Supervolcano All Fall Down(68)

He spread his callused hands in resignation. “Darn near anything,” he answered. “It’s not gonna go off again, not the way it did—the magma pool takes a long time to fill up again after it blasts out. Ordinary volcanic eruptions? After what we’ve already been through, those are a piece of cake.”

Some of the ordinary eruptions that would come would be enormous by the standards civilization was used to. Enormous, yes, but not humongous: the technical term geologists used for a major supervolcano blast. And Skrtel’s words brought back Kelly’s old worry—if studying the supervolcano was obsolete, wasn’t she?

Well, it wasn’t quite. There might be hope for her yet. And she had more urgent things to worry about. One was a volcanic hiccup, the equivalent of an earthquake aftershock, only with lava. Another was getting lost in this literally tractless wilderness and not making it out again.

MREs and plastic water bottles made her pack feel as if she were carrying another person piggyback. Everybody who was going forward had a GPS set. That ought to make getting lost less of a worry. And it did . . . up to a point. Everybody had a compass, too, but the damn things swung at what looked like random. The supervolcano hadn’t belched out much iron in relative terms, but there was plenty to confuse anything that relied on the Earth’s magnetic field.

GPS systems didn’t, of course. That didn’t mean Kelly trusted hers completely. When sorrows came, they came not single spies but in battalions. She laughed at herself. Where the hell had she come up with that bit of Shakespeare from an undergrad lit course? Only showed that general-ed requirements didn’t always go to waste.

Off she went with her colleagues. The dust and ashes scrunched under her hiking boots. She’d let herself fall out of shape since she got married, too. Well, things could’ve been worse. She could have been slogging through mud as deep as she was tall.

Still nothing man-made visible. Gone—all gone, buried, on the way to fossilization. She looked ahead. Even the mountains seemed strange. So much volcanic rubbish had fallen on them, it had changed their heights and their shapes. That should have been impossible. It wasn’t, not to the supervolcano.

Scanning the mountainsides with binoculars, she did spot a few dead pines sticking up through the dust and ash. Back in the day, you could see dead trunks from the big fires of the 1980s sticking up through snow. Colin said those reminded him of the stubble on a corpse’s cheek. Kelly never would have thought of that herself, which didn’t mean it didn’t fit.

Larry Skrtel called back to Missoula. He had a satellite phone. Like the GPS, those still worked. They also carried little radios, whose signals would cross the ruined land. Geoff Rheinburg called them Dick Tracy wrist radios. They weren’t quite, but that came close enough.

Except for the noises the geologists made, the world was eerily quiet. No insects buzzed or chirped. No birds called. No hawks or vultures glided overhead. At night, no coyotes yipped and yowled. No dogs howled at the moon. No cats screamed. No mosquitoes imitated tiny dentists’ drills. It wasn’t the worst of the mosquito season, nowhere near, but there should have been a few.

“You’re right!” Larry exclaimed when Kelly mentioned that. He made as if to slap himself upside the head. “I didn’t even notice.”

“Hard to notice something that isn’t there,” Professor Rheinburg said.

“Now we know what the supervolcano really was,” Kelly said. When her comrades sent her blank looks, she explained: “The world’s biggest bug bomb—what else?”

They groaned. She’d been sure they would. “Now that’s what I call overkill!” Skrtel said. Then he paused thoughtfully. “Or is it? Nothing smaller than a supervolcano could even slow the bastards down.”

“It’s not just the world’s biggest bug bomb,” Rheinburg said. “It’s the world’s biggest people bomb, too.”

No one said anything to that for some little while. The United States, one of the most thoroughly measured and counted countries in the world, couldn’t come close to being sure how many people the supervolcano had killed, not even two years after the eruption. Somewhere between two and three million: that was the best guess. Somewhere between five and ten times that many were still homeless.

Refugee camps were a staple of stand-up comics and late-night talk-show hosts. They weren’t so funny if you were stuck in one. And if you’d ended up in one after the supervolcano blew, odds were you remained stuck there. You could get out if you landed a job somewhere, but plenty of other people, most of them not from camps, were chasing that job, too. And there were hardly any jobs to land to begin with.