Supervolcano All Fall Down(66)

Odds were those signs had been made with snow in mind. What they’d been made for didn’t matter, though. They could, and did, also warn of other trouble ahead. Even in the jaunt from Missoula to here—the easy part of the trip—Kelly had watched those spilled-cement patches getting bigger and coming closer to the road.

Then there was more grit on the Interstate than blowing wind could account for. She could feel it in the Humvee’s motion and hear it scritching under the tires. “Fuck,” said the corporal behind the machine gun. “Signs weren’t bullshitting, were they?”

Bearmouth still had people in it: ghosts wouldn’t have needed to burn stuff and make smoke pour out of chimneys. The whole tiny town looked as if someone had smacked it in the face with a dirty-gray powder puff about the size of the Superdome, though. Kelly wondered if the locals would be as gray as their town, but she didn’t see any of them.

Pine forests were gray, too. Under that gray, how many of those trees were dead or dying? Most, unless she missed her guess. Rivers ran gray. Ash covered their beds and swirled along in their turbid waters. Ash did such a job of clogging rivers that the floods throughout the Midwest had been horrendous. They would have been even more horrendous if so much of the Midwest weren’t currently uninhabited.

Super-duper desert air filter or not, one of the Humvees crapped out only an hour and a half into the journey. Everybody stopped. People who knew about engines, or thought they did, huddled about under the hood. After a while, they threw their hands in the air and gave up. Once upon a time, Kelly’d seen a World War II cartoon of a tough sergeant looking away as he gave his mortally wounded Jeep the coup de grâce with a .45. She’d never run into anything in real life to remind her of that, not till now.

They shifted people and supplies to the surviving Humvees and went on. The Interstate became more and more a matter of opinion. There were times when Kelly couldn’t tell whether they were on the road or not. Only when they went under an overpass—or had to go around one that had collapsed under all kinds of strains its designers never worried about—was she sure.

The Humvees’ big, heavy-treaded tires began throwing up wakes of dust and ash. “Fuck,” the corporal said again. “This shit makes Iraq and Kuwait look like a walk in the park, and I thought they were just about all sand when I was there.”

When they camped that night, their site precisely defined the middle of nowhere. Kelly’d chowed down on MREs before. The one she had there did not improve her opinion of them. Back in the old days, hadn’t men joined the Army to get three square meals a day? Since then, the people who fed soldiers seemed to have forgotten the difference between a square meal and a meal that came in a square box.

Water had turned some of the ash and volcanic dust into something halfway between dried mud and cheap concrete. Except for the geologists, Kelly was hard-pressed to find anything alive. Everything was grayish brown. Well, almost everything. One of the machine gunners brought in a small plant and said, “This here is a dandylion, ain’t it?”

“It sure is,” Skrtel agreed. After popping the dandelion into a specimen jar, he checked the GPS on one of the Humvees to find out exactly where they were. He wrote it down. They had laptops and iPads, but the only way to recharge them in the field was from the Humvees’ batteries. Keeping their use down was a good idea, in other words.

Kelly’s chairperson did some poking around of his own. After perhaps ten minutes, he grunted in triumph and plucked a specimen of his own. He carried it over to Kelly. “Can you identify this?” Professor Rheinburg asked, as if she were still his student.

Her heart thumped in alarm. As if she were still his student, she didn’t want him to think she was dumb. She peered at the plant in the palm of his hand. Whatever it was, a dandelion it wasn’t. She nervously licked her lips. She knew a hell of a lot more about rocks and soil than she did about the plants that grew on them. Still, considering where they were and what this one looked like . . . “It’s a lodgepole pine sapling, isn’t it?”

He beamed at her. “That’s just what it is! The damn things can grow in the crappiest soil there is. That’s why there are—were—so many of them in Yellowstone. They’re the first squatter trees to come back after an eruption—even after this eruption.”

“Except this one won’t grow now,” Kelly pointed out.

“Nope.” Rheinburg didn’t sound upset about it. “If I can find one after a few minutes of poking, there are bound to be millions of them popping up all over the ashfall.”