Todd walked up to Nick, leaned over, and looked at the revealed opening.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You can make it up to me tonight,” Nick said and grinned. “In the first months after the eruption, survivors moved south, away from the blast zone and to the more temperate climate here. I’m not sure why, but there was a general breakdown in communications and things like medical services. Supposedly, it wasn’t just this part of the world affected, but the entire social infrastructure globally shut down. It was far more of an aftereffect, even for a natural disaster of that magnitude, than it should have been. Anyway, the people who were here and those that came to this area dug out underground rooms. They stored what they had left down there and lived down there at first, too. It was all ve
