Supervolcano: All Fall Down

the day after tomorrow. If Susan added even a little something to the pot after they got married, they’d. . kinda get along.

Maybe things would come back to normal by the time they hit middle age. Geologists and climatologists were still hashing that out. Bryce got distant, possibly distorted echoes of the argument from Colin: Kelly was one of the people doing the arguing. Right now the answer seemed to be Nobody knows for sure, but it doesn’t look so good. Or so hot, if your taste ran to old-fashioned slang and bad puns.

“It’s not fair!” Susan burst out.

Bryce nodded. “Nope. It’s not. But I don’t know what to do about it, hon. Fair or not, we’re stuck with it.”

“Shit,” she said. “When Rome fell, it fell an inch at a time, and the Romans kicked and bit and clawed as hard as they could. Mother Nature didn’t whack ’em upside the head with a shillelagh.”

“And you’re not even Irish,” he said. She made as if to whack him upside the head. Luckily, she wasn’t carrying a concealed shillelagh.

Two days later, Bryce looked forward to getting back to his apartment and pouring down a beer. Trying to explain the ablative absolute was as foredoomed as the charge of the Light Brigade. High school kids just didn’t get a language that used cases, not prepositions and word order, for its special effects-and the ablative absolute was some of Latin’s Pixar splendor.

He’d explained till he was blue in the face, but they didn’t see it. Well, Olga Smyslovsky-Sasha’s younger sister-did, but she spoke a language with more cases than Latin when she went home from school. Like Sasha, she had trouble with Latin vocabulary, but the grammar was a piece of cake for her. Nice to know it was for somebody.

Bryce wondered why he bothered opening his mailbox. He didn’t expect any bills. Junk mail was way down since the eruption. Paper was scarce and expensive, and so was everything else. Businesses hunkered down, the same as the people who mostly didn’t patronize them.

“What’s this?” he wondered out loud, plucking an envelope from the box. It was from Wayne State. Wayne State, he read on the printed return address, was in Wayne, Nebraska. One more “Screw you very much for your interest” letter, Bryce thought. He was damned if he remembered sending any kind of application to Wayne State. Maybe it was a preventive rejection-don’t you dare try to land a job with us! Were there such things? He wouldn’t have been surprised, not even a little bit.

He took it upstairs. He wouldn’t even be bummed when he got one more Are you kidding us?  — he was hardened to those by now. Nobody else would be there to pay any attention to him, anyhow.

Another gaudy sunset poured carnival-glass light into his living room when he opened the curtain. He hardly noticed it, which only went to show you could get used to anything. The first thing he did after opening the curtain was to try a lamp. It lit. He nodded to himself-he’d be able to nuke some leftovers tonight. Power had been on when he left Junipero, but that didn’t mean it was bound to stay on.

He turned off the lamp. The red-gold sunset was enough to read by for the moment, so he’d use it. The power company made up for being out of action half the time by jacking up the rates when it actually worked. That endeared it to everybody, as if it cared.

“The envelope. .” Bryce said, as if he were in a tux handing out Academy Awards. Yeah, as if! He opened it. Out came a sheet of-surprise! — Wayne State letterhead. He unfolded it and read the laser-printed missive inside.

Dear Dr. Miller, the letter said, We would be most interested in considering you for the assistant professorship position opening this coming fall. As you may be aware, Professor Smetana, who had held this position, recently passed away due to lung disease caused by the supervolcano eruption. We do have state-mandated funding for the position, and are anxious to fill it as quickly as possible. I look forward to your prompt response. Sincerely-and the department chair’s signature.

“Fuck me,” Bryce said softly. Why had the lightning struck him? That was sure what it felt like. Two answers sprang to mind. Either or both might be true. If they didn’t fill the slot in a hurry, their state-mandated funding was liable to dry up and blow away. And they probably figured he’d work cheap. They were probably right, too.

His eye went back to the middle of the paragraph. Professor Smetana. . recently passed away due to lung disease caused by the supervolcano eruption. Wayne State. Nebraska. Uh-huh. How far was Wayne from the Ashfall State Historical Park? A long-ago supervolcano blast had buried rhinos in ash; he’d seen some of their remains in Lincoln after barely surviving this latest explosion. Paleontologists had shown that they’d suffered from ash-induced lung troubles, too. Those were back, bigtime: Marie’s disease, otherwise known to broadcasters as HPO, the acronym for a cumbersome medical term. Poor Professor Smetana had a lot of company.

Bryce went into the bedroom and turned on his computer. He’d send an e-mail right away and follow it up with a snailmail letter in case it didn’t get through. He wrote the e-mail to the address under the signature. Then he Googled Wayne State’s Web site. He clicked on the link.

That server is temporarily unavailable. He swore at the error message and tried again. He got it again. Then he realized that, while he had power, Wayne State might not.

Where the hell was Wayne, Nebraska? A little more Googling showed him it was about a hundred miles from Omaha, north and a bit west. Wayne State had about 5,000 students. The town of Wayne-named after Revolutionary general Mad Anthony, Wikipedia explained-had 6,000 more.

Do I really want to move there? Bryce wondered. L.A. made every other place in the world except maybe New York City, London, and Paris seem like the boonies by comparison. Wayne was the boonies: the terminal boonies, if you wanted to get technical. You’d have to make your own fun. Boy, would you ever!

And what were winters there like? L.A. had got snow every winter since the eruption. Quite a few places, these days, were getting snow in summertime. Midwestern winters hadn’t been fun before the supervolcano went off, not if you were a California kid, they hadn’t. Did Wayne do its best impression of pre-eruption Winnipeg nowadays?

How he’d handle winter wasn’t the only thing he needed to worry about. What would Susan think? Would Wayne State have a job for her, too? It didn’t seem likely. How would she feel about that?

After thinking about Susan-quite a bit after thinking about her-Bryce remembered his mother. Barbara Miller hadn’t been thrilled when he moved up to the Valley. What would she say if he went two thousand miles away?

I want you to be happy. That’s what she would say, sure as God made Greek irregular verbs. And she’d be lying through her teeth. That was what the math guys called intuitively obvious.

“One thing at a time,” Bryce muttered, fishing his phone out of his pocket. First step was finding out what Susan thought.

His stomach rumbled, loud enough to startle his cat if only he’d had one. He stuck the phone back where he’d got it. No, first step was dealing with those leftovers. Whatever Susan thought wouldn’t change a hell of a lot in the next half hour. Yes, people were animals. Better not to be a hungry animal. He headed for the kitchen.

* * *

If there was a drearier place in the world than the Torrance office of the California Employment Development Department, Louise Ferguson couldn’t imagine what it might be. The way things looked to her, Satan would have had a tough time devising a drearier place in hell.

She sat on a hard, uncomfortable plastic chair of dispirited grayish blue in the waiting area. Water ran from her umbrella and puddled on the dispirited grayish brown linoleum under her feet. She’d had to walk several blocks from the bus stop to the EDD office. Three people on the bus were sneezing their heads off. She hoped she wouldn’t come down sick.

Somebody a couple of rows behind her in the waiting area coughed as if he’d smoked four packs a day for the past thirty years. The chill and the rain made people get sick more easily than Southern Californians were used to doing. When they weren’t sneezing and hacking, they bitched about it.

Louise wished San Atanasio had an EDD office. But Torrance was the biggest South Bay city, so such things aggregated here. She had to make the long bus trip instead of a short one. If she did catch something because of