Supervolcano :Eruption Read online

  Rain or no rain, people were out on campus collecting donations for all the millions who’d had to evacuate on account of the eruption. Cash, canned goods, old clothes-they’d take anything. Marshall had given them money. He couldn’t see how canned gooor beat-up jeans would make it from Santa Barbara to the Midwest.

  He’d even asked about that. “They won’t,” an earnest guy with a Red Cross pin on his pocket replied. “But there are plenty of refugees at the western edge of the ashfall, too.”

  “Oh.” Marshall hadn’t thought about that. The next day, he’d donated a can of roast-beef hash and a can of mandarin oranges. So they didn’t exactly go together. BFD.

  Today, he walked past the wet volunteers. He was low on funds, and he hadn’t stuck any cans in his backpack. The rain lowered everyone’s spirits. The volunteers didn’t try very hard to get people to stop. They stood or sat under polyethylene sheeting that didn’t keep off enough of the rain, and looked as if they would have donated their souls to go somewhere warm and dry.

  Marshall could actually do that. Campus buildings weren’t very warm, because thermostats got pushed way down after the eruption. But it wasn’t raining indoors. He could shed his poncho. He could even go into a men’s room and use a paper towel to dry off a little. New stickers in there warned DON’T WASTE PAPER GOODS! What wasn’t in short supply these days?

  On to the room for the creative-writing class. Professor Bolger wasn’t what Marshall had expected. He made the students write. Well, surprise! But he also made them submit what they wrote: submit it to markets where they were competing against people who’d been freelancing longer than they’d been alive.

  When Bolger had announced that requirement, a girl bleated, “We’ll get rejected!” Marshall would have beaten her to it if he hadn’t been exhaling at the moment instead of inhaling.

  The prof answered a squawk with a question: “Suppose you do. How are you worse off?”

  “Because!” the girl explained. Marshall nodded. That sure made sense to him.

  “Listen to me,” Bolger said grimly. “You are here to learn something about writing. And you are here-with luck-to see if you can make money writing. To make a living at it, even, if you’re good enough and stubborn enough and lucky enough. You cannot possibly sell your work if you never submit it. And so… you will.”

  “How often do you get rejected?” Marshall asked. He assumed Bolger did; if the answer came back never, what the hell was the guy doing teaching here? Why wasn’t he all over the best-seller list?

  “I have a stack of slips this high.” The prof held his hands six inches apart. “And that doesn’t even count e-mails. Nobody’s going to like your work all the time. You have to get hardened to that. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It just means that editor didn’t like that piece that day.”

  He made it sound simple and logical. Marshall still quailed at the idea of some hard-bitten, probably cigar-chewing, editor laughing at something he’d worked hard on. Logic would take you only so far.

  XVI

  When Vanessa heard loud diesel engines outside the Red Cross shelter in Garden City, the first thing she wondered was whether she’d slipped a cog. Hardly any motor noises had been around lately. The cars that could get out of town had got. Hardly any more vehicles were coming in out of the west.

  So what the devil was going on? Curiosity felt odd. She knew more about the people cooped up in room K- with her than she’d ever wanted to find out. She knew how they smelled: worse by the day. So did she. She knew how The Mill on the Floss came out. Knowing didn’t stop her from wondering why the Garden City school district inflicted it on defenseless high schoolers.

  Some of the refugees passed the time by playing cards. That had already caused two fights. Money seemed like a joke when you couldn’t buy anything with it-till you started losing. Then, to some people, it stopped being funny.

  And if Vanessa never saw another MRE… it was liable to mean she’d starve to death. Which was worse seemed less and less obvious.

  The MREs did give her and her fellow inmates at the refugee center the strength to complain. They complained about the food, though nobody did the old Catskills shtick and added and such small portions! Not even the most dedicated complainer-and Vanessa was right up there-wanted more of the military rations. As far as she was concerned, they only proved GIs were heroes.

  They complained about the accommodations. They complained about the stinking heads. They complained about having to go outside through the dust to use the stinking heads. (They complained even more about the idea of using a bucket behind a curtain in the room, not that there was enough space to set up that kind of niche anyhow.) Everybody complained about how smelly everybody else was.

  They complained whenever somebody farted. Since they were eating MREs all the time, people farted a lot. Some were sound and fury, signifying nothing. Some could have cleared out Madison Square Garden. Clearing out K-1 wasn’t so easy. You had to flee into the dust. Farts were only noxious. That stuff was whatever came after noxious.

  Pickles was out in it. She wasn’t the only one who complained about having to abandon a pet. Maybe somebody out there had taken in her poor, dumb kitty. She could hope so, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. Guilt gnawed at her.

  One of the Red Cross people came into the classroom in the middle of the morning. That alarmed Vanessa the way a change in routine alarmed a guy halfway through a twenty-year sentence. It was different! Something had to be wrong with it!

  “Grab your stuff, put on masks if you’ve got ’em, and come outside in a neat line,” the woman said, for all the world like a kindergarten teacher. But she added something a kindergarten teacher wouldn’t have: “We are going to evacuate the people at this center to a site farther east.”

  “There is a God!” Vanessa exclaimed amidst the general hubbub the announcement set off.

  A doughy, middle-aged woman gave her a disapproving look. “Of course there is,” she said, her voice a harsh Kansas rasp that sounded straight off a Depression-era farm. “Have you accepted our Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?”

  “I don’t think Jesus had shit to do with the supervolcano, and I figure I saved myself when I got the hell out of Denver,” Vanessa answered. To make herself perfectly clear, she added, “You can do whatever you want with your own stupid religion, as long as you don’t dump it on me.”

  When her father talked about religion, he described himself as a born-again pagan. His father had been a dour Baptist, but Dad got over it. Vanessa’s mother had messed around with various New Agey things without letting much stick. Her brothers were as pious as she was. Rob enjoyed getting into debates when Mormon missionaries came around. One memorable summer afternoon, Mahall tried a more direct approach: he turned around and dropped his pants. No Mormons-or even Jehovah’s Witnesses-rang the doorbell for a long time after that.

  Ms. Doughface looked as if Vanessa had sprouted bright red horns and a long, barbed tail. “You’ll burn forever!” she said.

  “Yeah, well, suppose you let me worry about that, too, okay?” Vanessa said. She pushed past the woman. She would have hauled off and belted her with any more provocations. None of the squabbles in K-1 had left anyone badly hurt, but everyone’s temper was frayed.

  Vanessa wasn’t close to the front of the line. She also wasn’t close to the doughy woman, who’d ended up near the back. Serves her right, Vanessa thought.

  Lines were also forming in front of the other overcrowded classrooms. A man’s voice floated through the air (so did volcanic ash people were kicking up, but Vanessa tried to ignore that): “Wherever we’re going, it’s gotta be better than this!”

  Now there was something to say Amen! to. One by one, each classroom’s worth of refugees headed up toward the front of the high school. At last, a Red Cross man shepherded K-1 forward. Vanessa hoped with all her heart she never saw-or smelled-this miserable place again.

  Some of the buses growling ou
t front were commandeered from schools: they were bright yellow, with the names of rural districts stenciled in black below the windows. More were as military as MREs, and painted olive drab. All of them had big, fat, super-duper filters sticking out from their engine compartments. If you were going to go anywhere with all this shit blowing around-and it was-that was how you had to go about it.

  The bus into which Vanessa climbed was a military model. That didn’t, and probably couldn’t, make it less comfortable than a school bus. The driver was also military. He wore desert camouflage and a gas mask.

  He touched a door when the bus was full. The doors rasped shut. Vanessa, who was sitting not far from the front, got the idea they were supposed to hiss instead of rasping. You couldn’t put super-duper filters on everything. Even if grit didn’t murder the engine, this bus had a strictly limited life expectancy.

  As long as it got her away from Garden City, Kansas, before it dropped dead, she couldn’t have cared less.

  “Where are we going?” someone asked as the bus pulled away from the high school.

  “It’s called Camp Constitution, sir,” the driver answered. Vanessa could hardly hear him over the roar of the bus in motion. Military specs plainly didn’t worry about noise inside the cabin. “As for where it’s located at, it’s between Muskogee and Fayetteville.”

  Oklahoma? Arkansas? One of those states. The ass end of nowhere, either way. Why on earth would they dump-how many? — refugees there?

  No sooner had the question occurred to Vanessa than the woman right behind her asked it out loud. “Ma’am, they briefed us on account of that’s where the dust from the volcano stopped falling,” the driver said, which made a certain amount of sense. He continued, “So that’s how come FEMA was tasked with setting up Camp Constitution there.”

  By the way he repeated the name, he seemed to like it. Vanessa didn’t. To her, it sounded like some bureaucrat’s effort to make squalor and misery sound patriotic. Hearing that FEMA was running the place did nothing to reassure her, either. Had FEMA ever run anitt hadn’t screwed up? If it had, it wasn’t within her memory.

  How many people aboard the olive-drab bus were having that same reassuring thought? At least one besides Vanessa: a man yelped, “How come the Army isn’t running this camp?”

  “The Army can’t do that!” The driver sounded as shocked as anyone could through a gas mask. “It isn’t the military’s responsibility to run a civilian facility inside the USA.”

  “But the Army might do it right. FEMA sure won’t,” the man said, which was exactly what Vanessa was thinking.

  This time, he got no answer. The driver was concentrating on the Interstate in front of him. He needed to concentrate, because he was going through a pretty fair sandstorm. Less dust and ash floated in the air than right after the eruption, but more lay on the ground. The bus convoy stirred it up again.

  The Army bus boasted air-conditioning. Soldiers traveled in more style than Vanessa would have guessed. What kind of fancy filters kept the A/C from overloading and crapping out? She didn’t much care. Breathing air that wasn’t close and moist and didn’t smell like too many other people felt wonderful, or whatever one step up from wonderful was.

  Then there was a pop! outside. One of the windows on the left side blew in. At the same instant, or close enough, one of the windows on the right side blew out. So much for the air-conditioning.

  Even as people were screaming and squealing and trying to get bits of glass out of their hair, the driver grabbed an M-16 Vanessa hadn’t noticed by his feet. He fired a burst out through his window. The din was horrendous, and set the passengers making even more noise than they were already.

  Another shot from outside punched through sheet metal. By what would do for a miracle, it didn’t punch through any people. The driver squeezed off a fresh answering burst. He hadn’t a prayer of hitting whatever maniac out there who was shooting at them. Maybe he could make the asshole duck, anyway.

  “What’s he doing?” a woman howled. Vanessa thought it was the gal who had a personal savior. That didn’t make it a dumb question, though.

  “Some people are kinda unhappy we’re evacuating from west to east, and on account of we’re taking folks out of Red Cross shelters first,” the driver answered with commendable calm.

  Kinda unhappy, here, meant something like pissed off enough to try to commit murder. Vanessa had no trouble working that out. She wasn’t so sure about her fellow refugees; she’d never been one to underestimate the power of human stupidity.

  Then she imagined herself on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific instead of in a freshly ventilated olive-drab bus that all of a sudden stank of cordite. She imagined some poor bastard treading water as the boat went by. It wasn’t going to stop for him and let him climb aboard. If he had a gun, wouldn’t he use it?

  No wonder the guy out there in the dust started shooting. Vanessa supposed they ought to count themselves lucky he only had a varmint gun, not an RPG. For whatever reason-maybe his car bought a plot right away-he was stuck in the middle of the dust. How much longer could he, or anybody else, last here?

  How many more like him were scattered from Nevada to here? How many of them would be able to get out? How many would die of one lung disease or another, or else starve because the continent-wide food-distribution system suddnly had a hole you could throw a few states through? Bound to be hundreds of thousands. Millions, more likely.

  How many acres of corn and wheat and soybeans were dying under the dust? How many cows and sheep and pigs and chickens? They weren’t going to evacuate livestock, not when they didn’t have a prayer of getting even a fraction of the people out.

  Which meant… what, exactly? It means I’m goddamn lucky to be on this bus, Vanessa decided. That was obvious, and made obviouser by someone in the blood-warm water with the circling dorsal fins opening up on her.

  Less obvious, maybe, was that, if things kept on the way they were going, pretty soon an MRE would be something to fight over, not something to swear at. That might have been the scariest thought Vanessa had had since the supervolcano blew up.

  The man from the National Park Service and the man from the U.S. Geological Survey nodded in jerky unison. “Yes, if you want to do this you have to sign all the releases,” the USGS guy said. “You have to acknowledge in writing that you are doing this at your own risk, that you know it is dangerous, and that the federal government is not liable if you are injured or killed. We have a little too much on our plates right now to worry about nuisance lawsuits.”

  “Yeah, just a little,” the National Park Service guy agreed.

  Kelly was ready to sign on the dotted line. Kelly was, in fact, eager. She wouldn’t have come to this meeting if she weren’t. A chance to fly over the supervolcano crater, look down, and take pictures? She thought she would have signed away her immortal soul for that, let alone a chance for her heirs and assigns to take a bite out of Uncle Sam if something went wrong.

  And something was liable to. She hadn’t told Colin about this little jaunt, for fear he would call her ninety-seven different kinds of idiot. If the supervolcano so much as hiccupped while they were over it, they’d be toast-to say nothing of toasted. They’d fall out of the sky and go into the magma pit. Three-quarters of a million years down the road, they’d be part of the next big show. A tiny part, but part even so.

  She signed on the dotted line. She signed, repeatedly, on the dotted line. The government’s attitude seemed to be that anything worth doing was worth doing in quadruplicate. Several other grad students and a couple of profs also indited their John Han-cocks in all the requisite places.

  What did it say that more graduate students than faculty members were willing to risk their lives for science? That people who’d got tenure had more brains than those who merely dreamt of it? Or that profs lived a better life than grad students and didn’t want to chance throwing it away? Was all of the above an acceptable choice?

  One of the other in
trepid grad students asked, “Do we know it’s safe for the plane to take off?”

  “Son, we don’t know the sun’ll come up tomorrow,” the USGS man answered. “It may go nova between now and then, or the Earth may quit rotating, or whatever the hell. What I do know is, when the plane takes off I’m gonna be on it. I’ve already signed all this bullshit paperwork. If that’s not good enough for you, I don’t know what else to say.”

  No one seemed to have any more questions after that. The National Park Service man said, “Be at Oakland International by five a.m. day after tomorrow. Airport security will be in place for our little jaunt.”

  “Wit. Run that by me again,” Kelly said. “We sign all this stuff saying we know we’re risking our lives, but they’ve got to make sure nobody’ll hijack the plane and crash it into the crater? Where’s the sense in that?”

  The USGS man grinned at her. “Hi! Welcome to Catch-22!” he said. “It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s government policy. Those people may pay me, but they don’t pay me enough to lie for them.”

  And so, at a few minutes before five in the morning-well before dawn, in other words-Kelly sleepily put her cell phone and laptop in a tray and took off her shoes. She passed her little bag through the X-ray machine. “Can you open this, please?” a stern-looking black woman said when it came out the other side.

  When TSA people said please, they didn’t mean it. Kelly unzipped the bag. The woman pawed through her meager stuff, then grudgingly nodded. “What was wrong?” Kelly asked.

  “Your bagels looked like something they weren’t supposed to,” the black woman answered.

  She told the story of the bagels of mass destruction to the other geologists waiting to go out to their chartered Learjet. They gave back the mixture of laughs and groans she’d looked for. “What else do you expect from a system designed by very sharp people for very dull people to work?” one of them said. Kelly hadn’t thought of it like that; when she did, the rituals of airport security made more sense.