Supervolcano: All Fall Down

Baffin Island.

Vanessa, who fit in between Rob and Marshall, didn’t do a lot of dope. Or if she did, it sure didn’t mellow her out. Colin wondered when, or if, she’d escape from that refugee camp somewhere near the Oklahoma-Arkansas border: just past the eastern edge of the ashfall from the supervolcano. She’d got out of Denver alive, which most people who’d lived there hadn’t, so he was inclined to count his blessings. Here most of a year after the eruption, nobody knew how many people it had killed, not to the nearest hundred thousand. Well up into seven figures, that was for sure.

Kelly clicked her tongue between her teeth. “He’s plenty smart,” she said. “And he knows what he thinks-he just doesn’t want to tell the rest of the world.”

“It could be, for most things,” Colin allowed. “But I’m as sure as I need to be that he doesn’t want to see Louise right now, not when she’s going to present him with a little half-brother or half-sister pretty soon.”

He also wasn’t exactly thrilled that his ex was pregnant again. For that matter, neither was Louise. Everything with the aerobics instructor for whom she’d left Colin had been all lovey-dovey-till Teo found out he’d knocked her up. Then, when she didn’t want to get rid of the baby right away, he’d dropped her like a live grenade.

“Why is she having it?” Kelly asked hesitantly.

Colin had known Louise for upwards of thirty years now. He shrugged anyway. “You tell me and you win the prize,” he said. “My best guess is because dear sweet Teo told her to lose it and then bailed. So she won’t do anything he would’ve wanted her to. But that’s only a WAG.” He didn’t like to cuss where women could hear him do it. The acronym didn’t seem to count, though.

“Wouldn’t be reason enough for me,” Kelly said. “When I have a baby, it’ll be because I want to, not because somebody I can’t even stand any more doesn’t want me to.”

“I feel the same way.” Having said that, Colin realized his wife wasn’t speaking hypothetically. When I have a baby, she’d said, not If I have a baby. When she had a baby, Colin figured he would be very much involved in the process. He wondered whether he was ready to be a dad again at his age. Fifty the new thirty? If only, with a newborn screaming in the house! He glanced over at Kelly. “When you do decide to, you’ll let me know first?”

“Oh, I suppose.” She sounded as much like him as a contralto was ever likely to. She sure sounded as dry as he ever did, which wasn’t easy. Had she had that tone before they started hanging out together? Colin was inclined to doubt it. But couples rubbed off on each other all kinds of ways they never would have expected before they hooked up.

Colin drove past the campus exit, and past the ones for Isla Vista beyond it. Most UCSB students lived in Isla Vista, just west of the university. It was a rowdy place, with bars everywhere and such quaint tribal rituals as couch-burnings to celebrate the end of spring quarter. It was full of college kids, in other words.

Marshall’s apartment was in Ellwood, farther west still. The part of Goleta called Ellwood housed plenty of students, too, but it wasn’t just kids and their amusements. A lot of the students who did live there were in grad school, which made them a little older and-with luck-a little more sensible. All things considered, Ellwood was more staid than Isla Vista. That was one of the reasons Colin had chosen that particular apartment building. Marshall needed more temptations the way he needed an extra set of ears.

Off the 101. South-toward the ocean here-to Hollister. Right on Hollister to the street excitingly called Entrance Road. Left at the light there. After making its entrance, the road divided, so that on a map it resembled a tuning fork. Marshall’s building, which looked an awful lot like apartments of 1970s vintage in San Atanasio, lay halfway down the right-hand tine.

Fewer buildings up here had underground garages than they did down there. That meant more people had to park on the street, so finding a space was always an adventure. Colin parallel-parked his way into one half a block down from his son’s place.

Kelly softly clapped her hands. “Very neat.”

“No big deal,” Colin said. He’d had to parallel-park, yeah, but he hadn’t really had to squeeze. “Trying to find somewhere to put the car within a mile of your place in Berkeley, that was combat parking.”

“You did it, though,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I had incentives.” He let his right hand drop to her denim-covered thigh.

“Incentives.” Kelly swatted the hand away. “Is that what they call it these days?”

“I dunno. All I know is, it’s what I just called it.” Colin opened the car door. “Come on. Let’s go round up the graduate. I haven’t been waiting for this forever-but it sure feels that way.”

The air was cool and moist. Morning air in Santa Barbara was apt to be cool and moist the year around. Still and all, this was cooler and moister than Colin would have looked for before the supervolcano erupted. A soft breeze blew mist-not quite fog, but close-in off the ocean. It carried with it the camphory smell of the eucalyptus grove in back of the beach.

Marshall’s apartment was on the second floor. The living-room window faced west, which gave him a terrific view of the gorgeously gaudy sunsets that had become the norm since the eruption filled the air all over the world with what people with high foreheads who wore lab coats called particulate matter. In plain English, that meant finely ground crud.

From what Kelly said, the Yellowstone supervolcano had belched out over six hundred cubic miles of rock-say, a hundred times as much as Krakatoa, which wasn’t east of Java. There’d been a couple of years of spectacular sunsets in the 1880s. They’d probably last longer yet this time around.

How long they would last wasn’t the first thing in Colin’s mind as he knocked on the door. He wondered if his son had ever used one of those over-the-top sunsets as background music, so to speak, to help get himself laid. If Marshall hadn’t, he’d missed one hell of a chance.

He opened the door now. He had on slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie: not his usual choice in clothes, but you were supposed to spiff yourself up under your robes. He was an inch taller than Colin’s five-eleven, a good deal slimmer, and also sharper-featured. Of Colin’s three kids, the one who most resembled him was Vanessa. Somehow, though, on her it looked good.

“Hey, Dad. Hi, Kelly.” Marshall shook hands with Colin and hugged his new stepmother. Then he moved aside. “C’mon in.”

The apartment was imperfectly neat. A sweater lay across one arm of the sofa. The kitchen table was all over papers. (Kelly worked the same way, which made Colin a little more willing to cut his youngest some slack.) Colin would have bet dishes filled the sink, though he didn’t go check it out. A stretch in the service might have worked wonders for Marshall. It wasn’t the first time that had crossed Colin’s mind.

His son grabbed one of those papers and held it up. “Here-check this out,” he said.

Colin tilted his head back to look through the bottom half of his bifocals. Kelly just leaned forward; that indignity of age hadn’t caught up with her yet. The sheet Marshall was showing off looked like a printout of some e-mail.

It said something called Storytastic was buying a piece called “Sunset Beach” and would be sending a check for $286.65, which was five cents a word. The story would be going up on their Web site as soon as Marshall made a couple of what sounded like tiny changes.

This time, Kelly hugged him. “Awesome!” she said. “That’s twice now!”

“Pretty amazing, huh?” Marshall said.

“It is.” Colin wasn’t kidding. Marshall had sold another short story near the end of the year before. Anybody, Colin figured, could do it once. Well, maybe not anybody, but lots of people. Doing it more than once probably took both talent and stubbornness: a good combination. He said, “This isn’t as much per word as you got for the first one, is it?”

“Colin!” Kelly sent him a reproachful look.

“You would remember that, wouldn’t you?” Marshall said. Colin only shrugged; remembering details was part of his job. His son continued. “I sent this one to New Fictions, too, but they turned me down. So I tried some other places, and it stuck here. A nickel a word’s not bad.”

“Okay. Congratulations, believe me.” Colin set a hand on Marshall’s shoulder. The kid hadn’t let getting rejected keep him from sending his story out again: more than once, by the sound of it. Stubbornness, sure as hell. And Marshall was bound to be right about the pay rate. Colin had stayed friends with Bryce Miller, Vanessa’s old