Page 122 of Eruption

They felt as if they were trapped in a burning building, these boys who’d come to this beach thinking the eruption would happen somewhere else on the Big Island, up near the sky.

But the eruption had followed them here.

Then the boats were flipping, turning over in the air,huli,the boys falling out of them; then they were all in the boiling water, seeing their skin turn the color of the lava, violently choking on gases and fumes suffocating them.

Kids who thought they would live forever, not believing something like this could happen.

Not to them.

Not here.

Luke felt as if he were drowning, though he managed to keep his head above the water that began pushing them farther away from the shore.

All around him, his friends were shouting, some of them crying, the ones still in the boats asking Luke what they should do even as the water in which they’d grown up, the water they loved, started to burn all of them alive.

CHAPTER 91

U.S. Military Reserve, Hawai‘i

General Mark Rivers’s war had officially begun.

People had already died, including some of his own. It’s what happened in war.

And he knew this was only the beginning. Mauna Loa had finally erupted a couple of hours ago with a force and a volume of lava that had shocked not only him but the scientists, including Brett’s Italians, who had announced they were going to watch the eruption from the Mauna Loa Observatory. Rivers had objected, but the Italians hadn’t listened to him any more than J. P. Brett had.

Everything happened at once.

Brett, who hadn’t listened to the end, and the Cutlers and their pilot had crashed into the summit moments after the eruption.

He’d gotten a call from a hysterical and almost incoherentHenry Takayama, the head of Civil Defense in Hilo, that the burned bodies of his son and nine other boys, rowers, had washed up on the beach at South Point Park.

Ten kids at a beach on the southern tip of the island.

Word was that a town there, Na‘alehu, was about to be flooded by lava, what the chief of police there described as a tidal wave of it coming straight for them.

“Is there anything you can do for us?” the chief said.

“Pray,” Rivers said.

Rivers kept hearing the sirens even after they’d gone silent.

There was a rap on the door and Colonel Briggs entered.

“Please give me some good news,” Rivers said.

“Sorry, sir,” Briggs said. “The kid sergeant who snuck out to the bar?”

“Mahoe.”

“He died just now in quarantine, sir.” Briggs paused. “Died looking like the others over there at the cabin. It just took longer with him.”

“Was anybody at the hospital infected?”

“Not that we know of.”

“Did you find his girlfriend yet?” Rivers asked.

“Yes, sir, we did. I got the call on her right before the one about Sergeant Mahoe. They found her body with the bodies of her grandparents at their little farmhouse near Saddle Road.”