Supervolcano All Fall Down(71)

Anywhere on earth but here (except maybe on the Big Island of Hawaii), that would have been spectacular, astonishing, even newsworthy. In this place, what had gone before utterly dwarfed it. Such minor spurts happened all the time. Satellites recorded some of them. Others just made small squiggles on seismographs. Too many trees had fallen in this forest. No one cared if the next one was noisy.

After a while, Geoff Rheinburg said, “People, we have done what we came to do. Now let’s get the hell out of here.” Kelly couldn’t remember hearing an idea she liked better.





XI




Winter. Back in his SoCal days, Rob Ferguson had thought the season a bummer, yeah. It got kind of chilly, yeah. Sometimes it rained. When it did, the freeways clogged. There were landslides if it rained a lot. Every once in a while, one would squash a car on Pacific Coast Highway.

That was SoCal. That was SoCal before the supervolcano erupted. This was Guilford, Maine, in the third winter after the eruption. Comparing one to the other was like comparing O’Doul’s to Everclear.

He carried a rifle through pine woods. During the Second World War, the Germans and Russians who’d fought in front of Murmansk might have carried rifles through weather like this. Or maybe it had been warmer and less windy up there.

Just for a moment, he wondered what Murmansk was like these days. This particular shiver had nothing to do with the deep freeze in which he walked. Better not to think about something like that. Or maybe it wasn’t. The only reason Murmansk had ever been even slightly habitable was that it got the Gulf Stream’s last gasps. If it was still getting them, it might have stayed slightly habitable.

But the Gulf Stream was supposed to be in trouble, too. He’d heard that, with the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean suddenly so much cooler, less water was going out from them into the Atlantic. If that was true, Murmansk wouldn’t be the only place getting the shaft as a result. All of northwestern Europe would go up against the wall—a wall made of blocks of ice.

That was northwestern Europe’s worry, though. His worry was shooting something to help Guilford through this latest winter of its distress. The few summer months had let the government send in what supplies it could. But even the government was running out of things, and couldn’t get more for love or increasingly worthless money. If people up here were going to make it, they would have to make it on their own.

I could go back to California, Rob thought. He’d been telling himself the same thing since Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles found themselves stranded in the middle of Maine. The advantages were obvious. Rain, not snow—at least not snow all the goddamn time. Electricity. TV. The Net. He hadn’t sent or got an e-mail in months.

Only one thing was wrong with that picture: he liked it here. He couldn’t imagine any place he’d rather be. Guilford would have been a neat place to live even before the supervolcano cast it back on its own resources. Everybody knew everybody else’s business, and all the people figured they had a right to know. And everybody chipped in to help everybody else, too. It wasn’t like SoCal, where half the time you didn’t even know the name of the people who lived next door to you.

And there was Lindsey. He’d never figured himself for the sort who fell in love, which made him slower to recognize it when it happened than he might have been. But he knew what was what now—knew it and liked it, which surprised him all over again.

The wind howled down from the northwest. Snow flew almost horizontally. Even in his extra-heavy-duty L.L. Bean winter gear and a bright vest over it, Rob was chilly. But he wasn’t any worse than chilly—well, except for the few square inches of face he had to expose to the blizzard.

What he really hated about weather like this was that a Super Bowl crowd of moose could amble by a hundred yards away and he’d never know it. Unlike so many things, that really mattered. Moose were lots of meat on the hoof. You couldn’t afford to miss them if they were around.

If. Sooner or later, Maine would run out of them. If people north and west of the Interstate had to get through every winter on moose meat, it would be sooner. Rob didn’t know what they’d do about that.

They were doing what they could. Lots of people were raising pigs and chickens. Unlike other livestock, those made do at least in part on human garbage. With greenhouses and sometimes even in carefully tended ground outside, some of the root vegetables of the far north got enough of a growing season to mature. Rob had never tasted, or heard of, a mangel-wurzel before he got to Maine. The food in California had to be better than this.

Something shot past him, seen and then gone. He started to raise the rifle, but lowered it again a moment later, feeling foolish. You needed a shotgun to go after a flying goose. Trying with a rifle only wasted ammo. Waste, these days, felt criminal.