Read Phobos: Mayan Fear for Free Online

me, was I good in bed?”
    “What?”
    “When you masturbated later that night … was I good in bed?”
    “That’s enough!” The president turns to her national security advisor. “Brief her.”
    Donald Engle positions his attaché case on the coffee table next to Lilith’s bare feet and opens it, revealing a holographic projector. “The report you’re about to see has been classified UMBRA, beyond top secret. Reveal its contents and you will be subjected to arrest.”
    “How exciting.”
    Engle activates the device, causing a 360-degree aerial video of Yellowstone National Park to bloom above the sitting area. “While Yellowstone National Park is known for its geysers and hot springs, to scientists it represents a ticking time bomb of Mother Nature, packing the explosive force of ten thousand Mount St. Helenses. Buried five miles beneath the surface, fueling those geysers and hot springs, is a coneless supervolcano, more commonly referred to as a caldera.”
    The image changes, converting to an animated color-coded thermal display revealing a massive subterranean magma pocket. “There are actually three calderas buried beneath Yellowstone. The largest and most lethal of these triplets is 112 miles across and 48 miles wide, encompassing nearly the entire park.
    “Yellowstone has erupted three times in Earth’s history, the first event occurring 2.1 million years ago, the second 1.2 million years ago, the last 630,000 years ago. The eruptions unleashed a combined six thousand cubic miles of debris, the ejection of lava causing the tops of the volcanoes to collapse, forming these three massive depressions.”

    The animated eruptions change to a real-time aerial view of a flooded forest.
    “Our scientists have known for decades that Yellowstone’s calderas are overdue to erupt. What you are looking at is Yellowstone Lake. Situated aboveground along the northern section of the park and directly beneath the pocket of magma is a mammoth, hill-size bulge. The bulge has been rising since the first geological survey of the park was taken in the late 1920s. Scientists became alarmed back in the 1990s when the bulge actually began lifting the northern end of Yellowstone Lake, causing its waters to spill into the forest along its southern shoreline.”
    “A rising bulge, spilling into the forest?” Lilith winks at Engle.
    The national security advisor ignores her. “When the caldera erupts again, the explosion will yield a detonation compatible with an asteroid strike. The pyroclastic blast will instantly kill tens of thousands of people living in the area. The resultant ash cloud that rises into the stratosphere will cover most of the United States, primarily affecting the Great Plains—America’s breadbasket. Harvests will be obliterated overnight. The ash plume will eventually span the entire globe, blanketing the atmosphere and blotting out the sun’s rays, condemning our planet to a hundred-thousand-year ice age.”
    “Brrrr.”
    “I’m so glad you’re amused.”
    “Donald, darling, everyone with a sixth-grade education knows about Yellowstone’s caldera. The Army Corps of Engineers have been focused on the problem for a decade. Your own administration siphoned a billion dollars from the Midwest farm subsidies program to vent the magma pocket.”
    “For some unknown reason, the vents failed. The caldera’s volcanic chambers collapsed four weeks ago, creating one massive magma pocket. Pressure within the pocket continues to rise. Our geologists now predict the caldera will erupt within the next four to six months. Maybe sooner.”
    “Of course, you already knew that,” the president states, staring hard into Lilith’s unnerving turquoise eyes. “We know you’ve had contacts feeding you information directly from the US Geological Survey long before you married your deceased billionaire and long after you began humping John Zwawa in the Oval Office. You must have been one helluva lay; either that, or