Grand Teton National Park
The morning after the day of
Fiona’s shriek shattered the muffled silence and jerked Jeremy out of his pitifully shallow sleep. It cut to his core, like fingernails scraping on a blackboard. He jerked up straight from his semireclined position in the driver’s seat and spun around to face a cacophony of screams.
Ellis and Fiona were both looking out the left passenger window, their faces contorted in fear. Judy bolted upright too, her eyes reflecting the fact that she was now in fight-or-flight mode, but not fear.
A face was pressed against the rear passenger-side window, like a kid window-shopping at Macy’s. Only this wasn’t a kid, and this damn sure wasn’t Macy’s.
The sun had risen less than an hour earlier, giving the air the soft gray glow of impossibly heavy morning fog. The visibility was better than it had been the night before, but barely so. Ash continued to fall just as heavily as it had been doing. Everything was covered in a smothering blanket of the stuff for as far as Jeremy could see, which, despite the radiance from the filtered sunlight, wasn’t over thirty feet.
The man whose face was pressed against the wind—Jeremy could tell it was a man by the figure’s size and hulking demeanor—had pulled a T-shirt over his head and torn two half-dollar-sized holes in it to peer through. The shirt, the skin around the man’s eyes, and his clothes were covered in black, glittering ash. He was so close to the truck that Jeremy couldn’t judge how tall he was, but his arms and shoulders made him out to be well over six feet and thickly muscled.
Three or four steps behind the man moved another smaller, shadowy, ghostlike figure. The cantaloupe-sized bumps inside a two-sizes-too-small Harley Davidson pullover indicated this was the man’s female companion. She had a bandanna wrapped over her nose and tied in the back, train-robber style. Her hair was stuffed inside a biker do-rag.
The man rapped on the window with the knuckles of his hamlike left hand.
“Hey, mister, we need to hitch a ride,” the man hollered through the closed window. “My bike choked up in all of this shit. Me and my old lady are stranded.”
Jeremy felt a wave of compassion—until he saw the tire jack handle clenched in the man’s right fist. Compassion was replaced by alarm.
“We’re heading south, toward Jackson Hole,” Jeremy shouted through the closed window. “If you put that club down, you can ride in the back of the truck until we get out of this mess.” He started the F-250’s engine.
“Sure, mister, but how about we ride in your trailer? Get us out of the volcano dirt.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Jeremy shouted back. “We’re leaving now. If you want a ride, throw your jack handle down and climb in the back.” He put the truck in M1 and started slowly moving forward.
“OK, motherfucker, you win, but you’ve gotta stop sometime!” the man screamed. He and his “old lady” clambered into the bed of the F-250.
Watching the pair through his rearview mirror, Jeremy didn’t miss the fact that the man was still holding on to what was potentially a deadly weapon. He didn’t say anything to Judy or the twins, who were watching through the back window.
The F-250 continued rolling as the man and woman crawled over the truck’s tailgate and into its bed, moving forward as far as the rack of bicycles and toolbox allowed. They settled under a tarp Jeremy had used to cover their firewood supply.
As he maneuvered slowly back onto US 191, Jeremy kept his eyes on what he hoped was the middle of the ash-covered road. “We’ll drive as far as we can, but at some point, we’ll have to take a potty break. I’m not even going to try to pull over. I’ll just stop, and we all get out and do our business. We’ll just have to play it by ear with those two.”
Jeremy caught Judy’s eye. He reached between his seat and the center console for the .357 Magnum. Judy nodded slowly. He laid the gun next to his right hip so that either of them could grab it if, heaven forbid, the need arose. The pistol was a five-shot revolver. The first two rounds in the gun’s cylinder were loaded with CCI shotshells, each of which fired 150 pellets of birdshot instead of a solid projectile.
Years earlier, when they first decided to purchase a firearm, Jeremy and Judy had jointly decided they wanted the protection. But even if push came to shove, they would try to avoid killing an attacker if at all possible. For that reason, they planned to pepper an assailant with birdshot rather than blast a hole in his chest the first time they squeezed the trigger. This strategy did not sit well with their die-hard Second Amendment friends, but Jeremy and Judy were more comfortable with this approach.
The visibility was much better now that the sun was out. Jeremy could make out rough shapes up to thirty feet in front of the truck, and he had a better sense of where the highway shoulders were. There wasn’t much, if any, difference in the volume of ash that continued to fall. It had accumulated significantly since they had pulled over for what pitifully little sleep they had been able to get. A good ten-to-twelve-inch-thick glittery black mat now covered the road and ground for as far as he could see. Tree branches sagged under its still increasing weight. Many had broken and fallen to the ground. These were evidenced now only by swollen mounds on an otherwise smooth surface.
Despite the increased visibility, Jeremy still wasn’t able to drive over ten miles an hour. The F-250’s four-wheel drive was able to push the truck forward, but Jeremy knew it would only be a matter of time before the ever-accumulating ash would grind them to a stop.
Please, God, let us make it to some kind of shelter in Jackson Hole before that happened.
The truck’s GPS had stopped working. Jeremy suspected this was due either to the layer of ash covering its roof-mounted receiver or the amount of material in the air, blocking satellite signal reception. Most likely, both. Regardless, he had only a vague idea of where they were and how much farther they had to go before they reached anything resembling a city.
As he pondered the question, they crept by another park sign next to the road: Snake River Overlook, 500 feet. If memory served him well, this would put them roughly thirty miles from Jackson Hole. The road would be flat and about as straight as it got in this part of the country. Jeremy drove on, hoping to get at least another hour farther south before they had to stop for a bathroom break. And to change out the makeshift filter he had put on the F-250’s air intake.
Just as they passed the first overlook turnoff, Judy pointed out lights in the distance. “Jeremy, look over to the right. Looks like a stranded vehicle.”
The vehicle—one of the trendy BMW SUVs that was so popular with young professionals—had stopped partially off the road, its emergency blinkers flashing. When the slowly moving F-250 was about sixty feet from the BMW, a man and woman got out. The woman was holding a small child in her arms. Jeremy guessed the kid to be less than a year old. Once out of the SUV, the man started waving his arms above his head.
Jeremy eased the truck up next to the BMW, and Judy lowered her window a crack to talk to the couple. They didn’t need any more ash drifting into the truck.
Stepping closer to the passenger door, the man said, “Thank God you stopped. We’ve been stranded here for hours. We’re the Tanners, from Duluth, Minnesota. I’m Brandon, this is my wife, Sophie, and our son, Hunter.”
Jeremy and Judy locked eyes. Jeremy nodded. Judy unlocked her door and opened it halfway. “We’ll do formal introductions later. Put Hunter in the back seat with our twins. You and your wife can get under the tarp in the back of the truck. Be careful climbing in. We picked up another couple a while back. Bikers. They’re under the tarp, probably asleep.”
“Asleep! How the hell we gonna sleep?” the man roared, sticking his head out from under the ash-covered tarp. “There’s four bicycles back here. There ain’t room for anyone else.”
Jeremy partially opened the driver’s door, leaned out, and shouted back, “Throw the bicycles overboard and make room. But do it while we’re moving. Even with four-wheel drive, I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to push through this stuff.”
As Jeremy shifted the transmission back into M1, Sophie handed Hunter to Judy.
Cursing for all to hear, the biker got out from under the tarp and tossed one of the four bicycles over the side of the truck as Sophie and Brandon climbed in over the tailgate.
“Well, grab a bicycle, Brandon from Minnesota,” the biker growled as he tossed another bike off the side of the truck.
Brandon did as he was told, first one bike and then the last, as the F-250 slowly muscled its way forward, its obscenely wide all-terrain tires slipping in twelve inches of powdery pumice.
From his side mirrors, Jeremy watched Sophie pull one side of the tarp up and slip into the semiprotective shelter it provided from the falling cinders. She held it up high enough to allow Brandon to crawl in next to her.
“Close the door, sweetie,” the biker chick twittered. “You’re getting the floor all yucky.”
Openly leering at Sophie, the biker added, “Yeah, we might as well get cozy. Looks like we’re gonna be here awhile.”