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.’”