I contacted Bridgeport. They had no advice.
Fifteen minutes gone by. I got to work, unloading the gondola and setting up house. Always the female who gets stuck. I laid out the Inn’s quilts and beside those beds made a kitchen of the backpack stove and cookpot. I lit the propane lantern. I put out matches and spare fuel canisters. I organized the food. I created a first aid station and inventoried supplies. I piled beside the door skis, boots, poles, snowshoes, and climbing equipment.
My hands stung. I sat and dwelt on that awhile. Whether to reapply ointment and rebandage, whether there was permanent damage. Hurts enough. Unlike Krom, I did not find that pain got rid of fear.
Forty-five minutes. Eric should be with them now. They should be climbing up.
Quakes. Magma on the move somewhere.
Where were they? A zillion things could have gone wrong. Eric fell and broke his leg. Eric couldn’t find them. They’d been caught in an avalanche. The sled broke a runner. Eric decided it was easier to get them down to the mid-station.
I spent half an hour going through the manual. If they’d gone down to the mid, was it insane to bring them back up on the gondola?
Were they having a picnic down there?
I put on jacket, helmet, goggles, mask and hurried outside and up to the vista point. Eric’s ski tracks were still visible. No sign of any living creature. No color but gray.
I sat in the ash and hugged my legs. The world at my feet. A dozen ways to look, even in ash, and what I chose to look at was the snake in the sleeping bag. I’d moved well beyond the stage of hearing the hissing and fearing what I’d find. I knew what I’d find and yet, perversely, I opened the bag and looked. Maybe the thing was asleep.
It wasn’t. The eruptive column grown into a larger and fatter snake.
I gave myself up to it and watched in grudging awe.
I should be taking notes. Recording the progression of events. Lindsay would. Unparalleled observation point up here. I had no fieldbook so I made mental notes. Estimated height of the eruptive column, estimated diameter. Color. Wind direction. Estimated speed at which the column climbed. Estimated composition of the ash.
I caught ash on my glove, like snowflakes, and studied it. Fluffy. This was not phreatic ash — ash pulverized from old rock. This was new stuff. This was ash from juvenile magma. It made my heart turn over. Not that the phreatic eruptions weren’t nasty enough beasts in and of themselves, but this new phase, this magmatic phase, was the stuff of my nightmares.
I stared down Dave’s Run. No sign of them below. Nothing to note. No estimated speed of climb.
Twenty minutes. I went back for my gear.
I dumped my pack and started fresh. Focus. Essentials. No kitchen sink this time. I couldn’t find my pocket knife. I wanted my knife. My eye fell on Walter’s pack, one of the packs Eric hadn’t thrown overboard. The pack bulged — it held whatever Walter had taken from the Explorer when he’d abandoned the evac and headed for town. Maybe a knife in there.
Or maybe I just needed the excuse.
I found his knife but I didn’t stop there. I looked for the love letters, not really believing in the love letters, and indeed did not find them but I did find something that was surely of value to Walter, because it was heavy and yet he had hauled it into exile — wrapped in a sweater for protection.
It was an oblong box, and for just a tick I thought it must have been hers, because its purpose was to monitor the heartbeat of the volcano. Then I remembered. The image formed — Krom with this device at Hot Creek, measuring the stinging gas. Clever little thing, his design. I’d been impressed. And Walter must have been impressed as well, when he’d come across it, or he wouldn’t have stowed it in his pack.
Another image — Walter at her safe. Is Krom there? I couldn’t see.
I couldn’t see what it meant. Why did Lindsay have Krom’s monitor in her safe? And why did Walter take it?
I fiddled with the switches. It was dead. I opened the battery door. Power supply, but no juice. It was dead and silent and told me nothing.
But it sure must have spoken to Walter. And to Krom. Walter and Krom, trading hard looks. Walter waving off all help loading his gear.
I’d bet Krom down there on the mountain knew that Walter had found Krom’s monitor in Lindsay’s safe — and why it mattered.
I returned the monitor to Walter’s pack, but I pocketed his knife. I radioed Bridgeport and reported landmarks and routes. Bridgeport had maps; they could do the coordinates. I put on ski boots, shouldered my pack, grabbed skis and poles, and went. I clumped up the knoll, fastened into my skis, and started to push off. Which way? Would they still be down in East Bowl, or had they already passed the saddle? Because it made a difference. I had a choice of runs. I stared through ash. Nobody. Nothing. Which way?
There was a sound, or rather an absence of sound, that turned my head.
I took a look at the eruption rising from Red Mountain.
The snake was still there, fatter than ever. Lazy, like it had ingested a meal and was stretching to let its belly out.
I hung on the lip of the summit.
The air turned strange, a soundless stifling feeling like the sky was going to fall. There was no up, no down, only ash. And the snake. And then there came a moment of utter calm as though the vent had sucked in its breath, and the column of ash seemed to freeze in place, neither climbing nor expanding but just existing, suspended from the roof of the sky.
A shiver took me and I slipped my skis backward.
A low-pitched rumble came, from every direction, and it came with such a vibration that the sound waves rolled through the air like scattering boulders and I ducked.
With dread certainty I turned to look down at the caldera and saw the moat going, stuff flinging into the sky like the caldera had spat, and I spun toward the snake but it was holding back, deferring to the display of its parent, and when I looked back to the moat I saw that the eruption there had fractured at the top and was spreading into the branching lobes of a mushroom cloud in full nuclear fury. It fluffed and sent arcs of lightning from one hemisphere to the other.
My legs buckled and I went down, hitting my knees hard on my skis, and on my knees I turned to face Red Mountain. The snake bobbed, and when it had commanded my full attention, it struck.
The column slumped and collapsed back down upon itself, and now it became a different beast. Its surface billowed and it glowed dull red from within, superheated to incandescence. An impossible beast, a dense dry mass of gas and ash and pumice that began to flow like fluid. A horrifying beast, this pyroclastic flow, a hot venomous thing.
With a hiss it spilled over the treeline and surged out of the Lakes Basin, downward, sending glowing tongues to probe every topographic depression in its path.
The beast flashed snow into steam and white plumes lifted in its wake.
Hardly had this avalanche begun when it threw off particles of lighter material and this cloud rose from the flow like steam from hot coffee. It boiled upward and outward, piggy-backing the flow, bulging into great gray and black blooms which swelled and burst and multiplied and spawned more. And then the cloud took the lead in the race downhill.
It was like Krom’s helicopter spewing smoke.
It was worse.
The flow spilled wide at the plateau on which the town sat, one lobe shooting northward as though following the Bypass on its channel through the Jeffrey pines. The main mass continued downhill from town, down along highway 203, and then the advancing wall of gas and rock met the eruptive column in the caldera moat and then there were no longer any points of reference. The entire ground below, from the Lakes Basin down through the plateau of the town, well north beyond the Bypass, and down well into the valley of the caldera was a uniform sea of mineral foam.