Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“Please remain seated with your seat belts securely fastened,” a flight attendant droned. “You may now use your cell phones and other approved electronic devices.”

Passengers were already doing it. Did the airlines really believe people didn’t know the ropes? Bryce didn’t think it was about controlling the occasional moron. More on the order of dotting i’s and crossing t’s. This way, if anything did go wrong, some corporate lawyer could truthfully testify it hadn’t gone wrong because the airline failed to make the proper offerings to the gods-uh, failed to deliver the appropriate warnings.

Since they were early, he made his own call to be sure Susan had got there. “Hi, sweetie!” she said. “Yeah, I’m down in baggage claim. Can’t wait to see you!”

“Boy, does that work both ways,” he answered. “We’re coming to the gate now, so it’ll only be a few more minutes.”

It took longer than that. His seat was well back of the wing. Everybody in front of him seemed to need to wrestle a carry-on the size of a well-fed Nebraska porker out of the overstrained overhead luggage bins. Airlines hadn’t intended that to happen when they started charging for checked baggage, but it did.

At last, he escaped the plane. A stewardess’ insincere “Thank you” seemed a fitting sendoff for what got more unpleasant every time he did it. But the whole crew had worked wonders when his last flight had to go into Branch Oak Lake. Remembering how nasty air travel was these days, he also needed to remember that.

He trudged past shops and restaurants and other gates. They gave you every chance to part with your money, all right. Bryce bought a 3 Musketeers and inhaled chocolate and nougat. His steps got bouncier as soon as he did. Blood sugar was a good thing, yes indeed. Now he’d last till he could get outside of some real food.

Down the escalator. Past one baggage carousel after another, some still, others spinning, all of them made from articulated bits of armor plate as elaborate as Henry VIII’s steel suit. There was his flight number, up in glowing red above a carousel that had just started to move. There was Susan. She saw him at the same time as he spotted her. Jesus, she looked good! He hurried toward her.

Then he saw his mother standing behind Susan. Barbara Miller was easy not to notice. She was short and plain, with mouse-brown hair going gray these past few years. She had on her usual outfit: trainers (she still called them tennis shoes), track-pants, and a polyester top. She’d taken off a cotton sweater and draped it over her arm.

Bryce hugged her, too. “Hi, Mom,” he said. Then he said it again, when he saw her eyes on his mouth. Her hearing was starting to go, though she was too vain to admit it. He loved her without taking her seriously. He’d outgrown her by the time he turned sixteen. What could you do?

“Susan sent me an e-mail and asked if I wanted to come along to pick you up, so I said sure,” she told him.

“That’s great, Mom.” He lied without worrying about it. “Good to see you.”

“Good to see you,” she said after he repeated himself again. “I was so worried! Such a terrible thing!” She was inventing emotions after the fact. She couldn’t have known he was airborne while the supervolcano erupted till after it happened. Well, people did such things all the time. Then she added, “Your father would have been proud of you for being so brave.”

His father had died when he was twelve. Maybe Colin Ferguson filled some of the hole that left in his life. Maybe that was why Bryce had stayed close to him after Vanessa said bye-bye. He could worry about such things later, though, if he bothered. For now… “Brave? There wasn’t any time to be brave. We got out as fast as we could and we floated in the lake till the boats got us.”

“You’re too modest. You’re always too modest. Listen, I made a chicken last night. The prices these days! It’s robbery, I tell you! But I’ve got almost a whole bird left over. If you and Susan want to stop in when you drop me off, you could have something to eat. There’s potatoes, too, and a Black Forest cake from Ralphs.”

Bryce raised an eyebrow at Susan. She threw the ball right back to him: “Whatever you want is fine with me.”

Thanks a bunch, he thought. Should he make like a dutiful son? Or go back to his place, screw himself silly, and then sleep for about a week? He knew what he wanted to do. He also knew he’d hurt his mother’s feelings if he did it. Mom wouldn’t say anything, but she’d find plenty of other ways to rub his nose in what was going on. She always did.

With a sigh he couldn’t quite swallow, he said, “Chicken sounds good. I haven’t eaten much home cooking lately.” That had the added virtue of being true. He appealed to Susan one more time: “If it’s okay with you.”

“It’s fine. I already told you,” she said quickly. She wasn’t going to play the villain, whisking Bryce away from Barbara so she could work her carnal wiles on him. Damn! I sure wish she would, he thought as they started off toward the parking structure.

Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles still hadn’t seen Greenville and the haunting, romantic shores of Moosehead Lake. By now, Rob was as near certain as made no difference that the band never would get there. He wasn’t nearly so sure about whether they would ever get out of Guilford.

It wasn’t where he’d expected to end up, which meant as close to nothing as didn’t matter. By the time the locals finally cleared the smashed Hummer and the flipped and jackknifed eighteen-wheeler from Route 6, he and Justin and Biff and Charlie-and a lot of other people trapped by the wreck-were glad to get into Guilford. That was definitely preferable to freezing to death in the snow, the other main choice.

The longer he stayed, the odder and more interesting Guilford seemed. For a town of just over 1,500 people, it had a lot going on. The Piscataquis River ran through it. Once upon a time, every Maine town with a stream had had water-powered mills and factories. Guilford still did. No one seemed to have bothered to tell the locals water mills were hopelessly outdated. This nineteenth-century anachronism remained a going concern a lifetime after most of the others had closed down.

And there was the Trebor Mansion Inn, where the band currently resided. You took a diagonal right-not a straight right, or you’d end up somewhere else-by the Shell station near the eastern end of town, went past the slough and the high school on the other side of the street, climbed a hill, hung a left into a long driveway whose outlet you barely noticed from the street, and there you were. The Trebor, by God, Mansion Inn.

Charlie stared at it in something approaching awe when he and his bandmates got out of their SUVs. “Wow!” he said-not the usual stoner’s slurred Wow! but one that showed he really meant it. He proceeded to explain why: “If this place doesn’t have an ‘H. P. Lovecraft slept here’ plaque, somedy dropped the ball somewhere. Of course, old H.P. spent most of his time down in Providence, but he should’ve made a side trip for this.”

“No, dude.” Biff shook his head. “H. P. Lovecraft started in Chicago, but they were working out of San Francisco when they made their records.”

Confusion and argument followed. Charlie had never heard of H. P. Lovecraft the band. Biff didn’t know about the writer from whom the band took its name. Rob vaguely knew about both. Justin, by all appearance, knew neither. “How come you know about this band?” he demanded of Biff. “They’re way older than you are, and they never got big.” That was an understatement, and a healthy one, too.

“My dad got me into them, believe it or else,” Biff answered, suitably shamefaced at the admission. “He told me he lost his cherry with ‘White Ship’ on the stereo.”