Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Can I stand up, too? she wondered. Only one way to find out. Ruth had already made it to her feet by the time Kelly did. Daniel also did it, though he limped as he went over to the Ford. Knee? Ankle? Whatever it was, he could, after a fashion, walk on it. That would do for the moment.

Larry tried the driver’s door. It opened. He looked inside. “Key’s in the ignition,” he reported. “The pilot wasn’t lying to us.”

They got in. The guys took the front seats; the women sat in back. It was fair-Larry and Daniel were taller than both of them. As Kelly fastened her belt, she noticed she’d barked her right palm. Ruth had a nasty scrape on her forehead and a bloody ear. All that was stuff they could worry about later.

Only after the belt clicked tight did Kelly start giggling. Ruth, who was also buckling up, sent her a curious look. She explained: “It’s the end of the world, and I’m fastening my stupid seat belt. So are you.”

“Oh.” Ruth managed a sheepish nod. “Force of habit.”

Larry started the car. He’d also used his belt. So had Daniel, who said, “We may need them. If it is the end d, people will be driving like bats out of hell.”

If that wasn’t a mixed-up metaphor-well, simile-Kelly’d never heard one. Being mixed up sure didn’t make it wrong, though.

Larry drove around the battered terminal building. People, some of them bleeding, were coming out through windows and doors. “I don’t like to pass them by, but…” he said. No one tried to change his mind.

By Montana standards, Butte was a good-sized town: it held about 35,000 people. It had banks and offices and apartment buildings and fast-food joints, just like a real city. Some of them had stayed up; some had fallen down. Glass from countless broken windows sparkled in the sun like snow. Some of the glass sparkled on Harrison Avenue, the street that would take them up to the Interstate. That wind hadn’t been fooling around.

“A flat would be all we needed right now, wouldn’t it?” Ruth said.

“Bite your tongue,” Kelly said sweetly. “Hard.”

Some of the locals were helping others who’d been hurt. But lots of men and women stood on the sidewalks-or sometimes in the middle of the street-staring and pointing at the cloud swelling up and up and out and out from the supervolcano. Kelly couldn’t blame them. She kept twisting to stare back at it herself. How high? How wide? How close? More of each every second-that was the only thing she was sure about.

Larry turned on the radio. Hiphop blared out of it: no doubt the station chosen by the last guy who’d serviced the Ford. He punched buttons. Before long, he found someone solemnly saying, “The President has declared a state of emergency in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The governors of those states have also declared emergencies, and have called out the National Guard.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Daniel said. “We’re all safe now.”

“Will you sock him, please?” Kelly said to Larry. “It’s a long stretch for me.”

“Consider yourself socked,” Larry told Daniel as he swung the car onto the westbound I-90. He pointed. “This overpass is okay, anyhow.”

“That makes one,” Kelly said. Ruth made as if to sock her. Kelly dipped her head in apology.

“Loss of life in and around Yellowstone Park is believed to be heavy, as is property damage,” the newscaster intoned. Obviously, he was in Washington or New York City or some place like that, some place where this seemed like one more natural disaster that didn’t have anything to do with him or his well-connected way of life. And so it was.

For the moment.

He went on, “For the time being, we have no direct reports from the impacted area.”

All the geologists in the Ford hooted and hollered. “No shit, Jackson!” Ruth yelled, which was among the more coherent editorials.

“1-800-BUY-CLUE,” Kelly added.

She and Ruth both kept twisting around to look back through the rear window. Every time, the cloud from the supervolcano looked bigger and blacker and closer. They were making Interstate speed. How fast was it going? How far would it come? Right about to Missoula, if past eruptions were any guide-and they were the only guide anybody had. How far the ash would blow in the other direction was an altogether different, and much bigger, question.

Every so often, the car would kind of lh for a little while, as if a tire were low on air. Then it would straighten out and fly right again. “Didn’t they put any shocks on this hunk of junk?” Daniel asked.

“It’s not the shocks,” Kelly said. Being a Californian, she had more direct and more varied experience with earthquakes than any of the others. “It’s the aftershocks. This is what an earthquake feels like in a car.”

“Oh,” Daniel said in a small, sheepish voice.

Larry hit the brakes. Kelly had to look forward instead of back. A pair of Montana Highway Patrol cars had their light bars flashing red and blue. An officer from one of them waved traffic towards an off-ramp. Sure as hell, an overpass was down. Half a car stuck out from under it. Kelly’s stomach lurched like the Ford in an aftershock when she thought about being in the other half. It would have been over fast, anyway. All that concrete falling…

The Highway Patrolman-no, Patrolwoman: she had boobs under her khaki shirt and a ponytail-waving cars to the ramp wore a mask like the ones the geologists had used in Yellowstone. That was smart. Whether it would be up to the challenge ahead… Whether the whole country would be up to the challenge ahead, let alone one crappy mask

…

Larry finally got around to asking Daniel if his place would hold four. “For a little while, anyway, if you don’t mind sleeping on the couch,” Daniel answered. “Kelly and Ruth can have the bed, and I’ve got a spare sleeping bag in my closet. I’ll use that.”

“Should work,” Larry agreed. In musing tones, he went on, “I wonder whether Missoula gets gas and food and things shipped in from the east or from the west.”

That was another fascinating question. Kelly hadn’t started thinking in those terms, but she realized she’d start needing to. Supplies might be able to reach Missoula from Idaho. Nothing much would be able to cross Montana for God only knew how long. Ash-and probably boulders, too-would already be raining down on Livingston and Bozeman. I-90 would be impassable. Stretches of it might end up under hundreds of feet of volcanic debris. Maybe some secondary routes farther north would stay open. Maybe-but Kelly had trouble believing it.

What would Missoula and lots of places like Missoula do when a whole bunch of what they depended on for daily living didn’t-couldn’t-get through? They’d damn well do without, was what. And what would come of that?

Kelly knew the question really mattered. She knew she ought to be worrying about it. But she couldn’t, not right now. Thanks to that helicopter pilot, she hadn’t been smack in the middle of ground zero when the Yellowstone caldera fell in on itself. She was still here. She was still breathing. She still had a chance to go on breathing a while longer. She still had the chance to find out the answer to her important question, and perhaps to some others as well.

Right this minute, she figured that made her one of the luckiest and, in a way, one of the richest people on the face of the globe. And she wasn’t going to worry about a single goddamn thing.

The powers that be at Amalgamated Humanoids didn’t mind if people listened to the radio at their desks. Every so often, there was a little dustup when somebody listened to something the person at the next desk couldn’t stand, and turned it up instead of down when the allegedly injured party complained. But that didn’t happen as often as Vanessa Ferguson would have guessed. Not everyone was as touchy as she was, though she didn’t see iat way.