Yael Dragwyla and Rich Ransdell First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 6,000 words

http://polaris93.livejournal.com/

The Eris War

Volume II: The Dragon from the Isles

Book 1: Independence Day

Chapter 10: Heaven Can Wait

Because of the thick, black smoke and airborne ash and debris now covering virtually everything from
southern British Columbia to Oregon’s Willamette National Forest and beyond, and from Moses Lake,
Washington on the east to somewhere far out into the Pacific Ocean, direct observation of that region
wasn’t possible, except for some radar images of the ground and optical photographs of the cloud-cover
above it made by satellites. However, speed-of-light communication via telephones and Internet among the
world’s various, still-operating seismology laboratories and research stations, including many in Osaka,
Japan, Southern California, Siberia’s Tunguska Peninsula, eastern Canada, and numerous others, made it
possible to reconstruct what had just happened. Apparently a gigantic eruption of Mt. Hood, one nearly as
massive as that of Mt. Rainier several hours before, had just taken place. Dennings’ report that it had
“exploded” was essentially correct. So violent had that eruption been that its ejecta, glowing brightly in
both the infrared and the ultraviolet regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, had been lofted miles above
the Earth’s surface and well above even the highest of the cloud-cover over the region, their images clearly
caught by overhead satellites. The event had caused an earthquake measuring at least 9.5 on the Richter
scale, centered more or less on what had been Mt. Hood. As a result, much of Oregon and Idaho, even in
areas far from the site of the actual eruption, had suddenly been transformed into a devastation of jumbled,
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burning debris, the fires fueled by the pitiful remains of many of the homes, business buildings, factories,
resorts, hotels, motels, parklands, and forests that had up until then been essentially spared from forest-fire
and earthquake damage.
But that was the least of it. Hood’s apocalyptic eruption had been just one of several – and not the
biggest, by any means – that had taken place simultaneously among still more of the volcanoes in the
Cascade chain. So far, the roster of the volcanoes that had erupted this morning included Helens in
Washington, Union Peak in Oregon, Shasta in California, and a number of others that had not erupted
earlier after the eruptions of Rainier and Baker. Worse, the entire Olympic and Seymour mountain ranges,
extending from Vancouver Island, BC down through Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, almost all the way
to Aberdeen and Olympia, had begun erupting and/or collapsing, judging from the seismic traces coming
from that area. Flaming debris from those eruptions had already been thrown well up into the stratosphere
by the initial eruptions and the vicious thermals that followed them. We sat mesmerized before the TV,
watching in amazement the clear satellite photos now coming in that showed the fiery ejecta fountaining far
above the cloud-tops, well into the stratosphere.
As if to punctuate what the announcer was saying, sudden tremors began shaking everything around
us. For a few seconds, while the picture on the television screen went in and out several times, due perhaps
to stress on the cable, glasses sitting on the kitchen table shook and clinked, windows rattled in their
frames, and the two of us, sitting on the floor in front of the set, clutched one another for support, too taken
by surprise to think of getting up and heading for a doorway or corner. The cats, who, up until now, had
been huddled miserably in our laps, wanting only to stay as close to us as possible, began to wail
hysterically.
Then the quake ended, apparently doing little damage. Shaken, we turned back to the TV, where the
announcer was saying: “— not sure exactly why these latest eruptions have taken place, but some think
that possibly nuclear submarines docked at Bremerton Island in Puget Sound, each of them armed with a
number of thermonuclear weapons, may have had something to do with it . . . ”
“Oh, shit! The Bangor sub pens!” I hissed. “Maybe some of the nukes there cooked off! Or
somebody tried launching the missiles!”
“It never stops!” Kathy moaned. “What next?”
“Hush, darlin’,” I told her, putting an arm tight around her shoulders and pulling her close. “If we
keep listening, we’ll find out real soon, I’m sure.”
“— the bottom of the Sound opened up,” said the announcer, “spilling all its contents onto the white-
hot rock in the magma chambers of the Cascade massif. This would have included any submarines docked
at Bremerton Island, as well as the island itself. Also, according to as-yet unconfirmed reports, it is
possible that a nuclear reactor had been built on Indian Island in Puget Sound some years ago, to provide
power for military operations at Bremerton and elsewhere. If so, that reactor would likewise have gone
down with everything else into the magma below. Since, according to the scientists we have contacted this
morning, volcanic magma itself already quite naturally contains a certain percentage of highly radioactive
material, the source of much or most of the great heat of the earth’s interior as well as of the magma
flowing out of it, the addition of more radioactive materials from the nuclear reactors in the Bremerton
Island submarines or the rumored reactor on Indian Island could have caused a reaction leading to these
latest eruptions and earthquakes. However, at this time that is just speculation . . . ”
His face shiny and pale, sweat beading on his forehead in huge blobs, the announcer went on to say
that of the thousands of people in the area of The Dalles, including all the people that had been rescued
from the western shore of the Columbia, only a few had made it out of that area via aircraft and ground
transportation before the eruption. Due more to sheer luck than anything else, a few of the trucks,
ambulances and other ground vehicles that had left that area before Hood had let go had actually gotten far
enough away from there that they had survived the tremendous earthquakes triggered by the eruptions of
Hood and its neighbors in the Cascades. But for every two hundred of those who had been there in the area
of The Dalles that morning, no more than one had made it away safely.
A few touching photographs of the non-human beings who had likewise been the objects of that
earlier, tremendous rescue effort – a small kitten held by a little girl; a horse and some dogs being led to a
holding area by a weary human volunteer; a small group of wild animals that included a badger, two
stunned-looking weasels, a coyote, and a shivering, dejected bobcat who stared at the camera with
enormous, terror-filled eyes – were shown: these were the lucky ones who had been taken out of the area
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by truck, car, and helicopter in time to escape the eruption and the worst of the earthquakes. All the rest, as
far as anyone knew, were gone.
Gone, too, were several squadrons of military personnel and three busloads of convicts who had been
transported into the area to help with the rescue effort. Gone, all gone, buried under vast tracts covered by
burning ash, flaming boulders, blazing mud, and slow-moving, deadly lava. Even if some of those who
hadn’t managed to get out in time had somehow escaped being buried, the hideously hot blast of the nuee
ardenne, the “burning wind” that had swept across the blistered, tumbled remains of The Dalles soon after
the eruption – a wind so hot that in fact it had registered quite clearly on infrared shots taken right through
the omnipresent cloud-cover by satellites – would have instantly incinerated them where they stood (or
crouched, or squatted, or lay flat; perhaps “vaporized” might have been a better term, as hot as that
blasting breath of white-hot, ash-laden air must have been to show so clearly on the infrared cameras
through all that cloud-cover).
Elsewhere, in the far eastern portions of Washington State, a good part of the city of Spokane was in
ruins and aflame, a victim of the tremendous earthquakes that had rumbled through that unhappy state over
the last several hours. Refugees from Spokane, Pullman, Cheney, and other areas near the Washington-
Idaho border had been streaming into Idaho, British Columbia, and northeastern Oregon ever since the
early-morning eruption of Rainier and the collapse of Puget Sound. Pictures taken by news-crews in Coeur
d’Alene and Moscow, Idaho, and the little towns of Grand Forks and Midway, just north of the BC-
Washington border, rapidly succeeded one another on the screen:
First there was the arrival of hundreds of refugees in Coeur d’Alene in trucks, vans, automobiles, RVs
and trailers, SUVs, Peterbilts, and a host of other means of transportation, including Shank’s Mare. The
news-crew rather understandably concentrated on one of the odder arrivals, an enormous old Chevy van
covered with bright decals of flowers and a dozen bumper-stickers that bore legends such as “One Nuclear
Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day” and “War is Bad for Children and Other Living Things,” carrying some
twenty terrified domestic ferrets, three shaken cats, six dogs, and ten small children from a daycare center
back in Spokane. The driver of the van was a woman who had been operating a North Star ferret shelter in
Spokane next door to the day-care center. When, around eight in the morning, the quakes had begun to get
more and more violent, she had loaded all her ferrets, cats, and dogs into the van, then had run next door to
the day-care center, where she had easily been able to persuade the workers there to let her take as many
children with her to safety as she could get into the van.
There was also a PAWS van from Pullman, loaded with puppies, kittens, rabbits, and several other
homeless pets, including a small pony, a young chimp, a banty hen, and several assorted guinea pigs. The
driver had, like the lady with the ferret-shelter, simply loaded as many of the animals from the local shelter
as he could into his van and taken off east when the quakes began to roll through.
And, of course, there were numerous horse-trailers, cattle-trucks, and other livestock conveyances.
All in all, at least nine hundred vehicles from Washington State had already arrived in Coeur d’Alene.
More were coming every moment, most of them carrying terrified men, women, and children, the children
either shocky or wildly screaming and otherwise acting out in their fright.
And now a bulletin was coming in concerning Hanford, Washington, located about thirty miles north
of the Washington-Oregon border, right in the middle of the state, not all that far from where The Dalles
had been.
The old Hanford reactors, used ever since World War II for the generation of electricity and, just
incidentally, for the production of plutonium for nuclear devices – the Fat Man device that had destroyed
Nagasaki in 1945 had been made with plutonium produced at the Hanford Reservation – had been smashed
to pieces by the pounding earthquakes that had roared through the region beginning at about 4:30 a.m. It
had been spared burial by the eruption of Hood and its neighbors, but that was no blessing at all, for it had
begun leaking intensely radioactive material in all directions. Some of the radioactive crud it was spewing
out was going into that section of what had, before this morning, been the Columbia River, its way to the
Pacific ocean now blocked east of The Dalles by ejecta from Hood. There had been attempts by both
military personnel and civilians, using whatever vehicles were available, to evacuate residents of the area to
safer areas, away from the increasingly radioactive environs of the reservation. But those efforts had
dwindled to nearly nothing after the eruption of Hood. In any event, such rescue efforts were likely to
prove worse than useless, for both the would-be rescuers and local residents had already had been exposed
to so much radiation by then that all their lives were almost certainly forfeit.
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Now films were coming in from Pendleton, Oregon. Pendleton was far enough from Hood that it had
been spared destruction by the earthquakes and the other side-effects of the eruption of Hood, at least so
far. In the last few minutes, burned, bleeding survivors from Kennewick and Walla, Walla, had begun
staggering out of the disaster that was the Columbia River Basin into Pendleton, many carrying those too
badly injured to walk. Interviews were being conducted with them on-site by numerous news-crews who
had been rushed there by air from various parts of the country, including teams from CNN. Sickened to the
heart, we watched men lifting charred bodies out of a battered, blistered two-trailer semi that had crossed
the gorge on a narrow bridge into Oregon. Others were attending to several still-living but almost as badly
injured refugees from Kennewick. Apparently there had been an explosion in a chemical factory there, so
powerful that it had flattened an area of at least nine square blocks. The victims we watched being carried
from the trailer’s vast maw to waiting ambulances had all been residents of the area. A raging firestorm
had swept outward from the inferno of the blasted factory, consuming a good portion of the surrounding
houses, office buildings, other industrial plant, and schools and other government buildings, but that wasn’t
the worst.
The worst was that among other products, the factory had manufactured a number of things whose
manufacture required such interesting chemicals as white phosphorus, various long-chain hydrocarbon
compounds, and others at least as malignantly vicious as those. The explosion had churned the factory’s
contents into a witch’s brew which was essentially indistinguishable from Greek Fire, something far, far
worse than mere napalm. The poor souls being carried from the trailer to the ambulances had been right in
the path of several huge, blazing blobs of the stuff, which had acted just like the ghastly “Willie Petes” –
White Phosphorus grenades and bombs – used in World War II had: the material in the blobs clung with
the tenacity of superglue to whatever it touched, consuming everything with which it came in contact,
almost impossible to extinguish by anything short of physically carving it away from whatever it had
encountered. When the surface which it had struck happened to be the flesh of living beings, it merrily
burned its way right on down to the bone unless the entire affected area was immediately plunged into cold
water and kept there. In cases in which they it someone’s face, this remedy wasn’t practical, as it would
have meant death by drowning – but that would have been infinitely preferable to the hideous death by fire
that was the only likely alternative.
One ingenious soul had, however, thought to grab some state-of-the-art fire-extinguishers waiting on
the back docks of a nearby company to be taken in and installed, and had sprayed the contents of the
extinguishers on those who had been hit by the blazing ejecta from the factory. Lucky idea: the
extinguishers were filled with crash foam impregnated with liquid nitrogen, the same stuff used at airports
on aircraft fires; not only does it smother almost any fire on which it is used, cutting it off from the oxygen
needed to support combustion, but, because it becomes so cold due to its rapid, enormous expansion upon
exposure to air (not to mention the fact that the liquid nitrogen with which it is doped has a temperature of
about -220º C to start with), it lowers the temperature of the burning material way below that necessary to
sustain re-ignition and combustion.
The genius who had grabbed the extinguishers and those to whom she had passed many of them had
been able to save quite a few of the victims. Those who had been hit with only a little of the stuff, on legs
or arms, were fortunate, for the crash-foam quickly put out the blazing gunk that had hit them, and rendered
it so cold that there was no way it could re-ignite.
Unfortunately, however, this also meant that the area immediately under and around the stuff was hit
by something a lot worse than mere frostbite. One tiny little girl being tenderly carried to one of the
waiting ambulances had been hit on her right hand by the fiery chemical mixture. Her rescuers had covered
her entire hand with crash-foam, putting out the blazing horror that had engulfed her hand – but also
freezing it along with her arm halfway from wrist to elbow in the process. Her damaged right arm,
dangling from the side of the gray-green cocoon of army blanket in which she had been swaddled, was
carbon-black where the original burning material had hit it. Everywhere else, from her fingertips to
halfway up her arm, was the blue-black of irreversibly frozen flesh – ending in the telltale, greeny-gray
signature of incipient gangrene in a band about an eighth of an inch wide that circled the place where the
frozen area met still-warm flesh. She would lose that arm most of the way to the shoulder for certain –
there was no way they could save it, and she’d be lucky if they didn’t have to excise the shoulder-joint, as
well.
Then there was the tall, broad-shouldered fireman, grimacing in his pain, who had been hit on the left
foot by some of the stuff. He’d probably lose most of that entire leg because of what the crash-foam had
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done to it. As the men carrying him on a stretcher toward the ambulance passed the news-camera, it
focused on his face, which normally would have been a gorgeous mahogany, but was now gray with pain
and horror. His lips were so tightly pinched from his effort not to cry out in his agony that little could be
seen of them beyond a thin line in his lower face slightly lighter than the surrounding skin.
Whoever it was they carried by next, however, wouldn’t be troubled by the prospect of losing a limb –
or anything else. He – or she, or it, there was no telling now – had been so hideously burned, over so much
of his or her body, that neither gender nor ethnic origin was discernible on the remains. The body looked
like nothing so much as an store-window dummy that had been badly charred over about 60% of its
surface, the rest of it looking as if it had been made up to look like overdone steak.
“Oh, my Lord!” muttered Kathy, raising the remote and aiming at the set. “I can’t take any more of
this! – Here, let’s see what’s on the other channels . . .”
Now we found ourselves looking at KTTV News again, where a grim-faced announcer was discussing
news of the previous hour which we had missed:
“— as we reported earlier, for some time after the eruption of Mt. Rainier and the subsequent collapse
and explosion of the Puget Sound basin, a small area of land in the southern part of Western Washington,
including the southern part of Pacific County by the Grays River, the eastern part of Wahkiakum County,
and Clark County, where the city of Vancouver, Washington, was located, was left miraculously intact,
though badly shaken up by the eruptions and subsequent earthquakes. So was most of Vancouver Island,
BC, from Port Albern north, as was Cape Flattery, at the far northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula
in Washington State, and onward east and south, to Ozette and Sekiu . . . ” he said, turning to look at an
electronically projected map of the area high up on the wall behind his desk and point to the indicated
regions with a long plastic rod held in his right hand as he talked.
Rescue-crews had soon begun to come to those areas to try to save the relatively few survivors
clustered there, he said. He began to tell the story of one of the heroes of those rescue attempts, a
courageous young journalist and pilot of a news helicopter, Katy Johnson of Salem, Oregon, originally a
native of Tacoma, Washington. Beginning at about 5:30 a.m. this morning, as false dawn was preparing to
give way to true dawn, she had carried out a series of valorous flights in and out of a tiny area near
Vancouver, Washington, picking up survivors huddled there and carrying them to safety in central and
southern Oregon. The stunning films that now began to fill the screen, together with the announcer’s
running voice-over commentary, brought that story home to us in a way no mere narration by itself ever
could have.
Ms. Johnson, who had started work that day at her company’s studios in Salem, Oregon, at about 3
a.m., caught the first reports of the disaster in Washington State at about 4:20 a.m. With blatant blarney, a
few bald-faced lies, and the most thoroughgoing nerve of anyone in the history of American journalism,
Ms. Johnson, driving like a bat out of hell to an Army Reserve unit about two miles from the Salem studios,
somehow conned the use of a Hueyvac-type Army helicopter, a full tank of fuel, and a portable reserve
fuel-tank out of the unit, and had taken off for Vancouver, Washington at about 5:30 a.m. On board the
helicopter with her, mounted in a ceiling clip so that it could view everything she could – and, incidentally,
Katy herself, which was why many of these films had survived her last flight – was a digital television
camera attached to a brand-new type of communication equipment, a laser “pulsed blip-squirter,” one of
three which her news-studio had acquired just a few weeks before. This state-of-the-art, space-age gadget
could send something like 50 Gigabytes of data every tenth of a second either to a satellite relay or a line-
of-sight to a receiver, or alternate between the two every tenth of a second. It ran off a polonium or
thorium battery that held enough charge to power the device for anywhere from 15 to 30 hours of
continuous use, depending on various factors.
Throughout Johnson’s amazing flights in and out of Clark County, Washington, back and forth over
Portland and the Columbia River, the “blip-squirter” continuously sent the data it was recording to
overhead satellites via a transmitting antenna which Johnson had arranged so that it hung out a partly-
opened cargo door. The satellites had, in turn, re-broadcast the data back down to the Salem studios, where
they were processed for television viewing. The resultant films, simultaneously Ms. Johnson’s finest work
and her memorial, were now being shown to us by KTTV, one of the many television studios across the
nation which had been sent the films via AP and UPS communications satellites. Other footage which
KTTV was also airing now, which had been shot during the interval between Rainier’s eruption and the
explosion of Hood by various news-teams throughout northwestern Oregon, paled to insignificance beside
Johnson’s magnificent last work.
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Each time Johnson, who had turned 26 the previous June, landed in Clark County, she had picked up
as many survivors as she could safely carry out, most of them children and wounded, and then had flown
back to the closest safe point in Oregon she could find to let them off. There they would be fed and treated
for whatever injuries they had sustained, those of both the body and the soul, before Johnson had rescued
them. Then, conning whatever fuel and supplies she could get from the places where she offloaded the
refugees – south Portland, Beaverton, McMinniville, Dallas, Salem, Tillamook – that gallant, gallant
woman flew back to Clark County, hunting for survivors, orienting her onboard camera via a lanyard tied
around its lens, using either one hand, or by means of her teeth or chin if both hands were occupied piloting
the helicopter, so that she could film the spectacular events unfolding all around and below her as she flew
in both directions.
Shots of two women and a man, all three towing two small children by the hands, running for her
helicopter, which had just landed in a spot near Vancouver, across the shaking, shivering land. In the
background, smoke fills the air, including an ominous black, fire-shot plume to the north, where Helens is
beginning to wake up. The three adults boost the children into the cargo-hold of the helicopter. The man
helps the two women in, then turns to go back for more, waving Johnson to leave and take the two women
and six children to safety. Shot of one of the children, a little boy, a muddy river of tears streaming down
his face, peering out of one window of the helicopter to get a glimpse of the dwindling figure of the man,
who looks so like the boy: his father.
Shots of Portland from above, passing by on the way back to a landing in Dallas, Oregon: a great
pillar of jet-black smoke stands tall in the sky above Mt. Hood, which also is beginning to come to full,
apocalyptic wakefulness. Panicked people milling in all directions in the streets below. Rubble lying in
the streets, sprawled and mangled bodies nearby, fallout of this morning’s great earthquake and numerous
aftershocks, which have done incalculable damage to the city, killing hundreds outright and leaving others
without shelter or medical aid for some time (though her first return landing had been in Portland, from
this point on, none of Johnson’s Oregon-side landings were within ten miles of that city, which simply had
nothing to offer refugees).
An overhead shot from above an area near Vancouver, WA, still relatively undamaged: Frightened
children and adults mill around like ants whose nest has been raided by an anteater. Suddenly, enormous
cracks begin to open in the ground. Incandescent plumes of gas and flame shoot up from them like demons
swarming forth from Hell. Shot of a screaming child suddenly washed by such a plume, which ignites the
child; now a living torch, the child runs across the ground – and then another gigantic crack in the ground
yawns open beneath it, and it falls in and disappears. An instant later, with no warning, the entire area is
engulfed in flames erupting from a gargantuan, county-wide, blazing abyss that opens up, Hell hungry for
dinner, swallowing the area and everything and everyone in it whole. (Johnson barely made it out of there,
because of the severe buffeting the helicopter was taking from the thermals.) Long shots of vast rivers of
fire, some of them as wide as the Columbia once was, suddenly springing forth from the devastated earth,
flowing across the pitiful remains of buildings, lawns, homes, everything else. As the chopper banks and
turns to leave the area, the onboard camera captures titanic fountains of fire erupting from the area it has
just left.
Again and again and again Johnson single-handedly flew that enormous helicopter into Washington
State to rescue survivors and return with them to areas of relative safety in Oregon, capturing on film the
titanic events of the day as she went. A hundred and fifty human beings owed their lives to Katy Johnson’s
unparalleled heroism. So did a host of domestic and wild animals. Some of those, like the small black cat
and the great iguana who were with her on her last, doomed flight, had been carried aboard by owners or
Good Samaritans. Others, such as the six crows, the shaken gray wolf, the utterly demoralized puma, and
the roan doe she let off at Tillamook at the end of one flight, had simply jumped into the open cargo-doors
at the first opportunity when she landed in Washington. If you save one life, you save the whole world –
what was Johnson’s score by then? A solar system? The local arm of the galaxy?
In spite of the incredible courage and unbelievable good luck which sustained her through flight after
flight, Johnson finally ran out of luck during her last flight into Clark County. She was coming in for a
landing in a field just outside of a little town called Dollar Corner, near Battle Ground Lake. The land
below her, which was already trembling like a terrified horse from the countless tremors wracking it, the
signatures of the forces now building up in Helens, Hood, and other parts of the Cascades that had not yet
erupted, began to ripple and buck like the surface of the Pacific ocean during a typhoon. Suddenly, right
under the descending helicopter, an enormous plume of blazing lava ripped through the shaking land and
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rose to greet her, instantly incinerating the dozen or so men, women, and children clustered there awaiting
rescue.
Via satellite relay, through the camera which she had clipped to a stanchion behind her so that she
could maneuver the helicopter through the increasingly turbulent air without having to worry about the
camera, the world – or what was left by now of it and television viewers who could still pull in news
stations – watched as Johnson, suddenly engulfed in the blazing plume that punched its way through the
bottom of the helicopter, erupting right beside her, screamed in agony, flailing her dark arms, two furiously
burning torches, as she crumpled and died. The little black cat she had rescued on one of her trips up to
Clark County, which she had carried with her during the last four flights because it had refused to leave the
helicopter and the security of its rescuer’s presence rather than abandon her for whatever unknown haven
Oregon had to offer, was sitting on a shelf beside her at the time. The cat watched in horror as its rescuer,
engulfed in flame, was transformed from a lovely, spirited young woman into a charred, contorted corpse
within instants. The picture jolted. The cat screamed. Then it, too, was awash in fire, instantly crisped
into ash by the molten rock surging up into the cabin of the helicopter. The last pictures the faithful camera
recorded before it, too, was destroyed by the plume was of a huge-eyed iguana, turning bright red in its
terror, poised atop another shelf high above the floor of the cabin, staring at the coyly beckoning tongue of
fire reaching out for it from below . . .
For a moment, the cameras switched back again to the announcer, who stood, head bowed, fingers
lightly pinching the bridge of his nose, clearly hard-pressed not to break down himself over his gallant
colleague’s horrifying end. Then, taking a deep breath, he raised his head and said, “According to the
clock inside her camera, Katy Johnson died about 8:30 a.m. this morning, not very long ago. Even as she
died, the drama of The Dallas, Oregon, was being played out not far to the east . . . ”
Johnson died as the first of a series of explosions, one after another, including the eruptions of Mts.
Helens and Hood, destroyed the last refuges in Western Washington, and blasted Portland, Oregon into so
much blazing rubble. The only stable land in WA state now lay east of Wenatchee. Vancouver,
Washington was destroyed by a nuee ardenne and tsunamis of lava from Helens, as was Portland, to the
south. In Oregon, everything from Salem north and The Dalles west was pretty much gone; those areas
which had somehow been left intact after the earlier eruptions of Rainier and Baker were now devastated or
completely obliterated by the eruptions of Hood and Helens.
A view now came up of the Hadean desolation of WA State from a news helicopter piloted by another
courageous – or foolhardy – pilot flying just south of Portland a few minutes ago, “blip-squirted” via
satellite link to news-studios around the world: steam, plumes of lava, boiling clouds of toxic gas and
incandescent ash filling the air, but openings among these permitted a view of the devastation below.
“Jesus God, it looks like . . . just like a – a view of Hell from just inside the Vestibule of the Inferno,”
whispered the ashen-faced commentator, who now shared a split screen with the shots coming in from the
news helicopter. Unthinkingly tracing a cross over his heart with one shaking brown hand, his hands
searching unconsciously for the rosary that wasn’t there, in an awe-struck voice he recited, the voyeuristic
throat-mike picking all of it up quite clearly:

“PER ME SI VA NE LA CITTÀ,
PER ME SI VA NE L’ETTERNO DOLORE,
PER ME SI VA TRA LA PERDUTA GENTE.
GIUSTIZIA MOSSE IL MIO ALTO FATTORE;
FECEMI LA DIVINA PODESTATE,
LA SOMMA SAPÏENZE E ’L PRIMO AMORE.
DINANZI A ME NON FUOR COSE CREATE
SE NON ETTERNE, E IO ETTERNO DURO.
LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’INTRATE.”

“Jesus,” I whispered. “It really is.”

“What?” Kathy asked me.
“Hell,” I told. “Look at it!”
Whatever ghouls in the news-station had put the commentator on the screen with the scenes now being
rebroadcast from Oregon finally had mercy on the poor bastard, who now vanished from the screen,
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By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 8 of 8

leaving only that endless, horrifying panorama of ultimate desolation before us, like shots from a National
Geographic documentary on the Kali Yuga For several minutes, no commentary accompanied that
fantastic, infernal parade of assorted views of a bad day in Hell: Against a Disean backdrop of Portland,
Oregon, burning in the distance, and heavy black blankets of fire-shot smoke, vast talons of blazing lava
reached out of the earth to claw at the black, black sky, while all around them the land bucked and
shuddered, wracked by continuous tremors. Tumbled blocks of ejecta shot into the sky from one nearby
opening in the earth; the view juddered violently as thermals buffeted the helicopter, whose pilot had the
fight of his life to keep his craft on a more or less even keel. Great veils of dark brown, poisonous-looking
smoke drifted through the air, even this high up. Below, the land burned, along with whatever greenery,
homes, office-buildings, and all the rest of civilization’s ephemera, along with the hopes, ambitions,
dreams, and achievements of the human beings who had occupied and used them, which had filled it just
hours before. We could make out the torn remnants of a number of roads and the broad black serpent of I-5
crawling brokenly across the landscape below, but little else stood out distinctly enough to identify it.
Suddenly, beside me, I heard a low moan. Then Kathy began to speak, in a voice I’d never heard her
use before:

“. . . and God remembered Babylon the Great,

to make her drain the cup of the fury of His wrath.
And every island fled away,
And the mountains were not found . . .”

Tears pouring down her cheeks, she was quoting the Book of Revelations. Hearing her do that sent shivers
of dread through me. Like me, Kathy was a sort of “born-again Pagan” who, raised in a nominally
Christian culture, had eventually found too much of the dogma with which she’d been raised impossible to
believe in the face of fact and experience acquired over the years. Still, she had read much of the Bible, or
had had it read to her, at least during her childhood. Now, in this hour of terror, one of its scariest passages
was coming back to haunt us both.
Wordlessly, I reached out and took her left hand, squeezing it gently. Throwing back her head, she
took a great breath, then sighed deeply. “Oh, Rich . . .” Then, turning to me, she laid her head against my
breast and wept. Quietly, I put my arms around her, all I could do.
Finally, regaining her composure, Kathy straightened up. Dabbing at her face with the towel she’d
carried in from the kitchen, she told me, smiling a little, “Maybe there’s something not quite as . . .
overwhelming on some other channel. Shall we?” she asked, raising the remote in one hand.
“Sure,” I told her. “I doubt you’ll find anything any better, though.”