Supervolcano All Fall Down(111)

Marshall lobbed a grenade: “Didn’t see her moving to Denver.”

Vanessa reddened. Kelly remembered wondering if she ought to run for a bomb shelter, and where she might find one. She sure wouldn’t have wanted that look aimed her way. But all Vanessa said was “Listen, do you use that stupid, noisy typewriter in the middle of the night? My room’s right on the other wide of the wall, you know.”

“I use it whenever I feel like it,” Marshall had answered. If the lights were on at night, there would be power for his iMac, too. He still preferred the computer, and it was a lot quieter. By the gleam in his eye, though, the Royal portable from the pawnshop was liable to get some workouts in the wee smalls.

“Excuse me,” Kelly said. “I’m going downstairs to check on the rabbits.” The kitchen wasn’t a bomb shelter, but it might do for one in a pinch.

“Is that what I smell?” Marshall said. “Where’d they come from?”

“Your dad traded some brandy to another cop for them,” she said. “I think that guy raises them.”

“Bunny’s not bad.” Marshall sounded surprised that that was so.

“Better than MREs. Anything’s better than MREs.” Vanessa spoke with great conviction.

Kelly had been basting the rabbits when Colin came in. “Is that Vanessa’s car out front?” he’d asked after he kissed her.

“Yup,” Kelly said, and not one word more.

“How’s she doing?” he inquired.

“She’s here.” Again, Kelly kept things as concise as she could.

Colin grunted. He chuckled, not in any enormously cheerful way. “Yeah, we’re all here. One big, happy family, right?”

“If you say so,” Kelly’d replied.

“I just did. ’Course, because I say it, that doesn’t make it true.” Colin sighed. “Be an awful lot simpler if it did, y’know?” Kelly didn’t say anything at all that time. But she did nod.





XVII




The Frozen Tundra. That was what Packer fans called Lambeau Field in December and January even before the supervolcano erupted. Teams from warmer climes, teams that played in air-conditioned domes on ground-up tires dyed green, often turned up their toes when they had to play in cold and snow on dead grass (also sometimes dyed green).

They still stubbornly, defiantly, played outdoor football in midwinter in Green Bay. Bryce Miller remembered hearing that one fan froze to death in a playoff game the year before, no matter how much antifreeze he’d poured down. The big squawk wasn’t about his untimely passing—it was about who would inherit his season tickets.

Green Bay lay some distance east of Wayne, Nebraska, but less than a hundred miles farther north. Bryce had discovered more about frozen tundra than he’d ever wanted to know. It was barely autumn, but much of the campus already answered to that description. All you had to do was cross the street from the student union   building and there you were, out in the middle of icy whiteness waiting for Jack London to mush past in a sled pulled by White Fang and Buck.

Frozen tundra. Oh, yeah. The soccer pitch was frozen tundra with nets. The baseball field was frozen tundra surrounded by fences, with dugouts and bleachers on the sides. The softball field was a smaller version of the same thing. Out beyond them was a walking path that skirted a golf course—still more tundra, with skeletal trees sticking up out of the snow and making it drift against their trunks.

Past the golf course, past the campus, gently rolling Nebraska farm country stretched as far as the eye could see. Before the eruption, it had yielded bumper crops of wheat and corn and soybeans. Cattle had grazed on green grass and fattened in feed lots.

Again, Bryce remembered the exhibit at the University of Nebraska museum in Lincoln. Ashfall State Park lay west of Wayne. He didn’t need to think of all the rhinos done in 12,000,000 years ago by that earlier supervolcano blast. Most of the livestock and an awful lot of the people across the modern Midwest had already died of HPO, just like those poor, extinct rhinoceroses.

Except for the small town of Wayne and the anything but enormous Wayne State campus, there was nothing but frozen tundra for miles and miles in every direction. Bryce’s breath smoked as if he were a three-pack-a-day guy. In spite of long johns, jeans, and a heavy coat that came down to his knees, he felt sure he was freezing his balls off.

For this you left Junipero High? For this you left SoCal? he asked himself, not for the first time. Since he unquestionably had, he asked himself a couple of more questions. Why? Were you out of your ever-loving mind?

He shook his head. In spite of everything, he didn’t think so. He’d spent a lot of time and a lot of effort making himself as much at home in the Hellenistic world as anyone could who happened to be born 2,300 years too late to see it in person.