“Now we know what the supervolcano really was,” Kelly said. When her comrades sent her blank looks, she explained: “The world’s biggest bug bomb-what else?”
They groaned. She’d been sure they would. “Now that’s what I call overkill!” Skrtel said. Then he paused thoughtfully. “Or is it? Nothing smaller than a supervolcano could even slow the bastards down.”
“It’s not just the world’s biggest bug bomb,” Rheinburg said. “It’s the world’s biggest people bomb, too.”
No one said anything to that for some little while. The United States, one of the most thoroughly measured and counted countries in the world, couldn’t come close to being sure how many people the supervolcano had killed, not even two years after the eruption. Somewhere between two and three million: that was the best guess. Somewhere between five and ten times that many were still homeless.
Refugee camps were a staple of stand-up comics and late-night talk-show hosts. They weren’t so funny if you were stuck in one. And if you’d ended up in one after the supervolcano blew, odds were you remained stuck there. You could get out if you landed a job somewhere, but plenty of other people, most of them not from camps, were chasing that job, too. And there were hardly any jobs to land to begin with.
Colin’s daughter had managed to get out. Kelly had never met Vanessa Ferguson. Colin was tight-lipped about her. Kelly gathered that the guy for whom she’d moved to Denver, the guy who was indirectly to blame for her landing in Camp Constitution, was his age, maybe older. What that said about Vanessa, Kelly didn’t want to know.
But she
This would be the third harvest in a row that didn’t happen in what used to be the world’s breadbasket. Well, the world’s breadbasket had taken one in the breadbasket. How many people would go hungry on account of that? No way to know, not yet, but the number wasn’t small.
And how many would freeze on account of climate change from the supervolcano? Some already had frozen. But that would only get worse. Canada, the northern United States, Scandinavia, England, Russia. . Drop Los Angeles’ average temperature by five degrees Celsius (nine in the scale she still used when she wasn’t being scientific), and you could still live there. Drop London’s or Moscow’s or Toronto’s? Living in any of those places after the climate change fully kicked in didn’t strike her as a whole lot of fun.
Besides, how hard would the sudden cooling hit all the big agricultural areas that weren’t caught by the ashfall? Again, nobody knew for sure. Everybody would find out, probably the hard way. Kelly did know the computer models weren’t encouraging.
Easier to lay your worries aside when you were exhausted. Which she was. And she, and everyone else, would only get tireder as they slogged on toward the caldera.
She felt more like going on the next morning. She felt enough more like going on, in fact, that even an MRE for breakfast didn’t discourage her. . much. The instant coffee was nasty, but it packed a caffeine punch.
Away they went. The wind was at their backs, blowing toward the crater. All the same, Kelly got whiffs of sulfur in the air. It was as if the Devil had set up shop in the phenomenal world. She shuddered. Yeah, it was just like that.
Every so often, the geologists stopped to collect specimens. Mass spectrography of samples of dust and rock and ash from varying distances from the caldera would tell them all kinds of interesting things about what went into the magma pool deep underground. That was the hope, anyhow. Right this minute, Kelly was just glad the technology had come far enough that the samples could be little tiny ones. She didn’t want to carry one more thing than she had to. For that matter, she didn’t want to carry the stuff she did have to. Her backpacking muscles were as out of practice as her hiking muscles.
When she complained about it, Daniel Olson gave her a crooked grin. “It’ll get light faster than you wish it would,” said the geologist from Missoula. “Trust me on that one.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. Much of what she was carrying was food and water. She had enough to get her through the planned length of the trek, and a little more besides. If something went wrong, though, they were liable to find out how far they could go on empty.
In due course, Larry Skrtel consulted his GPS and announced, “Well, we’re inside Yellowstone National Park.”
“I hate to tell you, but it’s not worth the price of admission any more,” Kelly said. That was definitely in the running for the understatement-of-the-year prize. The ground here was as ugly a gray-brown mash-up of dust and ash as it had been half a mile farther northwest. Here and there, igneous boulders-yes, there were plenty-gave the landscape variety: they made it ugly in a different way.
Daniel tugged on Larry’s sleeve like a spoiled six-year-old. He sounded like one, too, squealing, “I wanna see the buffaloes! And the grizzly bears! And the wolves and things, too!” in a high, thin voice.
Kelly laughed. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. The USGS geologist’s face was only half visible, what with his breathing mask and hat, but he seemed closer to tears than to mirth. “So do I, man,” he answered softly. “So do I.”
Yellowstone’s wide-open spaces-its wide-open, protected spaces-had saved bison from extinction at the end of the nineteenth century. It hadn’t quite been the only place where grizzlies still lived in the Lower Forty-eight, but it had held more of them than any other area of similar size. Wolves had been a recent reintroduction here, but they’d done well enough to leave the park and start raiding nearby farmers’ flocks and herds.
All gone now. Buffalo herds? Grizzlies? Wolf packs? Gone, gone, gone. Hell, the whole park was gone, and it was-or had been-bigger than several states. So were the nearby flocks and herds and crops. . and the ones not so nearby, too.
“I loved this place,” Kelly said.
“We all did,” Geoff Rheinburg agreed.
“I loved it,” she repeated. “I did, but there’s nothing left, not even the parts that didn’t fall into the caldera. It’s off the map-I mean, literally off the map. You can still figure out what some of the mountains are, but even that’s not easy.”
“Tell me about it,” her chairman said. “I’ve been photographing them as we go by, to help work out the changes in the local geography.”
Something far overhead made
“Not me,” Daniel said. “During the Civil War, when Sherman was marching through Georgia, he said he’d wreck it so well that even a crow flying across it would have to carry provisions. I was looking to see if the raven had a backpack.”
“You suppose it’s carrying MREs?” Kelly asked.
“Wouldn’t that be cruelty to animals?” Rheinburg put in. They could always bitch about their alleged nourishment.
“Seriously, though, something may sprout where it craps,” Daniel said. “Seeds in the shit, a little extra fertilizer. . That’s one of the ways life starts up again after big eruptions.”
A million ravens crapping for a million years. . Kelly shook her head. It wouldn’t take anywhere near so long. A million years from now, the supervolcano probably would have gone off again and mellowed again afterwards. In geological terms, these things healed fast. It was only in terms of human lifetimes that they seemed long- lasting.
Only? She shook her head again. Scientists had invented all kinds of other time frames to help them grasp things that happened very slowly or very quickly. But a human lifetime and its smaller divisions-those were what they lived in, the same as other people.
They reached the crater at the end of the fourth day. The air smelled of brimstone and metal. It smelled
When they did. . When they did, it was with a certain amount, or more than a certain amount, of trepidation.
