Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“I believe it.” Like anyone from L.A., Rob had seen road carnage now and then. He’d also seen some of the grisly photos in his father’s books. When he was a kid, he’d used them to gross Vanessa out. He wasn’t supposed to look at those books himself, much less give his little sister nightmares with them. He’d got a spanking when Vanessa ratted on him; Dad wasn’t the kind to figure corporal punishment warped you for life. His old man had licked him plenty, and he’d turned out all right, so… Thinking about that was more pleasant than remembering what lay under the coat. Rob made himself ask, “Anybody else in the SUV?”

“Ayuh,” the older man answered, which meant he came from these parts (and also meant yes). “There was a gal. She had her belt on, so she didn’t go into the windshield. But her leg got tore up pretty good, and she maybe busted some ribs. They done took her back to the clinic in Guilford.”

“How about the trucker?” Rob found the next logical question.

“He ain’t bad. Cuts, bruises, somethin’ sprained-maybe busted-in one foot. He was up high, like. Might not’ve got hurt at all, hardly, if the goddamn Hummer didn’t flip his rig.”

“You’ve got to be nuts to drive like that in this kind of weather,” Rob said.

“Ayuh,” the older man repeated. “Well, some folks are, and that’s the long and short of it. They figure their shit don’t stink, and nothin’ can go wrong with ’em no matter what kind of ass-holery they pull. I’m here to tell you, things don’t work that way.” He jerked a thumb at the Hummer’s late driver. “He ain’t gonna tell you nothin’, not no more.”

“How long will it take to clear this mess off the road?” Rob wondered.

“Beats me.” The local didn’t sound worried about it. Of course, he didn’t have a gig in Greenville tonight. Almost cheerily, he went on, “Christ only knows where from they’ll have to bring in a tow truck big enough to shift these fuckers. Guilford ain’t got one-I know that for a fact. I don’t believe Dover-Foxcroft does, either. Greenville, mebbe, or Newport where the Interstate goes through. All this snow, take forever to get here, too. Might as well relax and set a spell, know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” Rob was damned if he’d make a noise like ayuh. He unhappily mooched back to the waiting Justin. Seeing him coming, Biff and Charlie got out of the trailing SUV to hear the news. Rob made it short and sweet: “We’re fucked. They’ve got no idea when they’re gonna be able to clear the road.”

“That, like, sucks.” Biff wasn’t long on words, but he got the point.

“We can’t even turn around,” Charlie said. There were cars behind them and westbound cars in the eastbound lane. Some jackasses always figured they could dodge trouble if they broke the rules. Once in a while, they did. More often, as now, they screwed things up for themselves and everybody else.

“I think I’d better call Greenville and let ’em know we ain’t gonna make it.” Rob reached into his pocket for his cell phone.

The promoter didn’t sound brokenhearted. “We’ll cancel, all right,” he said. “We didn’t get as much advance sale as we wanted, and people sure won’t be coming into town in weather like this.” Which was all true, but left Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles stranded in the middle of Maine with not a gig in sight.

When flights to Los Angeles finally resumed, Marcus Wilson gave Bryce a ride from Lincoln to Omaha. “Thanks for everything,” Bryce said when they pulled up in front of the terminal. “I don’t know what I would have done without everybody from the department here.”

“Hey, man, after what you went through, I don’t know if I’d ever have the nerve to get on another plane again as long as I live,” the other grad student answered.

“If I’m gonna get home, I’ve gotta fly,” Bryce said. That wasn’t exactly true. I-10 was open, and some ordinary travel was allowed on it-but not much. It was the lifeline between Socal and points east, and most of the traffic was trucks. Passenger rail service had been cut off altogether. It was all freight all the time as far as the railroads were concerned.

He got out and strapped on his backpack. All his meager stuff fit in it. No need to pay the thieving airlines for the great privilege of checking a bag. Since he had a boarding pass, he headed straight for security. Getting through was a breeze-all the more so when you were used to dealing with LAX and O’Hare. Close to 400,000 people lived in Omaha, which made it a city of decent size, but you’d never mistake it for Chicago.

His gate had a big TV screen hanging down from the ceiling. Like most airport TVs, it was tuned to CNN Headline News. Bryce usually turned his back on the goddamn things-was there no place you could escape them? But the headline below the pretty girl who read the teleprompter made his eyes snap back, even if she

didn’t: NUCLEAR STRIKES ON TEL AVIV, TEHRAN.

“Oh, fuck,” he said, and then looked around to see if anybody’d heard him. No one was giving him an offended look, anyhow. He would have bet he wasn’t the only one here who’d come out with something like that. When you saw a headline with NUCLEAR STRIKES in it, what else could you say?

The screen cut away from the pretty announcer to show slagged ruins. “Loss of life in the Israeli coastal city is believed to be extremely heavy,” said acorrespondent with an English accent. “The Prime Minister has vowed an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

Bryce expected footage of devastated Tehran to follow hard on the heels of that biblical threat. Instead, the attractive newsreader came back on. “This just in,” she said breathlessly. “A flash of quote sunlike light unquote has appeared over the Iranian holy city of Qom, and communications with Qom seem to have been lost. It is not known whether the Grand Ayatollah-the real powerholder in Iran-was in Qom when it was struck.”

The woman who’d stopped next to Bryce to watch the news crossed herself. That was more elegant and restrained than cussing. Whether the sentiment it expressed was so very different might be another question.

“With us now is retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Cullenbine, our military analyst,” the pretty newswoman said. “Colonel Cullenbine, what is America’s likely response to this double tragedy in the Middle East?”

Randolph Cullenbine wasn’t pretty. He looked like, well, a retired Marine officer: short-haired, blunt-featured, wide-shouldered, tough. He talked like a TV guy, though: “It seems probable that Iran was trying to take advantage of the USA’s perceived weakness. We’ve had the middle of the country badly degraded, and the launch sites of many of our land-based ICBMs are currently unusable due to ash and lava laid down by the supervolcano.”

“Huh!” Bryce said, and he wasn’t the only one in the boarding area to make some kind of surprised noise. He hadn’t worried about where Uncle Sam parked his missiles. Uncle Sam hadn’t, either. Maybe he should have.

“But we still have our missile-carrying submarines and our manned bombers, right?” the newswoman asked.

“Oh, absolutely.” Cullenbine nodded. “We aren’t defenseless, no matter what the ayatollahs may believe. And neither are the Israelis. These were their strikes, not ours. I have multiple sources confirming that.”

“What’s… likely to come next?” The newswoman asked the question as if she feared the answer-and well she might.

“I don’t know, Kathleen. Right now, the only people who do know are whoever’s in charge in Iran and the Israeli Prime Minister.” The military analyst sounded thoroughly grim, which made more sense than most of what you saw on TV these days. “It depends on how many missiles the Iranians have left, and on whether they feel like using them. And it depends on how massive a retaliation the Israelis intend to take. They have enough bombs to destroy most if not all of Iran’s major cities. That would put the death toll in the millions, if not the tens of millions.”