Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

Her breath smoked. Missoula in autumn hadn’t been a place where anyone would go to loll around in a bikini even before the eruption. Since? Places like Moose Jaw and Novosibirsk came to mind. What Moose Jaw and Novosibirsk were like these days . . . Is someone else’s worry, thank God, Kelly told herself firmly.

  “All ashore who’s going ashore! Everybody else, all aboard!” Larry Skrtel didn’t have a bullhorn. Then again, the USGS geologist didn’t need one, either. He was as close to an unflappable man as anyone Kelly’d ever met, but he’d never had trouble making himself heard.

  He walked up and down the convoy of Humvees, impersonating a liner’s chief steward or a train conductor or a mother hen or whatever the hell he was impersonating. When he neared Kelly, he dropped his voice to talk in more civilized tones: “Won’t be quite such a mad dash along I-90 this time . . . I hope.”

  “Jesus, so do I!” Kelly blurted. They’d roared west from Butte to Missoula in a Ford they’d piled into at the Butte airport right after the supervolcano blew. That impossibly huge cloud of dust and ash swelled and swelled behind them, and Kelly’d thought it would catch them and eat them no matter how big a jump they had on it. This was the way the world ended—not with a whimper but with a bang.

  Skrtel grinned at her. “We’re still here. The caldera’s still here. Of course we’ll go take a good look at it. Doesn’t the Bible say something about a dog returning to its vomit?”

  “Beats me.” Kelly had only the most limited acquaintance with the Bible. If it went on about puking dogs, she wasn’t sure she wanted any more.

  Geoff Rheinburg climbed into the Humvee right behind hers. Her chairperson waved and winked when their eyes met. Kelly hoped he didn’t notice how halfhearted her answering wave was. Even more than she had at the geologists’ conclave in Portland, she felt as if she’d fallen back into grad school.

  They headed east about an hour later than they’d planned to. Used to the ways of geologists, Kelly thought that was a miracle of efficiency. The soldiers who manned the machine guns all rolled their eyes and shook their heads. They defined efficiency in military terms. It took more than surgical masks (Kelly wore one, too) to hide their scorn.

  For the first fifteen or twenty miles on I-90, things seemed close to normal. The Interstate was, well, the Interstate. There were a few vehicles on it besides the USGS Humvees. There were even a couple heading toward Missoula from the east. Missoula might not have been the end of the known world after all, then, even if you could see it from there. When would they reach Here Be Dragons country?

  It didn’t take long. Even before they got out of Missoula, she saw patches of ash and dust that a couple of years of rain and snowmelt hadn’t cleared away—they looked like nothing so much as the Jolly Green Giant’s spilled sacks of Ready-Crete. A giant had spilled that junk over the continent’s midsection, all right, but it wasn’t jolly and it wasn’t green.

  Halfway between the mighty metropolises of Clinton and Bearmouth, neon-orange highway signs warned ROAD PAST THIS POINT NOT PLOWED. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. It wasn’t quite All hope abandon, ye who enter here, but it was—literally—close enough for government work.

  Odds were those signs had been made with snow in mind. What they’d been made for didn’t matter, though. They could, and did, also warn of other trouble ahead. Even in the jaunt from Missoula to here—the easy part of the trip—Kelly had watched those spilled-cement patches getting bigger and coming closer to the road.

  Then there was more grit on the Interstate than blowing wind could account for. She could feel it in the Humvee’s motion and hear it scritching under the tires. “Fuck,” said the corporal behind the machine gun. “Signs weren’t bullshitting, were they?”

  Bearmouth still had people in it: ghosts wouldn’t have needed to burn stuff and make smoke pour out of chimneys. The whole tiny town looked as if someone had smacked it in the face with a dirty-gray powder puff about the size of the Superdome, though. Kelly wondered if the locals would be as gray as their town, but she didn’t see any of them.

  Pine forests were gray, too. Under that gray, how many of those trees were dead or dying? Most, unless she missed her guess. Rivers ran gray. Ash covered their beds and swirled along in their turbid waters. Ash did such a job of clogging rivers that the floods throughout the Midwest had been horrendous. They would have been even more horrendous if so much of the Midwest weren’t currently uninhabited.

  Super-duper desert air filter or not, one of the Humvees crapped out only an hour and a half into the journey. Everybody stopped. People who knew about engines, or thought they did, huddled about under the hood. After a while, they threw their hands in the air and gave up. Once upon a time, Kelly’d seen a World War II cartoon of a tough sergeant looking away as he gave his mortally wounded Jeep the coup de grâce with a .45. She’d never run into anything in real life to remind her of that, not till now.

  They shifted people and supplies to the surviving Humvees and went on. The Interstate became more and more a matter of opinion. There were times when Kelly couldn’t tell whether they were on the road or not. Only when they went under an overpass—or had to go around one that had collapsed under all kinds of strains its designers never worried about—was she sure.

  The Humvees’ big, heavy-treaded tires began throwing up wakes of dust and ash. “Fuck,” the corporal said again. “This shit makes Iraq and Kuwait look like a walk in the park, and I thought they were just about all sand when I was there.”

  When they camped that night, their site precisely defined the middle of nowhere. Kelly’d chowed down on MREs before. The one she had there did not improve her opinion of them. Back in the old days, hadn’t men joined the Army to get three square meals a day? Since then, the people who fed soldiers seemed to have forgotten the difference between a square meal and a meal that came in a square box.

  Water had turned some of the ash and volcanic dust into something halfway between dried mud and cheap concrete. Except for the geologists, Kelly was hard-pressed to find anything alive. Everything was grayish brown. Well, almost everything. One of the machine gunners brought in a small plant and said, “This here is a dandylion, ain’t it?”

  “It sure is,” Skrtel agreed. After popping the dandelion into a specimen jar, he checked the GPS on one of the Humvees to find out exactly where they were. He wrote it down. They had laptops and iPads, but the only way to recharge them in the field was from the Humvees’ batteries. Keeping their use down was a good idea, in other words.

  Kelly’s chairperson did some poking around of his own. After perhaps ten minutes, he grunted in triumph and plucked a specimen of his own. He carried it over to Kelly. “Can you identify this?” Professor Rheinburg asked, as if she were still his student.

  Her heart thumped in alarm. As if she were still his student, she didn’t want him to think she was dumb. She peered at the plant in the palm of his hand. Whatever it was, a dandelion it wasn’t. She nervously licked her lips. She knew a hell of a lot more about rocks and soil than she did about the plants that grew on them. Still, considering where they were and what this one looked like . . . “It’s a lodgepole pine sapling, isn’t it?”

  He beamed at her. “That’s just what it is! The damn things can grow in the crappiest soil there is. That’s why there are—were—so many of them in Yellowstone. They’re the first squatter trees to come back after an eruption—even after this eruption.”

  “Except this one won’t grow now,” Kelly pointed out.

  “Nope.” Rheinburg didn’t sound upset about it. “If I can find one after a few minutes of poking, there are bound to be millions of them popping up all over the ashfall.”

  “I guess.” That made Kelly more cheerful, but not for long. Millions of lodgepole pines scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles meant maybe ten trees per square mile. Ten saplings per square mile, that was. Not all of them would live t
o grow up. Even if all of them did, the result wouldn’t be what anyone in his right mind could call a forest. It would look a lot more like a bald man’s comb-over.

  She said as much to Rheinburg. He laughed. “There’s a difference,” he said. “A bald guy’s comb-over gets worse and worse as time goes by, ’cause he’s got more and more scalp showing and less and less hair to cover it with. Here, there will be more and more trees and bushes and whatnot to patch over Mother Earth’s bald spot.”

  Kelly found herself nodding. “Well, you’re right,” she said.

  Her chairperson beamed at her. “You can say that. It’s one of the reasons I enjoyed having you in the program so much. Most people would sooner be drawn and quartered than admit they’re wrong.” He briefly—only briefly—looked sheepish. “Lord knows I would.”

  “How come you never told me you enjoyed having me in the program till I wasn’t in the program any more?” Kelly asked pointedly.

  “How come? Because grad students are supposed to worry, that’s how come. It makes them work harder. If you thought everything was cool, you’d try to skate through your research, and then I wouldn’t enjoy having you around so much. Nope—you need fear and deadlines. And so did I.”

  Kelly would have liked to tell him he was full of it. She didn’t even try. She knew too well he wasn’t. What had kept her cramming her head with facts and formulas before her orals but fear of failing? If she’d been sure she would pass, she wouldn’t have studied so hard—and she would know less now.

  “Wait till you have grad students of your own,” Rheinburg said. “You’ll find out what I mean. Oh, will you ever!”

  People were slithering into sleeping bags. Kelly hadn’t done that in a while. She was used to sleeping on a nice, soft bed with a nice, warm husband. In spite of a foam pad between her and the ground, she tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable and not having much luck.

  She couldn’t go off behind a bush the next morning: no bushes to go behind. The geologists went behind Humvees instead, pointers and setters choosing different vehicles. Eventually, the Humvees wouldn’t be able to go any farther. What would they do then? Turn their backs, she supposed. Or, more likely, they’d be able to go behind boulders by then. The supervolcano had thrown great big rocks a hell of a long way.

  In fact, the Humvees lasted till late that afternoon. They were tough critters. They kept going for quite some time after the eruption had destroyed any sign that human beings had ever lived or built things in these parts. Had they been half-tracks, they might have gone farther yet. Or they might not have; wouldn’t tracks be even more susceptible to grit than wheels were? Kelly didn’t know one way or the other. When she asked at the stop for supper, the soldiers, who thought they did know, got into a hellacious argument, some saying one thing, some the other.

  They were still close to eighty miles from the crater when even the valiant Humvees couldn’t force their way through the dust and volcanic ash any more. “It’s a shame we couldn’t get helicopters to take us all the way in and out,” Kelly remarked the next morning as the geologists got ready for the trek that would follow if they wanted to—and if they could—see the caldera up close and personal.

  Larry Skrtel clapped a hand to his forehead: as much emotion as she’d ever seen him show. “Helicopters, she says!” the USGS veteran exclaimed. “Kelly, it took hand-to-hand bureaucratic combat to get the Humvees. The way things are, the way they’re gonna stay for as long as anyone can see, nobody will spend a dime on anything the computer geeks and bean counters call unessential. Like I just told you, it took a special miracle to get ’em to spend a nickel.”

  Mounting the expedition had cost Uncle Sam and however many taxpayers were still paying taxes a pretty fair pile of nickels. Skrtel was bound to be right, though: to a bean counter, it looked like small change. What did they say about the Feds? A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. That was the line. That was the attitude, too.

  But something else Skrtel said raised Kelly’s hackles, even if she wasn’t sure what hackles were. “Who says this is unessential?” she demanded irately. “What could be more important than understanding how the supervolcano did its number on us?”

  He spread his callused hands in resignation. “Darn near anything,” he answered. “It’s not gonna go off again, not the way it did—the magma pool takes a long time to fill up again after it blasts out. Ordinary volcanic eruptions? After what we’ve already been through, those are a piece of cake.”

  Some of the ordinary eruptions that would come would be enormous by the standards civilization was used to. Enormous, yes, but not humongous: the technical term geologists used for a major supervolcano blast. And Skrtel’s words brought back Kelly’s old worry—if studying the supervolcano was obsolete, wasn’t she?

  Well, it wasn’t quite. There might be hope for her yet. And she had more urgent things to worry about. One was a volcanic hiccup, the equivalent of an earthquake aftershock, only with lava. Another was getting lost in this literally tractless wilderness and not making it out again.

  MREs and plastic water bottles made her pack feel as if she were carrying another person piggyback. Everybody who was going forward had a GPS set. That ought to make getting lost less of a worry. And it did . . . up to a point. Everybody had a compass, too, but the damn things swung at what looked like random. The supervolcano hadn’t belched out much iron in relative terms, but there was plenty to confuse anything that relied on the Earth’s magnetic field.

  GPS systems didn’t, of course. That didn’t mean Kelly trusted hers completely. When sorrows came, they came not single spies but in battalions. She laughed at herself. Where the hell had she come up with that bit of Shakespeare from an undergrad lit course? Only showed that general-ed requirements didn’t always go to waste.

  Off she went with her colleagues. The dust and ashes scrunched under her hiking boots. She’d let herself fall out of shape since she got married, too. Well, things could’ve been worse. She could have been slogging through mud as deep as she was tall.

  Still nothing man-made visible. Gone—all gone, buried, on the way to fossilization. She looked ahead. Even the mountains seemed strange. So much volcanic rubbish had fallen on them, it had changed their heights and their shapes. That should have been impossible. It wasn’t, not to the supervolcano.

  Scanning the mountainsides with binoculars, she did spot a few dead pines sticking up through the dust and ash. Back in the day, you could see dead trunks from the big fires of the 1980s sticking up through snow. Colin said those reminded him of the stubble on a corpse’s cheek. Kelly never would have thought of that herself, which didn’t mean it didn’t fit.

  Larry Skrtel called back to Missoula. He had a satellite phone. Like the GPS, those still worked. They also carried little radios, whose signals would cross the ruined land. Geoff Rheinburg called them Dick Tracy wrist radios. They weren’t quite, but that came close enough.

  Except for the noises the geologists made, the world was eerily quiet. No insects buzzed or chirped. No birds called. No hawks or vultures glided overhead. At night, no coyotes yipped and yowled. No dogs howled at the moon. No cats screamed. No mosquitoes imitated tiny dentists’ drills. It wasn’t the worst of the mosquito season, nowhere near, but there should have been a few.

  “You’re right!” Larry exclaimed when Kelly mentioned that. He made as if to slap himself upside the head. “I didn’t even notice.”

  “Hard to notice something that isn’t there,” Professor Rheinburg said.

  “Now we know what the supervolcano really was,” Kelly said. When her comrades sent her blank looks, she explained: “The world’s biggest bug bomb—what else?”

  They groaned. She’d been sure they would. “Now that’s what I call overkill!” Skrtel said. Then he paused thoughtfully. “Or is it? Nothing smaller than a supe
rvolcano could even slow the bastards down.”

  “It’s not just the world’s biggest bug bomb,” Rheinburg said. “It’s the world’s biggest people bomb, too.”

  No one said anything to that for some little while. The United States, one of the most thoroughly measured and counted countries in the world, couldn’t come close to being sure how many people the supervolcano had killed, not even two years after the eruption. Somewhere between two and three million: that was the best guess. Somewhere between five and ten times that many were still homeless.

  Refugee camps were a staple of stand-up comics and late-night talk-show hosts. They weren’t so funny if you were stuck in one. And if you’d ended up in one after the supervolcano blew, odds were you remained stuck there. You could get out if you landed a job somewhere, but plenty of other people, most of them not from camps, were chasing that job, too. And there were hardly any jobs to land to begin with.

  Colin’s daughter had managed to get out. Kelly had never met Vanessa Ferguson. Colin was tight-lipped about her. Kelly gathered that the guy for whom she’d moved to Denver, the guy who was indirectly to blame for her landing in Camp Constitution, was his age, maybe older. What that said about Vanessa, Kelly didn’t want to know.

  But she was out. She was doing some national-service gig, salvaging what could be salvaged from the eastern fringes of the eruption zone. There was a government program that did make sense, no two ways about it. Because the supervolcano wasn’t done causing casualties. Oh, no. It was just getting started.

  This would be the third harvest in a row that didn’t happen in what used to be the world’s breadbasket. Well, the world’s breadbasket had taken one in the breadbasket. How many people would go hungry on account of that? No way to know, not yet, but the number wasn’t small.

  And how many would freeze on account of climate change from the supervolcano? Some already had frozen. But that would only get worse. Canada, the northern United States, Scandinavia, England, Russia . . . Drop Los Angeles’ average temperature by five degrees Celsius (nine in the scale she still used when she wasn’t being scientific), and you could still live there. Drop London’s or Moscow’s or Toronto’s? Living in any of those places after the climate change fully kicked in didn’t strike her as a whole lot of fun.