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.”