The Yellowstone Conundrum Read Online Free Page B

of 50-year old pines, before splitting in two. The smaller crack continued for twenty feet and then stopped no more than a car-length away while the larger crack zig-zagged toward Old Faithful.
      When the split in the earth hit the geyser, the sound was like the largest walnut ever had been cracked, a snap-crack of a bat hitting a fastball in the sweet spot. A large burst of steam spit into the sky; the split in the earth continuing toward the forest beyond.
      Then it stopped. Silence except for the steam rising from Old Faithful and Randy and Nadine breathing heavily.
      “You OK?” he asked.
      Before she could say yes, a fearful noise from Old Faithful; a terrible groan, then the earth gave way at the blow-hole, forming a nearly-perfect round opening fifty feet in diameter. Seconds later another series of terrible groans and the hole was filled with red liquid. A crust quickly formed over part of it. A quick glance and you’d swear it was a red eye peeking out from underneath the earth, like in a Stephen King novel.
      Wha’z up?  Anyone home?
      Just as quickly the scummy crust disappeared, but it sure looked like a wink to Randy.
      What the fuck?
      Old Faithful exploded. Normally, Old Faithful blows its top not on the hourly schedule so well advertised, but every 35-to-90 minutes based on the length of the previous eruption; scalding hot water shoots ninety to sometimes over one hundred twenty feet into the air in three or four movements, the third explosion being the money shot. But, this wasn’t scalding water. It was lava. Molten rock from the center of the Earth shot high a hundred feet into the air-before being overcome by gravity, returning to Earth in goopy clumps of upchuck rock; a cum shot from ol’ Vulcan himself.
      “Run, Randy, run!” shouted Nadine.
      Knees popping, muscles sore from the fall, Randy and Nadine scrambled to their feet and started to waddle as fast as they could, first toward the Old Faithful Inn—closed for the season, then to the Snow Lodge beyond.
      Randy took a last look behind him and wished he hadn’t; to his left and behind, the crack in the Earth stretched back across the large parking lot; to his right, to the geyser and beyond to the woods. In the distance across the parking lot he could see lava spurting, shooting up from Vulcan’s domain, squeezed out into a single line of gushers, each a hundred feet high. In an instant the line of gushers reached the viewing area, and continued back to Mother Faithful, now a chorus line of molten rock.
      Seconds later the woods on the far side of the geyser were on fire. Randy almost made it to the demolished Old Faithful Inn before falling flat on his face; then to his knees and scrambling.
      From behind him he heard the devil himself belch up fire and brimstone as the entire fault line turned from a red fountain of death, split wider, and then sank forty feet into the Earth’s mantle, all in the space of seconds. The parking lot, snowmobiles, skiers, Old Faithful herself and a good portion of the dense forest beyond, folding in on itself like God was making a crepe of fire and rock.
      Seconds passed and God exhaled, this time shooting rock and lava and earth and steam and molten ash not a hundred feet into the sky, but thousands of feet. 
      Randy and Nadine Crowe from Flagstaff, Arizona never made it to their cabin. The portions of Old Faithful Village that weren’t destroyed from the force of the blast—from a jagged hole in the Earth’s surface initially over two miles in length—were consumed by fire and burned to ashes as the molten material fell to Earth.

University of Washington, Seattle
    6:20 AM PST
     
      Sixth-year grad student Karen Bagley carefully placed her piping hot Starbucks double latte on a small, but clear portion of the left side of her messy workstation, ever so carefully because two years ago she’d casually put a similar cup of on top the tail of an old-fashioned mouse, which