Supervolcano: All Fall Down

She pointed feebly toward the kitchen. “The eggs. They were looking at me. You want dinner, you make it.”

“Okay,” he said, and did. The meatloaf came out ever so slightly scorched on the bottom and blander than she would have fixed it, but it was plenty edible. Colin cooked well enough. He’d never be great; neither his skills nor his repertoire reached far enough for that.

At the moment, Kelly wouldn’t fuss. She was just glad the meat loaf seemed inclined to stay down. Maybe the blandness even helped.

“Better now?” Colin asked.

“Uh-huh.” She nodded. “Thanks. You never can tell when it’ll get me. I sure can’t, anyway.”

She washed the dishes. After Colin had cooked supper, that seemed only fair. Marshall was out doing something with his friends. What and with whom, she didn’t know. Marshall was an adult, and she didn’t pry. Whatever it was, she hoped it didn’t involve too much money. Colin’s ex had fired her son right after ramen headquarters shuttered. If she had to stay home herself, she saw no point in paying him. Which made sense, but making sense didn’t mean it did Marshall any good.

Colin was not happy to have his younger son out of work. Kelly tried to soften it: “Times are tough everywhere. It’s not like he’s the only one.”

“I know,” Colin growled, “but he’s the only one here.”

“He’s still writing,” Kelly said.

“He sure isn’t selling much,” Colin answered, which was also true. Kelly had learned to recognize the SASEs Marshall included with his manuscripts when they came back. Every time her stepson picked one up, he looked disgusted. But he kept sending his stories out over and over, by snailmail and e-mail. If anything would let him escape from his current dead end, they were it.

But would anything? Marshall didn’t want anyone but editors looking at what he wrote. Again, Kelly didn’t pry. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone prying into what she was up to if she were in Marshall’s Nikes, either- do unto others and all that good stuff.

“He’s gonna need to get himself a real job now, a job job.” Colin paused, then tempered that ever so slightly: “Or at least find another kid who needs babysitting.”

“But-” Kelly left it right there, because she didn’t know where else she could go with it. It wasn’t that there were no real jobs; some work still got done in spite of everything that had happened to the country. Damn few new ones turned up, though, and next to none of the ones that did were for kids just out of college with a degree in creative writing.

As for babysitting, the only reason Marshall had done so much of that was that James Henry Ferguson was his half-brother. Sure, Louise would give him a good reference, but so what? Rug rat minder wasn’t his chosen career path.

Which wasn’t the only complication. If Colin felt like locking horns with his son, Kelly didn’t know what she should do. Play peacemaker? Stand clear and let them go at it? Whatever she did or didn’t do, she saw ways to wind up in trouble with the greatest of ease. That was one part of marrying somebody with grown kids she hadn’t thought about enough.

Colin chuckled. It wasn’t a cheerful chuckle: more the sort he might have given after spotting the driver’s license that dumbass bank robber left behind. “If he doesn’t find anything in the next few months, he can start making money taking care of his legitimate half-sib.”

“That’s true.” Kelly knew she sounded surprised. She hadn’t looked so far ahead. She would have bet Marshall hadn’t, either. She added, “Don’t rub his nose in it right now, please. It’s not what he wants to do.”

“I know,” Colin said. “But you do what you’ve got to do, not what you want to do. A lot of people haven’t figured that one out yet, even with the supervolcano yelling in their faces. They still try and do whatever they want, and then they get mad when it doesn’t work the way it used to.”

“Yup.” Kelly nodded. “I wonder what I’d be doing if my chairman didn’t know the head of the geology department at Dominguez.”

“You’d’ve made it,” Colin said with great certainty. “You’re the kind who does. You wouldn’t’ve stuck it out for your thesis and your degree and everything if you weren’t the kind of person who tended to business. You wouldn’t’ve been out there in the cold with your darn seismograph for me to make a jerk of myself over if you didn’t take care of business.” This time, his chuckle was self-conscious-not the kind of noise he usually made.

“Best chilly morning in Yellowstone I ever had,” Kelly answered. That made him smile. He needed reassurance he was okay with women in general and with her in particular. Having Louise dump him that way left him more deeply scarred than he showed anybody but her. Chances were it left him more deeply scarred than he wanted to show himself.

Reading by candlelight was possible, but it left a lot to be desired. They went up to bed before too long. Marshall hadn’t come in yet. Kelly figured he eventually would, and she was right. She had to get up to pee in the middle of the night. The power’d come back on, too. She saw light around the edges of Marshall’s door and heard him clicking away at the Mac.

Even if it cost her a reliable babysitter, she hoped he made it as a writer. Yes, you did what you had to do. Colin was dead right about that. But if what you had to do could also be what you wanted to do, you were looking at something as close to happiness as you were likely to find in this old world.

She went back to bed. She fell asleep again as soon as her head hit the pillow. That was one more thing the baby was doing to her. She would have liked it better if she didn’t have so much trouble getting started in the morning. Coffee tasted so horrible she couldn’t stomach it. That was Junior’s fault, too. She would have been grumpier if she’d stayed awake longer.

* * *

Bryce Miller had got his share of rejection slips for things he’d written. He was resigned to that. When you wrote poems modeled after ancient Greek efforts from poets long dead by the time of Christ, you needed to get used to rejection.

But he was getting different rejections these days. He kept sending out poems. And he also kept sending out applications to every college and university that had a job opening even faintly related to the kinds of things he could do. Some of them just ignored him. Others cared enough to tell him they wanted nothing to do with him. It was a compliment. . of sorts. He would have liked a compliment of the sort that came with paychecks attached.

It wasn’t that he hated what he was doing at Junipero High. He could still have been back at the DWP, for instance-now, that had been a crazy-making job, at least for him. He felt all throttled back, though. He was teaching so many classes and so many kids that he had no time or energy for anything that looked like scholarship. He also got tired of teaching nothing but the basics of what he knew. Sure, that was what high school was all about. He understood the problem. He got tired just the same.

So he cast his curriculum vitae upon the waters and waited to see what he would find after God knew how many days. The institutions of higher learning that did deign to answer-a bit more than half-were politely apologetic. No, they were politely hopeless. They had no openings. They were contracting, not expanding. They’d been contracting even before the supervolcano made classics and history seem even less relevant than they had back in the good times.

“At least I can do most of this by e-mail when the power’s on,” he told Susan. “It doesn’t cost me as much in postage as it would have thirty years ago.” He grinned crookedly. “And the ones who do answer tell me no a fuck of a lot faster than they could’ve in the old days.”

“Funny, Bryce. Har-dee-har-har. See? I’m laughing.” She was just finishing her own dissertation. She knew everything there was to know about Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor who was called Stupor Mundi: the stunner of the world. The world, unfortunately, had a new stunner now. Her chances for landing an academic job might have been better than Bryce’s, but that sure didn’t make them good.

“Hey, you’ll do it, whether I manage or not. I can be your kept man,” Bryce said.

“Right. Whatever you’re smoking, let me have some, too,” she answered. “I wonder if your high school needs two Latin teachers who can do world history, too.” Before he could say anything, she quickly added, “Yes, I’m kidding. You’re lucky Junipero needs one person in that slot.”

“Lucky. Uh-huh.” But Bryce didn’t push it. As things went these days, he was lucky. He had work. As long as he stayed careful and lucky, it let him pay the rent, eat, and put aside a widow’s mite for