Page 111 of Eruption

Patton had slapped soldiers under his command during the Sicily campaign, and Rivers thought he might’ve had the right idea. Rivers would’ve considered slapping Sergeant Mahoe now if he hadn’t been afraid of catching what Mahoe had and causing his own skin to rot.

His landline rang. The soldier at the front desk informed him MacGregor, Rebecca Cruz, Brett, and the Cutlers were here.

All of the available intel, all of the science at their fingertips, said that the eruption would happen today, perhaps even before the morning was over. The quakes were coming more rapidlynow, the way contractions did when a woman was about to give birth.

Birth,he thought.Beginning of life.

This might be the opposite of that.

Rivers looked down at the Hawaiian words he’d scrawled on the pad in front of him:

Ka hopena

The end.

Now his satellite phone was ringing. Rivers was using this, not his cell phone, now—the way all military personnel were.

Briggs.

“I think we might have eyes on the girl,” Colonel James Briggs said as the walls of the military base began to shake again, harder than ever.

Leilana Kane tried to blend in as best she could with the crowd moving toward the piers at the Port of Hilo, all the people ahead of her and behind her trying to get on one of the small ferryboats that had begun evacuating people from the island the previous afternoon. These were the residents of Hilo who had chosen to leave rather than work with the army, some of them not knowing when they would return or what shape the Big Island might be in when they did.

Some residents with enough money had been chartering small planes to get them to one of the other islands, wanting to be anywhere but here when Mauna Loa exploded with a force they had been hearing about for days, a force the likes of which their island had never seen.

Leilana had been on the run since the soldiers had dragged Noa out of Hale Inu Sports Bar like he was some sort of criminal;Leilana had managed to slip out the back door moments before the army closed the place down.

She had given up trying to reach Noa on his phone, especially after some of her friends told her that men from the army were calling around and asking if anybody had seen her or been in contact with her. She’d stopped using her phone at all, afraid the army or the police might use it to track her.

After she left the sports bar, she’d gone to the macadamia farm where her grandparents on her mother’s side had raised her after her mother died of cancer. The next morning soldiers had shown up at the farm, a postcard-pretty place off Saddle Road not far from the military base. Leilana had gotten away again, but not before telling her grandparents to tell the soldiers they hadn’t seen her and didn’t have any idea where she was.

Last night, Leilana had slept on the beach. She was used to being on her own, sometimes feeling as if she’d raised herself, and she had never been afraid, not in Hilo, to sleep on the sand and under the stars.

Maybe she could come back after the eruption, when the island was safe again, and find out what happened to Noa, but now she wanted to be anywhere except here, like the other people in the line.

There were soldiers and police showing up at her friends’ houses, saying it was urgent that they find her, that she was in danger.

But in danger from what?

Before Leilana stopped using her phone because it was a tracking device, one of the girls she worked with, Natalie Palakiko, asked, “Did you break the law, Lani?”

“God, no,” Leilana said.

“Because I got the feeling that if they find you, they want to arrest you,” Natalie said.

“Arrest me for what?”

“I don’t know,” Natalie said. “But before they left my house they told me that if you contacted me and I didn’t immediately contact them, I might be in trouble too.”

Leilana told herself she would sort it all out later. For now, as the ground kept shaking, causing occasional screams from the people moving slowly toward the piers, she just needed to make herself gone. She pulled herHILO VULCANShat farther down over her eyes.

When she briefly stepped out of the line to see how close she was to the front, she heard a loud voice she recognized call out, “Leilana Kane! You bagging this piece of rock too?”

She turned and saw Sherry Hokula, a girl she’d gone to high school with, wildly waving.

“Leilana!” she said, louder than before. “That you, girlfriend? Over here!”

When Leilana looked at the front of the line, she saw two soldiers making their way toward her from the dock area.