock across the now sterile terrain.

Within twelve hours, Yellowstone’s bizarre fate was sealed. Even as massive pumice fountains erupted along miles of ring fractures and lava surged from the new vents, the final stages of volcanism were already in motion.

The upper fathoms of molten rock froth floating atop the magma ocean jetted from their lithospheric prison and rose into the atmosphere. As the melt erupted away, the sheer volume of material in the depths declined, leaving a void. The earthen raft above, thousands of cubic miles of rock, pressed down on the magma chamber as it emptied. For the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, the volcanic structure of the region could no longer support the crushing weight of its own roof. A vast chunk of the Yellowstone plateau began to move, to sink, slipping down along the concentric ring fractures forming the outline of a wholly new, emerging caldera.

Chapter Forty-Three

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather researcher, watching a real-time satellite image of the western United States, saw several tiny but bright flashes of light in succession in the northwestern corner of Wyoming. Galvanized by the phenomenon, she thought she must be watching the aftermath of an airburst of a small streaking meteor when an ominous black plume blotted out the entire region. It appeared to her to be much like one of the earth-size plumes that erupted on Jupiter when the Jovian planet was bombarded by fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy several decades earlier. As she watched the satellite images, details faded from view, the ash plume darkening the atmosphere so as to reveal nothing more to the space-borne camera lens.

Quake monitoring equipment at the University of Utah, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, at UCLA, on campuses at Laramie, Missoula, Seattle, and Portland danced an angry jitterbug as the pens on seismographs leapt wildly right, then left and digital readouts whirred.

Cascades Volcano Observatory teams, scurrying to monitor new Yellowstone data, clutched their guts as their technology on the ground at Yellowstone blacked out suddenly. Turning to incoming seismometer data streaming from ground stations throughout the Northwest, the teams were swamped with information pouring in, much of it reading at magnitude levels most of the professionals found inconceivable.

Chapter Forty-Four

A Northwest Airlines Airbus A320, awaiting runway clearance from the airport tower at Bozeman, Montana, swayed and bobbed on the tarmac. The huge airframe convulsed as strong seismic pulses wriggled up the wheel assemblies. The forty-three passengers aboard grew anxious about the rattling of the aircraft at rest on the runway. The flight crew could see from their instrumentation that nothing was amiss on the jet itself. They wanted to get rolling and leave the thumping airfield behind.

Liz, seated in window seat 23A over the wing, glanced back and forth across the aisle. Eyes whipsawing nervously, she sought a glimpse out the windows on the far side of the shaking airliner. The glare of the morning sky was all she could detect. A male passenger in the aisle seat, observing the woman gyrating and straining against her seatbelt, became alarmed by his row-mate’s actions.

Engine noise increased as the Airbus throttled up and lumbered down the tarmac into the prevailing winds sweeping through the Montana State University campus city. Two minutes after liftoff from Bozeman and on a western heading, the jet dropped the left wing as the pilot maneuvered the jet in a wide arc to a southeastern heading, bound for Minneapolis with a stop at Denver International Airport. As the cabin rolled from level flight to a twenty degrees angle, explosive blasts shattered the takeoff routine, their concussive force rattling everything in the craft. Passengers screamed in fright at the stunning volume of the sounds.

In the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot froze in terror momentarily, but the A320 proceeded smoothly in its turn, the instrument panels glowing normally. The geophysicist launched out of her seat, jumped the male passenger sitting a seat away, and came down in the aisle. The steep angle of the turning plane foiled her landing; she lost her balance and pitched across passengers in the far row. From the rear of the cabin, a flight attendant shrieked for the unrestrained passenger to return to her seat. The geophysicist clawed a few rows toward the rear of the plane trying to reach an open F-seat where she could peer out a window to the south.

Pandemonium erupted as passengers recoiled in fright at the careening female flyer slamming about the cabin interior on the heels of the explosive noises. Fearing a terrorist incident, several passengers attempted to tackle her and pull her down to the aisle floor, but Liz dove to the open window seat and pressed against the window Plexiglas.

On the horizon, in the direction of Wyoming, a massive turbulent shape cloaked in black sheeting boiled up through the atmosphere. The formation already towered far above the climbing aircraft and filled the skies to the southeast with smudge-pot smoke.

Hands pawed at Liz’s clothing. She stood and twisted, tilted over the seatback, and screamed at a flight attendant racing down the aisle. “Look out the side of the plane. Look outside.”

A hand gripped Liz’s black ponytail and yanked it with brute force. The geophysicist brought an elbow up and rammed it back behind her, catching a man across the bridge of the nose. The fellow fell away to the floor. Others jumped at the woman, but she clawed fingers into the seatback and focused on the approaching stewardess.

“Volcano,” wailed Liz. “Volcanic. Out there, out the window!”

Somewhere in the cabin a voice soared: “Oh, my God.”

The attendant lunged for the scientist. Liz seized and pulled on the woman’s arms. The airline employee’s forward momentum drove her against a seatback. She landed across passengers in the aisle. Liz screamed into her face, dug her fingernails into the woman’s hair, and slammed the attendant’s face into the port. “Look, damn it all. See it! Tell the pilot. We’re in danger here. Tell the pilot. Do it!”

Liz was airborne suddenly, her waist clamped in a muscled vise.

“Let me go, you….”

Bodies tumbled and crashed to the floor of the cabin, Liz beneath. The force of the fall pounded the oxygen from her lungs. A large man sat on her ribs; others held her hands to the floor. With great effort she drew in a lungful of air.

“Aaaa, volcano.”

“Stay still, woman.”

Raging now: “That’s an eruption at Yellowstone. Turn the plane away.”

A commanding female voice splashed across the cabin floor. “Let her up a bit. Let her up.”

Liz was hauled to a sitting position. A woman in uniform, the head cabin attendant, dropped down before her. “What is it you want?”

The two locked eyes. “Did you see it?”

“See what?”

“That’s a volcano…a volcanic eruptive column.”

“How would you know?”

“I’m a scientist. Never mind. Tell the captain.”

“On your say-so? Huh!”

“This jet can’t fly into that or anywhere near it.”

“I understand.”

The head attendant instructed the male passengers holding the disruptive soul to keep a grip on her. The woman disappeared into the galley forward of first class and called into the cockpit.

“Captain.”

“What do you have back there?”

“We have one very distraught passenger.”

“Can your team secure the situation?”

“We have. She….”

“It’s a woman?”

“Yes. She says we’re in danger.”

“Is she threatening people?”

“She said something about a volcano.”

“That’s a volcanic cloud?” gasped the pilot. The first officer and navigator glanced at the professional seated next to them.

“Do you see something?” asked the cabin crew head.

“Yes. Have a look at it yourself. We’ll be on top of it in no time. We’re trying to get a read on the thing from ATC as we speak.”

“How should we precede, captain?”

“Have people in the cabin witnessed your problem passenger?”

“Everyone.”

“I see. Is she restrained now?”

“Yes.”

“Keep her that way until I make an announcement. Then get her into a seat and fastened in. If she refuses, we’ll backtrack to Bozeman and have her taken off the plane.”

The attendant returned to Liz’s side and instructed the male passengers holding her down to continue restraining the woman. The voice of the pilot filled the cabin.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain. We will be changing course shortly to move the aircraft away from large cloud formations ahead. Please stay seated and secure in your seats. We may be a little delayed getting to Denver.”

“Are you satisfied?” the airline attendant sneered at Liz.

“No. Tell the captain to stay a hundred miles from those clouds. They’re filled with volcanic ash and debris.”

Liz was escorted to her assigned seat and ordered to buckle up. The passenger in the aisle seat beside her requested a move. He left the row. Up and down the cabin, men and women stared out the plane’s windows at the approaching pillars of darkness.

Still climbing toward cruising altitude on its route to Denver, the Airbus hurtled southeast over south-central Montana on a heading that the pilots determined would take the craft into close proximity to the massive black shapes in the distance. They radioed air traffic control to request a new bearing, telling FAA controllers they were going to execute an evasive maneuver to the north to try to skirt a billowing column of black smoke that was rapidly filling in the horizon directly ahead of the airliner.

In her seat, the geophysicist fidgeted uncontrollably. The wall of darkness ahead was spreading rapidly northward, pushed by high altitude winds. On the far distant plateau, the cloud mass was growing in complexity. Perhaps other vents were opening in the landscape, adding new columns to the mix, thought Liz.

“Come on,” the scientist mumbled aloud. “Turn this plane.”

The flight crew sat mesmerized by the monstrous cloud castles building up ahead. Chains of lightning raked the billowing folds. Writhing snakes of crimson heat coiled through the dark masses. Everywhere opaque drapes hung in the atmosphere and spread rapidly across the horizon.

“Let’s get ourselves the hell out of here,” called the captain to his flight deck professionals.

The wing outside the window where Liz was seated ascended abruptly as the Airbus rolled in a tight turn to a northern heading. An audible sigh of relief escaped from scientist’s lips. She fumbled for her carry-on to find a credit card to use for the seatback in-flight phone. As she rummaged for card plastic, the hiss of friction filled the cabin. The woman’s head jerked upward. The sound electrified her. The metal skin of the aircraft sang as the leading flight surfaces collided with microscopic particles, millions of them.

A second time, Liz bolted from her seat and charged forward toward the attendants strapped into their jump seats affixed to the cockpit bulkhead, screaming at them as she clamored forward.

“That sound, that’s volcanic ash.” The attendant’s eyes flared in disbelief as the woman’s body hurtled at them. “The plane has run into an ash cloud. It has got to get out of it.”

The floor rocked from under the scientist as the plane rolled left in a radically steep turn. The loud whoosh of engines at full thrust rumbled in the cabin. Liz tumbled into a row of empty first class seats. Centrifugal forces kept her pinned down. Alarm bells sounded behind the cockpit door.

The loud whine of the mammoth left wing engine suddenly dropped off while the plane was steeply banked. It flamed out, lost power quickly, and acted as a brake as the left wing dragged in the air stream. The airliner shuddered violently as the pilots frantically executed emergency maneuvers designed to pull out of the steep turn, level out the plane, and set the flaps and rudder to compensate for the sudden loss of power on the left side.

The cabin floor pitched abruptly back to horizontal and stabilized. Opaque clouds clamped down over the windows. Liz righted her sprawling body and turned to the window. She could see nothing except brilliant flashes of lightning in the void and a torrent of white sparks lit by solid particles streaming into the leading edge of the wing. Trembling with fear, she fumbled for the belt in the first class seat she had come down in and fastened it.

To keep the huge A320 aloft, the crew gunned the right wing engine and finessed the control surfaces. They tried restarting the left engine when the right engine began oscillating wildly as it ingested air choked with rock powder. That engine flamed out, too. The roar of the spinning turbine died away. In the cabin, silence overwhelmed the interior, cut through by the sinister grinding noise of solid ash particles on the metal skin of the jet.

The force of gravity evaporated from under the passengers as the nose of the aircraft pitched steeply down, rendering terrified people weightless for a few moments. In the cockpit, the flight crew forced the aircraft into an emergency dive to maintain airspeed to insure adequate airflow over the wings so they could keep control the aircraft. With an eye on the altimeter, they bullied their controls in a mad effort to restart at least one of the engines.

“This is the captain.” The pilot steeled himself to address his passengers calmly. “Please take emergency precautions. Be sure your seatbelt is fastened. Lean forward and grasp the seatback ahead of you. Drop your head down between your arms and stay down.”

The plane lost altitude for an eternity, winging powerless northward over the broad sweep of the nation’s fourth largest state. The crew deployed the landing gear to create wind resistance to slow the descending jet. The altimeter numbers plunged down, down and still the engines refused to start. Visibility on the flight deck was fast disappearing. The forward windows were glazing over, pitted by countless particle strikes.

Pitch darkness switched to daylight in a millisecond as the Airbus breached a pocket of clear air. Below, just seconds away, was a divided country, flat open grassland plains to east, forested foothills and glacier-robed peaks to the west. The crew nursed the plane toward open ground, decreased the angle of descent, and swooped in over an ocean of grass. Ailerons fully elevated, the plane’s nose rose skyward. The Airbus presented its aluminum belly to the earth’s surface. The high-speed emergency glide procedure had been executed perfectly, textbook precise, but airspeed exceeded 250 miles per hour as the Airbus altimeter numbers ran out.

“Brace yourselves, brace for impact,” the Airbus captain yelled over the address system.

White fear evaporated from Liz’s body, replaced by a decade-old image of her daughter in diapers, splashing through a child’s plastic wading pool. She smiled into the joyous face of toddler Pelee the instant before all her senses quit her.

Chapter Forty-Five

In a men’s room stall in the terminal complex at Salt Lake City International Airport, Germaine grabbed for the latch when the door rattled violently and the stall walls rippled and chattered. “Quake,” he blurted out to no one. Claustrophobic within the undulating walls, he yanked the door back and raced out of the rest room into the airy spaces of the concourse. Pulling his smartphone from a pocket, he auto-dialed the Yellowstone geo offices. He couldn’t get through. He dialed again. Nothing.

“Come on, damn it,” he barked at the device in his hand.

Beyond the boarding area at the far northern end of Concourse C and across the tarmac and runways, the sprawling Utah metropolis founded by Brigham Young stretched its western hide against the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Range and dipped its toes into the shallow salty inland sea that the Mormon populous treasured. In the bright, dry western light, the cityscape tucked in beneath the mountains was a gemstone to behold.

Again there was no connection with Yellowstone. Germaine dialed the offices of the Cascade Volcano Observatory across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon, and punched extension numerals for the Volcano Hazards Team warren.

“CVO.”

“Germaine Yardley here, on my way back from Yellowstone.”

There was silence for a long second. “Jesus, where are you?”

“I’m in Salt Lake City.”

“Not Salt Lake!” howled the voice on the line.

“I just got here so I could catch….”

“To hell with it, sir, you’ve got minutes to get out of there.”

Germaine froze. “What?”

“Are you on the interstate?”

“No, I’m in the terminal.”

“For God’s sake, man.”

Germaine pulled the little communication device from his ear and stared at it as if it were a scorpion. A fist of insight staggered the professional. He reached for the tempered wall glass to steady his body.

“It’s the caldera?”

Silence reigned on the other end of the line too long. “Yes.”

The CVO’s computer wizard, the man whose data and graphic skills Liz was so enamored of, slipped the smartphone into his pocket. No need to talk a second longer.

Scores of people were milling about and seated in the boarding area. The man eyed the strangers, the same faceless travelers he had seen in airports dozens of times. Their faces exhibited flesh tones, color. His hands were suddenly the blue-gray hue of a cadaver.

At the corner of his eye, Germaine detected motion through the glass, a United Airlines jet on its approach for landing. He followed its path a moment, when his gaze shifted to something indistinct farther off, at the horizon. Beyond the lofty Wasatch Range, blue infinity was being devoured by the devil’s darkness. A malignancy was spreading low and quick, sucking down the brightness from the day.

The hands shook with the palsy of fear; he could do nothing to stop them. Instinct prodded him to turn and run, run fast, but there was no outrunning that smudge on the horizon. No car was fast enough. One couldn’t get a jet aircraft off the ground in time. Hiding was folly.

The sky to the north was lost to shades of night. The mountains, in full sun, were radiant in contrast to the swelling blackness. People in the terminal area took notice as the daylight shifted to dusk in seconds and an angry, tumultuous cloud wall breached the summits of the peaks.

Shouts rang out in the terminal. “Look at that. Look at that!”

The CVO veteran stood rigid, a fossil, watching the approach of geological hell. He understood what was coming at breakneck speed—a pyroclastic surge-cloud a mile tall, incandescent, unimaginably dense yet super fluid and hot beyond measure. Nothing on the surface of the earth could withstand the power of it, as he knew all too well.

The cloud front breached the Wasatch in seconds and descended on the city, witnessed by thousands of citizens going about their pedestrian lives. The force of the blast wall scoured the mountains clean of every living cell. The city fared no better. The Mormon Temple, Capitol Theatre, the Pioneer Memorial Museum, Brigham Young’s Beehive House, schools, businesses, churches, all were smashed to powder and every human life within incinerated.

Germaine instinctively closed his eyes at the last second and vanished in a mist of tiny glass shards.

The great city on the lake was sterilized and leveled. Debris from the eruption and material ripped from the mountains swept into Great Salt Lake. The shallow sea that lapped at the city’s parks and streets began filling in with millions of tons of volcanic fallout. The water level would rise dramatically over the course of the day. The vast lake would spread out over hundreds of square miles of salt flats and drowned what had once been city streets.

Chapter Forty-Six

Otatso Creek chattered loudly as snowmelt from the glaciers in Glacier National Park fattened the stream’s volume now that spring was underway in the high country. Benjamin White Elk had followed the Otatso far upstream during the frosty morning, checking for animal sign to see if grizzly bears had been foraging after emerging from their winter dens.

He was still troubled by the conversation he had had with his mother, feeling guilty for leaving her behind, though it was her fervent wish. He needed time alone, so when he returned to the Blackfoot reservation compound, he said his greetings, caught up on a bit of news, then padded along the creek bank to his tiny camp to spend the night. At dawn, he left his abode to trace the riverbank upstream for several miles.

When the sun reached zenith, White Elk climbed out on a turtleback stone slab projecting into the turbulent stream. It had long been a favorite spot. The rock had absorbed the sun’s rays all morning and was warm to the touch. In a crotch in the stone, worn smooth by eons of stream wear, the man leaned back as if on a couch and let his body mold itself into the warm geology. He pulled a corn johnnycake and dry venison jerky from his jacket pocket and nibbled at the food absent-mindedly. He stopped chewing for a few moments as a modest earth tremor skipped through the rocks.

The earth quieted down. Eased into his rock furnishing, White Elk was quite comfortable. Too comfortable. Basking in the sun, his dark clothes soaking in the soothing heat of the strengthening spring rays, he fell asleep. The loud background babble of the rushing stream kept all distractions at bay. White Elk gave in to the luxury of sleep out in the open.

An ermine scurried up onto the rocks to find a sleeping being. Curious yet cautious, the creature nosed in close to sniff the scent of the human. More interesting was the smell of the jerky that White Elk had held in his hands an hour earlier. The ermine approached White Elk’s relaxed right hand, sniffing in earnest, rising on its haunches, eyeing the surroundings thoroughly, and sniffing some more. The little mammal crept within inches of White Elk’s fingers. The scent of dry meat was irresistible.

A volley of deafening thunderclaps boomed through the uplands and drowned out the Otatso. White Elk flinched in fright out of his slumber and into an upright position. He scanned the wooded stream banks wildly. The little furbearing visitor vanished. The explosive noise bounced off the great square form of Chief Mountain and echoed across the valley.

White Elk gawked at the mountain towering above him. “Old Chief, what was that? You can see all from where you are.”

A second cannonade crashed through the terrain. White Elk slapped his hands to his ears. Again the noise echoed from the heights. The elder looked to the crystalline ceiling of sky. There was not a cloud about to loose thunder. The creek chatter returned; everything appeared fine, normal. White Elk struggled to his feet and surveyed the country in every direction. Through the soles of his old boots, a shimmer of movement climbed up his legs. The earth was rumbling quietly again.

The face of White Elk’s mother materialized before his eyes. The image startled him.  He could hear the words she had spoken to him at the nursing home. They echoed in the confines of his skull. He shook the voice away.

The sense of unease was suffocating. The sky was roaring and the country was shaking. Why was that? He knew Glacier County lands to be steadfast, unchanging, the country to be filled with grand silence, not thunderous noise in perfectly clear weather. He decided that things were not at all as they should be and that he must return to the community three miles downstream.

Thirty minutes south of his napping rock, following the ancient trail, White Elk stepped to the threshold of a dry stone grotto, once carved into smooth and sweeping arabesque formations by the stream. The Otatso had cut a new course in the deep past and had left the grotto with a meager source of water. A flash of light in the heavens ahead brought him to a halt at the edge of the natural stonework. A large jet aircraft, silent in its approach, was falling from the sky at an acute angle. White Elk realized at once the plane was a commercial airliner in distress.

The jet passed directly overhead. White Elk rotated in place and watched the craft disappear over the horizon, silent as an owl on the wing. It was visible for just a few seconds but was an awful thing to behold. The old man stood his ground for several minutes listening, thinking he might hear the sound of a crash, but the prairie wind carried nothing to him in its passing.

White Elk resumed his march south, shaken by the sight of the crippled jetliner. It was a cruel vision, he thought. Maybe what he had just witnessed was not real. Maybe Napiw was playing tricks with his mind.

Snaking through the cool shelter of rock overhangs, boulders and kettle-hole pools of the grotto, White Elk moved quickly when the sound of increasing winds in the forest rigging stopped him a second time. He listened. The atmosphere sounded of dank, heavy air exhaling in a rush from the lungs of a gigantic creature. There were other sounds in the mix, noises like drumming sleet and sparks popping from a hearth fire.

The daylight receded suddenly, as if a curtain had been drawn across the firmament. The blue above was swept aside by the color of smoke from damp firewood. Sonic tones in the air escalated quickly, as a freight train rumbling on its approach. With the crescendo of noise came a plasma front of rolling hot air. The cool, refreshing dampness in the confines of the stone grotto evaporated instantly. Broiling desert temperatures stabbed down into the low spaces.

White Elk fell to his knees on the slick stone when loud rifle reports from the forest ricocheted through the rock strata. He could not see them, but he could hear trees snapping and falling, not a few, but hundreds. In the next moment, darkness overwhelmed the grotto as whole trees rammed down to the horizontal and covered over the stone vault overhead. White Elk shielded his head with his hands and arms and yelled out in terror. A tornado of noise roared amongst the stone. The forest shrieked in mortal agony.

The maelstrom swept away to the north as quickly as it had arrived. Gray dust and choking gases replaced the sweet mossy smell of the grotto. The intense desert heat slackened but the coolness of the early hours did not return. The sky overhead lightened enough to bring dusky tones.

Slowly, White Elk brought his arms down from his head. Above him was a ceiling of tree trunks and downed canopy. Quickly he marched downstream out of the stone enclave and emerged shaken onto a game board of giant pickup sticks. Every tree had been leveled. The landscape had changed utterly, assuming a leaden hue. The little path beneath his boots had disappeared. In the valley was a minefield of tree trunks and branches coated with bitter dust. The sound of the Otatso, running on his left somewhere beneath the destruction, was the only reassuring element in the chaos.

On a clear trail, White Elk could reach the village in under an hour. Now, he thought, just reaching his cabin might take until nightfall. He would have to fight his way over every tree in the valley. It would be, he calculated, a great labor.

To get over the first tree, he swung a leg up to belt height, jimmied up onto the trunk, sat and pulled his other leg up and over, then dropped to the other side. Where he could, he stood and jumped to the next log. Sometimes he ducked under a tree. All the timber was lying down in the same direction, each trunk parallel to the next. From a standing position atop a blowdown, the forest appeared almost orderly, as if arrayed like a gigantic log pile at a sawmill.

Sweat soaked into White Elk’s clothing as he struggled in the forest. The going was tedious. He was not a young man any longer and the work was taxing. He needed long drafts of air to fuel his labors, but the trees and the atmosphere were filled with ultra fine dust and the air was noxious with acrid gases. The toxic cocktail caught in his throat and made him cough in fitful spasms.

White Elk lost track of time. The sun had disappeared with the forest fall. Everywhere everything was an ashen monotone, and the elder could sense that the single dead color was deepening, waning. Night would be upon him soon. He tried doubling his efforts but was exhausted. He had no reserves. He needed to find the cabin and soon.

Ahead, a wall of listing trees rose above the others. He would have to go around them. Standing on trunks, he picked his way along, pushing canopy foliage out of his way. The branches pushed back, so he went down on his knees and scrambled under the brush. As he did, he grabbed a squared timber. The dimension lumber felt wonderful to the touch. He pulled himself up to the timber and recognized the porch of his cabin.

The tiny building was standing. It had been punctured with heavy tree limbs and its south wall had been crushed, yet the interior space was largely intact. His bed was where it should be, with blankets folded neatly at the foot of the mattress. He could spend the night and continue in the morning.

White Elk rummaged through the simple kitchen along the ruptured south wall. Canned goods littered the deformed counter and floor. He scratched about the splintered counter for utensils and found a can opener. Now for a fire. He turned to the wood stove on the adjoining wall. It was undamaged, but he wanted to be certain the metal chimney pipe outside had not been stripped off the cabin. It was nowhere to be seen, probably crushed under the fallen trees. No matter, he would kindle a small fire on the ground at the foot of the porch.

Darkness enveloped the buried camp. White Elk harvested many small dry lower limbs of the evergreens and set the wood ablaze. Shattered timber and siding from the south wall went into the flames, too. In minutes, the infant campfire pushed the night and the chill back. Smoke curled and massed in the tangle of foliage above the cabin. White Elk placed an open can of corned beef hash harvested from the cabin floor next to the embers so the tin would soak up the heat of the little blaze and warm the food.

Weary, the elder sat quietly before the fire, his mind empty, his bones chafing in their sockets. The pop and spit of the open flames were a timeless and welcome comfort to the old man. He closed his eyes to listen to the familiar sounds. As he sat quietly, another noise infiltrated. Dry sleet pellets began falling on the evergreen tangle, he thought. Good thing to be seated under the porch roof.

The sound continued, hissing like steam issuing from an old steam radiator valve. In the firelight, small flakes sifted down from the shattered limbs above. The flakes looked like fine cold temperature snow to White Elk, but it was not cold enough for snow. The motes did not float, but fell straight to the earth and fell steadily. Within a few minutes, wherever the material filtered down through the vegetation above, the ground became covered with a fine layer. It glowed orange in the firelight, but it did not reflect the light well like fresh snow always did. White Elk reached out and dabbed a finger into the material and brought it up to his face. He rubbed it between his fingers. It was not cold. It didn’t melt away. It simply compressed to a gritty powder.

After consuming the contents of the hash can, fatigue overcame the man. His eyelids grew heavy as flickers of campfire light played over the structure. As he had always been taught, he extinguished the flames, covering the embers with the odd dry matter that was still falling. It smothered the fire readily. Satisfied the fire would go cold, he took to the cabin bed and pulled every one of the blankets over his weary frame.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Montana Governor Randall Seifert strode out onto a half-acre helipad atop the thirty-story Freeman Energy Corporation headquarters tower high above the streets of Denver. In town for several days, Seifert had reviewed the firm’s preliminary plans to open a pit mine in Montana’s Paradise Valley twenty miles north of the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. Part of his morning he had spent on the phone, boxing ears and rattling sabers, trying to force someone, anyone, in an official capacity to lift the damn volcano alert and call off the Yellowstone evacuation order.

A black corporate helicopter slumped on the pad, its blades drooping. The corporate pilot walked about the chopper doing his preflight check. He climbed in and ran through his checklist while others clambered aboard for a flight over the continental divide and north from the rooftop of the Rockies several long hours to the Yellowstone country.

As the pilot reached for the ignition to power up the craft’s powerful engine, a strong sensation of motion startled the aviator. He cocked his head up quickly to scan the helipad.

“What the hell?”

“Earthquake!” a company geologist shouted from the left rear seat of the chopper.

Only a narrow city block wide and pencil-thin tall, the Freeman building was designed to flex and twist in heavy winds without its outer sheathing and glass facade losing its integrity. A rolling tremor raced under the city, sending the upper floors of the tower into a slow whipping motion. At the roof level, the deck rocked a dozen feet to the southeast, then pulled back and teetered twelve feet to the northwest.

The chopper pilot sat frozen as the horizon shifted slowly to and fro. Governor Seifert flailed for something of substance, his hands grasping the interior door latch, knuckles white. Seated behind the pilot, Colorado Senator Carson Black glanced wide-eyed at the firm’s geologist, John Hasselman, for some reassurance. Hasselman, who understood the physics of what was happening to the skyscraper, smiled in the senator’s direction. “Don’t worry. The building’s just rocking a little. Just give it a minute.”

As the geologist expected, the rooftop swaying quieted down and stopped altogether. Hasselman laughed. “It’s a damn good thing this building isn’t a mile high. If it were, we’d have been in for one wild ride.”

“That was a hell of a ride anyway,” the governor shouted.

“That’s typical of tall buildings caught in the throes of a quake.”

The pilot spun around in his seat and looked at Hasselman. “We’ve never had anything like that happen here before.”

“That was quite a jolt,” offered the geologist. “Up here, it’s ten times worse than at street level. The building acts like fishing rod. Jerk the handle of the rod quickly and the tip of the rod whips back and forth. That’s what was going on. I wouldn’t worry about it. This building can withstand a quake of that modest magnitude easily enough.”

The pilot started the engine of the machine and the drooping blades began to turn, whir and lift. He checked his gauges again, flipped levers and gave a thumbs-up. In a moment the whirlybird popped off the roof tarmac vertically eighty feet before pitching nose down and sweeping out over the city toward the great wall of the Front Range of the Rockies.

The machine whirled north above the suburbs of Denver, drifting toward Boulder. The dry land prairie at the foot of the mountains looked no different than the Los Angeles basin from the air. Several booming waves of sound greeted the craft over Boulder, but the roar of the machine’s powerful turbine masked the brute noises.

West of Boulder, the helicopter ascended to 10,000 feet and followed the canyon road west beyond the Flatirons to the mountain village of Nederland. The metallic bird ascended past the two-mile elevation mark, racing for the very backbone of the nation itself at Rocky Mountain National Park.

The peaks were choked with snow. The snowcap was, for the second year in a row, at near-record levels. There would be plenty of water for the sprawling cities at the foot of the Rockies and for the thirsty towns of the Southwest this summer. There was sure to be a copious amount of the precious liquid for another blockbuster agricultural season.

The vista from the helicopter windows was awash in brilliant white, mountain crag gray and dark evergreen. As the machine climbed below and east of 14,255-foot Longs Peak and toward the roofline of the continent, the high country shimmered under an electric blue sky, filled with not so much as a single cloud.

“God, it’s beautiful up here,” Governor Seifert whispered to himself. “It is so darn beautiful.”

As the helicopter approached the summit ridges, the pilot accelerated, pushing the helicopter’s rpms. Rising beneath the lip of the divide, in the lee of the mountains, was always a gamble. Sometimes the airstream just above the ridgeline was howling fast, fast enough to markedly slow a low-flying aircraft. Pilots of small fixed-wing planes were occasionally lost in these peaks simply because they didn’t count on the dramatic change in air speed encountered as they winged up over the divide and met the prevailing westerlies head on.

The man at the controls powered the copter up to ensure the machine muscled through any change in wind speed. As he often did, he skimmed along close to the mountain slopes west of Estes Park so his passengers could get the full measure of the visual slingshot effect when the craft raced over the divide ridgeline and the world dropped away suddenly on the far side.

The helicopter slipped over Milner Pass and between the summits of Specimen Peak and Mt. Richthofen, below which the infant Colorado River received its first drink of spring snowmelt. At the last moment, the pilot pulled back on the controls and pulled the nose up to whip over the highest point between the two mountains. As the copter cleared the continental backbone, whoops of glee arose from those in the cabin.

As his passengers called out hosannas, the wide smile on the aviator’s face melted away in one tick of the clock as the new horizon opened above the mountain ranges just west of the divide. Nothing in his experience in the air had the appearance of what was sweeping down the mountain corridors from the northwest. The vision resembled the forward cascading wall of an alpine avalanche, but one that stretched horizon to horizon. Towering above the turmoil, yet far away at the limits of visibility, an immense pillar of dense ugliness ascended through the distant high atmospheric haze to the heavens.

Governor Seifert grabbed the pilot’s shoulder and pointed toward the windshield.

“What in hell is that, Birdie?”

The pilot did not answer. Whatever the boiling cloud formation was, it was moving their way, hurtling at great speed. There would be no time to ascend quickly enough to rise over the approaching tumult, so Birdie wrenched the controls over and tipped the helicopter into a radically steep pitch to turn the machine toward the southeast. Centrifugal force at the trough of the turn was several Gs, pressing the passengers down deep into their seats. The helicopter came full around, headed back toward Specimen Peak. Birdie twisted the throttle to its maximum.

The helicopter closed the gap with the continental divide ridge once again. Governor Seifert craned his neck around to look behind him. The geologist in the seat behind was glued to the window, his hands pressed up against the glass. To the south, over the great turn in the continental divide ridge below Mt. Richthofen, a jet-fast wall of seething cloud turbulence rammed over the heights.

“Mother,” yelled the corporate geologist. He whipped around, unbuckled his seat belt and lunged from his seat toward the pilot when the floor dropped away from under him. The geologist slammed into the roof of the cabin and then to the rear wall. In a fraction of a second, the interior of the cabin pitched vertically. The engine vibrated violently and the sound of shearing aluminum knifed through the interior of the craft. The rotor blades tore away as the ship was caught up in a pyroclastic vortex.

“Oh, my God,” croaked the pilot, now struggling with useless controls. Nothing he could push or pull made a difference. The copter sailed tail straight down, pushed forward by immense forces. The interior cabin temperature spiked. The color of night clamped down over the windows.

White terror gripped the governor. His eyes flared as the sensation of rolling upside down and falling sank its fangs into all the occupants. “Do something,” shrieked the politician. “Do something!”

The rear passenger window beside the Colorado senator exploded inward. The glass, held together by its strong safety binder, slammed against and wrapped around him. The impact killed him instantly. Poisonous gases and superheated air filled the craft, choking off the airways of the men and broiling them where they sat.

Now the helicopter was a coffin ship, helpless in the clutches of the volcanic storm. It lost whatever residual lift and forward momentum it had and dropped quickly below the summit ridges. The lifeless machine fell 4,000 feet into the valley of the nascent Colorado River and disintegrated on the steep rocky slopes just west of the river itself.

Pieces of the craft cartwheeled down the incline. The body of the governor, fastened to his seat, exerted enough force to sheer away the bolts holding the seat to the cabin floor. The man somersaulted away from the main compartment of the craft and cascaded down the steep landscape, bouncing and rolling. At the floor of the canyon, the governor’s tortured frame splashed down in the uppermost reaches of the snow melt-filled Colorado River. The chill current tugged at the torso and carried it downstream.

Chapter Forty-Eight

“Benjamin. Benjamin!”

White Elk awoke with a start to utter darkness and the sound of steady precipitation on the roof and fallen timber. The cabin creaked and logs somewhere in the forest groaned as they settled on the horizontal. Something had awakened him, but he had no idea what.

“Benjamin.” A distant male human voice bounced through the pitch.

White Elk yelled out. “I’m here. Here!”

“Keep calling. We will find you. Just keep calling.”

White Elk stumbled from his bunk and shuffled his way to the cabin door opening. He could see nothing, but he could hear coughing and indistinct words. A white shaft of light flared, just for an instant. He raised his voice to the dark again.

Branches snapped and a flashlight beam swept through the hovel. “I see the cabin. We found it,” a voice mumbled. Louder now, “Benjamin, we see the camp. We’ll get to you.”

White Elk stood in rapt anticipation. Suddenly they were upon him, two men and a woman, each holding a flashlight. In the newfound illumination, White Elk squinted at the figures before him. Each was a gray ghost and each wore cloth over the face.

The woman materialized in the darkness and grabbed the elder’s arm. “Thank goodness you’re safe, Benjamin,” said a female voice. White Elk recognized the voice of Petah, the daughter of Blackfoot Federation doctor Sinopa.

“My Petah, I am so happy to see you. You woke me up.”

“Of course we woke you up. You have to get out of here. You must come back to the village when it’s light.”

White Elk studied the three shadowy forms in his midst. They coughed often. “Are you all right, people?” he asked.

“Yes, we are fine now,” said Petah. “It was difficult getting here. The ash is terrible.”

“Ash? What do you mean by that?”

The trio of rescuers looked at one another. One of the men offered an explanation.

“Benjamin, ash is falling from a volcano, volcanic ash.”

“Is it Yellowstone?” White Elk inquired at once.

“Yes, it may be. We hear ash is falling all over the country. It has to do with an explosion at Yellowstone.”

Petah gazed at the old man with a queer expression across her face. “How could you know it was Yellowstone?”

“Your great grandmother, she told me this would happen. She told me some days ago.”

“How could she know this?” scoffed the male.

“Never mind that,” said White Elk, dismissing the question. “How are the people in the village?”

Petah spoke up. “We are missing folks, Benjamin. Some were caught out when the cloud came. Some are dead. It may take days before we know if others are safe or not.

“Eeee, this is terrible,” White Elk frowned. “I was told this was coming. I should have warned you.”

“Rest your mind, old man,” Petah said. “We need to stop talking and get some sleep. We must get going early. There are people to tend to.”

“If people are hurt, how come you came to find me, Petah?” asked the elder quietly. “Why aren’t you helping your mother?”

“Mother is at the North Piegan village. I don’t think she can get back.”

White Elk shook his head in frustration.

“We made everyone as comfortable as we could, old man,” Petah assured him. “We did what we could for them, but they need you in the village to help get through this. Without you, they will not get well.”

A cabin timber, under great strain, cracked along its grain with the sound of a gunshot. The noise startled everyone awake. Colorless light filtered into the cabin. Dawn had already overtaken them. White Elk walked out to the porch while the others stirred. Dust infested every surface and tall mounds of ash pocked the soils wherever it could sift in from above. In places there were several feet of the material, even on the roof of the building. White Elk called out for everyone to hurry and get out of the camp. He was afraid the roof might collapse.

The small band of Blackfoot scanned the environment. Along the Otatso, the land undulated where ash covered tree trunks and filled in the hollows between the downed timbers. The world looked as if a heavy gray snowstorm had coated the country. The ash continued to fall, cutting off visibility altogether at three-dozen yards. The planet lay muffled beneath a cloak of powdered volcanic glass. There were no forest noises, no birdcalls, no woodpecker drumming, not one scolding from a squirrel.

The four left the little structure for the village. The larger man broke trail over the trees, trying his best to push the ash away a bit as he went so the others would have less trouble. White Elk hobbled at the back of the pack, finding it difficult to climb over scores of blowdowns. Everyone coughed constantly and fell often, but they made fairly good time as they helped one another clear hurdles.

As the trail approached clearings near the village, it skirted a low butte-like projection in the earth. On the other side of it, the Blackfoot had built their community building. The decision to build it below the thirty-foot rock face proved fortuitous. The cooling pyroclastic blast of the day before had almost run its course when it reached the Blackfoot village. Much of the remaining energy in the cloud dissipated as the waning forces took down the forest and damaged homes and outbuildings. A few miles farther to the north and the volcanic storm exhausted itself.

The blast cloud swept around both sides of the rock formation, sparing the community center, a cluster of homes and a community store. Homes beyond the protective shield were heavily damaged and, as everywhere else, all the trees had been toppled. In the dry prairie pastures east of the village, livestock in the open had been killed or badly injured by hot, high velocity winds carrying debris of every description in its teeth.

The ash fall spared nothing. As White Elk and the little band reached the community center, the gritty mineral snow lay two feet on the ground and there was no sign that it would slacken any time soon. White Elk eyed the community center. It possessed a steep metal roof designed to shed heavy snows. The ash sloughed off as it fell from the sky. The building would be safe. Faces were pressed to all the windows, peering out at the four. White Elk waved, then mounted the steps to the building and went inside.

As the elder entered, a sea of humanity heaved toward him, many calling out, their words jumbled together. Hands reached out to him and adults pulled at his clothing to whisk him into the modest community center hall. As he entered the room, which doubled at times as an auditorium, cafeteria, small basketball court and meeting room, he could see that many families had brought blankets and supplies and had huddled in the room overnight. Some were in anguish, tears staining cheeks. People coughed in every corner.

The agony of his joints and his weariness had to be shunted aside. He would minister to the stunned citizenry. Raising his hands above his head, he called out: “Will you please bring everyone into the hall. I need you all here. If anyone is at their homes, bring them here. You go ahead now.”

While the gathering crowd waited for community members to herd others to the building, White Elk sought council. He needed information. What did people know? How many people were lost in the community and in the adjacent reservation on the Canadian side of the border? What had happened elsewhere in Montana, in the West, in Alberta? Did anyone know when the ash would stop falling? Could they get out? What was the condition of the roads?

A trusted council member, Samuel Feathers, in a rawhide vest and Stetson, offered the elder what he could.

“There is little to tell you, White Elk. We have lost communications with the outside. Radio disappeared yesterday; we can’t get broadcasts now. We were able to pick up satellite television for a time, but that is gone. Phones are dead.”

“You must know something. Petah told me that the ash is coming from the Yellowstone country. There has been an explosion. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Feathers nodded, “we were able to pick up the TV news. There was talk of a volcano in Wyoming; they think it was at Yellowstone. It was very big. The cities of Denver, Cheyenne and Salt Lake; they have been badly affected. But we don’t know more. We haven’t gotten any news since nightfall.”

“What about the people here. How bad is it here?”

“It’s hard to say. People are out looking for missing loved ones, those that were not at home when the big cloud came over. Children had left school. Some were playing outside, you know. There are a dozen children missing and some badly hurt by burns, branches and flying debris. I’d say seventy percent of us are accounted for here on the west side. We don’t know the fate of the eastern and northern villages. We have a dozen confirmed dead, including children.”

Many Blackfoot filled the hall. White Elk came forward onto the tiny stage at the south end of the room and raised his hands high. He asked for everyone to quiet down and be still. He scanned the many faces, many a brow furrowed with worry.

“Good people, I am more than a little happy to see you. I’m glad you are all here. A terrible thing has befallen us. But we must not dwell on what has happened. I want us to think about what we will do tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We need to take action. We must help our neighbors, and we must see to it that the injured have care.

“Now I must tell you something you could not know, but what my mother told me less than a week ago. I went to Livingstone on the Yellowstone River to see her. She is in the 100th year of her age. Mother told me about this very day, this tragedy we now suffer. She said it would happen. She told me that the mountains would rise up to heaven and the valley of the Yellowstone would turn over. Those are her words as she said them to me. My mother warned me that I must come back to you and tell you to prepare for the future. She said for us to go back to the old ways, to revive the old ways, or we will not survive.”

The crowd rumbled with banter. White Elk raised a hand high again to quiet down the many.

“We do not know what is to come. We don’t know when this dry gray rain will stop falling. We don’t know if another terrible cloud will descend upon us. But we do know that there are many of us and we are strong. We have many hands, many skills. We will go to work right away. So today, starting right now, I want you all to come forward and tell us what needs to be done. Is your house damaged? Is your child hurt or missing? Have you lost a loved one? How much food do you have in your larder? Do you have water? Do you need medicine? How much livestock have we lost? Bring your information here as soon as you can.

“Tomorrow, in the morning, we will go to work. We will do what is most urgent right away and continue working until we are back on our feet. We have a big task ahead, and we will do it.”

White Elk retreated to a side room to sit down. Petah followed him.

“Old man, you do not look well. How are you feeling?”

“Oh, my Petah, I’m just old and aching. I need to sit down for a bit. You do not need to worry about me.”

“Of course I worry about you. Mother worries about you. You look like you need a hot bath and a good meal. And you need eight hours of sleep in a warm bed with a soft pillow.”

White Elk managed a little smile at the child of Sinopa, the one person he considered the most indispensible of all on the entire Blackfoot reservation.

“Petah, can I trust you with something?”

“Trust me? Trust me with what?”

“You heard me say that my mother predicted this terrible day would come. Did you hear that?”

“Yes, Benjamin, I heard you.”

“She actually did say those things. Do you believe me?”

Petah nodded her head.

“Well, she said she was given the information ahead of time. She simply passed along the information to me.”

“Did she say who it was that told her?”

“Yes, she did. She told me the name. I can’t tell everyone this. But I thought I could tell you, Petah, so you could tell your mother when she arrives. Can I trust you with the name?”

The young woman studied the old man’s eyes. “You know you can put your faith in me, just as you do my mother.”

“Very well then, Petah. My old mother told me that my namesake came to her window at the nursing home in Livingstone. It spoke to her. The white ponoká told her, the white elk, Petah. The white elk.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

Sitting high in the cab of his John Deere tractor, Harland Sven squinted as the sun made its first appearance. In the early morning hours, Harland watched solar particles buff a silver mirror shine across the atmosphere at the table-flat eastern horizon. Now the red rim of the sun burned through a tree windrow a mile away. The ruby rays danced along the green paint on the tractor’s cowling and lit like flame the headhouse superstructure of the far distant grain elevator silos of Sweetly Growers Cooperative.

The farmer stopped his rig. He emerged from the heated cab into the crisp cool of the first day of May and dropped onto the prairie and scrambled onto an automatic planter. The machine could accurately dispense corn seed at ten-inch intervals, eight rows at a time. All the farmer had to do was load a central hopper atop the device with seventy bushels of bagged seed. He checked the hopper load to see if he could stretch another hour out of the unit before returning to the homestead for more seed.

The waltz of the seeding would go on all day and into the evening, a fifteen-hour day. Corn today, corn tomorrow and corn the day after that. Soybeans would follow later. All week the seeder would precisely meter out individual seeds, never missing a space, never doubling up. Bushel after bushel of American Midwest fecundity would be inserted into the Minnesota River Valley soil, some of the most productive land anywhere on the planet.

If all the hundreds of machine parts did their job, the day would be uneventful. Sitting in an enclosed air-conditioned cab and listening to country music and farm commodity bulletins, Harland had only to steer the tractor, drink coffee from his thermos cup, chew on a sandwich and daydream. Even the relentless rays of the sun burning into the earth all day were tempered by the cab’s polarized glass.

Throughout the morning, the farmer brooded. Last year’s prices had been brutal, and only a near-record harvest off the farm had buffered the worst of the financial pressures. With spring planting underway, grain reserves around the Midwest were well above average. If the U.S. didn’t pick up some heavy export contracts soon, another good harvest would only mean abysmal prices once again come fall.

But the day dawned splendid over the Minnesota River floodplain. At the noon hour, the temperature hovered in the low seventies and there was no humidity to speak of. The long-range forecast called for many bright days of clear high pressure over South Dakota. Perfect planting weather, certainly.

Harland hummed along with a country trash tune, “You’re In The Back Seat Of My Heart,” by a new C&W phenom with the stage name Will Cheater when the roar of military ordnance shook the John Deere. The initial report sent a shock through his body and he jumped involuntarily in his seat.

“Good lord, what was that?” Harland yelled inside the cab. As soon as the words left his mouth, a second volley of piercing sound crashed through the cab windows. He stopped the tractor, opened the cab door and stood on the door threshold. He hurriedly scanned 360 degrees to see if he could spot military aircraft in the vicinity. There was nothing to be seen. As he shifted his eyes along the points of the compass, several more thunderous concussions buffeted his ears, loud enough to make him recoil. Once the noise faded, the spring day embraced him as before. He shrugged his shoulders and seated himself back in the John Deere, closed the door and geared up to complete the planting.

At 6:35 pm, the farmer made the tight swing around for one more pass to the west before calling it quits for the evening. As he brought the tractor around, he noticed the late afternoon sun was little more than a bloody, hazy smudge above the western horizon, swaddled in a flat gray blanket. The sky darkened as the tractor rolled. The sun vanished. A wedge of drab weather swept in over the plains country.

Harland stopped his tractor and opened the cab door once again. He sniffed the air. It smelled clean and spring earth new. There was no real heat to it, no moisture. There was no tornado danger then, he knew. Still, the sky to the west appeared troubled and ugly while directly above him the dome of the atmosphere was crystal blue.

“That don’t look right,” Harland mumbled to himself.

The line of weather arched high overhead and the land fell under a dense colorless shadow. Harland peered westward again. It was breaking up. A sheet of dull fog was cutting furrows in the horizon and blotting it out. It appeared as if a line storm, a fast moving thunderstorm, was on its way in. But it couldn’t be. It just didn’t feel or smell of rain and there was no wind before the approaching front.

The farmer climbed down off his machine and took a few strides to the west to size up the building weather. After five decades in the fields, he had never seen a front behave in such a way. What was coming looked like a snow squall but it wasn’t white and everything around him was a still and quiet as the good black earth itself.

A flake appeared, falling straight down before him. Then another. The air quickly filled with dull crystals. He reached out a hand. One landed on his denim sleeve. He touched it, and it smudged to gray dust.

“Now what in the world is that?” he whispered to the empty field.

More fell on his jacket and head. It was not snow. It looked like fireplace ash, but there was no smell of wood smoke in the air, no sign of a fire anywhere.

Within minutes, Harland was engulfed in a steady fall of gray duff. Millions of flakes of the stuff murmured as they landed on earth and machine. On the edge of hearing, the New World Swede’s brain registered the sound of an automobile horn. He turned over his right shoulder to see a set of headlights charging along the northern margin of the field. He glared at the lights.

The family car came to a stop 400 feet away. A single figure slipped out of the interior and ran slowly toward him. Harland stood motionless for a few seconds, then jogged, then raced toward the person coming his way.

“Harland, Harland!” rose the voice of his wife, yelling his name.

“I’ll be right there, Sugar, right there.”

The two closed the distance between them as quickly as their late-middle-age legs could carry them. Harland stopped as his wife approached. She had a hand to her head; her eyes were circular, filled with trouble. Breathless from the run, she panted.

“What is it, Sugar? What’s the matter?”

“Harland,” Eda Sven wheezed and then coughed roughly. “Harland, something terrible is happening. There’s been a big accident out west somewhere. It’s terrible. You’ve got to come home.”

“Is that what this is all about, this stuff falling from the sky?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it is. There was some big explosion!”

“I heard it.”

“I did, too. It rattled every window in the house.”

“I thought it was a sonic boom.”

“Me, too. Then I got a call from my sister a little while ago.”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me to turn on the television. Harland, the whole TV is full of some sort of disaster. Nobody knows what it is, but it’s big. Maybe it’s terrorism, Harland. Something horrible. You’ve got to come home right away.”

Harland glanced back toward the John Deere, now a ghost standing in a fog bank.

“Okay, you go back to the car and get to the house fast. I’ll unhitch the planter and get the J.D. back to the house as soon as I can. Go! I’ll be right there.”

Eda Sven simply nodded, holding both hands around the top button of her blouse and pressing them to her throat. Her eyes drifted off and focused on the gray flakes drifting down now by the millions.

“Oh, Harland, what is it?” she warbled, fear rising in the words.

“I don’t know, sugar. Looks like ash.”

Trembling, the woman blurted out, “Is it fallout?”

“Fallout!”

The question stunned the farmer. Fallout. It hadn’t occurred to him. But the question jostled his soul like a jolt from an electric cattle prod.

“Christ in heaven, Eda, go on now! Go. I’ll be right along.”

Harland’s wife turned and ran awkwardly toward the headlights in the distance. Harland spun about and lumbered on scarecrow legs toward the mechanical apparition in the field. He reached the tractor in a blizzard of gray snow and struggled to free the John Deere from the automated seeder. The appendage swung away and Harland scrambled up on the machine and slammed the tractor cab door. He coughed violently for a minute, trying to clear his lungs.

The farmer strained to see through the glass of the cab. Everything about him was the color of dishwater. The cowling in front was visible but little else. He pushed the throttle and swung the nose to the right. He came around 180 degrees and tried desperately to see the row he had just planted. He thought he could make out the furrow. All he had to do was keep the tractor straight and he’d be able to run to the eastern end of the field. He crossed his fingers.

In an attempt to pierce the ghoulish atmosphere, Harland switched on the headlights. The lights brought only tension. The world had lost dimensions. Nothing tangible emerged from the torrent for his mind to grasp. His one comfort was the John Deere. He had spent many a month in that cab and he could sense its steady, powerful demeanor. Its throaty vibrations were reassuring.

The farmer pinched a bit of the gray between his calloused fingers. It crumbled to dust. There was a body to it, unlike firewood ash. The feel of it made him shiver as the word “fallout” sifted through his cranium. What the hell was fallout? Was this it? Was this radioactive? The South Dakotan was overwhelmed with fear of it. He slapped the stuff from his jacket and pants, brushed the material from his hair, and shook his head violently from side to side.

The tractor belched, backfired and shuttered, something the machine had never done. The tractor’s sudden odd behavior brought Harland to attention. He throttled down the machine to idle and listened. The beast was now running rough, laboring. Experience with tractors over a generation told him instantly where this new problem originated. The fuel mix was running rich; too little air was getting into the fuel mix.

The farmer slammed out of the cab and into the blizzard. He released the hood and rocked it up, fumbled for the releases on the air intake manifold, worked them free and reached into the large air filter bed. He lifted the filter out and banged the device against the cowling over and over again, then replaced it.

In the cab again, Harland listened with a trained ear. The engine seemed to be running better, but not as smoothly as it had all day long. The farmer pushed the throttle and put the Deere on the move again, this time a bit faster. He wanted out of the field, out of the dull, snowing darkness.

An eternity sifted by the cab windows but ended abruptly. The tractor bounced, bounded across a shallow ditch and up onto and over the field access lane. Harland stopped the rig, backed it back up onto the dirt track and turned ninety degrees to the left. He was on the lane back to the homestead, but he could not see it. He would have to sense its presence under the tractor’s wheels. He inched the machine along now, barely moving, trying to “feel” where the ditch edges might be and where the wheel ruts in the dirt path were. It was working. He could follow the lane blind.

Two weathered fence posts loomed on either side of the big rig. Good, a great sign. The farmhouse was now just 400 feet way. Harland exhaled in relief, letting his tension hunched shoulders relax a bit. The relief was short lived. The scream of shearing metal shot through the cab, the tractor bucked wildly for several seconds and then seized. A hush filled the cab, broken only by the murmur of ash falling heavily on the metal skin of the machine.

“Man, oh man,” Harland moaned, “what the devil am I going to do now?”

He did not want to stay with the dying mechanism. Not since Vietnam had the rope of fear twisted so tightly about his gut. If he was going to die in this blizzard, he wanted to die at home, not locked in a cold tractor cab lost on a South Dakota farm lane.

He took his jacket off, slipped his shirt from his shoulders and tied it around his head, covering his mouth and nose. He pulled the jacket back on, opened the door of the cab, and stepped out into the darkness. He climbed down, his boots settling into four inches of gritty powder.

Harland kept a hand on the steel of the tractor until he came around to the front of the machine. He pushed his back up against the grill to align himself as straight as he could, then he stepped away toward what he thought was the direction of the house. He nuzzled his boots through the ash to try to find ruts in the lane, but the stuff was softening every feature. He decided to count his paces. He figured he’d need about 150 to reach the homestead.

Standing on the farmhouse porch, Eda Sven strained to peer through the wall of gray streaks. She thought for a moment that she could see a blush of lights, but the indistinct glow disappeared. Now there was nothing but a dark void. Back and forth she paced from the porch to the living room to look at the cuckoo clock above the television. She was frantic. She could not stay still. It was over an hour since she had reached the house. Her husband should have been back no more than half an hour after she had arrived.

He was lost. She knew it. The thought had a strangle hold on her. She’d tried calling her sister and her grown children, but she could not get through. The phone lines were flooded with traffic. Now she was a desperate soul. She had to do something.

The woman spotted the brass dinner bell on the kitchen island. She ran to it, picked it up, and bolted for the door. On the porch, she grabbed the leather tassel attached to the bell anvil and swung it. The brass rang sharply and clearly, its loud vibrations coursing through the macabre snows.

The farmer counted off 150 paces but could see nothing. His eyes were burning and swollen. He was lost. Clutching the shirt fabric to his face, he wheezed as fine dust pulled through the cloth and settled on his tongue and in his lungs. He fought with his soul to keep panic from swallowing him. Panic was of no use. He had to determine why he was not at the house or near enough to it to see lights glowing through the storm of flakes. Suddenly, he realized his plight. He had walked straight, concentrating on his steps and the step count. But the lane turned to the right 200 feet out from the house and made for the sheds. He had simply moved straight ahead. He had, he thought, to make a ninety-degree turn to the right now and try to find the west side of the house instead of the south front entrance to the building.

Very deliberately he turned a ninety-degree angle to his present course. He took a deep breath through the shirt fabric and took a step into the black. A minute went by. Two. Three. Still there was nothing to be seen. The flakes falling from the sky were coming in torrents. He felt as though he was striding in desert dune sands.

“My God,” he whispered, “I’m going to die out here.”

Harland began to tremble, little tremors at first that graduated to quaking shakes. He tried to dampen down the twitching muscles, but he could not. Pain shot up his legs and down along the nerves of his arms, doubling him over.

In the inkwell of the dark, a clear metallic chime sounded. It came again. Harland bolted erect. There it was, a bell, the family dinner bell. Harland screamed, “Eda! Eda!”

The bell was an angel in the darkness. Its voice came on acoustic wings. The angelic tone lifted the farmer’s spirit, put him on a course fifteen degrees to the east and set his feet moving, jogging at first, then stumbling, running in the soft footing. Still the bell sounded.

Eda slammed the little anvil against the bell housing, over and over and over. She was possessed; there was nothing else she could do to rid herself of the fear for her husband’s life. He was out there somewhere. Something had gone wrong. She had to be his beacon on this evening in purgatory.

A ghost slipped between the ash flakes. The movement of it caught the woman’s eye. She turned to face it. It was coming toward her. It was an awful thing, materializing from behind the curtains of gray sleet. It was the same color as the night. If it were not moving she might not have seen it. She stopped ringing the bell, and then her name reached her ears: “Eda!”

“Harland!”

Eda shrieked the name of the man she had married thirty-four years earlier and jumped from the porch to meet him. She raced to the ghost and slammed into him, knocking the both of them off balance and down into the drifted material smothering the land. In the powder the two embraced as if the reaper of death was about to tear them apart. But the dust filled their lungs and each was seized with a fit of coughing. Harland yanked his wife to her feet and lunged for the porch, gained the steps, blew through the door and slammed it. He fell on his knees and coughed violently. His wife dropped down on his back and wrapped her arms around his chest, sobs of joy wracking her body.

Harland rolled over onto his spine on the rug on the floor, his wife on all fours at his side. She could not believe the image before her. The entire creature was gray, every inch of skin, every hair, every thread of clothing. He looked up at her, his mouth agape to grab clear air in the room.

“What, what is this, Eda? Do you know anything?

She was sobbing, smearing gray tears from her face. “It’s a volcano or something,”

Harland gasped for more air. “Volcano?” More labored breaths. “No bomb?”

“The TV’s dead, Harland. The last thing I saw was they said something about a big volcano, an explosion at a volcano.”

Harland rolled on his side. “Volcanic ash then. Good God!” He swallowed hard, and looked at his wife as if she had told him a fib. “There ain’t no volcanoes out here, Eda. There ain’t no volcanoes for a thousand miles.”

Chapter Fifty

A familiar ringing voice cut through greenhouse glass. Abel, tucking a strawberry plant into one of a hundred holes drilled into a vertical white plastic planting tower, looked over his shoulder and called out, “I’m in here, Bobcat.”

At the far end of the structure, a figure with a shaved head and trim beard burst through the open doorway and sprinted along a narrow corridor through a forest of vertical plastic tubes crowded with strawberry plants. The man raced up to Abel, who was sweating in the warm and moist interior of the greenhouse.

Bobcat stopped at Abel’s feet. He gestured wildly with his hands as he caught his breath.

“What is it, old friend?” asked Abel, unnerved by the man’s frantic nature.

Puffing, Bobcat blurted, “Abel, isn’t your ex, isn’t she at Yellowstone National Park?”

“Liz? Yes. She’s been working there. Why?”

The crew working throughout the greenhouse assembled close by. Bobcat gave them all a glance, and then turned his attention to Abel. “Abel, something has happened in the mountains near Yellowstone. There has been some sort of a huge event there.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I picked it up via shortwave a few minutes ago. I turned on a monitor in the studio, and it’s all over the networks. No one knows what it is, but something god-awful has taken place.”

The greenhouse crew left the building at a sprint, following Abel and Bobcat down a rise, beyond the community center and out to First Day Hall. The gaggle of humans clattered through the building and found their way upstairs to the communications center on the second floor. In the video studio, people were already crowded around a bank of monitors lining the walls, some displaying video. Audio was emanating from one tuned to CNN. The late-day anchor was talking to the camera, shuffling paper, and trying to handle a string of visual and audio cues.

“…report from KWCS in Colorado Springs, Colorado. What do you see, Aaron?”

The newscast switched abruptly to the image of a reporter on an interstate overpass. “I’m standing along Interstate 25 just north of the city. Behind me, the highway stretches away toward Denver. You can see on the horizon a band of dense cloud cover draped over the mountains and the interstate. Traffic is backed up on the northbound lanes; nothing is coming southbound. We know that commercial aircraft are being diverted away from Denver to Colorado Springs. There are reports of missing aircraft, and emergency crews were dispatched at the airport here to assist jet passengers after an emergency landing just minutes ago.”

“Aaron,” the anchor broke in, “what can you tell us about these events? What happened to cause what we’re seeing?”

“Earlier in the day, this area experienced thunder-like noises, like a series of very loud sonic booms. We now understand there were large explosions somewhere in the mountain interior, perhaps from some sort of weapons mishap, perhaps of volcanic origin. We do not know yet. I can tell you that we have felt tremors here, some earthquake activity. Not terribly strong here, but you certainly could feel them.”

The CNN anchor abruptly cut away from Colorado Springs. He held a hand to his earpiece, listening to a prompt.

“We have a bulletin just in from our CNN science advisor, Colin Godbout, who is in Los Angeles. He filed this report: ‘According to experts at UCLA, numerous great earthquakes have struck Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Seismic data indicate some of the strongest quakes ever recorded in the continental United States. Experts speculate that these earthquakes may be in concert with a major volcanic eruption, likely centered in or near Yellowstone National Park.’”

Abel turned from the studio, raced up a flight of stairs, and bullied his way through the door to a small office. He grabbed a phone from the desk in the cubicle, punched in an autodial number and waited.

“The number you have dialed is experiencing technical difficulty. Please check the number and dial again.”

Abel punched the number again and got the identical recorded message. He was about to try once again when Bobcat poked his head in the doorway.

“Trying to reach Liz?”

“I can’t get through.”

“You may not for a while, man.”

Abel was stoic. “What do you make of this, Bobcat? You know about these things. The kids don’t call you ‘Mr. Dinosaur Man’ for nothing.”

Bobcat smiled at the nickname the town’s children had given him. All his life the electronics communications expert had been obsessed with prehistoric animals, their evolution and extinction. As a child he had wallpapered his entire bedroom with drawings of the creatures of the Devonian, Triassic, Cretaceous, Miocene and so on.

Bobcat scratched his shaven head, pulled on his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, took a seat and hashed out a theory. “Well, there isn’t much to go on. You saw the footage from Colorado Springs just now.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Before I ran to get you up in the greenhouse, there was similar footage from Washington state, video of a dark band of low opaque clouds well to the east of Mt. Rainier and the Cascades.”

“Uh huh!”

“That tells me something, Abel.”

“Tells you what?”

“Do you know what Yellowstone is?” asked Bobcat.

Abel, mute, simply stared at his friend.

“It’s a volcanic caldera, the largest one on the planet, I think.”

“Okay, that’s why Liz has been working there. She told me there had been dramatic things going on in the park. She thinks Yellowstone is acting up.”

“That makes sense,” said Bobcat with a nod. “The cloud cover we saw in Colorado could be ash fall; the same with eastern Washington. That would mean volcanic ash is falling all over the West, over hundreds of thousands of square miles. That’s huge. No single volcano in the U.S. could do that. The only thing that could overwhelm such a large area is a monster caldera upheaval, and Yellowstone is the granddaddy of all calderas.”

Abel winced. “Tell me something, Bobcat,” he said slowly, deliberately, “do you think Liz is in danger?”

“Is she still at Yellowstone?”

“She was supposed to leave for Denver today to come east. She was going to be here tonight, stay for a few days and pick up Pelee.”

Bobcat stuttered, glanced repeatedly about the confines of the room, and then turned to lock on to Abel’s eyes. “Abel, if what we saw is the result of the Yellowstone caldera going up in smoke, then, well, she couldn’t get out of there. No one could survive that.”

The two men eyed one another in silence.

“But we don’t really know what’s happened,” Bobcat added after a chilling pause.

“She was supposed to leave early in the day. Maybe she missed this thing.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Well,” Abel huffed, “let’s go back down to your studio and see if we can find out a bit more about this whole thing.”

Word winged through the Independency compound. Within half an hour, scores of residents had made their way to First Day Hall. Townsfolk crammed into the modest room before the monitors and many more mingled in the halls, the stairwell and on the first floor. Bobcat, seeing the melee of fellow citizens, ran cable from the studio out to several other rooms and set up a single TV in each space. By the time most citizens arrived in the building, they were greeted with satellite images of North America, a gray mass rising and falling over the region of the upper western states.

“Bobcat,” called out Abel, “switch the audio over and see what they’re talking about there on that satellite image.”

Bobcat dialed down the audio on one set and brought the audio up on another.

“…rapidly moving cloud seen in time-lapse sequence. The cloud is not the result of local weather in the West. It appears from these images, taken over the course of several hours, that the cloud originates at the surface of the earth and spreads out to engulf many states in the West.

“Will you look at that,” muttered Bobcat, as he and others gathered about him watched the time-lapse images replay over and over again.

Abel placed a hand on his chest and rubbed his pectoral muscles slowly as if trying to console himself. As he watched the nuclear-like blast rerun before his eyes, he could think only of his daughter. What, he thought to himself, would he have to do if the worst had happened to the child’s mother? How could a father break such news to a youngster? What sort of words could one use?

Chapter Fifty-One

Late into the night, Abel and Bobcat sat before the monitors in the video studio in First Day Hall. Someone brought up several plates of supper, but the food lay cold, untouched. The hall was empty of community members. As midnight approached, the picture of an appalling catastrophe in the West had come into focus over the monitors, the web and via shortwave radio. Abel turned to Bobcat to interpret the events for him. Bobcat was forthcoming.

“Have you ever heard of Tambora?” Bobcat inquired of Abel.

“Tambora?” Abel’s memory yielded a blank. “No, I can’t say I know what that is.”

“Mt. Tambora was a volcano on the island of Simbawa in the Indonesian archipelago. It was a huge volcanic cone sitting atop the Ring of Fire. In 1815, the mountain blew up, totally destroyed itself. Scientists now know it as the largest single volcanic event in modern history.”

“What in the world does that have to do with what’s happened out west, Bobcat?”

“Everything.”

“How so?”

“Tambora was a single volcano, yet it affected every human being on the planet. It probably killed a hundred thousand in the region where it touched off, but more importantly, ash and soot from that eruption changed the weather all over the globe for several years. It may have killed some million people worldwide because it triggered famine and disease epidemics on many continents.”

“Why have I never heard of it?”

“Liz never mentioned Tambora?”

“No, not that I remember.”

Bobcat leaned forward in his studio console chair, put his elbows on his knees and propped his head on his hands. “Did you ever hear the expression, ‘1800 and froze to death?’”

“Yes, I’ve heard of that,” Abel said, nodding his head. “That was the infamous ‘year without a summer’ across the northern states, 1816.”

“Exactly right. The year without summer was triggered by Tambora,” Bobcat explained. “It released so much ash and gas—so much particulate matter entered the upper atmosphere—that it blocked enough solar energy from reaching the earth to cause the mean temperature of the planet to drop some five or six degrees. Crops everywhere failed in the northern latitudes.”

“That would explain the accounts I’ve read of small farmers from the northeast migrating out to the Ohio River Valley,” Abel mused. “People couldn’t feed their families. They were starving.”

“That would be right. It snowed on northern New England towns in July and August. Ice formed on ponds. Sleet and freezing rain fell all summer and it snowed many times across the northern tier, including right here.”

“So what are you getting at?”

“Yellowstone is no Tambora, Abel. Or, let me put another way. Mount St. Helens was the biggest volcanic eruption in recent times in this country. People think that it was some absolutely monstrous, remarkable event. It was really a little popgun. When held up against Tambora, Mount St. Helens was a kitchen match compared to a gasoline tanker truck explosion.”

“And Yellowstone?”

“Same thing. Only Yellowstone could be the Hiroshima A-bomb compared to Tambora’s gas truck. We don’t know just what Yellowstone is all about yet, but I can tell you, Abel, if Yellowstone’s caldera blew out, it would be capable of changing global climate drastically, probably for years.”

“How do you know all this, Bobcat?”

“My hobby.”

“Your hobby?”

“I’ve been interested in prehistoric life as long as I can remember. You know, you’ve seen my library. I’m addicted to the history of the evolution of life on this planet.”

“Our one ordained minister has a passion for evolution theory?”

“That’s me, Abel—creationism and evolution in one very unkempt package.”

Both men shared a laugh.

“So what does Yellowstone have to do with evolution?”

Bobcat leaned back in his chair and scratched his naked head. “Do you know anything about the great dyings?”

“Extinctions?”

“Yes, mass extinction events. Throughout the history of life on earth there have been scores of extinction events, large and small. But there have been at least half a dozen catastrophic extinctions, where much of the life on earth went extinct in the geological wink of an eye.”

“You mean like the dinosaur extinctions?”

“Yes, like the dinosaurs. But there were others, like the P-T, the Permian-Triassic boundary extinction event. Now that was huge. As many as ninety percent of all living things vanished. Imagine that. Ninety percent.”

“What does mass extinction have to do with Yellowstone, Bobcat?”

“Look, my man, unusual geological events have happened hundreds of times over geologic time. Volcanoes can trigger great change. Scientists now think that caldera upheavals, in particular, have had a profound effect on the history of life.”

“If that’s the case,” said Abel cautiously, “where does Yellowstone fit into all of this?”

Bobcat puffed up his mouth and released a steady stream of air. He sat silently for long seconds then cast his eyes on Abel.

“Let me explain something. Volcanoes are one way the earth releases energy and builds landforms. Calderas over giant hot spots in the earth’s mantle are another. They have vaguely similar origins, but most volcanoes are tiny geological structures compared to a caldera the likes of Yellowstone. A super caldera is really a receptacle for an immense sea of magma pooled a few miles down below the earth’s surface. That’s the way it is at Yellowstone. I can’t quite remember, but I think the caldera at Yellowstone is something like 1,500 square miles in size. You could fit hundreds of Mount St. Helens inside it.”

Bobcat let that tidbit of information hang in the air. “Now, would you mind if I bring up another Mount St. Helens-Tambora analogy?”

“No, Bobcat, let’s have it.”

“Okay, let’s do some time travel, then. About 75,000 years ago, a super-volcano by the name of Toba erupted catastrophically. Humans were around at that time. There might very well have been several hundred thousand humans on the planet then. People just like us. No different. They didn’t have cars and toasters, but they were just like you and me.”

Abel chuckled at Bobcat’s cars and toasters remark.

“If Tambora was that gas truck explosion, then Toba was a tanker ship loaded with liquefied natural gas going off. Tambora is considered a seven on the eight-point volcano energy release scale—the maximum is an eight, see. The Toba explosion was a full order of magnitude greater than Tambora. Toba was an eight out of eight on the scale. By contrast, Mount St. Helens would have been a five on the chart; it was probably ten thousand times less powerful.”

“Okay. What about us? What happened to human beings?” Abel rubbed his eyes to ward off the lateness of the hour, then looked to Bobcat for the answer.

“It was hard times 75,000 years ago, and I do mean hard times. Following Toba’s blowout, global temperatures fell like a stone around the world for a decade. The human population crashed to maybe just a few thousand.”

Abel was skeptical. “How in the world could anyone figure that out? No one was around to take a census, Bobcat.”

“That’s not exactly right, Abel. We do have a census, in a way, in the form of mitochondrial DNA.

“What, a genetic fingerprint?”

“You’ve got it. That’s a good way to put it,” smiled Bobcat through his neatly-trimmed beard. “Toba left an unmistakable impression—fingerprint, if you will—on our mothers’ mitochondrial DNA. That DNA is maternal; it’s passed down only through the female of the species. The rate of change, the mutation rate, is known. Since the rate of change is understood, the human population today should exhibit a much greater range of mitochondrial DNA mutation than it exhibits when we study it. If we’ve been around as long as we have, our mitochondrial DNA should be showing its age. But it isn’t.”

“Okay, fill me in,” Abel insisted.

“Well, the genetic makeup of our mitochondria should show evidence of much greater genetic variation. It doesn’t. That means something. Genetic researchers published papers postulating that some time in the deep past, about 75,000 years ago, something happened to the human population to suppress it, to nearly kill us off as a species. They had no idea what the mechanism was that caused the human population to drop to near zero and the DNA mutation clock to be stopped in its tracks and reset.

“Geologists and vulcanologists had the murder weapon, of course, but they weren’t working with geneticists. A bit of serendipity entered the picture about a dozen years ago, when a geologist happened to attend a genetics lecture. The speaker raised the question about what may have been the mechanism that would have reset the genetic time clock. The scientist in the audience had just read a paper about the Toba catastrophe in Southeast Asia 75,000 years ago. Eureka! Case solved.”

Abel attempted to internalize what he had just heard. “So, you’re telling me that a huge volcano blew up half way around the world and humans that were living in Africa and Asia nearly went extinct because of the changes the explosion wrought. That’s what you’re saying?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” affirmed Bobcat. “Those few lucky humans that survived in some remote pocket of the world now carried with them mitochondrial DNA that was very similar. It’s very uniform in us all today. The mutation evidence of the deep past had been erased to a great extent. Now the mitochondria had to accumulate all new mutation evidence, if you can call it that.”

“How did those few people survive?”

“If I had to guess, I would say they survived because they were in the best possible place to survive. They were, of course, living out in the wild. They weren’t living in cities or towns or on farms. They were roughing it. They were hunter-gathers. The ones who made it through holy hell were probably those who lived on or near the equator, and they lived on the seacoast.”

“Why the seacoast?”

“Food, plenty of food, all the time. And there were equable temperatures, or at least steadier and warmer temperatures due to warm seawater at the coastal margins. Terrible conditions elsewhere would have been moderated at the coasts and there would have always been food, even if it were only in the form of dead creatures and seaweed to scavenge, washing up ashore.”

Abel scratched his chin in reflection. “Fascinating. What do you think all this Yellowstone business will amount to?”

Bobcat whistled loudly through lips. “I do know that Yellowstone has erupted three times in the past two million years.”

Abel nodded. “Mmm, Liz has mentioned that before.”

“Sure, well,” Bobcat continued, “that region of the West has seen major trouble a dozen times, too, farther back in time. The three most recent eruptions had a significant impact on the North American continent. Two of them most certainly would have altered global climate. The eruption two million years ago was something few people can imagine. From what I’ve read, the explosive force of that eruption was something like the earth being hit by a big meteorite. Now, if this eruption is like any one of the two worst events in the last two million years, I would speculate that we are in for some chilly weather.”

“You think so?”

“I’d bet on it, Abel.”

“For how long?”

“Oh, jeez, I don’t have any way to know, but I’ll bet it’s at least a few years, maybe much more. We’ll know more by tomorrow night. That’s when we should see the first fallout from the eruption.”

“Tomorrow? What’s tomorrow?”

“I can guarantee you, Abel, the sunset tomorrow night will be the most remarkable one you will ever see. It should be like no other.”

“Why’s that?”

“Dust and gases in the upper atmosphere will block certain wavelengths of light and scatter light deep into the evening. The reds and oranges will get through. The whole sky will look as if it’s on fire. It’ll be brilliant, mark my word. And the sunset will last for hours, as trillions of high altitude particles reflect the light well past the hour of dusk.”

Abel shook his head slowly in disbelief, but his friend had his undivided attention.

“Are you familiar with the Tunguska disaster?” Bobcat  asked.

“Tunguska? Abel tapped his fingers to his forehead. “Hmm! Wasn’t that a meteor, or something like that, over Siberia, ah, sometime in the early years of the last century?”

“That’s the one. A meteor the size of a locomotive, traveling at 30,000 miles an hour, streaked into the atmosphere above Siberia and disintegrated in a powerful burst, like a hydrogen bomb going off. The explosion lofted tens of thousands of tons of pulverized debris from the object high into the uppermost layers of the atmosphere. That debris reflected so much light that newspaper editors in England reported that their readers could read the news by reflected sunlight as late as midnight, and this went on for many weeks. The sunsets were dazzling, according to all accounts.”

Abel took a long sip from a cold cup of home-brewed herb tea, then ground his teeth together audibly.

“How are you feeling about all this?” Abel probed.

“Oh, man,” Bobcat sighed, “I’d have to say I’m terribly nervous, really, knowing what I know about extinction.”

“You, of all people, you’re scared?”

“I am, Abel.” Bobcat focused on a spot on the floor, not wanting to look his friend in the eye. “Want to know what I really think?”

“Of course I do.”

“I think we may be in danger, all of us—maybe the whole damn planet.”

Abel chewed at the corner of his lower lip. “What do you think anybody can do about it?”

“God knows, Abel. Human beings have a hard enough time preparing for what’s coming down the pike a week into the future. No one on earth could imagine preparing for a disaster that’s been brewing for a million years. There’s no way to prepare for a Yellowstone. There just isn’t.”

“What do you think could happen to us?”

“You want it straight?”

“Yes, straight up!”

“We’re likely to go hungry.” Bobcat’s eyes were wide, dilated fully. “Crops could fail on every continent. If that happens, famine will stalk the globe. If this is another Toba, there aren’t going to be too many tomorrows for an awful lot of people on this little blue ball.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Well, you asked me, Abel. What in the devil do you want me to say?” Bobcat was visibly miffed.

“No, no, sorry. I mean, do you think Yellowstone is in a league with your, your mass extinctions?”

“Well, we’ll know soon enough.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

Smoke from smoldering brush circulated in Liz’s nostrils. Flickering ruby demons danced in darkness. Muffled scurrying noises, mice in a wall, drifted in and out. The odor, though, was pleasant. Neighbors had burned fall leaves by the curb when she was a child. It smelled like that.

The senses emerged one by one from the void, each bringing with it an unwelcome gift of pain. Taking stock of her immediate surroundings, trying to decipher what she was seeing and feeling, Liz sensed little that was familiar except physical agony so great she could not will her body off the earth to seek help. Her spine lay on what, straw? Something covered her but did little to temper cold. Fire smoldered on the edge of sight and red figures nearby moved in slow motion swinging white light beams through smoke and dust.

“Can you help me?” It took maximum effort just to pump a little volume behind the words.

A vision turned in Liz’s direction, flashlight beam to one side.

“Here.”

“I’m coming. Stay still,” a female voice called. A woman, small in stature, knelt down beside the scientist and played the beam about. The stranger touched Liz’s flesh, raised a wrist and took her pulse.

“Would you tell me something?” pleaded Liz.

“Of course, dear.”

“I don’t know where I am.”

“What is your name?”

Liz struggled with the question a moment. “El…, ah, Elizabeth.”

“That’s good, Elizabeth, that’s very good. You’ve survived a serious accident.

“Accident?”

“The crash of a plane.”

Liz vaguely recalled passengers seated in a jetliner. Their likenesses floated out of the darkness. “I’m supposed to be in Minneapolis.”

“You have fallen here. You’re in Alberta, dear, near the Canadian border.”

“There were others.”

“Yes, many of them survived the landing, like you.”

“I have a young daughter. I have to pick her up.”

“In time, mother, in time.”

“But I have to….”

“You need to be still. We’ll be along shortly to take you to the village. We can help you there.”

Confused, Liz looked away. She did not recognize that the tortured shapes in the firelight were the wreckage of a great airliner. The Airbus had split apart into two sections. The cockpit and first class seating area remained affixed to the wing superstructure. Much of the fuselage was distorted but still intact. It had suffered little fire damage. Most of the jet aft of the wings had separated from the main craft and burned furiously. Passengers seated over the wings had survived the crash landing; those in the back rows had perished in a flash fire. Liz had left her seat over the wings and had fallen into a first class seat when the plane pitched radically to avoid the ash cloud. Her behavior on board had conspired to save her life.

The stranger stood and turned toward the wreckage.

“Wait,” Liz called to the stranger in a panic. “When will you come back?”

“In a few minutes.”

“Thank you for talking to me.”

The tiny woman standing in the darkness replied, “I could do nothing less.”

Liz did not want the woman to leave her alone in such pain. She wanted to keep her engaged in conversation, to keep her nearby. “Who are you?”

“A doctor. I attend to the people of the Blackfoot Federation in this country.”

“I don’t know your name.”

“Sinopa, I am called.”

“Sinopa. I have not heard that before.”

“It is given on occasion to a small female newborn of our people. It means kit fox in the Blackfoot tongue.”

Liz managed a smile for the tiny woman with the bold moniker.

Chapter Fifty-Three

At mid-morning on May 2, night descended on Kansas City, the sprawling pioneer town crowding the Missouri and Kansas Rivers. Automatic photosensitive relays engaged on light towers above the vast railroad switching yards just north of the Missouri from downtown. Standing before an upper floor span of plate glass in the offices of Midland Research Group housed in the newly constructed Bess Truman Tower, Winnie Deschaines witnessed the rail yards brighten to white pink under the glare of hundreds of mercury vapor lamps nested in the light towers.

For half an hour, she and coworkers had left their work untouched to track the approach from the west of a mountain of hideous weather. In the recesses of her memory, Winnie unearthed Dust Bowl newsreel footage from the Dirty Thirties, grainy moving images of hardscrabble Texas and Oklahoma panhandle farms scoured by grit and buried by raging windblown soil off the drought-dry southwestern plains. The arriving menace appeared identical to the Depression-era dusty villains of the old celluloid films. The Platte County communities to the north, I-70 westbound, and Overland Park and Swannee to the southwest disappeared beneath the towering black front.

Darkness clamped tight about the city as battalion after battalion of tiny volcanic ash flakes swept west to east along the boulevards. Sheets of dry, dead volcanic sleet filled Winnie’s vision, backlit by the rail yard lights across the river. Employees at the windows backed away from the glass, afraid of the dangers that the gray matter might pose.

Voltage dropped suddenly and lights everywhere across the metropolis lost brilliance, cooling to anemic red. The suburbs and neighborhoods within Winnie purview soon cascaded into darkness. The Bess Truman Tower plunged to black for a few seconds, but emergency backup systems brought power up rapidly.

“Time to go,” yelled a superior from a corner office. If you want to get home, you had better leave now. We don’t want anyone stranded out there in that mess.” The floor emptied within minutes.

In the parking garage below ground level, Winnie freed the door locks on her Jeep. A well-dressed man stepped forward from behind a pillar, someone who must have had clearance to be in the catacomb.

“Do you have pantyhose on?” the stranger said in a brusque tone.

“What?” Winnie turned to face him, knowing fully well what he had said. She prepared to utilize her considerable self-defense training to protect herself.

“You’ll need something to put over the car’s air intake. Pantyhose will do just fine. If you open the hood, I’ll show you where to put it.”

Across Broadway Bridge over the Missouri River, Route 169 ran dead level between the rail yards and old municipal airport. Traffic inched along in volcanic hail as drivers struggled in near zero visibility, windshields smeared with a sludge of wiper fluid and rock dust. Minutes into her twelve-mile commute, cars, trucks and commuter buses about her began to slow, sputter and die, the engines starved for air or robbed of electrical pulses to fuel pumps and fuel injectors by the conductive properties of molten rock dust.

Half a mile east of the campus of Park University in suburban Parkville, Winnie’s auto engine lurched spasmodically and shut down. The starter motor could do nothing to turn the car over and get Winnie on her way again. Stepping out of her Jeep, she was swallowed by the stone blizzard. A single breath doubled her over in a coughing fit. Burying her face into her blouse was her only means of filtering the air enough to quiet heaving lungs.

For the first time since leaving the office, the talons of living fear sank deep into her being. She had just a single mile to go to reach the safety of her home, but McKay Hall on the college campus was half that distance away. She decided to make for the Victorian belltower landmark on the low steppe above Parkville village. If only she could see it.

A guardrail marked the way on the opposite side of the road. Winnie reached it, kept a hand on it for reassurance, and paced into the pale. Head down, face stuffed into her garments, she pushed along quickly until the guardrail came to an end. Ahead, visibility now down to yards, she sensed a mammoth silent form in the rock fog. A few feet more and the apparition resolved into a head-end locomotive of a freight train. It was motionless on the mainline tracks through town, its massive diesel heart dead.

Estimating distance, Winnie left what she thought was the highway right-of-way and ascended a slope, kicking four inches of ash aside with each step. A lamppost materialized, something familiar. She could just make out another post, lining the drive into the college, and went to it.

Cut limestone blocks, stacked precisely, heralded century-old McKay Hall. Winnie found a portal and stairs descending a few steps to a wide door. The dull glow of emergency lighting guided her into the building. A push of her hand and the door creaked aside. Winnie stepped no further, eyes fixed on a sea of human heads.

Crowded among bank after bank of student postal boxes were young people, all kneeling on the painted cement floor, hands folded in prayer.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Pelee had been hoarding sunflower seeds for months. Before leaving for school, she and her father planted hundreds of seeds in plots surrounding their cabin, seedbeds that Pelee had spaded up the day before. The planting completed, father and daughter washed their hands and walked the length of the village green to The Key, the colony’s school.

Abel dropped Pelee off and turned toward First Day Hall to chase down Bobcat, but he paused on the green to contemplate a schizophrenic sky vault. To the south and stretching to the infinite western horizon, a cloak of slate gray opacity hung in the troposphere and draped the plains. North of the ugly curtain, a brilliant, delightfully warm and cloudless blue day greeted Abel. The demarcation line between the sky colors was hard-edge honed and ruler straight on its march to western infinity. The divide seemed to hover a stone’s throw south of Independency compound.

Bobcat balanced on the edge of his seat in the second floor studio, obsessing over images on the monitors above the studio’s state-of-the-art editing board. Abel pulled up a chair next to his friend. Bobcat barely acknowledged his presence.

“It’s like 9/11, wouldn’t you say, Bobcat?” Abel baited Bobcat as he made himself comfortable.

“It really is, just like back in ‘01,” admitted Bobcat. “People have been coming and going all morning. Everyone is hypnotized by this.”

“What’s the lead?”

“Everything, man. The mountain states have disappeared. The vice president is missing, his plane presumed down somewhere east of Denver. Other planes are missing all over the west. Ash is falling everywhere in the plains, ungodly amounts of it.”

“Why aren’t we getting it here, Bobcat?”

Bobcat swiveled in his chair and glared, his eyes burrowing into Abel’s head. “Did you have a look out west?” Bobcat queried.

“I did,” Abel said, nodding. “Bizarre! The sky is divided right down the middle. That’s got to be volcanic ash just to the south.”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“How come we’re dodging it here?”

“We have so far, and the only reason is because of the jet stream. It’s right over us, keeping weather and the ash some miles south, I guess. We may not be so fortunate for long.”

“Why not?”

“The jet stream lifts northward every year as the season advances. It’s on its way up into Canada like clockwork.”

Bobcat turned back to the large monitors above the control console and elevated the sound volume. A meteorologist on the Weather Channel was issuing a warning to viewers: “…inside. Close all doors and windows and tape all cracks. Keep volcanic particles from getting into your home and into the air you breath. Do not leave your home. If there is an emergency and you absolutely must go out, cover your face with a wet towel or filter mask. Do not expose infants and children to airborne ash.”

“What’s the latest on the vice president?” Abel wanted to know.

“He was aboard Air Force II on his way to Denver for a fundraiser,” offered the man at the editing board. “Reports say the plane may have encountered volcanic ash on route—flew into it. The jet engines would ingest that garbage. It’s rock fluff and grit, of course. It would ruin turbines in short order. If that happened, the aircraft probably fell right out of the sky.”

“Where was the plane?”

“Somewhere over the Colorado-Kansas line, they say. Nobody can get into the area to search. The high plains are buried under six feet of ash as we speak, and there’s no end in sight.”

“Half a dozen feet?” Abel choked on his words, incredulous.

“It’s one frigging horror story, man,” Bobcat blurted.

Abel focused on the large monitor tuned to the Weather Channel. He could see footage of vehicle headlights and emergency flashers stopped within a torrid black snowfall. A digital display rolled across the bottom of the screen: Live Footage. Kansas City, Missouri.

“Boy, day’s turned to night in greater KC, by god,” muttered Bobcat.

On the monitor, the plains metropolis was being buried alive. Abel sat mesmerized by the images. The ash fall was a black blizzard, the rate of fall just like that of a heavy snow, as if it were a New England winter nor’easter in negative.

Pointing a finger at the screen, Abel turned to Bobcat. “You know that woman who was at the seminars—her name was Winnie Deschaines. She lives in the Kansas City area. What could she possibly do down there with all that ash raining down?”

“Nothing,” Bobcat suggested, throwing his palms up. “There’s not a damn thing she or anyone else can do. People can’t leave. Their cars will fail them in minutes. They can’t drive out, can’t fly out. They can’t even walk out. Ash is falling everywhere around that city for hundreds of miles. All anyone can do is sit tight, inside. They better hope they have roofs overhead with steep pitches on them so the ash slides off. It’s heavy as hell when it falls in that volume. It will crush houses, stores, schools, churches, you name it.”

On another monitor, a news crew camera focused on an elevated train in a station in downtown Chicago. Bobcat pushed a slide lever on his console and the audible came up a bit too loud.

“…transit trains have stopped running. Traffic lights are out. Offices are dark. People in elevators are stranded between floors. Chicago has come to a standstill.”

A stock image of high-tension power lines over table-flat agricultural fields bobbed up on the screen behind the network anchor.

“City power and light officials report that large transformers throughout the electrical grid have been damaged by fine particles of volcanic dust blowing into the metro area from the Great Plains. There is no word when metro and suburban Chicago will have power.

“If you live in the Chicago area,” the news anchor continued, “or in other metropolitan areas that are experiencing similar problems, be advised to stockpile a supply of water in the event that pressure in your supply system fails. Keep at least one three-gallon container full for flushing the toilet. Flush only once a day by pouring the container quickly into bowl. Be sure to….”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Bobcat declared.

“Thought about what?”

“Water. You have to have water.”

“What are they going to do for water when it’s contaminated with ash?” Abel wondered.

“That’s only the half of it,” Bobcat declared. “If there’s no power, there are no pumps, no filters, no purification.”

“Chicago has got to have emergency generators to back up its water system.”

“You would think so. But big generators burn lots of gasoline or diesel. You need air to burn fuel.”

Abel failed to understand Bobcat’s point. “Yeah, of course. So?”

“Ash clogs air filters quickly,” explained Bobcat. “They could have one terrific problem on their hands.”

“How many people in Chicago? Five, six million?”

“Probably. I’m glad I don’t head up their emergency task force.”

The men fell silent and listened to the continuing broadcast, now filled with a series of revolving emergency public service messages.

“You are advised not to use the telephone except in an extreme emergency. Communication capacity has been damaged by the eruption in the Rocky Mountain States and in portions of the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. Please delay your calls until after 10 p.m.”

“If you suffer from asthma, emphysema or other breathing problems, do not go outside. If you live in the Midwest, Great Plains states, Rocky Mountains region or the Pacific Northwest, stay in your home. Stay indoors.”

“If you are scheduled to take a flight, please check with your airline. Many flights to and from the Midwest and West have been canceled. Please check with your airline.”

The last message seemed to drain much of the vitality from Abel. Bobcat noticed.

“You with us, Abel?”

“I suppose.” He didn’t perk up. “You know, Liz was supposed to fly from Bozeman to Denver, then change planes for Minneapolis.”

“Oh.”

“I haven’t heard from her.”

Chapter Fifty-Five

Gaping volcanic vents opened across the parkland on the second day of the Yellowstone eruption. More miles of fissures snaked along the old caldera margins and thrust into new territory to the east. The unhinging of the plateau loosed colossal new lava fountains to dance skyward. From space, infrared-imaging cameras aboard satellites sensed the forging of a rough, broken oval crown dotted with jewels of hot lava. Seething froth, squeezed from the magma chamber below, roared from the ground and fluffed up into ultra-lightweight and fiercely hot pumice stone and fantastic volumes of ash. Erupted far across the Rocky Mountain States, the pumice and ash fell atop the pyroclastic sheet flows generated on the first day. Hundreds of feet thick, the flows buried the landscape over an area the dimensions of the state of Georgia.

Thousands of cubic miles of the ejecta filled in every valley, every mountain fold, every river basin wherever the flows poured, utterly erasing the distinctive typography of the Snake River valley, the Yellowstone River and upper Missouri River valleys as well as the Gallatin and Absaroka ranges and the northern slope country of the Grand Teton chain. Small towns and cities in the river valleys were flicked from the map like flies from a crust of bread.

Undercut by the emptying magma chamber below, the Absaroka summits on the eastern boundary of the park—Mount Langford, Grizzly Peak and Pyramid Peak—lost their footing. The high country, slipping along the great fractures, retreated into the earth. Across seventy miles of parkland, the strata above the magma sea subsided like a slow-moving elevator on its way down into the cellars of purgatory. The descending body of Yellowstone exposed vertical ramparts, mile after mile of them, all blasted red by searing lava forced up from below. Pressures exerted from above by new material falling out of the volcanic cloud columns and settling atop the smothered terrain abetted the Stygian process.

From the very first minutes of the eruption, the violence was sealed away from the eyes of the world. Those near enough to record the opening salvos of the eruption on still camera or video devices were buried. Within the first twenty-four hours, tens of thousands of square miles across five states disappeared beneath the pyroclastic assault. By the end of the second day, the jackboot heel print of the eruption and ash fall pressed into forty percent of the landmass of the contiguous forty-eight states.

Chapter Fifty-Six

Evening crept along the granite and rubble escarpment above Big Stone Lake. Abel anxiously anticipated the sunset to see if what Bobcat was telling him would come to pass. After dinner, he and Pelee strolled away from the heart of the Independency compound and picked their way down a meandering path cut into the glacial debris of the bluffs to the eastern shore of the thirty-mile-long finger lake to take in the celestial nightcap. He had corralled citizens all day, asking them to join him for the sunset at the water’s edge. He knew Bobcat and his wife would come, Penny Markham, too, and Findley and Sarah Litton, new arrivals to Independency and parents of Pelee’s new friend, Jennifer. There would be scores of others, most likely.

The third of May had been a frenetic day. It had dawned warm, in the high fifties, a decidedly toasty early morning temperature for the plains country. The balmy air was greeted by the Independency faithful with a flurry of activity. Acres of potato ground had been tilled with the old Ford tractor and several tons of Katahdin, Kennebec, and Russet seed potatoes had been healed into the warming soil. Danvers carrot seed followed the potatoes in several adjacent acres, as did onions, leeks and scallions. The Brassica family—broccoli, cabbages, kale, Brussels sprouts, and related oriental vegetables—had been set out as tiny starter plants in acre-long rows. Warm weather crops would have to wait until Memorial Day weekend.                             Abel was sullen as he left the community buildings behind. Pelee streaked ahead on the steep, well-worn path, keeping tabs on the unfolding ferns and listening to a deafening chorus of spring peepers and toads out early to greet the warm evening air. The sundown sky was partitioned as it had been the day before, with a gray flat wall to the south, clear air directly overhead and to the north.

Abel was troubled by his failure to contact Pelee’s mother. He couldn’t get through on his cell phone and landline circuits to the Rocky Mountain West were hopelessly jammed. News from the networks about conditions in the mountain states was increasingly grim. Salt Lake City, an entire urban metropolis, had not been heard from for nearly seventy-two hours. Denver and all but her southernmost suburbs were stone quiet. Those trying to raise scores of smaller high plains and mountain communities reaped only silence.

Nothing Abel did could penetrate the blanket over the West. He had Bobcat working every avenue of communication, but the pro could yield little. It was becoming clear to Abel that his ex-wife might be among the millions now missing. If entire states had been buried by the eruption and all communication had ceased in those regions, it was not much of a leap to assume Liz had died in the disaster the day she was to leave Yellowstone. He was facing the prospect of having to tell his daughter that her mother would not be coming home. He feared the burden of having to divulge the truth to Pelee. The notion made him nauseous and irritable.

At a fork in the path to the lake, Abel turned left, ambled around a backwater inlet and out to a bony limestone shelf of land on the eastern shore of Big Stone Lake, where he sat down. Blackbirds called from the cattails and reeds, each staking a claim to a stretch of lakeside turf. Insects winged just above the waters and the first whirligig beetles of the season pirouetted relentlessly on the surface in the shallows. New shoots of wild grasses waved in the sweet warm breeze.

Penny Markham, Bobcat and his wife, Josie, and several others padded along the lakeshore and came up to join Abel. Penny, the community’s master chef, sat down next to him and gave him a pat on the arm.

“Any word from Liz yet, Abel?” Penny asked.

“No, not a word. I can’t get through. Things look bad, don’t they?”

“Well, we’ll have to see. We really don’t know any more about what’s happened out west than anybody else. We just know we haven’t heard from anyone. That’s all we know.”

Abel understood instinctively the woman was being kind in the choice of her words. She was right, he reflected. He really knew nothing at all. Liz’s fate was unknown and would probably remain so for some time, at least until flights out of the mountain states resumed and communication was restored in the stricken region.

On the western horizon, the mirror-blue heavens north of the ash line blushed deep pink and the edges of high cirrus clouds picked up the rose hues. Bobcat and his wife plopped down on the grass, followed by a dozen others. Pelee came sailing into the clutch of sunset gazers, towing Jennifer by the hand. The kids were breathless and sprawled in the grasses and sedges near the water’s edge.

Bobcat had been working the communication channels all day, keeping to himself as much as possible. Community members dropped in on him throughout the day, asking him for help to see if he could find a way to communicate with Rocky Mountain towns where they had relatives or friends. He felt as if he were the wireless operator aboard the ill-fated Titanic, sending signals and getting little useful response in return. But he kept at it hour after hour, leaning heavily on the short-wave radio.

He could raise Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and San Francisco. There was traffic with Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Colorado Springs and Oklahoma City, too, some of them cowering and barely audible under a ferocious volcanic ash barrage. He had slapped a National Geographic Society map of the United States up on the wall and circled each city. He then connected the circles with a marker line, creating a great oval arch west, south and east of most of the Rocky Mountain States’ terrain.

As the map began to take shape, he tried to tighten the noose by attempting to get through to communities closer and closer to Yellowstone National Park. He learned quickly that the noose was loose and wide. Everywhere he turned, the voice of warm humans fell away just one hundred or so miles inboard from the freehand line he had drawn. Inside that marked-in zone, audible ceased. The sound of morgue silence reigned; it spooked Bobcat. As no one else at Independency, he now had a distinct concept of the scale of the event that had taken place in the Rocky Mountain country. He had uncovered the disaster’s audible reach. It was immense.

Bobcat sat pouting, pulling pebbles from the soil and tossing them about. His wife, Josie, sensing a cold shoulder, fell into conversation with Penny. Abel settled down on an elbow and tugged on Bobcat’s old leather vest.

“What do you hear, Bobcat?”

The man went on collecting pebbles. “I don’t hear a thing, Abel. Nothing.” Bobcat flicked a glance at his friend and tossed a pebble toward the lake. “There is no such thing in short wave as not picking up chatter from half a continent. It just doesn’t happen. I’ve never heard it like this before. It’s frightening.”

Silver riffles in the black lake caught fire. Each wavelet, capturing the lengthening light, reflected the color of wood embers and danced like flame. Pinks on the horizon had heated up to cadmium orange and the ash veil to the south blushed hot rouge. The cloud wisps throbbed with lustrous reds, their linings red violet. The atmosphere above pulsated with hot blast-furnace pigments, drenching the forest and bluffs in a warm, saturated orange.

“Have you ever seen such a remarkable sunset?” called a female voice across the water.

As the colors intensified, people could not contain their glee. Most rose from their sitting positions by the waters to stand and rotate about looking to all points of the compass. The children laughed and pointed at each other, rejoicing in the saturated orange tones of reflected luminous light scattering over their skin. The heavens were ablaze, as if solar flares had come to earth by day to dance upon the lake.

Abel was swept up in the evening fireworks. The atmosphere was joyous, alive, uplifting. The colors set the children prancing, each tossing away their sneakers to tread barefoot on the flickering orange ground. Several community members spread arms wide toward the heavens as if to evoke a blessing.

“My goodness, it’s heaven on earth!” sang out Penny.

“Quite the opposite,” rumbled Bobcat.

Bobcat’s quiet retort jabbed Abel’s sensibilities like a hatpin. He spun about, grabbed Bobcat by the arm, and led him away from the group.

“Is this the atmospherics you expected, Bobcat?” asked Abel.

“Exactly. Look at it. It’s remarkable.”

“What does it tell you?”

“Like I said yesterday, Abel, if Yellowstone blew away like it has in the deep past, then sunsets should be awesome. Well, it’s awesome right now.”

“It’s all the dust in the upper atmosphere?”

“Yeah, dust and sulfur dioxide.”

“What happens tomorrow? What happens the next day?”

“More of the same, Abel. The sunsets will be spectacular for months. That’s nothing to be happy about. Dust and gas is blocking sunlight from reaching the ground. The long red wavelengths of light are getting through, as you can see, but that’s it. Makes for really great sunsets.”

Bobcat pointed to the heavens, to the now-throbbing red drape-like formation to the south and southwest. “You see that shit out there. If that moves over us, we won’t be seeing sunsets for a while.”

“You told me yesterday,” Abel pressed, “that temperatures could cool down a great deal if Yellowstone erupted like it once did.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t joking. This is big and it’s not going to go away. Things are likely to get chilly, probably a great deal. It may be nirvana right now, like Penny said. But I’m telling you, man, it just may be hell on earth tomorrow.”

The evening stretched into the night hours and still the brilliant paint palette in the sky remained. Aerosols high in the stratosphere captured and reflected light from the sun that was now a long hour over the horizon. Dusk should have fallen, but the sky was still brightly lit, and the community citizens stayed out by the pond to bask in undying color.

One of the community members had lugged an acoustic guitar down to the shoreline and was now strumming a few bars of Oh, Susanna. Up and down the lake, people joined in a sing-along:

Rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry.

Sun so hot, I froze to death, Susanna don’t you cry.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Shouldering the waters of immense Lake Sakakawea reservoir in central North Dakota, the long, low Garrison Dam was built well for its Promethean task, but the great impoundment could not be found in the landscape. The massive concrete and earthen structure and hundreds of miles of shoreline lay buried beneath nine feet of volcanic ash.

Human life had been snuffed out in the lonely high plains country surrounding the great manmade body of water. There were no witnesses to the arrival of a mountainous juggernaut. A battering ram of mud, volcanic slurry, whole trees and structural debris fanned out for miles across the ash-choked reservoir. The mass surged tall enough to overtop two-story roof peaks of those few buildings that had not been crushed by the ash accumulation.

It had taken nearly a week for the Yellowstone lahar to reach Garrison Dam. Born of flash-thawed snow and ice from all mountain summits within several hundred miles of Yellowstone National Park, the potent volcanic flood traced both the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers and grew to hellish proportions as it surged out of the mountains. Slowed by endless debris fields, uprooted forests and dense ash and pumice deposits, billions of cubic yards of meltwater bulldozed the volcanic mire steadily downhill into the upper Missouri River basin.

At Lake Sakakawea, the mass fanned out across the sweeping lake topography and formed a mammoth debris jam at the dam that held for thirty hours. An ocean of lahar muck mingled with the reservoir waters, raising the level of the lake so much that the polluted swill overtopped the dam and cut new drainage passages around it. As a torrent of scum chewed new erosion canyons into the prairie, immense pressures behind the debris jam blew out the dam with explosive force. Garrison Dam failed utterly and the lahar was underway again. The viscous mass of volcanic horror had doubled in volume. Its speed increased, powered by the tonnage of mud and water that had accumulated behind the great dam and by the immense volume of the reservoir itself.

After ten days of relentless advance, the Yellowstone lahar entered the broad sweeping turn in the Missouri River at Sioux City, Iowa and swung south toward Omaha, Nebraska and Kansas City. At Sioux City, the town’s lively new riverfront developments and parks, sources of much civic pride, were ground to fragments and swept up into the moving mass. The Argosy, a floating gambling casino, was splintered to matchsticks. Fourth Street, the town’s historic commercial district, drowned in thick muck that reached up to the second story windows.

At Omaha, St. Joseph and Kansas City, severely crippled emergency management authorities could do little to communicate with low-lying businesses and residences within a mile of either side of the Missouri River. Crews had been rendered powerless by the ashfall to do anything to help hundreds of thousands of citizens get out of harm’s way.

Aboard the Missouri Mallet, a heavy diesel river tug stranded with its load of four tank barges full of light-grade kerosene, river pilot Jefferson McPhee was in near panic. His vessel’s engines had failed nearly two weeks earlier during the first days of the ash fall. The channel ship and its barges had been just north of a severe dogleg turn in the river, where the Kansas River empties into the Missouri within a long toss of downtown Kansas City. The fast river current pushed the stalled ship and its barge load backwards in the Missouri and onto the Kaw Point Riverfront Park spit where the Kansas River emptied into the larger flowage. There the ship and its fleet of barges stuck fast in the mud on the river’s west shore.

The Army Corps of Engineers ordered McPhee and his crew to return to the vessel and remove lanyards that kept the barges lashed together. The big floating flat-bottom tankers were to float free, separately. McPhee protested vehemently, thinking the order was complete madness. He was near fisticuffs with an officer of the Corps, when the tug’s bridge began to fill with an ominous growling noise, so low in frequency that it could be felt in the chest.

The pilot ceased his shouting match and glanced upriver beyond the old terminal buildings of nearby K.C. Downtown Airport. One of Kansas City’s famous limestone bluffs appeared to be moving, dropping south toward them, advancing at the same rate that the river was running. A monster was loose in the river valley. It crumpled private planes like waste paper and swatted down decades-old hangers and freight terminals one after another.

Roaring into the river dogleg, millions of tons of mud and materials rose up out of the Missouri as debris jammed and compacted in the tightest turn in the lower river system. The artificial dam built higher and higher, shutting off much of the Missouri. With nowhere to go, water surged into the Kansas River, reversing its course. The Missouri Mallet capsized and the kerosene tank barges separated. Several were crushed, spewing tens of thousands of gallons of kerosene.

Waves of river water raced out across the airport tarmac and swept into the rail yards, lifting boxcars, hoppers and tankers off the tracks. The rail cars piled in beneath the old steel arch Broadway Bridge and its Burlington Northern rail-span neighbor, where they stuck fast. Metal grinding on metal shed sparks into the kerosene-laced waters and an oily fire erupted and crawled upriver to the crushed barges. Booming explosions raced crossed the city and shattered windows in downtown buildings facing the riverfront.

The north and west faces of the new Bess Truman Tower glass imploded into the interior offices. Shards showered the floors of Midland Research Group, stripping overhead tiles and fixtures from ceilings and walls. The cubicle that Winnie occupied was vacant. Glass fragments and debris rained down into the empty space. After spending four days and nights in the building, sleeping at night beneath her desk in a sleeping bag, Winnie had left the building fifteen minutes earlier. She was headed home, a medical filter mask over her nose and mouth, intent on covering the twelve miles to her Parkville home on foot.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Abel awoke with a start. Spring birds broke into song half an hour earlier, but not this morning. Their avian trills were still. Silence awakened him.

In his underwear, Abel scampered downstairs, opened the front door, and stepped out on the porch to sample the day. A heavy overcast locked the morning away under an oppressive flatness. Over the bluff ridge to the west, the quiet hush of rain falling at great distance greeted him. He had heard it many times, a rain squall line rolling slowly west to east. He guessed how many seconds the drops would take to reach the cabin steps as the wet advanced. Twenty seconds, he thought. He counted down the time.

To the second the drops arrived. What he saw chilled him to the marrow. Rain had not come calling. Instead, tiny flakes of volcanic ash fell through the atmosphere mingling with countless specks of rock powder. Within seconds the volume of the ash fall drew an acoustic blanket over the village, muffling all sound. Buildings and trees disappeared one by one until it seemed Abel had developed cataracts over his eyes and could no longer see shapes.

Bobcat had feared this hour; now Abel knew why.

Standing in the cabin doorway, the town’s founder caught a glimpse of an amorphous shape hurtling through the ash shroud. The village’s communications czar arrived on the run, his face below the eyes fitted with a water-soaked bandana hastily ripped from any fabric he could scrounge. He swept Abel aside as he blew into the household.

“Close the door, close the door, man,” yowled the new arrival. Abel obliged and sealed the volcanic storm outside. Bobcat yanked the covering from his face and barred his teeth. “Abel, listen to me. This shit is airborne rock. It’s as heavy as stone. As it accumulates, it will get heavier and heavier.”

“You told me the other day,” stammered Abel.

Bobcat darted to a window and peered out. “I think most of the rooflines are steep enough to shed the ash. But the greenhouse glass, it’s not going to take too much of this. Their pitch might not be enough of an angle.”

“How much could they hold?”

“They won’t hold a foot, I’m sure of it. It has to come off. Pull, push, rake, shovel, whatever. It’s got to go!”

“How much of this stuff is going to come down?”

“I don’t know, man. Maybe one hell of a lot.”

“How much is a hell of a lot?” Abel’s voice swelled in volume.

“I don’t know,” Bobcat said emphatically.

“Well, give me some idea.”

“Okay,” Bobcat frowned, “if you want some bad news.”

“Let’s have it!”

“A dozen years ago I had the pleasure of standing in a new building excavation a dozen feet below ground level, a couple of hours northeast of Lincoln, Nebraska—the town of Royal, I think it was. I attended the opening of a museum, a great bone yard, a graveyard filled with creatures called Teleoceras. Paleontologists had unearthed them. They were something like rhinos that lived on the Great Plains about ten million years ago. They were big. They lived in herds of many dozens if not hundreds.”

“Yeah, so what. Who gives a damn?” Abel could not fathom where his friend was heading with his herd of rhinos.

“You know, they all died together,” Bobcat continued. “They all died at the very same time—bulls, cows, calves, newborn—all of them.”

“What are you driving at, damn it all?”

“They suffocated because their lungs filled with volcanic ash. It’s like breathing broken glass. Those animals were covered with an eight-foot layer of it. I was standing in it. That’s eight feet, man! The animals were at the bottom of that garbage.”

Abel flinched.

Bobcat paused for some seconds. “The ash that those creatures were buried in did not come from nearby, of course, not from Nebraska. The chemical signature of the ash was traced to Idaho, several hundred miles west of Yellowstone.”

Abel uttered not a peep.

“Abel, the crap that killed those animals is precisely the same stuff coming down on our noggins right now. I think it would be a very good policy to get it off the greenhouse glass.”

Young Pelee, stirred by loud voices downstairs, left her bed and bounded down the cabin stairway two steps at a time only to stop abruptly when Bobcat came into view. Abel’s daughter ogled the man. An expression of revulsion skewed her youthful face, as if she had smelled something foul.

“What’s all over you, buckwheat flour?” blurted the child.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Three nights in a sleeping bag on the sixth floor of the Bess Truman Tower was more than enough. Winnie headed for home. Since the opening ash salvos, many of her work colleagues in far-flung suburbs had not made it into the city to work. Winnie was the exception. Twice now she had jogged in unstable footing the twelve miles from Parkville to Kansas City, a medical mask over her mouth and nose. She made the half-marathon run in a little under three hours, only to stay at the office for days on end.

She slipped a day-pack on her back, filled a bottle of water from the last drops remaining in a water cooler, exited the building and ran out to impassable Sixth Street. She turned north on Grand Boulevard and ran downhill under the interstate overpass and out to City Market beyond. Light ash was still falling and the air was lousy with windblown gray dust off the western plains. Everywhere she ran, her feet came down in volcanic drifts. She paced in the car lanes where the thirty inches of ash in the city had been packed down somewhat before most traffic ceased moving.

At City Market she slowed to survey the long rows of empty open-air vendor stalls sheltered beneath rambling metal roofs. The farmers’ market was a venerated city institution, one of the Midwest’s largest and longest lived. There wasn’t a soul hawking at a booth in the vast arcade as Winnie entered the grounds. It was nearly impossible for anyone to get to town, let alone farmers with trucks and pickups loaded with produce and farm staples from farms thirty, fifty, even 100 miles away. The food had stopped coming. The sight of City Market without so much as a storage carrot or a red greenhouse tomato on display gave Winnie gooseflesh.

A pedestrian walk and skyway at the end of Third Street paralleled the Missouri River. Whenever she jogged on it for exercise during her lunch hour, big river tugs accompanied her, pushing long barges heavily loaded with everything from coal to bunker oil, from bulk grains to scrap metal. At the height of the ash fall, the fluid economic artery of the Plains drained completely of shipping commerce.

The pedestrian skyway deposited the Missourian near the head of Broadway Bridge, a steel arch span first opened to traffic in 1959. Winnie crossed to the in-bound lane side and jogged out over the Missouri River. There she slowed once again. Unearthly sounds brought her to a halt.

At the Kansas City Metropolitan Zoo, she had once stood as a young teen before a black panther at feeding time. It snarled at visitors continuously, a voice so menacing she prayed aloud the steel bars of pen would forever contain the creature. The air over Kansas City rumbled with just such noises.

Ahead to the north, private aircraft tied down at Downtown Airport flipped into the air. Structures crumpled and fell. Big rail freight cars rocked and moved, rafting toward the bridge. The train cars slammed into the concrete piers below Winnie’s feet and piled together in a massive metal heap. To the west, at the tight bend in the Missouri River, a creeping tsunami wave of mud and debris overturned a diesel river tug and swept the barges into its maw. Several barges were overtaken and crushed, but one rafted free and spun east, drifting downriver where it slammed into the railcars pinned under the bridge.

Fire erupted. Oily black smoke climbed into the bridge superstructure and flames followed a purple kerosene slick upriver. Winnie turned to run from the bridge when a bomb-like concussion knocked her down on the bridge roadway. Dazed for a second, she managed to clear her senses. Broiling heat engulfed her, spawned by the fire curling around and below the bridge deck. Scrambling to her feet, she sprinted north off the span and down the access ramp toward the airport and rail yards surrounding old Route 169. Her way was blocked. Missouri River water, denied its customary channel by the swelling dam of debris upriver, swept across the highway. Behind her, flames crackled ever higher among the steel arches of the bridge.

Winnie could go neither north nor south. On an island of asphalt, she stood her ground watching the Missouri River calve a new lake, dammed behind the massive jam. The freeform debris dam expanded rapidly before her eyes as the river, acting as a conveyor, continuously delivered massive piles of fresh material to the blockage. Water backed up into the industrial complexes across the river in Kansas, invading the industrial baking plants arrayed there: Continental, Nabisco, Keebler, and others.

Witness to the spectacle of landscape in motion, Winnie fought off an overwhelming sense of the surreal. The waterway was ablaze, structures and rail cars afloat within the flames. Windows in the buildings on the downtown hills were missing, blown out by the blast concussion. The river gnawed away virgin ground, cutting arroyos across the airport and twisting rail lines into pretzels.

A tearing sound rent the air, as if miles of spun cloth were ripped apart at once. Upriver, things began to come apart. Gaps in the massive jam appeared and volcanic sludge cascaded through. Suddenly the whole river view to the west galloped forward, hurtling toward Broadway Bridge. The leading edge of the monstrous lahar mass collided with the flaming rail car and barge tangle, paused just a second, then surged under the bridge.

Broadway Bridge shuddered violently as the volcanic hydraulic ram overwhelmed the steel trusses, arches and piers. With a roar, the bridge heaved from its stone foundations and collapsed onto the Burlington Northern railroad span. The rail bridge twisted, resisted, but it, too, fell and was incorporated into the volcanic lahar.

Chapter Sixty

Petrified air sank over the bluff ridges at Big Stone Lake, falling in pounds per square foot. The vacuum between the eighth-inch volcanic ash flakes was polluted with talc-like micro particles of rock. Abel, peering through his prescription lens straight up into the lithic deluge, could conjure nothing more appropriate than Chicken Little’s storybook cry of despair, “The sky is falling. The sky is falling.”

On all sides, men and women toiled beneath the dust torrent, heads shielded by hoods and towels soaked through with water. All worked furiously to sweep the ash layers off the wide A-frame roofs of the dozens of large glasshouses. Bodies ran with the sweat of exertion, volcanic grime binding to skin and clothing in caked mats.

Pulling on the fifteen-foot handle of a snow rake, Abel strained to bring down ash from the highest glass panels. He labored among dozens of others, going from greenhouse to greenhouse. The whole community, except those assigned to look after the town’s children, had turned out to rescue the structures from collapse. The citizenry had been terrified by the ferocity of the alien precipitation. It took raw-boned conviction to join the struggle against the volcanic debris. But here they were by the score, working in teams outside in the geological mayhem, toiling as if slaves before the whip.

Particles grinding together on the descent filled the atmosphere with fierce static electricity. When Abel picked up the snow rake he was using, a jagged white spark arced between the metal handle and his flesh, a shock forceful enough to buckle his knees. He dragged the socks off his feet, wrapped his hands in them, and resumed raking down the rock powder. The socks, he hoped, might blunt another shock if he let down his guard and absentmindedly touched another metal object or a fellow worker.

Human senses were betrayed. The ears of the laborers filled with the chatter of billions of ash flakes colliding in midair and bombarding objects. As the citizens toiled, the menacing sound seemed to slink off to some distant hideaway as dust filled in ear canals, adhered to earwax and was trapped by fine hairs.

Ash crystals grated like tiny rasps drawn across the eyes and skin, irritating cells until the eyes watered profusely and the dermal layers chaffed again cuff and collar. In the nostrils, ash adhered to sinus tissues, prompting a copious flow of mucus and blunting smell receptors to the point of uselessness.

Hour after hour teams labored against the ash, stopping only to dodge into a greenhouse to rinse suffocating volcanic clots from the wet cloth filters. No sooner had a team reached the far end of the greenhouse cluster than they backtracked to where they had started and began the process anew. The ashen storm sealed out daylight several hours earlier than the previous day. Nightfall descended abruptly. Abel pulled everyone off the line and directed them to one of the illuminated heated greenhouses. They had done their job well, for now, he told the crews. Tomorrow, if the ash continued to fall, they’d have to be up and out a first light to repeat what they had just so laboriously completed.

Abel left the sweating, overwhelmed citizenry in the safety of the greenhouse and stepped outside, absorbing a nasty shock from the metal door latch. He closed the entryway behind him and drifted into the fury alone, walking ten paces out from the structure.

The greenhouse he left thirty feet behind was a smudge of light in the void, nothing more. In the darkness, the air crackled with static. Bony fingers of electricity glowed from the ends of tools lost in the ash fall, akin to St. Elmo’s fire playing in the rigging of sailing ships.

Where did Independency, Minnesota reside? The village was invisible. It had been consumed, the whole of it. Yesterday, had he walked down of the hill from where the greenhouse banks stood, the village green and its buildings would have been right there, due east and just below. A good hefty toss and he could have hit the CC with a baseball if he so desired. Now the community was on the other side of the moon, for all intents and purposes.

PART III

Yellowstone Eruption May Yield Dramatic Global Cooling

By Adrianne Blakely, contributing science writer

The Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported this morning that eruption aerosols from the Yellowstone eruption have already encircled half of the globe and are beginning to block solar radiation from reaching the earth’s surface. The clouds of volcanic dust should begin impacting global temperatures within days. Sulfur and ash particles in the stratosphere are already having a cooling effect on surface temperatures in the United States.

In the portions of the Mountain and Great Plains States where sunlight has been blocked for days by heavy smoke cover from the smoldering caldera, scientists estimate temperatures to already be 12 degrees below the seasonal average.

NOAA experts warn that overall global cooling could be pronounced, estimates ranging from five degrees below the mean to as much as 15 degrees colder on average. The cooling effect from the eruption could linger for months, years, or even a decade. Sulfur particles in the upper atmosphere could linger for years, mixing with water vapor and forming a veil that acts like a mirror that reflects incoming light back into space.

Paleoclimatologist Paul Kraus at UCLA, making the rounds of morning talk shows in the Los Angeles basin, created a stir early this morning when he stated that the last Ice Age was in full swing when global temperatures were, on average, just five degrees lower than today. His comments went viral over the internet, and at this hour his comments have reached an unprecedented internet audience.

He warned that the Yellowstone eruption was the most powerful volcanic event since the Mt. Toba eruption in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, a cataclysm that nearly drove the human species to extinction.

Government officials have been downplaying such talk but urged people to take emergency precautions, stocking up on food, water, and heating fuels.

Chapter Sixty-One

The death throes of Yellowstone National Park slackened on the fifteenth day. The interminable pumice and ash fountains ebbed, lost power and altitude and fizzled to smoke well below the cliff tops of the newborn caldera. Surface strata that was once much of Yellowstone National Park now lay in the hollowed-out upper magma chamber, settling into its deathbed more than a thousand feet, and in some places more than twice that depth, below the terrain ringing the caldera rim. Several open vents in the depths continued to vomit lava even as their more lively and quick brethren flamed out to noxious exhaust.

No religious manuscript on earth carried passages that described hell as it manifested itself at Yellowstone. Every atom twitched wretched. The caldera floor and its walls smoked, disgorging an alchemist’s cocktail of poison. Pumice and fractured rock slides rained nonstop into the abyss, the sound of their falling lost in the depths of purgatory and rendered mute by the roar of vapor and gas venting from thousands of live steam fissures.

Hot poisonous air drifted toward the heavens, laced with toxins and sulfurous steam. The northwestern corner of Wyoming lay under perpetual night, so thick were the putrid clouds outpouring from the crater.

No living organism survived at the surface within two hundred miles, not so much as a thermophilic bacterium or archaic anaerobic microbe. The grand Yellowstone forests, every stick leveled or uprooted and blown miles from the eruption zones, were buried hundreds of feet below the massive sheet flows. The trunks of the trees, lost in their airless, super-hot coffin, charred to carbon charcoal even as the heat in the lightweight porous volcanic rock fused and welded the stone together to form a fragile lid over the dead world.

The new caldera would not rest peacefully. Although the magma chamber below lost its uppermost layer of material to the atmosphere and lands above, nearly ninety percent of the original magma ocean volume remained. With the weight of the rock strata above greatly reduced, the chamber began to receive more upwelling magma from the hot spot conduit pipe running deep toward the earth’s mantle.

Even as the caldera collapsed, it was poised to rebound slowly and to begin filling with newly extruded lava. Now that the great pressures were relieved by the eruption, there would be fewer and fewer explosive events in the near future for the Yellowstone country. The land would cough out torrents of ash occasionally and ooze lava for decades, as if leaking stinking puss over a festering flesh wound.

Seismic quiet returned. Seismographs at the Cascade Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington settled down, their ink styluses jiggling but no longer sweeping in great arcs over drum paper. Infrared satellite images lost their brilliance as the searing heat of the eruption was spent and buried. True-spectrum visible light images revealed nothing at all, as the caldera lay hidden beneath prodigious, opaque outgas clouds.

Space images of topography hundreds of miles outside the Yellowstone region were disquieting to scientists and media professionals alike who were pulling the digital images up on monitors in a thousand offices across the country. It was as if a time machine had rolled back eons to the dawn of creation. Did someone forget to load color film into the cameras? Rather than a greening, verdant living world, the photographs revealed a colorless, monotone moonscape covering hundreds of thousands of square miles.

Vulcanologists and geologists all over the West sought to rush off to Yellowstone despite the risks, but getting close to the caldera was impossible and would remain so for months. Helicopter was the only way in, but blowing ash and heavy particulate loads at every level of the atmosphere could destroy the intricate working of any chopper’s engine in minutes. Flights for any purpose, civilian or military, were grounded over much of the continental United States. There would be no going into Wyoming.

Chapter Sixty-Two

On the night of May 18th, late-season arctic air streaming across the Canadian Shield slammed into a moist low-pressure system over the Dakotas and exploded into a smothering sleet and snow line. Just after midnight, accompanied by gale force wind gusts, the storm barreled across Big Stone Lake, touching off a volcanic duster reminiscent of the topsoil-choked clouds of the Dust Bowl decade.

The wide overhanging eaves on Abel’s cabin snared increasing winds and gave them a howling voice. The moaning gusts woke the man from a fitful sleep. Abel lay in the dark listening to the commotion outside the single window in the exterior wall of his small, chaste bedroom. He rolled over on his bed and brought his head off the pillows to have a look at the world outside. Streaks of pallid mud pressed in against the pane and shellacked the grounds. A slimy paste of wet snow, ash and fine dust, driven to earth by the gale, was piling up.

Abel groaned aloud as he watched the horrid precipitation fall. It would put an end to the desperate work of pollinating insects and swipe fruit blossoms from branches and berry cane. There would be no apple and berry crop yields. Every seedling breaking from spring soils through the ash layer would be beaten down.

April had been unseasonably mild on the Great Plains and the first days of May had been luxuriously warm. Everyone in the Independency village was thrilled with the early start to the growing season. Then, during the second week of May, midday temperatures began to recede from their comfortable highs. The retreat from the mid-seventies down into the fifties alarmed Bobcat. He saw it as evidence that Yellowstone’s eruption was already beginning to assert itself on temperatures in the northern hemisphere. Abel, peering out the window at the chaotic environment outside, wondered if this nasty storm was the first scout out ahead of a climatic warring party.

Sitting on his mattress in the dark, Abel tried to pop out the bends in his bony frame. He could do it physically, but not mentally. His mind wasn’t up to the task. His young daughter lay asleep in the other tiny upstairs room on the other side of the narrow stairwell. The time had come to drop caustic news into her joyous existence. Sure, he could wait one more day to tell her that her mother was probably not coming home again, but he had waited one more day yesterday. He was afraid of this terrible duty.

The man rose from his bed, adjusted his one-piece union suit underwear and slipped out of his room to his daughter’s chambers, going along on bare feet as quiet as an owl in flight. Once there, he did not quite know what to do, so he sat down gently on the end of her bed.

In the darkness he could just make out the face of his child embraced by her pillow, Listening to her slow, rhythmic respiration, he studied the little life tucked under the covers, slumbering in a tiny room under a cabin roof that separated her from a driving blizzard of thick mud-snow. She was safe and comfortable despite the steady rat-a-tat on the window. That was what mattered.

Abel left Pelee’s room and felt his way down the stairs to the modest main room. He crossed to the cabin’s wood stove, rotated the damper and opened the stove door to throw a few sticks of hardwood onto the coals. Pulling up a chair, he sat close to the hot stove, orange light from the flames flickering through isinglass panes mounted in the cast iron door. The radiant heat felt therapeutic, a hot tonic for a brain full of cotton fiber.

Minutes scurried along the walls as Abel sat swaddled in darkness, soaking in the luxurious heat of burning kindling. The hooting winds, creaking stovepipe and the crackle of the fire were familiar sounds that masked the approach of little feet on the floor. Suddenly, Pelee was at her father’s side, startling him. He instinctively placed an arm around her waist and hoisted her up onto his lap. She nestled there and snuggled up against the man, wrapped in his arms.

“This is a nice little surprise,” Abel whispered.

“Mmm.”

“What brings you down here at this late hour, missy?”

“I was scared.”

Abel found the statement hard to fathom. “Pelee scared? No way.”

“I was. Honest.”

“What were you scared about?”

“The volcano.”

“Oh, the volcano.” Pelee’s admission sent a shiver through him.

“Pop?”

“Yes, missy?”

“Mommy was working at Yellowstone. And that’s where the volcano is.”

Abel’s chest tightened. He closed his eyes, knowing what was coming. Pelee had a razor-keen intelligence. She could thread minute and wildly divergent facts together and weave them into a whole, thoroughly thought-out conclusion. She customarily astounded him with her flashes of insight when confronted with novel situations. Could it be that Pelee was about to play a role reversal here and pin troublesome news on him?

“I know that the volcano was bad. It was really, really big. Mom was supposed to fly here then. She was supposed to be here a while ago, but she isn’t. She should have called. If she were going to be late, she would have called. But she didn’t call. That makes me scared.”

“Why do you think your mother hasn’t called, Pelee?”

“She would call if she could. If she didn’t call, that means she couldn’t call. Something happened to her. I think mommy is hurt. The volcano hurt her. I think the volcano hurt her badly. That’s why she hasn’t called.”

Involuntarily, Abel squeezed his daughter and held her tight to his chest. She began to sob quietly, pressing her head into his sternum. The child’s father was shaken by his daughter’s revelations. He was speechless, but he had to find his voice.

“Pelee.”

“What?” the little girl pouted, muffled against her father’s chest.

“I think you may be right. Your mom was working at Yellowstone when the volcano erupted.”

Pelee continued to sob quietly.

“We haven’t heard from your mom, so we don’t really know how she is. We don’t know if she is all right or not. But, Pelee, if your mother was still at Yellowstone when the volcano exploded, maybe your mom did not have a chance to get away. That’s possible.”

Pelee turned her head and placed an ear against Abel’s chest. “Pop?”

“What, missy?”

“Do you think mom is dead?”

Abel’s flesh and bone shook as if molded gelatin. He placed a hand to her hair and began stroking her head.

“We don’t know, Pelee, do we?”

“No.”

“She could have been hurt and can’t contact us. That’s possible. Bobcat says most communication is down. People can’t get through on phones or by email. If she could have called, she would have. So, we have to hope, Pelee. We have to hope that mom is somehow still alive and that some day she will be able to get in touch with us and come see us. We have to hold out hope.”

“You know what, Pop?” Pelee mumbled, sniffling and rubbing her nose.

“What, missy?”

“I know mom loves me.”

Chapter Sixty-Three

“Petah, please, please extinguish the lamps. We are all here now. We have but one candle lit. So, please, the lamps,” said elder Benjamin White Elk. The daughter of the Blackfoot Federation doctor, Sinopa, swept through the meeting hall at Chief Mountain village to carry out the task of puffing out half a dozen kerosene lanterns. White Elk’s shallow baritone voice hummed mellow and low to drive off the dead silence from the large interior space. A month earlier, the center could not hold everyone in the tiny Montana reservation town of the South Piegan Blackfoot. Now a third of the seats were vacant.

White Elk, in blue jeans and khaki shirt threadbare from long use, insisted on candles at the meeting. He wanted the light of the old ones to shine. The elder whom all the Blackfoot tribes knew to be as strong as heartwood and stable as kimberlite stone did not want to see the loose skin of starvation, the worm furrows of worry or the limp, joyless children with hollowing eyes.

No, White Elk wanted the saffron light of candles to bring back the warm glow of healthy flesh. Candles would represent warmth. Candles, most of all, would signify the return of the sun.

The wick filaments in the lamps went cool. Darkness closed in from the ceiling and pressed through cold windows somehow holding back heavy layers of volcanic ash. Now a single likeness filled the void. The elder’s face, sculpted as if from sedimentary rock before the winds off the Southwest deserts, reflected away the light of the single candle flame, scattering his image to the far recesses of the building.

“Petah, will you please bring your candle forth. And anyone who has brought a candle to the meeting, please follow her slowly, one at a time, up to the front here. Light the candle with the flame from this candle, and return to where you were sitting. Thank you.”

The young woman crossed from the rear of the hall quickly, wanting to catch the flame lest it go out before she reached the table. As she hurried along, the quiet gave way to rustling as many in their seats rose and shuffled out to the aisles to make their way forward. Down they came, dozens of young and old alike from the Blackfoot community. No one spoke. Feet, clad in boots to ward off the ash and cold temperatures, clattered along the floor creating a steady murmur. Eyes in dark sockets were fixed on the candle.

Slowly the hall began to glow gently, as White Elk hoped it would. The hard lines of tribulation on the brows, etched deep by the hard light of the kerosene lamps, melted like the wax in the candles’ aura. When the last person regained his seat, solemn quiet returned.

White Elk pushed his chair back from the table and stood up, rising above the other elders stretched along the simple furnishing. He waited. Silent. Waited a full minute.

“I would like to open this meeting with a prayer. Then we will get down to the difficult business ahead. But a prayer now, please. This is what I have to say: We are here at the end of days. And what are we doing now that we are here? My ancestors, your ancestors, all of our people who went before—before the white settlers came to this land and before we became like them—they knew what they would do at this time. And we must do as they would have done had they been alive on this land as we are now.

“Like this candle, one cannot hold back the darkness of an entire world. But many can light the darkness, as your candles are doing in this hall now. One alone, each one of us alone, cannot live through this time in isolation. We cannot shut ourselves away in the long night and weep with pity. The light in the soul will burn out, like the one candle.

“So this is my prayer. Seek the love of your family members. Seek to comfort and caress all our children. Seek to pray together with your elders. Seek to hold hands with all our brothers and sisters in our community so that we shall not be afraid when the days end.

“Like the candles, the sun will return and drive out the darkness. The ash will sweeten the earth and the grasses and trees will grow well again. The elk, buffalo and the bear, the fish, the eagle, they will return. When they do, we, too, will return.

“Until that time, we shall be remembered by our sacred paintings on the stones. We shall be remembered by our sacred drumming on the wind; remembered by our sacred chanting in the echo’s ring from the lakes. By our love of the sky, our one father and by our love of the earth, our one mother, we shall be remembered.”

White Elk let his words drift away in the candle smoke. He looked down at the waxy cylinder on the table. He put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and wet the tips. Then he reached down to the candlewick and pinched it tight between his fingers, killing the flame. He let another minute creep along the floorboards without a word.

“I had hoped our doctor, Sinopa, could be here to speak to you of a plan to save us," White Elk called in a tone of authority. Instantly the room filled with voices, a dam breach of words flooding out onto the seat backs and reaching the tops of the windows. The wave of noise swelled, when White Elk batted it down.

“Listen, you must listen. You must quiet yourselves.” He raised both arms over his head, spread them out to his sides and brought them down. The words drowning the hall were swept away by the gesture.

White Elk needed someone to deliver a stark message about the deteriorating health of the people, someone with medical knowledge that the people would not question. He needed an absolute. He needed Sinopa, but she had not returned from the northern villages across the border in Alberta, Canada. He took the task upon himself.

“You are starving. We all are starving,” White Elk called to the corners of the hall. “We need food. We need protein so that we may have clear minds to think about how we can survive these terrible months, and then thrive once things improve. We need fats so that we have calories to burn to keep our bodies warm. And we need lots of it. There are still many of us, thankfully. So we need a lot of food. Our stocks have run out, or nearly so. We have consumed our animals. Local game is gone from the forests, fish from the streams.”

“What will we eat?” broke a brittle shout from the left.

“We will do two things,” the elder continued, keeping on message. “We will do one thing now, so we may eat. And once we eat, we will move away from the ash. When the Yellowstone disaster hit us, it killed everything around us. With the mountains to shield us, we survived. Even now, much ash from the Yellowstone country moves east of us here. We are in a pocket of relative safety for now, but we must leave to find our way out of the ash. There is too much for us to live with.

“No one can get to us and we cannot get out on the roads. There are no supplies coming. Railroads and roads elsewhere are buried under mountains of ash or have been destroyed. We know this. What you do not know, but what we have just learned from the foragers just returning, is that the Kootenai elk herd is holed-up at the foot of Chief Mountain, just twelve miles away. Like us, the herd survived the scalding clouds. They were to the north, ahead of the worst of it. The herd tried to leave the area, but the animals suffered in the ash fall. They could not breathe in the ash and before long they began to get sick. They are dying now. Just by chance, in our protective valley, in our houses, we have not suffered quite as much as the elk.

“When the darkness descended with the ash and the weather turned cold, the ponoká had to yard up and seek protection among the trees. Now they are buried to their withers in ash. Many have died, but some are holding on. There are many hundreds of animals and they are still there. There are no predators to take the meat. They have died.

“We must go and harvest the meat, as much as we can. We must cut it up. We must dry the meat, smoke it, freeze it and protect it all, at all costs, so that we may eat for a few months.”

“How can we do this? We are in bad shape,” rang out a shout from among the seated.

“I will tell you how.”

Slowly, the elder raised his hands above his head, brought the forefinger of each hand together into a point. He spoke to his hands.

“My mother told me before the darkness came that we should return to the old ways to survive this tribulation. The old ways would provide for us and see us through to a new day. So, we will do as my mother said. We will begin right away.

“The first thing we will do is harvest hundreds of narrow poles from the forest and bring them here. We will lash them together to make travois, many of them, in the shape of my hands above my head. The travois we will pull ourselves. There are no dogs or horses to pull them. We will pull travois and carry with us what few supplies we can, and we will walk one whole day onto the mountain to the herd. When we are among them, we will take the weak, the sick and the dying and end their lives so that we may live. We will say prayers so their souls may be liberated. Then we will prepare the bodies, lash them to the travois and move on to Canada where they say the ash is not so bad. If we do our job well, we may complete the task in two or three days. Once we have eaten and are strong again, we will be able to walk to safety.”

“I will go with you,” sang out a voice from the back of the room. The words touched off a storm of shouts and hoots, many joining in to pledge their effort and support. The calling soon coalesced into a sustained, joyful cheer. It had been a month since anyone could recall a display of happiness.

White Elk glanced about the hall. A smile etched his lips, the yellow teeth of age shining, reflecting the warm light of many candles.

Chapter Sixty-Four

Standing in knee-high rubber boots on the peeling paint of his porch and shouldering a winter coat against a hard white frost, Harland surveyed his farmland to the horizon. Rather than moist late spring air and the smell of sweet tilled soil, the environment was fragile with cold and smelled of nothing at all. The earth appeared armor-plated everywhere, as if made of battleship steel.

What planet was this? Harland did not know. The familiar world of sweet black earth was buried out of reach. In its place were the plains of the moon. Rains and melted snow had fused the gritty ash surface into a thin welded crust. It knocked the blinding dust down, at the very least, when the westerlies didn’t blow too hard.

Harland waded into the ash moonscape, coughing as he went. In one of the large farm sheds, the farmer housed a vintage McCormick Farmall, a much loved but far smaller rig than his now moribund John Deere, abandoned at the far pitch of the homestead compound. Working feverishly since the letup in the ash fall, Harland got the older machine running and fitted it out with tire chains. He was desperate to drive it to town with a utility trailer in tow. Food was running out in the house. The family needed provisions desperately.

The town roads and state highways were sealed shut. Town highway department equipment failed the first day of the ash fall, as the graders, trucks and backhoes ingested ash and seized or shorted out. Much equipment lay buried under collapsed state sheds, brought down by the cement-like poundage of the volcanic ash. To save his own home and outbuildings, Harland had run a shovel over the roof on the homestead, pitching down the heaviest accumulations.

The Swede clambered up onto the open-air seat of the Farmall and cranked the key. Ignition spark caught gasoline and the engine roared to life. Harland raised his eyes to the heavens and uttered a “Thank you.” He pulled the tractor out of its shed, attached a utility trailer to it, and made off toward the house. The vehicle skewed sideways, spinning its knobby tires until the rig clawed down to the earth and the tire chains gained purchase. It would be slow going.

Leaving the tractor idling beside the porch, Harland stamped up the house steps and into the kitchen. The rotary dial phone rang as he closed the kitchen door. Harland picked up the old black Bakelite phone receiver and uttered a salutation. On the end of the line was Jim Bottomly, manager of the Sweetly cooperative grain silos. There was a tone of urgency in his voice, rolling over savage static in the line.

“Harland, Lord Jesus, I finally got through to somebody. Thank god for wires on poles. I’m glad you’re there.”

Harland recognized his old friend and business acquaintance immediately. “Now where else am I going to be, Jim?”

“Look, Harland, I’ve been trying to call coop members. There’s a National Guard unit working its way out from Sioux Falls, wanting to open up the rails. They’re coming this way, I think. They’ve got heavy equipment; even got some armored vehicles rigged up to move ash.”

Harland wrinkled up his face. “Well, it’s about time somebody came in here to try to open things up.”

“I know, Harland, but I got to tell you, they’re going to open the rail line for one reason and one reason only.”

“What’s that?” the farmer quizzed.

“They’re coming after the grain in the silos.”

There was a silence on the end of Bottomly’s receiver. A cold finger drew a line down Harland’s spine. “Jim, are the feds coming with a checkbook, or is the government coming in to seize the grain because there’s this emergency order thing going on?”

“They’re coming to take the grain, Harland. The feds got some new rationing plan in effect, you know. I think they’re going to take the grain out by hook or by crook and hand us an IOU.”

“An IOU? Hell, Jim, I can’t live on a promissory note. Neither can you. None of us can out here.”

“I know, Harland, I know. They’ve already been through Watertown and Brookings. They got a train into Brookings and that’s what they did. They offloaded the grain from Jorgensen’s there and then left town. I thought I’d let the coop members know, in case you folks want to have a say in this. The Guard is coming. They’re coming, like it or not. If they get the rails open, I think we can kiss the grain goodbye.”

“We can kiss our asses goodbye, Jim.”

“Look, Harland, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a dozen of other calls to make, not that I can get through. I’ll be seeing ya.”

Harland lowered the phone down slowly into its cradle. Eda peered over the rim of her glasses at her husband.

“What is it, Harland?”

“That was Jim down at the coop, Sugar. He said the National Guard is going to be here sometime soon. They are going to try to open up the rail line, he says.”

“That’s wonderful news.”

“That’s not what Jim was saying.”

“Why?” Eda questioned, a quizzical expression on her face.

“He says they’re coming to open things up so they can take the grain from the coop.”

“Take the grain? What do you mean ‘take the grain,’?”

“Jim thinks the feds will get a train in here, unload the inventory and leave town with us holding an IOU.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Feed people back east. People are going to starve if they don’t have something to eat.”

Eda looked at her husband as if he had uttered a profanity. “Why is Jim worried about easterners, for heaven’s sake? To heck with them,” she stammered. “We may need that grain for all we know.”

Chapter Sixty-Five

After a two-hour struggle, one that usually took ten minutes by car, Harland drove his Farmall tractor across buried railroad tracks on the outskirts of Sweetly and rolled in heavy ash onto Main. On the left, huddled below the coop grain elevator towers, the old, defunct Sweet Spring Brewery didn’t look quite right. Harland pointed it out to his wife seated in the utility trailer. “Will you look at that, Eda? The brewery’s lost some of its roof. Ash must have brought it down.”

Upon traversing Main, the Farmall waded into a buried parking lot in front of Sweetly’s one small supermarket, an independent IGA owned by an old local family. The farm couple entered a store that they had been in every week of their lives, ever since it had been erected in the early fifties. Then LaPerle’s had been a little miracle of marketing and design, a cornucopia brimming with 5,000 items.

Harland and Eda, like every one of their neighbors, could navigate the store blindfolded. Shopping was not a visual experience, really. Local customers didn’t so much see the layout of the store or the goods to be picked up as they sensed it. Farm wives, in town after an isolated week on the land, could become fully engrossed in gossip for an hour with another farm wife, yet without dropping a word or pausing to remember something, they could arrive at the checkout counter with a cart full to brimming with every single thing they wanted.

LaPerle’s interior glared at the Svens. The white shelves, customarily crammed with products, reflected naked light. Aisle after aisle was vacant. At the far end of the interior, where the meat counter was, Eda caught sight of a figure. The couple paced over to talk with old Elwin LaPerle.

“Help yourself,” LaPerle said, using the same two words he had repeated half a million times to his customers over the many years.

“Elwin, it’s so good to see you,” said Eda in all honesty.

“Well,” nodded the octogenarian, “I’m mighty glad you folks made it in. Some people I haven’t seen in weeks.”

Harland prodded LaPerle. “Elwin, what in god’s name has happened to your store? There’s nothing here.”

The elderly gentleman pulled his glasses off his long and age-freckled nose and cleaned them with his apron. “I could tell you what’s happened, but I ‘spect you can figure it out for yourselves. We can’t get deliveries. There isn’t a tractor-trailer moving anywhere in this country, so we can’t stock up. Once we run out of gasoline for the generator, we won’t have power either.”

Always jovial, long-winded but much loved by his customers, LaPerle seemed taciturn today. The grocer waved the couple through a service door into the narrow warehouse area behind the selling floor. He led them to a delivery bay where a number of large crates stood. Several were about half full with shriveling bulk storage potatoes. Two others held bags of lifeless carrots.

“Jig Morgan came in from his farm this morning with a load of the last of his storage potatoes and what’s left of his C.A. carrots,” LaPerle explained. “This is about all we’ve got. Get yourselves some boxes here and load up what you need for a few weeks. Whitey Westford, he’s been slaughtering his cows to cull his herd. He’s losing all his critters—can’t put them out on grass, of course, so he’s forced to cull them. He came down with a load of beef. No inspection, mind you, but to hell with it. He knows people are running out of food. Take a quarter-side home with you. It will last you a while.”

“Why, thank you, Elwin,” said Eda sincerely.

“What do you have to get for this, Elwin?” asked Harland.

“Never mind the money, now, Harland. When the ash started falling, we sold more food in a weekend than we do in two months. We don’t need the money. It’s useless right now anyway.”

Eda touched the old man on the shirtsleeve. “You’re too kind, Elwin.”

“Tell me, folks, where you staying?” asked the elderly gentleman.

“To home, of course,” said Harland, thinking the question odd.

“Lots of folks have set up in the school,” LaPerle instructed. “Families are running out of everything and they can’t get around. Having a real hard time of it, some of them. They need help. Lots of people sick, too. So the school’s been turned into a shelter.”

Harland pulled his tractor around the back of the store and loaded a hundred-weight of potatoes, a box of carrots and a quarter side of beef wrapped in sheet plastic into the trailer. After the last box was set down, Harland turned to address LaPerle, but the old man waved him off.

“Do me a favor, you two, will you?”

“What’s that, Elwin?”

“Stretch those victuals as far as you can. It may be a long time before help gets to Sweetly.”

Harland and Eda bid LaPerle farewell and motored away from the store and back onto Main Street. The Farmall rumbled past the deteriorating brewery and up to the office of the Sweetly Coop. Harland went in search of Jim Bottomly. He found the manager in a small back room that Bottomly used to keep equipment designed to test the moisture content of the grains and soybeans.

“That you, Jim?” Harland called out as he stepped to the half-open door to the small space. Bottomly spun around, recognized the farmer and waved to him to step into the room. The coop manager turned his attention back to a small microwave-size device, but managed a greeting. He banged the microwave with a fist. It would not come to life.

“Hello there, Harland. You made it to town, I see.”

“Somehow we did, Jim. How be ya?”

“Oh, fair.”

“Can you spare a few bushels of corn for me and Sugar, Jim?”

Bottomly turned to look over his shoulder at the farmer. It wasn’t the first time a member of a family had come through the door looking for some bulk whole grain to take home.

“You need some to hold you over, Harland?”

“I do. Can’t buy anything.”

“You’ve been over to LaPerle’s?”

“I just come from there.”

Bottomly put aside what he was doing, turned fully around to face the farmer. “Godawful, isn’t it?”

“I’ll say. You ever seen a store with nothing in it, Jim?”

“A grocery like LaPerle’s? No, sir.”

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Harland admitted. “You get used to something, you know, being there every day. LaPerle’s is LaPerle’s. It’s always the same. You never give it a thought. Go in today and it’s like another world.”

“I know what you’re saying, farmer.”

A manual timer sounded. Bottomly turned back around and busied himself for a few seconds. “Nothing but a whole lot of nothing,” he mumbled.

“What’d you say, Jim?”

“Oh, I was just getting a reading on the beans here. Moisture content, you know. Nothing’s working, though, not that any of this matters much anymore.” He paused for a second, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “Well, Harland, how much corn do you want?”

“Can you spare a hundred pounds?”

“A hundred? Why not take a couple hundred so you don’t have to come in any time soon? You and Eda could each eat a couple of pounds of the stuff a day if there’s no bread and cereal and such. Take a couple hundred.”

“All righty. What do you want for coin?”

Bottomly laughed. “I’ll bill you for it sometime, Harland. Do you have anything to put it in?”

“We could pipe it down into the trailer I hauled here with the old Farmall.”

Like all grain elevators, Sweetly coop was designed to load railroad hopper cars, not a farm utility trailer. But Jim Bottomly had a sixth sense when it came to operating the gravity feed offloading system. He calculated that he would trip the grain trap for just seconds and then shut it down again. That should free up a few bushels of grain, enough to get Harland what he needed. A second too long, though, and he’d swamp the trailer with a deluge of golden kernels.

At the top of his voice, Harland screamed for Bottomly to work his magic. In the cold air in the shadow of the grain elevators, a metallic thud sounded along with a noise like the rush of gravel from the back of a dump truck. The farmer looked to the spout just in time to see a snake of gold fall toward earth. A second later and the clank sounded again as thousands of corn kernels clattered into the trailer. In another moment, it was over. The little trailer squeaked and settled a bit under the weight of a tidy conical pile of grain. Harland gawked at the big feed-corn kernels heaped up in the trailer, spellbound by the color. The pile emitted the only rich tones whatsoever in the entire environment. The corn looked like the sun itself burning through a fog bank.

Back in the office of the coop, Harland thanked Bottomly for his generosity and his deft hand at loading the trailer.

“You got anything to grind that corn with?” questioned Bottomly.

“We’ve got an old hammermill in the barn, and we’ve got a few antique hand mills in the house. We should be able to make a decent corn meal.”

“Well, it will be corn bread and corn pone for a month of Sundays, Harland.”

Harland put a wry smile over his face. He had more urgent matters on his mind. All morning, seated on the cold metal seat of the Farmall, he had thought about Bottomly’s early phone call regarding the National Guard.

“Jim, you hear anything more about the Guard coming?”

“No, not since I called you this morning.”

“If they’re coming this way….”

“Hell, Harland, they’re coming, all right. They’re just north of Watertown now, on the Burlington Northern line. The ash dust bogs them down, you understand. Maybe they’re a couple of weeks away.”

“If they keep at it,” wondered Harland, “wouldn’t they go to Aberdeen and get the big town open?”

“Could, I suppose. But my guess is they’d want to meet Guard crews coming south from Fargo and Moorhead so they can get the rail open between the Dakotas.”

“That would put them on our doorstep.”

“Yes, it would, farmer. With the rail line through Sweetly, they’ll be coming through here regardless.”

“You’re certain they want the grain.”

“Positive. That’s what Ed Jorgensen down in Brookings said to me last night. The Guard told him in no uncertain terms to load the train they pushed and pulled into town.”

“And they loaded the train?”

“They did. Jorgensen had no choice. Orders are orders, you know.”

“And that’s that?”

“No, not really. Jorgensen told me that some farmers in Brookings got wind of what was going on, and some folks came down to the silos and threatened the Guard. Imagine that!”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, I guess. The train came and went. It left loaded. But Jorgensen said things got pretty tense down there for a while.”

Harland reflected on Bottomly’s remarks. If he and Eda were on the verge of going hungry now, then everyone in the county was living hand to mouth. What would happen in a month if things didn’t improve? What would be the food situation in Sweetly then? The feds wanted to ship the grain out, but what would come back in return, and at what cost?

Harland paced the worn floor of the coop office. Bottomly watched the farmer striding to and fro.

“What’s eating you, Harland?” Bottomly asked.

“Suppose it takes a month before the Guard can get anywhere near close to here. That means people in this county will probably be eating their own shoe leather.”

“That’s a fact.”

“With all this ash on the ground from the Rockies to the Mississippi, there ain’t going to be a crop come fall. What then?”

“I don’t know, Harland. I suspect most of the neighbors will quit the area once and for all when the Guard gets the rail line open.”

“Goodness sakes, Jim, we’re sitting on a 50,000 bushels right now. Folks here are going to need that food if they open up the line or not. They’re going to need it soon and they’ll probably need it for some time to come.”

Bottomly sighed. “You know, I was hoping nobody would come to that conclusion.”

“Well, it’s obvious, ain’t it?”

“Of course it is, old buddy. But what are we going to do about it, huh?”

“Jim, this is our grain,” Harland said emphatically. “It hasn’t been sold off to anyone.”

“There’s an emergency, farmer!”  Bottomly belted out the words. “The Guard’s got orders to take the grain.”

Harland scowled and shook his head. “Listen to what I’ve got to say, Jim. We can’t let the grain go, you understand. That grain may be our very lives. We’re going to need it to feed our families. They ain’t going to take it, Jim. You hear me. They ain’t going to take one damn kernel.”

There was a long silence and it hung in the room like the odor of dead mouse in the wall.

“Well, it’s an army that’s coming, Harland,” Bottomly said, the steam going out of him. ”What are you going to do, fight an army?”

“Tell the coop members that we’ve got to stop the Guard. Stop them with bullets, if we have to.”

“You’re crazy!”

“No, I’m not crazy. I’m dead set on this and you better be, too. We’re not going to starve to death when we have our own food supply right here in our own town. We let it go and no one on the outside is going to come in here to look after us.”

“That’s for damn sure, Harland.”

“So you tell everyone, Jim, that the grain stays. You tell them that if they want to protect their lives and their families, then we better draw a line in the sand right here in ol’ Sweetly.”

Chapter Sixty-Six

A rocking chair creaked by a corner window, the occupant of the chair a black silhouette against a moonlit ocean of frost-laden grasses and prairie brush. Liz detected the gentle swaying motion from her bed tucked into a small dark room with other beds. Who was this companion backlit by lunar reflection, she puzzled, and why was someone keeping a vigil while she slept?

“Who are you there?”

The creaking stopped. The form leaned forward and placed something on a small stand, a cup of tea, perhaps.

“I thought you might pay us a visit tonight,” said the silhouette. “You have been talking in your sleep a great deal.”

“I have?”

“Yes. You have been talking to someone. Your daughter, I believe.”

Lucidity flooded Liz’s brain at once. “My daughter? Where is my daughter?”

“I don’t know. She is not here.”

“Where is here?” The woman in bed tried lifting her head to survey the moonlit room, but her cranium seemed to weigh as much as her body. There were cots, eight of them, stuffed into a small space. Two other people occupied beds. The room reminded Liz of photographs of makeshift hospital wards set up in U.S. cities during the height of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

“You are outside the village of Stand-off Creek.”

“Where?”

“You are on the Blackfoot lands in Alberta.”

“Alberta?”

“In Canada.”

“My daughter is in Minnesota. How can I be in Canada?”

“You have been here for many many weeks.”

“What? I left Yellowstone….” Liz stopped in mid-sentence. Ice water drained through her tissues. “Yellowstone!”

“Yes, a terrible thing.”

“I was on a plane to Denver.” Chills were replaced by rising anxiety. “The plane flew into ash.”

“You survived the emergency landing of your plane several miles from this place, Elizabeth, and you have been with us in body but not spirit since that time.”

“You know my name. How do you know that?”

“You spoke your name the night we rescued you and the others. We talked then, but you have spoken only a little since.”

Liz threw the covers from her body, but moving them took great effort. She tried to sit up. A heavy rigid object on her left leg would not budge. Liz ran a hand over it; the feel of a full-length leg cast filled her with alarm.

“What happened to me?”

“You have had surgery to repair the bones in your leg. I removed a cast from your arm the other day.”

“I feel weak.”

“Your muscles have not had much work for many weeks.”

“Weeks? How long?”

“You have been in confinement for six weeks now.”

The revelation overwhelmed the scientist. She settled back onto her pillow, falling heavily as if she had received a punch.

“You had fractures of many bones on your left side,” Liz’s caregiver explained. “The breaks are knitting well now, but you need to begin therapy to build your strength. It will take time. I was worried about your mental condition, though. You suffered a head injury, a severe concussion and brain swelling, some facial trauma and bleeding. You have been in a coma.”

“Your voice is familiar,” said Liz.

“I have spoken to you often.”

“Who are you?”

“Sinopa.”

“Sinopa. Are you a nurse?”

“A doctor.”

“You have been caring for me?”

“After emergency surgery in Calgary, we had you brought here. There is no room in the city hospitals. There is great suffering on the eastern end of the province and across Saskatchewan. Medical facilities can’t handle the influx of the sick and injured.”

“It has to do with Yellowstone, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. The plains to the east are covered with a heavy burden. Ash is spawning respiratory illness and fostering much disease. I can’t reach my own daughter and the South Piegan people to the south, in Montana. Ash is heavy on the borderlands. It is impossible to go there.”

“You have a daughter? I do, too.”

“I know, you have been talking to her in your sleep. My daughter is Petah; I call her Petah. She is twenty years of age.”

“Huh. You know, my daughter’s name is something like that. Her name is Pelee.”

“That is very nice.”

“Thank you. Have you been in touch with your daughter to let her know where you are?”

“Communication is difficult. The eruption disrupted everything. There is no way to communicate with the South Piegan village, with her. But you must try to reach your daughter in the morning.”

“Oh, God, yes, I must.”

“You must try but it is unlikely you will get through. Things are that bad.”

“Pelee must think I died in the eruption.”

“Thank Napiw, you were not killed. I will see to it you regain your strength. I will make sure you see you daughter again.”

Chapter Sixty-Seven

On the evening of June 13th, a week prior to the summer solstice, a massive Canadian high pressure dome that had been building for weeks over the Mackenzie River delta on the Arctic Ocean thrust fully into the continental United States and overspread the northern Great Plains, the Ohio River Valley and the Northeast. The arctic, deprived of nearly ten percent of its normal twenty-four hour late-spring sunlight allotment by the heavy aerosol blanket from the Yellowstone eruption, never relinquished its late winter temperatures. Now a vast ocean of frigid air slid from the polar latitudes and stole into the heartland with no fanfare whatsoever.

At the international airport at Winnipeg, Manitoba, the automated weather station registered a freeze of 15 degrees Fahrenheit. At Pierre, South Dakota, the mercury bottomed out at 17 degrees, same in Duluth, Minnesota. Des Moines, Iowa: 19. Springfield, Illinois: 20. Lexington, Kentucky: 23. Pittsburg, Pennsylvania: 22. New York City: 28 degrees. Boston, Massachusetts: 26.

In the soil furrows of croplands across state after state, water molecules imbedded in food crop plant cells stiffened, one by one by one, into a solid state. Molecules built into crystals with needle sharp edges, perfect for piercing cellulose-based cell walls in countless plants in endless rows of crops. Soybeans, in particular, and corn fell victim to the ice crystal invasion from within. Red wheat, millet and oats, staples that could stand considerable cold, lost their fight as temperatures cascaded to the teens in the northern plains.

During the night, as the dew point and frosty temperatures collided, ice built up frost armies that marched on every surface across the land. Swaths of ghostly white clothed every living thing in wispy, thorny crowns of ice. The frozen regiments advanced west to east as the night wore on, leveling all but the heartiest of plants in the kingdom.

CNN late night editors, working through the wee hours, chose to mark the killing frost as their lead story for Morning Edition. In the history of television journalism there had never been a lead about the death grip of something so simple as common frost. Hurricanes, typhoons, drought and tornadoes were the usual summer meteorological fare, but summer cold? Never.

Abel invaded Bobcat’s domain in the video studio just before 6 a.m. Clothed in a parka, long johns and boots, and slumped in a seat, Independency’s figurehead flipped on a television monitor to pick up the headlines at the top of the hour.

“Our lead story is about winter in summer, about unprecedented cold June temperatures across much of the continental United States,” crowed a CNN anchor. “The National Weather Service is reporting widespread killing frost across the Northeast down to the North Carolina piedmont region, across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and through many of the Great Plains states as far south as Oklahoma.

“Agriculture officials from the affected states, whose farmers have suffered the loss of early plantings, are warning of a complete collapse of cereal grain and feed grain crops, including corn, wheat, soybeans, oats and more this year.

“For a closer look at the unusual conditions, we go live to Ohio and Ohio Agriculture Director Warner Reinhartson in Columbus. Thank you for getting up so early to be with us this morning.”

The man on camera shrugged and uttered in a heavy smoker’s voice, “You’re welcome.”

“What can you tell us about these latest cold conditions, sir?”

A stocky bulldog of a man in his late fifties, squinting behind glasses and topped with a military buzz cut, stood beside the black waters of the Scioto River in downtown Columbus. He rasped his words. “We have a disaster unfolding here in Ohio. We’ve lost our spring planting and subsequent plantings to the cold.”

“What are the prospects for replanting and a late harvest this fall?” asked the CNN anchor from studio facilities in Atlanta.

“It’s dangerously late in the season,” the state bureaucrat said, an edge of urgency in his voice. “I don’t know how to tell you this.” The man scratched his forehead and wrinkled his face. “With the prospect of other summer frosts or early fall frosts, there may very well be no harvest at all come fall. None whatsoever. It could be that bad. I have asked the governor to convene a meeting of experts to develop a strategy to safeguard what reserves we have in our grain storage facilities here in Ohio.”

“What impact will this latest weather have on Ohio’s economy?”

“Ohio may very well be a heavily industrialized state, but half of our economy is tied to agriculture. We can’t lose an entire crop. It would be devastating.”

“Can anything be done to alleviate the situation, director?”

“I’ve urged my colleagues across the breadbasket states to light a fire under Washington. The window is closing on planting anything. This country has got to take every step necessary to protect what food reserves we still have. If we fail to act….” The man stopped in mid-sentence and looked off-camera.

“Yes,” prompted the newscaster, “If we fail to act?”

The agricultural director looked squarely into the television camera lens. The man’s face crammed the monitor that Abel was watching through red morning eyes. “I’m afraid of the consequences,” he wheezed.

The CNN feature continued. Abel was drawn in, completely smitten. Food was at the heart of everything. Food was the foundation underpinning every society, he reasoned, weighing the implications of the report. As nowhere else on the face of the earth, people in the United States took food abundance for granted.

Before a news camera, pancake-flat fields in the truck-farm country of central New Jersey stretched away under morning light cast ruddy pink and dull. A CNN reporter had whisked her way down from New York City during the night on the empty New Jersey Turnpike to find Everett Mason, now sixty-one years of his age, standing amid rows of stunted tomato plants enduring a cold shower of water from portable, high pressure irrigation nozzles.

“I’ve been farming this land for forty years,” the man explained, directing his gaze at the reporter just off camera. “We’ve got ninety acres in fresh produce. I started out helping my dad, you see. After he died, I took over the farm. Our family has been at it ever since. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Why the sprinklers so early in the morning, Mr. Mason?”

“Just before dawn, we had temperatures down to twenty-four degrees. That’s one hell of a cold night for June. March sure, but the middle of June? No one has ever seen that kind of a chill here at this time of year. It just doesn’t happen. We’ve got the irrigation system up and going as soon as we could, but I think it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“You can stop frost in its tracks when the temperature drops below freezing if you spray the plants with water. A blanket of water ice forms on the plants and keeps them warmer than the air temperature. If the temperature isn’t too cold, it works fine. You save your crop.”

Mason pulled up an ice-coated tomato plant and looked it over. The truck farmer lamented, “This is the second planting now. We lost the first during the first cold spell after that Yellowstone blowup. These plants are small, too small. They should be big and full of green tomatoes just weeks away from being ripe enough to pick, box up and ship north. They aren’t growing. Just too little sun and too damn cool during the day, every single day.”

‘What are your plans in the event the weather has crippled this crop?”

“If we lose this crop, we’re history. We can’t plant again. Even if we could find seed stock to plant, it’d be too late: tomatoes, cukes, squash, pumpkin, all gone. The sweet corn would never mature. We’d just grind up what’s in the field for silage. At least then we could feed the silage to somebody’s cows.”

“Can you salvage anything at all?”

“The broccoli and cabbage, yes, maybe. They can take some hard cold. But let me tell you something, young lady, if this is going on west of us, out in the corn belt, there isn’t going to be one kernel of corn to fatten up a hog, not one kernel for your corn flakes.”

Abel triggered a remote and settled on NBC, running taped footage from the previous day. A husband and wife team leaned against a door opening in the wall of an empty tobacco-curing shed. The fields stretching alongside the shed had been tilled under and not a thing was growing in them. Abel’s ears rang with Kentucky twang as the man, dressed in a windbreaker and Cincinnati Reds cap, fielded questions from a reporter off-camera.

“We was supposed to enter the new emergency program. The county agent told us we was going to get seed and nitrogen fertilizer so we could bring in a crop of feed corn. We’re tobacco, always been tobacco. They told us we had to make the switch right away, you know, till under the tobacco and get ready for corn. They was going to bring in a corn drill and everything for us to use for a day so we could plant. They’d show us how to use the thing.”

The farm wife, in well-worn coveralls and a NASCAR jacket, scowled at the camera. “We ain’t seen no corn. We ain’t seen no nitrogen fertilizer, and we ain’t seen that planter contraption neither.”

The man pointed out across the fields that, under normal mid-June conditions, would be brimming with knee-high green.

“We tilled under everything, see, as we was told. But it’s been almost a month now, and we got nothin’ to plant. I been callin’ all the time, but I get no answers. I did find out from the auction barn that they ain’t no seed corn to be had anyway. It’s all in the ground in the Corn Belt, but nothin’s comin’ up. Too much frost. Corn can’t stand it, you know.”

His mate spit to the earth. “What are we supposed to do? We got no crop comin’ now. The feds tell us do this, do that. It’s an emergency. They’ll pay us to plant the new crop. But we got nothin’. It ain’t right. You can’t eat dirt, now can you? You sure as hell can’t smoke it neither.”

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Three lunar cycles removed from the day of the Yellowstone eruption, White Elk concluded that Napiw had abandoned the Blackfoot to the ash. On every front there was a new menace rearing its ugly head to strike out at the children and the oldest citizens—darkness, blowing ash, clogged lungs, so little food of any kind. The cold, the perpetual confinement to the community center and the constant expressions of fear and pain on the faces of the adults all conspired to sap vitality from the little ones and the aged alike.

And still ash fell occasionally in the folds of the mountains and across the western prairie. White Elk no longer recognized Chief Mountain village. It had been swallowed whole by the volcanic filth. Only the tallest rooftops poked up above the gray, those having been saved from collapse by constant shoveling. Occasional rains turned the land to a sea of slurry.

The skies above Chief Mountain had been corrupted by the stone rain. Dull twilight took the place of the blue vault during the sunlit hours. To the south, the horizon sulked under a gangrenous screen of smoke, the sun invisible. Late in the day, the solar ball appeared low in the west as an angry blood red disc, just before it drooped over the rim of the world. Without its warm embrace, the vile days of summer were sharp with chill.

Scores had died and many more were in respiratory distress. Famine gnawed at Blackfoot flesh. All were living off their body fat, a few roots from a town storehouse and the last of meager rations from the village store. The few horses, chickens and pigs that the community kept had been slaughtered and consumed in the first weeks, as most had been injured or killed in the blast surge on the first day of May.

White Elk thrust the front entrance door of the community center aside. He stepped out onto the landing, coated with gray dust but free of heavy ash deposits.  The air was still, as White Elk had hoped, the early morning atmosphere icy. White Elk sensed it was comfortable enough to give the order to go. Today they would leave to find the Kootenai elk herd stranded below the north face of Chief Mountain. They could wait no longer.

Slipping among the sleeping children, White Elk woke men and women of the community. Most were desperate to do something to improve their condition. Some saw the community center as a coffin that would soon seal shut over them if they did not take action. Leaving Chief Mountain for the North Piegan villages in Canada was the only chance to salvage their lives.

The Blackfoot would be beasts of burden, a hand-fashioned towing travois lashed to every able-bodied soul. They would carry blankets, a few tents, knives and axes, water, and little else. If the very oldest residents became too weary or sick to continue on, they could ride in one of the travois.

The plan devised by White Elk and several elders was to fasten snowshoes to the feet, tow the many travois and walk the twelve miles around the east flank of Chief Mountain in one day, trying to manage a mile per hour. By nightfall, they needed to be in the vicinity of the elk herd that was bogged down in the ash up to their withers. According to a scout, the animals were on the lower north slope of the mountain and were dying beside the banks of Lee Creek. On day two, the tribe members would dispatch as many of the stranded elk as they could, quarter the animal carcasses with axes and knives, and load the meat onto the travois. The Blackfoot would eat the flesh of the animals then and there to replenish their strength. On day three, they would continue north, dragging the heavily loaded travois in the hopes of walking out of the heaviest ash by nightfall.

After inspecting the preparations and taking the measure of the mood of the villagers, White Elk felt confident enough to wake those who still slumbered and rally everyone together in the main hall. Every tribe member, every parent and child, assembled in the half-light of the cave-like room. The elder surveyed the haggard clan, their clothes full of grit and dust, their skin and hair infested with mineral film.

“We will go now, today,” White Elk announced, summoning up a voice of strength and volume. “We all know what to do. We are Blackfoot. Once we were strong, the strongest of the native peoples on the plains. Napiw has seen to it that we are tested now. He wants to see if we can rise again and be strong like our ancestors were. We will meet the challenge he has presented to us.”

Men, women and able teenage youth dragged the travois out onto the ash and lashed snowshoes of hardwood and gut or aluminum and canvas to their feet. Volunteers raised the travois units and tied themselves in. The essentials for the trek were placed aboard the haulers. Then tribe members turned to each other and, one by one, bound faces with heavy moist cloth to help filter the air.

With little fanfare, what was left of the South Piegan Blackfoot pulled away from their village, headed for the east flank of the peak of the same name, an apparition to the northwest. The younger members, excited to be free from the bonds of the buried town, sprinted ahead. White Elk screamed after them to slow down and conserve what little energy they had remaining in their underfed bodies.

Within an hour, the tribe members had stretched out in a long single-file line, the leader nearly a half-mile ahead of White Elk, clustered with several others at the end of the string. The elder would not think of speed, only of slow, deliberate and steady progress. Perseverance had served him well all his days. He had not been the biggest, swiftest or strongest of the males among the Blackfoot, but he would stay on task as no other, see things through to their conclusions and then act decisively.

Several hours from the village, the Blackfoot came to the northern extent of the vast blowdown swath that the Yellowstone eruption had left in its wake. Abruptly, in a distinct line of division, the thin forests shifted from horizontal to vertical. To the southeast, most of the trees were toppled and were completely buried in ash, save for the occasional branch or leaning trunk. To the northwest, stands of evergreens and aspen towered.

Calm weather prevailed through the morning hours, but by noon rising winds along the summit began to sweep ash off the heights, sending long, smoky horizontal streamers out over the prairie. The atmosphere slowly filled with billions of minute particles sent tumbling with each new gust. White Elk stopped to tie his cloth mask as tight as he could over his mouth and nose. Bundled against the chill, and walled off behind the filter, only his eyes and forehead peeked out on the world.

High above them, Chief Mountain seemed to shrug its shoulders to free itself from its mantle of ash. The falling debris growled and roared, its tumultuous noise racing into the flats and through the evergreens. The ash burden slowed quickly on the sloping outrun of the mountain, but its cargo of fine dust continued to forge ahead and billowed into the path of the Blackfoot. The dust arrived with a forward pressure wave, inundating them with clouds of volcanic detritus.

The pace of the trek slowed dramatically. Huddled in the ash void, White Elk scanned the area, picking out ghosts, as Blackfoot trekkers appeared when the dust veil parted momentarily. People were formless, each laden with a colorless crust. The early exuberance had evaporated. The band was silent to a person. All stood, heads drooped to their chests, facing north. As visibility deteriorated, the only landmark to show the way was the thinning edge of the forest, riding the flank of the mountain.

The ashen air snuffed out the light of a truant sun. Darkness rushed into the thicket. The Blackfoot were short of their goal, but there could be no progress in the dying light. White Elk motioned everyone to free themselves from their travois and to pull the few tents under the boughs of the trees. The people worked feverishly to erect the tents so they could escape, in some small measure, the foul air. The clan felled several dead trees with axes, stripped the branches, chopped them into manageable pieces, and piled the wood at the center of the little tent cluster. A fire was lit and licks of flame caught in the tinder.

The boughs, brimming with dried resin, snapped and sparked as the fire roared to life. The yellow dancing flames and sudden heat were greeted as deliverance from the shock of the last dreadful hours caught in the maelstrom of blowing ash. Wails of relief and spontaneous shouts of joy escaped from parched and raw throats. As darkness descended fully under the tree limbs, the band of Blackfoot huddled as closely to the fire as they dared. Each let the heat of the blaze saturate the skin.

White Elk, outside the tight circle of people around the fire, sat on the ground rocking in pain. The joints in his knees ground together as if entombed in shards of glass rather than padded by soft cartilage.

The heat from the noisy fire was an effective sleep agent. The exhausted troops, without the prospect of food and with little desire to converse, melted away into the tents to sleep tightly packed together, under a few wool blankets to conserve body heat. White Elk curled up by the fire, scooped a mound of ash into a makeshift pillow with his hands, and settled down to try to sleep, despite the pain in his legs.

Exhaustion pulled him below the surface of consciousness for short intervals, but, like a new mother listening for a peep from a snoozing newborn in a nursery, he could not slumber long. Through the bituminous evening, cries from the smothered land stole through the evergreens to wake him. In the rock rigging of the mountain, the wind sang, its thousand voices bounding and lofting, ebbing and then dying away, only to catch a breath and soar through the octaves once more.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Probing the innards of the cabinets above her kitchen counter, Winnie Deschaines pulled down a box of Raisin Bran for which she had paid nearly nine dollars, almost three times what she might have spent for the pound of wheat and fruit four months earlier. She glared at it. It was empty like much of her cupboard. She retrieved her car keys, reached for a light parka, and vaulted out the door. Light rain was falling, enough to knock down the omnipresent volcanic dust that wreaked havoc with auto electrical systems and clogged air filters.

Piloting her Jeep Liberty in the rain, slithering in four-wheel drive in bumper deep ash muck, she crawled to nearby Platte Forest to a Harvest Bounty natural foods supermarket. Under weak emergency lighting, the lot was half full with other 4x4s that had somehow managed to get to the store. Two-wheel-drive cars couldn’t navigate in the slick. Suburbanites were streaming in and out of the market.

Usually a quiet, almost sedate shopping experience, the Harvest Bounty was throbbing with noise and chaotic activity. Suburban Platte Forest’s upper middle-class shoppers pawed at the threadbare shelves and stuffed carts with whatever staples they could find, grabbing at boxes and cans, shoving and shouting. Winnie slinked about the store with the lone shopping cart she could find, watching the melee in the aisles as employees tried to dampen flare-ups that broke out every few minutes.

Winnie collared a young store employee she knew who had been physically pushing his way between agitated customers to create a human barrier. His efforts were an ineffective deterrent to the escalating mayhem. “What do you want from me, Ms. Deschaines?” the young man gasped.

“Nothing, nothing, Jared. I just want to know what’s happening.”

The young man scanned down the aisle and put a hand to his forehead. “This is insanity.”

“What brought this on?”

“I think it was the news, because of what happened in South Carolina. Did you hear about it?”

“Hear what?”

“I heard it. People got gunned down in a Piggly Wiggly. Shook me up. It must have scared everybody. They started pouring in here this afternoon. Something touched them off. The news must have done it. I’ve never seen anything like this,” the store employee marveled. “It’s a panic is what it is.”

Shouts sailed across the aisles. The man waved off Winnie and ran toward the commotion, leaving the woman to drift in the breakfast cereal aisle. It was nearly empty of boxes, and shoppers were scrambling for the few remaining items.

Without a conscious thought, Winnie entered the fray, squeezed between several jostling women, and grabbed at several bulk rounds of instant rolled Quaker Oats on the bottom shelf. She pulled up two packages when something, a pocketbook, whacked her squarely in the face. The impact tipped her; she lost balance and stumbled, as sharp words boxed her ears: “Get away from it, bitch!”

As she righted herself, the form of a middle-aged woman in a tailored business suit filled Winnie’ line of sight, the female pulling an oats pack from her grip. With venomous intent, Winnie lashed out and slammed a hand down on her attacker’s shoulder. Employing a self-defense training technique, she dug fingers into the pressure point at the base of the skull. The woman’s knees buckled and she spilled onto the floor, sprawling prone.

Other shoppers recoiled, anxious to get away from Winnie. She swept around and glared at each and every one of them, coals of rage smoldering behind her eyes. Convinced she would not be challenged, she picked up the Quaker Oats containers and held them high, defiantly before her, for all to see. “Mine,” she screamed. “Mine!”

Winnie circled the store, a panther in the aisles, trying to cool down her boiling blood. There was little to be had on the shelves, so she slipped through a storeroom double door and wandered into the supply hub of the business. No one paid her a bit of attention. As she rambled among the three-pallet-high racking system, she got the impression that the market was suffering from chronic anemia. Such spaces were always crammed with product, but not today. The steel stock racks, standing in the cold light of a few naked light bulbs, looked like skeleton bone. Wooden pallets that foods were shipped on were empty and lay scattered about in heaps.

The agent’s cell phone jangled. Winnie jumped and chirped, the jingle startling her so. She flipped the lid on the device and uttered a flat salutation.

“Where are you, Winnie?” one of her superiors at Midlands Research Group broke through.

“I’m just off 1-29 north, at the Platte Harvest Bounty super trying to pick up a few things. It’s chaos here.”

“Never mind. Can you get home?”

“Sure, why?”

“Can you go on-line and see if you can tap into Mid-Continent Consolidated. It’s a 350,000-square-foot consolidated warehouse business. They are out near the International Airport, at Ferrelview. I don’t know if their data operations are there, but that’s immaterial.”

“What do you need?”

“Mid-Continent is a big food distribution player.”

“Are they a client of ours?”

“Yes. Mid-Continent serves major supermarket customers all over the heartland.”

“So it’s a food warehouse?”

“Yes. Meat and canned goods were commandeered from the docks at gunpoint. Men in military vehicles, we’ve been told, like troop trucks; they stormed the place. The executives are convinced it was an inside job—too clean, too big, too fast. So that’s where you come in.”

“Did they provide with anything, any code I can use to get into their system?”

“Yes, Mid-Continent gave us what you’ll need. See what you can glean from the internal scheduling data, recent shipments, inventory changes, personnel on the floor and such. I’ll give you more details when you get home.”

Winnie swept her wiry hair to one side. “A food heist. God, I can’t quite believe it”

“Well, believe it. Food’s the next big black market gig, Winnie. Food!”

Chapter Seventy

In the flat light of early dawn, the Blackfoot band crawled from their tents to find an utterly formless world beneath the trees. Most had spent a wretched night coughing, shivering to ward off the night’s chill and trying to banish demons of fear from their thoughts. Fatigue and hunger hollowed out every facial feature. Eyes ran with moisture, cutting furrows of ash mud down each cheek. Nostrils were ringed with gray crust.

White Elk saw nothing but corpses standing before him. He could imagine their misery, though they had little choice but to shunt pain aside. He had to rally the many. The key was time. It would only be a matter of hours, he calculated, before the band would reach the stranded elk. Then there would be real work to do, food to eat, and a chance to salvage their lives.

Saying nothing, the elder turned and left the tribe members, grabbed a travois, hoisted it up and fastened himself into its harness. Without looking back, he turned toward the mountain and paced out of the glade. In silence, everyone watched White Elk perform his little duties and walk away to the northwest, travois in tow. If the old man could continue on, there could be no dallying for the rest.

Two hours out from camp, the slopes of Chief Mountain turned in an arc to the west under the near-vertical north face of the peak. The Blackfoot trudged up a long incline, leaving the Otatso watershed. The band, moving in clear air, mounted a low height of land and descended into the valley of the east branch of Lee Creek. They could sense they were nearing their destination.

The Blackfoot toiled in stands of trees for several hours over the last miles until the forest trunks began to thin out. They were on the approach to the boundary of the short grass prairie when at last they reached the banks of the east branch of Lee Creek. The waters ran milky in color, saturated with volcanic residue, but the rivulet was inviting. Many slid down the ash slopes to the narrow stream and immersed their heads in the bone-jarring cold fluid to wash away the encrustation accumulated on the trek.

The party had oriented perfectly, intersecting the east branch as required rather than aiming too high up the mountain slopes, missing the stream altogether and picking up the middle branch instead. The scouts had said the elk were on the east branch at the point where the mountain’s outrun slopes vanished in the flats of the open plains. The herd, they reported, would be stranded in the last stands of trees before the grasslands commenced.

White Elk calculated that the tribe would have no more than a thousand feet or two to walk alongside the stream banks before they reached their quarry. Several of the members, eager to get to the elk, stood looking for a sign from him. White Elk simply pointed along the creek. “Leave your travois here for now. Go see what you can find.”

A few young men and women, all gaunt with hunger, dropped their burdens and hustled away on their snowshoes as fast as they could muster. White Elk and the others collected themselves and shuffled downstream. In the first sharp bend in the creek, the tribe members stopped. In the stream, the lead group was investigating the carcass of a large animal stranded on a gravel bar. It was a young elk, a female. The Blackfoot tried to raise its head, but the creature was as rigid as timber.

White Elk scrambled down the bank of the creek, groaning from the pain in his knees. He strode to the downed animal and ran his fingers along its lips and gums. They were as white as bone. Reaching into his parka, the old man fished for a small hunting knife, removed it from its sheath, and grasped it firmly in one hand. The eyes of the men and women in the stream were riveted on their elder to see what he would do with the cold dead beast.

White Elk knelt beside the stiff animal and plunged the blade into the lower belly of the creature. He pulled the blade out half way, rotated it to a shallow angle, and pulled up. The skin of the lower abdomen of the elk unzipped. White Elk continued until the entire belly was breached up to the rib cage. The man plunged his head down into the cavity and sniffed repeatedly.

“What do you see?” asked one of the young men.

White Elk nodded slowly, in thought. “This animal has been dead for some time. But it died here in the stream. The freezing nights and the cold water have done well to keep the meat fresh, I think.”

“How do you know this, old man?”

“Open the belly of any animal after it has been dead a short time and the smell will drive you away. You can’t stand it, unless it has been very cold at the time of death. In the water, the animal cooled down very quickly.”

White Elk handed the knife to a young woman kneeling at the head of the creature. He made a gesture for her to slice into the neck and to cut away a hank of meat. Without a second’s delay, the young woman did just that, craving a chuck of flesh away from the animal’s neck the size of a man’s fist. She handed it to the elder. White Elk brought it to his nose and again he sniffed. He nodded. Examining the tissues with his fingers, he nodded again.

“What, old man, what?” called out one of the men.

“The meat has little odor. It smells clean. It is still fresh. The flesh is dark because it is still in blood. It hasn’t drained away, you know, like when we stick a hog and let the blood run out.”

“What should we do, White Elk?” came a voice from the creek bank.

White Elk grinned, flashing his teeth. “Build a fire now. We all need to eat.”

A roar went up from the motley crowd gathered along the bank. People exploded into action, sweeping into the forests to gather fuel wood. The elk was pulled out of the stream, the body skinned in minutes, entrails removed, and the flesh, heart, kidneys and liver cut into thin strips to be skewered and placed over flames.

White Elk watched the proceedings, one hand held over his mouth. Petah observed the old man in a pensive mood and came over to him.

“Old one, you seem troubled.”

White Elk sighed, “Oh, no, my Petah, I am fine. I am just thinking a bit.”

The woman, once radiant but now pale and emaciated like the others, prodded him. “What must you be thinking now that we have found food?”

“I was thinking about the ponoká that died here. Three months ago, if an animal had died in the stream, there would be eagles and ravens perched in the trees, vultures overhead. There would be coyotes coming to feed. A bear or a mountain lion would have tried to move it and cache it somewhere in the trees.”

The young woman reacted little to the old man’s words.

“But we found the ponoká first. That means one thing, Petah. It means that there are no longer any of our animal brothers about. They have probably died. The eagles, maybe they have flown away from the ash to where living is better. I hope so.”

“I wish we could fly away, too,” said the woman softly. She lowered her head and walked away.

The Blackfoot built a large hot fire, sharpened dozens of long sticks, and skewered the freshly cut meat. One by one, the people ran their sticks out over the fire to roast the flesh. Most were too impatient from hunger to lodge the end of the branch into the ash on the ground and wait idly by to let the food cook. Each waved and turned the meat around and around in the flames, listening for the sizzle and pulling the stick out of the heat to sniff and savor the aroma of the roasting protein.

White Elk watched the people brighten before his eyes. Smiles flashed about the fire and eyes filled with color. Talk and laughter erupted, filling the woods with merry chatter, loud enough to drown out the stream. Goaded by hunger pangs rumbling in empty guts, a few wanted to sample their fare within a minute or two, but the older members coaxed the younger ones to be sure to cook the food thoroughly.

The first bites of roasted elk brought shouts of glee. White Elk waited until everyone around the fire had finished cooking and had settled down to eat. He then brought a slender slab of elk flank to his mouth and nibbled a tiny piece away. He chewed it slowly, mixing saliva with the food so that his mouth became saturated with the ancient flavors of wild meat. The sensation of the rich smoky taste vibrated throughout his body, wringing a weighty sigh from the depths of his lungs.

The clan fell silent, fixated on the urgent task of filling their bellies. They were ravenous and did not slow the pace of their eating until they had cut up, cooked and consumed the animal.

The sun, nearly invisible behind the black shroud of smoke still filling the heavens far to the south, told White Elk that it was mid-afternoon. There was work to be done, locating, killing and quartering whatever elk they could find. But the elder thought it best to let his people rest for half an hour, time enough for nutrients from the meat to find their way into the bloodstream and provide some energy for the toil ahead. So the old man signaled for all to relax and sit or stretch out by the fire. Like puppies in a whelping bed, young and old piled onto one another around the flames. Some fell asleep in seconds.

The pain in White Elk’s left knee made rest impossible. He kneaded the muscles and bones at the knee, trying to exorcise demons from the joint, when a shattering thunderclap rammed through the valley. Volleys of cannon shot sound reverberated off Chief Mountain and bounded into the vast prairie spaces to the east. The blasts startled everyone and fear froze in the faces around the fire. But as the noises rumbled away into the plains, the tribe settled down again.

White Elk, ignoring his knee, got to his feet. He scanned the horizon above the trees for signs of trouble. He could see nothing more than the now familiar black screen of smoke that hung from the heavens in the south. The explosive sounds unnerved him, so similar were they to the roar from the throat of Yellowstone three months past.

The people had rested long enough. White Elk roused everyone and set the tribe in motion once again. Within minutes, the strongest had vanished downstream, towing their travois.

Around the first bend in the creek below the campfire site, several more elk were down in the stream. Tribe members fell on the animals with axes and began dismembering the carcasses. A sinewy young man, running in the creek, called out to those upstream that there were many elk stranded in a streambed elbow just ahead. White Elk left the workers butchering the two ponoká in the creek bend and went down river to see for himself what the young man was calling about. He paced 300 feet along Lee Creek until he could see a large blowdown tangle in the distance. Many people busied themselves at the foot of the forest debris, cutting into the bodies of two-dozen animals.

In desperation, White Elk theorized, the elk must have congregated at the edge of the massive tree fall. It blocked their way north during a period of intense ash rain, so they must have huddled there against the volcanic storm and, slowly over several weeks, died of starvation or respiratory distress.

Elk quarters piled up in the travois. White Elk moved from one to the next, removing the hide to lessen weight. He was immersed in his labors when a rising, whispering swell permeated the evergreens. The elder looked up from his work to listen. Around him, others stopped their efforts and stood captivated by a steady hiss infiltrating the tree stands. White Elk spun around and yelled down to those dismembering the elk carcasses, “Stop. Stop. Cover your faces. That’s volcanic ash coming.”

In mid-sentence, a wall of gray sleet billowed out of the pine and swept over Lee Creek. Torrents of volcanic fluff clamped down on the work camp. Millions of dead mineral flakes cascaded from the heavens, swallowing up everyone as the clan made a frantic dash for cover and to find anything to cover exposed faces. Dimensions disappeared in the gray foulness, leaving many stumbling blind in the blizzard.

White Elk pulled a travois off the ground and angled it against tree trunks. He pulled others up and did the same, and screamed for anyone who could hear him to follow his voice and duck under the travois, standing like lean-tos against the trees. Gray ghosts crawled under cover as the old man kept up his wailing calls to guide people struggling in the volcanic void.

In a single minute, the joy and exhilaration of being able to harvest much needed food evaporated and was replaced by gasps for breath. The ash deluge horrified White Elk. The new fall was equal to the worst days of the terrible first week of May. No snowfall he had ever witnessed in all his years had fallen with such force.

A flash of fear pierced the elder’s bowels. The snowshoes, discarded while everyone worked over the elk, were essential to their ability to move, to their very survival. They had to be retrieved. They could not be allowed to be buried out of sight.

White Elk rolled out from under the travois and got to his feet. No one noticed him leave. He stood for some moments trying to sense the direction he should move in; he could see nothing substantial. The snowshoes would be piled on the banks alongside the creek. All he had to do was estimate the direction and the distance and shuffle away until he came to the point where the bank dropped away. With his feet, or on his hands and knees if need be, he could swing along the bank and feel for the snowshoes.

Blinded by the ash crystals and tortured by seizures of coughing, White Elk slipped into the gray-out. He walked as if on thin lake ice, relying only on dead reckoning to move at all. Pushing the toe of one boot ahead in the ash, he tried to sense firm footing. He stopped to try to determine a bearing and to bury his face into his coat away from the ash onslaught. White Elk wiped down his face with a hand, freeing the margins of his eyes of stone crust. Pushing away his physical pain, White Elk resumed his quest for the snowshoes, stepping into nothingness.

His right foot caught air. Gravity seized his coat collar and yanked him forward. The old body tipped over and fell from the bank of the Lee. White Elk slammed down on his right side, his right arm tucked in under him to take the blow of rounded rock rubble in the streambed. The humerus shattered and the elbow joint punched into his ribs, fracturing several. The man’s head crashed down, the palm of his hand shielding direct contact with the rocks. White Elk lost consciousness upon impact.

Trickling water roused the old man. He was sprawled on his back, his torso dampened by shallow creek riffles and covered with an inch of ash. His head, oozing thin ribbons of blood, faced downstream. Something stood over him. He tipped his head back to get a look, ash pouring into his mouth and eyes.

A great white form materialized from the mineral downpour. It was a dream beast, big and standing erect on four legs—a great ponoká. It towered above him. Slowly the creature lowered its head, bringing a square muzzle down to inspect him. The face was white; all its fur was bleached of color. It spoke to the elder sprawled in the creek in the tongue of the Blackfoot.

“Old man, you have come so far. But you are not finished. It is not the time to take the burden from your shoulders and lay it to one side.”

White Elk contemplated the beast, ash crystals scratching his eyes. It seemed a kindly creature, a gentle spirit. He felt a measure of comfort in its company, despite its great size.

“Human, you must get to your feet. Show your people the way to Stand-off Creek, White Elk,” ordered the animal.

“They are starving. They can’t go on,” groaned the elder.

“They will not go hungry, old man. Your hunger, too, it will be gone soon.”

“What will happen to them, ponoká?” the elder asked, speaking in a whisper and so slowly. “Tell me if you can.”

The white dream-creature raised its head and peered about through the stone-dust storm. “This land will return, old man. It is buried now, and there is more ash to come. But this has happened before, many times.”

White Elk coughed pink phlegm. He spit it out in a shower and it rained down on his ash-matted clothing and face.

“Five thousand moon cycles will come and go, old one. The prairie will return then. The buffalo, they will eat the grass that sends down roots to grow. The ponoká will walk the Otatso, and the wolf will follow to hunt the infirm. The coyote and the eagle will scavenge in the wake of the wolf.”

The elder closed his eyes, moaned and uttered a few quiet words. “What about these people?”

The white creature lowered its head again and brought its jaws to White Elk’s ear. “You will take them to Stand-off Creek now, to the North Piegan village. On the fourth day you will walk out of the ash. You will be free of it at last. On the fifth day, the buffalo, old man, they will be there in great numbers to receive you.”

“Buffalo?” White Elks whispered.

“Old man, you will walk with bison.”

Chapter Seventy-One

Ground fog poked fingers across the crop acreage south of the Independency’s village green. Abel muscled through the gossamer tendrils and the last pellets of miserable sleet when he noticed a single dark figure at the edge of the potato plantings.

Huddled in a rain slicker, farm manager Oleg Knudsen shed dull precipitation into the ash slick at his feet. Only the man’s eyes moved to greet Abel as the community founder approached. Knudsen stood statuesque, rain hood up, hands buried in the pockets of the slicker.

Oleg’s severe gaze mimicked the conditions in the fields. On an evening when yellow evening light should grace the plains and bluffs, slushy sleet was falling on seedling potato plants breaking through the soil. The fields oozed like open sewers. The robust organic earth he had worked for a decade to enrich, and which the colonists had labored unmercifully for weeks to clear to a degree of volcanic ash, was cold and soaking. It was a terrible medium for bringing a fledgling crop along.

Abel stopped alongside his good friend, the drumming of sleet filling the space between each man. “Not pretty, is it?” Abel muttered quietly.

Oleg sighed. “No. It’s a horrible sight, this.”

“What do you think, huh? Can we save the crop?”

“We’ll starve to death if we don’t. Like the Irish potato famine, you know.”

“Got any ideas?”

“Oh, ya, a few.”

The community leader looked squarely at the monk-like figure, hidden beneath the rain gear. Oleg Knudsen was a remarkable talent, Abel believed, whose agricultural skills underpinned the success of the little empire on the bluffs. He was a thinker, a doer. He needed the man’s expertise and creativity now.

“Care to share your thoughts?”

Oleg stroked his bushy chestnut beard, and, speaking in a light Norwegian accent, flung his tenor voice out across the cropland.

“Let’s say the weather stays bad like this, eh. Crops fail altogether or there is so little yield that most people won’t be able to afford to eat. I think that’s a real possibility.”

“I think so, too,” Abel agreed.

“So we’ve got to do something right away. Soon as we can.”

“What do you suggest?”

“When humans first invented this farming business and began putting up permanent settlements, there was always a staple crop or two to see them through the lean times. In the Americas here, it was maize and potato; in Asia it was rice and so on. To leave the hunter-gatherer life behind, people needed at least one master crop to make the huge leap to civilization.”

“So what would your crop be?” Abel sputtered, spitting sleet from his lips.

“Let’s say we need to get from today to this time next year without turning skin and bones,” Oleg offered. “To do it, we’d need a couple of foundation crops. In this corner of the world, it had better be corn and potatoes. There’s no way we’ll get corn at these temperatures, but we might get a few potatoes if we do some sleight of hand. And we better move a hell of a lot more ash and get as big a crop of grass as we can.”

“Why grass?” Abel wondered.

“We eat grass every single day, Abel,” answered Oleg. “We just feed it to the goats and sheep. They’re pretty good at making milk and new little goats and lambs. Grass has always been the feedstock for the algae that feeds the tilapia in the fish tanks.”

“What about these potatoes? They’re just about stillborn.”

Oleg scratched his heavy beard, immersed in thought. “Well, this is what I think we should do. We should pull up a lot of the greens we grow for the wholesale markets and plant potatoes in those unheated greenhouses. Do that starting first thing tomorrow. We dig up the seed and get it inside immediately, then cover as much of the rest as we can with plastic sheeting. Instead of field rows here, we double ‘em up in the greenhouses, pack the plants right in tight together so you can’t so much as take a step without banging into a spud. The seed in these fields that we can’t cover, well, it’ll rot to mush if it stays like this for another week.”

Oleg jerked around suddenly, ending his stoic frozen pose once and for all. He faced Abel, a drop of moisture hanging on the end of his nose.

“Look,” he spit his words, “the humble potato and the hay field make it possible for us to do everything else. Nothing yields tonnage like potatoes. If we have potatoes at the heart of our diet, then we just need to add some dairy protein and greens to round it out. We could live a long life on such fare. Now add a little fish protein, a little chevon and lamb, and the greenhouse fruits, and we just might live like kings. Little kings, maybe, but kings nonetheless.”

“You think we’ll have enough calories to see us through?”

“No, Abel, I don’t. We’ve got to go see Penny; she’s been tinkering with our calorie needs. It doesn’t look promising.”

The men left the runny potato barrens to rendezvous with Penny Markham at the CC kitchen. Abel paced along in silence, his mood black. The farm manager tried to lift his spirits. There was one consolation in the evolving struggle against the hardships Yellowstone had wrought, Oleg told the community founder as they trudged from the fields. Providence had been good to Independency, he suggested. If the colony had received the burden of ash that lay on Ortonville and Sweetly just to the south, nothing could be done to free the soils of their burden. There wasn’t enough labor, fuel, tractors or earth-moving equipment on the Great Plains to clear three, four, five feet and more of ash from even a few square miles of land. Even if it could be done, there would be no place to put the mountains of volcanic waste.

“The Plains are finished,” Knudsen remarked. “We can free up an acre here and there,” he’d told Abel, “but there’s no hope for a million square miles of breadbasket.”

Penny stood before a laptop computer on the counter in the community kitchen. She glanced up as Abel and Oleg arrived, the men dripping moisture on every surface.

“Will you take a minute from your work, Penny?” asked Abel.

“I don’t need much coaxing to give this up, Abel.”

“Oleg says you’ve been running numbers, charting calorie needs. What do you have?”

Penny wiped her hands on her apron, scowling all the while. “Well, I’ve been running minimum calorie requirements for our adult folks, normal levels for the children. I increased yields from the greenhouses but greatly decreased yields from the fields. I ruled out getting in a crop of corn altogether because of the conditions, but plugged in a potato crop into two-thirds of the greenhouse space. I ran the figures every which way. I have to tell you, Abel, without corn or some other grains there’s no way we can sustain 110 people.”

“What’s the shortfall, do you think?”

“The best estimate, we’re ten to twelve percent deficient. More likely we’re fifteen to as much as twenty percent off. We won’t harvest enough calories for ourselves and the animals if the fields don’t yield. If we see to it the children have enough to eat, the adults will slowly waste away.”

Abel stood in trance, contemplating Penny’s grim assessment. He lowered his head and squeegeed water from his face.

“If we can work out an arrangement with the coop in Sweetly,” the woman offered, “we might be able to….”

Abel held up a hand and shook his head no. “There isn’t going to be a pound available from the coop. The National Guard is moving into towns along the border country to pull the grain out of the storage silos and ship it east. They’re coming to Sweetly, as I understand it. They’re on their way as we speak.”

“Can’t be,” scoffed Oleg in disbelief. “When did you hear that?”

“I talked with Jim Bottomly.”

Penny pulled her lower lip down. “Who?”

“The man who manages the Sweetly coop.”

“What did he have to say?”

“He explained there’s a federal emergency policy in place. Washington has ordered up the Guard, here and all over the Plains. They’re clearing railroad tracks up from Watertown whenever they can keep machinery running.”

Penny shook her head. “How long until the forces get here?”

“Soon, if the weather runs wet. If the dust returns, it might take them a month, maybe more. Who knows? There’s no way to know with any certainty.”

“If the National Guard carts away the grain, famine is going to descend on the valley. We’ll have to think about abandoning this community,” Penny warned.

“No! There will be no pulling out.” Abel scowled and shook his head from side to side. “Look, we grow plenty of food. If we give this up, who in the world is going to feed us, the federal government? Not likely.”

Penny’s eyes flared wide with anxiety and flitted from face to face. “We will not produce enough food, Abel. We need a complex carbohydrate, something that yields plenty of calories. We have got to get our hands on some coop grain. There is no alternative.”

Penny glared at Abel. He turned away and cast his gaze out a window across the common to the soaking fields.

“Don’t you turn your back on me, Abel Whittemore,” Penny snipped tersely. “I’m talking to you.”

Abel spun around abruptly and faced the undisputed lord of the CC kitchen. “You are absolutely right, Penny. Right now, those coop silos down in Sweetly are, what, maybe half full of corn and soy? Go back to your numbers. Tell me how many tons of grain we would need for a year to make up for the calorie shortfall, worst case. Then project forward several years.”

“Years?”

“Three, four years, at the very least. Our troubles won’t end next year. Yellowstone made certain of that.”

Penny blinked, blindsided by that revelation.

“What are you figuring, Abel?” asked Oleg.

“We need a fallback position,” said Abel emphatically. “Salvation rests across Big Stone Lake. There’s a mountain of food in Sweetly. We’ve got to get at it. We’ve got to get at it before the Guard can move it out.”

Oleg raised a red flag. “Wait, wait, wait! The farmers in the valley aren’t going to take kindly to us waltzing in there asking for handouts.”

“He’s right. People have got to be terrified down there,” said Penny. “If they think their lifeline is going to be cut to some decree, they’re not going to greet us with open arms.”

Abel scoffed and set about pacing the room, thumping the floor, a quirk of personality that Oleg and Penny were long accustomed to. “Look, we built this town in a decade. We faced obstacles, big ones; we overcame them. We’ll do the same now, somehow. We could offer the citizens of Sweetly something in exchange—something that’s in short supply right now—our market crops and dairy surplus for their corn. We could do that.”

“Ya, we could,” Oleg concurred. “That would be just the thing.”

“We’ve got the best shot there is to make it right here,” Abel declared. “I’m throwing my shoulder against the grindstone. When the food reserves are exhausted in the good ol’ USA, things aren’t going to be very pretty. I don’t want to be walking the mean streets out there when the Chicken McNuggets run out.”

Chapter Seventy-Two

The taste of disgust, bile bitter, fouled Winnie’s tongue. She sat numb in her Jeep in her own driveway, having spent the day examining computer files at a clandestine packaging operation set up in an abandoned manufacturing plant. Inside the crumbling brick building were manual gravity-feed dispensers, set up on long tables. Stacked along the walls were fifty-pound bags of horse feed grain. Plastic bags were fitted over the dispenser nozzles and a few pounds of feed metered out to fill the bags. Pull the lever. Fill the bag. Each fetched five dollars from anyone anxious to horde foodstuffs of any kind against an uncertain future. Business had been brisk.

Using the firm’s own computer data, Winnie worked backwards from the packaging line and traced the feed to Agway and Blue Seal outlets throughout the metro area. The stores had been ransacked systematically over the course of many weeks. Supermarkets and food warehouses, now under armed protection, had become too risky as targets for thievery. No one thought to keep watch over the outlets of bagged farm animal feed.

Winnie learned from law enforcement that officials had detained a middle-aged woman as she left the hush-hush business. The lady was a travel agent at a small local firm, or so the story went. She’d always loved horses, and knew full well that bulk horse feed was many times cheaper per pound than boxed cereal for human consumption.

“You figure it out,” the lady chided the officers. “Before prices went through the roof, you’d have to shell out $150 for fifty pounds of Cheerios compared to ten bucks for fifty pounds of horse chow. You do the math. I did. I figured I could make a ton of money selling animal grain to moms crying over the ten dollars they’re getting these days for a few ounces of cereal. You know,” she added, “you grind that stuff up and it makes a pretty good porridge. Sticks to the ribs, honey.”

The horse feed ruse was but one of countless criminal conflagrations large and small erupting across the Midwest. At the opposite pole was a sweeping epidemic of amateurish breaking-and-entering episodes at residences. With roads impassable in many areas and police cruisers and emergency vehicles often crippled by ash dust, local and state police forces were powerless to respond to the fast rising tide of these crude burglaries.

On the home front, there was the constant stress of obtaining provisions for the house. Winnie longed for the return of the familiar bored grocery shopper and the effortless shopping routine. You needed something, fine; you drove to a market, waltzed in the aisles, pulled the object of your desire off a shelf, and paid for it. Done. So simple! Scanners did the calculating. Magic. A piece of plastic in the wallet passed for cash. More magic. You could obtain your daily bread without a single conscious thought. No more.

Abel had been on target, Winnie concluded. Disable the production or distribution system, Abel had preached, and the people of megalopolis would grow gaunt for the want of a few spuds. Lose the heartland and its farmers for any reason, and citizens everywhere would be forced to boil bark and roast insect grubs for their supper.

Winnie touched her fingers to her eyelids and rubbed them slowly, trying to drive off fatigue and tension. She tumbled out the car and stood surveying her neighborhood, shivering in the unseasonably cold summer night air. Curse the temperature. There hadn’t been a day all season that felt like suntanning weather. The gas furnace ran at night whenever the natural gas utilities could bring ash-plagued pipeline pumping stations online. Most mornings there was dust-infested frost on the windshield of the car, thick enough to scrape away.

Winnie turned from the street to the house and climbed the steps to the side entrance. The door was ajar. Alarm rippled along her spine. Never did she leave a door unlocked.

The entryway, designed to mimic wood but sheathed in steel, had been slammed with a heavy sledge-like tool, shearing away the door latch. The exposed lock mechanism had been struck hard several times until pieces of it flew out of the door and landed on the far side of the kitchen.

Winnie stepped through the portal and flicked a light switch. Damn it! Power was out again. She tiptoed into the kitchen. Every cabinet door was askew. Random contents from every drawer and cupboard littered the floor. The open pantry doors revealed clean shelves. Every can, box, bag and wrapper full of edibles was missing. There was not so much as a bottle of herbs or spice on the shelves or on the floor.

Winnie’ first instinct was to examine every particle in the room. But blood ran out of the woman’s head. The room demanded a thorough examination, but the prospect made her woozy.

She turned to the refrigerator. In it she had placed a small, precious rib eye steak packed in ice, fought over and won in the heat of a consumer battle with frantic sister supermarket shoppers. Suddenly she became obsessed with the whereabouts of the morsel of meat. She thrust her head and hands in the cold box. The appliance was naked.

“Damn it to hell,” the agent screeched into the white plastic interior of the refrigerator. “They took my steak. My steak! My goddamn steak!”

Winnie slammed the unit’s door so forcefully it rebounded and bounced against the interior wall that hid the stairs to the basement from view. Winnie careened down the basement stairs and sprinted to the far corner of the cellar to a bank of floor-to-ceiling cupboards. They too were open to the world.

When she had left the house, the shelves in the basement had been half full. They held her stash, her hoarded nutriment. She had tried mightily to create a reserve once familiar foodstuffs began disappearing from market shelves and prices began to climb wildly. The pantry was empty.

The sound of Abel’s voice floated through the barren larder. She could hear his voice pleading to all who matriculated at the Institute for Total Life Skills to abandon the pick-up-a-few-things mode of living demanded by the mass culture and build in its stead a lifestyle of permanence, sustainability and security. He cajoled his audience to put up food not just for tomorrow but also for a year and a tomorrow. Shakers had. Fundamentalist Mormons did so, as did the Amish, he’d preached. Why not the average American?

Winnie sat down on a paint can, her hands drooping to the floor. She felt disembodied, ephemeral, divorced from her emotions.

Ten minutes she sat in the basement gloom, confined to a carapace of sorrow. Winnie surveyed the cellar. It was such an uninviting tomb, never inhabited, always shunned by the living unless there was laundry to do. The walls fostered misery. There was no warmth within its confines. She craved a warm touch suddenly.

Winnie conjured up Abel’s face on the gray cement foundation walls. He was only mental mischief, but she wanted him in the flesh. His body would be sultry to the touch, his embrace a warm comfort. There was a spark there. An aura surrounded his person, rays of hope and threads of new ideas. He was exciting. He seemed kindly. He had been a target of her inquiry once, before Yellowstone, but no more.

In the basement, Winnie desired to kiss the man, to hold his warm torso close, entice him to intimacy.

Winnie rose from her paint can seat and climbed the cellar stairs to the ruined kitchen. She found it utterly alien. When would desperate citizens break in again, she wondered? Who in the neighborhood was plotting against his or her neighbors even now? Today she was a victim, as so many others around her had already been. What about tomorrow? No home was a safe haven. Whole neighborhoods were at risk. An entire community of people with empty stomachs and few prospects of filling them was a recipe for anarchy.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. There was no food in the house. “What the devil am I going find to eat tonight?” she fretted, speaking to the walls.

Chapter Seventy-Three

Following two days of cold soaking rain across the West, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 200 lifted off from Calgary International Airport at Calgary, Alberta, Canada. In minutes, it was joined by a U.S. Air Force 737 transport, assigned to escort the small plane, and a Royal Canadian Air Force harrier. Under a whitewashed morning sky, the three aircraft banked toward the serrated Canadian Rockies that framed the city, then swept southwest just west of downtown, bound for Wyoming. The summer snow line in the mountains was well down the slopes. They had the shine of peaks sporting a November snow mantle.

Frederick Womack, director of the Cascades Volcano Observatory, chartered the Beechcraft out of Calgary in the hopes that, for the first time, a few members of the scientific community could directly observe the shattered geology at Yellowstone. Womack invited several colleagues to join him and, ever mindful of the potential for publicity, extended an invitation to a friend, CNN Pacific Northwest correspondent Brian Oster. Oster brought with him a camera technician to record the trip and to monitor satellite uplink equipment so the news team might beam live footage to geosynchronous communication satellites for live broadcasting.

On the military aircraft, the Air Force ferried senators and congressmen from Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah and the Canadian premiers from Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The U.S. contingent had been in legislative session at the Capitol in D.C. when Yellowstone disintegrated. None had been able to get near the Wyoming high country, so they clawed at the opportunity to board the first flight that would permit civilians into the disaster area to survey lands affected by the catastrophe.

The flight had been delayed for weeks while the CVO awaited word that conditions were safe enough to permit a research observation plane to enter airspace over Yellowstone National Park. The National Weather Service hadn’t lifted its airborne ash advisory for the West, so commercial traffic was still shackled except for a narrow east-west corridor through Texas, central New Mexico and Arizona.

A front that brought several days of soaking rain was exactly what Womack and the Air Force had been waiting for. The precipitation scrubbed the atmosphere so that ash particle levels were low enough for the NWS and NOAA to give the green light for the observation flights.

The flight plan was simple: fly south-southwest from Calgary over southern Alberta, Montana and easternmost Idaho and get as close to the Yellowstone region as possible, staying west of the western boundary of the national park. They would spend a good hour surveying the region as far south as the Grand Teton Range before returning to Calgary.

In the video studio in First Day Hall, Bobcat overheard the word “Yellowstone” spoken by a character dancing on the television monitor screen above him. He looked up to see something he did not recognize at first. On screen, an aerial view of a slate gray mountainous landscape stretched to a digital horizon. In the upper left appeared an amorphous form belching something akin to a monstrous soft ice cream twist of white steam and black smoke. Bobcat stood up and pushed his nose close to the screen, studying the details in the image. In the foreground, the mountain folds seemed to be filled in, as if heavy ground clouds had infiltrated the elevations most of the way up the flanks of the peaks. The summits of the mountains looked queer, and Bobcat couldn’t decide why they appeared as they did. The audio picked up a male voice from someone that Bobcat recognized must not be a reporter. Whoever was talking off-camera was using geological terms freely in his description of the broadcast image. Bobcat listened intently.

“…Gallatin and Absaroka mountain ranges separated by the Paradise Valley. Welded tuff has completely filled in the valley and the drainages of the mountains as high as the 9,000-foot elevation level. It appears the energy release swept away the upper mountain strata, blowing away hundreds of vertical feet of material.”

Bobcat struggled with what he had heard. What earthly spasm could profoundly alter a mountain landscape, could tear whole mountains away and bury an entire environment under hundreds of feet of debris?

In the next instant, the electronics shaman was out the studio door and racing down the stairs to exit the building. He crashed into the outside doors, stumbled down the entrance steps, and fell in a heap on the red granite stone walkway. Abel, on his way over to First Day Hall, spied Bobcat as he exploded from the doorway and fell to the ground. He ran to help the fallen, but Bobcat scrambled to his feet in a flash and recognized Abel coming his way.

“Abel,” Bobcat yelled across the commons, “You’ve got to see this.”

“What have you got, Bobcat?”

Abel received no answer. Bobcat spun around, leaped up the steps he had just fallen down, threw open the door with a bang and disappeared inside the hall at a gallop. Abel quickened his step and found his way to Bobcat’s sanctum, the entire bank of monitors now powered up. He joined Bobcat nose to nose with the screens.

Aboard the Beechcraft King Air, Frederick Womack was trembling. No one on earth, let alone a trained geologist, had ever seen the immediate aftermath of a super eruption. As the aircraft approached what had once been the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park, the plane banked to the east revealing a macabre vista outside the passenger windows. For miles the landscape was utterly sterile and flat. All topography had been erased. The dead plain swept out ahead until it reached what appeared to be the black seething rim of the world. Beyond were the dense ugly clouds of hell punched through with white vapor jets and billowing steam. All were backlit with a radiant red glow cast by pooling magma hidden somewhere far below the earth’s surface but, since the eruption, exposed to the atmosphere.

As far as Womack could see to the east and west, the world was a smoking ruin and the skies above the vast new caldera choked with opaque and lethal gases. The structure of the newborn caldera was impossible to see amid the smoke, but, for Womack, it was enough just to see what he could up close.

He turned to reporter Brian Oster and began to speak. Oster thrust the microphone into his face. “What you are seeing below this aircraft is our first look at a newly-formed volcanic caldera. It’s immense in size.”

In the video studio at Independency, Abel and Bobcat were held hostage by Womack’s voice, backed by the loud background hum of the plane’s twin engines.              “Across Montana,” continued the observatory executive, “we’ve been flying over a volcanic tuff desert. No forests withstood the blasts. No structures of any kind are visible. Now, we are within, I’d say, twenty miles of the rim of the caldera, a crater that I’d have to guess is sixty miles across; we can’t see just how wide, as yet. We can’t get a good look into the caldera; there is too much outgassing. The topography that was once above the caldera has disappeared. It has sunk into the caldera basin or has disintegrated and is spread out in all directions for hundreds of miles, burying the surrounding terrain.”

The pilot of the Beechcraft banked the plane again, bringing it around 130 degrees to a western heading. He did not like the angry look of the horizon to the east. It was boiling black with gasses. The flight plan called for keeping well clear of the sinister stew. The pilot banked the plane over the tortured and broken ridges of the Gallatin Range along the Idaho border. He banked the craft again, this time to the left, and flew the craft south. The prevailing winds cleared the smoke from the heavens, so there was a clear view southward toward the Grand Teton Range.

No elevated terrain in the continental United States was held in such high esteem as the Tetons. To legions of city dwellers in the east and to those residing in the teeming California valleys, the Tetons were the quintessential Rockies, the very essence of what it was to be a mountain wonderland. Now, before the camera aboard the Beechcraft, the Tetons were mutilated corpses.

As the Beechcraft droned toward the Teton Range, the reporter on board pulled the microphone to his lips.

“The only way I can think to describe what we are seeing from the windows of this airplane is that the environment looks as if it has been destroyed by atomic weapons. The world below has been laid waste absolutely everywhere we look. We’ve been flying a straight course for nearly two hours, and there is nothing much to see. Everything has been obliterated.

“We have been flying over country that once contained towns and small cities, big cattle ranches, farms, highways, mines, schools, businesses, all the trappings of daily life. But there is not a whisper of life below us.”

Abel pulled away from the television screens in the midst of the reporter’s remarks and sat down in a chair. He glared at the screens, his face placid and pale.

“I guess this is as close to a funeral as I’ll ever get,” sighed Abel.

“Huh?” Bobcat wasn’t paying much attention to his friend.

“This closes the book on Liz. It really does.”

Bobcat turned his head to look Abel over. “What?”

Abel wasn’t focused. “Think of it, Bobcat. You fall in love and marry somebody, like everybody else does. You try to live as husband and wife, do the best you can. Some people marry for life. Some don’t. Liz and I, we couldn’t pull it off. We tried. Put some real effort into it, too.

“But nobody thinks about their dying day. There it is, though, right there on the screen. There’s Liz’s deathbed, right in front of us. That’s all the funeral Pelee and I will ever attend, right there.”

Bobcat now locked onto Abel’s words. The man had Bobcat’s complete attention now.

“You know what, Bobcat?”

“What?”

“I didn’t put 100-percent stock into what you had told me about mass extinctions. I just couldn’t imagine the full scope of it. But this, this is it in black and white. I get it now. I really get it.”

“No one could imagine this, Abel.”

Abel raised a finger and pointed to one of the television monitors with its screen filled with the hellish images of a geological ground zero.

“Look at that thing, Bobcat. That’s our dying day staring us right in the face.”

Chapter Seventy-Four

Holding a palm out to the skies, Winnie felt for cold pinpricks of precipitation. She wanted rain, blessed rain, an inch or two at the very least. Once and for all there would be some relief from the drifting, swirling gray dust off the western plains. Rain would allow her to start her car and keep it running.

Obsessed with the desire to flee the metropolitan area, Winnie hastily packed several bags of clothes and retrieved a meager box of emergency rations from a hiding place under her home’s porch steps. All went into her painstakingly cleaned Jeep Liberty, along with bottles of water, toiletries and makeup, her laptop, shoes, boots and maps. She stowed three precious five-gallon containers full of gasoline, procured with a $200 bribe.

Chilly rain fell throughout the day. Winnie waited until the earth got a good soaking, worrying all the while about the Jeep getting decent traction with its new all-weather radials in the greasy ash slime that coated the roads.

Time to go. Dropping into the driver’s seat, she turned the key. The car started quickly and purred smoothly. “Thank God on high!” she howled at the windshield, fogging it.

Winnie reached Interstate 70 eastbound in fifteen minutes. An exodus in slow motion was underway, traffic bumper-to-bumper eastbound. Westbound lanes were empty. Virtually every vehicle rolled eastward toward St. Louis, away from the suffocating gray ash blanket that lay like a rotting casket shroud on the plains. St. Louis, on the Mississippi River four hours normal drive time away, had endured just nine inches of ashfall. But windblown dust was a hellish problem there, too. Transportation and communication breakdowns plagued the Gateway City, but less so than the nightmarish troubles that locked down the westerly burgs of Kansas City, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Topeka and Des Moines.

Drivers desperate to leave the Missouri River Valley piloted cars outfitted with summer treads. Coated with several inches of oozing ash slime, the interstate became a luge run. Cars careened off into the median or spun out and rammed others, sweeping them off the highway. Traffic speed slowed to less than thirty miles per hour, bringing an end to the chaos. Winnie was grateful for the slow, safe speed, and thrilled just to be moving, to be free behind the wheel of an automobile once again and going somewhere, anywhere.

At Columbia, Missouri, Winnie rolled off the interstate to top off her tank, fully aware fuel supplies would be unreliable. Gasoline tanker trucks supplied mid-state gasoline stations with fuel from bulk-storage port depots on the Missouri River near Kansas City. Long-standing contracts locked suppliers into regions. With driving conditions difficult because of blowing and drifting dust, and the roadways often impassable, west-central Missouri ran dry of gasoline.

Rather than the useless pumps, it was bobbing yellow police tape surrounding a Dunkin Donuts chain store next door that commandeered her attention. The retail outlet was deserted. Coffee, the lubricant of business life, had stopped flowing. The plate glass on every window of the building was smashed to pellets. The interior lay in shambles. Winnie stood in the snow before the yawning holes in the glass, curiosity gnawing on her bones. She stepped through the fractured entry.

The serving counter and display racks were stark, empty, and coated gray with a thick film of ash dust. Counter coffee machines had been thrown about the building, the computers as well. Winnie slipped behind the counter and dodged into the preparation kitchen. The big doughnut fryers were intact. She peered into the vats and discovered a residue of fryer fats. Some unknown soul, using a spoon, had scrapped and scrapped down the walls of the Fryalators to get at the last molecules of grease.

The storeroom door latch and lock had been rammed with something heavy until they failed. Whoever the raiders, they had been after the storehouse commodities: bulk bleached flour, sugar, vegetable shortening and sacks of coffee beans. All had been removed, and, remarkably, it appeared someone had swept the floor, as if to come away with every runaway coffee bean or every last gram of spilled sugar or flour.

In the retail area on the way out, Winnie stopped amid the cheerless magenta and orange decor, now colors of a commercial desert. The refined sugar and flour, fat and caffeine-dispensing medusa had lost one of its many heads. The doughnut empire must be withering away, she thought. Certainly the supply pipeline at Columbia, Missouri had been severed.

Dunkin Donuts, Winnie imagined, was the very definition of eat-‘n’-out success, long a darling of Wall Street suits. In six months, after many decades of robust growth and corporate vigor, it must now be comatose, its fast-food chain cousins and poor relations wasting away, too, shriveling in suburban gutters.

Winnie left the gas depot, the Dunkin Donuts and the interstate behind. She’d try her luck away from the major transportation arteries and run a rural route to the northeast through Mexico and Hannibal, Missouri and on to Davenport, Iowa and, hopefully, out of the Yellowstone ash slick.

Crawling in low gear for fear of skidding off the secondary roads, Winnie thought it might take her twenty-four hours to eventually work her way along the upper Mississippi River watershed to Minneapolis.

Motoring through black walnut and hickory stands in the low hill country above the Mississippi River just south of Hannibal, the woman worked out a plan in her head. An hour north of the Twin Cities, at St. Cloud, she’d turn west again, back under the Yellowstone ash shroud. She’d push her Jeep as far as humanly possible due west toward the bluffs at the northern end of Big Stone Lake, hoping the four-wheel drive vehicle might actually deliver her to Independency village and Abel Whittemore.

Chapter Seventy-Five

The video from the Yellowstone plateau contracted to a white dot, phosphors glowing and dying down to a pinpoint and then to black.

“Curse my life,” snapped Bobcat, “not again.”

The studio communications system lost its satellite uplink connection as Abel and Bobcat monitored the live broadcast from a research aircraft above the vast gray Yellowstone desert. Daily, sometimes several times a day, Bobcat had to laboriously clean the community’s satellite dishes and components to remove volcanic dust. He dreaded the constant, grinding maintenance, but worked relentlessly to try to keep the communications channels open.

“So much for video tonight,” puffed Bobcat.

Abel glared at the lifeless screens, and hissed in frustration: “How the hell are we going to manage in the face of what we just saw?”

“We’ll get through this, Abel.”

“Oh, you’ve got a roadmap to the end of days, do you?”

“I do, actually. Thank you for asking,” Bobcat said in jest.

“It’s an autographed copy, is it?”

Bobcat swiveled in his chair, leaned back, and struck a pose suggesting he was at complete ease.

“Look,” Bobcat said, “this has happened before. It will happen again. You know, we’ve talked about this. But the world will come through it. The question is, really, will humans come through it.”

“Well, will we?”

“I can tell you this, Abel, throughout the long history of life on this planet, certain creatures always seem to muddle through a whole sequence of horrific events. You know, asteroid impacts, ice ages, wild sea level swings, strange fluctuations in oxygen levels or carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.”

“And Yellowstone eruptions?” Abel queried.

“Yes, and Yellowstone. I don’t want to make light of this, but there have been far worse events in the deep past and some creepy crawlies manage to come through them.”

“Anything on two legs?”

Bobcat smiled. “As a matter of fact, yes, if you count some dinosaurs. Are you familiar with the term the Deccan Traps?”

The words did not register with Abel. “No, I can’t say that’s familiar to me.”

“The Deccan Traps are the remains of continent-obliterating lava flows, or a long series of them, that took place some 68 million years ago or so and lasted through the end of the age of dinosaurs. The feature covers half of the Indian subcontinent. Most people have never heard of it, including the vast human population that lives right on top of it. The great cluster of active volcanoes that gave rise to the Traps impacted everything on this earth, changed the chemistry of the air and the oceans, caused wild global temperature swings, and certainly impacted the diversity of life of the planet in a negative way. Then, wham, the asteroid hits in shallows seas just off the Yucatan in Mexico a few million years after the Indian volcanoes start making mischief, and the whole world’s ecosystem falls to pieces.

“But, some organisms, even in the very worst of times—and there have been many ‘worst of times’ on this planet—always manage to squeak through and crawl off down radical paths to fill the skies, populate the continents, plumb the deepest depths, or give up the landlubber’s life for one in the ocean. The winners in life’s race are sometimes those organisms that were just plain lucky enough to have what paleontologists, biologists and others call pre-adapted traits. These are physical and latent genetic traits that, through sheer luck, just so happen to be best suited to new conditions arising after some terrible world-altering event. If you are a creature who just happens to have such traits, you make it. You win! Don’t have them? You lose. If you just so happened to be a little two-legged theropod dinosaur that sprouted feathers and modified your arm ligament and muscle attachments so you could flap your arms like wings, you made it, when your huge ground-bound cousin, T-rex, froze or starved to death.

“There is this treasure trove of scientific study out there that deals with catastrophic events that took place over the life of the planet. Most of that information never reaches the public, never makes the mainstream press. But you know, all any of us has to do is take a good look at the thousands of craters on the moon with a pair of cheap binoculars to see all the evidence you’d ever want of the cataclysmic adolescent years of this little rock orbiting the sun. The evidence of catastrophe is all around us, but we don’t see it. Hell, it took humans nearly 200 years to figure out what Yellowstone really was, and when we finally figured it out, it caught us with our pants down.”

Abel hadn’t heard Bobcat’s last few sentences. He was absorbed with the concept of pre-adapted traits that his friend had aired.

“Tell me something, old sage,” said Abel, “might what you call pre-adapted traits be applied to human existence now, or, you know, to human endeavor?”

“You mean,” said Bobcat, “do some humans have physical or mental traits that would make them better suited than other creatures to weather a post-Yellowstone world?”

“I don’t know about physical traits; humans are humans, we’re all one and the same species. What about cultural traits, though? Could your concept of pre-adaptation be applied to this little village?

Bobcat shrugged.

“If you will allow me some liberty,” Abel continued, “could it be that Independency is, as you call it, pre-adapted—through its insistence on self-reliance and self-sufficiency—and, therefore, more apt to succeed in a strange, cold post-Yellowstone world than most systems of human enterprise? Might Independency, the way we are organized, be far less apt to suffer distress and dislocation under the new hostile conditions brought about by the eruption?

“That, Abel, is one loaded question. Only time can settle that one.”

“Think about it for a moment, Bobcat. Independency isn’t so terribly different than the society around it, except for a few very specific traits.”

“Okay, name them.”

“Local food production, for one. Where in the broader society does the average member of any given community—city, suburb or rural hamlet—produce food for home consumption? It doesn’t happen. It used to, just three, four generations ago. That way of life became outmoded. Mass-production techniques swept local labor-intensive agriculture aside. But that way of life is not history in this town. We live it. We still have all the tools, all the knowledge, at our disposal. It’s not lost. We have it. Couldn’t you say, then, that by virtue of our penchant for keeping alive age-old rural skills and wedding them to our new systems, we are pre-adapted to move into the future without great upheaval?

“You are preaching to the choir, Mr. Whittemore.”

The town founder smiled warmly at Bobcat’s remark. “Yeah, but I’m not done preaching.”

“I figured that. I’m listening. Just keep it under three hours, and, please, don’t go off on one of your ‘round-the-room flits of yours, if you would. Spare me that tonight.”

“Very well, I’ll spare you.”

“Good. You may continue.”

“I like your concept, these pre-adaptive traits. As I think about it, it dovetails with much of what we’re doing. We are not heavily dependent on hydrocarbon fuels. Our food and energy systems are, to a great degree, self-contained. We’re not dependent on someone shipping spinach from Pasadena, oranges from Ocala or natural gas from the Gulf.”

Abel reined himself in for a moment, pausing to think through his argument before taking a leap forward.

“There’s something else, though, something basic, much, much more. It gets to the root of it all.”

“What would that be?”

“It’s the very specialized knowledge we possess and put to use on a daily basis. It’s the one trait we do not share with others, and it’s probably the most critical difference, the most valuable of all. We can do what we do because we have command of age-old knowledge and skills essential to bridging the gap between this world’s twenty-first century monoculture existence and that of the subsistence-level cultures that evolved over ten thousand human generations. We can reach back to the Olduvai Gorge, to the first people holding fishing spears and foraging for herbs, and we can actually take from them things we can use now. Who else can do that?

“The deep past is talking, get it? We’re the only ones listening. Nobody else can hear the past quite like we can; the lost messages can’t be translated any longer. But we’ve intercepted the messages and we can do the translating, see?

“That’s the difference between us here at Independency and Jack and Jill in Westchester, Georgetown, Shaker Heights and Beverly Hills. What are they going to do, fill the interiors of their SUVs with water, stock them with fish, and plant rice on the seats?”

Chapter Seventy-Six

A silver coyote lifted its muzzle to capture a scent streaming on currents of cold air descending the east flanks of the mountains. Erect ears had picked up unfamiliar sounds. Hidden by a hedge of brush in the drainage of Stand-off Creek, the animal waited until gray phantoms materialized. The coyote slipped away.

An emaciated Blackfoot male appeared, hauling a travois, moving at a hasty clip in snow and prairie grasses. Gray from head to foot after walking four days in blowing ash, the man marched into clear cold air surrounded by a verdant, unblemished environment.

On the fifth day of the long march from Chief Mountain village, he had slipped from under Yellowstone’s smothering ash blanket. As the man crested a gravel bar at the edge of the stream, he saw chimney smoke in the distance. A North Piegan tribal community, the village of Stand-off Creek, was within reach.

“Ah-eeeee,” the man yodeled into frigid air, lofting his call southward so his fellow Blackfoot on the march would know they had reached the end of their ordeal.

White Elk, sprawled in a blanket slung between travois poles and barely conscious, heard the call. A young woman walking beside him heard it, too.

“What is that, Petah? I heard something.”

“White Elk, you are awake?”

“I have been for a time. That call, what was it?”

“I think we are nearing the North Piegans. That’s a signal that we are close.”

The elder shifted his position, trying to dampen scalding pain from his arm, ribs and lungs. “How did we get here?”

“You told us where to go, White Elk.”

“I told you?” he whispered.

“Yes, days ago.”

“I do not remember.”

“In Lee Creek, we found you. You had fallen.”

White Elk appeared confused.

“You were hurt, but you told us to keep going no matter what happened, to follow the Lee to the big bend. There you told us to strike a course due north and to walk three days.”

“I told you that?”

“You said that the white ponoká gave you instructions.”

“The white one?” The grand dream beast reared up. He conjured it in three dimensions, so real he thought he could touch the animal.

“That’s what you said.”

“He came to me in the Lee, Petah, do you know that?”

“Yes, White Elk.”

On the approach to Stand-off Creek, Petah insisted that White Elk’s travois be turned around and then lifted at an angle so the old man could see across the valley to the North Piegan village. With the travois as support, White Elk was trussed up so that he could make out what the others were seeing.

The world before White Elk stretched away clean white and green. The Rockies to the west bore evergreen flanks and gleaming snowy summits. The endless flat prairie at the foot of the peaks, stretching to horizontal infinity to the north and the east, was a glassy calm ocean of pristine snow. The immense scenery cradled a small cluster of dark angular shapes, the roofs of homes, village and farm buildings.

On the broad shoulders of the prairie, hundreds of tiny black forms roamed over the snows.

“Petah, what is that far off? I can’t see well with these old eyes.”

The young woman looked at White Elk and smiled.

“Buffalo, old one. They are buffalo.”

On the fringe of the North Piegan tribal village at Stand-off Creek, Alberta, residents gathered in a tight cluster and beheld an unearthly visage. Stretched single file across the southern horizon, a line of ghosts crept, easily overtaken by snowdevils twisting in the unceasing prairie wind. Many of the poltergeists were towing burdens that slowed their progress. Who were these people coming north? What weighty possessions were they hauling? Every soul out on the prairie margin was the color of the Yellowstone ash that had fallen in torrents on the borderlands.

A North Piegan elder squinted to bring the undulating horizon line into focus. He stood transfixed for a minute. “Unbelievable,” the man gasped. “Praise Napiw.”

“What do you see,” burst a voice from those watching the distant gray creatures.

“Our brothers and sisters to the south, they are coming.”

On the in-run slope to the village, Petah, daughter of the Blackfoot physician, watched figures amass before the dwellings ahead. Each individual in the distant community was facing in her direction. Joy, that forgotten emotion that had lain buried in the ash layers for months, danced pirouettes about her heart. They were walking out of danger. They really were.

As the South Piegan band approached the North Piegan village, citizens of the town rushed forward to greet the ghost travelers. Shouts of greeting rang in the mountain folds and swept away into the prairie. Villagers threw up their hands when they recognized relatives and friends. They embraced their fellow Blackfoot. Many exhausted trekkers collapsed in the arms of the northerners, unable to expend another ounce of energy. Cries of agony punctuated the din when people learned of the deaths of kin, lost to the ash and the firestorm.

In the crush, young Petah thought only of tending to White Elk. He needed to be taken immediately from the travois he was lashed into and brought to a warm space for treatment. White Elk smiled at the exhausted youngster as she made him comfortable and told him she would get help to move him indoors. As she turned to go, an elder female loomed before White Elk’s vision, pulled brutishly at the shoulder of the young woman, and looked into her face. The matriarch clasped young Petah in an iron embrace and dug fingers into her back. The woman lifted her head to the clouds and howled in relief at finding her only daughter safe. White Elk recognized the doctor, Sinopa, missing for so long.

Sinopa placed a hand against the travois to steady herself as she and Petah finally broke their embrace. North Piegan tribal citizens formed a clutch about the women and White Elk. Petah stumbled. The trauma of the five-day death march from Chief Mountain left her suddenly unsteady on her feet. She grabbed for her mother’s hand and held it in a vice grip, as if to gain a great measure of strength from her.

Petah wiped ash from her face and addressed her mother and the many others now gathered. “You must know, everyone, that our beloved White Elk brought us here. He saved us.”

All cast eyes on the aged, stricken human sprawled in the travois. White Elk struggled to raise a hand in a simple gesture of greeting.

“He is the reason we are alive today. This man,” cried the young woman, battling tears of exhaustion, “this man works miracles.”

Chapter Seventy-Seven

The village green at Independency resembled an eighteenth-century New England common. Small homes, guest cottages, and town buildings stood at the edge of a tree-lined rectangular expanse. To relieve the mounting psychological stress of living in a volcano-fouled environment, Abel insisted the green be liberated from the ash. It had become an oasis of verdant life in a desert of gray ugliness.

Walking across the common, the town’s patriarch trod on sweet emerald turf, grass growing luxuriously in the unseasonably cool summer temperatures and white light radiating from a polluted sky. Yellowstone ash, rich with fresh minerals minted deep within the earth, fed plant roots extravagantly, promoting a lush growth of grass. Trees ringing the common had managed to leaf out in spring and seemed to find just enough nourishment in the feeble rays of the sun. Abel stopped to refresh his brooding soul, a steady breeze flipping his collar about. A single leaf from a silver maple lost its grip on a branch and tumbled in the air before his eyes. He followed its course, the leaf coasting on the wind. It sailed across the entire width of the common and disappeared.

Watching it, the man was struck by a thunderous thought, flashing through his mind’s creative recesses in an instant. He turned on his heels and broke into full running stride, aiming for the Beaver Den, the little town’s industrial building.

A door in the wall of Maxwell Zimmerman’s busy enclave burst open to admit Abel on the run. He dodged metal turning lathes, drill presses and old metal-working machines that defied description in a frantic dash to find the manager of the place. Maxwell and several others labored, fabricating steam fittings for a small boiler to be bolted into a tiny lake-going, wood-fired steamboat. Abel hurtled down upon them.

“Max, Max, I need to talk to you,” Abel wheezed, wolfing down breaths.

“You need the doctor, by the looks of you,” said Max, rumpling up his nose at the intruder.

Abel dragged the engineer away from the work area. “Come on, we need to talk right this minute.”

Max closed the door to a small office for an audience with the community leader. He beheld Abel, wild-eyed, drumming his fingers incessantly on the surface of a desk.

“Max, what do you know about pneumatic devices, things that operate by negative pressure, you know, like at a bank?”

“You mean something like a mail tube chute?”

“Exactly. Do you know how something like that works?

“Of course. Very simple,” shrugged Max, scratching a bushy head of hair the color of ground pepper. “The first subway ever put in service in New York was a pneumatic train.”

“Huh, I didn’t know that,” said Abel.

“ Yeah, engineers built a perfectly round tunnel, and the cars they built for it were round, too, like huge tin cans. On one side of the cars they pumped out the air and created a partial vacuum. Normal atmospheric pressure pushing on the back end of the car sent the thing flying through the tube.”

“You could send anything through a pneumatic tube, couldn’t you?”

“Certainly. Anything.”

“Could you build a pneumatic system?”

“I think I could. All I’d need is a source of power, fabricate a vacuum pump, and hook it to some tubing. That would do it.”

“How big could you make it?”

“Size isn’t a problem: send a letter, send a subway car. It just depends on what you want to move and how far you want to move it.”

Abel rocked to and fro, lost in thought. “Tell me, Max, how fast could you put such a thing together, using any odd engine you’ve got laying around here for a source of power?”

“How big?”

“Oh, big enough to move something through pipe no larger than, say, a basketball is round.”

“How far do you want to push your basketball?”

“I don’t know. Maybe 200 or 300 feet.”

“That could be done. I think I could rig up something.”

“How fast?”

“Fast enough, a week or two, I’d imagine. Where do you want to set this up?”

“Sweetly.”

“Sweetly?”

“Could you fashion it so it fits into a canoe?”

“A canoe?” Max closed his eyes and rattled his head about. “I have to tell you, Abel, you’re one bloody odd duck.”

Chapter Seventy-Eight

An elderly Native American man, mouth agape and gasping for air, lay entombed in bandages. He cried out in pain, but there was no volume to his voice. Liz listened to the man’s ordeal from her bed and studied a face chiseled by age, as if it were desert sandstone eroded by ceaseless wind and storm water. She had not seen this individual before, but she sought to overcome her own injuries and go to his bedside to assist him in his agony.

Before Liz could push off from the bed, the Blackfoot doctor, Sinopa, rushed into the room with a small implement wrapped in packaging. She struggled to liberate the tool. The woman’s daughter, Petah, entered carrying a small basin.

The doctor pulled on latex gloves, poured disinfectant onto the man’s ribs and washed him down with it. She placed a small metal object against the rib cage and spent a few seconds probing with her fingers.

“White Elk, this will hurt for one second, but you will forget the pain right away.”

Sinopa raised an arm and slapped the object. An audible pop, like a balloon exploding, followed. Fluids erupted from White Elk’s body. Dark watery froth and blood spatter showered the bed and drained into the container. The elder gasped and drew a deep breath.

“Ah-eee, I can breathe.”

The body cavity drained of fluid, Sinopa worked quickly to sew up the wound, disinfect once again, strap bandages to the skin and cover the elder with his blankets. She administered a shot as well.

The doctor threw the clinic door back and gestured for tribesmen and women to come forward. The room filled quickly with Blackfoot, who spread out to line the walls and encircle the bedridden man as Sinopa bent over to listen to the patient’s breathing.

At the foot of the bed, a small table was set out, a heavy ceramic pot upon its surface. Into the pottery went a twist of sweetgrass. The tinder was lit with a match.  Smoke curled into the room, filling the chamber with the ancient musk of prairie fire.

The many in the room set the walls vibrating with song, hoots and shouts. Two more individuals entered the chamber, a tall aged man bedecked in ceremonial tunic and a woman in fine weave and embroidery. On her shoulders she carried a rolled blanket, and this she brought to the bed and put it at the feet of the ailing one. One on each side of the bed, the two slowly unrolled the bundle exposing a three-foot reed and stone implement decorated with the head of a wood duck and many feathers of a golden eagle.

The tall aged one retrieved the long instrument from the bed and moved about the room, showing it to all in the chamber.

Blankets were brought to the room and spread about the floor. Several people moved onto them; they stepped lively, exaggerating their movements. They danced and twirled, moving with a purpose around the sick bed. Another joined the dance and another until the room drummed and vibrated with the slap of feet upon the floor.

Liz could not move her left leg easily, entombed in its cast. Damn the thing. It would not permit her freedom to join the dance. She so wanted to, though she had no idea why the festivities had erupted among the native people or if they would welcome her if she could join them. The stomping, whirling, and chanting were tonic for the eyes and ears. The monotony of quiet recuperation crawled off Liz’s bed, banished to the ward corners by the Blackfoot ritual playing out before her.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Tracing the southeast shoreline of Big Stone Lake, coils of black smoke intertwined beneath flat white skies tarnished by Yellowstone particulate. Men from Independency pulled on the oars of a flatwater canoe, plying southward, making for a column of smoke over Sweetly.

Big Stone Lake fast became a highway for villagers on the bluffs. With roads choked by ash and blowing dust, and gasoline an impossibly scarce and precious commodity, the lake provided freedom of movement. The town’s half dozen canoes and several kayaks were put into regular service.

Abel and Bobcat paddled toward the dark form of Sweetly Primary School, its rear brick walls illuminated by a crackling bonfire. Through the smoke, figures drifted, carrying materials from the school and anything that would burn from buildings nearby. Sweetly citizens had piled flammables high on the fire, creating a searing orange conflagration and oily smoke. Abel approached one of the citizens ferrying tinder and asked if the man knew the whereabouts of Jim Bottomly, the coop manager. The stranger simply pointed toward the school.

A small brick and mortar structure, the school building shouldered a wound in its roof above its multi-purpose room. The weight of wet ash had bent steel girders and brought down splintered span timbers on citizens huddled there, using the building for emergency shelter.

The sour stench of unwashed human bodies invaded the nostrils of the men from Independency village as the doors of Sweetly Primary School parted. Accustomed to the pissy odor of farm animal excrement and the acrid bite of agricultural chemicals wafting from South Dakota farm fields, Abel tried waving away the smell as he and Bobcat entered the school building, but the odor would not dissipate.

The central hallway down the middle of the small building stretched dark, illuminated only by sun filtering through the doorway. The corridor lay littered with bedding, clothing, utensils of every kind,, and knots of listless people. The sound of repeated coughing filled the space.

Electrical power and natural gas supplies had failed long ago. Food supplies dwindled down to bulk corn and soy salvaged from the grain coop towers. Shivering in frigid homes, families abandoned their dwellings and migrated to the school to seek shelter and the warmth of many bodies. Volunteer firemen pulled several corn pellet stoves out of homes and set them up wired to a small gasoline-powered generator, one stove in each of two classrooms to provide pockets of warmth in the little school building. They muscled drums of water from the lake for drinking, for washcloth bathing and for flushing toilets. Farmwomen, laboring outdoors, cooked corn meal and soy mush and hard, dry corncakes over wood fire coals glowing inside of gutted gas barbeque grills.

The efforts weren’t enough to keep people in place. Scores of citizens had left the area, fleeing the ash by traveling south on foot or, if they were lucky enough to still have some gasoline in a farm bulk tank, by mammoth field tractor down the buried rail lines.

Few acknowledged the arrival of the newcomers. Midwesterners were famous for neighborly greetings and welcoming travelers warmly. But the few townsfolk sprawled at Abel’s feet averted their eyes and shrank away as he and Bobcat picked their way through the hall and entered one of the classrooms, stacked tight with double-deck bunks all occupied with people. Bobcat thought the space resembled a barracks. Abel understood in an instant the classroom was a ward for the sick.

At the west corner of the room, Abel recognized a portly man heaped on a bunk in nightwear, pulling at the air with his mouth as a fish does when caught on a filament line and hauled out of the water. Jim Bottomly’s lips and fingers were blue from lack of oxygen, even though he was wheezing, panting heavily. The man’s left forearm was exposed to the air. The skin blushed dark red. Abel noticed the rash also encircled Bottomly’s neck and flared up on the top of the manager’s feet but not the souls. Like his fingers, Bottomly’s toes exhibited the blue hue of cyanosis.

Abel took a seat on the bed beside the ward patient and flagged a greeting with a wave of the hand.

“Well, Mr. Whittemore,” Bottomly gasped.

“How are you feeling, Jim?”

“I’m not much use to anyone right now.”

Abel placed his fingers to Bottomly’s forehead. The skin was hot to the touch. The man shook with a shivering spasm.

“How long have you been ill, Jim?”

Bottomly’s eyes widened to circles as if in fright. “Four, five days.”

“You’re running a frightful fever.”

“Much like everyone else. It’s swept through the town pretty hard.”

“What is it, what’s the contagion?”

“No idea. It’s pretty bad, though, like a bad flu. It’s taken down elderly folks, kids, a few adults.”

“You’ve lost townspeople?”

“We have, and folks are frightened to death of it. Some say it’s the plague; it’s typhus; it’s whatever. Lots left town because of it. It’s too much for them, that and the ash, conditions and all.”

Bottomly’s revelations unnerved Bobcat. He shook Abel’s shoulder. “We should be going, Abel.”

“Give me a minute, Bobcat.”

Abel turned his attention back to the man lying prone on the bunk before him.

“Jim, we think we can help people here in Sweetly.”

“Help us? Now how are you going to that? We’re a pretty miserable lot right now.”

“We need a supply of grain, Jim. Everyone in Sweetly needs that grain, too, of course, but we want to offer citizens fresh food in exchange for grain: vegetables, fruit, dairy products. What does that sound like to you, Jim—foodstuffs for grain.”

“Don’t matter what I think. We’re not going to have an ounce of grain to give you even if we wanted to.”

“Why’s that?”

“National emergency, boys. Washington is intent on moving the grain, move it by train if the Guard can get here.”

Abel shook his head in understanding. The rumor was true, then. “So the government is mobilizing now?”

“Yes sir, the Guard’s been put to work. Uncle Sam wants the rails dug out of the ash everywhere.”

“How long before they start work here on the lines?”

“No idea. Sooner than later is my guess. Harland wants to stop them.”

“Who?”

“Harland Sven.”

Abel’s eyebrows arched upward. “He does?”

“Says he’ll stop them with bullets. All he’s going to do is get himself killed.”

“Where is Harland?”

“Home tending to his bride. She’s sick something awful, as I understand it.”

“Well, we’ll have to go see him and….”

“Hell, he won’t have anything to do with you.”

“We’ve got an idea that should secure the grain, Jim. Maybe we can convince him to help us carry it out.”

“Don’t you be betting on that, Mr. Whittemore.”

Chapter Eighty

Seated at the stern of a canoe, Abel guided the craft toward the western shore of Big Stone Lake, aiming for a landing where a swarm of tractor tracks reached the water’s edge. Local citizens, many without power to run pumps or fuel to fire emergency generators, had no choice but to come down to the lake frequently to obtain a ration of water for their families.

After pulling hard on their oars to cut through cold lake chop, Abel and Bobcat nosed their canoe into the western shore five miles north of Sweetly. Abel jumped from the little vessel and disappeared up a rough lane on foot. Bobcat would wait for his companion’s return.

Walking for fifteen minutes in deep tractor ruts stabbed down into loose volcanic ash as deep as his hip sockets, Abel approached the marooned residence of Harland and Eda Sven. The dull volcanic crud was much deeper in Sweetly than at Independency village. The ash blanket from the Yellowstone eruption had swept lightly across the community on Prospect Bluffs but had descended with a vengeance on communities toward the southern narrows of the thirty-mile lake.

Bobcat pleaded with Abel to accompany him to Harland’s residence. As a precaution, he’d argued. But Abel insisted a lone figure would be less threatening to the farm family. Twenty feet from the farmhouse porch, Abel pulled a bandana from his nose and mouth and called out to make his presence known. No one acknowledged him. He called again.

“What’s your business?” a low voice rolled from the porch.

“I’ve come to talk with Harland.”

The front door opened and a wheat straw-thin man holding a bird gun appeared in the doorway. Harland cast an eye up and down the porch and waved to someone in the house, as if giving directions. Abel didn’t recognize the farmer at first. His body was a good deal thinner than he remembered and his face was clothed in white stubble. On each cheek, on either side of the man’s pencil-thin nose, was a large rash. Harland’s face looked as though a large red butterfly had alighted on it.

“Don’t I know you?” stammered the farmer. He paused a moment. “You that Whittemore fella.”

“Yes, Harland, I’m Abel Whittemore.”

“We’ve got no business.”

“Harland, it’s urgent I speak with you.”

“Nothing to talk about. Leave.” Harland leveled the shotgun at the visitor.

“I have a solution to the….”

“Don’t give me a reason to drive you off.”

Abel swallowed spittle in his throat and inhaled deeply. “I’ll give you a reason to put the gun down, Harland. I have a solution to the problem of the National Guard coming here and shipping the grain away.”

Harland raised the weapon to his right shoulder and screeched. “Get out of here.”

Abel held up a hand. “I’m not here to trouble you, sir. I’m here to offer a means to thwart the Guard’s mission, to keep them from emptying out of the grain silos.”

“We’ve got a plan in place and it doesn’t include you and your kind. You comprehend what I’m saying?”

“Harland, you and I should talk with Jim Bottomly. All we have to do….”

“Look, freak, that grain is life or death here in the valley. People either hold onto the grain in those silos or they starve. Pretty damn tough choice, wouldn’t you say? That’s my grain down there. I grew it. The families in this valley, they grew it. You have no right to it and neither does the Guard or anyone else.”

“I can assure you, Harland, there will be grain for everyone even if the Guard gets the train into town to offload it, even if they bring in armed troops.”

“How are you going to do that, freak? I’m not stupid. I read some of the crap you wrote. I hear what folks say. I know all about you people up on the bluffs.  You’re pacifists, one-worlders, or whatever bullshit. Well, I’m here to tell you, mister, it’s going to take a militia to face down the Guard. Most of us here have served our country. We know how to put up a fight.”

Exasperated, Abel yelled out, “You don’t need to fire a single shot, damn it.”

An explosive discharge from the right rocketed lead pellets through the air, just above Abel’s temple. The uninvited guest recoiled in terror from the sound of the blast and fell to into the ash dust.

“Get the hell out,” a husky voice, a different one, roared. “Next barrel load takes you down for good.”

Abel lay trembling, shaken by the concussion close to his face. Harland hadn’t shot at him. Who had? A huge pair of boots kicked up ash dust before his eyes, and the barrel of a shotgun arched above his nose. The Bunyanesque figure gripped the firearm. The barrel smelled of burned powder. Abel recognized the massive creature towering over him: Andy Regas.

“All right, then,” Abel exhaled loudly out of fear. “I’ll leave you to your own devices.”

“Don’t you show yourself again,” called Harland from his porch.

“Very well, but you have to know one thing.”

“And what would that be, freak?” the farmer uttered with distain.

“Applied physics is all that’s necessary to win the Sweetly grain war.”

Chapter Eighty-One

An hour north of Minneapolis, just off Interstate 94 at Sauk Center, a local police cruiser walled off Route 28 west. A Jeep Liberty slid to a stop at the checkpoint, manned by a single local policeman bundled beneath a winter parka and standing in a half inch of sleet pellets. The man took note of the vehicle’s Missouri plates.

“Good evening, ma’am,” piped a young officer, leaning into the car window, “what’s your destination?”

“Big Stone Lake.”

“Oh, not good, eh. We’re advising everyone to stay off 28 altogether. The highway is impassible most places.”

Winnie grimaced. “Could I at least get through to Morris?”

“Only emergency vehicles are permitted through to service the emergency shelter on the state university campus.”

The officer checked the interior of the vehicle and noticed belongings in the back seat.              “Where are you from in Missouri, ma’am?”

“Kansas City.”

“What are you doing up here, under these circumstances?”

Winnie engineered a verbal contrivance on the spot. “I haven’t heard from my parents in a month. I have to get to them.”

“I wish I could help you, ma’am, but it’s only going to get worse. We’re going to have some nasty weather blowing up on the plains.”

“Great.”

“Do you have emergency supplies with you?”

“Yes.”

The officer looked up the road then turned his attention to the woman behind the wheel. “Say, lady, you wouldn’t happen to have a little food you could spare?”

Winnie locked her eyes with the officer and held her tongue.

“I need to check…”

“No you don’t.”

“I…”

“No, you don’t,” she said caustically.

The young officer stumbled backwards as the Jeep Liberty suddenly lurched forward around the cruiser, fishtailed, and gained speed westbound.

“What in the name of Jesus are you doing, lady?” the officer bellowed into the west wind. “The road’s closed, woman!”

Within several miles of the roadblock, Winnie rolled under heavy spell of Yellowstone’s ash shadow. The dead rock flake layer accumulated quickly in the road and, mixed with the slick coating of sleet, created treacherous conditions. Piloting her Jeep within the confines of heavy ruts and geared down to second, she kept the Chrysler product crawling forward, yet it took nearly two hours to traverse the fifty miles to the university branch-campus town of Morris.

The gas gauge read one-third tank as the Jeep slithered onto Morris’ deserted Main Street. Motoring down the dark thoroughfare was a trip through a war zone. Not a single light shown in a storefront. No hint of the warmth of humanity materialized nor that of its trappings: no cars at the curb, no banners, flags, no marquee lettering, no trash bags set out for collection. The broad lane and sidewalks lay entombed in volcanic mire and slush paste, doorways filled in with dust drifts. The creator here had a passion only for lusterless black, hues of lead and the anemic pale skin of driven night sleet.

Winnie spun up the heater control dial to pump more heat into the cab to chase away thrumming dread.

A mile west of the Morris sleet turned to pancakes of wet snow. In minutes, Route 28 presented an unbroken track. Ruts carved down into the ash cover had drifted in with dust. The new slick of snow colored a ribbon of flat silver tarnish, twisting through the country night.

Massing armies of white flakes marched in the headlights as Winnie pushed the vehicle to its limits. The tires spun frantically in the unstable ash, rarely biting down to pavement. Snow and ash accumulated so rapidly the front bumper began to plow the filth rather than sweep over it wherever the wind sculpted drifts.

Half an hour west of Chokio, telephone poles became the only guideposts heralding the path of asphalt somewhere below. A business sign spelling out Chamberlain Lumber, Graceville, Minnesota emerged from storm. The Jeep Liberty couldn’t reach it. The vehicle bellied up and packed sludge beneath the undercarriage, sufficient to thwart the tires from gaining traction. It could go no further. Small matter, the rig would soon die of thirst.

Now what? Stay with the car and run out of gas in minutes? Burrow into the sleeping bag and wait until morning? And if the storm worsened and drifts piled up, what then? No one would be along on this miserable thoroughfare, and probably hadn’t been for weeks.

Winnie slammed a fist down on the steering wheel. Circumstances had careened out of control. She couldn’t abide the situation she had fostered and reacted against it, not in fear but in rage.

“Do something, you idiot,” she bellowed to the car’s interior. Action was better than inaction, she chided herself, movement better than stasis. She resolved to abandon the vehicle and strike off into the wind and pitch in an attempt to reach the sawmill huddled in the storm somewhere ahead in the night.

Bundled beneath layers of clothing, the woman pushed out the door of the vehicle and stepped into a raging gale as if she had dropped down into a late summer storm on Baffin Island in the Canadian high arctic. Ferocious gusts funneled down the buried highway, winging snow and ash on the horizontal.

Winnie trekked northwest against the tempest, burrowing through the brute force of howling air. Head ducked down, hunched over to present less body surface to the wind, she descended into an autonomic state. Push hard, she instructed her legs. Find the entrance to the mill somewhere ahead. Move and stay warm. Stop in this wind and lock rigid with cold.

Midnight brought no lull in the snow or wind. Caked white with driven rime frost and steaming sweat vapor from exertion, Winnie walked far longer than she had anticipated. Getting her bearings among the swirling ground clouds was difficult. The night illumination was flat at all compass points, rendering every image in two-dimensions. The environment around her was a cacophony of noise, wet cold and stinging precipitation.

Between gusts of wind-driven crystals, a smudge on the horizon materialized into the shapes of small industrial buildings. Frantic for safety, muscles in her thighs burning, she grappled for the nearest doorway in a structure to find a way out of the elements. She rammed an elbow through a pane of door glass, reached for an interior lock, found it, manipulated it, and fell headlong into the building.

The interior was as raw as the night air. In minutes she was shivering. Sweat soaked her clothing from head to foot. The garments had lost their insulating powers and were wicking body heat into the atmosphere faster than her metabolism could manufacturer it.

Frantically, she fumbled for a light switch, found one and flipped it. The darkness did not part. The space she had fallen into seemed to be a small office outfitted out with several desks, computers, a few chairs and a small sofa. In one corner stood a cement-block hearth and a massive wood stove, fabricated large to keep frigid Minnesota winters at bay. She groped the stove and objects near it. She ran her hands over a hewn log mantle, found a glass jar candle, and nudged a box of wooden kitchen matches. She shook the box. A single match remained. Pulling it out, she struck the flint strip hard, snapping the head of the match off the stick. The match head flew off into the black.

Chapter Eighty-Two

Farm manager Oleg Knudsen hurried through an armored morning, cut through with edgy black shadows. In the horizontal white light of the emerging cold sun, frost and snow crystals flashed as if reflecting light from a junkyard of shattered mirrors. The day had the look and feel of the first week of December, not the last days of summer.

The man approached the traditional red-painted barn, built in the style of a nineteenth-century Pennsylvania Dutch farm building. As he rounded the northeast corner, two piles of offal greeted him, glistening in the early hard light amid dark stains and clots formed by blood seepage in wind scoured snow.

Kneeling, Knudsen probed the intestines with a finger. They were hard to the touch, nearly frozen solid from long exposure to night air. In seconds the man formed a mental image of what had transpired sometime after the barns were shut for the night. One or two people had entered the barns late, he calculated. Two nannies were led outside, trying to get at a handful of grain used lure the animals to their deaths. The throats of the animals had been slit and they had been bled out on the spot and gutted.

Knudsen ran through the large equipment port on the rear of the building but stopped abruptly before the first massive square upright timber ten feet into the building. Affixed to the wood at chest height were two white ovoid shapes. Heads. Goat heads were pinned to the timber with small spikes driven through the once quick ears. The gold eyes, with their friendly rectangle bar irises, would not follow the human’s movements. They reflected no light.

Knudsen went to the severed heads and carefully lifted them from their crucifixion timbers, pulled them down and carried them into the barn office to locate a cloth or box and a shovel. He wanted to bury them right away, the offal, too.

Under a large tree, the farm manager cracked at the earth with a shovel and broke through the frost frozen film in the top inch of soil. He let fly heavy shovel loads of earth until he had descended thirty inches. Without a word, he placed the remains at the bottom of the little pit, returned the soil to it, then gathered leaf litter from the forest edge and covered the spot. When he was done, he couldn’t readily tell where the burial plot lay.

Chapter Eighty-Three

Thrusting a knife between the tibia and fibula of a lower leg, Andy Regas punched a narrow slit. The young man, a chewing tobacco wad between the cheek and teeth in his heavy jaw, hoisted a small caprian carcass up with one hand. Spreading the rear legs, he hooked the appendages onto driven nails. Now the beast could hang upside down. He did the same thing to a second carcass so he could work easily on the two freshly killed animals.

From the gaping hole in the goats’ abdomens, where the man had eviscerated the animals the night before, he slit the skin from the centerline out to each leg and up the inside of the thighs to the ankle joints, where he had severed the cloven-hoofed feet. Working deftly with his thick fingers, as he had done to hundreds of deer carcasses over many years, he peeled the hides back, guiding the knife to slice connective tissue so the skins would slip free of the muscle tissue without disturbing the flesh.

In a few minutes, he had stripped the goats of their pelts and nailed the wet skins to a wall to dry. The muscle tissues cast a purple hue beneath thin slips of membrane, tallow and small bead clusters of yellow fat. In the cool temperatures, he’d let the meat hang for a while to age and soften.

Regas turned to leave the shed but arrested himself, startled. Someone stood behind him, had come up on him without making a sound. He recognized the being once the startle reflex faded: his foster father, Harland.

“You scared the crap out of me, man,” sputtered Regas caustically.

Harland glowered at the strapping young male.

“Where’d you come from, old man?”

“The lake. I took Jim’s bass boat over.”

“What do you want, for chrissake?”

“What’s going on here, Andy, eh?” Harland scrutinized the skins nailed to the wall. “What’s all this?”

“A little payback.”

“Payback? For what?”

“Got pinched for jackin’ deer, so I’m pushing back.” Regas spit at the shed wall where the skins hung.

“So now you’re jacking farm animals from the bluffs?” Harland asked bluntly.

“It’s called filling my belly.”

“I brought you some food, a few sacks of corn.”

“Well then, I’ll eat pretty good.”

“Andy, I didn’t come here to talk about your eating habits. I need you down in Sweetly in a week, when the National Guard gets into town.”

“I told you I’d be there.”

“I’m counting on you.”

“When I’m done with that Whittemore asshole, I’ll be down.”

“What are you bothering with him for? He got the message from us loud and clear. Don’t waste your time on him.”

The farmer turned his back on the soul he and his wife had taken in as a ward of the state when Regas was a boy of eight years. He strode a few steps and turned. “There’s another thing.”

Regas continued dismembering one of the goat carcasses. “What’s that?”

“It’s your mother.”

“Yeah, and?”

“She’s sick, Andy. She’s come down with something serious.”

Regas glanced at Harland a second, shrugged and returned to his work.

The farmer shook his head in disgust and turned away from the young man once again. Harland ambled off toward the porch of the rundown structure the young man and several others called home.

“Where are you goin’?” Regas roared after the farmer.

Harland didn’t acknowledge the question.

“Man, stay out of my place.”

The Swede kept moving.

“Stay out of my fucking place.”

Chapter Eighty-Four

White Elk slept peacefully. His wounds were healing rapidly now. Liz studied the Blackfoot elder’s stone face as he slept, fascinated with the deep wrinkles of age, like Badlands arroyos.

With little to do while her bones knitted, the geophysicist took to assisting White Elk in his recovery, washing him, feeding him, and keeping company with him in the hopes he would spin yarns of Blackfoot lore to keep his mind off his pain. He did not fail her. His tales seemed to brighten both their spirits and make the long hours of recuperation speed by.

The Blackfoot doctor, Sinopa, entered the tiny moonlit ward to check on her patients. She found Liz seated at White Elk’s bedside, swaying quietly in the rocking chair Sinopa kept in the ward.

“How is he doing, Elizabeth?” asked the doctor.

“He’s at peace tonight.”

“Ah, that is a good thing. And you, my dear, how are you feeling this evening?”

“Much stronger, strong enough to think about making the trip east soon.”

“You may be able to. You have responded well to our healing practices. They work as no others.”

Liz chuckled at the doctor’s words. “You are the one who has worked, Sinopa. You are a fine doctor.”

“Made better by our faith and our rituals.”

Liz smiled at her caregiver. “I can’t argue with you on that.”

“I believe it in my heart, Elizabeth. Here on these reservation lands, we have to straddle two worlds. We live in both of them. In order for me to do my work well, I need the power of both worlds, of two medicines, to heal my neighbors.”

“How do you manage?”

“You’ve seen it for yourself, in White Elk. He was drowning in his own fluids when he came to us out of the ash. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“I needed to drain his chest to allow his lungs to expand, so I used a simple modern instrument to open the chest wall to let the fluids drain. Powerful antibiotics kept infection from gaining a toehold. But the ancient power of shamanism had just as profound an impact on White Elk. The dances, chanting, the herbs and sacred objects, all of these are as powerful as drugs for him—maybe not for you, but for him.”

“I am a woman of science, Sinopa. I have a little trouble accepting some of what you say wholeheartedly.”

Sinopa smiled wide enough to part the darkness. “Well, I was trained to be a doctor at Dartmouth. That would make me a woman of science, too, yes? But my Blackfoot heritage blessed me with other means to fight disease. I use them. You have heard of the placebo effect, have you not?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Medical science tells us that the placebo effect is a very powerful tool that can be used to shorten the duration of illness, or lessen pain, or to instill a sense of well-being in the sick. A patient who believes he or she will get better has a better chance of survival. There are a thousand research papers in journals that attest to that.

“The healing rituals, they are a godsend to our people. They mend much faster when we practice them. They are a link to the deep past, where our ancestors reside. Our rituals, our dances, our medicine bundles, they put us in touch with our culture from before the whites arrived. That is a comfortable place for us, a wellspring of honor and true faith.

“When we partake of our healing ceremonies, our people know they are being cared for in the physical world, and they also know they are being cared for in the spiritual realm of our ancestors. That is the secret and the power of ritual.

“So, as I have told you, I practice in two worlds. I know that each is more effective when used in conjunction with the other. One is not better than the other. White Elk there, he would be the first to agree.”

Chapter Eighty-Five

Wrestling into union suit underwear, heavy wool pants and work shirt, Abel mentally braced for a day of unrelenting toil harvesting what few spuds might be gleaned from the potato acreage. He and farm manager Knudsen already knew from samples extracted from the potato rows that the crop yield would be meager. Abel considered the little community fortunate to have anything at all to dig up from the cold soils. There would be no harvest on the vast potato farms across the Northwest, he understood. Every inch of the famous potato lands of Idaho and Oregon had vanished forever beneath volcanic tephra. There would not be one Ore-Ida French fry to be had from buried processing plants in communities along Idaho’s border-to-border Snake River Valley. The valley farms had ceased to exist.

In his tiny cabin kitchen, flashing canines and incisors in a head-splitting yawn, Abel lost his grip on a coffee pot as he filled it with water; it clattered into the sink. Muscles in the shoulders locked rigid from 10,000 canoe paddle strokes on a lake full of heavy chop the day before. Rabid about avoiding commercial over-the-counter drugs to relieve pain, he longed for a massage to loosen knot-bound tissues.

Retrieving the pot, he spotted Bobcat on the approach to the cabin. Abel threw the door back for his friend.

“Hello, Bobcat, I was expecting Oleg.”

“He’s the one with the red beard, remember?”

Abel managed a laugh. “I thought you’d still be sleeping in after the day we put in yesterday.”

“Couldn’t sleep. Here.” Bobcat handed Abel a slip of paper.

“What have you got?”

“Look at it. I came across it last night. I got a little web traffic, finally. It’s a list of names—survivors.”

“Survivors?”

“Flight 402 out of Bozeman.”

“This?” Abel held the paper to his face and squinted at the type, trying to bring the letters into focus without his reading glasses.

“It’s some sort of Canadian government data from Alberta officials, I believe.”

Abel’s sore neck muscles contracted violently, jerking his head up from the paper. “Liz is alive?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

The town’s founder glared at Bobcat, a look of utter astonishment across his face. “She did make it out of Yellowstone, then.”

“Apparently.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know, man. All I could find was this list. I couldn’t come up with anything else, not yet anyway.”

“Well, did you try the airline?”

“I did. I found out she had been released from a hospital in Calgary, Canada. That’s as far as I got.”

“Calgary? A look of pure puzzlement settled over his features. “She never reached Denver?”

“No. She must have survived some sort of emergency situation. It’s been months now, though. No one seems to know anything about her whereabouts, or that of quite a few others.”

Abel glanced up the stairway. “Look, I’ve got to tell Pelee. I’ll show her this. Can you go see what else you can find?”

“Sure, if the communication lines stay up for more than a minute or two.” Bobcat turned toward the door. “I’ll see you later.”

“Thanks, old friend.”

Bobcat exited the cabin as Abel mounted the stairs in a few bounds. He flipped the latch on his daughter’s small room, entered and took a seat on the child’s bed next to his daughter.

“Pelee. Are you going to sleep until tomorrow, missy?” Father shook his daughter gently. “Pelee.”

“Mmmm, go ‘way.” The youngster tightened her eyelids and buried her head in her pillow.

“I brought you a gift, missy.”

“No, you didn’t.” An eye opened and peeked out from the pillow.

“I did, a marvelous gift just for you. Here, you may have it.”

Pelee rolled in her covers and looked squarely upon her father. Abel presented Bobcat’s printout. The youngster lifted it from his hands.

“Oh, Pop,” Pelee grumbled, “just what I always wanted, a piece of paper. Poo!”

“You should read it. Then your present will appear.”

The child studied the type. “There are just names, Pop.”

“Not just any names, Pelee.”

The youngster scanned the sheet hurriedly, exaggerating head movements to show discontent with her father’s little ruse. She stopped still. “No.”

Pelee exploded from her covers, settling on her knees. She rammed a finger at the list. “There’s mom’s name. There it is.” She waved the paper at the ceiling. “What is this?”

Abel swept his daughter up in his arms and turned revolutions on the floorboards, Pelee’s legs and feet swinging arcs. “Your mother is alive, Pelee.”

Chapter Eighty-Six

Oleg hammered loudly on the exterior doorframe of Abel’s bungalow. Father and daughter, in mid-twirl, stopped gyrating. Pelee pushed away from her father, raced from her room and jumped down the cabin stairs. She unlatched the door, took one look at the farm manager, and jumped off the floor into his muscular arms. The farm manager, rocked off his feet by the lunging youngster, managed to grab the doorframe and pull the both of them inside.

“Mom’s alive, mom’s alive,” the child yelled into Oleg’s heavy red beard.

“What now, miss?”

“She is, she is.”

“Glad you’re up, Abel,” croaked Oleg, giving Pelee a bear hug as Abel padded down the stairs.

“Morning, Oleg.”

“What’s this your Pelee is telling me?”

“Her mother. She’s listed on a manifest as a survivor.”

“You mean….”

“Yes. She apparently survived the Yellowstone blow-up.”

“Well,” smiled Oleg through his beard, “that would be cause for celebration, eh, Pelee?”

“Yes.”

“But we’ve some things to attend to right now,” the farm manager said, a stern wrinkle across his brow. “We’ve got a serious situation, Abel. Did Pelee tell you?”

“Oleg told me yesterday there was trouble, Pop.”

Abel flinched and rubbed his eyes to clear them of morning encrustation. “How serious?”

“Someone took two goats from the barn,” noted Oleg. “They’re gone.”

Abel moaned and took a seat on the bottom stairs. “We lost two milking goats?”

“Yes, but that’s not the whole of it.”

Abel’s face stretched toward the floor. “What else?”

“In the caves, now. You ought to have a look.”

Pelee insisted on joining the men on their sojourn across the town. Abel told her to hurry, dress warmly, and come along.  Joyous occasion or tribulation, Abel insisted his daughter experience every aspect of community life.

The trio stepped into an armored morning, cut through with limp violet shadows on a crust of new snow.

Beneath the ridgeline of Prospect Bluffs, where slopes leveled out at the base of a raw glacier-cut wound along the northwest flank stood a stonework portal, a graceful arch of native rock and mortar. At the center of entrance were heavy plank doors that could be opened wide enough to allow a pickup truck to back in and a second entry, a small insulated door. It had been left ajar.

Beyond the stonework, the little band stepped into the deep past, when glacier ice scoured the Minnesota lake country to dust and rubble and fractured and cleaved huge slabs of rock away from their stony cradles. At Prospect Bluffs, ice sheared sheets of rock from bony ridges of stone protruding from the prairie. Beneath the ice mantle, the rock leaves slowly piled into the region to come to rest at angles at the base of the newly forming glacial moraines, kames and drumlins. The angled rock formed narrow hollows at Prospect Bluffs, running in a continuous line in excess of 500 feet. Glacial till and forest duff had, over millennia, covered the slabs, sealing the caves off completely from the outside world, save a ragged, triangular entrance. In the first days of the existence of Independency, the deep secret of the bluff country was discovered, and the early colonists put the cave to good use as a cold storage chamber and, more recently, as a vast mushroom nursery.

Oleg threw a light switch and strings of bulbs illuminated the granite sheaths that formed the linear vault. Thirty feet into the cave, the farm lane ended at a small loading dock. A few dozen feet beyond, loaded crates of carrots, parsnips, beets, salsify, turnips and rutabaga stood side by side. In the deepest recesses, the community members stored apples and pears. Overhead and hanging by their roots from wire lines were hundreds of heads of cabbage. On the opposite side of the skid, across from the root crops in storage, stood five-foot log butts, bolt upright every one, a battalion of wooden soldiers in marching formation. Into the depths of the rock chamber coursed the logs until the uneven walls of the cave hid the remainder from view. Each length of wood shouldered a burden of growth, umber or buff in tone, ragged, fluted and fan shaped, all the multitudinous organic forms of shitake and morel mushrooms.

Pelee, skipping and dancing, led the way into the cavern to a rock masonry wall, similar to the entrance but standing to one side and sealing off a deformation in the rock cavity. Oleg pointed the way through a heavy door, found yet another light switch, and illuminated the interior. The locker was little more in square feet than a large suburban living room, but the entire space was given over to painted wood slat shelving. Most of the racks were burdened with weighty wheels of goat cheddar, edam, gouda and Swiss and tawny cubes of sweet gjetost. Intermingled were rounds of cheeses curried from cow’s milk, bartered for and bought many months before.

The cheese stocks were methodically inventoried; at any one time the keepers of the cave’s cheese locker knew to the pound how much was on hand. That was just the problem. Hundreds of pounds of cheese were unaccounted for.

Lifting a clipboard from a nail on the racks, Oleg pointed to the entries on the paper. “At dawn, I discovered the problem here. I did a count, and we’re short right plenty.”

“What’s the tally, Oleg?” asked Abel.

“Whoever our friends are, they’ve taken to the cheddar. We are four twenty-pound wheels down this morning. Edam rounds, off twenty pounds, too. No gjetost, thank heaven. Must not be Norwegians, them.”

Abel rubbed a finger under his nose. “This is getting old.”

“It certainly is,” Oleg agreed.

“We post a watch, and still things go missing.”

“Somebody is using us as a supermarket, I’d say,” the farm manager offered.

“It’s not somebody, it’s a small number of people,” said Abel, examining the earthen floor and the boot impressions in the soil. “Other than ourselves, there are a few different sole prints on the floor here.”

“Could just be shoe prints of any of us here.” Oleg said, scratching his beard and studying the inventory sheets.

“Pop,” called Pelee bending over to draw a finger on the earthen floor.

“What, Pelee?”

“One of these people has a really big foot. It’s huge,” said the youngster, kneeling now.

Abel and Oleg joined Pelee at her level at the floor.

“Who would wear a boot that size here?” the farm manager pondered.

“Huh.” Abel rubbed his chin to stimulate a thought. “I know someone that who could leave a print that size.”

“Who?” Both the child and the farm manager piped up.

“A fellow by the name of Andy Regas,” Abel suggested. “Foster son of an old Sweetly farm family. He is one very immense character.”

“Big or not,” Oleg stammered, “he’s stealing us blind, if that’s who he is.”

After a long minute of silence, the three stood, pumping columns of cooling breath into the dank cave atmosphere, Abel filled the cloister with a bitter oath: “We damn well have to do something about this and do something soon.”

“We’re going to have everybody up all night then, if you want catch the gents,” Oleg figured.

“Well, that’s what we’ll do.”

“Ya, and if we do catch them, what then?” Oleg scowled. “How are we going to put a stop to them, eh? We’re not exactly the Marines.”

PART IV

Yellowstone Refugees Flood Cities; Canada Stops All Food Exports

Special to The New York Times

Rye Wooten, Canada Bureau Chief

OTTAWA, CANADA – As refugees continue to stream out of the Yellowstone ash-infested regions of North America, overwhelming relief efforts in cities such as Winnipeg, Edmonton, Chicago, Minneapolis, Chicago, Springfield, Illinois, St. Louis and Memphis, members of parliament here voted to stop all export shipments of Canadian grain. In a near unanimous vote, and following Argentina’s lead yesterday, ministers called for protectionist policies designed to ensure the future of Canada’s food supply. With temperatures in the grain belt cooling and expected to be far below normal during the summer growing and fall harvest seasons, the lawmakers chose to safeguard Canada’s population in the event that Yellowstone-spawned conditions greatly suppress the fall harvest.

Meanwhile, parliament also passed emergency funding measures to provide resources and manpower to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of people who have flooded out of Saskatchewan and eastern Alberta prairies into Calgary and Edmonton in the west and Regina, Winnipeg and Thunder Bay to the east. In the United States, millions are feared dead and perhaps as many as ten million people have been displaced by the eruption and its aftermath. Midwestern and southern cities on the eastern edge of the ashfall have been inundated with desperate citizens who managed to walk overland or travel by boat, in some cases hundreds of miles out of the affected areas.

Martial law is in effect in most of the cities where refugees have sought shelter. Troops roam the streets maintaining order and distributing relief supplies. There have been only sporadic reports of looting and violence in the affected cities now that troop presence has been firmly established.

Around the world, nations have reacted vehemently to the Canadian and Argentinian votes to cut off grain shipments. Communist Party leaders in China, the world’s most populous country and the world’s largest importer of grain, voiced strong opposition to the maneuvers and threatened to cut off all trade with Canada unless exceptions were made. China imports millions of metric tons of grain from Canada and Argentina. The Chinese also lost little time leveling a thinly veiled threat at Australia, the largest producer of wheat on the Asian rim.

Chapter Eighty-Seven

Bonfires drew Plains people like June moths to flame. When Milbank played Ortonville High on the local gridiron, valley folks strung out for miles along Big Stone Lake and the Minnesota River converged on the town high school for a homecoming fire. The conflagration was a bona fide can’t-miss annual tradition, better attended than Christmas services. Families eagerly awaited the touch-off ceremony each fall and the sparking flames that followed, if only to be sure to get a glimpse of sons and daughters having good honest fun with school chums beneath the orange glow of the fire.

Harland stood before an angry blaze burning on the playground at the Sweetly Primary School, not two-dozen paces from the shores of the lake. The night wrapped coal-tar black around a snapping pyre burning scavenged lumber, school desks and cabinetry, and the fats and sinews of the dead.

The Swede gazed transfixed into the living flames, stupefied by how fast a town could contract and its citizens disappear in stinking smoke. Something had come on the wind and lay waste the town. Within forty-eight hours, fever swept through the majority of citizens huddled in the school for emergency shelter and warmth. Death infiltrated the crowded classrooms soon after, snatching away the young and old and taking down men and women in their prime.

The farmer ferried his wife, Eda, from the farm to town in a desperate bid to find help for her, or at least find some comfort in the hands of friends and neighbors. He found only a town hollowed out and the dead abandoned to the flames of a bonfire.

Having witnessed the first deaths and endured the agony of the dying, families by the score abandoned the school and melted away into the cold gray landscape. Harland stayed, wet cloth in hand, wiping away the soaking sweats of a raging fever consuming his wife. Eda’s entire frame flushed red with a patchy rash. The pestilence clamped down tight on muscles from head to foot. Her moaning cries for relief from the agony haunted the farmer. He was powerless in the face of it and ashamed of himself for being so.

The woman failed so rapidly that Harland feared that if he took just a minute to sleep, his wife of many years would die unattended, alone. Nodding off in a chair, gravity got hold of him and nudged him over. He awoke in with a start, caught himself, and returned to his vigil. Eda Harland laid still, eyes staring, intent on the schoolroom ceiling. Harland reached out to place a hand on her forehead. She did not respond, eyelids unblinking. Her brow felt cool to the touch. The fever had broken; there was no life force left to do battle with the unknown microbial menace.

Plains men allowed emotion no purchase. His dead wife cooling on the cot before him, Harland thought only of how to dispose of the body. Mourning could be put off, days and weeks if necessary, but a body free of its spirit must not reside in a schoolhouse one minute. Schools were not for the dead. Eda’s remains had to be removed.

The farmer cradled his wife in his arms and carried her out into the night. The bonfire was inviting, warm, brilliant, and sparking lively. Neighbors had delivered their loved ones to the flames already. Traumatized by their struggle in Yellowstone hell, ill feed, and suffering chronic maladies of their own, citizens gave up the arduous task of hand-digging graves. Cremation made difficult work so much easier, faster. Fire was efficient. Fire could handle all that could be heaped upon it. So many had died in Sweetly from the mysterious plague that searing flames became the mode of disposal for the living; otherwise the bodies of the deceased would stack up as one stacked cordwood. No soul remaining had the energy for anything else. Well fed, the pyre burned with a spirited crackle.

With the help of several Sweetly natives, Harland heaved his wife’s body upon the burning mass and retreated to cool air so his skin would not blister. He didn’t know why he stayed to watch the blaze work its awful magic—out of respect, maybe. He couldn’t be sure. Wishing a soul peace and bidding the body adieu was supposed to be a collective exercise, wasn’t it? Friends and neighbors pulled together in grief, listened to a few well-chosen words over the grave, prayed a minute to a higher authority, placed a flower on the casket, and filed away slowly. That’s the way it was done. But the bonfire required none of that. So Harland stayed on, husbanding the flames hour after hour.

“Harland.”

A familiar rasping croak got through to the farmer, the voice of Jim Bottomly.

“Harland.” Bottomly approached, wrapped in a soiled blanket, sleet pellets spinning about the man. The coop manager’s fever had broken in the morning hours. He was feeling well enough to lift himself from his sweat-soaked schoolhouse bunk and go in search of his neighbors. “I got word.”

“Huh?” Harland mumbled. “What’d ya got?”

“The train, the Guard, they’re coming. Won’t be long now.”

Chapter Eighty-Eight

Dawn brought a lull in the icy sleet but not the wind. Caked white with driven frost and steaming sweat vapor from exertion, Winnie could not gain her bearings among the swirling ground clouds. First light was flat at every compass point. Wind direction hadn’t shifted all night, so west must still be directly ahead.

Between gusts, a smudge on the horizon materialized into the roof of a small home. Spent from the relentless night march against the elements and her leg muscles burning, the woman left the track and made for the building. Maybe someone would let her rest a while and help her orient, that is if anyone was still about. There had been no sign of life all night in any of the tiny communities she had passed through since leaving Morris.

Ice plaster stuck to a swayback home sandwiched into the folds of the bluffs four miles south of Independency village. A rusting pickup in the yard huddled under a shell of ice, spotty snow and ash burden. Beyond the roof of the truck Winnie could make out a black ribbon stretching lean and long behind a tree break. It was lake water: Big Stone Lake.

No lamp filaments aglow, the house slumped uninviting in the snowscape. Winnie leaned heavily against a window sash, quaking with cold and lack of sustenance from her nightlong slog against the storm. She ogled the dim interior and rapped hard on the windowpane.  Silence greeted her in return. Pushing through a weathered door, Winnie entered a grime-encrusted environment.

The entry opened onto a filthy kitchen, a chipped linoleum print coating the floor, popular in kitchens a decade after the Second World War. Cold white enameled steel dressed out the wall cabinets. The table and chairs were of tubular steel. A single lifeless florescent fixture clung to a stapled fiberboard ceiling, lacquered with fat and cooking oil stains. Every surface labored under dirty utensils, cups, dishes, empty cans, paper, tools and scores of glass beer and spirit bottles.

Winnie determined at once she had entered the domain of several people, males with particular habits. The phantoms of the kitchen didn’t wash silverware; they boiled it clean. They did not use the oven, preferring to cook everything in a skillet and in blackened pots atop the stove. There was no apron about and not a potholder. A grease slick hand towel lay on the counter by the burners. The room spoke not at all of a feminine touch. Nowhere was there hand cream, a potted plant, display of family photos, dish of hard candy. Not a single magnet graced the refrigerator, holding up cutout bits of humor, the portrait of a child, an inspirational poem. Everywhere there was grime.

A quick run through the house revealed that several bedrooms had been occupied recently. The sheets on the single bed and pillow in one room were stained mustard; they hadn’t been washed clean in months. On the floor beside the bed were old copies of Field and Stream magazine, Smack Down and Hustler. She read the name on the mailing label on several of the publications: Andrew Regas.

The living room was uninhabitable. Crowding the floor were automobile parts, small engines in differing stages of dismemberment, boxes of power tools, a chainsaw, piles of clothing, and a pile of spilt cordwood next to a warm wood burning stove. It did little to slake the chill in her.

Returning to the kitchen, Winnie opened an interior door onto a basement stairwell. She descended to have a look below. Most of the cobweb-infested catacomb was smothered with bottle, can and cardboard trash, but a far corner was more orderly. There stood an old-fashioned cold locker, workbench, floor-to-ceiling cabinetry, stakes of boxes and a trunk.

In the dim light filtering through the casement windows, the woman pushed through the debris and went to the cabinets, opening each door. Behind them, standing upright and arrayed in neat order were bird guns and deer rifles, boxes full of ammunition stacked about, scopes and other minutia of the hunting craft. The weapon on the far right in the cabinet held her gaze, a Browning 30-06 semiautomatic rifle, highly polished, obviously the center of someone’s attention. Next to the semiautomatic were two empty weapon slots. Either there were no other rifles to fill them, or someone had taken them.

Instinctively, Winnie ran her fingers over the little Beretta Px4 Storm pistol in her parka pocket. She gave it a little pat to reassure herself.

On the workbench beside the gun cabinet several objects distracted her. More ammunition clips rested on the bench.  Adjacent to the magazines were short sections of steel pipe and a pipe threader. Each pipe boasted shiny new threads. Winnie turned to the trunk and opened the lid. Filling it to capacity were cylindrical tins of black powder, fusing material, and metal caps. She pulled a cap out and threaded it over one of the pipes. They wedded perfectly.

Arrayed along the length of one concrete wall were dozens of cardboard boxes, stacked one above the other, rising to the ceiling. A glimpse revealed a motley collection of canned and bottled products. They weren’t case goods but single items jumbled together, a jar of tomato paste, a box of spaghetti, a can of baked beans, a half-full box of Bisquick, a quarter bottle of pancake syrup. There was no rhyme to it. Winnie thought she knew why. The foods had been stolen—not from stores where all like goods would be stocked together—but from individual households. This Andrew Regas, and whoever else frequented the home, was stealing from people in the local communities. He had to be.

Winnie sought out the old cold locker, a cement block room in the north corner built into many homes predating the World War II. The small space, well below ground level, acted as a natural refrigerated area where perishable foods could be kept six to seven months a year. Pulling the door open revealed a space with shelving crammed with large blocks and rounds of unpackaged cheese. There were baskets of potatoes and root crops. Where did this food come from? Starving, she yanked a large crumb from one block of cheese and tasted it. It was delicious. She stuffed the rest into her mouth.

Leaving the cold locker behind, Winnie examined a bulkhead stairway and rotting cover door. Placing a shoulder against the old wooden access, she moved it, letting in a shaft of light. There was an avenue out of the basement other than the way down from the kitchen. Turning from the bulkhead, she was startled by sudden movement, other than quarter-size flakes of snow now falling beyond the casement window at the far end of the foundation. Winnie chanced to see something race by the glass.

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Up the basement bulkhead stairs Winnie crept, and there she camped beneath the slanting bulkhead door. Somewhere above, a large dog was all commotion, whining and yipping. “Damn it,” whispered the woman. Should she bolt or stay hidden in the basement? She remained where she was.

The dog clawed its nails into the house siding.

“Come on, you little bastard,” a heavy male voice rang out. Leggings appeared outside the casement window. The stranger pounded up the front steps with the dog in tow and opened the kitchen door. The two were in the house.

Immediately the canine began pacing the floors, sniffing. Through the rooms it pranced, weaving to and fro. Finally the unseen creature seemed to narrow its focus on the basement door. Winnie could hear its rapid inhalations. Then came a toenail scrape on wood, then another. Whimpering now, the creature began pawing frantically.

The male voice, annoyed: “What the hell are you doing, you idiot? Get away from there!”

The dog kept up its scratching.

“What is it, boy? What is it?”

Winnie rushed up the bulkhead steps, pushed a shoulder against the slanted entryway door and with great effort lifted the thing. Snow cascaded into the basement. Outside, she lowered the rotting wood bulkhead cover as quietly as she could. Her ears detected the interior basement door open and the dog leap down the cellar steps. Keeping her composure, Winnie closed the bulkhead entry without a sound, turned and ran to the outbuildings and out beyond them into the forest. All the while, the canine howled in the basement confines.

Dodging branches and forest debris in a leaded snowflake downpour, she caught a glimpse of the bulkhead as it was thrust up from the inside. A black shepherd vaulted from the earthly bowels running, its nose close to the ground following new scent and the sight of foot tracks in new snow. Winnie froze in terror a second, but then something kicked in—training, her self-defense marksmanship training. In a fluid motion, she unzipped the right pocket of her parka, retrieved her pistol. Dropping to one knee, she brought both arms up, cupped both hands about her Beretta handgun, released the safety, nudged her head down and, with the cool confidence of dozens of hours on firing ranges, aligned the sights.               In the few seconds remaining to her before she pulled the trigger, she steeled herself against the coming brutal act. She didn’t want this—couldn’t kill something. At the last instant, eyes wide and teeth clenched, she pulled the trigger. The thunderclap of the discharge echoed through the hollows. No time for contemplation, for self-recrimination. Never mind checking on the sprawling dog. There was no time. She had to put some distance between herself and the hovel behind.

Weaving in snow fog, Winnie reached the shore of Big Stone Lake and an abandoned access lane that skirted the shore northward. She was tempted to leave the trees and trudge out into the lane, but her mind conjured up the image of the rifle in the cabinet in the basement of the house. Best to stay in the woods, hidden by tree trunks, snowflake-laden leaves, and the cascading white, than to show a snow ghost profile to whomever was in the hollow.

Striking a course parallel to the snow-covered skidway along the lake but fifty feet or so from it, Winnie drove hard, despite the snow and ash sucking at her feet. Squeezing between two glacier-dropped boulders, she sensed the sputter of a small gas-fired machine rumbling to life. The rider goosed the throttle several times, then engaged a clutch and was off. The whir of the engine had the whine of a snowmobile. She guessed it was moving to the abandoned road and would be along quickly.

The agent couched between the boulders, guarded, attentive. The buzz of the engine increased: the Doppler effect. It advanced in the lane, slowly, swept by and rolled north, the engine noise declining. Winnie abandoned her boulder den and followed the sound, slinking along well off the pathway in the forest. If she had to, she thought, she could play cat and mouse with the snowmachine for some time.

Quickening her pace, the woman pressed forward, always northward, as fast as she could manage in the flake-filled forest maze. She was in a rhythm, despite here weariness, synchronized to the whitening landscape. Adrenaline had a firm grip on her. Her living gears were turning, meshing fine, obedient to her call to duck and weave, reorient and advance.

The whine of the motor returned. A muddled apparition appeared in the gloom of the storm-darkened day, a Stentor, half-man, half-mechanical beast. The huge creature rolled its head surveying the wall of woods. As the power sled passed, the woman recognized a vertical form lashed to the back of the beast. A rifle. The thing was hunting her.

To the south, the sputtering creature tracked. Winnie rose to her feet again, listening to the engine noises fade and back off to a steady idle. The machine stopped and putt-putted in the lane somewhere nearby. Not waiting to listen, Winnie sprinted uphill. Behind her, she imagined, the human on the snowmachine had dismounted with his rifle and was drifting into the forest margins to search for clues of passage. If he ventured east, he should find her footway in the snow.

A shot cleaved the air and the whine of a high velocity bullet sang high above the ruddy corridor, followed by a crack as the projectile impacted a tree limb far ahead.

A distant shout muffled by the snow: “Fucking goddamn. I’ll get your ass, you Indy bastard.”

Winnie kept to the trees for an hour, rising as the land increased in elevation. Hustling uphill, her legs muscles ached from the accumulated acids of exertion. She needed a rest, needed to sleep but pressed on in fading light until a solid stonework portal built into a ledge in the bluffs hove into view. She recognized the stonework entrance. She had taken a tour of the facilities of Independency village and had come to this place nearly a year ago. It was the cold storage and mushroom culture facilities of the community.

She kicked her way through the snow to a small door in the masonry. Tripping a latch, the door opened. Winnie bent over and placed her gloved hands on her knees. She closed her eyes, exhaled thick pillows of breath into the cold, and sighed in relief.

Stepping through the portal door and out of the snapping teeth of the wind, a crisp photon of light poked the woman in the right eye. The twinkle brought her to a halt. She pivoted to the west, from where she had come, and peered through waving walls of blue snow. At the edge of a steep pitch in the direction of Big Stone Lake, a low golden halo glowed, illuminating the snow flood there. As she watched the light flickered, shafts of illumination bobbing up and down. The man whose dog she had killed was still out on his little monster of a machine. As it bounced and bobbed over rocks on the incline below, its headlight jostled and jumped so that the beam sliced erratically into the atmosphere.

There was a man determined, Winnie concluded. That character out in the blizzard, he was possessed. The man had not returned to his bungalow to sulk. He was not nursing his anger or his grief by a fire or having a pull on a whiskey bottle. Out there in the snow was a game tracker, one lone madman with a single black thought to fill his bloody head.

Before closing the door in the cave portal, Winnie faced one last time into the west wind, toward the yellow halo low in the country below near the lake. The luminous arch had not changed position appreciably. In thickening snow and sleet, in ash and dreary pale, the heavy rider on the little craft must be finding it tough going, she guessed. She gave thanks for the snow and the smothering ash. Even though the white crap was falling on the waning days of September, thank heaven for it. Or maybe thank the devil. Thank them both.

Chapter Ninety

Fearing the dank black cave interior, yet terrified of being overtaken by the brute on the mechanical sled, Winnie wedged herself between door and frame and kept a vigil as darkness filled the forest. The storm giving way now fully to crisp white snow, the landscape brightened enough to keep the night from sealing shut the visible world. Some comfort it was to her, being able to see some detail.

Exhaustion made rigid demands on her being. She needed sleep desperately, somewhere safe, someplace she knew. A year ago, at the Total Life Skills seminar sessions, Rough Diamond cabin beside Independency village green had been a simple but comfortable refuge. Make for the cabin, she urged her being, and get there quickly. Safety must be nearby, on the far side of the bluff.

Scrub forest crowded in about the drifted lane as Winnie plodded over the ridgeline to the east. Surely the town’s structures should loom out of the darkness. Winnie gnawed on a knuckle as she made haste.

Cresting the height of land, brilliant lights blazing from greenhouse glass greeted her eyes. Beyond, in the dark, the rectangular edges of architecture mingled with black tree branches. The village was a hand. Desperate to end her twenty-four hour forced march and to distance herself from the fanatic who had given chase, Winnie broke into a run, instinct driving her to find protection.

Along the village green and up to the string of hostel cabins she ran, seeking the little structure she had lodged in almost a year ago. She found the little camp, Rough Diamond, and went inside. The interior was as cold as the raw night. Fumbling for a light switch, she found it and flipped it, but the darkness remained. She groped for the little table she knew was standing in the room, found it and ran her hands over it, searching for the once familiar glass jar candle. Her hands nudged a box full of wooden kitchen matches. Pulling one out, she struck it. This time the matchhead did not somersault away into the void; it flared hot and bright yellow. There was the candle. Placing flame to wick, the paraffin block erupted in light.

A wood-burning stove hunkered in a corner, a stuffed chair nearby. It was as she remembered the arrangement. The wood box contained dry firewood and kindling. There were newspapers on a shelf. All the ingredients were on hand to start a fire, but she hadn’t kindled one since she was a Girl Scout. Like riding a bike, she told herself.

In a minute the Missourian had a little fire rising in the wood stove chamber, but smoke poured out of the door instead of rising up the chimney. She slammed the door and still the smoke spilled out of the stove. Damper! A flick of the wrist and Winnie opened the stovepipe damper. A whoosh of air sped up the pipe, the air cleared, and the city girl had herself an inviting fire. Small split logs were introduced to the blaze, then larger ones. Radiant heat welling from the open stove door wrung the chill out of her bones and firelight played cheery games on the walls.

Once she was satisfied with the strength of the blaze, she filled the stove to capacity, damped it down, and went into the back rooms to pull blankets and a comforter from the bunk beds. She curled up in the overstuffed chair and pulled the covers up to her chin. Heavenly warmth filled her little cocoon. The luxury of heat seeping into her bone-weary tissues sapped what little will she had to stay awake. Nuzzled face down into the comforter, Winnie fell into slumber in seconds.

* * *

“Wake up. Get up!”

A shrill male voice clapped the ears of the sleeping woman. Winnie awoke in a blind fright, a harsh light playing into her eyes. The flight reflex seized her muscles. She bolted from the chair, but a large hand intercepted her shoulder as she launched herself, and she slammed back down into the soft chair.

“Don’t move again,” a tight tenor voice yelled. “Who are you?”

A self-preservation response kicked in hard. She uttered two words: “A friend.”

“Friend of whom?”

Winnie ignored the question. “How did you know where I was?”

“Chimney smoke. Why are you here?”

“I came to see Abel.”

“Abel?” Once the name aired, the voice of the unseen man behind a big flashlight lens softened a bit. “You know Abel?”

Winnie sensed she now had an opening to exploit. She could turn this confrontation around to suit herself.

“Yes, I know him well.”

“You do? Look, you can’t stay here.”

“You may know me, too.”

“Me?”

“Will you get that light out of my face so we can talk in a civil manner,” Winnie demanded.

The flashlight flicked off. The male with the loud voice backed up and pulled the lit candle to the edge of the table so he could see the woman’s face. She could make out her antagonist in the candlelight, as well.

“I’m Winnie. Winnie. You know. Deschaines. I was here for four sessions last fall.”

“Jesus. You’re the woman from, what, Kansas City?” the man said, incredulous.

Winnie pulled away the blanket she had wrapped around her head to keep the cold at bay. She shook her hair about then looked at the dark face above her. “That’s right. See!”

A long moment of silence divided the two.

“What am I going to do with you?” the man fretted. “Look, we have this town locked down. Things have changed a lot here.”

“I have to see Abel as soon as I can.”

The man wiped a hand over his forehead and grimaced. “Ah, Winnie, look, it’s very late. Why don’t you just stay right here; at least I know who you are. Stay put. Come up to the CC in the morning. There’s a meeting first thing. Why don’t you come up for that, okay?”

“All right.”

“Good God, I’m not supposed to do this.”  The man seemed to be in a quandary.

“Do what?”

“We voted to keep people out, you know. A precaution.”

“Why?”

“We’ve had problems. We expect we may have more.”

Chapter Ninety-One

Townspeople made their way on foot through a foot of new snow to the community center for the weekly morning meeting. Such a gathering was familiar fare, a cornerstone in the intimate true democratic process that all in the colony cherished. The meetings were part social bee, ‘round-the-pickle barrel’ news exchange, grievance session, political brouhaha, award ceremony or pep rally, depending on the season and the will of the people.

Inside the community center’s main hall, people busied themselves setting out folding chairs, chatting with neighbors and grumbling about the ugly storm and hard September cold. The room teemed with souls young and old. Abel wrestled to the head of the room a heavy, aged rock maple podium that had graced a Minnesota meeting hall as early as 1850. He called the meeting to order.

“Good morning, citizens in this great experiment, and welcome to our first March storm in the merry month of September.”

Voices in the audience gave rise to moans, rumblings and catcalls.

“There is much to discuss today. We are living in extraordinary times, desperate times, so there is good news and bad news to report. We’ll start with the bad. As you know, we moved tons of ash and tilled it into our croplands, and still had low potato yields due to the cool weather induced by the Yellowstone eruption. Things did not work out well, despite the fact we had some very hearty Andean seed and did a fair job of covering some of our crop with plastic sheeting. According to Oleg, our esteemed farm manager, we have brought in a crop not so much as half the size of the one last year. Still, we do have our eight ninety-foot coldhouses full of potatoes to be harvested next month, so we’ll have a fair supply of potatoes to eat. Considering the field crop is one of the very few staples to make it through the cold summer, I suppose it would not be too much to ask to give thanks for the humble spud.”

“Here, here,” rang out a voice from the back of the room. The townspeople broke out in spirited laughter. Clapping followed.

Abel did not share the people’s enthusiasm. Pushing his glasses tight to his nose bridge, he looked long at a paper printout. “Penny did a comprehensive study of our calorie needs and our calorie production. Despite all we have done, it is likely we will see a substantial calorie shortfall, as much as fifteen or twenty percent. Unless we do something about this, we will not be able to sustain ourselves.

The audience fell stone silent.

“At our present level of consumption, we will not have enough calories in storage, from the greenhouses, from the barns and fish tanks to see us through at current levels. We need a supply of grain. We will not short-change the food needs of the children, no matter what. If we have to cut back consumption a bit, we adults will be the ones to tighten our belts.”

A wave of commotion swept through the interior, voices colliding, ricocheting.

“I would like to tell you that the….”

One of the double doors fronting the dining room at the rear of the hall opened and a single figure stepped through. Abel cast a glance at the individual and faltered in his address. He paused to take a second look, pulling his glasses down off his face and squinting so that he might see better the new arrival.

Abel’s facial muscles went slack. Men and women in the audience took notice of the founder’s sudden loss of candor. What had shanghaied him? Many turned in their chairs and gazed toward the rear of the hall.

A trim female filled the opening in the rear doors. The woman did not come forward to take a seat. Her eyes were nailed to the man at the podium. Slowly, she raised a hand and waved just the tips of her fingers toward him in an abbreviated gesture of hello. Each individual in the audience spun around to watch Abel. He bowed his head a fraction before shrugging his shoulders to bring himself back into the present.

Winnie remained at the back of the hall, drifting inconspicuously from window to window; peering across the commons, up to the greenhouse cluster on the bluff and along the snow covered access road. She kept one ear to the proceedings and one ear to the wind outside the walls. Young Pelee, seated with several friends, was overwhelmed by the sight of the woman and insatiably curious about Winnie’ unobtrusive movements at the back of the hall. The youngster rotated in her chair every few seconds to check on the adult. Abruptly, she left her seat and slipped to the back of the room.

Pelee approached in a crouch, wearing a great toothy grin on her face. “What are you doing, Win-Win?” the child whispered. “You look like you’re spying on somebody.”

Winnie winked at the child and gave her hair a tussle. “I am spying, Pelee,” she said holding up a finger to her mouth in the hush sign.

“Who are you looking for?”

“You! I need your help.”

“You do?”

“Yes, I do. I want you to go to that side of the room and watch out the window for anyone you see. Absolutely anyone. If you see someone, just wave to me and get my attention, okay?

“Okay.”

“It won’t be much fun, but I am counting on you.”

“Okay.”

Abel put a fresh face on the calorie shortfall problem. “Despite the hardships that have befallen us because of the Yellowstone disaster, we have a surplus in dairy, greenhouse greens, mushrooms, and greenhouse fruits. Where we once sold these goods, we offered to exchange our goods for supplies of grain from Sweetly Cooperative.  Our request was rejected, most forcefully, I might add.

“So with the help of Max and his able crew at the Beaver Den, we have developed the means to try to secure a supply of grain before the vast inventory of grain in the elevators in Sweetly is removed by federal order.”

Voices rang out and more joined the first calls. The room suddenly throbbed with conversation and echoed with oaths. Awash in the din, Pelee placed the palms of her hands onto the windowpanes, searching for a low buzzing noise, like that of a fly newly caught in a spider’s web. She pitched her head to the window glass and scanned about, doing what Winnie had instructed. She could not see the source of the annoyance, but the buzzing persisted. The youth peered across the room at her newly arrived friend. She could see Winnie at the opposite window intent on something outside. The woman craned her neck around and looked at Pelee. The child shrugged her shoulders. Winnie knew Pelee had heard the sound, too.

Winnie disappeared through the double doors she had first entered through, and crossed the community dining room’s large dimensions to a rear window, facing north. She saw nothing unusual as she approached the glass, then noticed a narrow flattened trail through the snow leading to the parking area and away down the access road. She hustled to the window and discovered forms parked against the building, small machines, idling. Snowmobiles. Leading from them were foot tracks in the fresh snow. They rounded the eastern corner of the building.

Winnie wheeled and sprinted to an east corner dining room window, desperate to see who had just arrived via the motorized sleds. She slammed against the window frame and saw the figures of two men, one huge, standing twenty feet out from the east face of the building. Each held a rifle up to the chest.

“Winnie!” Pelee screeched.

Glass shards, wallboard gypsum dust and shattered wood splinters exploded into the great hall, showering the occupants in the room. From her position at the dining room window, Winnie screamed, “Get down, get down!” Terrified, she sprawled on the floor, trying to press her body into the floorboards. At her abdomen, something hard pressed against her. She reached for object to move it. It was in the parka pocket: the Beretta.

“My God.” She had forgotten about it.

Winnie attempted to wrench her pistol from her coat pocket. In paralyzing fright, she fumbled with the weapon, dropped it, picked it up and dropped it a second time. Struggling to steady her trembling hands, she managed to hold the pistol up to her eyes. Beyond the barrel of the gun, through the main hall doors, an image of the small body on the floor flashed into Winnie’ consciousness. She recognized the twisted frame on the boards. Pelee! The child was down, a pool of scarlet spreading in a growing arch around the youngster’s head.

A vicious nuclear light flooded Winnie’s cranium. The heat of blind hatred seared her flesh. Do something! Do it now!

Winnie rolled to her knees, slapped her arms on the window frame to steady herself, smashed a pane of glass, pushed the pistol out beyond the shattered edges and aimed.

Two shots to the body; one to the head. Her self-defense training kicked in. She heard not a sound, not the screaming from the townsfolk, not the roar of weapons fire, nothing.

The man nearest her position was less than twenty feet away. One of Winnie’ first shots struck the man in the temple. The character’s head exploded in a spray of blood and his body jackknifed into the snow.

Instantly, Winnie turned her attention to a huge male forty feet away. Pulling in a breath and holding it, she willed herself still. She squeezed the trigger. A round discharged and hit the assailant, but the impact only made the man flinch. The body armor, concealed under a heavy parka, stopped the bullet. It flattened and was deflected. A second shot, striking within an inch of the first, buckled the man’s knees. He could not keep his feet and fell into the snow. In that second, Winnie sprinted into the main hall to another window to get closer to her target. She jumped over the small human form on the floor and reached an opening where glass and window frame had been seconds earlier.

The woman raised her arms, sighted her handgun and commenced firing anew as the beast outside shifted to his knees, raised his gun once again and began squeezing off more rounds.

The interior of the main hall was a space imploded. Milky dust shut down visibility. Debris flying at tornado velocity rocketed across the room. Bullets passed out of the west side of the structure and were lost to the snow, ash and forest.

One to the head, now:: she processed the situation automatically, coldly, as she had been taught. A third 45-caliber round struck the man’s rifle, deforming it, as he raised it towards his chin. The firearm spun crazily away from the man’s grip and slammed into his face. The blow sent the hulking man sprawling down into the snow and ash. Wood from the rifle’s stock disintegrated into shrapnel and whistled away into the atmosphere, but not before peppering the right side of the man’s face.

Frantic, thin rivulets of blood leaking from his chin, check, forehead and ear, the man scrambled for the firearm. He reached it, clawed it from the snow, pulled it up to look at it and stood breathless before the now-useless weapon.

As the man fumbled, Winnie sprang from the floor of the room and through an eviscerated window. Vaulting five feet to the ground, she ran at the huge male. The demon pulled the weapon apart. It cleaved into several pieces. Winnie saw the gesture, the crippled firearm, and stopped, her handgun pointed at the heart of the man. Her entire being shook, as if caught in an earthquake.

“Chickenshit,” the sprawling man choked, gulping down air and wiping the blood oozing into his eyes and down his cheek

Winnie mumbled something indistinct.

“Gonna shoot me like my dog, eh, bitch?”

“No, mister, no more killing.”

The words settled on the massive being and seemed to embolden him. Andrew Regas rolled up onto his knees, stood and faced his adversary, staring, his tongue protruding from his lips. In a wide arch, he shuffled around the woman, eyes locked onto hers.

“You won’t ride that snowmobile, mister.” Winnie trailed him, staying at a discreet distance, always with the Beretta directed at his chest.

“I’ll walk, then.”

“Yes, you will.”

Regas turned his back on Winnie and trudged to the north end of the ruined community center, its interior vibrating with the screams of terrified and wounded souls. The man went for his snowmobile—a test—to see what the woman would do. She braced herself against the corner of the community center and purposely fired the gun once again at the man’s body armor. He careened away from the snow machine. The punch of the bullet fired at close range bludgeoned the wind from him.

“What are you doing, bitch?” his words labored.

“Herding a bull!”

Regas snickered, a dark laugh of uncertainty. He took flight, stumbling toward the access lane to the greenhouses. Winnie jogged around to the man’s right. He turned west to crest the bluff ridge and descend toward the lake. She followed over his right shoulder, keeping him between her person and Big Stone Lake in its basin beneath the bluffs.

As the stone archway entrance to the community’s food storage and mushroom cultivation caves came into view, Regas made for the door. Before he could get to the entryway, Winnie took aim at a tree within feet of her quarry and fired off another round. The bullet shattered and blew out wood and bark fragments              directly into the flesh and scalp of the man.

Winnie’s face flushed white, expressionless, as Regas toppled over, clutching his head. Her mind blazing with lightning impulses, Winnie entered a state of consciousness she had never before experienced. Wholly focused on the scoundrel and the dark lake waters beyond, she resolved to move him, shepherd him downhill, using the gun as a prod. She wanted him to push westward, ever westward, to the lake.

The pounding had a traumatizing effect on Regas. He was caught in a cruel game of predator/prey. He had never faced a female who was not intimidated by, even terrified of him. This woman was a leopard, shadowing him with evil intent. He was afraid of her, his fear cresting and rolling, blinding him to her demonic plan.

Within feet of Big Stone Lake, the monster slowed and stopped. He could barely see now with wood fragments and blood in his eyes.

“You get off on this shit, bitch?”

“No. Walk!”

“I can’t. I’ll be in the goddamn lake, one more step.”

“That’s right.”

“Fuck this.” Regas lunged toward her.

The 45-caliber pistol flared again and again. Regas recoiled from the impact of the rounds on the body armor plates, turned in panic, and lost his footing on slick soils. He stumbled amid lakeside rocks and toppled backward into the steaming black fluid surface of the thirty-mile finger lake, the wind-driven chop an icy thirty-four degrees. The shock of the bitter bath overwhelmed the big male. He frantically struggled to his feet, flailing, roared in agony, and took a step to run out of the lake.

Winnie squeezed the trigger, repeating the same maneuver and getting the same result, only this time Regas submerged deeper into the flooded shallows.

In a panic to clear his vision and find his feet again, despite water saturating his heavy garments and the weight of the vest, the man screamed out. “What are you trying to do, drown me?”

“No, not drown.”

“What then?”

“I won’t kill you.”

Winnie watched the man’s body convulse violently with cold and terror. She sensed that immersion in freezing water must be akin to 10,000 stabbing knives to the flesh.

“Hypothermia.” In an almost hypnotic state, Winnie accentuated slowly each and every syllable. “Hy-po-ther-mi-a.”

“What? Ahh!” Regas’ voice warbled, teeth chattering loudly, uncontrollably. “I can’t see, here!”

“Hypothermia exhibits a number of distinct stages, mister. That’s what my trainers taught me. Do you understand?”

Winnie was unemotional marble carved to take on human form. “A body loses the ability to keep warm; it drains heat from the extremities to keep the body core alive. Once the core temperature falls below ninety-five degrees, the brain can’t adequately process information. Victims begin to act irrationally.”

“Ahh,” Regas bellowed.

“In the final stages, mister, the body pushes heat back to the extremities again in one final last desperate gasp to try to salvage itself. You see, people have been known to strip off their clothes even in temperatures below zero. Death follows almost immediately. Am I making sense?”

“Ahh. Mad, you.”

“No, oh no, not mad.”

The man’s flailing slowed, whimpering noises dripping from his nasal passages.

“Hypothermia, mister, hypothermia. Do you understand? I’m not going to kill you.”

Struggling to free himself from his heavy coat and body armor, Andrew Regas fell forward face first into the water. His arms thrashed at the lake surface, but the saturated clothing was an effective anchor. Unable to resist gravity’s inexorable force, he sank, the black fluid closing over his head.

Her voice flat, Winnie mumbled a last few words over the new, cold liquid grave. “Understand? Now do you understand?”

Chapter Ninety-Two

Leaning over the aged maple podium, Abel beheld a sea of hands. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to air an idea about how to bridge the looming calorie gap he had spoken about. It was heartening. Always, whenever the community faced a hurdle, dozens of people came forward with suggestions and with offers of help. He pointed to a woman waving with urgency among the sea of faces.

“Yes, Betsy, you have the floor.”

As the mother of a new Independency citizen stood to address the crowd, Pelee, standing at an east window at the back of the room, erupted with a shrill screech: “Winnie.”

The instant Pelee squealed, staccato explosions sounded. At the podium, Abel stood suspended; time ceased to move forward altogether. The crowd appeared riveted to the chairs they occupied, frozen in place as the atmosphere around them spun in a vortex of violence. Then came a shout from somewhere beyond the doors at the rear of the room. “Get down, get down!”

Standing at the east window, young Pelee watched figures run before her, turn and strike poses facing the building. A heavy-framed man held something lengthy in his hands. As his arms lifted the object, Pelee was horrified to see that it was a firearm of sorts, something she had seen only a handful of times during her young life.

Pelee’s call was greeted with a volley of shots toward her position, standing at the glass. One of several rounds caught the child in the neck, the bullet entering in muscle and flesh but missing the carotid artery and the third cervical vertebrae. Missing the vital structures, the bullet still savaged tissues as it passed through the body at supersonic speed. The impact instantly dropped the child’s body in a disfigured heap near the dining hall entrance doors.

Two gunmen cut a swath with shots across the entire span of the building before Winnie could get into a position to use her weapon. Bullets grazed four townsfolk as they struggled to find safety. A fifth person fell with a shallow shot across the abdomen, the bullet acting like a scalpel, zipping open the supporting skin and muscle tissue and permitting the intestines to protrude like wet rope.

One of the community’s registered nurses reacted to the explosive reports by bolting straight up from her seat into the path of a round. It entered beneath the cheekbone, destroyed the palate and sinuses and sent rippling fractures through the skull. She collapsed with just seconds to live.

Another shot found the father of two, struck as he tried to force his wife and children to the floor, the bullet severing the man’s spine. Dead the instant he was hit, he crashed down onto his family, pinning them below the mayhem.

Infinite silence followed the gunfire, swallowing the congregation for several heartbeats, only to disintegrate as moans, screams and shouts rocketed off the floor. Last to dive to the maple flooring, Abel was one of the first to push into the crowd to assist. He reached the nurse, sprawled in a circular and expanding pool of blood, took her wrist and tried, unsuccessfully, to find a pulse. He spat on his hand, wiped the saliva on his ear and placed it next to the remains of the woman’s mouth and nose to try to see if she was exhaling air. Gurgling was the only sign of life.

Bobcat yelled out, frantic to locate the community doctor. Abel went to Bobcat’s aid and found his friend pressing the spilled guts of a victim back into the abdomen. “Where’s doc?” blurted Bobcat. “We’ve got to sew up him up right away.”

A single shot outside the building brought another wave of screaming, but the shot was not followed by a second. The room emptied of most of the town’s citizens, many running to the basement, others to the second floor. Few dared venture outside. At the back of the room, Abel recognized community physician Arthur Ruckelshaus. The doctor was leaning over a small figure on the floor, tearing at his shirt, ripping strips of cloth away and wadding the material. Abel left Bobcat and jumped over fallen chairs to get to the back of the room. He came down on his knees next to the doctor, and pleaded for him to help with the injured man at the middle of the hall.

“It’s your daughter, Abel,” spat the doctor, working frantically.

Abel glared at the waif sprawled in a lake of blood on the floor.

“No, no!” he yodeled to the ceiling. “This can’t be happening.”

The doctor pushed cloth into a great open wound at the back of the neck, and plugged a tiny hole around the opposite side.

“She’s bleeding out, Abel. I’ve got to stop this or I’m going to lose her.”

Abel hands trembled. He stammered, stuttered. “What, what, can I do, ah, what? I’ve got to do something.”

“Get Max to plow us out to Morris.”

Through the community center Abel sprinted, screaming the name of Max, the man who managed the production facilities and maintained the fleet of restored cars at the Beaver Den. Max bounded down the steps from the second floor and caught Abel as he raced for the basement stairs.

“What is it?

“Get the plow out!”

“What?”

“We’ve got injured. Let’s go.”

Max held the Abel at an arm’s length. “Abel, we can’t plow that crap out there.”

“Damn it, man, make it happen. I don’t care how,” Abel bellowed.

* * *

Fronted by a dump truck, outfitted with chains and a steel V-blade plow and heavily weighted down with a load of wet earth, a convoy of three automobiles edged into the lot before the CC. The most seriously injured were ferried from the building to the vehicles and stretched out in the back seat of each. Abel insisted on driving one of the cars while the doctor worked to stabilize his daughter. The community figurehead was scattered. He needed something concrete to focus on.

The doctor fashioned a backboard from a cupboard door ripped from the kitchen and tucked folds of linen tablecloth on each side of Pelee’s head. Slowly six volunteers moved the child to the first car in line behind the truck. As they loaded the little figure into the back seat, the doctor gave the six instructions.

“Have Bobcat get in touch with University Hospital any way he can. Tell them to have IV plasma at the ready and to scrub up for surgery. Now, there are two dead inside. Remove them to the kitchen, please, clean them with care and wrap them in cloth. Strap them down to something, anything. Put the bodies in the cold foyer, please.”

Ants in a line, the vehicles threaded the narrow two-mile access lane out to Rural 7. Against the burden of ash and new snow, the plow labored at a snail’s pace. They could get to Graceville on Route 28, Max guessed, since he and a crew had slashed a single lane out through the ash to that hamlet a week earlier to gain access to Chamberlain Lumber for a load of sawdust for the town’s powerplant. But east of Graceville, the driver of the truck feared, the convoy would bog down.

In the forward car, the community physician had little to bring to bear against the grievous  wound in Pelee’s neck. Abel, glancing incessantly into the rear view mirror, watched Art Ruckelshaus raise the child’s legs and prop them up higher than the body. He covered her with his jacket and told Abel to turn up the car’s heat fully. The general practitioner applied sustained pressure to the neck wound for a minute then relaxed. This he repeated over and over in the hopes that the pressure would encourage clotting in minor blood vessels and slow the loss of blood.

“You’ve got to go faster, Abel,” the doctor ordered. “She’s losing too much blood.”

“Can you stop it?”

“Impossible.” Slow it some, yes, but I can’t stop it. An arm, a leg, we can work with. A neck wound? Good lord.”

In a tunnel of icy tension, Abel nearly collided with the rear steel bumper plate of the truck when it bucked to a stop at the edge of the abandoned village Graceville. Max sprinted back to talk as Abel rolled the window down.

“Abel, 28 east of here is doable, I think,” the driver of the truck said in an excited rush.

“There’s not so much ash under the snow out here. I can cut through it a bit with this plow blade.”

The doctor roared from the back seat of the car: “Max, put the pedal down. Do everything you can. We need speed, man. Go. Go!”

Route 28 presented a desolate snow-swept flat eastbound, but Max kept the fleet rolling. Pelee slipped down the black well of shock. Doctor Ruckelshaus touched a finger to her eye and received no response in return; the eye was fixed, rigid and unblinking. Her skin, the color of rotten hardpack snow, was cold to the touch. Tiny sweat beads broke out from her facial pores. Her pulse was shallow and picking up tempo.

“We’ve got to go, man, we’ve got to do better,” Art yelled.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve got tachycardia.”

“Heart rate?”

“Yeah, yeah, fast. Getting faster.”

“What can you do?”

“We need plasma, soon.”

Ruckelshaus applied as much pressure as he dared to the neck wounds, but she was slipping away. Death sought to infiltrate the automobile, slip in under the old molding or squeeze through the air intake, but the doctor fought it off.

“Where are we, Abel?”

“Chokio. Max has picked up the pace.”

“When we get to the hospital, pull up to the ER door, okay? Drive right through it if you have to.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get an IV into your daughter. We’ll have seconds when we get there, I hope. You grab somebody, anyone. Drag them kicking and screaming if you have to. Tell them to get a bag of plasma to the car. We’ll start a needle right here. Never mind a transfer first thing. She needs fluids. Then we can think about getting her into the place.”

Inside the Morris town limits, there were few tire ruts in the snow and the streets had not been plowed. University Hospital sat on Sutter Hill above town. Max rammed snow and ash out of the way as he willed his plow truck into the hospital lots. Abel swung the car around the plow, bounced over a curb and brought the vehicle to a halt before sliding doors. From the rear seat, Ruckelshaus glowered at the doors. The interior foyer was not illuminated. No one was standing at the ready with a gurney, an IV pole, anything.

“Get in there,” the doctor yelled from the back seat, even as Abel was out of the car.

Expecting the doors to part automatically, Abel slammed into the glass and bounced back. He tried wedging the doors apart with his hands but failed.

“Never mind,” screamed the blood-drenched physician in the car. “Ram the damn doors. Use the car.”

Talons of panic slicing into his hide, Abel wrenched the car’s transmission into gear and punched the throttle. Safety glass in the sliding doors exploded into fractured beads as the metal frames buckled under the impact of the car’s grill. A shriek from a female human voice spun up through the ruined entrance. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

A heavy-set figure in the gloomy interior curled into a ball of self-protection as Abel vaulted through the doors toward the only person on the floor.

“IV, we need IV plasma, now. Now!” Abel shouted. “My daughter is dying.”

The woman, dressed in a winter coat, trembled and croaked, “There’s no doctor here.”

Abel was incredulous. “What? Look, there’s a doctor in the car with my daughter.”

“They’ve all gone to St. Cloud.

“Never mind,” Abel scoffed. “Where’s the plasma? Didn’t anyone call?”

“Everything has been shipped out to Regional.”

Bellowing now: “Plasma, woman. Get it!”

“I can’t. The hospital is shut down.”

From the car, the doctor yelled for Abel to come to the back of the vehicle. He instructed Abel to take his place with his daughter and to apply pressure to the makeshift bandages. Art bolted from the back seat, emerging slick with blood from his neck to his feet.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” the woman on duty squealed with fear at the sight of gore smeared down the doctor’s raiment.

The physician grabbed the employee with both hands, buried his face into hers and commanded, “Show me where you store plasma.”

“You don’t understand.” Tears erupted from the woman’s face.

“I’ve got a dying child back there,” the doctor screamed in a bald rage, spittle flying.

“You don’t understand, for heaven’s sake,” the lady wailed.

“What don’t I understand?”

“Everything has been moved out. Emergency orders. The drugs, the machines, all gone weeks ago.”

“Where is it, woman?”

“At St. Cloud Regional.”

“No, not St. Cloud.” The doctor seemed to shrink before the stark revelation.

“UH is closed. So are most of the outlying facilities in the state.

“You have no plasma, no nothing?”

“No.”

“That’s another hour out. We don’t have one minute.”

It was no small miracle that Pelee reached Morris alive, the community doctor knew. A ten-year-old bleeding profusely could tolerate the loss of a few pints, maybe. Anything more and there would be precious little for the heart to pump. Blood pressure would drop drastically. Blood supply to the cells would virtually cease, bringing on a cascade of organ failure.

Pelee lay limp in her father’s arms. Abel could not detect the rise and fall of her chest nor feel air moving in and out of her mouth. There was no fanfare to it, no Hollywood theatrics. Stealthy death quietly shut the child away from the living, leaving a small gangly body to quicken no more.

Abel needn’t hail a coroner to pronounce the end. Through the skin of his sticky, soaking hands, he could feel the last of it, fragile life, tumble from his grip and fall down to nothing.

At once, a swollen lake of tension and terror breached its confinement, tearing away Abel’s defenses. A deluge of emotional darkness struck him a brutal blow, engulfing him. He gasped, drowning, desperate to suck down air. His lungs full, he coughed out his daughter’s name, a howl rising, agony swimming in the sound waves, a tone so mournful as to skitter and spark like electric current along the vertebrae of every wounded passenger in the little car fleet.

The shout of despair ebbed, pulling with it every ounce of energy remaining. Abel sat languid in congealing blood, moist and still. The muscles below the wet surface of his face drooped, his jowls fell, hound-like, and years of age advanced and metastasized to the skin. The doctor, leaning into the car to make certain for himself what Abel already knew, recoiled from the ghastly look of the vibrant man he had known well for nearly a decade.

“She’s gone, Abel. You did well by her,” whispered the doctor.

“I did nothing.” He could manage a listless puff.

“I have to get the others some treatment.”

“Yes, of course.”

“We’re going to make the trip to St. Cloud. Will you come? They can help you with your daughter.”

Abel finally looked up at the doctor. “No, Jim.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to take my daughter home.”

“I see. I’ll have one of our folks drive you back.”

“Yes, that would be good. I want to wash my daughter. I want to wash her clean. She has to be clean. Has to be.”

His eyes were washstands draining. From swollen orbs, the saline solution of his tears formed rivulets down his cheeks, collected at his chin and fell in a stream.

Chapter Ninety-Three

Careful not to strike Pelee’s torso or head against the car frame, Abel eased his daughter out of the vehicle stopped in the CC parking lot. Arms curled to his chest, carrying the body tight against him to ward of the wind, he turned to the south and slogged in the snow across the expanse of the village green to the cabins, shuffling at a sloth’s pace to the bathhouse.

From windows fronting the buildings, faces appeared to watch the death promenade. Doors opened. People disgorged from the structures intent on following Abel.

In the moist heat of the bathhouse interior, Abel picked up several towels before stepping through the door to the men’s bath. He spread a single towel down at the edge of the small steaming pool and gently rested Pelee upon it. With utmost care, Abel removed the child’s garments, folded them with precision and laid them aside. He then stripped away his gruesome threads, folded them neatly, as well, and left them in an orderly, bloody stack.

Expressionless and with little awareness of the heat of the pool water, Abel descended naked into the liquid and turned to ease his daughter up off the towel at the bath’s tile rim. Cradling Pelee’s form, a towel on his shoulder, Abel shuffled to the center of the bath, water reaching his chest. There he let the buoyancy of the warm fluid lift the child’s body, freeing it from the tyranny of gravity. He closed his eyes to quiet the cacophony in his head.

Word spread through the community as fast as any telecommunications miracle. In minutes the bath filled with souls. None dare break the silence. The first souls in the building discovered Abel at the center of the pool in the men’s bath. As at a funeral procession for a dignitary, people filed silently into the modest moist chamber and assembled along its west wall to bear witness.

Abel did not acknowledge the assembled. He wetted the towel and, with a slow, almost feminine grace, swabbed the clotted blood from his daughter’s skin. He was sobbing. The sound of his quiet anguish disarmed most. Tears swelled in the eyes of each face in turn. Low murmurs of grief mingled together and rose in volume into a sustained moan, chant-like, voices amplified, reverberating as if let free in the grand interior spaces of a gothic cathedral of the Old World.

Clutching his daughter firmly, Abel submerged in the blood-stained gallonage, taking his daughter down with him in a baptismal gesture. Below the surface, in amniotic warmth, in the dim light and free from earthly sound, Abel kissed Pelee’s cheek and uttered a simple sonnet he had written years earlier, blessing her for having shared her brief life with him.

“Your ship’s not meant for harboring.

It’s meant to ply the distant seas.

Sail my lovely child, sail away from me.

I’ll pray for you out on the main

And wonder always where you’ve been.”

Word bubbles surfaced and vanished one by one. Winnie, sitting cross-legged at the edge of the pool, observed the bubbles break the plane of the water, popping pink from the stain of countless blood cells. She brought her hands up to her face to dam the tears bursting from her. Her fingers were useless against the torrent.

Chapter Ninety-Four

In a vacuous state, Abel dressed his daughter in a simple white smock, inserted dried flowers in her hair and placed her body in her bed. No fire was lit in the downstairs stove, so that the cold could steal into the cabin home.

The despondent father went to the Beaver Den woodworking shop. There he spent the day hand-planing red pine boards and fashioning a simple coffin held together with hand-whittled pegs. When the box was complete, he spent the evening hand-carving images of flower pedals and his daughter’s name into the softwood surface of the coffin lid. Abel did not stop when his woodwork was complete. He pulled a shovel and mattock from the community’s tool cache and disappeared into the night. Bobcat followed him as Abel trudged to the community cemetery plot, tools over his shoulder. There the man shoveled snow and ash from unfrozen soil that a few days earlier had been snow free. Abel chose the highest point in the graveyard, and there he began to dig and pick at the ground. For half an hour, Bobcat watched the founder of the town toil, throwing dirt onto a single growing pile as he descended into the earth. Bobcat figured it would take Abel half the night to dig a burial chamber as deep as the man was tall.

Abel accepted no help and never slackened from his toil. He did tell Bobcat that he would preside over a funeral service for his daughter in the morning at 10 a.m. and that Bobcat should inform the members of the community, should they wish to attend.

Two hours after midnight, Abel cast off his shovel and walked through a brightening night to his cabin. There he built a fire, collected pen and paper, and sat by the flames crafting a funeral oration to his daughter. Scribbling the last word, he laid it aside and spent another hour sketching an elaborate design for a headstone. He would start work hand chiseling a slab of granite once he could manage to bring himself to begin the task.

Following the morning funeral ceremony, despite freezing temperatures, every soul at Independency stayed to help Abel close the grave. All wanted to participate, using bare hands to move earth, to show solidarity with Abel and to in some way begin their own healing process. When the plot was sealed and covered with hay to dampen the effects of the coming winter freeze on bare earth, Abel thanked the many gathered, then turned and walked away alone, retiring to his cabin to mourn and fast. Winnie watched him go. He locked his door, something he never did.

Chapter Ninety-Five

Half an inch of skim ice plated the shore margins of Big Stone Lake, imprisoning the body of Andy Regas within its frozen armor. Bobcat and Oleg stood at the shore gazing at the dead man, suspended face down, his back frozen into the surface layer.

Oleg, in barn waders, tested the thin ice, slammed a foot down on it and cracked through. He kept at it until he was close enough to the body to swing an ax and break out the corpse. It rolled over, presenting a frozen skim-milk face to the sky.

The farm director grabbed Regas by his collar and floated him to shore. With great effort, the two pulled the corpse up off the ground with the rope and flopped the lifeless soul into the bottom of a canoe. The other dead man who had joined in the assault on the town, lay in a second canoe lashed to the first.

Paddling in close to shore and breaking ice sheets when they had to, Bobcat and Oleg managed to reach the hollow to the south, where Regas’ weathered camp stood 200 feet from the water’s edge. They struggled with the heaviest body again, dumped it on the ground, and dragged it over the snow and ash with ropes. They pulled the body to the house, up the porch stairs and laid Regas out on the kitchen floor. They brought the other man in a few minutes later and deposited him in the living room.

For half an hour, Bobcat and Oleg removed boxes of stolen foodstuffs from the basement and filled the canoes with them. They estimated they moved more than a quarter ton of provisions. After the final box was placed, Bobcat walked back to the house with a five-gallon gasoline can topped-off with community-distilled ethyl alcohol. He descended to the basement and emptied half the contents into the trash on one side of the confinement, then ran a stream of fluid up the stairs and around the perimeter of the outside walls, slinking through the kitchen, living area and other rooms. He saved a quart of the alcohol so he could pour a stream of it out the door, down the steps and on toward the lake.

Oleg waited for Bobcat, holding a box of matches. Bobcat raised a hand to stop Oleg from striking a match.

“Just one minute, Oleg, okay. I want to be sure my humanity is intact before we do this. Permit me to say a brief prayer, please.”

Oleg nodded and pocketed the matches.

Bobcat tossed the gas can in a canoe at the lake and returned to face the house. He folded his arms across his chest.

“Lord, do you hear us any longer, any of us? Take these wretched souls from us and do what you will with them. Forgiveness is not in our hearts today. Perhaps, in time, you will show us how to forgive them for what they have done.”

Bobcat bowed his head and was silent for a minute. “We present them to you, Lord,” he said finally. He gestured to Oleg to strike a match.

The Norseman with the heavy red beard bent down to the ground, a match in his fingertips. He swiped it against the box striker and drew a flame. The match dropped into the slick of alcohol. A nimble clear light danced along the ground, up the front porch stairs and into the home. Within a minute the dark interior brightened to a hot, brilliant yellow.

Chapter Ninety-Six

Young Petah brought bowls of steaming buffalo stew for White Elk and the white woman she sometimes called Piksi, or bird in the Blackfoot tongue. Liz was the woman who flew down from the heavens, so Piksi would be her nickname.

“How are you feeling this evening?” Petah asked White Elk, who had managed to sit up in his bed in the ward created from an old storehouse in Stand-Off Creek village.

White Elk gestured for a bowl of buffalo stew. He wanted to hold it in his own hands so he could feed himself. “I am much better today, thanks to you and your mother, and to my new friend, Elizabeth. Sinopa put my bones back together. The two of you put my spirit back together. If you were not my companions these long days, I would not be mending so fast.”

“I think you will be on your feet in a few days,” offered the young woman.

“I hope that will be so, Petah,” replied White Elk while sampling his dinner.

The Blackfoot doctor left White Elk in the care of the woman who fell from the sky. Now able to get around on her own and wanting something useful to occupy her time, Liz had asked Sinopa if she could help care for White Elk though the course of his convalescence. The doctor was happy to oblige, so the scientist spent much of her time tending to White Elk’s needs and in so doing had become fond of the elderly gentleman.

This evening, though, Liz was long in the jowls. White Elk could see that she was pensive.

“You are troubled, Elizabeth. I think so. Your body has mended but your spirit is not whole.”

Liz marveled at the wisdom of the Native American elder. “Am I that transparent, Benjamin?”

“Your trouble is riding trails all over your face. It shows me that you are mourning for your little one and your life with her.”

“I’m conflicted. I want desperately to see Pelee. But, I’m ashamed to say, I long to get back to Yellowstone to see what impact the great eruptions had. If I told you that I love my daughter, but dread the life we had together in Boston, what would you say?

“That does not surprise me. I have not met a White who was at ease with his lot. You are no different.”

“I am not at all at ease, Benjamin. I don’t think I can articulate why that is.”

“Maybe I can do that for you.” The elder raised an arm and turned the palm of the one hand up toward the ceiling, then turned the palm over. “There is a concept among native peoples, Elizabeth. The Hopi people of the Southwest even have a word for it. It is about the peculiar culture of discontent the Europeans brought with them to this continent. The Hopi say koyaanisqatsi. Do you know what that means?”

Liz shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“It means ‘life out of balance.’ The Europeans came to America with customs that were koyaanisqatsi, out of balance with their neighbors, with all other peoples, with the world of nature. They imposed their culture on all of us, the 500 native tribes of the continent. Their way of life defeated us as surely as the smallpox and the gunpowder they brought with them.”

“I feel like that, out of balance,” said Liz. “I haven’t seen my daughter for months. We live in an apartment across the river from Boston. It should be a happy place. There is all so much to do, so much stimulation. But Pelee wants to live on the experimental farm in Minnesota founded by my husband, that is to say, my former husband. We’re divorced. Pelee is unhappy in Boston. I am distraught that she is so unhappy.”

“And your husband? What happened to him?”

“His name is Abel. We separated less than two years after Pelee was born—purely a twenty-first century split: two separate career paths, two strong-willed parents with terrific prospects going nowhere together. We actually loved one another, cared for each other, we did. But he was a rising counter-culture star trying to make his ideas, his writing, a three-dimensional reality. I was immersed in the most exciting science imaginable and had offers to teach at the university level. Love or not, we agreed to go our separate ways. I walked away with Pelee and my maiden name. No fights. No legal struggle, just mutual consent on everything. It was easy, really. Maybe too easy.”

“Why does your daughter want to live with this man and not with you?”

“She loves the farm, the animals, the people there. It is not a typical farming arrangement, you understand, where one family tends a few hundred acres. It’s more like a big community farming experiment, something like a commune or an Israeli kibbutz. It has something of a pioneer spirit about it. She likes that. She knows everyone there. It’s a tight-knit, self-sufficient world with lots to do: fun, real chores, friends, lots of time outdoors in the woods, farm fields, greenhouses and gardens, those sorts of thing. It’s like a big extended family, something I can’t give her.”

“And do the people there have a single purpose—they work together for the benefit of all who live there?”

“Yes, I would say so.”

“Then it is not surprising that your child wants to live there. You would be happy to live such a life, too.”

“Oh, I couldn’t adapt to that life. I like my space. I love the melting pot of a city, the intellectual community, the science, the stimulation.”

“That is not what your face is telling me.”

“Really?” A frown pulled on Liz’s lips. “What do you think it is telling you, Benjamin?”

“Your spirit does not want, as you say, space. You tell me you live in a box in Boston, when you could live in community with your daughter. She does not want space. She does not want isolation, I think. Her spirit is longing for inclusion, where she may share her days with you among like people, people you can both call your own. I think you want serenity, stability, security and purpose that come from life within the circle of community. You want that. White Americans are desperate for it, but they are the farthest from it. Now why is that?”

“I was hoping you would tell me.” Liz smiled. White Elk returned the smile.

“I think I know why. My ancestors lived a life of custom and tradition handed down through the generations for thousands of years. They did not reel from one new fad to the next like drunks, yet their lives were not one of cliché about the noble savage, you know, living out some idyllic fantasy in a Garden of Eden. They got sick. They had domestic squabbles, stole from neighboring tribes, waged war. But they lived well for millennia in small nomadic groups following the buffalo herds, in step with the seasons. They were, for the most part, a stable and self-reliant people, at peace with themselves and the natural forces around them.

“All over the world, even today, people live best when they live in small social arrangements. You spoke of one, the one your daughter wants to live in. Do you know what you described for me?

“No, what?”

“You described a tribe. Your daughter wants to live as a member of a tribe. And so do you.”

Liz issued a nervous laugh. “I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

“I think you do. I will tell you, if you will listen.”

“Oh, I’ll listen to you, Benjamin, but I must tell you, I’m more than a bit skeptical.”

“Well, then, I will give you a modern example, very up-to-date. Months ago, before Yellowstone brought the ash and the cold, I saw on television something remarkable.”

“And what was that?”

“It was a televised sermon delivered by an evangelical minister in the West. They call him a… televangelist, I think is the word. I was not interested in the message he was preaching. He was on a stage ministering to 10,000 people sitting in what I first thought was a stadium. Only the stadium was a church; it was that big. It is in southern California, I remember. The gathering looked like a concert for the rock music. That is what captured my interest.

“I watched the people in the audience mostly and saw something remarkable, too. The parishioners were all Whites. They were dressed in similar clothing. They had a particular look, a particular style. They were listening to a codified creation myth, limited in its vocabulary and imagery, but delivered in a ritualistic manner that all in the audience recognized, knew well, and felt perfectly at home with. It was uplifting for them. For them, it was life in balance. In that place, in a rough and tumble city of ten million strangers, they had found balance. Now why was that?

“I can’t imagine, Benjamin.”

“They were a tribe—a tribe, the very oldest form of organized social structures—affirming their beliefs and their customs before their fellow tribesmen and women.”

Liz placed a hand on her forehead. “I’ve never thought of something like that in such terms. That’s quite a compelling argument you make.”

“The Blackfoot do the same thing, all native peoples do. We honor our ancestors by keeping alive their beliefs, dressing in ceremonial costumes from their time, holding festivals and dances that they passed down to us, listening to the ancient creation stories and repeating tales of great deeds from the distant past so that the young may know them. These are the things that people do as members of a tribe. Such things affirm who tribe members are in ways modern societies do not.

“As a Blackfoot, I can hold myself up to the mirror of my native culture and see a reflection that I expect to see and am comfortable with. I am Blackfoot, a man of the Blackfoot tribe. I know what that means in the depths of my heart. Knowing that gives me great strength, gives me a spirit that cannot be taken from me, not even in death. That is what native peoples mean by life in balance.”

The woman turned her gaze out a window and sat silently until she could organize disparate thoughts in her head. She sighed. “Benjamin, the man I married, Abel Whittemore, he knows something about what you are telling me.”

“Oh, what does he say?”

“In his writing, his words constantly speak about what you call, umm, koy-an-a-what?”

“Koyaanisqatsi.”

“Yes, thank you. The way to free oneself from life in chaos, he writes, is to reject mass modern culture, the industrial monolithic culture you speak of that Europeans brought with them to the New World. He advocates the establishment of small post-modern self-sufficient communities that have their roots in living arrangements from the deep past, ones employed by indigenous people all over the globe.”

White Elk nodded quietly.

“I was up to my ears in his New Age philosophy from the day I met him. And here you are saying precisely what he was writing about for a decade. It’s astonishing.”

“Hmm,” purred White Elk, “I think I might like your husband.”

Liz’s lips turned up and exposed her teeth. A quiet laugh popped its way out from between the incisors. White Elk found the little laugh infectious. He chuckled, too. In a few seconds, the two were howling in a knee-slapping laugh fest.

Chapter Ninety-Seven

Cloistered in his cabin, Abel was visited by a parade of demonic characters, cheerless memory masks residing in penitentiary; they found the key to their confinement once Pelee’s coffin lid was sealed. By day the fugitives scratched at his skin with sharp nails and probed his brain with lances. By night, they rolled his eyelids and propped them open with sticks, then poured pails of acid color and flicked monstrous shapes into his eyes.

The unholy lot dismantled his daughter’s bed, rendered it to pieces and carried it to the woodstove. There they burned the whole of it. They swept her closet and small bureau clean of her clothes, ran off with all the stuffed toys and the wall posters. When they were done, the room was stark. But they forgot to take one small token, a small photo in a gilded frame of the child, her mother and her father; that they did not have the strength to lift up and cart away.

In the darkness of early dawn, awake following a night of exhaustion, Abel paced the cabin floors, agitated, desperate to leave the confines of the walls. He scrambled to the front room to locate his parka and a backpack when he noticed a note under the door. “Look on the porch,” it read. Abel threw the lock on the door, pulled the latch and discovered a small container on the threshold. Penny had left a vessel full of soup and a crust of potato bread. Abel stuffed the container into his pack, dressed for the cold, and left his little home for Lakota Lodge at the height of land atop the bluffs.

Abel wanted to work, wishing only for warmth and quiet. After the long climb to elevation, he entered the frigid space of the little lodge, climbed to the second floor studio and closed the door. Within minutes he had fire going; within the hour the space was warm enough for him to remove all his cold-weather clothing. With hot flames snapping in the woodstove, Abel pulled a small table near the stove and sat bare-chested. In longhand, he set about writing with those Old World inventions, pen and paper.

Wedged into his tight culvert of despair, Abel groped for solace in ideas. Creative endeavor had always been his salvation. Whenever inspiration surfaced, Abel embraced it fully, knowing that for a day or a week, he might enter a blessed state of sweet invention, where time was timeless and work was exquisite pleasure. He never knew when the door to his creative machinery would creak open.

Soaking in the stove heat and scratching at beard stubble growing like succession forest in an abandoned pasture, Abel pondered the fate of his little society below, lost in folds of the bluffs. He agonized over its future. Would the decade-old walls of the peaceful fortress on the bluff hold? Would the terrible conditions and the murders breach those walls and disgorge the citizenry, fleeing in panic? Which would it be?

Independency had not been conceived or organized as a lifeboat, designed to float free of the fallout from a global natural disaster. Abel couldn’t conceive of a natural disaster on the scale of the Yellowstone eruptions. Such an event was unthinkable. But, he pondered, didn’t Independency now fit the definition of an ark? Surely it was something of a 400-acre life raft, not adrift without a compass, but capable of steering a course through an ocean of horrific prospects.

The town had been shaken to its foundations by the shootings. But Independency citizens did not have to weather worsening conditions evolving elsewhere on top of the murders. Independency families were weaned from so much of the mass culture and its interconnected systems. That the underpinnings of the greater society outside Independency’s borders were crumbling would probably have little direct impact on the colony in the future, Abel reasoned. The townspeople were isolated from the growing horrors of daily living in a food-short society, both literally and figuratively. That isolation was sure to be an effective psychological buffer, he guessed. They might not soon have a wheat flour roll for dinner, but there were alternatives, not the alternative of having nothing at all to eat.

Independency worked, he had no doubt about that. It could carry them along through the difficulties ahead. The village would nurse him and his neighbors back to health. They would get their supply of grain from across the lake, he’d make certain of it. In the days and weeks ahead, life in town would return to a normal state, familiar neighbors coming to work each morning, children running and playing each day, community dinners prepared and enjoyed as was their custom, paintings painted, musical instruments played, dramas performed, a piece of special furniture loving crafted.

The man filled page after page with hastily scribbled notes. Where citizens across the country had few options once foodstuffs ran out, Independency residents still had most avenues open to them. Of all the people in a land of 300 million inhabitants, they were the ones who would not go to bed hungry this night or any other night. They would not have to watch loved ones waste away to bone.

Abel rose from his chair and paced the room, lit only by several candles on the table by the woodstove. Animated, hands gesturing, talking out loud, he told the walls that no others would die at Independency in the face of hardship. Yellowstone had already taken his daughter; it would not take another. They had the means for their own salvation in their very hands. He would see to it they succeeded, every man, woman and child.

Chapter Ninety-Eight

The latch on the door to the little study tripped. Abel turned in his chair, expecting to find wood mouse scurrying on the floor or rummaging in his pack.

“Hello, Abel.”

A figure materialized at the door. Abel sat confounded.

Winnie stood in the opening, trembling. She had tracked Abel up the bluffs for a mile. She had felt confident, ebullient on the way up, but, when she saw smoke rising from the chimney, her emotional braces bent and fell away.

Abel stared at the woman, the candlelight shadows hollowing out his eye sockets and wide-open mouth.

“Hello.”

After ten seconds of silence, that was all the man could muster. He was, for once, bereft of words.

Winnie didn’t know what to do with her hands; she kept sweeping them through her hair, over and over again. Since the death of Abel’s daughter, she had been thrashing in the drifting wreckage of her personality. Coming upon Abel clutching his lifeless and bloodied child in the baths was such horror. Her iron constitution, her professional coolness, all of it disintegrated before the baptism of death.

Abel beheld a wild-eyed creature, as if Winnie’s expression were that of a raccoon cornered by a scent hound. Her mouth agape, she brought her hands up to it to hide her expression from him. Liquid ran in sheets from her eyes, soaking her cheeks. Somewhere at the deepest recesses of her lungs came a whining pitch, an audible warble etched with the sting of pain.

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Abel.”

Winnie shuffled backwards into a corner, holding a hand out as if seeking assistance least she lose her balance and fall.

“It’s my fault.”

The fallen angel before him vexed Abel. Why was she recoiling from him?

“Winnie, what is it?” he called quietly.

“It’s my fault.”

“What’s your fault?”

Your daughter,” Winnie sobbed. “I killed your daughter. I killed her.”

Tremors swept through her body, convulsions so powerful that she seemed to deform before Abel’s eyes. Instinct prodded him. He raced forward, grabbed the woman and locked her to his chest in a vice-like embrace to try to dampen her thrashing throes. Winnie pounded her forehead against his chest repeatedly, flooding his chest with moisture from her tears.

Roaring in agony, Winnie coughed up nonsense. “I can’t stand it. I want to die, I want to die.”

Abel stood as if a granite block, letting her emotions play out in his embrace. She needed release just as he had needed it. He found catharsis through work, hastily writing down his thoughts hour after hour by the heat of the woodstove. She would need to take a different path to exorcize her demons.

It took nearly five minutes for the bonds of Winnie’s emotional seizure to loosen. The outcry left her panting for oxygen. She clung to him, childlike, as if afraid of a nightmare beast in a nursery closet.

Abel stroked her unruly hair. She placed her left temple against his heart and let the quiet whoosh of blood pumping reassure her. She ran her fingers through the hairs on his chest. It was a comfort to do so.

After long minutes standing mute at the corner of the studio, Abel suggested they sit quietly for a time by the fire.

“I have a present for you,” he said, hoping the little revelation would take her mind off her melancholia.

“You do?” In a whisper: “What is it?”

“I’m not telling. Come on.”

His arm around her, Abel led Winnie across the room and sat her down next to the fire. He loaded an armful of logs into the flames. The place had to be toasty warm to ward off all chill, real or imagined.

He went to his small cupboard and pulled a corked bottle from it, then pulled two heavy tumblers off a shelf. He sat down at the table next to her and poured a dram of fluid into each glass.

“Here you are, Winnie.”

She accepted a glass. “Thank you. What is it?”

“Your favorite. It’s Courvoisier. We left it here, maybe a year ago.”

Winnie grinned sheepishly, then broke into a smile.

“I thought you might like some.”

“It’s perfect.”

While Winnie sipped, Abel tidied up the small space. He lit several more candles, set the tin of soup Penny had made atop the woodstove so the contents would warm slowly, and returned to his chair.

“Penny’s white bean soup,” the man pointed out.

“What could be better?”

“Not a thing. Best soup on Planet Earth these days.”

Chapter Ninety-Nine

Abel and Winnie shared a meal of Penny’s potato soup and bread, chatting quietly as they brought to an end days of hunger. Abel was intent on discovering why she had returned to Independency village, but, more importantly, he wanted to know details about what had taken place during the shooting. He had almost no recollection of what had happened, but he knew that she had materialized from thin air and had intervened somehow in the terrible events of the day.

“How did you do what you did?” Abel asked as he put aside his soupspoon.

“Do what?”

“People were shooting at us. Somehow you had something to do with, ah, I think, putting an end to it. How did you do it?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

“How could you not know?”

“I was scared to death. Something overcame me, though.” She paused a moment, staring vacantly across the little space. “I saw your daughter on the floor. She had been shot. I remember that. And I remember an overwhelming sense of hatred, of pure loathing for the men outside. But I don’t remember much of anything else, not a thing.”

“But you saved this community.”

“Abel, I don’t think I can talk about this.”

“Why?”

“I mean, how can you stand to talk to me after what happened? I’m to blame for this.”

“You are not to blame for what happened.”

“Yes, I….”

“No, you are not,” Abel said emphatically. “And I won’t hear of it otherwise. You did not kill my daughter. If it was anyone, it was I.”

“You?”

“Look, I never resolved my differences with Mr. Regas and, ah, his father. You know, I didn’t even know Andy Regas. He kept riding his damned machines over our property, leaving trash, poaching game, threatening our people. Finally, I’d had enough. I blew his ears off. I had authorities file charges against him. But it didn’t stop there. I went after him again and again, then I got Fish and Game to entrap him and haul him into court.”

“I see.”

“I made that man terribly angry. He held a grudge, obviously, and I never approached him to assuage his anger. The wounds festered, but I didn’t see it.”

“What could anyone do up against a personality like that?”

“I’m not sure. But doing something would have been better than nothing. I should have invited him and his parents, farmers from Sweetly, up to see what we do here, to take the mystery out of it. A simple gesture like that might have worked wonders.”

Abel’s words did little to lift the mantle of guilt from Winnie’s shoulders, but she was relieved to be talking about the tragedy. She longed to divulge her own story, to throw down her burden in the hopes of atoning for her sins.

“I haven’t told you why this all happened.”

Abel shrugged. “Does it matter now?”

“It matters to me.”

“Okay, then it matters to me, too.”

“I stumbled upon his home.”

“You did?”

“I was trying to get here by car, but I had to abandon it, I don’t know, twenty, thirty miles from here.”

“You came through on foot? Through that storm?”

“I did. I managed to get to an intersection with a house to the west. I went to it. It was that man’s residence. I managed to get into the house and rummage around in it.”

“You were in there? What did you find?”

“I discovered a small arsenal of firearms and ammunition, not really too far over the edge, though, except for a few things.”

“A few things? Such as?”

“They had materials in there for making pipe bombs.”

“Whoa, that’s a revelation.”

“They had a pipe threader, threaded caps, fusing material, and enough black powder to do damage.”

Abel scratched his head, weighing everything Winnie conveyed. “You say they. There were others.”

“At least several other individuals. And there was the food.”

“Food you say?”

“The men were stealing from you. Your farm cheese was stacked in cold storage with bulk foods from here, I think. There were boxes and boxes stacked to the ceiling full of supermarket goods, too. That had to come from the local area, from people’s homes. They had been stealing for a while, rather methodically, if I were to guess.”

“So they were in it for the duration.”

“They were.”

“Any other people involved?”

“I think so, but there was no sign of anyone else at the house except the dog.”

“The dog?”

Winnie rubbed her eyes with her fingers, dreading the incident with the man’s shepherd. She stalled, not wanting to continue.

“What about his dog?” Abel probed.

“There was a small shepherd. It came to the house along with the big man. I noticed the dog through a basement window. The man let the animal into the house. That’s when I left. It could smell that I was in the basement. I ran into the woods and was well away from the building when he let the dog out. The thing came straight for me.”

She stopped her tale and lifted both hands to her forehead.

“What’s the matter, Winnie?”

Eyes dilated fully, casting the look of a frightened child, she stammered, inhaled deeply. “I shot it. I killed his dog. I never killed anything before.”

“He heard the shot?”

“Of course he did. If the dog hadn’t been killed, Pelee would be alive today.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It touched off everything, don’t you see.”

“No, I don’t see.”

“Shooting his dog was all the excuse he needed. What’s he do? He comes to the village the very next day with a loaded semiautomatic. I was afraid of that. That’s why I came to the meeting when I did. I thought I would wait until your meeting was over and surprise you. I thought you’d like that. But I was scared. I had a feeling there could be some trouble. I thought you had to know.”

“I see,” Abel said, his face deadpan. “And what about your firearm? Where did that come from?”

“I brought it with me when I came north. I had it for self-protection. I almost forgot I had it with me.”

“I’m glad you had it.”

“You’re glad? It was a mistake, a terrible mistake, Abel. Your daughter died because of it.”

“I lost Pelee because of corn, not because of the death of a dog. All this was about resources. It was about protecting a critical resource from an outside threat. We represented a threat to that stored food supply in Sweetly. That’s how Regas saw it, I imagine. It’s certainly how his foster father, a man named Harland Sven, sees it even now. It’s how they see the National Guard, which is working hard to get to towns up and down the South Dakota line. The Guard has orders to pull grain out of every grain silo in every county they can get to.”

Abel rubbed his hands over the wood stove. “Winnie, you have to understand something.”

“What?”

“A week ago or ten weeks from now, it makes little difference. Andy Regas or somebody else like him was bound to show up on our doorstep to prevent us from getting access to Sweetly grain. The dog was an excuse. There could have been other excuses. What’s certain is that you stopped him with a bullet before he stopped us.”

“I didn’t kill him with a bullet.”

“Huh?”

“He didn’t die from a bullet wound.”

“I’m not following.”

“He was wearing a bulletproof vest, you know, body armor of some sort. My rounds couldn’t get through it. I figured that out soon enough.”

“Well, then how did he die?”

“He killed himself.”

Abel grimaced. “Suicide?”

“No. I used my pistol to move him. I could push him with the blows from the bullets. They couldn’t get through the armor, but the impact of them, he couldn’t stand the impact. So he fled toward the lake. I drove him to the shore. He froze to death in the icy water. The elements killed him.”

Abel threw his head back and gawked at the ceiling. The two remained quiet for some time. Winnie broke the silence.

“Abel, what are you going to do about the grain?”

“What about it?”

“You need corn from Sweetly, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“How in the world are you going to persuade the people in that town to share anything with you?

“Well, it took a while to figure it out. But we did it.”

“What are you going to do?”

Abel let loose a light chuckle. “In a few days, we will set off down the lake to, umm—how should I say this?—to borrow a little good Sweetly corn for a while.

Winnie wrinkled into a smirk at the odd remark. “What do you mean, borrow?”

“I mean precisely that.”

Chapter One Hundred

A National Guard unit, maneuvering Army Corps of Engineers heavy equipment, arrived overnight at the Sweetly town line five miles from the village after nearly six weeks in a pitched battle with volcanic elements to open the rails along the eastern flank of the South Dakota. Another few days and they’d have the train at the town crossing.

A strategy to block the Guard from the offloading of Sweetly Coop grain from the grain elevator complex consumed Harland Sven. The angular Swede hoped he would find a large circle of fellow farmers at the coop, ready to fend off the ash-removal crews. A confrontation, he told anyone who would listen, would be a struggle for the town’s survival.

With food supplies all but exhausted in the region, each of Sweetly’s grain-elevator silos was an immense lifeline. Sweetly Coop manager Jim Bottomly rigged an antique belt-driven gristmill to produce corn and soy meal for local families and for what few head of livestock and egg-laying hens had managed to survive the threat of the butcher’s knife.

Harland convinced many of his friends and neighbors  that it would be suicide to give up a huge food resource when there were no assurances that food shipments could reach Sweetly from the east. In organizing farmers for this very day, Harland had been overwhelmed by the shrill outcry from the local farmwomen. Whereas the men saw the coming confrontation with the Guard in dollars and cents, the women saw it in the more stark terms of protecting their families from the ravages of hunger. The cry of pain from children with empty bellies was shock treatment for the women. They howled at the idea of Sweetly grain slipping through their hands when there were young mouths to feed. Many had told Harland they would be joining their husbands down at the coop, guns at the ready, if it came to that. The reaction and heartfelt support had stunned the farmer.

Harland’s old Farmall made the turn at the brewery and rumbled up to the coop. Arrayed before the towering silos were half a dozen powerful farm tractors, but far fewer of them than Harland had anticipated. As the farmer rolled toward the coop office, he could see just a dozen of his neighbors—men, women, grown sons and daughters—had already assembled and were awaiting his arrival. He had expected to see scores on hand. Several spotted the farmer as the Farmall moved up the lane, and a tepid greeting went up from the lips of the assembled.

The little gaggle of citizens gathered around the Farmall. Harland recognized Jim Bottomly among the group and tipped his head toward him. Old friend and goose hunting companion Percy Bliss stood beside Bottomly. The manager of the coop called out to the farmer, “Harland, glad you got yourself here. What’s the plan?” Harland scanned the environs for his foster son, Andy Regas, but the man was nowhere in sight.

For weeks, Harland had plotted how the citizens of Sweetly might foil an attempt to offload the grain. Now he had a chance to spell it out. He removed a large fold of paper from his shirt, opened it before him and laid it out on the floor of a flatbed utility trailer for all to see.

“First thing, the rail line should be open to the coop in a few days,” Harland said. “They’ll get that train in here. It’s down on the town line right now, coming this way. In two days, come back in and set up your tractors side by side on the tracks near the crossing. That will send a pretty clear message. If you don’t want to get a scratch on your new John Deere, well, leave it home. But if you want to eat the day after tomorrow, stick it down the track.”

“I’m with you, Harland,” rang out a voice.

A dozen voices seconded the first.

Harland nodded. “Good! Okay, then, let’s keep going. Percy over here, he went down to Milbank and broke into the gandy-dancer shack there. We have railroad crowbars and track lug wrenches. We’re going to pull up a rail right here. We just need to remove one rail. That’s it. No train can get past it. Then we’ll ditch the tools.

“Now, we need a united stand. I’d hope that a few of you would cradle your firearms and simply stand your ground here at the office. Jim is going to talk with whoever comes up to try to negotiate with us. The word is we just won’t let the grain go.”

From the back of the assembly, a question sailed on the air. “What are we going to do if they won’t accept what we say?”

Harland paused for a minute. “I’ve thought about that a great deal. I didn’t call you folks down here to get hurt. I don’t want the Guard shooting at you or anything. If they don’t respect our numbers here, then they still won’t be able to get at the grain. I’m going up into the headhouse.”

The farmer turned and pointed at the boxy structure at the very top of the old elevator silos that ran the whole length of the complex. In the headhouse were the mechanical workings of the granary. It was the control center that pneumatically pulled grain into the buildings, sorted it among various elevator bins, and then shuttled grain by gravity to the offload compartments and tubes so that grain could be channeled down to rail cars. The headhouse was the brains and brawn of any grain elevator facility and Harland meant to control every inch of this one high above Sweetly.

Still pointing to the top of the towers, Harland boomed, “I’m going up there, and I’m staying there come hell or high water, Percy, too. We’ll have some protection up there. You don’t down here. If things get ugly, Jim will come up and tell us what’s going on.”

Over the previous two weeks, Harland and Bliss had moved food, water, sleeping rolls, ammunition, fuel, warm clothing, reading materials and sanitary goods up into the headhouse atop the grain towers. Day after day, they donned backpacks and boarded the ingenious man-lift inside the complex to take them to the heights. All they had to do was throw a breaker on the wall, step onto a tiny steel platform hooked to a continuously revolving belt hoist, and ride to the headhouse high in the heavens. The trick was not to look down and witness the ground floor fall away fifty feet or more. Once in the headhouse, they grabbed a pull-bar and slipped out onto the floor. The men emptied their packs, climbed back on the hoist and dropped down for another load.

Now the headhouse could shelter several men for as long as thirty days without resupply. Harland was eager and ready, and Percy Bliss was determined to follow his friend into the loft and create a fortress.

“So now,” Harland bellowed for all to hear, “Jim is going to tell the Guard that the community is not willing to part with its grain stores no matter what the official order is. That’s not likely to go over well. But remember, in order to move the grain, the Guard has to get a train in here. They’ll have to fix the rail once we take it apart. No one is going to be able to do that with Percy and I up there.

“So the idea is to show force, but not use force. We didn’t come here to die, just to get the Guard to move on somewhere else and leave us alone. The boys are South Dakota boys, after all. They’re probably just a work crew anyway. We want to intimidate them so they’ll pick up and go. Understand?”

The crowd rumbled in support of Harland’s words.

The length of track the farmers pried up was in the line of sight from high in the headhouse. With strenuous effort, the men loosened the huge rusted nuts on the rail bolts that held the rails together in an endless steel ribbon. They labored to pull dozens of rail spikes so one section of track could be swung to one side and hauled away. The breach was all that was necessary to foil the advance of any rail car.

The heavy work done, Harland called to everyone to reassemble. “All right,” he declared, “we are all set. We’ve only got a few days before the crew gets here and the train pulls in. Show your stuff, look like you mean business, but don’t take unnecessary risks. Think of your families. Put your trust in what Jim’s going to say and in what Percy and I can do up there in the headhouse. Remember, that train can’t move into place to get at the grain, and Percy and I have our hands on the machinery up there. That’s all that’s really necessary to win this thing. “Now, go home, get some rest. Be back here early two days from now, and see if you persuade some others to join us.”

The farmers had their orders. They mounted their huge field tractors and moved off through the ghostly landscape. Jim Bottomly turned to walk to his home in town. Harland stopped him.

“Jim, where is everybody? I thought we’d have one hell of a lot more folks on hand.”

“They’re gone, Harland,” Bottomly whispered. “We lost plenty to the fever. Folks just didn’t stick around after that.  You know that. Plenty of them just picked up and left down the rail line to where the Guard crews are clearing things out.”

“Do we have much of a town left, Jim?”

Bottomly looked squarely into Harland’s eyes and simply shook his head no.

Harland and Percy Bliss disappeared inside the coop office. They jogged down to the man-lift and rode the contraption up five stories to the corrugated steel headhouse just to check on their provisions one last time. Once inside the gloom of the structure’s interior, they made their way to the east end to a small window overlooking the town. As they walked, clouds of fine grain dust billowed up from the floor, powdery particles that had accumulated in the headhouse over several years. It had been some time since Bottomly had gotten around to having the place cleaned out.

Chapter One Hundred-One

Rough Diamond cabin puffed woodsmoke into the morning shine. Penny approached the little adobe as fast as her sixty-five-year-old legs could carry her in search of the woman who could handle a firearm. The matron rapped frantically on the door jamb with her knuckles and snapped, “Let me in, Winnie, or I’ll blame you for letting my breakfast go cold on the stove.”

The door latch tripped and Winnie waved the unexpected visitor inside. The younger woman had taken a liking to Penny during her stay in town to take the Total Life Skills seminars. It was a relief to see someone she knew, now that Abel had left the bluffs for Sweetly in the company of Max and Oleg.

The sexagenarian eyed Winnie up and down. The young female presented an unkempt appearance. No doubt she had been sleeping in her clothes for days.

“I came here on business, Winnie. I need some help preparing a big meal tonight, and you’re it.”

“Why do you want me, of all people?” Winnie said, surprised. “No one knows me here.”

“I know you. That’s what matters. This whole town is in a state of shock. We don’t know what happened or why. You come to town and suddenly there are several people and a child dead, and there’s a body floating in the lake.”

“Have a seat, Penny.” The women sat down at the little cabin table and faced one another.

“No one has seen you for many months, young lady. Abel has some feelings for you, so he tells me, but you’re off somewhere in Missouri. Suddenly here you are with a gun in your hand.”

Penny leaned into the table and brought her face close to Winnie’s. “I don’t know what to think, but I see you can handle a loaded pistol. You’ve obviously been trained to use it well enough. You weren’t raised to sell perfume at the dollar store, I gather.”

Winnie let out a nervous laugh but tried to deflect Penny’s inquiry. “I came to town to be with Abel, it’s as simple….”

An open palm slapped down with a bang on the cabin table and Penny chewed the air with her teeth. “Listen, young lady, I saw some things the other day. You were firing bullets at people outside the CC. You! Not me, not anyone else. Who are you? Are you some sort of law enforcement pro, some federal agent or something?”

“Penny, I’m a private citizen. I trained to use a handgun for self-protection. I enrolled in self-defense classes and spent time on a firing range. I brought the gun with me from Kansas City because things are in turmoil there and everywhere. It was dangerous out there.”

Penny scrutinized Winnie’s facial expressions as the she spoke. “Have you ever been in a situation like the one here, where you had to use that, that weapon?”

“Never.”

“So you aren’t in police work or in involved in something bigger than that?”

“No, not exactly. I had a career working for a private company under contract with the government. Last year, when I was here, I was after background information on Abel.”

“Why in heaven’s name were you doing that?”

“Why? Because I specialize in following data trails, ah, you know, digital information left by subversives, radical groups, militias, suspected terror….”

“Do we look like that to you?” said Penny sternly.

“No. There are those who might like to think so, but I don’t believe so, not any longer. My final report cleared the air. But it doesn’t matter now anyway.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

“Because of this Yellowstone mess.”

“Oh. Well then, where does that leave you, Winnie? I mean, why did you give up on what you had in Kansas City?”

“Things are disintegrating everywhere. I kept at it, you know, my work, until I couldn’t keep enough food in the house. Desperate people robbed me of every scrap of food; they’d been doing it all over my neighborhood, all over Kansas City for that matter, time and again. Not only that, it was getting impossible to find anything of substance in the city markets.”

Penny ruminated over everything tumbling from Winnie’s lips. “So, everything you were doing last year is behind you now, you’ve given up on all that?

“Yes, I’d have to say I have.”

“Good!

“Why is that good?”

“Listen to me carefully, Winnie. All anyone ever has to know about what you did here is that you were trying to uncover whatever that gunman was doing. You were after him. That’s why you had the gun. It had nothing to do with us. You were just here for the Total Life courses so you could get close to that animal. Do you hear me?”

“That’s not what I was doing.”

“I don’t give a gosh-darn what you were really doing,” Penny fumed. “If the truth gets out, you’re going to be gone. This community isn’t going to stand for someone who’s been spying on them. If you’re ostracized, where are you going to go? You said yourself that Kansas City isn’t terribly appealing right now.”

Winnie nodded. “That’s the truth.”

Penny lowered her tone of voice. “Winnie, people aren’t saying much, what with what just happened; they’ve turned inward. They can’t handle such a terrible thing. But this town has to get stitched back together and soon. To do it, I need you.”

“Why me? What could I possibly do to fix anything here?”

“Two words: Abel Whittemore. Abel needs you, dear. Because he needs you, we need you. You have to realize, he just lost the sweetest child on earth. We all did. We all loved that little one. He’s hurting, more so than the rest of us. But you can help him through it, more than you know.”

Penny leaned back in her chair and peered down the length of her nose beyond the frame of her glasses. “Abel works like no one I have ever known. He pushes himself much too much because he doesn’t have a companion to share his life. He does what he does because, frankly, he’s lonely. He wants to fill every waking second of every day with something to do because he doesn’t want to face going home to his cabin alone. Now that Pelee is gone, it will get worse. With his daughter, he would take time to play games, go for a swim, do some silly things and get away from the incessant demands of this place and his public life.

“What I’m trying to say is this: We need Abel to be healthy and whole, to rebound and put the hurt behind him. We need his hands on the tiller of this town. No one in this community is going to be able to help him do that more than you. You love him, don’t you?”

“Love him? No one’s ever asked me that.”

“Well, do you love him, yes or no?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? What kind of an answer is that?”

Winnie flinched at Penny’s question, feeling no small twinge of discomfort. “Penny, we’ve known one another for such as short time. We had a relationship for a week or two, really. I can tell you I have some strong feelings for him. I can tell you that.”

“Okay, I’ll accept that. Has he told you he loves you?”

“No.”

“Well, he’s crazy about you. Once he gets back on his feet and I get finished with him, you’ll get your ‘I love you,’ or I’ll never make him another potato pancake.”

Laughter ballooned out of Winnie, the tension of the last days broken and the pieces kicked aside. She laughed so, tears welled in her eyes.

“Thank you, Penny.”

“Thank me later, Winnie. We’re all in terrible straits. We need everyone to get over this horrible episode and get back together as a big family and go forward. No one knows how bad things are going to get. But things will be far worse if we don’t pull for one another. We can’t do it without Abel, and you can help him. So get that chin up off the floor, girl, and keep your little secret to yourself. Promise me that.”

“I can do that, Penny, I promise you.”

“Now that’s settled. You come up to the CC kitchen in an hour. I need you to help me prepare that big meal for this evening. We need to start the healing process for this town. Food will do it. You won’t be coming back here for a while. People need to see us together. They need to see that I have faith in a stranger. Will you come up?”

“I would like nothing more.”

The women rose from the table. Penny pulled Winnie to her breast and gave her a heartfelt embrace.

“See you in an hour,” said the senior as she reached for the exterior door of Rough Diamond cabin. “It will be good for the both of us to do some honest work in the kitchen.” Penny snapped the door latch and stepped out into the cold. “You know that young man who was killed in the shootings, the young father?”

“No, I’m sorry I didn’t know him.”

“He was my son.”

The door closed and Penny hustled away.

Chapter One Hundred-Two

A train of grain hopper cars approached the grade crossing west of Sweetly and stopped before the lead car struck Harland’s Farmall tractor. Human figures, tiny in the distance and far below the headhouse where Harland and Percy Bliss perched, formed a small knot between the train and the blockade of tractors.

As the figures huddled, Harland noticed something curious about the train.

“Say Percy,” Harland said, elbowing his friend to get his attention. “You see that second car in the train there?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. Some sort of work unit.”

“No, look closely at that thing.”

Percy studied the metal creation for a minute, and scratched his head, bewildered.

“You know, Harland, that looks like it has all kinds of steel plating welded to it.”

“That’s what I was thinking. It looks like it has armor bolted on.”

“Could be. What’s it mean, you think?”

“It has to be protecting something.”

“Is it a troop carrier?” Percy ventured a guess.

“Mmm, could be. I don’t see any activity, though. Maybe it’s just there so those equipment operators have a place to sleep and get something to eat.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

A single individual broke away from the human cluster and moved up the lane to the grain coop. As he went, he waved at the heavy equipment operators and pointed to the tractors on the rails. The character made the turn up the ash-filled access to the coop. Behind the man, big bucket loaders roared to life and descended on the line of tractors. Buckets down, the loaders engaged one tractor after another and nudged them off the tracks.

Coop manager Jim Bottomly felt light-headed and could not catch sufficient breath as a man in military fatigues drifted up the drive and entered the lot before the coop office. Bottomly stepped ahead to meet him. He could see the fellow was an officer in the Guard, a fellow with a cement-block build topped with short bristles of red hair. He appeared very businesslike. The man confronted Bottomly and leveled a salvo of words at the manager.

“I’m Captain Ernest Hampstead, National Guard unit commander, Sioux Falls.”

Bottomly uttered a word, but he was cut off abruptly.

“You are to disperse these people now. My orders state that we are to load the grain from this facility onto that train. We will do that. If there is resistance, we will take any and all necessary steps to put down the resistance.”

Fright manhandled the coop manager. He could reach nowhere within his soul to find the fortitude to blunt the officer’s words. In the blindness of panic, he blurted, “Captain, these people haven’t anything to eat, for God’s sake. You can’t just take their grain.”

The officer looked over the small crowd and turned his attention to the farmers arrayed before the coop office. He chose his words carefully in an attempt to disarm the armed protesters confronting him.

“We are opening this line from Sioux Falls. We will move you there, then evacuate you to the east where conditions are far better. All the towns along the route are to be evacuated, per federal order. The terrible conditions you have been facing these past months are about to come to an end. You will be able to get plentiful food and supplies once we see you out to a safe and secure location.”

The officer turned to Bottomly once again. In quiet tones, the man issued an ultimatum. “Sir, we are here to do a job. We are going to do it. If there is any resistance whatsoever, it will be meet with overwhelming force. You have one hour to clear this lot. In one hour that train moves into place under these towers. Let me make one thing perfectly clear. At Brookings, we had to resort to deadly force. We are prepared to do that here if necessary. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

From their perch high in the headhouse, Harland and Percy watched as the lone figure turned away from the milling farmers below. The people remaining in the lot swarmed together around Bottomly for some sort of discussion. To Harland’s horror, the group below began to break up and drift away from the coop complex. They weren’t going to stand their ground even for a few minutes.

Anger swelled in Harland’s chest. Raising a clenched hand, he slammed it into the corrugated steel shell of the headhouse, cutting away the skin above the knuckles. Bleeding, Harland stalked down through the headhouse in an effort to dump the rage that had swept over him.

As his feet slammed along the gangway floor, he heard the man-lift motor whir to life. He clambered over to the shaft and peered down. Someone was coming up. After a minute, Jim Bottomly stepped out onto the headhouse floor. The lift did not stop. Others were coming up the shaft, too.

“What’s going on, Jim?” Harland growled at his old friend.

“They’re coming, farmer. They’re armed to the teeth, the commander says. They’re going to carry out their orders one way or the other.”

“We’ll see about that,” Harland bristled.

“Before the officer left, he told me that, at Brookings, they had been met with resistance from the local folks. They learned something from the hostilities, I guess. They used force, big force, to put the locals down. He also told us all that there’s an evacuation order out for all South Dakota border towns.”

“Evacuation? Do you believe that nonsense?”

“I don’t know what to believe, Harland. I’m just telling you what the man told me.”

As the coop manager and Harland exchanged words, four others, including two women, scrambled out onto the headhouse floor. All shouldered arms and toted small boxes of ammunition stuffed into their garments. The new arrivals pressed close to listen to the conversation. Harland switched into command mode now that he had an audience.

“Okay, the plan wasn’t to confront them directly. I thought everyone would put up a front for a while. That’s over. But the plan is still intact. From here we can control what happens on the tracks down below and to the grain in these bins. If we have to fire on them to chase the crews from the tracks, we’ll get return fire, says Jim. Stay away from the steel walls. They’re not thick enough to stop anything. Get down on the floor. There’s heavy reinforced concrete in the elevator towers, and that should stop just about anything from reaching us. If they send up tear gas, it would be pretty tough to get it in here. But if they do, just run all the way down to the headhouse end down there and wait until the air clears on this side.”

For an hour, the little resistance force in the headhouse peered out the east end window to watch the proceedings below. A throaty rumble from a diesel locomotive some distance away reached the headhouse and the farmers watched as the train inched its way toward the elevator silos. Several figures below walked ahead of the train, as if inspecting the track. In short order, they came upon the gap in the rails and flagged the train to a stop.

In the old rail car behind the flatcar, a door opened in the side of the body and figures disgorged, nearly a dozen of them, hands laden with goods.

“Will you look at that,” stammered Harland. “They brought track tools with them. Damn, they’re going to knit that rail back together. That isn’t going to happen.”

The farmer hoisted a rifle off the floor and loaded rounds one by one into it. As the last bullet slipped into place, the man-lift motor whirred to life again.

“Percy, go over there, throw the lift breaker off and find out who the hell is trying to come up.”

Harland turned to the window again as his friend hustled over to the man-lift shaft. Bliss peered over the lip of the floor and flipped the breaker to an open setting to cut power to the lift. He could see little down the shaft, but he heard the mumble of voices rising up from far below. Whoever was below left the lift boarding area rapidly.

From the window, the little band of protesters observed several figures bolt from the coop office and out to the individuals at the train. Below, a hasty meeting convened then people vanished abruptly, dodging behind the train and boarding the work car.

“Why are they leaving?” a farmwoman in a red, white and blue NASCAR jacket asked.

“They’re not,” Harland said. “They’re taking cover.”

A loud male voice, projected from a bullhorn, rang through the corrugated metal enclosure: “Please leave your post in the tower. You have five minutes to exit the building and show yourself. Put any firearms down before you exit the building. You have five minutes. If you fail to leave, you will be driven out. You have five minutes.”

Eyes darted from face to face among the little group.

“What do we do?” asked Jim Bottomly.

Harland wiped a hand over his mouth. “If any of you want to leave, leave now. Get down the lift. I figure they are going to try to launch some tear gas up here. It could get mighty unpleasant if they do. So if you want to go, go.”

Without saying a word, Jim and one of the couples retreated along the headhouse floor and reached the man-lift. The coop manager threw the breaker, stepped onto one of the mobile platforms and disappeared. The couple followed shortly afterward. Harland looked at the three others who remained and thanked them for staying.

The threesome that dropped down the man-lift shaft soon walked from the front door of the coop. A figure at the train ran the tracks to meet them, stopped for a moment, and then hustled the trio away. Peering cautiously from the window, staying back from the light so that he stood in shadow, Harland strained to try to see if Guard members were taking up positions so they might have a shot at the headhouse window, but he could make out nothing to cause alarm. He turned and motioned for the others to retreat down the narrow headhouse floor to the other end of the complex. The three slipped away, ducking heavy suspended electric motors, distribution piping, mammoth valves and assorted headhouse machinery.

Harland stood alone to one side of the window, resuming his vigil. Cold prairie breeze moaned about the eves of the place, but the wind did nothing to move the seconds along. Spittle in the farmer’s mouth turned to stiff taffy.

Wham! The steel corrugation just above and to the left of the window opening buckled under the force of a blunt projectile. The instant it hit, an explosive pop thundered down the metal headhouse. The vista outside the building disappeared in a cloud of white.

The noise, the suddenness of it, made the farmer recoil violently from the window. Harland lost his footing and sprawled into the heavy grain dust in one corner of the long room. Above him, acrid smoke curled up into the steel superstructure, leaving the air at the floor clear.

A moment later an object sliced into the headhouse rafters and exploded. Harland filled his lungs to bursting with clear air, picked himself up and ran, eyes closed, through a whiteout of gases, feeling for obstructions with the barrel of his rifle. In a minute he stumbled into the company of Percy Bliss and the others huddled beneath a window at the far end of the loft. Harland turned to the wall, looking for an electrical switch. Steel conduit ran away from a switch nearby and up the wall into the peak of the headhouse. There, in the dim light, could be seen a huge ventilation fan, its louvers closed. The farmer slammed the switch with his free hand and the fan blades well above them began to turn.

“Praise Jesus, there’s still power,” Harland yelled.

Within seconds the big industrial fan blades were a blur, forcing the louvers open and pulling great volumes of air down the length of the headhouse.

Crouched beneath the window, the little band of dissidents watched as the white cloud of tear gas filling the opposite end of the headhouse coiled like rope and lifted into the rafters on a river of streaming air spawned by the roaring exhaust fan. It would take only minutes, Harland estimated, for the headhouse to cleanse itself of noxious fumes.

“We’ve won this round,” the Swede boasted.

Chapter One Hundred-Three

An antique railroad brakeman’s lantern, threaded with a wick and topped off with vegetable oil, barely illuminated the cavernous confines of one of the two fermentation rooms in the buildings of the defunct Sweet Spring Brewery. Abel set the lantern on the pitted concrete floor amid sections of piping resting between two twenty-foot-tall stainless steel fermentation tanks. The huge vessels, two of ten standing in the cold, unused sanctuary, lined the walls in parallel rows, each one tucked tight against its neighbor. Each one held thousands of gallons of beer, but there wasn’t a drop of drink anywhere.

In the weak light of the lamp, the great tanks seemed to Abel to be huge living beings standing in lines in the dark awaiting instructions. He would give them something to do, he, Max and Oleg.

The men retreated from the tank room, disappeared into the night, and ran to the lakeshore to haul a heavily-loaded canoe ashore. From the craft they pulled ropes and belt harnesses. Fastened into the slings, they put their weight into the ropes. The canoe slid forward, sliding easily on the ash and frozen sleet layers despite the great weight of clumsy metal cargo it carried.

At the brewery, the men wrestled the heavy canoe through a freight door. Cussing and kicking at the craft, they wedged it around corners, through tight spaces and managed to get the awkward contraption into the tank room. The trio did not stop to rest. Immediately Abel and Oleg began fitting the pipes strewn on the floor to the machine in the canoe. For an hour they ran pipe, some of it up a steel stairwell to a catwalk at the top of the room. Some pipe they ran out of the building. At the top of one of the tanks they snaked pipe to an access hatch and inserted it.

Outside the building, Max unrolled big coils of flexible neoprene septic line tubing. He stretched the lines behind the brewery to the base of one of the concrete grain elevator towers standing just fifty feet from the north brick walls of the brewery. He disappeared beneath the structure.

Sweating despite the refrigerator-like cold inside the unheated brewery, the men finally set down their tools, their heavy work done. They glanced back and forth at one another.

“We ready?” huffed Abel.

“Line’s to the first silo,” Max gasped. He gave a thumbs up.

“We’re okay here, too,” said Oleg.

“Shall we fire it up?” asked Max, raising an eyebrow.

“Go ahead.” Abel agreed.

“Okay, I think we’ve got everything closed up fairly well,” said Max. “This contraption’s going to make a bit of a racket.”

The men fell silent while Max clamored into the canoe and grasped a loose battery cable in one hand. Bracing himself, he dropped the line onto the terminal of a battery resting in the bottom of the canoe. The machine sputtered a moment then settled down, coughing and whining. Max cursed, urging the engine to fire up. As if obeying the man, the unit’s cylinders suddenly fired in sequence. The rough wheeze of the engine leveled out and the rig soon sang harmoniously. Max whistled out a lungful of air, pushed the engine’s throttle and increased the RPMs.

The slap of pistons was overcome by a mechanical pumping noise and the rush of air moving at ever-increasing velocity. In the confines of the fermentation tank room, the beast Max had fashioned rumbled like an Everglades airboat.

At the base of the fermentation tank they had been working on, Oleg swung a cleanout door closed and latched it to see if it would hold tight. He opened it again, stuck his head into the tank, and waited.

Max ran his hands along the piping that stretched out of the building. “Come on, baby. Come on. Come on.”

Abel retrieved the railroad lantern and brought it over to Oleg so the man could see inside the fermentation chamber. Abel kneeled down beside him.

The roar of the engine was a haunted sound. The room throbbed. The huge stainless steel tanks, empty and hollow, amplified the noise and hummed like mammoth pipe organ pipes.

A rockslide rattle suddenly bounded across the great room.

“Here it comes,” wailed Max. “Here it comes!”

Abel and Oleg crammed their heads through the tank’s cleanout door and peered to the top of the huge vessel. They held the lantern up inside to illuminate the bright stainless steel. From the end of the pipe on high a yellow torrent burst forth. The men fell over each other trying to get out of the cleanout trap. As they piled on the floor and struggled to close the door behind them, little nuggets of gold sprayed out into the room. The cleanout door slammed shut and Oleg set its latch. He spun away from the door with a toothy smile etched on his face, laughing hysterically.

Abel dropped on his knees and scooped yellow bits into a pile. He cupped his hands around the material and stood up. Max and Oleg crowded around him, Oleg holding the lamp high.

“I’ll be damned,” howled Oleg. “I’ll be good goddamned.”

Max bit his lower lip with every one of his top front teeth.

Abel held up the little cone of treasure in his hands, held it up under their dirt-caked noses.

“We’ve got corn, gentlemen,” Abel beamed. “Do we ever have corn!”

Chapter One Hundred-Four

“Tonight our story is about America on the move. A mass migration is underway as this broadcast airs. Millions are fleeing the northern tier of states for the southland, and they are finding they are not welcome there.”

Monitoring National Public Television in the video studio, Bobcat bit his fingernails to the nub. Alone, he chewed in anguish over the fraying constitution of Independency’s shattered citizenry and fretted about the progress of the three who had left for Sweetly towing Max’s pneumatic contraption shoehorned into a canoe.

“Legislatures in the South from Atlanta to Austin, all following Florida’s lead, have voted into law emergency measures designed to thwart the influx of northern newcomers trying to cross their borders.

“As unseasonable winter-like cold sweeps across the country, and as deepening food shortages have become a reality for millions, a trickle of migrants from the Northeast and Great Lakes states has become a stream in flood. Tonight, the southbound lanes of Interstates 95, 81 and 75 are choked to capacity with vehicles crammed with travelers migrating south. The crush of traffic has turned the southbound lanes into parking lots hundreds of miles long.”

“What in hell is the South going to do with all those people?” Bobcat mumbled to the monitors.

“In the Carolinas, hundreds of thousands of snowbirds are camped out along the roads, in fields, by waterways, in business parking lots everywhere. The southern counties of South Carolina resemble refugee camps on the Horn of Africa.”

Footfalls clattered on the stairs to the second floor offices and a face appeared in the doorway to Bobcat’s lair. A fright mask appeared atop a trembling body.

“What is it?” yelled Bobcat, recoiling from the look of the woman who had burst into the room.

“Bobcat, we got a call at the CC on that phone, that special phone.”

“What, the satellite phone?”

“Yes, that one.”

“Well, what’s the matter?”

“Elizabeth Embree called.”

“What?” Bobcat chocked. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Liz Embree?” Bobcat couldn’t quite come to terms with what he’d heard.

“Yes. I’m sure of it.”

“My God.” Bobcat placed fingers in his mouth and yanked on his teeth. “Did you talk to her?”

“No, I couldn’t, I, I just couldn’t. But I got a number.”

“You have a number where she can be reached?”

“I do.”

“Well, let me have it.”

“Are you going to try and reach her?’

“Of course. Stupid question!”

The video master grabbed a scrap of paper a telephone number scrawled on it, with a 403 area code. Canada. Alberta Province.

“All right, I’m off to the CC.”

* * *

In the town office at Stand-off Creek, Liz waited anxiously for a return call from Minnesota. She paced the floor under Sinopa’s gaze. There was something disturbing in the voice of the individual who answered the phone at the CC in Independency village. The villager had refused to talk to her. How strange. She was told someone would get back to her, provided she left a number where she could be reached. When the phone did ring and she leaped to it, she recognized the voice of the caller.

“Robert? Thank God it’s you. This is Liz Embree.”

“I know. They told me to call you, Liz. I can’t believe it.”

“They wouldn’t talk to me there.”

Bobcat tried swallowing without spittle. “Liz, where are you?”

“I’m in Canada. I was hurt badly. But I’m feeling strong now. I want to come east.”

“Oh, you do. Well, um, I….” Bobcat’s sentence fell apart. He couldn’t frame his thought, so his voice sputtered to a halt.

“Robert, what’s going on?”

The chill of water ice clamped down on Bobcat’s shoulders. He shuttered. “Liz, it’s your daughter, Pelee.”

“Yes, she’s there? Let me speak to her.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“She’s not here, Liz. Pelee was badly injured. A week ago.”

“Injured?” Liz’s bones locked rigid. “Is she all right?”

“No! No, Liz, she’s not all right.”

“What’s the matter with her?” squealed Liz.

“She was wounded, a gunshot, Liz. She was hit. She bled much too much. She’s gone.”

Sinopa had hustled Liz to the town offices to use a telephone. A Siksika clansman brought emergency equipment including a satellite phone to the Stand-off Creek community offices at Sinopa’s insistence. The Blackfoot doctor stood by as Liz tried to get a connection.

The phone slipped from Liz’s hand and clattered to the floor.

“What are you doing?” snapped Sinopa, grabbing in vain for the falling instrument. When she looked back at Liz, she witnessed the woman’s skin tone wash out to the color of skim milk.

Chapter One Hundred-Five

A fitful night in the headhouse behind him, Harland awoke in a fetid mood. The initial shudder of panic that he’d felt when the tear gas shell exploded the day before had left behind a thick residue of resolve. The gall of the Guard personnel below, fumed the farmer. Agents of the federal government sought to cripple a productive U.S. citizen and an Army veteran trying to protect the edible bounty that he himself had willed from the ground. How dare they!

Harland jogged down to the far end of the headhouse again and took up a position in the morning shadows to one side of the window. He surveyed the activity at the train.

Behind the lead rail cars, Jim Bottomly paced back and forth, agonizing over what Harland and Percy might do from their sniper’s perch. The National Guard unit commander approached. Hampstead collared Jim, led him into the second car of the train and seated the coop manager in a tiny partitioned area. The officer introduced another individual standing in the room, a man dressed in a blue jump jacket with the letters FEMA stitched into the breast. Jim nodded to the Federal Emergency Management Administration employee. Hampstead took a seat directly across from Bottomly.

“If you don’t mind, I would like to address you by your proper name,” said the officer in a polite tone.

“I’m Jim Bottomly. I manage the coop here.”

“Very well, Mr. Bottomly, Jim, you obviously have a hand in this.”

The coop manager admitted nothing.

“Someone is at the top of the elevator. Do you know how many?”

“Two. I don’t think there is anybody else left.”

“What is their purpose?”

“Well,” Jim sighed, “they’re not willing to let the grain go.”

“Are they well armed?”

Bottomly looked the officer squarely in the eye. “And if they are?”

Hampstead scratched the short stubble on the top of his head. “Jim, my orders are to get the grain out under any circumstances. I told you, other Guard units have encountered resistance elsewhere. In every case, Jim, the Guard has prevailed.”

“What do you want me to do?” Jim asked.

“You can get up there, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then I want you to tell them to come out with you immediately, no questions asked. We don’t want to hurt anyone. If they don’t come out, though, we will use force.”

“What are you going to do to those poor bastards? That’s their grain, sir.”

“Not anymore,” grumbled the man in the FEMA jacket.

Captain Hampstead folded his hands. “If they don’t come out, we’ll put a shell in the works up there.”

“You can’t do that,” Jim screeched.

The officer sat tightlipped.

“You set off a charge up there and we’re going to lose those towers. They’re half full. There’s grain dust everywhere. Look, you’ve got….”

“Never mind,” the officer snapped. “Do you know those men well?”

“Very well.”

“Are they your neighbors?”

“Yes.”

“Then do them a favor and talk to them. Bring them down. Tell them they are going to be evacuated with the rest of the townspeople anyway in a week or two—alive. Tell them that. There will be no charges filed against them if they come peacefully. They’ve got twenty-four hours. Once we mend that rail, they had better be down and gone.”

Bottomly’s heart sank. He buried his head in his hands.

“Can you do that?” asked the FEMA agent.

“I can, yes!”

The coop manager walked into the cavernous expanse of the towers and got aboard the man-lift. He threw the breaker and up he went. In several seconds the lift stopped. Bottomly shouted up the shaft and told the boys above to engage the breaker on the headhouse floor so he could reach the top.

Percy Bliss pulled Bottomly off the lift and Harland came over to round out the trio.

“What do you have, Jim?”

Jim ground his teeth together. “Boys, it’s time you came down.”

“Not going to happen,” said Harland.

“I talked to the field officer down there. He says if you don’t come out within twenty-four hours, things are going to get hot up here.”

“Okay, Jim, tell whoever he is down there that we’ve got a job to do up here. Our job is to keep the grain here in Sweetly. That’s what I’m going to do. Percy and these folks can leave if they want.”

“I’m staying put,” insisted Bliss. The couple backed away toward the lift.

“All right then, Percy and I are staying. But I want you to throw a monkey wrench in the works when you go down. You tell the guy in charge that our flanks are protected. If the Guard fires on us, then there are men in strategic locations around the perimeter of the coop that will fire on the Guard.”

Jim Bottomly’s eyes swelled to saucer size. “What? I didn’t know that.”

“Just tell him that for me, Jim. Make him understand that.”

“Jesus, double Jesus! Okay, okay. But I’m going to tell him I had no idea.”

“Fine, just tell him.”

The coop manager’s blood pressure spiked. He felt faint.

“And another thing, Jim,” said Harland. “Is that a fighting force down there or is it just a bunch of fellas moving ash around?”

Jim pondered the question. “I don’t know, Harland. I didn’t see a thing that looked like real firepower.”

The coop manager turned and stepped back on the lift. Before flipping the breaker he called out to Harland. “You’ve got twenty-four hours. That’s what they told me. They’ve got to get a new rail in here anyway. They’ve got to pull one up from a siding somewhere and bring it up here. So it will be a while before they do anything, I guess.”

At that Jim disappeared down the shaft. The couple followed, leaving Percy and Harland to their fate.

Percy watched them vanish below before turning to Harland. “Now, where did you come up with that, Harland?”

“Look at it this way, Percy,” the tall weathered Swede frowned, “if the troops down there think we’re the only thing between them and the grain, then all their focus will be on us. Now, if they think that they’re being flanked by hostile folks, they are going to think twice about making a move.”

“But nobody’s down there, Harland.”

“Doesn’t matter. All they have to do is think they have a gun at their back. That’s deterrent enough.”

Chapter One Hundred-Six

The threshold of the porch at the Blackfoot clinic was something of an obstacle to White Elk, relying heavily on a crutch. The wheelchair ramp entrance beckoned, but he wanted to test his mettle on the steps. Placing the tip of his crutch on the top riser, the elder managed to take a step down, then another so that he could pull up alongside Liz, who was standing alone at the foot of the clinic walk.

“Sinopa tells me you have suffered a great loss.”

Liz simply tipped her head forward.

“I see.”

Liz would not look into the old man’s eyes, as if she were ashamed to gaze upon him.

“Elizabeth?”

“Yes, Benjamin.”

“Would you be kind enough to walk with me to the edge of the village? We can shuffle along together. I would like to see the buffalo. They are nearby.”

The scientist placed a hand on the elder’s shoulder to steady him. Together the pair hobbled over hard-packed wind-scoured snows to the limitless prairie expanse at the eastern edge of the North Piegan village. Black humps inched over the plains. White Elk was pleased that the huge beasts were in close proximity. The Blackfoot propped himself in place upon the crutch and surveyed the great herd, oblivious of a biting wind. The breeze burrowed into Liz’s parka, sending chills through the microfiber-fill to her flesh.

“Do you see them there, Elizabeth?”

Barely audible: “Yes, Benjamin.”

“They have been keeping us alive all these weeks.”

Liz didn’t react to White Elk’s observation.

“They are sustaining us now, body and mind. That is why this old man has recovered quickly and why a woman in her prime, with the terrible injuries you had, has prospered.”

“Sinopa says I should be able to travel now.”

“Ah, that is a good thing.”

“I had hoped to build up enough strength to go to my daughter. But it’s too late. I’ve lost her. I haven’t the strength I thought I had.”

“No, you have more in reserve than you think, Elizabeth. You have only to lay aside your grief when you are ready. Your strength is there for you to draw upon when you will need it.”

“I don’t believe that, Benjamin.” Liz paced a few steps away and revolved to face the Blackfoot elder. She remained quiet for thirty seconds.

“All the things that matter to me, Benjamin, they’ve vanished. My daughter is gone. The life we had together is over.” Liz rubbed moisture from her eyes. “What does someone like me do in a world that has disintegrated?”

White Elk thought it wise to let the woman unburden her soul of its anguish. He remained quiet while Liz, wrapping her torso in her arms, shivered before the force of the prairie wind.

“I have to go.”

“Yes, of course.”

“But I don’t know where to go.”

Benjamin squinted and shook his head. “You must go to where your daughter is resting.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” Liz sobbed.

“There is no alternative, woman.”

“I have to tell you, I’ve decided to go south.”

“South? What is in the south?”

“Yellowstone,” Liz whispered, almost inaudibly.

“Yellowstone?” White Elk rapped his crutch on frozen ground. “Why would you want to go where the earth has come to an end?” he said in a huff.

“I haven’t got the courage to go anywhere else.”

Scowling, White Elk scolded the woman at his side. “You must go to your daughter’s grave. There is no other place you have to be. None!”

“I will, Benjamin, when I think I can face up to it.”

“You must do so now. There is nothing for you at Yellowstone.” White Elk’s voice cut a swath across the prairie landscape.

Liz boxed her head with her hands and bared her teeth. “Yellowstone buried everything. I have to come to terms with that, as a geologist, as human being, as a mother. I can’t feel anything. I want to know why I can’t feel anything.”

“You must give yourself time. And time starts with your little one. You must go to her. There can be no other destination.”

Howling at the stark linear geometry of the plains, Liz ranted, “I want to know why the rocks took precedence over everything, over my daughter. I spent more time at Yellowstone last year than I spent with my Pelee, do you know that? I dropped her on my husband’s doorstep so I could work at the park. My career was everything to me. Yellowstone—I absolutely had to be there.

Liz kicked the snow at her feet, kicked at it as though trying to ward off a rabid fox.

“My daughter got in the way. Can you imagine that? I was grateful that she loved to stay with her father at the farm in Minnesota.”

White Elk turned his back to the woman, inching away to distance himself from her. He studied the behemoths on the horizon, listening to the grunting and lowing of their many voices as they bulldozed the snows to find forage.

“Sinopa and I have talked about the day when you could leave, Elizabeth. Sinopa needs supplies badly for the clinic. She has to go to Calgary, but she delayed her going because of you.”

White Elk frowned in disgust, waving a finger toward the heavens as if ordering the scudding clouds to move on. “You have made your decision. Where you go from here is your business. We will help you get to the airport. That will be the end of it.”

Liz shook her head and wiped tears away. “I’m sorry I am such a disappointment to you.”

“The Siksika, the Kainai and the North Piegan, they all have gone to great lengths to help us. We would do the same for them, the same for you. We would not leave one of our own alone to suffer.”

“Are you all this way, Benjamin?”

“I’ve told you, Elizabeth, this is the way of native peoples. The many help the few. The strong help the weak. As tribe members, this is what we do, what we have always done. We lost our Montana home to the ash, so our brothers and sisters here in Canada took us into their homes. They are helping us make a new life among the buffalo. We all grow stronger. You grow stronger, too. But now I am worried about you, Elizabeth. You are not making sense.”

“Why are you wasting your energy on one white woman? I can’t fathom it.”

“You must know, a buffalo calf alone on the prairie cannot survive even for one day. It must be among its kind. It needs protection; it must be taught, to learn. It needs help every day so it can grow to great size. You see them all out there? There are hundreds of them. The Blackfoot here, there are many. We can’t go through this life alone, any more than the buffalo calf I speak of.”

White Elk tilted forward on his crutch and waved an open palm at the scientist. “You, Elizabeth, you go to your daughter’s grave, and you will find peace in time. Your spirit will heal. But you go to Yellowstone and do you know what you will find there?”

“I don’t know, Benjamin.”

“I know. I will tell you. You will find your heart is empty and cold.”

Chapter One Hundred-Seven

Nothing came of the ultimatum from the National Guard. Through noon the next day and well into the late afternoon, there was little activity on the coop grounds below. Harland felt he had at least won round two of the fight, and there might be time to take a nap. He rolled out an arctic sleeping bag and settled down to see if he could snatch a few hours of rest.

Percy poked the farmer an hour later, the angry red light of a Yellowstone sunset flickering in the headhouse superstructure. The noise of equipment engines rumbled through the building.

“Harland, I think you should see this,” Percy said, motioning his friend toward the window.

In the parking area of the coop and along the tracks, the big earthmovers were scrapping the earth clean and piling up long windrows of volcanic ash eight and ten feet high. The machines were building banks on both sides of the railroad track. Harland realized immediately what was unfolding.

“They’re building a blind, a screen. Do you see that, Percy?”

Percy nodded.

“They must have taken me seriously, you know, about outflanking them.”

“What do you think they’ll do when they get that done?”

“I think they’re fixing to try to restore that rail.”

“It’s going to be dark in an hour. You think they’ll try the rail tonight?”

Harland stood pondering Percy’s question, but he was distracted. His mind was racing, trying to come up with a strategy that would keep the train frozen in its tracks. Rather than rely on the simple bluff that Harland had revealed to Jim Bottomly, he now felt the two of them needed to put some teeth into the ruse.

“I’ve got an idea, Percy.”

“What’s that?” said the older man, now sitting against the wall with a coat over his legs to keep warm.

“Can you stay here and cover me?”

“Cover you? Where are you going?”

“Once it gets dark, we won’t be able to see too good what’s going on down below. They’ll probably use the cover of darkness to work on the rail. Don’t you say?”

“Yeah, that’s a good bet.”

“I’m thinking, I’ll drop down and find a place where I’ve got a shot at the tracks. If you hear me fire a shot, you fire a shot. That will make them think that what I told Jim was the real thing, that there are hostiles in hiding around the coop.”

“You going to shoot somebody, Harland?” asked Percy with a look of alarm on his face.

“All we want to do is get them the hell out of here, go someplace else, that’s all. If we make it uncomfortable enough for them, maybe they’ll move out.”

Percy agreed to Harland’s Spartan plan and made preparations by the window for an all-night vigil. Harland shouldered his rifle and left the headhouse as darkness seeped into the structure.

Harland retreated into the bowels of the towers, slipping into the night and making the long trek to the far end of the silo cluster. He ran behind them and came out to the far corner by the tracks. Now the train was many hundreds of feet away and barely visible. Before him the rail line was clear but invisible beneath the ash.

Harland crouched down, inched across the railbed and climbed the crumbling slope of a great mound of ash. At the top, he stretched out, perched an elbow atop his pack and sighted down his rifle toward the train. He’d have a shot, if need be, although he could barely make out details in the dark.

The evening temperatures dropped quickly and fell well below freezing. Harland shivered but kept his watch. In the headhouse, Percy pulled on a heavily insulated snowmobile suit, a hat and gloves.

Hours after sundown, the first sounds of activity swept by on the cold prairie breeze. A grunt fired up one of the pieces of heavy equipment. Others roared to life. Harland’s heart rate soared. Maybe the Guard was going to move out of Sweetly after all. Straining to see, he noticed a big mechanical form move and disappear behind the edge of the coop office. Suddenly it appeared again, running down along one of the tall ash windrows in the direction where Harland was posted. When the machine cleared the end of the windrow, it turned abruptly and came to a halt. The driver left the unit where it stood.

“Shit!” Harland swore to himself. The machine blocked his view completely. He decided to leave his perch and move forward. The farmer scrambled to his feet and, as he took his first steps, heard the clamor of voices, the clank of tools, and the ring of metal on metal. Just as he expected, a Guard crew was moving up the tracks with gear to mend the missing rail.

The piled ash was unstable, like sand in a beach dune beneath the farmer’s feet. Harland stumbled, regained his feet and stumbled some more. More noises tumbled down the tracks, the rap of heavy hammers and the groan of metal, too. The farmer was alarmed now. He needed to do something.

Harland sank to his knees in the ash, steadied himself and raised the rifle to his chin. Eye sighting along the barrel, he decided to aim at the cab of the big bucket loader and blow out the glass. That would get someone’s attention. If Percy answered with a shot, then the Guard would know they had an enemy force to contend with.

Harland took a deep breath and held it. He closed his eyes and pulled back on his trigger finger. A flash of light and a loud report sent the bullet hurtling down the tracks. Instantly the glass in the cab disintegrated and rained atomized splinters of glitter into the night.

There was a second of frozen silence, pure nothingness. The next moment the atmosphere roared with automatic weapon fire. Percy had not wavered from his post. He would not disappoint. When he heard Harland’s rifle shot, he leaped from behind the wall into the window frame. Bullets cascaded into space, the shots echoing loudly in the headhouse superstructure.

Commander Hampstead had spent the evening calculating, just as Harland had. All he needed, he decided, was one well-placed projectile from one grenade launcher. The trajectory had to be steep so that once the explosive device detonated in the headhouse it would do so at the very end of the structure. That would silence the antagonists there but leave the critical equipment in the headhouse intact so the train could be loaded.

The officer had stationed a single man with a shoulder-held launcher at the southwest corner of the coop office. The sharpshooter had been given a simple order. Should there be any gunfire from above, he was to step into the clear, take aim at the headhouse window on high and fire. Even if the launched grenade missed the opening, it would surely slam into the eaves of the building and explode. The job would be done.

When Harland fired the first shot, several armed Guard members ran forward to take positions at the crippled bucket loader. The shot was the cue for the grenade launcher specialist to react. As the soldier stepped out of the building’s shadow, he could see gun barrel flashes as the rifleman in the headhouse unloaded a volley of bullets into the darkness.

Percy ducked away from the window. He did not see a flash of propellant from the lot below as a grenade swept aloft. At the periphery of his vision, Harland sensed a light trail streak toward the heavens.

The night ripped open and let the sun out. A pulse of incandescence lit up the environment as if an emergency rocket had been launched. In the light pulse, fragments of structure somersaulted away into the darkness. The concussive sound wave of the explosion slammed down on everyone below.

The man who fired the grenade knew in a moment he had hit his mark. Hampstead managed a little nod as the initial flash began to fade.

In the headhouse, white hot metal fragments sliced into steel and wood and the heavy coating of ultra dry grain dust that infested every nook and cranny of the structure. The hot fragments in the dust were as a spark to a munitions dump.

An unholy light swallowed the dying strobe of the grenade whole. The streets of Sweetly, South Dakota flared bright as midday. The little 40mm grenade unleashed a monster. The headhouse roof peeled up and disappeared into the night sky. Panels of corrugated steel from the walls scissored through the air, some traveling a thousand of feet.

The superstructure buckled and tons of heavy machinery, suspended in the disintegrating headhouse, fell, sheering away the spidery run of grain distribution tubes running to each of the coop silos. The falling equipment slammed into the elevator tower roof caps and breached several, and white heat raced into the interiors of the half empty spaces.

The steel-reinforced concrete walls of the silos managed to contain much of the force of the detonations that followed the breach of the towers. To those at ground level, it appeared as if intercontinental ballistic missiles were launching from underground bunkers. Prodigious forces vomited columns of roaring inferno into the heavens. With each thunderous blast, other towers were breached and each, in turn, erupted in an orgy of fire.

The forces tore apart smaller distribution bins in the complex and grain cascaded out of the building and smothered the tracks. Chunks of concrete and flaming debris rained down off the structures and slammed into the ground and onto equipment.

The Sweetly coop complex was reduced to hollowed-out concrete chambers, each belching acrid smoke from flames now consuming the dry grain remaining in the mammoth bins.

Jim Bottomly, at his home on the far side of the community, heard staccato explosions and raced out his front door. He knew before he reached his steps what had happened. Catastrophic grain elevator explosions were the things of legend on the Plains. Such events were revered and feared at the same time and were fodder for barroom embellishment one generation to the next. On the edge of town, he watched Sweetly’s newborn monstrous roman candles launch hellfire into the sky.

Harland, knocked down into the ash by a shower of small debris, watched the horror above while lying windless on his back. He sensed he was at the center of a nuclear firestorm. As he bore witness to the conflagration, pieces of building landed with a thump on all sides. Somehow he was not impaled by the larger pieces, but the intense heat of the blasts forced him to roll off the top of the ash berm and down the far side.

The Sweetly grain war was over in a single minute. Its tarnished souvenir was a tortured hulk of concrete and tons of smoldering grain. With no possible way to fight such a fire, the grain would likely burn for weeks, even months.

Harland stumbled to his feet and stood unsteady in the flame-flickering dark. He idled emotionless. There had been a purpose to all this, right? He had come to safeguard the grain supply, to save it for the citizens of Sweetly and to keep the federal boys from getting their hands on it. He had meant to do well by the local citizens, but what had he done? He had destroyed the very thing he came to save, and likely his old friend’s life. Now there was ruin, corruption on all sides.

Harland raised his rifle before his eyes and held it at arm’s length, studying the thing. It was useless now. Best to toss it away. It had been folly to use it, after all.

Down the tracks at the bucket loader, a Guard solider, protected from the violence by the equipment’s steel, noticed something moving in the distance. He raised his weapon and took a look through the mounted scope. The troop saw a human form hoist a rifle toward its shoulders.

A tiny flash of light erupted from the equipment steel.

Chapter One Hundred-Eight

Harland held his rifle up before his eyes, as if to inspect it. Misery engulfed him. Despite meticulous planning, he failed his neighbors and friends terribly. He hefted the gun to toss it away into the ash.

Someone unseen fired a shot. A blunt force rammed his left flank. Harland hurtled from the ash mound through the air. No chance to break his fall, the farmer landed heavily on his back in the shadow of the grain elevator towers. His cranium pounded down into the ash, the concussion stunning him. Struggling for a breath, something pounced on his chest, a black creature. It was inhuman, the thing, grabbing at his clothing with four arms. It pulled at him, dragged him on rough ground until sensation left him.

* * *

Dim light from a kerosene lantern was all Harland could make out when he opened his eyes. Dead silence permeated the formless space he occupied. His head throbbed abominably.

“Here, take these. Pain killers,” someone said.

A cup of water and several tablets were offered. Harland accepted the pills into his mouth and took a swig of water. Someone cradled his head and placed a jacket under his skull to keep it off a cold concrete surface.

Five minutes elapsed.

“What is this place?” Harland whispered.

“You’re in the old Sweet Spring Brewery.”

“Brewery?” Harland could manage nothing else.

“We brought you here. We thought you’d be killed or captured.”

“Killed? Uhh. What happened to Percy?”

“Who?”

“Percy. He was in the headhouse over the silos.”

“The coop silos blew up, Harland. Grain dust explosion.”

“What?”

“If you had a man up there, you’ve lost him.”

Images of the night rushed back to the Swede. Suddenly the grain elevators were alight, launching columns of fierce flames into the night. Harland pushed himself up to a sitting position and discovered three dark figures weakly illuminated by the single light source.

“What is this? You Reserve boys?”

One of the figures laughed. “No, Harland. We’re not the Guard. We’ve got nothing to do with them.”

“What do you want with me?”

“We wanted to be sure you didn’t die out there.”

The farmer sat speechless for ten seconds. “Who are you people?”

A figure reached for and clutched the kerosene lamp. He brought it over to Harland, just to one side of him, and set it down. The farmer could now see the faces of the three men before him. He recognized one.

“God in heaven, you Whittemore?”

“That’s right, Harland. The man on your right is Max Zimmerman, on your left, Oleg Knudsen. We’re all from the bluffs.”

“Holy sweet savior, you stay away from me.”

Harland scrambled to his knees, his head vibrating with pulsing pain. Abel placed a hand to the farmer’s chest.

“Be at ease, sir. We’re not here to cause you harm. Sit. Sit. Have some more water.”

Harland scowled, but sat back down wearily on the jacket. A look of defeat made the rounds of his face. Abel noticed the farmer’s cheeks still displayed the angry red rash, the same one the farmer had sported on the porch of the family homestead several weeks earlier.

“It’s over, isn’t it? You saw the silos go up, eh?”

“Yes, Harland, most of them are burning.”

The farmer covered his face with his hands. “That’s not what I wanted. I thought sure we could protect the grain, get the Guard out of here and leave us be.”

“They’ll be going, Mr. Sven,” said Oleg, “empty-handed.”

“It’s all gone, then, isn’t it? All burning up.”

“That’s what the Guard’s thinking out there as we speak,” Abel said. “I imagine they’ll assess things in the morning, then pull the train out of here sometime tomorrow if the ash dust isn’t too terribly bad.”

“So they’ll have nothing. Do you know what that means?”

The three men around Harland remained silent.

“That means….” Harland’s demeanor turned surly suddenly. “What in Christ’s name do you care? You don’t know shit about these things.”

“Quiet yourself about this, Harland,” Abel remarked in a calm, parental tone. “The Guard will be leaving without your grain. But it’s not ruined. It’s safe.”

Harland squinted in the dim light and grimaced. “It’s out there burning. It’s going to burn forever and ever and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

“Some of it will burn, that’s a certainty, Harland. Some of it, though, can’t burn. It can’t burn because it isn’t in the silos.”

The farmer didn’t know what to make of Abel’s jargon. He couldn’t decipher what the man meant.

“Ah, I don’t follow you,” murmured Harland. “The grain’s on fire. You said yourself the Guard is going to pull out of here tomorrow with nothing.”

“That’s right, Harland.” Abel stood up and paced by the farmer. He went over to a heavy wooden crate and shoved it under one of the fermentation tanks, below a cleanout door.

For the first time, the Swede took a good look at the interior space around him. Huge steel tanks towered over him.

Abel revolved to face the farmer seated on the cold floor. “Tomorrow, the Guard will be gone, but the grain is most assuredly not gone, Harland.”

Abel nodded to his companions and pointed to Harland. He gestured to have them pick the farmer up off the floor and deposit him before the wooden crate. Max and Oleg grabbed the farmer’s arms and hoisted him to his feet.

“What are you doing with me?” Harland protested loudly and lashed out with one arm. Max caught the flying appendage and expertly yanked it behind Harland’s back and pushed upward causing the man some pain.

“Sorry, Mr. Sven,” Max apologized, “I’ll let you free in a minute.”

Max and Oleg pushed the farmer to the edge of the crate and pinned him there. Abel focused on the Sweetly citizen and brought his face close to that of the farmer.

“Harland, what you did in Sweetly tonight doesn’t matter.”

“All of it matters,” screamed Harland. “What the hell could you freaks possibly know, eh?”

“What matters,” Abel uttered, “is this!”

The man from Independency village wrapped both hands about a steel lever on the cleanout trap at the base of the huge fermentation tank. He pulled back, straining.

Teeth clenched, Abel instructed, “I need you to watch, Harland. You need to see this.”

Abel pitched his full weight back and yanked the lever on the door. It sprung free and the door burst open. A landslide of yellow color cascaded before Harland, rattling down into the crate. In seconds the wooden vessel filled to the top and a dome of gold built up before the opening. Soon the brightly-colored material stopped moving and the room pitched to silence.

Max let Harland’s arm go; the farmer did not notice. Harland placed both hands on the gold nuggets of corn before him. He seemed fixed in trance, jaw slack, scarcely breathing.

Harland studied Abel, eyeing him coldly for five seconds. “You moved it here?”

“Moved it, yes.”

Harland scanned the hulking fermentation vessels around him.

“You filled these tanks? Harland nodded at the rows of mammoth containers.

“Many of them. There are two rooms, twenty tanks in all.

“I’ll be damned.”

“We figure we moved a good percentage of the corn that remained in the silos. We moved some soybeans, too.”

“You did all that?” Harland huffed as if suffering anaphylaxis.

“The three of us, Harland. Others helped with the logistics. We used a vacuum pump and lots of pipe. That’s all. It did the job.”

Harland turned away from the golden kernels and shuffled across the room. He leaned back against one of the fermentation tanks, facial muscles drooping, head bobbing low.

“You know something, Mr. Whittemore?”

“What’s that?”

“I have no love for you, no love for your kind.”

Abel cocked his head.

“I could have shot you down when you came at my door some weeks ago. If it came down to keeping the grain for my neighbors, I’d’a shot you as soon as look at you.”

Abel was straightforward in his response. “I came to your door, farmer, to tell you what we were planning to do here. You needed to know that there was no need to confront anybody. Not at all.”

“I was afraid we’d be fighting on two fronts,” Harland admitted, “fighting you people and the Guard.”

“If you had given me the chance to speak my mind, the Guard would be leaving here tomorrow with a fraction of what they thought they’d haul out. The elevators would still be intact, and no one would have been hurt.”

Harland waxed pensive, sensing that Abel wanted something from him. The farmer knew he was in no position, a prisoner in the dark tank room, to cut a deal with the three men around him.

“What is it you want, Whittemore? You’ve got the corn here. What else do you want from me?”

“What do I want? You mean, ‘what do we want?’ That’s what you mean.”

“People need this grain, mister,” Harland hissed.

“That’s right, Harland,” Abel shot back forcefully. “Any and everyone remaining in this valley needs the grain, needs it for months, even years to come.”

“Without it, people are going to die,” Harland ripped.

“They are going to die with it, too, if other things aren’t done.”

“Other things? What other things?”

“You’ll see for yourself, Harland, tonight.”

“See what?”

“Never mind now. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us.”

“What do you mean, we?” The Swede’s voice warbled, betraying rising apprehension.

“You, Harland, and the three of us.”

“I’m not going anywhere!” Harland protested.

“Oh, yes, you are, about a dozen miles, farmer.”

Chapter One Hundred-Nine

Sleep deprivation accentuated pain flaring from a score of points throughout Harland’s body. His mouth and esophagus burned; cramps ran the length of his intestines. His skin folded like thick dry leather about him and crusty fissures inhabited the skin at every joint. The throbbing from the blow to the head was not the worst of it.

Hours sitting in freezing darkness, straddling the centerline of an open canoe, were torture. Fore and aft, younger men pulled hard on paddles through the night, churning up swirling foam on the ebony surface of Big Stone Lake. Harland imagined himself a prisoner of war, a hostage being spirited away by night from loved ones by terrorists bent on breaking him down mentally and physically.

The climb uphill from the lake on a rough lane carved into the bluffs had brought the farmer to the brink of delirium. He couldn’t recall when he had slept enough to feel rested or eaten anything substantial. Sound sleep had been impossible through the nights the National Guard was in town. He calculated he must have been awake for a greater part of sixty hours.

Spirited along by the men who had piloted the canoe, Harland crested the bluffs overlooking Big Stone Lake just as the first scouts of gray dawn light infiltrated the frigid air. Roofline angles loomed out of the night. A few were brightly lit. Harland could make little sense of all he was seeing. Mental acuity had eroded, lost to the trauma of the last hours.

Hustling, always moving, the men who flanked Harland brought him to the community center kitchen. Electric lights stabbed into his eyes, fully dilated by hours of travel in darkness. A chair was produced and Harland lowered into it. He put his head down on a table, giving in to nervous exhaustion.

“Mr. Sven, are you hungry?” a woman’s voice asked. “We have some food for you. You need to eat.”

The new arrival raised his head off the table. A female in her mid-sixties placed several plates before him, food on each. One platter offered a square of corn bread and a small slab of dark, dried jerky. The other plate, larger than the first, carried a similar square of corn bread, but also a heap of salad greens, baked beans, a small wedge of cheese, and what appeared to be a small fillet of some sort of white fish. A thin melon slice filled out the dish.

Abel arrived with a glass of water and a glass of milk. He placed the water with the plate holding the lean fixings and the glass of milk with the plate brimming with many different foods.

Harland glared at the two platters and their accompanying beverages. After a lengthy pause, Harland spoke up. “Are these, ah, is this food for me?”

“Yes, Harland,” said Abel. “Pick one, either one. You may have one, but not both meals.”

Harland sighed. “I would like….” He stopped in mid-sentence, sensing something otherworldly about having to make a choice from two very different selections. Paranoia froze him in place.

Penny, the woman who had placed the food before Harland, recognized instantly the farmer was afraid and unable to make a choice. Her instincts told her that Harland was either terrified of making a wrong choice, or found the situation unfolding around him so absurd as to be unable to respond.

“Mr. Sven, I made you two meals,” Penny said in motherly tones. You may have either one. You need to eat. I would be pleased if you would accept one of my dishes.”

The farmer rocked back in his seat slowly, his face pulsing with rash red. Without uttering a syllable, and pleading to Penny with his eyes, Harland pointed to the plate brimming with the many different foods.

“Yes, Mr. Sven, you may have that one.” She handed him a place setting and a napkin.

As Harland took the knife, fork and spoon, a stranger crossed the room and took a seat across the table from the farmer and to one side of Abel.

“Harland, this man is a physician,” said the town’s founder. “This is Arthur Ruchelshouse, he has been our caregiver for as long as we’ve been on the bluffs.”

Harland put his utensils down and dropped his hands to his side. He glared at the doctor.

“Hello, Mr. Sven. I’m Art.”

Harland remained tight-lipped.

“I’m going to ask you just a few things while you eat your meal.” The physician touched the cheeks on his own face. “Mr. Sven, you have what we call a butterfly lesion on your face. Have you had it long?”

The farmer nodded imperceptibly.

“That’s a clue, a symptom of something. It tells me you are quite sick. Could I ask you to stick out your tongue for me?”

Slowly, Harland did what the doctor asked.

“Mr. Harland, your tongue is bright red, unnaturally so. Does the skin inside your mouth next to your molar teeth hurt you?”

“Yes,” the man said in a whisper.

“How about your throat, your windpipe and esophagus?”

“They’ve bothered me for a month.”

“Do you have rashes on your elbows and crusty spots? Do you have indigestion often, nausea, loose bowels sometimes?

“How would you know?” Harland rumbled defensively.

“I would imagine you are in real pain much of the time.”

Harland exhaled a storm of carbon dioxide. “You’ve got that right.”

Doctor Ruchelshouse folded his hands and leaned over the table toward the farmer. “Mr. Sven, you are suffering from a disease called pellagra. It was a common ailment in the Deep South during the Depression. It’s caused by niacin deficiency. That deficiency is due to eating a diet like you see on this plate.”

The doctor touched the platter containing the square of corn bread and the small slab of dried meat. He inched it toward Harland. “You are eating a diet the majority of which is corn. Would that be correct?”

“We don’t have anything too much else to eat.”

“It’s making you sick, Mr. Sven, very sick. But we can remedy that.”

Abel pulled the anemic fare away from the farmer leaving only the full meal before him. “Harland, please, eat all you want. This is a complete meal. A few of these and your illness will go away.”

Harland raised his fork but hesitated.

“It’s okay, Harland. Go ahead. Some of us haven’t eaten much at all in the last twenty-four hours either. We’re going to join you.”

More plates of food were brought to the table. Max and Oleg joined Abel and Harland. Penny sat down with a cup of hot tea. The doctor remained, too.

Abel took a bite of his meal, and gestured to Harland to get started on his. The farmer lowered his face to his plate and was about to shovel the food into his mouth, when he stopped abruptly and glanced at everyone around him. “People in these parts, we say grace before a meal,” he said cautiously. “Always do.”

A smile of understanding brightened Abel’s face. “Of course, Harland. We would be pleased if you said grace.”

The man who had spent an entire lifetime with his hands and feet in black fertile soil grimaced and closed his eyes. He seemed to suspend in time before he broke his silence. “Dear Lord, we give you thanks for your gifts from the soil, for your bounty from this great and fertile land that you have made. Amen.”

A chorus rose from the throats of those seated with Harland: “Amen.”

Harland collapsed over his food, shoveling the sustenance into his mouth as fast as he could chew and swallow. Gulping, he took a breath and coughed his throat clear. “This is the best meal I’ve had in ages.”

“You can thank Penny, Harland,” said Abel.

The farmer turned to the woman among them. “Bless you, ma’am.”

Penny smiled warmly.

“When we’re done eating, Harland, we’d like to have you do one last thing,” Abel added. “Then we can all get some rest.”

Harland seemed resigned to his fate. “Whatever.”

“We’re going to take you on a tour. You will see exactly where this food comes from.”

Chapter One Hundred-Ten

The long rooflines of dozens of glass greenhouses emerged from the night as ruddy pink dawn advanced on the bluff ridge. The little powerhouse puffed white wood sawdust smoke into the atmosphere. Eight of the dozens of glass houses shimmered with electric light, activated by timers a half hour before sun up.

Abel and company shepherded Harland to the largest of the brightly illuminated greenhouses. The farmer read a sign on the door: Strawberry Cathedral.

Welcome to hippie heaven, Harland thought to himself, shaking his head.

The party descended four steps down a few feet below grade level into the hothouse. All were enveloped by tropical heat and the thick smell of moist green vegetation and sweet earth. The heat felt luxurious against Harland’s diseased skin. The building surrounded an emerald jungle eight feet in height. Tiny white flowers and pale pink and red orbs dotted the greenery.

Abel approached a wall of green and plucked a red object from a plant. He handed it to Harland. It was a large ripe, ruby strawberry.

“Don’t be shy, farmer. Take a bite.”

The man sank his teeth into the fruit. “Oh, mercy.” The flavor was overwhelming to a palette that hadn’t tasted something so sweet for months.

Harland stood bewildered. Abel had pulled the fruit from a wall of foliage rising eight feet from the ground. Cautiously, the farmer stepped forward and touched the leaves. There was something white and rigid behind the plants. He parted the green growth and examined what lay behind. A white plastic pipe stood fast in the soil and reached nearly to the roof glass above. Holes were drilled in the plastic and strawberry plants grew from the openings. It was a veritable strawberry tree.

The farmer spun about, seeking out the man who had forced him to come to the bluffs. “How many plants on one of these things?”

“Eighty to a tower, Harland.”

“Eighty? Can’t be.” Pragmatic to the core, Harland realized the strawberry tree took up the space that only two or three plants would if growing on the ground. Independency villagers were getting forty times the production from a few square feet of soil than a conventional grower.

“How many of these strawberry things have you got standing in the building?”

“There are 600 planting towers in this greenhouse alone.”

Harland did some quick calculating in his head. He was dumbfounded by the figure he arrived at. “You, er, you’ve got nearly 50,000 plants in here?”

“Yes, that’s about right.”

“That’s a hell of a crop in such a small space.”

“Well, Harland, we usually produce three crops, bringing new plants along all the time to take the place of those that reach the end of their useful life.”

“You get three crops? How is that possible?”

“This building is heated by hot water from our waste sawdust boiler. It’s plenty warm enough in here, even in the winter, to grow strawberries. We need to boost the light available to the plants half of the year in order to get reasonable yields.” Abel pointed to neon tubes glowing from the superstructure above. “The lights run eight hours day in the wintertime off a co-generator on the boiler. When we heat some of the greenhouses, we generate free electrical power thanks to a generator coupled to a little steam turbine on our sawdust boiler. The lights mimic the solar spectrum. Plants can’t tell the difference.”

“How many greenhouses have you got going like this?”

“Eight heated ones, with enough capacity in the boiler for two or three more.”

“All strawberries?”

“No, no. We’ve got tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, peppers, herbs and more growing, most like you see here, on towers or vine supports. We even raise tilapia fish and carp in tanks on the north wall of some of these buildings. A few lemon trees, too.”

The farmer’s skull rocked side to side. “I’ll be jiggered.”

“There’s more, Harland, much more. Let me show you what we can do without heat.”

Inside one of the dozens of unheated greenhouses, Abel removed a poly covering atop a cold frame on the floor. The space beneath the frame was brimming with greenery. As far as Harland could see in the building, there were transparent panels covering an ocean of leafy greens.

“What is this you’ve got growing here?” asked the grain grower.

“This happens to be miner’s lettuce. The Gold Rush 49ers lived on it; it grew wild at the mine sites. It’s as cold-hardy as anything on the planet. It yields all year ‘round inside the cold frames protected by the greenhouse. In winter, the plants think they’re in the Texas Panhandle in here, even though we don’t heat the building. As a matter of fact, we don’t heat the majority of them.”

“The plants will freeze,” Harland scoffed. “What good are they after that?”

“Protected as they are, they don’t suffer frost or wind damage. They go right through the winter perfectly fine.”

“You grow anything else this way?”

“Two dozen cold-tolerant edible plants can be cultivated like this with good success all winter: spinach, chard, kale, bok choi, mache, mizuna, and so on. You ate a bit of most of them in the salad you just had.”

Harland retreated into himself, weighing what he had witnessed since arriving at Independency and what Abel had just revealed to him. He was fascinated but unnerved as well. Ill thoughts crowded his mind. Everything spinning around him seemed to have been very carefully orchestrated. The episode in the brewery didn’t happen by chance. His removal to Independency had to have been planned, he calculated. And the odd choice of meals and the doctor’s diagnosis, they were certainly scripted. He was convinced all of it had been worked out in advance. This was a set-up. There had to be an ultimatum coming. They’d spring it on him soon, he fretted, when crushing fatigue had finally worn him to the nub.

A lance of panic pierced Harland’s sensibilities. “Look, you people, I’ve got to leave,” the farmer coughed. “I’ve got to get to town.”

“Don’t fret,” said Abel waving away the farmer’s concerns. “We’ll get you back to town tomorrow. It’s a long pull down to Sweetly. We all need to rest for a day before we make the journey again.”

Checkmated, Harland grew visibly flustered. He cut to the quick and held up his hands, a gesture clearly signaling back off.  “Look, mister, you people brought me up here for a reason. You didn’t bring me here to fill my stomach and send me on my merry way. What’s going on? What do you want with me?”

“Very well, Harland, fair questions each,” remarked Abel. “It comes down to this: In the old Sweet Spring brewery there are now tons of grain. Your people in Sweetly need that grain and we need the grain. Here, as you can see, we grow great quantities of all sorts of things, all protected from the elements. We need this food, of course. But, Harland, you and the citizens of Sweetly need it, too. You need it badly. Are you following me?”

Harland responded slowly, uncommitted. “Go ahead.”

“A good deal of what we grow here we sell into the marketplace. We sell big surpluses and generate a steady stream of dollars. But it’s impossible to get the food out to market because of conditions. Wholesalers can’t get in and the whole food distribution system out there is crumbling. Essentially, Yellowstone shut down our business. For all we know, it may be gone for many years, maybe for good. Tons of what we grow is going to waste, but we don’t want to just pull it up and compost it.”

“What are you going to do with all of it, then?” Harland questioned bluntly.

“It should be altogether clear, Harland.” Abel became animated, his hand gestures and facial expressions increasingly exaggerated. He paced around the farmer. “We need people to consume this food, farmer, local people—your people. If they don’t get it, people are going to die. They’ll die of disease. They’ll die of malnutrition. But they don’t have to die.”

“They’re already dying.”

“All the more reason to act right away.”

From another one of the cold frames, the town founder pulled up a large carrot and wiped dirt from the orange root before Harland’s eyes. Abel held it up for all to see. “You have to understand something, Harland. Before Yellowstone disrupted our planting cycle, this town we’ve shown you was almost entirely self-sufficient. We designed it to be that way on purpose, to control our own destiny to the greatest degree. We didn’t need to run to the grocery store every week. We never had to go to the mall. We weren’t dependent on the broader American culture. We weren’t dependent on anyone.”

“About the only thing we didn’t grow was wheat, so we’d bring that in. We’d also buy some citrus and tropical fruits and a few spices we couldn’t grow on the bluffs. But we grew virtually everything else. We were food independent. We had a perfectly sustainable culture going up here. We didn’t eat processed garbage. We had a rich and wholesome diet. And we still do—as you’ve seen—except the weather induced by Yellowstone killed our corn crop and stunted the potato plantings.”

Abel wheeled about before Harland and squared off directly before the farmer, lifting and holding his hands out beyond his shoulders and tipping them up and down as if balancing a scale. “We want to barter our food for your grain, simple as that. You can’t eat corn alone; your illness is proof of that. We need more calories from carbohydrates to see us through up here. In other words, we want corn and soy—the foods you and your fellow farmers down below grew, the grain we pilfered out from under the Guard’s noses and crammed into the brewery. You? You need everything but corn.”

Harland weighed Abel’s words. He had feared a much darker scenario, something that forced him into a blind corner from which he could not retreat. That was not what he was hearing. Abel was offering some sort of cooperative arrangement, something open-ended.

“You’re talking a simple swap? Is that’s what I hear you saying?”

“That’s it, the old barter system. Swap a bushel of this for a bushel of that.”

“No money changes hands?”

“We can’t eat money, Harland. Neither can you.”

“Never liked the taste of it anyway,” Harland said, cracking a toothy smile.

The little aside severed the tension between the parties. Abel and his few cohorts laughed aloud at Harland’s remark. For the first time since arriving on the bluffs among strangers, the farmer felt he could let his guard down a little.

“When would you want to get started?” Harland queried.

A grin brightened Abel’s face. The farmer had arrived at the exact place the town’s founder hoped he would. “Let’s get going as soon as the Guard drives that train out of Sweetly. It will take us a few days to get the logistics down and harvest and pack for shipping. Does that work for you, Harland?”

Harland’s tilted his head back and clamped his eyelids tight to squeeze the fatigue from his eyes. “Yeah, that works, mister.”

Chapter One Hundred-Eleven

Canada Route 2 rolled northward, a strand of grit and tar lost on a table-flat ocean of early fall snow and range stubble. Driving under an icy moondog halo encircling a hazy half moon, Sinopa ferried Liz north to Calgary, humming a tune at the wheel. Slumped in the passenger-side seat, the geophysicist sowed disjointed thoughts. Through the window floated flippered plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, creatures that inhabited the inland Cretaceous sea that had laid down the dead-level sediments sweeping by the car windows. If it would ever warm up again, Canada could at least turn to these tabletop ranges and flat wheat lands to feed itself several times over, Liz speculated.

To stimulate conversation to help pass the three night hours to Calgary, Liz called Sinopa’s name.

“Yes, Elizabeth.”

“What will you do if cold persists next summer? How will you people manage?”

“As we once did,” said Sinopa flatly, eyes fixed tight to the road. “White Elk says the buffalo will provide for us. They eat the grass. No matter what the weather, the grass is immortal.”

“You can’t live on buffalo meat alone.”

“There are a hundred wild plants that provide nourishment, but you must know what they are and where to look for them.”

“Name one.”

“Oh, let’s see, timpsula, the prairie turnip, is a good one. Boil it, bake it, fry it, pickle it, it doesn’t matter. Whites moving into this country called it Indian breadroot. Topeka root, too, is very good, something like potato.”

“I can’t imagine the plants maturing in the cold.”

“These wild plants have always lived with cold weather. They evolved in it. It is nothing to them. They are free for the harvesting. We know them well.”

“You’ve eaten them, then?”

“Of course. Some of us have not forgotten these foods. They have always sustained the Blackfoot in times of hardship. When the Whites murdered the buffalo herds for sport and left us to starve to death, we turned to the wild plants. Without them, we would have perished.”

Several miles of road passed under the car before Sinopa found her voice again. “And what will you do a year from now, Elizabeth? How will you sustain yourself?”

The last smudge of red illuminated the mountains to the west and the hard level edge of the limitless prairie to the east, backlighting dark milk-carton-shaped forms of great, aging wood-sheathed grain elevators rising twenty miles apart. The radio scratched out a single evening radio preacher, steeped in Revelations, broadcasting a warning: “Two of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse were already astride the land in the wake of the Yellowstone disaster. The others would follow soon, very soon.”

Calgary, as cold a metropolis as Russian cities of the Siberian interior, crept over the horizon. As promised, Sinopa delivered Liz to the airport. Specialists from the Cascades Volcano Observatory were on their way from the west coast, bent on employing the international airport as a staging area for the first research helicopter flights into the Yellowstone country. Teams would soon amass gear and personnel for the journey. Liz had every intention of joining fellow scientists on the first trip to edge of the new caldera.

Chapter One Hundred-Twelve

Fierce Yellowstone sunset reds lingered in the evening sky, unblemished by earth’s satellite in dark new-moon phase. As the fires in the stratosphere ebbed, forward legions of solar flare particles entered the ionosphere of earth. The galactic flood of supercharged radiation from the sun, interacting with the earth’s lean outer atmosphere, provided the spark to light the halls of heaven to neon brilliance.

Abel strode across the town common in the darkening hour, a heavy homespun wool sweater over a flannel shirt and long johns. He toyed with worry as he moved through the glassy cold, turning over in his mind imaginary snowscapes shivering under the vicious freeze of the first Yellowstone winter to come. Would weather destroy food crops in the unheated greenhouses? Would the cold bring down Independency?

The man had experienced minus forty-eight once, an unearthly reading. That sort of temperature was heavy air from the northern outrun slopes of the Brooks Range of Alaska come calling. The Siberian gulag camps at Kolema could scarcely be colder. How many such nights would a Yellowstone January yield?

Such temperatures could kill. Deer, huddled in deeryards beneath thick stands of evergreens and weakened by weeks of brute cold, froze to death standing fully erect. Step outside, Abel knew, and one had to pull a scarf across the face to trap the warmth of breath against the flesh. Super cold air could damage tissues in the larynx and lungs.

The man parked a hand on the entrance railing to the CC and turned to survey the snapshot-still, frostbitten landscape of October, then craned his neck to find Cassiopeia, the star queen in her great W-shaped throne of distant suns. In the east, green and red curtains of aurora fluttered across the night sky.  Abel was the only customer at the celestial carnie show. Maybe, he thought, a moment might arrive when a single last human remained on the planet to see such a brilliant performance. On all sides, that singular individual would have witnessed his or her companions vanish, children shrivel to bone, the elders crawl into the bush to hasten the end, women go barren for lack of sustenance and civility, and the men war among themselves until the lone victor stood triumphant over a world of ruin and an empire of corpses.

The complex order of things had already been turned on its head, and just in a handful of months, Abel reflected. The whole of it, that frenetic economic marvel machine out there, had been undone by a single geological event. It seemed incomprehensible, the stuff of black magic.

Abel pushed open the door to his upstairs office, seeking the farmer, who had spent his first full day at Independency in the workspace sleeping fitfully and eating little. A cot had been prepared for the guest and food brought up. Penny and Doctor Ruchelshouse had checked in on him often, Abel, too, when he awoke from his sleep of exhaustion.

Harland lay awake on the cot, breath rattling in his throat, the glow of a single nightlight illuminating his weathered, sharply angular Scandinavian features and tightly cropped white hair. The low wattage light shed an aura of severity over Harland’s wiry frame. He could not bring himself to lift his eyes to acknowledge the being entering the room.

Abel took a seat in a chair at the foot of Harland’s cot and sat in silence for several minutes, trying to settle on an opening inquiry that might free up the farmer’s tongue.

“Did the doctor come to see you, Harland?”

“Um.”

“Did he examine you a bit?”

“He did.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Dust pneumonia. I got it. Ain’t going away.”

“Are you feeling well enough to walk down a few flights of stairs and go over to the CC?”

“What do you want now?”

“I’d like to show you something. I think it’s something you should see.”

“What?”

“It’s difficult to describe. Best to see for yourself.”

The men slowly tramped the stair treads and made their way to the CC kitchen. In the dark interior of the building, Abel led Harland to the unlit dining hall, crossed the room and pushed open double doors to the main meeting hall. A cloud of cold air muscled through the opening as the men stepped through. Abel closed the doors.

The floor and scores of chairs flickered with the haunted colors of the aurora cascading through the windows. Engulfed in the pure reds and greens of electromagnetic radiation streaming into the room, Harland sensed the place was in utter disarray, chairs scattered, tipped over, the once orderly rows wildly askew. The to-the-marrow cold in the great-enclosed space suggested malfunction, the black shadows, malevolence.

Narrow shafts of color hijacked Harland’s attention. Across the space, beams of aurora pigments ran laser straight, entering from holes in one of the walls and racing through the dimensions. Intrigued by the lines of light, Harland went to the dark interior plaster surface and pressed his fingers against one of the entrance points where the photons invaded. Harland sensed what he was feeling was actually a bullet hole.

“You brought me here to see this?” Harland said, spinning about searching for Abel. The host had his back to the doors the men had entered.

“Yes, I did.” At that, Abel threw light switches by the doors and the room blossomed with electric light.

Having spent hours in feeble light, Harland squinted beneath the hard glare of the fully illuminated hall. With the brilliant rays of light came reflections from plaster rubble and dust, wood siding fragments, glittering glass shards, brown pools of coagulated fluid and spatter droplets of rust color on white satin latex paint.

“Jesus, this looks like something out of Nam,” blurted Harland. “What happened here?”

Abel flipped the lights off again to let the aurora borealis back in the room. Several slow steps and the Abel closed in on the farmer, too close, and made direct eye contact. Harland looked way. “I thought you could tell me, Harland.”

Surprised, Harland returned the man’s gaze. “What? Me?”

Abel sidestepped to the ruined exterior wall and padded along it, thrusting an arm through the naked spaces where window glass and frames had been. Silhouetted against the billowing colors of the aurora, the town founder held up a fist and snarled into the cold. “Who did this, Harland?”

The farmer stood stone quiet.

Abel emptied his lungs. “You know who is responsible for this!”

Apprehension welling up in flood, Harland backed away from the black form hanging in a window opening.

“Don’t move a damn muscle,” Abel vented in tones sharp with threat. “We had people die here in this room.”

Harland welded his mouth shut and frantically scanned the walls of the hall to see if others were lurking in the recesses ready to pounce.

“Farmer, tomorrow we are going back to your town with a shipment of our food. We agreed to it. It’s going to happen. But you and I aren’t leaving this little corner of hell until you make clear to me why, okay, why it was necessary for your son to come here and murder my daughter and two others.”

Abel’s words struck like a prizefighter blow to the stomach.

“Two men came here and opened fire on us. One of them was Andy Regas. My daughter was stuck down by a bullet. She bled to death in an hour. Why?”

“Where is Andy?” Harland whispered.

Abel grabbed a chair, lifted it, and winged it into a far corner of the room. “Who gives a good goddamn where he is? What did you have to do with this?”

“Nothing,” Harland stammered. “I haven’t seen Andy in weeks.”

Spittle spurted from Abel’s mouth. “Farmer, I’m a man of principle. I want to beat you to within an inch of your life. But that’s not possible. I’m sworn never to strike a person in anger.”

Abel kicked a chair out of his way to vent frustration.

“A month ago I come to your doorstep to talk to you and took a shotgun blast an inch from my ear.”

“That was Andy’s doing.”

“Yes, and you held a gun me, too.”

“Maybe I did, but I could no more hurt you than you can hurt me.”

“Enlighten me, will you?” Abel rumbled sarcastically.

“I’m a Christian man, raised up with the good book over me. I believe in the good in people.”

“You do, do you?”

“Me and Eda, we took Andy in. He needed care, some tough love, and guidance that only Jesus can provide.”

“Then why all this?” Abel spread his arms to encompass the carnage throughout the room.

“Andy had always been trouble, ever since he came to us. I worked the boy hard on the farm to try to straighten him out, but I couldn’t reach him, not much anyway. Just a week or two ago, I found him butchering out some of your animals.”

“Our milking goats.”

“That’s what they were. I told him then and there to leave you people alone. We didn’t have a quarrel with you no more. I needed him to help put off the National Guard that was coming, so we could hold on to the grain in the silos. But he didn’t show.”

Abel turned to face out the devastated window, drinking in the fluttering aurora colors but taking no delight in them. “He didn’t come into Sweetly to assist you?”

“No.”

“He could not have made it.”

“I see that now; he was here. I had no idea. I don’t know what to say.”

“Harland, your son didn’t come to your aid in Sweetly because he lost his life here.”

“That’s not so.”

“He perished in Big Stone Lake.”

“No.”

“He died of hypothermia in the icy water.”

The farmer shuttered and took a seat on one of the chairs, head bowed forward. The color circus of the electric magnetic radiation played over his slumped form, painting his body with Fauve pigments. For a full minute he stared at the wasteland of the meeting hall floor before drawing a breath to speak.

“Everything’s come to no good.”

Chapter One Hundred-Thirteen

A segmented waterborne creation strained against the biting prairie wind hustling over Big Stone Lake. A stubby open steam craft with a simple canopy covering a rudimentary steam boiler labored on the waters, trailing puffs of wood smoke. To keep the craft’s steam-driven propeller shaft spinning, Max fed split logs into the steamboat’s tiny firebox one by one.

The little craft was a tow vessel pulling a hastily rigged raft comprised of canoes and kayaks lashed to a rough timber frame supporting a pine board deck and gunwales. The deck of the little barge held stacked crates loaded down with fresh foodstuffs harvested by many hands at Independency and shuttled down to the lake. All the goods rested securely under blankets and tarps to prevent the cold from freezing the perishables. Half a dozen crew members from the bluffs rode aboard the contraption. Winnie joined Abel and the others on the slow voyage to Sweetly.

Harland stood forward, brooding, hands clasping a canopy post, scanning the south shore of the lake for signs of a pulse within Sweetly’s architecture. The bonfire, lit behind the Sweetly Primary School and kept going so many days and nights, had cooled to weak embers, giving off a lacy curl of colorless haze.

Etching the anemic sky above the schoolhouse, the soaring concrete columns of the Sweetly Coop grain elevator silos filled the farmer’s sightline. The ruined towers disgorged fat streamers of white smoke boiling up from smoldering grain fires hidden deep within the recesses of the cement cylinders.

The image of the burning silos triggered a wave of nausea in the farmer, every pore on his face and hands opening and disgorging a soaking sweat, as if the sight of the violated towers were poison and the body mustered last-ditch defenses to flush itself free of the toxin. The smoking hulks were eerily familiar, akin to media footage of the World Trade Center towers burning in Lower Manhattan more than two dozen Septembers in the past.

To blot out the smoke banners above the lake, the farmer lowered his chin to his chest and clasped a hand over his eyes. Abel noticed and inched over the narrow deck to have a word with him.

“What is it, Harland?”

“Nothing,” the farmer croaked.

“Not a pleasant a sight, those towers.”

“No, they ain’t.” Harland extricated his face from his hand to reveal clenched teeth. “Those silos are my whole existence out there, going up in smoke. They’ve been a part of my days ever since I can remember. From the farm, you can see them in the distance, always there, all the time. They’ve never looked anything like that.”

Harland dug his fingernails into his scalp as if to pull the hair out by the roots. “I never once spent a summer when I wasn’t in the field, driving a tractor under those things. My earliest recollection—maybe three or four years old—is sitting on my father’s lap on his John Deere, out in full sun, wind in the face, side-dressing corn. Not talking much, no. Just sitting with my dad’s long arms around me and not wanting to be anywhere else.”

“That’s a fine memory.”

“It is. But it’s gone, mister. There’s your proof, right there, in those silos. There’ll be no more plowing Plains earth.”

The farmer craned his head about and glanced at the bluff country receding far behind the steamboat. Abel followed his eyes.

“You come along, then, and you got a whole other life up there on the bluffs.” Harland stretched an arm and pointed a finger to the north. “You’re doing some interesting things there, really. I never figured on it. But that’s not my world. Corn is my world. To raise corn is to be who I am.” Harland tapped his chest with his fingers. “We’re one and the same, you know. You can’t separate this man from the cob. Impossible! My skin is cornhusk; feels just like it. My hair is white as corn silk. You take a dry corn kernel, and, why, it’s as hard as teeth.”

Abel listened intently to Harland’s spin, nodding to encourage the man to bring his pain up from the gut and get rid of it.

“All corn ever needs is sunshine, see, a good soaking every week or two, good river bottom soil, summer heat, and it grows and grows. When there’s good growing, you just can’t believe your eyes what you’ve done. For a mile this way and that way it’s just green, green, green. There’s so much food packed in that section that you can feed a thousand people or a hundred head of cattle for a year.

“Sometimes it’s bad. Hail comes down big as a fist; a twister cuts out the south corner acreage; it don’t rain for so long the corn stalks just shrivel to tinder sticks, they’re so dry. Life’s that way, you know, good years, bad years. No different. But it’s done. Good or bad, it’s finished.”

The farmer spit in the lake and watched the wet foam recede behind the boat.

“I never seen one minute when I didn’t know what to do with myself. Walk out the front door and I knew just where to plant my feet. If it was eleven in the morning, I knew what I’d be doing; if it was late in the afternoon, same thing. Everything fit. Everything worked. Like the heart, you know. The heart knows its job, knows it so well it never pauses to consider what it’ll be doing. Same with me.”

Harland heaved and erupted in a coughing spasm, lungs sloughing fluids to their lower chambers. When the coughing seizure abated, the farmer threw his head back and gulped air. “This Yellowstone thing has me beat. It’s going to bury me.”

Abel broke his silence. “It starts getting better when this boat gets to town.”

Harland shrugged and lowered his chin to his chest once again. “I don’t see it. Can’t plow up a God-forsaken volcano.”

Throttled down, the little lake steamer slowed and drifted the final 200 feet to the lakeshore below the silo towers and the old Sweet Spring Brewery. Max pulled a rope attached to a hollow tube affixed to the funnel. Steam screamed through a whistle, reminiscent of a cannonball steam locomotive on a long lost rail mainline. Max let loose three loud toots, each echoing down the length of the lake and dying away without fanfare.

The shallow keel steamer edged the shore and the raft grounded itself in the shallows. Harland eased himself over the side of the craft, splashed down up to his boot tops and moved onshore. Circling his hands about his mouth he hollered for the coop manager, Jim Bottomly, hoping the man might be in the vicinity. The farmer received an echo in response, his voice booming off concrete and brick.

The farmer hurried away toward the Sweetly Primary School, Abel, Winnie, Max and the others watching him go. There were crates to unload and haul into the brewery. Perhaps Harland could locate a few local citizens and persuade them to help with the task of moving a short ton of produce, greenhouse fruits and cheese and distributing it to the many in need.

Chapter One Hundred-Fourteen

Sweetly’s schoolhouse lay broken, comatose in the stone dust landscape, upstaged by the animated smoke streamers rolling off the tops of the grain elevator silos. Nothing moved within. Harland yanked the entrance door wide, lunged into the hall and pulled up, the acrid smell of ammonia from decomposing urine so sharp the stench stung the eyes and sinuses.

Classroom to classroom the farmer lurched, kicking clothing, soiled bedding and children’s toys aside. Each space yawned lifeless and cold, the corn stoves set up to heat several rooms dead for lack of generator electricity to run their augers and fans. Every call for attention went unheeded.

A small flag of the United States hung from its staff on a wall-mount holder in the last classroom Harland entered, the red stripes the only remaining trace of vibrant color in the chamber. The farmer reached for it, pulled down the banner and, with care, ran his rough hands gently over the fabric, the texture pleasing to the touch. He buried his face in the stars and stripes.

“Where is everyone?” he mumbled into the nation’s symbol.

Eastbound on Main Street, Harland hustled across the Burlington Northern tracks, drifted over again with blowing ash, and trudged into the heart of Sweetly’s few downtown blocks. The door to Ester’s Café lay back against an exterior wall, giving free passage to the prairie wind so it might have its way with Sweetly’s lone eatery. Harland inched through the opening cautiously, as if not wishing to be seen. Volcanic powder infested the one business in town that Harland had frequented most winter days for thirty years to sip coffee and to catch up on local gossip and farm news. Instead of taking a seat at the counter, he stepped around behind it. Ten thousand cups of coffee over all those years and not once did he ever venture around to the business side of the counter to see what Karen, the waitress who poured her weak coffee from an endless pot, worked with every day of her working life. He could see her handiwork now, stout ceramic coffee mugs stacked and aligned, heaps of cheap place-setting silverware, well-thumbed menus and grease-stained breakfast cards, dish trays, and the rest. She had kept her workspace orderly. It was neat now, except for the ash dust overlay.

The counter presented a uniform coating. Nothing had disturbed the dust, not a fingerprint, not a smudge, a smear or a drop of something. No one had tended to a patron for many weeks, the gray talc-like substance told Harland as much.

A revolving stool took Harland’s poundage, the counter his elbows. The weight of his head seemed suddenly too great to support; he lowered his forehead into his hands to seek relief from the burden.

Chapter One Hundred-Fifteen

Thrusting its massive head side to side, a heavy bull bison shoved away a foot of snow so that it could get at the prairie grasses on the Alberta plains east of Stand-off Creek. When it had cleared a swath, it cropped the plants and chewed slowly in a bid to keep full its huge four-chambered stomach.

Benjamin White Elk advanced on the buffalo, one of hundreds in the fine North Piegan tribal herd taking up winter residence low in the river drainage. The great creature kept its wooly head and shoulders into the blustery wind, an ancient strategy that saved the animal precious energy during long winter months. White Elk approached from upwind, and the animal soon caught the scent of the human and raised its head to see what possessed such a strange odor. A two-legged creature had managed to close within twenty feet. The burley bison blinked.

“Don’t you worry yourself, iinii,” White Elk called out to the animal. “I have come to talk, just to talk.” The bull stood perfectly still, its barrel chest rising and falling and clouds of white vapor exhausting from its nose. “We are old friends, you and I. We have known each other forever. So you are in good company.”

The bull snorted loudly and turned its head to focus one eye on White Elk and to see if others of its kind were still near. It began to chew its cud, a good sign. It did not seem to be troubled.

“My people, buffalo, they used to be tied to you, like a mother is tied to her child by the cord at birth. Where you went, we went. When you rested, we rested. When you drank at the river, we drank. It was like that, once. We were inseparable.

“What happened to us, huh? We were both lost, you and I. The Europeans separated us. We have been wandering ever since. They changed the world long ago. But no more, iinii. No more.”

White Elk’s clothing chattered loudly in the icy wind, but he was comfortable in the teeth of the weather. It was a clean cold, free of the gray dust. The bison was immune to the sharp wind-chill.

“There is something you should know, my old friend. The world has changed again. There is a place many days from here. Yellowstone, it is called. It spits fire and rock dust over the earth and hides the sun. This early cold, it comes from that place. The whitefaces who stepped between you and me long ago, they are leaving this country now. They cannot live here without their cheeseburgers, their soda, the gasoline, and the foolish television. Yellowstone is driving them away.

“But we can live here, you and me. We can return to the life of the old ones, to the old ways. We have a chance to live as we always did, when there were ten thousand of you for every one of us.”

The bull pawed the ground and rammed its head into the snow. When it brought its head up, it was heavily coated with white fluff.

“I know this will come to be, iinii. The ponoká, the one for which I am named, he came to me and told me. He told me that you and I will live side by side again.”

The massive ungulate shook its great hump. Snow cascaded from its hide. When it finished freeing itself of its white mantle, the bison resumed its vigil of the two-legged creature.

“What do you think of that, iinii? You let me know when you can, huh? I’ll be here. I’ll wait for your answer. I am very patient.”

Chapter One Hundred-Sixteen

Nose pressed against a plate glass window, the logo Ester’s Cafe stenciled across it, Winnie discovered a lone figure in the interior seated at a counter. The foodstuffs unloaded and stored in the brewery, she and Abel sought to find the farmer and other Sweetly residents. They followed a single line of fresh boot-heel prints in the ash into town and up to a storefront.

The sound of muffled footsteps at the threshold of the restaurant roused the slender character at the counter. Harland freed his skull from his hands, wiped his eyes with a sleeve of his jacket, but stared ahead, his emaciated reflection returning to him by way of the backboard mirror behind the coffee percolators and frappe glasses.

“Karen works here,” the farmer whispered to his newfound audience, relieved that that he had been discovered and there was someone to actually talk to. “She makes lousy coffee, always did, but I didn’t care. Did you ever have a cup of her coffee?

“No, Mr. Sven,” said Winnie.

“Known Karen all my life. I wish she was behind the counter. I’d order my two eggs over easy, a side of ham—real slab of ham off the bone, not that pressed-pig cardboard—three slices of wheat toast, dark, butter heavy. That’s what I’d have. And she’d know. If I said, ‘Karen, I want the big spread this morning,’ she’d know exactly what I meant. She never screwed it up, never.

“Before this Yellowstone thing hit, she told me she’d won big on a scratch ticket. She’d been buying those damn things every week for as long as they’ve been printing them, and she finally hits it, a hundred bucks. Probably cost her fifty times that over the years just to make that little wad.”

Abruptly, Harland rotated on the stool, sweeping dust off the counter with his trailing arms. “I want things back that way.” He dribbled the words out. “We had a town here, a good place, a damn good one. Where’d everybody go, eh? You see anybody?”

“We haven’t, no, Harland,” Abel admitted as he joined Winnie.

“Well, ain’t that ironic as hell. You come to my town, you move my corn out of the silos, and now, Christ, there’s no one here to eat it.”

The farmer topped off his lungs with air and blew a cough across the counter, sending a wave of fine dust toward the mirror, enough to blot out his own image.

“My people been here seven generations. You? You’ve been here just a few years. Why is your godforsaken place getting on fine on the bluffs, eh? Why has this town of mine fallen to hell?

“I can’t answer you, Harland.”

“It don’t make no sense. It’s like God is smiling down on you people.”

Harland rotated from the counter stool, straightened his legs and strode for the door. Abel held up a hand in front of the man to slow his exit. “Harland, you’re welcome to come back to the bluffs.”

Harland shook his head. “I’m staying put right here.”

Abel let the farmer pass to the street. “We’ll be back for more loads of grain over the next few days. We need to move what we can before the lake freezes tight. See if you can rally some of your people so we can be of some help to them. We packed the food in the brewery, okay, like we said we would. You need to get townspeople in there. Get them something to eat. Will you do that? Will you?”

The man licked dust from his lips. “I’ll get them what they need.”

“That’s good, Harland.”

The farmer left Ester’s, pacing eastward toward LaPerle’s supermarket, hollow and shuttered against the cold.

Chapter One Hundred-Seventeen

From a helicopter pilot’s perspective, Liz appeared as a miniscule animated dot balanced on the rim of the underworld. The geophysicist frowned as the tiny blue and white USGS aircraft approached from the south; she did not want it to touch down. Liz and others in the research party would have to board the thing and be whisked away. She didn’t want to leave the rim of the new Yellowstone crater yet, the caldera stretching so far away to the dark smoking east that she could not see the horizon.

All day the professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology geology research laboratory had prowled the northwestern edge of the caldera, burying several seismometers in the warm pumice grit and collecting rock, ash and air samples. Finally, after so many months, it had been deemed safe to approach the caldera, but a wave of bad weather, poor visibility and difficult fueling logistics had delayed Cascades Volcano Observatory helicopter flights throughout the month of October. When the craft finally touched down and dropped her off, Liz wanted nothing more than to stay put at the crater’s edge, despite a galloping wind and scudding clouds threatening snow.

Liz’s vantage point was one no human being had ever encountered. Before her yawned a fathomless canyon she estimated to forty or more miles across to the south rim. A few yards beyond her boots, the earth plunged vertically 800 feet to a hideously steep slope of ruination that pitched down at a dizzying angle for another 1,000 feet. The walls and slopes below smoked, pumping out hundreds of wispy tendrils that played tag with one another and dodged the wind.

A mile to the east, a river of mountain water reached the edge of the new lost world and leapt out into nothing, falling in a gossamer strand to lose itself in the mists below. Regularly, light-colored caked layers of pumice, dark volcanic glass shards, ash and rock fragments broke loose from the unstable plateau or the walls of the caldera and plunged in dusty avalanche falls into the depths. With snow clouds scudding overhead, steam from the fissures rising, the falls and rock slides descending, it appeared to the scientist that the entire expanse before her was a living organism, as if she were microscopic and could witness busy biological processes at the cellular level.

The scientist imagined she could spade up the Grand Canyon in Arizona and heave it into the Yellowstone void. That national marvel, its candy cane-stripe beauty intact, would fall away and vanish into the ugly, tortured hellhole below. Once thrown down, the sandstone reds and mudstone yellows of the countless buttes of the canyon, would, over millennia, be smothered with upwelling magma and drowned in temporary great lakes until sometime, far into the future, the abyss would fill in with new basalt and rhyolite rock and the cycle would prime itself once again for another catastrophe hundreds of millennia hence.

Already the earth building had commenced, as much of the great magma ocean was still intact far below. On the eastern horizon, the unseen caldera floor glowed with crimson heat. Viscous magma was oozing up quietly somewhere on the edge of sight, building up small swelling lava domes deep within the sunken ruins of the landscape. The researcher reflected a bit on the processes already underway before her and the time scale necessary to complete a new caldera cycle. Human beings, she thought, if they were still parading about the planet, would be three times older as a distinct species the next time Yellowstone vanished in clouds of ash and hell fire.

Scanning the country, synthetic fabric flapping lustily in the breeze, Liz was grateful for the easterly coursing wind. The caldera was still outgassing a toxic gas stew from thousands of small fissures and would do so, presumably, for generations to come. Conducting studies on the inner flanks of volcanic craters the world over, scientists had learned to work around upwelling poisonous gases, but no one in the scientific community had a minute of experience working inside a newborn volcanic environment spanning 2,000 square miles and that was, in a some places, nearly a mile deep. The volume of gas seeping from the earth’s bowels was impossible to know, but Liz sensed that the atmosphere wafting over the eastern rim, fouled by prodigious outpouring of gases, must be perfectly lethal.

Nothing looked remotely familiar. There were no landmarks to gauge where she was within the former park. The Gallatin Range to the west was an indistinct undulating series of humps, its prominent folds and creases filled in by pyroclastic sheet flows.

After months analyzing seismic and ash sample data and weeks pouring over photography and ash fall depth measurements across the country, the CVO team she was with had developed a portrait of the true extent of the Yellowstone eruption and caldera collapse.

When the first images of the new crater were downloaded, vulcanologists and geologists the world over stood in awe of them. The chasm created by the sinking of Yellowstone’s terrain into the empty upper magma chamber covered an area nearly twenty percent larger than the known dimensions of the former Lava Creek caldera that encompassed half of the national park. Using early raw figures to determine the extent of the ejected material from the eruption, CVO scientists estimated that no less than 1,800 cubic miles and perhaps as much as 2,200 cubic miles of volcanic deposits, from rock bombs, to pumice, to ash and fine dust, had vented from gaping fissures and vents around the oval dimensions of the caldera. A quick set of calculations and the team determined that the volume of ejected material, if it had all fallen within the dimensions of the state of Wyoming, would have smothered the entire state under no less than fifteen feet of ash and debris.

The superheated pyroclastic clouds billowing from the exploding caldera reached as far as 400 miles from their origin, southwest to Salt Lake City, north far into Idaho and Montana, and southeast across the Great Divide to within striking distance of the western city limits of Denver. Inside the pyroclastic flow zones, there was little evidence that anything had survived the catastrophe.

The preliminary ashfall profiles were overwhelming. Surrounding the crater and encompassing an area the size of the state of Ohio, ash accumulations were catastrophic, amounting to hundreds of vertical feet in many regions. So much material was heaped up that the land remained hot, the upper layers of ash acting as a thermal blanket trapping the heat of the pyroclastic flows and the super dense ash falls well below the surface. Where Liz stood, snow melted on contact with the ash, so much heat was finding its way to the surface from buried hot deposits below.

Further out, up to 500 miles from the epicenter of the eruption, ash depths ranged from eight to a dozen feet. Twice as far away and primarily to the east, ash accumulated in some locales as deep as three, four and five feet. Pushed by the prevailing westerlies, ash up to a foot in depth fell as far to the east as Madison, Wisconsin and Springfield, Illinois. Accumulations of up to several inches brought choking dust to the streets of Chicago; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Terre Haute, Indiana and Memphis, Tennessee.

To the west and southwest, the regions fared better as winds aloft carried much of the ash burden away into the Great Plains and Midwest. But the pyroclastic clouds scorched most of Montana and Idaho and much of Washington State well west of Yakima city but east of the Cascade Range. The devil’s veil of death swept the living away in western Oregon, northeastern Nevada, Utah south to I-70, and in the northwestern quadrant of Colorado, from Grand Junction through to Denver and north to Ft. Collins. As for most of Wyoming, Liz couldn’t imagine anything larger than a bacterium surviving the blowtorch clouds.

Over the course of her career, Liz had met many of the monsters of geology, the remains of catastrophic eruptions that raged in the deep and not so distant past: seawater-flooded Toba caldera; Santorini, the villain that erased the Minoan culture; the little bad-tempered infant island known as Anak Krakatoa, hiding the wreckage of the famed Krakatoa explosion in the late 1800s, and beautiful Crater Lake, the placid liquid child of massive Mount Mazama, a Rainier-sized volcano that had disintegrated in a flash and incinerated an area the dimensions of West Virginia.

Gamblers at Reno, Liz was fond of telling acquaintances, liked to drive up to the rim country around Lake Tahoe to marvel at its majestic symmetry and delight in its brilliant blue waters, filling a basin once ringed with sentinel peaks of fire. Sometime in the future, Yellowstone would clothe itself in forests again, the trees standing before a huge, frigid lake that would dwarf Lake Tahoe. And like Tahoe, Yellowstone’s future lake would sport a perfectly round conical island, perhaps several of them, new volcanic cones whose only purpose would be to slowly fill in the sunken basin once again and set the Yellowstone country on a course for yet another geological cataclysm.

For now, it was just enough to stand before the blackened monster, resting fitfully in the land. Before her stretched a laboratory of such grand scale it would surely swallow up the remainder of her career—that is, if she still had a career.

In the aftermath of this disaster, would anyone anywhere care to fund the long-range study of the new caldera when the first order of business for most of the nation’s citizens was to try to hoard a few calories against the stalking specter of starvation? Would there even be a single thought given to the staffing and funding requirements of university geology departments when there was a massive cancer in the body of the nation that had already consumed half its flesh?

None of the business of livelihood mattered in the least now. Confronted with the enormity of the Yellowstone cataclysm, Liz felt chaste, her soul hollowed out. Feet on the lip of geological ground zero, the only image she could process was that of her daughter’s face, the only emotion that of overwhelming isolation.

White Elk had foreseen this. What did he say? She would find nothing at Yellowstone. ‘Empty,’ that was the word he’d used.

Liz seated herself in the volcanic grit, planted the heels of her boots firmly down, crossed her forearms over her knees, and put her head down to rest on her arms. The impoundment holding back her misery, the one her conflicted soul had fabricated to wall her emotions away from Pelee’s horrible death, gave way all at once, and the tears began to flow in a torrent.

Chapter One Hundred-Eighteen

The atmosphere persisted in a sullen state, damped down under a seamless quilt of moisture-poor snow clouds that hung over the Plains day after day throughout the month of October. Water vapor floated imprisoned, locked in needles of ice crystal, drifting aimlessly. The monotony of the Yellowstone-induced weather strangled the spirit of the Independency colonists. All were anxious for the arrival of the final grain shipment from Sweetly. Penny was planning a celebration to lift and brighten their spirits, one to celebrate their continued existence as a community on Prospect Bluffs.

An hour after sunrise on the morning of the third Thursday of the month, dozens of Independency villagers made the descent to the lake shoreline below the bluffs to see the tiny freighter and its crew off. The steamer lay locked fast in ice, however. Bitter early fall temperatures had welded black plates of lake ice an inch thick across the entire surface of the watery expanse. Max fretted the wood-fired lake steamboat might not be able to break through the ice barrier while towing the barge, made larger and more stable by the addition of newly fabricated pontoons and expanded decking. Men and women swung axes, crowbars and spitting mauls to free the vessels from their ice shackles. Max coaxed a fire to life in the cold boiler and slowly built steam pressure. Satisfied with the ice work and the strength of the head of steam, the town’s jack-of-all-trades opened a value to funnel steam to piston so that the propeller might be engaged . The tug labored mightily to gain a knot or two of momentum. The ice crackled, split and parted before the bow, and the little ship made way.

The crew huddled about the little boiler for warmth as the ship plied the icy surface of the waters. Far to the south down Big Stone Lake, smoke from the grain fires, ever smoldering inside the concrete grain silos, still trailed eastward on the incessant wind, sometimes dodging to earth to obliterate the farming town, sometimes running ruler straight hundreds of feet over the black waters. Abel kept an eye on the smoke and pondered the fate of Harland Sven. Was the farmer still alive to see the white ribbons of vaporized grain?  He hadn’t seen the man for two weeks, hadn’t seen anyone in Sweetly, for that matter. But fresh food that had been delivered repeatedly to the brewery as promised, and some fraction of it had disappeared. At least a few South Dakotans were taking advantage of the victuals, behaving as nocturnal mammals would, perhaps, coming in the night unseen to forage under cover of darkness and to hole up by day out of the light.

Two hours running behind it, Max’s watercraft closed within a quarter mile of Sweetly. Winnie, intent on the landing, observed something moving in the clouds of white grain smoke drifting over the townscape and hugging the ground. A stick figure emerged from the particle haze standing at the shoreline.

“Abel, someone’s there.” Winnie raised an arm and waved toward the south. “Do you see it?”

Abel surveyed the water’s edge and picked out a slender vertical line, black against the white grain smoke.

“Our man is still with us, I think.”

“Harland?”

“Yes, the farmer.”

As the steamer made landfall, Abel leapt from the craft, splashed down in the frigid lake water, kicked plates of ice aside and jogged before the scarecrow at lakeside.

“Harland,” uttered the crewman as he came forward out of the lake, “We thought something happened to you.”

“Never mind me,” the farmer rumbled. “There are still a few people here. They’ve got to be taken out.”

“All right, we can do that.”

“Sweetly is no place for them anymore.”

“How many, Harland?”

“Just six, no more.”

“That’s it? Where are the rest of your townsfolk?”

“Evacuated, gone to Sioux Falls, they tell me, then all the way out to Minneapolis.

“How?”

“The Guard took them out by train just a day or two after the silos went up.”

“Where are those you managed to locate?”

“In the coop office. They had to get out of the school. No one can live in there anymore.”

“Are they in any condition to make the trip across the lake?”

“I’m not sure. I think maybe.”

“Okay, bring them down in two, three hours. We’ll be loaded then. They can sit on the raft. We’ll wrap them up in something to keep them warm. It will be a slow, cold ride back to the bluffs.”

As instructed, Harland led a meager band to the lakeshore, a few women, one man and several teens reduced to flesh-clothed skeletons, faces rigid with fright and simmering with rash. Harland assisted each in boarding the barge, now heavy with a conical pile of corn covered with tarpaulin. Once all were settled and protected from the wind swirling over the waters, Harland left the raft, gained the shore and swiveled to watch the crew of Max’s steam creation shove off.

Winnie hailed Abel and pointed out the farmer, feet planted in ash ashore, the grain silos belching smoke at his back.

“Harland, for goodness sake, man, come on board,” howled Abel as he vaulted from the deck and raced to confront the farmer.

“Take care of those people, mister.”

Nose in Harland’s face, Abel searched the farmer’s fixed hazel eyes. “You’re not going to tell me you won’t make the trip north with us.”

“I’ve got things to tend to here.”

Abel backed away a step, turned aside, and cast his eyes to the dull heavens. “There can’t be anything to tend to in this town any longer, farmer.”

“Why, of all people, would you give a damn about it, or about me, for that matter?”

Abel rolled his lower lip out and back. “Too much death, Harland. Too much! We need to get on with the business of living, every one of us. If you don’t get on that boat, we won’t be back until the ice goes out next spring. You won’t survive here alone.”

“I can fend for myself.”

Abel shifted on his boot heels, back and forth. “Look, Harland, you’re a man of the earth. You’re about growing things, about raising living things up from nothing, not withering in the face of hardship. You told me your father sat you on his lap on his John Deere when you were barely old enough to walk. He taught you what it took to wrest food from the land, from the elements. I don’t imagine he taught you how to give up.”

Harland narrowed his gaze to pinholes, his lips pursed.

“Make the journey with us, farmer. You can go to work with us first thing tomorrow morning. You can get your hands dirty in the good earth once again. That’s what you do. That’s what you have always done. There is no way you are going to give that up.”

The bony figure shrugged his shoulders but committed to not a thing.

Abel blew out a cyclone of frustration, rotated 180 degrees on his heels, and paced to the shoreline, leaving Harland locked down in his boot prints. Max helped the town founder aboard the lake steamer.

“Will you come aboard, Harland?” offered Abel aloud.

Harland tilted his head back to better view the fat smoke plumes trailing from the grain silos, the white acrid clouds as thick as the night the towers erupted in flames.

Max tugged on the whistle cord to let out a banshee wail of live steam. The powered scream rolled away mile after mile down the thirty miles of open lake water.

The farmer cast a look over his right shoulder at the little vessel and the human cargo aboard, a dozen pairs of eyes burrowing into his hide. A hand went up to scratch the white bristle on his topknot.

“Abel?” Harland croaked.

“Talk to me, farmer.”

Harland brought his hand down from his scalp and rubbed his fingers across his heart. He did not make eye contact with Abel for twenty long seconds.

“I’ll be along.”

Epilogue

At first light on the morning of the vernal equinox, human figures streamed from Independency village’s many modest homes through white hard March cold. Each shuffled briskly along shoveled paths up the hill to the greenhouse complex, its powerplant stack trailing a thin streamer of condensation and sawdust smoke.

Throughout the entire month a seamless quilt of moisture-poor snow clouds lay draped over the bluffs. Water vapor was locked away in floating needle crystals, drifting aimlessly. Dry snows atop the frozen earth served as an effective foil to incessant clouds of fine volcanic dust that, until freeze up, wafted across the mid-continent on the ever-present winds off the western prairie.

The sun was but a memory. The frigid monotony of the weather strangled the spirit of colonists and retarded the growth of the greenhouse plants in the unheated high tunnels. The heated greenhouses, though, their banks of lighting glowing day and much of the night, were a riot of foliage and a temperate oasis for the winter weary.

Citizens climbed the elevation, making for one of the heated structures, Strawberry Cathedral. A group of four carried a flat object the size of a small table, to be wrestled through the small east door of the hothouse. Down the four interior steps they shuttled, descending below grade level, and there they clustered in the narrow workspace at the east end of the building or fanned out among the many hundreds of strawberry towers sprouting from the floor.

Most coming along in the dusky dawn observed that the sky seemed open and bright. The persistent cloud blanket had thinned out during the night. The dawn seemed promising, as did the annual equinox service.

Abel and Bobcat waited beneath the glass vault as every man, woman and child in the little town made their way down the steps into the greenery. They stood before a plank table covered with a sheet. The humid air smelled earthy, of the odor of compost and growing things. The temperature hovered just above seventy degrees. Penny and Winnie lifted the sheet over the table and busied themselves arranging whatever treasures lay beneath.

Harland and the tiny band of Sweetly émigrés stood in a little cluster to one side. Abel was pleased that they had healed well at Independency from their serious bout with pellagra. It had taken months for the shock of the loss of their loved ones, their little farm community, and their former life to dissipate, but the South Dakotans seemed noticeably more at ease in their new surroundings. Some were making real strides to attempt to integrate into the life of the village on the bluffs.

As the last citizens spread out in the greenhouse, Abel signaled to Oleg to throw the breakers and cut power to the grow-lights. The interior of the greenhouse plunged down to a dusky green. Abel turned to his longtime friend and nodded. Bobcat, donning his ministerial persona, led the community in an invocation.

“Hear us, Lord, we the few. Through your infinite mercy, you have seen fit to spare us the horrors of the Yellowstone cataclysm. ‘Why us?’ we ask. What have we done to deserve such a blessing, when all the peoples of the earth are diminished and many are failing to thrive?

“We are not nobler than others, more pure, more deserving. We must seem a motley band before your eyes. We do not even know how to address you as one or pray to you in unison. We are hardly devout. Yet you have set us aside to preserve our lives so that we may continue to do good work on this earth.

“We are humble in your presence this equinox morning, more so than at any time in the past. We rejoice in the increasing daylight, in the promise of warmer temperatures to come, in the miracle of growing things, and in the miracle of our very lives.”

Suddenly, a gleam—ruler straight rays of red sunlight pierced the glass and scattered into the foliage and faces. On the horizon, the ruby rim of the new day’s sun swelled on the eastern horizon. The citizens found their voices. A joyous cheer went up from every throat and filled the huge glass enclosure. The spontaneous outburst rent a toothy smile across Abel’s face.

“A miracle, indeed,” he murmured quietly.

Warm red gold washed through the greenhouse, casting the people in bronze and the plants in tones of freshly oxidized copper and chartreuse. Trapped beneath the glass, the warming rays of the sun quickly nudged the temperature up and freed random water molecules to further dampen the air.

The colony’s minister, marveling at the gilded light, raised his hands to heaven and called out, “Who wrote this script?” Laughter echoed through the building.

“I would like to conclude our little prayer by saying simply this: Thank you, Lord, for giving us a tiny corner of an immense universe, a tiny corner of a vast solar system, and a tiny corner of a blue planet to carry on. We will not fail you, as you have not failed us. Amen.”

“Amen,” from scores of throats.

Abel stepped forward and thanked Bobcat for his words. As Bobcat before him, he lifted his hands to the heavens, and there rose a clamor from the far end of the greenhouse. It was the drum and fife band, the little ragtag ensemble that had once called everyone to dinner on the first day of the Total Life Skills seminars. Lost in the strawberry foliage, the assembled could hear the band approach, drumming and piping and stomping the soft earth beneath. Suddenly, four mimes burst from the foliage, raced to the table, and stood at the four corners of it, stone still. The band emerged, banged its feet as one, and stopped.

At that, the mimes reached down to the cloth covering the table, and in unison, they lifted it away. Beneath lay a modest feast, with stakes of corn bread, crocks of New England-style baked beans, pans of potato pancakes, pots of herb tea, pitchers of goat milk and a wheel of cheese. At the center was a four-foot-long sheet cake, slathered with white icing and sporting filigrees of sliced strawberries and a garnish of strawberry leaves and flowers. Scrawled across the center of the cake were two words formed by the strawberry slices: ‘Wonderful Life’.

Abel brought his hands down and clasped them before his chest. “It’s time to break fast, good people. Take all you want, eat heartily. As for this grand cake, it represents the last of something and the beginning of something, as well. The cake was made with the very last of our wheat flour stocks. And it was whipped up with refined beet sugar that we scavenged. There may be no wheat for a good long while. As for the sugar in the icing, that will be the end of it. So think of the sugar in this cake as the passing of an era, as moving from one epoch to another, from one human system of organization to another completely different one. The old system is slipping away from us, yet our way of life has a bright future ahead, as bright as the sunlight streaming through the glass above us all.”

As the sun advanced into the heavens, the greenhouse warmed rapidly. Nibbling at their food and listening to Abel’s words, colonists stood about, soaking in the rising heat and humidity. Some closed their eyes and let the warmth cradle them gently and soak deep into their pores. After nearly six months of a brutal, record cold winter, the solar heat trapped by the glass seemed a great luxury.

Abel reached below the table and pulled up a large sign with the numerals one-seven-zero on it. He held it aloft and watched the crowd as all acknowledged the placard.

“We are more than one hundred strong at Independency. We have been that many since a few weeks after that terrible fall day. Remarkably, we have lost no one since. There have been no deaths and, really, few serious illnesses despite the ash and what is going on elsewhere around the nation. We are blessed. We really are.

“The spring equinox tells us that life renews itself endlessly. It reminds us that we must renew our efforts to create a just, self-sufficient, productive and peaceful society, one that lives within its means and in balance within the greater framework of the natural world.

“I would like to think that this great strawberry house will be our cathedral most Sundays, until the ravages of the Yellowstone disaster are spent and we can resume life as we knew it, outdoors in the fields and orchards. I had hoped that we might meet here indefinitely, among the strawberry towers, to celebrate our good fortune, our good life, our full life.”

Abel quieted down for a long pause and scanned the many. Vigor seemed to drain away from the man as silence filled the vast greenhouse spaces. He closed his eyes and rubbed the palm of his right hand into his flesh of his face. Many citizens looked up from their plates, sensing their founder was not quite himself.

Abel exhaled abruptly. “Good people, like the spring equinox, we must renew ourselves,” the town founder said flatly. “We cannot stay here on the bluffs much longer.”

Every eye fell upon Abel at once.

“When winter breaks and the lands to the west dry out, dust from the Yellowstone ashfall will blow into this community on the wind night and day. It will go on for years, decades, maybe even centuries until the prairie grasses and river bottom forests reestablish their hold on the Plains. The coming dust storms will be far, far worse than the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. We will simply have no choice but to leave.”

Amid a rising crescendo of howls, a shout among the strawberry towers rang out: “Where will we go?”

Abel closed his eyes and bit down on his tongue for five seconds. “We will remove from here when the weather improves and, hopefully, settle at our fledgling Canadian sister community in the Maritime Provinces, on the Atlantic coast, at Prince Edward Island.”

Throughout the room mouths hung agape.

“Our forebears settled the West, arriving by horse, by ox team and Conestoga wagon. We will reprise their toil and effort, only in reverse. We will settle the East, and bring with us our potent brand of self-reliance and self-determination, tenets that are just about extinct on this continent. We will rebuild our town there on the rim of the bountiful ocean. And like here at Independency, will we forge a new community, one that is just, peaceful, fruitful and beautiful amid a world of gathering famine, fear, and darkness.”

The entire congregation stood stunned by Abel’s revelation. Servings of cake sat neglected on plate after plate.

Relieved to have finally aired thoughts that had been fermenting in his souring soul much of the winter, blood returned to his face. His backbone straightened. He seemed to grow in stature before his audience. He peered to his left and sought Winnie’s eyes, seeking one last measure of assurance before addressing the flock again. Winnie simply nodded her sentiments his way.

For thirty seconds he scanned the room and made eye contact with each and every one. Slowly, he raised his right arm chin high, palm open, fingers outstretched. He held is hand in the air for ten seconds, then slowly rotated it and held it palm up, fingers now closed together. He reached out to his neighbors, as if motioning to each of them to take his hand.

“Join me.” Abel said firmly. “I can’t do this without you.”

About K.R. Nilsen

Author K.R.Nilsen is a retired natural foods industry marketer and manufacturer who began a writing career right out of college behind cramped desks in the chilly newsrooms of small northern New England daily and weekly newspapers. He gravitated to magazine editorial work at Yankee Publishing at Dublin, New Hampshire, and eventually earned a CASE Grand Gold Award for educational publications, before changing careers abruptly and becoming a marketer then producer of shelf-stable fruit juices and all-juice sodas.

Outside the confines of working life, Nilsen became a factor in New Hampshire’s hiking community by planning and developing the 170-mile Cohos Trail and its shelters situated from the White Mountains to the Canadian border. For his all-volunteer work creating that lengthy outdoor recreational resource, he was presented the Granite State Legacy Award in 2015. He is the author of several hiking guidebooks and trail databooks, including 50 Hikes North of the White Mountains from Countryman Press.

A strong advocate of self-reliance and for self-sufficient lifestyles and communities, the author channeled his interests into developing a fully-fledged alternative living community within the pages of this novel. Not one to idly preach, he recently put his ideas into practice, developing and expanding a small organic farm on the campus of a year-round Waldorf educational camp, Camp Glen Brook, at Marlborough, NH.

Wedded to a life-long love of the earth sciences, particularly paleontology and geology, his passion invariably led him to the geological minefield that is Yellowstone National Park. For more than twenty years, he has spent his leisure hours reading the works of scientists who were unraveling the mysteries of the immense volcanic structure beneath the national park and similar features beneath other slumbering calderas scattered about the planet.

To this day, Nilsen dabbles in freelance article writing. His work has been published in the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, Private Pilot, Country Journal, New Hampshire Profiles, and the like.

Nilsen lives with his wife, Catherine, on a small farmstead in the rural southwest corner of the Granite State, sharing outdoor chores with Havanese and Polish Lowland Sheepdogs and an eclectic assortment of chickens.

Copyright

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

Publisher’s Note:

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are the work of the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is coincidental.

Solstice Publishing - www.solsticepublishing.com

Copyright 2018 – K.R. Nilsen

Content

K.R. Nilsen
THE YELLOWSTONE TRAPS
NUMBER 1

MAP

Prologue

PART I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

PART II

Volcano Threat Prompts Yellowstone Park Evacuation

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

PART III

Yellowstone Eruption May Yield Dramatic Global Cooling

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

Chapter Seventy-Six

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Chapter Eighty

Chapter Eighty-One

Chapter Eighty-Two

Chapter Eighty-Three

Chapter Eighty-Four

Chapter Eighty-Five

Chapter Eighty-Six

PART IV

Yellowstone Refugees Flood Cities; Canada Stops All Food Exports

Chapter Eighty-Seven

Chapter Eighty-Eight

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Chapter Ninety

Chapter Ninety-One

Chapter Ninety-Two

Chapter Ninety-Three

Chapter Ninety-Four

Chapter Ninety-Five

Chapter Ninety-Six

Chapter Ninety-Seven

Chapter Ninety-Eight

Chapter Ninety-Nine

Chapter One Hundred

Chapter One Hundred-One

Chapter One Hundred-Two

Chapter One Hundred-Three

Chapter One Hundred-Four

Chapter One Hundred-Five

Chapter One Hundred-Six

Chapter One Hundred-Seven

Chapter One Hundred-Eight

Chapter One Hundred-Nine

Chapter One Hundred-Ten

Chapter One Hundred-Eleven

Chapter One Hundred-Twelve

Chapter One Hundred-Thirteen

Chapter One Hundred-Fourteen

Chapter One Hundred-Fifteen

Chapter One Hundred-Sixteen

Chapter One Hundred-Seventeen

Chapter One Hundred-Eighteen

Epilogue

About K.R. Nilsen

Copyright