Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Nobody needed to tell Vanessa twice. She made a beeline for her car, fumbling in her purse for the keys. She’d just unlocked the door when the bellow from the blast tore through Denver. Yellowstone was over 400 miles away-she’d found that out. Sound took forty minutes or so to get from there to here. She wondered what that bellow would have been like if she were only, say, fifty miles away. She didn’t wonder long. It would have torn her head off.

She jumped into the car and slammed the door. That helped a little: less than she would have wished. The car rocked under her. She started it anyway, and punched the radio buttons till she found news. For once, it didn’t take long.

“-gigantic disaster,” someone was saying in a high, excited voice. “Several states are sure to be severely impacted.”

Vanessa started a reflexive sneer, then cut it off. Things were going to come down on several states, sure as hell. Things were already coming down on several states. When you used impact as a verb, that was what you were supposed to mean. Maybe this yahoo meant affect, but for once he was literally correct.

“We’ll be right back after this important message,” he said. The message proved to be important only to the male-enhancement company that put it out and to the radio station’s bottom line. Vanessa hit another button.

“-will undoubtedly blanket Denver,” an educated-sounding woman was saying. “How deep the ashfall will be, and how serious its effects, no one can yet predict. It is already obvious, though, that removing it will be more challenging than clearing a heavy snowfall. Where can we take it that isn’t also already covered in ash?”

Wasn’t that also true of snow? But snow eventually melted, and you just had to get it out of the streets. Snow on lawns and parks was beautiful. Volcanic ash would be anything but.

“How will volcanic ash affect people with respiratory ailments?” a man asked.

“The only thing I can say right now is, it won’t be good,” the woman answered. “It won’t be good for anyone. And it won’t be good for livestock, and stockraising is particularly important in the eastern half of the state.”

Colorado had always been uneasily divided between agriculture and mining. Tourism added a third leg to the stand, but now everything was knocked for a loop. Who besides geologists would want to come visit a city blanketed-how deep? — in volcanic ash? Escaped lunatics, maybe.

“Some of this dust-maybe a lot of it-will reach the upper atmoere and be blown around the world,” the woman added. “Global climate change may be severe.”

That didn’t sound good. The hugely towering black cloud off to the west of north didn’t look good. The earthquakes that kept rolling through Denver didn’t feel good. Nothing seemed good-except Vanessa had the rest of the day off.

Colin met Gabe Sanchez at a familiar spot: in front of the coffeepot. As Colin loaded up more instant brain cells, Gabe said, “Well, it’s finally gone and happened.”

“What’s gone and happened?” Colin asked, adulterating his java with cream and sugar. He stood aside so Gabe could get at the pot.

“That superwaddayacallit in Yellowstone went kapow,” Sanchez answered. “I just saw it on a news feed from the Net… Hey, where you going, man?”

“To find out what’s going on for myself,” Colin said grimly. “Kelly’s still up there, or she was last night.”

“Oh. Hell. That’s not good,” Gabe said.

“Tell me about it.”

“I hope everything turns out okay.” Sanchez crossed himself.

Raised a hardshell Baptist, Colin had long since lost his religion. Most of the time, he didn’t miss it. Most of the time, in fact, he forgot he’d ever had it. It was easy not to believe in God, especially a merciful God, when you were a cop. Colin often wondered how guys like Gabe managed. Every once in a while, he envied them the solace their faith could bring. This was one of those times.

The first thing he did was check his phone. He breathed again when he saw a text from Kelly: On helicopter. On my way out. “Thank you, Jesus,” he muttered. It was as close to a prayer as he’d come in God knew how long.

One thing the cop shop could boast, and that was fast Internet. When Colin turned to CNN. com, he got live streaming video from a weather satellite. There was a hell of a lot of smoke, and under it patches of fire. The headline was simple: YELLOWSTONE CATASTROPHE! When he noticed the computer-added state boundaries on the video, he realized that was an understatement, but English didn’t come equipped with words to describe anything this big. No language did. No language since the primeval Ook! had ever needed to cope with anything like this.

There was a story under the video. The great collapse had happened only forty minutes earlier. He shook his head in wonder. The world was a connected place these days, all right.

Then he remembered he’d had a coffee cup in his hand when he ran back to his desk. He reached for it… and discovered the world was a connected place in more ways than the information superhighway. That gentle rolling motion under his swivel chair could only be an earthquake. By the way it went on and on, it was one doozy of an earthquake, too. Cops and secretaries started exclaiming-he wasn’t the only one who felt it. But it stayed mild, so it was a long way off.

“Holy crap!” he said. “That’s got to be the supervolcano.”

Back more than a hundred years before, they’d felt the San Francisco earthquake in Los Angeles. But Yellowstone was a lot farther away than San Francisco. Didn’t that argue that the quake that went with the supervolcano eruption was bigger than the one that had flattened the city bythe bay? How much would this one flatten?

He wondered what had happened to Denver. Central Colorado suddenly seemed much too close to northwestern Wyoming. He called Vanessa. He got her voice mail, which might mean anything or nothing. At the beep, he said, “You okay? Give me a call and let me know. ’Bye.” He’d done what he could on that front.

A little fiddling on the computer told him how far from San Atanasio Yellowstone was. It also told him how fast earthquake waves traveled, even if the Wiki article did say they “propagated” (he tried to imagine fornicating earthquake waves, but his mind rebelled). San Atanasio would feel an earthquake in Yellowstone about forty minutes after it happened, assuming it felt such an earthquake at all. Yeah, assuming, he thought.

His cell phone rang. He always answered the landline on his desk with some variation on Ferguson. Here he said, “Hello?”

“Hi, Dad.” It was Vanessa. “I just got home. Could you feel the quake there?”

“Sure could. What’s it like where you are? You just got home, you said?”

“Yeah. The building where I work stayed up, but power’s out. It’s out here, too. I don’t know when it’ll come back.” She hesitated, then added, “I don’t know if it’ll come back. And the sky… Oh, my God, the sky! The cloud’s coming this way. You can tell. Pickles is under the bed, and he won’t come out. He’s scared shitless-I cleaned it off the rug.”

“I believe that. Should you get out now, while the getting’s good?” Colin asked.

“I don’t know. I’m thinking about it. Will you let Mom and the brothers know I’m okay? I don’t want to run my battery any more than I have to-I don’t know when I’ll be able to charge it again.”

“Okay,” Colin said, though he looked forward to calling Louise the way he looked forward to losing a tooth. “Take care.”

“You, too. ’Bye.”

He started to add Good luck, but she’d hung up by then. Sighing, he called Louise’s cell. Maybe he’d luck out. Maybe he’d get her voice mail and not actually have to talk to her.