Harry Turtledove: Supervolcano :Eruption

Colin didn’t hate the music. Some of the band’s songs were funny. Some were clever. A few managed both at once. He did hope Rob wore earplugs at every gig and every rehearsal. Otherwise, his son wouldn’t have any hearing left by the time he hit thirty-five. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles liked turning it up to eleven.

The guys in the band liked smoking dope, too. They liked it a lot, Rob no less than any of the others. He didn’t waste any time pretending he didn’t smoke it, either. Hypocrisy wasn’t in him, any more than it was in Colin. If such things came down through the gene pool, he’d got it from his old man.

“I could bust you for that,” Colin had said the first time he smelled sweet smoke and walked in on Rob toking.

“Go ahead, then,” his son had answered. He didn’t yell Fascist swine! but he might as well have.

And, of course, Colin had done no such thing. He’d woken up the next morning with a hangover at least as vicious as this one, though. Rob hadn’t pointed out that pot didn’t hurt you the morning after. For such small mercies, Colin was grateful. With a cop’s cynical certainty, he was sure he wouldn’t get the larger ones.

Several cars sat by the side of the road at an oxbow bend in the Snake River. People with binoculars and spotting scopes and cameras with long lenses peered out across the water. Colin kept going. He was only a halfhearted birder. A bald eagle he would have stopped for, but those seemed unlikely here. He couldn’t get excited about some duck species he hadn’t seen before.

Right now, he had trouble getting excited about anything. That was part of the reason he’d come here: the hope that being somewhere different, doing something different, would start him perking again.

He’d seen plenty of new stuff, all right. But none of it did much to distract him from the mess his family had turned into, or from the South Bay Strangler, the bastard who got his jollies raping and murdering little old ladies from Hawthorne down to Rolling Hills Estates. Over the past five years, he’d done in at least thirteen of them. Plenty of DNA evidence to put him away if he ever got caught, but no matches showed up with anybody who’d run afoul of the criminal-justice system.

“Probably a pillar of the fucking community-except when he goes hunting,” Colin snarled, there in the Ford where nobody could hear him. He’d voiced the idea before, whenever the South Bay police met to coordinate the hunt. Nobody’d wanted to listen to him. He snorted. As if that were anything new!

It started raining harder. Colin fiddled with the windshield wipers, trying to keep them going just fast enough to wipe away the drops before the windshield got too spattered to see through… and no faster. Such relentless precision was a habit of his. It had driven Louise crazy. Crazy enough to shack up with a guy ten years younger than she was, evidently.

What did they call women who did such things nowadays? There was a word for it. Not being on the front lines of American slang, Colin had to go fishing inside his head. He caught it, though: “Cougars!” He felt good about remembering, then not so good because it was something he needed to remember.

A squirrel darted across the highway. It was smaller and redder than the squirrels in San Atanasio, but just as stupid and suicidal. He slowed down enough to keep from squashing it.

“Cougars,” he repeated sadly. He wouldn’t have figured Louise for one, not till it happened. But then, he hadn’t realized his marriage was in trouble till it blew up in his face. Which proved… what, exactly?

Proves you don’t know shit about women, that’s what, he answered himself. You were supposed to understand your wife better than any other woman, right? Obviously, he hadn’t. And he still didn’t know why his daughter had dumped her longtime boyfriend three weeks after Louise bailed on him. Maybe Louise and Vanessa had plotted it together. Maybe it was just in the air, like swine flu.

Bryce Miller still came by the house every week or two. Part of that was bound to be misery loving company. Part of it… Colin clicked his tongue between his teeth: not a happy noise. The sad and sorry truth was, he liked Bryce better than Vanessa. Bryce had his head on pretty straight, even if he was writing a thesis about Hellenistic poetry. Vanessa… Vanessa got touchy. She snapped like a mean dog if things didn’t go the way she wanted.

Colin’s foot came off the gas pedal. Did you just call your one and only daughter a bitch? Unhappily, he nodded. He hadn’t done it in so many words, but he’d done it. Yeah, that was the word for Vanessa. Not as in touchy-feely, either.

Here came the rangers’ station at the south entrance to Yellowstone. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Not bad. This station was manned. Colin pulled up to one of the gates, stopped, and rolled down his window. A smiling ranger in what looked like a Marine drill sergeant’s hat to Colin said, “Welcome to Yellowstone.” That meant Have you paid yet? Colin held up his map and, stapled to it, the pass-good for a week-he’d bought the day before. Nodding, the ranger changed her lines: “Welcome back to Yellowstone.”

“Thanks.” Colin drove in.

The road up from the south entrance ran pretty straight for twenty miles. Colin held to a steady forty-five even so. A couple of cars and a monstrous SUV zoomed past him. The guidebooks warned that the rangers were fanatical about enforcing the speed limit, especially on this stretch of the Yellowstone highway system. Maybe that was pious bullshit. Or maybe…

He rounded a curve. A rangers’ carith a light bar-now flashing-had pulled over the SUV. The guy behind the wheel looked righteously pissed off. Colin chortled. “Tough luck, sucker,” he said.

You could still see what the big fires of 1988 had done to the park. Some dead tree trunks went on standing tall. Some lay scattered across the meadows that had replaced some of the old lodgepole-pine forests. And the lodgepoles that had sprouted since the fires ranged from the size of coffee-table Christmas trees up to twenty or twenty-five feet tall: about half the size of the burned ones.

When the road finally forked, you swung left to go to Old Faithful and the swarm of famous geysers near it. Colin had done that the day before, his first day in the park. He supposed everybody did. They were Yellowstone’s number one attraction, and he had to admit Old Faithful lived up to its billing.

If you swung right instead, you went to West Thumb, an arm of Yellowstone Lake. There was a geyser basin there, too, and an information station with a bookstore. And there were restrooms. With quite a bit of Bubba’s coffee sloshing around inside him, that mattered to Colin. West Thumb Basin it was.

He pulled into the parking lot at half past nine. Not many cars in it yet. He’d beaten the rush to Old Faithful, too, but he suspected there was no enormous rush to beat here. The potholes scarring the lot argued that way. Had more people come, they would have kept things in better repair.

A round hot pool threw up clouds of steam by the entrance to the lot. It didn’t have a sign or anything-just a wooden warning rail around it to keep idiot tourists from cooking themselves. He found a spot near the start of the boardwalk that let visitors go by the geothermal features in reasonable safety-no, the parking lot wasn’t crowded. After he killed the lights and motor, he got out. Locking the car door as soon as he closed it was as automatic as breathing.

Signs in several languages warned people to stay on the boardwalk. The crust was thin. You could fall through. Right this second, boiling didn’t seem so bad. He shivered despite sweatshirt and jacket; it had to be down in the forties. It had been in the upper eighties when he flew out of LAX. Well, he wasn’t in L.A. any more. That was the point of this exercise, if it had one.