10 Minutes of Danger by Jack Heath

Author:Jack Heath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Minutes of Danger
Publisher: Scholastic Australia
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

VDLCAND

10:00

Boom.

Tatum removed one of his earplugs, wondering if he’d imagined the sound. He adjusted his grip on the rock face and looked down.

The crater was huge—a bowl half a kilometre wide and a hundred metres deep. Tatum thought it had probably been caused by an asteroid impact a million years ago. The kind of impact that caused earthquakes, thousand-year winters, and mass extinctions. He couldn’t be sure from up here, but it looked like the floor of the crater was smoking. And there was a nasty smell, too, like burning matchsticks.

Tatum had a breathing mask and an air tank with him, but he wanted to save the air for the higher altitudes. He would just have to live with the smell. He kept climbing.

When he was seven, Tatum had been invited to a friend’s birthday party at the rock climbing gym. Halfway up the first wall, he had already fallen in love with the sport. The roughness of the handholds under his fingers, the courage it took to leap to the next one, the sense of accomplishment— and a little fear—whenever he looked down. Since then, he couldn’t look at a wall without wondering how he would scale it. He was always searching for bigger, more difficult cliffs. Often he climbed carrying weights. Sometimes he climbed without rope. His friends thought he was crazy. They preferred cricket, a sport in which nothing happened for hours—sometimes days.

Now Tatum was about sixty metres from the top of this crater, and the higher he got, the steeper the rock face became. But his gloves and shoes had hard, rubber tips, with a sandpapery texture for extra grip. He wasn’t struggling yet.

The smell got worse. Why would there be smoke? It had been a hot day, but the sun was low enough now that the floor of the crater was in shadow. It should be cooling down, not heating up.

Hanging from a protrusion about fifty metres from the top, Tatum looked down again. This time the smoke stung his eyes. He blinked it away and squinted at the bottom of the crater.

09:10

He still couldn’t see anything—but now there was a rumbling sound. The wall started to vibrate, then shake.

Earthquake.

Panicked, Tatum grabbed one of the spring-loaded cams on his belt and wedged it into a crack in the rock face. When he released the trigger, the two blades sprang apart, lodging the cam in place.

Just in time. The wall shuddered, then bucked like a horse. Tatum lost his handhold and his footing, but the cam held fast. Instead of falling to his death, Tatum was slammed against the cliff. His helmet fractured.

Something crackled behind him. Tatum twisted in place and saw a geyser of flame burst from the centre of the crater, shooting towards the sky.

As the globs of orange rained back down, Tatum realised what he was looking at. He hadn’t been climbing a crater. He’d been climbing a caldera—the hollow bowl at the centre of a volcano!

08:43

Fear clawed at his heart as more smoke filled the caldera.

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