Chapter 81

U.S. Military Reserve, Hawai‘i

Time to eruption: 6 hours

They still hadn't found the Kane girl, the one who'd been with Sergeant Noa Mahoe at the bar the night of the leak at the Ice Tube. The girl or girlfriend.

General Mark Rivers didn't want to hear any more excuses from Briggs. It wasn't as if they were trying to find a missing person in New York City, he'd said.

"Find her!" Rivers roared, then dismissed Briggs with an irritated wave of his hand.

The girl was a loose end. He hated loose ends.

Sergeant Mahoe, that dumb-ass, was still in quarantine. In quarantine and under twenty-four-hour armed guard and possibly recovering from exposure to the radiation, although in the pictures Rivers had seen Mahoe looked like a napalm victim. The doctors wouldn't say that he was definitely going to make it, just that he had a chance. They wanted to know more about his exposure.

All Rivers cared about was that this dumb-ass horny kid had taken his exposure with him off the base that night and without permission.

He needed to know if the girl was infected and whom she might have infected.

Goddamn, he hated loose ends.

Mark Rivers rubbed his forehead so hard he was afraid he'd break the skin. He wondered if the girl even knew Mahoe was sick, wondered if she might be some sort of carrier even if her skin wasn't starting to fall off her in black flakes.

What if we all survive the eruption, what if we control the lava in the end at the same time a different kind of black death starts to seep across the island like a plague, all because of a sergeant under my command?Rivers thought.

On how many fronts was he expected to fight this war?

What if something just as deadly made its way across the Big Island before the lava began to flow like a tidal wave from the top of the mountain about which they were all obsessing?

God, he needed sleep.

Or a stiff drink.

Maybe both.

Patton had slapped soldiers under his command during the Sicily campaign, and Rivers thought he might've had the right idea. Rivers would've considered slapping Sergeant Mahoe now if he hadn't been afraid of catching what Mahoe had and causing his own skin to rot.

His landline rang. The soldier at the front desk informed him MacGregor, Rebecca Cruz, Brett, and the Cutlers were here.

All of the available intel, all of the science at their fingertips, said that the eruption would happen today, perhaps even before the morning was over. The quakes were coming more rapidly now, the way contractions did when a woman was about to give birth.

Birth,he thought. Beginning of life.

This might be the opposite of that.

Rivers looked down at the Hawaiian words he'd scrawled on the pad in front of him:

Ka hopena

The end.

Now his satellite phone was ringing. Rivers was using this, not his cell phone, now—the way all military personnel were.

Briggs.

"I think we might have eyes on the girl," Colonel James Briggs said as the walls of the military base began to shake again, harder than ever.

Leilana Kane tried to blend in as best she could with the crowd moving toward the piers at the Port of Hilo, all the people ahead of her and behind her trying to get on one of the small ferryboats that had begun evacuating people from the island the previous afternoon. These were the residents of Hilo who had chosen to leave rather than work with the army, some of them not knowing when they would return or what shape the Big Island might be in when they did.

Some residents with enough money had been chartering small planes to get them to one of the other islands, wanting to be anywhere but here when Mauna Loa exploded with a force they had been hearing about for days, a force the likes of which their island had never seen.

Leilana had been on the run since the soldiers had dragged Noa out of Hale Inu Sports Bar like he was some sort of criminal; Leilana had managed to slip out the back door moments before the army closed the place down.

She had given up trying to reach Noa on his phone, especially after some of her friends told her that men from the army were calling around and asking if anybody had seen her or been in contact with her. She'd stopped using her phone at all, afraid the army or the police might use it to track her.

After she left the sports bar, she'd gone to the macadamia farm where her grandparents on her mother's side had raised her after her mother died of cancer. The next morning soldiers had shown up at the farm, a postcard-pretty place off Saddle Road not far from the military base. Leilana had gotten away again, but not before telling her grandparents to tell the soldiers they hadn't seen her and didn't have any idea where she was.

Last night, Leilana had slept on the beach. She was used to being on her own, sometimes feeling as if she'd raised herself, and she had never been afraid, not in Hilo, to sleep on the sand and under the stars.

Maybe she could come back after the eruption, when the island was safe again, and find out what happened to Noa, but now she wanted to be anywhere except here, like the other people in the line.

There were soldiers and police showing up at her friends' houses, saying it was urgent that they find her, that she was in danger.

But in danger from what?

Before Leilana stopped using her phone because it was a tracking device, one of the girls she worked with, Natalie Palakiko, asked, "Did you break the law, Lani?"

"God, no," Leilana said.

"Because I got the feeling that if they find you, they want to arrest you," Natalie said.

"Arrest me for what?"

"I don't know," Natalie said. "But before they left my house they told me that if you contacted me and I didn't immediately contact them, I might be in trouble too."

Leilana told herself she would sort it all out later. For now, as the ground kept shaking, causing occasional screams from the people moving slowly toward the piers, she just needed to make herself gone. She pulled her HILO VULCANS hat farther down over her eyes.

When she briefly stepped out of the line to see how close she was to the front, she heard a loud voice she recognized call out, "Leilana Kane! You bagging this piece of rock too?"

She turned and saw Sherry Hokula, a girl she'd gone to high school with, wildly waving.

"Leilana!" she said, louder than before. "That you, girlfriend? Over here!"

When Leilana looked at the front of the line, she saw two soldiers making their way toward her from the dock area.

One of them was on his phone.

Leilana ran, ran from the army again, sprinting back to her motorbike in the long-term parking garage on Kuhio Street; she looked back once and saw the soldiers break into a run too.

Her only thought was to make it back to the farm and her grandparents.

There was nowhere else for her to go, nowhere to hide.

She didn't know why she was on the run. But she was. Running harder than ever.

The sun was finally up, usually such a beautiful time of day in Hilo, one she loved watching from the beach.

Just not today.

The walls were closing in on her before the volcano did.

Leilana was very fast; she had been a sprinter at Hilo High.

She raced past the garage now, then circled back on side streets. When she finally reached the garage, the soldiers were nowhere in sight.

She got on her small motorized bike, eased it out onto the street, and headed out of town, making sure not to drive too fast. She drove until she ran out of gas, maybe half a mile from the farm.

She left the bike in the brush on the side of the road that was just wide enough for her grandfather's rickety old truck.

Just before she reached the farmhouse, she stopped.

Something was wrong.

Something, she could see, was very wrong.

She stared at the small cluster of macadamia trees to the side of the ranch house, the beginning of the modest orchard that had been in her family for generations.

The trees had turned completely black—they looked like they had been drenched in ink.

Or burned in a fire.

In addition, she could see small black circles leading from the trees toward the front door, as if holes had been burned into the lawn.

Leilana Kane felt as if she could not breathe, as if a shadow had fallen on her grandparents' beautiful, innocent world.

She moved to the other side of the house, to where she had always been able to find her grandmother's pride and joy, the jacaranda tree whose blossoms were almost too lovely to bear at this time of year, the one that her grandmother had told Leilana had grown up with her, because she had planted it the day Leilana was born.

Now it looked as if someone had set fire to it; the remaining leaves on the tree were completely black, the trunk withered. If she walked over and touched it, Leilana thought, it would simply turn into a pile of ash.

But she was afraid to get closer to it, much less touch it.

She kept moving around the house, afraid now to go inside, hoping that her grandparents were anywhere but here.

Her grandmother's small vegetable garden in the back, the one she grew her beloved tomatoes in, looked like soot; it had turned black along with everything else outside the house.

She took a deep breath, wondering what toxins she might be breathing, and walked back to the front of the house.

The windows were open, the curtains billowing softly, as they always did on mornings like these. Her grandmother said all the air-conditioning she needed was the breeze off the bay.

The front door was open. Her grandparents never locked the door. They had told her, for as long as she could remember, that Kū-kā‘ili-moku, the god of protection, was all they needed to watch over them and keep them safe.

She called out as she opened the door.

"Kūkū?" she said.

It was the shorthand she'd used for both her grandparents since she was a little girl.

She stepped into the room and a strangled cry came from somewhere deep inside her.

Both her grandparents were dead on the floor of their tiny living room, their skin the color of coal as if they had been burned alive, though there was no sign of fire.

Leilana was startled by the sound of a car coming closer. Or maybe a jeep. Or a truck.

She wanted to look out the front windows, see who it might be.

But she couldn't stop staring at her grandparents.

Ka hopena.