I was on my hands and knees, dumb with disbelief.
Lightning coruscated the sky and winds eddied madly around me as the eruption engendered its own weather system.
And as the flow finally lost momentum, its attendant cloud untethered itself and, borne by the winds, came back across the valley and up over the town’s bones. If Pika Canyon had been spared by the downflow it was surely caught on the way back up, for nothing was going to be spared because the cloud now rose to the very base of Mammoth Mountain and slowly began to boil up its flanks.
I knew it must rise to bury the Inn and Lodge and lifts and then scale the final heights of the mountain to overtop this summit.
As they died below, I would die right here on my knees.
But the cloud remained simmering far below. The onslaught came from another direction. Red Mountain had not yet finished its work. It spouted a new column, and the violent winds skimmed off tephra and swept it westward, toward my summit. Ash began to fall on me like powdery snow, thick and suffocating, and then I was pelted with a rain of pumice stones, and within the space of time it took me to come alive and struggle to my feet a gloom had fallen so dense that I could not see the gondola station. I switched on my headlamp and bent, curling away from the downpour, and started down the knoll. Something cold and wet hit my neck. I put out my hand and caught ashfall and it was no longer dry and powdery but falling wet like a thin stream of oatmeal. Water in the air — condensing steam.
I fell. I snapped out of my skis and continued on foot. The ground was rotting beneath me and the rain of thin cement poured in a curtain off the rim of my helmet. The gloom had become so thick, so Stygian, that it was hopeless.
I could not find my way back. I could not help them down below. I could do no good.
Wandering, aimless, I smacked into concrete.
It made no difference to me, but my gut led me inside. I closed the door and sat in a circle of light made by Jimbo’s headlamp. My mind dulled. I had no more terror, no thoughts really, save one. I can do no good.
The noise outside was formless, sounds of wind and explosions and pelting ashfall merged to a monochromatic din.
Sometime later, I thought to call Bridgeport. I could raise nothing but static. I cracked the door and peered out. It was lighter outside than inside. I changed from ski boots to hiking boots, shouldered my pack, and trudged outside.
The sky, in every direction, was a damp gray-white fog. It seemed the output of ash had lessened, or the capricious winds had driven the bulk of it elsewhere. I heard no roaring, saw nothing but fog.
Once again, I climbed the knoll. The footing was tricky — everywhere a crust of ash, ice, cinders, and mud, and in places I could tread upon it and in places my boots punched through to a slurry like setting cement. I reached the vista point and started down Dave’s Run, which disappeared below in fog, but as the angle steepened the stuff beneath my boots began to slide. I scrambled backward, sinking into it now. Couldn’t get free. Here was the old nightmare, only I couldn’t run and I didn’t scream because I no longer felt any need to escape. I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled back up and anchored there at the summit.
I’d wait. In time, the stuff would congeal enough for me to go down and search. I had nothing better to do than wait.
Sometime later, the mountain tried to shake me off.
There was a screech, another class of roar in my growing catalog of beastly sounds, and I thought, here it comes. But the mountain did not explode. The sounds grew and the ground shivered and I knew, regaining enough of my senses to recognize the quirks of this latest of beasts.
The flanks of the mountain seemed to heave. Far down as I could see, the entire pack of muck was in motion, fluidized, slopping downhill and disappearing into the fog, and what was left behind was ground stripped raw. This beast was named lahar—a landslide of volcanic debris made fluid by steam-wetted ashfall and melted snow. What this debris flow did farther downslope as it picked up boulders and trees and chairlift pilings and speed was beyond my sight and desire to know.
Within the gray avalanche below, for a moment, I thought I saw a flash of neon yellow plumage, but the color disappeared so quickly I knew it must have been a hallucination.
I knew only that they were dead down there.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I waited until the rumbling abated, then started down.
Where the downslope side of the knoll steepened, its crust had crevassed and sheared off, and so I waded out of the mucky stuff onto a hardened mudcap. I descended slowly, automatically scanning for loose rocks and cornices but I saw nothing left capable of avalanching. I looked up; the gondola towers just outside the station stood. Downhill, they were gone.
It was primeval and I wandered lost down the landscape.
As I walked I chafed at the skin of cement which coated every exposed inch of flesh. It came off in chips and left my face burning.
I came to a rise and far down the flank of the mountain I saw shapes. Towers? No, stumps. I tried to pierce the ashy fog. I looked up, saw how far I’d come, and calculated that the stumps must be the remains of the mid-station.
Then something was left standing. A brick or two. Not enough, though, to shelter four fragile packages of flesh and bone. Too far down, anyway. Even had they struck out for shelter at the first sight and sound of the cataclysm, they surely could not have reached the mid-station.
But I had nowhere else to go.
I got all the way down to the mid, and I would have kept going except the lumpy remains reminded me of something I’d read in the manual — Mike’s bible. I’d been reading about the mechanics of the gondola, wondering if we dared risk riding it again, but there was more to the pages, including a maintenance map of the mountain. I closed my eyes and saw the page, saw the green square near the top of Ricochet run. Just at the patrolled boundary, a green square indicated a maintenance shed. I thought this over. Mike had devoured the manual; Mike would know about the shed. If they had come far enough up Dave’s Run when Red Mountain went pyro, they might have struck out for the shed and reached it before the lahar hit.
I angled back up the mountain.
Once, I raised my eyes from the strange pitted asphalt-clad ground to look beyond, eastward. There was no horizon, no caldera, nothing below the mountain but bands and layers and eddies of ash. There was no town down there, certainly. But the scalped mountain was real enough.
I began to cry, plodding uphill, the caustic ash in the goggles washing into my eyes.
In time, through the fog, something took shape. Should be the shed. I traversed the fall line, and as I drew nearer the shape resolved into walls and a bit of roof. The shed’s high enough on the mountain, I saw dully, that the lahar had not yet gathered enough force to obliterate. It had merely torn the building in half, and one half was gone.
No door to enter so I clambered over mud-caked bricks. Inside looked like outside. Rubble and muck. A twisted I-beam. In the corner where the two standing walls met, where there remained a semblance of structural integrity, there was a body.
I stood rooted. Please, not Walter. Not Eric. I let out a sound and the head slowly turned. He’s alive, and everything changed and I scrambled forward yelling but as I knelt and struck my knee on hard metal I recognized this body — body and sled united. Krom. I tore around the rest of the room, finding nothing that could be human. They were gone, then. Krom, in the corner, groaned. Krom’s survived, on pain. I will be forever stumbling across his body.
I came over. “Where are they?”
“Get it off.” The voice was muffled, nearly unrecognizable.