Supervolcano: All Fall Down

“Me, neither,” Kelly said. One of the reasons she didn’t remember was that she’d been seriously drunk when it happened. And she’d let out a long, loud sigh of relief when her next period came right on schedule.

This, though, this was different. You could joke about biological clocks. It wasn’t as if she never had. But things got less funny when you listened to your own ticking-and when you knew it would wind down for good in the ever-less-indefinite future.

Oh, sometimes you got a surprise later than you thought you could. Colin’s ex sure had, and now his kids had an altogether unexpected half-brother. And here I am, thinking about Louise again. Kelly was annoyed with herself, which didn’t mean she could keep from doing it. Which was part of what she got for marrying a man with a considerable past. Of course, when you got up to her age the only men without considerable pasts were the ones who’d never moved away from their mothers. They presented different-and usually worse- problems.

She shook her head. “What?” Colin asked, feeling the motion.

“Nothing,” Kelly answered, which wasn’t quite true, but it was nothing she wanted to talk about with him. After a moment, she went on, “If we can make something together-make a baby together-what could be more special than that?”

“That’s why we’re doing it. And besides, even trying is fun,” Colin said. Kelly poked him in the ribs. She was usually more ticklish than he was, but she must have hit the bull’s-eye, because he jerked.

“Serves you right,” Kelly told him.

“What? You didn’t have fun trying?” When he decided to be difficult, he was difficult as all get out. But then he said, “Y’know, after Louise and I had our three, she was always after me to get a vasectomy so she wouldn’t have to go on using her manhole cover.”

“Her what?” Kelly was glad Colin couldn’t see her blank stare.

“Diaphragm,” he explained.

“Oh.” She poked him again, less successfully this time. He would make a bad joke like that. He not only would, he had.

“Yeah, well,” he went on, “I didn’t feel like doing anything where the odds of undoing it weren’t so great. I didn’t think anything was wrong-which only shows how much I knew, doesn’t it? But I even used condominiums every once in a while so she wouldn’t need the Frisbee.”

To do that justice, Kelly would have had to poke him eight or twelve times. She contented herself with snorting instead. Colin hadn’t made the smallest of sacrifices, though, not from the male point of view. Guys used condoms, but the next man she found who liked them would be the first. Then again, she hoped she wouldn’t have to do any more looking for men-or why had she just made love wanting to get pregnant?

Colin turned on the lamp on his nightstand. He smiled over at her. “I definitely got lucky,” he said.

“Oh, foosh!” she replied. She wasn’t anything special, not with the way her tummy pooched out and her seat spread. She’d never actually met Louise in person, but she’d seen photos. Louise was elegantly slim, and her sculpted features reminded Kelly of some actress whose name she couldn’t quite come up with. When she added, “I don’t know what you see in me,” she wasn’t making idle talk.

“Somebody I love, that’s what,” Colin said, which was always the right answer. He went on, “Somebody who loves me, too, and who wants to be here with me.”

Kelly kissed him. “You better believe it, mister.”

“Oh, I do. For a while, I didn’t think I would ever believe it, but I do.” This time, he kissed her. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure.” She meant it.

He grinned a male grin. “Not all of it, lady. And the other thing I see is, I see this darn sexy broad naked in bed with me, and what could be better than that?”

Kelly didn’t think of herself as a darn sexy broad. She thought of herself as a geologist. Being thought of as a sex object kind of weirded her out. Then again, if you weren’t your husband’s sex object, you had other worries. Colin didn’t just want her for that. She never would have married him if he had. Since he did want her for that. . “Turn off the light again.”

He was in his fifties. Second rounds didn’t happen quickly, the way they would have when he was younger, or sometimes at all. That didn’t make fooling around any less enjoyable. And even if he didn’t rise to the occasion right away, he wasn’t shy about using fingers and tongue to bring her along.

“I don’t think I can walk to the bathroom,” she said after a while. “My knees are all loose.”

“That’s nice.” If he sounded smug, he’d earned the right. “You could just roll over and go to sleep.”

“That’s your department,” Kelly retorted, though Colin didn’t live up to-or down to-the male cliche very often.

“Huh!” This time, he poked her in the ribs. She squeaked. He chuckled. “I’ll go, then,” he said, and he did. When he got back, he added, quite seriously, “I do love you, you know.”

“I noticed,” she answered. “If I remember straight, that’s how my knees got all loose.”

“Nah.” He shook his head; the mattress sent her the vibration in the dark room. “That’s just fooling around. Fooling around is great-don’t get me wrong. But I mean, I really love you. That quake in Yellowstone was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Well, I got some good data from it, too. The thought went through Kelly’s mind, but died unsaid. Another time, another place, she would have come out with it. Colin appreciated dry-you didn’t know him at all if you didn’t know that. Not right this minute, though, not when they’d been trying to start a child together. “I love you, too,” she said, and leaned over and kissed him. “And now I am gonna go to the john, loose knees or not.”

She burrowed under the covers when she returned. It wasn’t warm. It hardly ever was any more. “Good night,” Colin said, so he hadn’t gone to sleep.

“G’night.” A few minutes later, she did.

VIII

It wasn’t snowing. There was still snow on the ground, but not everywhere. Rob Ferguson savored the sun shining wanly down out of a sky exactly the color of a high school girlfriend’s gray-blue eyes. Here and there, hopeful green grass sprouted through the dead yellow tangle of last year’s halfhearted growth. A few deciduous trees showed new little leaves.

It should have been April, or maybe early May-Rob wasn’t a hundred percent sure how the weather had worked in Guilford before the supervolcano went off. It was. . the middle of August. It was the second year in a row without a summer, the second of nobody knew how many.

The roads were open. For the time being, till the blizzards clamped down again, Maine north and west of the Interstate was reconnected to the rest of the country. The Shell station down the street from the Trebor Mansion Inn had gas-not a lot of gas, and twelve bucks a gallon, but gas. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could have got the hell out.

Plenty of people had. Most of the ones who’d left had relatives in warmer parts of the country. (There weren’t many colder ones, not in the Lower Forty-eight. What was happening to places like Fairbanks and Nome and Anchorage, Rob didn’t want to think about.)

Dick Barber was glad to see individuals and families pull up stakes. So was Jim Farrell. “The fewer mouths we have to feed when we’re on our own again, the better off we’ll be,” he declared to anyone who would listen. Barber spread the gospel of flight, too-without packing up and leaving himself.

The band was still here, too. Every once in a while, Justin would make wistful noises about hitting the road again. Sometimes Charlie Storer would nod, but not in a way to make anybody think he really meant it. One reason he didn’t was that Biff wasn’t going anywhere. Biff cared more about Cindy down at Caleb’s Kitchen than he did about touring. Well he might: she was going to have a baby. They hadn’t tied the knot yet, but that also looked to be in the cards.

And Rob wasn’t eager to vamoose from the land of moose, either. He’d been going with Lindsey ever since they literally bumped into each other outside the Episcopal church. She wasn’t carrying his child, but not for lack of