Free Burnt Sea: A Seabound Prequel (Seabound Chronicles Book 0) by Jordan Rivet

wouldn’t make it to her interview. In a way it was easier to think about
that than about her family. Captain Martinelli had to
be wrong about San Francisco. She would email her parents to let them know
where she was. They would answer her. Everything would be fine.
    “I’ve been trying,” Nora said. “I’ve only been able to log on for
seconds at a time. It’s worse than spotty dial-up.”
    “Did you check the news?” Judith went around to the other side of the
desk to sit beside Nora. The woman was relatively calm. Judith respected that.
“The captain was telling everyone some pretty crazy things in the plaza. He
said the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted.” Judith
tried to laugh. “It can’t be that bad, can it?”
    Nora shook her head. “It’s that bad. The networks in New York are
broadcasting. Anything based in California or the Midwest is silent as the
grave.”
    “What do the networks in New York say?”
    “Apocalyptic headlines. Fear-mongering talking heads. The usual click-bait bullshit.”
    “You don’t think it was Yellowstone, then?”
    “Some people say Yellowstone,” Nora said. “I don’t know yet. Need more
data.” She twisted the ring in her eyebrow, making Judith feel queasy. “You’ve
seen the documentaries, right?”
    “Not really.” Judith didn’t waste her time with conspiracy theories and
doomsday predictions. The chances of that kind of thing happening in her
lifetime were vanishingly slim. And yet . . . “What do the documentaries say?”
    “That it’ll get worse before it gets better,” Nora said. “The day of
the eruption is killer obviously, but the scientists think the US probably
wouldn’t be able to produce a harvest in the years afterwards because of
weather disruptions. It’s like climate change on steroids. The big problem is
that there might not be any food to get from overseas either if the harvests
fail there too. Depending on what happens to the weather, we could go for years
without a proper harvest.”
    “What would we do then?” Judith asked. This was all hypothetical,
surely.
    “Starve,” Nora answered. “That’s what the documentaries say at least.
It’ll happen all over the world.”
    “This doesn’t feel real.”
    “Tell me about it,” Nora said. “Hey, the net’s back. Let’s see if we
can get the BBC. They’ll sort out the bullshit.”
    Her fingers flew across the keyboard. Judith had never seen anyone type
so fast.
    “Here we go. Fuck.”
    The BBC page loaded slowly, opening a few pixels at a time. The picture
that emerged was a simulated image of North America. The headline, in
eighty-point font, said simply, catastrophe . The simulation showed a crater
the size of Washington over Yellowstone National Park. Contour lines marked the
estimated ash fall range. California had been swallowed up. Lower Canada and
the desert in the Southwest. To the east, the disaster squeezed outward like an
amoeba. It ate up the Great Plains, the Midwestern cornfields, threatening Pennsylvania, sitting heavy above the Deep South. The
Eastern Seaboard looked untouched for the moment.
    “Damn,” Nora breathed. “It says casualties could be in the hundred
millions. That’s eight zeros.”
    They stared at each other for a moment. There was no scope to
comprehend this catastrophe. A hundred million was an abstract number, a fiction.
    And California was buried. Judith’s whole family was there. She hadn’t
been close to her parents since their divorce. But even when they fought over
custody, argued about money, or paid more attention to their work than to her,
they had still been there. She could always go home. Now her whole life had
been swallowed up in a single morning, and she couldn’t do anything about it.
    “Isn’t anyone sending help?” Judith said weakly.
    Nora turned back to her computer screen. Where before she had been
purposeful, now her fingers moved clumsily. Judith felt like she was seeing
everything from underwater.
    “It says