Supervolcano All Fall Down(65)
“Well, ma’am, nobody’s quite sure—that’s what our briefing says.” The corporal was relentlessly polite. “Some of the ash has washed away since the eruption. Some of the land toward the crater may be habitable, and some people who kind of want to get out from under may have taken up residence there.”
People who kind of want to get out from under. That was an interesting way to put it, but not a bad one; for the first time since Wild West days wound down, the government of the United States didn’t fully control all the land from sea to overfished sea. You saw CNN stories about squatters and homesteaders and survivalists and cultists founding their own little communities inside the devastated areas off to the east of the eruption. They didn’t always like it when the government found them again. Sometimes they didn’t like it with guns.
You didn’t see stories like that about Montana, or at least Kelly hadn’t. But since when had CNN given a flying fuck about Montana? Kelly wouldn’t have bet CNN had ever heard of it. And some people had always lived in these parts because they wanted the government bothering them as little as possible. Some of those people did have guns, too. Lots of guns, in fact.
Which meant the pintle-mounted .50-calibers probably weren’t the worst idea in the world. That world wasn’t the way you wished it were, or the supervolcano never would have gone off to begin with. The world was the way it was, dammit, warts and zits and all.
Her breath smoked. Missoula in autumn hadn’t been a place where anyone would go to loll around in a bikini even before the eruption. Since? Places like Moose Jaw and Novosibirsk came to mind. What Moose Jaw and Novosibirsk were like these days . . . Is someone else’s worry, thank God, Kelly told herself firmly.
“All ashore who’s going ashore! Everybody else, all aboard!” Larry Skrtel didn’t have a bullhorn. Then again, the USGS geologist didn’t need one, either. He was as close to an unflappable man as anyone Kelly’d ever met, but he’d never had trouble making himself heard.
He walked up and down the convoy of Humvees, impersonating a liner’s chief steward or a train conductor or a mother hen or whatever the hell he was impersonating. When he neared Kelly, he dropped his voice to talk in more civilized tones: “Won’t be quite such a mad dash along I-90 this time . . . I hope.”
“Jesus, so do I!” Kelly blurted. They’d roared west from Butte to Missoula in a Ford they’d piled into at the Butte airport right after the supervolcano blew. That impossibly huge cloud of dust and ash swelled and swelled behind them, and Kelly’d thought it would catch them and eat them no matter how big a jump they had on it. This was the way the world ended—not with a whimper but with a bang.
Skrtel grinned at her. “We’re still here. The caldera’s still here. Of course we’ll go take a good look at it. Doesn’t the Bible say something about a dog returning to its vomit?”
“Beats me.” Kelly had only the most limited acquaintance with the Bible. If it went on about puking dogs, she wasn’t sure she wanted any more.
Geoff Rheinburg climbed into the Humvee right behind hers. Her chairperson waved and winked when their eyes met. Kelly hoped he didn’t notice how halfhearted her answering wave was. Even more than she had at the geologists’ conclave in Portland, she felt as if she’d fallen back into grad school.
They headed east about an hour later than they’d planned to. Used to the ways of geologists, Kelly thought that was a miracle of efficiency. The soldiers who manned the machine guns all rolled their eyes and shook their heads. They defined efficiency in military terms. It took more than surgical masks (Kelly wore one, too) to hide their scorn.
For the first fifteen or twenty miles on I-90, things seemed close to normal. The Interstate was, well, the Interstate. There were a few vehicles on it besides the USGS Humvees. There were even a couple heading toward Missoula from the east. Missoula might not have been the end of the known world after all, then, even if you could see it from there. When would they reach Here Be Dragons country?
It didn’t take long. Even before they got out of Missoula, she saw patches of ash and dust that a couple of years of rain and snowmelt hadn’t cleared away—they looked like nothing so much as the Jolly Green Giant’s spilled sacks of Ready-Crete. A giant had spilled that junk over the continent’s midsection, all right, but it wasn’t jolly and it wasn’t green.
Halfway between the mighty metropolises of Clinton and Bearmouth, neon-orange highway signs warned ROAD PAST THIS POINT NOT PLOWED. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. It wasn’t quite All hope abandon, ye who enter here, but it was—literally—close enough for government work.