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.”