Supervolcano: All Fall Down

acquaintances whose folks had divorced and remarried on the other).

What she really reminded him of was a new older sister. He also liked her better than he’d ever liked Vanessa, though. Why not? She didn’t try to boss him around the way Vanessa always had. She didn’t make as if she knew everything there was to know, either. She just. . got along with him. He wasn’t remotely used to that.

He would have liked to talk it over with Dad. His father was the one unchanged point in his life. Dad might be a little grayer, a little jowlier, than he had been when Marshall was in high school, but how often did you notice that? His style hadn’t changed, not a nickel’s worth. And wasn’t the style the man himself? Somebody’d said that. Marshall couldn’t remember who. So much for the bachelor’s degree they’d finally made him take.

But, because Dad was Dad, Marshall couldn’t imagine talking to him in any serious way. Dad would listen. He’d listen hard, like the cop he was. And then he’d give forth with something that might as well come from Mars. Which was one reason Marshall didn’t try talking with him: he’d had that happen before. The other reason, of course, was much older and more basic. Marshall had expended a lot of time and testosterone gaining such flimsy independence as he had. Was he going to risk that for the sake of conversation? Like hell he was.

And so he had to find some other way to channel his confusion. He put it into a story. Not only was he channeling it, he was giving himself a chance to make some money from it. He did sell things-less often than he wanted to, but he did. The money was nice, but he couldn’t begin to live on it. Nobody could live on what you made from short fiction. Everybody said so, and for once everybody seemed right.

He could talk about that with Kelly: no testosterone involved there. She thought for a little while, then said, “Maybe you should write a novel.”

“A novel? Are you nuts?” Marshall made a cross with his two index fingers, as if trying to protect himself against vampires. “I couldn’t write a novel!”

“Why not? You sell some of what you write.” Kelly was painfully precise-even more so than Dad. Did that go with being a geologist or just with being her? Marshall wasn’t sure, but either way. . She went on, “That’s got to mean you’re good enough, right?”

“Jeez, I dunno,” Marshall muttered. What he did know was that the idea of tackling a novel scared him shitless.

Kelly didn’t want to let it go. “You can make a living on novels, can’t you?” she asked.

“If you’re lucky enough, maybe.” Marshall didn’t want to admit anything. But she had a point, or the blogs and Twitter feeds and bulletin boards he haunted made him think she did. You wrote short stories for glory or experiment or because you liked a little idea so much you couldn’t not write it. Novels, now, novels paid bills-except when they didn’t.

“So go for it. What have you got to lose?” Kelly could be most infuriating when she sounded most reasonable.

“My mind?” Marshall suggested. One more thing everybody always said was Don’t quit your day job. Considering that his day job was taking care of his half-brother, dumping it didn’t seem half bad. It wasn’t that he had anything personal against James Henry. The baby was probably as nice as a baby was gonna be. He couldn’t help it that, just by coming along, he’d fucked up a whole bunch of lives.

Being able to tell Mom to find somebody who really was a babysitter, though? That sounded pretty good. If he never messed with another poopy diaper as long as he lived, he wouldn’t shed one single, solitary tear. Dad always claimed babies weren’t really human till they got potty-trained. Marshall hadn’t known about that one way or the other before. He believed it now.

Making real money, grown-up money, sounded pretty good, too. Zero chance of doing that with short stories. Your chances of doing it with novels weren’t what anybody would call good, but they weren’t zero, either. People did make a living writing novels. One or two of them even got rich.

All the same. . “I mean it, Kelly. I’ve never had an idea that big.”

“How hard have you looked?” she asked.

He didn’t answer that. He had no idea how or why ideas came, or why sometimes they didn’t. Maybe the Idea Fairy was spending a couple of weeks on the beach at Maui, working on her tan. Maybe the bulb in his story- detector light burned out, and he didn’t notice it for a while. He had no clue.

“Um, Marshall. .” Kelly’s voice changed. It was as if she’d suddenly realized she didn’t know everything there was to know. So Marshall thought, anyhow, but he was feeling harassed right then.

“What is it?” he asked, more roughly than he might have.

She bit her lip. “Just so you know, your father and I are trying to have a baby. So there may be another half- brother or half-sister on the way for you. I didn’t think it should be a surprise if it happens.”

“How about that?” Marshall said, which was safe almost all the time. His first reaction was Oh, Christ! I’ll never get away from diapers! His second reaction made him giggle. Kelly raised an eyebrow the way Dad would have-damned if they weren’t rubbing off on each other. Marshall explained: “Here I’d have two new half-sibs, and they wouldn’t be related to each other at all. How bizarre is that?”

“Pretty much,” Kelly allowed. “Your father said the same thing about you and Rob and Vanessa when we started trying.”

“Oh, yeah?” Marshall pondered that. Nothing he could do about it, he decided-Dad had had a lot longer to rub off on him than on Kelly.

“Uh-huh.” Kelly got back to the main track: “Is it bizarre enough to be a novel idea?”

It was novel to Marshall, all right, whether it was to his father or not. Then he realized that wasn’t what she meant, or not all of what she meant. He shrugged. Maybe it was. Maybe.

X

The last time Kelly’d seen Missoula, Montana, she’d left it behind in a GI-issue Humvee with a super-duper desert air filter and a pintle-mounted.50-caliber machine gun. That was what the Idaho sheriff-an old buddy of Colin’s-who’d taken her away had called it, anyhow. Kelly didn’t know from pintles. She’d never heard the word before-or since, either.

But now she was back in Missoula, looking at more Humvees with super-duper air filters and pintle-mounted guns. When she climbed into one of them this time, she’d be heading east, not west.

Missoula was the edge of the world these days. The edge of the habitable world, anyhow. Everything closer to the supervolcano was buried in ash. Missoula had got ashfall, too, but it wasn’t buried. Plenty of places much farther away had had a lot more dumped on them. The prevailing winds kept most of the ash away from here.

And so, if you wanted to examine the new caldera, Missoula made a good place to start from. That you had to be out of your frigging mind to want to do any such thing. . Colin had said as much to Kelly. He’d been as emphatic as he could manage without using profanity-enough to impress her quite a bit, in fact. And then, when he saw she was out of her frigging mind, at least that particular way, and had been for years, he threw his hands in the air and said, “Well, if you’re gonna go, I hope to God you learn something worthwhile.”

If that wasn’t love, what was it?

Kelly’d signed as many releases for this little jaunt as she had when she flew over the enormous zit the supervolcano blew on the Earth’s face. If anything happened to her while she was exploring-anything at all, from dandruff to unasked-for rattlesnakes or bears to getting charbroiled in a lava burp-she admitted in advance it wouldn’t be the government’s fault.

This time, the Humvees had U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY stenciled on their sides. The guys sitting behind the machine guns, however, didn’t look like USGS personnel. They looked like soldiers. There was a good reason for that, too: they were.

One of them had two little black stripes on each collar point of his camo uniform. “Uh, Corporal, are we really gonna need all of that firepower?” Kelly asked him.

“Ma’am, I just don’t know,” he answered with unsmiling-and unyielding-seriousness. That ma’am grated, but only for a moment. He was more than half Kelly’s age, but he couldn’t