Waves of river water raced out across the airport tarmac and swept into the rail yards, lifting boxcars, hoppers and tankers off the tracks. The rail cars piled in beneath the old steel arch Broadway Bridge and its Burlington Northern rail-span neighbor, where they stuck fast. Metal grinding on metal shed sparks into the kerosene-laced waters and an oily fire erupted and crawled upriver to the crushed barges. Booming explosions raced crossed the city and shattered windows in downtown buildings facing the riverfront.
The north and west faces of the new Bess Truman Tower glass imploded into the interior offices. Shards showered the floors of Midland Research Group, stripping overhead tiles and fixtures from ceilings and walls. The cubicle that Winnie occupied was vacant. Glass fragments and debris rained down into the empty space. After spending four days and nights in the building, sleeping at night beneath her desk in a sleeping bag, Winnie had left the building fifteen minutes earlier. She was headed home, a medical filter mask over her nose and mouth, intent on covering the twelve miles to her Parkville home on foot.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Abel awoke with a start. Spring birds broke into song half an hour earlier, but not this morning. Their avian trills were still. Silence awakened him.
In his underwear, Abel scampered downstairs, opened the front door, and stepped out on the porch to sample the day. A heavy overcast locked the morning away under an oppressive flatness. Over the bluff ridge to the west, the quiet hush of rain falling at great distance greeted him. He had heard it many times, a rain squall line rolling slowly west to east. He guessed how many seconds the drops would take to reach the cabin steps as the wet advanced. Twenty seconds, he thought. He counted down the time.
To the second the drops arrived. What he saw chilled him to the marrow. Rain had not come calling. Instead, tiny flakes of volcanic ash fell through the atmosphere mingling with countless specks of rock powder. Within seconds the volume of the ash fall drew an acoustic blanket over the village, muffling all sound. Buildings and trees disappeared one by one until it seemed Abel had developed cataracts over his eyes and could no longer see shapes.
Bobcat had feared this hour; now Abel knew why.
Standing in the cabin doorway, the town’s founder caught a glimpse of an amorphous shape hurtling through the ash shroud. The village’s communications czar arrived on the run, his face below the eyes fitted with a water-soaked bandana hastily ripped from any fabric he could scrounge. He swept Abel aside as he blew into the household.
“Close the door, close the door, man,” yowled the new arrival. Abel obliged and sealed the volcanic storm outside. Bobcat yanked the covering from his face and barred his teeth. “Abel, listen to me. This shit is airborne rock. It’s as heavy as stone. As it accumulates, it will get heavier and heavier.”
“You told me the other day,” stammered Abel.
Bobcat darted to a window and peered out. “I think most of the rooflines are steep enough to shed the ash. But the greenhouse glass, it’s not going to take too much of this. Their pitch might not be enough of an angle.”
“How much could they hold?”
“They won’t hold a foot, I’m sure of it. It has to come off. Pull, push, rake, shovel, whatever. It’s got to go!”
“How much of this stuff is going to come down?”
“I don’t know, man. Maybe one hell of a lot.”
“How much is a hell of a lot?” Abel’s voice swelled in volume.
“I don’t know,” Bobcat said emphatically.
“Well, give me some idea.”
“Okay,” Bobcat frowned, “if you want some bad news.”
“Let’s have it!”
“A dozen years ago I had the pleasure of standing in a new building excavation a dozen feet below ground level, a couple of hours northeast of Lincoln, Nebraska—the town of Royal, I think it was. I attended the opening of a museum, a great bone yard, a graveyard filled with creatures called Teleoceras. Paleontologists had unearthed them. They were something like rhinos that lived on the Great Plains about ten million years ago. They were big. They lived in herds of many dozens if not hundreds.”
“Yeah, so what. Who gives a damn?” Abel could not fathom where his friend was heading with his herd of rhinos.
“You know, they all died together,” Bobcat continued. “They all died at the very same time—bulls, cows, calves, newborn—all of them.”
“What are you driving at, damn it all?”
“They suffocated because their lungs filled with volcanic ash. It’s like breathing broken glass. Those animals were covered with an eight-foot layer of it. I was standing in it. That’s eight feet, man! The animals were at the bottom of that garbage.”
Abel flinched.
Bobcat paused for some seconds. “The ash that those creatures were buried in did not come from nearby, of course, not from Nebraska. The chemical signature of the ash was traced to Idaho, several hundred miles west of Yellowstone.”
Abel uttered not a peep.
“Abel, the crap that killed those animals is precisely the same stuff coming down on our noggins right now. I think it would be a very good policy to get it off the greenhouse glass.”
Young Pelee, stirred by loud voices downstairs, left her bed and bounded down the cabin stairway two steps at a time only to stop abruptly when Bobcat came into view. Abel’s daughter ogled the man. An expression of revulsion skewed her youthful face, as if she had smelled something foul.
“What’s all over you, buckwheat flour?” blurted the child.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Three nights in a sleeping bag on the sixth floor of the Bess Truman Tower was more than enough. Winnie headed for home. Since the opening ash salvos, many of her work colleagues in far-flung suburbs had not made it into the city to work. Winnie was the exception. Twice now she had jogged in unstable footing the twelve miles from Parkville to Kansas City, a medical mask over her mouth and nose. She made the half-marathon run in a little under three hours, only to stay at the office for days on end.
She slipped a day-pack on her back, filled a bottle of water from the last drops remaining in a water cooler, exited the building and ran out to impassable Sixth Street. She turned north on Grand Boulevard and ran downhill under the interstate overpass and out to City Market beyond. Light ash was still falling and the air was lousy with windblown gray dust off the western plains. Everywhere she ran, her feet came down in volcanic drifts. She paced in the car lanes where the thirty inches of ash in the city had been packed down somewhat before most traffic ceased moving.
At City Market she slowed to survey the long rows of empty open-air vendor stalls sheltered beneath rambling metal roofs. The farmers’ market was a venerated city institution, one of the Midwest’s largest and longest lived. There wasn’t a soul hawking at a booth in the vast arcade as Winnie entered the grounds. It was nearly impossible for anyone to get to town, let alone farmers with trucks and pickups loaded with produce and farm staples from farms thirty, fifty, even 100 miles away. The food had stopped coming. The sight of City Market without so much as a storage carrot or a red greenhouse tomato on display gave Winnie gooseflesh.