Supervolcano All Fall Down(2)
“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.”
“If anything is, with all the weed he smokes,” Colin said disgustedly. Here he was, a cop, and both his boys got wasted every chance they could. Rob, the older one, used his engineering degree to play bass in a band called Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. They’d been stuck in the middle of Maine since winter came down. And winter there didn’t want to let up. If L.A. was—or was alleged to be—the new Seattle, Maine could double as the new Baffin Island.
Vanessa, who fit in between Rob and Marshall, didn’t do a lot of dope. Or if she did, it sure didn’t mellow her out. Colin wondered when, or if, she’d escape from that refugee camp somewhere near the Oklahoma-Arkansas border: just past the eastern edge of the ashfall from the supervolcano. She’d got out of Denver alive, which most people who’d lived there hadn’t, so he was inclined to count his blessings. Here most of a year after the eruption, nobody knew how many people it had killed, not to the nearest hundred thousand. Well up into seven figures, that was for sure.
Kelly clicked her tongue between her teeth. “He’s plenty smart,” she said. “And he knows what he thinks—he just doesn’t want to tell the rest of the world.”
“It could be, for most things,” Colin allowed. “But I’m as sure as I need to be that he doesn’t want to see Louise right now, not when she’s going to present him with a little half-brother or half-sister pretty soon.”