Page 90 of Eruption

Mac watched as a rock as big as a bowling ball hit a man squarely in the back and saw the man go down and then not move.

Another man raced down the hill toward Mac and Brett as if trying to outrun the storm; a jagged piece of basalt hit his hard hat and sent it flying, and he went down.

Mac turned to see if Brett was all right and saw him diving into the front seat of his Rivian R1T truck just as a rock came crashing into his windshield.

Mac ran up the mountain to the army man lying face down and motionless. He rolled him over and was relieved to see he was still breathing, although blood poured out of the wound on the side of his face.

In the next instant Mac smelled the rotten-egg odor of sulfur dioxide; the rocks kept raining down.

A rock slammed into Mac’s hard hat, knocking him down and nearly out. He rolled over in the dirt, trying to cover up, and heard a different kind of roar above him. Mac looked up and saw a drone the size of a small plane spinning out of control, about to come crashing down from the sky on top of him.

For days he had been obsessed about the end being near.

It had been nearer than he’d thought.

CHAPTER 64

Hilo Medical Center, Hilo, Hawai‘i

Jenny and Rebecca were waiting for Mac when he stepped out of the hospital and onto Wai Anuenue Avenue.

They both knew what had happened up on the mountain by now, the crippled drone that had missed Mac by less than twenty yards. One of the soldiers from the Corps of Engineers had seen the whole thing, come sprinting to his aid, and driven him straight to the hospital despite Mac’s protestations that all he had was a bump on the back of his head.

“Fortunately,” Jenny said to Rebecca, “the rock struck the hardest part of him. So he caught a little break there.”

“Iwaslucky,” Mac said.

Jenny smiled at him.

As he told them about the various injuries people were being treated for in the medical center, from broken legs to fractured cheekbones, Jenny put a hand on Mac’s shoulder. She let it restthere, and Mac saw Rebecca see her do it and then quickly look away, as if she were somehow intruding.

“You’re sure you’re still up to this meeting?” Jenny asked.

“Well, you call it a meeting,” he said. “My understanding is that in the Mafia, they refer to them as sit-downs.”

Rebecca Cruz smiled. “I’ll put our mob up against Brett’s any day of the week.”

Laniwas a native word for “paradise.” It was also the name of a new hotel located in Hilo. The rival to the city’s new Four Seasons turned out to be owned by one of J. P. Brett’s holding companies. Mac wondered if Brett, as obsessed as he was with trying to be the star of it all, had considered the possibility that his new luxury resort might be a death trap if their calculations about the diversion of the lava, including some that had come from Brett and the Cutlers, were even a little bit wrong.

But they had found out today that all of their plans and schematics and projections, all the pretty pictures that had been drawn on various computers—none of that had been worth a bucket of spit when the rocks and ash came shooting out of the earth like some angry geyser.

Now they were in a ballroom on the second floor of the Lani, all of them: Mac, Jenny, Rebecca, the Cutlers, Brett. General Rivers was on his way back from visiting the injured at Hilo Medical Center.

“Glad to see you’re all right,” Brett had said to Mac when he arrived about ten minutes after the others.

“Are you?” Mac asked.

“Fortunately, I’m fine,” Brett said.

“Not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

“Just a general observation of how full of shit you are,” Mac said evenly.

All eyes in the room quickly focused on the two of them, as if a fuse had just been lit.

“Hey, don’t give me that,” Brett said. “I was in the same danger you were in today.”