Page 78 of Eruption

“I know how much you miss them, Mac,” Jenny said.

He put the framed picture down gently, as if it might break if he weren’t careful. “What if I never see them again?” he asked.

“You will.”

What came next seemed to explode out of him; there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“You don’t know that! No one does!”

He knew how angry he sounded and knew it had nothing to do with her, his best friend and his wingman and whatever else she was and might not ever be if they couldn’t keep the lava away from the cave.

But she was Jenny. If he knew these things, so did she.

“Sorry,” he said.

“You know you don’t have to apologize to me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do.”

She sat down on the edge of the desk.

“I can’t do this,” he said, his voice not much above a whisper.

She smiled at him. “Then we really are screwed,” she said.

He could not make himself smile back.

“I come in here sometimes and close the door and sit down behind this desk and try to think of what I might have missed,” he said. “And then, just like that, I feel as if I want to drive a fist through one of these walls.” He looked down and saw his fists clenched in front of him.

“I didn’t sign up for this!”He didn’t care if the people out in the bullpen heard him.

“None of us did,” Jenny said softly. “And yet here we are. And all I’m going to ask is that you don’t let anybody else see you like this. Because this isn’t you, and we both know it.”

“I’m allowed to feel like this, Jenny,” Mac said. “And I’m allowed to tell you that right now I feel like there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that we can pull this off.”

She went behind him and reached down to the bottom drawer where she knew he kept the bottle of Macallan and two glasses. She poured them each a shot.

They drank, and Jenny made a big show of wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Now please shut the fuck up and get to work, because that’s what I’m going to do,” Jenny said. When she got to the door, she added, “You’re always telling me that if these jobs were easy, everybody would do them.”

And she walked out.

Mac could hear the strain in Briggs’s voice when the colonel called and said Mac needed to see something right away. It was as if Briggs’s voice were stretched as far as it could go, and the next thing he said might snap it like a rubber band. He told Mac where he was—in a remote cabin at the end of Pe‘epe‘e Falls Road, near a succession of bubbling pools known in Hilo as the Boiling Pots area.

“Make sure to stop at the base on your way and pick up your hazmat suit,” Briggs said.

CHAPTER 54

Briggs was waiting for Mac in front of what looked like an old-fashioned log cabin set back in the woods above Pe‘epe‘e Falls Road, at least a mile past any lights Mac had seen as he slowly drove along a dirt road just wide enough for his jeep.

There were soldiers there, also in suits, training powerful flashlights on the area in front of the cabin.

Mac could see immediately that the shrubs the locals called Hawaiian cotton had turned black, like they’d suffered some kind of internal oil spill. The banyan trees on either side of the front door had also turned black and begun to wither; the branches were as thin as matchsticks. It smelled like a forest fire, except there was no smoke from the woods surrounding the cabin. There was only the scorched earth all around them.

“Follow me,” Briggs said.

Battery-powered Nomad scene lights illuminated the single room, just some chairs set around an old butcher-block table covered with beer cans and empty whiskey bottles and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts.