Free Fire Page 16

  “I wanted to see the murder scene,” Nate said, “find out if I could get any vibes from it. I got nothing. But I was glad I was there when you and the ranger walked up.”

  “Me too.”

  “Are you figuring anything out?” Nate asked.

  Joe thought about it before answering. “Overall, I’d have to say . . . nope.”

  Nate simply nodded. Joe filled Nate in on what had happened so far, where he was headed. As Joe talked, he studied his friend. Nate appeared to be only half listening, as if there was something else on his mind.

  When Joe was through, he asked, “Any questions? Any ideas?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Nate stood up, checked the front desk to confirm there was still no one there, then stepped over a metal barrier and approached the fireplace. “Watch this,” Nate said, and started climbing the chimney using the outcrops of volcanic stones for hand- and footholds.

  “Nate . . .”

  He scaled the fireplace until he vanished into the gloom. Above, in the shadows, Joe could hear Nate’s heavy breathing and the scuffle of his boots on rock. Ten minutes later, Nate rejoined him after scrambling from the chimney onto a cat-walk and taking a series of rickety, ancient stairs back to the lobby.

  “I used to do that when I worked here,” Nate said in explanation. “Every night if I could.”

  Joe shook his head. “When did you work here?”

  “Many years ago.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “There are a lot of things about me you don’t know.”

  “And I’m not sure I want to know them.”

  “No,” Nate said, “you probably don’t.”

  Joe sat back in his chair. “This is quite a place, isn’t it? I read that it was built in 1903 and 1904, in the middle of winter. Some days it was fifty below. The guy who built it had a sixth-grade education, but he was a self-taught genius.”

  Nate agreed. “He was a wizard too. If you noticed, the windows on the building don’t correspond with particular rooms or floors. They’re scattered against the outside like they were just thrown up there and stuck. That’s intentional. The architect wanted the look of the hotel to be random and asymmetrical, like nature itself. And it’s just as interesting inside. There are secret stairways, hidden rooms, and a crazy dead-end hallway called Bat’s Alley. They’re closed to the public, of course, and very few people know about them.”

  Joe looked over. “But you know about them.”

  Nate nodded Of course but didn’t meet Joe’s eye.

  “Nate, what’s going on? There’s something wrong, I can tell. You didn’t climb that chimney to impress me, although it did. You climbed it because something’s eating at you and you need to think.”

  Nate sighed but didn’t disagree.

  “What is it?” Joe asked.

  “I was over in the Zephyr housing area earlier,” Nate said. “I was wondering if there was anybody still here who I knew when I worked here.”

  “Yes?”

  Nate leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and cocked his head. “Joe, there’s somebody you probably ought to see.”

  Joe was puzzled.

  “Did you bring the Glock?” Nate asked.

  “I left it in my room.”

  “Good,” Nate said, rising. “You probably don’t want a weapon around afterwards.”

  13

  JOE FOLLOWED NATE THROUGH A BACK DOOR AND they crossed a meadow of dry, ankle-deep grass on a well-worn path. Because a curtain of clouds had shut out the stars and moon and there were no overhead lights, the darkness was palpable. It was still and cold. Joe tracked Nate ahead of him by the slight white whisps of Nate’s breath in the utter blackness. The lights of the inn receded behind them.

  When the path stepped up onto blacktop, Joe knew where he was—crossing the highway toward employee housing, which was hidden away from tourists. There were no cars in either direction. They plunged into the trees on the other side and Joe stumbled into Nate, who had stopped.

  “What?”

  “There’s something in front of us,” Nate said. “Something big.”

  Joe looked over Nate’s shoulder. Despite the lack of light, he could see a huge black triangle shape blocking the path. There was a strong odor of fur, dust, and manure. With a guttural snort, the buffalo spooked and crashed ahead through the timber.

  “Are there more?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t think so. He was a loner.”

  “Like you.”

  Nate didn’t respond. Behind them, far away in the basin, a geyser erupted. The sound was furious, angry, the roar of a boiling waterfall shooting into the air.

  “Nate,” Joe asked, “where are we going?”

  “Employee housing,” Nate said.

  “But where specifically?”

  “The bar.”

  THE ZEPHYR EMPLOYEE bar was hidden in the center of a long barracks-like building that fronted the dark employee dormitories. Steam hissed from a dimly lit laundry facility in one part of the building, and Joe caught a glimpse of several employees inside folding linen sheets. There were no neon beer signs to mark the bar and no cars outside, just a window leaking low light through a curtain and two middle-aged women smoking cigarettes on either side of the door. The women stubbed out their smokes as Joe and Nate approached, and started walking heavily toward the dormitories. Joe followed Nate inside.

  The place was rough and crude, Joe thought, with the feel of a secret frat house drinking room. It was paneled with cheap laminate, and small bare lightbulbs hung from wires behind the bar. A crooked and stained pool table glowed under a pool of light, battered cues lying on it in a V. An entire wall was covered with curling yellowed Polaroids of Zephyr employees who had graced the place. Two tables were occupied with young employees who had been there for most of the night—it was obvious by the collection of empty drinking glasses and pitchers—and only two men were at the bar, one standing and glaring at them with a hand on the counter as if to hold himself back from attacking, the other slumped forward and asleep with his face nestled in his arms.

  “Nate Romanowski!” the standing man boomed. “You’re back!”

  “I said I would be,” Nate said.

  The bartender, who was washing glasses in a sink behind the bar, looked up and nodded to Nate and Joe.

  “Joe,” Nate said, “meet Dr. Keaton, or, as he’s known around here, Doomsayer.”

  Joe extended his hand. Keaton was slim, tall, unshaven, and jumpy, with deep-set eyes and a sharp face like an ax blade. He looked to be in his sixties. He had stooped shoulders and a malleable mouth that twitched to its own crackling rhythm. Just being next to him made Joe tense up.

  “Welcome to hell on earth,” Keaton said, and cackled.

  “Don’t mind him,” the bartender said to Joe, “he always says that. What can I get you two?”

  Joe shot a glance at Nate, who ordered a pitcher of beer for the three of them.

  “Is your partner going to join us?” Nate asked, nodding toward the man next to Keaton, who appeared to have passed out.

  “He’s sleeping it off,” Keaton said. “He hit it a little hard earlier this evening, but when he awakes I’m sure he’ll join right in again. We are both disciples of the Louis Jordan song ‘What’s the Use of Getting Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again).’ ”

  Joe noticed the cadence of Keaton’s phrasing: effete, affected. Educated. It played against his tramplike appearance.

  The pitcher appeared. “Drink up,” Keaton said, grabbing it before Nate could and pouring it into the glasses, “for tomorrow we die.”

  “That’s why they call you Doomsayer, huh?” Joe said.

  Keaton glared at Nate. “Who is this man, exactly?”

  Nate said, “Friend of mine. He’s up here investigating the Zone of Death murders.”

  Joe wondered why Nate blurted it out like that.

  “Ah,” Keaton said, turnin
g his eyes to Joe and studying him from a new angle by listing his head to the side. “Another one up here to try and solve the great mystery . . .” He said it with condescension that dripped.

  “The amount of time and angst that has gone into this puzzle,” Keaton said, sighing, “trying to figure out why the shabby lawyer killed the insolent Minnesotans. It amazes me.”

  “Why is that?” Joe asked, taking a sip.

  Keaton shook his head. “Because it’s indicative of a tired mind-set. It’s nothing more than mental jerking off: puffed-up officials trying to make order out of random acts when all around them their world is about to explode—but they just don’t know it, or care. It’s like trying to find the fly shit in the pepper. I mean, who cares?”

  Joe had no idea how to respond, and he was angry with Nate for bringing him in here when he should have gone up to bed. Nate’s fondness for the otherworldly and mystical grated on his nerves, and this, Joe thought, was a waste of his time.

  “He has a Ph.D. in what, geology?” the bartender explained to Joe. “He’s one of the founders of EarthGod, the big environmental activist group. He came up here twelve years ago to protest snowmobiles and never left.”

  Joe nodded. He’d heard of EarthGod. Even ardent environmentalists considered the group extreme.

  Nate picked up on Joe’s discomfort. “He isn’t like that anymore,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “There’s no point,” Keaton said, “because we’re all going to die.”

  “Maybe I ought to get a good night’s sleep then,” Joe said, not all that interested anymore.

  Keaton jerked back, offended. His eyes narrowed. “You don’t seem to understand, Joe,” Keaton said, his voice dripping with contempt. “You’ve misread me entirely. You’ve made assumptions that I’m some crazy old man who is diverting you from your mission. But what you don’t seem to understand, Joe, is that your mission doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Your laws don’t matter, you don’t matter, and neither do I. We’re all on borrowed time, and have been for tens of thousands of years.”

  Over the next twenty minutes, Keaton laid it out. As he talked, his tone swooped while he made his arguments, then descended into whispers to drive home the gravity of what he was saying. Joe found himself getting sucked in.

  “We are drinking this beer right now in the middle of a massive volcanic caldera,” Keaton said, leaning across Nate to address Joe directly. “Do you know what a caldera is? It’s the center of a dormant volcano. The Yellowstone caldera encompasses most of this so-called park. The edge of the caldera is all around us; we’re in the bowl—in the mouth—of it right now. That’s why we have all of our lovely attractions—the geysers, the steam vents, the mud pots. Magma from the center of the earth has pushed through the seams in the crust”—he demonstrated by making a bony fist and shoving it into his other palm, pushing up with the fist—“right here, right below us. It’s pushing upward trying to get out. There are only thirty places in the world where the center of the earth is trying to get out, and this is the only one of them on land, not water. When it does, when it finally blows, it will be a super volcano of a magnitude never even contemplated by man. It will be two and a half thousand times more powerful than Mount Saint Helens! And it won’t erupt slowly, it will explode!”

  To demonstrate, Keaton slammed his fist down on the bar so hard the beer glasses danced.

  Keaton screwed up his face with menace. “When it goes, when the Yellowstone super volcano goes, it will instantly kill three million people—every human life and all animal life for two hundred miles in every direction. Ash will cover the continent, asphyxiate the wildlife, and clog all the rivers. There’ll be nuclear winter in New York City, and the climate truly will change as the world enters a vicious, sudden ice age. America will be over. Southern Canada, Northern Mexico—wiped out. The continent will resemble a postmodern wasteland, even more than it does now. This time, it will be real and not social.”

  Keaton paused to sip his beer, but he was so wound up that most of it dribbled out of his mouth onto his chin whiskers, which didn’t seem to bother him.

  “It has happened every six hundred thousand years through geologic history, at least four times we can determine. Each super volcanic eruption changes the world. The last time it erupted was six hundred forty thousands years ago.” Keaton’s voice dropped to a whisper. “We’re forty thousand years overdue.”

  “Then maybe it won’t happen,” Joe said.

  Keaton showed his teeth. “Typical,” he spat. “Just ignore it, wish it away. That’s what people do best. But the signs are all around us that it will come sooner instead of later. You have to wake up and look at them!”

  Joe now knew that he wouldn’t be going back to the inn and tumbling into a restful sleep.

  “In the past decade,” Keaton said, “the ground has risen fourteen centimeters in the Yellowstone caldera. That’s right, the dirt beneath your feet is five inches higher in elevation than it was ten years ago. That’s because the magma has forced it up, putting tremendous pressure on the thin crust. It’s just like filling a tire with more and more air until it finally ruptures. And do you know, Joe, what is likely to cause the ground to rupture and release all that pressure, to turn the world inside out?”

  “No.”

  “Earthquakes,” Keaton said. “A tremor that will weaken and part the tectonic plates beneath us. That’s all it will take . . . a crack, an opening. And do you know how many earthquakes there were in Yellowstone this past year?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “Three thousand. Think about it: three thousand. Over five hundred just in the Old Faithful area alone!”

  To demonstrate, Keaton made himself tremble and his eyes blinked rapidly: “We’re starting to shake apart.”

  With that, Keaton calmed himself, sighed, and settled back on his stool. “So drink up, Joe, for tomorrow we die.”

  Joe looked at Nate. Nate shrugged.

  “So it doesn’t matter about the tiny little things you’re concerned about,” Keaton said, his voice moderating so he sounded almost reasonable, “your murders and your laws. Your jurisdiction. Once I realized that, the snowmobile emissions in Yellowstone Park seemed so . . . trivial. So stupid. So pointless. Nothing matters. We’re trivial pissants in the big scheme of things, fleas, fly shit in the pepper.”

  Joe sipped his beer but it tasted bitter. He stanched a wild impulse to call Marybeth and tell her to grab the girls and flee to the root cellar.

  “So I don’t concern myself with laws or causes anymore,” Keaton said. “I don’t get worked up about what used to be my passions—emissions, or recycling, or the trashing of the environment. We humans have such a high opinion of ourselves—especially my old brethren in the movement. We think we’re gods on earth, that by merely changing our behavior or, more important, changing the behavior of the heathen industrialists and capitalists, that we can actually affect the outcome of the planet. We’re so unbelievably arrogant and elite, so blind, so stupid. We think we can control the world. It’s so tremendously silly I laugh when I think about it. It would be similar to if all the germs on our bartender’s head decided to get together to prevent him from farting. It makes no difference what they decide or what they think—he’ll still fart like a heifer.”

  The bartender, who’d been listening, looked offended.

  Doomsayer continued, “Such efforts are beyond quixotic—they’re comically hopeless. So we take infinitesimal little actions like preventing oil exploration, or recycling our beer cans, or driving hybrid cars that cost twenty-five times what a Third World worker makes in a year, or shaming other people for their desire to live well and prosper . . .”

  Keaton paused, let the word trail off, then shouted: “Ha! I say ha! Because once this baby goes,” he yelled, pointing at the floor between his dirty shoes, “once this baby goes, none of those things matter. Nothing matters. We’re stir-fry.”

  The bar was absolutely silen
t. Even the Zephyr employees at the tables looked wide-eyed at Keaton. Only the old drunk next to him slept through the reverie.

  “So,” Joe said, “if you really believe all that, why are you here? Why aren’t you on some island in the Pacific?”

  “Because, Joe,” he said in a singsong, as if explaining fundamental truths to a child, “when it goes I want to go with it. Instantly, in a flash of light with a drink in my hand. I don’t want to huddle, shivering, in my apartment in Brooklyn or Boston while ash and snow blankets the city until I freeze slowly in the dark. I don’t want to be on an island watching the ocean turn slowly milk-colored with ash and dead fish. I want to be here, ground zero, where I can watch and monitor the thermal activity so I can be right here ordering that drink with my so-called friends around me.”

  “You mean there are others who think like you do?”

  “Dozens,” he said. “We’re known as the Geyser Gazers. We serve a true purpose for the Park Service—charting eruptions and thermal activity. It used to be an easy job—sedentary—sitting on a bench waiting for a geyser to erupt and noting it in a little book. But that was in the old days, before the ground started to rise. Now, it’s crazy. Geysers that used to go like clockwork have stopped entirely. Meanwhile, long-dormant geysers—monsters, some of them—are shooting off all over the park like fifteen-year-old boys on vacation. It’s like the earth’s guts are churning, ready to vomit! The signs of the apocalypse are all around, but only a few of us—my compatriots in the Geyser Gazers—have the knowledge and foresight to realize what is happening right in front of our eyes.”

  As he spoke he turned toward the bar, in profile, and Joe suddenly knew where he’d seen Keaton before.

  “So you try to keep up with what’s going on in the park, huh?” Joe asked.

  Keaton hesitated a moment. “Yes . . .”

  “So you probably knew Rick Hoening and his buddies?”

  “Savages! Nonbelievers!”

  “And you like to check out visitors,” Joe said. “Is that why you and your buddy there were in the Mammoth Hotel last night? Trying to see what I was doing here?”