Harry Turtledove
Supervolcano: All Fall Down
I
Colin Ferguson called upstairs to his wife: “You ready?”
“Just about-not even a minute,” Kelly answered.
“We need to get going,” he muttered discontentedly. He was punctual to a fault. A police lieutenant had to be. In his younger days, the Navy’d rammed being on time down his throat. To be fair, he hadn’t needed much ramming. He’d never been the kind of person who always ran fifteen minutes or half an hour behind schedule-unlike one poor sailor a pissed-off CPO finally tagged the late Seaman Kurowski.
And, to be fair, neither was Kelly. As quickly as she’d promised, she joined him by the front door. Patting at her honey-blond hair, she asked, “Do I look okay?”
“I’m the wrong guy for that question, babe,” he said. “You know you always look good to me.”
“You!” She shook her head, but she was smiling. Colin meant every word of it. He was happy the way only a man in his early fifties still pretty newly wed to a damned fine-looking woman in her late thirties can be: happier than he figured he had any business being, in other words. After Louise walked out the door on him, after she and the lawyers got through with him, he’d never dreamt he could be this happy this way again.
One never knows, do one? he thought. Which, like his earlier woolgathering, was beside the point. “Let’s head on out,” he said.
Kelly nodded. “Sounds good.”
Out they went. Colin locked the dead bolt. There’d been a break-in the next block over last week. You didn’t want to make things easy for burglars. They might get you anyway, but why help ’em along?
“Brr!” Kelly said, and buttoned her denim jacket. It didn’t exactly go with Colin’s blue wool suit and maroon tie, but she did what she liked while he dressed the way he did more from force of habit than for any other reason. San Atanasio was a South Bay town. The nearby Pacific and the good old sea breeze had always moderated its climate. It didn’t get as cold or as hot as downtown L.A., to say nothing of the San Fernando Valley (as far as Colin was concerned, the best thing you could say about the Valley).
But this was June. It was supposed to be mild, if not hot. The sun wasn’t supposed to shine palely from a sky more nearly gray than blue. This past winter-if winter was past-the L.A. basin had got its first all-over snowfall in more than sixty years. . and then, a month later, its second.
“You and your supervolcano,” Colin said. If he and Kelly had been in an interrogation room, it would have done duty for an accusation.
“I was just studying it. I didn’t make it go off. And if the copter that got me out of Yellowstone had taken off fifteen minutes later, chances are I wouldn’t be here for you to complain to,” she replied in at least medium dudgeon.
“Well, I’m glad you are,” he admitted. Nothing much was left of Yellowstone. For that matter, nothing much was left of Wyoming, or of big chunks of Montana and Idaho. Most of the Rocky Mountain West and the Great Plains was pretty much screwed, too. When the supervolcano erupted-for the first time in close to seven hundred thousand years-he’d heard the roar and felt the quake here in San Atanasio, eight hundred and some odd miles away. Volcanic ash and dust had rained down here, too, but not the way they had closer to the eruption site.
As he and Kelly walked over to his silver Taurus, Wes Jones waved from across the street. Wes-an aerospace engineer, now retired-and his wife had been neighbors for more than twenty years. Colin waved back. Pointing to the Taurus, Wes called, “You got gas?”
“Darn right,” Colin said solemnly. “That kimchi I ate last night’d do it to anybody.”
Wes laughed more than the joke deserved. “Ah, you’re nutso,” he said-his word for anything out of the ordinary. After hearing it for so many years, Colin found himself using it, too. Wes went on, “Say congratulations to Marshall from Ida and me. We’ll have a little something for him when he gets back to town.”
“Thanks. Will do.” Colin didn’t bother telling Wes that his younger son was less than thrilled about finally graduating from UC Santa Barbara, and about the idea of coming back home to live. Marshall, in fact, had often seemed to try his best not to graduate. But accumulated time and units caught up with him at last. Like it or not-and he didn’t-he’d have to face the real world.
Colin used his key-ring control to open the car doors. He sat down behind the wheel. Kelly slid in on the passenger side. When he started the engine, the fuel gauge shot all the way up to the capital F. Kelly pointed to the gauge. “A year ago, we would have taken that for granted.”
“Uh-huh.” Colin nodded. Less crude was coming up out of the ground in the USA because of the supervolcano. The spasmodic nuclear war between Iran and Israel hadn’t done production any favors, either. Quite a bit less oil was getting refined into gasoline. And what did get refined had a devil of a time reaching L.A. Put it all together, and a full tank was something of a coup.
North on La Merced, the little street he lived on. The left onto Braxton Bragg Boulevard was easy: not much traffic these days. West on Braxton Bragg toward the ocean-and, more toward the point, toward the 405. Most of the gas stations flew red flags to show they were out of fuel. Cars queued up at the few that were open. The date was an odd number. So was the last digit of Colin’s license plate. If he had to, he could gas up today. He hoped he wouldn’t have to. North on the 405, past LAX, past UCLA, through the Sepulveda Pass, to the 101. West on the 101, even if the sign said north.
About 125 miles from San Atanasio to Santa Barbara. Two hours-likely less, with the freeways. Once they got out of the Valley and into Ventura County, the 101 came down close to the Pacific. It was a pretty drive, a hell of a lot prettier than if Marshall had chosen UC Riverside. Riverside was, or had been, as hot as the Valley. It was also where the sea breeze blew the smog from the L.A. basin.
“The hills are so green,” Kelly marveled. “It’s June. Everything is supposed to be brown by now.” She’d grown up in Torrance, not far from San Atanasio, though she’d gone to grad school up at Berkeley. She knew how things in Southern California worked, or had worked.
“Everything was supposed to be brown by now.” Colin remembered years when everything was brown and bare by April Fool’s Day. He remembered the horrendous brush fires that often followed in such years, too. No one hereabouts remembered a year where it snowed twice during the winter. There’d never been a year like that, not till the Yellowstone supervolcano blew. And things were just warming up-or rather, cooling down.
“Yeah, yeah. Los Angeles is the new Seattle.” Kelly quoted the new conventional wisdom.
“Sure it is.” Colin snorted. “And fifty is the new thirty. And the check is in the mail.” Fifty is the new thirty was part of the Baby Boom’s fanatical effort to deny the obvious: like it or not, the Boomers were getting older. Fifty might or might not be so bad. Thirty it wasn’t. Colin had seen both, and he knew the difference. As far as he was concerned, anybody who didn’t was a goddamn fool.
Something with one hell of a wingspan floated over the freeway. Hawk? Eagle? Vulture? He didn’t get a good enough look to tell. He had to keep most of his attention on the asphalt ahead and the morons all around.
They were nearing Santa Barbara when Kelly suddenly said, “It’s cool with Marshall that I’m coming to his graduation and his mother isn’t?”
That kind of thing was and always would be a second wife’s worry. It probably got more acute when the second wife was closer in age to her husband’s children than she was to him. But Colin’s answer came quick and certain: “As far as I know, he’s fine with it.”
“Yes, but how far do you know?” Kelly persisted. “Marshall. . doesn’t leave a lot of clues about what’s going on inside his head.”