Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  Which mattered only so much. Teo’d been a hell of a lot better in bed and easier to get along with . . . till he freaked out when she found herself pregnant.

  James Henry was trying to catch his toes and stuff them in his mouth. “I love you,” Louise told him, “but you are such a damn nuisance.”

  “Da-da-da!” the baby said happily. His tummy was full. His diaper was dry. His onesie kept him warm. His mommy was there. He didn’t care about anything else in the whole wide world.

  I should be so lucky, Louise thought.

  * * *

  Kelly lay next to Colin. Once upon a time, Louise had lain with him on the same mattress. Kelly mostly didn’t think about that. Expecting somebody to get a whole new bed after a breakup would have been way over the top. Now, though, it forcibly came back to her mind.

  Maybe it came back to his, too. “You sure you wanna go through with this?” he asked in a low voice. It was dark. The door to the master bedroom was locked and latched. Marshall’s door was locked, too, and he probably wouldn’t come out for anything this side of the crack of doom, anyway. And if he did, he wouldn’t worry about his dad and his dad’s new wife. Colin kept his voice down just the same.

  “Darn right I do,” Kelly said. She nodded, too. It was so dark, Colin might not see that. She reached for him. And go through with it they did.

  Afterwards, Kelly sprawled on her side, lazy in the afterglow. Colin said, “Boy, I don’t remember the last time I did that without protection.”

  “Me, neither,” Kelly said. One of the reasons she didn’t remember was that she’d been seriously drunk when it happened. And she’d let out a long, loud sigh of relief when her next period came right on schedule.

  This, though, this was different. You could joke about biological clocks. It wasn’t as if she never had. But things got less funny when you listened to your own ticking—and when you knew it would wind down for good in the ever-less-indefinite future.

  Oh, sometimes you got a surprise later than you thought you could. Colin’s ex sure had, and now his kids had an altogether unexpected half-brother. And here I am, thinking about Louise again. Kelly was annoyed with herself, which didn’t mean she could keep from doing it. Which was part of what she got for marrying a man with a considerable past. Of course, when you got up to her age the only men without considerable pasts were the ones who’d never moved away from their mothers. They presented different—and usually worse—problems.

  She shook her head. “What?” Colin asked, feeling the motion.

  “Nothing,” Kelly answered, which wasn’t quite true, but it was nothing she wanted to talk about with him. After a moment, she went on, “If we can make something together—make a baby together—what could be more special than that?”

  “That’s why we’re doing it. And besides, even trying is fun,” Colin said. Kelly poked him in the ribs. She was usually more ticklish than he was, but she must have hit the bull’s-eye, because he jerked.

  “Serves you right,” Kelly told him.

  “What? You didn’t have fun trying?” When he decided to be difficult, he was difficult as all get out. But then he said, “Y’know, after Louise and I had our three, she was always after me to get a vasectomy so she wouldn’t have to go on using her manhole cover.”

  “Her what?” Kelly was glad Colin couldn’t see her blank stare.

  “Diaphragm,” he explained.

  “Oh.” She poked him again, less successfully this time. He would make a bad joke like that. He not only would, he had.

  “Yeah, well,” he went on, “I didn’t feel like doing anything where the odds of undoing it weren’t so great. I didn’t think anything was wrong—which only shows how much I knew, doesn’t it? But I even used condominiums every once in a while so she wouldn’t need the Frisbee.”

  To do that justice, Kelly would have had to poke him eight or twelve times. She contented herself with snorting instead. Colin hadn’t made the smallest of sacrifices, though, not from the male point of view. Guys used condoms, but the next man she found who liked them would be the first. Then again, she hoped she wouldn’t have to do any more looking for men—or why had she just made love wanting to get pregnant?

  Colin turned on the lamp on his nightstand. He smiled over at her. “I definitely got lucky,” he said.

  “Oh, foosh!” she replied. She wasn’t anything special, not with the way her tummy pooched out and her seat spread. She’d never actually met Louise in person, but she’d seen photos. Louise was elegantly slim, and her sculpted features reminded Kelly of some actress whose name she couldn’t quite come up with. When she added, “I don’t know what you see in me,” she wasn’t making idle talk.

  “Somebody I love, that’s what,” Colin said, which was always the right answer. He went on, “Somebody who loves me, too, and who wants to be here with me.”

  Kelly kissed him. “You better believe it, mister.”

  “Oh, I do. For a while, I didn’t think I would ever believe it, but I do.” This time, he kissed her. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.” She meant it.

  He grinned a male grin. “Not all of it, lady. And the other thing I see is, I see this darn sexy broad naked in bed with me, and what could be better than that?”

  Kelly didn’t think of herself as a darn sexy broad. She thought of herself as a geologist. Being thought of as a sex object kind of weirded her out. Then again, if you weren’t your husband’s sex object, you had other worries. Colin didn’t just want her for that. She never would have married him if he had. Since he did want her for that . . . “Turn off the light again.”

  He was in his fifties. Second rounds didn’t happen quickly, the way they would have when he was younger, or sometimes at all. That didn’t make fooling around any less enjoyable. And even if he didn’t rise to the occasion right away, he wasn’t shy about using fingers and tongue to bring her along.

  “I don’t think I can walk to the bathroom,” she said after a while. “My knees are all loose.”

  “That’s nice.” If he sounded smug, he’d earned the right. “You could just roll over and go to sleep.”

  “That’s your department,” Kelly retorted, though Colin didn’t live up to—or down to—the male cliché very often.

  “Huh!” This time, he poked her in the ribs. She squeaked. He chuckled. “I’ll go, then,” he said, and he did. When he got back, he added, quite seriously, “I do love you, you know.”

  “I noticed,” she answered. “If I remember straight, that’s how my knees got all loose.”

  “Nah.” He shook his head; the mattress sent her the vibration in the dark room. “That’s just fooling around. Fooling around is great—don’t get me wrong. But I mean, I really love you. That quake in Yellowstone was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Well, I got some good data from it, too. The thought went through Kelly’s mind, but died unsaid. Another time, another place, she would have come out with it. Colin appreciated dry—you didn’t know him at all if you didn’t know that. Not right this minute, though, not when they’d been trying to start a child together. “I love you, too,” she said, and leaned over and kissed him. “And now I am gonna go to the john, loose knees or not.”

  She burrowed under the covers when she returned. It wasn’t warm. It hardly ever was any more. “Good night,” Colin said, so he hadn’t gone to sleep.

  “G’night.” A few minutes later, she did.

  VIII

  It wasn’t snowing. There was still snow on the ground, but not everywhere. Rob Ferguson savored the sun shining wanly down out of a sky exactly the color of a high school girlfriend’s gray-blue eyes. Here and there, hopeful green grass sprouted through the dead yellow tangle of last year’s halfhearted growth. A few deciduous trees showed new little leaves.

  It should have been A
pril, or maybe early May—Rob wasn’t a hundred percent sure how the weather had worked in Guilford before the supervolcano went off. It was . . . the middle of August. It was the second year in a row without a summer, the second of nobody knew how many.

  The roads were open. For the time being, till the blizzards clamped down again, Maine north and west of the Interstate was reconnected to the rest of the country. The Shell station down the street from the Trebor Mansion Inn had gas—not a lot of gas, and twelve bucks a gallon, but gas. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could have got the hell out.

  Plenty of people had. Most of the ones who’d left had relatives in warmer parts of the country. (There weren’t many colder ones, not in the Lower Forty-eight. What was happening to places like Fairbanks and Nome and Anchorage, Rob didn’t want to think about.)

  Dick Barber was glad to see individuals and families pull up stakes. So was Jim Farrell. “The fewer mouths we have to feed when we’re on our own again, the better off we’ll be,” he declared to anyone who would listen. Barber spread the gospel of flight, too—without packing up and leaving himself.

  The band was still here, too. Every once in a while, Justin would make wistful noises about hitting the road again. Sometimes Charlie Storer would nod, but not in a way to make anybody think he really meant it. One reason he didn’t was that Biff wasn’t going anywhere. Biff cared more about Cindy down at Caleb’s Kitchen than he did about touring. Well he might: she was going to have a baby. They hadn’t tied the knot yet, but that also looked to be in the cards.

  And Rob wasn’t eager to vamoose from the land of moose, either. He’d been going with Lindsey ever since they literally bumped into each other outside the Episcopal church. She wasn’t carrying his child, but not for lack of effort. If it came down to a choice between her and the band . . . Rob was glad it hadn’t come down to that.

  Justin and Charlie had also found friends of the female persuasion. That, no doubt, was one reason why they didn’t sound more serious about bailing out. Yes, they were musicians. Yes, they were used to temporary attachments. But, whether or not they’d intended to, they’d put down roots here.

  Roots . . . Every house had a garden. All the gardens were trying to grow potatoes and parsnips and turnips and mangel-wurzels and anything else that had a prayer of maturing in a growing season abbreviated even for Maine. Extravagant mulch and plastic sheeting fought the cold as best they could. And maybe there would be a crop and maybe there wouldn’t. Everyone would find out when the weather turned really bad again.

  In the meantime . . . In the meantime, Rob ambled down the semigrassy slope to the Piscataquis. The stream had thawed out enough to chuckle over its rocky bed. It had probably been born from glacial runoff. Rob stuck his finger into it, then jerked the digit out again. “Brr!” he said. By all the signs, the river was getting back to its roots.

  A blue jay scolded him from a pine tree. A lot of birds had flown south for the winter and not come back. Jays and robins and ravens lingered. So did ospreys—one plunged into the frigid water and came out with a fish clamped in its talons. Another jay flew after the fish hawk, screeching.

  Some kids threw a football around. The slope that led to the river meant only sidehill sheep could have played any proper kind of game. The kids didn’t care. They threw and kicked and yelled and laughed. It was summer vacation, even if it was summer only by the calendar.

  They’d missed a lot of school even when it wasn’t vacation. Lindsey made sorrowful noises about that. Sometimes it was because they couldn’t get to class themselves. When the snowdrifts were taller than they were. . . . More often, though, their teachers couldn’t make it. Not all the teachers lived in Guilford. The ones who didn’t had relied on the quaint concept known as motor transportation. Here and there in the U.S. of A., roads still stayed open. Not in this part of the country, though. Nowhere close. The joke for Siberia had been ten months of winter and two of bad skiing. The joke, these days, applied all too literally to this part of Maine.

  As he had with Alaska, Rob wondered how things were in Siberia right now. Cold: the one-word answer immediately supplied itself. Bloody fucking cold, if you wanted to get technical. Though it might seem hard to believe, there had been places with climates worse than the one Guilford didn’t enjoy. If Guilford had turned into a pretty fair approximation of Siberia, what had Siberia turned into?

  The South Pole, Rob thought. Then he tried to imagine penguins roaming the tundra. It made him want to giggle.

  A kid missed the football. It took three crazy bounces and stopped right at Rob’s feet. “Throw it back, man!” the kid yelled. He was about twelve—no beard on his cheeks, and his voice hadn’t broken.

  Rob picked it up. “I’ll do better than that,” he said. The shape and the pebbly feel of the leather or rubbery plastic or whatever the hell it was combined irresistibly. Like a certain deranged beagle, what red-blooded grown-up doesn’t want to be the Mad Punter, even if only for a moment?

  He let fly. He hadn’t played football since PE in high school, and he hadn’t been the punter then. By rights, he should have squibbed it off the side of his foot. By dumb luck, he caught it square. It flew long and straight. It would have been a forty-yarder on any NFL gridiron—well, any NFL gridiron except Mile High Stadium, which was still deeply buried in volcanic crap.

  “Wow!” The kid who’d called for the ball wasn’t the only one to stare at him, wide-eyed. He tried not to preen. Damned if he hadn’t had standing O’s at club gigs that he’d enjoyed less. Being applauded for skill was one thing. Being applauded for skill and strength . . . He felt as if he’d grown shoulder pads under his flannel shirt.

  After the kids retrieved the ball, they brought it back to him. One of the kids flipped it his way. “Do it again!”

  He didn’t think he could do it twice in a row. Hell, he hadn’t thought he could do it once in a row. But he’d always been able to resist anything but temptation—a line his old man had used more than once. He punted again. It wasn’t as good as the first try, but it went a lot farther than any kid who hadn’t reached puberty could manage.

  They swarmed after it and brought it back like retrievers. He didn’t want to play punting machine. If once was experiment and twice was perversion, what was three times? Boring, that was what.

  They didn’t ask him for another punt, though. Instead, one of them said, “When are you guys gonna play again?”

  “I dunno,” Rob answered. “Next town meeting, maybe, if they want us to.” That was a week away.

  When you were eleven or twelve, a week was as good—no, as bad—as forever. “Wish you’d play here in the park again, sooner than that,” the boy said.

  “In the daytime,” one of his friends added.

  There was a lot of daytime at this season of the year, just as nights here stretched like Silly Putty during wintertime. More than just the weather told you Maine lay a lot farther north than L.A. or Santa Barbara, which were Rob’s standards of comparison.

  “Well, we’ll see,” he said.

  “Puhleeze!” Three of them squealed it at the same time.

  Hearing them, he realized how starved for entertainment they were. They’d grown up with TV and the Net and PlayStations and Wiis and Xboxes. All of that stuff took electricity, though. Guilford had power for three or four hours a day during the summer. During the winter . . . Well, people tried—you had to give them that. But it was mostly no go, and no juice.

  If they wanted to listen to a band they’d surely never heard of before it washed up on their frozen shore—and wanted to badly enough to beg for music—they really had it bad. If Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could tour the local towns, towns that hadn’t had an almost–rock band get stuck in them, it might clean up. It might clean up as much as anybody in this part of Maine could right now, anyhow.

  “We’ll see,” Rob repeat
ed, but in a different tone of voice this time. Biff wouldn’t mind that kind of tour. Rob wouldn’t mind it himself. It might work. It was definitely worth talking about.

  The kids caught the difference. “Yeah!” they said, or rather, “Ayuh!” It was Maine, all right. One of them waved for another to go out on a pass pattern. The ball spiraled after him. The boys raced away.

  But when Rob looked out the windows of his tower garret in the Trebor Mansion Inn the next morning, the sky had gone gray and gloomy and dark. Snow swirled through the air. It wasn’t a blizzard, but it also wasn’t the kind of weather that would let the band draw a crowd, even from the hardy folk who’d stayed in Guilford. He still intended to talk about playing, but this wasn’t the day for it.

  * * *

  Colin Ferguson looked wistfully at the Taurus in his driveway. It still ran. He fired it up every now and then and took it around the block to keep the battery alive and to make sure the tires stayed round. He’d drive it if he went out to dinner with Kelly, especially when it was raining. And these days it rained more often in the L.A. basin than he’d ever dreamt it could.

  But he didn’t go to work in the Taurus every day any more, even though it wasn’t far. Gas was too hard to come by, and too expensive for anyone on a civil-service salary to use very much. A San Atanasio police lieutenant made a pretty good civil-service salary. What Kelly brought in from Cal State Dominguez didn’t hurt, either. All the same . . .

  All the same, he put his briefcase in his bike’s cargo basket, climbed aboard, and pedaled away. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle very often between the time when he was fifteen or sixteen and the day the supervolcano erupted. They said you never forgot how. Like a lot of things they said, that had holes that would have sunk it if it were a boat. He’d wobbled all over the place when he started riding again. He’d had a good fall, too. Luckily, he’d blown the knees out of an old pair of sweats, not the pants from any of his suits. Even more luckily, though he’d pedaled home scraped up and bruised, he hadn’t broken anything.