Rain of Fire (2 page)

“Somebody there?” The raspy voice of Institute Director Stanton Jameson and the rose circlet of his cigarette reassured her.

Nearly thirty years ago, when Kyle arrived at Utah with all her possessions crammed into a rusting Pinto, Professor Stanton had been a lifesaver. His answer to her query about student housing had been to phone his wife to make up their guest room. Four years later, when Kyle completed her Ph.D., she was still boarding in their home.

“Who is that?” This time something querulous in Stanton’s tone alarmed her.

With three long strides, she reached the light switch.

Flooded with fluorescence, the Institute’s nerve center lay revealed. Triple banks of seismographs tracked Earth’s pulse, their pens tracing a record of crustal motion at remote stations all over the Mountain West. In this day of computers, there was something satisfying about the old-fashioned drum with a strip chart tracing.

Inhaling the familiar ink smell, Kyle checked out the data for Yellowstone Park and nearby Hebgen Lake. Parallel rows of straight lines meant all was quiet, but her scalp prickled.

She chalked it up to Stanton’s gray and disheveled appearance. He half-reclined on a faded plaid couch left behind by some graduate student, a cowlick in his faded umber hair. The furrows beside his mouth etched deeper than usual.

“What were you doing sitting in the dark?” She tried to keep alarm out of her voice.

“I’m … not sure. I believe I’ve been here … all night.”

Stanton was indeed dressed in the same gray suit and red tie he’d had on yesterday. Always a snappy dresser, he regularly gave Kyle a ration of grief over her workweek uniform, well-worn jeans and a pale blue cotton shirt rolled at the cuffs. Her excuse was that having grown to almost six feet, with her father’s height and her mother’s slender strength, her arms overshot most sleeves. With her dark hair pulled back from her oval face into a thick braid, she favored silver and turquoise accents that played up her exotic looks, a combination of Nez Perce, Tuscan, and central European ancestry.

This morning Stanton didn’t look up to giving her a hard time about anything.

“Are you all right?” She went and knelt beside the sofa, putting a hand on his. His flesh felt chilled, and her heart beat faster as she wondered if she should call for help.

“Don’t hover,” he ordered.

With reluctance, she drew back and watched him draw himself together, pulling in bits and pieces, a lolling leg here, a lazy arm there. Finally, he stood and dragged on his smoke, exhaling a small wreath.

Kyle fanned the cloud. That part of her past she’d managed to kick, but had no doubt she could be back to a pack a day in no time.

“Coffee?” she suggested.

“Caffeine,” Stanton said in a stronger voice.

Relieved, she walked with him toward the kitchen down a hall lined with maps of earthquake prone areas of the world. Once he was fully alert, they needed to talk about next Monday’s annual funding meeting. Although having a Consortium of the Institute, the National Park Service, and the United States Geological Survey brought valuable resources to earthquake and volcano research, Kyle dreaded the budgeting chaos.

In the kitchen lounge where a bulletin board advertised used textbooks, pizza delivery, and ‘roommates wanted,’ she passed a steaming cup into Stanton’s unsteady hands.

“Does Leila know where you’ve been all night?”

He looked confused, then brightened. “She called me on my cell. I told her I was too tired to drive safely.”

“You should go home for a shower and breakfast.”

“Soon as I finish my coffee.” Stanton nodded. “Forty years and we’ve seldom spent a night apart.”

As Kyle studied him with a worried eye, he flipped on the TV he usually kept tuned to the stock market. Onscreen, Monty Muckleroy, a corpulent Los Angeles talk show host, sat on his signature, striped sofa. He faced a man with an aging hippie’s halo of curly hair.

“Well, I’m damned,” Kyle said. “It’s Brock Hobart.”

Fellow scientist Brock had developed a bit more salt than pepper in his hair in the years since she’d last seen him, but he looked as sure of himself as ever, going on national television in an academic uniform of tweed jacket over jeans. When she and Brock had worked together at USGS in Menlo Park, he’d seemed a regular guy. And though in recent years he had moved away from serious science toward the fringe, Kyle followed his earthquake predictions on the Web with the perverse fascination of a bird watching a cat approach.

“Come on, Brock,” Monty urged. “The audience is waiting for your latest prediction.”

The studio came alive with calls of “Yeah,” “All right,” and “What’s shakin’?”

Brock shot the camera a conspiratorial look. “There’s a reason I chose this morning to come on the show. With a full moon out there, we’ve got the earth, sun, and moon in alignment with Venus and Mars.”

“What does that mean?” Monty played the straight man.

Kyle knew what it meant. Gravitation fields were at a maximum, making for the largest tides in years. Sometimes it did seem that more earthquakes happened under these conditions, but she wouldn’t have stuck her neck out like she assumed Brock was about to do.

Sure enough, he jabbed a finger at Monty. “Earth tides set up the scenario for a quake waiting to happen.”

“Ooh,” from the audience.

“You mean today?” Monty gripped the couch’s arm. “Like this morning?”

Brock nodded.

“Gutsy,” Stanton observed, lighting another cigarette in defiance of university smoking regulations.

Her heart rate accelerating, Kyle mentally agreed it took brass balls to go on national television and declare an earthquake was about to take place.

“There you have it.” Monty sounded subdued, as though his bluff as well as his guest’s was about to be called. “Straight from Brock Hobart, a Stanford Ph.D. and former scientist at the United States Geological Survey.”

In his typical fashion, Brock hadn’t predicted where the quake would take place.

“When we come back,” Monty enticed, “we’ll talk to Laurie, who was kidnapped by aliens.” Music swelled and the studio audience applauded.

“Little green men,” Stanton mused, “and earthquakes on demand.”

But, Kyle realized, though most geologists made fun of Brock with his website and quake predictions, didn’t it strike a chord in her? Deep down, didn’t she want to believe she could someday save some other little girl a lifetime of nightmares?

Stanton clicked off the TV. In the silence, she heard a buzzing from the lab.

Her fingers curled and she pushed away thoughts of the Wasatch Fault skirting the base of the hill the Institute sat upon. The zone of unstable earth was believed capable of producing a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, as strong as the one she’d survived at Hebgen Lake. Hoping their luck had not run out, she slid a hand onto the kitchen counter, the way a mother might check her child’s forehead for fever.

Buoyed by the solid feel of the Formica, she turned to Stanton. “The alarm.” His hearing wasn’t what it once was.

In the same moment, the pager on her belt began to vibrate, an electronic leash that connected her to the Institute 24/7. Whenever it went off, no matter where she was, a stab of anxiety pierced her.

She raced to the lab, where pens traced dark arcs on the strip charts. Taking a seat before one of the computer monitors, Kyle typed in quick commands, connecting to the National Earthquake Information Center in Boulder.

Stanton came up behind her carrying his coffee and a fresh cigarette.

Somewhere in the world, the quake continued. Kyle felt an ache in her chest for the little girl who must be crying for her parents. In Madison Canyon, her own voice had been small against the sifting and cracking of avalanches, while the earth heaved and shimmied like Jell-O.

Two minutes ticked toward three since the quake had begun. Sweat broke out down Kyle’s sides, while at the same time she felt chilled. Though there was a chance the upheaval was in some remote area, people could also be hurt, dying, crushed beneath the rubble of homes where they had felt safe.

Finally, the amplitude of the oscillation began to dampen. Kyle and Stanton waited while the Earthquake Center calculated the location of the epicenter using triangulation of multiple stations. The first bulletin came up.

A major earthquake occurred near Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on Sakhalin Island, Russia, 800 miles (1330 km) north of Tokyo, Japan, at 7:10 AM Mountain Daylight Time today, September 10
^th
(September 11
^th
at 12:10 AM local time.)

Sakhalin lay just off the east coast of Siberia, part of the ‘ring of fire’ encircling the Pacific. Just to the south lay Japan, with its populous coasts and its own unstable ground.

A preliminary magnitude of 7.3 was computed. This area has a history of large earthquakes. On August 4, 2000, a 7.0 struck 120 miles (200 km) north. In addition, on May 27, 1995, a magnitude 7.5 shook the Neftegorsk area 240 miles (400 km) north, killing 2,000 people and causing severe damage
.

Kyle didn’t want to feel relief that disaster struck faceless foreign victims, for she had lived the havoc wreaked by earthquakes and volcanoes … both as a child and as a scientist. Nevertheless, she was fiercely glad this morning’s quake wasn’t happening in Yellowstone where she would be forced to deal with it. Her love-hate relationship with the park region balanced uneasily at best.

Looking at a wall map showing the Pacific and the earthquake epicenters and volcanic terrains surrounding it, she knew it was too soon to feel relief. Sometimes, whether because of celestial alignments or seismic waves propagating through the planet, quakes tended to happen in widely varying locales in a sort of chain reaction.

Behind her, Stanton remained silent. Kyle assumed he was watching the monitor, but with a sudden jerky move, he seized her arm. Thinking he was about to say something about Brock Hobart’s uncanny skill or blind dumb luck, she turned to him.

Instead of speaking, he gave a small gasp. His hand clutched her like a claw even as his body began to sag.

Leaping to cushion his fall, she found him a dead weight. His cup hit the floor with a clatter and rolled under a table. A trail of smoke curled from his cigarette, dropped from nerveless fingers.

“Kyle, thank God you’re here.” Stanton’s wife Leila entered the ER, her heels tapping on the tile. The sixty-five-year-old moved with the grace of a much younger woman.

“I was with him when he had the stroke,” Kyle said.

Going into Leila’s embrace, she was struck anew by how fine-boned her friend was, draped in the delicate softness of a gray silk dress. For the first time since Stanton’s collapse, tears pricked Kyle’s eyelids. She’d been too busy calling 911, screaming in vain down the hallway for anyone else there that early in the morning, and waiting by his side for the paramedics.

Leila must have felt the change in her, for her arms wrapped tighter. “God, Kyle, not Stanton.”

Her anguish was all it took to set Kyle’s dammed-up tears flowing. Though the age difference between the Jamesons and her was not so great that they could have been her parents, she had always treasured both Leila and Stanton as dearly as though they were bound to her by blood. Especially after losing her maternal grandmother, who had raised her after Hebgen Lake. Being in a hospital reminded her of Franny’s last days and that ultimately, nobody got out alive.

“How is he?” Leila pulled back and wiped her wet face without shame.

“They’re doing a CT scan.” Kyle dashed at the salt tears on her own cheek. “After that, he’ll be moved to a room.”

The two women took seats in a small waiting area. A tattered copy of yesterday’s newspaper littered the floor, but Kyle’s focus was too shattered for her to read. She tried not to watch the wall clock as its hand leaped forward to mark each interminable minute. Though dry-mouthed, she did not dare leave for coffee.

After an hour’s wait, she thought she was prepared. However, when she pushed open the door of Stanton’s hospital room, she found out otherwise. He lay slumped on his side with his eyes closed, his skin as ghostlike as the transparent tubes connecting his IV bag.

Leila’s gaze rested upon her husband. They had been friends first, or so the story went, but her look bespoke a deep and abiding love, one Kyle had always envied. After a disastrous relationship of her own when she was twenty, Kyle had believed up into her forties that she’d someday meet the right man.

“The doctor said he was awake,” Leila murmured.

“Should we let him sleep … or maybe call somebody?”

Blue-veined eyelids flickered then opened. “Stop that infernal whispering.” Stanton’s voice, though weak, projected attitude.

Leila tugged Kyle along with her to his bedside. “Look who’s here?”

“I see who’s whispering.” He fixed them with a look composed half of iron will and half of melted wax where the left side of his face sagged.

When he reached out with his good right hand, Kyle met him. She kept her eyes on his, wondering if he could see out of them both. Part of her wanted to cry or run, but all they had been for each other kept her in place. Yet, as Stanton looked toward his wife, Kyle realized she should leave them. If, God forbid, he did not make it through this, he and Leila deserved their time together.