Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“You’ve got something, I’m afraid,” Justin said. “And when they start running out of food and heating oil…” His voice trailed off. If you wanted to, you could imagine this whole state-hell, you could imagine everything north of Boston-fading away like that.

“Remind me again why we took that gig in Greenville,” Rob said.

“It’s called money,” Justin explained. “Bringing some in every once in a while instead of spending it all the goddamn time is supposed to be good. I think I remember that, anyway.”

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Rob sighed. “I still wish like hell we’d been going down to Key West or something when the supervolcano blew. New England… It’s over with here.”

“Uh-huh. And you knew ahead of time that Yellowstone was going to go kablooie like Hamster Hughie.” Justin was as big a Calvin and Hobbes fan as Rob was. That sensibility-if you wanted to call it a sensibility-also rubbed off on the band.

The bitch of it was, Rob had known, or known as much as anybody not a geologist could. It wasn’t as if Dad hadn’t gone on about the supervolcano whenever they talked. Rob had tuned out most of it. What were you going to do when your father went on and on about stuff he got from his new girlfriend, especially when she wasn’t a whole lot older than you were?

“Too late to worry about it now,” he said with another sigh.

“You got that right.” Justin clicked the wipers from regular to high. It did less good than he must have hoped it would. He slowed down some more. The snow on the road was getting thicker. “I wonder if we’re going to make it to Greenville.”

“This thing is the size of an armored personnel carrier. It’s got four-wheel drive and snow tires,” Rob said. “You gonna let Mother Nature dick around with us?”

“I may not have a choice. You fight with Mother Nature, you’re fighting one big mother,” Justin answered. Rob looked out the window. Not much to see but blowing white and, through it, already-fallen white. He wondered if he ought to be looking for gigantic rabid St. Bernards, or maybe vampires, for real. No sunshine to slow ’em down, and none likely any time soon.

Dexter was a big enough deal that the next village up 23, instead of enjoying its own name, went by North Dexter. Up the road a ways from it was an Italian-Mexican restaurant. Rob saw the neon sign in spite of the snow; the restaurant itself, set back from the road, was barely visible.

“Mexican food in Maine,” Justin mused. “You think the Chinese’d be weird, what about that?”

“You’re not stopping, are you?” Rob said with mock-perhaps not so mock-anxiety.

“Nope. Greenville or bust,” Justin said. They chugged on.

A streak of red shot across the road. It was there and then gone. Justin had time to take his foot off the gas, but not enough to bring it down on the brake. “The fuck was that?” Rob asked, wondering if he’d really seen it.

“Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a moose.”

“Brilliant deduction! A lesser mind would be incapable of it.”

“Yeah, I know,” Justin said smugly. “My best guess is, it was a fox-and not the kind that walks on two legs.”

“A fox! Cool!” There weren’t so many of them in California. California had coyotes instead. Coyotes thought four-legged foxes were tasty.

The map insisted there was a village called Sangerville just before Route 23 ran into Route 6. Rob saw another snow-covered graveyard off to the right, which made him look out for vampires again. Other than that, damn all suggested human beings had ever lived anywhere near here. He flipped to the back of the road atlas. It insisted that Sangerville had 475 people. If the place did, most of them, in the classic phrase, came disguised as empty seats.

When 23 dead-ended at 6, Justin said, “I go left, right?”

“Right-left,” Rob agreed. “If you go right, you head away from Greenville and toward Dover-Foxcroft.”

“Dover-Foxcroft?” Justin echoed. “Bizarre, man. I mean, I know a lot of people with hyphenated names. These days, who doesn’t? But a town?”

“I just work here,” Rob said. “That’s what the map says. However they got married, they’re a bigger place than Dexter, or even Newport. They’re in bigger type, and the town sign is a white circle with a little black dot in it, not just a black dot.”

“Place’ll be Boston before we know it.” Justin dutifully swung the SUV to the left.

“Next town ahead is Guilford. It’s a mile or two from here,” Rob said, still eyeing the Rand McNally. “The road forks there. We stay on 6, heading northwest. Next place after Guilford is Abbott Village, and then North Abbott.”

“No North Guilford?” Justin asked.

“As a matter of fact, there is a North Guilford. But it’s not on 6. It’s on some half-assed side road.”

“This road we’re on is half-assed,” Justin said accurately.

“Well, then, the other one’s quarter-assed.” Rob corrected himself.

As things turned out, they were counting chickens they never got to see. They didn’t even make it quite as far as Guilford. It wasn’t that the blizzard got worse, though it did. The accident down below North Dexter hadn’t closed down the whole damn road. This one did. A Hummer had slammed into an eighteen-wheeler head-on.

Rob didn’t know how fast the guy in the Hummer had been going. Fast seemed a pretty good guess. A Hummer was half again as big and twice as heavy as any other SUV in captivity. A Hummer was a fucking bad joke, was what a Hummer was. No wonder the market for them tanked- le mot juste — when gas prices took off at the end of the Aughts.

This particular Hummer was scrap metal, with the whole front end stove in. The windshield glass was starred and bulged outward on the driver’s side. What cop’s kid couldn’t read that sign? The jerk behind the wheel-hey, he was speeding in a Hummer, so of course he was a jerk-hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. The only question now was whether he only needed a dentist and a plastic surgeon or a neurosurgeon. That assumed he had any brains left at all, which also wasn’t obvious.

And he’d done a number on the eighteen-wheeler, too. He’d rammed it hard enough to flip it over onto its side and jackknife it. That would have shafted the Santa Ana Freeway. On a narrow two-lane road in Maine… The broken-nosed cab lay on the shoulder to one side, diesel fuel dribbling out into the snow from the punctured fuel tank like blood from a cut jugular. The trailer stretched all the way across the asphalt to the other shoulder.

“Fuck me up the asshole,” Justin said, and that about covered that. He eased to a stop.

Several other cars had already had to stop in front of them. Some people had got out to do what they could for the injured, or else just to get a better look at the mess. Charlie and Biff stopped two cars behind Justin and Rob. More cars pulled up behind them. Nobody would be going anywhere around here any time soon.

Justin found a question: “Where are the cops?”

“Maybe they’re on the Guilford side, and we can’t see ’em,” Rob answered. “Or maybe they’re on their way from Dover-Foxcroft.” He would have bet on the latter. Dover-Foxcroft was a good bit bigger than Guilford. “In the meantime, let’s see if we can do anything useful.”

He opened the door. Cold bit at him. L.L. Bean knew their business, though. As soon as he zipped up his anorak, he stopped freezing. He’d never owned long johns before this trip to Maine. He was damn glad now that he’d bought some. His nose stayed cold, but what the hell? He figured that made him a nice, healthy mutt.

An older guy who’d already got out nodded at him. “I ain’t seen nothin’ like this since I was in Eye-raq,” he said, and pointed to a body lying behind the Hummer. Someone had draped a coat over its head. “You’re lucky he’s covered up. He ain’t pretty, not even a little bit.”