Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  Sooner or later, the woods would get logged out. Sooner or later, the ground would be bare and smooth as a baby’s backside—only much colder. Or maybe all the people would give up and move away before that happened.

  From what Rob had seen of Mainers, he doubted that. They would hang in there till a glacier grinding down out of the north drove them away. Even then, they’d dynamite the leading edge of the ice as long as they could.

  The wind picked up. Farrell stuck his hands into the pockets of his overcoat. After a moment, Rob followed suit. That glacier didn’t feel very far away at all.

  * * *

  On my way home! The words chimed inside Vanessa. They should have had four exclamation points, to say nothing of a heavenly choir singing hosannas. “California, here I come!” she caroled, not exactly in tune but with great sincerity.

  Every mile she drove took her farther south, farther from Oklahoma City, farther from the supervolcano. Those miles didn’t take her all the way out of the ashfall zone, though. She’d have to go way the hell down into Mexico to manage that. She would sooner have gone to hell for real. Not that she had anything enormous against Mexico, but she was all done with detours.

  She hoped so, anyhow. The Toyota didn’t sound as smooth as it had when she drove it off the lot, and she wasn’t even out of Oklahoma yet. Would it keep running all the way to L.A.? “You fucker, you’ll keep running if I have to push you across Texas,” she told the machine.

  It kept running. She supposed—she hoped—that meant it got the message. Southern Oklahoma didn’t look too bad. It mostly wasn’t coated in volcanic dust and ash. If it had been right after the eruption, rain and wind had got rid of the bulk of the shit. People were trying to grow crops here, which would have been unimaginable up in Kansas.

  But what you could see wasn’t always what you got. It wasn’t all of what you got, either. How much invisible crud still fouled the breeze? How much was getting sucked into her air filter? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, how much was getting sucked through the air filter and into her engine’s innards?

  If she got into trouble, what was she supposed to do? Get a tow back to Oklahoma City and complain to Carl and the tough broad who told him what to do? That was pretty goddamn funny, wasn’t it? She had no AAA. What point to keeping it up in Camp Constitution or while she was playing vulture in Kansas?

  She didn’t have plastic, either—just the cash in her billfold. She’d cut up her Wells Fargo Visa when she moved to Denver. Wells Fargo was wounded. All the big banks were, with the new mortgage shock that screwed whole states. But Wells Fargo kept breathing, wounded or not, which was a damn sight more than she could say for her Colorado credit union.

  Down I-35 she rolled. Somewhere near Fort Worth, she’d get on I-20, which would take her southwest to I-10. I-10 she knew, or at least the part of it that ran through Los Angeles. There, it went by the Santa Monica Freeway or the San Bernardino, depending on whether you were west or east of downtown. Yes, it ran all the way across the country, but she’d rarely needed to worry about the 3,000 miles or so that weren’t in her own back yard.

  Driving on I-35 could have been driving on the Interstate any place out in the boonies. The landscape was flat and boring, but she wasn’t there to sightsee. She just wanted to make miles. When she remembered she was driving on an expired license, she slowed down a little. A ticket was the last thing she wanted. When she forgot, she put the pedal to the metal again.

  She had to slow down not long after she got into Texas, because she met up with a hellacious rainstorm. Even though she cranked the wipers up to high, she couldn’t see farther than six inches past the end of her hood. That didn’t worry everybody. Several cars roared past her. She’d long been convinced that most people were assholes. Here they were, proving the point for her one more time.

  Then everybody slowed down, even the assholes. Vanessa feared she knew what that meant: somewhere up ahead was a fender-bender or worse. She hit the SEEK button on her radio again and again, trying to find a station that gave traffic reports.

  In L.A., it would have been easy. (In L.A., she would have known where on the dial to look, but she didn’t think of that.) Here, she went through a shitkicker station, someone explaining how the supervolcano was connected to the Blood of the Lamb, somebody singing mournfully in Spanish to the accompaniment of accordions and electric guitars, an earnest woman talking about post-eruption agricultural issues, and several other things she had less than no interest in listening to. She swore at the radio. That didn’t help her get the traffic news, but it made her feel a little better, anyhow.

  The rain drummed down on the Toyota’s roof. She wondered if it would leak. She remembered her old man talking about a car he’d had that was as wet inside as it was outside. The Toyota stayed dry, at least in the passenger compartment. That was one technology they’d managed to improve.

  She crawled along. At last, through the curtains of rain, she saw cops—or were they Texas Rangers?—in slickers doing something with a truck and trailer on this side of the road that closed it down to a single, very cramped, lane. A little farther on, a VW Beetle—a new, postmodern one, not an ancient, funky beater—lay on its back, looking too much like an oversized dead bug. The roof was partly smashed. She couldn’t see who, if anyone, was still inside. That might have been just as well.

  Because of the downpour and the wreck, she didn’t make it to the I-10 the first day, the way she’d hoped she would. She pulled off the Interstate in Cisco, still on the Fort Worth side of Abilene. There she discovered the Texas institution called the access road: the street full of motels and restaurants and gas stations paralleling the highway, with ramps leading on and off. They didn’t have those in L.A. or Denver. She found a place about on the level of the Super 8 she’d had in Oklahoma City and pushed greenbacks at the desk clerk.

  As she paid, she asked, “Do they know when the storm’s supposed to stop?”

  “Tomorrow? The day after?” the black woman answered. “Whenever it does. It’s in the Lord’s hands, honey.”

  “Terrific,” Vanessa muttered. She’d hoped the Lord might keep her from getting soaked when she walked across the parking lot to the Applebee’s next door, but He didn’t seem cooperative.

  And He wasn’t. Umbrella or no umbrella, she got good and wet by the time she reached the restaurant. She ordered a double gin and tonic to improve her attitude. The waitress carded her. From a guy, that might have been flattering. Here, it just pissed her off. Showing the deceased Colorado license alarmed her, too.

  But the waitress cared only about the birthdate. She went away. She came back with booze. What more could you want? Vanessa chose chicken fajitas from the menu. “If I never see another MRE as long as I live, that’ll still be too soon,” she told the gal.

  “You were in one of them camps?” the waitress asked. By her drawl, she’d never gone farther than a long piss from this miserable little hole in the ground.

  “Afraid so,” Vanessa said.

  “Lotsa folks are stuck in ’em, and they ain’t supposed to be real nice,” the waitress said. “You’re lucky you got out.”

  “Tell me about it,” Vanessa said with feeling. What did they call luck? The residue of design, that was what. It sounded impressive, and as if it ought to mean something. Odds were it was nothing but bullshit, the way most impressive-sounding slogans were. Her luck was the residue of not being too fussy about whom she blew, and she’d tried her best not to think about it since she did it.

  “Well, I’ll take your order to the kitchen.” The waitress hustled away. She was perky and built. A guy probably would have watched her ass. Vanessa concentrated on the level of gin in the glass. To her, that was a hell of a lot more interesting.

  If you expected grand cuisine, Applebee’s was the wrong place for you. Better than MREs, it definitely was. Vanessa got outside of the f
ajitas faster than she’d imagined she could. She got outside of another double gin and tonic, too. She lurched when she went back to the motel. She got wetter than she had on the way over to the restaurant, but she cared less.

  Next morning, the motel had donuts and granola bars and coffee in the lobby. The spread wasn’t exciting, but it was free. It was also fast. Vanessa wanted to get on the Interstate and make more miles. She hurried to the car. It was still raining hard. At least it wasn’t snowing. She hadn’t had enough practice with the white stuff to feel easy about driving in it.

  I-20 was full of eighteen-wheelers. Every time one of them growled past her, it threw more water onto her windshield than her wipers could handle. For a few scary seconds, she’d go next to blind. Then the wipers would catch up. She’d be able to see . . . till the next honking big truck came along.

  She wondered why a no-account stretch of Interstate through the middle of Texas was as truck-packed as the Long Beach Freeway coming up from the harbor. And then, all of a sudden, she quit wondering. These swarms of diesel monsters were heading for Los Angeles, just like her. Without them, L.A. would starve, to say nothing of running out of everything it needed besides food.

  Somewhere a little farther along in west Texas, this highway would join I-10, and I-10 would take her home. Till she moved to Denver to be with Hagop, she’d spent her whole life in San Atanasio. If—no, when—she made it home, she vowed she wouldn’t live outside the city limits ever again, either.

  Miles. More miles. Still more miles. She couldn’t go as fast as she wanted to, because of the rain and because of the accidents people who went as fast as they pleased to in spite of the rain got into. She snarled at those blockheads as she crawled past the smashed vehicles they’d infested. Some of the blockheads stood glumly on the asphalt, staring at the havoc they’d wreaked.

  When she finally inched past one horrendous pileup, she saw her snarls there were wasted. Some of the people who’d caused that wreck would never cause another one. She wasn’t sorry the rain kept her from getting a good look at the bodies. She had no trouble imagining what they’d look like. They’d look like the photos in her dad’s cop books, the ones Rob had used to gross her out when she was little. He’d got his butt warmed for that, which didn’t do squat to stop her nightmares.

  And then, just when she started getting close to the I-10, things slowed down again. Vanessa said something that should have turned all the rain pouring down on the whole state to superheated steam. That improved her attitude, but not the traffic.

  In due—no, in overdue—course, she discovered this slowdown didn’t spring from an accident. Instead, an electric signboard sat on the shoulder. It said I-10 CHECKPOINT AHEAD. PREPARE TO STOP. Then it blinked out. And then it said the same thing again. Blink. Message. Blink. Message . . .

  Vanessa lost track of how many times she read it before she rolled past the signboard at last. What she said about stopping for a checkpoint—what she said about preparing to stop for a checkpoint—made what she’d said about the earlier wrecks seem an endearment by comparison.

  Then she said some things about the idea of checkpoints, too. What did they need them for, whoever they were? Wasn’t this the United States? Wasn’t it a free country? If it was, what business did it have checking on who drove to California? You couldn’t hijack a state and fly it into a skyscraper or a government building.

  She got her answer to that when she came up to the checkpoint. STATUS EVALUATION CONTROL—SUPERVOLCANO EMERGENCY AUTHORIZATION ACT, the sign there announced. As far as she knew, the supervolcano was unauthorized. The act authorized things like Camp Constitution and its many unpleasant siblings, the scavenger programs in the Midwest, and maybe this status evaluation control thingy, too. An unnatural act, is what it is, she thought.

  Trucks breezed through. Their reasons for heading west were obvious enough even for government functionaries to grasp. People in cars, though . . . People in cars got the same friendly greetings Taliban terrorists toting AK-47s would have earned going through airport security.

  A fellow in a uniform Vanessa didn’t recognize scowled at her expired Colorado license: not because it was expired but because it was from Colorado. “Why are you going to Los Angeles?” he demanded.

  “Because I lived there my whole life till I went to Denver,” she answered, which was nothing but the truth.

  Truth or not, it didn’t impress him. “Have you got any family there? Can they vouch for you?”

  What if I say no? Vanessa was tempted to. Her attitude towards authority’s pushes had always been to push back as hard as she could. She was able to learn from experience, though. She didn’t always, but she could. This guy’s humorless face said any answer he didn’t like would keep her off the I-10.

  And so, feigning meekness she didn’t feel, she answered, “My father is a police lieutenant in San Atanasio.” He’d never heard of her old stomping grounds; amazing how a face all slabs and angles could show such eloquent disbelief. Quickly, she explained, “It’s not far from LAX—a little south and a little east.”

  “That’s what you say, anyhow,” he answered, his voice as stony as his eyes. He pulled out a cell phone. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a number where I can contact this individual?”

  Vanessa could have taken the cop shop’s number off her own phone. She could have, but she didn’t need to. Dad’s work number had been ingrained in her head since she was a kid. She needed to add an area code to it now, and she did as she rattled it off. At the uniformed man’s annoyed glower, she repeated it more slowly.

  He punched the number into his phone, turning his back and stepping away so she couldn’t follow his conversation. He didn’t look so sour—or rather, he looked sour in a different way—as he stuck the phone in his pocket and swung toward her again. “You appear to have been telling the truth,” he said, sounding quite humanly surprised.

  “Of course I was!” Vanessa yipped. She was surprised herself, and furious, that he should doubt her. She prided herself on her honesty. She said what she meant even when keeping her mouth shut would do more good.

  “Hunh!” Her father couldn’t have snorted better than this guy did. “You listen to the bullshit we hear here, you wouldn’t go of course.”

  “You sound like a cop, all right,” Vanessa said.

  “Yeah, well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

  “Can I go on, then?” Vanessa itched to floor the gas pedal. If she drove fast enough, maybe she could get back to L.A. before this piece of junk crapped out on her. Maybe.

  “I . . . suppose so,” the uniformed man answered reluctantly. “If you haven’t got a place to stay and a job to look forward to, though, you’re a damn fool for heading that way.”

  “The last place I had to stay was Camp fucking Constitution,” Vanessa said through clenched teeth. “Whatever I end up with in L.A.—even if I sleep under a goddamn freeway overpass and dumpster-dive for dinner—it can’t be worse than that. NFW.”

  “Hunh!” the guy said again, even more dubiously than before. But he stepped back and jerked a thumb to the west. “Go ahead, then. You’ll find out.”

  Vanessa didn’t waste time thanking him. She mashed the accelerator with her foot. Smoke spurted from the Toyota’s tailpipe. So what? she thought, and burst into more verses of song nobody but her could hear: “California, here I come! Right back where I started from!” Had anybody from Stephen Foster to Irving Berlin to John Lennon to Bob Dylan to Stephen Sondheim ever penned a finer lyric? She didn’t believe it, not even for a minute. She sang it again, louder yet.

  * * *

  It wasn’t as if Marshall had never seen a typewriter before. He had. Old people kept them around as souvenirs of bygone days. A few offices even had electric ones, for dealing with carbon-copy forms. But he’d never expected to discover one on his desk next to the iMac.

 
“Found it in a pawnshop on San Atanasio Boulevard,” his father said, not without pride. “You’ve been bitching about how you have trouble writing when the power goes out. Well, now you can.”

  “Yippee skip,” Marshall said. “Um—most places these days want you to submit your stuff in Word or RTF. How am I supposed to get those out of this—thing?” It was a Royal manual portable, what a college student might have used in a 1970s dorm room.

  Dad exhaled through his nose, which meant he was bent out of shape—he must’ve thought Marshall would fall on the ancient machine with a glad cry. He sounded hyperpatient as he answered, “You can get words out of it, right?”

  “Maybe.” If Marshall seemed dubious, well, he was. He poked one of the keys. It went down partway, then stopped—he’d taken up the slack, or whatever. He poked again, quite a bit harder. Clack! The key hit the black rolling pin (he supposed it had a real name, but what that was he didn’t know). The carriage advanced a space. For somebody used to effortless computer keyboards . . . “I dunno, Dad. It’s got a monster touch.”

  “You’ll get used to that,” his father said, though how he knew it or whether he knew it Marshall couldn’t have guessed. “And you can get words out of it. People got words out of them for more than a hundred years.”

  “Words, yeah, but not Microsuck Word.”

  Dad waved that aside. “Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,” he said, like a lawyer objecting in court. “So you send somebody a hard-copy manuscript. If he likes it and he’s got power, he can scan it to OCR and get his own Word file. And if he doesn’t have power, he won’t be able to do anything with Word or RTF files any which way.”

  Marshall opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that. After a moment, he tried, “Suppose I get something halfway done on the computer while we’ve got electricity, but I do the rest on this—thing?”