Supervolcano: All Fall Down

V

“I’ve got a job for you, Colin,” Mike Pitcavage said. He didn’t look like a police chief. He looked like a national news anchor, or maybe a Senator who was thinking about running for President. He was tall and fit and tan, with a full head of iron-gray hair. He wore custom-made Italian suits, not the off-the-rack stuff most cops-Colin included-put on every day.

Colin didn’t even particularly resent him for winning the chief’s job, though he’d put in for it himself. Pitcavage could make nice, a talent Colin knew he lacked. You could get by as a lieutenant if people saw what you really thought of them. When you had to deal with the mayor and the city council all the damn time, that didn’t fly any more.

“What’s up?” he asked, looking across the desk at Pitcavage.

The desk was about the size of an aircraft-carrier flight deck. It was almost entirely bare. The only things on it were two framed photographs, one of Pitcavage’s wife, the other of his son. Caroline was a nice gal. She wasn’t a trophy wife or anything; they’d been married a long time. Colin’s opinion of Darren Pitcavage was rather lower. If he weren’t a prominent cop’s kid. .

But he was, so the drunk-driving charge quietly got reduced to speeding. That fight in the bar? People said the other guy threw the first punch. There’d been something that had to do with vandalism, too, but that also didn’t stick. Darren was even better-looking than his old man, but his eyes didn’t seem to want to meet the camera.

Mike Pitcavage opened a desk drawer, took out a piece of paper, and slid it across the desk at Colin. “We’ve got a big oil tanker coming into San Pedro next week,” he said. “The crude will go to the refineries in El Segundo. All the impacted departments will participate in security arrangements. I want you to take leadership in San Atanasio.”

Before Colin said anything, he took a long look at the paper. Then he clicked his tongue between his teeth. “So this oil is for South Bay police departments? How’d we manage that?”

“We managed, with some help from the politicians. Trust me-you don’t want to know the gory details,” Pitcavage answered.

Colin believed him. The world seemed to get dog-eat-doggier every day. With more and more people grabbing for less and less, where was the surprise in that? “San Pedro’s part of Los Angeles. I don’t see the LAPD mentioned here anywhere.”

“No, and you won’t, either.” The San Atanasio police chief looked sly.

“Huh,” Colin said. A narrow strip of territory-part of it ran just east of San Atanasio-connected San Pedro to the rest of L.A. The port helped make Los Angeles a great city; it had for more than a hundred years. “So, are we going to have to protect this crude from the L.A. cops, then?”

“They aren’t supposed to know about the tanker,” Pitcavage said.

“And then you wake up!” Colin exclaimed. The chief looked blank. Colin put it in words of one syllable: “What are the odds of that?”

“We’ve made the necessary arrangements,” Pitcavage insisted. How many bureaucrats had been persuaded to look the other way and keep their mouths shut? How much had it cost?

“If LAPD does find out, we’re liable to have a war on our hands.” Colin meant it literally. The To protect and to serve boys were as hard up for gasoline as anybody else. If they found out this big shipment was coming into their port, under their noses, and all earmarked for other people, there’d be stereophonic hell to pay.

“Well, that’s one of the reasons I want you in charge of our part of the security,” Chief Pitcavage answered. “You’ve got the military experience we need.”

To Colin’s way of thinking, a hitch in the Navy didn’t exactly equate him to General Patton (although one might work wonders for Darren Pitcavage). He could see that saying so would do him less than no good, though. Swallowing a sigh, he asked, “This takes priority over. .?”

“Everything,” Pitcavage said flatly.

“Including the Strangler case?”

“Everything includes everything,” the chief said. “If we don’t get our hands on this gas, pretty soon we’ll we chasing the damn Strangler on skateboards and scooters.”

It wasn’t that bad. Colin knew it, and Pitcavage had to know it, too. Civilians could still buy-some-gas. But the price went up every day. The supervolcano had wrecked refineries and pipelines. The spasmodic nuclear war in the Middle East had knocked production over the head. If the South Bay towns had to pay anything close to retail for the fuel their cops used, they wouldn’t be able to do much else. Thus-Colin supposed-this skulduggery.

“Well, I’ll do it,” he said: the only possible reply. “And I’ll make damn sure I’ve got Gabe Sanchez right beside me.”

“However you want it.” Something in Pitcavage’s voice told Colin he’d just lost points with the chief. Gabe was too. . too unpolished, that was the polite word, to stand high on Mike Pitcavage’s gold-star list. Gabe didn’t worry about it; he loved his capo di tutti capi, too. Colin didn’t worry about it, either. If Pitcavage needed him so bad, he’d have to live with Gabe. And he evidently did.

Something else occurred to Colin: “Whatever we’ve bought the SWAT team in the way of heavy weapons, I want that, too.”

The chief frowned, plainly trying to remember. “I know we’ve got some military rifles that’ll fire full auto. We may have a real machine gun. If we do, nobody’s taken it out of storage except maybe to clean it for a hell of a long time.”

Colin nodded; he also couldn’t remember the San Atanasio PD hauling out a machine gun. God, the paperwork that would have taken! But, as the man said, the times, they were a-changin’. No, they’d a-changed.

“Let me have the Door-Knocker, too,” he said. “I’ll lead the parade with it.”

“There you go!” He actually made Pitcavage grin. “You got it.” The Door-Knocker was a Ford Explorer armored against small-arms fire, with a ram sticking out from the front of the hood and with vision slits and firing slits for the cops inside. A do-it-yourself armored car, in other words. It was ugly as sin, but terrific for smashing down barricaded entryways to crack houses, meth labs, and lots of other places where the bad guys really didn’t want company.

“Okay,” Colin said, anything but sure if it was. “Let me get my people together, and I’ll see what kind of toys we have in the playroom. When does this tanker get in?”

“Next Tuesday,” the chief answered. “Our convoy of trucks will exit the 110 at Braxton Bragg Boulevard. You’ll meet them at the exit ramp and escort them west through the city before handing off to the Hawthorne PD.”

“Right.” Colin had to hope it would be. His opinion of the neighboring department was not high. Hawthorne was full of gangbangers, and its cops were chronically underfunded. “I’m worrying about the LAPD, but they’ll have to make sure the Crips don’t hijack our crude.”

“Lord knows the Crips get into all kinds of shit, but I don’t think they have a rogue refinery.” Pitcavage grinned to show he’d made a joke.

He thought he had, anyhow. The Crips wouldn’t have to turn the crude into gas and motor oil to get value for it. All they’d have to do was steal it and threaten to light a match. How big a ransom could they squeeze out of people if they did that? Big. Big, big, big. Colin could see as much. Could Mike Pitcavage? It didn’t seem so. He might be able to make nice, but he had all the imagination of a cherrystone clam.

Well, when he wore a uniform instead of Giorgio Armani, he had the row of stars on either side of his collar. He knew where to find a guy with imagination, and knew how to give him orders. Which he’d gone and done.

“I’ll get on it,” Colin said.

The first thing he did, of course, was tell Gabe Sanchez. The sergeant pursed his lips and blew out through them. It might have been a whistle without sound or an exhalation without a cigarette. “We’ve got the fix in good, huh?” he said when Colin finished.

“Sure sounds that way.” After a meditative moment, Colin added, “We’d damn well better.”

“Boy, you can sing that in church!” Gabe agreed. “The LAPD doesn’t know thing one about it, huh?”

“Not Thing One, and not Thing Two, either.” How many times had Colin read his kids The Cat in the Hat? A zillion, at least. “That’s what the heap big boss says, anyway.”

“Could get interesting if he’s wrong,” Sanchez observed.

“That also crossed my mind, as a matter of fact. I have the feeling it crossed Mike’s mind, too. Which is why we meet the tanker trucks loaded for bear.”

“Yeah!” Gabe sounded enthusiastic. He might have rough edges, but he didn’t know how to back up. “Wonder what an LAPD squad car’d look like after it ran into the Door-Knocker.” By the way he said it, he couldn’t wait to find out.

“Mm, the idea is for the Door-Knocker to run into stuff, not the other way around,” Colin reminded him.

“Details, details.” Gabe waved that aside. “Can’t wait to see the L.A. cops’ faces when they find out we’ve got the goods and they don’t.”

“If everything works right, they won’t find out,” Colin said. Gabe shrugged, as if to note that everything never worked right.

Tuesday dawned chilly and rainy, as too many days in San Atanasio had since the eruption. If this was what Seattle had been like before the supervolcano went off, all the Californicators who’d moved to the Northwest got what they deserved. Only now SoCal was getting it, too.

Rain or no rain, Colin and his armed party took their stations on the Braxton Bragg Boulevard overpass to the Harbor Freeway, waiting for the precious petroleum convoy to come up from the south. Gabe Sanchez stood by the rail, the hood to his plastic poncho shielding his face well enough to let him smoke. Colin had his own share of bad habits and then some. He didn’t know how he’d missed tobacco, but he had.

Watching Gabe crush one cigarette under his shoe and then light another, he wondered what would have happened if people had discovered the filthy weed about 1950 instead of way the hell back when. He didn’t need to wonder long. He was convinced governments all over the world would have outlawed it as a dangerous, addictive drug. And, no doubt, bad guys would be growing it on secret farms right this minute and making stacks of illegal cash off it. There’d be books and earnest, concerned TV movies and obscene hip-hop records glorifying the cigar dealer. .

He shook his head. Gabe saw the motion. “What’s up?” he asked, breathing out smoke.

“Nothing.” Colin’s speculation left him faintly embarrassed. Gabe would only guffaw. “Just woolgathering.”

Before Gabe could come up with any more blush-worthy questions, a uniformed cop called, “Won’t be long now. They’re moving past the Goodyear Blimp’s mooring mast. Five, ten minutes.”

“Gotcha, Jimmy,” Colin said. “Tell ’em we’re ready and waiting as soon as they get off the freeway.” He walked over to another black-and-white and asked the man inside, “Anything interesting going on on the LAPD frequencies?” Monitoring the enemy was always a good idea when you were at war.

The San Atanasio policeman wore headphones to help him monitor the radio without interference from the freeway’s unending whoosh and roar. Colin had to repeat his question, louder the second time. Then the fellow answered, “Everything seems pretty quiet. Maybe the fix really is in.”

“Here’s hoping.” Colin still had trouble believing it. He turned east, toward the offramp the fuel trucks would use. A couple of minutes later, a Torrance police car-part of the advance guard, no doubt-pulled off. The cops inside waved when they saw the waiting San Atanasio police officers. Colin waved back.

“Uh-oh!” exclaimed the cop monitoring LAPD radio traffic. “Cars on the way to Braxton Bragg Boulevard and the 110.”

Which was where they were. And the entrance to the southbound freeway was west of the one coming up from San Pedro. They could block the tanker trucks if they got here soon enough. The freeway ran through the L.A. strip, too-the LAPD had all the jurisdiction here it needed.

Here came the first precious tanker. And here, sirens screaming and light bars blazing, came three LAPD police cars. Sure as hell, they positioned themselves to block the westbound lanes of Braxton Bragg Boulevard. Uniformed men with riot guns piled out of them.

“Get out of the way!” Colin yelled.

“Like hell we will!” an LAPD man yelled back, hefting his shotgun.

“Sonny, we will fucking bury you if you don’t get out of the way right now,” Colin assured him, waving toward the Door-Knocker. As if on cue, the machine gun they’d found in storage and mounted on it swung to cover the LAPD man, who wasn’t wearing a helmet. His bulletproof vest might stop a rifle-caliber round, but might wasn’t something you really wanted to test.

“You wouldn’t dare.” The Los Angeles cop’s voice wobbled; he wasn’t altogether convinced they wouldn’t.

Colin was convinced he would. A police force couldn’t function without fuel-Mike Pitcavage was dead right about that. Horses and bikes and shoe leather didn’t cut it, not in L.A. County, they didn’t. “This is our oil. We’ll do whatever we need to do to keep it,” he answered. The fuel trucks were piling up on the offramp. The LAPD guys would already be screaming for their SWAT team and other reinforcements. “Get out of the way. Last warning! We’ll clear you out if you don’t.”

About then, the LAPD officer noticed that the San Atanasio cops were toting M16s, not shotguns. Colin waved to the Door-Knocker again. It rumbled forward with intent to squash.

“You people are fucking insane!” the L.A. cop bleated.

“Yeah? And so?” Colin answered.

The LAPD guy called him something that would have made a CPO with twenty-five years in the Navy blanch. With far less time in the service, Colin only laughed. On came the Door-Knocker, inexorable as fate. Still swearing a very blue streak, the LAPD cop dove back into his squad car and got it out of the way just before the Door-Knocker did the job for him.

As the other LAPD black-and-whites also opened a lane so the fuel trucks could go west, young man, Colin posted armed San Atanasio officers on the southbound offramp from the 110 to Braxton Bragg Boulevard. “Make ’em run over you if they want to get past you,” he told his troops-that was how he thought of them. “And if they look like they want to run over you, shoot first. Got it?”

“Got it!” the San Atanasio cops roared in testosterone-fueled unison. Colin hadn’t taken any female officers on this particular run. He wanted the headstrong craziness that could only come with a pair of balls.

It was maybe half a mile, maybe a little less, from the freeway to New Hampshire Avenue, where the L.A. strip ended and San Atanasio’s jurisdiction actually began. One by one, the fuel trucks followed the Door-Knocker through the gap. San Atanasio cop cars went through, too. They looked a lot like LAPD cars, but the guys inside them were grinning. The Los Angeles policemen ran the gamut from glum to homicidal.

San Atanasio police cars looked a lot like L.A.’s now. Old-timers had told Colin about a ’70s experiment that, for some reason, didn’t last. The city painted its cars a color it called lime yellow-a bureaucrat’s weaseling name for chartreuse. And it slapped POLICE on their sides in enormous diffraction-grating letters.

He’d seen photos, too. But he’d believed the old-timers even without them. Some shit was just too weird to make up. And a decade responsible for Grand Funk Railroad would have to answer for lime-yellow cop cars with rainbow letters as well.

After the last tanker truck rumbled off the freeway and through the LAPD’s would-be roadblock, Colin turned to Gabe Sanchez and said, “Piece of cake.”

Gabe scratched his thick, bushy mustache. “L.A. cops’ll call it a piece of something else,” he said with unusual delicacy.

“Too bad,” Colin answered. “C’mon. Let’s go. I want to be leading the parade again when we hand off to the Hawthorne guys.”

They got into their unmarked Ford. Colin waved sweetly to the guys from the LAPD as they went by. At least three Los Angeles policemen flipped him off in reply. He smiled even wider-he gave them a shit-eating grin, if the truth be known-and went right on waving. As long as they didn’t open fire on him, everything was jake.

Gabe drove with a splendid disregard for what little traffic there was. “Who’s gonna write me a ticket, huh?” he demanded.

“Not me, dude,” Colin said.

At the border between San Atanasio and Hawthorne, one of the latter town’s finest asked him, “You get any trouble from LAPD?” By the way one eyebrow quirked, he already knew the answer. Well, he would. Every LAPD radio frequency would have been sulfurous. And the Hawthorne cops would have monitored the scanners just so they could stay informed, of course. Yeah, of course.

Colin shrugged and jerked a thumb at the Door-Knocker. “They didn’t want to see whether we really would have shot them up and knocked them out of the way.”

The guy from Hawthorne studied him. “I think they worked out the answer on their own.”

“Maybe.” Colin shrugged again. “The trucks are your babies now. Take good care of ’em. Tell the El Segundo guys the same thing when you make the handoff.”

“Will do,” the Hawthorne officer promised. Like Colin, he wore a suit not too new and not too stylish. If you became a cop to get rich and look cool, you were more than a few boulders short of a rock pile.

Or maybe you were Mike Pitcavage. Colin reported back to the elegant chief of the San Atanasio PD after the Hawthorne cops took charge of the fuel trucks. On the other side of his flight-deck desk, Pitcavage nodded. “Yeah, that pretty much matches the complaint I got from LAPD,” he said, and then stood up and stuck out his hand. “Good job, Colin.”

He was manicured, too. Colin noted as much as he shook with the chief. Just as you’d expect, Pitcavage had a smooth, firm grip. “Sometimes us small-town boys can surprise the city slickers,” Colin said, putting on a cornpone drawl.

“There you go. They want to draw you and quarter you and put your pieces at the city gates to warn off anybody else who gets ideas like that,” Pitcavage said.

“What did you tell ’em?” Colin wondered if he’d get thrown to the wolves, a sacrifice to the great god Petroleum.

But Pitcavage answered, “I said, if they wanted to try it, they’d have to do me first.”

“Thanks.” Colin sounded less dry than usual. Yes, he’d wondered whether Pitcavage would grab the chance to hang him out to dry. He’d been a rival for the leather swivel chair the chief sat in now. He didn’t want it any more, but Pitcavage didn’t know that, and probably wouldn’t believe it if he found out. Ambitious himself, he’d always figure everybody else was, too. But here he’d done everything a subordinate could want from his CO. After a momentary pause, Colin asked, “What did they say when you told ’em that?”

“They told me to fuck myself in the ass. They said they’d drive spikes through a telephone pole, and I could use that.” Pitcavage grinned. “They were righteously pissed off.”

“I guess,” Colin agreed. “If they’re that up in arms, are they really so low on gas themselves? They’re L.A., for crying out loud. They always get what they want.”

“Not this time. This time they get hind tit. They aren’t used to it, and they don’t like it for beans.” Pitcavage stuck out his hand again. As Colin took it, the chief went on, “I won’t forget the number you did on them, either. Way to go.”

That was dismissal. Even Colin, who didn’t always notice hints, got this one and took it. Leaving the chief’s inner sanctum, he liked Pitcavage better than he had for years. If Mike had a prick for a son, it could happen to anybody. Colin knew that only too well. Rob and Marshall weren’t perfect. Neither was Vanessa.

And neither am I, Colin thought. And neither is anybody else.

* * *

Kelly looked up bemusedly at the ceiling of the Benson Hotel’s lobby. It was a pretty fancy place, all dark, mellow wood. And she had to look a long way up at the molded and gilded plaster on the ceiling. The Benson dated from 1912, when splendor, by God, was splendor. Across the street stood the colonnaded magnificence of the First National Bank building, which might almost have come to Portland from the acropolis of Athens.

She shivered, not because she mourned the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome but because she was bloody cold. They’d scheduled the American geologists’ conclave for December in northern Oregon before the supervolcano erupted. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. Now. .

People kept saying Los Angeles was the new Seattle. Kelly didn’t think that was true, but people kept saying it no matter what she thought. Going with it for the sake of argument, that made Portland the new. . well, what?

Seattle lay about 1,100 miles north of L.A. What was 1,100 miles north of Portland? The end of the world was the first thing that occurred to Kelly, but she’d actually checked on a map before she came up here. On that same crappy scale of analogies, Portland was the new Skagway, Alaska.

And it felt like it. Snow swirled through the air and drifted on the sidewalks. Heat was in short supply. By law, the only places where you could set your thermostat higher than fifty were schools and hospitals. She wore the same clothes she would have taken to Yellowstone in winter, and she was glad to have them. Ice was forming on the Willamette and even on the broad, swift-flowing Columbia.

When the assembled geologists weren’t giving papers or listening to them, they did the same thing as every other group of conventioneers ever hatched: they headed for the bar. It was just off the lobby, to the right of the glass-and-bronze revolving door that let you in.

Booze didn’t really warm you up, but it made you feel as if it did, which was often good enough. And Oregon was microbrew heaven. Even the new, abbreviated growing season around here seemed to be enough to let barley mature. Behind the bar stood a rack of Oregon reds and whites from before the eruption. When those were gone, they’d be gone for good. Oregon wasn’t wine country any more, and wouldn’t be for nobody knew how many years to come.

And booze lubricated social gatherings. Kelly was halfway down a hoppy IPA when a friend of hers walked in. She waved. Daniel Olson nodded back. He picked his way through the chattering crowd. They hugged. They’d both been plucked from Yellowstone by helicopters just ahead of the supervolcano eruption. Along with two other rescued geologists, Kelly had crashed in his apartment in Missoula till Colin finagled a way out for her.

Daniel ordered himself a pale ale, too, and clinked bottles with her. “Did I hear you got married?” he said. She spread the fingers on her left hand to show off the ring. He nodded. “Sweet. And a job, too? At-what is it? Dominguez State?”

“Cal State Dominguez, yeah,” Kelly agreed. People said San Francisco State and Long Beach State, but Cal State Northridge and Cal State Dominguez or Cal State Dominguez Hills. Why they did that, she had no idea, but they did. She asked, “How’s Missoula these days? Do I want to know?”

“Well, it’s still there and still kind of in business, which is more than you can say for most of Montana,” Daniel answered. “But everything that comes in comes from the west. We’ve got electricity, but no natural gas.”

Kelly nodded. “I remember when it went out.” The big pipe that fed Missoula came to it across the rest of Montana. Or rather, it had come across Montana. Now it lay squashed under God only knew how many feet of ash and dust and rock.

“Not much gasoline, either,” Daniel went on. “We chopped down a hell of a lot of trees to get through last winter, and we’ll chop down more this time around. We’ll regret it one of these days, but people are too worried about not freezing now to give a damn about later.”

“Welcome to America,” Kelly said, and the other geologist spread his hands in resigned agreement. When this quarter’s balance sheet decided whether you got promoted, you wouldn’t care what happened a few years down the line. And when it really was a choice between fuel in the fireplace and a Missoula winter on steroids, you’d chop down the pines now and let the bare hillsides take care of themselves in the sweet bye and bye.

“So, when are you presenting your paper?” Daniel asked.

“Morning session tomorrow,” Kelly answered. She was one of the world’s leading experts on everything that led up to the supervolcano blast. Passing on what she knew. . probably won’t matter one goddamn bit, she thought. By the time another supervolcano went off, odds were they wouldn’t understand English any more. And even if they did, you couldn’t do anything about a supervolcano eruption anyhow.

“I’ll be there,” Daniel promised.

Kelly gulped a little; Daniel knew as much about the Yellowstone supervolcano as she did. At least partly to soften him up, she said, “You want to have breakfast tomorrow?”

“Sure. And when we talk shop in the restaurant downstairs, everybody can look at us like we’re nuts.” Daniel clucked and caught himself. “Nah. Most of the people in there’ll be nuts the same way we are. Say, half past eight?”

“Sounds good. I’m scheduled for ten thirty. That’ll give us plenty of time to eat, and then I can be nervous afterwards.” Kelly knew she was kidding on the square. She’d critiqued other people’s papers before, but this was her first big presentation on her own. The room would be packed, too. There wasn’t anything more urgent in the field, and there wouldn’t be for years, maybe centuries, to come.

“Okay. I know that song.” Daniel grinned crookedly. He’d snagged a tenure-track job at Montana State while she was still in grad school. Had she been jealous? Oh, just a little, especially since he was younger than she was. Now he went on, “Let’s meet in the lobby. That way, whoever gets here first can gawp at the ceiling till the other one shows.”

“You do that, too? Oh, good! I wondered if I was the only one. Isn’t it over the top?” Kelly said.

As it happened, neither one of them beat the other; they rode down in the same elevator. A couple of people were eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant, but only a couple. A sharp-faced, officious middle-aged woman in a fuzzy orange sweater waved away other would-be customers. “We can’t serve you now,” she said. “We’re setting up for Sunday brunch.”

“We don’t want brunch. We just want breakfast,” Kelly protested.

“There are people in there,” Daniel added.

“We can’t take you now,” the woman in the orange sweater repeated, and she would not be moved.

Dejected, decaffeinated, and pissed off, Kelly and Daniel walked up the stairs to the ornate lobby. “Where can we get something to eat in this miserable town?” Kelly growled at a desk clerk. “Your restaurant seems to be under a curse.”

“A curse in an orange sweater,” Daniel agreed.

The clerk blinked, but she said, “There’s the Original, a block up Sixth.”

“Let’s go,” Kelly said grimly. Out the revolving door they strode. Kelly was wearing long johns, and damn glad she’d put them on. The wind had knives in it. Snow crunched under her shoes. It drifted here and there. Not many cars were on the street. Chains made the ones that were rattle as they slowly went by. It was more like a scene from Duluth than anything anyone would have looked for in Portland before the eruption.

Decor in the Original lived up to its name. The paintings on the walls were of clowns and mayonnaise jars-together, not separately. Contemplating what use the swarms of Bozoids might have for all that Best Foods made Kelly queasy. Coffee and ham and eggs and hash browns worked wonders, though. Daniel had sausage and eggs instead.

When they were finishing up, he took his iPhone out of his pocket to check the time. Kelly looked a question at him. “Nine forty,” he said. “Unless the grizzlies carry us off between here and the Benson, you’re golden.”

“Okay. Thanks. For a while there, I was too mad at that orange bitch to worry about what I’m going to say, you know?” Kelly said. “Maybe I owe her something after all.”

“A kick in the teeth?” Daniel suggested.

“I’d love to. People might talk, though.” Kelly sighed, as if to say there was no accounting for society’s foibles. When the tattooed waiter brought the check, she grabbed it. Daniel started to squawk, but she cut him off: “Hey, how long did I spend at your place after things blew up?”

“I dunno, but I bet it seemed like forever,” he answered, which wasn’t so far wrong. Even so, he let her put it on her Visa.

They walked back to the Benson through the arctic chill. Kelly changed into business attire. Pants hid the long underwear. A wool turtleneck under a jacket kept her top half tolerably warm. She grabbed the manila folder that held the paper and headed down the hall to the elevator again.

The packed function room intimidated her less than she’d feared it would. Standing up and lecturing her Dominguez Hills classes had burned the fear of public speaking out of her. And she’d have a much more interested audience here than she did there.

Her chairperson introduced her as “Somebody who knows the Yellowstone supervolcano better than anyone. If she’d been any closer to it when it did erupt, she wouldn’t be here talking to us now.” Geoff Rheinburg might have been stretching the first part of that. He sure wasn’t kidding about the second half.

Kelly had to adjust the mike at the lectern before she started talking; Rheinburg was several inches taller than she was. “I am glad to be here-and you can take that any way you want,” she said. In the second row, Daniel nodded emphatically. He knew how she felt, all right. And yes, Larry Skrtel and Ruth Marquez were here, too, farther back in the crowd. They’d also got out in the nick of time. And they were sitting side by side now, which was, or at least might be, interesting.

Interesting later. Now was business time. Kelly talked about everything the supervolcano had done in the runup to the eruption: the earthquakes all the way back to Hebgen Lake in 1959, the rising magma domes, the hot springs and geysers picking up, the premonitory volcanic outbursts in the southwest and northeast parts of Yellowstone, and finally the big kaboom.

“Even by supervolcano standards, it proved to be a large eruption: not quite the size of the one 2.1 million years ago, but close,” she said. “Climatic effects have proved at least as severe as the models predicted.” Her shiver underlined that. Even with all these bodies in the room, it was bloody cold. She went on, “So have other environmental impacts. Geologists did everything they could to alert the authorities to what a supervolcano eruption would mean. The authorities, unfortunately, didn’t want to listen to us. At the time, I was furious. In retrospect, I don’t think it mattered much. During the last big recession before the eruption, there was a lot of talk about companies and banks that were too big to fail. The Yellowstone supervolcano was a disaster too big to let us succeed. No matter what we did or didn’t do, we were going to get overwhelmed. We grew up in the Golden Age. It’s gone. It won’t come back for decades or lifetimes, if it ever does.”

It wasn’t anything her audience didn’t already know. They’d known it before the supervolcano went off, which was more than the rest of the world could say. But hearing it backed up with all the data Kelly’d presented was sobering all the same.

When she asked for questions, the ones she got were mostly technical-about the order and intensity of the precursor signs, about possible steps the government might have taken and what those could have accomplished, and the like. It was all academic, and everybody knew it. Yellowstone wasn’t the only supervolcano. The one on Sumatra deserved careful watching, and so did the one on the Kamchatka Peninsula. There was even one near Mono Lake in eastern California. But none of the others seemed likely to erupt for thousands of years. The Midwest had drawn the short straw this time around. Well, so had the whole planet.

Professor Rheinburg beamed at Kelly as things broke up. “Good job! Very solid!” He clapped his hands with no sound.

“Thanks.” She gathered up her papers. “I’m just glad it’s over.”

“I always feel that way, and I’ve been doing this about as long as you’ve been alive,” he said. “So, how’s your job?”

“Terrific,” she replied. Having one was terrific. She had no doubt he was responsible for it.

He didn’t let on. He never had. “How’s everything else? How’s your life? How do you like being married?”

“So far, so good. Better than so good,” Kelly said. One day at a time. That was how you did anything.