Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  “Hey, at least your dad knows what rock is and probably likes some of it,” Justin said. “My grandfather is like ninety-four. He’s still got his marbles, but he’s so old, he’s on the other side of the line. He was grown up when rock ’n’ roll started, and it’s just kids’ noise to him.”

  “Like my dad with hiphop,” Rob said.

  “Yeah, just like that,” Justin agreed. “If you decide it isn’t for you the first few times you hear it, you’ll never get it.”

  “So where can we play between now and Greenville?” Rob asked, reaching for the road atlas once more. “Some place where we haven’t been, and where there’ll be enough people who haven’t heard us yet and might want to.”

  “Is there any place like that left in Maine?” Justin asked. “And if there is, can we get there and get back through the snow?”

  “Boy, you ask a lot of questions,” Rob said. “Come have a look-see what you think.” They both bent low to study the small print that showed town names.

  Bryce Miller gravitated to university campuses the way bees went for flowers. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the university dominated the town in a way UCLA couldn’t begin to in Los Angeles. Too many other things went on in L.A. Without the University of Nebraska, though, Lincoln hardly had any reason to exist.

  Not only that, Bryce had met a few of Nebraska’s classicists and their grad students at conferences. They were the only people in the whole state he knew even slightly. He hadn’t expected to end up here with only the clothes on his back. That he’d ended up anywhere at all alive and in one piece was something close to a miracle-and a testimony to the endless training pilots put in, getting ready for emergencies they might er see in their whole career.

  The Red Cross had put him and the other passengers from the plane (minus a few who’d ended up in the hospital-but everybody’d got out alive) in a Motel 6 commandeered for the purpose. Colin Ferguson hadn’t had many kind things to say about his stay in one a couple of years before. Now Bryce knew why. The place made getting away feel all the more urgent.

  Getting away, though, wasn’t so easy. Volcanic ash started falling on Lincoln three days after the supervolcano erupted. The sky went gray and hazy. The sun disappeared. It might have been fog. It might have been a sandstorm. It seemed to combine the worst features of both.

  Red Cross workers handed out surgical masks. They were already wearing them. Some of them wore goggles, too. They didn’t distribute those. Bryce’s guess was that they didn’t have enough to go around.

  He took the bus to campus. A grad student with the fine classical first name of Marcus (his last name was Wilson, which was just-there) asked him, “Want to see something interesting?”

  “Like what?” Bryce returned.

  “Let’s go over to the museum,” Marcus said.

  “Okay.” Bryce was game. It would have air-conditioning. It would keep out the worst of the dust. He did wonder what Marcus reckoned interesting. Maybe the museum had a good collection of classical coins or Greek pottery or something like that.

  If it did, they weren’t on display. On display were the bones of a bunch of extinct elephantoid creatures. The L.A. County Museum of Natural History had some, too, but not so many. A placard declared that this museum boasted the finest collection of proboscidean fossils in the world.

  But they weren’t what Marcus wanted to show Bryce. Marcus took him over to a much smaller display of fossilized rhinos from something called the Ashfall State Historical Park. “Where’s that?” Bryce asked.

  “Northwest of here.” Marcus pointed to a map on the wall above the display case with the bones. “Near a little town called Orchard. The text will tell you more about it.”

  The text told Bryce that the dead rhinos were almost 12,000,000 years old. They’d been buried by volcanic ash at what had been a pond. Many more of them remained in situ at the state park, along with the other critters that had been entombed by the ash at the same time.

  That ash proved to come from a supervolcano eruption in Idaho, though that wasn’t established till a generation after the fossils first got found. This same geological hot spot, the informative text went on, is today responsible for the exotic geological features of Yellowstone National Park.

  Maybe the hot spot had been responsible for Yellowstone yesterday. Today, it was responsible for screwing up half the country-or the whole planet, depending on how you looked at things. Bryce went on reading. Many of the bones on display here, the text told him, show the overgrowth typical of Marie’s disease, or hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy.

  Being a classics major let him translate the Greek and Latin medical jargon into ordinary English: bad bone overgrowth that had to do with the lungs. Sure as hell, the plaque continued, Marie’s disease is caused by slow suffocation. In this case, it was brought on by inhaling volcanic ash and dust. The rhinos and other animals probably came to this pond or waterhole to soothe themselves in the cool mud, since a high er is another symptom of the illness. The ashfall that killed them also entombed them, and preserved them extremely well.

  “Hey, Marcus.” Bryce jerked a thumb at the plaque. “Check this out.”

  The other grad student read it. He grimaced. “That’s exciting,” he said.

  “Ain’t it just?” Bryce used the bad grammar on purpose. “Remind me not to inhale as long as I’m here.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Marcus eyed the text again. “How many cows and sheep are dying like that right now? How many fossils will they dig up ten or twelve million years from now?”

  “I don’t know about the second part,” Bryce said. “The answer to the first part is, all the sheep and cows-and pigs; don’t forget about pigs-out there, minus three. Oh, and the chickens, too.”

  “We don’t want to leave the chickens out,” Marcus agreed gravely. “But what are we going to eat once they’re all dead?”

  “Well, the dust doesn’t cover the whole country. Some of the livestock will live,” Bryce said.

  “Uh-huh. What will it eat, though? The corn and the wheat and the rye won’t get, uh, Marie’s disease, but they won’t grow with a couple of feet of ash dumped on them, either. This is Nebraska, remember. TV shows about farming draw fat ratings here. They run commercials for tractors and things. Most of the country between the Rockies and the Mississippi is the same way. Wipe all that off the map, and what’s left on the menu?”

  “Crow,” Bryce answered. Marcus gave him a funny look, but then nodded. And Bryce found a question of his own: “How many people are going to come down with hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy?” He delivered the polysyllables with a certain somber relish.

  “I don’t know, and if anybody else does, they aren’t talking,” Marcus said. “It’s liable to be everyone from here all the way to Vegas who hasn’t got a dust mask.”

  How many million people was that? If they were all doomed, no wonder no one was talking about it. Not even CNN Headline News would want to lead with a story that went Okay, Middle America, bend over and kiss your ass good-bye. Bryce dared hope not, anyhow, which might have been the triumph of optimism over experience.

  Then he remembered that Vanessa was living in Denver. He hadn’t really thought about her since his plane ditched in Branch Oak Lake. How many people in Denver were coming down with Marie’s disease right this minute? Wasn’t it easier to wonder how many weren’t?

  He must have made some kind of noise as all that went through his head, because Marcus asked, “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” Bryce answered. But it hadn’t been nothing, or Marcus wouldn’t have noticed. Awkwardly, Bryce explained, “I was just thinking about my ex. She moved to Denver a little while ago.”

  “Oh.” The other grad student digested that. Then he delivered his verdict: “Bummer, man. Talk about timing.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” Bryce said.

  “Ex?” Marcus said. “Ex-wife?”

  “We weren’t married. We were living together… and then we wer
en’t.” Bryce spread his hands. “You know how it goes? Well, it went.”

  “Uh-huh.” Marcus nodded. Bryce thought he might be gay, but Marcus didn’t make a big deal out of it if he was. After a few seconds’ pause, he asked, “You still have feelings for her?”

  “I’m going with somebody else who’s a lot easier to get along with.” For a moment, Bryce thought that was a responsive answer. When he realized it wasn’t, he sighed and said, “Yeah, I’ve still got some. I sure as shit don’t wish Marie’s disease on her, or anything like that.” He sighed again. “I’m not nearly certain it works both ways, though.”

  “So she told you to hit the road, not the other way round.” This time, Marcus didn’t make it a question. “Oh, well. Good luck to her and all that, but you can’t do anything about it.”

  “I know.” But now Bryce also knew he’d have to keep reminding himself of that. Everything that had gone on had driven Vanessa out of his thoughts ever since the shock wave hit his plane. Now she was back, dammit. Like a chunk of gristle wedged in between two molars, she wouldn’t be so easy to dislodge.

  After the display from Ashfall, the rest of the museum seemed an anticlimax to Bryce. He was relieved when Marcus was ready to leave. He carefully adjusted his mask before they stepped out into the open air once more. He might have been a little casual about it before. Not now. Never again. Hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy sounded righteously horrible. And he noticed Marcus taking pains to adjust the straps on his mask over his ears, too.

  Everything out there was gray. Dust swirled through the air, now thicker, now thinner, but always around. It collected in drifts in front of fences that lay athwart the breeze. It was inches thick everywhere. Bryce’s shoes scrunched and sank into it, so that he might almost have been walking on the beach. He left blobby, indistinct footprints.

  “I wish it would rain,” Marcus said. “That would clean the air-for a while, anyhow.”

  “It would, yeah.” Bryce was a Southern Californian, used to wishing for rain and not getting it. He had to remind himself that things worked differently in the Midwest. He looked up to the sky. He could hardly see the sun through the dust still blowing east. “Come on, Jupiter Pluvius. Do your stuff.”

  Marcus laughed. “Jupiter Pluvius, Roman rain god known only to classics students and old-time baseball writers.”

  Bryce’s ears pricked up. Baseball neep was meat and drink to him. “If you know about Jupiter Pluvius and sportswriters-” he began. For the next little while, he forgot all about the supervolcano. Here was somebody who spoke his language, and it wasn’t ancient Greek.

  Garden City, Kansas, was no garden, not these days. Vanessa didn’t think any of Kansas was a garden these days. The only good thing you could say about Kansas was that it was farther from the supervolcano crater than Colorado was. It was still screwed. It just wasn’t screwed quite so hard.

  Nobody on the Interstate had stopped and tried to molest her. Nobody’d stopped and offered her a ride, either. She’d walked and walked and walked till her arms were about to fall off and her blisters bled.

  And when she got into town at last, nobody seemed the least bit interested in heading west with her and fixing her car. “Sorry,” said a mechanic in a gimme cap with PUROLATOR FILTERS in big letters on the front. He didn’t sound sorry-not even close. “I got more work in town than I can handle. I take my tow truck out into that blowing shit-’scuse my French-and I ain’t got but a fifty-fifty chance of comin? back with your vehicle.” He put heavy stress on the hick in the last word, which seemed much too fitting to Vanessa.

  She fixed him with her flintiest-hell, bitchiest-and most footsore glare. “What am I supposed to do now?” Pickles’ yowl from inside the carrier underscored the question.

  All the same, the mechanic remained depressingly unfazed. “Y’ought to thank the Lord you made it this far. Plenty of people ain’t,” he answered. That was true, but also infuriating. He went on, “Red Cross done set up a shelter at the high school. It’s three blocks over from here and two blocks up.” He pointed. “You can’t hardly miss it, even with all the crap in the air.”

  He wasn’t wearing a mask. He was smoking a Camel. The pack stuck out of a front pocket of his chambray work shirt. Written above the pocket in machine-embroidered red script was the name Virgil. Hick is right, Vanessa thought disdainfully. And whatever happens to his lungs, he fucking deserves it.

  Lugging Pickles, she wearily limped over to the high school. Most of the time, You can’t miss it warned that you’d get lost, but not today. She wasn’t the only tired-looking person toting this, that, and the other thing converging on the school, either. A woman with a so-help-me beehive hairdo who looked pretty goddamn tired herself checked Vanessa in at the front office.

  “Denver?” she said when Vanessa told her where she was from. A carefully plucked eyebrow rose. “We only have one other person from Denver here that I know of. Not many from there have been able to get this far.”

  “I got out the morning after the supervolcano blew,” Vanessa said, now sounding proud as well as pooped. “I bet it just kept getting worse from then on.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” the woman answered. “Before we check you in, though, either I’ll take charge of your cat or you can let it go if you want to. No pets here. None. It’s the rule.” By the way she said it, even the idea of appealing against The Rule was unimaginable.

  Vanessa did anyway: “You can’t do that! I got Pickles all this way! I won’t turn him loose now!”

  “Then you can look for help somewheres else,” the woman with the beehive said flatly. “Only there ain’t no somewheres else in Garden City.”

  That struck Vanessa as much too likely to be true. “What happens if you take charge of him?”

  “He goes to the pound.”

  “You kill him, you mean.”

  “He goes to the pound,” the woman repeated, as if she didn’t like to think about that.

  Tears stung Vanessa’s eyes behind the goggles. “You’re mean. You’re cruel. You’re hateful. I’d feed him out of whatever you feed me.”

  “Where’s he gonna piss? Where’s he gonna crap? What if he bites a kid or scratches somebody up? What if he gets into fights with other cats and dogs? Well, he won’t, on account of we don’t allow any pets. Any. Like I said, that’s the rule.”

  No matter how mean and cruel and hateful it was, it made sense in a bureaucratic way. Even though it made sense in a bureaucratic way, it was mean and cruel and hateful. Trying not to sob, Vanessa carried Pickles outside. He wasn’t an outdoor cat. He wouldn’t know what to do loose in the world. But it was better-she hoped it was better-than just killing him. Even after so long in the carrier, he didn’t want to come out. When he finally did, he stared with big round eyes. The ash and dust on the grass made him sneeze. Then a noise or something made him scoot away. He slunk around the corner of the office building and was gone.

  When Vanessa went back in, she’d lost her place in line. She had to work her way up to the front again. She wondered if she’d have to go through all the paperwork twice, too, but she didn’t. The woman with the beehive said, “Let’s see-where can we put you? The auditorium is full, and so is the gym. It’ll have to be a classroom… Susie, have we filled up J-7 yet?”

  Susie was the next woman standing behind the counter. “Sure did, Lucille. They’re packed in there like sardines. We’re working on the K block.”

  “K-1 it is,” Lucille said, and told Vanessa how to get there. “Here’s your authorization card,” she added. “It’s good for rations and water and enough cot or floor or whatever they got for sleeping.”

  “Wonderful,” Vanessa mumbled, still leaking tears. She’d had nothing to do with high school since escaping not so good, not so old San Atanasio High. Well, almost nothing: she’d gone to a five-year reunion with Bryce, and spent most of her time dishing the dirt on the local guy she’d lived with before him with other girls who’d also known that luckl
ess fellow. The guy himself didn’t come, which only made the stories better.

  They’d done English in room K-1. Posters of Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and Toni Morrison hung on the walls. A lesson plan for Julius Caesar covered one of the whiteboards. A bookcase in a corner of the room held more copies of The Mill on the Floss than anyone in his right mind would ever need.

  All the desks were gone, including the teacher’s. No cots-just people. The air inside was warm and stuffy, though less dusty than the stuff outside. Vanessa shed her masks and goggles. The room smelled of humanity, but not of raw sewage. Which probably meant…

  “Do we go down the hall to use the bathroom?” she asked.

  Half a dozen people nodded. “Sure do,” a chunky guy said. “But you don’t need no hall pass, anyways, and they don’t hit you with detention if you smoke in there.”

  He was playing to everybody stuck in K-1 with him. He got his laugh, too, though not from Vanessa. She mourned poor Pickles. Maybe putting him out of his misery right away would have been better. But maybe someone would take him in before he starved or got eaten or choked on dust. She could hope. She had to hope. She made herself ask another question: “What do they feed us?”

  “It was Del Taco last time. Gen-you-wine dogmeat Mexican,” the chunky man said. He woofed, and got another laugh. If he hadn’t been class clown when he was a skinny teenager with zits, Vanessa would have been amazed.

  Asshole, she thought while Mr. Class Clown preened. She almost said it out loud. Old Porky wore thin in a hurry. But some of the other jerks who’d got here before her plainly liked him. She kept her mouth shut and staked out her own little patch of worn, dirty linoleum. Her purse would make a lumpy pillow, but better than nothing

  … maybe.

  More people came in. The room got crowded, and even stuffier. The power was out, so the air conditioner didn’t work. With all the blowing, drifting crud outside, opening a window seemed a doubleplus ungood idea. She was exhausted from her hike into town, and the bad air sure didn?t help.