Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Eyeing the sunrise, Justin put it a different way: “My grandfather went to sea in freighters for a few years when he was about the age we are now. He always used to say, ‘Red in the night-sailors’ delight. Red in the morning? Sailors take warning.’ ”

“A bunch of nervous sailors out there, then,” Rob predicted.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Justin shivered in the parking lot. “Brr! That’s one nasty wind.”

“Yeah. Well, welcome to Maine,” Rob said. But nervous sailors wouldn’t have surprised him, either. He wished he’d put on something heavier than an old UCSB sweatshirt. The wind seemed to have taken a running start from Baffin Island.

“How soon does it start snowing here?” Justin asked. Sure as hell, other cloud fortresses, these more ominous gray and less pretty pink, were stacking up to the north and west.

“I’d say tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon,” Rob answered. “We’ve got chains for the vans, right?”

“Uh-huh,” Justin said without enthusiasm. They weren’t practiced at putting them on. They weren’t practiced at driving in snow and ice, either. They were California kids. What did they need to know about that kind of stuff?

Trying to cheer up the lead guitarist-or something-Rob said, “Bangor and Orono are north of here, right?”

“Fuck you,” Justin explained. He pointed to the diner across the street. They’d had dinner there the night before. It was okay. “C’mon. Let’s go feed our faces.”

“You don’t want to wait for Charlie and Biff?”

“Nah. Let ’em sleep if they want o. They’ll eat sooner or later. And Bangor’s not that far north from here.” Justin used the word with more irony than Rob had. “Even if we leave later than usual, we’ll make our next date.”

Breakfast was pretty good. You never could tell with local places. They were like the little girl with the little curl. With Denny’s, you always knew what you were getting-which was both the good and the bad news. This proved a step, even a step and a half, up from that. The potatoes that went into the hash browns were fresh, not frozen, and not too greasy. The same with the sausage, which had a hint of something-fennel? — you didn’t taste every day. And the over-medium eggs came to the table hot and exactly over medium.

Biff and Charlie ambled in when Rob and Justin were getting close to done. Biff ordered coffee. “You never do that, dude,” Rob said.

“Unless you got some meth, I hafta get my heart started some kinda way,” the rhythm guitarist answered. Rob shook his head. Crank was not his drug of choice. Neither Charlie nor Justin volunteered any. Biff spread his hands. “See?” he said. When the coffee came, he poured in lots of cream and sugar so it wouldn’t taste like coffee any more. Then he gulped it. The sugar rush would help wire him for the morning, too.

The waitress brought Rob and Justin more toast to give them something to nibble on while their buddies chowed down. Rob smeared strawberry jam on his. It came in the same little foil-topped plastic package you saw everywhere. Oh, well. As he ate, he stared out the tinted window and across the street at the motor lodge they’d just come from.

After a while, he said, “Is it the glass, or is the light funny?”

“It’s the light,” Charlie said. “I noticed it when I was coming over here. Did you, Biff?”

“Huh?” Biff said. Rob didn’t need to be Hercule Poirot to figure out that Biff hadn’t noticed much of anything till he surrounded his coffee.

They paid for breakfast and walked out. A guy about their age coming down the street on a bike stopped and said, “Hey, I was at your show last night. I don’t know about anybody else, but I liked it.”

“Thanks-I think,” Rob said. Not enough people had. The guy gave a vague wave and pedaled off.

“The light is funny.” Justin was looking at the sun. No clouds were close by or in front of it, but he looked at it anyway. Rob could do the same thing. The sun was uncommonly weak, uncommonly white, as if seen through fog. But there was no fog. You could see for miles without channeling the Who. Rob turned and looked at his shadow. He had one, but not the kind he should have had on a sunny day.

They all started across the street. Not much traffic in Bar Harbor, not after the end of the season. “Is this, like, Maine weather or volcano weather?” Charlie wondered.

“Volcano weather.” Rob heard something peculiar in his own voice, something he didn’t think he’d ever found there before: a sad certainty. A doctor might have had that tone after seeing a chest X-ray with a dark spot on the lung.

All of a sudden, particulate matter wasn’t just a pompous phrase to Rob. There wasn’t any fog down here, no. But way the hell up there? That was liable to be-no, that was bound to be-a different story. How much crud had the supervolcano flung into the stratosphere? How much sunlight was it blocking? How bad would that screw up the weather? And for how long?

He shivered. The old Gaucho sweatshirt felt even thinner and rattier than it had when he pulled it on. He wanted something warmer: an ankle-length polar-bear coat, maybe, or a goose-down sleeping bag with sleeves.

Charlie hopped up onto the curb. “Boy, you sounded like a judge passing sentence there,” he said.

“You totally did, man,” Justin agreed. Even Biff nodded. That wasn’t quite how Rob had thought of it, but wasn’t so far removed, either. Out of the blue-the pale blue, the almost icy blue-Justin asked, “You ever hear anything from your sister, the one who moved to Denver?”

“No,” Rob said tightly. “Cell phones are down for God knows how far. I’ve been hoping she could get to a landline or send me an e-mail or… something. But no.”

Justin set a hand on his shoulder for a second. “That’s hard, man.”

“Nothing I can do about it. I keep telling myself there’s more to Vanessa than you’d think. She can get out of there if anybody can.”

Rob wished he hadn’t added the last three words. They helped remind him how enormous the catastrophe was. Denver was hundreds of miles from Yellowstone. But Denver was also not far from the middle of the area the eruption had screwed, blued, and tattooed. The TV said volcanic ash was coming down in Alberta, in Texas, in Iowa, even in California.

He didn’t want to think about that, so he turned to Biff and Charlie and asked, “Are we ready to rock?” He knew he and Justin were; they’d cleaned out their room down to the last dirty sock.

Charlie nodded. “Didn’t leave the drums behind, honest.” That made Biff snort. It would be easier to forget an elephant than Charlie’s kit, even if the elephant would be harder to disassemble.

“Let’s go, then,” Justin said. They piled into the SUVs. Under that pale, unnatural sunlight, they started up the road toward Bangor. Pretty soon, all the sunshine disappeared. Rob turned on his headlights. It started to rain. By the time they got where they were going, the rain had turned to snow. Maine weather or volcano weather? What difference did that make? It was here, and they were stuck in it.

The first thing Colin Ferguson did after sitting up in bed was check his cell for voice mail and texts from Kelly or Vanessa. Nothing this morning from either one of them-nothing at all from Vanessa since the eruption. Had anything in his own bailiwick gone wrong, the folks at the cop shop would have called on the landline and woken him up.

After he took a leak, he went downstairs to fix coffee. He didn’t have to go in today unless something hit the fan. If Kelly weren’t stuck in Missoula… But she was, dammit. So instead of enjoying himself with good company, he’d try to catch up on some around-the-house stuff. His Navy-trained soul was dismayed by how much he just let slide.