get it.”
“So where can we play between now and Greenville?” Rob asked, reaching for the road atlas once more. “Some place where we haven’t been, and where there’ll be enough people who haven’t heard us yet and might want to.”
“Is there any place like that left in Maine?” Justin asked. “And if there is, can we get there and get back through the snow?”
“Boy, you ask a lot of questions,” Rob said. “Come have a look-see what you think.” They both bent low to study the small print that showed town names.
Bryce Miller gravitated to university campuses the way bees went for flowers. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the university dominated the town in a way UCLA couldn’t begin to in Los Angeles. Too many other things went on in L.A. Without the University of Nebraska, though, Lincoln hardly had any reason to exist.
Not only that, Bryce had met a few of Nebraska’s classicists and their grad students at conferences. They were the only people in the whole state he knew even slightly. He hadn’t expected to end up here with only the clothes on his back. That he’d ended up anywhere at all alive and in one piece was something close to a miracle- and a testimony to the endless training pilots put in, getting ready for emergencies they might er see in their whole career.
The Red Cross had put him and the other passengers from the plane (minus a few who’d ended up in the hospital-but everybody’d got out alive) in a Motel 6 commandeered for the purpose. Colin Ferguson hadn’t had many kind things to say about his stay in one a couple of years before. Now Bryce knew why. The place made getting away feel all the more urgent.
Getting away, though, wasn’t so easy. Volcanic ash started falling on Lincoln three days after the supervolcano erupted. The sky went gray and hazy. The sun disappeared. It might have been fog. It might have been a sandstorm. It seemed to combine the worst features of both.
Red Cross workers handed out surgical masks. They were already wearing them. Some of them wore goggles, too. They didn’t distribute those. Bryce’s guess was that they didn’t have enough to go around.
He took the bus to campus. A grad student with the fine classical first name of Marcus (his last name was Wilson, which was just-there) asked him, “Want to see something interesting?”
“Like what?” Bryce returned.
“Let’s go over to the museum,” Marcus said.
“Okay.” Bryce was game. It would have air-conditioning. It would keep out the worst of the dust. He did wonder what Marcus reckoned interesting. Maybe the museum had a good collection of classical coins or Greek pottery or something like that.
If it did, they weren’t on display. On display were the bones of a bunch of extinct elephantoid creatures. The L.A. County Museum of Natural History had some, too, but not so many. A placard declared that this museum boasted the finest collection of proboscidean fossils in the world.
But they weren’t what Marcus wanted to show Bryce. Marcus took him over to a much smaller display of fossilized rhinos from something called the Ashfall State Historical Park. “Where’s that?” Bryce asked.
“Northwest of here.” Marcus pointed to a map on the wall above the display case with the bones. “Near a little town called Orchard. The text will tell you more about it.”
The text told Bryce that the dead rhinos were almost 12,000,000 years old. They’d been buried by volcanic ash at what had been a pond. Many more of them remained in situ at the state park, along with the other critters that had been entombed by the ash at the same time.
That ash proved to come from a supervolcano eruption in Idaho, though that wasn’t established till a generation after the fossils first got found. This same geological hot spot, the informative text went on, is today responsible for the exotic geological features of Yellowstone National Park.
Maybe the hot spot had been responsible for Yellowstone yesterday. Today, it was responsible for screwing up half the country-or the whole planet, depending on how you looked at things. Bryce went on reading. Many of the bones on display here, the text told him, show the overgrowth typical of Marie’s disease, or hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy.
Being a classics major let him translate the Greek and Latin medical jargon into ordinary English: bad bone overgrowth that had to do with the lungs. Sure as hell, the plaque continued, Marie’s disease is caused by slow suffocation. In this case, it was brought on by inhaling volcanic ash and dust. The rhinos and other animals probably came to this pond or waterhole to soothe themselves in the cool mud, since a high er is another symptom of the illness. The ashfall that killed them also entombed them, and preserved them extremely well.
“Hey, Marcus.” Bryce jerked a thumb at the plaque. “Check this out.”
The other grad student read it. He grimaced. “That’s exciting,” he said.
“Ain’t it just?” Bryce used the bad grammar on purpose. “Remind me not to inhale as long as I’m here.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Marcus eyed the text again. “How many cows and sheep are dying like that right now? How many fossils will they dig up ten or twelve million years from now?”
“I don’t know about the second part,” Bryce said. “The answer to the first part is, all the sheep and cows- and pigs; don’t forget about pigs-out there, minus three. Oh, and the chickens, too.”
“We don’t want to leave the chickens out,” Marcus agreed gravely. “But what are we going to eat once they’re all dead?”
“Well, the dust doesn’t cover the whole country. Some of the livestock will live,” Bryce said.
“Uh-huh. What will it eat, though? The corn and the wheat and the rye won’t get, uh, Marie’s disease, but they won’t grow with a couple of feet of ash dumped on them, either. This is Nebraska, remember. TV shows about farming draw fat ratings here. They run commercials for tractors and things. Most of the country between the Rockies and the Mississippi is the same way. Wipe all that off the map, and what’s left on the menu?”
“Crow,” Bryce answered. Marcus gave him a funny look, but then nodded. And Bryce found a question of his own: “How many people are going to come down with hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy?” He delivered the polysyllables with a certain somber relish.
“I don’t know, and if anybody else does, they aren’t talking,” Marcus said. “It’s liable to be everyone from here all the way to Vegas who hasn’t got a dust mask.”
How many million people was that? If they were all doomed, no wonder no one was talking about it. Not even CNN Headline News would want to lead with a story that went Okay, Middle America, bend over and kiss your ass good-bye. Bryce dared hope not, anyhow, which might have been the triumph of optimism over experience.
Then he remembered that Vanessa was living in Denver. He hadn’t really thought about her since his plane ditched in Branch Oak Lake. How many people in Denver were coming down with Marie’s disease right this minute? Wasn’t it easier to wonder how many weren’t?
He must have made some kind of noise as all that went through his head, because Marcus asked, “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” Bryce answered. But it hadn’t been nothing, or Marcus wouldn’t have noticed. Awkwardly, Bryce explained, “I was just thinking about my ex. She moved to Denver a little while ago.”
“Oh.” The other grad student digested that. Then he delivered his verdict: “Bummer, man. Talk about timing.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Bryce said.
“Ex?” Marcus said. “Ex-wife?”
“We weren’t married. We were living together… and then we weren’t.” Bryce spread his hands. “You know how it goes? Well, it went.”
“Uh-huh.” Marcus nodded. Bryce thought he might be gay, but Marcus didn’t make a big deal out of it if he was. After a few seconds’ pause, he asked, “You still have feelings for her?”
“I’m going with somebody else who’s a lot easier to get along with.” For a moment, Bryce thought that was a responsive answer. When he realized it wasn’t, he sighed and said, “Yeah, I’ve still got some. I sure as shit don’t wish Marie’s disease on her, or anything like that.” He sighed again. “I’m not nearly certain it works both ways, though.”
“So she told you to hit the road, not the other way round.” This time, Marcus didn’t make it a question. “Oh, well. Good luck to her and all that, but you can’t do anything about it.”
