Free Fire - C. J. Box [67]
“No.”
“Earthquakes,” Keaton said. “A tremor that will weaken and part the tectonic plates beneath us. That’s all it will take . . . a crack, an opening. And do you know how many earthquakes there were in Yellowstone this past year?”
Joe shook his head.
“Three thousand. Think about it: three thousand. Over five hundred just in the Old Faithful area alone!”
To demonstrate, Keaton made himself tremble and his eyes blinked rapidly: “We’re starting to shake apart.”
With that, Keaton calmed himself, sighed, and settled back on his stool. “So drink up, Joe, for tomorrow we die.”
Joe looked at Nate. Nate shrugged.
“So it doesn’t matter about the tiny little things you’re concernedabout,” Keaton said, his voice moderating so he sounded almost reasonable, “your murders and your laws. Your jurisdiction.Once I realized that, the snowmobile emissions in YellowstonePark seemed so . . . trivial. So stupid. So pointless. Nothing matters. We’re trivial pissants in the big scheme of things, fleas, fly shit in the pepper.”
Joe sipped his beer but it tasted bitter. He stanched a wild impulse to call Marybeth and tell her to grab the girls and flee to the root cellar.
“So I don’t concern myself with laws or causes anymore,” Keaton said. “I don’t get worked up about what used to be my passions—emissions, or recycling, or the trashing of the environment.We humans have such a high opinion of ourselves— especially my old brethren in the movement. We think we’re gods on earth, that by merely changing our behavior or, more important, changing the behavior of the heathen industrialists and capitalists, that we can actually affect the outcome of the planet. We’re so unbelievably arrogant and elite, so blind, so stupid.We think we can control the world. It’s so tremendously silly I laugh when I think about it. It would be similar to if all the germs on our bartender’s head decided to get together to prevent him from farting. It makes no difference what they decide or what they think—he’ll still fart like a heifer.”
The bartender, who’d been listening, looked offended.
Doomsayer continued, “Such efforts are beyond quixotic— they’re comically hopeless. So we take infinitesimal little actionslike preventing oil exploration, or recycling our beer cans, or driving hybrid cars that cost twenty-five times what a Third World worker makes in a year, or shaming other people for their desire to live well and prosper . . .”
Keaton paused, let the word trail off, then shouted: “Ha! I say ha! Because once this baby goes,” he yelled, pointing at the floor between his dirty shoes, “once this baby goes, none of those things matter. Nothing matters. We’re stir-fry.”
The bar was absolutely silent. Even the Zephyr employees at the tables looked wide-eyed at Keaton. Only the old drunk next to him slept through the reverie.
“So,” Joe said, “if you really believe all that, why are you here? Why aren’t you on some island in the Pacific?”
“Because, Joe,” he said in a singsong, as if explaining fundamentaltruths to a child, “when it goes I want to go with it. Instantly,in a flash of light with a drink in my hand. I don’t want to huddle, shivering, in my apartment in Brooklyn or Boston while ash and snow blankets the city until I freeze slowly in the dark. I don’t want to be on an island watching the ocean turn slowly milk-colored with ash and dead fish. I want to be here, ground zero, where I can watch and monitor the thermal activityso I can be right here ordering that drink with my so-called friends around me.”
“You mean there are others who think like you do?”
“Dozens,” he said. “We’re known as the Geyser