Supervolcano: Eruption (7 page)

Read Supervolcano: Eruption Online

Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Supervolcano: Eruption
11.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Yeah,” Colin said tightly. “Marshall visits sometimes. His room still has his junk in it. The rest . . . It’s mine, all right, such as it is.”
Kelly caught the edge in his voice. “Sorry. I’ve got foot-in-mouth disease.”
“Don’t worry about it. If I didn’t have this place all to myself, I wouldn’t have pried your phone number out of you when we started talking there by the lake, and I’m darn glad I did.” He set a hand on her shoulder.
She moved closer to him. “Me, too.” She looked around some more. “Everything is so neat. Books, DVDs, CDs—they’re all where they belong. I have to paw through piles of trash to find anything.”
“Navy hangover,” he said with a shrug. “Want something wet?”
“A beer, I think. But give me the tour first.”
“Okay. You’ve got to remember, most of the stuff on the tables and the shelves and all is Louise’s taste.” That taste ran to sad-faced icons, enamelware boxes, and figurines that nested one inside another. Colin didn’t know why his ex had wanted to make the place look like a cheap imitation of the Hermitage, but she had. Thinking back on it, some of the pieces hadn’t been so cheap. Way too late to worry about it now.
“Well, Russian art is something different, anyway,” Kelly said diplomatically.
One upstairs bedroom had a closed door with yellow tape reading POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS! running from the top left corner to the bottom right. “Marshall’s,” Colin said dryly.
“Duh!” Kelly winked at him.
Colin’s study was next door, with his computer and more bookshelves. It looked out on the backyard. Some wet sparrows and mourning doves pecked seed from a tray feeder.
“I like this,” Kelly said. “It feels like you.”
“No saints on the wall here,” Colin replied, which might have been agreement. He also had a work niche in the master bedroom, the next stop. He’d been using it more since he didn’t need to worry about waking up Louise by turning on a light at odd hours. Kelly didn’t seem to care about that. She was looking at the bed. Colin needed no grad school to work out why. “If it bothers you, there’s still a bed in what used to be Vanessa’s room. All the bedclothes are new since—well, since. Same old mattress, though.”
She thought about it for a few seconds. Then she said, “That should be okay. Now what about that beer?”
They went downstairs. The kitchen was also humongous, at least if you listened to Kelly. As Colin poured a couple of Sierra Nevada Pale Ales (he’d drunk Bud, but going with Kelly had opened his eyes to the notion of good beer), he said, “I know why you say that all the time.”
“Say what all the time?”
“Humongous. It’s what you guys call the top end of eruptions. A real technical term, like perpetrator or something.”
“You’ve been reading books again.” Kelly sounded amused and accusing at the same time.
“Guilty. I didn’t know it wasn’t in the rules.” Colin raised his glass. The pale ale was several shades darker than Bud, which was, now that he thought about it, the color of piss. This brew had real ingredients in it. “Here’s to us.” They solemnly clinked, then drank. The pale ale had real flavor in it, too. A damn shame it cost as if it did.
“To us.” Kelly glanced around the kitchen, which was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house. “I still get nervous saying that.”
“How come?” Alarm bells jangled in Colin’s mind. He was pretty sure he’d found a good one, a keeper. Was she having doubts she’d found one? If she was . . . idn’t know what he’d do if she was.
“Because people who go through divorces are usually crazy for a couple of years afterwards,” she answered seriously. “God knows I’ve watched enough grad-school marriages explode.”
God knew Colin had watched enough cops’ marriages explode, including Gabe Sanchez’s and his own. If you were crazy, did you know you were crazy? If you knew you were crazy, did that mean you weren’t really crazy after all or only that you couldn’t do anything about it? A DA would argue one way, a defense attorney the other.
He’d seen people do some pretty nutso things after their marriages crashed and burned—no two ways about that. He’d seen guys date women and women hook up with guys they never would have looked at twice if they were in their right minds. Most of them regretted it soon enough. One or two made it work. He’d also seen one guy smash his truck and end up in a wheelchair with gazillions in medical and legal bills because he hopped in while he was drowning his sorrows. And one pretty good cop had got buried in a closed coffin because not even a mortician could make him presentable after he ate his gun.
Suicide scared cops shitless, not least because it sometimes seemed contagious. If one guy did himself in, it could happen that a couple of weeks later someone else, someone nobody’d thought had any big troubles, also took the long road out. Spooky.
Colin didn’t want to feel spooky right now, which was putting it mildly. Kelly hadn’t flown down from the East Bay to make him feel spooky. He hoped like hell she hadn’t, anyhow. He put his hand on her shoulder again. She smiled and moved closer to him, the way she had before. That eased his mind.
“So how’s the supervolcano doing?” he asked casually.
Her smile winked out like a blown candle flame. Maybe
he’d
spooked
her
. “My chairman doesn’t like what it’s doing,” she said, the way Colin might have said
The chief wouldn’t like that
. She went on, “And I
really
don’t like what it’s doing.”
“I’ve seen stuff in the papers,” he said, nodding. “More quakes over 5.0, the geysers’ schedules all fouled up . . .”
“Yeah, the tourists get upset when Old Faithful doesn’t go off right on time.” Kelly didn’t bother hiding her scorn. “But that’s only part of what I mean—the part that makes the papers and sometimes even the TV news. The worst things don’t. They only show up in surveyors’ records and satellite radar readings.”
“How do you mean?” Colin asked.
“The magma domes are bulging. Pushing up. Especially the new one, the one under Coffee Pot Springs,” Kelly said. “Moving up by feet where they moved by inches even just a couple of years ago.”
That led to the obvious question, so Colin came out with it: “Is it getting ready to blow, then?”
“Nobody knows. We’ve never observed a supervolcano eruption before, so how can we tell for sure what we’ve got?” The way Kelly knocked back a big gulp of beer said she sure didn’t like what they had. “Something’s going to happen, though. Maybe it’ll go back down again. It could. Maybe there’ll be ordinary volcanic eruptions. We haven’t had any for seventy thousand years, give or take, and they might relieve the pressure. Or maybe you can drop Rhode Island half a mile straight down.”
“Your chairman will know people—people in the government, I meanolin said slowly. “So will the other scientists who study this thing. Are they jumping up and down, trying to make the Feds pay attention in case Yellowstone does go kaboom? There ought to be . . . contingency plans, they call ’em in the service.”
“I know the geologists are talking to people in the Interior Department,” Kelly answered. “And I know they’re having trouble getting anybody to listen to them. It’s a—” She broke off, groping for the word. “A question of scale, I guess you’d say.”
She paused again, plainly wondering if she’d have to explain. She didn’t. “The South Bay Strangler’s murdered fifteen little old ladies now. That’s a story. People understand it. It gets splashed all over CNN Headline News,” Colin said, his voice thick with disgust. “But what Hitler did, and Stalin, and Mao—you can’t take in numbers like that and what they mean. A good thing, too. Anybody who could
feel
all those millions of murders would have to go nuts, wouldn’t he?”
“You’d hope so,” Kelly said.
“Uh-huh. You would,” Colin agreed. “So the Interior Department guys can’t wrap their heads around the supervolcano?”
“Not even close,” Kelly said. “They see the studies, and they go, ‘It can’t be this bad.’ And what our people give them is always cautious and careful and conservative. Even that’s enough to make them not take it in. Or they say, ‘If it really does what you say it’ll do, what’s the point of planning for it? It’s too big.’ ”
“Bend over and kiss your behind good-bye.” Colin wasn’t quite old enough to remember drop-and-cover drills in school, but he knew plenty of people who were.
“Yeah. Like that. Except the supervolcano is so much bigger than an H-bomb, it’s not even funny,” Kelly said.
“It isn’t radioactive,” Colin pointed out. “No fallout.”
“Well, no,” she allowed. “Not like you mean. But it would put so much ash in the air. . . .” She laughed, shakily. “We sure have cheerful things to talk about, don’t we? Stranglers and supervolcanoes. Oh, my!”
“They’re what we do. And it’s better than not talking,” Colin said. After the kids got out of the house, he and Louise had hardly said anything to each other for days at a time. She didn’t care about policework. She’d cared that he hadn’t been chosen chief, but that was because she’d lost face through his failure. And he hadn’t worried about how she got through her days. With any brains in his head, he would have noticed that that was a bad sign. Aerobics class? Hey, why not?
Kelly held up her empty glass. “I think I could use a refill.”
Colin’s glass was empty, too. He didn’t recall finishing the beer, but if he hadn’t a drunk pixie was hiding in one of the cabinets. “Motion seconded and passed by acclamation,” he said, and opened the fridge.
She gave him a quizzical look. “You talk funny sometimes, you know?”
“Too many City Council meetings. They’d make a penguin go jogging in the Mojave, honest to God they would.”
Kelly snorted. “You
do
talk funny.”
He’d heard that before from his fellow cops. He’d also got dressed down by his superiors for writing reports in English rather than police jargon.
Jesus! No wonder I never made chief
, he thought.
If anybody ever came out and just d what goes on in a cop shop, they’d ride him out of town on a rail. They’d have to
.
Some of his bitterness at getting passed over went away. The administrative part of the job would have been a piece of cake. Knowing which asses to kiss and when, on the other hand . . . Even if he’d tried, he would have made a hash of it. A police chief had to be a pol, too, and that just wasn’t part of his makeup.
The second beers vanished faster than the first ones had. “What do you want to do now?” Colin asked.
“Could I take a shower?” Kelly said. “You go through the airport and you sit on a plane, you feel all grubby even if the flight only lasts an hour. And after that, well, who knows?” She grinned at him.
“Sounds better than anything else I can think of,” Colin said.
She came out of the bathroom off the master bedroom naked. Colin lay on the bed waiting for her. She grinned again. “Oh, good,” she said. “You turned up the heat.”
“We aren’t wearing clothes. No insulation,” he said gravely. And he knew damn well that any woman ever born would shiver at temperatures he thought fine. He had no idea why things worked like that, but they did.
She got down beside him. It felt a little strange, a little awkward—the more so for him because it was their first time here, in this bedroom full of memories. He’d gone up to Berkeley a few times before, but they were still learning what floated whose boat. With Louise, after all those years, he’d known.
Or he’d thought so. If he were as smart as that, how come she’d bailed on him? If people generally were as smart as they thought they were, they’d be a hell of a lot smarter than they really were. Cops learned that fast. Most crooks—not all, but most—were crooks because they were dopes.
All of which went through his head in odd moments when he wasn’t otherwise distracted. Before long, he stopped having moments like that. Much too soon, or so it seemed, he lay on his back, holding an imaginary cigarette between his first two fingers and blowing an imaginary plume of smoke up toward the cottage-cheese ceiling.
She laughed. The rain tapped softly at the roof. Then, suddenly, there was a much bigger noise up there—something alive running from one side of the house to the other. “What the devil was that?” Kelly said.
“Squirrel,” Colin answered. “Just a rat with a pretty tail. You can hear crows up there too sometimes. Wildlife.” He made a face. “Not like Yellowstone, even if we do get coons and coyotes and skunks every once in a while. Possums, too.”
“Yeah, we have possums in Berkeley,” Kelly said. “A guy I dated a few times—grad student in biology—called ’em junk mammals.”
“Pretty good name,” Colin said, and let it go right there. Of course she’d gone with guys before him. He didn’t want to know all the gory details. He snooped for a living. He didn’t care to do it on his own time. The way she relaxed beside him, just a little, showed he’d passed one more test.
Was he going to stay crazy for another year and then some? If he was, present company seemed pretty good. He started to tell her so. Before the words came out, he noticed her eyelids had slid shut. He lay there quietly. In a few minutes, her breathing said she’d fallen asleep. He sometimes thought sleeping—really sleeping—with someone was more intimate, more trusting, than merely going to bed.

Other books

Inconceivable! by Tegan Wren
Surrender by Violetta Rand
All in a Don's Day by Mary Beard
Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman
elemental 01 - whirlwind by ladd, larissa
The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass