Buried Flames by Kennedy Layne Read Free Book Online Page B

He could still feel the weight of her stare, so he finally replied.
    “Just look ahead of us, Brenna.”
    They were currently headed due west on a gravel road on another attempt to duck traffic using blacktop lanes. Once free of the crowds, they’d catch another secondary road headed north. Mason didn’t want to get too close to Wyoming for fear of what would be in their path. The truck’s FM radio had initially been filled with advisories against heading west toward the blast zone. News anchors repeated stories about the state of Wyoming suffering catastrophic losses numbering in excess of a hundred thousand lives.
    Mason considered himself a smart man, but he knew jack shit about volcanoes, let alone a supervolcano. That was Tank’s specialty and he wasn’t here to answer the Mr. Scientist questions—like how fast lava flowed or what were the odds of earthquakes or massive aftershocks after something of this magnitude. What Mason did know was that the vast sky in front of them was no longer blue.
    “What do you see out there?”
    Brenna finally tore her eyes from Mason and glanced out the windshield. The hiss of her quick inhalation said it all. She’d been paying more attention to her phone and trying to reach her friends than she had to her surroundings as they traveled.
    “How soon…”
    “I don’t know.” Mason finally saw the small four-way stop he’d been looking for. “We’re going to head north for a while, so I figure we have maybe another three hours on our side before we start to see any ash falling. It will start as an occasional flake and become thicker from that point on until we are unable to see out the windshield. The ash will scratch the glass if we over use the wipers and they will only last so long. The radiator will clog with deposits and the truck will eventually overheat or the intake manifold will fill with the stuff and the engine will die when the injectors foul the plugs. Either way, we’ll go as far as this truck can take us.”
    Mason continued to drive horizontal to the darkness, where Brenna focused all of her concentration looking west toward the coming front. Another fifteen minutes passed before he saw signs up ahead to indicate that a small Montana town was up ahead. Mason slowed his speed. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but he wasn’t too worried about marauders at this point. His trusty Colt 1911A1 was currently fastened inside his shoulder holster, counterbalanced by two spare clips on his right side. His go-bag on the floor behind his seat had his backup Colt and enough spare magazines to drop an army.
    Across the top of Mason’s bag was his M-4 with an EOTech EXPS Holographic Sight with a flap-up G33 3X Magnifier rig for longer-ranged sights. Brenna’s old Winchester .45-70 would only be good for short distance slow fire, but the benefit of that type of rifle was that it carried a large enough round to drop a man-sized target with a single hit anywhere in the torso. It was currently leaning up against the dash by her door.
    Brenna’s father’s Blackhawk pistol was strapped to her waist in an old style cowboy holster. Mason wondered if she’d be able to fire a second round out of that monster considering the recoil from the first round would make her entire arm numb.
    “We have gasmasks for us to use, but what about the horses?” Brenna’s question caught Mason off guard, especially since he was scanning the area for trouble. “They would have to travel over hundreds of miles in the same ash. Their lungs wouldn’t—”
    “I have it covered,” Mason said distractedly, noting the damaged storefronts and the people who were still hanging around and taking items off the ravaged shelves—water, food, clothes, and anything else that wasn’t bolted to the floors. A few men stood on the corner with various items in their hands, their eyes zeroing in on the truck and the hitched horse trailer. Mason pressed on the gas pedal, already going twice the speed