Chapter 63

Mauna Loa, Hawai‘i

By now Mac knew the zone maps for the lava as well as he knew his email address, knew that all the information he was getting, almost moment to moment, was based on the best empirical data and geologic mapping his team had available to it.

His team minus Kenny and Pia, of course.

He had studied the hydrologic modeling of the previous downhill lava flows from previous eruptions. He was fully aware that a flow path as immense as this one was would ultimately be defined from the point source of the catchment, following as closely as possible the steepest line of descent.

That was the plan, anyway.

But he knew the earth-eating goddess Pele had her own plans, with her rift zones and cones and scattered ramparts and what looked like a million ground cracks and everything that was happening right now in unseen lava channels.

Mac knew that in the end, the area covered by the lava would be a function of the duration of the volume of magma, how quickly it left the volcano—a fact as unknowable as anything they were dealing with—and its various angles of descent, how many and how steep.

No matter how often he told himself that the world had survived volcanoes before, he knew that the reality was that it would not survive this one because of the death contained in the canisters stored inside the Ice Tube.

This time both man and nature would lose…

The ground shook again. It didn't startle him as much as the loud voice behind him.

"You said you wanted to talk," J. P. Brett said. "So let's talk. I've got things to do."

Mac turned to face him. He felt a sudden and powerful urge to knock the smirk off Brett's face, this rich and powerful asshat who thought this was some kind of game, just like the Cutlers so clearly did, all of them more worried about the way things looked than the way things actually were, realizing what was on the line here, for all of them.

He wanted to ask them how being famous would help them when everyone and everything was gone. He wanted to scream at them that all of them might be about to die.

But before he could say a thing, there was an explosion from the summit. It sounded as if a bomb had gone off up there, as if the aerial bombing had already begun.

Another explosion followed that one.

Then a third.

Mac and Brett stared at where the noise was coming from and saw rocks rocketing up in the sky as if they had been shot from below the surface by some unseen cannon. Then a hailstorm of lava rock and ash rained down on them.

The vehicles came to a stop. The hard hats on all the crews up the mountain began to scatter in all directions, men and women diving for cover, some of them going underneath the metal blades of the bulldozers, some of them crowding into the cabins, all looking for some shelter from the sudden storm.

Even from this distance, Mac could hear their screams.

Mac watched as a rock as big as a bowling ball hit a man squarely in the back and saw the man go down and then not move.

Another man raced down the hill toward Mac and Brett as if trying to outrun the storm; a jagged piece of basalt hit his hard hat and sent it flying, and he went down.

Mac turned to see if Brett was all right and saw him diving into the front seat of his Rivian R1T truck just as a rock came crashing into his windshield.

Mac ran up the mountain to the army man lying face down and motionless. He rolled him over and was relieved to see he was still breathing, although blood poured out of the wound on the side of his face.

In the next instant Mac smelled the rotten-egg odor of sulfur dioxide; the rocks kept raining down.

A rock slammed into Mac's hard hat, knocking him down and nearly out. He rolled over in the dirt, trying to cover up, and heard a different kind of roar above him. Mac looked up and saw a drone the size of a small plane spinning out of control, about to come crashing down from the sky on top of him.

For days he had been obsessed about the end being near.

It had been nearer than he'd thought.