Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Pickles hated going into his carrier any old time. He knew going outside meant trouble-the vet and other notorious cat-torturers. And he particularly hated it when he was all jumpy anyhow. He scratched her but good before she finally stuffed him in there. “You’d better be worth it, you stupid fuzzhead,” she snapped before she sprayed the wounds with Bactine. That little bottle went into the overnight, too.

Then she soaked a towel in the kitchen sink and draped it over the cat carrier. She soaked another one for herself.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she said aloud in a voice whose calm surprised her. As a matter of fact, she wasn’t remotely sure. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t was another old phrase that fit much too well. She might be worse off bailing out; she might be worse off staying. The swirling gray-brown grit outside warned that she might be in over her head no matter what she did.

You could die out there. Or right here. That was what it boiled down to. Vanessa had always been the kind who did something when she had a choice between that and sitting tight. She wouldn’t have given Bryce the heave-ho if she weren’t. She wouldn’t have followed Hagop to Denver, either.

Yeah, and look how well that turned out, her mind jeered. L.A. wouldn’t be catching it like this.

But she wasn’t in L.A. She had to do what looked best where she was. “Fuck,” she said one more time, and lugged her chattels to the apartment door. Pickles yowled mournfully. “Shut up,” she suggested. He yowled some more. Ignoring him, she shouldered the overnight bag and draped her own wet towel over her eyes and nose and mouth. It didn’t want to stay, so she secured it with a rubber band.

The next little while would have to be in Braille. She opened the door, got the cat carrier out, and closed it behind her. She groped till she grabbed the iron railing that would take her to the stairs and followed it till she found them. Left turn, eminded herself. Sixteen stairs down to the courtyard, right? Take ’em slow. You can’t watch what you’re doing.

At what she thought was the bottom, she felt around with her foot. Concrete, sure enough-concrete with a bunch of new grit on top. The stucco wall that led to the parking garage would be over to the right. To her vast relief, her hand brushed rough plaster. Okay. She knew where she was again.

Anyone who could see her was probably laughing his ass off. Too damn bad. Anyone who could see her was inside an apartment, which meant the sorry son of a bitch had his own problems. She patted the wall every step or two to guide herself along. She didn’t want the stucco ripping up her fingers, especially after the number the cat had done on the back of her hand.

She patted again-and felt nothing. “Ha! Found it!” she exclaimed in triumph. Here was the opening for the stairway down to her car. Some more groping got her to the rail attached to the stairway wall.

Down she went. How many stairs till she got to the bottom? Sixteen from her place to the courtyard, but how many going below? She couldn’t remember. She guessed it would be sixteen again, and slammed her foot against flat concrete flooring, hard, when that proved one too many. Taking a stair that wasn’t there was almost as bad as missing one that was. But she didn’t fall.

After a couple of steps away from the stairwell, she adjusted the rubber band and let the towel drop away from her eyes, though not from her nose and mouth. She had to see to get to her car, and she had to see to drive. Things weren’t so bad here as they were up top. The air was still dusty, and there was grit with footprints going through it on top of the smooth concrete. It wasn’t already hideously thick, though, the way it was in the courtyard.

She chucked her bag into the car, then stuck Pickles on the passenger seat. She draped a blanket on the overnight bag so nobody peering in could see it was there. At another time, she would have stashed it in the trunk. Not today. The less she got in and out, the better. She was just glad the tank was almost full.

As soon as she started the motor, she turned on the lights. You wouldn’t normally need them during the day in Denver, but what did normally mean now? Nada, that was what. She backed out of her space. “Good-bye, God. I’m going… someplace,” she said. Kansas? New Mexico? Some place where things like this didn’t happen, like the frogs in Cannery Row.

She didn’t have to open the window to use a card to open the gate. A beam sensed the car coming up. The gate slid back. Was it her imagination, or did the thing sound creakier, squeakier, than usual? What was all that volcanic grit doing to its mechanism? How long would it keep working? That wasn’t her worry. As long as the thing had opened this time…

Vanessa drove slowly and carefully. A good thing, too. Somebody’d already rear-ended the car that crapped out down the street from her building. She skirted the fender-bender and went on. When she tried the radio, all she got was static. She pulled out her phone. No bars. She swore. What the hell was going on? TV back at the place had worked.

Sure it had. It was cable. But how many zillions of tons of crud were fouling the air right now? How much of that crud was tiny bits of iron? Some small fraction, no doubt. But a small fraction of a zillion was still a jillion: plenty to jam radio and phone signals. Vanessa cussed some more. She hadn’t figured on that.

She hadn’t figured on any of this. Who hado could have, except for a handful of crazy geologists? Only they’d turned out not to be so crazy after all, hadn’t they?

Traffic lights were still working, but you couldn’t see them till you got right on top of them-if then. She drove around more dead cars, and around a couple of more accidents, too. One of them looked bad: an SUV had broadsided a car at an intersection. Maybe the driver hadn’t seen the light till too late.

Here was Mississippi Avenue. She turned left, ever so warily. Buckingham Square Shopping Center was only a couple of blocks east. Not far past it, she could get on the 225, and it would take her down to I-25 or up to I-70: whatever her little heart desired.

Her little heart desired to be back in L.A. The 225 wouldn’t give her that, not directly. But it would get her started.

Kelly Birnbaum was four-hundred-odd miles from the centerpiece of her academic career. She’d passed her doctoral orals not least by explaining in great detail what might happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano ever went off. Looking back on that terrifying morning in the Geology Department conference room, she’d done pretty goddamn well.

Only one trouble left: she couldn’t get any closer, to see for herself just how smart she’d been. Ash had dusted Missoula, but only dusted it. The coating here was thicker than the ash from a bad brushfire would have been in California, but not a whole lot thicker. Missoula lay almost straight upwind from the eruption. Both surface winds and the jet stream blew stuff away from here. And Missoula got dusted anyway.

You could go fifty miles down the Interstate if you had a super-duper air filter on your car. If you had a vehicle with a super-duper air filter and caterpillar treads, you might make a hundred miles from Missoula. If you were real lucky, you could get to Butte.

Farther than that? No way, Jose. Wasn’t gonna happen. The ash was too thick. The wind had already started blowing it into drifts that were thicker yet. I-90 was buried deeper than alas poor Yorick had been before they started playing catch with his skull.

Planes and helicopters were even more fugheddaboutit than cars. If your car’s air filter clogged past survivability, you were stuck, yeah, but at least you were stuck on the ground. If your aircraft’s filter died, so did you. It was a long way down.