Free Fire - C. J. Box [66]
“He has a Ph.D. in what, geology?” the bartender explained to Joe. “He’s one of the founders of EarthGod, the big environmentalactivist group. He came up here twelve years ago to protest snowmobiles and never left.”
Joe nodded. He’d heard of EarthGod. Even ardent environmentalistsconsidered the group extreme.
Nate picked up on Joe’s discomfort. “He isn’t like that anymore,” he said.
“Oh?”
“There’s no point,” Keaton said, “because we’re all going to die.”
“Maybe I ought to get a good night’s sleep then,” Joe said, not all that interested anymore.
Keaton jerked back, offended. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t seem to understand, Joe,” Keaton said, his voice dripping with contempt. “You’ve misread me entirely. You’ve made assumptionsthat I’m some crazy old man who is diverting you from your mission. But what you don’t seem to understand, Joe, is that your mission doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Your laws don’t matter, you don’t matter, and neither do I. We’re all on borrowed time, and have been for tens of thousands of years.”
Over the next twenty minutes, Keaton laid it out. As he talked, his tone swooped while he made his arguments, then descendedinto whispers to drive home the gravity of what he was saying. Joe found himself getting sucked in.
“We are drinking this beer right now in the middle of a massivevolcanic caldera,” Keaton said, leaning across Nate to addressJoe directly. “Do you know what a caldera is? It’s the center of a dormant volcano. The Yellowstone caldera encompassesmost of this so-called park. The edge of the caldera is all around us; we’re in the bowl—in the mouth— of it right now. That’s why we have all of our lovely attractions—the geysers, the steam vents, the mud pots. Magma from the center of the earth has pushed through the seams in the crust”—he demonstratedby making a bony fist and shoving it into his other palm, pushing up with the fist—“right here, right below us. It’s pushingupward trying to get out. There are only thirty places in the world where the center of the earth is trying to get out, and this is the only one of them on land, not water. When it does, when it finally blows, it will be a super volcano of a magnitude never even contemplated by man. It will be two and a half thousand times more powerful than Mount Saint Helens! And it won’t erupt slowly, it will explode!”
To demonstrate, Keaton slammed his fist down on the bar so hard the beer glasses danced.
Keaton screwed up his face with menace. “When it goes, when the Yellowstone super volcano goes, it will instantly kill three million people—every human life and all animal life for two hundred miles in every direction. Ash will cover the continent,asphyxiate the wildlife, and clog all the rivers. There’ll be nuclear winter in New York City, and the climate truly will change as the world enters a vicious, sudden ice age. America will be over. Southern Canada, Northern Mexico— wiped out. The continent will resemble a postmodern wasteland, even more than it does now. This time, it will be real and not social.”
Keaton paused to sip his beer, but he was so wound up that most of it dribbled out of his mouth onto his chin whiskers, which didn’t seem to bother him.
“It has happened every six hundred thousand years through geologic history, at least four times we can determine. Each supervolcanic eruption changes the world. The last time it erupted was six hundred forty thousands years ago.” Keaton’s voice dropped to a whisper. “We’re forty thousand years overdue.”
“Then maybe it won’t happen,” Joe said.
Keaton showed his teeth. “Typical,” he spat. “Just ignore it, wish it away. That’s what people do best. But the signs are all around us that it will come sooner instead of later. You have to wake up and look at them!”
Joe now knew that he wouldn’t be going back to the inn and tumbling into a restful sleep.
“In the past decade,” Keaton said, “the ground