Rain of Fire (49 page)

As the heat from the expended flow dissipated, cold seeped into her from her wet pants and the natural refrigeration that had kept a cone of snow unmelted through a summer’s heat.

Dark … dark, and so cold, wet…

Her fingernails dug into her palms. She squeezed her eyes shut as tears stung her lids.

She would not go back there. No matter how black it was or how violent the earthquakes, she would stay in the present. Blood slicked her hands where her nails broke the skin, the pain connecting her with reality. With her head pressed to her knees, she pretended it was dark because her eyes were closed.

Terror swelled in her chest, not for her present danger, but because she didn’t want to see … didn’t want to recall what had been walled so many years on the other side of a delicate partition within herself.

A tear broke and rolled, warm against her cold cheek. And another.

“Daddy.”

When she had dragged herself out of the freezing flood of the Madison River onto the pile of rock and grit, shivering so violently that her teeth knocked together, dawn had grayed the canyon. And in that wash of pale light, Kyle had seen her father.

He lay with his chest barely covered by the rags of dark plaid shirt. One arm reached toward her, an invitation to safety, love, and all she’d believed shattered. Sobbing, she crawled through the mud, ignoring the cuts and scrapes from sharp edges of stone.

When she touched his cold hand with her own freezing fingers, it didn’t move. She grabbed his wrist and tried to shake his arm, but it was stiff and unyielding, as though he had turned into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife in the Bible.

“Daddy?” Her voice rose.

There was something the matter with his eyes; they stared yet he did not act as though he saw her.

“Wake up!” she shrieked, prodding his chest with a fingertip and then pummeling with her fists. “Daaaadddy!”

Another of the tremors that had come without warning all night shook the Madison Valley. And in the next instant, she heard a swooshing and looked up to see the beginnings of an avalanche about a hundred feet above her and her father.

She dragged at his arm. He didn’t budge, and she saw he was buried up to his thighs. Though she felt the growing gut sense that Daddy was dead like Grandma and Grandpa Stone, gone away to Jesus, she clung to his hand.

The approaching mudslide gathered speed. And as surely as if she heard her father speak, she knew he wanted her to leave him.

Kyle scrabbled across the slope away from the hissing river of mud and rock. Slipping on the liquefied surface, she plopped back into the rising cold flood, opaque and brown like coffee with cream. It was all she could do to fight being washed away, but she flailed with her arms and legs the way Daddy had taught her. Toward a ball of tree roots and uprooted earth that protruded from the slide, something she could grasp to pull herself out.

When the ooze stopped sliding, she couldn’t see Daddy anywhere.

Perhaps an hour later, as she huddled on the shore in the mud-stiffened rags of her clothing, she heard voices and the splash of oars.

Sitting in the same fetal position in the black lava cave, Kyle realized she’d been about to give up. To let the constant earthquakes that seemed to be increasing in intensity and the darkness immobilize her.

With her back to the rock, she realized it was no longer sucking the heat from her body. Rather, it was the other way round, as the floor and walls began to radiate warmth.

In a single motion she was on her feet, touching the stone with her palms for confirmation. Such sudden and rapid heat flow this near the ground surface this far from the peak could only mean one thing, that another, even larger eruption was imminent.

With a hand on the wall and the other extended before her, she began to walk. Counting her steps, she figured she’d come less than twenty feet when the tunnel curved sharply at the place she’d run into the wall. Beyond, she saw a blessed faint glow.

Dry-mouthed, she hurried toward the entry. And stood looking up at least fifteen feet to the rounded opening in the ceiling. Not even a gecko could make its way up there; the rock around the entrance appeared too rough for even suction-cup feet, supposing one could hang upside down.

Kyle turned to the dead pine, imagining she might use it as a ladder, but try as she might, each effort to raise it was like wrestling an octopus.

She began to sweat and stripped off the parka. The cone of snow was softening and darkening as the heat flow melted it down.

“Help,” she shouted, and, her voice rising, “Wyatt!”

There could be no answer, she knew. If anyone had been out on that slope, they’d be dead. Yet, she shrieked on and on. Each time she tried to stop, the grip of hysteria was too great.

Finally, sobbing, hoarse, and feeling stupid for losing it so badly, she slumped back to the floor. Air from above chilled her sweating brow. And though she grew cold again near the entrance, she could not imagine once more walking away from the light.

How gray it already looked outside with all the particulate matter in the air. Her aching throat closed further at the thought of night falling on the mountain.

She began rooting through the pockets of Wyatt’s coat, wishing she hadn’t lost her pack. No food, no water, except the ash-sprinkled snow cone that was rapidly melting.

The air in the cave continued to warm. From outside, she began to hear a crackling that defied identification until she smelled something burning. Of course, the hot gases or the lightning thrown off by static electricity had ignited wildfires.

With the recent snows, it was probably too wet for the trees to catch, but the stench of burning under-story grew stronger. Within minutes, Kyle saw the first wisps curl into the cavern like smoke down a chimney.

Her heart rate accelerated. As the smoke continued to come in, forming eddies, she watched a stray tendril waft down the lava tube. The smoke moved in the direction she’d just come from.

Was it possible the cave had another entrance?

She shook her head. In places, lava rock was so porous that one could lift boulders measuring three feet on a side over their head. She had faded photographs of her and Nick doing that at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho when they’d gone there during field camp. The drawing effect of the cave must be because there were small vents to open air.

On the other hand, the lava had run out of the tube, leaving the void behind. There could be a large enough exit for her to escape.

Kyle stared into the maw of the tunnel. If she stayed where she was, she was dead. One way or another … poisonous gas, another eruption, or dehydration in this pit with no way out. Could she face the darkness with no guarantee?

She had to. If she didn’t make it through, she’d never see Wyatt or Nick again.

Facing down the blackness, she asked herself for the first time … how bad could just being in the dark be? In the past hour, she’d faced far worse.

She forced her chest to rise and fall more evenly while determination strengthened her spine.

During the next lull in the earth tremors, Kyle managed to shove to her feet. She slung Wyatt’s coat around her waist and secured it with a knot.

Bending, she pawed into the snow to a slightly less filthy layer and scooped up a double handful. No matter that her raw hands dyed the edges with blood, she crunched ice until her thirst was reasonably quenched.

As though force of will could make it so, she envisioned the other opening of the cave, a place where the lava flow had spread out over the shield of mountain. She would push past horror and anything else in her way to reach that exit…

And after she did, she might never again be able to muster adrenaline for imagined peril. She would live in a world where she could decide whether or not to use a goddamned nightlight.

With a last look behind her, Kyle took the path she’d traveled, back into darkness.

I
t wasn’t the dank, musty smell, or the ever-narrowing walls of the tunnel that seemed to lead into the bowels of the mountain. Not even the spider web that caught Kyle across the mouth and made her flail wildly. It was the constant sense that something was about to strike her in the face that kept her heart galloping.

That, and she couldn’t seem to breathe.

Slow, she admonished herself, the litany she’d recited through the years whenever she had the misfortune to end up in darkness. But, though she managed to get her respiration rate down a little, there still didn’t seem to be enough oxygen in the rapidly warming air.

Nonetheless, she carried on, feeling as though her head were wrapped in some kind of suffocating cloth. With her once-more gloved hands waving before her nose, she brushed the ceiling and found it lowering almost directly in front of her. She stopped and bent, feeling for open space and finding a passage no more than three feet high. If she got down and crawled, she might…

Get out of here, her inner voice shrieked. Time to turn around and run back to where she could gulp even smoke-tainted air.

Gritting her teeth, she moved forward and found a duck walk sufficient to negotiate the low point. In this crouched position, the heat radiating from the rock was more noticeable. Trying to ignore the constant quakes rumbling like distant thunder, she made a sweep before her with her hands to make sure she would not hit her head upon arising. Then she shoved up from the floor.

She shuffled a foot forward but … which way to go now?

Although the general slope was downhill, here the floor seemed a perfect plane.

She chose a direction and moved. In three steps, she felt the rock above begin to slope down. Quickly, she executed an exact U turn and began to move forward as quickly as she dared. In four steps, the ceiling began to come down again.

She stopped, her hands curling into fists. A sound of frustration escaped her dry throat. Her eyes straining as they had been for long minutes, Kyle looked back over her shoulder and tried to decide whether she was coming or going. With time running out, she tried to feel lucky. She turned and looked forward again. All her senses strained to perceive some texture in the utter blackness. “Please, God,” she murmured.

There was nothing … but then there was … some indefinable nuance in the darkness that simply felt right.

She moved and this time the rock above stayed the same height so she was able to walk without stooping. In a moment, she could feel from the floor’s downhill slope that she followed the way of gravity, where the lava would have drained. And, though it might be her imagination, the blackness ahead did not seem so absolute.

Kyle began to move more recklessly. Her hands encountered no obstacle as long as she steered toward the faint suggestion of light.

Gray brightened to silver and she began to believe her prayer might have been answered this time.

Yet, she prepared herself for the worst. The opening would be no larger than her head. The ceiling was about to collapse between her and freedom. The heat radiating from the walls presaged a fresh outpouring of lava.

Nonetheless, she followed the sloping floor. With each step, the illumination grew stronger.

When she lacked about a hundred feet to the entry, she could see the patch of light, at least three feet tall and about as wide. Panting, she put on a burst of speed.

Kyle emerged into monochrome twilight and was immediately struck by the cold. Her chest muscles rebelled and it took a gasp to draw in air that stabbed at her lungs.

As fast as she could, she fumbled the jacket from around her waist and put it on. With wind-driven flakes of ash falling almost sideways, she blinked and tried to duck away from their assault.

The contrast between the light outside and total darkness was great, but as her eyes adjusted, she realized she’d thought there was a lot more day left. Her watch revealed it lacked a few minutes till seven. Not quite sunset, but she guessed that under these conditions there would be no more than fifteen minutes before it would be too dark to tell white from black.

She scanned the lowering sky and saw steam billowing from the crater. What were the chances any of the aircraft were still in the area?

Hearing no engine noise, she turned her attention to the pine-studded slope. Here the incline was at least fifty degrees and she thought that in the cave she’d lost quite a bit of elevation. Thankfully, she’d left the wildfire above where it would burn toward the mountaintop. Off to her left about thirty yards, she made out the dark shape of the rocky spine and realized she couldn’t be too far from where she’d seen Wyatt alight from the helicopter.

Sidestepping on the steep slope, Kyle began to make her way down. It was rough going in the semidarkness, as the contrast between rocks, roots, and solid footing ebbed. Ash coated the trees, making them look flocked as if for Christmas in the last of the dying light.

Despite having braved the blackness of the lava cave, she felt a stab of alarm as night fell. The familiar sensation made her long to reach for her pocket flashlight, though she knew it lay broken where she’d dropped it.