Supervolcano All Fall Down(8)

Colin was the kind who paid off his credit card balance in full every month. Except for his mortgage, he owed nobody in the world a dime—and he’d lived in his house long enough that he wasn’t far from waving bye-bye to the mortgage, too. Even when he was going through his divorce, he’d paid the lawyers on time. It hadn’t been easy, but he’d done it.

Like a bear bedeviled by mosquitoes, he shook his big, square head. He didn’t want to remember the divorce now, not while he was out having a good time with Kelly. But he couldn’t very well forget it, not when he saw Louise’s face every time he looked at Marshall. How much of life was rolling with the difference between what you wanted and what you got? A hell of a big chunk, for sure.

Then the food came. He couldn’t imagine a better, or a more delicious, amnesia inducer. No, he couldn’t afford to do this every day, or even very often. All the more reason to enjoy it when he could.

He’d reached blissfully overloaded nirvana when Kelly touched his hand. “Look outside,” she said softly. “It’s raining.”

It never rained in June in Southern California. Sure as hell, though, the sidewalk and the street out there glistened with water. Cars went by with their wipers and lights on. He couldn’t forget about his divorce. The supervolcano insisted on being remembered, too.





II




In the Year Without a Summer, back two centuries ago now, it had snowed in Maine in June. As a matter of fact, it had snowed in June as far south as Pennsylvania. Rob Ferguson knew more about the Year Without a Summer than he’d ever wanted to find out. The eruption of Mount Tambora, down in what had been the Dutch East Indies and was now Indonesia, touched it off. Mount Tambora had been one hellacious boom—two and a half times as big as Krakatoa, a lifetime later, though without such a good press agent.

And that hellacious boom was maybe—maybe—five percent the size of the Yellowstone supervolcano eruption. Guilford, Maine, had a park that ran along by the banks of the Piscataquis River. Rob stood in the park on the Fourth of July and watched snow drift down from a sky the color of a flock of dirty sheep.

“Boy, this is fun,” Justin Nachman said, his breath smoking at every word.

“Now that you mention it,” Rob answered, “no.”

“We could bail out,” Justin said, not for the first time. He played lead guitar and did most of the singing for Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles: he would have been Squirt Frog, had they reckoned things that way. He was short and kind of chunky. He’d worn a perm he described as a Yiddish Afro till the band got stranded in Guilford not long after the eruption. He hadn’t kept it up since, but his hair was still plenty curly.

“We could, yeah.” Rob’s words showed agreement; his tone didn’t. For a long time, getting into and out of Guilford had been as near impossible as made no difference. Rob had never seen, never dreamt of, so much snow in his life. He was from L.A., so that didn’t prove much. All the guys in the band were Californians; they’d come together at UCSB. But people who’d lived in Guilford their whole lives said the same thing.

Basically, Maine north and west of I-95 had been left to its own devices by a country that had bigger catastrophes to worry about than too goddamn much snow way the hell off in its far northeastern corner. Food, fuel oil, and gasoline stopped coming in. The power went out—not all at once, but now here, now there, till eventually nobody had any. The nineteenth century came back in a big way.

And the locals made it through better than Rob would have believed. They cut down a lot of second-growth pines. They shot a lot of moose and white-tailed deer and ducks and geese. Rob had shot a moose himself, with a rifle borrowed from Dick Barber, the proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn, the B & B where the band was staying.

Barber was a longtime Navy man who had a pretty fair arsenal. And Rob, a cop’s kid, knew what to do with guns. Except for occasional target practice with his father, he’d never used what he knew till this winter. Eating something you’d killed yourself, he discovered, made both the hunt and the following meals feel special, almost sanctified.

This time around, Justin didn’t want to let it alone: “It’s not as bad as it was. We can get to Bangor. The airport’s open. We can go anywhere we want.”

He had a point . . . of sorts. It didn’t snow all the time any more—only some of the time. When it wasn’t snowing, it got warm enough so the stuff that had already fallen started melting. It had climbed all the way up into the sixties once or twice in June.

Roads emerged from under snowdrifts. Here and there, food and fuel started coming in, though it wasn’t as if the rest of the country had a whole lot to spare. It seemed to matter less than anyone would have dreamt possible before northern and central Maine got stranded.