Volcano Watch

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

This is it, I thought, already through the door.

The road was clogged with people. The convoy was stopped, the gray-green line broken as trucks had veered to avoid rear-ending each other. Drivers hung out windows, people ran out their doors, and we all gaped east, down Minaret Road, in the direction of the caldera.

It’s what we all expected, what I’d dreamt of, a dark cloud rising.

A neon-yellow fire truck came screaming down Minaret, the driver blasting the horn in fury but the convoy could not get out of the way because there was no room in the road. The fire truck came halfway up onto the sidewalk, screaming a warning, and people scattered as it passed.

“I’m going to see,” I told Walter, and set off at a run before he could stop me.

I ran down Minaret to the intersection with Highway 203 and followed others who made the turn onto the road out of town. Down 203, I could see flames rising above the tops of the Jeffrey pines.

This was wrong.

A horn blasted and I threw myself out of the way to let the ambulance scream by.

I ran until my muscles seized then slowed to a limp and finally stopped and crouched over my cramping thighs. It’s too far. I’d made it as far as the ranger station on the edge of town. Close enough to smell the acrid smoke and hear the snap of flames but not close enough to see the damage. Others caught up, gasping. The foolhardy. We were a small panting crowd, the kind that races toward the scene of an accident only none of us had the wherewithal to make it. Bo Robinson was in my face, yelling “where do we go?” and I shook my head. I didn’t know where to go.

Screams. Fire trucks. Ambulances. Police.

I started back to the lab, no longer wanting to witness this accident.

At the intersection of 203 and Minaret, I ran into Krom. His blue Blazer was stopped at right angles to the stalled Guard convoy, its uniformed crew looking ready to stampede. The driver’s door of the Blazer was open and Krom stood in the road with a cell phone to his ear. “Calm it down,” he was saying to someone. He held his big frame straight and wore the heavy parka and thick corded pants like a pelt. Calm, sure of himself.

I listened to the sirens scream.

He lowered the phone and told me to go home.

“What happened?”

“It’s under control. Go home and be ready to evac.”

The yellow fire truck careened by and then an ambulance and I glimpsed inside something blackened, and I turned to watch, I’d become an accident junkie, and then from another direction an amplified voice rose over the sirens. Remain calm, proceed to your homes in an orderly fashion, tune in to KMMT for further instructions.

Krom got in his Blazer and peeled off.

I ran.