Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  Colin waited under the chuppah with a Reform rabbi, Wes Jones, and Kely’s first cousin, Loreen Samuels. Damned if Wes didn’t wink at her as she came near. There’d be never a dull moment living across the street from him. He wore a yarmulke with as much ease as the rabbi did. Colin’s kind of stuck up on his head. He’d agreed to a Jewish ceremony with good grace, but nothing would ever make him look Jewish.

  Some chanted Hebrew prayers, some marriage advice that was sensible but perfectly ordinary, Colin’s shoe coming down on a cloth-wrapped glass to remember the fall of the Temple, a ring, a kiss

  … It was official. She’d have to start getting used to her new last name. Well, she wouldn’t have to, not these days, but she intended to. Kelly Ferguson? For once, it sounded as if her first and last names went together.

  After champagne toasts at the reception, Colin said, “I saw a study that showed guys who marry younger wives live longer and are happier.”

  “Oh, yeah? Wonder how come that is,” Gabe Sanchez said. Everybody laughed. Gabe struck Kelly as a slightly rougher, Hispanic version of the guy she’d just married. He went on, “Congratulations, man. Looks like you got a real good one. Gives us all hope, y’know?” His heavy-featured face clouded. Kelly remembered Colin saying Gabe had gone through a divorce even uglier than his own. Evidently he hadn’t found anyone new since.

  They ate. They drank some more. They danced. Colin moved as gracefully as anyone with two left feet. “Man, I know white folks got no sense of rhythm, but can’t you at least try?” a black cop said, softening the dart with a grin.

  “This ain’t the ’hood, Rodney. You got to do the dozens on me at my wedding?” Colin said.

  “Any time at all,” Rodney answered. He was strutting his stuff with a Latino woman-his wife, Kelly decided after checking for rings. She still hadn’t got used to rings on her own finger. She expected she would.

  At last, they changed back into street clothes. A limo laid on by Kelly’s folks waited under an awning outside the hall. A good thing the awning was there. A nasty, chilly rain came down; it couldn’t have been far above freezing. “It wouldn’t be this cold if it wasn’t for your dumb old supervolcano,” Kelly’s mother said. She was right, but she made it sound as if the supervolcano wouldn’t have erupted if Kelly hadn’t studied it.

  The driver-a Samoan big enough to have played pro football-whisked them up the Harbor Freeway to the Bonaventure Hotel downtown. Colin slipped him fifty bucks. “Thanks a lot, man,” the guy said, touching a blunt forefinger to the brim of his cap. “Happy wedding, y’know?”

  Their room was high up in one of the hotel’s round, glassy towers. Colin lifted a squeaking Kelly over the threshold. A bottle of champagne with a card waited in an ice bucket in the room. Colin opened the card. He grinned. “From Gabe,” he said.

  “He’s sweet.” Kelly was looking at the city lights and at cars streaming by on the freeway just to the west. In spite of gas shortages, there were still lots of them. She wondered if things would pick up or just keep going downhill.

  “Yeah. He is,” Colin agreed from behind her. “And he’d clout us one if we said so to his face.” A muffled pop announced he’d opened the bottle: carefully and neatly, so as not to waste any. On the nightstand stood two glass flutes, not plastic like those at the reception. He poured for them both and handed her one. Then he raised the other. “Here’s to us, babe. I love you.”

  “I love youtoo.” She clinked flutes. “To us.” After they drank, she said, “If I do too much more of this, I’ll fall asleep on you. Some wedding night that’d be.”

  He mimed a leer. “I’d just have my way with your unconscious body-mwahaha!”

  Kelly snorted. “It’s better when both people in the game want to play.”

  “I won’t argue.” Colin shut the drapes. “So-do you want to play?”

  “Right this minute, there’s nothing I want more in the whole wide world.” Kelly stepped into his arms. Things went on from there. Some considerable and very happy time later, she said, “Don’t you ever let that Rodney sass you about your sense of rhythm again, you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered from a distance of about three inches. Then he patted at his hair. Kelly made a questioning noise. “I was wondering if you took the top of my head off there,” he explained.

  “You!” she said fondly.

  “Me,” he agreed. “Is there anything left in that champagne bottle?”

  “If there isn’t, we can always call room service,” she answered.

  There wasn’t, and she did. “Spending my money already,” Colin said.

  “No way,” Kelly told him. “Dominguez will pay me… a little something, anyway.”

  They eventually went to sleep. When Kelly woke, wan gray light was leaking past the drapes. She put on sweats and a T-shirt and went to look outside. She must have made a noise-probably a startled grunt-because from behind her her new husband asked, “What is it, babe?”

  “Come see,” was all she said.

  He needed a moment to get decent, too. Then he joined her at the window. He let out a low whistle of astonishment. Snowflakes danced in the air. It was white down below, white in the middle of downtown L.A. The Harbor Freeway was white, too, white and empty: ghostly, even. Any snow at all would screw traffic here from A to whatever came after Z.

  No sooner had that crossed her mind than a car on the surface street down below skidded sideways into a pickup truck. Neither, luckily, was going very fast. Both drivers got out and glumly eyed the damage.

  Colin turned on the TV. A chipper local weatherman said, “Be careful out there, folks. The last time we had snow all over the L.A. basin was in January of 1949. I have to say, we aren’t really equipped for it. If you can possibly stay home, you’d sure be smart to do it.”

  Kelly and Colin exchanged stricken looks. Marshall had been planning to pick them up and take them back to the house. From there, they would have gone to the Hotel Coronado in San Diego: a honeymoon on a tank of gas. Now… Kelly had no idea what they’d do now.

  Colin did: “Call room service again. Tell ’em to send up coffee and some breakfast. And after that-hey, we’ll just go on from there.” By the way his gaze roamed her, she didn’t need to have bothered dressing.

  “Sounds good to me,” she said, and padded over to the phone. Outside, the snow kept coming down.

  Along with Gabe Sanchez, Colin spooned up ramen-fancy ramen, not the packaged stuff college kids ate and Louise dealt with-in a little place on Reynoso Drive. It was in the mostly Japanese shopping center that also held the Carrows where he’d had that lacerating lunch with his ex. If he looked out the window, he could see the other place. As long as he kept slurping up soup and noodles and chopped pork, he didn’t have to look out the window.

  “So you and Kelly were stuck there, huh?” Gabe said. “That’s funny, man!”

  “Worse places to be than snowed in with your brand-new wife,” Colin answered. In the two and a half days before enough snow melted to let traffic start moving again, he’d done more than he’d figured a man his age could do. And he’d managed all right once they finally got to San Diego, too.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Gabe didn’t sound completely convinced. No, he hadn’t had much luck with his love life since his marriage hit a mine and exploded. “It’s good to have you back in the saddle, though.”

  “Good to be back,” Colin allowed. No matter what kind of carnal excesses he’d managed at the Bonaventure and the Coronado, a man his age couldn’t do that all the time, not unless he wanted to roll up like a window shade, thwup, thwup, thwup!

  “You figure we’ll ever drop on the goddamn Strangler?” Gabe asked. It wasn’t out of the blue. There’d been a fresh killing over in Manhattan Beach while Colin and Kelly were on their abbreviated visit to San Diego. Colin hadn’t heard about it till he came home. Watching the news hadn’t been his biggest worry while he was there. As long as no more snow came down, he hadn’t cared what happened i
n the outside world.

  Now he did. Now he had to. And now he said what cops all over the South Bay had been saying all along: “He’s bound to goof sooner or later. Trip over something in the dark and break his ankle, maybe. Something.” Some bad guys got away with things for a long time, either through fool luck or because they were the uncommon smart people who turned to crime. Very few went to their graves uncaught. Colin was sure of it. He had to be, if he wanted to keep thinking he was doing something that mattered.

  “This one’s not in our jurisdiction, same as the last one wasn’t,” Gabe said. “Let the guys in Manhattan Beach take the heat. See how they like news vans lined up outside the department all the time and the clowns with the expensive haircuts asking dumbass questions.”

  “I’m sure they enjoy it as much as we do,” Colin said. Gabe laughed harshly. Colin went on, “What I want to be is, I want to be the one who busts the son of a bitch. I don’t know if I can be that lucky twice, but I sure want to.”

  “Twice?” Now Gabe sounded puzzled. Colin had been a solid, steady, capable cop for a hell of a long time now. He’d caught a lot of perps, some smart ones and even more of the jerks and losers who went wrong. But he’d never pulled a coup that even came close to what arresting the South Bay Strangler would mean.

  He wasn’t thinking of policework, though. “Lucky. Uh-huh,” he said. “Only reason I ever went to Yellowstone was to get away from everything after Louise walked out on me.”

  “Me, I went to Vegas when things hit the fan,” Sanchez said. “I bet you got away cheaper-I’ll tell you that.”

  “I bet you’re right,” Colin agreed. “So there I was, walking around in this cold, miserable drizzle, still kind of hungover, looking at the hot pools in the West Thumb Basin, and I reamed out this gal for going off the boardwalk.”

  Gabe chuckled. “Once a cop, always a cop.”

  “Tell me about it. So Kelly showed me she had every right to be where she was ’cause she was doing her research, and I felt two inches tall and covered in dogshit. But then I got lucky one more time. This earthquake hit, and it gave us something to talk about besides what a moron I was. I ended up getting her e-mail, and I gave her mine, and we just went on from there. Fool luck all the way, nothing else but.”

  Instead of answering right away, Gabe concentrated on getting to the bottom of his bowl. Then he said, “If you tell me the same thing ten, fifteen years from now, I’ll be more impressed.”

  “Mm, I know what you mean,” Colin admitted. People went into first marriages sure theirs was a passion for the ages, and just as sure love would last forever. They went into second marriages hoping things worked out. Even that might have been the triumph of hope over experience. But it also might have been a more realistic attitude.

  “Sometimes even ten, fifteen years aren’t enough. Look at us. Our first ones both lasted longer’n that, but when they died, they fuckin’ died, man,” Gabe said.

  “I know. Sometimes you grow together, sometimes you grow apart,” Colin said. He worked at his own ramen. The broth was salty and porky and delicious. His doctor would probably scream that it was a sodium bomb-and a fat bomb to boot-but sometimes he just didn’t care.

  “You know what I’m really jealous about?” Gabe asked.

  “What?” Colin worked to keep his voice neutral. How could his buddy help being jealous of his happiness? Gabe didn’t have a hell of a lot of his own these days.

  But the sergeant’s answer blindsided him: “I’m jealous you got to see Yellowstone. See it while it was still there to see, I mean. Nobody’s ever gonna be able to do that again, but you did.”

  “You’re right,” Colin said in surprise. “Kelly goes on about so much stuff being gone, but I hadn’t thought about it that way. Hell of a lot of stuff nobody’ll see again.”

  “You were there.” Gabe paused. “Wasn’t that the name of a TV show a million years ago?”

  “I think it was. Something like that, anyway.” Colin finished his lunch. Before the eruption, this place had served its ramen in big old styrofoam cups. You could wash bowls and use them over and over. The only time you needed a new one was when you dropped an old one. Once these people ran out of styrofoam, they fell back on Plan B.

  Plan B… Plan C… A lot of the time these days, it seemed as if the country was on about Plan Q. Nobody had any good ideas to pull it out of its mess. Or, more likely, the mess was simply too goddamn big for anything so trivial as some human’s good idea to make much difference.

  And, as Kelly kept pointing out, this was only the beginning. The eruption was over, but the aftereffects lingered on. How long would it be before the Midwest was the world’s breadbasket again, not buried under ash and dust? How many people would go hungry on account of that? Would the Midwest be the world’s breadbasket again, with the weather getting so much colder? How long would the chill last? Years? Decades? Centuries? Nobody knew for sure, but everybody was going to find out.

  Things probably wouldn’t be anywhere close to the same for the rest of his life. What were you supposed to do?

  Gabe put money on the table. “Here, Mister Just Back from His Honeymoon, this one’s on me.”?Thanks.” Colin stood up.

  So did Gabe. As they walked out to their car, he asked, “So… You got your ducks in a row to testify at the Ellis trial?”

  The kid from the projects was up for three counts of armed robbery and one of first-degree murder. The case looked open-and-shut to Colin, but nothing was open-and-shut if you messed it up. “I’m getting there,” he answered. “Still reviewing the videotapes and the reports and all. How about you?”

  “Pretty much the same,” Gabe said. “If they don’t stick a needle in his arm, they need to make damn sure he doesn’t get out again.”

  “Yup.” Colin nodded. Maybe this was what you were supposed to do: what you’d always done, as well as you could for as long as you could. What else could any one person do?

  He unlocked the car and slid into the driver’s seat. Gabe got in on the other side. They drove back to the cop shop under a sundogged sun in an ague-cheeked sky.

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