Gray (Book 1)
Lou Cadle
Copyright © 2015 by
Cadle-Sparks Books
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is entirely coincidental.
The midmorning sun lit her way as Coral pulled in near the cave’s entrance. She parked, climbed out of the cab of the motor home, and looked around the small clearing. An evergreen forest stretched down the slope ahead of her and back up to the distant mountain ridges. The woods were eerily still, not a bird singing or insect buzzing.
She shook off a vague sense of unease as she walked over a pad of fallen pine needles to the cave’s entrance. She could see inside to curved walls marked by horizontal striations, carved patterns of water cutting through the rock in centuries past. Beyond the first few feet, the darkness of the cave beckoned.
Returning to her brother’s aging 20-foot motor home, which he kept for hunting getaways and had reluctantly let her borrow for this trip, Coral found a flashlight in the glove box, shoving it into the daypack she always kept ready on the passenger seat for spontaneous hikes. Hauling the pack with her, she crawled back between the bucket seats to the living area. In the propane-powered mini refrigerator were two one-liter bottles of cold water. She made sure the cap of one was tight and tossed it in the pack, then, thinking better of it, grabbed the other, too. From the closet, she pulled her gray sweatshirt off a hook and tied it around her waist.
She had nowhere to be and no one to report to until July 1, when her summer job started. Over the past ten days, she had lost track of days and calendar dates, a loss she found made her nearly giddy with relief after the past year of a rigid and packed freshman schedule at the University of Michigan. She was pre-med, and the classes were tough. This month was her well-deserved reward for a freshman year spent working while most of her friends had spent theirs partying.
At the cave’s low entrance she stooped to peer inside. The floor was flattened by time and wear. She hesitated. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, or of small spaces. And the website had said it was a safe beginner’s cave, right? But caving alone, she knew, was a risk. Maybe she should leave a note on the windshield of the motor home, with the date and time she went in.
Then something—not a sound, but some other sense—made her look up into the sky.
A dense black cloud was boiling up in the southeastern sky. It rose high and fast, like a time-lapse movie of the birth of a thunderhead. But it was no rain cloud. Deadly black, it reached up and loomed over her, blocking out the sun.
What the—? She stood and gaped. The menacing cloud was nothing like any Coral had ever seen before. Nothing natural. Four mule deer crashed through the clearing, running to the west. They disappeared, and Coral stood alone again, staring at the coming blackness.
She had no idea what it was. It looked like some Renaissance vision of the world’s end. It looked like death itself coming, silent and swift. And damned fast, she realized. Coral’s shock turned to fear. Logical thought fled. She stooped and dove into the cave’s maw.
The sky outside went dark. Blackness covered all the world around her. A hissing wind whipped through the clearing, whistling at the cave entrance.
She dropped to the ground, covering her head with her arms. Her bare arms were stung by tiny pricks as pebbles rained down outside and bounced inside. Coral scrambled away from the barrage and farther back into the cave, scuttling like a beetle. She escaped the rain of rocks and curled into a tight ball, her eyes shut, hoping desperately she was having a bad dream.
Her panic may have lasted only a minute. It might have been as long as ten. When she forced herself to raise her head and look around, the world to her right was a bit lighter than to her left. The cave’s entrance was barely visible.
Groping to the sides, she touched a rock wall, rough and cool to her fingertips. That reassured her. Anything solid—anything
normal
—was reassuring. The outside world had just gone crazy, or maybe she had just gone crazy, but rock walls in a cave were a comforting link to the real world.
She dug out her flashlight, flipped the switch, and a thin beam of LED light came out, enough to illuminate the ground before her feet, to see the sloping ceiling. She crept toward the entrance, shining the beam outside. The flashlight beam reflected back at her, like headlights bouncing off fog.
Black, menacing fog.
What was going on out there? A memory pushed its way forward—a television show on Mt. St. Helens erupting in 1980, clouds of ash, a downwind town turned to twilight at midday.
Was that what this cloud was? A volcano had erupted to the southeast? Something dark and solid was falling in the sky—hanging there and falling both. Not rain. Not hail. So ash?
But the Cascades, the only collection of volcanoes in the lower forty-eight states, were far to her west. What, then, was this black cloud that had come from the southeast? Yellowstone was due east of her, so it couldn’t be that. Her mental map of the country didn’t have any volcanoes in the right direction. But couldn’t new volcanoes pop up? Maybe, but she didn’t think they popped up like
this.
Not in an instant, without warning, and not this vast.
Or was the airborne stuff from a fire? She remembered the image of the boiling cloud. No, not a fire. It was more like a slow-mo movie fireball, but black instead of orange.
She was out of theories.
She could try and get some news about it—whatever
it
was—from the RV radio. News might tell her whether she should stay here in the cave or flee to the west. She took her pack off and unzipped the smallest compartment, taking out the yellow bandana she kept there and tucking the flashlight back inside. She wrapped the bandana around her nose and mouth as a mask, and left the pack at the entrance to the cave, just inside, protected from the falling grit.
When she stepped out of the cave, the black stuff swirled around her, and she shut her eyes against its sting. She shaded her right eye with her hand and barely opened it, just enough so that she could find her way back to the RV. She jogged across the bare ground of the parking area, through stuff falling all around like a photographic negative image of a blizzard.
The motor home was barely visible. The ash seemed to be growing thicker in the air with each passing second. She coughed.
Reaching the motor home, she yanked at the driver’s door, frustrated when it didn’t give, then remembered she had locked it. She found the keys in her jeans pocket.
She hauled the door open, leapt up, slammed the door, and climbed back to the living area. She yanked the bandana down to her neck, hacking at the irritation in her throat. Grabbing a tissue, Coral coughed into it, spitting out the grit she had sucked in, leaving a brown swath of dirt on the tissue. She went to the sink and ran water, splashed some into her right eye, blinking it out, then washing it a second time.
Inside the motor home’s cleaner air, she managed to quiet her coughing. She ducked to peer through the front windshield at the outside world. The cave’s entrance and the pine forest were invisible in the blackness. There was nothing at all outside, only charcoal gray ash filling the air. She had an eerie sense that Chaos was unmaking the world, reclaiming all matter and form.
She was utterly alone in the gray world.
Get out of here, she told herself. Go somewhere safer! She jumped in the driver’s seat, jammed the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing happened. She tried the radio, hoping for news, but the battery seemed to be dead. The engine wouldn’t start, didn’t even click. Why? It had been fine when she pulled in just a few minutes ago.
A short whistling sound startled her. Then—bam!—something hit and shook the ground nearby. The motor home rocked on its tires. Then a flash of orange outside the windshield made her cringe back from it. Something was falling out there! Lava? Rocks? Leaving was impossible now. She had to get back in the cave. A wall of cave rock would protect her from this rain of fire better than the thin ceiling of the motor home.
How much time might she have to grab some more gear? What if some flaming bit came down right onto her head while she did it? What if some burning bit of debris hit the propane tank and it exploded?
She scampered all the way to the back of the RV. Under the seats of the dinette, she stored the items she didn’t use often—drawing supplies, spare blanket, fishing gear, and her thrift-store internal frame backpack for long hikes.
It was the backpack she needed. She found it, unzipped it, shoving her rolled sleeping bag inside. In the kitchenette, she pulled open rattling drawers until she found matches and a package of four votive candles. From the refrigerator: sliced cheese, a fresh half-gallon of milk, and an apple. She spun around and opened the overhead storage and pulled down a couple sweaters, stuffing them into the pack.
A voice inside her head urged her to hurry, hurry. The voice was accompanied by percussive sounds from the rain of rocks on the roof. They clinked against the metal roof above her, and one big one clanged on it, freezing her for a moment, then pushing her to move faster. She slid the frame pack onto her back. She pulled her bandana back up to cover her nose and mouth, then crawled back into the cab, and got ready to open the driver’s door. Outside, many streaks of orange fire were visible through the gray air. She got herself oriented towards where she thought the cave entrance was, took a deep breath and held it. Then she shoved open the door.
She kicked it shut and ran from the motor home. Another boom from a falling boulder shook the ground, driving her to run faster. There it was, the cave’s entrance, a blacker patch in the thick dark air.
She crawled in and turned around to look back out. Outside, she could see a big bright flash of orange plummeting down, too close for comfort. It fell into the trees with a crash of splitting lumber. From the distant booms, she guessed that some pieces that fell were far larger. The smell was growing stronger—the smell of smoke and sulfur and something else bitter, unfamiliar.
The air outside seemed warmer, too. Were the flaming rocks heating the air? Were they coming from a fire? She backed another few steps into the cave. She saw her daypack lying where she had left it and picked it up. She dug out the flashlight again and flipped it back on, using it to move deeper into the cave, deeper into safety. Cooler air bathed her face. The dark pulled her in. The sounds from outside faded, and only then did she realize how loud it was outside—not just the sounds of falling rocks, but a steady hiss.
She moved right toward the straightest wall, took off her frame pack, dropped the daypack, and slid down to her rump, leaning against the rough wall. The rock floor was cold through her jeans.
To her left, the cave’s entrance was an archway of dim light, barely lighter now than the blackness of the cave, framing a tiny bit of the outside world. She watched it for long moments but saw nothing moving, nothing but the dark gray air. She forced herself to take deep breaths, willing herself to calm until she could feel her heartbeat slowing, her muscles unclenching.
Another loud boom outside rumbled vibrations through the cave, making her jump. She glanced overhead, wondering if the cave’s ceiling was stable. Would she end up buried in a ton of rubble or hit on the head by something jarred loose from the cave’s ceiling?
There was nothing she could do to prevent that. And it had to be safer in here than outside or sitting in the motor home wedged between explosive gasoline and propane tanks, with nothing but a thin sheet of plywood over her head.
A new sound made her stare out the cave’s entrance. The wind had suddenly picked up, blowing harder and harder. A moan sounded on the wind, like a hundred people in pain. A rumbling, like a freight train, overtook the moans. Coral shone the flashlight at the entrance, saw the particles being whipped into the cave by the rising wind.
As suddenly as it had come, the moaning wind stopped. The noises ended, and an eerie silence descended.
She stared at the entrance, not knowing what to expect next, but afraid of another awful surprise. An image of fresh flowing lava came to mind, creeping toward her, sealing her inside this cave and making it her tomb. She trembled, literally quivered, at the nightmare image of being buried alive. A rational voice spoke up in her mind, telling her no, if there were lava, the weight of it would probably collapse the cave or burn her to death first.
Well, that was a cheerful thought! Coral laughed aloud then stopped herself when she heard the edge of hysteria in the sound.
When no new horror came from outside, her trembling eased, leaving her cold and weak.
The ash—or whatever, maybe soot?—outside was thickening, that much she could see from here. The entrance to the cave was dim, night appearing to come to the skies outside. Coral knew it was approaching noon, but it was like no noon she had ever seen. Crawling forward, she felt fine particles score her throat. The air out there was definitely getting hotter. She coughed, and she backed away.
There was nothing else she could do. She couldn’t go outside. She couldn’t get help, or give help, for that matter, if someone out there needed it. Her car radio didn’t work. Her engine wouldn’t start. Her cell phone was sitting on the center console of the cab of the motor home, but she hadn’t had a signal in several miles anyway, driving in the remote areas of the national forest. The cave was in the middle of nowhere. She was stuck here alone until the skies cleared, however long that might be.