“Then leave the pipe.”
“If we do, we risk the pressure building and creating a toxic geyser like Old Faithful.”
“Then take it out. What do you want me to say?”
“Here’s the thing,” Benjamin said. “The bottom seventy feet has no lining whatsoever. We’ve pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals into permeable Precambrian metamorphic rock. Lord only knows what effects they had on it. There could very well be a cavity eroded under half the state and we’re about to destabilize the whole works.”
Randall heard his name shouted from a distance and turned to see Thompson running across the field toward him. The production plants were little more than silhouettes against the plains behind him. He’d never seen the scientist in the sunlight before, let alone moving at a pace anywhere close to a jog. Something must have happened in the lab. Something of a sensitive nature that couldn’t be broadcast across the open airwaves. Time to end this conversation.
“You have your orders, Corporal. Tear the damn thing down.”
Benjamin’s eyes narrowed and his jaw muscles bulged.
“Yes, sir.”
Randall turned his back on the engineer and struck off down the dirt road to meet Thompson. Benjamin immediately started barking orders behind him and the engines of demolition vehicles roared to life.
Thompson stopped a hundred yards away and had to double over to catch his breath. Randall closed the gap and pulled the scientist upright by the back of his lab coat.
“What is it, Doctor?” he asked.
“There are no words to describe it. You have to see it to believe it.”
“WE HAVE BREAKING news to report,” the newscaster says. “For those of you who somehow missed it, seismologists are reporting a magnitude 5.3 earthquake that shook the downtown area. The USGS is holding a press conference in Golden right now, where the chief seismologist, Dr. Rana Ratogue, is talking to reporters. Let’s hear what she has to say.”
The image on the screen cuts to a woman with jet-black hair and blue eyes. Her name is displayed above the words United States Geological Survey and between the station logo and a rushed graphic with concentric circles at the center of the Colorado map.
“…a swarm of earthquakes that have occurred over the last twenty-four hours along the Front Range, about ten miles northeast of Denver, on the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. We’ve tracked more than a dozen in all, most of them nowhere near as strong as the magnitude 5.3 we experienced at 10:58 AM Mountain Time. The thing to note about the sequence is we’ve had swarm activity in this very same region before, although not since the 1960s—”
RANA TRUDGES THROUGH the hip-deep weeds of one of the nation’s largest urban refuges toward the epicenter’s GPS coordinates. She’s surrounded by willow groves, marshes, and seemingly eternal stretches of grass, and yet she can still see the skyscrapers of downtown Denver from the corner of her eye. The air positively shivers with the roar of planes passing low overhead as they descend into DIA, mere miles to the east. It’s strange to think that this sanctuary filled with bison and ferrets, deer and bald eagles, had not so long ago been a toxic swamp unsuitable for habitation. She knew of its history, which was why she was unsurprised to learn that the coordinates corresponded to the location of the deep injection well that had been the source of the quakes that necessitated its closure in the first place.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the well had been properly sealed in the eighties and the process of remediation was moving along at an unprecedented rate. In fact, they were debating opening the final remaining closed area to the public a full year before the original Superfund timetable. A new swarm of earthquakes was more than a setback; it potentially compromised all of their hard work by creating fissures through which the chemicals trapped below the bedrock could seep into the groundwater. This wasn’t just another earthquake caused by the subterranean disposal of wastewater from fracking, like she dealt with on a daily basis, but a potentially disastrous contamination issue, which was why she and her team were forced to wear CBRN isolation suits matching those of their HAZMAT escort.
Sydney Partridge tromps through the field beside her. The cumbersome suit makes the young seismologist appear even smaller than she is. She carries the digital seismometer in one hand and its instrumentation in the other. Tim Telford had offered to help her, despite being overburdened by his own infrasound sensors, but she’d declined, largely because she knew how the geophysicist felt about her. The Hazardous Materials Response Team had its own equipment, which Rana would be more than happy if they never had any reason to use.
The grass gives way to bare earth, where absolutely nothing is able to grow. She’s still contemplating how bad it must have been if this is what progress looks like when she sees the jagged chunks of concrete standing from the earth.
“There it is,” she says.
Lightning-bolt crevices riddle the hardpan, none of them more than six inches deep. The hole at the center, however, is a heck of a lot deeper than that.
Rana climbs up onto an arched section of concrete that must have once been part of the containment shell and stares down into darkness that stretches seemingly to the planet’s core.
“I’M PICKING UP some strange seismic readings from down there,” Sydney says.
“What do you mean?” Rana asks, and crouches behind her so she can better see the monitor on her colleague’s laptop.
“That’s just it. They’re hard to qualify. The seismogram is incredibly sensitive and displays every little vibration. We’re talking air traffic and passing cars. In an area like this we’re dealing with an absurd amount of interference, but I can tell you that something down there is causing faint, irregular vibrations similar in amplitude to waves on the ocean.”
“You think there’s still fluid down there?”
“It’s possible, but that’s definitely not the source of the vibrations.”
“I’m picking up sound in the infrasonic range, too,” Tim says. “Nothing I’d attribute to tectonic activity, though. More like the resonance of air flowing into an enclosed space, a subtle increase in pressure like you feel in your ears when you change altitude.”
“The well must still be patent,” Rana says.
“That’s a safe assumption.”
One of the men from the HAZMAT response team scuffs across the dirt behind Rana. She glances back and reads the nameplate on his isolation suit: Stephens.
“We’re picking up high concentrations of volatile organic compounds,” he says. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with the suits for the duration. And I wouldn’t suggest lighting a match. There’s enough benzene in the ground to burn for weeks.”
He turns and heads back toward where his team is already cordoning off the area.
“How deep is that well?” she calls after him.
“A little over two miles, ma’am.”
Rana walks as close to the ragged hole as she dares. It’s nearly ten feet wide at the surface, but narrows to thirty inches somewhere below her in the darkness, provided they’re right in their assumption that the passage remains open. She kicks a rock over the nothingness and watches it plummet out of sight. It clatters from the walls several times before passing beyond the range of hearing. She stares into the ground for several more seconds before returning to the others.