The Ultimate Remedy

It was supposed to be a break from the hustle and bustle of the city. My buddy John had been talking up this pig hunting trip in Amarillo for months. It was a normal afternoon—the kind of quiet, dusty day where the only thing on the agenda was prepping gear and waiting for the sun to go down. We were just sitting on his porch, cleaning rifles and checking the weather for the morning, when the world changed.

“BEEEP—BEEEP—BEEEP.”

The sound didn’t come from the radio or the TV. It came from our pockets. Both our phones screamed in a perfect, terrifying sync. At the same moment, the porch beneath my boots started to sway. It wasn’t a sharp jolt like the earthquakes I’d felt back in California; it was a slow, sickening roll, like being on the deck of a boat in high seas.

“What the hell is that?” I gripped the railing.

John didn’t answer. He was staring at his screen. I pulled mine out. The white text was blinding against the red background: EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! FIND SHELTER IMMEDIATELY!

“Is this a test?” John’s voice was thin.

“No,” I rasped, looking toward the horizon. “Look.”

The Amarillo sky was being swallowed. A wall of absolute, ink-black darkness was rising from the west, wiping out the sun and the clouds like a curtain being pulled across the world. It wasn’t a storm. It was a solid, towering mass of shadow.

“Hurry! The shelter!” John shouted.

We ran for the steel hatch in his backyard. We weren’t sure exactly what was going on.

The room was relatively small, maybe the size of a small bedroom, not too bad. I think it was meant for a family and there were only two of us, so it was more space than it could have been. There was a flickering light over our heads that flipped on when we entered. The shelter still felt like it was dark and damp. It had a musty smell to it, probably because it wasn’t used very often. Even though it wasn’t used often John had made sure there was enough food for a couple of days and a case of water inside. We kept hearing some sirens for a few hours and then it stopped. About 8 hours had passed since we entered the shelter. We were hoping for an all clear or something like that,over our phones like the warnings had come out, but we hadn’t heard anything.

Another few hours went by and we were both extremely tired but couldn’t sleep. Unsure of what exactly was going on made it hard, too. It was eerily quiet for what we expected to be going on outside. All the noise from above had vanished hours ago. You didn’t hear much, just the hum of the ventilation system working. We didn’t talk too much; we were both scared and didn’t know what to say even if we were speaking. Our phones still had some battery left, but there was no service.

At about 3 AM John suggested we sleep in shifts, 3 hours each, to make sure if something happened someone was always awake for it. I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to, so I took the first ‘watch’ although there wasn’t much to even watch. I just sat and listened, hoping to hear anything really.

I woke John up three hours later, giving him a small nudge. He jolted awake, rubbed his eyes, and said jokingly, “My time is up already?”

“Yep, it’s been three hours,” I replied.

John’s humor faded as he looked around the cramped, dim space. “So, what do you think is happening?”

I hesitated. I had been thinking about a super-volcano I learned about in school as a kid—Yellowstone. I remembered reading for an exam about how an eruption would spread ash across the entire United States, Canada, and even down into Mexico. It was supposed to be a worst-case scenario.

“Well, that large wall of black... if I had to assume, I think it was ash,” I said, looking at him. “And it was coming from the north or northwest. I think Yellowstone erupted.”

“Like the national park?” John asked, his eyes wide.

“Yep. But we shouldn’t have been able to feel it shake from all the way over here in Texas. Earthquakes aren’t exactly common here, so that part still doesn’t make complete sense.”

“Yeah, they are definitely not,” John said, staring blankly at the wall.

Either way, we weren’t going anywhere for a while. If it was Yellowstone, we needed to wait for the ash to settle as much as possible before venturing out.

We had enough food and water for six or seven days, so that was the plan — sit tight, wait it out, and hope someone told us something useful before we had to make any decisions ourselves.

The first full day, we actually talked a bit, trying to rationalize the situation. But by day three, the reality of the bunker truly started to set in. Three days of no showering and using a bucket in the far corner really gets to a man; the damp air grew thick and sour. We found an old, faded deck of cards on a shelf, but after a few quiet rounds of poker by the light of our phone screens, the silence swallowed us completely. There was nothing left to say. We just sat in the dark, watching our battery percentages tick down, waiting.

On the fifth day, a faint tapping broke the silence, coming from the air filtration system. I walked over and put my ear to the metal.

“It sounds like some rain,” I whispered to John. “That would be nice. Maybe it’ll clear the larger particles out of the air.”

By day seven, the water was gone. We couldn’t sit in the dark anymore; we had to surface and get our bearings of what exactly was going on around us.

I gripped the handle of the steel hatch and braced myself on the steps. The door was probably a solid three hundred pounds normally, but I figured if I put my back into it, I could crack it open. I placed my back flat against the steel, planted my feet firmly on the stairs, and gave it one big shove upward.

Nothing. The door didn’t even rattle.

I dropped my weight back down onto the steps, panting a bit.

“It’s not budging,” I said, staring up at the handle. “Dang... this thing is really heavy. I guess it’s all the ash.”

I wiped my forehead, trying to figure it out. I’m definitely not the strongest person in the world, but I can probably deadlift close to five hundred pounds and squat close to four hundred. If I couldn’t even get this thing to rattle, the weight on top had to be insane.

Then I remembered that loud bang we’d heard a few days prior. At the time we weren’t sure what it was, but now it clicked—it had to be the roof of the house caving in from the weight. If a six-inch layer of ash was sitting directly on our hatch, that three-hundred-pound door was easily pushing eight hundred pounds now. Ash doesn’t melt like snow; it just accumulates and packs down dense. And the rain added to this weight making the ash harder.

“We are going to have to both push at the same time,” I told John.

We squeezed onto the narrow steps side by side. I wedged my back against the door again and he shoved his shoulder up against it.

“Alright,” I muttered. “One, two, three, push.”

With that first push we were able to get the door open about 3 or 4 inches, but the best part was we moved some of the ash off of the door. The top layers of the ash were still slightly loose, which allowed us to move some of it off when we moved the door. We gave it another go and with a creek it opened 6 inches, then 9 inches, and then finally with one big last push, we shoved the door open and were able to escape the bunker.

“So, what do we do now?” I asked John.

“We need some masks. I may have some in what is left of my garage, let’s have a look real quick.” John’s garage was detached from his house slightly so it didn’t cave in like the house did.