Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  A lot of people wouldn’t. Hell, a lot of people didn’t. They put in their hours and used the company Xerox to copy their own stuff and stole paper and pens and anything else that wasn’t nailed down and did what was required of them and not a speck more. Bryce sometimes found himself slipping into that easygoing slothfulness. He wondered how different it really was from going nuts in a quiet, polite way.

  After lunch, someone put an RFP on his desk with a Post-it note: What do you think our chances are for getting ahold of some of this grant money? Evaluating an RFP, especially one from the Federal Department of Energy, was a little more fun than passing a kidney stone, but only a little.

  Could I do this for twenty-five years? he wondered as he scribbled notes. Would anything be left of me if I did?

  * * *

  Somewhere in Kansas. That was as much as Vanessa Ferguson knew about where she was. Probably somewhere in eastern Kansas. The dust and ash got thicker as you moved toward the Colorado border. That meant things got more screwed up. She didn’t think anybody had actually gone back into Colorado yet. There was plenty of disaster to go around here closer to the edges of the ashfall.

  She didn’t care. She’d escaped Camp Constitution, and escaped whatever sorry-ass place the suckers flooded out of Camp Constitution had gone to instead. She would never see Micah Husak again. If by some misfortune she did, she could kick him in the nuts or plug him instead of sucking him off.

  And all her freedom had cost her was one more quickie blow job on that nameless National Guardsman. Her self-respect? As a matter of fact, no. You did what you had to do and you counted up the tab later on. Or else you didn’t worry about it at all. Most of the time, she didn’t.

  Some stretches of ground in these parts were free of volcanic crud. Rain and wind had blown it away or washed it into rivers—which was why the floods were so horrendous. But there was genuine, no-shit green in those places. Robins hopped around, probing the ground for worms. Every so often, they even found some. Worms had to be tougher than Vanessa had imagined.

  But where the ash and dust had drifted . . . In the lee of houses and fences, in places where the wind didn’t reach, in hollows without streams running through them . . . In spots like that, the ground was as gray and lifeless as it had been right after the eruption, going on two years ago now.

  No people had been found alive. Not everybody had fled to the camps, maybe, but the people who hadn’t fled hadn’t made it. Lung diseases brought on by inhaling all the abrasive ultramicroscopic crud in the air did them in. It wasn’t quite as if they’d smoked twenty packs a day for fifty years, but it might as well have been.

  Cows? Sheep? Pigs? Chickens? Horses? Gone, gone, gone, gone, and gone, for the same reason. Those worm-hunting robins must have flown here from somewhere else. Livestock couldn’t fly away like that.

  No crops in the ground the past two years, either. Where anything grew up in the fields, it was weeds pushing up through dead cornstalks. No trace at all was left of year before last’s wheat. It was only a memory. This country was importing as much grain as it could these days, along with oil and so much else. The dollar was sinking like a stone. It would have sunk even faster if Europe and Japan and China weren’t hurting, too.

  Except for the ruined farmlands all around her, Vanessa didn’t have time to think much about the battered economy. Washington talked about sending work crews into ashfall country to reclaim it. Washington, though, was a thousand miles away. Nothing would reclaim this country except time.

  “So what are we doing here, then?” she asked the boss to whose crew she’d been assigned.

  Merv Saunders looked like something out of a Grant Wood painting. He was tall and thin and bald, with wire-framed glasses and a long face made up of vertical and horizontal lines of disapproval. “Scavenging,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Lots of stuff got left behind when people had to run. Quite a bit of it’ll still work—or we can make it work with a little cleaning and tinkering. There’s an awful mob of folks out in the camps who need anything we can get our hands on.”

  Ashley Pagliarulo let you know at any excuse or none that she had a law degree. That didn’t mean she wasn’t wearing somebody else’s old clothes like the rest of the work crew, or that she didn’t need a shower as much as her comrades. But it did give her an attitude. Now she said, “Under most circumstances, this would be theft.” By the way she said it, she expected cop cars to roar up with sirens blaring any second now.

  It wasn’t gonna happen. If there were any cop cars within a hundred miles, Vanessa would have been amazed. And Merv Saunders sounded as calm as Valium as he answered, “The Abandoned Property Act makes it legal, as you know perfectly well.”

  Ashley only sniffed. Either Pagliarulo was her married name or her ancestors came from some part of Italy that produced petite blondes. “The Abandoned Property Act will never stand up under judicial review,” she predicted.

  Saunders shrugged. “If you feel that way about it, how come you’re here?”

  “Because I was gonna go bonkers if I stayed in that lousy camp another minute,” the attorney snarled, a sentiment Vanessa completely understood.

  “Well, okay.” Saunders got it, too. “But we honest to God are doing something useful for the country here. A lot of the stuff that we’re getting out won’t be worth having if we leave it here for another few years. And most of the people we’re taking it from are dead.”

  “Some aren’t. Some wound up in camps the same way we did.” Ashley was always ready to argue. Any time, any place. She was a lawyer, all right. She went on, “And even the dead people have heirs. We’re plundering their estates.”

  The crew boss looked at her. “You can always go back to a camp, you know.” He didn’t say whether you want to or not, but anybody with two brain cells to rub together would hear it in his voice. Vanessa sure did. She’d given him some static, too. Now she decided keeping her mouth shut for a while might be a pretty fair plan. Going back to a camp was the very last thing she wanted to do.

  Ashley Pagliarulo also got the message loud and clear. She said not another word. She looked miffed. Hell, she looked righteously pissed off. But she was plainly of the same opinion as Vanessa: that going to a camp was like going to jail, only with worse food and accommodations.

  Not that being in the middle of ruined Kansas was any bargain. Whenever the wind blew out of the west, as it did a lot of the time, it picked up dust from the thicker layers in those parts and did its best to re-cover what time and rain had started to clear.

  They all had pig-snouted gas masks. When the wind blew from the west, they wore them, too. Hundreds of thousands of people had already died from HPO and other lung ailments brought on by breathing that crap. Nobody could guess how many more would prematurely follow them into the grave. And, as Vanessa knew from the dreadful days right after the eruption, being out and about with the dust blowing around was like trying to carry on after you’d had a handful of grit thrown in your eyes. Wearing a gas mask was a metaphorical pain. Doing without one was a literal pain. Reality trumped metaphor every goddamn time.

  Here was another farmhouse with the front door standing open. Maybe the people who’d lived here hadn’t bothered closing it when they got the hell out. Maybe looters had hit the place after the owners bailed. If they had, Vanessa hoped the time they’d wasted plundering meant they came down with one of the zillion lung diseases the dust could give you. As far as she was concerned, looters deserved all the bad things that happened to them and a few more besides. Her father, no doubt, would have sympathized with the attitude.

  Looters had hit the place. The TV was gone. There was no computer anywhere. Pulled-open drawers, everything in them now gray with dust, said there wouldn’t be any jewelry, either.

  But there were shoes in the bedrooms and clothes in the closets. Before long, some refugees would be we
aring these people’s castoffs. Vanessa was in clothes like that herself. So were her colleagues. Demand still exceeded supply. Like her, plenty of people in the camps had no money to buy anything new. They depended on charity—and on the fruits of the Abandoned Property Act.

  The wearables went into black trash bags. Vanessa wondered out loud what people had done before they had plastic bags to stash stuff in.

  She didn’t particularly expect an answer, but she got one. “Burlap,” Merv Saunders said. “It was cheap, and there was lots of it. They still use it for sandbags because of that. Feed sacks, too.”

  They found feed sacks out in the barn. No livestock remained in there. These people must either have taken their animals with them or, if they couldn’t do that, turned them loose and hoped for the best. Those hopes were doomed to disappointment, but they couldn’t have known ahead of time.

  Vanessa had had to turn her cat loose before they let her into a refugee center. She’d hoped for the best, too, but . . . Poor Pickles! Tears stung her eyes. She blinked them back. Crying inside a gas mask was a bad idea, because tears had nowhere to go and fogged up your lenses like nobody’s business.

  But the barn did have those sacks of feed—some made from plastic-impregnated paper; others, sure as hell, of good, old-fashioned burlap. And feed, even feed that was past its sell-by date, was precious. The Midwest’s endless abundance was dead, smothered in supervolcano ash and dust. Those sacks of corn and soybeans and whatever wouldn’t be coming out of America’s breadbasket by the millions any more, not for God only knew how many years. Animals that had survived elsewhere in the country still needed to eat. If the food was stale, well, stale feed was a hell of a lot better than no feed. People weren’t so fussy now as they had been when times were flush.

  The crew lugged the feed sacks to their truck. It wore the mechanical equivalent of a gas mask. It sported an enormous, heavy-duty air filter that sure as hell wasn’t part of its original equipment. The engine compartment and transmission were much better sealed off than was necessary in most of the country, to keep grit from getting into the moving parts.

  Vanessa remembered how her own Toyota had crapped out on the road while she was trying to get away from the eruption. She just thanked heaven she’d got her hands on some surgical masks before then. Otherwise, she’d be coughing her lungs out now, if breathing in that garbage hadn’t made her kick the bucket.

  Then she thought of Pickles again. She’d had to turn him loose to die. This time, she wasn’t fighting tears but killing rage. If she ever ran into the prune-faced bitch who’d made her get rid of the cat . . . That gal wouldn’t last fifteen seconds, and there was the long and short of it.

  And here she was, straining her back to lug feed sacks over to a truck kitted out like something from a Mad Max movie. And she was glad to be doing it, too, because all her other choices looked worse. If that wasn’t a bastard and a half, she was damned if she knew what would be.

  When they’d emptied out the barn, Merv Saunders checked a printout he’d got before they started this grave-robbing expedition. “Way to go, people,” he said. “Our next stop is Arma, Kansas.”

  “Arma virumque cano,” Vanessa said. It was a leftover from Bryce, and damn near the only bit of Latin she knew.

  Everybody else in the crew looked at her. Saunders rolled his eyes.

  “It’s from Vergil,” she said. “Means ‘Of arms and the man I sing.’”

  They didn’t care. Their stares, some black and others suspicious (as well as she could guess by reading expressions through gas masks), showed that only too clearly. She wished she could have done three or four more lines, but that probably would have just made matters worse. She spread her work-gloved hands.

  “Our next stop is Arma,” Saunders repeated, every line of his body saying Wanna make something out of it? Vanessa gave up and stood there, waiting. The crew boss went on, “It’s a decent-sized town—more than fifteen hundred people, when it had people. It’s got a gas station. If the underground tanks are anywhere close to full, that’s even more important than bringing back feed.”

  The crew nodded. Vanessa found her own head going up and down. Any gasoline or diesel fuel that you could get your hands on was more precious than rubies these days. The dollar was hurting. Countries that hadn’t been trashed could afford oil imports better than the USA could. Not that the oil business was in great shape itself. The sputtering wars in the Middle East made sure of that.

  So . . . grave-robbing. And it was important enough that even Vanessa couldn’t get—too—cynical about it.

  * * *

  Louise Ferguson pulled into her parking space in the condominium complex. She wondered how much longer she’d be able to keep driving to the ramen headquarters on Braxton Bragg Boulevard. It wasn’t all that far from here, and she didn’t use very much gas going back and forth. But the stuff was ridiculously expensive—when the stations had any, which they did less and less often. Back before the supervolcano erupted, Europeans would have rebelled at paying prices like these. They were paying even more than she was now, not that that made her happy. Misery, here, didn’t love company. Misery was just miserable.

  She walked to the mailboxes at the front of the complex. A cable bill. A catalogue from a clothing company—NEW FASHIONS FOR COOLER CLIMES! the cover said, sounding more cheerful than it had any business being. A notice from the electric company, warning that reduced generating capacity might mean intermittent service. That translated into English as rolling blackouts. The governor threatened them before. Now they’re here, she thought as she went back toward the condo that had been Teo’s and was now hers.

  It really was hers. The lawyers had done their dance over title to the place, dotting every t and crossing every i and doing whatever the hell they did: probably lifting their legs and peeing on the papers till the miserable things smelled right. Whatever it was, it hadn’t come cheap. Nothing did, not in this day and age.

  Up the stairs she trudged. She remembered how Teo had bounded up them, and how her heart had jumped when she heard his energetic strides. She would have loved him still if only he could have handled the idea of having a kid. She had the kid. She had the condo. She didn’t have Teo—and if he showed up now, she’d spit in his eye.

  When she walked in, Marshall was holding his little half-brother. The baby’s smile at seeing his mother was so wide it almost made the top half of his head fall off. “Da-da-da-da!” he squealed.

  “That’s your mama,” Marshall said. “Mama.”

  “Da-da-da-da!” James Henry repeated, even louder than before.

  “He’ll figure it out,” Louise said. “All of you guys went ‘dada’ before you went ‘mama,’ too.” That had made Colin proud and irked her, not that either one of them would ever have admitted it.

  “Whatever.” Usually, Marshall bailed out of the condo as if his Nikes were on fire when Louise got home. That was partly because he liked babysitting no better than any other single guy his age, partly because he remained pissed off at his mother for ending the marriage that had brought him into the world. He didn’t—by the nature of things, he couldn’t—understand how dead the marriage was before Louise ended it. (That Colin hadn’t had the first clue it was dead said nothing good about him: not if you listened to Louise, anyhow.)

  Today, though, Marshall didn’t go anywhere. He just stood there. Louise gradually recognized the look on his face as expectant. With a sigh, she remembered why: she was supposed to pay him today. She fumbled in her purse till she found her checkbook and a pen. She wrote rapidly, tore off the check, and handed it to him. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks.” He put it in the pocket of his Levi’s. That he wouldn’t help his mother for free never failed to annoy her, but he wouldn’t. If you listened to Colin, you couldn’t reasonably expect anything else, but Louise made a point of not listening to Colin.
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  “Wait!” she said suddenly when Marshall was already halfway to the door.

  He paused. “Wazzup?”

  “Let me see that check again.”

  He handed it to her. She scribbled the amount in her register. She used to forget to do that about one time in five. It had driven methodical, organized Colin straight up a wall. Louise always figured she had more creative things to worry about . . . till she was on her own, and had to balance the checkbook herself instead of letting somebody else worry about it. The hassles a couple of unexpected bounced checks put her through did more to make her note every single one of them than Colin’s sarcasm had ever managed.

  She gave back the check. “Now you can escape.”

  “Whatever,” Marshall said again, and did just that.

  Dealing with the register meant Louise had taken her eyes off James Henry for a few seconds. She couldn’t safely do that any more, not when he was crawling. He’d got something in his mouth. She grabbed him, reached in there, and pulled it out.

  A little scrap of paper. It wouldn’t have hurt him even if he’d swallowed it, but you never wanted to take chances like that. Most of the time, she wouldn’t have wanted to stick her finger into somebody else’s mouth, either. A mom with a baby got used to all kinds of things she wouldn’t have wanted to do most of the time.

  She nursed him. She gave him some rice cereal and some carrot goop. His diapers had got more revolting since he started eating solid food. Colin used to say a rug rat wasn’t human till it was potty-trained. Like a lot of things Colin had said, that held just enough truth to be annoying.

  Louise found herself thinking of her ex-husband a lot more often than she thought about the departed father of her latest child. Yes, she’d been together with Colin a lot longer than she had with Teo, but that wasn’t it, or not all of it. Colin said and thought more interesting things than Teo.