The Yellowstone Event (Book 5): The Eruption by Maloney Darrell

Author:Maloney, Darrell [Maloney, Darrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic
Published: 2018-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

The media, like the rest of the world, was now calling the pending eruption “the Yellowstone Event.”

They were calling Professor Wayne Hamlin’s gloom-and-doom prediction “the press conference heard around the world.”

They were all clamoring to get him face to face on their news shows. Any shows. He could have picked and chosen his favorites.

They went so far as to do something they always say only tabloid television does… they were willing to pay him, and pay him very well, for a thirty minute segment.

Some of them, quite honestly, wanted to embarrass him. They’d found experts who rebutted Hamlin’s claims and wanted their program to turn into a shouting match.

Drama helped ratings, and even when the earth was on the cusp of its biggest disaster in recorded history, ratings ruled everything.

The problem was, Wayne Hamlin wasn’t biting.

One media scheduler stood on his front porch and shouted, to whoever was inside, “Dr. Hamlin, we’re prepared to pay you a hundred thousand dollars plus travel expenses for a half hour spot.”

Like a grouchy old man yelling at neighborhood kids to get off his lawn he yelled back through the wall, “Get off my property.”

“I’m authorized to go as high as one twenty, but you’ve got to sign the contract today.”

Wayne ignored him.

They came all day, every day, one or two at a time.

Ignoring them was all he could do.

They all knew he couldn’t call the police.

All the police would do was escort them off the property and issue them a No-Trespass Order. It was a form listing the person by name, telling him if he stepped on the property again he’d be arrested for trespassing.

And it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, because he’d merely pass the baton to a colleague who hadn’t been served such an order.

Wayne’s mailbox was full of written offers from as far away as Tokyo, Sydney and Riyadh.

“Oh, great,” he deadpanned to Julie.

“We finally get a chance to travel the world on somebody else’s dime, just before the world blows up.”

They hadn’t left the house in days.

News vans parked in the street at the end of their driveway blocked them in, making it impossible to get their cars out.

They called the cops to complain once and the cops told the stations to move their vans or they would be towed.

They complied, and as soon as the cops left a competing network parked their own van in the newly empty space.

The news media, once respected and respectful, were these days little more than rabid animals.

When Wayne gave his news conference he tried to explain the pending eruption in terms everyone could understand.

Newsmen, being newsmen, seemed to have difficulty understanding and kept asking the same tired questions time and time again.

One of them was “How come some volcanos blow up, like Mount St. Helens, and some just ooze lava like Mount Kilauea?”

He looked for a simple way to explain it to them.

“It’s like a teenage boy in the midst of puberty who’s suffering from acne.

“He has pimples

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.