Read Supervolcano: Eruption Online
Authors: Harry Turtledove
Supervolcano: Eruption (32 page)
Her motor coughed. She forgot about the big picture. Somebody might have dropped an ice cube down the back of her shirt. A human being who sounded like that would have been dying of emphysema. The enine was dying, too. A mechanic wouldn’t call it emphysema, but it amounted to the same thing.
Here came Syracuse. A roadside sign proudly proclaimed you could get gas there. It also said you could get food. Chances were you could get gas from the food, too, even if the sign didn’t tell you that.
Go? Stop? Did she want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere if the car quit between towns? Wasn’t this already the middle of nowhere? Was she better off with other people or as far away from them as she could get?
She kept going. Whether that made her an optimist or a pessimist was one more thing she’d think about when she had time. If she ever did. Which looked less and less likely.
After Syracuse, signs announced that the next town ahead was Garden City. By the way they announced it, Garden City might actually be something. It had hotels and motels and fast-food joints and meat-packing plants. Some of the signs for those were in both English and Spanish. She’d seen the like in L.A. and Denver, of course. Spanish was the language in which a lot of hard work got done in the USA.
But in a place like Garden City, Kansas? Evidently. It turned out not to matter to Vanessa. The engine coughed again. This time, it sounded more like Cheyne-Stokes breathing than emphysema. And, like somebody with Cheyne-Stokes breathing, her car died. All the red and yellow warning lights came on. As she’d figured she would, she rolled as far as she could. Then she steered over to the shoulder and stopped.
As soon as the motion ceased, Pickles quit sounding like an air-raid siren. Relishing the silence, Vanessa spoke out loud: “Well, what do I do now?”
Her basic choices were sitting tight or getting out and walking toward Garden City. If she sat tight, she was counting on somebody halfway decent rescuing her before she
had
to start walking to Garden City. If she got out, she’d feel like a snail without its shell. And she and Pickles—especially Pickles—would be breathing the outside air that had just killed her car.
had
to start walking to Garden City. If she got out, she’d feel like a snail without its shell. And she and Pickles—especially Pickles—would be breathing the outside air that had just killed her car.
In a TV show, they’d go to commercials. When they came back, she’d find the right answer with the greatest of ease. Or they’d cut away to her somewhere else, and she’d explain to an admiring friend how she’d got there.
Unfortunately, you couldn’t cut away from life. She had no idea what the right answer was, or even if there was one. She hadn’t come this far by sitting tight, though. She got Pickles and an abridged version of her stuff—iron rations, tampons, a few socks and panties, and an umbrella—and started walking.
She was glad for the umbrella right away. The rain was so mixed with ash that everything it touched got dirtier. That included her jeans from the knees down, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t do anything about anything, except hope her feet didn’t blister before she got to Garden City.
She almost slipped in the mud. A car going by splashed a little on her. If that went on, she’d look like someone made of muck by the time she got to the town. Another car sloshed past and splashed her some more. She kept walking.
Colin Ferguson begrudged the time he wasted doing the I-5 boogie from L.A. to the Bay Area. Even with all the security bullshit, flying would have been faster. But ash in the air kept planes on the ground. If you wanted to get anywhere, you drove.
He hoped the Taurus would make it. Driving was a crapshoot these days, too. California hadn’t been buried r ash from the supervolcano, the way the Rocky Mountain states and much of the prairie had been. Ash lay on the ground, though, and the ash in the air wouldn’t screw up airplane engines alone. It wasn’t good for cars, either.
He’d made it over the Grapevine, anyhow. That long, tough climb getting out of L.A. County had worried him, but here he was, easing down the other side. He’d thought about taking Highway 1 up to Berkeley; there was supposed to be less ash along the coast. But, while the Pacific Coast Highway was breathtakingly beautiful, it was also slow and wearing. You couldn’t just haul ass on PCH; you had to
drive
. He’d taken a chance for speed, he’d got away with it, and now he had his reward.
drive
. He’d taken a chance for speed, he’d got away with it, and now he had his reward.
I-5 ran straight as a string through the Central Valley. It was the short way north, and it was the straight way north. As long as you didn’t fall asleep at the wheel, you pointed the car and you went. Mountains off to either side, fields lying next to the unwinding road, occasional towns. The landscape didn’t change, but the odometer did.
At one point, the atmosphere changed, and not for the better. Near Kettleman City (which wasn’t one), they collected cattle to ship them to market. You breathed concentrated essence of bullshit for a few minutes as you went by. Then the air cleared again, and you were relieved you couldn’t smell what had relieved the cows any more.
Except the air didn’t completely clear. Oh, the stink went away. But a dust haze remained. It was worst near the Interstate, where tires and the wind of many cars’ passage kept stirring up what the supervolcano had spewed all those miles away.
Sunlight still seemed wan. That wasn’t only the ash in the lower atmosphere; it was also the finer-gauge crap—the particulate matter—the eruption had blasted into the stratosphere. Sunsets kept on being improbably gorgeous, showing every color of the rainbow. Sometimes the hues were splattered together in Jackson Pollock randomness, sometimes stacked as neatly as the layers in a poussé-café. They were never the same from one day to the next. Hell, they were never the same from one minute to the next. That ancient Greek who said you could never step into the same river twice knew what he was talking about. You could hardly step into the same river once.
It was chilly. Colin told himself that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Fall didn’t come to California the way it did to most other places. It could be hot or cold or hot and then cold. The only trees that changed colors were a few sycamores, and they didn’t get around to it till Thanksgiving. So chilly weather now didn’t have to mean the supervolcano was doing what Kelly had warned all along it would do.
It didn’t have to mean that, no. But it sure was likely to.
Colin beat the darkness up to Berkeley. That was good. He knew the Bay Area well enough to sortakinda find his way around, but only sortakinda. Trying it at night would have been harder.
He made it to Kelly’s street, and damned if he didn’t find a parking space no more than two lengths away from where he’d snagged one the last time he drove up. It wasn’t much longer than the Taurus, but it didn’t need to be. There were plenty of things he couldn’t do. By God, he could parallel park.
Her building had added a security door since the last time he was here. Nodding in approval, he pressed 274—her apartment number—on the keypad and buzzed. “That you, Colin?” Kelly’s voice came out of the cheap speaker as if it were a tin-can telephone connected by a string that wasn’t taut enough.
“Who else were you expecting?” He had to ask twice; the first time, he forgot to press the ANSWER button.
“You might have been the Thai takeout,” she replied after he did it right. The door’s lock clicked. He opened it, made sure it closed behind him, and hurried up the stairs like somebody half his age. If that wasn’t love, it sure as hell was a reasonable facsimile.
Kelly opened the door while he was still walking towards it. He wished he’d thought to buy flowers. He wished he were the kind of guy who thought to buy flowers before it was too goddamn late. Of course, if he were that kind of guy, he might well still be married to Louise.
He was what he was. He was where he was, too, and damn glad of it. He grabbed Kelly and clung to her as hard as she was clinging to him. He wasn’t usually touchy-feely, either—the opposite, in fact—but holding her was like finding a life ring in the North Atlantic after a torpedo hit your freighter.
“Jesus, it’s good to see you!” he said hoarsely.
By way of reply, she tilted her face up for a kiss. Before he could deliver it, the buzzer in her apartment went off again. She made a face. “Sorry. Wait one,” she said, and ran back inside.
This time, it was the Thai food. The short, skinny man who carried up the two big white paper bags had brown skin and a flat face, which probably made him a Thai. By his English, he hadn’t been here long. Colin paid him. Kelly squawked. He ignored her. She was still squawking when they went back into the apartment. The dinette table was strewn with books and journals and papers, but Kelly shoved them back to make enough space for two people to eat. Colin set the bags down on the wood-grain Formica.
Then he held out his arms and said, “Where were we?” “When we were so rudely interrupted, you mean?” Kelly stepped into the circle that closed around her. “Right about here.”
A few minutes later, they spooned squid salad and larb and other good things onto paper plates. One of the bags also held two Thai iced teas, sweetened with coconut milk, in styrofoam cups. Colin slathered bright red chili sauce from little plastic containers onto everything but his iced tea.
“I’d have to eat flame retardant if I did that,” said Kelly, who stuck to seasoning with soy sauce.
“I like it,” Colin answered, and proceeded to prove as much by making his share disappear. As he took seconds, he said, “Lord, I’m glad to see you. I told you that once already, didn’t I?”
“Uh-huh. But it’s okay. I like to hear it. I’m glad to see you, too.” Kelly’s expression darkened. “I’m glad to see anybody. I was, like, three hundred miles from the supervolcano when it went off. Almost everybody who was—oh, God, I don’t know—say, fifty miles closer is probably dead right now.”
A circle five hundred miles across . . . Colin centered it on Yellowstone and laid it over a mental map of the United States. Salt Lake City wouldn’t be far from the edge. Denver lay outside, but not far enough outside to suit him.
“Still nothing from Vanessa,” he said, his voice harsh.
“I’m sorry,” Kelly answered. “Still too early to know if it means anything, though. The whole middle of the country is fubar’d.”
He stabbed a blunt, accusing forefinger at her. “That’s what you get for hanging around with an old Navy guy.”
“Why, what ever can you mean, sir?” She batted her eyelashes fit to make Scarlett O’Hara gag. “It stands for
fouled up beyond all recognition
, right? Or something like that.”
fouled up beyond all recognition
, right? Or something like that.”
“Yeah. Or something like that.” Colin aimed the forefinger again. “But nobody your age says ‘fubar’d.’ It’s what you get for hanging around with an old Navy guy, like I said. Stuff rubs off.”
“Suppose you let me worry about that,” Kelly said, and a CPO couldn’t have put more bite into it. She snapped the lids back onto the containers they hadn’t emptied and stuck them in the fridge. Forks clattered in the sink. She nodded to herself. “The rest can wait.”
“The trash?” Colin knew he sounded disapproving. Being an old Navy guy helped make him Felix, not Oscar.
But Kelly nodded again. “Yeah, the trash.” For her part, she sounded defiant. “You keep telling me you’re glad to see me. How are you gonna show me?”
After the long drive up and a belly full of Thai food, Colin hoped he
could
show her. He’d seen that occasional bedroom failures bothered middle-aged men more than their women, but he was a middle-aged man, dammit, and he especially didn’t want to fail now.
could
show her. He’d seen that occasional bedroom failures bothered middle-aged men more than their women, but he was a middle-aged man, dammit, and he especially didn’t want to fail now.
He didn’t. For a man, it’s always terrific. Kelly didn’t seem to have any complaints. She rolled over and made as if to go to sleep. “Hey, I’m the one who’s supposed to do that,” Colin protested. What with the drive and the big dinner and the exertions just past, he wasn’t far from it.
She sat up. He put an arm around her. She leaned against him. “Everything works here,” she said in wondering tones. “We had power in Missoula, but the gas went out. Landlines were iffy. So was the Net. My cell was iffier.”
“I know. I wish I could’ve talked to you more,” Colin said.
Kelly nodded, but kept following her own train of thought: “Everything works. I called for Thai takeout, and half an hour later it showed up. There’s no problem with food here, not yet. And we’re on the coast, so it’ll keep coming in by ship. The weather here won’t get
too
bad. California’s lucky. I don’t know what’ll happen to Missoula once winter settles in.” She bit her lip. “No. I do know. I just don’t want to think about it. There’s a difference.”
too
bad. California’s lucky. I don’t know what’ll happen to Missoula once winter settles in.” She bit her lip. “No. I do know. I just don’t want to think about it. There’s a difference.”
“Maybe things won’t be so bad,” Colin said. “I was wondering about that on the way up here—right after I went past Kettleman City, matter of fact.”
“Timing!” Kelly held her nose. Colin laughed. So did she, but she quickly sobered. “It will be that bad. It may be worse. This was a big eruption, even by supervolcano standards. Just about—maybe not quite, but just about—the size of the one over two million years ago, or the one that turned Mount Toba into Lake Toba.”
“So we’re in it for real?”
“We’re in it for real,” Kelly agreed. “Bigtime. The ash has already taken out most of this year’s crops in the Midwest, and maybe next year’s, too. After that . . . After that, it’ll get cold. It’s already getting cold—not so much heat from the sun can make it through the atmosphere. Things here seem fine now, but the whole world is running on momentum. When it slows down . . .”
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