Harry Turtledove: Supervolcano :Eruption

Colin Ferguson woke up with a hangover, alone in an unfamiliar double bed. Not the best way to start the morning. “Fuck,” he muttered, and sat up. Moving made his headache worse. Even the quiet four-letter word seemed too damn loud, always a bad sign. The inside of his mouth tasted as if something had died in there a week ago.

Thick maroon curtains kept out most of the daylight. Most, but not enough. He felt like an owl squinting at the sun. Yeah, he’d done a number on himself, all right. Bigtime.

“Fuck,” he said again, not quite so softly this time. Here he was, in a rented room in… For a second or two, he no-shit couldn’t remember where the hell he was. The hangover just hurt. Not remembering honest to God scared him.

If it hadn’t come back to him, he could have got the answer from the telephone book. The nightstand by the bed was a two-shelf unit attached to the wall. No drawer-using one would have cost an extra seventy-one cents a room, or whatever. Multiply that by a raft of rooms and you knew why Motel 6 never lost money. The top shelf held a phone and his watch, which was that close to falling on the uncarpeted floor. On the bottom shelf lay the phone book and a Gideon Bible bound in bilious blue.

Motel 6. Jackson, Wyoming. The day after Memorial Day. He did remember. “Fuck,” he said one more time. Back when he’d set up this vacation, Jackson, Wyoming, had seemed about as far from the L.A. suburb of San Atanasio as he could get. As far from the fiasco he’d made of his life.

What was supposed to be a laugh came out more like a raven’s croak. That was one of those jokes that would have been funny if only it were funny.

You couldn’t get away that easily. Most of the time, you couldn’t get away at all. Being a cop taught you all kinds of lessons. That one stood pretty high on the list.

He’d slept alone in that not very comfortable double bed because Louise, his wife of close to thirty years, was currently living in sin, as the saying went once upon a time, with her aerobics instructor back in San Atanasio. And he’d slept alone because…

“Fuck!” he said yet again, this time in genuine horror. Bits and pieces of the night before came back to him. You always remembered the shit you most wished you could forget. He’d slept alone because he’d tried to pick up a waitress half his age and struck out as gruesomely as some poor, hopeless high-school kid flailing away against Randy Johnson in his prime.

Christ! No wonder I tied one on, he thought. Shame-and a bladder full to bursting-propelled him to the head. It was as severely functional as the rest of the unit. Its walls were just as thin, too. A guy in the next room was taking a leak at the same time as Colin. The other guy finished and flushed-a space-age whoosh! — long before Colin did.

After his own whoosh! Colin fished three aspirins out of his travel kit. They sat on his tongue while he filled the plastic glass with water. Once he’d swallowed them, he brushed his teeth. That got rid of the dead animal.

He pulled off sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt-elegant nightwear-and stepped into the corner shower stall. The head was set into the outer part of the ceiling, and pointed in at the control and the soap ledge. That struck him as weird, but it worked okayou mont›

He made the water as hot as he could take it without boiling like a lobster and stood under it for a long time. A Hollywood shower, he would have called it in his Navy days. He was surprised the shower head didn’t have an automatic cutoff. If he could think of it, some Motel 6 bean counter could, too, and probably would.

By the time he came out, the aspirins were starting to work. He figured he’d live. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to, but he figured he would.

Up till now, he’d done everything in near darkness. If he planned to shave without cutting his throat, though, he needed to turn on the light over the sink. If he did… Another interesting question, but, he decided, not one for right now. A cop who aimed to end things could always find a quicker, neater way than a disposable Bic.

He flicked on the switch. The vicious photons made him flinch. So did the ancient alky who peered out of the mirror at him. Sallow, sagging skin. Gray stubble. Not to put too fine a point on it, he looked like hell.

Scraping off the stubble helped… a little. So did Visine.. a little. He still had all his own hair, and the stuff on his scalp, unlike his whiskers, was only beginning to frost. Once he combed it, he didn’t look too much older than he really was.

“Coffee,” he said-the first word besides fuck that had come out of his mouth this morning. He could get some down at the front desk, but the coffee here was as chintzy as the rest of the operation. He quickly dressed (jeans, sweatshirt, denim jacket over it, Angels cap-the calendar might say June was starting, but Jackson was cool and Yellowstone, seventy-odd miles north and over a thousand feet higher, was downright cold). Then he went down to his rental car and headed toward the national parks.

Bubba’s was a lot closer. They brewed good coffee there, and cooked enormous, delicious, artery-clogging breakfasts. And they opened at half past six, so you could feed your face and head out for wherever you were going.

“What can I get you today, dear?” the waitress asked when Colin sat down. She wasn’t young or cute, but she said dear as if she meant it. Maybe I should have hit on somebody like her last night, Colin thought-too late, as usual.

Aloud, he said, “Coffee-and a big bowl of vanilla ice cream.”

It was the best hangover fighter he knew. It made people give him funny looks, though. Not this gal. It didn’t faze her a bit. She just nodded. “Hurt yourself last night, you say?”

“Oh, maybe a little,” Colin answered dryly.

“I’ll get it for you right away, then. And I’ll keep the coffee coming.” The waitress bustled off.

Caffeinated, his stomach greased against the slings and arrows of outrageous single malts, Colin drove out of Jackson: past the park with the elk-antler arches at each corner, past the visitors’ center, and north out into open country. Yellowstone was still more than fifty miles away, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t fighting traffic, the way he would be on the Harbor Freeway or the 405. A lot of the time, his little Ford seemed to be the only car on the road. Things here would get more crowded later in the season, but they hadn’t yet. No one even checked his receipt when he came to Grand Teton National Park-the ranger station at the southern entrance was closed and empty.

Off to his left towered the Grand Tetons themselves. One of his guidebooks said that was French fr Big Tits. The sharp, jagged, snow-topped mountains didn’t make him think of boobs. They reminded him of a cat’s back teeth, made for shearing meat into swallowable chunks. Whose cat’s back teeth? Maybe God’s.

Even the guidebook allowed that only a very lonely French trapper could have imagined those mountains were breastlike. Colin wasn’t so sure the book had it straight there. How about a French trapper whose wife had run off with an aerobics instructor? That sounded just about right to him.

Clouds rolled in. They were lower than the Tetons, and blocked them from view. Pretty soon, rain started spattering down. Rain in June seemed perverse to someone from L.A., but Colin could deal with it. Besides, it would stop pretty soon, and then start up again whenever it felt the urge. He’d seen that on his drive up the day before-and on the drive down, and while he was in Yellowstone. Erratic weather was the price you paid for beating the crowds.

His older son, Rob, would have appreciated the empty highway. Rob spent much more time on the road than Colin did. He’d taken five expensive years getting an engineering degree from UC Santa Barbara. Since then, he’d made his living-when he’d made a living-playing bass in a band called Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. “Best damn outfit nobody’s ever heard of,” was how he described it, not without pride.