"All over the Earth... Higher pressures. Up until a few days ago the brainiacs were still arguing over whether this could even happen." He laughed. "It is happening and they are arguing over whether it can happen. Well, we had our little debates and then we realized that history shows clearly that this has happened before. Several times. Call it the Earth's way of cleansing itself."
"But it's not an absolute, right?"Sammy asked.
"Don't start sounding like the scientists." He reached below his desk and came up with six small silver canisters. Each had a small red button mounted on the top with a protective cap over the button itself. He clicked a button on his desk, and a picture of destruction appeared on the screens. It was obviously an aerial shot, looking down at a chain of islands. Smoke hung over the chain, reaching as high as the plane itself. As the plane dropped lower, rivers of red appeared. "That picture is an hour old. That is...
Was,
the Hawaiian chain."
Sammy twisted further to the side, staring at the monitor. "How can that be... I mean everyone would know about it." He turned back to Weston.
Weston nodded. "And that would be true except the satellites are out because of the asteroid. Shut down to avoid damage. That is the official word." He clicked the button on his desk and the monitor went dead once more. "I started this out saying that none of it matters and that is true. The Yellowstone caldera is going to erupt sometime in the next few days. Not a maybe, not an educated guess: If the satellites were up you would know that the park is closed. It has already started. We have had a few quakes, but the big stuff is on the way. He rolled the canisters across the desktop; Sammy and John caught them.
"Super volcanoes... Earthquakes that modern civilization has never seen... The last super eruption was responsible for killing off the human population some seventy-four thousand years ago. Reduced it to a few thousand. And that is not the biggest one we have evidence of." He lifted his palms and spread them open, sighing as he did. "So it is a double whammy. If we survive the asteroid the volcanoes get us, or the earthquakes because of them, or we'll die from injuries. And I think those of us who die outright will be lucky. The rest of us will have a hard time of it... Staying alive with nothing... We will probably all starve to death."