Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

IX

Dr. Stan Birnbaum paused before plunging the novocaine-filled hypodermic into Colin Ferguson’s gum. Kelly’s father was in his mid-sixties, with gray hair, thick glasses, and a scraggly white mustache. He was heading for retirement, but he hadn’t got there yet.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” he said reassuringly. “The building has a backup generator and a very smooth switching system. Even if the power in town goes out in the middle of things, the drill won’t slow down even a little bit.”

Colin cocked an eyebrow at his father-in-law. He very nearly cocked a snook at him, too. “Stan,” he said, “I’d be happier if the drill weren’t going at all. Then I wouldn’t be getting this blinking root canal.” He would have expressed himself in stronger terms, but Stan’s assistant, a pretty young Asian woman, was in the room with them.

“Not going is good. Going fast is good—it doesn’t hurt so much,” the dentist told him. “Going not so fast… Going not so fast is why root canals used to have such a nasty reputation. Now open wide.” With no great enthusiasm, Colin did. He clutched at the arms of the reclining chair as the hypodermic went home. Withdrawing it at last, Stan Birnbaum said, “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

“Depends which end of the needle you’re on,” Colin answered. His father-in-law chuckled. After a moment, Colin added, “I’ve had worse—I’ll say that.”

“Well, good. I’m a painless dentist—it didn’t hurt me a bit,” Stan said. Colin winced worse than he had when he got the shot. But he’d asked for it with his own crack. The dentist continued, “We’ll give you a little while to get numb now. Come on, Ruby. Let’s see how Mrs. Diaz is doing in room three.”

“Okay, Dr. Stan,” the assistant said. Out they went, leaving Colin alone with his thoughts and with a tongue that seemed more like a bolt of flannel with every passing second.

In due course, Stan Birnbaum reappeared. Dentistry resembled the Navy in its hurry-up-and-wait rhythms. Dr. Birnbaum poked Colin’s gum with a sharp instrument. “Feel anything?” he asked.

“Only pressure—no pain,” Colin answered—he knew the ropes. He’d been on antibiotics long enough that the sore tooth wasn’t so bad, either.

“Let’s get to work, then,” the dentist said. In spite of all the modern technology, it wasn’t what anyone this side of a dedicated masochist would have called fun. Still, Colin had been through plenty of bumpier rides in that chair. Stan Birnbaum knew his business, all right. Colin wouldn’t have expected anything else from Kelly’s father.

When the ordeal was over, Birnbaum gave him his marching orders: chew on the other side, and no strenuous exercise for a day. He also gave him a prescription for more Cleocin and one for Vicodin. “Drugging a cop, are you?” Colin said—thickly, because the left side of his tongue was still disconnected from his brain.

Dr. Birnbaum shrugged. “You don’t have to take them. I’ve known macho guys and recovering addicts who got by on aspirin or ibuprofen. But these are better for pain, and they don’t leave most people too blurry. The way things are nowadays, you’re not likely to go driving while you’re loaded, are you?”

“Nope,” Colin said. Gas was around twenty-five bucks a gallon. The auto industry and all the ones related to it still hadn’t started to recover from the eruption. Their collapse meant more hundreds of thousands out of work—and unable to afford even a motor scooter, never mind the tiny cars Detroit was still haplessly trying to sell. The only person Colin knew of who’d bought new wheels after the supervolcano blew was Vanessa’s boss. The only reason he knew about Nick Gorczany was that Vanessa cussed him every chance she got. It sounded more like After the revolution, we deal with swine like him each time he heard it.

“All right, then. I’ll call you tonight to see how you’re doing.” Stan didn’t do that just because Colin had married Kelly. It was SOP for him. He was a damn good dentist, even if he did say so himself.

The building with the backup generator had a pharmacy on the ground floor. Colin filled both prescriptions there. He washed down one pill from each with a large apple juice. They told you to drink plenty of fluids (what else would you drink? rocks?) when you took Cleocin, and they meant it; the stuff would leave you nauseated for hours if it landed on an empty stomach.

That done, he walked to the bus stop to wait for the ride back to San Atanasio. Dr. Birnbaum’s office was in Torrance, the biggest South Bay city. Kelly had grown up there. Torrance was… less strapped than San Atanasio, anyhow. It boasted the Del Amo mall, which it claimed was the second biggest in the country, after only the Mall of America. Since the Mall of America lay right outside subarctic Minneapolis, odds were pretty good the Del Amo mall was busier these days. Busier didn’t mean busy enough, though.

He waited long enough that the Vicodin had kicked in before the northbound bus showed up. The bus ran late. Once he felt the pill, he cared less than he would have before. It distanced him from annoyance almost as much as it would distance him from pain once the novocaine wore off.

When the bus finally did show up, he climbed aboard and gave the driver six dollars—more thievery. He saw a Torrance police car and two civilian autos on the way back to San Atanasio. A few motor scooters, a Harley, bikes, trikes, pedicabs, skateboards, an honest-to-Pete horsedrawn buggy, Rollerblades… The streets were full of wheels, but they weren’t full of engines. The pace of living had slowed down since the eruption. No one had wanted it to, but it had anyway.

He had to walk several blocks from the closest stop to the police station. Walk he did, hoping it wouldn’t count as strenuous exercise. When he came in, Malik Williams was talking with the desk sergeant. The chief turned toward him and nodded, asking, “How’d it go?”

“I’ll live. Like I told my father-in-law the dentist, I’ve had worse,” Colin answered. Williams chuckled sympathetically. Colin went on, “Afraid I’ll flunk a drug test for the next little while.”

“Hey, I hear that,” Williams said. “I had an implant done a couple of years ago—you know, where they stick a screw in your jaw and then mount a replacement tooth on top. The thing works great now, but you bet I was glad for the dope then.”

“That’s what the shit is for,” the desk sergeant said. “The trouble is the people who get off on it.”

“I’m a little buzzed right now,” Colin said, “but I like scotch better.”

“There you go,” the sergeant agreed. “Something with some taste to it, not just a lousy pill.”

“Uh-huh.” Colin nodded, then glanced toward Malik Williams. “You need me for anything right now, boss?”

“No, no.” The chief understood the question behind the question. “Go on to your desk, man. I bet you aren’t real bouncy on your pins.”

“Now that you mention it, no.” Colin sketched a salute and headed towards a place where he could sit down. Between the root canal and the pain pill, the world felt less steady than it should have.

No sooner had he plopped his behind into his swivel chair than Gabe Sanchez came over to see how he was doing. Gabe smelled of cigarette smoke. Smokers always did, and hardly ever knew it. If you didn’t light up, you knew they were around even before you saw them.

“So what’s it like having your father-in-law drilling holes in your head?” Gabe asked.

“Just as much fun as it is with anybody else,” Colin answered.

“You wouldn’t want to go to him if you were giving Kelly grief,” Gabe said.

“I didn’t want to go to him today, but that stupid tooth wouldn’t quit hurting,” Colin said. “I’m just glad we’ve still got a decent dental plan. Otherwise, my bank account would’ve taken one in the teeth, too.”

“Probably get wiped out the next time we have to talk contract with the city,” Gabe said gloomily. He had too good a chance of being right. Every contract kept less than the one before. San Atanasio had been scuffling for money even in the good old days. Since the eruption, each year’s budget turned into a dance with bankruptcy.

“Joys of being a civil servant,” Colin said. “And if you believe that, I’ll tell you another one.”

“Save your breath,” Gabe said. “I already know just how much fun this job is.” He sighed. “’Course, collecting unemployment’s even more fun.”

“You got that right.” Colin shuffled through the papers on his desk. After they found out who the South Bay Strangler was—and after that almost tore the department to pieces—everything else felt like an anticlimax.

Well, almost everything. He noticed a familiar name on a manila folder. Opening it, he read a carbon of a badly typed report a patrolman had submitted—one more place where old technology had more life to it than anyone would have dreamt before the eruption.

“How about that?” he said.

“How about what?” Gabe asked.

Colin tapped the folder with the nail of his right index finger. “Our old buddy, Victor Jennings, is back in business again.”

“Oh, yeah?” Gabe sounded disgusted. The DA’s office hadn’t thought a jury would convict Jennings of armed robbery or assault with a deadly weapon, not when most of what he stole was food. So they’d told him Go, and sin no more. And go he did, but quit sinning he didn’t.

“Yeah.” Colin tapped the report again. “This time, he knocked over a check-cashing place on Hesperus. Probably would’ve made his getaway, too, if Jodie Boyer hadn’t been coming by on her bike right then. She’s the one who made the bust.”

“Jodie’s always had a pretty good bust,” Gabe opined. Colin was inclined to agree with him… in a purely theoretical way, of course. He wouldn’t have said so out loud, though. Gabe sailed closer to the breeze than he did. A crack like that could make Internal Affairs want to talk with you, and never mind whether you wanted to talk with them.

When he went out to lunch with Gabe, he ate soba noodles. Squishy was good right after you’d had a root canal. He hadn’t been back to the office long when the root-canaled tooth loudly reminded him that, though the offending nerve was gone, it wasn’t yet forgotten. His first Vicodin and the last of the novocaine chose the same time to wear off. He hurried to the water fountain to gulp another pain pill.

What would they do with Victor Jennings this time? Jennings had evidently decided that, if he couldn’t work, he might as well steal. He’d have to get charged and tried and serve some kind of term this time… wouldn’t he? Colin hoped so, but he wouldn’t have bet anything that cost more than a McDonald’s Happy Meal on it.

Nick Gorczany’s chief accountant was a no-nonsense, short-haired woman named Mary Ann Flores. She was a dyke, and made no bones about it—the photos on her desk were all of her much more feminine partner. Vanessa Ferguson didn’t care about that one way or the other. She did care that Mary Ann was the one who doled out the salary checks twice a month.

The head accountant set one on Vanessa’s desk now. “Here you go,” she said gruffly. It had nothing to do with her machismo. She gave Vanessa dubious looks because Vanessa wasn’t corporate enough to suit her.

“Thanks.” Vanessa let it go right there. Mary Ann was way too corporate to suit her. Mary Ann was also too gay to suit her, though she never would have admitted as much. She didn’t care what people did in the bedroom. When they acted as if they wanted a medal for it, too… That got old fast.

No matter who brought it, the check was highly welcome. If not for the check, she wouldn’t have had anything to do with this miserable, stupid place. Maybe that also showed enough to make Mary Ann Flores suspicious of her.

She waited eagerly for the (battery-powered) clock on the wall to announce that it was quitting time. Banks stayed open later than usual Friday nights, but she’d still have to hope the bus ran on schedule. If it was late, she’d have to go in on Saturday morning, which would be a pain.

She hustled out as soon as she could, or even a couple of minutes sooner. If Mr. Gorczany and Ms. Flores didn’t like it, too damn bad. She was still standing at the bus stop waiting when Gorczany drove by. She ground her teeth. After his recent adventures at the dentist’s, her father would have told her that was a bad plan. She did it anyway.

The bus came five minutes late. Normally, no biggie. When she was trying to get to the bank on time… “Nice of you to join us,” she snarled as she fed money into the slot. The driver just looked at her. He didn’t get it. When you insulted somebody and it flew right over his head, weren’t you wasting your time?

She hustled into the B of A on Reynoso Drive just before the security guard would have kept her out. She filled out the deposit form and went to the end of the line. Before the eruption, she’d hardly ever set foot in the bank. She’d done as much as she could on the computer. But with both power and the banks’ servers erratic these days, dealing with genuine human beings worked better.

Better, but slower. The line was long, and crawled forward. Somebody at one of the tellers’ stations had trouble with something, which bogged things down even more. I might as well be at the post office, she thought sourly, going nowhere fast.

She finally reached the front of the line, made her deposit, stuck some cash in her purse, and got the hell out of there. Then she had to wait for the bus that would take her not quite close enough to her apartment building. It ran late, too. Of course it did. It ran later than the other one had, as a matter of fact. And rain started coming down while she was walking from the stop to her building. So she was not a happy camper when she turned the key in the lobby mailbox.

A linen catalogue, a coupon from a new pizza place that had opened a few blocks away, a bank statement, her cell-phone bill. If the world were beige and concrete-gray all over, her mail would have fit in perfectly.

Shaking her head, she went on to her apartment. At least she didn’t need to hassle with cooking. She’d splurged on Thai takeout the night before, and she kept enough ice in the refrigerator to make sure the leftovers would stay good even if the power had been off all day.

It was on now, so she heated herself some dinner. After she put the dishes in the sink, she sent Bronislav a text. He was somewhere out on I-10, either hauling something back from L.A. or bringing something this way. She hadn’t heard from him in a few days. She’d been beat after she got home from work, and her cell hadn’t been working anywhere close to all the time.

The cell proved it was working now by making the almost-hiccup with which it announced an error message. “The fuck?” Vanessa said. She hadn’t miskeyed Bronislav’s number. She couldn’t have; she’d taken it out of the phone’s list of saved numbers, the way she always did.

But the screen said THAT NUMBER IS NOT CURRENTLY IN SERVICE. NO REPLACEMENT NUMBER APPEARS IN THE DATABASE.

She tried it again. She got the same error announcement and the same message. “The fuck?” she repeated, louder this time. She wondered if he’d had an accident somewhere that she didn’t know about.

Wondering, worrying, she called his cell this time. It rang, which encouraged her, but instead of him or his voicemail she got a computerized voice that said, “We are very sorry, but the number you have dialed is not in service at the present time.”

“What do you mean, we?” she growled, but insulting a computer was even more pointless than zinging someone who didn’t notice he’d been zinged.

She watched TV and read a thriller till she got sleepy. Every so often, she tried Bronislav’s number again. As far as her phone could tell, he might have dropped off the face of the earth. Something was rotten in the state of Serbia or along the Interstate, but she had no idea what. All she knew was, she didn’t like it.

She slept badly. She texted him in the middle of the night, but his phone hadn’t magically come back to life. She tried yet again when she got up too early in the morning. Still no luck.

“Shit,” she said. Breakfast was bread, which didn’t need to stay cold, and jam, which could also do without much refrigeration. After breakfast, Vanessa knew, she’d have to bustle around taking care of the things she couldn’t do while she was stuck at her nine-to-five. Shopping. Paying bills. All the exciting, time-swallowing stuff.

First things first. Vanessa wrote the cell phone company a check. Then she opened the bank statement. When she’d reconciled her checkbook the month before, she’d come out ten dollars lower than B of A thought she was. She figured the goof was likely hers, but maybe the bank had decided it was wrong. Stranger things had happened—they must have. Name two, she thought, hearing an echo of her dad’s voice inside her head.

Because she was intent on the checking, she almost missed what was going on in her savings account. Almost, but not quite. “The fuck?” she said one more time, her voice far angrier than it had been when she was trying to figure out what was up with Bronislav. Two large withdrawals just before the statement mailed had almost drained the account.

The only problem was, she hadn’t made them.

“Jesus H. Christ!” she said, loud enough to scare a cat if she’d had the heart to get another one after poor Pickles. Then she swore at the bank and all the swarms of idiots, morons, and perverts who’d ever worked for it. And then she hied herself off to the bus stop through the rain to give the idiots, morons, and perverts at the Reynoso Drive branch a jagged-edged piece of her mind—and, not at all incidentally, to get her money back.

Getting wet on the way to the bus and on the way from the other stop to the bank building did nothing to improve her mood. The line for the tellers was long, as usual. But she didn’t need a teller today. She needed a supervisor. They had desks on the other side of the line from the tellers’ stations. One of the people behind the desks had no one in front of her. Her name was Denise Yamaguchi, but she had blond hair, blue eyes, and freckles. She also had a wedding ring, which probably explained the surname.

“How can I help you?” she asked when Vanessa sat down at the other side of the desk.

Vanessa slammed the bank statement down on the Formica. “I’ve got close to ten grand that needs to go back in my account,” she said. It wasn’t worth anywhere near so much as it would have been before the eruption, but it wasn’t chicken feed, either, not unless the chicken was the size of an ostrich.

Ms. Yamaguchi examined the statement. “Your problem is… ?”

“I didn’t make this withdrawal, or this one, either.” Vanessa stabbed at each item in the printout with her right forefinger. Water from her umbrella soaked into the rug. Steam from her ears should have scorched the ceiling.

“Let me see, please.” The supervisor did things with her computer. She frowned as she studied the monitor. “I don’t find anything wrong with the transactions. They were both done by computer. They used your password. It was given correctly at the first try both times. There was no reason not to release the funds.”

“Then you’ve been hacked. You—” Vanessa broke off as a horrible fear filled her mind. She yanked her phone out of her purse and called Bronislav’s number again. She got the automated announcement that it was no longer in service. “No. Jesus, no! I think I’ve been hacked. Oh, shit!”

He’d been looking at her laptop when she woke up that morning. He kept her story front and center to show her. Cover—it had to be cover. Up till then, he’d been snooping. If he wasn’t so dumb with computers as he claimed, he wouldn’t have had much trouble finding her password list.

And then, when the time was right, maybe when he found a town where he could open a little restaurant, or buy into one, and needed some money for a down payment or whatever… She didn’t know that was what had happened, not yet she didn’t, but she sure would have bet that way.

“Bog te jebo!” she hissed.

“What does that mean?” Denise Yamaguchi sounded impressed in spite of herself.

“God fuck you,” Vanessa answered absently. It sounded better, filthier, in Serbo-Croatian. Her mind raced in overdrive. “Listen—do you have the IP address of the computer or smartphone or whatever the thief used to get into my account? If you do, maybe you can find out who he was.”

“Let me see what I can manage.” For the next several minutes, Denise Yamaguchi fiddled with her computer. When she stopped, she looked as if she also wanted to say God fuck you, but she was too professional. She did say, “I can’t access that from here, but I think our IT people will be able to run it down. Now… I’m afraid you’re going to have to fill out about a ton of papers. They’ll protect you, and they’ll protect us. People work out schemes to defraud banks sometimes.” She held up a hasty hand. “I’m not saying you’re one of them, but they do. Am I right that you have an idea about who might have taken the money out of your account?”

“Oh, yeah. You’re right. My boyfriend. My ex-boyfriend, I guess I should say.” Vanessa had loved Bronislav. She’d thought he loved her back. If he didn’t… She hadn’t even started processing what that meant. All this was happening too fast. But you didn’t rip off someone you loved. That, she was solid on. “Let me have those forms. As many dotted lines as you’ve got, I’ll sign on them.”

“Excuse me for a minute, please. I don’t use these very often. I have to pull them from that file back there.”

As the banker walked over to the file cabinet, Vanessa realized that, if Bronislav had been planning for a while to steal from her, he might have been lying when he said he liked her story. Somehow, absurdly, that seemed a worse betrayal than all the money he’d siphoned from the B of A.

A few minutes before the bus was supposed to pick up Louise Ferguson and take her to the stop across the street from the Van Slyke Pharmacy, three eighteen-wheelers came down the street. Because their motors were the only ones she could hear, they seemed ridiculously loud. She knew she and everybody else had taken them for granted before the supervolcano blew up, but she couldn’t imagine how. Hadn’t the growling, clanking, stinking monsters driven all the people within half a mile squirrely?

As each truck passed—slowly, to keep from mashing bike-riders and what have you—she peered into its cab. She didn’t think Bronislav Nedic would come back to L.A. any time soon, but you never could tell. She wasn’t all that sure she would recognize him in a truck, either, but, again, you never could tell. So she looked.

Vanessa had dumped a string of boyfriends in her time. She’d never been dumped by one till now. She’d never had her bank account cleaned out by one, either. She’d made more money than Bryce Miller had, but that wasn’t the same thing.

Now she knows how it feels, Louise thought. She’d dumped Colin, but then Teo’d dumped her. Having it done to you left a different feeling from doing it yourself. When you did it, you did it because you were—or at least you hoped you were—heading for a better place. When you were on the receiving end, it felt more as if an earthquake knocked your life higgledy-piggledy.

Louise looked down the street. Where was the damn bus? Her boss would understand if she got in late; Jared mostly rode a bus to the pharmacy himself. But Louise didn’t like it. Living with Colin all those years had left her compulsively punctual. She hated running late, and she hated when anything in her life didn’t run on time.

Which didn’t mean she could do squat about it. Schedule or no schedule, the bus would come when it felt like coming, not when she wanted it to come or expected it to come. Fuel shortages, the breakdowns of an aging fleet, spare-parts shortages, the problems drivers had getting to work on time… Oh, the Retarded Transit District had all kinds of good reasons its buses didn’t always show up when it claimed they would. Louise hated every one of those reasons. That didn’t help, either, of course.

Half an hour late, the bus at last deigned to make an appearance. Instead of hissing open, the door wheezed and creaked. Motors and transmissions weren’t the only parts showing the strain of too much use over too many years.

As she paid her fare, she asked the driver, “What will you guys do when the buses start dying and you can’t fix them any more?”

The Hispanic man looked at her. “Maybe we get stagecoaches—you know, with horses. Or maybe we just pack it in on account of it’s too expensive. Then everybody climbs on a bicycle, hey?”

He was only a driver. He didn’t make transit policy. Louise had to remind herself of that as she sat down. The vinyl or whatever it was that covered the seats was wearing out, too. You could see bits of yellowish foam rubber sticking up through holes and cracks and tears.

The whole damn country was wearing out the same way, with things breaking down and falling apart faster than people could run around and fix them. There’d been worried talk about that even before the supervolcano erupted. Back then, though, the fixer-uppers had just about managed to stay even with the breakdowns. So it had seemed to her, anyway.

Now… The supervolcano had broken so many things and made so many others fall apart, the whole damn human race was scrambling to try to fix things up in its aftermath. And, for all its frantic scrambling, humankind seemed to lose ground every day.

Such cheery thoughts occupied her till the bus shuddered to a stop at the corner of Van Slyke and Reynoso Drive. The pharmacy was already open. Jared’s bus must have shown up closer to the promised time than hers had.

Her boss greeted her with, “Morning, Louise. Have you heard the latest?”

“Nooo,” she said slowly, wondering whether the latest revolved around soccer, Broadway, or some incestuous combination of the two.

It turned out to be none of the above. “The Russians have invaded Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” he said.

“Good God!” Louise said. “Why?”

“Well, I was listening to Radio Moscow on the shortwave this morning”—yes, Jared was the kind of man who would listen to Radio Moscow on the shortwave—“and they said it was to consolidate the historic unity of the region. I’m quoting, you understand.”

“Uh, right,” Louise answered. “What does that really mean? Does it really mean anything at all?”

“I think it means the cold has hit Russia so hard, nothing’s growing there at all,” Jared said. “Ukraine and Kazakhstan are a little better off, so the Russians are grabbing with both hands.”

“That will make everybody love them,” Louise said. She’d grown up loving the Russians that way; like the pharmacist, she was old enough to remember the Cold War. To her grown children, it was as one with World War II and the Battle of Hastings and the Pyramids: something they had to learn about in school that didn’t mean anything in their own lives. Thinking back to Cold War fears, Louise found a brand-new question: “Are they using nukes?”

“They haven’t yet, or nobody’s said they have,” Jared answered. Louise nodded in relief. With several—no one seemed sure just how many—nuclear bombs tossed around in the Mideast, that genie was out of the bottle, dammit. Her boss went on, “But Ukraine and Kazakhstan are both screaming for NATO help.”

NATO, Louise remembered from somewhere, stood for North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Kazakhstan was one hell of a long way from the North Atlantic. Well, so was Ukraine, but it did touch the Black Sea, which was connected to the Mediterranean, which was connected to the North Atlantic.

And the ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone, and the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone, and the hip bone’s connected to the backbone… Louise wasn’t even close to sure she had the old song straight. She also wasn’t even close to sure she had all her marbles right now.

Then something else occurred to her, something that had to do with connections and that made her pretty sure she did. “When they’re yelling for NATO help, that means they’re yelling for American help. What are we doing about it?”

“Last I heard, the Secretary of State told the Russians that attacking independent countries was a big no-no,” Jared answered, which surprised a laugh from Louise. He continued, “The Russians have told the Secretary of State that Washington needs to mind its own business.”

Trying to picture a map in her mind, Louise said, “I wouldn’t want to have to send soldiers to Kazakhstan.”

“Neither would anyone else with all his brains,” Jared said. Louise laughed again—he was on a roll. Then he added, “Some of the commentators are saying they don’t want soldiers. They want us to tell the Russians we’ll shoot missiles at them if they don’t go home and play nice.”

“Urk,” Louise said. If the USA shot missiles at Russia, it wasn’t like shooting at Iran or North Korea. The Russians could shoot back. Oh, could they ever! That was why the Cold War had stayed cold. Both sides could shoot back much too well to take suicidal chances.

“Urk is just about the size of it,” Jared agreed. “You can get to Ukraine from the rest of Europe, anyhow. Or to Russia. You can assuming you want to, I mean. The last fellow who went into Russia from the rest of Europe was Hitler, and he didn’t have such a great time afterwards.”

“No,” Louise said. “We don’t need a war now. We’re still picking up pieces from the supervolcano, and we will be for the next fifty years.”

“You know that. I know that,” Jared said. “I’ll bet the Russians know that—they’re picking up pieces, too. But does the President know that?”

As far as Louise could tell, the President was a twit. He meant well, but he was a twit regardless. And everybody except maybe him knew which road was paved with meaning well.

A little old Asian man with a fedora came in. It wasn’t a hipster’s stingy-brim. It was just a hat. He’d probably started wearing it when most men put them on every day, and somehow never stopped. He nodded to Jared. “Good morning. Is my Inderal prescription ready?”

“It sure is, Mr. Nakasone.” The pharmacist went behind the counter and handed him a pill bottle. The Asian man handed back a credit card. Since the power was on, Jared could use the computerized system. After Mr. Nakasone signed the slip, he stuck the pills in a pocket of his windbreaker and tottered off. He wasn’t going anywhere fast, but he was going.

He reminded Louise of the whole world these days.

She wondered what the world would do if Russia overran those two chunks of what had been the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Then she wondered what Russia would do if it overran them. Just because you wanted something, you wouldn’t necessarily be happy once you got it. (Hadn’t somebody with Vulcan ears said that the first time?) Ukraine and Kazakhstan had been their own countries for a generation now. They’d got used to being their own countries. They wouldn’t want Moscow ordering them around again. And they were big enough that trying to hold them down might not be a whole lot of fun for the Kremlin.

Well, that was the Kremlin’s worry. It wasn’t Louise’s. She had plenty of worries of her own.