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  ANY DAY NOW

  The Yellowstone Event:

  Book 4

  By Darrell Maloney

  This is a work of fiction. All persons depicted in this book are fictional characters. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Copyright 2018 by Darrell Maloney

  This book is dedicated to:

  Joe “Harley Joe” Bennett.

  A trusted friend for more years than I can count.

  Here are some fun facts about the

  Yellowstone Caldera:

  - It’s a real thing. It really does exist

  - It’s a super volcano simmering just beneath the surface of Yellowstone National Park

  - It has erupted in the past, and will erupt again

  - Scientists believe that when it erupts again it will destroy 20 percent of the United States

  - You do NOT want to be in that 20 percent

  Bearing all that in mind, enjoy the book…

  *****************************************

  THE STORY THUS FAR…

  *****************************************

  Tony and Hannah were just starting out when their world was turned upside down by a series of events they never saw coming.

  She was a geologist with a bright future ahead of her, tasked with collecting data from Yellowstone National Park.

  She was also expecting their first child.

  Tony was just along for the ride, really.

  She’d pulled some strings and got him a temporary job as a helper. A “lugger” of heavy equipment. A laborer whose mere presence at Hannah’s side was as important as anything else he did to assist in the project.

  Things went well and the couple returned home.

  All seemed rosy until Hannah got a phone call from her good friend Gwen. Gwen was a co-worker in the Phoenix office who gave her some very distressing news.

  The Yellowstone Caldera, a mass of volcanic activity beneath the sprawling park, was beginning to stir for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years.

  Fifty miles wide and seven miles long, the massive Caldera would cause an eruption never before seen by modern man.

  And there was no way to stop it.

  “No,” Hannah said. “There must be some mistake.”

  “That’s why I’m calling you. I want you to review the data and double check everything. See if my team left something out or failed to account for something.

  “See if you interpret it any differently.”

  But that wasn’t all that was worrying Gwen.

  “Hannah, we’re finding out that some of the people who gathered the data in previous years… the ones who also saw the Caldera’s pressure building… well, they’ve been disappearing.

  “In some cases they’ve been falling victim to terrible accidents.

  “Accidents which may not be accidents at all.”

  The couple took what they thought were adequate precautions, but the government found them anyway.

  They were taken prisoner and tortured by the Department of Homeland Security, which desperately wanted to find and capture Gwen as well.

  The government doesn’t like it when their secrets are known by outsiders.

  Gwen and her husband Melvyn fled to Canada.

  Hannah gave birth to a baby boy while she was in captivity.

  A baby boy named Samson who disappeared.

  Tony, with the help of his friend Bud, managed to outsmart the federal agents.

  Bud’s friend Wayne released the news of the Yellowstone Caldera to the world. The cat was out of the bag.

  Holding prisoners was now pointless, and Tony and Hannah were released.

  Hannah was told baby Samson would be delivered to her, but he never showed.

  This time the government wasn’t to blame, but rather a rogue government agent.

  A lonely and troubled woman named Marilyn Petty, who’d lost her only son to SIDS some years before and who saw this as her last opportunity to become a mother again.

  Marilyn was on the run with Samson, who she now called Jacob.

  And as desperate as Marilyn was to be a mother again, Hannah was equally desperate to find her and recover her child.

  As a gesture of good faith, and perhaps to somehow make amends, Hannah was aided by Rebecca, the woman who oversaw her torture.

  “The DHS sometimes makes mistakes,” she told Hannah. “But most of the time we get it right and the country is better off with us on its side. Having said that, we did you a disservice. We’ll do what we can to make things right.”

  We left off with Marilyn and the baby in Florida, Rebecca’s people hot on her trail, and Hannah dealing with a couple of writers with a bizarre tale to tell.

  And now, the fourth installment of the series:

  ANY DAY NOW

  Chapter 1

  Wayne Hamlin decided he rather liked being a celebrity.

  The good professor had only been out of the hospital for four days after suffering a massive heart attack. It was the so-called “big one” which by all rights should have killed him but didn’t.

  He’d only been back in Springfield for a day, having been driven back to Missouri by his wife Julie.

  “We’re not even going to try to book a flight and deal with all the chaos going on at the airport,” she told him. “They’d likely give us seats based strictly on who you are. But then everyone would want a piece of their newest hero, and you just don’t need the stress right now.

  And now, not even twenty hours since they’d rolled into Springfield, the clamor for Dr. Hamlin’s attention was already at a fever pitch.

  As they turned the corner at the end of the street they saw them, lined up along both curbs and totally ignoring the “No Parking Anytime” signs.

  Satellite trucks, their booms extended and ready to broadcast the good professor’s words into the heavens and back down again around the earth.

  “All this for me?” he said with a smile.

  It wasn’t really a question.

  For it was quite obviously there for him.

  Rather, it was a statement of disbelief.

  “Let’s stop and give them a statement,” he said. “Maybe they’ll go away.”

  “No way, Jose,” Julie adamantly said.

  “It won’t make them go away. It’ll just make them want more. It’d be like feeding a guppy to a pool of hungry sharks in a feeding frenzy.”

  And she was one who knew.

  She’d been dealing with a different pool of two-legged sharks with microphones in their hands at the Hillsborough Hospital in D.C. for the previous two weeks.

  She tried to be courteous and helpful, at least at first.

  She understood they had a job to do, and were merely trying to earn their pay.

  But then she got tired of giving the same interviews, over and over. Answering the same questions a dozen times a day.

  Then they started getting more and more pushy as their producers started telling them to look for different angles.

  Their ratings were flat because they were reporting the same tired things as everyone else.

  They needed something fresh. Something new. Something different.

  It was when they started making things up that they really started getting under Julie’s skin.

  And when she decided to stop being so nice.

  It was then she decided they weren’t just nice people trying to do their jobs.

  That they were little more than rabid dogs, ready to tear the others apart just for a bit of flesh.

  Oh, they were respectful, at least in their tone.

  They still called her “ma’am” or “Mrs. Hamlin.”

  They still politely asked her how she was feeling on any particular day, and
still said “may we” when requesting a one-on-one.

  Rather, it was the substance of their questions which had changed.

  “Mrs. Hamlin, is it true that your husband came to Washington to meet a woman with whom he was carrying on a long-term affair?”

  “Mrs. Hamlin, is it true that your husband was an operative for the department of Homeland Security before he decided to blow the whistle on the Yellowstone Event?”

  “Mrs. Hamlin, there are rumors that the professor was getting ready to be fired from his position at the university. And that he only went public about the Yellowstone Caldera to save his job. Would you care to comment?”

  No, she would not.

  And no, he was not having an affair. Wayne didn’t have an unfaithful bone in his body. He was a most devoted and loving husband who doted on her.

  And no, he wasn’t an operative for the federal government. Like practically every other good American, he despised the federal government. He accepted that the federal government had forgotten its charter many years before. And that government agencies were no longer there for the good of the people. They were for sale to the highest bidder.

  No, she would answer no more questions.

  She told the last interviewer who accosted her he was no better than a vulture.

  She implied he had no father and suggested he go and perform unnatural acts upon himself.

  Then she yelled to the crowd of assembled reporters awaiting their turn that there would be no more comments on her part.

  “Go to hell, all of you!”

  But they didn’t go to hell.

  They didn’t go anywhere.

  They kept on coming. They kept on trying.

  She’d had enough.

  Wayne hadn’t seen any of that.

  She’d snuck a handful of reporters into his hospital room, back when they were playing nice.

  Wayne found them to be polite and respectful, and generally nice people.

  And they were indeed all that.

  When they had Wayne all to himself and didn’t have to compete for his attention or share him with twenty other reporters from other news outlets.

  “I’m going to open the garage remotely and drive into it,” Julie said. “Don’t open your car door until I lower the garage door again.”

  Wayne was feeling, for the first time in his life, what it was like to be a movie star.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll talk to them for a few minutes.”

  “Wayne, are you frickin’ nuts?”

  “No. If I talk to them they’ll go away. If I don’t they may be here for weeks.”

  She knew better than to argue with him.

  For although he was an incredible husband, Wayne was like most men and was as stubborn as an old mule.

  He wouldn’t heed her warnings until he saw first-hand she was right.

  And the thing about Julie… she was always right.

  Chapter 2

  Wayne had always been a rather low-key type of fellow; decidedly not flashy.

  Most men of science are.

  The sudden attention he’d been getting, the worldwide fame and accolades from world leaders, was therefore quite unusual for him.

  And rather fun.

  When he was in the hospital recovering from his heart attack Julie took frequent breaks in the only designated smoking section the hospital had: on the ground floor in a tiny courtyard.

  It was while smoking her Marlboro Reds in the courtyard that Julie had a chance to mingle with the reporters who were staking out the hospital hoping for an interview with Dr. Wayne Hamlin.

  Such interviews were exceedingly rare and a treasure, for any reporter granted such an interview had to pass muster with Julie.

  To reduce the stress on her husband, Julie chose carefully who she took back upstairs with her to meet with him.

  She only chose people who were courteous and respectful, and who struck her as kind and decent people.

  In the large pool of reporters, not many passed the test.

  Wayne could be forgiven for thinking that all reporters were polite and kind and respectful.

  After all, those were the only ones Julie exposed him to.

  “Park in the driveway,” he instructed his wife. “I’ll spend a few minutes with them, and maybe that’ll make them happy and they’ll go away.”

  “Ya think?”

  “Sure. I mean, they’ll all have to leave and go find typewriters so they can pound out their stories, right?”

  She looked at him and asked, “Seriously?”

  “Sure. That’s what reporters do, right?”

  “Wayne, when’s the last time you even saw a typewriter?”

  He thought for a moment, then replied, “Years, actually.”

  Then after another moment he added, “But then again I’m not a reporter. So they use computers now. They still have to go somewhere to type in their stories and email them.”

  “Honey, they’re going to eat you alive.”

  He was undeterred.

  “I’m sure most of them are good people, Julie. You’ll see.”

  She rolled her eyes and muttered beneath her breath, “hard-headed typical male…”

  “What did you say, honey? I didn’t hear you.”

  “Nothing, honey.”

  Julie had no idea how they recognized the Hamlins’ car, but they were still half a block from the house when reporters started running out into the street.

  Four houses away from their own she had to slow to a snail’s pace to avoid running over idiot newsmen who walked out in front of her car.

  She never stopped completely, though. She wanted to get to the safety of her driveway. To stop now would mean they’d have to abandon their vehicle and wade through the sea of supposed humanity which made up the media.

  Instead she crept forward, yelling at the reporters to get the hell out of her way.

  Emblazoned across the front page of the biggest papers in the country the next day would be a photograph of her with her mouth wide open and gripping the steering wheel tightly with one hand.

  With the other she was giving the reporters a one-finger salute.

  The photo was far from the dignified persona Julie preferred to convey of herself.

  But then again, it summed up perfectly what she thought of the media she’d long before grown tired of and just wanted out of their lives.

  As her husband requested, though, she stopped the car in her driveway instead of seeking the safety of the garage.

  Wayne stepped from the car with a smile on his face, ready to answer any and all questions.

  It was late morning when he got discharged from Hillsborough Hospital the day before, and early afternoon by the time Julie finished driving around in circles in an effort to lose three news vans which were following them.

  Had they left earlier they’d have made it to Springfield in a single day.

  As it was, though, they had to stop for the night just outside of Indianapolis.

  From his hotel room before they left Indianapolis Wayne watched a White House press conference in which well behaved reporters followed traditional protocol.

  They respectfully took turns, didn’t trample over one another, and didn’t interrupt the White House communications director until he finished answering each of their questions.

  That news conference was still fresh in Wayne’s mind as he stepped out of his car and onto his driveway, and he expected his own impromptu news conference to happen in more or less the same manner.

  Julie tried to tell him it wouldn’t.

  But he wouldn’t have listened to her anyway.

  “Good afternoon,” he said to more than two dozen reporters, each crawling over one another for prime spots.

  Several of them crawled atop the hood and trunk of his car so they could get better angles.

  Several microphones were shoved into his face, one even hitting him in the nose hard enough to hurt.

  “Professor, what do
you have to say about the rumors you were a DHS operative who went rogue and switched sides?”

  “Dr. Hamlin, why did you wait so long to reveal your secrets about Yellowstone?”

  “Dr. Hamlin, who exactly is Becky Tomlinson and is she really the mother of your illegitimate daughter?”

  “Professor, exactly what day do you expect Yellowstone to blow?”

  “Dr. Hamlin, if what you say about the Yellowstone Event is true, why haven’t you and your wife evacuated?”

  “Professor, some are saying you’re perpetuating a cruel hoax on the American people. What is your response to them?”

  Wayne panicked. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.

  He stammered, trying to answer each question one by one. But they were coming faster than he could keep track of them.

  He looked at Julie, who read an unmistakable look on his face.

  It said, “I was wrong. You were right. Get me the heck out of here.”

  Julie forced her way around the car, grabbed Wayne by the arm, and dragged him through the crowd to the front door.

  “He cannot hide,” one reporter yelled at her as she fumbled with the keys.

  “We’ll just stay out here until he comes out and faces us.”

  Her response was a bit harsh, but she gave it without hesitation.

  “All of you just go straight to hell,” she said.

  She slammed the door and wanted to cry.

  But Wayne needed her.

  He had the look of a shell-shocked soldier.

  She held him, comforted him, and soothed his frayed nerves.

  “Sit on the couch,” she told him. “I’ll fix you a martini.”

  “Make it a double. And remind me never to ignore your advice again.”

  Chapter 3

  Hannah paced back and forth across her front porch.

  She wasn’t claustrophobic by nature, but being cooped up in the house was sheer torture.

  She needed some fresh air.