Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Still and all, the Red Cross man had a point. A full belly was better than a hungry one.

Vanessa chucked her trash into one of the garbage bags the Red Cross people left behind. Then she went outside and down the hall to the john-which, of course, meant she gave up the chunk of floor to which she’d laid claim. The TP was just this side of wax paper: even worse than the cheap, scratchy stuff offices used. And the roll was almost empty. What would they do when they ran out? She didn’t know, but she had the bad feeling she’d find out.

Mr. Class Clown came out of the boys’ room at the same time as she came out of the girls’. “Boy, that was fun,” he said, and held his nose.

“Yeah.” Vanessa nodded. With one toilet backed up, the girls’ room had been pretty rank, too.

“I wanna get outa here,” he said. His name was Luke. She’d found that out.

“Who doesn’t?” she said. “But how do you aim to do it?”

“I know how to hotwire a car,” he answered. “If it’ll take me out of the fuckin’ dust before it goes belly-up, I’m golden.”

Cop’s kid or not, Vanessa considered that with less disgust and more interest than she would have imagined before the supervolcano went boom. How many thefts and robberies could you blame on the eruption? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? That would have been her guess.

Luke went on, “Anybody thinks I’m gonna sit here scarfing down Meals Revolting to Eritreans, he damn well better think again.”

Vanessa had heard Meals Rejected by Ethiopians, but not his take on the name. That might have been why she said, “Want a passenger? I’ve got some cash. I can pay for gas and stuff.”

He looked her up and down. As he did, she realized she’d made a mistake. His wet gaze made her feel as if she had slugs crawling over her. “There’s other ways to pay,” he said, running his tongue over his lips as if he were running it into her ear. “Cheaper’n cash, and more fun, too.”

“No, thanks. Forget I asked,” she said, and hurried back to room K-1. He wouldn’t try anything with people around.

“Hey!” He hurried after her.

She turned around. The. 38 was in her hand, aimed a few inches north of his belly button. “I said no. I meant no. What part of that didn’t you follow?”

“Okay. Okay!” He drew back a couple of steps. He was smart enough to see he’d get ventilated if he came forward instead, then. That was good-for him. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. You ain’t such hot sit, trust me.”

He wasn’t so very smart after all. He was trying to wound her, but he thought she’d give a rat’s ass about anything that came out of his mouth. “Like you are. As if!” she said. “Just stay away from me, and we’ll both pretend this never happened. Otherwise, I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“You talked me into it.” Luke eased around her, hands plainly visible, making no sudden moves. Vanessa got the idea he might have had a gun pointed at him before.

He went into the classroom first. She put the pistol back in her purse before she opened the door. He was already launched into a stupid joke by then. He didn’t even look at her. That suited her fine. Not much in the way of brains, but at least some street smarts.

Night absent electricity was darkness absolute, darkness claustrophobic and scary. Vanessa would have loved it had someone lit a candle, but she, like everybody else in K-1, was left to curse that darkness. She hadn’t tried sleeping in a crowd like this since summer camp when she was a kid. People muttering, people twisting and crunching as they tried to find half-comfortable positions on the hard floor, people snoring, people farting… People.

In spite of everything, she did fall asleep. Not too much later, someone tapped or kicked her in the ankle. She woke with a wildly pounding heart. For a few bad seconds there in the blackness, she had no idea where she was or what she was doing there. Memory came back piecemeal. Garden City… Red Cross shelter… Poor Pickles!.. This stupid fucking classroom… Oh.

She tried to go to sleep again. It took longer this time. At least no one in here was having screaming hysterics. That was something. A whole room full of people could forget about shut-eye if anybody did.

Asleep. Awake. Asleep. Awake. Asleep. Awake. It was still as black as the middle of an SS man’s heart, but she knew damn well she wouldn’t go back to sleep again. So she said to hell with it and waited till wan gray light started leaking through the windows. Then she discovered she wasn’t the only one who’d given up and was sitting instead of lying.

The Red Cross people brought more MREs and water bottles. Mushrooms and beef tasted like mud with lumps, some squishy, others chewy. No way to boil water for the instant-coffee packet. She tore it open, poured the stuff onto her tongue, and washed it down with water. It was as bad as she’d thought it would be. Any caffeine, though, was better than none.

When she came back from the john, she pulled out a copy of The Mill on the Floss and started reading it. It was the only entertainment around. Unlike the vile instant coffee, it wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be.

Luke disappeared two days later. Maybe he did know how to boost a car. Stuck in a room full of increasingly smelly strangers, Vanessa wondered if she should have gone with him. Wasn’t escaping-this-worth some less than heartfelt fucking and sucking? She hadn’t thought so then. As time dragged on in her crowded cage, she got less and less sure she’d been right.

Every time Colin picked up the Times from his driveway, it got thinner and lighter. It might almost have been an African famine victim, slowly wasting away. It had started shrinking long before the Yellowstone supervolcano, of course; the Internet had been sucking the life out of newspapers for years. But less and less per was making its way to the presses these days. The Times did wry stories about its own struggles for survival. And the Breeze, which remained Web-only, no doubt envied its bigger rival.

That wasn’t the only struggle going on. When he drove to the cop shop in the morning, gas stations reminded customers ODD or EVEN: the governor had reimposed the every-other-day rationing scheme not seen since the Arab oil embargoes. Mother Nature could embargo Los Angeles, too. More and more stations flew red flags to show they had no gas at all. Thanks to Gabe’s swoop right after the eruption, San Atanasio’s police department still had a tolerable supply. How long that would last, and what the police would do when it ran low… Colin preferred not to dwell on yet.

A Burger King had a big sign in the window-SORRY, NO FRIES. TRY OUR ONION RINGS! When not enough spuds were making it into town to support the fast-food business, L.A. was in deep kimchi. Colin hadn’t heard of a kimchi shortage, and San Atanasio abounded in Korean restaurants. Maybe they brought their Napa cabbage down from the nearby Central Valley.

It got cold-highs refused to climb into the sixties. A rainstorm came down from the Gulf of Alaska, and then another one, and then another one still. Anything could happen in the fall; everybody who’d lived here for a while knew that. People kept hoping things would warm up. Colin eyed the pale sun and the washed-out sky and the unbelievable sunsets. He hoped things would warm up, too, but he didn’t expect it. That was what he got for falling in love with a geologist.

He doggedly kept on with his own job. If snow fell below 2,500 feet and didn’t want to melt right away, if the mountains ringing the Los Angeles basin were white, white, white, he couldn’t do anything about that. His own little corner of the world? There, he stood a chance.