Maybe it wouldn’t blow now. Maybe it wouldn’t blow at all. Maybe the two eruptions would do whatever they did and then subside, leaving Yellowstone changed and damaged but still a place someone in his right mind- someone not a geologist, in other words-might want to visit. big explosion wouldn’t happen for another few thousand years or another few tens of thousands of years.
Maybe. But Kelly couldn’t make herself believe it.
While she stewed, the pilot talked with people who weren’t in the helicopter. At last, he said, “Okay. This is what I’ve cooked up. A car’ll be waiting for you at the Butte airport. That’s about as far as I can go on my fuel load. One of you people has a place in Missoula, right?”
Daniel was in the other whirlybird. Somebody out there had a feel for what was going on. Missoula was about 120 miles northwest up I-90 from Butte. If the supervolcano blew, most of what it blasted into the air would go in the other direction. Missoula might get some, but probably wouldn’t get a lot.
And if the eruption held off, Kelly could head back to California. Ruth could go to Utah… assuming anyone would want to go to Utah in the shadow of the big blast. Larry mostly hung out in and around Yellowstone. Knowing him, he might be me-shuggeh enough to head back if he got some kind, any kind, of excuse.
Meanwhile… “Thanks,” she said, a whisker ahead of Larry. She had no idea what Daniel’s place was like. If they couldn’t crash on him… Well, Missoula was bound to have motels. Hotels, even. Times like this were why God made plastic. She might even get the Berkeley Geology Department to reimburse her. Then again, given California’s never-ending budget woes, she might not.
One more thing she could worry about later, if she was still alive to worry about it.
Once they got over the Gallatin Range, they were out of the mountains and forests and roaring along above ranch country. The copter flew much lower than the airliners that had been Kelly’s only source of views of the ground from on high. She could see individual cows and even sheep from the herds, and individual cars scattered along the pale asphalt of country roads that hadn’t been repaved in a long time and got so little wear that they wouldn’t need to be for quite a while yet.
There was I-90 up ahead. Kelly had wondered if it would be packed solid with cars and RVs full of people fleeing Yellowstone, but it wasn’t. Probably weren’t that many left to flee any more.
The Interstate was two lanes wide in each direction. But for the lack of traffic lights, that would have been a boulevard in L.A. or the Bay Area. When your whole state was almost the size of California but held fewer than a million people, you could have a four-lane main highway and go like hell instead of sitting stuck in traffic on a freeway twelve lanes wide.
“Bert Mooney Airport coming up,” the pilot said in due course. Kelly idly wondered who Bert Mooney was or had been. The pilot did things with his stick-with the collective, he called it, as if it were a farm in the extinct Soviet Union. The helicopter descended. Not far away, so did the one carrying Ruth and Daniel.
Whoever Bert Mooney might have been, the two helicopters were his airport’s only current business. Kelly was used to airports like LAX and San Francisco and Oakland. That green Ford sitting there near the terminal couldn’t be the car they’d take away… could it?
“There’s your wheels, I expect,” the pilot said, pointing to it. Sometimes simplicity had advantages.
Touchdown on the tarmac a moment later was surprisingly gentle. The other chopper landed three or four seconds after Kelly and Larry’s. A fuel truck pulled up and waited for their rotorsto stop spinning.
Kelly took off her helmet. Now, with the motor cut, it wasn’t deafening in here. “Thanks more than I know how to tell you,” she said.
“Amen,” Larry agreed.
“Not a big deal. Might not’ve been anything at all,” the pilot answered. “Sometimes you’d sooner be safe than sorry, is all. Good luck to you guys.”
“You, too,” Kelly said as he opened the canopy and she scrambled out. Larry followed her. Ruth and Daniel got out of the other helicopter. They all started dogtrotting across the tarmac toward the car. Kelly presumed it was a rental. She didn’t know for sure, but that was one more thing she could worry about later. After they got to Missoula seemed a pretty good time.
Halfway to the green Ford, Larry suddenly stopped. Intent only on getting to the car and getting onto I-90, Kelly sent him an annoyed glare. “What’s the matter with you?” she snapped.
Instead of answering with words, he pointed southeast, over the top of the low, flat-roofed terminal building. Kelly’s gaze automatically followed his index finger. That great, black, swelling, leaping cloud hadn’t been there when they touched down a minute before. It grew every second. Even across a couple of hundred miles, Kelly could see the lightning bolts lashing around its edges. Which meant they were how big? How bright? Some questions either answered themselves or didn’t really need answering, one.
“Oh, my God,” Kelly whispered. Ruth crossed herself. Kelly hadn’t known she was Catholic. With a last name like Marquez, it was a good bet, though. Maybe Ruth hadn’t thought about being Catholic herself any time lately. Seeing… that ahead was the kind of thing that would remind you.
“Why isn’t there any noise?” Daniel asked. “Why isn’t the ground shaking?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll feel it. We’ll hear it, too,” Larry answered. “The earthquake waves and the sound waves haven’t got here yet. But they will.” He looked as grim as a phlegmatic person could. “Oh, boy, will they ever. People heard Krakatoa two thousand miles away, and Krakatoa was only a fart in a bathtub next to this.”
“What would have happened to us if we’d been in the air when the sound wave or shock wave or whatever you want to call it hit us?” Ruth said.
Kelly looked back at the helicopter pilot. He was staring toward Yellowstone, too. Even through the chopper’s Plexiglas canopy, she could see his mouth hanging open. “What happens to a fly when the swatter comes down?” she said. If you hit a fly with a swatter the size of a house, that probably came closer to describing the force matchup.
None of them went any closer to the car. Out here in the open, they were about as safe as they could be. Even if the terminal building fell over, it wouldn’t fall on them. “I think we ought to get down,” Larry said. “You guys are too young to remember ‘Drop!’ drills, but you know about ’em, right?”
An officious fifth-grade teacher from days gone by would have yelled at Kelly for bad form, but she didn’t care. She assumed the classic position on the pavement, which was much smoother than the parking lot where she’d spent the night before-the parking lot that was now one tiny puff in that insanely huge mass of smoke and dust. Drop drills were designed to protect you against Russian H-bombs. What did you do when something way, way bigger than an H-bomb went off not nearly far enough away?
“Whoa, Nelly!” Larry yelled when the shaking started. Getting down was a good idea, because Kelly knew she couldn’t have stayed on her feet. She’d wondered what the Richter reading for a supervolcano would be. It was enormous, or whatever one step higher than enormous was. She’d put all this distance between herself and the epicenter, and she was still getting tossed around like a rag doll.
It didn’t want to ease up, either. Like the Energizer Bunny, it kept going and going and… How much energy was being released all at once? The calculator inside her head said TILT.
Windows in the airport terminal broke. One of the helicopters that had flown the geologists out of Yellowstone went over onto its side. Luckily, the pilot was still in his safety harness, so he might be okay. Even more luckily, neither copter had started refueling. Everybody’d stopped to gape at the cataclysm off in Yellowstone.
The ground was still shaking when the wind came. Blast from an atomic bomb could wreck things far away from the actual explosion. The roar came at the speed of sound. It had had plenty of distance to attenuate, and had gone around and over a couple of mountain ranges on the way. That meant it was just far and away the loudest thing Kelly had ever heard in her life.
Somewhere she’d read that artillerymen yelled to help equalize the pressure on their ears. She tried it. It couldn’t possibly hurt. And she felt like screaming any which way. She blew twenty or thirty feet down the runway, picking up more bumps and bruises and scrapes. If she hadn’t had her hands up to her face, that would have been worse, too.
Part of the terminal did fall in on itself about then. Knocked down by the wind roaring around and through it? Flattened by the unending quakes? Wrecked by nothing more than the vibration from the great roar? Kelly would have checked all of the above on a multiple-choice test.
The green Ford didn’t flip over. That was something. How much, she wasn’t so sure. Could they make it to Missoula? She’d traveled I-90 before. As she did in many parts of the country, she’d noticed how spindly the
