Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  SORRY! WE’RE DOING THE BEST WE CAN!

  The scary part was, Louise believed it. Nobody who could get his hands on higher-quality veggies would have put these sorry specimens on display.

  “Sucks, doesn’t it?” the newlywed said.

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Louise answered. They smiled at each other and rolled their eyes. At least for a moment, misery loved company.

  Things got no better in the rest of the market. The shelves had lots of odd, spotty gaps. Louise had noticed a few of them the week before. Now they came right out and poked her in the eye. She didn’t need long to see what the pattern was. You could still buy local stuff. Anything that came from back East was in short supply.

  She got what she could. Some of what she couldn’t get, she could work around. No tissues in sight, but they had plenty of TP for some reason. If you had to, you could use it on your nose as well as your rear end. And rice could substitute for potatoes: oh, not exactly, but close enough. Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer, she thought. Then she tightened her lips so her mouth turned into a thin, bloodless line. That had been-and no doubt still was-one of Colin’s jokes.

  Well, what’s-her-name-Kelly-was listening to them now. She hadn’t heard all of them a million times yet. Only a few hundred, say. If she stuck with him as long as Louise had… He’d be pretty ancient by then, and Kelly would be no spring chicken herself.

  People said you were crazy for two years after your marriage sank. Much of what people said was bullshit, nothing else but. That, though, seemed pretty much true. Louise felt a lot more stable, a lot more grounded, than she had when she walked out the old front door for the last time.

  Grounded or not, she couldn’t get away from what had been so familiar for so long. Would Colin and the things he’d done and said keep bubbling up inside her for the rest of her life? It sure looked that way. On the outside, the break was clean. On the inside… She could still hear him, dammit.

  She steered the cart to a checkout stand. As she displayed her Vons Club card for the discounts, the Hispanic kid bagging groceries said, “Hope you don’t mind plastic bags. They’re the only ones we were able to get.”

  “That’s okay,” Louise said. They were supposed to be phasing out plastic. No, they were supposed to have phased it out. Maybe they’d won some kind of dispensation on account of the supervolcano.

  The Pope gives dispensations. You mean an exemption. Damn straight she could still hear Colin in her head. Oh, Vanessa would have said the same thing, but not in the same tone of voice. And she hadn’t heard one damn thing from Vanessa since Yellowstone fell in on itself.

  Reminding herself of that made her miss whatever the bagger said next. “I’m sorry?” She tried to look interested and attentive.

  “I said, if you’ve got some of those cloth totes with the handles, it might be a good idea to bring them the next time you come in. Who knows how much longer we’ll be able to get any bags at all?”

  “Okay. I’ll do that.” Louise had several of them in a drawer. Who didn’t? Some people were bound not to. And they’d be the ones who raised a stink when the market didn’t-couldn’t-help them corral their groceries.

  Louise stowed the Vons Club card and took out her trusty Visa. She was signing the store copy of the register printout when the checkout gal remarked, “Maybe you’re lucky to get plastic bags today. It’s coming down in buckets out there.”

  “It is?” Louise hadn’t paid any attention to what the weather was doing. Now she looked out through the big plate-glass windows. “It is!” she agreed in dismay. It hadn’t been when she got there. “Can I run back and buy an umbrella?” That would make the two women behind her in line love her to death.

  The checker turned to the bagger. “Run get Mrs. Ferguson an umbrella, Orlando. Hustle!”

  “ Si, Virginia,” Orlando said, and he was off like a shot. He came back with an umbrella-an umbrella with a tacky floral pattern, but what could you do? — a lot faster than Louise could have got it for herself. She paid cash; it was quicker than plastic, and she did care what people thought, even if they weren’t people she knew.

  Buckets was barely the word for the way it was pouring. L.A. didn’t usually get deluges like this. The umbrella kept her top half dry. From the waist down, she was soaked anyhow; it was blowing almost horizontally out of the northwest. The plastic grocery bags were a blessing. Brown paper would have disintegrated in rain like this. Louise threw the sacks into the trunk and waded around to the driver’s door.

  Getting in, wrestling the umbrella shut, tossing it down in front of the passenger seat, and slamming the car door took only a few seconds. All the same, Louise let in enough water to fill a hazard on the golf course down the street. Quite a bit came down on her in the process, too. “Yuck!” she said. That wasn’t nearly good out throh. She tried again: “Shit!”

  Better. Definitely better. She’d given up trying to understand why people told you not to swear. It didn’t help the human condition as much as getting drunk or screwing, but it made a pretty fair Band-Aid.

  Then she said “Shit!” again. Getting in, letting in all that water and wet air, and having the gall to go on breathing had steamed up the inside of the car windows. For all the seeing out she could do, she might as well have been in the middle of her own private fog bank.

  She turned on the motor and hit both front and rear defrost. Blowing warm air across the inside of the windshield made things worse before it improved them. She’d known it would, so she didn’t bother cursing. Weren’t a couple of old paper towels hiding under the passenger seat?

  They were, and they weren’t too wet, either. She used them to wipe off the side windows, or as much of the side windows as she could reach. Once she finished, she started to wad them up so she could give them the old heave-ho once she got home. Thoughtfully, she caught herself. Kleenex was gone from the shelves. How long would paper towels last? These would dry out, and she could use them again. She shoved them back under the seat un-crumpled.

  Start the windshield wipers. Turn them up to high. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that, but she sure needed to now. Turn on the headlights. If the wipers were going, you had to do that. It was the law. As a cop’s wife-yes, yes, dammit, a cop’s ex-wife-she not only knew about stuff like that, she took it seriously. And in a downpour like this, you needed to give the other jerks out there all the chance to see you they could get.

  A ginormous SUV was shoehorned into the space on her left. As it always did, that made backing out a special delight. She wondered why the damn things had got so popular and stayed so popular so long. She shrugged. Nothing she could do about it now but escape this one without getting rear-ended.

  She managed that. She pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. She started back toward the condo, trying to look every which way at once. She’d been driving for thirty years. She’d seen from experience that people in L.A. didn’t know how to handle rain. They went too fast and they tailgated. If she hadn’t seen it for herself, the stories Colin brought home from the cop shop would have rammed the lesson home.

  So she wasn’t astonished when things ground to a halt halfway home. Disgusted? Yes. Ticked off? You betcha. Astonished? No way. It was about time for the news station to run its traffic report. On the off chance, she hit the third button on the radio.

  “-fic on the fives,” came out of the speakers. Freeway crashes-and there were a slew of them-came first. Then the announcer said, “And there’s a bad surface-street accident in San Atanasio, near the corner of Sword Beach and 169th Street. At least four cars are involved, and a light pole is down across the road. That’ll put a hitch in your git-along.”

  He sounded absurdly cheerful. Of course, he wasn’t stuck in it. Louise was. She slid into the right lane, ignoring the horn from the asshole who didn’t care for it. Then she got off Sword Beach with almost as much relief as soldiers must have felt escaping the genuine article in 194
4.

  Stores and restaurants and gas stations and banks and all the other impedimenta of Western civilization fronted the avenue. As soon as you got away from it, things changed. White clapboard houses from before the war sat side by side wit faded stucco ones from not long after. The house where she’d raised her family with Colin was only a couple of miles away, but in a much better neighborhood.

  A much whiter neighborhood, too. Louise might be living with a Hispanic man, but when she didn’t watch herself she still eyed faces darker than her own with suspicion. That was one more inheritance from being married to a cop, even if it was one she wished she could have escaped.

  Not many white faces here. Mexicans, Salvadorans, blacks, Koreans, Filipinos… You could find everybody, and every kind of hole-in-the-wall eatery, in San Atanasio. A lot of lawns hadn’t been mown any time lately. Some of these men mowed other people’s lawns for a living, and had no time or energy to worry about their own. Before the rains started, the grass would have been yellow or brown. It greened up in a hurry, though. A few lawns had cars on them.

  An Asian woman with an umbrella pushed a stroller along the beat-up sidewalk. A black guy who’d got up onto his roof with an aluminum ladder secured a blue plastic tarp with broken bricks to bandage a leak till the roofers showed up. That wouldn’t be till after it quit raining, of course, if it ever did.

  Nobody paid any attention to her as she drove along. It wasn’t a neighborhood like South Central, where people stared at any white face. San Atanasio’s everybody included honkies, too. And when you were in a car, especially a car closed up against the rain, you were halfway towards invisibility anyhow.

  She hit the brake as a boy on a bike zoomed out from nowhere. Plenty of kids ran here and there, rain or no rain. Well, okay. It was Saturday. No doubt their older brothers had scrawled the graffiti that marked fences and garage doors the way cat pee marked toms’ territories. San Atanasio had a graffiti-abatement program. You could call in and get them painted over for free. You could, but nobody here seemed to care.

  And how long would a program like that last now that times were hard and getting harder? Probably not long. But then again, who could say where spray paint came from? If it wasn’t made here, the gangbangers would have trouble getting any more.

  Would they go back to buckets and brushes? Or would they…? Cut it out, Louise told herself sternly. It wasn’t her worry. Even if it had been, she couldn’t do anything about it these days. Back when she was married to Colin, she’d fed him tips, and he’d used some of them. She was damned if she’d call him or e-mail him now. Unless it was about the kids, she wanted nothing to do with him. She didn’t want that, either, but she knew she was stuck with it.

  If she turned left here, she ought to be able to get back on to Sword Beach beyond the accident. She turned-carefully. The rain was really coming down in buckets. You never saw rain like this in the fall. You hardly ever saw rain like this in January or February, as wet a season as L.A. had.

  There was the stop sign at Sword Beach. Louise didn’t California it, the way she would have in good weather. It wasn’t only that she’d lost the immunity to tickets cops and cops’ spouses enjoyed in their hometown. Some jackass barreling along the street after going slow for so long was liable to cream her.

  She made good time after she turned on to the thoroughfare. The accident receded in her rearview mirror. She saw a lot of smashed sheet metal, two black-and-whites, an ambulance, a fire engine, and a yellow truck with a cherrypicker from the Department of Public Works. A mess, all right. She supposed the Public Works guys were in charge of the downed light pole.

  Back to the underground parking lot that had become as familiar as the old driveway used to be. She popped the trunk and grabbed as many sacks of groceries as she could carry. Rainwater dripped from the bumper. It rilled down to the center of the concrete expanse and vanished into a softball-sized drainage hole with a metal grate over it.

  Louise got soaked all over again lugging the groceries up to the condo. “Oh, you poor thing!” Teo exclaimed when she came in. “Are there more? Let me fetch the rest.”

  “Don’t bother. Why should you get wet, too?” Louise said. But he wasn’t listening to her. He plucked the keys out of her handbag and vanished down the stairs. He came back with the rest of the sacks a couple of minutes later. Sure as hell, he was as wet as if he’d just come out of the shower. The keys clanked when he put them back in her purse.

  “Forty days and forty nights,” he said, more happily than the sentiment deserved.

  Louise was already putting stuff in cupboards and the fridge. She missed her old kitchen; she didn’t have room to swing a cat in here. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she agreed. “There was a godawful wreck on Sword Beach, too. I had to kinda go around it to get home.” She told him about it.

  “Did you?” Teo said. Louise nodded. So did he, as if that explained something he’d wondered about. And it did: “I thought you were taking a while getting back.”

  “Well, I was. Couldn’t help it,” Louise replied. “Hand me that chub of ground round, will you?” She stuck it in the freezer. “You can still get beef,” she said. “I know it’s fatty and everything”-Teo worried much more about nutrition than anybody she’d known before-“but you can still get it.”

  “The earth is angry at us,” he said. “Who would have imagined a volcano could throw all our plans for a loss?”

  He was a football fan. Louise… tolerated that. As for who would have imagined-well, Colin had been tiresome about it even before the supervolcano erupted. Of course, that was because his new squeeze worried about such things. People rubbed off on each other as they rubbed against each other. You couldn’t help it.

  She smiled. Teo smiled back, and ran a hand through her wet hair. As far as Louise was concerned, she’d got the best of the bargain.

  There was a technical term for what riding a bike through heavy rain was like. It bit the big one, was what it did. Marshall Ferguson had a plastic poncho that kept him at least partially dry. It bit the big one anyhow.

  But so did the UCSB parking policy. There weren’t nearly enough spaces on campus. The ones that were there cost too bloody much. A bike was a lot more practical.

  Most of the time. This past week, riding the bike to school tempted Marshall to take the bus instead. But he would have got drenched waiting for it, and it stopped three blocks from his place, so he would have got drenched walking to and from, too. You couldn’t win.

  A car zoomed by. It kept its distance; most Santa Barbara drivers, unlike their counterparts in a lot of Southern California, at least had some notion that they shared the road with people on two wheels. That didn’t mean the tires didn’t pick up water and plaster it against Marshall’s side, then splash him in the face as the Toyota got ahead of him.

  This happened at least half a dozen ties before he finally got to campus. As he did every day when he arrived, he wondered if the bus wasn’t a better idea after all. He wondered the same thing every time he pedaled home in the rain. Maybe I should suspect a trend, he thought. Somehow, though, he climbed aboard the bike every morning instead of walking to the bus stop. He always figured things would get better this next time. He might have been like that annoying song about tomorrow, tomorrow. Or he might have met one of the short definitions of insanity: doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

  “Hey, at least I have fun,” he muttered as he escaped the nasty traffic at last. Whether getting cold, dirty water flung in his kisser from speeding Michelins honest to God counted as fun was something he’d worry about some other time.

  Campus bike racks took up less room than parking lots did, but they filled up just as fast. He found a space, put his bicycle in it, and locked the machine to the rack. He used a lock and a chain his father approved of. He’d got el cheapos at first-and, one unhappy day his sophomore year, he’d had to take the bus back to his place after biking in that morning. His old man mad
e him pay for the new bike, lock, and chain out of his own money, too. He hadn’t appreciated that. He also hadn’t had his bike stolen since.

  Everybody else on campus looked as wet and miserable as he did. Well, almost everybody. A tweedy prof strolled along under an umbrella big enough to keep the supervolcano crater dry. The guy was almost bald on top, but his gray hair came down to his shoulders all the same. He’d probably grown it out when he was a kid around 1973, decided it looked way cool, and never bothered to change his mind in spite of changing styles and changing hairline. Tenure could do that to you. You stopped needing to change, so you didn’t. And if people snickered at you behind their hands, so what? You still had tenure.

  Marshall wished students could get tenure. That was what he’d been trying to do all his years here. He liked imagining himself at fifty-five, paunchy, maybe balding, too, still living in an apartment with ratty furniture in Ellwood or Goleta, still soaking up units, still smoking dope, and still laying coeds whenever he got the chance. What more could anybody want?

  He was mournfully aware it wouldn’t happen. For one thing, his father wouldn’t keep fronting him cash forever, and you couldn’t make enough money odd-jobbing it to pay for your place and your food and your car and all the other shit you needed, to say nothing of university fees. One more thing that bit. Bigtime, in fact. For another, even if his old man had been willing to leave him on the gravy train for the next thirty years, UCSB wasn’t. By rights, he should have graduated long since. He’d passed-way passed-the ordinary limits on time of attendance and total units. Adroit major-changing and a couple of petitions the administration had carelessly approved left him still working toward his sheepskin.

  Pretty soon, though, he’d graduate no matter how much finagling, how much wiggling, or how much kicking and screaming he did. He hadn’t had many expectations before the supervolcano knocked the economy flat and stomped on it. Now life with a bachelor’s degree looked depressingly like going back to San Atanasio, back to his room at the old house, and sponging off his dad while he flailed around looking for work that wasn’t there.