Supervolcano: Eruption

XII

It was a quiet Saturday afternoon in Ellwood. There were times when Marshall Ferguson didn’t appreciate his dad for getting him anpartment here rather than in Isla Vista, which was right next to the UC Santa Barbara campus. But his old man the cop had learned of Isla Vista’s many bars and of couch-burning and other quaint native rituals, so Marshall was out in the boonies instead.

Nothing exciting had happened in Ellwood since that Japanese submarine shelled the place. But living here wasn’t so bad. Marshall didn’t mind riding his bike to school, or hopping on the bus on the rare days when the weather was bad. He had a car-of course! — but campus parking cost two arms and a leg. He could get anything he needed at the big shopping center on Hollister, just a few blocks away. And it wasn’t as if Ellwood had no bars; it just didn’t have quite so many. It was still a student town, but a quieter student town for quieter students.

No, not so bad. It wasn’t as if Marshall never drank. Oh, no-not even close. Like his father was a teetotaler. As if! Like his mother had never got up on a Sunday morning making a beeline for the Excedrin. Yeah, right!

But he wasn’t smashed on this Ellwood Saturday afternoon. He could have been. The quarter was still new. Nothing needed turning in Monday morning. So, yeah, he could have been, but he wasn’t. He was stoned instead.

The apartment faced west, so he could sprawl on the ratty but unburnt couch in his front room and watch the sun go down through the Venetian blinds’ half-open slats. Sprawled next to him was a little dark-haired girl named Jenny. They weren’t touching right now. Sooner or later, he expected they would. No hurry, though. No hurry at all.

Not hurrying, he passed her the pipe. “Thanks,” she said. He liked the way her lips closed on the stem as she inhaled. The apartment was already fragrant with smoke. It got a little more so.

She gave the pipe back. He took another hit himself. It was all good: the dope, the company, the half-dark room, the sun slowly sliding down between the slats. Thanks to the dope, it seemed to slide slower than usual.

“Wow,” Marshall said. Jenny giggled-if that wasn’t the stoner cliche, what was? Even wasted, Marshall was embarrassed. But he pointed out through the blinds and defiantly said “Wow” again. This time, he amplified it: “That’s quite a sunset, you know?”

Santa Barbara sunsets, like a lot of Santa Barbara life, often spoiled you and made you feel every other place in the world was tacky and not worth living in. Clouds and soft, moist Pacific air painted the sky in red and orange and gold. Could nightfall in, say, Omaha come close? Not a chance.

This one was outdoing itself, even by Santa Barbara standards. Marshall blamed the good weed he’d got from a grad student in the creative-writing program. It made him feel pretty goddamn creative himself, though he would have been too languid to write even without a little dark-haired girl within arm’s reach.

But seriously, would he have seen all those wild colors if he weren’t baked? Reds and maroons and tangerines and carmines and lemons and lavenders and magentas and fuchsias and how many others the Crayola people had never heard of? He didn’t think so.

“This is good dope,” he said seriously.

“It is,” Jenny agreed. She held out her hand. Marshall’s fingers brushed hers when he gave her the pipe. They both smiled. They had time. When you’re young and wasted, time stretches like taffy. She sucked in more smoke. After a while, she blew it out. She admired day’s decline for a while. Then she said, “It’s not j the dope.”

“Huh?” Marshall said.

“It’s not just the dope,” Jenny repeated. “It’s the volcano thing in Yellowstone, too. It’s, like, put a lot of stuff in the air. Sunsets all over will be special for a while.”

“Oh.” Marshall nodded. “Cool.” He seemed to remember that big volcanoes did that. The one they’d made the old movie about… He tried to come up with the name. It was on the tip of his tongue, but chasing it down seemed like more trouble than it was worth. A lot of things seemed like more trouble than they were worth.

A lot of things, but not all. He slid the palm of his hand along the warm, smooth skin on the inside of Jenny’s forearm. It felt something like velvet, something like electricity. Some of that was normal, healthy horniness. Some of it was the dope, too. Girls were wonderful any old time. They got wonderfuler after a few bowls. Hey, what didn’t? And he was sure the volcano had nothing to do with it.

Jenny made a noise down deep in her throat that sounded more like a cat’s purr than human noises had any business doing. Her eyes sparkled. Dope definitely made it better for people of the female persuasion, too. She slid toward him.

They kissed for a while on the couch. Then they went into the bedroom. Marshall’s bed was narrow for two, but that just meant they had to press together tighter. The amazing sunset played itself out in the front-room wall, forgotten.

The gig at Bar Harbor turned out to be a mistake. The club crowd there didn’t get Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, and it worked both ways. New England seaside vacation towns seemed different from their Pacific equivalents. Rob Ferguson tried to figure out what made these people tick. It wasn’t easy.

Some of the crowd were leftover summer people. Not all of them went back to Boston and New York City right after Labor Day. Some stuck around and kept partying till… what? Till their money ran out? Not likely-they weren’t the kind whose money ever seemed likely to run out. Till the cows came home, was the way it looked to Rob.

The rest were Maine townies. Summer people and townies. It reminded him of Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine. And why not? Wells had been talking about the class system in Victorian England. The class system remained alive and well on the East Coast of the modern USA.

For the summer people, the band was just background noise. The townies saw amplified instruments and expected-hell, demanded-straight-ahead, raucous rock. Neither was what Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles was all about. You needed to pay attention to the band, and it wasn’t about head-banging or about ears that stayed stunned three days after the show.

A good time was had by few.

Afterwards, Justin put the best face on things he could: “Maybe Bangor will be better.”

“Or Orono,” Rob said. “Orono’s got a University of Maine campus. Our kind of people will be listening to us.”

“Stoned freaks and geeks, you mean?” Biff Thorvald said.

Rob made as if to bow to the rhythm guitarist, but there wasn’t room in the cramped dressing room. “Precisely,” he said.

“You know what the real trouble is?” As Justin often did, he answered his own question: “The real trouble is, there aren’t enough stoned freaks and geeks running around loose to supt us in the style we’d like to get accustomed to.”

“If you mean we ain’t gonna get rich like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, why don’t you come out and say so?” Charlie Storer demanded.

“We ain’t gonna get rich like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber,” Justin said obligingly.

“We don’t have some corporate dickhead telling us what to do next, either,” Rob said.

“Of course not. We know what to do next: go on to the next town,” Charlie said. “Play there, then head for the one after that.”

Rob remembered his own uneasy thoughts of not too long ago. Did he like doing this enough to keep at it the rest of his life? Could he make a living at it if he did? If he didn’t, what would he do instead?

They got to stay in Bar Harbor; with most of the summer people gone, prices dropped like a stone. The desk clerk at their motel said, “We’ve had a Secretary of Labor stay in one of your rooms.”

“Not after Labor Day, you didn’t,” Rob answered. She gave him a dirty look, but didn’t try to tell him he was wrong. Afterwards, he was sorry he’d pissed her off; he’d seen plenty worse. As usual, afterwards was too late.

Summer weather seemed to have gone home with the summer people. The sun came up in blood-drenched splendor from the Atlantic, tinting the stacked clouds every shade of red and purple and red and pink and orange imaginable. Sunsets had been just as spectacular since the supervolcano let go. When TV pundits weren’t bemoaning everything else about the disaster-deaths were well up into six figures, and damage estimates heading toward the trillions-they talked learnedly about particulate matter.

Eyeing the sunrise, Justin put it a different way: “My grandfather went to sea in freighters for a few years when he was about the age we are now. He always used to say, ‘Red in the night-sailors’ delight. Red in the morning? Sailors take warning.’ ”

“A bunch of nervous sailors out there, then,” Rob predicted.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Justin shivered in the parking lot. “Brr! That’s one nasty wind.”

“Yeah. Well, welcome to Maine,” Rob said. But nervous sailors wouldn’t have surprised him, either. He wished he’d put on something heavier than an old UCSB sweatshirt. The wind seemed to have taken a running start from Baffin Island.

“How soon does it start snowing here?” Justin asked. Sure as hell, other cloud fortresses, these more ominous gray and less pretty pink, were stacking up to the north and west.

“I’d say tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon,” Rob answered. “We’ve got chains for the vans, right?”

“Uh-huh,” Justin said without enthusiasm. They weren’t practiced at putting them on. They weren’t practiced at driving in snow and ice, either. They were California kids. What did they need to know about that kind of stuff?

Trying to cheer up the lead guitarist-or something-Rob said, “Bangor and Orono are north of here, right?”

“Fuck you,” Justin explained. He pointed to the diner across the street. They’d had dinner there the night before. It was okay. “C’mon. Let’s go feed our faces.”

“You don’t want to wait for Charlie and Biff?”

“Nah. Let ’em sleep if they want o. They’ll eat sooner or later. And Bangor’s not that far north from here.” Justin used the word with more irony than Rob had. “Even if we leave later than usual, we’ll make our next date.”

Breakfast was pretty good. You never could tell with local places. They were like the little girl with the little curl. With Denny’s, you always knew what you were getting-which was both the good and the bad news. This proved a step, even a step and a half, up from that. The potatoes that went into the hash browns were fresh, not frozen, and not too greasy. The same with the sausage, which had a hint of something-fennel? — you didn’t taste every day. And the over-medium eggs came to the table hot and exactly over medium.

Biff and Charlie ambled in when Rob and Justin were getting close to done. Biff ordered coffee. “You never do that, dude,” Rob said.

“Unless you got some meth, I hafta get my heart started some kinda way,” the rhythm guitarist answered. Rob shook his head. Crank was not his drug of choice. Neither Charlie nor Justin volunteered any. Biff spread his hands. “See?” he said. When the coffee came, he poured in lots of cream and sugar so it wouldn’t taste like coffee any more. Then he gulped it. The sugar rush would help wire him for the morning, too.

The waitress brought Rob and Justin more toast to give them something to nibble on while their buddies chowed down. Rob smeared strawberry jam on his. It came in the same little foil-topped plastic package you saw everywhere. Oh, well. As he ate, he stared out the tinted window and across the street at the motor lodge they’d just come from.

After a while, he said, “Is it the glass, or is the light funny?”

“It’s the light,” Charlie said. “I noticed it when I was coming over here. Did you, Biff?”

“Huh?” Biff said. Rob didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to figure out that Biff hadn’t noticed much of anything till he surrounded his coffee.

They paid for breakfast and walked out. A guy about their age coming down the street on a bike stopped and said, “Hey, I was at your show last night. I don’t know about anybody else, but I liked it.”

“Thanks-I think,” Rob said. Not enough people had. The guy gave a vague wave and pedaled off.

“The light is funny.” Justin was looking at the sun. No clouds were close by or in front of it, but he looked at it anyway. Rob could do the same thing. The sun was uncommonly weak, uncommonly white, as if seen through fog. But there was no fog. You could see for miles without channeling the Who. Rob turned and looked at his shadow. He had one, but not the kind he should have had on a sunny day.

They all started across the street. Not much traffic in Bar Harbor, not after the end of the season. “Is this, like, Maine weather or volcano weather?” Charlie wondered.

“Volcano weather.” Rob heard something peculiar in his own voice, something he didn’t think he’d ever found there before: a sad certainty. A doctor might have had that tone after seeing a chest X-ray with a dark spot on the lung.

All of a sudden, particulate matter wasn’t just a pompous phrase to Rob. There wasn’t any fog down here, no. But way the hell up there? That was liable to be-no, that was bound to be-a different story. How much crud had the supervolcano flung into the stratosphere? How much sunlight was it blocking? How bad would that screw up the weather? And for how long?

He shivered. The old Gaucho sweatshirt felt even thinner and rattier than it had when he pulled it on. He wanted something warmer: an ankle-length polar-bear coat, maybe, or a goose-down sleeping bag with sleeves.

Charlie hopped up onto the curb. “Boy, you sounded like a judge passing sentence there,” he said.

“You totally did, man,” Justin agreed. Even Biff nodded. That wasn’t quite how Rob had thought of it, but wasn’t so far removed, either. Out of the blue-the pale blue, the almost icy blue-Justin asked, “You ever hear anything from your sister, the one who moved to Denver?”

“No,” Rob said tightly. “Cell phones are down for God knows how far. I’ve been hoping she could get to a landline or send me an e-mail or… something. But no.”

Justin set a hand on his shoulder for a second. “That’s hard, man.”

“Nothing I can do about it. I keep telling myself there’s more to Vanessa than you’d think. She can get out of there if anybody can.”

Rob wished he hadn’t added the last three words. They helped remind him how enormous the catastrophe was. Denver was hundreds of miles from Yellowstone. But Denver was also not far from the middle of the area the eruption had screwed, blued, and tattooed. The TV said volcanic ash was coming down in Alberta, in Texas, in Iowa, even in California.

He didn’t want to think about that, so he turned to Biff and Charlie and asked, “Are we ready to rock?” He knew he and Justin were; they’d cleaned out their room down to the last dirty sock.

Charlie nodded. “Didn’t leave the drums behind, honest.” That made Biff snort. It would be easier to forget an elephant than Charlie’s kit, even if the elephant would be harder to disassemble.

“Let’s go, then,” Justin said. They piled into the SUVs. Under that pale, unnatural sunlight, they started up the road toward Bangor. Pretty soon, all the sunshine disappeared. Rob turned on his headlights. It started to rain. By the time they got where they were going, the rain had turned to snow. Maine weather or volcano weather? What difference did that make? It was here, and they were stuck in it.

The first thing Colin Ferguson did after sitting up in bed was check his cell for voice mail and texts from Kelly or Vanessa. Nothing this morning from either one of them-nothing at all from Vanessa since the eruption. Had anything in his own bailiwick gone wrong, the folks at the cop shop would have called on the landline and woken him up.

After he took a leak, he went downstairs to fix coffee. He didn’t have to go in today unless something hit the fan. If Kelly weren’t stuck in Missoula… But she was, dammit. So instead of enjoying himself with good company, he’d try to catch up on some around-the-house stuff. His Navy-trained soul was dismayed by how much he just let slide.

It’s not like I don’t work, he thought defensively, but his internalized CPO knew bullshit every time.

He always looked out the window while he waited for his water to boil. This morning, he looked and then he looked: a double take Harpo Marx would have been proud of. Even with on-and-off water rationing, he kept his lawn green. He was proud of it, the same way he was proud of his well-organized filing system.

Only the lawn and the flowers weren’t green any more. They were about the color of cement dust. So were the leaves on the orange tree and the lemon ts prouand the magnolia. So was the cinder-block wall, which had been pink. So was just about everything in the backyard. The supervolcano had come to L.A.

The microwave chimed. He absently took out the water and poured it into the brown plastic cone that held the Melitta filter-the coffeenose, the kids had called it when they were little. A cat (also grayer than it should have been; he recognized the critter, which lived down the block) left almost-green footprints on the grass. It didn’t like what was going on. It would take a few steps, stop and wash, walk on a few more steps, then wash some more. How much grit was it swallowing? What would that do to its insides? Nothing good, Colin was sure.

Rationing rules said he wasn’t supposed to water the lawn on Saturday. He’d spent most of his life enforcing rules. Now he broke one. He ducked under the sink to fiddle with the sprinkler controls. Nozzles popped up and started spraying. The cat levitated, then teleported. The lawn turned green again-except for patches still streaked with ugly brown sludge.

Thoughtfully, Colin put on slippers before he went out to get the Times and the Breeze. He didn’t want to walk barefoot through that crud, not even slightly he didn’t. It scrunched under his crepe soles and came up in little puffs. The front lawn was gray: almost the same color as the sidewalk. The street, which should have been asphalt-dark, was doing a sidewalk impression, too, one slightly spoiled by a few tire tracks.

His car was gray. All the cars he could see were gray-windows, mirrors, the whole deal. All but one: right across the street, Wes Jones was breaking some more rules by hosing his Nissan back to its original blue. Wes was a retired aerospace engineer who spent most of his time gardening. Like everybody else, he’d be playing catch-up for a while.

Colin waved to him. “Some fun, isn’t it?” he called, and grabbed the papers. They were both wrapped in poly bags, as if against rain. Volcanic ash slid off the plastic.

“Fun? Oh, you bet.” Wes pointed east. “Even the sun’s gone nutso.” Anything he disapproved of was nutso. But Wes didn’t disapprove of much; he was an easygoing guy.

“Huh?” Colin hadn’t paid any attention to the sun, past noticing that the daylight looked wan and washed out. Now he did. It sat low in the sky, still red as if closer to its rising than it really was. A hellacious halo surrounded it, with a pair of sundogs-false images of the sun-on the halo. He’d seen a sundog once, while in a destroyer off the coast of Greenland, with a sky full of ice crystals. The sky above San Atanasio had a different kind of junk in it. He delivered his verdict: “Holy crap!”

“Yeah, that’s about what I was thinking,” Wes replied. “Anything from Vanessa?” He’d watched her grow up; he’d been an honorary uncle.

“Nope.” Colin left it right there.

Wes grunted. “Well, I’ll tell Ida she needs to pray harder.” He was at least as skeptical as Colin, but his wife went to a Methodist church every Sunday and did good works during the week. She didn’t try to ram it down anybody’s throat, even her husband’s; she just did what she did. They’d had their fortieth anniversary the year before. Colin remembered no more than a handful of cross words between them.

Now he said, “It can’t hurt.”

“I expect you’re right. And I expect I’m going back in the house.” Wes scuffed at the ash on his driveway. Some of it was wet, but some came up the way it had underolin’s slippers. “Breathing this crap has to be hazardous to your health-to my health, even.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Colin said, which only gave him more reason to worry about his cross-grained daughter. Like Missoula, the L.A. area was getting only a light dusting of volcanic ash. But the shit was practically burying places like Salt Lake City… and Denver. You could foul up your lungs inhaling sawdust at a furniture factory. What the supervolcano spat out was bound to be a hell of a lot nastier than sawdust.

If Vanessa had listened to him-she wouldn’t have been Vanessa. He hadn’t wanted to listen to anybody when he was her age, either. Come to that, he was none too good at listening to other people even now.

But what Wes said made good sense. Things Wes said usually did. And Colin had that coffee waiting for him back on the kitchen counter. It wouldn’t be too cold yet. Wes was already making for his own front door. Colin followed his lead. He paused at the doorway and left the slippers outside. The less ash he tracked in, the better.

His bare feet left gray prints on the dark brown foyer tiles. He’d kicked dust up into the slippers. Well, 409 and some paper towels would take care of that. Coffee first, coffee and the newspapers.

A notice on the front page of the Breeze said We will keep printing as long as we can. Our paper supplier is in Minnesota. The supervolcano eruption has disrupted communication with areas to the east. Even when things come closer to normal, we fear paper will have a lower priority than food and fuel. But, at least temporarily, we may be compelled to go to Web-only publication.

Harder to have a cup of coffee and check your computer or your smart phone. Not impossible, but harder. And what happened if L.A. lost power? So much for Web-only publication, that was what.

The Times didn’t talk about a paper shortage. Maybe it got its newsprint from the Northwest, which was still reachable. Or maybe the editor didn’t believe in borrowing trouble. The headline there said

SENATORS FROM AFFLICTED STATES APPEAL FOR FEDERAL AID.

Afflicted. Colin slowly nodded as he considered the word. It was one you seldom met outside the Bible, but no denying it fit here. If the Children of Israel had ever met anything as overwhelming as the supervolcano eruption, the Old Testament failed to mention it.

He did wonder what Washington was supposed to do for Wyoming and Montana, where the very geography had been pretty drastically revised. How many feet of dust lay on Idaho and Utah and Colorado and Nebraska and Kansas? Not just here and there in those states, but all over everything, or as near as made no difference. How many bulldozers and trucks and years would you need to clear hundreds of thousands of square miles? More than even the USA had in its back pocket: he was sure of that.

Colin also noticed the irony in the Times ’ headline. L.A.’s leading newspaper had leaned left for longer than he’d been alive after an even lengthier spell of leaning hard right. Had the headline writer chosen his phrase with malice aforethought? Colin wouldn’t have been surprised. Those Senators appealed for Federal aid, did they? Before the supervolcano went blam, they would have found Federal aid about as appealing as HIV. It all depended on whose ox was being gored, didn’t it?

Almost all the Senators-and Representatives-from the afflicted states were Republicans. That didn’t stop them from sticking their hands out. If Washington couldn’t help them, nobody could. Tlin, it looked very much as if nobody could.

Which raised other interesting questions. Was anybody at all left alive in Wyoming? Western Montana was hanging on, but barely. Idaho and Utah were in pretty bad shape, too. So was Colorado, though maybe not quite to the same degree. The farming states farther east had also taken a big hit. Almost all those states were red as Rudolph’s nose. If they got depopulated, what would that do to American politics? Nothing good, not as far as Colin was concerned.

He grabbed the Daily Breeze again. Yes, that was what he’d read. Paper will have a lower priority than food and fuel. “What food?” he wondered out loud. America’s breadbasket had just taken one right in the breadbasket. How could you bring in or move the harvest when volcanic ash smothered the fields and blanketed the roads and choked the life out of tractors and harvesters and trucks (to say nothing of farmers)? One more thing that wasn’t gonna happen.

The United States had been the world’s larder since the nineteenth century. That was out the window, too. How was the USA going to feed its own people, let alone the many, many hungry beyond its borders? Who would-who could-take up the slack? Anybody? If no one did, what would happen then? Colin couldn’t see the details, but the broad outlines seemed plain enough. Nothing good would happen-that was what.

How much of the country’s grain was stored in areas suddenly ungetatable on account of the eruption? How many cows and sheep and pigs and chickens were dying right now? He’d read a newspaper squib about a yak farm in the Colorado Rockies. Was anybody saving the poor goddamn yaks?

Yeah, the country was screwed. The part of the world that depended on the USA was screwed, too. And so was everybody else. He was still only on his first cup of coffee. He hadn’t even started worrying about climate change yet. He got up and put some more water in the microwave. If he was going to do that, he’d definitely need more.

The knock on the door was loud and somehow official-sounding, as if the guy doing the knocking had a hell of a lot of practice. Daniel had gone to the university, which left Kelly and Ruth and Larry sitting around his apartment waiting for something to happen. Well, now something had.

Larry went to the door. He was the man. That wasn’t exactly twenty-first-century thinking, but neither Kelly nor Ruth made a move to get there ahead of him. Kelly didn’t even think about it till afterwards.

When Larry opened the door, standing there in front of it was the most cop-looking cop Kelly’d ever seen. Yes, he’d know how to knock on doors, all right. Shoulders. Chin. Khaki shirt with badge. Pistol on hip. Olive-drab pants, sharply creased. Shiny black boots. Gunnery sergeant’s hat. Mirrored sunglasses, even.

“Yes?” Larry said, in a tone that couldn’t mean anything but You’ve got to have the wrong apartment.

But the cop rumbled, “Is Miss Birnbaum here?”

“That’s me,” Kelly squeaked in surprise. About the most nefarious thing she’d done was smoke dope every once in a while, and she hadn’t even done that since she’d started dating Colin. He made no bones about hating it, it was still mildly illegal, and she didn’t get off on it that much anyhow. Quitting hadn’t been hard.

“Miss Birnbaum, I’m Roy Schurz,” the cop said. “I’m chief of police in Orofino, Idaho.”

“Yes?” Kelly said blanklyief ofAnd so?”

“And so I used to be a cop down in San Atanasio, California,” Schurz answered. “Colin Ferguson’s a buddy of mine. He asked me to see what I could do about getting you out of here. Are you ready to go?”

Colin had said he might be able to pull some strings. He must have meant it. Colin, Kelly had discovered, commonly meant what he said. That was so far out of the ordinary, she was still getting used to it. “Am I ready?” she echoed.

“Yes, ma’am,” Chief Schurz said. “I’ve got a Humvee with a desert air filter parked out front. It’s what I came here in.” In case you think I bounced in on a pogo stick or something. The mirrored shades kept his face from showing how big a jerk he thought she was.

“Let me grab my purse,” Kelly said. All at once, she believed. It wasn’t as if she had much more than that here. She hugged Ruth and Larry. “Tell Daniel thanks a couple of million for me.”

“We will.” Ruth Marquez sounded wistful, or more likely jealous.

Kelly followed Roy Schurz out to the Humvee. It was a Humvee, too, not a Hummer: a military vehicle, painted in faded desert camo. It mounted the biggest machine gun Kelly had ever imagined. A soldier sat behind the gun.

“National Guard,” Schurz explained. “I borrowed the vehicle-and Edwards there-from them. Colin, he thinks you’re something special.” He didn’t say Hell with me if I can see why, but it was in his voice.

“I think he’s something special, too,” Kelly managed.

“Good. When him and Louise broke up, he was mighty, well, broke up about it. Now he’s more like his old self again.” Schurz gestured. “Hop on in.”

It was a tall hop; the Humvee had humongous tires. Kelly climbed aboard. The seat was severely functional. Chief Schurz got in on the driver’s side. The engine might boast a desert filter, but it sounded raspy anyway. Of course, it probably had that filter because it had seen action in Iraq or Afghanistan. It wasn’t new, or close to new. It was a Regular Army castoff good enough for the Idaho National Guard. Chances were it had sounded raspy for years.

Roy Schurz put it in gear. It rode as if it had left its shocks near Kandahar, that was for sure. “Do we really need a gunner?” Kelly had to shout to make herself heard.

“Well, you never can tell,” Schurz shouted back. The Humvee kicked up its share of dust and then some. He pulled a surgical-style mask out of his shirt pocket and put it on with one hand. The Smokey Bear hat went into his lap for a second, no more. He extracted another mask and offered it to Kelly. “Your own air filter.”

“Thanks.” She put it on. When she turned around to look at the machine gunner-Edwards-she discovered he’d also donned one. The less volcanic crap you put in your lungs, the better. A lot could kill you pretty fast. Even a little wasn’t good news. Twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, she expected mesothelioma cases to shoot through the roof. Not much of what the supervolcano belched into the air was asbestos fibers, but when you were talking about several hundred cubic miles of material there’d be plenty to go around.

A Missoula policeman with a shotgun stood guard at the edge of town. He was also wearing a mask. He waved to the Humvee as it got on US 12 heading south-Orofino evidently wasn’t on the Interstate. Chief Schurz gravely waved back.

“Well, you never can tell,” Schurz repeated. With the mask and shades, his face was almost completely unreadable. But the way he fidgeted in the hard, uncomfortable bucket seat told Kelly he realized he needed to say more: “People are starting to run low on all kinds of stuff. They’re putting armed escorts on food and fuel convoys. We haven’t had a lot of trouble yet, and nobody wants it to start, y’know?”

“I guess,” Kelly said. How many folks couldn’t get to a Safeway or a Mobil station so easily these days? How many couldn’t get their hands on ground chuck or gasoline even when they did? How many of those folks had guns? In this part of the country, quite a few. And what would they do when they got hungry or otherwise desperate? If you had to take what you needed or starve, who wouldn’t think about turning robber?

“I’ve got some jerrycans of gas in the vehicle here,” Chief Schurz went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “That’s one of the reasons I brought Edwards along. Nothing like a soldier on a. 50-caliber to keep people honest.”

“God, you sound like Colin!” Kelly blurted, all at once missing him more than ever now that she was actually heading toward him, not stuck in Missoula.

The Orofino (would that be Fine Gold in Spanish?) police chief chuckled. “Wouldn’t be surprised if we rubbed off on each other some. You ride in the same patrol car a few years, that’ll happen. Almost like being married, only without benefits.”

Not knowing what to say to that, Kelly didn’t say anything. They climbed toward the hills, which were covered with a light coating of ash, a little too dark and a little too brown to look like dirty snow. Most of the clouds in the sky were just clouds. It was a gloomy, chilly, lowering day. Her heart soared like a skylark anyhow. She was out, out, out of Missoula!

Hardly anybody shared the road with the Humvee. She didn’t know how many people used US 12 on an average day, but this had to be way down from that. Just across the Idaho line, Schurz pulled onto the shoulder. Some grass showed through the ash here; they were right at the western edge of the throw line.

“Is the, uh, Humvee okay?” Kelly asked.

“As okay as it ever is,” he replied. “Gotta throw in some fuel. It can do more than a jeep can, but Christ, it’s a gas hog.” He and the silent Edwards emptied two camo-painted jerrycans into the vehicle. Then he got behind the wheel again, fired up the machine, and drove on towards Orofino.