Rain of Fire (5 page)

Although she’d downplayed the Wasatch Fault to Hollis this afternoon for effect, Kyle knew all too well the USGS gave the probability of it spawning a large earthquake in the next fifty years as one in four. With two million people living within fifteen miles of the fault, studies had placed the potential death toll at over 2,000, with 30,000 homeless.

Rather than live in the valley, Kyle chose mountains cored by 200-million-year-old sediment. Though there was ongoing debate whether a Wasatch earthquake would be felt more severely in the heights or the valley, she slept better knowing she was grounded on solid rock.

Kyle turned in at the complex where she owned a modest townhouse, parked, and used her key-ring flashlight to augment the streetlight. Once inside, she began with the living room where overstuffed armchairs metamorphosed to crouching beasts in the shadows.

Preceding her entry with the flashlight beam, she switched on Franny’s porcelain lamps that flanked her couch. In the dining room, she lit the fixture over a glass-topped rectangle of deep-green labradorite she’d saved along time to purchase. Feldspar crystals in the stone winked.

Moving from room to room, Kyle turned on every light in her house.

From the point of view of escape, it would be preferable to have the master bedroom on the ground floor. Yet, that was balanced by the fact that upper floors could pancake like they had in Northridge, California, where TV had brought a collapsed apartment house’s image into the living rooms of the world.

Upstairs, beneath Kyle’s bedroom windowsill, her climbing rope waited rigged and ready. Her earthquake clothes lay folded on the chair beside the bed, clean underwear to make any mother proud, socks, jeans, a sweatshirt, raincoat, and well-worn running shoes. In case the lights went out, a lantern powered by a six-volt battery rested on the floor.

Ready to face the night, she decided to try calling Wyatt again. After half a dozen tries today, she had not yet reached him.

Back downstairs in the kitchen, she dialed the number for Wyatt’s employee housing in Mammoth. Just when she thought he wasn’t going to pick up, a sleepy female voice answered.

Kyle kept her tone even. “I’m calling for Wyatt.”

“It’s a woman,” she heard.

“Hello?” Wyatt said a moment later.

“It’s Kyle. I’m sorry to call so late, but…” Her voice broke. “Stanton is in the hospital. He’s had a stroke.”

“Oh, no.”

“His left side is pretty weak. He can talk.”

“Are you and Leila holding up?”

The warmth in his tone made Kyle wanted to pour out every detail of the past two days, beg him to get into his truck and come straight to Salt Lake …

“Do you want your robe?” the background woman asked.

“Hold a sec?” Wyatt said.

The moment for dumping her troubles on a man sleeping with another woman passed, as a rustling might have been the robe going on. The sound of metal against a hard surface was probably him ferreting out his glasses on the nightstand. Kyle imagined him standing beside the bed, his long feet pale against the dark wood floors she’d seen in his housing the one time she’d stopped by. He’d be settling his titanium frames on the bridge of his nose, his dark brows knitted with concern.

He was back. “Ah damn. Stanton.”

“It happened the morning before yesterday in the lab. I’ve tried to call you.”

“I was in the field.” He paused. “Have you seen the seismic pattern up here for the past forty-eight hours?”

“I’ve been so caught up with Stanton and trying to keep a class schedule …” She knew she should have taken the time to check the signals from Yellowstone.

“We’re having a swarm of quakes.”

Her heartbeat accelerated. “That’s the last thing I need right now.”

“Me, too. If it weren’t going on, I’d drive down to see Stanton. Buy you a beer.”

“I could use one.” Her mind raced. “We need the GPS data.” Satellite receivers planted in over fifty park locations triangulated their position so that the smallest elevation change was detectable.

“I ran some numbers today,” Wyatt said. “The caldera is on the rise.”

Usually a spate of increased activity in the park piqued her interest. Tonight, it just seemed an additional, overwhelming burden.

“It’s always up and down,” she bargained.

“Six inches since last week?”

“Impossible.” Between 1923 and 1984, the caldera had risen a mere three feet. Then, accompanied by thousands of tremors, it dropped eight inches by 1995; it has since started again to rise. “We’ve never recorded movement this rapid.”

“Mount St. Helens rose a meter a day. Right before it erupted.”

Kyle folded down onto the floor next to the phone. The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, the worst in the human history of the United States, might have taken the country by surprise but not the men and women who studied volcanoes. They had known the deadly potential coiled beneath the smoking crater. Miles of forest turned to ash-deep wasteland, millions of trees mowed down like toothpicks, the Toutle River a rampaging flood that swept away bridges and everything else in its path … not to mention fifty-seven people dead or missing.

“Kyle?”

“I’m here.”

“I wonder if you might bring some portable seismographs up tomorrow.”

She couldn’t leave Stanton … but even as she formed the thought, she knew the danger from an awakening Yellowstone could spell disaster for so many that her problems didn’t amount to anything in the balance.

“I can be there by afternoon.”

“Good. Meet me at Earthquake Lake Visitor Center on the Madison slide.”

Kyle gasped and put a hand onto the cool floor tile. She had never been to the Earthquake Lake Visitor Center, a few miles from where Rock Creek Campground had been. The idea of people putting a scene of death and devastation on a vacation agenda turned her stomach, not to mention her personal reluctance to stir up ghosts.

“We ought to check for renewed activity west of the park,” Wyatt said.

After a second of silence, “You there, Kyle?”

He’d been a friend for years, but on policy, she never told anybody.

“Can I let you know in the morning? I’ve … got some things to work out.”

Climbing the stairs toward bed, her thoughts roiled. She had succumbed to her uncanny fascination with the Yellowstone region several times in her life. First, when she was an undergraduate and attended geology field camp south of the park; next when she came to Utah for her Ph.D.; lastly upon coming to work at the Institute. Yet, she tended to watch from arm’s length due to a lesson learned when she got too close.

During her first year at Utah, she had joined a student fieldtrip to Hebgen Lake. Twenty-three years old, with a B.S. and M.S. in geology from the University of Arizona, she figured it was a good time to put the past behind her.

All went well as the group loaded onto vans in Salt Lake and caravanned north. Pizza, beer and field stories carried her through to bed, but at 4
AM,
she awakened in her sleeping bag on the floor of an overcrowded West Yellowstone motel room. Slick with nightmare sweat, she fought off her covers. The room’s black ceiling lowered like the sky when dust had blotted out moon and stars seventeen years ago.

Breathe, she ordered. Her tight chest barely responded. She should never have let herself be peer-pressured into sleeping in the dark. Reaching by her side, she switched on a flashlight beneath her covers.

It didn’t calm her racing heart.

Dragging the sleeping bag into the john, she closed the door and turned on the light. Stark green-blue eyes like her father’s stared back from the mirrored medicine cabinet, her dark brows startled wings. “Jesus,” she muttered, running a hand through her disheveled hair, while she tried to tell herself she was being ridiculous.

It didn’t work. With shaking hands, she spread the bedding in the tub and spent the rest of the night in the garish reflection off white tile.

In the morning, Stanton approached. “Kyle? One of the guys thought you might be sick.”

She kept her gaze on the wheel stops in the motel parking lot. “Maybe a stomach virus. Since we’re staying here again tonight, would it be okay if I crashed today?”

He let her stay behind, but something in her quavering voice or averted eyes must have tipped him. The day they got back to school, Stanton asked Kyle into his office and closed the door. Wordlessly, he passed across a newspaper account of the Hebgen Lake catastrophe. The list of victims included Rachel and Daniel Stone.

It hurt somehow that there was no mention of Max.

“Are you sure you want to study earthquakes?” Stanton asked.

“There’s no better place for me,” Kyle’s younger self had told him. As much as she loathed her memories, it was in and near Yellowstone that she might find the key to warn others.

Seeming to understand her inability to discuss the past, Stanton had set the matter aside.

Still going to bed with her light on after so many years, Kyle thought how Franny had accepted her grandchild’s fears, making sure her room had an extra lamp and a backup nightlight. Moreover, as there were things in Franny’s life that she had refused to discuss with Kyle, she had never pressed for details about that awful night. Perhaps Franny had not wanted to know too much about how her only daughter died.

Celebrities might go to shrinks; might even think it fashionable, but Kyle had never gone for counseling. Her reading told her psychologists forced you to relive bad experiences, to go through them relentlessly until you were too worn down to get excited.

Kyle preferred her method, erecting a wall and putting disaster behind it.

Yet, she felt sure that if Stanton knew what Wyatt had told her, he’d want everything checked out, including the area near the defunct Rock Creek Campground. And there was no gracious way of refusing without attracting attention. Wyatt might start probing for answers she wasn’t prepared to give.

No, it was clear that with Stanton out of commission and Hollis gunning for her funding, Kyle had no choice. She must face the danger gathering beneath Yellowstone.

T
he next afternoon, Kyle drove the Institute van along the Hebgen Lake shore. The fifteen-mile length of dammed reservoir ran east-west, a few miles outside Yellowstone’s western boundary. Looking out over the gray expanse, she questioned the shreds of what she regarded as her sanity.

With a jerk of the wheel, she pulled into an overlook.

This was ridiculous. A single peek behind her wall and the bogeyman was still there.

Deep breaths of the crisp fall air, in and out until she calmed.

There was some time before she was supposed to meet Wyatt, so she opened the door and stepped out with a crunch of gravel beneath her boots. A sign indicated a walk down to the lake would take her to the site of summer homes flooded during the 1959 earthquake. Determined to treat this like any other fieldtrip, she reached behind the seat for her Canon and brought along a field notebook and pen.

As she looked around, she realized Dad had stopped the Rambler here on the drive west to Madison Canyon. That August day had been a bright gem, the lake shimmering beneath a faultless sky. Today was cold and cloudy bright with a sprinkling of snow capping the trees on Coffin Mountain to the southwest.

Kyle set out on a narrow footpath through waist-high brush. Evidently, based on the poorly marked trail, not many people cared about the ancient ruins anymore.

After a few hundred feet of steep incline, she came to a weathered log cabin without windows or doors. Going down to the shore, she photographed a house that had sunk to its roofline when the bank collapsed and dropped twenty feet. Waves lapped at fragments of green tarpaper where the shingles had weathered away. Had the place been empty that August night, its owners blessedly away? Not likely during the high season for vacation and fishing.

Kyle imagined being shaken awake and kicking open the jammed door, leaping a crevice that had opened in the earth, while her house fell away behind her into turbulent waters.

Taking no pictures or notes, she stared at the wreck before retreating on foot back to the road.

A few miles farther, the lake narrowed into a neck, where a seven-hundred-foot-long, ninety-foot-high wall of earth held back the reservoir. In the twelve hours after the initial shock, the lake had sloshed back and forth like water in a bathtub, sending three-foot surges over the dam’s crest at least four times. Kyle photographed the sign that proclaimed:
THE DAM THAT HELD,
an impressive feat since the construction dated back to 1915.

The highway began to wind downhill beside the un-impounded river. At her next stop, a twenty-foot scarp followed the trace of the Hebgen Fault. Although softened by years, the earthen wall was still an impressive monument to the upheaval. A vision of her father on the high side of a similar scarp sent a shaft of pain through her.

Farther on, the Madison began to widen into Earthquake Lake, the remnants of the flood. Kyle closed her eyes and rode another wave of anguish as she imagined a black wall of water rushing toward Rock Creek Campground.

For several weeks after the quake, the Madison had been dammed completely. Although the Army Corps of Engineers cut a channel that permitted the river to renew its flow, the slide had flattened the configuration of the valley floor. Even now, drowned trees stood with their tops sticking out of the water.

Along the shore, the original highway remained as violently tilted pavement blocks. The rebuilt route lay higher on the hillside, the new construction smoother and straighter than the road Kyle had watched from the Rambler’s rear window.

Seven miles downriver, she came to the edge of the massive slide. The shock wave ahead of eighty million tons of falling mountain had created the hurricane force wind that swept into Rock Creek Campground.

Her mouth went dry and she gripped the wheel. Thankfully, what remained of the campsite was on the opposite side of Earthquake Lake. She drove past and began the winding climb up and over the massive treeless mound. In a few minutes, she caught sight of the round building of the visitor center perched like a flying saucer on the north rim of the valley.