Supervolcano: Eruption Read Free Page A

beating, till it got up enough speed to take off.
    The Black Pool was a sickly green, not black. Colin had no idea whether the Abyss Pool, on the other side of the planked path, led to the abyss. By the sulfurous steam rising from it, though, he wouldn’t have been surprised
    Somebody in a broad-brimmed hat, a rain slicker, and jeans was hunkered down on the narrow lakeside beach, back to Colin, intent on something he couldn’t see. Not six feet away stood one of those stay-on-the-boardwalk! signs. “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?” he growled, a line whose every intonation was honed by years on the beat.
    The miscreant jumped and whirled back toward him. Only he—no, she: a woman in her mid-thirties, with short, honey-blond hair and attractively weathered features that said she spent a lot of time outdoors—probably wasn’t a miscreant after all. She wore a picture ID on a lanyard around her neck, the way rangers here did. And she answered, “Checking a seismograph. Why? What business is it of yours?”
    Colin felt like a jerk. He wouldn’t have minded vanishing under the oh so thin, oh so hot crust that seemed to have no trouble at all supporting the woman’s weight. “Sorry,” he said, and for once he meant it. “I’m a cop back home. I saw you out there where I didn’t think you were supposed to be, and I jumped to a conclusion, and I went splat.”
    She weighed that. On one side of the scales was something like Okay, fine. Now fuck off, asshole . He’d earned it, too. But a couple of other tourists were coming. Maybe she didn’t want to cuss him out in front of an audience. All she did say was, “Mm, I can see that—I guess.”
    Then fate—or something—lent a hand. The ground shook more than hard enough to need no seismograph to detect. Colin staggered. He was glad to grab the handrail on the boardwalk. For ten or fifteen seconds, he felt as if he were standing on Jell-O. At last, the earthquake stopped.
    “Holy moley!” said one of the approaching tourists. “Nobody told me it was gonna do that ! Let’s get outa here, Shirley!” He and Shirley did, at top speed.
    Waves—not big ones, but waves—rolled up onto the beach. The ice farther out cracked with noises that made Colin think of what would happen if the Jolly Green Giant dropped a tray from his freezer. Darker streaks—water—appeared between the remaining chunks of ice.
    Eyeing them and the direction from which the waves had come, Colin said, “That’s gotta be a 5.3, maybe even a 5.5. Epicenter’s that way somewhere.” He pointed northeast.
    One of the woman’s eyebrows jumped. “I was going to ask you where home was, but now I hardly need to. Norcal or Socal?”
    “Socal,” Colin answered. “San Atanasio. L.A. suburb.” Of course he had to come from California. Guessing the Richter scale was a local sport of sorts. “How about you?” he asked. That she knew it was a local sport, and that she used local slang for the two rival parts of the state, argued she was a Californian, too.
    Sure enough, she said, “Some of both. I grew up in Torrance”—which wasn’t far from San Atanasio—“but I’m finishing my doctorate at Berkeley. So I’m Norcal now.”
    In his mind, Colin prefaced Berkeley with The People’s Republic of , the same as he did with Santa Monica. The university was good, though; Marshall, his younger son, had been bummed for weeks after he didn’t get in. He’d followed Rob to UC Santa Barbara instead. He’d followed Rob into smoking pot, too, and still hadn’t graduated. One more thing for his old man to worry about.
    Not the most urgent one at the moment. “I didn’t know you could get quakes that big up here,” Colin said.
    “Oh, yeah,” the woman answered. “This is the second-busiest earthquake zone in the Lower Forty-eight, after the San Andreas. There was a 6.1 in the park in 1975, and a 7.5 west of Yellowstone in 1959. That one killed twenty-eight people and buried a