Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1) (9 page)

I shuddered. My mom had tortured me
one Saturday night by watching a documentary about Pompeii. I remembered casts of bodies trapped in the inescapable ash, mannequins forever caught in the poses of death by suffocation. “That part will stop, though, right? I mean, a volcano mostly makes lava and that can only affect the area already ruined, right?”

He shook his head as
he clicked over the other windows opened in his browser, finally finding a map of North America with some oblong shapes drawn over the west. “This is what the stratigraphic history shows from previous eruptions. This dark oval is ash coverage from two million years ago, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to Iowa, Montana to Texas. This lighter gray one, from 630,000 years ago, stretched from Oregon to Iowa again, and from the Dakotas to Mexico.”

I glanced up at Boone. He had obviously seen this before and knew
those long ago eruptions totally covered Nebraska.

“Now, this doesn’t mean these areas were devastated,” Dr. Potter added. “Only that there is a detectable layer of ash in the geologic record. In modern U
.S. history, the only experience we have is with Mt. St. Helens. A ten-hour eruption ejected 1.3 cubic kilometers of ash and about a tenth of a cubic kilometer of pyroclastic material. So, let’s be generous and say it produced 1.5 cubic kilometers of ejecta in 1980.” A map showed a bright yellow area around the black dot of Mt. St. Helens with some small orange areas. The map key said the orange areas had received from five inches to a quarter-inch of ash. The yellow, less than a quarter inch. He continued reciting statistics. “The Yellowstone eruption 630,000 years ago produced an estimated 1,000 cubic kilometers of ejecta. The one 2.1 million years ago produced 2,500 cubic kilometers.”

“Wait, did you say 1.5 cubic kilometers versus 1,000 cubic kilometers?” I said.
Here we go with all those zeroes again, I thought.

He nodded.

I knew a cubic-something meant in three dimensions, like a child’s block. But cubic kilometers? One thousand of them? I couldn’t wrap my head around the scale.

I searched Google on my phone,
requested the route home with a shaking finger. Four hundred miles.
400 miles equals….
Then I selected the autofill for
400 miles equals how many kilometers.
643.7376. So, the seven-hour drive from Sycamore Springs, Indiana, to Case, Pennsylvania didn’t equal one side of the block of crap potentially spewing into the air. “And that will be all ash, shooting up in the atmosphere?” I asked, feeling a little faint.

“Even if most of
it’s lava,” the professor said, “there’ll be an ash component, and any percentage of a thousand cubic kilometers is a shedload. All the volcanologists who know Yellowstone are saying the same thing—if this eruption continues, it isn’t going to sit there and simmer. The way it erupted, almost without warning, how every single sensor in the entire region went offline at the same instant indicates this thing has popped its cork with an almost unfathomable amount of energy behind it.”

“Are we all gonna die?” I asked, feeling like the useless, helpless, clueless peon who
perished first in every natural disaster flick I’d ever seen.

His head swiveled
, and he looked at me, stricken as he realized he was like a fireman yelling “Fire!” in a burning elementary school. “Where’s home?”

“Indiana
.” I figured on the global scale of things—on the scale of 1,000 cubic kilometers of ejecta, for example—the name of the town probably didn’t matter.

“Your family
’s safe for now. The jet stream will probably carry the worst of this north, along the Canadian border, for the next few days, at least.”

I looked at Boone’s map. The
Dakotas and Dr. Potter’s family waited right on that path.
Hopefully, the eruption will stop.
It
has
to stop.
The mind of the elementary student produced those words, not the knowledge of the fireman.
 

 

Boone and I held hands to give and receive comfort vibes until we stopped on the steps beneath the arched porch of the earth science building. I felt like I should stay with him, but we both still had classes. Our lives continued, oddly enough.

A
little ash, if it ever drifted this far, couldn’t disturb our campus routine. The Mt. St. Helens map had shown “Trace to ¼ inch” in the farthest reaches of the ash fallout. It would be like snow flurries to us, not the instant black blizzard those poor people near the eruption experienced.

“You talked to your parents?” I said.

“Yep.”

“Maybe they
’re on their way east already.”

“
I doubt it,” he said, aggravated. “My dad won’t leave the cattle. Damn, I wish Drew was there.” He looked across campus for a moment then back at me. “I don’t know why I dragged you into this. Dr. Potter was
so
weirded out when I came in. He made it sound like this could become a major problem.”

I nodded, now familiar with the freak-out potential of Dr. Potter. “I’m glad you told me. And I know you’re really worried so if you need to talk later, or when you hear something, text me. Or stop by. Whatever.”

“Thanks, Violet,” he said with a lopsided curve of his lips that didn’t reach his eyes. He brushed a little kiss on my mouth. I smiled, glad he’d definitely
not
ended our three weeks of talking.

“Hey
.” I touched his stubbly cheek. “I mean it. Let me know about your family, okay?”

I watched him walk a
way, and my thoughts staggered in the fashion of drunk fraternity brothers, each on its own erratic route. Everything about Boone elated me. Out west, the ground shook and exploded, heedless of the fragile humans in its path. I needed to do some calculus problems before my one o'clock class. I wanted to talk to my mom.

Wait. Where had that come from?

I wandered back to the dorm room. Mia’d already left for her eleven o’clock so I lugged my calculus book to the empty lounge to watch the TV coverage. After five minutes, I muted the sound and hit speed dial for The Perch. My home phone.

Caller ID worked its magic. “Morning, Violet. This is a nice surprise,” Mom chirped.

“Hi, Mom. Hey, have you checked the news today?”

“Not yet
. I’ve been washing the outside of the windows. My spring cleaning never got done, and I’m not sure the fall cleaning last year got done, either,” she said with a laugh. “Now you’ve given me a welcome excuse to take a break. What’s up?” She suddenly sounded cautious. “You didn’t have one of those school shooters, did you?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s
something my geology professor told me today…well, he told the TA, Boone, who then told me…Yellowstone is erupting.”

She sort of breathed the word
Yellowstone
in a way that made my scalp prickle. “Are you serious? Wait. I’m turning on the TV.” Through her silence I heard the sudden babble of a news channel. “Oh my God.”

I had expected Mom to reassur
e me. That’s what mothers did, right?

“Oh, Violet.” I co
uld hear concern in her voice. She paused again. “Oh, no. What did your professor say?”

“
He said it’s bad. He called it a mega caldera. He said all his volcano dude friends are saying it has a lot of energy. Every sensor in the area is gone.”

“Geez
, Louise, this thing is huge,” Mom said.

“Ye
ah.”

“Did you see the satellite?”

“Yeah.”

I could hear her fingers clicking on her keyboard now. She’d gone into science mode
, and she didn’t need me on the other end of the phone for that.

“Ok
ay, Mom, I thought you should know.”

The clicking stopped. “Hey, Violet?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for calling. Thanks for making sure we knew. This is important. Like altering-things-on-a-global-scale important. I’m gonna go get some extra supplies for here. You and Mia make sure you have enough food and water for a few days in your room. And batteries. Oh, I wish you were closer to home, sweetie.”

“Mom, I’m farther from this thing than you are.”

“True.
Okay. Good. I know you’re a smart girl. You’ll be fine. Is everything still good there?”

“Yeah, everything’s great. Most of the kids
haven’t heard yet.”

“Figures. O
kay, be smart. People act weird during a crisis.”

Yeah, like you.
“Say hi to Daddy and Sara for me.”

“Will do. I love you. Thanks again for calling me.
Let’s keep each other posted, okay?”

“
Okay. Bye.” I didn’t like to say
I love you
. Not to anybody, really. I did love people, of course, as a little secret I held deep inside, not something to blurt out to the universe. My feelings were not volcanic ejecta forced out of me by unfathomable energy.

Daddy texted me fifteen minutes
later.

Text from Dad: