The Vengeful Earth

The hardest part about betrayal is that it’s like an earthquake in Bozeman. You know it’s possible; after all Yellowstone is an easy morning’s drive. And we all know that Old Faithful’s homestead is just a super-volcano waiting for the right moment to show off. But you don’t actually expect it. Those worries are for the people who live in Alaska or California. Not Montana.  

I woke up that morning, wishing I didn’t have to. The betrayal I’d endured the day before was a 9.5 magnitude that I never saw coming. I’d given five years to the company that fired me, I lived for that company. I bled for that company. I lost a good man because of all the hours I put in at that company.

And yesterday they decided they no longer needed my services. Car payment? Not their problem. Childcare? Not their problem. Slumping sales because lowering prices would send the wrong signal about our brand? Now there was a problem. One that demanded immediate and “sometimes unpleasant decisions.”

I stumbled out of bed and over to the coffee maker. My head was pounding and the vodka bottle on the counter was empty. Somewhere in my brain, I knew the two were connected, but the relationship between them eluded me. How had I not seen this coming? What would I do now? It wasn’t like I could call my landlord and ask for break on rent.

The next moment, a rumbling came from all around and lingered for too long. Dishes fell from the cupboard and the Keurig slid off the counter as the ceiling fell down as the floor heaved up.

Then came an enormous wind and a boom. Whatever happened, the ground kept shaking. Holy crap, we really were having an earthquake in Montana. But the wind? The boom? Whatever was going on, a really bad day had just gotten a whole lot worse. Drive… my brain told me. Get in your car and drive. Leave.

I decided to listen to my hungover brain and grabbed my keys.

ran out to my trusty Jeep, thankful for the ridiculously high lift kit I’d had on it. Around me, buildings crumbled to debris in the street. As I fired up the engine my passenger door swung open, and my overly nerdy neighbor climbed in. “North!”

I slammed my foot on the gas as my neighbor pulled out her phone. My brain struggled out of its fog. “Amy. Your name is Amy, right?”

“Amy, yeah.” She was breathless as her fingers flew over her phone.

“Why are we going north?”

“Because the death is coming from the south.” Her fingers continued to fly as I rolled over the remains of a parking garage as fast as I could. “We have ten minutes. Less now.”

“Ten minutes to what?”

“Find a bunker. Come on, come on. Malmstrom is way too far away…. There’s no way we can make it to—”

“Malmstrom? The Air Force Base? Are you Air Force? What is going on?, have we been attacked?”

She didn’t answer, but as I hit a clear patch of road, I also hit the gas.

“270 miles per hour…” she was mumbling as she calculated.

“Are you calculating a takeoff speed or something?” I wasn’t sure but I didn’t think airplanes calculated take off speeds in miles per hour.

“Airport!” She snapped her head around at me like I was some kind of genius. “The airport is 5 minutes away. Go there.”

My headlights snapped on.

I hit a round-a-bout and got my first look at the southern sky.

It was black.

I slammed my foot on the gas and completed my turn, nearly tipping both of us over.

“Pyroclastic surge.” Amy answered my silent question. “We need to be inside the baggage area of the airport when that hits us or we’re dead.”

The radio crackled and hissed as my hair stood on end. Moments later a bolt of lightning behind us reflected off my rear-view mirror, almost blinding me.

“Move it!” She shouted.

“Moving it!”

We continued to the airport as Amy mumbled through her calculations. It didn’t take much for me to figure out what happened. “You didn’t answer. Are you Air Force?”

“Contractor. I’m a geologist.”

We pulled on to Airport property and ahead of me two planes took off one right after another in steep climbs. Bozeman was not a big enough airport to safely do that. Pilots were risking their lives to get a lucky few to safety. I wondered what they saw and thought as they climbed into the sky and headed north. “You work on digging missile silos or something?” Fine time to get to know my neighbors, right?

Amy laughed as another lightning bolt flashed to my left and the Jeep shorted out.

 “Run!”

We jumped out and stumbled our way through another earthquake as the surge thundered ever closer. In front of the airport, people were panicking, praying, or both. 

“Follow us!” I shouted as we ran through the aiport doors.

Inside was more chaos. Airport personnel shuffled people down to where Amy pointed for us to go.

I’d never been into the luggage handling part of an airport. It would never have occurred to me that this would be a safe place. But as I looked around, it made sense.

There were vehicles and machinery everywhere, and on a normal day, airplanes were in close proximity. Of course there was exceptional airflow.

For however long as the air filters would last.

Around me were a lot of scared people, again, some praying, some crying, parents reassuring their children with shaking voices. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

The door to luggage processing closed, and the entire airport shook with the force of the pyroclastic cloud hitting.

We weren’t just being hit by a cloud of ash and dust, we were hit with the fury of a planet.

The lights went out, and everyone screamed.

~~

Of course, in the coming days, I would find out that the Yellowstone super-volcano had indeed decided it was time to erupt. Northwestern Wyoming, southwestern Montana and Eastern Idaho were gone- vaporized in the pumice, fires, and hot gasses. The ash cloud reached around the globe within days, altering the climate more in one week than all the Industrial Revolutions had done since man discovered fire. Food shortages grew much faster than I’d expected as all transportation instantly ground to a halt because of clogged air filters. The volcanic smog— or VOG as people like Amy called it, didn’t just take out planes, trains and trucks; the damage to unprotected lungs was fast and deadly. As with every disaster, it was hardest on mankind’s most vulnerable, the very young, the very old, and the already ill.

The eruption itself was something that baffled every geologist and vulcanologist who looked at the data. Nobody could visit the former Yellowstone; the gases and ongoing smaller eruptions made that impossible. What had been a national park was now was a charred open wound on the face of the planet, and Earth had only just begun to heal itself.

What puzzled them all was that there’d been no lead-up rumblings, no change in the water levels or the gases, even Old Faithful had been just that- old and faithful.

In the absence of solid information, the conspiracy theorists began to speculate. Hadn’t the US been testing new weapons? Wasn’t there an ICBM silo nearby? Weren’t the Chinese been floating more of their weird balloons over the area? Hadn’t the Russians been flying in cargo plane after cargo plane of unknown supplies to Air Force bases all over California? Hadn’t the drug cartels been using the remote parts of the park for nefarious purposes? Yeah. That last one made me raise an eyebrow too. While nature abhors a vacuum, humans are more than happy to step in with whatever flows out of our stupid mouths.

So what caused the Yellowstone Caldera to send us into a nuclear winter? I have my own theory.

We were betrayed by the earth itself.

Why, you ask?

Look at what we were before the eruption. We built communities of houses, then we complained that the ground couldn’t absorb the rain anymore. In the 1700’s, lobster was a poor man’s food. We over-harvested it into an expensive delicacy. The small family farm was a thing of the past. They had a saying in Los Angeles about not trusting air your couldn't see. Not to be outdone, cities like New York had so much light pollution you could barely see the moon, much less see any stars. We poisoned our rivers, streams, and oceans, killing fish and the wildlife that depended on them. In the ultimate monument to the stupidity of man, hikers in at least one national were forbidden to clean up the trash left from land surveyors over a hundred years ago.

That’s right. We federally protected our litter.

To me, that makes the answer pretty clear.

The earth betrayed us because we betrayed it first.