Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3

by Harry Turtledove

  XII

  Back in California, Bryce Miller had never paid that much attention to the Weather Channel even after the supervolcano eruption. When he did pause there in his channelsurfing, it was to see what Mother Nature was doing to some other part of the country, not what she had in mind for him and his friends. SoCal led a charmed life.

  But he wasn’t in SoCal any more. He was smack dab in the middle of the flyover states. Back in California, he’d used the term with the light irony it deserved… if you came from one of the coasts, anyhow. They used it here, too—bitterly, angrily, hopelessly. This was the part of the country the parts of the country that made (and that spun) the news ignored. Roman citizens of the second century A.D. who lived in Spain or Pannonia or Cappadocia would have said provincial the same hangdog way American citizens who lived in Nebraska said flyover states.

  And, in this part of the country, the Weather Channel had the urgency of a kick in the teeth. That had been true even before the eruption. It was truer now. Satchel Paige famously said Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you. Around here, you did need to look ahead, to see what was rolling down on you.

  This particular Weather Channel talking head was a very pretty Asian woman. She was pretty enough to make Susan notice. “You don’t mind the blizzards so much when she tells you about them?” she suggested.

  “I could have the mute button on, and I wouldn’t mind,” Bryce answered. Susan gave him a dirty look. He winked at her. That helped, a little.

  He discovered he didn’t want the mute button on after all. The pretty weathercaster was saying, “The upper Midwest needs to brace itself for the arrival of the Siberian Express. This enormous cold front was born near the North Pole and has been rolling south like a freight train. It has already severely impacted Canada.”

  Bryce made a face at the bureaucratic language. He started to say something rude about it, but Susan shushed him.

  Just as well, too. The talking head went on, “Edmonton’s low night before last was minus sixty-eight. Saskatoon’s high yesterday—the high, mind you—was minus thirty-one. The storm reached Winnipeg last night. The low there was minus fifty-six.”

  A screen behind her showed a handful of people bundled up like Eskimos trying to make their way through swirling white. It was labeled EDMONTON, but it could have been any place up to and including the last frozen circle of hell, the one where Dante stuck Satan. Americans were preoccupied with their own misery. The eruption itself had hurt the USA worse than Canada. The disrupted weather was doing a nastier number on the neighbor to the north.

  Even back in pre-eruption days, ninety percent of the people in Canada had lived within a hundred miles of the American border. That was where the climate had been sortakinda decent: like northern Minnesota, say, only a little rougher. A little rougher than northern Minnesota now, though, was on the ragged edge of human habitability. Or, judging by that footage, maybe over it.

  “This is a big storm—a big, rugged storm. Even by post-eruption standards, this storm is very bad news,” the weathercaster said seriously. “Lots of snow, strong winds, and frigid temperatures mean you should not go out in it unless you absolutely have to. And if you think you have to, think again. Staying inside may save your life.”

  Susan eyed the progression of the front on the CG map. It was just roaring over the border now. That put it about a day from Wayne. Maybe a little more, but you couldn’t count on that.

  “Don’t go in to class tomorrow,” she said. “You’d probably get there okay, but I don’t know about coming back to town. What I do know is, I’m afraid you’d be dumb enough to try.”

  “Hey!” Bryce sounded indignant, which he was. “I don’t do anything the people around here don’t do.”

  “Yeah, well, even the people from around here aren’t used to a blizzard like this,” Susan answered. “Stay here. Stay… as warm as you can, anyhow.” She couldn’t say stay warm, because the apartment wasn’t warm. But it was warmer than the outside would be, anyhow. How cold could it get here with the Siberian Express howling down? Colder than Bryce wanted to find out about, that was for sure.

  He went to the Wayne State Web site. On the home page, an announcement in big red letters said DUE TO THE WEATHER EMERGENCY, CLASSES WILL NOT BE HELD FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS. A DECISION ON REOPENING WILL BE MADE AT THAT POINT IN TIME. THANK YOU.

  Susan read it over his shoulder. “There,” she said, a certain I-told-you-so in her voice. “Now you can stay home without guilt.” Since guilt was exactly what Bryce would have felt for ditching his class without official approval, he maintained a prudent silence.

  Al Stewart sang a song called “Coldest Winter” about, among other things, the winter of 1709. Along with the guys in Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, Al Stewart was one of the few pop musicians with a sense of history, or even a sense that there was such a thing as history. No surprise that a classicist and ancient historian like Bryce had a lot of him on his iPod.

  When the Siberian Express blew into and blew through Wayne and did its goddamnedest to blow the town over, Bryce decided that 1709 no longer came within miles of being the coldest winter in memory. Topping it might have taken more than three centuries, but this winter of the world’s discontent froze every earlier competitor in its tracks.

  The wind howled. It screamed. It wailed. The apartment had double-paned windows with shades, venetian blinds, and thick curtains. Cold seeped through them anyhow. Susan had a stuffed cat with a long, fat tail filled with sand that she used to keep chilly outside air from sliding in under the bottom of the door. That was fine, but how did you keep the chilly air from sliding past all the other cracks between the door and its frame?

  For that matter, how did you keep cold from sliding in through the door, and through the walls? Yes, the walls were insulated, too. When the Siberian Express came to town, the insulation was fighting as far out of its weight as a flyweight forced into the ring against Mike Tyson.

  Bryce had always been glad the apartment was on the second floor, not the first. When you had neighbors above you, you often wondered if a herd of shoes was migrating right over your head. Stereo sound you didn’t want was another delight when it came through the ceiling.

  That much, he’d known as long as he’d been apartment-hunting. But what he hadn’t worried about till he got to Wayne was that heat rose. When the people down below tried to heat their place to the fifty degrees allowed by law, some of what their sorry heater pumped out also did its feeble best to warm this apartment. That feeble best might not be very good, but anything was better than nothing.

  Against the Siberian Express, anything wasn’t nearly enough better than nothing. After a while, Bryce and Susan spread all the blankets they had on top of the bed. They got in, fully clothed, and wrapped their arms around each other.

  “I’m still cold,” Susan said.

  “So am I.” Bryce nodded. “Well, if they find us frozen, we’ll be one lump of ice, not two.” He squeezed her tighter.

  “You say the sweetest things,” she murmured. For some reason, Bryce suspected her of imperfect sincerity.

  He couldn’t stay wrapped up with her all the time, not unless his bladder froze solid. When he flushed the toilet, he hoped it would work. They insulated pipes here, but not against weather like this. Sooner or later, those would start freezing up.

  On his way back to bed, he pulled back the curtains and the blinds and the shade so he could look out the window. He saw a tone poem Whistler would have been proud of. White snow fell from a gray sky onto white drifts. The drifts might not have been as high as an elephant’s eye, but they were gaining on it.

  “What do you see?” Susan asked. She was too sensible to come out from under the covers herself unless she had to.

  “Outside of a couple of woolly mammoths, just snow.” Bryce adapted a line from Groucho Marx: “Inside the woolly mammoths, it’s too dark to tell.”

  “Ba-dum-bum! Rimshot!” Susan said, and th
en, “Invite the poor things in for coffee. I’ll bet they’re freezing out there.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised.” Bryce got back into the bed. As he chastely snuggled with his wife, he said, “Remind me again why I wanted to move to Nebraska.”

  “It’s called a job.” Susan pronounced the last word yob, as if it were some strange foreign term, possibly borrowed from the German. “They give you money for it.” That came out as moh-nee, as if it also didn’t belong in English.

  “Oh, yeah.” Bryce nodded as if he’d forgotten. He wished he had.

  After a while, bored by doing nothing under the covers, he started to do something. Susan slapped his roving hands away. “If you think I’m going to take my clothes off for you, Buster, you’re out of your ever-lovin’ mind!”

  “You don’t have to take ’em off,” Bryce said—reasonably, he thought. “Just slide some of ’em down a little. Hey, what else have you got to do right now?”

  “Now there’s a come-on line,” Susan muttered. But she rolled over so her back was to him. With a minimum of disrobing, the deed was done. Fornication with next to no bare skin wasn’t nearly so much fun as fornication with lots of bare skin. It was a hell of a lot better than no fornication at all, though.

  Bryce thought so, anyhow. “See?” he said, setting a hand on her bare hip. “We’re warmer now.”

  “Oh, boy.” Susan quickly made sure that hip wasn’t bare any more. Then she rolled over to face him again and gave him a kiss. “You’re crazy. I love you. I must, or else I’d be crazy, too.”

  They got out of bed to use the john, to eat, to make hot coffee for themselves if not for the woolly mammoths, and to check the Weather Channel and CNN for views of what the Siberian Express was doing to the Midwest beyond their frozen apartment and frozen Wayne. By then, the storm had got down to St. Louis, which didn’t even come close to being built for blizzards like that. It was heading for Memphis and New Orleans. They were even less ready. Ready or not, here it came.

  • • •

  For Marshall Ferguson, the Siberian Express was a noise in another room. When the house had power, he saw a lot of white on white on the TV. Newscasters gave forth with the number of people found frozen. It was up into the hundreds by now.

  His own problems were more immediate. He remembered hearing about someone who set out to be a writer. Naturally, the fellow cast his eyes on the tip-top markets like Playboy and The New Yorker. He declared he wouldn’t bother to submit to any market that paid less. Either he starved or he found some other line of work, because you sure couldn’t make a living that way.

  For one thing, you were competing against the entire literate world. All the top writers aimed their top stuff at places that paid best. For another, those magazines weren’t likely to buy more than one story a year from you even if you were Salman Rushdie or Stephen King. No matter how well they paid, they didn’t pay well enough to let you make a living on one story a year, or even on one story a year to each if you could do that.

  And selling pieces for two hundred bucks here, or four hundred fifty there, didn’t feel the same after the big check from Playboy came in. His friends wondered why he couldn’t do that all the time. So did his father. Dad nodded when Marshall explained the facts of a writer’s life to him. He might understand them once he heard them, but they sure didn’t make him jump up and down.

  They didn’t make Marshall jump up and down, either. If he weren’t living at the house where he’d grown up, if he didn’t pick up money on the side sitting for James Henry and Deborah, he would have had to look harder for a real job. He didn’t get as much from his mother as he had because James Henry was in school and had teachers to babysit him.

  After he took a shower and dried his hair one evening, he came downstairs. “Do you know somebody named Sophie Lundgren?” Kelly asked.

  “Mrs. Lundgren? Sure. She taught me Spanish at San Atanasio High,” he answered. “Hay un elefante en mi ropa interior.” It meant There’s an elephant in my underwear. Mrs. Lundgren hadn’t taught him that, but he wouldn’t have been able to work it out for himself without what she had taught him. After a second or two, he thought to ask, “How come?”

  “Because she called a few minutes ago—wants you to call her back. I wrote her number down.” Kelly paused, too. “Sophie Lundgren taught you Spanish? She sure doesn’t sound like she’s from Mexico City.”

  Marshall shrugged. “I just work here. But yeah, she did. Hey, this is L.A. People here do all kinds of shit you wouldn’t guess from their names.”

  “Well, you’ve got that right,” Kelly said.

  “What did she want?” Marshall asked. “I don’t think I’ve heard from her more than once or twice since I graduated, and that’s, like, a while ago now.”

  “She said she was calling some of the students she liked best. She’s moving—moving a long way, I think. She wants help weekend after this one hauling boxes out to a truck. She say’s she’ll buy dinner for everybody who shows up.”

  That was bound to be a cheaper way to move than paying professionals. Still, Marshall had liked Mrs. Lundgren. Seeing her one more time might be a kick. “Where’s the number? I’ll call her back.”

  “It’s on a Post-it by the landline phone.”

  “Okay.” Marshall ambled over. So it was, with the name in Kelly’s neat, legible script. Accurate was the word for Kelly, all right. Marshall dialed the number. It had a 310 area code, so it wasn’t too far away.

  Ring… Ring… “Hello?” Yes, that was Sophie Lundgren’s voice—a whiskey baritone, or near enough. Marshall didn’t know that Mrs. Lundgren poured ’em down, but that sure had been the rumor. Her voice did nothing to disprove it, anyway. If he’d taught high school for umpty-ump years, he figured he would have drunk, too, in self-defense if for no better reason.

  “Hi, Mrs. Lundgren. This is Marshall Ferguson. I hear you need some moving help weekend after this one. What time, and where do you live?”

  “Thank you so much, Marshall!” his old teacher exclaimed. “Yes, Saturday a week, starting right after lunch.” She gave him the address. It was down in Torrance, but this side of the Del Amo mall—not too far to get to by bike. He wrote it down on the Post-it, too. Next to Kelly’s, his handwriting looked even sloppier than it did on its own.

  “Who else’ll be there?” he asked. “Anybody I know?”

  She named two or three names he didn’t recognize—they were from either before or after his time. Then she added, “Oh, and Paul and Janine Werber said they’d come.”

  “How about that? I remember them, yeah,” Marshall said. He’d had serious hots for Janine Werber when he was seventeen years old. She’d been Janine O’Sullivan then: a gray-eyed blonde who looked as Irish as her name. She’d liked him okay, but not like that. She’d had eyes only for Paul. In high school, he’d already had his eye on becoming a CPA. Marshall thought Paul was the dullest thing that walked on two legs, but even he knew he might not be completely objective.

  “Paul is… very reliable,” Mrs. Lundgren said.

  “Right,” Marshall answered. If that was the best she could come up with, she thought Paul was the dullest thing on two legs, too. “Look, I’ll see you about one Saturday after next, okay?” He said his good-byes and hung up.

  “Somebody you knew way back when?” Kelly asked.

  “Uh-huh. A couple—they’ve been a couple a long time, I guess. She was kinda cute then.” Marshall didn’t want to admit too much, even to himself. “He was kinda nerdly.” That was an understatement.

  One of Kelly’s eyebrows quirked. “Okay.” She left it right there. So did Marshall. If Paul and Janine were still an item all this time after graduation, what else could he do?

  On the appointed day, he pedaled down to Torrance. Clouds blew past the watery sun. He got a couple of spatters of drizzle, no more. It was chilly, but he didn’t mind that. He’d work hard enough to warm up.

  Mrs. Lundgren’s apartment was on the ground floor, which was
good. He wouldn’t have to lug heavy stuff down stairs. Piles of boxes stood everywhere. His old teacher introduced him to a couple of guys he didn’t know. One of them said, “Hey, haven’t I seen some of your stories online?”

  “Yeah.” Marshall grinned from ear to ear. He’d had one or two people recognize his name before, but only one or two. It was still a treat when it happened.

  Then he forgot about it, because Paul and Janine Werber showed up. Paul had put on fifteen or twenty pounds; his hair was thinning. Janine looked… just the way Marshall remembered. Damn good, in other words.

  Paul started gabbing with Mrs. Lundgren and even trying out bits of the Spanish she’d taught him. He’d always been a suckup—looked as if he still was. That left Marshall with Janine. “Long time,” he said brilliantly.

  “It has been, yeah,” she said, and held out her hand. Marshall shook it. Then—Paul was paying zero attention to anything but his old teacher (and himself)—he kissed her hand and quickly let it fall. If she didn’t like that, she’d let him know about it. If she did like it… He didn’t know what he’d do then. It was like putting a story together. If you didn’t write the first sentence, you’d never see how it came out.

  Her eyes widened. Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it. She didn’t look mad or anything, though. “What have you been up to?” she asked.

  “Got out of UCSB a few years ago,” he said. “I write some stories. I sell ’em, but I’m not getting rich at it or anything. How about you? Kids and all?”

  “No kids.” She shook her head. “I’m a paralegal. It’s not exciting, but it pays some bills. Paul’s practice is doing pretty well, too. We’re so busy all the time, we hardly get to see each other.”

  Was that a hint? He didn’t get the chance to find out, because Mrs. Lundgren said, “Come on, people. You didn’t come over here for Old Home Week. You came to work for your dinner. So work!”