Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

She was still living at Daniel’s apartment along with Ruth and Larry. Daniel had got a cot so he wouldn’t spend all his nights on the floor in a sleeping bag. He’d offered the cot to Larry, but the older man actually liked the couch. Kelly and Ruth shared the bed. The one-bedroom place was crowded. The geologists got on one another’s nerves. Nobody complained too much, though. They all knew things could have been worse.

Refugees packed Missoula. Everyone who’d managed to escape from places farther east seemed to have stopped right here. No apartments or hotel rooms were to be had for love or money. People who’d never met till they got here found themselves living together as intimately as the geologists were. Plenty of people were sleeping in their cars or in tents-and living like that in Missoula as fall replaced summer and warned of winter ahead was not for the fainthearted.

Kelly would have been glad to get out. Her own small Berkeley apartment took on the aura of the earthly paradise in her memory. But no flights came into or went out of Missoula International. They were near the edge of the no-fly zone, but they were in it-the air was too foul. She couldn’t afford a car, even a on-trip beater. Prices had skyrocketed because so many people wanted to get away. Not even trains were coming into town. She was stuck.

She did what she could with her cell phone and with Daniel’s computer. He’d created new user accounts for her and Ruth and Larry. They took turns on the machine and tried not to hog it. But walking away from the apartment and talking on the phone where no one else could hear her was the biggest pleasure she got most days.

If she’d had her druthers, she would have talked Colin’s ear off. But he was still working, and had his own worries. If you had to be somewhere when the supervolcano erupted, L.A. wasn’t the worst place. Something within shouting distance of normal life still went on there

… not that a cop’s so-called normal life was anything to write home about.

Even so, it had to beat Missoula. “There’s nothing fresh in the stores,” Kelly complained. “No fruit, no salad fixings, no vegetables-well, a few potatoes.”

Across the miles and the wireless link, Colin chuckled. “You’re right next door to Idaho, remember. Spud paradise, right?”

“I guess,” Kelly said. “Next to no fresh meat, either, and no fish at all. Most of what we’re getting is canned goods, stuff that keeps.”

“It makes sense, you know,” Colin said.

“That doesn’t mean I’ve got to like it,” she answered.

“Nope. Prices are way up here. There’s talk about doing something to stop profiteers,” Colin said. “What’s it like there?”

“About the same-through the roof,” Kelly told him. “People bitch like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Who says I wouldn’t?”

“Okay, maybe you would. They wouldn’t complain so much if they could get what they wanted. There isn’t even much fresh bread here. Noodles and rice and flour take up less space and last longer, so that’s what they ship in.”

“What do you do with flour if you don’t have much in the way of anything to bake it with?” Colin asked.

People in Missoula were starting to ask the same question, only louder. Kelly had an answer, though not one she’d offered the locals: “Matzos, what else?”

“Huh.” In multicultural Los Angeles, Colin would know about matzos. He clinched it by saying, “Will that get you converts or a bunch of raving anti-Semites?”

He took Kelly by surprise-so much so that she laughed out loud. She laughed loud enough, in fact, to make an unshaven guy in a sweatshirt and ratty jeans give her a funny look. Despite his shabby appearance, he might have been anything from a wino to a bank president. Missoula was a funky place these days. Kelly didn’t care what he was, as long as he didn’t bother her. “I love you, Colin!” she said.

“Well, I love you, too, babe,” he answered. They didn’t throw the word around like a Frisbee. He was chary about using it at all. Considering how he’d been burned, Kelly had never blamed him for that. She wished she heard it more, though; it warmed her every time she did. Stuck in Missoula, Montana, in autumn, she needed all the warming she could get.

And this was only the beginning. The very beginning of the beginning, in fact.

Colin added, “I sure wish you were here and not there.”

“Jesu”

“Sooner, I hope. Let me see what I can do from this end,” Colin said. “I’ve been working on a couple of things, but they haven’t panned out yet. I’ll keep trying. Didn’t want to say anything about it, ’cause I can’t promise. All I can do is try, same as you.”

“O-kay,” Kelly said. How many strings could a Socal police lieutenant pull in Montana, or maybe Idaho? What kind of connections did Colin have, to make him think he could pull any at all? Had he, say, spent ten years working alongside somebody who was now a county sheriff up here, or chief of police in some little town near the state line?

Kelly realized she had no idea. It didn’t seem impossible, or even unlikely, but she couldn’t have proved it one way or the other. There was a lot she didn’t know about this man whose company she longed for.

She could have asked him, but what good would it have done? Either he’d finagle something, or he wouldn’t. Or maybe the trains or buses would start up again, or she’d be able to find a ride heading west, or

… something.

She said her good-byes and went back to Daniel’s apartment. It had a TV, and it had books she was interested in reading. Stacked up against the rest of Missoula, that made it seem like heaven on earth, even if this particular version of heaven was on the crowded side.

Daniel was out when she got there: probably at the university. They were trying to get the fall semester going, though the odds seemed poor. She envied Daniel his place here. He fit in. It made a difference.

Larry and Ruth were there, though, and greeted her with long faces. “What now?” Kelly asked, wondering if she really wanted to know.

“The gas is out,” Ruth answered. “I was going to heat up some corned-beef hash”-more stuff in cans-“but the stove doesn’t work. Nothing’s coming through the burners-you’d smell it if it was.”

Kelly found the next reasonable question: “Have you called the gas company yet?”

“No, the gas is really out. As in, there is no gas in Missoula any more,” Larry said. “The big pipeline that brings it into town comes from the east, through Montana. I don’t know how much ash and rock the supervolcano put down on top of it, but enough to finally squash it or break it, looks like.”

“That’s… not so good,” Kelly said. The other geologists nodded. No gas for stoves, no gas for heating water, no gas for heating houses? That was about as not so good as it got. Missoula was a place where you needed to be able to heat houses. Did you ever! And the weather wouldn’t get better on account of the Yellowstone eruption. Oh, no.

“I was thinking, what happens if the electricity goes next?” Ruth said.

There was a cheery notion. “Welcome back to the nineteenth century, that’s what,” Kelly said. Only the twenty-first-century world wasn’t ready to fall back more than a hundred years. Not even close. Unfortunately, the supervolcano didn’t care whether the twenty-first-century world was ready. Ready or not, here it came.

It was a quiet Saturday afternoon in Ellwood. There were times when Marshall Ferguson didn’t appreciate his dad for getting him anpartment here rather than in Isla Vista, which was right next to the UC Santa Barbara campus. But his old man the cop had learned of Isla Vista’s many bars and of couch-burning and other quaint native rituals, so Marshall was out in the boonies instead.