Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

They had reservations at a motel not far from the airport. Rob had spent enough time on the road that he was good at it, which didn’t mean he got off on it. There were times when he’d wake up cold sober, not wasted on anything, but still without the faintesg aea of where the hell he was. The feeling didn’t always disappear right away, either. Rooms rarely gave a clue. Cable stations were the same everywhere, pretty much. If a paper was shoved under the door or waiting outside, odds were it would be USA Today. Hotel management types commonly felt it was better than the local rag. The sad thing was, they’d be right more often than not.

By the time he got down to breakfast, he’d usually have things figured out-usually, but not always. He liked playing. He liked performing. He liked the small-scale celebrity status being in a halfway successful band brought. Travel… He wasn’t so sure about travel.

There were guys older than his father who’d play a gig, hop in a car, and play at another club five hundred miles away the next night. Some of them had been big once upon a time and were still hanging on. Some had made a career out of being second-stringers. They had their fans-not enough to get rich from, but enough to pay the bills. Most of them. Most of the time.

That seemed to be about what Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had to look forward to. Do I want to wake up wondering where I am when I’m fifty? Rob asked himself that question, and another one, every time he checked in somewhere. The other question was, Do I want to wake up wondering where I am when I’m seventy?

So far, he hadn’t found anything else he wanted to do more. He hadn’t found any place where he wanted to grow roots, either. So tonight here he was in Portland, Maine. He’d played in the other Portland, too.

Justin sometimes got sick of life on the road, the same way he did. As far as Rob could tell, Biff and Charlie didn’t care where they were. For guys in a band that needed to stay on tour-and, in this age of MP3s and iTunes, how many bands didn’t? — that was the right attitude.

After they checked in, Justin asked the desk clerk, “Where can we get some dinner around here? Doesn’t have to be fancy. Just, y’know, food.”

She named a place, adding, “They’ve got the best lobster rolls in Portland, I think.”

“How do we get there?” Rob asked eagerly. He was in favor of lobster and shrimp and crab. If the rest of the guys weren’t, well, the menu was bound to have other stuff on it they could eat.

Directions didn’t sound too complicated. The band kept talking about getting GPS. God knew the systems were cheap these days. But Rob and Justin both liked to navigate. Finding a place on your own made arriving mean something it didn’t when a computer held your hand all the way there. Even getting lost could be interesting. Rob thought so, anyhow. Charlie and Biff thought their bandmates were full of it. But they’d never missed a gig because they’d got lost, so the rhythm guitarist and drummer didn’t grumble. Much.

A roll, split in half. A little mayo, even if under an assumed name. Lobster-lots of lobster. A lobster roll. A Maine specialty. The finest invention since the wheel, as far as Rob was concerned. Maine was one of the few places where lobster didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Rob was happy to pay a mere arm for such concentrated deliciosity.

Justin had a big bowl of clam chowder-creamy, of course, with not a tomato in sight. Tomato chowder was a New York City thing, not a New England one. The divide was as fierce as Yankees and Red Sox. Rob actually liked both kinds, which made him either a neutral or a heretic, depending.

Charlie got a chicken pot pie. You could do that anywhere. Biff ordered the brrito. Rob didn’t think he would have chosen a lobster roll in Phoenix. A burrito in Portland, Maine, struck him as an equally bad idea. But it wasn’t his stomach. Sometimes the less you said to the guys you played with, the better off you were.

When they walked out of the restaurant, the sun was going down. It looked like… a sunset. The only screwy thing about it, as far as Rob was concerned, was that the Atlantic was at his back and the sun was sinking toward land. He was conditioned to think of the sun coming up over land and going down in the Pacific. This felt wrong-wrong enough for him to say something about it.

The other guys were all Californians, too. They nodded. “Hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right,” Biff said.

“I read somewhere that after Krakatoa blew up, sunsets were spectacular for a couple of years because of all the dust and ash in the air,” Justin said. “I was kind of hoping for something fancier than-this.” He waved across the parking lot at the ordinary red ball going down into the ordinarily reddening western sky.

“Give me a break, man!” Rob exclaimed. “It just happened a few hours ago, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Justin had the grace to sound sheepish. “But this thing is a lot bigger than Krakatoa, too. This thing is a lot bigger than, well, anything. I mean, it happened in fucking Wyoming, and we heard it here.”

“Instant gratification, that’s all you want, dude.” Rob wanted to bite his tongue. Damned if he didn’t sound like his father. If you played in a band and your old man was a cop, what did that say about you? Nothing good, for sure.

“Hey, who doesn’t want gratification?” Charlie said. “We’ll pick up some girls after we play.”

“There you go!” Justin and Biff said the same thing at the same time in the same enthusiastic tone. Rob didn’t, but it wasn’t as if he hated the idea. It wasn’t as if he didn’t do it himself, either. What was the point of even fairly small celebrity, after all, if you didn’t take advantage of it?

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Vanessa remembered that was a line from a play, but not which one or who’d written it. Things she was interested in, she remembered-and she’d hit you over the head with the details, too. What she didn’t care about was as one with Nineveh and Tyre… which was also a line from something or other. From what? Who cared? If she ever needed to find out for some reason she couldn’t imagine now, she could always Bing it.

If she got the chance, she could. Denver was also becoming as one with Nineveh and Tyre. She’d never dreamt it could happen so fast. Ash started raining down on the city-Jesus Christ, ash started raining down on the whole goddamn state-the day after the supervolcano went off.

Vanessa got up that morning intending to go back to Amalgamated Humanoids. There hadn’t been any earthquakes big enough to wake her up during the night. She had power again; her digital alarm clock buzzed her at a quarter past six, as she’d set it to do when the electricity came on again. So, volcano or no volcano, everything should have been pretty much back to normal.

Well, almost everything. Pickles remained one freaked-out kitty, and who could blame him? Cats and cataclysms didn’t mix well.

She soon discovered she didn’t mix so well with cataclysms, either. When she opened the blinds after she got dressed, everything was grayish brown: the walkway outside the apartment, the stairs, the grass in the courtyard, the air, everything. She could barely see across the courtyard to the apartments on the other side-there was that much crap in the air. The breeze made it drift and billow, now thinner, now thicker.

“Fuck!” Vanessa said, which exactly summed up how she felt. She’d looked forward to watching snow fall in Denver. It was something she’d never seen before; she was an L.A. kid, all right. What was out there now seemed like a filthy parody of the genuine article.

Somebody across the courtyard opened his door and headed for his car. He took about three steps before he started coughing and frantically rubbing his eyes at the same time. His shoes kicked up ghostly clouds of dust and ash. He turned around and went right back into his place as fast as he could.