Volcano Watch

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I was choking. That’s what made it real.

This was no dream, no drill, this was the real thing and I knew it because our fleeing neighborhood — and the neighborhood that fled before us and the neighborhood coming behind us — filled the air with exhaust that seeped in through the vents, in through the nose and mouth and eyes and burned the message into the tissues. It’s real.

Jimbo’s Fiat was in front of me and the Precourts’ pickup was behind me and the high Pika walls flanked me. That was the immediate neighborhood.

We crawled. Twenty-five miles per hour. Safe and sane.

My second hand leaped to four o’clock.

Jimbo’s radio fed me a steady whisper of advice. Stay calm. Keep moving. Leave two car-lengths between your vehicle and the vehicle in front. I wore the phones, like Jimbo, half-on and half-off my ears so I would not miss the onset of an eruption.

Up ahead, someone honked.

Another honk, and then another.

Jimbo slowed and I gained on him and then I slowed too, and I watched the rearview to be sure Rich Precourt was going to slow. We were doing fifteen, and holding our two-car-lengths-pace beautifully, when Jimbo’s brake lights went on and his Fiat squirreled into the right-hand snowbank. I slammed on my brakes and the Subaru’s nose slid left, and up ahead I heard nonstop honking and in the earphones stay calm leave two car-lengths and then all I heard was the screeching of brakes up and down the line and somewhere far behind the Precourts, like distant thunder, a crumpling of metal on metal, time after time.

Jimbo was already out when I got out, both of us choking on the haze of exhaust. And then mercifully people began to shut off their engines.

I killed the Soob.

Now, there were screams. I braced for an explosion. No explosion came — just nonstop screaming. It came from up ahead.

The Precourts were crowding behind me, and behind them the Robinsons and the Wargos and the Ruiz’s, the whole damn block. They swept me up and we engulfed Jimbo and in front of him the Werneckes, and like the accident junkies we’d all become, we surged forward toward the screams.

Some twenty vehicles up the line the crowd stopped and swelled like an aneurysm and I was squeezed against a little sedan. I’d lost Jimbo. I wormed along the sedan and then suddenly I got a clear view and saw why we had stopped our flight.

Between our crowd and another crowd plugging the canyon up ahead was an unpopulated stretch of road. Vehicles were stopped at odd angles, doors open. Roaming this no-man’s-land was a bear. Big as a truck, within a paw’s swipe of someone’s Taurus. It reared as if trying to see over the crowd, and the screamers who had not once let up screamed even harder. The bear froze. Ears went flat. The ground gave a little jolt, and nobody in the crowd noticed or cared about one more shake, but the bear did. It launched itself backward, landing on its belly, then lumbered up with a howl of anguish like the snow’s on fire. It shook itself and snow crystals popped off the cinnamon fur.

Dragged out of its winter sleep, I guessed, by the same rude shakeup that sent us all scrambling for a way out.

Something jammed into my back. I turned. It was Jimbo’s elbow. He held his biathlon rifle, pointed skyward, but I could see the clip was in firing position.

“You can’t stop a bear with a twenty-two,” I hissed.

My brother hissed back, “Got a better idea?”

Of all times to decide not to duck out, Jimbo chooses this.

In my earphones a voice was advising calm and I didn’t know if that was the standard evac spiel or if emergency communications had caught up with the bear.

The bear wasn’t calm. It was trapped and snarling and it lowered its anvil head and began to come our way.

I was deafened by screams. I lost Jimbo again and then I saw him worming his way out front of the crowd, rifle held high. He yelled “back up, back up” and the crowd did its best, heaving backward but there were just too many of us squeezed in at this block party, and the people farther back could not hear, over the screaming, my brother’s cries.

The bear heard. I saw the silhouette of teeth, and then the big cinnamon started forward again, all its anguish homed on Jimbo.

Jimbo shifted into marksman’s stance and like he has done a thousand times before he brought the rifle to his cheek and sighted and squeezed off a round.

There was a bellow from the cinnamon that stopped my heart.

Someone nearby yelled Jimbo you idiot.

But it looked for a moment as though Jimbo had done the right thing, for the bear froze and twisted, focusing its rage on the pinprick in its shoulder.

“Okay,” I said, heart beating again.

At both ends of no-man’s-land the crowds had shut up.

There was gunfire upcanyon.

Jimbo raised his rifle again and I elbowed him because across the gulf, Eric had appeared. He had both hands wrapped around his service weapon, leveling it at the bear.

And now the bear and I had two marksmen to worry about. A shooter with a glass eye and the knowledge that accuracy is not his trademark, but he’s got a whole lot more firepower than the other shooter, who’s armed with a weapon meant to knock down mechanical targets.

Eric sidled along the road. The bear turned, nose into the air, and zeroed on Eric. They were no more than a couple of truck-lengths apart. Eric eased forward, waiting, it seemed, for the bear to lift its chin and present its best target.

I wanted to scream.

There was gunfire, again, upcanyon. The bear reared up.

And now the crowd behind Eric convulsed, and five Guardsmen trotted into the clearing, one behind the other like a line of geese. They carried heavy artillery and the cinnamon hardly had time to shift its focus to this new threat before they’d wheeled into a firing squad. The bear seemed to flinch, and then the sound of automatic weapons swamped all else, even its roar of surprise. The shooters fired for what seemed minutes, shredding the bear until the wall of snow behind it was splashed red and cratered with plugs of fur.

Jimbo fumbled to eject his clip. “Let’s go.”

He was shoving me, everyone was shoving again, back the way we’d come, back toward the cars. I didn’t need shoving, I had plenty of adrenaline pumping me along. And then someone said “bears” and Jimbo caught it — bears, plural — and my dumbshit brother turned with his rifle under his arm and fought his way back toward Eric. By the time I caught up Eric was saying, “Bears are all down, bears aren’t the problem.”

I said, sick on adrenaline, “What is the problem?”

“Pileup.” Eric pointed back toward town, the way we’d come. “Back in that throat where the canyon starts.”

I looked. Vehicles to the horizon. No access.

“How big?” Jimbo asked.

“Big.”

I said, “How big is big?”

Eric met my look. “It’s all clear up ahead. Be ready to move in fifteen minutes.”

I was looking back, toward the throat of the canyon. I said, my own throat constricted, “No way out.”

“We’ll get them out,” Eric said.

“Walter’s back there.”

“I’ll check,” Eric said.

“No, I will.” I started off. Vehicles to the horizon, and way back there, beyond the throat — beyond the pileup — vehicles waiting to get out. Walter was in the group behind ours. How many neighborhoods to a group, how many vehicles to a neighborhood, how many miles back in the canyon was Walter’s Explorer? Beyond the throat? I started to run.

Eric caught my arm. “I’ll find out where he is, Cass. I’ll see him on his way. If he’s behind the pileup, we’ll get him out. We got a lot of people stuck back there and you can be damn sure we’re not going to leave any of them behind. I give you my personal guarantee.”

I shook my head. “I’m going to check.”

“Aw shit, man,” Jimbo said, “you want a sister?”

Eric said, “No.”

I tried to move.

Eric tightened his grip and said, weary, “You see those guys?”

There were Guardsmen moving our way, monitoring the flow of the crowd. They moved like they were under fire. I saw one guy look up the canyon walls. He was skinny — all helmet and uniform. He planted his hands on his wide fatigue belt and scanned the cliffs far above. He looked like he was expecting a bomb to fall. His head snapped down. He spat. He didn’t want to be here. He looked like he wasn’t going to be patient with anyone who slowed him down.

“There isn’t an option,” Eric said.

Death by traffic jam.

With a sense as strong as I have ever had of making the wrong choice, I let Jimbo tug me back toward our cars.