Supervolcano: Eruption (43 page)
Read Supervolcano: Eruption Online
Authors: Harry Turtledove
XVIII
W
hen flights to Los Angeles finally resumed, Marcus Wilson gave Bryce a ride from Lincoln to Omaha. “Thanks for everything,” Bryce said when they pull
ed up in front of the terminal. “I don’t know what I would have done without everybody from the department here.”
hen flights to Los Angeles finally resumed, Marcus Wilson gave Bryce a ride from Lincoln to Omaha. “Thanks for everything,” Bryce said when they pull
ed 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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