Not necessarily. If the plows couldn’t keep the highways open, how long would the town still have food? How would anybody bring it in? What would happen if-no, when-the waterworks stopped working? Or when the roofs started buckling and people discovered they couldn’t breath indoors, either?
She was a cop’s kid. Spinning out disaster scenarios came easy. So did knowing that most people would sit tight till it was too late, then start running around like chickens that had just met the chopper. That was what most people did. She’d seen it for herself; she didn’t need to remember her father’s scorn for the common run of civilian.
And since that was what the common run of civilian did, it behooved her not to do likewise. Her mind made up, she threw some clothes and pills and tampons and a couple of books into an overnight bag. She added bottles of water, granola bars, and anything else edible she could grab that wouldn’t go bad right away. She also threw in kibbles and treats for the cat. If she slung the bag over her shoulder and carried the cat carrier in one hand, she’d be able to keep the other one free, and she needed that.
Pickles hated going into his carrier any old time. He knew going outside meant trouble-the vet and other notorious cat-torturers. And he particularly hated it when he was all jumpy anyhow. He scratched her but good before she finally stuffed him in there. “You’d better be worth it, you stupid fuzzhead,” she snapped before she sprayed the wounds with Bactine. That little bottle went into the overnight, too.
Then she soaked a towel in the kitchen sink and draped it over the cat carrier. She soaked another one for herself.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she said aloud in a voice whose calm surprised her. As a matter of fact, she wasn’t remotely sure. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t was another old phrase that fit much too well. She might be worse off bailing out; she might be worse off staying. The swirling gray-brown grit outside warned that she might be in over her head no matter what she did.
You could die out there. Or right here. That was what it boiled down to. Vanessa had always been the kind who did something when she had a choice between that and sitting tight. She wouldn’t have given Bryce the heave-ho if she weren’t. She wouldn’t have followed Hagop to Denver, either.
Yeah, and look how well that turned out, her mind jeered. L.A. wouldn’t be catching it like this.
But she wasn’t in L.A. She had to do what looked best where she was. “Fuck,” she said one more time, and lugged her chattels to the apartment door. Pickles yowled mournfully. “Shut up,” she suggested. He yowled some more. Ignoring him, she shouldered the overnight bag and draped her own wet towel over her eyes and nose and mouth. It didn’t want to stay, so she secured it with a rubber band.
The next little while would have to be in Braille. She opened the door, got the cat carrier out, and closed it behind her. She groped till she grabbed the iron railing that would take her to the stairs and followed it till she found them. Left turn, eminded herself. Sixteen stairs down to the courtyard, right? Take ’em slow. You can’t watch what you’re doing.
At what she thought was the bottom, she felt around with her foot. Concrete, sure enough-concrete with a bunch of new grit on top. The stucco wall that led to the parking garage would be over to the right. To her vast relief, her hand brushed rough plaster. Okay. She knew where she was again.
Anyone who could see her was probably laughing his ass off. Too damn bad. Anyone who could see her was inside an apartment, which meant the sorry son of a bitch had his own problems. She patted the wall every step or two to guide herself along. She didn’t want the stucco ripping up her fingers, especially after the number the cat had done on the back of her hand.
She patted again-and felt nothing. “Ha! Found it!” she exclaimed in triumph. Here was the opening for the stairway down to her car. Some more groping got her to the rail attached to the stairway wall.
Down she went. How many stairs till she got to the bottom? Sixteen from her place to the courtyard, but how many going below? She couldn’t remember. She guessed it would be sixteen again, and slammed her foot against flat concrete flooring, hard, when that proved one too many. Taking a stair that wasn’t there was almost as bad as missing one that was. But she didn’t fall.
After a couple of steps away from the stairwell, she adjusted the rubber band and let the towel drop away from her eyes, though not from her nose and mouth. She had to see to get to her car, and she had to see to drive. Things weren’t so bad here as they were up top. The air was still dusty, and there was grit with footprints going through it on top of the smooth concrete. It wasn’t already hideously thick, though, the way it was in the courtyard.
She chucked her bag into the car, then stuck Pickles on the passenger seat. She draped a blanket on the overnight bag so nobody peering in could see it was there. At another time, she would have stashed it in the trunk. Not today. The less she got in and out, the better. She was just glad the tank was almost full.
As soon as she started the motor, she turned on the lights. You wouldn’t normally need them during the day in Denver, but what did normally mean now? Nada, that was what. She backed out of her space. “Good-bye, God. I’m going… someplace,” she said. Kansas? New Mexico? Some place where things like this didn’t happen, like the frogs in Cannery Row.
She didn’t have to open the window to use a card to open the gate. A beam sensed the car coming up. The gate slid back. Was it her imagination, or did the thing sound creakier, squeakier, than usual? What was all that volcanic grit doing to its mechanism? How long would it keep working? That wasn’t her worry. As long as the thing had opened this time…
Vanessa drove slowly and carefully. A good thing, too. Somebody’d already rear-ended the car that crapped out down the street from her building. She skirted the fender-bender and went on. When she tried the radio, all she got was static. She pulled out her phone. No bars. She swore. What the hell was going on? TV back at the place had worked.
Sure it had. It was cable. But how many zillions of tons of crud were fouling the air right now? How much of that crud was tiny bits of iron? Some small fraction, no doubt. But a small fraction of a zillion was still a jillion: plenty to jam radio and phone signals. Vanessa cussed some more. She hadn’t figured on that.
She hadn’t figured on any of this. Who hado could have, except for a handful of crazy geologists? Only they’d turned out not to be so crazy after all, hadn’t they?
Traffic lights were still working, but you couldn’t see them till you got right on top of them-if then. She drove around more dead cars, and around a couple of more accidents, too. One of them looked bad: an SUV had broadsided a car at an intersection. Maybe the driver hadn’t seen the light till too late.
Here was Mississippi Avenue. She turned left, ever so warily. Buckingham Square Shopping Center was only a couple of blocks east. Not far past it, she could get on the 225, and it would take her down to I-25 or up to I-70: whatever her little heart desired.
Her little heart desired to be back in L.A. The 225 wouldn’t give her that, not directly. But it would get her started.
Kelly Birnbaum was four-hundred-odd miles from the centerpiece of her academic career. She’d passed her doctoral orals not least by explaining in great detail what might happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano ever went off. Looking back on that terrifying morning in the Geology Department conference room, she’d done pretty goddamn well.
Only one trouble left: she couldn’t get any closer, to see for herself just how smart she’d been. Ash had dusted Missoula, but only dusted it. The coating here was thicker than the ash from a bad brushfire would have been in California, but not a whole lot thicker. Missoula lay almost straight upwind from the eruption. Both surface winds and the jet stream blew stuff away from here. And Missoula got dusted anyway.
You could go fifty miles down the Interstate if you had a super-duper air filter on your car. If you had a vehicle with a super-duper air filter and caterpillar treads, you might make a hundr
ed miles from Missoula. If you were real lucky, you could get to Butte.
Farther than that? No way, Jose. Wasn’t gonna happen. The ash was too thick. The wind had already started blowing it into drifts that were thicker yet. I-90 was buried deeper than alas poor Yorick had been before they started playing catch with his skull.
Planes and helicopters were even more fugheddaboutit than cars. If your car’s air filter clogged past survivability, you were stuck, yeah, but at least you were stuck on the ground. If your aircraft’s filter died, so did you. It was a long way down.
She was still living at Daniel’s apartment along with Ruth and Larry. Daniel had got a cot so he wouldn’t spend all his nights on the floor in a sleeping bag. He’d offered the cot to Larry, but the older man actually liked the couch. Kelly and Ruth shared the bed. The one-bedroom place was crowded. The geologists got on one another’s nerves. Nobody complained too much, though. They all knew things could have been worse.
Refugees packed Missoula. Everyone who’d managed to escape from places farther east seemed to have stopped right here. No apartments or hotel rooms were to be had for love or money. People who’d never met till they got here found themselves living together as intimately as the geologists were. Plenty of people were sleeping in their cars or in tents-and living like that in Missoula as fall replaced summer and warned of winter ahead was not for the fainthearted.
Kelly would have been glad to get out. Her own small Berkeley apartment took on the aura of the earthly paradise in her memory. But no flights came into or went out of Missoula International. They were near the edge of the no-fly zone, but they were in it-the air was too foul. She couldn’t afford a car, even a on-trip beater. Prices had skyrocketed because so many people wanted to get away. Not even trains were coming into town. She was stuck.
She did what she could with her cell phone and with Daniel’s computer. He’d created new user accounts for her and Ruth and Larry. They took turns on the machine and tried not to hog it. But walking away from the apartment and talking on the phone where no one else could hear her was the biggest pleasure she got most days.
If she’d had her druthers, she would have talked Colin’s ear off. But he was still working, and had his own worries. If you had to be somewhere when the supervolcano erupted, L.A. wasn’t the worst place. Something within shouting distance of normal life still went on there
… not that a cop’s so-called normal life was anything to write home about.
Even so, it had to beat Missoula. “There’s nothing fresh in the stores,” Kelly complained. “No fruit, no salad fixings, no vegetables-well, a few potatoes.”
Across the miles and the wireless link, Colin chuckled. “You’re right next door to Idaho, remember. Spud paradise, right?”
“I guess,” Kelly said. “Next to no fresh meat, either, and no fish at all. Most of what we’re getting is canned goods, stuff that keeps.”
“It makes sense, you know,” Colin said.
“That doesn’t mean I’ve got to like it,” she answered.
“Nope. Prices are way up here. There’s talk about doing something to stop profiteers,” Colin said. “What’s it like there?”
“About the same-through the roof,” Kelly told him. “People bitch like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Who says I wouldn’t?”
“Okay, maybe you would. They wouldn’t complain so much if they could get what they wanted. There isn’t even much fresh bread here. Noodles and rice and flour take up less space and last longer, so that’s what they ship in.”
“What do you do with flour if you don’t have much in the way of anything to bake it with?” Colin asked.
People in Missoula were starting to ask the same question, only louder. Kelly had an answer, though not one she’d offered the locals: “Matzos, what else?”
“Huh.” In multicultural Los Angeles, Colin would know about matzos. He clinched it by saying, “Will that get you converts or a bunch of raving anti-Semites?”
He took Kelly by surprise-so much so that she laughed out loud. She laughed loud enough, in fact, to make an unshaven guy in a sweatshirt and ratty jeans give her a funny look. Despite his shabby appearance, he might have been anything from a wino to a bank president. Missoula was a funky place these days. Kelly didn’t care what he was, as long as he didn’t bother her. “I love you, Colin!” she said.
“Well, I love you, too, babe,” he answered. They didn’t throw the word around like a Frisbee. He was chary about using it at all. Considering how he’d been burned, Kelly had never blamed him for that. She wished she heard it more, though; it warmed her every time she did. Stuck in Missoula, Montana, in autumn, she needed all the warming she could get.
And this was only the beginning. The very beginning of the beginning, in fact.
Colin added, “I sure wish you were here and not there.”
“Jesu”
“Sooner, I hope. Let me see what I can do from this end,” Colin said. “I’ve been working on a couple of things, but they haven’t panned out yet. I’ll keep trying. Didn’t want to say anything about it, ’cause I can’t promise. All I can do is try, same as you.”
“O-kay,” Kelly said. How many strings could a Socal police lieutenant pull in Montana, or maybe Idaho? What kind of connections did Colin have, to make him think he could pull any at all? Had he, say, spent ten years working alongside somebody who was now a county sheriff up here, or chief of police in some little town near the state line?
Kelly realized she had no idea. It didn’t seem impossible, or even unlikely, but she couldn’t have proved it one way or the other. There was a lot she didn’t know about this man whose company she longed for.
She could have asked him, but what good would it have done? Either he’d finagle something, or he wouldn’t. Or maybe the trains or buses would start up again, or she’d be able to find a ride heading west, or
… something.
She said her good-byes and went back to Daniel’s apartment. It had a TV, and it had books she was interested in reading. Stacked up against the rest of Missoula, that made it seem like heaven on earth, even if this particular version of heaven was on the crowded side.
Daniel was out when she got there: probably at the university. They were trying to get the fall semester going, though the odds seemed poor. She envied Daniel his place here. He fit in. It made a difference.
Larry and Ruth were there, though, and greeted her with long faces. “What now?” Kelly asked, wondering if she really wanted to know.
“The gas is out,” Ruth answered. “I was going to heat up some corned-beef hash”-more stuff in cans-“but the stove doesn’t work. Nothing’s coming through the burners-you’d smell it if it was.”
Kelly found the next reasonable question: “Have you called the gas company yet?”
“No, the gas is really out. As in, there is no gas in Missoula any more,” Larry said. “The big pipeline that brings it into town comes from the east, through Montana. I don’t know how much ash and rock the supervolcano put down on top of it, but enough to finally squash it or break it, looks like.”
“That’s… not so good,” Kelly said. The other geologists nodded. No gas for stoves, no gas for heating water, no gas for heating houses? That was about as not so good as it got. Missoula was a place where you needed to be able to heat houses. Did you ever! And the weather wouldn’t get better on account of the Yellowstone eruption. Oh, no.
“I was thinking, what happens if the electricity goes next?” Ruth said.
There was a cheery notion. “Welcome back to the nineteenth century, that’s what,” Kelly said. Only the twenty-first-century world wasn’t ready to fall back more than a hundred years. Not even close. Unfortunately, the supervolcano didn’t care whether the twenty-first-century world was ready. Ready or not, here it came.
XII
It was a quiet Saturday afternoon in Ellwood. There were times when Marshall Ferguson didn’t appreciate his dad for getting him anpart
ment here rather than in Isla Vista, which was right next to the UC Santa Barbara campus. But his old man the cop had learned of Isla Vista’s many bars and of couch-burning and other quaint native rituals, so Marshall was out in the boonies instead.
Nothing exciting had happened in Ellwood since that Japanese submarine shelled the place. But living here wasn’t so bad. Marshall didn’t mind riding his bike to school, or hopping on the bus on the rare days when the weather was bad. He had a car-of course! — but campus parking cost two arms and a leg. He could get anything he needed at the big shopping center on Hollister, just a few blocks away. And it wasn’t as if Ellwood had no bars; it just didn’t have quite so many. It was still a student town, but a quieter student town for quieter students.
No, not so bad. It wasn’t as if Marshall never drank. Oh, no-not even close. Like his father was a teetotaler. As if! Like his mother had never got up on a Sunday morning making a beeline for the Excedrin. Yeah, right!
But he wasn’t smashed on this Ellwood Saturday afternoon. He could have been. The quarter was still new. Nothing needed turning in Monday morning. So, yeah, he could have been, but he wasn’t. He was stoned instead.
The apartment faced west, so he could sprawl on the ratty but unburnt couch in his front room and watch the sun go down through the Venetian blinds’ half-open slats. Sprawled next to him was a little dark-haired girl named Jenny. They weren’t touching right now. Sooner or later, he expected they would. No hurry, though. No hurry at all.
Not hurrying, he passed her the pipe. “Thanks,” she said. He liked the way her lips closed on the stem as she inhaled. The apartment was already fragrant with smoke. It got a little more so.
She gave the pipe back. He took another hit himself. It was all good: the dope, the company, the half-dark room, the sun slowly sliding down between the slats. Thanks to the dope, it seemed to slide slower than usual.
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