Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“And are you proud?”

“I’m so fucking proud, I play bass in Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles so I never have to worry about another circuit board as long as I live.”

“Sounds about right,” Justin agreed. “Now where the hell are we?”

Rob grabbed the trusty road atlas. “We got off I-95 at Newport, right?”

“Right.” Justin’s head bobbed up and down. “Maine roads suck, you know?”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” Rob said. Once you got off the Interstate, you fell back in time, probably back to the days before Beaver Cleaver was even a glint in Ward’s eye. Two-lane winding blacktop roads, too many of which hadn’t been resurfaced for a long, long time… California, it wasn’t.

“And we’re heading north up be-yoo-tiful Route 7,” Justin went on.

“Roger,” Rob said. “With a little luck, Biff and Charlie are, too.”

“Or what would be beautiful Route 7 if I could see through this goddamn snow any farther than I can piss,” Justin said. “And we passed through the grand metropolis of Corinna, otherwise known as a wide spot in the road.”

“We sure did.” Rob started singing “Corina, Corina.” The way he sang showed why he played bass. Then he looked at the map again. “And wet are coming up on lovely, romantic Dexter. Dexter is a bigger dot than Corinna. Not a big dot, mind you, but a bigger one. Might even be big enough for a traffic light or two.”

“Wowww!” The way Justin brought it out, he might have been stoned. He might have been, but he wasn’t, or Rob didn’t think he was. Driving while loaded was more trouble than it was worth. Being a cop’s kid, Rob had impressed that on the band. The amount of dope he smoked when he wasn’t driving also impressed, if in a different way.

But the Wowww! wasn’t undeserved. A Maine town big enough for stoplights was well on its way to cityhood… or, more likely, had been the same size for the past seventy-five years. This part of the country wasn’t into cancerous growth like California.

They drove past a roadside traffic sign. It was a yellow diamond, there and gone again in the snow. You might have seen the like back home. But no traffic sign in California bore the silhouette of a big old deer with honking antlers. “Bullwinkle crossing,” Rob said: it wasn’t the first moose sign they’d spotted.

“There you go.” Justin nodded. “Enough signs, though. I want to see some more real moose.”

“Supposed to be bunches of ’em over by Greenville. They do tours,” Rob said.

“The mooses do?” Now Justin sounded surprised-and with reason. He slowed down some more, and he hadn’t been going real fast to begin with.

“Um, no.” Rob pondered antecedents.

“Well, that’s a relief, anyhow,” Justin said. “I think the snow’s getting worse.”

“I didn’t think it could,” Rob said, not wanting to admit he was right.

“Yeah, well…” Justin took a hand off the wheel for a vague gesture. “Not like we’ll have to worry about global warming for a while. We should’ve torched more dinosaurs while we had the chance.”

At the moment, what they had to worry about was staying on the road and not drifting onto the shoulder-when there was a shoulder. Some of the yellow signs that didn’t warn about moose did let you know when there wasn’t. What happened when you went off the road there? Rob had no trouble finding an answer: you flipped over and burst into flames, that was what.

“Stick to the paving,” he urged.

“Yes, Mommy. I’m working on it, believe me,” Justin answered. Rob shut up.

They finally made it into Dexter. It was indeed a town of some stature: two or three traffic lights, two gas stations (a sure sign it was no dipshit village), a church with a tall white steeple, a graveyard now blanketed in snow, and, along with the Subway that seemed to be far and away the most common fast-food joint in this part of Maine, a mom-and-pop Chinese restaurant.

“I wonder what Chinese food tastes like in the middle of moose country,” Rob remarked.

“I dunno, but an hour after you eat some you’re curious again,” Justin said.

“I’ve had some shit do that to me, but never the goddamn beef chow mein,” Rob said.

Which, of course, made Justin break into “Werewolves of London.” Warren Zevon wasn’t exactly a spiritual father to Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, but he was no further removed than spiritual uncle. And the kind of almost-fame he’d won was at the top end of what they could hop? Rob hadr.

Even if Dexter was a fair-sized place by the standards of Maine away from the Interstate, rolling through it took only a few minutes. Then they were out in the country again, with snow-covered meadows and fields going back from the increasingly snow-covered road to the snow-draped pines. Sometimes, for variety’s sake, the snow-covered pines came right up to the edge of the road. No need for the NO SHOULDER signs on those stretches; it was pretty obvious.

They’d switched to Route 23 halfway through Dexter. It offered a more direct path to Greenville than 7 did. It was also even narrower, which hadn’t shown on the map. Rob started wondering if the switch was smart. He wondered even more when Justin hit the brakes-carefully, to keep from skidding. And he didn’t skid, either. For a guy from California, he was doing okay with the funky white stuff. “What’s up?” Rob asked.

“Accident ahead,” Justin said. “Flashing lights and stuff.”

And damned if there weren’t. Rob hadn’t noticed them through God’s blowing dandruff. Good thing Justin was keeping an eye peeled. That’s why we pay him the big bucks, Rob thought vaguely.

An accident it was, with two cars and an SUV. One of the cars lay on its side next to the road, unpleasantly reminding Rob of his fretting before they got to Dexter. There was a big dent in the sheet metal above the rear wheel on its other side. The second car and the SUV were both upright, but pretty well crunched. A couple of the people milling around were bleeding. A cop was tending to one of them. Red and yellow and blue lights flashed on top of his cruiser.

Glass crunched under Justin’s tires as he steered around the wreck. Only a couple of cars skirted it ahead of him. On any road in L.A., it would have tied things up for an hour. On the 405 at four in the afternoon, it would have screwed traffic for the rest of the night. Well, L.A. County all by itself had more people than forty-two states-or was it forty-three? Rob couldn’t remember. Maine was definitely one of them.

“Charlie and Biff are still with us,” Justin said as he picked up a little more speed. “I could get used to a heated side-view mirror. I wouldn’t be able to see squat without it.”

“Okay, great. But how often would you need it in California?” Rob asked.

“Depends on how cold it gets, right? If California turns into, like, Washington state, it’ll freeze sometimes.”

“Huh,” Rob said thoughtfully. That hadn’t occurred to him, and it should have. Then something else did: “If Los Angeles is the new Seattle-”

“Like fifty is the new thirty?” Justin interrupted helpfully.

“My ass,” Rob said. They both laughed-easy enough, when neither of them had seen the old thirty yet. He went on, “Like I was saying, if L.A.’s the new Seattle, what does that make Maine? The new North Pole?”

“Nah. Won’t be that bad,” Justin said. “More like the new Labrador.”

“Happy day!” Rob said in distinctly unhappy tones. “Ten months of winter and two months of bad skiing.”

“You think you’re kidding, don’t you?”

“I wish!” Rob rolled his eyes. “The next interesting question is, how the hell do we ever get out of here? If the snowdrifts are as high as an elephant’s eye and they stay that way, nobody goes in or out, near enough.”