That sounded about right to Kelly. Krakatoa turned into a jungle again less than a lifetime after the roar of its eruption was a shot heard almost halfway round the world. Krakatoa had been a piddly little thing next to the Yellowstone supervolcano, but Helena was a lot farther from the eruption site than the edges of the Indonesian island had been.
They put up tents and stayed in the buried city overnight. MREs were uninspiring, but they did fill the belly. And camp stoves let the geologists and chopper pilots fix coffee and tea.
When morning came, they went into one of the buildings through a window. Volcanic ash and rain had done their worst inside. They found no skeletons during their brief exploration. It was a relief of sorts, but Kelly wondered if that just meant the people who’d been in there had died fleeing instead.
Years too late to worry about that now, she thought. All the same, she didn’t like wondering about how many dead lay blanketed under the ashfall. Pompeii and Herculaneum, only spread out over the heart of a continent. She wasn’t sorry to fly back to Missoula that afternoon, not even a little bit.
Deborah was excited to ride in a car, even if she did have to sit in her car seat to do it. It was a rare treat; Colin didn’t take the old Taurus out very often. But, while Kelly was off in Montana, he made sure the beast ran. LAX wasn’t far from San Atanasio. Better for him to go over there and pick her up than for her to schlep luggage on the light rail line and the bus.
He drove carefully. He was out of practice. And the people on two wheels and three, who dominated the streets these days, didn’t have enough practice at looking out for cars. Deborah’s presence inhibited him from calling some of the pinheads what they deserved. He knew one cop who’d told his kids before the eruption that cussing in the car didn’t count. He sympathized.
The twenty-first century was still in effect at the airport. LAX had generators to keep the power running 24/7/365. You wouldn’t want the lights going out and the computers crashing when a 747 was fifty feet off the ground. The people on the plane really wouldn’t want that happening. Cell phones and WiFi worked all the time around here, too.
And there were a lot more cars than Colin was used to seeing. If you weren’t staying near the airport, cabs would take you where you needed to go. You would pay an arm and a couple of legs for the privilege, but you paid for everything these days. Oh, did you ever!
Still, traffic wasn’t the insane nightmare it had been before the eruption—nowhere close. And Colin easily found a space when he pulled into a parking structure. That wouldn’t have happened in pre-eruption days, either. He locked the car—one conditioned reflex that hadn’t faded—and headed for baggage claim, making sure Deborah held his hand.
He hadn’t been there long when his phone rang. Kelly was calling. “Yo, babe,” Colin said.
“We’re down,” she told him. “We’re taxiing to the terminal. Won’t be long.”
“Sounds good. Love you. ’Bye.” He stuck the phone back in his pocket.
“That was Mommy!” The idea was so exciting, it made Deborah jump up and down.
“Nah. That was a salesman, trying to get me to buy spinach and beets.” Colin named two of Deborah’s least favorite vegetables.
“Silly!” Deborah tossed her head in scorn. She’d never heard I didn’t come to town on a turnip truck, Charlie, but that was the vibe she gave off. “You said ‘babe.’ You said ‘love you.’ So that was so Mommy!”
She was her own little person. She could walk. She could talk. She could think. She was good at it, in fact. “Okay, Sherlock. You got me,” Colin said.
“I’m not Sherlock. I’m Deborah! Talk sense, Daddy!”
Instead of talking sense, Colin tried bribery: he gave her a granola bar. She chomped away. The bar declared that it was gluten-free. It was, too: the grains in it were buckwheat and oats. Wheat wasn’t so hard to come by as a good New York strip would have been, but you couldn’t take it for granted any more.
People coming out of the boarding area started gathering at the carousel for Kelly’s flight. Colin remembered the days when you could meet somebody right at a gate. Those had vanished long before the supervolcano blew.
“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” Deborah saw Kelly before Colin did. She streaked toward her, running a little faster than light. Colin followed more sedately, as befit his years and the small paunch he still had in spite of all the bike riding.
Kelly picked Deborah up and kissed her. Since she already had a backpack and an overnight bag, she was handling a lot of extra weight. Despite wiggles, Colin took Deborah off her hands. “My turn,” he said. “I want to kiss your mommy, too.”
“O-kay,” she said grudgingly—that was in the rules, even if it wasn’t too far in them.
As they walked out to the car, Colin asked, “What was it like, going into a town where nobody’s been for years?”
“Eerie,” Kelly said. “That’s the only word that fits. Geoff Rheinburg quoted from ‘Ozymandias.’”
“What’s Ozymandias?” Deborah asked.
“Not what, hon—who. He was a king in ancient Egypt—a pharaoh, they called them—a long time ago. A man named Shelley wrote a poem about the ruins of his statue.”
“Haven’t thought of that one in a long time,” Colin said. “Not since English lit in high school.” But, once reminded, he did bring back the images of arrogance and desolation. Slowly, he nodded. “It fits, all right.”
“I thought so, too. Maybe it fits too well,” Kelly said. “Everything we worked so hard to build… all ruins now.”
They’d got to the Taurus. Colin opened the trunk. With a groan of relief, Kelly shed her backpack. Colin threw her bag in it with it. “Most of us did the best we could most of the time,” Colin said. “That’s about as much as you can expect from people.”
He had to pay to get out, even though he hadn’t been there more than a few minutes. Like every public institution these days, LAX grabbed every nickel it possibly could. You got less, you paid more, and they expected you to thank them for it.
“See any scavengers in there?” Colin asked. “I know Vanessa ran into some—and even into some survivors—when she did cleanup work in Kansas.”
“That was on the fringes of the ashfall, though. This was only a hundred and fifty miles or so from the eruption,” Kelly said. “Nobody could survive there. You might be able to ski in from Missoula or something, but you’d have to take all your own supplies and you couldn’t bring out anything much.”
“Snowmobile?” he suggested.
“Mm, maybe,” Kelly said. “But there’s still an awful lot of dust to kick up. And if you broke down, you’d be an awful long way from a garage. I wouldn’t want to try it, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, Triple-A service might be on the slow side,” Colin said.
“What’s Triple-A?” Deborah asked. With magnetic letters on the fridge, she was starting to learn the alphabet.
“They’re people who help fix your car if it breaks down,” Kelly explained.
“Did they help Ozymandias?” Deborah remembered the name. She’d be dangerous when she got older. She was already dangerous, in fact.
“Ozymandias didn’t have a car. They didn’t know about cars when Ozymandias was king,” Colin said.
“Why not?”
“Nobody’d thought of them yet,” Colin said. How were you supposed to explain the idea of technological change to a preschooler? Hell, plenty of allegedly adult elected officials didn’t get it.
Luckily, he didn’t have to try. Deborah didn’t start the endless Why? routine that drives so many parents straight up a wall. A few months earlier, chances were she would have. She was changing, sometimes, it seemed, every day. She was growing.