Authors: Harry Turtledove

Supervolcano: Eruption (30 page)

BOOK: Supervolcano: Eruption

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“You totally did, man,” Justin agreed. Even Biff nodded. That wasn’t quite how Rob had thought of it, but wasn’t so far removed, either. Out of the blue—the pale blue, the almost icy blue—Justin asked, “You ever hear anything from your sister, the one who moved to Denver?”

“No,” Rob said tightly. “Cell phones are down for God knows how far. I’ve been hoping she could get to a landline or send me an e-mail or . . . something. But no.”

Justin set a hand on his shoulder for a second. “That’s hard, man.”

“Nothing I can do about it. I keep telling myself there’s more to Vanessa than you’d think. She can get out of there if anybody can.”

Rob wished he hadn’t added the last three words. They helped remind him how enormous the catastrophe was. Denver was hundreds of miles from Yellowstone. But Denver was also not far from the middle of the area the eruption had screwed, blued, and tattooed. The TV said volcanic ash was coming down in Alberta, in Texas, in Iowa, even in California.

He didn’t want to think about that, so he turned to Biff and Charlie and asked, “Are we ready to rock?” He knew he and Justin were; they’d cleaned out their room down to the last dirty sock.

Charlie nodded. “Didn’t leave the drums behind, honest.” That made Biff snort. It would be easier to forget an elephant than Charlie’s kit, even if the elephant would be harder to disassemble.

“Let’s go, then,” Justin said. They piled into the SUVs. Under that pale, unnatural sunlight, they started up the road toward Bangor. Pretty soon, all the sunshine disappeared. Rob turned on his headlights. It started to rain. By the time they got where they were going, the rain had turned to snow. Maine weather or volcano weather? What difference did that make? It was here, and they were stuck in it.

The first thing Colin Ferguson did after sitting up in bed was check his cell for voice mail and texts from Kelly or Vanessa. Nothing this morning from either one of them—nothing at all from Vanessa since the eruption. Had anything in his own bailiwick gone wrong, the folks at the cop shop would have called on the landline and woken him up.

After he took a leak, he went downstairs to fix coffee. He didn’t have to go in today unless something hit the fan. If Kelly weren’t stuck in Missoula . . . But she was, dammit. So instead of enjoying himself with good company, he’d try to catch up on some around-the-house stuff. His Navy-trained soul was dismayed by how much he just let slide.

It’s not like I don’t work
, he thought defensively, but his internalized CPO knew bullshit every time.

He always looked out the window while he waited for his water to boil. This morning, he looked and then he
looked
: a double take Harpo Marx would have been proud of. Even with on-and-off water rationing, he kept his lawn green. He was proud of it, the same way he was proud of his well-organized filing system.

Only the lawn and the flowers weren’t green any more. They were about the color of cement dust. So were the leaves on the orange tree and the lemon ts prouand the magnolia. So was the cinder-block wall, which had been pink. So was just about everything in the backyard. The supervolcano had come to L.A.

The microwave chimed. He absently took out the water and poured it into the brown plastic cone that held the Melitta filter—the coffeenose, the kids had called it when they were little. A cat (also grayer than it should have been; he recognized the critter, which lived down the block) left almost-green footprints on the grass. It didn’t like what was going on. It would take a few steps, stop and wash, walk on a few more steps, then wash some more. How much grit was it swallowing? What would that do to its insides? Nothing good, Colin was sure.

Rationing rules said he wasn’t supposed to water the lawn on Saturday. He’d spent most of his life enforcing rules. Now he broke one. He ducked under the sink to fiddle with the sprinkler controls. Nozzles popped up and started spraying. The cat levitated, then teleported. The lawn turned green again—except for patches still streaked with ugly brown sludge.

Thoughtfully, Colin put on slippers before he went out to get the
Times
and the
Breeze
. He didn’t want to walk barefoot through that crud, not even slightly he didn’t. It scrunched under his crepe soles and came up in little puffs. The front lawn was gray: almost the same color as the sidewalk. The street, which should have been asphalt-dark, was doing a sidewalk impression, too, one slightly spoiled by a few tire tracks.

His car was gray. All the cars he could see were gray—windows, mirrors, the whole deal. All but one: right across the street, Wes Jones was breaking some more rules by hosing his Nissan back to its original blue. Wes was a retired aerospace engineer who spent most of his time gardening. Like everybody else, he’d be playing catch-up for a while.

Colin waved to him. “Some fun, isn’t it?” he called, and grabbed the papers. They were both wrapped in poly bags, as if against rain. Volcanic ash slid off the plastic.

“Fun? Oh, you bet.” Wes pointed east. “Even the sun’s gone nutso.” Anything he disapproved of was nutso. But Wes didn’t disapprove of much; he was an easygoing guy.

“Huh?” Colin hadn’t paid any attention to the sun, past noticing that the daylight looked wan and washed out. Now he did. It sat low in the sky, still red as if closer to its rising than it really was. A hellacious halo surrounded it, with a pair of sundogs—false images of the sun—on the halo. He’d seen a sundog once, while in a destroyer off the coast of Greenland, with a sky full of ice crystals. The sky above San Atanasio had a different kind of junk in it. He delivered his verdict: “Holy crap!”

“Yeah, that’s about what I was thinking,” Wes replied. “Anything from Vanessa?” He’d watched her grow up; he’d been an honorary uncle.

“Nope.” Colin left it right there.

Wes grunted. “Well, I’ll tell Ida she needs to pray harder.” He was at least as skeptical as Colin, but his wife went to a Methodist church every Sunday and did good works during the week. She didn’t try to ram it down anybody’s throat, even her husband’s; she just did what she did. They’d had their fortieth anniversary the year before. Colin remembered no more than a handful of cross words between them.

Now he said, “It can’t hurt.”

“I expect you’re right. And I expect I’m going back in the house.” Wes scuffed at the ash on his driveway. Some of it was wet, but some came up the way it had underolin’s slippers. “Breathing this crap has to be hazardous to your health—to my health, even.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Colin said, which only gave him more reason to worry about his cross-grained daughter. Like Missoula, the L.A. area was getting only a light dusting of volcanic ash. But the shit was practically burying places like Salt Lake City . . . and Denver. You could foul up your lungs inhaling sawdust at a furniture factory. What the supervolcano spat out was bound to be a hell of a lot nastier than sawdust.

If Vanessa had listened to him—she wouldn’t have been Vanessa. He hadn’t wanted to listen to anybody when he was her age, either. Come to that, he was none too good at listening to other people even now.

But what Wes said made good sense. Things Wes said usually did. And Colin had that coffee waiting for him back on the kitchen counter. It wouldn’t be too cold yet. Wes was already making for his own front door. Colin followed his lead. He paused at the doorway and left the slippers outside. The less ash he tracked in, the better.

His bare feet left gray prints on the dark brown foyer tiles. He’d kicked dust up into the slippers. Well, 409 and some paper towels would take care of that. Coffee first, coffee and the newspapers.

A notice on the front page of the
Breeze
said
We will keep printing as long as we can. Our paper supplier is in Minnesota. The supervolcano eruption has disrupted communication with areas to the east. Even when things come closer to normal, we fear paper will have a lower priority than food and fuel. But, at least temporarily, we may be compelled to go to Web-only publication
.

Harder to have a cup of coffee and check your computer or your smart phone. Not impossible, but harder. And what happened if L.A. lost power? So much for Web-only publication, that was what.

The
Times
didn’t talk about a paper shortage. Maybe it got its newsprint from the Northwest, which was still reachable. Or maybe the editor didn’t believe in borrowing trouble. The headline there said SENATORS FROM AFFLICTED STATES APPEAL FOR FEDERAL AID.

Afflicted
. Colin slowly nodded as he considered the word. It was one you seldom met outside the Bible, but no denying it fit here. If the Children of Israel had ever met anything as overwhelming as the supervolcano eruption, the Old Testament failed to mention it.

He did wonder what Washington was supposed to do for Wyoming and Montana, where the very geography had been pretty drastically revised. How many feet of dust lay on Idaho and Utah and Colorado and Nebraska and Kansas? Not just here and there in those states, but all over everything, or as near as made no difference. How many bulldozers and trucks and years would you need to clear hundreds of thousands of square miles? More than even the USA had in its back pocket: he was sure of that.

Colin also noticed the irony in the
Times
’ headline. L.A.’s leading newspaper had leaned left for longer than he’d been alive after an even lengthier spell of leaning hard right. Had the headline writer chosen his phrase with malice aforethought? Colin wouldn’t have been surprised. Those Senators appealed for Federal aid, did they? Before the supervolcano went blam, they would have found Federal aid about as appealing as HIV. It all depended on whose ox was being gored, didn’t it?

Almost all the Senators—and Representatives—from the afflicted states were Republicans. That didn’t stop them from sticking their hands out. If Washington couldn’t help them, nobody could. Tlin, it looked very much as if nobody could.

Which raised other interesting questions. Was anybody at all left alive in Wyoming? Western Montana was hanging on, but barely. Idaho and Utah were in pretty bad shape, too. So was Colorado, though maybe not quite to the same degree. The farming states farther east had also taken a big hit. Almost all those states were red as Rudolph’s nose. If they got depopulated, what would that do to American politics? Nothing good, not as far as Colin was concerned.

He grabbed the
Daily Breeze
again. Yes, that was what he’d read.
Paper will have a lower priority than food and fuel
. “What food?” he wondered out loud. America’s breadbasket had just taken one right in the breadbasket. How could you bring in or move the harvest when volcanic ash smothered the fields and blanketed the roads and choked the life out of tractors and harvesters and trucks (to say nothing of farmers)? One more thing that wasn’t gonna happen.

The United States had been the world’s larder since the nineteenth century. That was out the window, too. How was the USA going to feed its own people, let alone the many, many hungry beyond its borders? Who would—who could—take up the slack? Anybody? If no one did, what would happen then? Colin couldn’t see the details, but the broad outlines seemed plain enough. Nothing good would happen—that was what.

How much of the country’s grain was stored in areas suddenly ungetatable on account of the eruption? How many cows and sheep and pigs and chickens were dying right now? He’d read a newspaper squib about a yak farm in the Colorado Rockies. Was anybody saving the poor goddamn yaks?

Yeah, the country was screwed. The part of the world that depended on the USA was screwed, too. And so was everybody else. He was still only on his first cup of coffee. He hadn’t even started worrying about climate change yet. He got up and put some more water in the microwave. If he was going to do that, he’d definitely need more.

The knock on the door was loud and somehow official-sounding, as if the guy doing the knocking had a hell of a lot of practice. Daniel had gone to the university, which left Kelly and Ruth and Larry sitting around his apartment waiting for something to happen. Well, now something had.

Larry went to the door. He was the man. That wasn’t exactly twenty-first-century thinking, but neither Kelly nor Ruth made a move to get there ahead of him. Kelly didn’t even think about it till afterwards.

When Larry opened the door, standing there in front of it was the most cop-looking cop Kelly’d ever seen. Yes, he’d know how to knock on doors, all right. Shoulders. Chin. Khaki shirt with badge. Pistol on hip. Olive-drab pants, sharply creased. Shiny black boots. Gunnery sergeant’s hat. Mirrored sunglasses, even.

“Yes?” Larry said, in a tone that couldn’t mean anything but
You’ve got to have the wrong apartment
.

But the cop rumbled, “Is Miss Birnbaum here?”

“That’s me,” Kelly squeaked in surprise. About the most nefarious thing she’d done was smoke dope every once in a while, and she hadn’t even done that since she’d started dating Colin. He made no bones about hating it, it
was
still mildly illegal, and she didn’t get off on it that much anyhow. Quitting hadn’t been hard.

“Miss Birnbaum, I’m Roy Schurz,” the cop said. “I’m chief of police in Orofino, Idaho.”

“Yes?” Kelly said blanklyI’m chieAnd so?”

BOOK: Supervolcano: Eruption

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