Supervolcano: All Fall Down

VI

Thunk! The axe bit into the pine log. Rob Ferguson raised it and let it fall again. Little by little, trees turned into firewood. You could work up a sweat chopping wood even in a Maine winter. And the way Maine winters were these days, that was really saying something.

Thunk! Rob got the axe to do what he wanted now. When he’d first started with it, he’d counted himself lucky for not amputating anyone else’s fingers or his own leg. These days, it was just a tool-a tool you had to respect, sure, but a tool all the same. Thunk!

Biff came out of the Trebor Mansion Inn. He held up his left wrist to display a windup watch. Rob wore one, too. They’d had electricity through what was laughably called the summer in these parts, but it was out again now that the Ice Age had returned. Without it, they had no cell coverage, and without coverage their phones were nothing but little plastic bricks.

To amplify the message, Biff said, “Town meeting’s in half an hour.”

“Gotcha.” Rob swung the axe again. Another billet of what would be firewood jumped from the log.

Biff eyed it and the ones lying in the snow nearby. They were all of pretty much the same size and shape. “Dude, you’re getting to be like Conan the Barbarian with that thing.” The rhythm guitarist jerked a mittened thumb at the axe.

“Practice makes pregnant, same as with anything else.” Rob hefted his implement of destruction. “What I think is, it’s goddamn funny to be using a genuine axe for a change, instead of-” He mimed pulling hot licks from a guitar.

“Axe. . axe. . Yeah!” Biff grinned. You took the nickname for your instrument for granted until you did a compare-and-contrast with the real Craftsman article.

Rob went on chopping wood for another ten minutes or so. You had to earn your keep, all right. As soon as the power failed, Guilford and the rest of Maine north of the Interstate fell back in time to the land of Currier and Ives. What those nostalgia-filled prints didn’t tell you was how much goddamn work that nineteenth-century life took. You had to find that out for yourself. Rob had, and his hands had new ridges of callus to prove it.

He walked to the town meeting with the other guys from Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, and with Dick Barber and the swarm of his relations who lived on the family side of the inn. They’d had a couple of paying customers when some of the snow melted, but only a couple. Given that the all-time high summer temperature was sixty-one degrees, and that it snowed on August 3, ten days after that tropical afternoon, having any paying guests at all approached the miraculous.

Barber didn’t seem to worry about it. “Are they going to foreclose on me and toss me out in the snow?” he asked, and answered his own question: “I don’t think so! That kind of crap is all over, at least for now. Half the country isn’t making any mortgage payments now, probably more. Hell, there are whole states where nobody’s making any mortgage payments.”

He was bound to be right about that. Nobody was living in Wyoming, for instance, much less keeping the bank happy about the loan on the condo. Montana, Colorado, and Idaho were almost as badly screwed, and it got better only in relative terms as you moved farther away from what had been Yellowstone National Park and was now the world’s biggest, hottest hole in the ground.

The unwritten rule was that everybody shoveled the snow off the sidewalk in front of his own house or shop. The snow that got shoveled went into the street. Back in the day, plows had kept the roads cleared. They’d mostly given up on that now. If you wanted to go from town to town in wintertime now, you could take a sleigh or ski or snowshoe.

Children and people like the guys from the band amended the unwritten rule. If you were an old man with heart trouble or a woman with a bad back, you didn’t shovel your own walk. You gave somebody something to do it for you: food or warm clothes or firewood or sometimes even cash. Even with the roads opening up in the alleged summer, it was an economy of scarcity. Things counted for more than money did. And Rob had got some of his calluses with a snow shovel.

Biff ducked into Caleb’s Country Kitchen and came out with the waitress he’d fallen for. Cindy was a short brunette who hardly ever said anything. That had to appeal to Biff. Rob and Justin and Charlie were all full of themselves and full of their own opinions. So was Dick Barber. With Cindy, Biff could get a few words of his own in edgewise.

Caleb, the guy who ran and cooked for the diner, also came out. He turned the sign on the front door to CLOSED. “Won’t do no business till the meetin’s over, anyways,” he said. He’d stayed open where the Subway, more dependent on outside supplies, went under. He raised chickens and a couple of pigs, and cooked lots of eggs. That improved the overall level of his cuisine; eggs were harder to screw up than some of the things that had been on the menu.

Guilford held its town meetings in the Episcopalian church, one of the few buildings big enough for the crowds. Everybody came; no one made noises about the separation of church and state. Locals nodded to the guys in the band as they came up. They were tolerated just fine, though they’d stay outsiders forever. Dick Barber had lived here for years. He remained an outsider, too, though not one who was shy about speaking his mind. As far as Rob could see, Dick wasn’t shy about anything.

A fancy sleigh was hitched outside the church. Rob turned accusingly on Barber. “Why didn’t you tell us Jim was in town?”

“Because I didn’t know till just now,” Barber answered with a broad-shouldered shrug. “The landline’s out. I can do all kinds of things, but I don’t read minds.”

“It’ll liven up the meeting, anyway,” Charlie said, and no one was rash enough to try to contradict him. They walked inside.

“Boy, anybody’d think there were people here or something.” Justin made like Phil Collins: “I can feel it in the air tonight. . ”

Feel it wasn’t quite right. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t in the air. Regular baths and showers were modern luxuries that had gone by the wayside along with so much else. If you wanted to get clean, you heated a basin of water over your fire and washed one body part at a time till the stuff in the basin got too frigid to stand. If you had the patience to do that once a week, you were about average.

Rob didn’t notice how he smelled when he was by himself. He hardly noticed how the other people at the Trebor Mansion Inn smelled, either; he’d got used to them. But he sure did notice a whole bunch of strangers gathered together in one place. He noticed them for about five minutes, anyhow. After that, his nose forgot about them. When everybody was funky, nobody was funky.

The mayor of Guilford was a stocky, middle-aged fellow named Josh McCann. He also ran the local independent hardware store. Rob gathered that, before the eruption, it had been one step this side of a junk shop, and a small step at that. Since the supervolcano blew up and Maine north of the Interstate was mostly forgotten by the rest of the country, junk and being able to do things with junk suddenly became worth their weight in gold-sometimes, even worth their weight in pork spare ribs.

Swaddled in a bulky wool sweater, McCann took his place at the pulpit, where the minister usually stood. He brought down his gavel: once, twice, three times. People packing the pews quieted down, the way they would have at a church service. Democracy here was a secular faith, and the folks took it much more seriously than they did in SoCal. These towns were small enough that everyone knew or knew about everyone else. Money and slick advertising didn’t matter the way they did in the big city.

“Meeting will come to order,” the mayor rasped in a two-pack-a-day voice. Rob wondered how his habit was holding up. Tobacco had as much trouble getting here as everything else did. McCann went on, “First order of business is a little talk by Jim Farrell. He’s come a ways to call, so it seems only fair to let him speak his piece.”

Rob snorted under his breath. Nor was his the only amused or dubious voice rising to the heavens-or at least to the rafters. The next little talk from Farrell would be the first. He was a retired professor of Greek and Roman history who’d moved back to Maine after teaching for a million years at SUNY Albany. He was used to speaking in front of other people, in other words. And he was a man of strong opinions, and far from shy about letting the world know what they were.

Not long before the eruption, he’d run for Congress up here as a Republican. He’d got trounced. Dick Barber had helped run his campaign, and still grumbled about the way it turned out. The winner, a lawyer with an expensive haircut (Farrell’s words), was down in Washington, where it was. . well, warmer, anyhow.

Maybe he was doing what he could for his district. You never could tell. What he could do, in this ravaged, ravished country, seemed vanishingly small. Farrell, who’d stayed behind, was the biggest cheese north and west of the Interstate.

The other difference was, the lawyer knew bureaucracy and politics and policy. When the Federal government touched this part of Maine only while the roads were open, and when they hadn’t been open much this year, he became a cipher. Jim Farrell knew useful things, like which root vegetables had the shortest growing seasons and how to salt trout or make sauerkraut. He knew, and he talked. Oh, yes-he talked. And talked and talked some more.

He got to his feet now. Instead of the more common stocking cap, he wore a snap-brim fedora. His pearl-gray topcoat was of a cut reckoned elegant when FDR decided we had nothing to fear but fear itself: some years before he was born, in other words. He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t so old as that. He was a dandy with antique tastes.

He had a ruddy Irish face with a pointed nose and bushy eyebrows. The first time Rob met him, the winter before, he’d been reminded of a smaller version of John Madden, but only till Farrell opened his mouth. Madden had a mouth full of gravel. Jim Farrell’s baritone was a very different instrument. He spoke in sentences that parsed and paragraphs where the sentences followed logically, one upon another. That should have ruled out a successful political career for him, and as a matter of fact it had-till the supervolcano erupted.

“Here we are again,” he said as he took McCann’s place at the pulpit. “Here we are again, all right, in this, the second winter of our discontent. The first one was pretty easy, as these things go. We chopped down the trees that stood closest, and we shot the nearest and stupidest moose.”

People chuckled. It wasn’t that Farrell was saying anything that wasn’t so. They’d done exactly that the winter before. They’d got by with it, too, until things thawed out enough to remind the wider world for a little while that they were there.

“I’m serious,” Farrell insisted, “or as serious as I’m likely to get, anyhow. I’m serious, and the situation is liable to turn critical. If we don’t want to end up burning down our houses to keep warm and eating long pig so we don’t starve, we’d better do some planning first.”

Rob wondered how many of the men and women in the crowd understood what long pig was. Sitting next to him, Justin quirked an eyebrow, so he got it. Well, Justin knew all kinds of weird things. Knowing weird things was his specialty, maybe even more than playing guitar. And Dick Barber also grinned out of one side of his mouth. But he too was a man of parts, even if not all of them worked all the time. And he would have heard more from Farrell than anybody. For most of these folks, though, long pig would be caviar to the general. Then Rob wondered how many people here knew about caviar to the general. And then he quit worrying about crap like that and listened to Farrell some more.

“-got to organize and share what we can gather,” the retired history prof was saying. “If we don’t hang together, you can be sure we will hang separately.”

That was Ben Franklin. Before Rob could even start to wonder how many people in the church knew that much, somebody called, “I thought you were a Republican, not a goddamn Commie!”

Farrell beamed. He loved hecklers, mostly because he loved demolishing them. Before Mayor McCann could gavel the loudmouth out of order, Farrell waved for him not to bother. “Right this minute, I think Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang are a little too cold themselves to worry about Maine north of the Interstate.” He got his laugh. Having got it, he went on, “At least, I don’t think North Korea has a rocket that will reach all the way to such a dangerous place as Guilford.”

That won him another one. “Washington doesn’t worry about us, either. We’ve seen that. And I am a Republican, so I say that’s a good thing more often than not. I don’t want Big Brother watching me. But I also don’t want my friends and neighbors squabbling like the Kilkenny Cats, and I don’t want them starving or freezing, either. If we can take care of ourselves, we won’t need to cry because Big Brother’s falling down on the job. All politics is local, but some is more local than others. For about nine months out of the year, maybe more, ours looks as though it’s going to be about as local as it gets.”

He went on to talk about schemes for using the gasoline and fuel oil they did have, and about organizing hunts and woodcutting parties. He talked about parsnips and mangel-wurzels and Andean potatoes that ripened faster than the varieties of spuds Maine had been famous for.

“What the hell is a mangel-wurzel?” Rob whispered to Justin.

“You grab a wurzel and you hurt it real bad,” Justin explained, so he had no clue, either.

“None of this will be exciting,” Farrell finished. “But we’re not talking about excitement now. Excitement is for good times. It’s a luxury. We’re talking about survival. Survival is what we’ll be talking for the rest of my life, for the rest of your lives, and probably for the rest of your children’s and grandchildren’s lives. I don’t think Washington has figured that out yet, but it looks pretty obvious here, doesn’t it?”

Nobody, not even the guy who’d yelled at him, tried to tell him he was wrong. No one applauded when Farrell stepped away from the pulpit-the bully pulpit, Rob thought-either. The thoughtful silence he got seemed higher praise than any mere handclapping could have been. And the agenda items following his talk seemed even duller than they might have otherwise.

After the town meeting adjourned, Rob waded through the crowd around Jim Farrell and waited his turn to talk. When it finally came, he asked, “Why aren’t the Feds paying more attention to us? We’re hit harder than any place that didn’t get covered in ash.”

“Well, for one thing, a lot of places did get covered in ash,” Farrell replied, and Rob nodded. The older man continued, “And Washington is out for what it can get, much more than it is for what it can give. From us, that means it’s out for nothing. You can’t get blood from a turnip, or from a mangel-wurzel. So Washington shines the light of its countenance on the places that are still warm, or at least warmer.”

That made more sense than Rob wished it did. He was less convinced than Farrell that being forgotten about by Washington was a good thing. But he wasn’t nearly so sure it was a bad thing as he had been when Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles first got stuck in Guilford. He let someone else talk to Farrell and walked out into the sharp-toothed cold outside.

It was dark outside the church, too-no working streetlamps. Rob stepped on somebody’s foot before he’d gone very far. “Sorry,” he said, wondering who his victim was.

“No damage,” came the reply: a woman’s voice. She couldn’t see him, either, because she asked, “Who are you?”

“Rob. I’m one of the fellows staying at the Mansion Inn.”

“Oh, from the band!” she said. “You guys are good, even acoustic. I like it when you play in the park by the river. I go whenever I can.”

“Cool,” Rob replied. A fan-he recognized enthusiasm when he heard it. But which fan? “Um, who’m I talking to?”

“Oh. I’m Lindsey Kincaid. I teach chemistry at Piscataquis Community Secondary School,” she answered. That was the high school not far from the inn.

Rob sortakinda knew who she was, the way he sortakinda knew an awful lot of people here. About his age, halfway between blonde and brunette. . not half bad, all thing considered. How much considering did he feel like? “Where do you live?” he asked. “Can I walk you back there, wherever it is?”

If she said no, he wouldn’t get shot down too badly. But she said, “Okay,” and sounded pleased saying it. So maybe he’d find out how much considering he felt like.

* * *

“Attention! Attention! May I have your attention, please!”

When a man with a bullhorn shouted for your attention, you gave it to him whether you wanted to or not. He didn’t even have to say please. Vanessa Ferguson wondered why he bothered. Vestigial politeness, was her guess. Like the human tailbone, it was shrunken and useless, but the FEMA guy out there still had that little bit.

He blared away: “Camp Constitution is being adversely impacted by the flood-type conditions currently obtaining in this geographical location.”

That was so bad, Vanessa almost liked it. She couldn’t imagine a more bureaucratic way to say The flood here is screwing Camp Constitution to the wall.

Things had been bad the spring before. Ash and dust covered the basins of the rivers that flowed into the Mississippi from the west. She still remembered what a pool-service guy had told her mother when she was a kid: “Your pool is the lowest part of your yard, lady. Anything that can get into it goddamn well will.” He’d had a cigarette twitching in the corner of his mouth, and he was tanned as Cordoban leather. These days, he was probably dead of melanoma or lung cancer.

Which didn’t make him wrong. The rivers were the lowest parts of their big back yards, too. They’d flooded last year from all the volcanic crud rain and melting snow and wind dumped into them. Now they were doing it again, still more crud going into riverbeds that hadn’t yet got rid of everything from the year before. And so the rivers-including the Mississippi itself, which was after all the ultimate channel for half a continent’s worth of gunk-were spilling over their banks and spreading out across the countryside.

It wasn’t dramatic, the way the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan had been. There weren’t huge, speeding walls of water smashing everything in their path. But in the end, how much difference did that make? Whether you went under with a smash or merely a dispirited glub, under you went.

“Evacuation procedures are likely to become necessary for implementation in the nearly immediate future,” the flunky with the bullhorn bellowed. Not just an evacuation, mind you, but evacuation procedures. That made it official, to say nothing of officious. “Gather your belongings and prepare to be in compliance with all instructional directives. National Guard personnel will assist in ensuring prompt satisfaction of requirements.”

They’ll shoot you if you don’t do what we tell you. They would, too. The National Guard had opened fire in the camp several times. Like Vanessa, lots of refugees were armed, but not many had assault rifles or body armor or military discipline. The Guard outclassed them.

“What the fuck they gonna do to us now?” grumbled a middle-aged black man a couple of tiers of bunks over from Vanessa.

“Waddaya think, Jack?” a woman said in tones that came from Long Island, or possibly the Jersey shore. “They’re gonna do whatever they damn well wanna.”

And that was about the size of it. Vanessa hoped the waters would close over Micah Husak. She hoped crawdads and sticklebacks and little fish whose names she didn’t even know would pick out his dead eyes and nibble the rotting flesh off his toes-and off his dick. All the while, she understood it was a hopeless hope. That kind of shit didn’t happen to the people who ran camps. It happened to the people who wound up stuck in them.

Gathering her belongings didn’t take long. Everything she owned fit in her purse and in a dark green garbage bag. That seemed fitting enough and then some, because most of what she owned was garbage.

Off in the distance, an M16 barked: a quick, professional three-round burst. Whoever’d been giving some Guardsman grief would just have discovered he’d made his last dumbass mistake. Or maybe he was too high on crank even to notice he was dead. Methamphetamines and weed fired people up and mellowed them out all over the camp.

The yahoo with the bullhorn ordered the people in the tent next to Vanessa’s out to comply with his instructional directives. The middle-aged black guy moaned. “I didn’t used to think there was no place worse’n this,” he said. “But what you want to bet they went and found one?”

“Made one,” Vanessa corrected. The difference sounded tiny, but seemed profound to her.

Then, half an hour later, the bell-or the bullhorn-tolled for them. “Tent 27B inmates, assemble outside the entrance in a single-file line,” the guy with it boomed. Vanessa wondered if he would lead them to the Department of Redundancy Department. She didn’t make the joke. She didn’t think anyone else in good old Tent 27B would get it. Too bad, but there you were. And here she was.

Nervous-looking Guardsmen held their rifles in positions from which they could open up in a hurry. There were a lot of them. How much trouble had they had evacuating other great big tents? Quite a bit, by all the signs.

“Follow me toward the transportation that will transport you to the new provisional facilities,” Bullhorn Boy continued. “Obey all commands immediately.” That was so plain, it could only mean Don’t screw with me-or else.

Off they went, at a retarded shuffle, garbage sacks slung over their shoulders. Up ahead, people were slowly filing onto buses ancient enough to have carried kids back in the days when Southern schools were still segregated.

Vanessa made up her mind right there that she didn’t want to get transported to any provisional facility. Camp Constitution was bad. A half-assed version would only be worse. They said it couldn’t be done, but as often as not they didn’t know what they were talking about. This looked like one of those times.

Off to one side stood a much shorter row of newer, less decrepit buses. The people getting into those also seemed newer and less decrepit than the ones boarding the wrecks toward which Vanessa was heading. Pointing at the newer buses, she asked one of the Guardsmen, “What’s up with those?”

He was a squarely built, blocky fellow with beard stubble so dark and thick he probably had to shave twice a day. “Oh, those are for the reclamation parties,” he answered.

“Huh?” Vanessa said brilliantly.

“Reclamation parties,” the Guardsman repeated. “You know, to go into the country the eruption fucked over and scavenge stuff from it and start cleaning it up so it’s, like, worth something again.”

“How do I get on one of those buses?” Vanessa asked. If you were cleaning up the countryside, you weren’t living in a camp. Not living in a camp seemed the most wonderful thing in the world to her, the way El Dorado must have to the conquistadors.

The guy looked at her. “You shoulda signed a volunteer sheet. They went around, like, weeks ago.”

“Sign one? I never even saw one!” Vanessa yipped. She wondered if that was so. All kinds of stupid administrative papers circulated through the tents and FEMA trailers. Like most of the other poor slobs stuck in Camp Constitution, she ignored them. If she’d ignored the wrong one, she’d just screwed herself to the wall. But even if saying she’d never seen one might not be true, it was definitely truthy. She sure hadn’t paid attention to one.

“If you didn’t sign up, you can’t go on those buses. You gotta get on these ones instead.” The Guardsman pointed in the direction she was already going with the muzzle of his assault rifle.

Full of helpless longing, Vanessa stared at the newer buses. Helpless? God helped those who helped themselves. “I’d do anything to get on one of those buses,” she said in a low, breathy voice she didn’t remember using since before she threw out her last boyfriend.

If she hadn’t taken care of Micah Husak that way, chances were she would have kept quiet. But after you’d done it once, the second time turned out to be a lot easier. She had a weapon, and she’d use it, the way the Guardsman would use the M16 if he needed to.

He understood what she was offering, all right. Well, he didn’t exactly need to be Phi Beta Kappa to figure it out. “Yeah?” he said, as people not so young, not so cute, and maybe not so desperate trudged past so they could go from a godawful camp to one that had to be even worse.

“Yeah,” Vanessa said. The fish had taken the bait.

“Joe-Bob, keep an eye on the parade,” her Guardsman said to the fellow next to him. Then he turned back to her. “C’mon in here.” In here was into a tent that had already been evacuated. He beckoned to her as he undid his fly. “Let’s just make it quick, okay?”

“Okay.” She got down in front of him. Blowing him was better than fucking him. She wouldn’t have to worry about dressing again-or about getting knocked up. He would have been better right after a shower, but he could have been worse, too.

And it would be quick. She could tell as soon as she started. “Yeah, babe,” he muttered, shoving his hips forward and thrusting deeper into her mouth. Coughing, she pulled away a little, then went back to what she was doing.

He was about to go off. Just when she was going to jerk away so he’d spurt on the ground, he grabbed her head and held her to him while he came in her mouth. It was as bad as she remembered. She gagged and choked and almost puked on his sand-colored Army boots.

“All right,” he said as he let her go. Eyes watering, she spat out as much of the gross, sticky stuff as she could. He chuckled and ran his hand through her hair: affection now, not brute strength. Why shouldn’t he feel affectionate? She’d given him what he wanted. “You better hustle if you’re gonna get on the reclamation bus,” he told her.

“You bet I am,” she said grimly. She spat again as she climbed to her feet and brushed dirt off the knees of her jeans. The Guardsman chuckled some more. He could afford to think it was funny. He hadn’t been on the receiving end.

She fled the tent and hustled toward the newer buses before she realized they hadn’t even found out each other’s names. That came closer to the famous zipless fuck than she’d ever dreamt she’d get. She hadn’t got fucked, though. She literally hadn’t even got kissed.

She spat one more time before she got into the boarding line. She wished for a jug of Scope, but wishing failed to produce one. The taste lingered. As she took her place, the woman in front of her-a gal about her own age-gave her a curious look, but didn’t say anything.

A man with a clipboard was making checkmarks on the paper it held. A roster sheet? Vanessa’s heart sank. If she’d sucked off that National Guard asshole for nothing. . “Ferguson,” she said with more confidence than she felt.

He frowned. “You aren’t on the list.”

“I’m supposed to be,” she declared-again, at least truthy if not true.

He inspected her. Was she going to have to do him, too? Pretty soon she’d be swimming out to meet troopships if she wasn’t careful. But all he said was “Well, get on. We’re a couple people short, and you look like you can do the work. Ferguson, your name was?”

“That’s right. Vanessa. Thank you.” She didn’t usually dole out gratitude so casually, but she made an exception here. As the man added her to the roster, she happily hopped into the bus. She didn’t care where it took her. She was out of Camp Constitution at last!

* * *

When Marshall Ferguson wasn’t babysitting his little half-brother, he had the family house pretty much to himself. His father went to the cop shop early every morning, and Kelly-Marshall couldn’t think of her as a stepmom, not when she was as close to his age as to his old man’s-headed for CSUDH not a whole lot later. Peace. Quiet. If he wanted to make like a writer, all he had to do was sit in front of the screen and let the words pour out.

In theory, anyhow. Theory was wonderful. Practice, he was discovering, was a little different. Yeah, just a little. Theory was all about inspiration and how to court it. As he was discovering, practice turned out to involve a lot more of figuring out what the hell you did after the fickle bitch upped and left you.

Because she damn well would. Inspiration had launched Marshall into a couple of stories that seemed like surefire winners. Inspiration took him 1,500 words into one of them, maybe 2,500 words into the other. Then he had to work out what happened next and what, if anything, it meant. And he had to work out how to put it across without being obvious or boring.

Somehow, neither of those masterpieces of Western literature ever got finished.

But Marshall did finish one piece he started with no inspiration whatsoever. Well, almost none. His father’s dubious stare at the dinner table every evening kept Marshall busy. Where art and brilliance failed to serve, stubbornness and craft got him to the end.

Then he had to put the story on the market. Being forced to submit by Professor Bolger at UCSB was one of the best things that ever happened to him: he’d started early on getting hardened to rejection. The prof said straight-out that some people would rather submit to a root canal than to an editor.

Marshall had never had a root canal, but he understood the feeling. He’d sold a story during that quarter, which freaked him and the prof almost equally. But you didn’t sell every time. And getting rejected sucked.

He tried to think of it like dating. If you didn’t hit on girls, you’d never get laid. Yeah, sometimes they shot you down. That didn’t mean you didn’t pick yourself up and ask somebody else out. It might not even mean you didn’t try again with the girl who’d told you no before.

Or with the market that told you no. Marshall’s stubborn story went out and came back five times before it found a home at a Web site that put the munificent sum of two and a half cents a word in his PayPal account.

Two and a half cents a word wouldn’t make anybody rich. Marshall knew that only too well. In case he didn’t, his father rubbed his nose in it: “I don’t think you’ll have Tom Clancy or Bill Gates trimming your oleanders any time soon.”

“Right,” Marshall said, and then, “Pass the potatoes, please.” Was Dad cynical because he’d been a cop for too long, or had he become a cop because he was already cynical? Could you answer all of the above? That was how it looked to Marshall.

“He sold it,” Kelly said. “Two and a half cents a word is better than nothing. It’s more than I’ve ever got for an article. In academic publishing, all they give you is the glory of your name in print-usually with a raft of coauths.”

“Yeah, well, you’re advancing human knowledge,” Colin Ferguson said, “not just-” He stopped short.

“Bullshitting?” Marshall suggested.

“You said it. I didn’t.” Dad wouldn’t, either, not with Kelly across the table from him. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking it.

Kelly was less touchy about that kind of thing than her husband. “God knows there’s plenty of bullshit in the academic journals,” she said. “How about the ones for criminal justice?”

One reason you had to respect Dad was that he would ’fess up when you caught him out. “Well, you’ve got me there,” he admitted now. “You read those things, you’d think we caught every perp, and that about day after tomorrow we can talk all the bad guys into staying good guys and put ourselves out of business forever.” He smiled crookedly. “And rain makes applesauce.”

“Is that what they call pie in the sky?” Marshall had run into the phrase, but he wasn’t sure exactly how it worked.

His father nodded. “That’s what they call it, all right. Come the revolution, they used to say. Then the revolution came, and things were just as nasty afterwards as they were before. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” He got that from some old rock song.

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others,” Kelly said, which sounded like agreement.

It also sounded familiar. “That’s from Animal Farm!” Marshall exclaimed. “I had to read it in Western Civ. It’s by the guy who wrote 1984, back when 1984 seemed a long way away.” It seemed a long way away to him, too-lost in the distant past like 1945 and 1865 and 1776 and 1066.

“The 1984 we got wasn’t too great, but it was better than the one Orwell wrote about,” Dad said.

“If you say so,” Marshall answered. He had no memories of 1984. Kelly would have been a little kid back then, so she wouldn’t remember much, either. For Dad, it seemed to feel like the week before last. Getting old, having all that stuff to remember, to try and keep track of, had to be a terrible thing.

Thinking about what a terrible thing it was and trying to work out exactly what kind of terrible thing it was must have shown on Marshall’s face. Kelly murmured, “He’s getting an idea for a story.”

“Or indigestion, one.” But Dad didn’t sound disgusted. Coming out with snide cracks was as much a reflex with him as breathing was. All the other cops Marshall knew-and he naturally knew more cops than most stoners ever wanted to-talked the same way. It had to help shield them from some of the nasty shit they ran into on the job.

“Well. .” Marshall stood up.

He paid rent-a third of what he grossed. Not netted: grossed. Between babysitting and writing, he wasn’t grossing one whole hell of a lot. But he was a cash customer, so his old man didn’t ride him too hard. With most of his high school buddies scuffling even harder than he was, he didn’t feel embarrassed about living at home. Misery really did love company.

He went up to his room. He kept it tolerably clean and neat; he’d learned how taking care of himself at UCSB. It wasn’t so much for his sake. Like a lot of young males on their own, he didn’t mind living like a slob. What guys didn’t mind, though, grossed girls out. Some guys were too dumb to learn from failure and frustration. Marshall wasn’t.

No one in the house minded if he brought a girl upstairs. No one was going to pound on the door with the crime-scene tape while he had company. Things could have been worse. He kept telling himself as much. He kept looking at apartments, too. Unfortunately, landlords were less adaptable about rent than Dad was.

Earbuds and his iPod made the outside world go away. Or they would have, but the first song that came out was from Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles: a strange, droning chant called “Justinian II,” an Emperor of Byzantium who got his nose chopped off. Listening to it reminded Marshall how much he missed his older brother. He hadn’t seen Rob since before the supervolcano blew. Maine? OMG! Maine was the Devil’s personal icebox these days.

In the song, Justinian II came to a bad end. Singing about it, Justin Nachman sounded unwholesomely amused. He had a knack for that. Something more innocuous but less evocative shuffled onto the iPod next. Marshall closed his eyes and listened.

After a while, he shut it off and started noodling on a story. Not much inspiration, no. Maybe perspiration would do. One thing sure: the elves wouldn’t write it for him, no matter how much he wished they would. Wondering why they didn’t make elves the way they used to, he soldiered on. Once he finished the first draft, he could read it over and see just what he had, or if he had anything at all.