Death Canyon (35 page)

“Stay in!” Jake yelled back, and pressed down the automatic door lock.

It was getting hotter in the car, and fast.
Probably ninety degrees.
Now around a hundred.
Jake looked at Noelle. They were both sweating. He was rethinking his decision to stay in the vehicle.

The chaos was still carrying on outside.
One hundred and five.
They heard a crack below the truck's transmission and the body tilted backward. The road was literally crumbling beneath them. Steam flowed around the cabin.
One hundred and ten degrees.

“Shit! We're parked on a steam vent!” Noelle shouted.

Jake and Noelle exchanged a horrified look. They held each other as tight as they could.

The singular thought in each of their heads was identical.

This is it.

One hundred and twenty-five degrees.

Jake threw the transmission into reverse and floored it. With a thud, the truck slid off the ramped slab and back onto the flat road. Jake reached across and opened Noelle's door and then his own. The heat poured out of the passenger cabin like smoke out of a burning oven.

The quake stopped. Jake took stock of the damage. It looked like a tornado and wildfire had swept through the woods at the same time.
But we're still here.
Yellowstone hadn't erupted, but the quakes were intensifying.

They got out of the truck to cool off. It was still outside now. After a few minutes, Noelle stuck her head back in, looked around, and found a bottle of water on the floor. Its plastic had melted slightly from the heat. But it was still full. Jake insisted that she take a drink first. It was warm but still tasted good. She handed the bottle to Jake.

“Well,” he said after taking a gulp. “It would be nice to say we could turn around. But it looks to me like we're going through the park no matter what.”

Noelle followed Jake's glance back up the road. About fifty yards away, an enormous pine rested on the road. There was no way through the mess that they could see. The tree extended sixty feet past either shoulder of the road. On one end, the dirt-packed ball of roots sat heavily, soil still falling from its gangling tentacles. On the other end, the wispy upper limbs hung in the air.

“Shit!” Noelle was visibly shaken. She brought her trembling hands to her head. She was losing it.

Jake had to keep her sharp if they wanted to survive. “How could you know? Let's get out of here.” He put his arm around Noelle's shoulders and led her to the car, embrace more protective than romantic. When they got in, the evening breeze had cooled down the vehicle's cabin significantly.

Ahead of them, the right lane of the road was damaged to the point that travel would be impossible. Although the earth's tremors had ceased for the time being, there were still steam vents and miniature geysers dotting the roadside. It was an unearthly atmosphere.

“We'll get through the park as quickly as we can.” Jake skidded out, turned into the left lane, and drove as fast as possible until they came to the north entrance.

“No!” Jake put the truck in park and killed the engine. They exited the car. The small ranger station booth was in ruins. Two of the four walls had fallen outward, leaving the interior of the building exposed. A medium-sized pine rested menacingly against one of the remaining walls. Worse yet, another tall pine lay suspended across the road to their south. Four feet in the air, its tip resting on
the upturned roots of another fallen tree. There was no way to go under or over with the truck.

“Now what?” Noelle asked him as she dropped her hands to her sides. “I'm sorry—” Jake stopped her. As he did, the earth groaned again. They braced for another thrashing, but it never came. Instead, the noisy grumble faded back into the silence that normally came with the isolation of the park.

“Don't be sorry. We're fine. I'm going to see if the phone in the booth still works. I'll be right back.”

Noelle looked around nervously. It was starting to get dark. Her fears of the wild—bears, mountain lions, and storms—had long faded after years of living in the mountains. Now, though, there was a new set of threats. The deserted woodlands had transformed into a nightmarish landscape.

Inside the remains of the booth, Jake was fiddling with the phone. No dial tone.

He looked around for another means of communication. The fax machine had suffered the same fate as the phone. On the floor below it, though, Jake saw a facsimile. He picked up the paper. It was dated only a few hours before. It looked to be the product of some automated disaster alert system. It contained information on the series of quakes in the last few days; “nothing to worry about,” it said. Park employees should do their best to keep the public calm during evacuation.

On the bottom of the page was a simple map of Yellowstone, really just a rectangle with a few markers for the obvious points of interest. Tiny asterisks showed where the most recent geological activity had been. It was hard to say from such a rudimentary map, but it looked as if they were centered in the area that Keith was referring to as the epicenter of the quakes, in the northwest corner of the park. If not there, somewhere damn close.

Jake and Noelle were near the epicenter, and he got the feeling it wasn't coincidence. He had never believed in fate, but he couldn't shake the thought that they were there for a reason.

He ran out of the booth and headed toward Noelle.

“Noelle!” Jake called for her as he left the booth. “Look at this!”

Noelle had wandered a short distance into the woods. She came jogging back. “Did you find a phone?”

“Yeah, but it's dead. I found this, though. It gives us the locations of all the tremors in the last forty-eight hours.” He passed her the fax.

She looked it over. “Not too far from here. What's your plan?”

Jake paused for a second, trying to think how to best phrase what he was about to propose. “We're never gonna get around this tree. I'd say we try going back north. I think there might be a big enough gap at the end of that tree to get through. You have four-wheel drive, right?”

“Of course. But what're we going to do when we get past the tree? There could be more roadblocks. It could be worse up there closer to the epicenter.”

“Well, we have a map now; we could drive up there and take a look around.” He felt a tinge of guilt at his proposition. The idea would only put Noelle in more danger. His instinct, however, told him that this was a lead that needed to be followed. “I have a feeling this isn't going to stop unless we stop it.”

“Go to the epicenter, you mean?” She looked at Jake dubiously.

“It sounds worse when you say it. I don't think we're going to be safe until we find out exactly what's causing these quakes.”

She looked for confidence and determination in his eyes and found it.

“I'm in.” In a fraction of a second, she was back in the car.

Jake was in the driver's seat again and going fast. He deftly maneuvered around potholes on the freshly pocked road, fallen trees, and newly formed geothermal features. They arrived back at the roadblock in less time than their original opposing journey.

He pulled the park service vehicle over to the shoulder—an unnecessary move because of the seclusion of the road. There was no way another vehicle would cross their path; the precaution was a habit, a remnant of their world that had just been turned upside down.

“I'm going to walk around the end here.” He pointed to the tree's upper terminus. The root ball on the other end created a much bigger obstacle. “Stay in the car. It's hard to tell how solid the ground will be out there.” The gruesome scene he'd witnessed at the geyser basin flashed in his mind.

Jake walked on the tree trunk as long as possible to avoid the steaming ground. When the trunk narrowed to the point that using it was impossible, he stayed on miniature hummocks of high ground and rocks.

Back on the road, Noelle ignored his request and was looking around the scene, trying to formulate her own idea for a way out.

Looks like Jake is right,
she thought as she looked at the opposite end of the tree. There around the root ball, dense trees made passage impossible.

She went back to the truck, which now had a few sinewy clouds of sulfurous steam twisting around it. The road was warming and small fractures were silently forming. The earth shivered ever so slightly.

Night was just around the corner. The evening light was a cool blue, and the mangled trees were silhouetted in black against it. Noelle got in the truck and threw on the headlights to illuminate Jake's path back to her. The cylindrical beams of light cast an even more peculiar mood on the scene. Although the evening mountain air was crisp, the emerging gasses lent their share of humidity and heat.

Jake looked around and squinted through the dusk when he reached the end of the pine. It would be tough going; the ground was already soft from spring moisture, and again, it was hard to tell how deep and strong the earth was at any given point. There was no way to know whether it could support the weight of a person, let alone that of a large vehicle. At any time, the truck could get bogged down in mud or worse—the mass of the vehicle might break through the earth's crust, exposing Jake and Noelle to God knows what lay beneath.

Boiling water and steam or two-thousand-degree lava.

There was a path, though—a small swath through the still standing pines that would barely accommodate the width of the pickup. Assuming the ground there was firm, Noelle's four-wheel drive would have no trouble navigating the route. It was their only option.

He hopscotched on the rocks and walked back down the tree's trunk to the road. Jake shielded his eyes from the headlights and approached the truck.

“I think we've got a chance getting around that way,” he said. “It's hard to say how much weight this crust can hold, though. If we get stuck and have to leave the car, we could be in trouble.”

“In a few minutes, we're gonna be in trouble
here
.” Noelle pointed to the scatter of now-widening steam vents and crevices in the road. Again the earth shivered and the asphalt belched out steam.

“Okay.” Jake thought for a second. “I want you to walk over, though. There's no reason for us both to put ourselves at risk. I'll see you on the other side.”

Before Jake could put the transmission into drive, Noelle clamped her hand over the keys where they rested in the ignition. “No way. If we're gonna try this, I'm driving.”

“No. I don't think—”

She interrupted before he could finish. “It's my truck, Jake. I'm more familiar with it. I'm driving the damn thing.” The look on her face told Jake that it wasn't worth arguing over.

“Fine. But I'm going with you.”

Jake and Noelle exited the car and switched positions, Noelle getting in the driver's seat. Jake had no idea what he could do to help if the car started to bog, but he wanted to be there to try. The thought of standing idle while Noelle struggled—maybe to her
death—to get the car through the steaming swamp was too much for him to handle.

“I'd go in with some speed,” Jake told her as she put the car in drive and cranked the wheel to the left, toward their way out. “You know, I mean, momentum is your friend. The faster we can go through this junk, the better.”

“Are we in driver's ed?”

“Sorry, can't help it.”

Jake grabbed the molded plastic handle on the ceiling of the cab and held on. Noelle pulled up to the gap in the trees and scoped out her planned route. She reversed the truck a short ways to put a runway between the truck and the unstable ground ahead.

Dropping the truck into drive, Noelle accelerated deliberately toward the opening in the trees. She turned the dial on the dash to “4wd-hi.” Then with a quick pull on the wheel, the truck bounced off the road's man-made plateau and down a few inches onto the forest floor. Jake and Noelle looked at each other for a moment as the truck cruised through the first short stretch of the route with ease.

Around them, vents in the earth released more and more steam, and small, bubbling hot springs were showing up in the low-lying hummocks. Every so often one of these springs would spout a fountain of steam and water a few feet into the air. The rumbles coming from the earth were becoming constant. As Stevenson predicted, the energy fueling the newly lifeless geysers to the south was finding new ways to run its course. The area around Jake and Noelle was becoming a new geyser basin.

Pace is good. Traction is good. Keep moving.

Noelle kept her eyes well ahead, focused on potential obstacles forty feet or more in front of the car. She wanted to anticipate
any blocks early so she could avoid them without losing too much speed. The truck was fast approaching the tree, where its delicate upper branches were shaking slightly with the earth's trembles.

Just like Jake said, there wasn't much space for the truck; the limbs, some as much as five inches in diameter, reached out over the most viable portion of the morass. She could go far left to avoid them, but the terrain was even more treacherous there.

Noelle decided to force the vehicle through the mass of branches. She accelerated toward them, hoping the extra momentum would help her break through. Jake was startled at her choice—the direction and acceleration—but he gave her one quick look and realized her intentions. He gripped the interior handle more firmly in preparation for impact.

The first few branches bent under the force of the big engine rather easily. The tree was still green, so rather than snapping, the limbs folded as they smeared across the windshield before flinging back to life behind the truck. As they ran across the roof, they screeched and scratched like fingernails on a chalkboard. If they lived, Noelle was going to get flak for the damage to the paint job.