This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
Noah’s lab was a small, nondescript, one-story building surrounded by big box strip clubs. Upon entering, he flicked on the lights and revealed a space the size of a basketball court. Its sides were lined with wide, shallow drawers built into a continuous wall unit. The counters on top of the drawers housed a suite of decade-old computer monitors, vertical bandsaws, printers, drill presses, centrifuges, and other assorted bulky equipment only Noah could identify.
“This is where the magic happens,” said Noah with a flourish. “Welcome! So, what exactly are you guys looking for?”
“This is your wheelhouse, Dr. Science Genius,” said Monica to Carlos. She crossed her arms and leaned against the countertop.
“You’re damn right. Let’s get nerdy,” he replied with a grin. Turning to Noah, he added, “I originally posited the Bulge might’ve been formed by a localized hot spot.”
“Good hypothesis,” responded Noah. “If that were the case, you’d expect to see some telltale chemical markers.”
“Exactly! So, we collected samples from the Bulge.”
“During the battle?” asked Noah in surprise.
“Just before,” said Carlos with a wave of his hand. “But they all came back negative. So, we’ve hit a wall and now I’d like to check some core samples taken from around the area to see if I missed something or if we come across any new clues that’ll lead us in another direction.”
Noah walked to the computer bank and fired up the monitor.
“Alright, buddy, I’m in!” he said. “Let’s see if he can crack this case. What depth do you want to start with?”
“Well, to be perfectly honest, I’m not all that familiar with Florida’s underground geography, so I was hoping you could give me a quick primer.”
“Sure thing,” replied Noah. He input his password and turned to face Carlos. “Florida’s built on a limestone base.”
“The Swiss cheese of bedrock.”
“Exactly, but what most people don’t know is just how big the holes in that cheese can get. There’s an enormous labyrinth of flooded underground passages and caverns that span the entire state of Florida. Some are the width of a penny, others the size of multiple football fields. We have no idea how many or where they are because we haven’t mapped even a fraction of the system. Whenever you hear of a sinkhole appearing in the news, it’s simply the roof of one of those caves collapsing. We get so much rain that all that water simply can’t all flow on the surface, so it trickles into the limestone and matches the aboveground flow through those passages. In South Florida, that means it travels south and toward the coasts.”
“Very cool stuff.”
Monica and Cynthia gave each other sideways glances indicating they had very different ideas about what constituted cool stuff.
“What depth do you want to take a look at first?” asked Noah.
“First, let’s find the nearest core sample to the Bulge.”
“Give me a sec.”
Noah typed on a keyboard and rapidly opened and closed several windows on his monitor.
“Here we go,” he said.
He walked to a set of cabinets in the far-right corner of the room trailed by Carlos.
“These samples were collected just a half mile north of the Bulge. They should give us a pretty good idea of what’s directly underneath it.”
“Let’s start at 200 feet,” said Carlos.
No problem.
Noah opened a middle drawer, which contained rows of grayish-brown cylindrical rock samples about three feet long and the width of a fist.
“What do you see,” asked Carlos.
“Pretty standard stuff,” replied Noah. “This is all limestone at the depth of the Surficial Aquifer System. It’s where South Florida gets most of its groundwater from. It basically confirms the findings of your air and soil samples. I don’t see any evidence of a hot spot or any other volcanic activity.”
“OK,” said Carlos. “Why don’t we take a look at something closer to the surface?”
“You got it.”
Noah opened the topmost drawer.
“Alright,” he said. “Now this is much more interesting. You’ve got the uppermost layer of topsoil.”
He pointed at a 10-inch section of dark, loamy earth.
“Then, right underneath it you have limestone bedrock down to eight feet. Nothing new there. Then right underneath that… wow, OK. Didn’t expect to see that.”
“What?”
“You see this layer right here?”
Noah pointed to a reddish band that extended across several core samples.
“That’s clay. It’s completely impermeable, so liquid can’t penetrate it. And right underneath that, we have another layer of limestone. Check out all these fissures.”
He gestured at a series of light lines across the cores.
“That means we definitely hit a cavern. A really big one by the looks of it. For sure.”
“What’s underneath the cavern?”
“Let’s find out.”
Noah walked back to the terminal and spent a few seconds pulling up spreadsheets.
“Huh…” he said.
“What?” asked Carlos.
“The limestone cavern I mentioned extends to a hundred feet deep and is bordered underneath by another thick layer of clay. In other words, the liquid in it wouldn’t be able to filter up or down. It’s trapped.”
Pieces started to click together in Carlos’ mind.
“OK, OK,” he exclaimed excitedly. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Sherman mentioned before the ceremony that there was a sinkhole just south of the meadow, which would place the core sample between it and the Bulge. In other words, that sinkhole is the entrance to this impermeable cavern that probably runs right under the Bulge.”
“Oh shit,” said Noah, raising his eyebrows in surprise. “You’re probably right.”
“Do you have any data on the chemical composition of the liquid in the cavern?”
“Definitely. Let me look it up.”
A flurry of typing suddenly stopped as a horrified look crossed Noah’s face.
“Oh my God,” he muttered. “The rumors were true…”
“What rumors?” asked Monica. She and Cynthia approached the terminal and looked over Noah’s shoulder at the indecipherable spreadsheet.
Noah, deeply perturbed, turned from his monitor.
“I’d heard stories about companies, the airport, waste management, just about everyone in South Florida dumping their waste into that sinkhole for decades, going back to the 50s. We’re talking thousands and thousands of tons. Supposedly, even the Seaquarium tossed a killer whale in there back in the day.”
“I… totally believe that,” said Cynthia, recalling the previous night’s whale song.
“It was so convenient,” continued Noah. “That the state looked the other way and the federal government refused to designate it a Superfund site or investigate the perpetrators because they were doing it too. As far as I know, people were still dumping there last week.”
“And the reason why the waste never filled the sinkhole was that it flowed south into the cavern beneath the Bulge,” said Carlos. “What chemical markers did you find in the core?”
“The absolute worst,” replied Noah. “Mercury, lead, fecal matter, sulfuric acid, asbestos, arsenic, chlorine, cyanide, and a statistically significant amount of human DNA.”
“Like human bodies?” asked Cynthia in horror.
“Not necessarily. Could be bodies or tissue, blood, or hair, or even semen. Maybe a hospital was dumping cadavers. We’ll never know for sure,” replied Noah.
“What about radioactive material? Are there any traces of that in your core samples?”
Noah checked the spreadsheet.
“Nope.”
“Well, I’ll be damned…” muttered Cynthia to herself. “For once, it wasn’t the nuclear power plant. If you had all this data in your system, how come your lab didn’t put the pieces together on the Bulge?”
“We have terabytes of data on tens of thousands of feet of core samples from hundreds of drill sites across the state,” explained Noah. “True, it was all sitting in our hard drives, but it’d take several lifetimes to analyze it all unless someone like you guys came in here and told us exactly where to look and what we were looking for.”
“OK, OK,” said Carlos. He paced the floor, growing increasingly animated as he talked. “We have this insane, gargantuan cocktail of chemical and biological waste accumulating under the Bulge with no means of dissipating, but how does that lead to the actual Bulging?”
He stopped in mid stride and turned to Monica.
“When did Rosa say Seabreeze Ridge experienced its little earthquake?”
“A week before the night of the Bulging,” she answered.
“And when did the first signs of the Bulging begin to manifest?” he asked Cynthia. “The strained powerlines, cracks in the street, stuff like that.”
“One week before the night of the Bulging,” she said.
“Holy shit.”
Carlos grabbed his head with both hands.
“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”
“What?” demanded Monica and Cynthia in unison.
“I think I know what happened.”
A half-crazed look settled on Carlos’ face as he stared into the middle distance.
“I was close, but I was so wrong,” he said. “I was so wrong! It wasn’t the thermodynamic power of a liquid magma hotspot that created the Bulge. It was gas!”
He turned to Noah, Cynthia, and Monica, a feverish look in his eye.
“It was gas! One week before the Bulging, what Seabreeze Ridge experienced as a small earthquake was actually an underground passage collapsing somewhere between the sinkhole and the cavern under Seabreeze Ridge. This sealed the toxic soup between two layers of impermeable clay. With nowhere for the gasses to vent, they mixed, accumulated under the neighborhood, became more and more volatile, and formed the Bulge. I got it!”
He jumped up and down excitedly.
“I got it! It was the gas!”
Cynthia smirked at his enthusiasm. Carlos was at his dorkiest and sexiest when he was being smart.
Monica whipped out her phone.
“That’s perfectly plausible, if unprecedented, as far as I know,” said Noah.
“Hey guys, I have a question,” said Monica while scrolling through her phone. “What would happen if you suddenly pierced the top layer of the Bulge with a giant metal stake?”
“That would be insane,” replied Noah. “Who knows what could happen? The entire Bulge could explode if it has the right chemical mixture. It might burst, catch fire, or slowly sink into the ground. There’s no way to know.”
“OK,” continued Monica. “But, whatever happens, it wouldn’t be good, right?”
“Absolutely not,” said Noah. “Why?”
“Because Santos is about to pop this mile-wide balloon in front of all her billionaire friends.”
Monica turned her phone to show them Santos’ press release, replete with a picture of the giant medal spike she planned to drive into the Bulge.
“The thing looks exactly like a dick,” she proffered.
“Not everything’s a dick, Monica” retorted Carlos.
“Most things designed by men are,” she replied.
“Hey! Can we focus here!” cried Cynthia. “The Bulge might detonate, or implode, or God knows what! We have to try and stop it!”
“Oh, I definitely want to be there when it goes off,” said Monica.
“When does the event start?” asked Cynthia
“10 minutes,” replied Monica.
“And how far is it?”
Monica checked her phone.
“20 minutes. 15 with how I drive. Let’s go.”
She turned to leave with Carlos in tow.
“Do you want to come?” Cynthia asked Noah.
“Are you kidding me?” he responded. “This might be a globally unique geological phenomenon! I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
He turned off the lights and they ran out the door.
