Seeing him coming, Biff and Charlie got out of the trailing SUV to hear the news. Rob made it short and sweet: “We’re fucked. They’ve got no idea when they’re gonna be able to clear the road.”
“That, like, sucks.” Biff wasn’t long on words, but he got the point.
“We can’t even turn around,” Charlie said. There were cars behind them and westbound cars in the eastbound lane. Some jackasses always figured they could dodge trouble if they broke the rules. Once in a while, they did. More often, as now, they screwed things up for themselves and everybody else.
“I think I’d better call Greenville and let ’em know we ain’t gonna make it.” Rob reached into his pocket for his cell phone.
The promoter didn’t sound brokenhearted. “We’ll cancel, all right,” he said. “We didn’t get as much advance sale as we wanted, and people sure won’t be coming into town in weather like this.” Which was all true, but left Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles stranded in the middle of Maine with not a gig in sight.
XVIII
When flights to Los Angeles finally resumed, Marcus Wilson gave Bryce a ride from Lincoln to Omaha. “Thanks for everything,” Bryce said when they pulled up in front of the terminal. “I don’t know what I would have done without everybody from the department here.”
“Hey, man, after what you went through, I don’t know if I’d ever have the nerve to get on another plane again as long as I live,” the other grad student answered.
“If I’m gonna get home, I’ve gotta fly,” Bryce said. That wasn’t exactly true. I-10 was open, and some ordinary travel was allowed on it-but not much. It was the lifeline between Socal and points east, and most of the traffic was trucks. Passenger rail service had been cut off altogether. It was all freight all the time as far as the railroads were concerned.
He got out and strapped on his backpack. All his meager stuff fit in it. No need to pay the thieving airlines for the great privilege of checking a bag. Since he had a boarding pass, he headed straight for security. Getting through was a breeze-all the more so when you were used to dealing with LAX and O’Hare. Close to 400,000 people lived in Omaha, which made it a city of decent size, but you’d never mistake it for Chicago.
His gate had a big TV screen hanging down from the ceiling. Like most airport TVs, it was tuned to CNN Headline News. Bryce usually turned his back on the goddamn things-was there no place you could escape them? But the headline below the pretty girl who read the teleprompter made his eyes snap back, even if she
didn’t: NUCLEAR STRIKES ON TEL AVIV, TEHRAN.
“Oh, fuck,” he said, and then looked around to see if anybody’d heard him. No one was giving him an offended look, anyhow. He would have bet he wasn’t the only one here who’d come out with something like that. When you saw a headline with NUCLEAR STRIKES in it, what else could you say?
The screen cut away from the pretty announcer to show slagged ruins. “Loss of life in the Israeli coastal city is believed to be extremely heavy,” said acorrespondent with an English accent. “The Prime Minister has vowed an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
Bryce expected footage of devastated Tehran to follow hard on the heels of that biblical threat. Instead, the attractive newsreader came back on. “This just in,” she said breathlessly. “A flash of quote sunlike light unquote has appeared over the Iranian holy city of Qom, and communications with Qom seem to have been lost. It is not known whether the Grand Ayatollah-the real powerholder in Iran-was in Qom when it was struck.”
The woman who’d stopped next to Bryce to watch the news crossed herself. That was more elegant and restrained than cussing. Whether the sentiment it expressed was so very different might be another question.
“With us now is retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Cullenbine, our military analyst,” the pretty newswoman said. “Colonel Cullenbine, what is America’s likely response to this double tragedy in the Middle East?”
Randolph Cullenbine wasn’t pretty. He looked like, well, a retired Marine officer: short-haired, blunt- featured, wide-shouldered, tough. He talked like a TV guy, though: “It seems probable that Iran was trying to take advantage of the USA’s perceived weakness. We’ve had the middle of the country badly degraded, and the launch sites of many of our land-based ICBMs are currently unusable due to ash and lava laid down by the supervolcano.”
“Huh!” Bryce said, and he wasn’t the only one in the boarding area to make some kind of surprised noise. He hadn’t worried about where Uncle Sam parked his missiles. Uncle Sam hadn’t, either. Maybe he should have.
“But we still have our missile-carrying submarines and our manned bombers, right?” the newswoman asked.
“Oh, absolutely.” Cullenbine nodded. “We aren’t defenseless, no matter what the ayatollahs may believe. And neither are the Israelis. These were their strikes, not ours. I have multiple sources confirming that.”
“What’s… likely to come next?” The newswoman asked the question as if she feared the answer-and well she might.
“I don’t know, Kathleen. Right now, the only people who do know are whoever’s in charge in Iran and the Israeli Prime Minister.” The military analyst sounded thoroughly grim, which made more sense than most of what you saw on TV these days. “It depends on how many missiles the Iranians have left, and on whether they feel like using them. And it depends on how massive a retaliation the Israelis intend to take. They have enough bombs to destroy most if not all of Iran’s major cities. That would put the death toll in the millions, if not the tens of millions.”
“Thank you,” the pretty newswoman said, in about the tone you’d use to thank a dentist after a root canal. “Do you think this would have happened if the supervolcano hadn’t erupted?”
“Not a chance,” Lieutenant Colonel Cullenbine replied at once. “The perceived weakness”-he liked that phrase-“of the United States after the disaster had to be what galvanized the Iranians into motion.” He bared his teeth in what wasn’t quite a smile. “They forgot that Israel was plenty able to take care of itself. But we may have to look for other trouble spots coming to the boil, too, and we won’t be able to do as much about them as we might have before we landed in so much trouble of our own.”
They started boarding then. When his group got called, Bryce turned away from the TV and walked to the jetway. Along with the rest of the paying sheep, he filed aboard the airliner. He tried not to think about what had happened the last time he flew. Trying not to think of a green monkey after somebody talked about one would have been easier. He didn’t expect to end up in a lake again. Ending up dead… That, he worried about.
Takeoff was smooth enough. The pilot came on the intercom to say, “We’ll be using a southerly route to get to Los Angeles today. There’s no report of any unusual activity from the supervolcano caldera, but we’ll give it an extra-wide berth anyhow. We expect to arrive at LAX on time-maybe even fifteen minutes early if the headwinds cooperate. So relax and enjoy the flight.”
Bryce wondered if he’d ever enjoy a flight again. Right this minute, he would have bet against it. He had a window seat. Before long, he started seeing signs of the eruption. Despite rain and snow, gray volcanic ash still dulled broad swaths of landscape. Things wouldn’t have been very green at this season in any year. Less so now, and that got truer as they flew farther west.
Even the Rockies looked like gray ghosts of their old selves: not nearly so rocky as they should have. Up right by the eruption, where lava and ash and sludge or whatever the hell they called it lay hundreds of feet thick, they would, given enough centuries, turn into more rock. Down here, they just made a godawful mess of hundreds of thousands of square miles.
A southerly route, the pilot had said. Presumably, that took the plane well south of whatever was left of Denver. Buildings-not a lot of people, not any more. Vanessa had made it out of town before things got as bad as they could get. Bryce had heard that from Susan, who’d heard it from Colin. For quite a while, Susan had been weirded out because Bryce stayed friends with his ex’s dad. For all Bryce knew, she still was. But she’d decided it didn’t threaten her, so she didn’t worry about it out loud any more.
Bryce was glad he knew Vanessa was alive. That she’d dropped him like a live grenade wasn’t enough to wish on her the kind of end those 12,000,000-year-old rhinos on display in Lincoln had got. Marie’s disease… Bryce’s mouth twisted. Before the supervolcano, not one person in a million had ever heard of it. He knew damn well he hadn’t.
