The Nebraskan picked up the veteran first, then put-putted over to Bryce. Strong, sunburned arms helped him out of the lake and into the bottom of the boat, where he lay like a just-caught bluegill-except he lacked the energy to flop around. “You okay, man?” his rescuer asked. “Everything in one piece?”
“I… think so,” Bryce answered after taking stock. “Thank you.”
“Yeah!” the Afghan vet said. “Thank you! Amen!” He sounded as if Bryce had reminded him of something important he’d been too rattled to remember on his own. And that was probably what had happened.
“I’m gonna see how many more folks we can get aboard,” the local said, and got the boat going again. Bryce didn’t care. He’d made it.. so far.
XI
Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were on I-95, heading north toward Portland, Maine, when the boom from the superano roared over their van. They weren’t taken by surprise; by then, NPR was tracking the progress of the enormous sound wave. “The biggest noise this poor old planet has heard in tens of thousands of years,” one of their correspondents declared.
“Yeah-except for Congress,” Rob Ferguson said.
Justin Nachman followed a snort with a reproachful look. “Piss and moan, piss and moan. Five minutes ago, you were bitching about paying the toll before they let us onto this stretch of the Interstate.”
“Well, it sucks,” Rob said.
“It’s how they pay for keeping the road up,” Justin said, as if reasoning with a possibly dangerous lunatic.
The van chose that moment to bounce on a pothole. Rob, who was driving, said, “They do a great job, too. We manage okay back home without this toll-road bullshit.”
The lead guitarist rolled his eyes. “Give me a break, man. How many years in a row is it that the California budget’s been fucked up?”
Rob didn’t know how many consecutive years it had been. He did know he couldn’t remember a year when the budget hadn’t been a disaster area. And he could remember further and further back as he got older: close to twenty-five years now, though he hadn’t cared about the budget when he was a little kid. Twenty-five years seemed a hell of a long time to him. He’d never had the nerve to say anything like that to his father, though. He had what he was all too sure was an accurate suspicion the older man would have laughed in his face.
Since he didn’t have a good comeback for Justin, he concentrated on making miles. Charlie and Biff were in the other van, right behind this one. They were on their own. Snakes and Ladders had dissolved in New York City, and they hadn’t booked another opening act.
Rob wondered what his bandmates thought of the supervolcano. They knew about it: everybody’d been talking about it when the band stopped at a roadside Hardee’s for lunch. Seeing the star on something called Hardee’s weirded Rob out every time he came East. In his part of the country, the chain that served those same burgers went by Carl’s Jr. Well, Best Foods mayonnaise was Hellman’s back here, too. Bizarre, all right. He wondered if there was a song in it.
“Devastation continues to spread across wide stretches of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana,” the NPR newsman continued gravely. “There are as yet not even the vaguest estimates of lives lost or property damage. Nor is there any way to stop the spreading ash cloud. An astronomer has calculated that the supervolcano eruption might well be observable from the planet Mars.”
“Wow,” Justin said. “Can you imagine the Martians going, ‘Bummer, man! The Earth is screwed big-time!’”
Rob could imagine it. “Write that down,” he said. “We should be able to do something with it.” It sure as hell made a better song idea than artery-cloggers with the wrong names.
The band always took Write that down seriously. Stuff that was supposed to stay in people’s heads too often didn’t. Justin produced a notebook and wrote. Better than even money nothing would come from the jotting, but at least it wouldn’t get lost.
They had reservations at a motel not far from the airport. Rob had spent enough time on the road that he was good at it, which didn’t mean he got off on it. There were times when he’d wake up cold sober, not wasted on anything, but still without the faintesg aea of where the hell he was. The feeling didn’t always disappear right away, either. Rooms rarely gave a clue. Cable stations were the same everywhere, pretty much. If a paper was shoved under the door or waiting outside, odds were it would be USA Today. Hotel management types commonly felt it was better than the local rag. The sad thing was, they’d be right more often than not.
By the time he got down to breakfast, he’d usually have things figured out-usually, but not always. He liked playing. He liked performing. He liked the small-scale celebrity status being in a halfway successful band brought. Travel… He wasn’t so sure about travel.
There were guys older than his father who’d play a gig, hop in a car, and play at another club five hundred miles away the next night. Some of them had been big once upon a time and were still hanging on. Some had made a career out of being second-stringers. They had their fans-not enough to get rich from, but enough to pay the bills. Most of them. Most of the time.
That seemed to be about what Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had to look forward to. Do I want to wake up wondering where I am when I’m fifty? Rob asked himself that question, and another one, every time he checked in somewhere. The other question was, Do I want to wake up wondering where I am when I’m seventy?
So far, he hadn’t found anything else he wanted to do more. He hadn’t found any place where he wanted to grow roots, either. So tonight here he was in Portland, Maine. He’d played in the other Portland, too.
Justin sometimes got sick of life on the road, the same way he did. As far as Rob could tell, Biff and Charlie didn’t care where they were. For guys in a band that needed to stay on tour-and, in this age of MP3s and iTunes, how many bands didn’t? — that was the right attitude.
After they checked in, Justin asked the desk clerk, “Where can we get some dinner around here? Doesn’t have to be fancy. Just, y’know, food.”
She named a place, adding, “They’ve got the best lobster rolls in Portland, I think.”
“How do we get there?” Rob asked eagerly. He was in favor of lobster and shrimp and crab. If the rest of the guys weren’t, well, the menu was bound to have other stuff on it they could eat.
Directions didn’t sound too complicated. The band kept talking about getting GPS. God knew the systems were cheap these days. But Rob and Justin both liked to navigate. Finding a place on your own made arriving mean something it didn’t when a computer held your hand all the way there. Even getting lost could be interesting. Rob thought so, anyhow. Charlie and Biff thought their bandmates were full of it. But they’d never missed a gig because they’d got lost, so the rhythm guitarist and drummer didn’t grumble. Much.
A roll, split in half. A little mayo, even if under an assumed name. Lobster-lots of lobster. A lobster roll. A Maine specialty. The finest invention since the wheel, as far as Rob was concerned. Maine was one of the few places where lobster didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Rob was happy to pay a mere arm for such concentrated deliciosity.
Justin had a big bowl of clam chowder-creamy, of course, with not a tomato in sight. Tomato chowder was a New York City thing, not a New England one. The divide was as fierce as Yankees and Red Sox. Rob actually liked both kinds, which made him either a neutral or a heretic, depending.
Charlie got a chicken pot pie. You could do that anywhere. Biff ordered the brrito. Rob didn’t think he would have chosen a lobster roll in Phoenix. A burrito in Portland, Maine, struck him as an equally bad idea. But it wasn’t his stomach. Sometimes the less you said to the guys you played with, the better off you were.
When they walked out of the restaurant, the sun was going down. It looked like… a sunset. The only screwy thing about it, as far as Rob was concerned, was that the Atlantic was at his back and the sun was sinking toward land. He was conditioned to think of the sun coming up over
land and going down in the Pacific. This felt wrong-wrong enough for him to say something about it.
The other guys were all Californians, too. They nodded. “Hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right,” Biff said.
“I read somewhere that after Krakatoa blew up, sunsets were spectacular for a couple of years because of all the dust and ash in the air,” Justin said. “I was kind of hoping for something fancier than-this.” He waved across the parking lot at the ordinary red ball going down into the ordinarily reddening western sky.
“Give me a break, man!” Rob exclaimed. “It just happened a few hours ago, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Justin had the grace to sound sheepish. “But this thing is a lot bigger than Krakatoa, too. This thing is a lot bigger than, well, anything. I mean, it happened in fucking Wyoming, and we heard it here.”
“Instant gratification, that’s all you want, dude.” Rob wanted to bite his tongue. Damned if he didn’t sound like his father. If you played in a band and your old man was a cop, what did that say about you? Nothing good, for sure.
“Hey, who doesn’t want gratification?” Charlie said. “We’ll pick up some girls after we play.”
“There you go!” Justin and Biff said the same thing at the same time in the same enthusiastic tone. Rob didn’t, but it wasn’t as if he hated the idea. It wasn’t as if he didn’t do it himself, either. What was the point of even fairly small celebrity, after all, if you didn’t take advantage of it?
Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Vanessa remembered that was a line from a play, but not which one or who’d written it. Things she was interested in, she remembered-and she’d hit you over the head with the details, too. What she didn’t care about was as one with Nineveh and Tyre… which was also a line from something or other. From what? Who cared? If she ever needed to find out for some reason she couldn’t imagine now, she could always Bing it.
If she got the chance, she could. Denver was also becoming as one with Nineveh and Tyre. She’d never dreamt it could happen so fast. Ash started raining down on the city-Jesus Christ, ash started raining down on the whole goddamn state-the day after the supervolcano went off.
Vanessa got up that morning intending to go back to Amalgamated Humanoids. There hadn’t been any earthquakes big enough to wake her up during the night. She had power again; her digital alarm clock buzzed her at a quarter past six, as she’d set it to do when the electricity came on again. So, volcano or no volcano, everything should have been pretty much back to normal.
Well, almost everything. Pickles remained one freaked-out kitty, and who could blame him? Cats and cataclysms didn’t mix well.
She soon discovered she didn’t mix so well with cataclysms, either. When she opened the blinds after she got dressed, everything was grayish brown: the walkway outside the apartment, the stairs, the grass in the courtyard, the air, everything. She could barely see across the courtyard to the apartments on the other side-there was that much crap in the air. The breeze made it drift and billow, now thinner, now thicker.
“Fuck!” Vanessa said, which exactly summed up how she felt. She’d looked forward to watching snow fall in Denver. It was something she’d never seen before; she was an L.A. kid, all right. What was out there now seemed like a filthy parody of the genuine article.
Somebody across the courtyard opened his door and headed for his car. He took about three steps before he started coughing and frantically rubbing his eyes at the same time. His shoes kicked up ghostly clouds of dust and ash. He turned around and went right back into his place as fast as he could.
How much volcanic ash did he bring in with him? Enough to keep him coughing and rubbing for the next week? Vanessa wouldn’t have been surprised. She was glad she’d seen him. Otherwise, she would have charged out there herself. All of a sudden, that didn’t look like such a great idea.
Instead, after coffee and some oatmeal, she went back into the bedroom and turned on the TV. She’d already given Pickles his usual morning kitty treats. Now he jumped up beside her on the bed and meowed for more. The world had broken routine, she’d broken routine-why shouldn’t he? She fed him. If food made him happy, or at least happier, fine.
Then she opened up the bedroom blinds. The Black-and-White Fairy-actually, the Shades of Grayish Brown Fairy-had touched that side of the building, too. Dust drifted the vacant lot next door. The house on the far side of the house was painted a pink hotter than Vanessa would have used for anything but lipstick. You sure couldn’t prove it now.
A couple of cars chugged by on the street. Their lights speared through the dust as if it were fog. They kicked up enormous, plumy wakes of ash as they went. One of them stopped before it got to the corner. The driver popped the hood and got out. Then, like the fellow in the apartment across from Vanessa’s, the gal got in again and slammed the door. Only dimly visible, her hazard lights came on.
“This sucks. Big-time,” Vanessa said. Pickles meowed again. If that wasn’t agreement, she’d never heard it from the cat.
She turned on the TV. A talking head on CNN was going on about the climatic implications of the eruption. That wasn’t what Vanessa needed to hear. If you were somewhere else, somewhere far away, you could afford to talk about such things. Vanessa wanted to know what to do about the mess she was in the middle of.
She grabbed the remote again and fired an infrared beam at the set. CNN gave way to local news. It was news for morons, but the other local morning news shows were news for imbeciles. If not good, this was better.
It wasn’t the usual morning crew, but the gang who’d done the eleven o’clock news the night before. They were in the same clothes. They looked tired. One of them sipped from a styrofoam cup.
“If you’re wondering where Jud and Mariska and Meteorologist Mark are, they were advised not to come in today,” she said, setting the cup down. “Everyone in the Denver area is advised not to travel today-or for the foreseeable future-unless it’s absolutely necessary. This is an emergency the likes of which we’ve never known.”
Newsies usually laid things on with a trowel, to say nothing of a shovel. Vanessa began to think that they weren’t exaggering this time. Looking out the bedroom window again, she wondered if anybody could exaggerate this.
The advice the night newswoman gave was simple. Don’t go outside. If you have to go outside, for God’s sake don’t breathe. That was fine for the moment. What happened when you ran out of food, though? If you had a choice between filling your lungs with crud and going hungry, which should you pick? If it wasn’t Don’t know whether to shit or go blind, what would be?
“Ash continues to fall,” the weary-looking blonde said, brushing back a lock of hair that had come loose in spite of spray. News for morons, sure as hell. “Some geologists believe it may get three feet deep all over the Denver metropolitan area before it lets up. Roof collapses are probable, especially in case of rain.”
“Urk!” Vanessa said, a dismayed noise she’d got from her old man. She hadn’t thought of that. How much would a layer of volcanic ash three feet deep on a roof weigh? How much would it weigh after absorbing as much rainwater as it could hold? How much weight would a roof be designed to take? Some, sure, because roofs here had to hold up against snow. But that much?
Every time she heard a creak overhead, she was gonna freak out. She could see that coming like a rash. You weren’t supposed to go outside into the ash. They’d made that abundantly clear. But what if the ash decided to come to you instead? It was a good question. Vanessa wished she, or somebody, could come up with a good answer.
After commercials-this didn’t seem to be an urgent enough emergency to dispense with selling the product-a newsman whose boyish charm had worn thin by this hour said, “No one is sure yet whether mandatory evacuation of Denver and the surrounding areas will become necessary. The Governor, who was in Lamar at the time of the eruption, has ordered out the National Guard to assist in protecting Colorado lives and property.”
A ne
wcomer to the state, Vanessa didn’t know where the hell Lamar was. A road atlas showed her: out in the southeast, in cow country near the Kansas border. The governor was one lucky stiff. That put him a couple of hundred miles farther away from the eruption. Things might not be so bad out there.
Since the nighttime sports guy was still in the studio, he came on the air. The end of the Rockies’ season and the early part of the Broncos’ season had gone on indefinite hold. Vanessa despised baseball and football impartially. The only thing she wondered was which wasted more time.
Then the worn-looking newsman came back and said, “Snowplows are doing their best to keep the Interstates open south and east of the city to facilitate evacuation in the event that the authorities decide to implement it. No one knows how long the big machines’ air filters can continue to protect them from the grit in the air. By the same token, no one knows how long the volcanic ash will keep on raining down from the sky, either.” He added something he might not have been reading off his teleprompter: “Right now, nobody seems to know much of anything, folks.”
Vanessa loathed facilitate and implement almost as much as she hated impact. They were stupid and pretentious. People used them to sound important and knowledgeable, and ended up sounding like pompous assholes instead.
But if I-25 and I-70 were open, at least partway… Shouldn’t she get the hell out while the getting was possible even if not exactly good? If they were already thinking about evacuation, Denver was really and truly screwed. In the way of bureaucrats, the authorities were nerving themselves before doing what they plainly needed to do.
She looked out the window again. That car was still stuck there, with others easing around it and kicking up more dust and ash as they went. How long would her own elderly Corolla last? Wouldn’t she be worse off if she got stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere-which, to her, defined all of Colorado outside Denver-than if she sat tight?
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