Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

He spoke as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about the chances of rain tomorrow. That made what he was saying more scary, not less. “Why?” Vanessa asked. She wasn’t used to feeling out of her depth, but she sure did now.

Bronislav gave her why , in great detail. He hated Croats with the bitter passion someone could only feel for a close relative. She tried to imagine hating her little half-brother that way, tried and felt herself failing.

Bronislav had no trouble at all. He hated the Croats because he was Orthodox and they were Catholic. He hated them because they used the Roman alphabet and he used the Cyrillic. He hated them because he used hard vowels while they used soft ones.

“Say what?” Vanessa asked-that one meant nothing to her, not as a reason to hate and not at all. Nothing. Zilch.

“For milk , they say mleeyehko .” Bronislav said the word very slowly, and looked as if he wanted to wash his mouth out with soap while he did it. “We say mlehko . You see the difference? You hear, I mean?”

“Yes, but-”

He talked through her answer: “ Mleeyehko . Peh!” He spat on the sidewalk in disgust. “It is how fairies talk.”

That was even less PC than her old man. Then Bronislav talked about how, during the war, the Croats had jumped into bed with Hitler with open legs. They’d tried to murder everybody they could reach who wasn’t a Croat, and they’d done a damn good job of it. If you listened to Bronislav, the Croat irregulars, the Ustasha, had been vicious enough to horrify the Gestapo.

“And the Croats, they still have Ustasha today,” Bronislav said. “They are as bad as their grandfathers were, too. I fight-fought-them in Eastern Slavonia. It is part of the Serb homeland that the Croats stole when they ran out of Yugoslavia. They always steal everything they can grab, Croats.”

“What would they say about Serbs?” Vanessa asked, perhaps incautiously.

With great dignity, Bronislav replied, “I do not know. I do not care. Whatever it is, it would be a lie.”

They didn’t eat at the Croat-run restaurant. Where there was one, though, there were bound to be more. Vanessa wondered if she’d already seen some and assumed they belonged to Serbs. Did all the Serbs and Croats in San Pedro feel about each other the way Bronislav felt about the people from the other side of the tracks or the border or whatever you wanted to call it?

She didn’t ask him. She didn’t think she wanted to know badly enough to put up with another frozen explosion. And he’d intimidated her. She didn’t realize that till she was riding home on the bus the next morning. Even after she did realize it, she didn’t want to admit it to herself. But it was true.

Even these days, sometimes you really wanted a car if you could possibly get hold of one. Colin didn’t care to think about taking Kelly to San Atanasio Memorial on his bike when she went into labor. Bringing the baby back that way didn’t seem any too practical, either. The bus also wasn’t the best bet. Talk about jumping on the kid’s immune system with both feet!

And so he made damn sure the Taurus was in decent working order well before the due date. As it had when he went to Officer McClintock’s funeral, the mere act of driving felt funny. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten how or anything; he hadn’t. But it wasn’t part of his routine any more.

“I don’t take it for granted the way I did once upon a time,” he told Kelly when he pulled into the driveway after taking the car to Jiffy Lube for a tuneup. Then he nodded to himself. That was a big part of the change he’d noticed, all right.

Kelly nodded with him. She knew what he was talking about; it wasn’t as if she’d driven to CSUDH every day before she went on maternity leave. “I bet they were glad to see you when you rolled in,” she remarked.

“Oh, boy, were they ever,” Colin said. “They sure don’t do the kind of business they used to. We thought gas was expensive before the eruption? Lord! What did we know?”

“Who can afford it now, except for something special?” Kelly agreed. She set one hand on the shelf of her belly. She had quite a shelf to set it on. It wouldn’t be much longer.

“I was shooting the breeze with the manager while they were working on the car,” Colin said. “Probably lucky I went in when I did. Their parent company is talking about filing for bankruptcy.”

“How many more people will that throw out of work?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Manager wasn’t happy about it, I’ll tell you that. I guess he’d be one of them.”

San Atanasio Memorial, by contrast, was part of one of the few industries the supervolcano hadn’t ruined. People got sick and broke bones and had babies after the eruption, just as they had before. If anything, they got sick more often than they had before, thanks to extra lung problems and more hunger and colder weather coupled with less heat.

Unlike most of America, the hospital had power all the time. It was heated to sixty-five degrees, which felt tropical to Colin. Such extravagance cost, of course. He thanked heaven for the good medical plan that went along with his line of work. Without it. . Without it, he might have been filing for bankruptcy along with Jiffy Lube.

He’d stayed with Louise when all three of their children were born. Now he tried to coach Kelly through the breathing exercises she’d practiced getting ready for the day. He hadn’t told her that they’d done Louise no good he could see. Everybody was different. They were supposed to help some women have an easier time.

It wasn’t fun for her. He hadn’t figured it would be. They called it labor for a reason. Louise had been younger than Kelly was now when Marshall was born. Then again, she’d had James Henry, too, and she was quite a bit older then. It could be done.

Done it was, after nine tough hours. In the process, Kelly called Colin some things he hadn’t suspected she knew how to say. As things turned serious, she also yelled, “I’m shitting a goddamn bowling ball!” That one cracked up the maternity-ward nurses, who evidently hadn’t heard everything after all.

The bowling ball turned out to weigh eight pounds one ounce and measure twenty-one and a half inches. Colin cut the umbilical cord after the doctor tied it off. He’d done that with his older children, too. The feel of the surgical scissors slicing through that finger-thick cord was like nothing else he’d ever known. He’d always thought that that cut ought to hurt the mother or the baby or maybe both of them, but it never seemed to.

Deborah Michelle Ferguson rooted at Kelly’s breast when the nurse set her there after she went on the scale. “How are you, babe?” Colin asked.

“Hammered,” she answered. Even though it wasn’t warm in the delivery room, greasy sweat made her face shine under the fluorescent lights and matted her hair. “I want to sleep for a month.” Her mouth twisted into a wry, weary grin. “I know-good luck.”

“Well, I wasn’t gonna say that,” Colin told her.

“No, but you were thinking it.” Kelly’s gaze traveled down to the little pink critter in the crook of her left elbow. “I’ve got milk! How about that? Me and Elsie the Borden Cow.”

“Elsie’s got milk,” a nurse said. “For the next couple of days, you’ve got colostrum. That’s what the baby needs right now.”

“Uh-huh,” Kelly said. “The supervolcano probably took care of Elsie, anyway. Didn’t quite get me.”

“Elsie’s still around. She’ll last as long as she moves milk and cheese and glue and whatever,” Colin said. “After that, she’s short ribs.”

“Short ribs! Oh, my God! I just realized how hungry I am! That’s hard work to do on an empty stomach!” Kelly’s eyes swung toward the nurse in appeal. “What can I eat? When can I eat it?”