Supervolcano: All Fall Down

XI

Winter. Back in his SoCal days, Rob Ferguson had thought the season a bummer, yeah. It got kind of chilly, yeah. Sometimes it rained. When it did, the freeways clogged. There were landslides if it rained a lot. Every once in a while, one would squash a car on Pacific Coast Highway.

That was SoCal. That was SoCal before the supervolcano erupted. This was Guilford, Maine, in the third winter after the eruption. Comparing one to the other was like comparing O’Doul’s to Everclear.

He carried a rifle through pine woods. During the Second World War, the Germans and Russians who’d fought in front of Murmansk might have carried rifles through weather like this. Or maybe it had been warmer and less windy up there.

Just for a moment, he wondered what Murmansk was like these days. This particular shiver had nothing to do with the deep freeze in which he walked. Better not to think about something like that. Or maybe it wasn’t. The only reason Murmansk had ever been even slightly habitable was that it got the Gulf Stream’s last gasps. If it was still getting them, it might have stayed slightly habitable.

But the Gulf Stream was supposed to be in trouble, too. He’d heard that, with the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean suddenly so much cooler, less water was going out from them into the Atlantic. If that was true, Murmansk wouldn’t be the only place getting the shaft as a result. All of northwestern Europe would go up against the wall-a wall made of blocks of ice.

That was northwestern Europe’s worry, though. His worry was shooting something to help Guilford through this latest winter of its distress. The few summer months had let the government send in what supplies it could. But even the government was running out of things, and couldn’t get more for love or increasingly worthless money. If people up here were going to make it, they would have to make it on their own.

I could go back to California, Rob thought. He’d been telling himself the same thing since Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles found themselves stranded in the middle of Maine. The advantages were obvious. Rain, not snow-at least not snow all the goddamn time. Electricity. TV. The Net. He hadn’t sent or got an e-mail in months.

Only one thing was wrong with that picture: he liked it here. He couldn’t imagine any place he’d rather be. Guilford would have been a neat place to live even before the supervolcano cast it back on its own resources. Everybody knew everybody else’s business, and all the people figured they had a right to know. And everybody chipped in to help everybody else, too. It wasn’t like SoCal, where half the time you didn’t even know the name of the people who lived next door to you.

And there was Lindsey. He’d never figured himself for the sort who fell in love, which made him slower to recognize it when it happened than he might have been. But he knew what was what now-knew it and liked it, which surprised him all over again.

The wind howled down from the northwest. Snow flew almost horizontally. Even in his extra-heavy-duty L.L. Bean winter gear and a bright vest over it, Rob was chilly. But he wasn’t any worse than chilly-well, except for the few square inches of face he had to expose to the blizzard.

What he really hated about weather like this was that a Super Bowl crowd of moose could amble by a hundred yards away and he’d never know it. Unlike so many things, that really mattered. Moose were lots of meat on the hoof. You couldn’t afford to miss them if they were around.

If. Sooner or later, Maine would run out of them. If people north and west of the Interstate had to get through every winter on moose meat, it would be sooner. Rob didn’t know what they’d do about that.

They were doing what they could. Lots of people were raising pigs and chickens. Unlike other livestock, those made do at least in part on human garbage. With greenhouses and sometimes even in carefully tended ground outside, some of the root vegetables of the far north got enough of a growing season to mature. Rob had never tasted, or heard of, a mangel-wurzel before he got to Maine. The food in California had to be better than this.

Something shot past him, seen and then gone. He started to raise the rifle, but lowered it again a moment later, feeling foolish. You needed a shotgun to go after a flying goose. Trying with a rifle only wasted ammo. Waste, these days, felt criminal.

He laughed at himself. Two years here and you’re turning into a New Englander, he thought. But what he felt wasn’t really old-fashioned New England frugality. No, it was post-supervolcano desperation. When you used something these days, you could never be sure you’d be able to replace it.

That flurry of motion was a fox. He took them for granted now, though the first one that darted in front of his SUV had freaked him out. He supposed there would always be foxes and weasels and mice and squirrels. They’d find enough to eat, whether people could or not.

Sure as hell, a squirrel chittered at him from high in a pine. If he’d had a.22 instead of a.30–06, he might have knocked it down. Rob had nothing against squirrel meat, one more delicacy (if that was the word) he’d met here. But hit a squirrel with what was originally a military round and you didn’t commonly leave enough to be worth salvaging.

He’d had to walk farther to reach the woods than he would have at the start of the winter before, and quite a bit farther than he would have the winter before that. Like the moose, the firewood had held out so far. What would they do when it ran out? You couldn’t raise baby pines to a useful size on table scraps in a few months.

The wind eased up. The snow kept falling, but more nearly vertically. Rob could see farther that way, or thought he could. Maybe his eyebrows were just a little less frozen. That over there in the electric-orange vest was another hunter. Moose hardly ever wore vests like that.

Someone had got shot near Dover-Foxcroft in spite of a DayGlo vest. He’d lived. Officially, it was listed as an accident. Unofficially. . People said the guy who’d plugged him didn’t get along with him. Still as near a stranger as made no difference even if he’d been here more than two years, Rob didn’t know about that one way or the other.

More motion, this time straight ahead. Damned if that wasn’t a bull moose, sure as the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt. Rob did his best to impersonate a bright orange pine sapling. The moose dug at the snow with a big splayed hoof. Not much grass had come up during this abbreviated sortasummer. Rob would have bet the moose’d come up empty. And he would have lost the bet, too, because it lowered its dewlapped head and started pulling up whatever it had found.

“Yeah, you go ahead and chow down.” Rob’s mouth silently shaped the words. Fog gusted from his lips. If he’d worn glasses, it might have screwed him up. Not a sound came out to spook the moose. Slowly, smoothly, he raised the rifle to his shoulder.

A gunshot.

Next thing he knew, he was lying in the snow. He couldn’t figure out how he’d got there. He didn’t hurt or anything-and then, all of a sudden, he did. Quite a bit, as a matter of fact. “Fuck!” he said, in lieu of howling like a wolf. No wolves in Maine yet, or none anybody knew about, anyhow. From how far up in Canada would they have to come? However far it was, they hadn’t got here.

And Rob had other things to worry about. It felt as if one of those wolves that weren’t here was gnawing on his left leg. He wondered if he wanted to look down. If that bullet had shattered tib and fib, they were liable to have to take the leg off. A cripple in the Ice Age-just what I always wanted to be.

Blood on the snow, more of it every second. It steamed like his breath. Breath, blood-both showed life going out. He hiked up his jeans and his long johns. Each had a neat piece bitten out.

His stomach lurched when he saw that his leg had a piece bitten out, too. But then he realized the wound was a groove. It had got the muscle on the inside of his calf, but it hadn’t-he didn’t think it had-smashed the bones to smithereens. He yanked a hanky out of his pocket and packed the bleeding gouge with it. Not exactly sterile, but he’d worry about that later. Little by little, he realized he’d probably be around to worry about it.

The other hunter lumbered over to him. The moose was long gone. “Dude! What happened?” the other guy said brilliantly.

“Some dumb asshole went and shot me,” Rob answered. “The fuck you think happened?” His wits began to work again, after a fashion. “You got anything I can use to hold this bandage in place?”

“Sure do.” The other hunter pulled a fat rubber band out of his trouser pocket. What he was doing with it in there, God only knew. Rob took it gratefully any which way. In the war, he would have dusted the wound with sulfa powder. He would have done it now, too, if only he’d had any.

Another man came up. “I’m so sorry! I was aiming for the moose.” He had to be the guy who’d nailed Rob.

“Yeah, well, you got some long pig here,” Rob said. The local only stared at him, so he had no idea what long pig was. Clueless git, Rob thought. Aloud, he went on, “Look, I don’t think it’s too bad. Can you guys get me back into Guilford and let them patch me up?”

He had one good leg. The hunters made animated crutches. The fellow who’d shot him turned out to be Ralph O’Brian, who worked at the Shell station down the street from the Trebor Mansion Inn when he had anything to do there. “I’m so goddamn embarrassed,” he said. “I never done nothing like that before, swear to Jesus I didn’t.”

“Believe me, once is twice too often,” Rob said through clenched teeth. The leg hurt like a mad son of a bitch now, and sparklers of pain burned him whenever it touched the ground or bumped O’Brian, who was on that side of him. He would be, Rob thought. It didn’t hurt enough to make him want to pass out or anything. He rather wished it would have.

They were almost back to town when they came upon a middle-aged woman hauling a big sack of rice to her outlying house on a sled. In a matter of moments, the rice was off the sled and Rob was on it. The woman put the sack on her back and trudged away.

The clinic did what it could for Guilford. There was a real hospital in Dover-Foxcroft-a little one, but still. Rob hoped he wouldn’t have to go there. At the clinic, Dr. Bhattacharya said, “Oh dear me! How did this happen?” The small brown man sounded like somebody who did tech support from Mumbai.

“Damn Venezuelans are giving the moose AKs,” Rob answered, deadpan.

For a split second, the doctor took him seriously. Then he snorted through his bushy mustache. “You are probably not at death’s door,” he said in his lilting English, sending Rob a dirty look.

“Good,” Rob said. “What really happened was-”

“I’m a crappy shot,” O’Brian broke in.

“Yeah, well, listen, Mr. Crappy Shot, go on over to the school and let Lindsey know what happened to me, okay? And stop at the Mansion Inn and tell the guys, too,” Rob said. Ralph O’Brian nodded and scurried away, seeming relieved at the excuse to be gone.

Dr. Bhattacharya brandished a needle. Rob wished he had an excuse to get the hell out of there, too. “I will give you the local anesthetic,” the doc said. “It will sting, then you will grow numb. Then I will clean the wound and I will suture it. You will experience some pain when the local anesthetic wears off. I will give you pills for it. They will help less than you wish they would. I will also give you antibiotics.”

“Have any more good news?” In spite of the way Rob’s leg was yelling at him, he felt the needle go in and the sting of the local. He felt them several times, in fact, because Dr. Bhattacharya stuck him again and again. Then, blessedly, he stopped feeling anything south of his knee. The doctor went to work.

When he finished, he said, “Let me see if we have a set of crutches that will fit you. Your height is. .?”

“I’m six-one,” Rob answered. Using crutches through snow didn’t sound like something he much wanted to do. The alternative seemed to be staying right here till he healed, though. Crutches, then, if they had them.

Dr. Bhattacharya pulled a pair from a closet, shook his head, and put them back. “Too short,” he muttered, and tried again. The next set he found made him nod. “Yes, these will do.” He used set screws to adjust their length. “Six feet one, you said.”

“Uh-huh.”

“See how you do here, then.”

Rob tried. He’d used crutches before, but that sprained ankle was half a lifetime ago now. The knack didn’t come right back. He swung himself across the linoleum of the clinic floor. Dr. Bhattacharya gave him a vial of Vicodin and one of amoxycillin.

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. Somebody said that. Who? He couldn’t remember. If it was true, he’d just gained some serious strength points. And, if he could make it back to the Trebor Mansion Inn without breaking his other leg or his neck, he’d pick up some more.

Then the local would wear off. He wasn’t looking forward to that, even with drugs in his anorak pocket. Maybe it would make him stronger, too. Somehow, he couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for finding out.

Lindsey rushed in just before he was going to leave the clinic. “I got Marya to cover my class for me,” she panted. “Ralph said you got shot! My God!”

“Ralph said I got shot?” Rob echoed. Something in the way that was phrased made him go on “Did he say who shot me?”

“No. Who?”

“He did.”

Her face was a study-disbelief, amazement, and rage chasing one another across her features. “I’ll murder him!” she said when her mouth stopped hanging open.

“Don’t,” Rob said wearily. “It was just one of those stupid things. It wasn’t like he meant to do it-and I’m not too badly damaged, anyway.”

“For a gunshot wound, it is very minimal,” Dr. Bhattacharya agreed.

“For a gunshot wound,” Lindsey said. “Not for any other kind of wound.” The doctor didn’t tell her she was wrong.

“Would you break trail for me while I go back to the Inn?” Rob asked her. “That’d help.”

“Come to my place instead,” she said. “It’s closer, and you won’t have to climb stairs and a ladder to get to your room.”

“I’ll do that,” he said. “You bet I will. I should get shot more often.” She snorted and held the clinic door open for him.

* * *

Bryce Miller’s alarm clock went off like a bomb. It was a windup Timex of uncertain but ancient vintage. Its ticking was loud enough to be annoying when he noticed it. It kept rotten time. He’d bought it for two bucks at a Goodwill store right after he landed the job at Junipero High.

That was six months ago now. These days, one like it would cost at least ten times as much, likely more. Six months ago, power in L.A. had been pretty reliable. Now. . Now all the supervolcano sludge in the Columbia had screwed the fancy turbines up there but good. The grid had other problems, too, but that was the juicy one.

So L.A. had power a few hours a day, a few days a week. Bryce vaguely remembered reading Bucharest had been like that, back when the Communist dictator, old nutty What’s-his-name, ran Romania. The Cold War was only history to him, and seemed almost as far removed from the here and now as his pet Hellenistic poets.

The Cold War here and now was the war against real, physical cold. The world’s politics were still screwed up, but not that particular way. Los Angeles remained lucky. It might get chilly here, but chilly wasn’t arctic.

And Bryce was awake. Once that alarm started clattering, he would have had a hard time staying dead. With a rented truck, he’d spent a small fortune moving up to what they called West Hills. He was only a couple of miles from Junipero High here. These days, that was walking distance.

He had a gas stove. He could light a burner with a match when the electric flame-starter didn’t work. That let him boil water to make coffee to go with his bagel. He liked real cream in his coffee, but he used Coffeemate with sugar. Coffeemate kept basically forever. Cream didn’t keep at all without refrigeration. The apartment had a refrigerator. It made a fair icebox when he could get ice, which wasn’t often enough.

Out he went, carrying a briefcase and an umbrella. It wasn’t raining right this minute, but you couldn’t trust it even in summer after the eruption, let alone in winter. He’d work up a sweat by the time he got to school, but he didn’t worry about it. He wouldn’t be the only one.

When he got to the campus, the first thing he did was check his box. With e-mail scarce and unreliable, paper was making a comeback. A typewriter-an ancient manual, dredged up God knew where-clacked on a secretary’s desk. When you lacked what you’d had before, you did the best you could with what you could find. Or, welcome back to the turn of the twentieth century.

Bulletins and orders might be typewritten, but they got Xeroxed when the power did come on. Junipero dished out less bullshit than he’d heard public schools had to endure. All the same, the administration had some pretty good fascists in training-or would they be inquisitors here?

Bryce taught Latin, world history, and U.S. history (in the latter, he was indeed staying a chapter ahead of the kids). Maybe next year, if the world hadn’t ended by then, the powers that be honest to God would let him take a swing at Greek. Or maybe they wouldn’t. And if they didn’t, maybe he wouldn’t be so very upset. Seeing what tough sledding the students made of Latin, they might not grok Greek at all.

U.S. history first period. In he walked, to go over the causes of the Civil War one more time before the kids showed up. By Junipero standards, it was a big class: twenty-three students. No, public school wasn’t like this.

The kids were totally SoCal, which was to say, almost everything under the sun. Hispanics. Irish. A very bright Jewish kid named Perry Ginsberg, who seemed to be stoned most of the time. A dark, pretty girl named Singh, which probably meant she was a Sikh. A Vietnamese kid. A Korean.

No African-Americans, though. There weren’t many at Junipero-fewer, Bryce thought, than there were Jews. It would have been funny if it weren’t sad. Fewer black parents than Jewish ones trusted a Catholic school not to mess up their children.

He covered the points he needed to cover. “Slavery,” he said. “That’s the biggest cause. All the talk about states’ rights and other stuff, it’s just a smokescreen for slavery. The South wanted to keep it and make it grow. The North wanted to stop it and eventually roll it back.”

Most of them took notes. A few didn’t give a damn. Their parents were wasting the cash they spent here. What could you do, though?

“Question?” Bryce nodded towards a raised hand.

“Yes.” The Sikh girl nodded. “How do you know it was slavery most of all? What is the evidence?”

Would she be a lawyer when she grew up, or a biochemist? Bryce was just glad he’d done his review before the class started. He had the answer at his fingertips. “Well, let’s look at South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession. South Carolina was the first state out of the Union, remember. When the ordinance talks about why the state’s leaving, it says ‘These States’-the free ones-‘have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions, and have denied the right of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and eloin’-that means steal-‘the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books, and pictures, to servile insurrection.’ It goes on for several more paragraphs after that.

“Instead of reading them, though, let’s look at the Confederate Constitution. That was the law the South set up for itself to live by. A lot of it’s modeled after the U.S. Constitution, but some isn’t. Here’s Article One, Section Nine, Part Three: ‘No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.’ The Confederate Constitution talks about the right of slaveholders to keep their property in a couple of other places, too.”

He looked at her. “So. Is that evidence?”

“It is.” She nodded gravely.

Right then, he was a little relieved to have no black kids in the class. Reminding them Southern whites had been sure enough that their ancestors were no more than cattle with hands to fight a war about it wouldn’t have been comfortable, which was putting things mildly. Easier to sound dispassionate about it while they were out of the room, so to speak.

Or maybe the fact that he still worried about it meant the country had taken longer to dig out from under the burden of slavery than it would to clean up after the supervolcano eruption. And if that wasn’t a scary thought, he didn’t know what would be.

Latin was cleaner. It didn’t seem so intimately connected to the world they lived in. (Well, yes, the Romans were slaveowners, too. Well, yes, the Hispanic kids, or most of them, spoke a language that was one of today’s versions of Vulgar Latin. Details, details. .)

Trying to explain what cases were all about took up a lot of his time. When he was in college, he’d taken German before Latin, so the dead language had confused him less, anyhow. The kids might well have had an easier time with calculus. Some of them were having an easier time with calculus.

Then there was Sasha Smyslovsky. He spoke Russian at home, and Russian had more cases than Latin. His trouble wasn’t grammar-it was vocabulary. People who grew up with English (and, even more so, people who grew up with Spanish) could figure out a lot of Latin words from their modern cognates. Russian, though, didn’t have that kind of relationship to Latin.

Sasha was a junior, so he was sixteen, maybe seventeen. To Bryce, he looked about thirteen. All the boys in his classes, even the football players who could have cleaned his clock without breaking a sweat, looked like kids to him. He worked hard not to show it. He’d hated his teachers condescending to him when he was in high school. That had to be a constant of human, or at least teenage, nature.

Some of the girls in his classes looked like kids to him, too. Some of them struck him as seventeen going on thirty-five. He also worked hard not to show that. He didn’t want to give them ideas, and he didn’t want some of the ideas they gave him. More than he ever had before, he understood how high school teachers slipped every once in a while.

He never said word one about that to Susan. He didn’t want to give her ideas, either. If he had, he knew what she would have given him: a piece of her mind, and a sharp-edged one at that.

World history struck him as an exercise in political correctness. Every ethnic group made its contribution-its important contribution, its wonderful contribution-to the way things ended up working out. Kalmuks? Papua New Guineans? You betcha, and you’d better be able to give them back on the test.

Female Kalmuks? Gay, lesbian, and bisexual Papua New Guineans? Of course there’d be a question about them. Two questions, more likely.

Maybe history courses had been all about dead white males once upon a time. No, certainly they had. World history was supposed to be the antidote to that. From time to time, Bryce wondered if the cure wasn’t worse than the disease.

They were paying him not to wonder about such things. No, they were paying him to keep his big trap shut if he did wonder about them. And keep it shut he did-where the students and the people who were paying him could hear, anyhow.

Susan got an earful, though. When his cell phone had power, so did Colin Ferguson. The police lieutenant laughed his gruff laugh. “Didn’t you take Hypocrisy 101 in college?” he said. “Well, even if you didn’t, this is your postgraduate course.”

“Tell me about it!” Bryce exclaimed. “Is the whole world like this?”

“Pretty much.” Colin wasn’t laughing any more. Bryce remembered he’d been passed over for chief of the San Atanasio PD not least because he had the dangerous habit of saying what he thought. And I just stuck my foot in my face, Bryce thought unhappily. After a beat, Colin went on, “You get used to it after a while. . most of the time, anyhow.”

“I guess.” Bryce wasn’t nearly sure he wanted to get used to it. He wondered if he had any choice. No, there were always choices. Socrates had made his. Sure, and look what it got him. Changing the subject looked like a good idea: “You ever hear anything from Rob and Vanessa?” He asked about his ex with no more than a momentary twinge.

“Well, Rob got shot,” Colin answered.

“Shot!” That was the last thing Bryce expected to hear. “Jesus! What happened?”

“I got a card from him a few days ago. He says somebody mistook him for a moose. He says he isn’t eating that much. He says there isn’t that much to eat where he’s at in Maine. And he says he’s healing up, which is the most important part.”

“Uh-huh.” Bryce nodded, not that Colin could see him. That sounded like Rob, all right. It also sounded quite a bit like Colin himself. His firstborn would have got pissed off had anyone told him so, though. Bryce tried again: “And Vanessa?”

“Still on the scavenger circuit. She doesn’t write much, and she’s not any place where she can power up her phone-or where she can get bars even if she does. I keep reminding myself she’s good at landing on her feet. You know about that.”

“Now that you mention it, yes.” Bryce tried to sound light, and feared he made a hash of it. On the way to one of those landings on her feet, Vanessa’d kicked him in the teeth. The Bulgarian judge gave her a 9.85 for technical ability when she did it, too, and 9.9 for artistic merit.

Well, what could you do? She’d walked out of his life four and a half years ago now. He couldn’t do a damn thing, that was what. What he ought to do was forget he’d ever known her and spend all his time thinking about Susan, who actually wanted to be with him. Much as he would have liked to, he’d long since discovered he couldn’t do that, either. Colin still had Louise on his mind, too, even if he wished he didn’t. No wonder they’d stayed friends. No, no wonder at all.

What Bryce could do now was grade papers. As a matter of fact, that was what he had to do. And so, as soon as he got off the phone with Colin, he went ahead and did it.

* * *

The late, not so great town of Fredonia, Kansas, wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere. It was in the southeastern part of nowhere, or at least of Kansas. Since the supervolcano blew, Kansas and nowhere had become effectively synonymous.

As far as Vanessa Ferguson was concerned, Kansas and nowhere were synonymous long before the supervolcano blew. Since she’d escaped Camp Constitution to pick the bones of people who’d made the mistake of feeling otherwise, she kept quiet on that score.

Fredonia, Kansas, also wasn’t in the middle of a Marx Brothers movie. Vanessa made the mistake of mentioning it to the rest of the refugees from the refugee camp she worked with. They all looked at her as if she’d just sprouted an extra head, even-no, especially-when she started singing “Hail, Hail, Fredonia!”

“Vanessa, we already know you’re weird,” Merv Saunders told her with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “Do you have to go and advertise it?”

“Oh, give me a fucking break,” she snarled. He was close to twenty years older than she was. Shouldn’t that have been enough of a head start to give him some kind of clue about the Marx Brothers? Evidently not.

What really pissed her off wasn’t that he didn’t have a clue. What really pissed her off was that he didn’t want a clue. He wasn’t just a yahoo. He was proud to be a yahoo. He was the kind of yahoo who didn’t know what a yahoo actually was, too. If he didn’t know about Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and hapless Margaret Dumont, he for sure wouldn’t know about Lemuel Gulliver’s last voyage.

Winter in Fredonia wouldn’t have been a picnic before the eruption. Winter in Fredonia since the eruption reminded Vanessa of what she’d heard about Fargo, or maybe Winnipeg. Sometimes it got up into the twenties. Sometimes it warmed up to zero. And sometimes it didn’t.

Fredonia hadn’t had a whole lot of trees when the supervolcano was biding its time. This was Kansas, for crying out loud. Just about all the trees it had had were dead now. If the ashfall hadn’t done for them, those upgraded winters bloody well had.

So they were bare-branched and graying. They reminded Vanessa of human corpses-you could tell right away that they wouldn’t spring back to life when (or, nowadays, if) spring came around again. And their gray starkness, and that of the rest of the local landscape, just made the cell phone relay towers all the more obvious-and obtrusive.

The towers here, like the ones in L.A. and Denver, had been disguised as trees, with brown plastic trunks and green plastic leaves. They hadn’t made what you’d call convincing trees: neither colors nor shapes were spot-on. But they looked better than bare aluminum scaffolding and wires and whatever would have.

Because they were only approximations of trees, Vanessa and her family and friends had noticed them every so often, mostly when out driving. Somebody (as a matter of fact, it was Bryce, which Vanessa had deleted from her internal hard drive) tagged them alien listening devices. The name stuck in her little crowd.

Here in drab, abandoned Fredonia, Kansas, the relay points honest to God did look alien. Their plastic leaves were still green (snow-speckled green right now), their plastic trunks still brown. Sooner or later, the sun would fade them. With the sun so feeble nowadays, it was likely to be later.

No matter how out of place they seemed, their wiring and electronics remained valuable. The salvage team methodically cut them down and cut them up. “We’d better be careful,” Vanessa said. “We don’t want the aliens to find out we’re messing with their stuff.”

She meant it for a joke. She was going to explain how her friends had called the relays alien listening devices. Had the rest of the team liked her better, she would have got a laugh.

But the others disassembling the relay only scowled. “Aliens! Give me a fucking break!” one of them said.

“Bite me,” Vanessa answered sweetly.

“Knock if off, both of you.” Saunders sounded weary. One of his jobs, along with this government-sponsored graverobbing, was putting out little fires in his crew before they turned into big ones. Nobody’d murdered anybody yet, or even assaulted with intent to maim, which proved he was good at what he did.

Vanessa wanted to yell He started it! How many times had she done that back home, with one brother or the other? Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but it was always worth a try. Not here. Merv Saunders didn’t care who’d started it. He just wanted it to stop.

And he had the power to bind and to loose. He could kick somebody off the team. If you got kicked off, you went out of the devastated zone on the next truck that came in to pick up salvageables. You didn’t get to go off on your own once you left the devastated zone, either. Oh, no. The powers that be were crueler than that. If you got kicked out, you went straight back into a refugee camp.

Staying in a camp was punitive. The authorities could see that (so could anybody who’d ever been in one). But millions of people remained stuck in them. The authorities couldn’t see how to put them anywhere else.

Not enough houses. Not enough money to build them. Not enough money for anyone to afford them even if they got built, either. The economy had been rotten before the supervolcano went off. With the Midwest essentially gone, it wasn’t just rotten any more. The vultures had eaten the meat off its bones. And the rest of the poor, chilly world wasn’t much better off. The USA had been the engine that pulled the train. Well, the engine had gone off the rails.

They slept in the best quarters Fredonia offered. It wasn’t a Motel 6, but it might as well have been. A motel with no electricity and no running water. Happy fucking day! The bed was more comfortable than a sleeping bag. The windows in Vanessa’s room weren’t broken, either, so they shielded her from the freezing wind. And that was about as much good as she could find to say about the place.

Her father had stayed at a Motel 6 when he went to Yellowstone. She remembered him bitching about it. That was back in the days when things still worked, though. Now. . Now she was stuck in this cold, miserable place with a bunch of people who couldn’t stand her.

She’d blown that National Guardsman so she could end up in a place like this, no matter what the people with her thought of her. She nodded to herself. I’d do it again, too, she thought. Next to Camp Constitution, this wasn’t half bad. There was a judgment for you! Nodding again, she rolled over and fell asleep.