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 make 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.
Her breath smoked. Missoula in autumn hadn’t been a place where anyone would go to loll around in a bikini even before the eruption. Since? Places like Moose Jaw and Novosibirsk came to mind. What Moose Jaw and Novosibirsk were like these days. . Is someone else’s worry, thank God, Kelly told herself firmly.
“All ashore who’s going ashore! Everybody else, all aboard!” Larry Skrtel didn’t have a bullhorn. Then again, the USGS geologist didn’t need one, either. He was as close to an unflappable man as anyone Kelly’d ever met, but he’d never had trouble making himself heard.
He walked up and down the convoy of Humvees, impersonating a liner’s chief steward or a train conductor or a mother hen or whatever the hell he was impersonating. When he neared Kelly, he dropped his voice to talk in more civilized tones: “Won’t be quite such a mad dash along I-90 this time. . I hope.”
“Jesus, so do I!” Kelly blurted. They’d roared west from Butte to Missoula in a Ford they’d piled into at the Butte airport right after the supervolcano blew. That impossibly huge cloud of dust and ash swelled and swelled behind them, and Kelly’d thought it would catch them and eat them no matter how big a jump they had on it. This was the way the world ended-not with a whimper but with a bang.
Skrtel grinned at her. “We’re still here. The caldera’s still here. Of course we’ll go take a good look at it. Doesn’t the Bible say something about a dog returning to its vomit?”
“Beats me.” Kelly had only the most limited acquaintance with the Bible. If it went on about puking dogs, she wasn’t sure she wanted any more.
Geoff Rheinburg climbed into the Humvee right behind hers. Her chairperson waved and winked when their eyes met. Kelly hoped he didn’t notice how halfhearted her answering wave was. Even more than she had at the geologists’ conclave in Portland, she felt as if she’d fallen back into grad school.
They headed east about an hour later than they’d planned to. Used to the ways of geologists, Kelly thought that was a miracle of efficiency. The soldiers who manned the machine guns all rolled their eyes and shook their heads. They defined efficiency in military terms. It took more than surgical masks (Kelly wore one, too) to hide their scorn.
For the first fifteen or twenty miles on I-90, things seemed close to normal. The Interstate was, well, the Interstate. There were a few vehicles on it besides the USGS Humvees. There were even a couple heading toward Missoula from the east. Missoula might not have been the end of the known world after all, then, even if you could see it from there. When would they reach Here Be Dragons country?
It didn’t take long. Even before they got out of Missoula, she saw patches of ash and dust that a couple of years of rain and snowmelt hadn’t cleared away-they looked like nothing so much as the Jolly Green Giant’s spilled sacks of Ready-Crete. A giant had spilled that junk over the continent’s midsection, all right, but it wasn’t jolly and it wasn’t green.
Halfway between the mighty metropolises of Clinton and Bearmouth, neon-orange highway signs warned ROAD PAST THIS POINT NOT PLOWED. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. It wasn’t quite All hope abandon, ye who enter here, but it was-literally-close enough for government work.
Odds were those signs had been made with snow in mind. What they’d been made for didn’t matter, though. They could, and did, also warn of other trouble ahead. Even in the jaunt from Missoula to here-the easy part of the trip-Kelly had watched those spilled-cement patches getting bigger and coming closer to the road.
Then there was more grit on the Interstate than blowing wind could account for. She could feel it in the Humvee’s motion and hear it scritching under the tires. “Fuck,” said the corporal behind the machine gun. “Signs weren’t bullshitting, were they?”
Bearmouth still had people in it: ghosts wouldn’t have needed to burn stuff and make smoke pour out of chimneys. The whole tiny town looked as if someone had smacked it in the face with a dirty-gray powder puff about the size of the Superdome, though. Kelly wondered if the locals would be as gray as their town, but she didn’t see any of them.
Pine forests were gray, too. Under that gray, how many of those trees were dead or dying? Most, unless she missed her guess. Rivers ran gray. Ash covered their beds and swirled along in their turbid waters. Ash did such a job of clogging rivers that the floods throughout the Midwest had been horrendous. They would have been even more horrendous if so much of the Midwest weren’t currently uninhabited.
Super-duper desert air filter or not, one of the Humvees crapped out only an hour and a half into the journey. Everybody stopped. People who knew about engines, or thought they did, huddled about under the hood. After a while, they threw their hands in the air and gave up. Once upon a time, Kelly’d seen a World War II cartoon of a tough sergeant looking away as he gave his mortally wounded Jeep the coup de grace with a.45. She’d never run into anything in real life to remind her of that, not till now.
They shifted people and supplies to the surviving Humvees and went on. The Interstate became more and more a matter of opinion. There were times when Kelly couldn’t tell whether they were on the road or not. Only when they went under an overpass-or had to go around one that had collapsed under all kinds of strains its designers never worried about-was she sure.
The Humvees’ big, heavy-treaded tires began throwing up wakes of dust and ash. “Fuck,” the corporal said again. “This shit makes Iraq and Kuwait look like a walk in the park, and I thought they were just about all sand when I was there.”
When they camped that night, their site precisely defined the middle of nowhere. Kelly’d chowed down on MREs before. The one she had there did not improve her opinion of them. Back in the old days, hadn’t men joined the Army to get three square meals a day? Since then, the people who fed soldiers seemed to have forgotten the difference between a square meal and a meal that came in a square box.
Water had turned some of the ash and volcanic dust into something halfway between dried mud and cheap concrete. Except for the geologists, Kelly was hard-pressed to find anything alive. Everything was grayish brown. Well, almost everything. One of the machine gunners brought in a small plant and said, “This here is a dandylion, ain’t it?”
“It sure is,” Skrtel agreed. After popping the dandelion into a specimen jar, he checked the GPS on one of the Humvees to find out exactly where they were. He wrote it down. They had laptops and iPads, but the only way to recharge them in the field was from the Humvees’ batteries. Keeping their use down was a good idea, in other words.
Kelly’s chairperson did some poking around of his own. After perhaps ten minutes, he grunted in triumph and plucked a specimen of his own. He carried it over to Kelly. “Can you identify this?” Professor Rheinburg asked, as if she were still his student.
Her heart thumped in alarm. As if she were still his student, she didn’t want him to think she was dumb. She peered at the plant in the palm of his hand. Whatever it was, a dandelion it wasn’t. She nervously licked her lips. She knew a hell of a lot more about rocks and soil than she did about the plants that grew on them. Still, considering where they were and what this one looked like. . “It’s a lodgepole pine sapling, isn’t it?”
He beamed at her. “That’s just what it is! The damn
things can grow in the crappiest soil there is. That’s why there are-were-so many of them in Yellowstone. They’re the first squatter trees to come back after an eruption-even after this eruption.”
“Except this one won’t grow now,” Kelly pointed out.
“Nope.” Rheinburg didn’t sound upset about it. “If I can find one after a few minutes of poking, there are bound to be millions of them popping up all over the ashfall.”
“I guess.” That made Kelly more cheerful, but not for long. Millions of lodgepole pines scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles meant maybe ten trees per square mile. Ten saplings per square mile, that was. Not all of them would live to grow up. Even if all of them did, the result wouldn’t be what anyone in his right mind could call a forest. It would look a lot more like a bald man’s comb-over.
She said as much to Rheinburg. He laughed. “There’s a difference,” he said. “A bald guy’s comb-over gets worse and worse as time goes by, ’cause he’s got more and more scalp showing and less and less hair to cover it with. Here, there will be more and more trees and bushes and whatnot to patch over Mother Earth’s bald spot.”
Kelly found herself nodding. “Well, you’re right,” she said.
Her chairperson beamed at her. “You can say that. It’s one of the reasons I enjoyed having you in the program so much. Most people would sooner be drawn and quartered than admit they’re wrong.” He briefly-only briefly-looked sheepish. “Lord knows I would.”
“How come you never told me you enjoyed having me in the program till I wasn’t in the program any more?” Kelly asked pointedly.
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