Supervolcano: Eruption

XVII

Camp Constitution. Vanessa wondered what dumbshit adman or bureaucrat got himself a bonus for coming up with the name. Whoever the bastard was, she would have bet her life he not only didn’t live here but had never got within a thousand miles of the place. Camp Hole in the Ground would have come a lot closer to the truth.

Truth? You can’t handle the truth! What movie was that from? She couldn’t remember. Back a long time ago-she couldn’t think of exactly when, either-swarms of people trying to get away from the Dust Bowl packed up whatever they had and headed for California. Some places in the state, being of Okie blood still mattered.

Well, the supervolcano had made a bigger, more horrible Dust Bowl now. The only reason even more people hadn’t washed up in these camps was that a hell of a lot of would-be refugees ended up corpses instead. As things were, tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people from at least half a dozen states wound up in Camp Constitution and others like it on the eastern fringe of the supervolcano eruption, and more streamed in every day.

And there were more refugee centers in the West. The biggest-imaginatively tagged Camp Independence-was somewhere near Pasco, Washington. People who’d gone west, young man, instead of east to flee the ash and dust wound up in them. Again, those camps would have been larger if a lot of the folks who tried to get away from the supervolcano hadn’t gone west for good. Fewer refugees squatted in the western camps, because the population in those parts hadn’t been much to begin with.

Vanessa wondered if they could possibly be anywhere near as fucked up as Camp Constitution and the others around here. The FEMA functionaries and National Guard officers with the power to bind and loose in these parts swore they were doing their level best. The really ry thing was, Vanessa believed them.

A Welsh corgi that ran yapping at a rhinoceros was doing its level best, too. That wouldn’t stop it from winding up smeary goop on the bottom of the rhino’s big foot, though. The federal government and the sovereign states of Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas and Missouri were fighting just as much out of their weight.

No one had looked for cities to spring up out of nowhere around here. There wasn’t enough of, well, anything to take care of the swarms who’d got out of the ash clouds the supervolcano dropped all up and down the USA’s midsection (and Canada’s, too). FEMA had caught and deserved holy hell for the shitty job the organization did when Katrina drowned New Orleans. Next to this, New Orleans looked like a stroll through the park.

Most of the evacuees there had had homes to go back to. Those homes were wrecked, yes, and needed repair and rebuilding. But what were you supposed to do when whole states were wrecked? It wasn’t a question of when people could start rebuilding in Wyoming. The question at the moment was, did anything bigger than a microbe or possibly a windblown bug or two survive in Wyoming? Vanessa had no idea how many people from the Denver metropolitan area had died (neither did anyone else, not to the nearest hundred thousand). She did know she was damn lucky not to be one of them.

FEMA had housed some of the people who’d lived through Katrina in trailers that stank of formaldehyde and had swarms of other things wrong with them, too. Some of those trailers-or some kind of trailers, anyway: trailers that looked old enough and ratty enough to have gone through the aftermath of Katrina-were here at Camp Constitution. Vanessa had seen them.

She didn’t get to stay in one. They counted for luxury housing in these parts. There weren’t enough to go around. (There wasn’t enough of anything to go around.) To rate a trailer, you had to be a family with a bunch of little kids, and there weren’t enough for all of them, either.

Instead, she was under canvas. Back in the day, she’d gone camping a few times. She’d done all the dumb things you do: looked for moss on the north side of a tree, toasted marshmallows over an open fire, slept in a sleeping bag in a day-glo nylon tent that would have horrified every claustrophobe ever hatched.

This wasn’t like that. Vanessa hadn’t dreamt even the circus had tents the size of the one she lived in. Hell, didn’t the circus mostly play in the same arenas that hosted basketball teams and jowly metal bands these days? She thought so, but, since her interest in the circus was only slightly higher than her interest in suicide, she wasn’t sure.

Somebody had run up four-decker bunks inside the tent. Probably somebody from the National Guard: her respect for the competence of the guys in the camo unis had gone up by leaps and bounds since she landed here. FEMA people seemed more interested in explaining why you couldn’t have what you wanted. The Guard got it for you if they possibly could.

She had two inches of foam rubber over a sheet of plywood for a mattress. She bitched about that, but not for long. If she had no shoes, the refugees who came in after her had no feet. Try as the Guardsmen would, they didn’t have enough tents for everyone. They couldn’t build bunks fast enough. They ran out of the mattress pads even sooner than they ran low on tents.

Yes, the mantra of FEMA and the Guard was “We’re doing the best we can.” The Guard meant it. FEMA went through the motions.

Morton mined salt. Somewhere far undrground ran endless tunnels and columns that glistened white when electric light shone on them and were altogether black when it didn’t. (Wasn’t that in Kansas? If it was, the salt biz had as much trouble as everybody else.)

Vanessa had started to suspect that they mined MREs the same way. People swapped them around, trying to get the varieties they found least obnoxious. Vanessa played the game, but more to make the time go by than because she really cared about the relative demerits of MREs.

Making time go by was as big a challenge here as it had been back at good old Garden City High, and for the same reason: no electricity. There were charging stations for cell phones, powered by chugging generators. The line for them was never shorter than two hours, 24/7. Vanessa braved it anyhow.

“I’m alive,” she greeted her father when he answered her call.

“You would have had a harder time phoning if you weren’t,” he agreed.

“Dad!” She might have known he would come out with something like that, especially when she handed him such a juicy straight line. All the same…

“It’s good to hear from you,” he said. “I’m sure your mother will think so, too.”

Call her next, that meant. Vanessa was less than thrilled. For one thing, Mom still treated her like a baby, and no doubt would till the end of time. For another, Vanessa blamed Mom for breaking up her folks’ marriage. But, if blood was even slightly thicker than water, it needed doing. Otherwise, Dad would have to take care of it himself. He would, too, and then probably get plowed to wash it out of his system.

So she sighed and said, “Right.” Then she added the essentials: “I’m in Camp Constitution. The refugee camps are all over the news, I bet.”

“Yup,” Dad said. “How bad is it?”

“Camp Concentration would be a better name,” she dished. “It sucks.”

He wasn’t impressed. She might have known he wouldn’t be. “They’re swamped,” he said. He wasn’t here, either, or he wouldn’t have added, “I’m sure they’re trying as hard as they can.”

“My ass!” Vanessa said, and then, quickly, “Listen, I’m gonna go, and save my battery. You wouldn’t believe what a hassle recharging is, and that’s almost the only electricity here.” He might have said good-bye, but she didn’t wait to hear.

Mom said, “Oh, thank God!” and burst into tears when Vanessa called. Vanessa kept the call even shorter than the one to her father. Again, hanging up was a relief.

After that, Rob. She got his voicemail. He’d updated it to include gigs in Maine, so she figured he was up there. Denver winter was bad enough. Maine was bound to be worse. She left a message and called Marshall.

“Yankee Stadium, second base.” Yeah, that was him.

“Hey, kid bro. Believe it or else, I’m alive.” Vanessa waited for him to do the same kind of number on her as Dad had a few minutes earlier.

“Good kind of way to be,” was as far as Marshall went. He asked the next reasonable question: “Like where are you alive?”

“Camp Constitution.”

“Where’s that?”

“About five miles southeast of the middle of nowhere. Don’t you ever watch the news?”

“Huh? No.” By the way Marshall said it, that was one of your basic dumb questions. He was probably sitting there in Santa Barbara, totally wasted, without a clue about how lucky he was. Then he said, “Guess what I did.”

“I don’t know. Are you out on bail because of it?” Vanessa was thinking about getting busted for dope, although these days that wasn’t easy in California. The acid bite of malice felt good any which way.

It would have felt even better if Marshall had noticed it. As if she hadn’t spoken, he went on, “I sold a story. To New Fictions. They’re gonna pay me real money for it.”

“You did what? No way!” That was more sea-green envy than disbelief. Like any good editor, Vanessa was sure she would make a good writer as soon as she found the time. As with a lot of good editors, somehow she never did. That Marshall could have appalled her.

“Way,” he said, and she couldn’t doubt the smugness in his voice, however much she wanted to. “I bet I never would have done it if I wasn’t taking that writing class that made me submit.”

“Rrr.” Vanessa wasn’t grinding her teeth, just making a noise as if she were. How many times had she told herself that quitting school and making a real living instead was a good idea? “ Weren’t taking. It’s contrary to fact,” she said automatically.

“Whatever.” He not only didn’t know, he didn’t care. And he was in Santa Barbara, with electricity and hot water and food that didn’t come out of cardboard boxes and taste like cardboard, and he’d sold a fucking story? As a matter of fact, yes. Where was the justice in that?

“I’ll talk with you more later. I’m going to save my battery.” Vanessa trotted out her built-in excuse once more.

“Right. Take care, y’know?” How baked was Marshall? Short of calling the Santa Barbara PD and having them bust him, Vanessa had no way of doing thing one about that. And, since it was Santa Barbara, half the cops probably got lit when they were off duty.

“Shit!” she said loudly. People were walking by her through the mud. Nobody even looked up. You heard plenty worse than that in Camp Constitution. Vanessa heard plenty worse in her own tent from the trailer-trash single mom whose eleven-, eight-, and six-year-old girls were going out of their tree because they couldn’t watch TV or play video games or get on Facebook-and from the little darlings, too.

She looked up to the uncaring heavens. The uncaring heavens started raining on her. Well, where else would the mud have come from? By the look and feel of things, it was liable to start snowing pretty damn soon. Wouldn’t that be fun, when she was living under canvas?

And speaking of shit… The wind blew harder, from out of the west. It brought the stink of row upon row of outhouses. Running water? A sewage system? It was to laugh. How long since cholera last broke out in the land of the free and the home of the brave? How long till it did again? The only thing Vanessa could do about it was hope she didn’t get sick.

“Wow!” Rob said, and then, “Oh, wow!”

Justin Nachman nodded. “This is white like white on rice.” They’d both seen snow before, on Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles’ earlier winter forays into the cold parts of the country. Only this wasn’t winter, and Rob didn’t think anyone this side of an Eskimo had ever seen snow like his.

Justin’s thoughts ran along different, though related, lines. He was driving, and had his nose about six inches from the windshield-it looked that way to Rob, anyhow-to try to see out better. He said, “I keep expecting to spot a St. Bernard by the side of the road. I wouldn’t mind, either. A slug of brandy right now would go down nice.”

“Uh-huh.” Rob nodded. The SUV’s heater was doing its brave best, but how long would that stay good enough? He had no idea what the outside temperature was, but he would have bet dollars to dill pickles he’d never been anywhere colder. “You might want to be careful if you do see a St. Bernard,” he added. “This is Maine, remember. Stephen King country. It could be Cujo.”

“You know how to cheer a guy up, don’t you?” Justin said.

The wipers on the SUV went back and forth, back and forth. So far, they were staying pretty much even with the swirling snow. Rob just hoped they could keep doing it. Justin had the lights on, but sensibly kept them on low beam. All the blowing white would have reflected brights straight back into his face, making it even harder for him to see where he was going.

“Hey, there are worse things than giant rabid dogs.” Rob was determined to be helpful-or something like that. “Maybe some vampires from ’Salem’s Lot still flitting around.”

“It’s daytime,” Justin pointed out.

“Oh, yeah. That’s really gonna bother ’em in weather like this,” Rob said. “Besides, nowadays they probably wear shades and smear themselves with SPF 50 sunscreen. Using technology to solve problems. That’s what engineering’s all about.”

“Thank you, Albert Speer.” Justin gave a straight-armed salute truncated by the SUV’s roof.

Rob had only a vague notion who Albert Speer was. A Nazi: what more did you need to know? “That wasn’t him,” he said. “That was Professor Dinwiddie, explaining why engineering majors should be proud of what they were doing.”

“And are you proud?”

“I’m so fucking proud, I play bass in Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles so I never have to worry about another circuit board as long as I live.”

“Sounds about right,” Justin agreed. “Now where the hell are we?”

Rob grabbed the trusty road atlas. “We got off I-95 at Newport, right?”

“Right.” Justin’s head bobbed up and down. “Maine roads suck, you know?”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” Rob said. Once you got off the Interstate, you fell back in time, probably back to the days before Beaver Cleaver was even a glint in Ward’s eye. Two-lane winding blacktop roads, too many of which hadn’t been resurfaced for a long, long time… California, it wasn’t.

“And we’re heading north up be-yoo-tiful Route 7,” Justin went on.

“Roger,” Rob said. “With a little luck, Biff and Charlie are, too.”

“Or what would be beautiful Route 7 if I could see through this goddamn snow any farther than I can piss,” Justin said. “And we passed through the grand metropolis of Corinna, otherwise known as a wide spot in the road.”

“We sure did.” Rob started singing “Corina, Corina.” The way he sang showed why he played bass. Then he looked at the map again. “And wet are coming up on lovely, romantic Dexter. Dexter is a bigger dot than Corinna. Not a big dot, mind you, but a bigger one. Might even be big enough for a traffic light or two.”

“Wowww!” The way Justin brought it out, he might have been stoned. He might have been, but he wasn’t, or Rob didn’t think he was. Driving while loaded was more trouble than it was worth. Being a cop’s kid, Rob had impressed that on the band. The amount of dope he smoked when he wasn’t driving also impressed, if in a different way.

But the Wowww! wasn’t undeserved. A Maine town big enough for stoplights was well on its way to cityhood… or, more likely, had been the same size for the past seventy-five years. This part of the country wasn’t into cancerous growth like California.

They drove past a roadside traffic sign. It was a yellow diamond, there and gone again in the snow. You might have seen the like back home. But no traffic sign in California bore the silhouette of a big old deer with honking antlers. “Bullwinkle crossing,” Rob said: it wasn’t the first moose sign they’d spotted.

“There you go.” Justin nodded. “Enough signs, though. I want to see some more real moose.”

“Supposed to be bunches of ’em over by Greenville. They do tours,” Rob said.

“The mooses do?” Now Justin sounded surprised-and with reason. He slowed down some more, and he hadn’t been going real fast to begin with.

“Um, no.” Rob pondered antecedents.

“Well, that’s a relief, anyhow,” Justin said. “I think the snow’s getting worse.”

“I didn’t think it could,” Rob said, not wanting to admit he was right.

“Yeah, well…” Justin took a hand off the wheel for a vague gesture. “Not like we’ll have to worry about global warming for a while. We should’ve torched more dinosaurs while we had the chance.”

At the moment, what they had to worry about was staying on the road and not drifting onto the shoulder-when there was a shoulder. Some of the yellow signs that didn’t warn about moose did let you know when there wasn’t. What happened when you went off the road there? Rob had no trouble finding an answer: you flipped over and burst into flames, that was what.

“Stick to the paving,” he urged.

“Yes, Mommy. I’m working on it, believe me,” Justin answered. Rob shut up.

They finally made it into Dexter. It was indeed a town of some stature: two or three traffic lights, two gas stations (a sure sign it was no dipshit village), a church with a tall white steeple, a graveyard now blanketed in snow, and, along with the Subway that seemed to be far and away the most common fast-food joint in this part of Maine, a mom-and-pop Chinese restaurant.

“I wonder what Chinese food tastes like in the middle of moose country,” Rob remarked.

“I dunno, but an hour after you eat some you’re curious again,” Justin said.

“I’ve had some shit do that to me, but never the goddamn beef chow mein,” Rob said.

Which, of course, made Justin break into “Werewolves of London.” Warren Zevon wasn’t exactly a spiritual father to Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, but he was no further removed than spiritual uncle. And the kind of almost-fame he’d won was at the top end of what they could hop? Rob hadr.

Even if Dexter was a fair-sized place by the standards of Maine away from the Interstate, rolling through it took only a few minutes. Then they were out in the country again, with snow-covered meadows and fields going back from the increasingly snow-covered road to the snow-draped pines. Sometimes, for variety’s sake, the snow-covered pines came right up to the edge of the road. No need for the NO SHOULDER signs on those stretches; it was pretty obvious.

They’d switched to Route 23 halfway through Dexter. It offered a more direct path to Greenville than 7 did. It was also even narrower, which hadn’t shown on the map. Rob started wondering if the switch was smart. He wondered even more when Justin hit the brakes-carefully, to keep from skidding. And he didn’t skid, either. For a guy from California, he was doing okay with the funky white stuff. “What’s up?” Rob asked.

“Accident ahead,” Justin said. “Flashing lights and stuff.”

And damned if there weren’t. Rob hadn’t noticed them through God’s blowing dandruff. Good thing Justin was keeping an eye peeled. That’s why we pay him the big bucks, Rob thought vaguely.

An accident it was, with two cars and an SUV. One of the cars lay on its side next to the road, unpleasantly reminding Rob of his fretting before they got to Dexter. There was a big dent in the sheet metal above the rear wheel on its other side. The second car and the SUV were both upright, but pretty well crunched. A couple of the people milling around were bleeding. A cop was tending to one of them. Red and yellow and blue lights flashed on top of his cruiser.

Glass crunched under Justin’s tires as he steered around the wreck. Only a couple of cars skirted it ahead of him. On any road in L.A., it would have tied things up for an hour. On the 405 at four in the afternoon, it would have screwed traffic for the rest of the night. Well, L.A. County all by itself had more people than forty-two states-or was it forty-three? Rob couldn’t remember. Maine was definitely one of them.

“Charlie and Biff are still with us,” Justin said as he picked up a little more speed. “I could get used to a heated side-view mirror. I wouldn’t be able to see squat without it.”

“Okay, great. But how often would you need it in California?” Rob asked.

“Depends on how cold it gets, right? If California turns into, like, Washington state, it’ll freeze sometimes.”

“Huh,” Rob said thoughtfully. That hadn’t occurred to him, and it should have. Then something else did: “If Los Angeles is the new Seattle-”

“Like fifty is the new thirty?” Justin interrupted helpfully.

“My ass,” Rob said. They both laughed-easy enough, when neither of them had seen the old thirty yet. He went on, “Like I was saying, if L.A.’s the new Seattle, what does that make Maine? The new North Pole?”

“Nah. Won’t be that bad,” Justin said. “More like the new Labrador.”

“Happy day!” Rob said in distinctly unhappy tones. “Ten months of winter and two months of bad skiing.”

“You think you’re kidding, don’t you?”

“I wish!” Rob rolled his eyes. “The next interesting question is, how the hell do we ever get out of here? If the snowdrifts are as high as an elephant’s eye and they stay that way, nobody goes in or out, near enough.”

“You’ve got something, I’m afraid,” Justin said. “And when they start running out of food and heating oil…” His voice trailed off. If you wanted to, you could imagine this whole state-hell, you could imagine everything north of Boston-fading away like that.

“Remind me again why we took that gig in Greenville,” Rob said.

“It’s called money,” Justin explained. “Bringing some in every once in a while instead of spending it all the goddamn time is supposed to be good. I think I remember that, anyway.”

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Rob sighed. “I still wish like hell we’d been going down to Key West or something when the supervolcano blew. New England… It’s over with here.”

“Uh-huh. And you knew ahead of time that Yellowstone was going to go kablooie like Hamster Hughie.” Justin was as big a Calvin and Hobbes fan as Rob was. That sensibility-if you wanted to call it a sensibility-also rubbed off on the band.

The bitch of it was, Rob had known, or known as much as anybody not a geologist could. It wasn’t as if Dad hadn’t gone on about the supervolcano whenever they talked. Rob had tuned out most of it. What were you going to do when your father went on and on about stuff he got from his new girlfriend, especially when she wasn’t a whole lot older than you were?

“Too late to worry about it now,” he said with another sigh.

“You got that right.” Justin clicked the wipers from regular to high. It did less good than he must have hoped it would. He slowed down some more. The snow on the road was getting thicker. “I wonder if we’re going to make it to Greenville.”

“This thing is the size of an armored personnel carrier. It’s got four-wheel drive and snow tires,” Rob said. “You gonna let Mother Nature dick around with us?”

“I may not have a choice. You fight with Mother Nature, you’re fighting one big mother,” Justin answered. Rob looked out the window. Not much to see but blowing white and, through it, already-fallen white. He wondered if he ought to be looking for gigantic rabid St. Bernards, or maybe vampires, for real. No sunshine to slow ’em down, and none likely any time soon.

Dexter was a big enough deal that the next village up 23, instead of enjoying its own name, went by North Dexter. Up the road a ways from it was an Italian-Mexican restaurant. Rob saw the neon sign in spite of the snow; the restaurant itself, set back from the road, was barely visible.

“Mexican food in Maine,” Justin mused. “You think the Chinese’d be weird, what about that?”

“You’re not stopping, are you?” Rob said with mock-perhaps not so mock-anxiety.

“Nope. Greenville or bust,” Justin said. They chugged on.

A streak of red shot across the road. It was there and then gone. Justin had time to take his foot off the gas, but not enough to bring it down on the brake. “The fuck was that?” Rob asked, wondering if he’d really seen it.

“Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a moose.”

“Brilliant deduction! A lesser mind would be incapable of it.”

“Yeah, I know,” Justin said smugly. “My best guess is, it was a fox-and not the kind that walks on two legs.”

“A fox! Cool!” There weren’t so many of them in California. California had coyotes instead. Coyotes thought four-legged foxes were tasty.

The map insisted there was a village called Sangerville just before Route 23 ran into Route 6. Rob saw another snow-covered graveyard off to the right, which made him look out for vampires again. Other than that, damn all suggested human beings had ever lived anywhere near here. He flipped to the back of the road atlas. It insisted that Sangerville had 475 people. If the place did, most of them, in the classic phrase, came disguised as empty seats.

When 23 dead-ended at 6, Justin said, “I go left, right?”

“Right-left,” Rob agreed. “If you go right, you head away from Greenville and toward Dover-Foxcroft.”

“Dover-Foxcroft?” Justin echoed. “Bizarre, man. I mean, I know a lot of people with hyphenated names. These days, who doesn’t? But a town?”

“I just work here,” Rob said. “That’s what the map says. However they got married, they’re a bigger place than Dexter, or even Newport. They’re in bigger type, and the town sign is a white circle with a little black dot in it, not just a black dot.”

“Place’ll be Boston before we know it.” Justin dutifully swung the SUV to the left.

“Next town ahead is Guilford. It’s a mile or two from here,” Rob said, still eyeing the Rand McNally. “The road forks there. We stay on 6, heading northwest. Next place after Guilford is Abbott Village, and then North Abbott.”

“No North Guilford?” Justin asked.

“As a matter of fact, there is a North Guilford. But it’s not on 6. It’s on some half-assed side road.”

“This road we’re on is half-assed,” Justin said accurately.

“Well, then, the other one’s quarter-assed.” Rob corrected himself.

As things turned out, they were counting chickens they never got to see. They didn’t even make it quite as far as Guilford. It wasn’t that the blizzard got worse, though it did. The accident down below North Dexter hadn’t closed down the whole damn road. This one did. A Hummer had slammed into an eighteen-wheeler head-on.

Rob didn’t know how fast the guy in the Hummer had been going. Fast seemed a pretty good guess. A Hummer was half again as big and twice as heavy as any other SUV in captivity. A Hummer was a fucking bad joke, was what a Hummer was. No wonder the market for them tanked- le mot juste — when gas prices took off at the end of the Aughts.

This particular Hummer was scrap metal, with the whole front end stove in. The windshield glass was starred and bulged outward on the driver’s side. What cop’s kid couldn’t read that sign? The jerk behind the wheel-hey, he was speeding in a Hummer, so of course he was a jerk-hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. The only question now was whether he only needed a dentist and a plastic surgeon or a neurosurgeon. That assumed he had any brains left at all, which also wasn’t obvious.

And he’d done a number on the eighteen-wheeler, too. He’d rammed it hard enough to flip it over onto its side and jackknife it. That would have shafted the Santa Ana Freeway. On a narrow two-lane road in Maine… The broken-nosed cab lay on the shoulder to one side, diesel fuel dribbling out into the snow from the punctured fuel tank like blood from a cut jugular. The trailer stretched all the way across the asphalt to the other shoulder.

“Fuck me up the asshole,” Justin said, and that about covered that. He eased to a stop.

Several other cars had already had to stop in front of them. Some people had got out to do what they could for the injured, or else just to get a better look at the mess. Charlie and Biff stopped two cars behind Justin and Rob. More cars pulled up behind them. Nobody would be going anywhere around here any time soon.

Justin found a question: “Where are the cops?”

“Maybe they’re on the Guilford side, and we can’t see ’em,” Rob answered. “Or maybe they’re on their way from Dover-Foxcroft.” He would have bet on the latter. Dover-Foxcroft was a good bit bigger than Guilford. “In the meantime, let’s see if we can do anything useful.”

He opened the door. Cold bit at him. L.L. Bean knew their business, though. As soon as he zipped up his anorak, he stopped freezing. He’d never owned long johns before this trip to Maine. He was damn glad now that he’d bought some. His nose stayed cold, but what the hell? He figured that made him a nice, healthy mutt.

An older guy who’d already got out nodded at him. “I ain’t seen nothin’ like this since I was in Eye-raq,” he said, and pointed to a body lying behind the Hummer. Someone had draped a coat over its head. “You’re lucky he’s covered up. He ain’t pretty, not even a little bit.”

“I believe it.” Like anyone from L.A., Rob had seen road carnage now and then. He’d also seen some of the grisly photos in his father’s books. When he was a kid, he’d used them to gross Vanessa out. He wasn’t supposed to look at those books himself, much less give his little sister nightmares with them. He’d got a spanking when Vanessa ratted on him; Dad wasn’t the kind to figure corporal punishment warped you for life. His old man had licked him plenty, and he’d turned out all right, so… Thinking about that was more pleasant than remembering what lay under the coat. Rob made himself ask, “Anybody else in the SUV?”

“Ayuh,” the older man answered, which meant he came from these parts (and also meant yes). “There was a gal. She had her belt on, so she didn’t go into the windshield. But her leg got tore up pretty good, and she maybe busted some ribs. They done took her back to the clinic in Guilford.”

“How about the trucker?” Rob found the next logical question.

“He ain’t bad. Cuts, bruises, somethin’ sprained-maybe busted-in one foot. He was up high, like. Might not’ve got hurt at all, hardly, if the goddamn Hummer didn’t flip his rig.”

“You’ve got to be nuts to drive like that in this kind of weather,” Rob said.

“Ayuh,” the older man repeated. “Well, some folks are, and that’s the long and short of it. They figure their shit don’t stink, and nothin’ can go wrong with ’em no matter what kind of ass-holery they pull. I’m here to tell you, things don’t work that way.” He jerked a thumb at the Hummer’s late driver. “He ain’t gonna tell you nothin’, not no more.”

“How long will it take to clear this mess off the road?” Rob wondered.

“Beats me.” The local didn’t sound worried about it. Of course, he didn’t have a gig in Greenville tonight. Almost cheerily, he went on, “Christ only knows where from they’ll have to bring in a tow truck big enough to shift these fuckers. Guilford ain’t got one-I know that for a fact. I don’t believe Dover-Foxcroft does, either. Greenville, mebbe, or Newport where the Interstate goes through. All this snow, take forever to get here, too. Might as well relax and set a spell, know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” Rob was damned if he’d make a noise like ayuh. He unhappily mooched back to the waiting Justin. Seeing him coming, Biff and Charlie got out of the trailing SUV to hear the news. Rob made it short and sweet: “We’re fucked. They’ve got no idea when they’re gonna be able to clear the road.”

“That, like, sucks.” Biff wasn’t long on words, but he got the point.

“We can’t even turn around,” Charlie said. There were cars behind them and westbound cars in the eastbound lane. Some jackasses always figured they could dodge trouble if they broke the rules. Once in a while, they did. More often, as now, they screwed things up for themselves and everybody else.

“I think I’d better call Greenville and let ’em know we ain’t gonna make it.” Rob reached into his pocket for his cell phone.

The promoter didn’t sound brokenhearted. “We’ll cancel, all right,” he said. “We didn’t get as much advance sale as we wanted, and people sure won’t be coming into town in weather like this.” Which was all true, but left Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles stranded in the middle of Maine with not a gig in sight.