All the same . . . “I mean it, Kelly. I’ve never had an idea that big.”
“How hard have you looked?” she asked.
He didn’t answer that. He had no idea how or why ideas came, or why sometimes they didn’t. Maybe the Idea Fairy was spending a couple of weeks on the beach at Maui, working on her tan. Maybe the bulb in his story-detector light burned out, and he didn’t notice it for a while. He had no clue.
“Um, Marshall . . .” Kelly’s voice changed. It was as if she’d suddenly realized she didn’t know everything there was to know. So Marshall thought, anyhow, but he was feeling harassed right then.
“What is it?” he asked, more roughly than he might have.
She bit her lip. “Just so you know, your father and I are trying to have a baby. So there may be another half-brother or half-sister on the way for you. I didn’t think it should be a surprise if it happens.”
“How about that?” Marshall said, which was safe almost all the time. His first reaction was Oh, Christ! I’ll never get away from diapers! His second reaction made him giggle. Kelly raised an eyebrow the way Dad would have—damned if they weren’t rubbing off on each other. Marshall explained: “Here I’d have two new half-sibs, and they wouldn’t be related to each other at all. How bizarre is that?”
“Pretty much,” Kelly allowed. “Your father said the same thing about you and Rob and Vanessa when we started trying.”
“Oh, yeah?” Marshall pondered that. Nothing he could do about it, he decided—Dad had had a lot longer to rub off on him than on Kelly.
“Uh-huh.” Kelly got back to the main track: “Is it bizarre enough to be a novel idea?”
It was novel to Marshall, all right, whether it was to his father or not. Then he realized that wasn’t what she meant, or not all of what she meant. He shrugged. Maybe it was. Maybe.
X
The last time Kelly’d seen Missoula, Montana, she’d left it behind in a GI-issue Humvee with a super-duper desert air filter and a pintle-mounted .50-caliber machine gun. That was what the Idaho sheriff—an old buddy of Colin’s—who’d taken her away had called it, anyhow. Kelly didn’t know from pintles. She’d never heard the word before—or since, either.
But now she was back in Missoula, looking at more Humvees with super-duper air filters and pintle-mounted guns. When she climbed into one of them this time, she’d be heading east, not west.
Missoula was the edge of the world these days. The edge of the habitable world, anyhow. Everything closer to the supervolcano was buried in ash. Missoula had got ashfall, too, but it wasn’t buried. Plenty of places much farther away had had a lot more dumped on them. The prevailing winds kept most of the ash away from here.
And so, if you wanted to examine the new caldera, Missoula made a good place to start from. That you had to be out of your frigging mind to want to do any such thing . . . Colin had said as much to Kelly. He’d been as emphatic as he could manage without using profanity—enough to impress her quite a bit, in fact. And then, when he saw she was out of her frigging mind, at least that particular way, and had been for years, he threw his hands in the air and said, “Well, if you’re gonna go, I hope to God you learn something worthwhile.”
If that wasn’t love, what was it?
Kelly’d signed as many releases for this little jaunt as she had when she flew over the enormous zit the supervolcano blew on the Earth’s face. If anything happened to her while she was exploring—anything at all, from dandruff to unasked-for rattlesnakes or bears to getting charbroiled in a lava burp—she admitted in advance it wouldn’t be the government’s fault.
This time, the Humvees had U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY stenciled on their sides. The guys sitting behind the machine guns, however, didn’t look like USGS personnel. They looked like soldiers. There was a good reason for that, too: they were.
One of them had two little black stripes on each collar point of his camo uniform. “Uh, Corporal, are we really gonna need all of that firepower?” Kelly asked him.
“Ma’am, I just don’t know,” he answered with unsmiling—and unyielding—seriousness. That ma’am grated, but only for a moment. He was more than half Kelly’s age, but he couldn’t have been much more than half her age. To him, that would make her a walking antique. He went on, “Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”
“I guess.” Kelly didn’t feel like a walking antique, no matter what the corporal (who had zits of his own, though not supervolcano-sized ones) thought. Nobody truly antiquated could have a baby, right? She wasn’t going to have one now, or they wouldn’t have let her do this no matter how many releases she signed. But she was trying. She took another shot here: “I didn’t know anybody was left alive very far east of Missoula.”