Since I can't leave a teaser on my new super secret project, and any teaser I leave for the book I'm rewriting would have spoilers, I thought I'd step into the wayback machine and drop a bit from my second book - the 2006 'Final' draft (which ended up being not so final). This Prologue is one I really liked, but also one that I decided to snip away. (Although, I
did have an agent read this and ask me if I ever considered writing non-fiction - which was the nicest thing he had to say since the rest of his rejection letter called my book 'improbible'*.)
Anyway, here's the beginning of
Nature of Destruction...
It has happened
before.
Six hundred thousand years
ago, death and destruction rained from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi
River, from the plains of Saskatchewan to the Gulf of Mexico. Seventy-five thousand years ago the sun
disappeared beneath a haze of ash, killing the majority of the human race in
the ensuing global winter. Fifteen
hundred years ago, the most notorious of human eras—The Dark Ages—began in a
shroud of gray volcanic dust.
Early
in the 19th century, the center of a tiny island in the Dutch West
Indies swelled and trembled and burst.
Fiery boulders fell from the sky; ash blanketed both land and ocean for
hundreds of miles as it spewed into the atmosphere. More than ninety thousand people died as the
sky became clogged with soot—soot so thick that the year of 1816 was to become
known as ‘The Year Without a Summer’.
Later in that same
century, a mountain rising from the depths of the East Indies exploded and then
collapsed. The sea rose twelve feet that day, pushed up suddenly as tons of
rock dropped into its murky depths.
Thundering walls of water swept toward Java, Sumatra, Bali; tens of
thousands drown as the ocean broke over their homes and villages.
In each instance a
caldera has erupted, and in each instance the world has born the brunt of its
destruction.
So far, many of
these types of events occurred before the ascension of man; so far, they have
all occurred in sparsely populated areas.
In the scheme of human disaster, these events remain insignificant. In perspective, the death toll has been
minimal. But still, the tiny native
children who shivered in fear as Tambora thundered down upon them thought it
more than minimal. The tribal women who
screamed their last breaths as Krakatau choked the sound away considered it
from a different perspective. The
peasants who endured The Dark Age’s endless years of starvation and suffering
certainly thought it significant.
They all must have
prayed for whatever god they knew to make it stop. They must have offered sacrifices and
tributes to appease the wrath that cascaded upon them. But even amidst their fruitless prayers and
hopeless offerings, they must have believed in their hearts that nothing could
stop nature.
In the mountains
of western Wyoming, a caldera lays in a fitful sleep—churning and gurgling and
smoking like some great evil dragon—and mankind dances around it as if it has
been caged for their amusement. The
sparkling geysers and the boiling mud are merely an interesting diversion right
now, but the dragon is bound by no man’s chains and it has overslept by twenty
thousand years. When it awakens, no man
will think it amusing, and no man with think of it as a mere diversion.
Pompeii was a
firecracker. Mount Saint Helens, a
birthday candle. When Yellowstone makes
up its mind to blow, the people in its path will wish they’d been at Hiroshima
instead.
Will they be
praying on some sprawling ranch in Montana?
Will they be screaming in some sparkling penthouse in Denver? Will they be choking under a layer of ash on
the bustling streets of Houston?
Perhaps nothing
can be done to stop nature. Or perhaps,
just maybe, something can.
It has happened
before. Perhaps it doesn’t have to
happen again.
Okay, so not necessarily my best work, but remember, this is from 8 years ago. I've learned a lot since then. ;o)
* the spelling error was his but it still amuses me after 8 years.
