Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

How much volcanic ash did he bring in with him? Enough to keep him coughing and rubbing for the next week? Vanessa wouldn’t have been surprised. She was glad she’d seen him. Otherwise, she would have charged out there herself. All of a sudden, that didn’t look like such a great idea.

Instead, after coffee and some oatmeal, she went back into the bedroom and turned on the TV. She’d already given Pickles his usual morning kitty treats. Now he jumped up beside her on the bed and meowed for more. The world had broken routine, she’d broken routine-why shouldn’t he? She fed him. If food made him happy, or at least happier, fine.

Then she opened up the bedroom blinds. The Black-and-White Fairy-actually, the Shades of Grayish Brown Fairy-had touched that side of the building, too. Dust drifted the vacant lot next door. The house on the far side of the house was painted a pink hotter than Vanessa would have used for anything but lipstick. You sure couldn’t prove it now.

A couple of cars chugged by on the street. Their lights speared through the dust as if it were fog. They kicked up enormous, plumy wakes of ash as they went. One of them stopped before it got to the corner. The driver popped the hood and got out. Then, like the fellow in the apartment across from Vanessa’s, the gal got in again and slammed the door. Only dimly visible, her hazard lights came on.

“This sucks. Big-time,” Vanessa said. Pickles meowed again. If that wasn’t agreement, she’d never heard it from the cat.

She turned on the TV. A talking head on CNN was going on about the climatic implications of the eruption. That wasn’t what Vanessa needed to hear. If you were somewhere else, somewhere far away, you could afford to talk about such things. Vanessa wanted to know what to do about the mess she was in the middle of.

She grabbed the remote again and fired an infrared beam at the set. CNN gave way to local news. It was news for morons, but the other local morning news shows were news for imbeciles. If not good, this was better.

It wasn’t the usual morning crew, but the gang who’d done the eleven o’clock news the night before. They were in the same clothes. They looked tired. One of them sipped from a styrofoam cup.

“If you’re wondering where Jud and Mariska and Meteorologist Mark are, they were advised not to come in today,” she said, setting the cup down. “Everyone in the Denver area is advised not to travel today-or for the foreseeable future-unless it’s absolutely necessary. This is an emergency the likes of which we’ve never known.”

Newsies usually laid things on with a trowel, to say nothing of a shovel. Vanessa began to think that they weren’t exaggering this time. Looking out the bedroom window again, she wondered if anybody could exaggerate this.

The advice the night newswoman gave was simple. Don’t go outside. If you have to go outside, for God’s sake don’t breathe. That was fine for the moment. What happened when you ran out of food, though? If you had a choice between filling your lungs with crud and going hungry, which should you pick? If it wasn’t Don’t know whether to shit or go blind, what would be?

“Ash continues to fall,” the weary-looking blonde said, brushing back a lock of hair that had come loose in spite of spray. News for morons, sure as hell. “Some geologists believe it may get three feet deep all over the Denver metropolitan area before it lets up. Roof collapses are probable, especially in case of rain.”

“Urk!” Vanessa said, a dismayed noise she’d got from her old man. She hadn’t thought of that. How much would a layer of volcanic ash three feet deep on a roof weigh? How much would it weigh after absorbing as much rainwater as it could hold? How much weight would a roof be designed to take? Some, sure, because roofs here had to hold up against snow. But that much?

Every time she heard a creak overhead, she was gonna freak out. She could see that coming like a rash. You weren’t supposed to go outside into the ash. They’d made that abundantly clear. But what if the ash decided to come to you instead? It was a good question. Vanessa wished she, or somebody, could come up with a good answer.

After commercials-this didn’t seem to be an urgent enough emergency to dispense with selling the product-a newsman whose boyish charm had worn thin by this hour said, “No one is sure yet whether mandatory evacuation of Denver and the surrounding areas will become necessary. The Governor, who was in Lamar at the time of the eruption, has ordered out the National Guard to assist in protecting Colorado lives and property.”

A newcomer to the state, Vanessa didn’t know where the hell Lamar was. A road atlas showed her: out in the southeast, in cow country near the Kansas border. The governor was one lucky stiff. That put him a couple of hundred miles farther away from the eruption. Things might not be so bad out there.

Since the nighttime sports guy was still in the studio, he came on the air. The end of the Rockies’ season and the early part of the Broncos’ season had gone on indefinite hold. Vanessa despised baseball and football impartially. The only thing she wondered was which wasted more time.

Then the worn-looking newsman came back and said, “Snowplows are doing their best to keep the Interstates open south and east of the city to facilitate evacuation in the event that the authorities decide to implement it. No one knows how long the big machines’ air filters can continue to protect them from the grit in the air. By the same token, no one knows how long the volcanic ash will keep on raining down from the sky, either.” He added something he might not have been reading off his teleprompter: “Right now, nobody seems to know much of anything, folks.”

Vanessa loathed facilitate and implement almost as much as she hated impact. They were stupid and pretentious. People used them to sound important and knowledgeable, and ended up sounding like pompous assholes instead.

But if I-25 and I-70 were open, at least partway… Shouldn’t she get the hell out while the getting was possible even if not exactly good? If they were already thinking about evacuation, Denver was really and truly screwed. In the way of bureaucrats, the authorities were nerving themselves before doing what they plainly needed to do.

She looked out the window again. That car was still stuck there, with others easing around it and kicking up more dust and ash as they went. How long would her own elderly Corolla last? Wouldn’t she be worse off if she got stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere-which, to her, defined all of Colorado outside Denver-than if she sat tight?

Not necessarily. If the plows couldn’t keep the highways open, how long would the town still have food? How would anybody bring it in? What would happen if-no, when-the waterworks stopped working? Or when the roofs started buckling and people discovered they couldn’t breath indoors, either?

She was a cop’s kid. Spinning out disaster scenarios came easy. So did knowing that most people would sit tight till it was too late, then start running around like chickens that had just met the chopper. That was what most people did. She’d seen it for herself; she didn’t need to remember her father’s scorn for the common run of civilian.

And since that was what the common run of civilian did, it behooved her not to do likewise. Her mind made up, she threw some clothes and pills and tampons and a couple of books into an overnight bag. She added bottles of water, granola bars, and anything else edible she could grab that wouldn’t go bad right away. She also threw in kibbles and treats for the cat. If she slung the bag over her shoulder and carried the cat carrier in one hand, she’d be able to keep the other one free, and she needed that.