Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

It’s not like I don’t work, he thought defensively, but his internalized CPO knew bullshit every time.

He always looked out the window while he waited for his water to boil. This morning, he looked and then he looked: a double take Harpo Marx would have been proud of. Even with on-and-off water rationing, he kept his lawn green. He was proud of it, the same way he was proud of his well-organized filing system.

Only the lawn and the flowers weren’t green any more. They were about the color of cement dust. So were the leaves on the orange tree and the lemon ts prouand the magnolia. So was the cinder-block wall, which had been pink. So was just about everything in the backyard. The supervolcano had come to L.A.

The microwave chimed. He absently took out the water and poured it into the brown plastic cone that held the Melitta filter-the coffeenose, the kids had called it when they were little. A cat (also grayer than it should have been; he recognized the critter, which lived down the block) left almost-green footprints on the grass. It didn’t like what was going on. It would take a few steps, stop and wash, walk on a few more steps, then wash some more. How much grit was it swallowing? What would that do to its insides? Nothing good, Colin was sure.

Rationing rules said he wasn’t supposed to water the lawn on Saturday. He’d spent most of his life enforcing rules. Now he broke one. He ducked under the sink to fiddle with the sprinkler controls. Nozzles popped up and started spraying. The cat levitated, then teleported. The lawn turned green again-except for patches still streaked with ugly brown sludge.

Thoughtfully, Colin put on slippers before he went out to get the Times and the Breeze. He didn’t want to walk barefoot through that crud, not even slightly he didn’t. It scrunched under his crepe soles and came up in little puffs. The front lawn was gray: almost the same color as the sidewalk. The street, which should have been asphalt-dark, was doing a sidewalk impression, too, one slightly spoiled by a few tire tracks.

His car was gray. All the cars he could see were gray-windows, mirrors, the whole deal. All but one: right across the street, Wes Jones was breaking some more rules by hosing his Nissan back to its original blue. Wes was a retired aerospace engineer who spent most of his time gardening. Like everybody else, he’d be playing catch-up for a while.

Colin waved to him. “Some fun, isn’t it?” he called, and grabbed the papers. They were both wrapped in poly bags, as if against rain. Volcanic ash slid off the plastic.

“Fun? Oh, you bet.” Wes pointed east. “Even the sun’s gone nutso.” Anything he disapproved of was nutso. But Wes didn’t disapprove of much; he was an easygoing guy.

“Huh?” Colin hadn’t paid any attention to the sun, past noticing that the daylight looked wan and washed out. Now he did. It sat low in the sky, still red as if closer to its rising than it really was. A hellacious halo surrounded it, with a pair of sundogs-false images of the sun-on the halo. He’d seen a sundog once, while in a destroyer off the coast of Greenland, with a sky full of ice crystals. The sky above San Atanasio had a different kind of junk in it. He delivered his verdict: “Holy crap!”

“Yeah, that’s about what I was thinking,” Wes replied. “Anything from Vanessa?” He’d watched her grow up; he’d been an honorary uncle.

“Nope.” Colin left it right there.

Wes grunted. “Well, I’ll tell Ida she needs to pray harder.” He was at least as skeptical as Colin, but his wife went to a Methodist church every Sunday and did good works during the week. She didn’t try to ram it down anybody’s throat, even her husband’s; she just did what she did. They’d had their fortieth anniversary the year before. Colin remembered no more than a handful of cross words between them.

Now he said, “It can’t hurt.”

“I expect you’re right. And I expect I’m going back in the house.” Wes scuffed at the ash on his driveway. Some of it was wet, but some came up the way it had underolin’s slippers. “Breathing this crap has to be hazardous to your health-to my health, even.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Colin said, which only gave him more reason to worry about his cross-grained daughter. Like Missoula, the L.A. area was getting only a light dusting of volcanic ash. But the shit was practically burying places like Salt Lake City… and Denver. You could foul up your lungs inhaling sawdust at a furniture factory. What the supervolcano spat out was bound to be a hell of a lot nastier than sawdust.

If Vanessa had listened to him-she wouldn’t have been Vanessa. He hadn’t wanted to listen to anybody when he was her age, either. Come to that, he was none too good at listening to other people even now.

But what Wes said made good sense. Things Wes said usually did. And Colin had that coffee waiting for him back on the kitchen counter. It wouldn’t be too cold yet. Wes was already making for his own front door. Colin followed his lead. He paused at the doorway and left the slippers outside. The less ash he tracked in, the better.

His bare feet left gray prints on the dark brown foyer tiles. He’d kicked dust up into the slippers. Well, 409 and some paper towels would take care of that. Coffee first, coffee and the newspapers.

A notice on the front page of the Breeze said We will keep printing as long as we can. Our paper supplier is in Minnesota. The supervolcano eruption has disrupted communication with areas to the east. Even when things come closer to normal, we fear paper will have a lower priority than food and fuel. But, at least temporarily, we may be compelled to go to Web-only publication.

Harder to have a cup of coffee and check your computer or your smart phone. Not impossible, but harder. And what happened if L.A. lost power? So much for Web-only publication, that was what.

The Times didn’t talk about a paper shortage. Maybe it got its newsprint from the Northwest, which was still reachable. Or maybe the editor didn’t believe in borrowing trouble. The headline there said

SENATORS FROM AFFLICTED STATES APPEAL FOR FEDERAL AID.

Afflicted. Colin slowly nodded as he considered the word. It was one you seldom met outside the Bible, but no denying it fit here. If the Children of Israel had ever met anything as overwhelming as the supervolcano eruption, the Old Testament failed to mention it.

He did wonder what Washington was supposed to do for Wyoming and Montana, where the very geography had been pretty drastically revised. How many feet of dust lay on Idaho and Utah and Colorado and Nebraska and Kansas? Not just here and there in those states, but all over everything, or as near as made no difference. How many bulldozers and trucks and years would you need to clear hundreds of thousands of square miles? More than even the USA had in its back pocket: he was sure of that.

Colin also noticed the irony in the Times ’ headline. L.A.’s leading newspaper had leaned left for longer than he’d been alive after an even lengthier spell of leaning hard right. Had the headline writer chosen his phrase with malice aforethought? Colin wouldn’t have been surprised. Those Senators appealed for Federal aid, did they? Before the supervolcano went blam, they would have found Federal aid about as appealing as HIV. It all depended on whose ox was being gored, didn’t it?

Almost all the Senators-and Representatives-from the afflicted states were Republicans. That didn’t stop them from sticking their hands out. If Washington couldn’t help them, nobody could. Tlin, it looked very much as if nobody could.

Which raised other interesting questions. Was anybody at all left alive in Wyoming? Western Montana was hanging on, but barely. Idaho and Utah were in pretty bad shape, too. So was Colorado, though maybe not quite to the same degree. The farming states farther east had also taken a big hit. Almost all those states were red as Rudolph’s nose. If they got depopulated, what would that do to American politics? Nothing good, not as far as Colin was concerned.