Supervolcano: All Fall Down

VIII

It wasn’t snowing. There was still snow on the ground, but not everywhere. Rob Ferguson savored the sun shining wanly down out of a sky exactly the color of a high school girlfriend’s gray-blue eyes. Here and there, hopeful green grass sprouted through the dead yellow tangle of last year’s halfhearted growth. A few deciduous trees showed new little leaves.

It should have been April, or maybe early May-Rob wasn’t a hundred percent sure how the weather had worked in Guilford before the supervolcano went off. It was. . the middle of August. It was the second year in a row without a summer, the second of nobody knew how many.

The roads were open. For the time being, till the blizzards clamped down again, Maine north and west of the Interstate was reconnected to the rest of the country. The Shell station down the street from the Trebor Mansion Inn had gas-not a lot of gas, and twelve bucks a gallon, but gas. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could have got the hell out.

Plenty of people had. Most of the ones who’d left had relatives in warmer parts of the country. (There weren’t many colder ones, not in the Lower Forty-eight. What was happening to places like Fairbanks and Nome and Anchorage, Rob didn’t want to think about.)

Dick Barber was glad to see individuals and families pull up stakes. So was Jim Farrell. “The fewer mouths we have to feed when we’re on our own again, the better off we’ll be,” he declared to anyone who would listen. Barber spread the gospel of flight, too-without packing up and leaving himself.

The band was still here, too. Every once in a while, Justin would make wistful noises about hitting the road again. Sometimes Charlie Storer would nod, but not in a way to make anybody think he really meant it. One reason he didn’t was that Biff wasn’t going anywhere. Biff cared more about Cindy down at Caleb’s Kitchen than he did about touring. Well he might: she was going to have a baby. They hadn’t tied the knot yet, but that also looked to be in the cards.

And Rob wasn’t eager to vamoose from the land of moose, either. He’d been going with Lindsey ever since they literally bumped into each other outside the Episcopal church. She wasn’t carrying his child, but not for lack of effort. If it came down to a choice between her and the band. . Rob was glad it hadn’t come down to that.

Justin and Charlie had also found friends of the female persuasion. That, no doubt, was one reason why they didn’t sound more serious about bailing out. Yes, they were musicians. Yes, they were used to temporary attachments. But, whether or not they’d intended to, they’d put down roots here.

Roots. . Every house had a garden. All the gardens were trying to grow potatoes and parsnips and turnips and mangel-wurzels and anything else that had a prayer of maturing in a growing season abbreviated even for Maine. Extravagant mulch and plastic sheeting fought the cold as best they could. And maybe there would be a crop and maybe there wouldn’t. Everyone would find out when the weather turned really bad again.

In the meantime. . In the meantime, Rob ambled down the semigrassy slope to the Piscataquis. The stream had thawed out enough to chuckle over its rocky bed. It had probably been born from glacial runoff. Rob stuck his finger into it, then jerked the digit out again. “Brr!” he said. By all the signs, the river was getting back to its roots.

A blue jay scolded him from a pine tree. A lot of birds had flown south for the winter and not come back. Jays and robins and ravens lingered. So did ospreys-one plunged into the frigid water and came out with a fish clamped in its talons. Another jay flew after the fish hawk, screeching.

Some kids threw a football around. The slope that led to the river meant only sidehill sheep could have played any proper kind of game. The kids didn’t care. They threw and kicked and yelled and laughed. It was summer vacation, even if it was summer only by the calendar.

They’d missed a lot of school even when it wasn’t vacation. Lindsey made sorrowful noises about that. Sometimes it was because they couldn’t get to class themselves. When the snowdrifts were taller than they were. . More often, though, their teachers couldn’t make it. Not all the teachers lived in Guilford. The ones who didn’t had relied on the quaint concept known as motor transportation. Here and there in the U.S. of A., roads still stayed open. Not in this part of the country, though. Nowhere close. The joke for Siberia had been ten months of winter and two of bad skiing. The joke, these days, applied all too literally to this part of Maine.

As he had with Alaska, Rob wondered how things were in Siberia right now. Cold: the one-word answer immediately supplied itself. Bloody fucking cold, if you wanted to get technical. Though it might seem hard to believe, there had been places with climates worse than the one Guilford didn’t enjoy. If Guilford had turned into a pretty fair approximation of Siberia, what had Siberia turned into?

The South Pole, Rob thought. Then he tried to imagine penguins roaming the tundra. It made him want to giggle.

A kid missed the football. It took three crazy bounces and stopped right at Rob’s feet. “Throw it back, man!” the kid yelled. He was about twelve-no beard on his cheeks, and his voice hadn’t broken.

Rob picked it up. “I’ll do better than that,” he said. The shape and the pebbly feel of the leather or rubbery plastic or whatever the hell it was combined irresistibly. Like a certain deranged beagle, what red-blooded grown-up doesn’t want to be the Mad Punter, even if only for a moment?

He let fly. He hadn’t played football since PE in high school, and he hadn’t been the punter then. By rights, he should have squibbed it off the side of his foot. By dumb luck, he caught it square. It flew long and straight. It would have been a forty-yarder on any NFL gridiron-well, any NFL gridiron except Mile High Stadium, which was still deeply buried in volcanic crap.

“Wow!” The kid who’d called for the ball wasn’t the only one to stare at him, wide-eyed. He tried not to preen. Damned if he hadn’t had standing O’s at club gigs that he’d enjoyed less. Being applauded for skill was one thing. Being applauded for skill and strength. . He felt as if he’d grown shoulder pads under his flannel shirt.

After the kids retrieved the ball, they brought it back to him. One of the kids flipped it his way. “Do it again!”

He didn’t think he could do it twice in a row. Hell, he hadn’t thought he could do it once in a row. But he’d always been able to resist anything but temptation-a line his old man had used more than once. He punted again. It wasn’t as good as the first try, but it went a lot farther than any kid who hadn’t reached puberty could manage.

They swarmed after it and brought it back like retrievers. He didn’t want to play punting machine. If once was experiment and twice was perversion, what was three times? Boring, that was what.

They didn’t ask him for another punt, though. Instead, one of them said, “When are you guys gonna play again?”

“I dunno,” Rob answered. “Next town meeting, maybe, if they want us to.” That was a week away.

When you were eleven or twelve, a week was as good-no, as bad-as forever. “Wish you’d play here in the park again, sooner than that,” the boy said.

“In the daytime,” one of his friends added.

There was a lot of daytime at this season of the year, just as nights here stretched like Silly Putty during wintertime. More than just the weather told you Maine lay a lot farther north than L.A. or Santa Barbara, which were Rob’s standards of comparison.

“Well, we’ll see,” he said.

“Puhleeze!” Three of them squealed it at the same time.

Hearing them, he realized how starved for entertainment they were. They’d grown up with TV and the Net and PlayStations and Wiis and Xboxes. All of that stuff took electricity, though. Guilford had power for three or four hours a day during the summer. During the winter. . Well, people tried-you had to give them that. But it was mostly no go, and no juice.

If they wanted to listen to a band they’d surely never heard of before it washed up on their frozen shore-and wanted to badly enough to beg for music-they really had it bad. If Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could tour the local towns, towns that hadn’t had an almost-rock band get stuck in them, it might clean up. It might clean up as much as anybody in this part of Maine could right now, anyhow.

“We’ll see,” Rob repeated, but in a different tone of voice this time. Biff wouldn’t mind that kind of tour. Rob wouldn’t mind it himself. It might work. It was definitely worth talking about.

The kids caught the difference. “Yeah!” they said, or rather, “Ayuh!” It was Maine, all right. One of them waved for another to go out on a pass pattern. The ball spiraled after him. The boys raced away.

But when Rob looked out the windows of his tower garret in the Trebor Mansion Inn the next morning, the sky had gone gray and gloomy and dark. Snow swirled through the air. It wasn’t a blizzard, but it also wasn’t the kind of weather that would let the band draw a crowd, even from the hardy folk who’d stayed in Guilford. He still intended to talk about playing, but this wasn’t the day for it.

* * *

Colin Ferguson looked wistfully at the Taurus in his driveway. It still ran. He fired it up every now and then and took it around the block to keep the battery alive and to make sure the tires stayed round. He’d drive it if he went out to dinner with Kelly, especially when it was raining. And these days it rained more often in the L.A. basin than he’d ever dreamt it could.

But he didn’t go to work in the Taurus every day any more, even though it wasn’t far. Gas was too hard to come by, and too expensive for anyone on a civil-service salary to use very much. A San Atanasio police lieutenant made a pretty good civil-service salary. What Kelly brought in from Cal State Dominguez didn’t hurt, either. All the same. .

All the same, he put his briefcase in his bike’s cargo basket, climbed aboard, and pedaled away. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle very often between the time when he was fifteen or sixteen and the day the supervolcano erupted. They said you never forgot how. Like a lot of things they said, that had holes that would have sunk it if it were a boat. He’d wobbled all over the place when he started riding again. He’d had a good fall, too. Luckily, he’d blown the knees out of an old pair of sweats, not the pants from any of his suits. Even more luckily, though he’d pedaled home scraped up and bruised, he hadn’t broken anything.

It did come back in a hurry. The mysterious they were right about that much. Colin had got to the point where he enjoyed the wind in his face as he rode. (The rain was a different story. He’d quickly bought a plastic slicker that covered him from head to foot, and a broad-brimmed hat to keep most of the raindrops off his bifocals. Bicycling with an umbrella, he’d rapidly discovered, was an invitation to suicide.)

He wasn’t the only two-wheeled commuter. Oh, no-not even close. Bikes, and especially bikes with adults in business attire on them, had been uncommon sights on L.A.-area streets before the eruption. No more. As gas prices zoomed up like a Trident missile, more and more people said to hell with their cars and started doing without infernal combustion.

Colin had dropped five pounds since he started biking more than he drove. His wind was better than it had been. That was the good news. The bad news was the San Atanasio PD’s Robbery Division was trying to deal with an explosion of bicycle thefts. So was every other police department in Southern California-and in a lot of other places, too.

A car whizzed by. It didn’t come particularly close, but he sent it a resentful stare even so. Now that he rode the bicycle, he looked at automobiles in a whole new way. The goddamn things were dangerous. If you tangled with one, you lost. It was as simple as that. And so many people drove with their heads up their asses. Bike? What bike? they might have been saying.

He’d probably driven that way himself. As a matter of fact, he was sure he had. How many times had he almost creamed some green ecofreako with delusions of Lance Armstrong? Plenty-he knew as much. And he’d blamed the skinny morons on the bikes every single time.

He stopped at a light, then turned right onto Hesperus. That was a bigger street. It had more cars on it. Not a whole lot more, though. Even L.A. and its auto-based suburbs could do without the sacred conveyance if they had to. They sure were trying to make like they could, anyhow.

“Pothole coming,” he muttered, reminding himself. It was right in front of a tropical-fish place run by a Japanese couple who, he happened to know, also owned about a quarter of the real estate down in Torrance-a bigger, richer burb than working-class San Atanasio. But they just plain liked tropical fish, so they went on selling them.

The pothole was a doozy. He would have felt it in the Taurus. On the bike, it might have sent him ass over teakettle. Not for the first time, he told himself to call Street Maintenance and give them hell. One of these days. In his copious spare time.

He had to get out into the middle of the street to turn left into the police station parking lot. The bike rack there was new since the eruption. Colin chained his mount to a hitching post. The bike was secondhand, and had seen better times. The chain was new, and industrial-strength. Marshall had had a bike disappear from a UCSB rack on account of an el-cheapo chain. Colin made his share of mistakes, but usually not the ones he could see coming six miles down the road.

Gabe Sanchez was standing outside the door poisoning his lungs. Colin nodded to the sergeant. “What do you know?” he called.

“I know I’d rather do this inside,” Gabe answered. “It’s cold out here, dammit.”

Colin didn’t feel cold. “You must have driven this morning,” he said. No, he didn’t feel cold at all. Antiperspirant was still getting into SoCal. The world would turn less pleasant if that supply ever failed.

“Way to go, Sherlock,” Sanchez said. “Anybody would guess you were a cop or something.”

“You think maybe?” Colin said. He looked like a cop. He dressed like a cop. He talked like a cop. He thought like a cop. So what was he gonna be? A tropical-fish merchant? An auctioneer? Like Popeye, he was what he was, and that was all that he was.

Well, almost all. If he hadn’t been a post-divorce tourist, he wouldn’t also be a middle-aged guy trying to start a second family. Rob, Vanessa, and Marshall might end up with a new half-brother or half-sister. Another new half-brother or half-sister, that is. And one with exactly zero biological relationship to their last new half-brother.

“Life gets fucking weird sometimes, you know?” Colin said: no great originality there, but plenty of feeling.

Feeling or not, Gabe shook his head. “Unh-unh, man. That’s a negative. Every once in a while, life stops being fucking weird. That’s when you think it starts making sense. And when you do, it drops the hammer on you but good. Because the rest of the time. .” He shook his head again, and crushed the coffin nail under his heel. Then he looked mournful. “I want another one, dammit.”

“I’d go easy, if I were you.” Colin left it there. Like antiperspirant, tobacco reached L.A. from points east. Like antiperspirant and everything else coming in from points east, it reached L.A. in limited amounts, with prices inflated to match. Or maybe to more than match. People who had the cigarette jones had it bad.

Take Gabe Sanchez, for instance. He looked more sorrowful still. “Tell me about it. I’m smoking, like, half as much as I used to. That means I always need the next one twice as bad.” His laugh was singularly-almost plurally-devoid of humor. “The weenies who get on your back for liking the shit at all say you’ll live longer if you smoke less. It sure as hell seems longer-I’ll tell you that.”

“Ready to earn your next pack?” Colin asked, stepping toward the door.

“Way prices are now, that’s about two weeks of work.” Gabe exaggerated, but less than he would have a year earlier, and a lot less than he would have before the eruption. He followed Colin into the station.

Before long, Colin wasn’t so warm as he had been right after he chained his bike to the rack. You couldn’t crank up the heat the way you had in the old days. You also couldn’t roll the AC like nobody’s business on a scorching summer day. That turned out not to be such an enormous issue. The next scorching summer day here after the eruption would be the first.

Supervolcano or no supervolcano, people still robbed banks and liquor stores and even a laundromat. That one croggled Colin. The perp had escaped with over a hundred pounds of quarters in four large sacks.

“What the hell’s he gonna do with all of ’em?” he asked, not at all rhetorically. “You can’t spend ’em more than maybe five bucks at a time. Take your girlfriend out to a fancy restaurant and pay in rolls of quarters, people will talk.”

“Watch out for some dude buying everybody games at the arcade,” Rodney Ellis suggested. The black detective mimed working a joystick.

“There you go,” Colin said. “Makes more sense than anything I thought of.”

“Perp was in his forties, the crime report says,” Gabe pointed out. “So that’s kinda less likely, know what I mean?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Rodney answered. “But what did that guy say? You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever.”

Colin thought of Louise, and of her adventures and misadventures with her younger man. But if he told her anything like that, she’d go off the way the hot spot under Yellowstone had. Except in the line of duty, he tried not to talk to her these days.

Back to business. “What are we going to do about this asshole?” he said. “It’s not what you’d call a good description.”

“Wait till he hits the next Stop-and-Rob,” Rodney said. “And if he gets away with quarters again, right after that he’ll show up at the San Atanasio Memorial ER with a double hernia.”

“Everybody’s a comedian,” Colin said, but he and Gabe were both laughing.

It had started raining by the time they went out to lunch in Gabe’s car. The Honda stank of cigarette smoke, but that was better than getting drenched. “You’re gonna have fun riding home tonight,” Gabe remarked.

“Tell me about it,” Colin said gloomily. Poncho or not, he’d get wet. Sighing, he went on, “Once upon a time, it didn’t rain this time of year.”

“Yeah, I know.” Gabe nodded. “We’ll keep saying that till they shovel dirt over us. All the kids too young to remember what it was like back then will think we’re a pathetic bunch of old farts for all the pissing and moaning about the good old days we do.”

“Yup.” Colin contented himself with the one word. The prediction sounded altogether too likely.

“Your wife knows about this shit, right?” Gabe said. “So, how long is the weather supposed to stay fucked up?”

Colin only shrugged. “From what she tells me, nobody can say for sure. Twenty years? fifty? A couple of hundred? A couple of thousand? We all get to find out.” He didn’t say that Kelly feared things would stay bad for the long end of the guesses-estimates, if you wanted the more scientific term. She didn’t think a short cold snap would have put Homo sapiens through such a wringer 75,000 years ago, after Mount Toba went kablooie.

No point passing that on to Gabe. Kelly admitted it was nothing but speculation. If Gabe wanted to think his kids would see the good old climate again, he could. Nobody could prove he was wrong for thinking so. And optimism, like so many other things, came where you found it.

The rain had grown more serious, more sure of itself, while they were eating. They ran to Gabe Sanchez’s car. “Boy, this is fun,” Sanchez said. He pulled out a pack of Camels from his inside jacket pocket and held it up. “You mind?”

“You think I’m gonna tell you what to do here?” Colin said. “I’m rude, but I ain’t that rude, dude.” Gabe lit up and started the car. Colin knew secondhand smoke from one cigarette wouldn’t give him lung cancer. He also knew it would make his clothes-and his skin, too-smell like burnt tobacco. Kelly would wrinkle her nose when he came home tonight. Maybe if he got there ahead of her, showered, and changed into something else. .

“One thing,” Gabe said as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. “South Bay Strangler’s been quiet lately.”

“Probably had to pull overtime at his day job,” Colin answered. For all he knew, it was the exact and literal truth. If he’d known more. . If he’d known more, he would have dropped on the son of a bitch a long time ago.

* * *

The sign was dusty. It could have used a fresh coat of paint. But it was still easy enough to read. KEEP OUT! it said in big red and blue letters on a white background. THIS MEANS YOU! Below that was a line of slightly smaller words: TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED!

Vanessa Ferguson eyed the sign with something less than enthusiasm. “Nice friendly asshole, wasn’t he?” she remarked.

“Or maybe, isn’t he?” Merv Saunders pointed to the farmhouse in the middle distance. “Somebody might still be holed up in there.”

“I don’t think so!” Vanessa wasn’t shy about talking back to the scavenging crew’s boss. Vanessa had never been shy about talking back to anybody. She’d had a checkered work life and a checkered love life because of it, but she was one of those people who counted costs afterwards, if they counted them at all.

“Do we want to find out?” Ashley Pagliarulo pointed to another sign, maybe fifty feet closer to the farmhouse.

That one showed a black skull and crossbones, with a blunt warning in red below it: ACHTUNG! MINEN! Not DANGER! MINES! No, not that, but auf Deutsch. Vanessa’s lip curled in disgusted scorn. “Neo-Nazi shithead,” she said. “I hope he did cough his worthless lungs out. He deserved it.”

“It’s likely just bullshit,” Saunders said, but he made no move to approach the farmhouse. “And if people are alive in there, we’re supposed to make contact with them no matter what kind of dumbass politics they’ve got.”

No one was supposed to be living in this part of Kansas. The mandatory evacuation order had gone out soon after the supervolcano erupted. Vanessa had been stripping farms and little towns of whatever might prove useful to survivors for months now, her team steadily working its way deeper into the ruined state. She’d helped bury more bodies than she cared to remember. That was one reason her palms were hard with callus. As for livestock carcasses. . No point even trying to count those. The scavengers didn’t try to put them underground.

She did wonder what the country could do for meat with so many of its cows and sheep and pigs and chickens as one with the extinct animals that had died in earlier eruptions and fossilized. One of these millions of years, funny-looking archaeologists digging up ash-covered cattle ranches might write learned papers about what they found.

In the meantime. . “I’d just as soon go on to the next place down the road,” Vanessa said. “I don’t care if we are supposed to make contact with people. If they don’t want to make contact with us, the hell with ’em.”

Several of her comrades in vulturing nodded. Saunders frowned, though. “We are supposed to get in touch with them, assuming they’re alive.”

“Harder if they’re not,” Vanessa agreed sweetly.

He gave her a dirty look. “I don’t think it’s real likely that they are, though,” he said, as if she hadn’t opened her mouth. “I think the chances are that that sign is a bluff, too, or was a bluff when there were people here.”

As if to prove as much, he took a few steps past the KEEP OUT! sign, toward the one that warned of the mines. He hadn’t gone far before something in or near the farmhouse opened up with a stuttering roar. Tracers zipped past overhead, but not too far overhead.

The machine-gun fire stopped. “Get the fuck off my land, bastard!” an amplified voice bellowed. “I won’t shoot to miss next time.”

Maybe he had a generator in or near the farmhouse, even if Vanessa couldn’t hear one chugging. Maybe he just had a battery-powered bullhorn, though batteries were drawing ever closer to their shelf life. Whatever else he had, he had the goddamn machine gun. Vanessa had used firearms often enough. Having the bullets coming in instead of going out was a whole different feeling, though. Fear tasted like a copper penny under her tongue. She didn’t piss herself, but she had to clamp down hard to keep from having that accident.

Merv Saunders didn’t argue with the survivalist or whatever the hell he was. Whatever he was, he had survived. Was he living on stashed food? Did he go out to do some freelance scavenging of his own? Had he somehow kept his livestock alive along with himself and whoever else he had in there?

At the moment, all that was academic. The government-sanctioned scavengers retreated with more speed than dignity. Saunders got on the radio to points farther east. Except for the satellite variety, cell phones didn’t work in these parts. Power remained out through most of the country’s midsection. When it would come back, nobody could even begin to guess.

“Can you call in helicopter gunships?” Vanessa asked eagerly. “Or at least soldiers with mortars and grenades and things?”

The crew boss looked at her. “Have you been eating raw meat again?”

Her ears burned. “We ought to kill that son of a bitch!” she said.

“Go ahead,” Saunders answered. “You first.”

That made her ears flame hotter. Her pistol seemed mighty small potatoes when you set it against the concentrated essence of infantry a machine gun represented. “They can get him on a weapons rap.” Machine guns weren’t legal anywhere that she knew of. Then real inspiration struck: “Or for taxes! I bet he hasn’t paid a dime since the supervolcano went off.”

“And you have?” Saunders inquired.

He was being as difficult as he could. It sure felt that way to Vanessa, anyhow. “No, but I haven’t had any money, either,” she said, which wasn’t provably false. What followed was actually true: “My stupid little credit union’s servers are back in Denver, and they’re dead as King Tut.”

“Denver. That’s right.” He nodded, as if reminding himself. “Not many got out from that far west.”

“Tell me about it.” Vanessa knew how lucky she was to have fled far enough and fast enough. She was as stubborn as she was lucky, too: “Taxes work. That’s what they finally hung on Al Capone, remember.”

“The guy probably figured we were bandits, not I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help-you,” Saunders said. Vanessa inhaled sharply. The gang boss must have psyched out what she was going to say, because he beat her to the punch by continuing, “But if it makes you happy, I’ll pass the suggestion along. Maybe someone in authority will do something about it.”

Fuck off. Get out of my hair. That was what he meant. If she pissed him off badly enough, he could send her back to whatever had replaced the soggy Camp Constitution. If that wasn’t a fate worse than death, you could sure see one from there. She would have done almost anything to keep from ending up in a refugee camp again.

Her mouth twisted. Micah Husak had given her a most unwelcome education about what doing almost anything to get out of something else really meant. If Saunders made it plain her choice was between coming across and going back to a camp. . She’d already had to make that kind of choice twice now. She’d yielded both times, and loathed herself whenever she had to remember. She also would have loathed herself had she chosen the other way; she knew that only too well.

Sometimes you couldn’t win.

Sometimes you couldn’t even play. The scavengers’ boss had shown exactly zero interest in her fair white body. That irked her, too. There weren’t a whole lot of things that didn’t irk Vanessa.

For now, though, unless she really wanted to piss Saunders off, she needed to leave him alone. She could see that. She didn’t like it for hell, but she could see it. With poor grace, she walked away. Dust and volcanic ash that would be dirt one of these years scuffed up under her feet.