Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  The ground was still shaking when the wind came. Blast from an atomic bomb could wreck things far away from the actual explosion. The roar came at the speed of sound. It had had plenty of distance to attenuate, and had gone around and over a couple of mountain ranges on the way. That meant it was just far and away the loudest thing Kelly had ever heard in her life.

  Somewhere she’d read that artillerymen yelled to help equalize the pressure on their ears. She tried it. It couldn’t possibly hurt. And she felt like screaming any which way. She blew twenty or thirty feet down the runway, picking up more bumps and bruises and scrapes. If she hadn’t had her hands up to her face, that would have been worse, too.

  Part of the terminal did fall in on itself about then. Knocked down by the wind roaring around and through it? Flattened by the unending quakes? Wrecked by nothing more than the vibration from the great roar? Kelly would have checked all of the above on a multiple-choice test.

  The green Ford didn’t flip over. That was something. How much, she wasn’t so sure. Could they make it to Missoula? She’d traveled I-90 before. As she did in many parts of the country, she’d noticed how spindly the supports for the overpasses were. Building codes hereabouts didn’t mandate anything like the quake resistance required in California. So what would happen when something bigger than the Big One hit, even if it was a long way off? They’d find out.

  That cloud in the sky swelled and swelled. It hadn’t blotted out the sun-not yet, not here. But how much of Wyoming and Montana and Idaho had seen night fall in the middle of the day? More every minute, as the long, long shadow went on stretching. It reminded Kelly of the blast from Mount Doom when the Ring went into the fire in The Return of the King.

  But Sauron proved impotent in the end. The hot spot under Yellowstone was anything but. How many millions-or was it billions? probably-of tons of pulverized rock did that cloud represent? Not all of it would be thoroughly pulverized, either. How far could the biggest explosion in the past 75,000 years throw boulders big enough to squash houses and cars? How far could it throw rocks big enough to smash skulls? People in a broad swath of the Rocky Mountain West were finding out right this minute, sometimes the hard way.

  And, for the ones too close to the supervolcano, flying boulders and ash in the sky would be the least of their worries. Good, old-fashioned lava was pouring out of the caldera along with all the junk going straight up. So were pyroclastic flows-mud and boiling water mixed into a hellbrew. When Vesuvius blew in 70 AD, a pyroclastic flow was what buried Pompeii. But, like Krakata, like Mt. St. Helens, like, well, everything, Vesuvius was only a hiccup next to this.

  West Yellowstone, Montana, a tacky tourist town, would be gone, off the map. So would Gardiner, Montana, at Yellowstone’s north entrance, and Cooke City and Silver Gate, Montana, to the park’s-the ex-park’s-northeast, and Cody, Wyoming, a little farther east. South of Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons were going to get another layer of volcanic tuff pasted on. And it would be tuff-and tough-on Jackson, Wyoming, too.

  And all that, of course, was only the beginning. Only the tiniest fraction of the beginning.

  Larry managed to make it to his feet. His denim jacket had a hole in one elbow. His jeans were out at both knees. One knee was bleeding into the blue denim. He didn’t seem to notice. Well, Kelly had hurts she hadn’t started reviewing yet, too. One thing at a time.

  The ground went on rolling under them. Normally, you wouldn’t feel aftershocks from a quake that far away, but that was a big quake, and these were big aftershocks. Still, they did roll instead of jerking, as they would have done closer to the epicenter. You could-Larry could-stand up while they were going on. The wind blasting out from the eruption was still fierce, too, but not fierce enough to knock him over.

  He could even yell through it and make himself heard: “Let’s haul ass while we can. The farther we go before ash starts falling on us, the better. I don’t know how the car’s air filter will like all that grit, and I don’t know how the engine will like the crud the filter lets through.”

  Kelly had known him for a while now. He was low-key, unexcitable. She translated what he’d said into what would have come from most people. He figured the air filter wouldn’t like volcanic ash for hell, and the motor would go queep and die once it inhaled enough grit.

  How many cars-and trucks, and fire engines, and ambulances-across how many states would go queep and die when their engines seized up from overdosing on ash? One more interesting question, in the Chinese sense of the word.

  She’d seen the maps that showed how far the supervolcano threw ash in previous eruptions. Most of the Midwest and big pieces of the West were in deep, deep kimchi. And all that also was only the beginning.

  Can I stand up, too? she wondered. Only one way to find out. Ruth had already made it to her feet by the time Kelly did. Daniel also did it, though he limped as he went over to the Ford. Knee? Ankle? Whatever it was, he could, after a fashion, walk on it. That would do for the moment.

  Larry tried the driver’s door. It opened. He looked inside. “Key’s in the ignition,” he reported. “The pilot wasn’t lying to us.”

  They got in. The guys took the front seats; the women sat in back. It was fair-Larry and Daniel were taller than both of them. As Kelly fastened her belt, she noticed she’d barked her right palm. Ruth had a nasty scrape on her forehead and a bloody ear. All that was stuff they could worry about later.

  Only after the belt clicked tight did Kelly start giggling. Ruth, who was also buckling up, sent her a curious look. She explained: “It’s the end of the world, and I’m fastening my stupid seat belt. So are you.”

  “Oh.” Ruth managed a sheepish nod. “Force of habit.”

  Larry started the car. He’d also used his belt. So had Daniel, who said, “We may need them. If it is the end d, people will be driving like bats out of hell.”

  If that wasn’t a mixed-up metaphor-well, simile-Kelly’d never heard one. Being mixed up sure didn’t make it wrong, though.

  Larry drove around the battered terminal building. People, some of them bleeding, were coming out through windows and doors. “I don’t like to pass them by, but…” he said. No one tried to change his mind.

  By Montana standards, Butte was a good-sized town: it held about 35,000 people. It had banks and offices and apartment buildings and fast-food joints, just like a real city. Some of them had stayed up; some had fallen down. Glass from countless broken windows sparkled in the sun like snow. Some of the glass sparkled on Harrison Avenue, the street that would take them up to the Interstate. That wind hadn’t been fooling around.

  “A flat would be all we needed right now, wouldn’t it?” Ruth said.

  “Bite your tongue,” Kelly said sweetly. “Hard.”

  Some of the locals were helping others who’d been hurt. But lots of men and women stood on the sidewalks-or sometimes in the middle of the street-staring and pointing at the cloud swelling up and up and out and out from the supervolcano. Kelly couldn’t blame them. She kept twisting to stare back at it herself. How high? How wide? How close? More of each every second-that was the only thing she was sure about.

  Larry turned on the radio. Hiphop blared out of it: no doubt the station chosen by the last guy who’d serviced the Ford. He punched buttons. Before long, he found someone solemnly saying, “The President has declared a state of emergency in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The governors of those states have also declared emergencies, and have called out the National Guard.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Daniel said. “We’re all safe now.”

  “Will you sock him, please?” Kelly said to Larry. “It’s a long stretch for me.”

  “Consider yourself socked,” Larry told Daniel as he swung the car onto the westbound I-90. He pointed. “This overpass is okay, anyhow.”

  “That makes one,” Kelly said. Ruth made as if to sock her. Kelly dipped her head in apology.

  “Loss of life in and around Yellowstone Park is believed to be
heavy, as is property damage,” the newscaster intoned. Obviously, he was in Washington or New York City or some place like that, some place where this seemed like one more natural disaster that didn’t have anything to do with him or his well-connected way of life. And so it was.

  For the moment.

  He went on, “For the time being, we have no direct reports from the impacted area.”

  All the geologists in the Ford hooted and hollered. “No shit, Jackson!” Ruth yelled, which was among the more coherent editorials.

  “1-800-BUY-CLUE,” Kelly added.

  She and Ruth both kept twisting around to look back through the rear window. Every time, the cloud from the supervolcano looked bigger and blacker and closer. They were making Interstate speed. How fast was it going? How far would it come? Right about to Missoula, if past eruptions were any guide-and they were the only guide anybody had. How far the ash would blow in the other direction was an altogether different, and much bigger, question.

  Every so often, the car would kind of lh for a little while, as if a tire were low on air. Then it would straighten out and fly right again. “Didn’t they put any shocks on this hunk of junk?” Daniel asked.

  “It’s not the shocks,” Kelly said. Being a Californian, she had more direct and more varied experience with earthquakes than any of the others. “It’s the aftershocks. This is what an earthquake feels like in a car.”

  “Oh,” Daniel said in a small, sheepish voice.

  Larry hit the brakes. Kelly had to look forward instead of back. A pair of Montana Highway Patrol cars had their light bars flashing red and blue. An officer from one of them waved traffic towards an off-ramp. Sure as hell, an overpass was down. Half a car stuck out from under it. Kelly’s stomach lurched like the Ford in an aftershock when she thought about being in the other half. It would have been over fast, anyway. All that concrete falling…

  The Highway Patrolman-no, Patrolwoman: she had boobs under her khaki shirt and a ponytail-waving cars to the ramp wore a mask like the ones the geologists had used in Yellowstone. That was smart. Whether it would be up to the challenge ahead… Whether the whole country would be up to the challenge ahead, let alone one crappy mask

  …

  Larry finally got around to asking Daniel if his place would hold four. “For a little while, anyway, if you don’t mind sleeping on the couch,” Daniel answered. “Kelly and Ruth can have the bed, and I’ve got a spare sleeping bag in my closet. I’ll use that.”

  “Should work,” Larry agreed. In musing tones, he went on, “I wonder whether Missoula gets gas and food and things shipped in from the east or from the west.”

  That was another fascinating question. Kelly hadn’t started thinking in those terms, but she realized she’d start needing to. Supplies might be able to reach Missoula from Idaho. Nothing much would be able to cross Montana for God only knew how long. Ash-and probably boulders, too-would already be raining down on Livingston and Bozeman. I-90 would be impassable. Stretches of it might end up under hundreds of feet of volcanic debris. Maybe some secondary routes farther north would stay open. Maybe-but Kelly had trouble believing it.

  What would Missoula and lots of places like Missoula do when a whole bunch of what they depended on for daily living didn’t-couldn’t-get through? They’d damn well do without, was what. And what would come of that?

  Kelly knew the question really mattered. She knew she ought to be worrying about it. But she couldn’t, not right now. Thanks to that helicopter pilot, she hadn’t been smack in the middle of ground zero when the Yellowstone caldera fell in on itself. She was still here. She was still breathing. She still had a chance to go on breathing a while longer. She still had the chance to find out the answer to her important question, and perhaps to some others as well.

  Right this minute, she figured that made her one of the luckiest and, in a way, one of the richest people on the face of the globe. And she wasn’t going to worry about a single goddamn thing.

  The powers that be at Amalgamated Humanoids didn’t mind if people listened to the radio at their desks. Every so often, there was a little dustup when somebody listened to something the person at the next desk couldn’t stand, and turned it up instead of down when the allegedly injured party complained. But that didn’t happen as often as Vanessa Ferguson would have guessed. Not everyone was as touchy as she was, though she didn’t see iat way.

  She bounced from NPR to the classical station to political talk. She would have liked to bring her iPod, but the powers that be did frown on headphones-even earbuds. They claimed people got too distracted using those. It sounded like bullshit to Vanessa, but she hadn’t been there long enough to stick in her oar on something like that.

  She sure as hell needed something to take part of her mind off the proposal she was editing. If she gave the wretched document her full attention, she’d grab a paperweight or something and chuck it at her monitor. Uselessly long words in uselessly long sentences that twisted and writhed like worms on a sidewalk after a rain…

  Would the engineers write better if they learned English the way they learned programming, however they learned that? They couldn’t very well write worse.

  An announcer broke into a Bach harpsichord concerto. If that wasn’t a hanging offense, it damn well should have been. “I do apologize for the interruption,” the woman said, “but an important news bulletin has just reached us. There is a major-I repeat, a major-volcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park. This is on a scale far larger than anything previously known. There is some concern that Denver may be adversely affected. Please stay tuned for any further developments. Thank you.” Bach returned, cool and pure.

  As far as Vanessa knew, she was the only person here who listened to classical music. But exclamations floated up from several cubicles, so the bulletin must have gone out on a bunch of stations. Vanessa remembered her dad pitching a hissy fit because she was coming here.

  That was just too ridiculous, though. Volcanic ash could screw up flight schedules, sure-Denver politicos had been pissing and moaning about revenue reversals for months now. Even so, Yellowstone was… well, how far from Denver was Yellowstone, anyhow? Vanessa had checked once, before she moved here, but she’d forgotten.

  She hit Bing. com to find out. Most people would have Googled it, but she was Microsoft all the way. From Yellowstone to Denver was about 430 miles. She laughed. Ridiculous to think that anything so far away could possibly do much here. Reporters got you to keep listening by exaggerating bulletins, and the poor woman at the classical station had to read whatever they stuck in front of her. She wouldn’t have any way of knowing what bushwah it was.

  Nodding to herself, Vanessa closed the Bing window and grimly returned to the proposal. She tried to tell herself it wouldn’t seem so bad with Bach lilting out of the radio. She tried, but she didn’t have much luck.

  At first, she hardly noticed the rolling motion under her. But it built and built and kept on building. A rolling motion rather than a sharp wham meant a quake was a long way away-all her California experience taught her so. A quake a long way off that was this big was a lulu, though.

  A file cabinet somewhere not far enough away went over with a crash. Next thing Vanessa knew, she was under her desk, trying to bunch her legs up under her so it would protect them, too. The rolling went on and on. Screams-soprano and baritone-rang through the office. “Make it stop!” somebody yelled, but it wouldn’t stop.

  Little by little-after several more tall files fell-it did ease up. A final shake sent Vanessa’s keyboard clattering down. She supposed she was lucky the monitor didn’t slide off the desk, too. And acoustic cottage cheese drifted from the ceiling like indoor snow.

  She hit "1em"›She scrambled out from under the desk. She was one of the first to emerge, maybe because she was a Californian and more used to quakes. Several cubicle partitions had gone down along with the file cabinets. She could see much farther across the office than she’d been able to before. Lucky the
power stayed on, she thought.

  Which must have tempted fate or something, because a doozy of an aftershock almost knocked her off her feet. She squawked and grabbed for the edge of the desk to steady herself-and as she touched it the lights went out. For a few seconds, everything went as black as the inside of a mortgage banker’s heart. People started screaming in earnest. Vanessa didn’t join them, but she didn’t miss by much.

  Then a few wan emergency lights came on. Somebody spoke from ceiling speakers that she hadn’t known were there: “Evacuate the building! Immediately evacuate the building!”

  She couldn’t remember hearing an idea she liked better. Pausing only to grab her handbag, she hurried toward a red EXIT sign glowing over a door. The office was on the second floor. Along with everybody else, she went down a gloomy hallway to the stairs. Several people limped. A small man had his arms around the shoulders of two bigger guys. As Vanessa squeezed past, the smaller fellow said, “Goddamn file cabinet smashed my ankle. Hurts like a motherfucker, pardon my French.”

  “I’ve heard the word,” she answered. He chuckled before he went back to swearing.

  The stairwell was dark except at the bottom, where dim daylight beckoned. Vanessa had done plenty of things she’d enjoyed more than trying not to trip and break her neck, or even an ankle of her own. If anybody above her fell, everybody on the stairs was liable to go ass over teakettle.

  She made it. She hurried to the front entrance. It had those glass doors that automatically slid sideways when anyone approached. Printed across them was the legend IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, PUSH OUTWARD. Vanessa had seen it a million times without ever paying much attention to it. But someone had pushed, and the doors had indeed opened outward.

  Yet another aftershock hurried her into the parking lot. How much could the building take? What kind of quake standards did Denver have? Out in the open, she didn’t have to worry about that so much. She really had wondered if the ceiling would come crashing down.