Trapped in Nevada

"Look up on the hills. See those weird looking trees' shapes? Focus in on one." Dad opened his door and got out. I saw him walk over to talk to Dr. Kenton.

"Oh my god. Those are, like... those are, like, cameras!"

What?" I asked.

"The trees are not trees!" She handed me the binoculars. "They're cameras."

Looking through the binoculars, I quickly saw what she meant. Sitting up on the hill was a small, metal post with a long-barreled camera. It was pointed our way. Moving a bit I saw a second and then a third. Then as I watched a white SUV with dark-tinted windows pulled up into view.

I hopped out and walked around to Dad. He was helping to unroll a huge banner on poles. As I got there, about five guys stood it up like they were raising the flag on Iwo Jima. It billowed in the light breeze till they got it taut.

"END ALL TESTING WHILE THERE IS STILL TIME"

As I tried to get Dad's attention other banners were being raised. Clouds of dust blew past as more cars drove up, including a News van from Fox5. I could see other cars following it in. Then in the distance, I saw a larger broadcast truck making its way through the dust.

"Dad. Dad!"

"What?" he asked, turning away from a conversation he was having with a man wearing a clear, green visor hat.

"There are guys up on the hill. A white SUV."

Dad looked up and then nodded like he had known all the time.

"Yeah, those are the CamoMen. They won't come down," he went to turn back.

"What if someone tried to cross the gate? I mean there is nobody in the guard shack," asked Tasha, stepping up next to me. I noticed she had put her hair up into a ponytail.

"Oh, you can cross the gate," said Dr. Kenton stepping up next to us. "You can cross it and walk about a half mile down that road if you like. Then you will round a little corner and find yourself on the ground with a gun barrel on the back of your head. How are you doing Raoul?"

He turned away from us and began talking with the same man Dad was chatting with. Feeling a bit ignored, Tasha and I moved away from the group to get out of the dust. We finally had to climb a little rise to get above it. Looking back out at the small sea of cars gathering and at the billowing banners that were springing up everywhere, she and I exchanged a look of disbelief.

"This is insane," she said after a few minutes. "And a little scary."

When she pointed towards the top of the hill, I could see that there were now three white SUVs with dark-tinted windows. No one had gotten out of them yet. I pulled her into my arms, and she leaned her head back against my chest. My chin resting by her ear, we watched the protest rally continuing to assemble. After a bit we got tired of standing and took a seat.

I was in the process of stealing a few kisses along her neck when I saw my dad and his friend making their way towards us. I whispered, to the softly moaning Tasha, to direct her attention to them. Getting up she held her hand down to me. I smiled as she pulled me up.

"You have dust on your ass," I told her, grinning.

"You two aren't up here giving away any secrets you don't want the government to know are you?" asked Dad with a smile as he walked up the little rise.

"What?" asked Tasha in mid butt-de-dusting.

Dad and Dr. Kenton exchanged a grin.

"You two are standing next to a Joshua tree. All the Joshua tree around here are microphones," said Dad pointing to the little scrub tree next to us.

"Well, not all of them. Some of them are heat and seismic sensors," said Dr. Kenton. He looked over the one next to us. "This one is all three, in fact."

"What?" I asked, wondering what these two had been smoking while we were away. Mom was going to kill me.

Dad walked over to the tree and pushed back a few of the spiky fronds. When he did a few moths went flying off into the breeze, but after a moment I didn't even notice them. My eye was caught by the black metal rod sticking out the side of the tree. He then directed me to three other metal shapes.

Tasha and I exchanged similar, open-mouthed looks.

"You did ask where all the security was," Dad said with a grin after a few moments of dead silence from us. "It's all around you."

Dr. Kenton looked at us with a smile. He was about to say something when the ground suddenly began to move under my feet. I felt Tasha grab my arm to steady herself.

"What the hell?"

Looking out across the desert, I watched as the ground moved like a blanket being waved in slow motion. The little hills and trees shook and swayed. Looking down at the protesters, I saw several of the banners go tumbling. The tall antenna of the TV broadcast van lurched from side to side. There was a deep sound. I more felt it in my chest bone than heard it with my ears.

In about a minute, it slowed then seemed to stop. I turned to my Dad to ask something predictable. He and Dr. Kenton were looking at each other, speaking volumes without a word being said.

"That felt shallow," said Dad softly.

"It was. Damn shallow," answered the Doctor just as softly. He looked over to the two of us then after a second, looked back at Dad. "Just a guess but I would say probably about a 3 or a 4 on the Mercalli scale."

"So that was, like, an earthquake, right? Not a bomb?" Tasha asked him while still holding onto my arm.

"Oh, it was an earthquake alright." Suddenly the ground began to tremble under us again. "And a swarm quake at that."

This time the shaking was not as bad, but it seemed to go on forever. I'm sure it was only for a few minutes, but Tasha and I were knelt down hugging till it passed. Dad and Dr. Kenton had each taken a knee to try and keep their balance. Just as we went to stand up again, I felt Dad lurch into my side as he went to stand.

What hit us this time was huge. I was driven to the hard, rocky desert floor unable to even begin to keep my feet. I could hear screams from the protesters down the hill. Car alarms started to go off in a few of the vehicles below as well. I felt Tasha's hand clawing at my leg, and I grabbed it and held on tight even though I could not begin to move. I felt like I was being shaken by giant hands.

"MILES?" I heard my dad shout.

"SEVEN OR EIGHT AT LEAST! It's a BIG one, Bill. Hang on."

The doctor had to yell back to be heard over a deep rumble that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. Turning as best I could on the trembling ground, I managed to grab hold of Tasha's arm and pulled her into my side. The shaking of fear, spasms of terror would be more accurate, eased a bit between the two of us. I held her and tried to be calm for her sake. I hoped her calming was from lessening of fear and not trust in me. I was far too scared to be worthy of that kind of trust.

And then it... stopped.

Just as suddenly as it began, it ended. It ended not slowly, but like a switch had been thrown somewhere. The ground stilled, the growling sound stopped and all was quiet. After a few moments the people down below began to get to their feet. Several were hurt, judging by the calls for assistance that began to sound out. Lifting my head I looked down to see the wide eyes of my lover taking in every inch of my face.

"Is it stopped?" she whispered. Almost as if she was afraid speaking too loudly would make it start back. I must have felt the same way, as I couldn't even make a sound. I simply nodded. Looking over, I saw Dad half way to his feet and he was helping Dr. Kenton up as he went. At first I thought the older man might be hurt, as his face was as white as a sheet.

Then I followed his gaze.

Beyond the low hills further into the base, say maybe a few miles away was a very tall column of billowy, gray smoke. It was rising straight as an arrow into the sky. Almost like smoke from a chimney on a very calm day. Then as we watched it hit a thinner layer of air and began to fan out into a huge smoke umbrella.

Then I saw a second one... and then a third. A sound began to drift over us then. A whisper in the winds that had the uncanny resemblance to a tea pot on the boil. A hissing sound that grew and grew as we watched more and more of these columns of smoke rising. I soon lost count when I was distracted by Tasha clutching tighter to me. She pointed up at the taller hill where the white SUV had been parked.

Six guys in grayish camouflage were just managing to roll one of their trucks back onto its wheels. The other two SUVs were a smoking pile of metal at the bottom of the hill. Even as I watched, the men jumped inside and with a cloud of dust, sped off down the road from their perch.

I was about to make some stupid, I'm sure, comment when a sickening smell washed over us. The most putrid rotten-egg smell tinged with a burnt-iron reek that seared my nose.

With the stench came a hot, acidic wind. Billowing with all the force of the Chinook winds but with far more heat than I had ever felt. My eyes streaming from the smell and my face feeling sandblasted, I turned my back to the wind and held Tasha in the protection of my chest. Looking at my Dad and Dr. Kenton, I saw them sheltering their faces, but they were looking off in the direction of the gale.

"What the hell is happening?" I yelled at them. The sound was all but nothing in the howl of air that blew past me then. It staggered me towards them, pushing Tasha backward. They grabbed at us and together we huddled.

"We've got to get out of here!" yelled my dad next to my ear. "Let's get to the truck!"

Dr. Kenton, his face a dead white color like he had never seen the sun, shook his head.

"It's pointless. You know what's happened. What's the point of running?"

That rotten, fetid stench then began to die off almost as quickly as it came.

"We might have a chance!" my dad yelled at him. "Come on. Come on, damn it!"

Stumbling down the hill, we had to all but drag Dr. Kenton. He kept looking back over the group of us towards the center of Area 51. The sky was now a dark gray under lit with a deep reddish orange. That glow lit the sky and, strangely enough, behind the hills. They were cast into the blackest of silhouettes. The mountains looked like eroded spikes of black against a sky afire.

The hill side, once a gentle ascent through man-made shrubs and trees to the top, was now a far more torturous path to the base. Rocks slid and shifted under foot, and large, broken lines, like cracks in a sidewalk, ran down its sides. Laying in our path, sometimes shadow hidden, they were there ready to trip a toe in the growing dark as the sun was being hidden above us.

The protest caravan was a mass of confusion. Some were trying to get the injured to vehicles or simply get them out of the way as frightened people spun their tires in the dry desert ground. Even as we were reaching the side of our truck, I heard a scream behind me.

"LOOK OUT!"

Spinning around, I saw the nose of a tan Hummer plow through the barrier bar of the gate and then, with no care for consequences to life, right through the middle of the protesters' group. It was followed by a half dozen other trucks, filled with people in military fatigues and white lab coats. They waved frantically at us to get out of their way. I pulled Tasha around so she didn't see what happened when someone didn't manage that in time.

The sides of a few of the military vehicles were blistered black. Their tan desert-style coating was submerged under massive burn scars. The Hummer that passed me, close enough to see the frightened face of the driver, had impacts points scarring the windshield and across the hood.

"Move!" yelled my dad.

Scrambling into the truck I pulled Tasha in next to me. I saw a moment's hesitation from Dr. Kenton as he looked over at his RV. The tall antenna from the news van was lying across the front half, the cab-end partially crushed under its weight.

"Miles! Come on," yelled dad as he started the truck.

The bearded doctor was hardly in the seat before Dad joined the military's column of dust fleeing the scene.

"Dad? What happened back there? Was it a nuke?" I winced as my shoulder smacked the side of the door as dad wrenched the truck around a small car and then all-but ran him off the road.

Dad shook his head, but beyond wiping at the running mucus from his nose, he did not answer. It was his action that made me take notice of the fact my nose was running nonstop. As I tried to draw a deep breath to blow it out I also noticed a burning in my chest and a wave of dizziness swept over me. I took and old shirt of mine from behind the seat and cleared my nose on it. It helped for a moment but not for long.

"Dad!"

"I cannot talk right now, Jim. Miles answer him!"

His bearded face, still with its resemblance to Jeff Bridges firmly in place, turned to look at me. Then he looked at Tasha. Wiping his slick mustache in disgust, he sighed.

"What happened was not man-made. Man-caused certainly, but not man-made. You saw the gas geysers?" At our nod, he continued. "If we could have seen the base of them, you would have seen the cracks in the ground leading away from them. Behind us, even now those cracks are billowing huge fountains of lava. Within an hour there will be lakes of it."

He wiped at his face again. I offered him my old shirt, and he blew out his nose. When he passed it to Tasha, I thought she might refuse, but was wrong.

"Lava? A volcano's opened up behind us?" I asked, unable to believe what he was suggesting.

"Not one. Dozens... maybe even hundreds. They are popping up all over the testing site behind us even now." He pointed over my shoulder.

I looked back and wished I hadn't. The sky was ablaze of fire and lightning. Black clouds rose thousands of feet into the heavens to not just block the light of the sun, but hide it entirely. Massive bolts of lightning, far worse than any spring storm I had ever seen, tore through these frighteningly large clouds.

"It's a... Trap?" Tasha's voice was a hollow whisper.

When I looked at her, I saw that she was beginning to pant like she had run a marathon. When Dr. Kenton slowly nodded, she started to shake and huge tears rolled down her cheeks. She turned and buried herself against my arm. Not knowing what was wrong I put my arm around her and held her tight. I looked to the doctor, my expression demanding an answer.

"It's a huge field of volcanic activity that releases millions of tons of toxic and greenhouse gases. It doesn't erupt lava so much as it flows it out." He looked up at the sky behind me. I glanced back and made the decision that no matter what happened, I wasn't going to do that again.

The sky looked alive and hungry.

"So it's supervolcano? Like Yellowstone?" I asked.

"No," said Tasha next to me.

When I looked down at her face, her eyes were haunted.

"It's far worse."

Dad locked up the brakes on the truck and still nearly ran into the rear of a tan Hummer. It was just parked, sitting there. Dad fought the wheel around, and we drove past.

Everyone inside the jeep was dead. Eyes vacant as empty windows, mouths lined with a crusting of bloody froth, the bodies were clung to each other in some cases.

Just past the jeep was one of the trucks. It was even worse since there were more people in it.

"What happened to them?" I asked suddenly, terrified even more than I had been. I would have not thought that possible, but those empty eyes looking out to me, as if to question what had happened to them, was too much.

"Poison gas. Most probably Hydrogen Sulfide or Sulfur Dioxin. That was the rotten egg stench you smelled, that's why our noses are running so badly."

"But... but, that stopped." I said, shaking my head.

"No it didn't. Your nose lost the ability to smell it. That gas paralyzed your ability to smell the gas. The Trap back there is going to give off enough poison gas to kill anyone close to it for the whole of the eruption." He coughed. "We were almost too close to it. A few miles closer, and we would be dead now, like them."

A flash of white ahead of us caught my attention. I realized that I was seeing the shiny metal hull of the fake alien ship that hung from the tow truck in front of the Lil'ale'inn. Dad had covered the ten miles back to the road in almost a third of the time it took us to get to the gate this morning.

A shaking and then a deep rumble from behind told us that sitting here was not a good idea.

"The trailer." I reminded dad when he started to turn towards the north. "Dad where are you going?"

Dad dropped the truck into park. He slowly turned to look back over the seat at Tasha and me. The look on his face made my hair want to stand on end.

"I'm going to Santa Fe. To get your Mother...and Tasha's mom"

"Bill..." Dr. Kenton started to say.

"I know, Miles. I know," Dad sighed and unhooked the buckle of his seat belt. "Jim, I need you to do something. I need you to do exactly what I tell you."

"What?" I asked, looking at him as he and Dr. Kenton exchanged a long look. The doctor nodded and also unhooked his seat belt.

My Dad reached over the seat and held his hand out to me. I took it and he held onto me with painful force. I saw tears in his eyes.

"You and Tasha are going to take the truck. Miles and I will take one of those Jeeps. The military doesn't need them anymore. We will circle around this thing and get back to Santa Fe. I need you to take the truck and head..." He stopped and looked at Miles.

"North. Not all that much better really, but better than anywhere else." the bearded doctor said after a moment's thought.

Dad nodded.

"Jim, head north. Just keep going. Canada, maybe even all the way to Alaska."

"Alaska? Dad, I'm not leaving you. We will all go together," I demanded.

My father looked away from me to Tasha. She was looking at him with those haunted eyes. Something passed between them then. Maybe it was her long months studying under him in his geology class, but she understood him at that moment better than I did. That same class time was also giving her far more knowledge to work with than I had. She looked at me and wiped her eyes dry. "Jim..." Her voice was a soft pleading to me. "We need to, like, head... north."

"Dad, no. Tasha, no. It's wrong for us to split up. Let's just go now before that thing erupts again." I held onto my dad's hand as he tried to turn mine loose.

"It has not stopped erupting, Jim. It won't stop... not for a long time." Dr. Kenton opened the door to his side of the truck and got out.

Looking over my shoulder at him, I saw him walk back to one of the Hummers and start to pull out bodies. At about that time, a small convoy of cars and trucks came past us, spinning dust from their tires. They turned onto the main road and headed off towards Vegas. A slow trickle of single vehicles then began to appear.

"Jim, do what I'm telling you. Take Tasha and go!" Dad tried to pull his hand from mine but I brought my arm from around Tasha and grabbed hold of him with both hands.

"Dad, no! How will I find you? How will you find us? When this thing stops, we will be scattered all over the place." Dad looked down from my face, and I saw a tear drop off his chin.

"Jim... son, we won't live long enough to see it ever stop." Dad looked up at me, tears flowing freely. "A basalt flood like this, a Trap, can erupt lava and gas for thousands of years. Now I've got to go get your mother. She will be scared there with just herself. When... when I've done that, I'll...I'll come north too. I'll...I'll head to... Anchorage, you do the same. Go there. That way I'll know where to find you."

I looked up to see Dr. Kenton back at the door.

"We're ready, Bill. We need to go, it's getting worse. More vents are opening up back there."

I started to look, but suddenly my dad's hands were on my head. He pulled me forward till his face was next to mine. The bristle of his day without a shave was rough against my cheek. I could smell the stale smell of cigarette smoke in his hair.