Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

She bounced from NPR to the classical station to political talk. She would have liked to bring her iPod, but the powers that be did frown on headphones-even earbuds. They claimed people got too distracted using those. It sounded like bullshit to Vanessa, but she hadn’t been there long enough to stick in her oar on something like that.

She sure as hell needed something to take part of her mind off the proposal she was editing. If she gave the wretched document her full attention, she’d grab a paperweight or something and chuck it at her monitor. Uselessly long words in uselessly long sentences that twisted and writhed like worms on a sidewalk after a rain…

Would the engineers write better if they learned English the way they learned programming, however they learned that? They couldn’t very well write worse.

An announcer broke into a Bach harpsichord concerto. If that wasn’t a hanging offense, it damn well should have been. “I do apologize for the interruption,” the woman said, “but an important news bulletin has just reached us. There is a major-I repeat, a major-volcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park. This is on a scale far larger than anything previously known. There is some concern that Denver may be adversely affected. Please stay tuned for any further developments. Thank you.” Bach returned, cool and pure.

As far as Vanessa knew, she was the only person here who listened to classical music. But exclamations floated up from several cubicles, so the bulletin must have gone out on a bunch of stations. Vanessa remembered her dad pitching a hissy fit because she was coming here.

That was just too ridiculous, though. Volcanic ash could screw up flight schedules, sure-Denver politicos had been pissing and moaning about revenue reversals for months now. Even so, Yellowstone was… well, how far from Denver was Yellowstone, anyhow? Vanessa had checked once, before she moved here, but she’d forgotten.

She hit Bing. com to find out. Most people would have Googled it, but she was Microsoft all the way. From Yellowstone to Denver was about 430 miles. She laughed. Ridiculous to think that anything so far away could possibly do much here. Reporters got you to keep listening by exaggerating bulletins, and the poor woman at the classical station had to read whatever they stuck in front of her. She wouldn’t have any way of knowing what bushwah it was.

Nodding to herself, Vanessa closed the Bing window and grimly returned to the proposal. She tried to tell herself it wouldn’t seem so bad with Bach lilting out of the radio. She tried, but she didn’t have much luck.

At first, she hardly noticed the rolling motion under her. But it built and built and kept on building. A rolling motion rather than a sharp wham meant a quake was a long way away-all her California experience taught her so. A quake a long way off that was this big was a lulu, though.

A file cabinet somewhere not far enough away went over with a crash. Next thing Vanessa knew, she was under her desk, trying to bunch her legs up under her so it would protect them, too. The rolling went on and on. Screams-soprano and baritone-rang through the office. “Make it stop!” somebody yelled, but it wouldn’t stop.

Little by little-after several more tall files fell-it did ease up. A final shake sent Vanessa’s keyboard clattering down. She supposed she was lucky the monitor didn’t slide off the desk, too. And acoustic cottage cheese drifted from the ceiling like indoor snow.

She hit "1em"›She scrambled out from under the desk. She was one of the first to emerge, maybe because she was a Californian and more used to quakes. Several cubicle partitions had gone down along with the file cabinets. She could see much farther across the office than she’d been able to before. Lucky the power stayed on, she thought.

Which must have tempted fate or something, because a doozy of an aftershock almost knocked her off her feet. She squawked and grabbed for the edge of the desk to steady herself-and as she touched it the lights went out. For a few seconds, everything went as black as the inside of a mortgage banker’s heart. People started screaming in earnest. Vanessa didn’t join them, but she didn’t miss by much.

Then a few wan emergency lights came on. Somebody spoke from ceiling speakers that she hadn’t known were there: “Evacuate the building! Immediately evacuate the building!”

She couldn’t remember hearing an idea she liked better. Pausing only to grab her handbag, she hurried toward a red EXIT sign glowing over a door. The office was on the second floor. Along with everybody else, she went down a gloomy hallway to the stairs. Several people limped. A small man had his arms around the shoulders of two bigger guys. As Vanessa squeezed past, the smaller fellow said, “Goddamn file cabinet smashed my ankle. Hurts like a motherfucker, pardon my French.”

“I’ve heard the word,” she answered. He chuckled before he went back to swearing.

The stairwell was dark except at the bottom, where dim daylight beckoned. Vanessa had done plenty of things she’d enjoyed more than trying not to trip and break her neck, or even an ankle of her own. If anybody above her fell, everybody on the stairs was liable to go ass over teakettle.

She made it. She hurried to the front entrance. It had those glass doors that automatically slid sideways when anyone approached. Printed across them was the legend IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, PUSH OUTWARD. Vanessa had seen it a million times without ever paying much attention to it. But someone had pushed, and the doors had indeed opened outward.

Yet another aftershock hurried her into the parking lot. How much could the building take? What kind of quake standards did Denver have? Out in the open, she didn’t have to worry about that so much. She really had wondered if the ceiling would come crashing down.

People in the lot were aligning like iron filings scattered across a paper on top of a magnet. They were all facing a little west of north. Vanessa turned that way, too, before she quite realized what she was doing.

She liked Denver’s western horizon, with the Rockies shouldering their way up into the sky as far as the eye could see-if air pollution let the eye see them at all. This was a clear, bright day; the morning had been downright chilly. She could see the mountains just fine.

And, towering far above them, she could see what all the other people saw: that enormous column of smoke growing, swelling, every second. “That can’t be Yellowstone. It can’t,” someone said, with the plaintive tones of a man hoping to be contradicted. “It’s too far away

… isn’t it? I mean, a little ash at the airport, that’s one thing. But this…” His voice trailed away.

Vanessa wanted to believe it was much too far to be Yellowstone. She couldn’t. You could see the Rockies most of the way to Kansas in good weather. That cloud, obviously, was a hell of a lot taller than the mountains. For all she knew, her father could see it back in San Atanasioiv›

“It’s getting bigger,” a woman said. “It’s heading this way.”

Plenty of crap from the little eruptions-though they hadn’t seemed little till now-had headed this way. That was why flights into and out of the airport had been hit-and-miss for so long. Not all of this titanic cloud was heading toward Denver, obviously. Oh, no. There’d be plenty to go around and then some. But what would happen when Denver’s share landed? Nothing good. Vanessa could see that right away.

“Go home, folks.” That was Malcolm Talbott, who ran Amalgamated Humanoids. “We’re not going to get anything done today. Go home,” he repeated, louder this time. “We’ll see how things are tomorrow. If they aren’t so bad, we’ll work. If they are…” He shrugged. “We won’t be the only one with troubles. You’d best believe we won’t.” One more earthquake put a rolling period under his words.