Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  If she’d been in touch with her feelings then, she would have walked away from the marriage on the spot. And if she had, her life now would sure as hell be different. Better? Worse? She hadn’t a clue. Different she was sure of.

  The other thing she was sure of was that the OTC meds she was stuffing into James Henry weren’t worth shit. She was definitely in touch with her feelings about that. It made her mad, was what it did. Back when her other kids were little, you could buy stuff that actually made snot dry up. Sure, it’d come back as soon as the dose wore off, but it went away for a while.

  No more, dammit. The FDA, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that the drugs that helped most kids also messed up fourteen in a million, or whatever the hell the number was. And so, to keep the fourteen in a million safe, the other 999,986 sniffled for a solid week whenever they caught a cold.

  And they did catch them. Boy, did they ever! Babies and colds went together like ham and eggs. All the cold medicines on the drugstore shelves looked pretty much the way they had back when Louise was taking care of Rob and Vanessa and Marshall. Their boxes said things like SAFER THAN EVER! What that meant was, they didn’t do squat.

  She cuddled James Henry. “Mama!” he said mournfully. He got snot on her shoulder even though she’d put a cloth diaper there to try to block that mucus. One more blouse she’d have to wash. At least snot didn’t stink the way spit-up did.

  Her phone rang. James Henry jerked. He wasn’t as jumpy about the phone as a cat was, but he didn’t like it. The phone made her pay attention to something besides him, and he didn’t like that, either.

  She fished the phone out of her purse. Marshall’s number was showing. “Hello?” Louise said.

  “Yo.” That was Marshall’s way of talking, but it didn’t sound like him. It was too deep and too slow, and punctuated by a sneeze: “I better not come over there tomorrow. I’m—ah-choo!—sick.”

  “So is James Henry,” Louise said. She didn’t quite remember how she’d got into the habit of always using both his first and his middle name, but she had. “Did you give him the cold, or did he give it to you?”

  “Probably,” Marshall said. Again, the answer sounded like him even if the voice didn’t. Again, he sneezed. This time, he blew his nose right afterwards: a long, sorrowful honk. I wish James Henry could do that, Louise thought. Her older son went on, “Either which way, I feel like dog shit.”

  Unlike his father, he wasn’t shy about swearing where women could hear. Chances were he hardly noticed he was swearing; to people of his generation, it was just the way they talked. Louise wasn’t offended. As far as she was concerned, Marshall’s casually foul mouth only proved Colin had wasted time and temper smacking him for cussing.

  Right this minute, that was beside the point, no matter how gratifying it might have been some other time. Louise didn’t want to think about Colin, not when she could—and needed to—think of herself instead. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “How can I go to work tomorrow if James Henry’s sick and you can’t come take care of him?”

  “Beats me, Mom.” Marshall sounded nearly as chilly and indifferent as his father might have. Maybe the cold helped, or maybe it was the triumph of one heredity over another. Then he added, “Don’t forget—I’m sick, too.”

  Lost in her own worries, Louise had forgotten. She was briefly embarrassed, but only briefly. “What am I going to do?” she said—not quite a repetition, but close enough.

  “Whatever it is, don’t put me in it.” Yes, Marshall could sound too damn much like Colin. And he’d always blamed Louise for walking out and getting free. He got only the first part, not the second. He took care of James Henry for money. He didn’t really care about his little half-brother. As if to underscore that, he went on, “I’ll check with you when I’m not so rancid any more. ’Bye.” Silence echoed in Louise’s ear: the Zen sound of a seashell that wasn’t there.

  “Shit!” she said, most sincerely.

  James Henry looked at her. “Shit,” he echoed, the way babies will.

  She laughed so hard, she almost dropped him. He laughed, too, till he coughed and choked and sprayed boogers all over his cheeks. She wiped him off, saw he could have more of the worthless decongestant, and spooned it into him. He made a horrible face. It all seemed so unfair. If the crap didn’t do any good—and it didn’t—couldn’t it at least taste halfway decent?

  She still didn’t know what she was going to do tomorrow. She couldn’t take James Henry to the ramen works. He’d only make everybody else sick. That’d thrill Mr. Nobashi, wouldn’t it? But she didn’t want to stay home, either. Waste a vacation day? She didn’t get enough of them to be happy squandering one on a sick kid.

  Which left . . . what? Anything? The Yellow Pages weren’t worth shit those days. She wouldn’t find a babysitting service there. She went online instead. She came up with several in the area. All of them said Se habla español. Which was great, no doubt, but how about inglés? Well, the only thing she could do was start calling and find out.

  So she did. Sure enough, most of the people she talked with had accents flavored with Spanish. You got used to that in Southern California. What she had more trouble getting used to were the prices they wanted. If Marshall ever found out what they were asking, he’d yell for more himself.

  “That’s just about what I bring home!” she yelped to one service that was particularly outrageous.

  “Sorry, ma’am. We got to make a living, too,” replied the woman on the other end of the line. That might have been politer than Fuck you, lady, but it amounted to the same thing.

  She ended up burning the vacation day. The professional babysitters were too goddamn professional for a mere human being to afford. Then she had to burn another one, because Marshall was still sick the next day. That got her through Friday. She dared hope things would be at least near normal by Monday.

  Back when she first found out she was pregnant, her OB had asked her if she would take it out on the baby for blowing up the life she’d had. She’d denied the possibility—denied it indignantly, in fact. Now . . . Now she would have been a liar if she said the idea of punting James Henry didn’t cross her mind.

  She didn’t do it. By Saturday afternoon, the baby was pretty much his old cheerful self again . . . and Louise had a scratchy throat and a tickle in her nose. You couldn’t win. The way things looked, you couldn’t even break even. That crossed her mind just before she started sneezing.

  * * *

  There were times when Marshall Ferguson felt as if he’d never gone to college. Here he was, in the house where he’d grown up—in his old room again, for God’s sake! He had more money in his pocket than he’d enjoyed before he went up to Santa Barbara, but not enough more to move out on his own. If his mother hadn’t had her little bastard, he wouldn’t even have had that. The economy had fallen, and it couldn’t get up. He wondered—and wondered seriously—whether he’d die of old age before it managed to climb to its feet again.

  And there were times when he thought he’d fallen into the looking glass, just like Alice. Dealing with his mother as a near-enemy would do that to him. However much he tried, he couldn’t think of her any other way now. She’d blown up the family. What else was he supposed to think about her?

  His dad’s new wife . . . He liked Kelly. He liked her better than he liked the woman who’d given him birth. But she didn’t seem like a mother to him, or even like a stepmother, however a stepmother was supposed to seem (what he knew about stepmothers was a weird mash-up of fairy tales on the one hand and friends and acquaintances whose folks had divorced and remarried on the other).

  What she really reminded him of was a new older sister. He also liked her better than he’d ever liked Vanessa, though. Why not? She didn’t try to boss him around the way Vanessa always had. She didn’t make as if she knew everything there was to know, eith
er. She just . . . got along with him. He wasn’t remotely used to that.

  He would have liked to talk it over with Dad. His father was the one unchanged point in his life. Dad might be a little grayer, a little jowlier, than he had been when Marshall was in high school, but how often did you notice that? His style hadn’t changed, not a nickel’s worth. And wasn’t the style the man himself? Somebody’d said that. Marshall couldn’t remember who. So much for the bachelor’s degree they’d finally made him take.

  But, because Dad was Dad, Marshall couldn’t imagine talking to him in any serious way. Dad would listen. He’d listen hard, like the cop he was. And then he’d give forth with something that might as well come from Mars. Which was one reason Marshall didn’t try talking with him: he’d had that happen before. The other reason, of course, was much older and more basic. Marshall had expended a lot of time and testosterone gaining such flimsy independence as he had. Was he going to risk that for the sake of conversation? Like hell he was.

  And so he had to find some other way to channel his confusion. He put it into a story. Not only was he channeling it, he was giving himself a chance to make some money from it. He did sell things—less often than he wanted to, but he did. The money was nice, but he couldn’t begin to live on it. Nobody could live on what you made from short fiction. Everybody said so, and for once everybody seemed right.

  He could talk about that with Kelly: no testosterone involved there. She thought for a little while, then said, “Maybe you should write a novel.”

  “A novel? Are you nuts?” Marshall made a cross with his two index fingers, as if trying to protect himself against vampires. “I couldn’t write a novel!”

  “Why not? You sell some of what you write.” Kelly was painfully precise—even more so than Dad. Did that go with being a geologist or just with being her? Marshall wasn’t sure, but either way . . . She went on, “That’s got to mean you’re good enough, right?”

  “Jeez, I dunno,” Marshall muttered. What he did know was that the idea of tackling a novel scared him shitless.

  Kelly didn’t want to let it go. “You can make a living on novels, can’t you?” she asked.

  “If you’re lucky enough, maybe.” Marshall didn’t want to admit anything. But she had a point, or the blogs and Twitter feeds and bulletin boards he haunted made him think she did. You wrote short stories for glory or experiment or because you liked a little idea so much you couldn’t not write it. Novels, now, novels paid bills—except when they didn’t.

  “So go for it. What have you got to lose?” Kelly could be most infuriating when she sounded most reasonable.

  “My mind?” Marshall suggested. One more thing everybody always said was Don’t quit your day job. Considering that his day job was taking care of his half-brother, dumping it didn’t seem half bad. It wasn’t that he had anything personal against James Henry. The baby was probably as nice as a baby was gonna be. He couldn’t help it that, just by coming along, he’d fucked up a whole bunch of lives.

  Being able to tell Mom to find somebody who really was a babysitter, though? That sounded pretty good. If he never messed with another poopy diaper as long as he lived, he wouldn’t shed one single, solitary tear. Dad always claimed babies weren’t really human till they got potty-trained. Marshall hadn’t known about that one way or the other before. He believed it now.

  Making real money, grown-up money, sounded pretty good, too. Zero chance of doing that with short stories. Your chances of doing it with novels weren’t what anybody would call good, but they weren’t zero, either. People did make a living writing novels. One or two of them even got rich.

  All the same . . . “I mean it, Kelly. I’ve never had an idea that big.”

  “How hard have you looked?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer that. He had no idea how or why ideas came, or why sometimes they didn’t. Maybe the Idea Fairy was spending a couple of weeks on the beach at Maui, working on her tan. Maybe the bulb in his story-detector light burned out, and he didn’t notice it for a while. He had no clue.

  “Um, Marshall . . .” Kelly’s voice changed. It was as if she’d suddenly realized she didn’t know everything there was to know. So Marshall thought, anyhow, but he was feeling harassed right then.

  “What is it?” he asked, more roughly than he might have.

  She bit her lip. “Just so you know, your father and I are trying to have a baby. So there may be another half-brother or half-sister on the way for you. I didn’t think it should be a surprise if it happens.”

  “How about that?” Marshall said, which was safe almost all the time. His first reaction was Oh, Christ! I’ll never get away from diapers! His second reaction made him giggle. Kelly raised an eyebrow the way Dad would have—damned if they weren’t rubbing off on each other. Marshall explained: “Here I’d have two new half-sibs, and they wouldn’t be related to each other at all. How bizarre is that?”

  “Pretty much,” Kelly allowed. “Your father said the same thing about you and Rob and Vanessa when we started trying.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Marshall pondered that. Nothing he could do about it, he decided—Dad had had a lot longer to rub off on him than on Kelly.

  “Uh-huh.” Kelly got back to the main track: “Is it bizarre enough to be a novel idea?”

  It was novel to Marshall, all right, whether it was to his father or not. Then he realized that wasn’t what she meant, or not all of what she meant. He shrugged. Maybe it was. Maybe.

  X

  The last time Kelly’d seen Missoula, Montana, she’d left it behind in a GI-issue Humvee with a super-duper desert air filter and a pintle-mounted .50-caliber machine gun. That was what the Idaho sheriff—an old buddy of Colin’s—who’d taken her away had called it, anyhow. Kelly didn’t know from pintles. She’d never heard the word before—or since, either.

  But now she was back in Missoula, looking at more Humvees with super-duper air filters and pintle-mounted guns. When she climbed into one of them this time, she’d be heading east, not west.

  Missoula was the edge of the world these days. The edge of the habitable world, anyhow. Everything closer to the supervolcano was buried in ash. Missoula had got ashfall, too, but it wasn’t buried. Plenty of places much farther away had had a lot more dumped on them. The prevailing winds kept most of the ash away from here.

  And so, if you wanted to examine the new caldera, Missoula made a good place to start from. That you had to be out of your frigging mind to want to do any such thing . . . Colin had said as much to Kelly. He’d been as emphatic as he could manage without using profanity—enough to impress her quite a bit, in fact. And then, when he saw she was out of her frigging mind, at least that particular way, and had been for years, he threw his hands in the air and said, “Well, if you’re gonna go, I hope to God you learn something worthwhile.”

  If that wasn’t love, what was it?

  Kelly’d signed as many releases for this little jaunt as she had when she flew over the enormous zit the supervolcano blew on the Earth’s face. If anything happened to her while she was exploring—anything at all, from dandruff to unasked-for rattlesnakes or bears to getting charbroiled in a lava burp—she admitted in advance it wouldn’t be the government’s fault.

  This time, the Humvees had U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY stenciled on their sides. The guys sitting behind the machine guns, however, didn’t look like USGS personnel. They looked like soldiers. There was a good reason for that, too: they were.

  One of them had two little black stripes on each collar point of his camo uniform. “Uh, Corporal, are we really gonna need all of that firepower?” Kelly asked him.

  “Ma’am, I just don’t know,” he answered with unsmiling—and unyielding—seriousness. That ma’am grated, but only for a moment. He was more than half Kelly’s age, but he couldn’t have been much more than half her age. To him, that would ma
ke her a walking antique. He went on, “Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”

  “I guess.” Kelly didn’t feel like a walking antique, no matter what the corporal (who had zits of his own, though not supervolcano-sized ones) thought. Nobody truly antiquated could have a baby, right? She wasn’t going to have one now, or they wouldn’t have let her do this no matter how many releases she signed. But she was trying. She took another shot here: “I didn’t know anybody was left alive very far east of Missoula.”

  “Well, ma’am, nobody’s quite sure—that’s what our briefing says.” The corporal was relentlessly polite. “Some of the ash has washed away since the eruption. Some of the land toward the crater may be habitable, and some people who kind of want to get out from under may have taken up residence there.”

  People who kind of want to get out from under. That was an interesting way to put it, but not a bad one; for the first time since Wild West days wound down, the government of the United States didn’t fully control all the land from sea to overfished sea. You saw CNN stories about squatters and homesteaders and survivalists and cultists founding their own little communities inside the devastated areas off to the east of the eruption. They didn’t always like it when the government found them again. Sometimes they didn’t like it with guns.

  You didn’t see stories like that about Montana, or at least Kelly hadn’t. But since when had CNN given a flying fuck about Montana? Kelly wouldn’t have bet CNN had ever heard of it. And some people had always lived in these parts because they wanted the government bothering them as little as possible. Some of those people did have guns, too. Lots of guns, in fact.

  Which meant the pintle-mounted .50-calibers probably weren’t the worst idea in the world. That world wasn’t the way you wished it were, or the supervolcano never would have gone off to begin with. The world was the way it was, dammit, warts and zits and all.