18 HERE’S AN INTERESTING QUESTION CAN YOU OUTRUN AN EXPLODING VOLCANO

18. HERE'S AN INTERESTING QUESTION. CAN YOU OUTRUN AN EXPLODING VOLCANO? Here's an interesting question. Can you outrun an exploding Volcano? The answer is, if you survive the initial explosion, you can, depending on the type of lava. Some lava runs extremely slowly. Some lava runs horribly quickly. It depends, in short, on the Volcano in question. And you can't really tell what kind of Volcano it is until the Volcano actually explodes. When this particular Volcano exploded, the whole of the top half of the mountain blew right off. A great mushroom of cloud ballooned up into the air and rolled out across the clear blue sky. The entire

island vibrated, churning up the seas roundabout and sending The Peregrine Falcon, The Blue Whale, and The Mighty Momma rocketing up and down the gigantic waves, and sending the hearts of the two parents aboard those ships plunging up and down with it. Great chunks of burning mountain were blasted up into the air and rained down to the ground and into the sea. The Windwalker screeched to a halt as a truly gigantic flaming boulder that could have squashed them flatter than two pieces of paper crashed to earth right in front of them, close enough to graze the Windwalker's quivering nostrils. The Windwalker leaped on, dodging the flaming rocks falling out of the sky, and now running over the Exterminator Eggs that stretched before him in a great carpet all the way down to the sea. Hiccup looked over his shoulder. Burning rivers of hot molten lava were shooting out of the top of the crater and racing down the sides of the mountain. It really wasn't Hiccup's lucky day. Depending, of course, on the way you look at these things, whether you are a "glass half full, or glass half empty" kind of person. You COULD, for instance, say that Hiccup had been really rather lucky to survive the day so far.

It turned out, as bad luck would have it, that the lava on Lava-Lout Island was the extremely fast- running kind that races in a red-hot river of death at speeds of over seventy miles per hour, much, much faster than a man can run—but was it faster than a Windwalker? It already seemed to be catching up with them. "R-R-R-R-R-R-RUNNNNNNN!!!!!!!" screeched Hiccup again, as if the poor Windwalker needed telling, already running as fast as he possibly could, ears back, smoke steaming from his nostrils, taking great gasping breaths as he rocked forward in his extraordinary, limping run. The lava streams shot down the mountain, horrible, steaming bright-red rivers. And it wasn't just the lava that was chasing them. You'd have thought that things couldn't get any worse—but things can always always get worse. The Exterminator Eggs were HATCHING the instant the lava touched them. So that out of the red-hot streams came bursting thousands and thousands and thousands of Exterminator fledglings. You might have thought that these newborn creatures would be still sleepy, still shaky, after lying curled up in those Eggs for nearly two hundred years,

but no, it was as if their long gestation had been driving them MAD, so eager were these animals to be off and killing, even in their first few seconds of life. They burst out of the lava streams still curled up like fiery Catherine wheels, and unfurled themselves midair in a shower of sparks, shaking the lava from their unfolding wings. And the first thing they saw as their carnivore eyelids snapped open was ALVIN, hovering at the top of the exploding Volcano, holding the terrifying flame-gold Fire-Stone in his hand. For the previous three months, they had been trapped in their Eggs, looking up at the great statues of Alvin scattered all over the island. Now here was this familiar face in the flesh, aboard one of their own, screaming at the top of his voice "AFTER THEM!!!!!" and pointing with his terrible copper-red sword at the shaking, terrified little figures of Hiccup and the Windwalker, fleeing from the lava streams like a fox from the Hunt. The Exterminators didn't need much encouragement to obey. An ancient memory stirred in their tiny brains. They knew what THIS was. This was PREY. Ten sword-claws leaped from the ends of their fingers like switchblades, and the Exterminator

fledglings took off in hot pursuit of the fleeing Viking and his dragon, shrieking as loudly as the Furies having their hair pulled. Down shot the lava streams, rushing closer and closer, nearer and nearer, catching up with Hiccup. Down, too, flew Alvin and the Exterminators, in their hundreds of thousands, like a gigantic cloud of homicidal bats. Hiccup remembered what Humungous had said about Exterminators. They would attack everything, anything that moved, set fire to every blade of grass, every bush, every tree. There wouldn't be a single living thing for hundreds of miles in every direction. Even if they survived (and at this particular moment, this seemed unlikely), the Quest itself had failed. And they hadn't even saved the Archipelago after all. The Volcano had erupted, and nothing could now put the Exterminators back into their Eggs. The genie was out of the bottle, the plague was unleashed, and the Archipelago would be turned to sooty ruin in a matter of weeks. Great clouds of steam rose hissing up into the air as the pouring rain met the searing heat of the running lava. "Don't fall over... don't fall over," prayed a

soaking wet Hiccup, racing down the mountain on the back of the Windwalker. "D-d-don't panic! D-d-don't panic!" muttered Toothless, panicking like crazy, as he approached Alvin on the Exterminator from above. Alvin was helpfully holding the Fire-Stone high above his head, so that the fledgling Exterminators would have a good view of it. "H-H-Hiccup gave Toothless this j-j-job 'cos he t- t-trusts Toothless... Toothless NOT make mistake again," said Toothless encouragingly to himself, praying that the Exterminator would not smell him through all this rain. "Toothless gotta G-G-GRIP this time... GRIP..." and he practiced gripping with his little talons, as he edged ever downward toward that tempting yellow Ball. Toothless pounced just exactly as if he were catching a nice fat rabbit. His claws closed around the Stone. They gripped... and held. Alvin gave a shriek of horror as his hand closed on nothing. He whirled around, but in the smoke, and rain, and thunder-and-lightning, he could not see what had attacked him. His Treasure was gone. Held firm, if Alvin could but have known it, in