Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Seat cushion may be used for flotation, it said on the back of the seat in front of Bryce’s-and on all the others. At least it didn’t say floatation, the way it did on some airlines. For some idiot reason, the idea of going into the drink with a misspelled safety device weirded Bryce out.

He was four rows behind the exit. I’ve got a chance, he thought-if the plane didn’t smash itself to smithereens hitting the water, if it didn’t sink like a chunk of concrete, if, if, if…

“One more thing,” the captain added from the speakers. “If anybody goes for anything in the overhead bins, clobber the jerk and then step on him. This isn’t the time to worry about your stuff. You’ve got enough other things to worry about, right?”

Both Bryce and the veteran beside him nodded. He looked out the window again. Here came the lake or reservoir or whatever the hell it was. It was mostly quiet in the cabin now. People had gone through panic and, with luck, come out the other side. The plane flashed past a bird, almost as a car might have on the 405. One more look… They were over water, closer by the second.

“Here we go,” the captain said. “Take your brace again.”

The airliner’s belly smacked the smooth surface of Branch Oak Lake. The plane skipped like a stone, then almost instantly smacked again. This time, it stayed on the surface. The splash made Bryce’s window useless. He didn’t care. At least he hadn’t got smashed to strawberry jam right away.

“Open the exit doors!” the boss flight attendant shouted, and then, “Passengers, remember your flotation devices! p anyone near you who is injured!” One more afterthought, reminiscent of recess at elementary school: “Take turns!”

And damned if they didn’t. A mad rush would have hopelessly clogged the exits. But the passengers moved toward them in an orderly hurry. Bryce paused at the edge of the aisle to let a woman go up ahead of him. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” Bryce answered. He supposed there’d been scenes of such civility aboard the Titanic, too. The chilly water streaming in through the exit doors made the comparison much too apt. But it wasn’t even up over his shoetops yet. He had no trouble moving against it.

When he got to the open door, a flight attendant and one of the big men from the exit row were standing on the wing helping people come out. “You all right?” the attendant asked.

“Shit, I’m alive,” Bryce blurted.

She smiled. “There you go. Now off the wing and into the water. Get as far from the plane as you can.”

He put his arms through the straps on the seat cushion and went into the lake. It didn’t feel too cold once he got used to it. He’d been in pools that were worse. What it would feel like come February was bound to be a different question, but it wasn’t February, thank God.

Kicking was awkward in his Adidases. He pulled them off. The plane settled behind him as he moved away from it. He hoped the captain would get out. Damned if the guy hadn’t pulled a Sully. If the passengers had anything to say about it, he wouldn’t be short of drinks or anything else he happened to want for the rest of his days.

“Some fun, huh?” The Afghan vet bobbed in the water a few feet away.

“I’ve had rides I liked better,” Bryce replied. The other guy laughed.

The sky looked a million miles away from down here, even though Bryce had been flying a few minutes before. The ugly black cloud rearing over the western horizon had to be the same thing he’d seen up there.

Buzzing noises swelled from distant mosquitoes to up-close Harleys in a matter of minutes. Everybody who had a boat by Branch Oak Lake must have put it in the water. Corn-fed Corn-huskers started hauling people out of the drink. Bryce waved to make sure they saw him. When a guy in a baseball cap in one of the boats waved back and gave him a thumbs-up, he knew rescue was only a matter of time.

The Nebraskan picked up the veteran first, then put-putted over to Bryce. Strong, sunburned arms helped him out of the lake and into the bottom of the boat, where he lay like a just-caught bluegill-except he lacked the energy to flop around. “You okay, man?” his rescuer asked. “Everything in one piece?”

“I… think so,” Bryce answered after taking stock. “Thank you.”

“Yeah!” the Afghan vet said. “Thank you! Amen!” He sounded as if Bryce had reminded him of something important he’d been too rattled to remember on his own. And that was probably what had happened.

“I’m gonna see how many more folks we can get aboard,” the local said, and got the boat going again. Bryce didn’t care. He’d made it.. so far.

Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were on I-95, heading north toward Portland, Maine, when the boom from the superano roared over their van. They weren’t taken by surprise; by then, NPR was tracking the progress of the enormous sound wave. “The biggest noise this poor old planet has heard in tens of thousands of years,” one of their correspondents declared.

“Yeah-except for Congress,” Rob Ferguson said.

Justin Nachman followed a snort with a reproachful look. “Piss and moan, piss and moan. Five minutes ago, you were bitching about paying the toll before they let us onto this stretch of the Interstate.”

“Well, it sucks,” Rob said.

“It’s how they pay for keeping the road up,” Justin said, as if reasoning with a possibly dangerous lunatic.

The van chose that moment to bounce on a pothole. Rob, who was driving, said, “They do a great job, too. We manage okay back home without this toll-road bullshit.”

The lead guitarist rolled his eyes. “Give me a break, man. How many years in a row is it that the California budget’s been fucked up?”

Rob didn’t know how many consecutive years it had been. He did know he couldn’t remember a year when the budget hadn’t been a disaster area. And he could remember further and further back as he got older: close to twenty-five years now, though he hadn’t cared about the budget when he was a little kid. Twenty-five years seemed a hell of a long time to him. He’d never had the nerve to say anything like that to his father, though. He had what he was all too sure was an accurate suspicion the older man would have laughed in his face.

Since he didn’t have a good comeback for Justin, he concentrated on making miles. Charlie and Biff were in the other van, right behind this one. They were on their own. Snakes and Ladders had dissolved in New York City, and they hadn’t booked another opening act.

Rob wondered what his bandmates thought of the supervolcano. They knew about it: everybody’d been talking about it when the band stopped at a roadside Hardee’s for lunch. Seeing the star on something called Hardee’s weirded Rob out every time he came East. In his part of the country, the chain that served those same burgers went by Carl’s Jr. Well, Best Foods mayonnaise was Hellman’s back here, too. Bizarre, all right. He wondered if there was a song in it.

“Devastation continues to spread across wide stretches of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana,” the NPR newsman continued gravely. “There are as yet not even the vaguest estimates of lives lost or property damage. Nor is there any way to stop the spreading ash cloud. An astronomer has calculated that the supervolcano eruption might well be observable from the planet Mars.”

“Wow,” Justin said. “Can you imagine the Martians going, ‘Bummer, man! The Earth is screwed big-time!’”

Rob could imagine it. “Write that down,” he said. “We should be able to do something with it.” It sure as hell made a better song idea than artery-cloggers with the wrong names.

The band always took Write that down seriously. Stuff that was supposed to stay in people’s heads too often didn’t. Justin produced a notebook and wrote. Better than even money nothing would come from the jotting, but at least it wouldn’t get lost.