Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  “Wouldn’t be surprised,” Colin said, which only gave him more reason to worry about his cross-grained daughter. Like Missoula, the L.A. area was getting only a light dusting of volcanic ash. But the shit was practically burying places like Salt Lake City… and Denver. You could foul up your lungs inhaling sawdust at a furniture factory. What the supervolcano spat out was bound to be a hell of a lot nastier than sawdust.

  If Vanessa had listened to him-she wouldn’t have been Vanessa. He hadn’t wanted to listen to anybody when he was her age, either. Come to that, he was none too good at listening to other people even now.

  But what Wes said made good sense. Things Wes said usually did. And Colin had that coffee waiting for him back on the kitchen counter. It wouldn’t be too cold yet. Wes was already making for his own front door. Colin followed his lead. He paused at the doorway and left the slippers outside. The less ash he tracked in, the better.

  His bare feet left gray prints on the dark brown foyer tiles. He’d kicked dust up into the slippers. Well, 409 and some paper towels would take care of that. Coffee first, coffee and the newspapers.

  A notice on the front page of the Breeze said We will keep printing as long as we can. Our paper supplier is in Minnesota. The supervolcano eruption has disrupted communication with areas to the east. Even when things come closer to normal, we fear paper will have a lower priority than food and fuel. But, at least temporarily, we may be compelled to go to Web-only publication.

  Harder to have a cup of coffee and check your computer or your smart phone. Not impossible, but harder. And what happened if L.A. lost power? So much for Web-only publication, that was what.

  The Times didn’t talk about a paper shortage. Maybe it got its newsprint from the Northwest, which was still reachable. Or maybe the editor didn’t believe in borrowing trouble. The headline there said

  SENATORS FROM AFFLICTED STATES APPEAL FOR FEDERAL AID.

  Afflicted. Colin slowly nodded as he considered the word. It was one you seldom met outside the Bible, but no denying it fit here. If the Children of Israel had ever met anything as overwhelming as the supervolcano eruption, the Old Testament failed to mention it.

  He did wonder what Washington was supposed to do for Wyoming and Montana, where the very geography had been pretty drastically revised. How many feet of dust lay on Idaho and Utah and Colorado and Nebraska and Kansas? Not just here and there in those states, but all over everything, or as near as made no difference. How many bulldozers and trucks and years would you need to clear hundreds of thousands of square miles? More than even the USA had in its back pocket: he was sure of that.

  Colin also noticed the irony in the Times ’ headline. L.A.’s leading newspaper had leaned left for longer than he’d been alive after an even lengthier spell of leaning hard right. Had the headline writer chosen his phrase with malice aforethought? Colin wouldn’t have been surprised. Those Senators appealed for Federal aid, did they? Before the supervolcano went blam, they would have found Federal aid about as appealing as HIV. It all depended on whose ox was being gored, didn’t it?

  Almost all the Senators-and Representatives-from the afflicted states were Republicans. That didn’t stop them from sticking their hands out. If Washington couldn’t help them, nobody could. Tlin, it looked very much as if nobody could.

  Which raised other interesting questions. Was anybody at all left alive in Wyoming? Western Montana was hanging on, but barely. Idaho and Utah were in pretty bad shape, too. So was Colorado, though maybe not quite to the same degree. The farming states farther east had also taken a big hit. Almost all those states were red as Rudolph’s nose. If they got depopulated, what would that do to American politics? Nothing good, not as far as Colin was concerned.

  He grabbed the Daily Breeze again. Yes, that was what he’d read. Paper will have a lower priority than food and fuel. “What food?” he wondered out loud. America’s breadbasket had just taken one right in the breadbasket. How could you bring in or move the harvest when volcanic ash smothered the fields and blanketed the roads and choked the life out of tractors and harvesters and trucks (to say nothing of farmers)? One more thing that wasn’t gonna happen.

  The United States had been the world’s larder since the nineteenth century. That was out the window, too. How was the USA going to feed its own people, let alone the many, many hungry beyond its borders? Who would-who could-take up the slack? Anybody? If no one did, what would happen then? Colin couldn’t see the details, but the broad outlines seemed plain enough. Nothing good would happen-that was what.

  How much of the country’s grain was stored in areas suddenly ungetatable on account of the eruption? How many cows and sheep and pigs and chickens were dying right now? He’d read a newspaper squib about a yak farm in the Colorado Rockies. Was anybody saving the poor goddamn yaks?

  Yeah, the country was screwed. The part of the world that depended on the USA was screwed, too. And so was everybody else. He was still only on his first cup of coffee. He hadn’t even started worrying about climate change yet. He got up and put some more water in the microwave. If he was going to do that, he’d definitely need more.

  The knock on the door was loud and somehow official-sounding, as if the guy doing the knocking had a hell of a lot of practice. Daniel had gone to the university, which left Kelly and Ruth and Larry sitting around his apartment waiting for something to happen. Well, now something had.

  Larry went to the door. He was the man. That wasn’t exactly twenty-first-century thinking, but neither Kelly nor Ruth made a move to get there ahead of him. Kelly didn’t even think about it till afterwards.

  When Larry opened the door, standing there in front of it was the most cop-looking cop Kelly’d ever seen. Yes, he’d know how to knock on doors, all right. Shoulders. Chin. Khaki shirt with badge. Pistol on hip. Olive-drab pants, sharply creased. Shiny black boots. Gunnery sergeant’s hat. Mirrored sunglasses, even.

  “Yes?” Larry said, in a tone that couldn’t mean anything but You’ve got to have the wrong apartment.

  But the cop rumbled, “Is Miss Birnbaum here?”

  “That’s me,” Kelly squeaked in surprise. About the most nefarious thing she’d done was smoke dope every once in a while, and she hadn’t even done that since she’d started dating Colin. He made no bones about hating it, it was still mildly illegal, and she didn’t get off on it that much anyhow. Quitting hadn’t been hard.

  “Miss Birnbaum, I’m Roy Schurz,” the cop said. “I’m chief of police in Orofino, Idaho.”

  “Yes?” Kelly said blanklyief ofAnd so?”

  “And so I used to be a cop down in San Atanasio, California,” Schurz answered. “Colin Ferguson’s a buddy of mine. He asked me to see what I could do about getting you out of here. Are you ready to go?”

  Colin had said he might be able to pull some strings. He must have meant it. Colin, Kelly had discovered, commonly meant what he said. That was so far out of the ordinary, she was still getting used to it. “Am I ready?” she echoed.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Chief Schurz said. “I’ve got a Humvee with a desert air filter parked out front. It’s what I came here in.” In case you think I bounced in on a pogo stick or something. The mirrored shades kept his face from showing how big a jerk he thought she was.

  “Let me grab my purse,” Kelly said. All at once, she believed. It wasn’t as if she had much more than that here. She hugged Ruth and Larry. “Tell Daniel thanks a couple of million for me.”

  “We will.” Ruth Marquez sounded wistful, or more likely jealous.

  Kelly followed Roy Schurz out to the Humvee. It was a Humvee, too, not a Hummer: a military vehicle, painted in faded desert camo. It mounted the biggest machine gun Kelly had ever imagined. A soldier sat behind the gun.

  “National Guard,” Schurz explained. “I borrowed the vehicle-and Edwards there-from them. Colin, he thinks you’re something special.” He didn’t say Hell with me if I can see why, but it was in his voice.

  “I think he’s s
omething special, too,” Kelly managed.

  “Good. When him and Louise broke up, he was mighty, well, broke up about it. Now he’s more like his old self again.” Schurz gestured. “Hop on in.”

  It was a tall hop; the Humvee had humongous tires. Kelly climbed aboard. The seat was severely functional. Chief Schurz got in on the driver’s side. The engine might boast a desert filter, but it sounded raspy anyway. Of course, it probably had that filter because it had seen action in Iraq or Afghanistan. It wasn’t new, or close to new. It was a Regular Army castoff good enough for the Idaho National Guard. Chances were it had sounded raspy for years.

  Roy Schurz put it in gear. It rode as if it had left its shocks near Kandahar, that was for sure. “Do we really need a gunner?” Kelly had to shout to make herself heard.

  “Well, you never can tell,” Schurz shouted back. The Humvee kicked up its share of dust and then some. He pulled a surgical-style mask out of his shirt pocket and put it on with one hand. The Smokey Bear hat went into his lap for a second, no more. He extracted another mask and offered it to Kelly. “Your own air filter.”

  “Thanks.” She put it on. When she turned around to look at the machine gunner-Edwards-she discovered he’d also donned one. The less volcanic crap you put in your lungs, the better. A lot could kill you pretty fast. Even a little wasn’t good news. Twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, she expected mesothelioma cases to shoot through the roof. Not much of what the supervolcano belched into the air was asbestos fibers, but when you were talking about several hundred cubic miles of material there’d be plenty to go around.

  A Missoula policeman with a shotgun stood guard at the edge of town. He was also wearing a mask. He waved to the Humvee as it got on US 12 heading south-Orofino evidently wasn’t on the Interstate. Chief Schurz gravely waved back.

  “Well, you never can tell,” Schurz repeated. With the mask and shades, his face was almost completely unreadable. But the way he fidgeted in the hard, uncomfortable bucket seat told Kelly he realized he needed to say more: “People are starting to run low on all kinds of stuff. They’re putting armed escorts on food and fuel convoys. We haven’t had a lot of trouble yet, and nobody wants it to start, y’know?”

  “I guess,” Kelly said. How many folks couldn’t get to a Safeway or a Mobil station so easily these days? How many couldn’t get their hands on ground chuck or gasoline even when they did? How many of those folks had guns? In this part of the country, quite a few. And what would they do when they got hungry or otherwise desperate? If you had to take what you needed or starve, who wouldn’t think about turning robber?

  “I’ve got some jerrycans of gas in the vehicle here,” Chief Schurz went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “That’s one of the reasons I brought Edwards along. Nothing like a soldier on a. 50-caliber to keep people honest.”

  “God, you sound like Colin!” Kelly blurted, all at once missing him more than ever now that she was actually heading toward him, not stuck in Missoula.

  The Orofino (would that be Fine Gold in Spanish?) police chief chuckled. “Wouldn’t be surprised if we rubbed off on each other some. You ride in the same patrol car a few years, that’ll happen. Almost like being married, only without benefits.”

  Not knowing what to say to that, Kelly didn’t say anything. They climbed toward the hills, which were covered with a light coating of ash, a little too dark and a little too brown to look like dirty snow. Most of the clouds in the sky were just clouds. It was a gloomy, chilly, lowering day. Her heart soared like a skylark anyhow. She was out, out, out of Missoula!

  Hardly anybody shared the road with the Humvee. She didn’t know how many people used US 12 on an average day, but this had to be way down from that. Just across the Idaho line, Schurz pulled onto the shoulder. Some grass showed through the ash here; they were right at the western edge of the throw line.

  “Is the, uh, Humvee okay?” Kelly asked.

  “As okay as it ever is,” he replied. “Gotta throw in some fuel. It can do more than a jeep can, but Christ, it’s a gas hog.” He and the silent Edwards emptied two camo-painted jerrycans into the vehicle. Then he got behind the wheel again, fired up the machine, and drove on towards Orofino.

  XIII

  Things in Kansas were better than they had been in Colorado. Vanessa was convinced of it, even though she breathed through three masks worn one on top of the next and kept swimming-pool goggles on even when she slept. Her eyes itched all the time anyhow; she hadn’t got the goggles soon enough. She couldn’t take them off to rub or use Visine or anything. The air was still too full of fine dust.

  Pickles was even less happy than she was. He couldn’t wear a mask or goggles, poor thing. She didn’t know what to do about him. She couldn’t keep him in the carrier all the time, but she couldn’t let him out, either. She still had nasty scratches from when she’d extracted him from under the Toyota’s front seat. She had to get someplace where he’d be able to move around more-and where she would, too. width="1em"›She carried a snub-nosed. 38 revolver in her purse. Her father had taught her how to handle firearms when she was twelve. She’d never used what she’d learned; she always worried more about a moment of rage or stupidity or black depression than about blowing away a burglar. But the times, they were a-changin’.

  She’d got the gun in Pueblo. Another hundred miles and a little bit away from the supervolcano, it hadn’t been hit as hard as Denver. She stopped for gas and a fresh air filter. She paid ten bucks a gallon plus another fifty for the filter, and she didn’t say boo. She could count the cost later. Now was a time for doing what she had to do.

  The guy who took her money was already wearing goggles. “Where did you get those?” she demanded enviously.

  He pointed across the street. “Walgreens is still open.” She could barely see the sign through swirls of dust, but she stopped there as soon as he finished with her car. He used a mask, too, and had probably also got his hands on it at the drugstore.

  Volcanic ash came in every time the automatic door opened, and would keep coming in as long as it kept working. Still, like the air inside her car, the air inside the Walgreens improved on the general run of things. There was a display of goggles with bright plastic straps.

  Only three boxes of masks were left. “One box to a customer, ma’am,” the clerk said when Vanessa tried to buy them all. “We want to spread ’em around as much as we can.”

  She could see the logic in that, even if she didn’t like it. Unlike the man at the gas station, the Walgreens clerk didn’t gouge her for what she bought. “How long will you stay here?” she asked him as she put on the goggles.

  “I don’t know. A while longer. I’ll see if it looks like it’s getting worse or better,” he answered.

  “It won’t get better.” Vanessa spoke with great conviction.

  “Well, you may be right,” he replied, which had to mean I ain’t paying any attention to you, lady.

  She put on one of the masks before she went outside again, too. Either it made a difference or her imagination was working overtime. That was when she noticed the gun shop between the Walgreens and a tropical-fish store. The fish place was dark, but a light burned in the gun shop. Out in the middle of-this-having a real weapon looked like a terrific idea. She went inside.

  The man behind the counter looked like a shop teacher. He was leafing through-surprise! — a hunting magazine, but he put it down. “What can I do for you?” he said.

  “I made it down from Denver,” Vanessa answered. “I want to keep going. In case my car doesn’t, I may need to take some chances. A pistol could come in handy.”

  He nodded. “If you know how to use one.”

  “My dad’s a cop in California.”

  “Then you probably do,” he allowed. “You’ll have to fill out about five pounds of forms.”

  “As long as there’s no waiting period,” Vanessa said. “I’m not going to wait.”

  “Not in this state,” he assured her. “I do have to perfo
rm a background check, though. Right now, the phones are out, and so is the Net.” He rubbed his chin. “Turn around, please.”

  “Huh?” Mystified, Vanessa did.

  “I liked your foreground,” the man explained. “Your background will definitely do, too. I’ll sell to you, and we’ll sort everything else out later-if there is a later.”

  “Thank you,” Vanessa said, more sincerely than she was in the habit of doing. She handed him her Visa card. “Here.”

  He took it, but he didn’t do anything with it for a few seconds. Was he going to ask her for a blowjob, too, or something? If he did, she’d… She didn’t quite know what she’d do. In normal times, she would have told him to go fuck himself. In normal times, though, she wouldn’t have been standing here in a Pueblo, Colorado, gun shop. She needed a piece. If he decided he needed one, too…

  But it didn’t come to that. He just said, “You want to be careful on the road, Ms., uh”-he looked down at the little plastic rectangle in his hand-“Ferguson. A pistol can get you out of some tight spots, sure. Maybe you’d do better not getting into them in the first place, though.”

  She shook her head. “If I hadn’t bailed out of Denver when I did, I would’ve been stuck there. If you don’t get out of here pretty damn quick, you won’t be able to leave, either.”

  “I’m still thinking about it,” he said. Vanessa left it there; she was a refugee, not a missionary. He went on, “You’ll want to buy a couple boxes of cartridges, too, am I right?”

  “That’s why God made plastic,” Vanessa agreed.

  As soon as she got back to the car, she loaded the. 38. It was a double-action model; you could safely carry a round in every chamber in the cylinder. And she did. She felt better having it. She might have faced a nasty choice in the gun shop. Out on the road, there were bound to be sons of bitches who didn’t believe in giving any choices.

  If she got back on the Interstate, she’d end up in New Mexico. If she chose US 50 instead, she’d cross the Colorado prairie till she got to the Kansas prairie. Kansas held no appeal. Sometimes, though, you didn’t get what you wanted. She hadn’t been off I-25 very long, but when she went back cars were coming off at the on-ramp. That couldn’t possibly be a good sign.