From the upper end of the mountain’s eastern spine, Kyle watched the crater’s side collapse. Impossible to think she’d stood there only moments before with the faith of a child in Santa.
As the nuée poured over the rim, her throat constricted. She knew she could never outrun this fiery gathering of broken rock and ash, tumbling particles that threw off lightning spears and charged the air with ozone. It thrust forth from the mouth of the declivity and spread over the slope with a horrible energy. Constantly shifting, forming new shapes, it sprang down the mountain like a leopard dropping from a branch onto prey.
Knocked to her hands and knees by a quake, Kyle watched annihilation wing toward her, furious, alight with a reddish glare.
She struggled to her feet; half running, half sliding down the gravel slope on the east side of the spine and into the forest. With no time to escape, she sat with her back against the nearest large pine and pulled her pack up to protect her head. Knees drawn to her chest, she unzipped Wyatt’s parka and ducked her face inside, creating an air pocket in case part of the nuée crested the ridge and dropped down over her.
Her ears already ringing from the piercing note preceding the eruption, she flinched at the cacophony of the surging current. It managed at once to whoosh, roar, and clank, like a flash flood she’d once heard in a desert wash.
She took a big breath, wondering if it would be her last, and wished she had let Wyatt get out of the helicopter with her so he’d be here to hold her … but no, if she were going to die she’d want him to live.
Listening with horror to the uproar, she suddenly realized it had reached the peak of its crescendo and began to lessen. When no roiling cloud overtook her, she inhaled with care.
On a puff of foul air, she tasted the taint of burned matches. Hugging her knees, she tried to tell her knotted muscles to relax.
When the sound and the sulfur fumes diminished, she decided to climb back onto the spine and see if she could see Wyatt. Leaving her pack at the base of the tree, she dragged herself back up the slope to the ridge top. Though the wind shoved her shoulders and tore at her hood, she planted her feet against the earth tremors and looked down the west valley.
Ash coiled like smoke in the air above the dying avalanche. The path of newly deposited gravel and sand size material formed a meandering path down the lowest downhill route. It had passed close to the ridge where Kyle had hidden out and even closer down near where she’d last seen Wyatt. But what chilled her even more was that the place they’d left the journalists beside seismic station four had been overrun and buried.
It was time to get off this mountain. Her watch read 5:55; with the lowering ash cloud, a premature darkness began to fall. The thought of night sent an arrow of alarm through her. After the violence of the last surging flow, she had to accept that she might be the only person left alive down here.
As she faced the mountain’s ruined summit, another glowing avalanche poured over the edge like fumes from an acid-filled beaker. After a moment, the eerie combination of rumbling, hissing and clacking once more assaulted Kyle’s ears. Flying rocks burst from the expanding cloud. Beneath her feet, the ridge heaved and shuddered.
Then, deep in her chest came a vibration so low and ominous it was felt rather than heard. Her bones trembled.
The mountaintop exploded.
She had no more than an instant before a shock wave hit, a great thunderclap that lifted her like a huge hand and thrust her back off the ridge. Tumbling end over end down the scree, she felt her shoulder, hip, and one knee impact the ground. Her momentum halted by a thick tree, her vision narrowed to what was before her face. Her escape options must be as thin, for if the helicopters and the plane she’d seen had escaped the blast, they’d be winging on a prayer for clear air.
Kyle shoved to her feet and ran, headlong down slippery evergreen needles, and over exposed roots. Her heart raced and her breath came in hitches. More than once she tripped over deadfalls and went sprawling.
Somewhere nearby must be the lava cave Nick had told her about. If she could make it there … wisdom had it that one of the few survivors of Mount Pelée’s 1902 eruption on the island of Martinique had been in a stone jail, while the rest of 27,000 citizens died.
On their way to the cave, before she and Nick were distracted by the fumaroles on the cinder cone, they were near a cairn of boulders on the ridge. He’d pointed it out as a landmark. He had also said they would need a climbing rope so as not to get trapped.
She didn’t have a rope now or a choice.
The approaching flow crested the ridge, puffing like a locomotive. If she were overtaken, she could be surrounded by material as hot as 1,500 degrees.
There must be some clue to the cave, rather than this monotonous high-angle slope studded with pines. As she dared a glance over her shoulder, a bolt of St. Elmo’s fire radiated off the front of the flow, causing her to duck and swerve.
With heat assaulting the back of her head, she saw a ring of rock to her left that might surround the cave’s opening. Sliding toward sanctuary with stones peppering her skull, she didn’t think she could make it. Then she saw the sinkhole in the mountainside, where jumbled rocks had collapsed beneath an arch of smooth, dark rock.
Kyle dove like a base runner. If she landed hard enough to break bones, so be it.
The filthy cone of last season’s snow came up to meet her, capped in places by the sugary white of this winter’s beginning. The impact caught her on the chest and she slid down, shushing over cold crystals. She felt as though she rode a roller coaster into the dark.
She tangled in something that felt like tree branches and came to a jolting halt. Her head just missed smashing into the rock floor.
Flush with adrenaline, she staggered up, fought her way free of the dead pine lying against the snow cone, and plunged into blackness. The light from the entrance shone farther than she had imagined, a silvery glow that suffused the rocky walls. Every few steps, she looked over her shoulder toward that beacon, gradually watching the illumination recede.
She hadn’t realized how much she was counting on that dwindling spark until she turned to find total blackness and knew the ash cloud was upon her. The hot blanket seared her exposed face and neck until she burrowed deeply into the parka’s hood. Holding her breath against the fumes, arms out before her, she continued her blind flight.
Fifty feet, perhaps a hundred, she ran. Her gloved hands hit first, a warning, but not in time to prevent her crashing chest-first into a solid rock wall. She twisted wildly, feeling the urge to suck in a lungful of air, sweet or foul.
God, what did it matter? She was surely surrounded by poison gas, she couldn’t see, and her hair and clothes were probably about to burst into flame.
Still, she fought the rising impulse to inhale. Shoving off the rock, she tried to recall which direction was away from the cavern opening, and moved in that direction. God, let this not be a dead end.
Light, she had a flashlight in the inside pocket of Wyatt’s parka. How stupid of her to have panicked and not remembered. The snaps ripped and she fumbled inside, then removed her gloves so her fingers could find the metal cylinder and drag it out.
She pressed the switch.
Nothing happened.
For a moment, she thought she was blind. Then she shook the light and heard the sifting of the broken bulb inside.
Kyle gasped. She dropped the useless flashlight and heard it roll away over rock. Hot air rushed into her throat, sulfurous and heavy with dust, so thick that she choked.
Yet, the furious sound of the beast that pursued her had abated, for she had not only heard the tinkle of glass in the flashlight, but now she registered her own rough breathing.
She continued to inhale and exhale rapidly. Time to get out of here, but as the air quality continued to improve, she realized the tunnel she had run through must have curved round a corner and she’d lost the light. Her eyes strained into utter darkness, while the earth began to heave and shudder once more.
Kyle’s legs folded and she went down. Her chest rose and fell in an ever-increasing tempo that merely sipped when what she needed was a long drink of pure sweet air. Curling into herself, she hugged her knees against her chest.
As the heat from the expended flow dissipated, cold seeped into her from her wet pants and the natural refrigeration that had kept a cone of snow unmelted through a summer’s heat.
Dark … dark, and so cold, wet…
Her fingernails dug into her palms. She squeezed her eyes shut as tears stung her lids.
She would not go back there. No matter how black it was or how violent the earthquakes, she would stay in the present. Blood slicked her hands where her nails broke the skin, the pain connecting her with reality. With her head pressed to her knees, she pretended it was dark because her eyes were closed.
Terror swelled in her chest, not for her present danger, but because she didn’t want to see … didn’t want to recall what had been walled so many years on the other side of a delicate partition within herself.
A tear broke and rolled, warm against her cold cheek. And another.
“Daddy.”
When she had dragged herself out of the freezing flood of the Madison River onto the pile of rock and grit, shivering so violently that her teeth knocked together, dawn had grayed the canyon. And in that wash of pale light, Kyle had seen her father.
He lay with his chest barely covered by the rags of dark plaid shirt. One arm reached toward her, an invitation to safety, love, and all she’d believed shattered. Sobbing, she crawled through the mud, ignoring the cuts and scrapes from sharp edges of stone.
When she touched his cold hand with her own freezing fingers, it didn’t move. She grabbed his wrist and tried to shake his arm, but it was stiff and unyielding, as though he had turned into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife in the Bible.
“Daddy?” Her voice rose.
There was something the matter with his eyes; they stared yet he did not act as though he saw her.
“Wake up!” she shrieked, prodding his chest with a fingertip and then pummeling with her fists. “Daaaadddy!”
Another of the tremors that had come without warning all night shook the Madison Valley. And in the next instant, she heard a swooshing and looked up to see the beginnings of an avalanche about a hundred feet above her and her father.
She dragged at his arm. He didn’t budge, and she saw he was buried up to his thighs. Though she felt the growing gut sense that Daddy was dead like Grandma and Grandpa Stone, gone away to Jesus, she clung to his hand.
The approaching mudslide gathered speed. And as surely as if she heard her father speak, she knew he wanted her to leave him.
Kyle scrabbled across the slope away from the hissing river of mud and rock. Slipping on the liquefied surface, she plopped back into the rising cold flood, opaque and brown like coffee with cream. It was all she could do to fight being washed away, but she flailed with her arms and legs the way Daddy had taught her. Toward a ball of tree roots and uprooted earth that protruded from the slide, something she could grasp to pull herself out.
When the ooze stopped sliding, she couldn’t see Daddy anywhere.
Perhaps an hour later, as she huddled on the shore in the mud-stiffened rags of her clothing, she heard voices and the splash of oars.
Sitting in the same fetal position in the black lava cave, Kyle realized she’d been about to give up. To let the constant earthquakes that seemed to be increasing in intensity and the darkness immobilize her.
With her back to the rock, she realized it was no longer sucking the heat from her body. Rather, it was the other way round, as the floor and walls began to radiate warmth.
In a single motion she was on her feet, touching the stone with her palms for confirmation. Such sudden and rapid heat flow this near the ground surface this far from the peak could only mean one thing, that another, even larger eruption was imminent.
With a hand on the wall and the other extended before her, she began to walk. Counting her steps, she figured she’d come less than twenty feet when the tunnel curved sharply at the place she’d run into the wall. Beyond, she saw a blessed faint glow.
Dry-mouthed, she hurried toward the entry. And stood looking up at least fifteen feet to the rounded opening in the ceiling. Not even a gecko could make its way up there; the rock around the entrance appeared too rough for even suction-cup feet, supposing one could hang upside down.
Kyle turned to the dead pine, imagining she might use it as a ladder, but try as she might, each effort to raise it was like wrestling an octopus.
She began to sweat and stripped off the parka. The cone of snow was softening and darkening as the heat flow melted it down.
“Help,” she shouted, and, her voice rising, “Wyatt!”
There could be no answer, she knew. If anyone had been out on that slope, they’d be dead. Yet, she shrieked on and on. Each time she tried to stop, the grip of hysteria was too great.
Finally, sobbing, hoarse, and feeling stupid for losing it so badly, she slumped back to the floor. Air from above chilled her sweating brow. And though she grew cold again near the entrance, she could not imagine once more walking away from the light.
How gray it already looked outside with all the particulate matter in the air. Her aching throat closed further at the thought of night falling on the mountain.
She began rooting through the pockets of Wyatt’s coat, wishing she hadn’t lost her pack. No food, no water, except the ash-sprinkled snow cone that was rapidly melting.
The air in the cave continued to warm. From outside, she began to hear a crackling that defied identification until she smelled something burning. Of course, the hot gases or the lightning thrown off by static electricity had ignited wildfires.
With the recent snows, it was probably too wet for the trees to catch, but the stench of burning under-story grew stronger. Within minutes, Kyle saw the first wisps curl into the cavern like smoke down a chimney.
Her heart rate accelerated. As the smoke continued to come in, forming eddies, she watched a stray tendril waft down the lava tube. The smoke moved in the direction she’d just come from.
Was it possible the cave had another entrance?
She shook her head. In places, lava rock was so porous that one could lift boulders measuring three feet on a side over their head. She had faded photographs of her and Nick doing that at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho when they’d gone there during field camp. The drawing effect of the cave must be because there were small vents to open air.
On the other hand, the lava had run out of the tube, leaving the void behind. There could be a large enough exit for her to escape.
Kyle stared into the maw of the tunnel. If she stayed where she was, she was dead. One way or another … poisonous gas, another eruption, or dehydration in this pit with no way out. Could she face the darkness with no guarantee?
She had to. If she didn’t make it through, she’d never see Wyatt or Nick again.
Facing down the blackness, she asked herself for the first time … how bad could just being in the dark be? In the past hour, she’d faced far worse.
She forced her chest to rise and fall more evenly while determination strengthened her spine.
During the next lull in the earth tremors, Kyle managed to shove to her feet. She slung Wyatt’s coat around her waist and secured it with a knot.
Bending, she pawed into the snow to a slightly less filthy layer and scooped up a double handful. No matter that her raw hands dyed the edges with blood, she crunched ice until her thirst was reasonably quenched.
As though force of will could make it so, she envisioned the other opening of the cave, a place where the lava flow had spread out over the shield of mountain. She would push past horror and anything else in her way to reach that exit…
And after she did, she might never again be able to muster adrenaline for imagined peril. She would live in a world where she could decide whether or not to use a goddamned nightlight.
With a last look behind her, Kyle took the path she’d traveled, back into darkness.