Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  Besides, how hard would the sudden cooling hit all the big agricultural areas that weren’t caught by the ashfall? Again, nobody knew for sure. Everybody would find out, probably the hard way. Kelly did know the computer models weren’t encouraging.

  Easier to lay your worries aside when you were exhausted. Which she was. And she, and everyone else, would only get tireder as they slogged on toward the caldera. Maybe I should have listened to Colin and stayed home, she thought. But that was bare heartbeats before sleep dragged her under.

  She felt more like going on the next morning. She felt enough more like going on, in fact, that even an MRE for breakfast didn’t discourage her . . . much. The instant coffee was nasty, but it packed a caffeine punch.

  Away they went. The wind was at their backs, blowing toward the crater. All the same, Kelly got whiffs of sulfur in the air. It was as if the Devil had set up shop in the phenomenal world. She shuddered. Yeah, it was just like that.

  Every so often, the geologists stopped to collect specimens. Mass spectrography of samples of dust and rock and ash from varying distances from the caldera would tell them all kinds of interesting things about what went into the magma pool deep underground. That was the hope, anyhow. Right this minute, Kelly was just glad the technology had come far enough that the samples could be little tiny ones. She didn’t want to carry one more thing than she had to. For that matter, she didn’t want to carry the stuff she did have to. Her backpacking muscles were as out of practice as her hiking muscles.

  When she complained about it, Daniel Olson gave her a crooked grin. “It’ll get light faster than you wish it would,” said the geologist from Missoula. “Trust me on that one.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. Much of what she was carrying was food and water. She had enough to get her through the planned length of the trek, and a little more besides. If something went wrong, though, they were liable to find out how far they could go on empty.

  In due course, Larry Skrtel consulted his GPS and announced, “Well, we’re inside Yellowstone National Park.”

  “I hate to tell you, but it’s not worth the price of admission any more,” Kelly said. That was definitely in the running for the understatement-of-the-year prize. The ground here was as ugly a gray-brown mash-up of dust and ash as it had been half a mile farther northwest. Here and there, igneous boulders—yes, there were plenty—gave the landscape variety: they made it ugly in a different way.

  Daniel tugged on Larry’s sleeve like a spoiled six-year-old. He sounded like one, too, squealing, “I wanna see the buffaloes! And the grizzly bears! And the wolves and things, too!” in a high, thin voice.

  Kelly laughed. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. The USGS geologist’s face was only half visible, what with his breathing mask and hat, but he seemed closer to tears than to mirth. “So do I, man,” he answered softly. “So do I.”

  Yellowstone’s wide-open spaces—its wide-open, protected spaces—had saved bison from extinction at the end of the nineteenth century. It hadn’t quite been the only place where grizzlies still lived in the Lower Forty-eight, but it had held more of them than any other area of similar size. Wolves had been a recent reintroduction here, but they’d done well enough to leave the park and start raiding nearby farmers’ flocks and herds.

  All gone now. Buffalo herds? Grizzlies? Wolf packs? Gone, gone, gone. Hell, the whole park was gone, and it was—or had been—bigger than several states. So were the nearby flocks and herds and crops . . . and the ones not so nearby, too.

  “I loved this place,” Kelly said.

  “We all did,” Geoff Rheinburg agreed.

  “I loved it,” she repeated. “I did, but there’s nothing left, not even the parts that didn’t fall into the caldera. It’s off the map—I mean, literally off the map. You can still figure out what some of the mountains are, but even that’s not easy.”

  “Tell me about it,” her chairman said. “I’ve been photographing them as we go by, to help work out the changes in the local geography.”

  Something far overhead made grukking noises. “A raven!” Kelly exclaimed in amazement. It was the first one they’d seen. “I feel like something out of Edgar Allan Poe—I want it to go ‘Nevermore.’”

  “Not me,” Daniel said. “During the Civil War, when Sherman was marching through Georgia, he said he’d wreck it so well that even a crow flying across it would have to carry provisions. I was looking to see if the raven had a backpack.”

  “You suppose it’s carrying MREs?” Kelly asked.

  “Wouldn’t that be cruelty to animals?” Rheinburg put in. They could always bitch about their alleged nourishment.

  “Seriously, though, something may sprout where it craps,” Daniel said. “Seeds in the shit, a little extra fertilizer . . . That’s one of the ways life starts up again after big eruptions.”

  A million ravens crapping for a million years. . . . Kelly shook her head. It wouldn’t take anywhere near so long. A million years from now, the supervolcano probably would have gone off again and mellowed again afterwards. In geological terms, these things healed fast. It was only in terms of human lifetimes that they seemed long-lasting.

  Only? She shook her head again. Scientists had invented all kinds of other time frames to help them grasp things that happened very slowly or very quickly. But a human lifetime and its smaller divisions—those were what they lived in, the same as other people.

  They reached the crater at the end of the fourth day. The air smelled of brimstone and metal. It smelled hot, too, or Kelly thought so, even if no thermometer showed a rise in temperature till they got very close to the edge.

  When they did . . . When they did, it was with a certain amount, or more than a certain amount, of trepidation. One little burp from the supervolcano, something so small as to be unnoticeable next to the eruption that dropped so much of Yellowstone into the frying pan, would be plenty to make sure the presumptuous geologists didn’t make it back to the Humvees.

  No doubt about the heat at the edge. Kelly could see the air shimmer, the way it did above a desert highway in the summer—or, more to the point, above a burner on a stove. The odor of sulfur was stronger now. Had people got the idea for hell by staring down into active volcanoes? Kelly wouldn’t have been surprised.

  With the others, she collected mineral samples from the caldera lip. She carefully labeled them, using the GPS to get her exact position. One of these days, she thought, I’ll have to see where this would have been in Yellowstone before the supervolcano went off. Like the others, she’d loved the great park and mourned its loss—along with so much else.

  But that would be one of these days. She had no idea when she’d come back to the caldera, or whether she ever would. She stepped forward till she could look down and look across.

  It was like sticking your head into an oven on high. You could do it for a little while, but not long. More of the lava half a mile down had congealed into rock than had been true when she flew over the crater in a Learjet. She snapped a few photos. Then she had to step back and cool off for a bit.

  The rest of the geologists were doing the same thing. Awe softened Larry Skrtel’s features as he drew back from the very edge. Kelly knew he wasn’t a man who awed easily. “The scale of the thing!” he said.

  “It’s amazing,” Kelly agreed. It was too big for anything so mundane as mere words. More than heat shimmers blurred the caldera’s far wall. It had to be thirty-five or forty miles away: this was a bigger eruption than the one that had created Yellowstone. More than half an hour at freeway speeds. How many thousands of years would it be before there were any roads here again, much less freeways?

  Kelly stepped up for another look. Something out there on the crater floor geysered upward. But that wasn’t boiling water. It was melted rock. She got a pic: a good one, she saw when she checked her viewfinder. Gold and red again
st the gray—no, things down there hadn’t calmed down, nor would they for a long time to come.

  Anywhere on earth but here (except maybe on the Big Island of Hawaii), that would have been spectacular, astonishing, even newsworthy. In this place, what had gone before utterly dwarfed it. Such minor spurts happened all the time. Satellites recorded some of them. Others just made small squiggles on seismographs. Too many trees had fallen in this forest. No one cared if the next one was noisy.

  After a while, Geoff Rheinburg said, “People, we have done what we came to do. Now let’s get the hell out of here.” Kelly couldn’t remember hearing an idea she liked better.

  XI

  Winter. Back in his SoCal days, Rob Ferguson had thought the season a bummer, yeah. It got kind of chilly, yeah. Sometimes it rained. When it did, the freeways clogged. There were landslides if it rained a lot. Every once in a while, one would squash a car on Pacific Coast Highway.

  That was SoCal. That was SoCal before the supervolcano erupted. This was Guilford, Maine, in the third winter after the eruption. Comparing one to the other was like comparing O’Doul’s to Everclear.

  He carried a rifle through pine woods. During the Second World War, the Germans and Russians who’d fought in front of Murmansk might have carried rifles through weather like this. Or maybe it had been warmer and less windy up there.

  Just for a moment, he wondered what Murmansk was like these days. This particular shiver had nothing to do with the deep freeze in which he walked. Better not to think about something like that. Or maybe it wasn’t. The only reason Murmansk had ever been even slightly habitable was that it got the Gulf Stream’s last gasps. If it was still getting them, it might have stayed slightly habitable.

  But the Gulf Stream was supposed to be in trouble, too. He’d heard that, with the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean suddenly so much cooler, less water was going out from them into the Atlantic. If that was true, Murmansk wouldn’t be the only place getting the shaft as a result. All of northwestern Europe would go up against the wall—a wall made of blocks of ice.

  That was northwestern Europe’s worry, though. His worry was shooting something to help Guilford through this latest winter of its distress. The few summer months had let the government send in what supplies it could. But even the government was running out of things, and couldn’t get more for love or increasingly worthless money. If people up here were going to make it, they would have to make it on their own.

  I could go back to California, Rob thought. He’d been telling himself the same thing since Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles found themselves stranded in the middle of Maine. The advantages were obvious. Rain, not snow—at least not snow all the goddamn time. Electricity. TV. The Net. He hadn’t sent or got an e-mail in months.

  Only one thing was wrong with that picture: he liked it here. He couldn’t imagine any place he’d rather be. Guilford would have been a neat place to live even before the supervolcano cast it back on its own resources. Everybody knew everybody else’s business, and all the people figured they had a right to know. And everybody chipped in to help everybody else, too. It wasn’t like SoCal, where half the time you didn’t even know the name of the people who lived next door to you.

  And there was Lindsey. He’d never figured himself for the sort who fell in love, which made him slower to recognize it when it happened than he might have been. But he knew what was what now—knew it and liked it, which surprised him all over again.

  The wind howled down from the northwest. Snow flew almost horizontally. Even in his extra-heavy-duty L.L. Bean winter gear and a bright vest over it, Rob was chilly. But he wasn’t any worse than chilly—well, except for the few square inches of face he had to expose to the blizzard.

  What he really hated about weather like this was that a Super Bowl crowd of moose could amble by a hundred yards away and he’d never know it. Unlike so many things, that really mattered. Moose were lots of meat on the hoof. You couldn’t afford to miss them if they were around.

  If. Sooner or later, Maine would run out of them. If people north and west of the Interstate had to get through every winter on moose meat, it would be sooner. Rob didn’t know what they’d do about that.

  They were doing what they could. Lots of people were raising pigs and chickens. Unlike other livestock, those made do at least in part on human garbage. With greenhouses and sometimes even in carefully tended ground outside, some of the root vegetables of the far north got enough of a growing season to mature. Rob had never tasted, or heard of, a mangel-wurzel before he got to Maine. The food in California had to be better than this.

  Something shot past him, seen and then gone. He started to raise the rifle, but lowered it again a moment later, feeling foolish. You needed a shotgun to go after a flying goose. Trying with a rifle only wasted ammo. Waste, these days, felt criminal.

  He laughed at himself. Two years here and you’re turning into a New Englander, he thought. But what he felt wasn’t really old-fashioned New England frugality. No, it was post-supervolcano desperation. When you used something these days, you could never be sure you’d be able to replace it.

  That flurry of motion was a fox. He took them for granted now, though the first one that darted in front of his SUV had freaked him out. He supposed there would always be foxes and weasels and mice and squirrels. They’d find enough to eat, whether people could or not.

  Sure as hell, a squirrel chittered at him from high in a pine. If he’d had a .22 instead of a .30-06, he might have knocked it down. Rob had nothing against squirrel meat, one more delicacy (if that was the word) he’d met here. But hit a squirrel with what was originally a military round and you didn’t commonly leave enough to be worth salvaging.

  He’d had to walk farther to reach the woods than he would have at the start of the winter before, and quite a bit farther than he would have the winter before that. Like the moose, the firewood had held out so far. What would they do when it ran out? You couldn’t raise baby pines to a useful size on table scraps in a few months.

  The wind eased up. The snow kept falling, but more nearly vertically. Rob could see farther that way, or thought he could. Maybe his eyebrows were just a little less frozen. That over there in the electric-orange vest was another hunter. Moose hardly ever wore vests like that.

  Someone had got shot near Dover-Foxcroft in spite of a DayGlo vest. He’d lived. Officially, it was listed as an accident. Unofficially . . . People said the guy who’d plugged him didn’t get along with him. Still as near a stranger as made no difference even if he’d been here more than two years, Rob didn’t know about that one way or the other.

  More motion, this time straight ahead. Damned if that wasn’t a bull moose, sure as the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt. Rob did his best to impersonate a bright orange pine sapling. The moose dug at the snow with a big splayed hoof. Not much grass had come up during this abbreviated sortasummer. Rob would have bet the moose’d come up empty. And he would have lost the bet, too, because it lowered its dewlapped head and started pulling up whatever it had found.

  “Yeah, you go ahead and chow down.” Rob’s mouth silently shaped the words. Fog gusted from his lips. If he’d worn glasses, it might have screwed him up. Not a sound came out to spook the moose. Slowly, smoothly, he raised the rifle to his shoulder.

  A gunshot.

  Next thing he knew, he was lying in the snow. He couldn’t figure out how he’d got there. He didn’t hurt or anything—and then, all of a sudden, he did. Quite a bit, as a matter of fact. “Fuck!” he said, in lieu of howling like a wolf. No wolves in Maine yet, or none anybody knew about, anyhow. From how far up in Canada would they have to come? However far it was, they hadn’t got here.

  And Rob had other things to worry about. It felt as if one of those wolves that weren’t here was gnawing on his left leg. He wondered if he wanted to look down. If that bullet had shattered tib and fib, t
hey were liable to have to take the leg off. A cripple in the Ice Age—just what I always wanted to be.

  Blood on the snow, more of it every second. It steamed like his breath. Breath, blood—both showed life going out. He hiked up his jeans and his long johns. Each had a neat piece bitten out.

  His stomach lurched when he saw that his leg had a piece bitten out, too. But then he realized the wound was a groove. It had got the muscle on the inside of his calf, but it hadn’t—he didn’t think it had—smashed the bones to smithereens. He yanked a hanky out of his pocket and packed the bleeding gouge with it. Not exactly sterile, but he’d worry about that later. Little by little, he realized he’d probably be around to worry about it.

  The other hunter lumbered over to him. The moose was long gone. “Dude! What happened?” the other guy said brilliantly.

  “Some dumb asshole went and shot me,” Rob answered. “The fuck you think happened?” His wits began to work again, after a fashion. “You got anything I can use to hold this bandage in place?”

  “Sure do.” The other hunter pulled a fat rubber band out of his trouser pocket. What he was doing with it in there, God only knew. Rob took it gratefully any which way. In the war, he would have dusted the wound with sulfa powder. He would have done it now, too, if only he’d had any.

  Another man came up. “I’m so sorry! I was aiming for the moose.” He had to be the guy who’d nailed Rob.

  “Yeah, well, you got some long pig here,” Rob said. The local only stared at him, so he had no idea what long pig was. Clueless git, Rob thought. Aloud, he went on, “Look, I don’t think it’s too bad. Can you guys get me back into Guilford and let them patch me up?”