Since the eruption, though, everybody knew its name. It was on the news all the time, sometimes called HPO because no one but a medical specialist wanted to come out with hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy if he could help it. It had sickened and killed thousands in Denver and Salt Lake City and Topeka and Pocatello and Saskatoon and all the places in between.
So far as anybody knew, it was incurable. There were cries for research, for treatment. In normal times, the Feds and private foundations would have thrown money at it till it yielded up its secrets. Bryce supposed some research on it was going on. But with untold millions of refugees, with the country’s economy shot to hell, with hideous crop failures, with the prospect of years if not decades or centuries of frigid weather, even Marie’s disease had to stand in line and wait.
Flight attendants came down the aisle flogging their overpriced boxes of what was allegedly good. Bryce hadn’t bought anything in the airport, the way he usually did: he hated giving the airlines money for stuff that shouldn’t have rated a fee.
He didn’t pay them this time. Rubbery cheese on what the stewardess kept calling artisan bread (why did they grind artisans into flour?) was less than appealing. He’d be hungry when he got back to L.A., but he wouldn’t starve.
Then he said, “Urk!” The guy in the aisle seat gave him a funny look. Bryce didn’t care; Urk! was exactly what he meant. His car had been sitting in one of the satellite parking lots at LAX since he headed for Chicago before the supervolcano blew. The battery was bound to be dead by now. And, at twelve bucks a day, he’d have to come up with several hundred dollars to get it out of hock.
In a rational, reasonable world, he would have been able to talk to some parking honcho, explain how he was lucky to be alive and even luckier to be back in California, and let people know he hadn’t meant to leave his car in the lot so long. The honcho would have nodded and forgiven his fee, except for the part he would have paid had he come home on time.
The words rational and reasonable did not go along with the acronym LAX. They never had. Odds were they never would. The airport was as dedicated to separating the people who used it from their cash as the airlines were themselves. That was saying something-something filthy. Bryce resigned himself to forking over the dough.
He wouldn’t even try to take care of that today. All he wanted to do was get back to his apartment-oh, and jump on Susan once he did. The car would wait another day or two. The bill would get correspondingly bigger, but WTF.
Everything the airliner flew over now seemed to be the same shade of grayish brown-everything, for hundreds and hundreds of miles. No doubt the depth of the ash varied, but Jesus God there was a lot of it! And the sunlight that shone on it seemed weak, almost consumptive. Bryce had wondered if getting seven miles up in the air would make the light look more the way it had in pre-eruption days.
Nope. A nice thought, but no. And that made sense, when you worked it through. If the supervolcano had blasted particulate matter twenty or twenty-five miles up into the stratosphere, a mere seven wouldn’t make much difference.
When the engines’ roar changed pitch, Bryce tensed. He feared he’d be a nervous flier the rest of his days. “We’re beginning our descent into the Los Angeles metropolitan area,” the pilot announced, and he relaxed… some. “We will be landing about ten minutes ahead of schedule.”
Coming in to LAX from the east, you flew over built-up country for about fifteen minutes. At jetliner speeds, that translated into a lot of miles and a hell of a lot of metropolitan area. Bryce didn’t know of any other flying approach even remotely like it.
Lawns here were green. That jolted him with its novelty. For one thing, the ashfall in Southern California hadn’t been bad enough to kill off the grass before rain could wash the ash away. For another, they hadn’t had any freezes. From what Susan told him, the weather was colder than usual, but not that much colder.
Not yet.
The last thing an airliner did before touching down on the runway was to fly low across the 405: almost low enough to look out the window and read the cars’ license-plate numbers as they zoomed by. If they zoomed by. If the San Diego Freeway had coagulated, as it so often did, you could probably tell whether a driver’s fingerprints were whorls or loops.
A bump-not a very big one-and they were down. Bryce let out a long, slow sigh. He’d spent a lot of time wondering if he’d ever make it back. A few minutes of that had been sheer terror, wondering whether he’d stay alive longer than those few minutes. The rest was on a rather lower key, but no less sincere even so.
“Please remain seated with your seat belts securely fastened,” a flight attendant droned. “You may now use your cell phones and other approved electronic devices.”
Passengers were already doing it. Did the airlines really believe people didn’t know the ropes? Bryce didn’t think it was about controlling the occasional moron. More on the order of dotting i’s and crossing t’s. This way, if anything did go wrong, some corporate lawyer could truthfully testify it hadn’t gone wrong because the airline failed to make the proper offerings to the gods-uh, failed to deliver the appropriate warnings.
Since they were early, he made his own call to be sure Susan had got there. “Hi, sweetie!” she said. “Yeah, I’m down in baggage claim. Can’t wait to see you!”
“Boy, does that work both ways,” he answered. “We’re coming to the gate now, so it’ll only be a few more minutes.”
It took longer than that. His seat was well back of the wing. Everybody in front of him seemed to need to wrestle a carry-on the size of a well-fed Nebraska porker out of the overstrained overhead luggage bins. Airlines hadn’t intended that to happen when they started charging for checked baggage, but it did.
At last, he escaped the plane. A stewardess’ insincere “Thank you” seemed a fitting sendoff for what got more unpleasant every time he did it. But the whole crew had worked wonders when his last flight had to go into Branch Oak Lake. Remembering how nasty air travel was these days, he also needed to remember that.
He trudged past shops and restaurants and other gates. They gave you every chance to part with your money, all right. Bryce bought a 3 Musketeers and inhaled chocolate and nougat. His steps got bouncier as soon as he did. Blood sugar was a good thing, yes indeed. Now he’d last till he could get outside of some real food.
Down the escalator. Past one baggage carousel after another, some still, others spinning, all of them made from articulated bits of armor plate as elaborate as Henry VIII’s steel suit. There was his flight number, up in glowing red above a carousel that had just started to move. There was Susan. She saw him at the same time as he spotted her. Jesus, she looked good! He hurried toward her.
Then he saw his mother standing behind Susan. Barbara Miller was easy not to notice. She was short and plain, with mouse-brown hair going gray these past few years. She had on her usual outfit: trainers (she still called them tennis shoes), track-pants, and a polyester top. She’d taken off a cotton sweater and draped it over her arm.
Bryce hugged her, too. “Hi, Mom,” he said. Then he said it again, when he saw her eyes on his mouth. Her hearing was starting to go, though she was too vain to admit it. He loved her without taking her seriously. He’d outgrown her by the time he turned sixteen. What could you do?
“Susan sent me an e-mail and asked if I wanted to come along to pick you up, so I said sure,” she told him.
“That’s great, Mom.” He lied without worrying about it. “Good to see you.”
“Good to see you,” she said after he repeated himself again. “I was so worried! Such a terrible thing!” She was inventing emotions after the fact. She couldn’t have known he was airborne while the supervolcano erupted till after it happened. Well, people did such things all the time. Then she added, “Your father would have been proud of you for being so brave.”
His father had died when he was twelve. Maybe Colin Ferguson filled some of the hole that left in his life. Maybe that was why Bryce had stayed close to him after Vanessa said bye-bye. He could worry about such things later, though, if he bothered. For now… “Brave? There wasn’t any time to be brave. We got out as fast as we could and we floated in the lake till the boats got us.”
“You’re too modest. You’re always too modest. Listen, I made a chicken last night. The prices these days! It’s robbery, I tell you! But I’ve got almost a whole bird left over. If you and Susan want to stop in when you drop me off, you could have something to eat. There’s potatoes, too, and a Black Forest cake from Ralphs.”
Bryce raised an eyebrow at Susan. She threw the ball right back to him: “Whatever you want is fine with
