Rain of Fire (51 page)

“You walk the edge,” Wyatt told Nick. “I’ll watch.”

“You mean we will,” said Kyle, as she and Wyatt shared a grin.

J
ust after midnight, Deering’s helicopter touched down at University Hospital in Salt Lake City. After Nick’s unquenchable enthusiasm had convinced everyone he was not in critical condition, Deering had flown Carol Leeds and Larry Norris to Billings. There, ash had been falling very gently, putting a pale gray blanket onto the half-emptied town.

Now, seeing a chopper on their pad where life flight usually landed, the University’s hospital staff came out at a run. Upon seeing the blood on Nick’s face and hands, and the ash covering him, Kyle, and Wyatt from head to toe, they had to be assured there had been no car bombing. Though Nick insisted he was good to walk, Wyatt practically shoved him into a wheelchair just inside the hospital door. Then, limping himself, he insisted on pushing Nick down the hall to the ER.

Kyle stayed behind to see Deering off. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you were willing to do all that you did.”

He stood with his helmet under one arm, “They say I’m a wild man.” His gaunt features creased into a smile. “You’ll get my bill.”

She laughed and brushed ash from her shoulders in a little cloud. “Were you serious about contracting with Nick to make additional over-flights as this thing unfolds?”

Deering’s face sobered. “Tell you what. I saw you on
America Today
, and if you check things out before we fly, we’ve probably got as good an opinion as any.”

But she couldn’t check things out for him as things stood now. Power-mad Hollis had cut her out of her world, and damned if she wasn’t going to get back onto the network before this new day was over.

To Deering, she said, “What if I told you we really don’t know what’s going to happen? We make educated guesses, better ones every year as our technology advances, but the fact remains that something huge could happen in Yellowstone virtually without warning.”

“It sounds like waiting for terrorists to attack, to get hit by lightning, or for a meteor to fall out of the sky … you’ve just got to live with it.” He stuck out his hand.

“Amen,” she said, accepting his firm handshake.

He put on his helmet and went to the cockpit. She remained on the roof for his run-up and watched him take off into the city-washed night sky.

Inside the hospital, the wait in the ER was several hours while a major car accident was sorted out. Finally, Nick was seen, his burns bandaged, finger splinted, and the doctors insisted he stay overnight for observation and a CT scan in the morning.

With no means of transportation and no inclination to leave Nick alone, both Kyle and Wyatt decided to take turns cleaning up in his hospital room’s bath. As the gift shop was closed at this hour, there was no chance of buying even a clean shirt.

“You can wear hospital gowns,” quipped Nick from his bed, looking like an ancient mummy with his head, neck and cheeks swathed in gauze. He plucked at the gray material. “Don’t you envy me in this?”

Feeling the scratchy ash that had penetrated Wyatt’s outer parka and winter pants, and through fleece to her skin, Kyle started opening cabinets looking for extra gowns.

“Over here,” said Wyatt after a moment of rummaging through drawers.

Kyle opened the bathroom door. “I think the last time we were in this position, I said ‘gentlemen first’.” She gave him an unquestionably intimate smile, fraught with memory of yesterday morning at her townhouse. Then she laughed. “This time, I say to hell with that.”

Wyatt watched the door close behind Kyle, aware of Nick peering at him from between the bandages. Standing by the bed, Wyatt ruffled a hand through his hair, sending a rain of sandy particles onto his shoulders and the floor. “Oops.”

He glanced around to find a place to sit without making too big a mess and he decided to wait until he could get cleaned up.

“Wyatt.”

He met Nick’s gaze.

“I think you were upset the other day when I was telling Kyle about the torch I’d seen you carrying.”

A flash of irritation penetrated even his haze of exhaustion. “You did make me sound like a patsy.”

Nick shot a significant look at the bathroom door. “It seems to me your patsy days are behind you.”

Wyatt thought for a moment. “If that were true, how would you feel about it?”

Nick’s grin crinkled the edge of his cheek bandage. “I’d say congratulations.”

Wyatt smiled in return.

The laugh lines around Nick’s eyes settled. “Kyle’s the best, always has been, and I treated her badly. She and I both considered whether we could have a second chance, but that was all nostalgia.”

“It looked a little more intense than just old home week,” Wyatt countered.

Nick spread his hands. “Okay … but there were two reasons it could never have worked.” He ticked his index finger. “One. I’m married to the mountains.”

Wyatt nodded without surprise.

“Two. If Kyle hadn’t been so careful keeping the world at arm’s length so she wouldn’t have to face her past, she and you would have come together long ago.” His eyes twinkled. “It just took some shaking up to get there.”

Kyle stood in the shower, letting hot water run over her aching neck and back muscles. If there had been a tub, she’d have drawn a bath and lay down in it. After the extremes of cold and heat of this day, the beating she’d taken from repeated falls on the mountain, and the sleep deprivation … Jesus, that had begun with the early rising for
America Today
, and it had been over thirty hours since Nick’s call had wakened her and Wyatt from their post-lovemaking nap. After all that, she should be thinking of nothing but a soft pillow.

Rather, she kept wondering what was happening at Nez Perce. Outside the door, she imagined Nick doing the same. As she had on the crater rim, she appreciated the lure of studying dynamic change in the earth. Now, she understood she’d been doing that all along, watching live earthquake records. She had simply been too shell-shocked from her childhood experience to risk going through it again.

Kyle turned off the water and dried herself on a thin towel. She caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror, her cheeks and neck laden with patches of pink, the remnants of burns from the
nuée ardente
. What startled her was the serenity she saw in her eyes, something that had been absent since her sixth birthday, in a peaceful campground beneath a silver moon.

Vowing to put that part of her past where it belonged, she focused on smoothing some of the hospital lotion onto a few of her more livid bruises.

With Kyle leaving the bath in her gown and Wyatt coming in wearing his briefs, they brushed past each other in the doorway. Though there was adequate room to get by without touching, Wyatt paused, cradled her cheek and pressed a light but lingering kiss onto her lips.

Nick was asleep in the bed, the room lights dimmed but not extinguished. Kyle smiled at his consideration, and without disturbing him, lay down on the room-wide window seat. The last thing she recalled was Wyatt curling up next to her.

At 2:41 in the afternoon, rested and ready for battle, Kyle stepped off the University shuttle bus in front of the Institute. Wyatt, with his ankle wrapped in an elastic bandage, came down the step behind her. Nick emerged through the door, gauze-wrapped to the eyes, and brandished a fist. “The mummy versus Hollis Delbert.”

Kyle figured Nick’s cocky attitude stemmed in part from a clean bill of health on his head scan. Yet, she said to him, “You take it easy. You’re supposed to be hurt, remember?”

“Wish I had my dress uniform for this,” Wyatt said. He wore his dirty fleece that he’d talked the ER staff into not cutting off him, as did Kyle and Nick, along with their parkas that she’d sponged off so they were merely dirty rather than disgusting.

With no campus security in sight, they marched three abreast up the sidewalk and entered the building basement, where it opened in the rear at ground level. Though she and Wyatt had been there only three days ago, she inhaled the earthy smell of rocks, the ink of the seismographs, and an academic chalk-like odor with a sense of wistfulness.

Hollis wasn’t in his office. His Tectonophysics class on the fourth floor would end at 2:50.

Kyle went behind Hollis’s desk, settled into his chair and nudged his computer mouse to see if his machine had the security on. Immediately, his screen came alive with the seismic signal from the Pelican Cone station, only a few miles west of Nez Perce.

“We’re in,” she said.

Nick pulled the guest chair away from the wall and brought it around behind the desk to straddle. Wyatt sat on the desk, his back to the door.

In the hall, the bell clanged, signaling the end of classes. A moment later, there came the sound of many feet and voices from upstairs as the classrooms emptied.

Kyle focused on the Pelican Cone record. The display was the one for yesterday’s eruption. It showed the twenty-four-hour record for October 1, starting with the oscillating sine wave of rising magma. At 1:10
PM
the tornillo, or screw-shaped signal, appeared, signaling the final turbulent rise to eruption.

Later in the record of the afternoon, Kyle noted the continued quakes, background rumbling punctuated by the sharp excursions that had knocked her on her ass multiple times. There was the big one that had ripped open the Saddle Valley fault to form a fissure that fountained lava as they scrambled for safety.

Kyle clicked forward to today’s record.

Nick whistled. “Thar she blows again.” He pointed to another tornillo just after noon, followed by a large reverberation and more lower case grumbling.

“What in hell do you think you’re doing?” Hollis shrilled from the doorway.

Kyle kept watching the computer. From the corner of her eye, she saw Wyatt turn his head with slow deliberation as though Hollis were the intruder. In the chair beside Kyle, she felt Nick’s body make a subtle transformation from alertness to a slack posture.

“I said, what are you doing with my computer?” Hollis advanced into the room.

Wyatt shoved off the desk and towered over him. “As Park Service, I have a perfect right to be here and look at the records.”

“Who’s that?” Hollis pointed at Nick, who lifted a hand to his bandaged forehead and grimaced as if he were in pain.

“That?” Wyatt echoed dryly. “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize Dr. Nicholas Darden of USGS Volcano Hazards?”

“Nick Darden?”

Nick turned. “The same. Haven’t seen you since the Geophysical Society meeting in San Diego, Delbert? Say what, ten years?”

Kyle pushed a button on the mouse and toggled to look at yesterday’s eruption from the Pitchstone Plateau station.

Hollis looked at her again and inhaled a big breath. “Kyle,” he said with tight control, “you’ve been fired. You have no right to be in this building, much less at my desk.”

She ignored him.

Wyatt moved a step closer to Hollis, who took an equal pace back. “That’s what we’ve come to talk to you about.”

He stepped. Hollis retreated.