Trapped in Nevada

"Son... I love you! Now get your ass up here and go! Drive this thing, and don't you stop till hit an Eskimo." I felt my dad lips kiss my cheek, hard and rough against the side of my cheekbone, something he hadn't done to me since I was a very young child. He grabbed my hair, and looking me in the eyes, shook me. "Go."

Suddenly he was not there. I watched him cross in front of the truck, and with Dr. Kenton running next to him, they sprinted to the Hummer. I took in, but didn't see the still forms lying next to the jeep's tires.

"Jim. Jim, honey we, like, have to go."

It was her voice and the terror in it that got me moving. Spilling out on the driver's side, I slipped around and into the driver's seat. Tasha didn't use the door, she climbed through in between the front seats. My seat was still warm from Dad's body heat was the thought that hit me even as I looked over and saw the Hummer pull up next to us.

"Anchorage!" Dad yelled out the window. "Now go!" The tan jeep roared past us and turned, with a spray of gravel and dust, towards Vegas. As I pulled the shifter down, I wanted to follow. I wanted to go and help save my Mom. It was Tasha's hand next to mine, slowly putting pressure on the wheel, that made me turn the truck towards the north.

As I drove us north down the empty stretch of long, straight road my eyes kept going to the side mirrors. Looking towards the red clouds and the terrible sky that made everything to the south west look like hell on earth.

Finally, after what seemed like hours I could feel the truck start to climb into hills. Looking back at a turn, I felt my jaw drop. The sky was on fire as far as the eye could see, and under it boiled a sea of red.

"My god," I said in a whisper. "How could that have formed so quickly?"

Tasha looked out at the hell spreading to the horizon and shook her head sadly.

"We did it. Fifty years of nuclear testing. A thousand plus underground bombs turned the subsurface to broken rubble. The big bombs, the deep ones... one after another cracking the upper-mantle let a hot spot form. A magma bubble plumed." She turned her head away from view. When she looked into my eyes, I saw a pain that was horrible. "It's a human made... Trap... and it's caught us all."

Unable to bear that look in her eyes, I looked past her anguish out the window into a vision from Dante.

"How big will it get?" I asked, seeing the lines of fire running everywhere, the fiery geysers sending lava upwards toward the dark skies. I swallowed and hid myself from the knowledge that my father had driven in that direction. Was Vegas in those rivers and lakes of fire already?

"I studied the ones in, like, Siberia and India in my geology books. The Deccan Traps are, like, in India. When they erupted it covered about half of India in basalt lava. Say, about, like, a third the size of the U.S. It was up to sixty five hundred feet thick."

At my stunned gasp, she gave a sad, humorless chuckle.

"It was the smaller one of the two," she said softly. "It only erupted for about thirty thousand years."

Tasha's face was so beautiful. It was sad and dirty. There was a shiny mess on her cheek where she had wiped at her nose. But she was beautiful. The most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

And that I ever would, I came to realize then.

"And the big one?" I asked, not really wanting to hear about it, but too mentally torn apart to not listen.

She sat there looking at me for a moment then turned and looked out the window again at the growing sea of fire, smoke and ash.

"That one was in Siberia. It covered, like, an area that was about, like, the size of Europe. It erupted for, like, a million years." Tasha reached back for my hand, and I let her have it. To me if felt like a lifeless part of me anyway. "Ninety percent of all life on the planet died."

We sat there like that. I was holding her hand, she was holding mine. Then she turned to look at me, her eyes taking in my face the same way I had looked at hers.

"Let's go," she said after a moment. "It's... it's a long way to Anchorage."

I looked at the steering wheel for a moment as if to figure out what it was for. My hands moved almost without thought to the shifter, and I eased the truck forward. I drove till the glow of the sky alone showed the building horror to the southwest. As Tasha leaned her face against the glass window and silently wept, I too cried. I cried for my mother that I knew was probably already dead. The drifting clouds of poisonous gases would have had to have reached Santa Fe by now. I cried for her and for Tasha's mother as well. Emily, had already begun to treat me as her son-in-law.

My dad and Dr. Kenton were probably gone as well. Their bodies, inside the blackened metal shell that was once a Hummer, burned to bone and buried under the growing sea of molten rock. My tears fell unheeded as I drove. Drove till the sun, lost behind the clouds, finally set bringing with it a permanent false-dawn sky.

Still I drove on, my eyes on the road. Watching for signs that I wasn't alone on this earth. There should have been traffic. Where were the cars full of people fleeing the destruction?

Were they all dead already?

I thought then of the future, millions of years from now. Would someone study this newly-formed volcanic rock? Would they find the fossils of all these pitiful humans? Would they learn that we had made this happen? Would they learn that humanity had set this Trap for itself?

Looking down at the dashboard, I saw that I would soon need to find a gas station. Looking over at my beloved Tasha, I felt my heart burn with love for her. It hurt. It hurt so much... because I knew, just as I knew that everyone I loved was already gone, that I wasn't driving us to safety. Not really.

I was just driving us to somewhere else to...

[While this story is fiction and the cataclysmic ending is a product of my imagination, the facts I used are quite true. In the 50+ years of nuclear testing, the United States has set off more than 900 underground detonations, ranging in magnitude from small to massive. The ground at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site has been so heavily fractured from all the testing, that many places are no long usable. This test facility is within 500 miles of three of the largest supervolcanoes in the world. It is also only hours away from Mammoth Mountain a volcano that was thought extinct until the late 1980s when it was detected to be releasing massive amounts of CO2 gas. More than 1,000 tons of it a day.]

**** (I would like to thank patientlee for her efforts editing this story. She had to chase far too many commas down. Any mistakes you see now are on me.)