“Just Gene will be fine. You have activity?”
“We do,” she replied. “Wasn’t big. Looks like it happened six hours ago, at least from our readouts. Nothing major. A two pointer. The town shook a little.”
“So this is the epicenter?” Gene asked.
April nodded.
Susan added, “This didn’t just happen when I called you. It happened hours beforehand, we think. We’ll know more later, FBI is checking transactions from stores. Phone signals. That sort of thing. The town is removed so it was unnoticed at first.”
“Seems everyone knows now,” Gene said. “Did you see the news?”
“The news knows something is up. They just don’t know what. This way.” She waved her hand and walked beyond the van to behind the body shop building.
At first it looked like just a field or farm and then Gene saw it.
Rocks and dirt covered the ground like snow and fifty feet away was a long mound of dirt, at least ten feet high. As if a bulldozer had pushed it.
Gene knew that wasn’t the case.
He ran to the mound and just as he suspected it wasn’t a line, he climbed to the top to see. The massive amount of dirt was a circle that formed around a huge, perfectly round hole in the ground.
The hole had to be at least fifty feet in diameter and more than a hundred feet deep.
“Holy shit.” Nervously, Gene undid the latch on his bag and pulled out a handheld reader. “April,” he called to her, “Did you do readings?”
“We just got here,” she replied. “We just placed sensors.”
Gene nodded and turned on the red gadget. He extended the small wand, moved it around. His eyes stay transfixed on the meter readings.
“Anything?” Susan asked.
Gene shook his head. “Let me try something else.” He made a knob adjustment and his eyes widened. Hurriedly, he slid down the mound and held the wand outward. He walked around further back, taking readings as far back as the body shop. Then he returned to the crater in the ground and the dirt there.
Crouching down, he did one more reading, then stood and took off his mask.
“Gene?” Susan asked in shock. “What are you doing?”
“It’s fine. It’s safe now. It’s definitely not biological,” Gene said. “It’s methane.”
<><><><>
Fort Collins, CO
When Tom Foster said he didn’t travel much, he wasn’t kidding. More so, he just didn’t fly. In fact, the last time he flew he was young and they still served food on the plane, and if he remembered correctly, his father made them sit in the ‘smoking’ section.
Flying just wasn’t his thing. He didn’t place taking family vacations under the category of travel. Mainly because they drove to their destination and the places they did go to were cheap and close.
Tom was never a rich man. He worked hard his entire life, he made good money, but by the time he really achieved that level of income where he could save some money, his wife met someone else and left him. That was about the same time his youngest son, Gabe, discovered that getting in trouble was a new way of life.
Like most siblings, Gabe and his brother were complete opposites. It was strange because when they were teens, Gabe was responsible and Owen was the mouthy one. Then life seemed balanced when the boys were in their twenties.
He guessed somewhere in there Gabe decided he didn’t want to be the good guy any longer. He was still a nice kid, but he made horrible decisions, like leaving his wife of three years for a stripper he met in another county.
Suddenly, Tom sprouted gray hair after gray hair the more he had to bail Gabe out of one spot of trouble or another. He swore Gabe would never live to see his thirtieth birthday. He did, but that thirtieth birthday was certainly iffy.
In a way, bad news for Gabe wasn’t always bad, it helped keep his mind off the breakup.
Tom wasn’t surprised or devastated like he thought he’d be when Julie left him. He saw it coming. Admittedly, Tom was never around, he was far too focused on Gabe and they had married when they were merely twenty. He just wanted her to be happy. Not so much that he wanted to give her that boat load of court ordered alimony each month.
In fact, alimony and Gabe were the reasons for the vacation.
Julie finally remarried and the alimony stopped, and Gabe looked as if he were finally finding his way.
A cause to celebrate.
Then again, poor Owen was like, “And Dad, what exactly am I celebrating?”
Tom told him, “The fact that you’re hearing me talk to you about your brother far less.”
“I’ll celebrate when a little more time goes by,” Owen had told him. “However, I won’t pass up a trip to Vegas.”
Both his sons knew it was a big thing for Tom to get on a plane, even if it wasn’t that long of a flight.
As he packed his bag in his room, he thought about the day he told his sons they were gonna take a trip to Vegas.
“How about I get a hold of a travel agent and we get these plans in motion,” Tom said.
They both made fun of him. It wasn’t like they were taking some exotic vacation, they were going to Las Vegas, the sort of trip that could be booked right on line.
Admittedly, Tom’s knowledge of computers and the internet was limited to a single social media account where most of his posts were people ‘tagging’ him, and that smart phone Owen got him for his fiftieth.
Two years later, Tom was still discovering cool things about it.
Of course, when he was confused, he just called Owen. After all, Owen worked with phones
