Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  “Vanessa, we already know you’re weird,” Merv Saunders told her with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “Do you have to go and advertise it?”

  “Oh, give me a fucking break,” she snarled. He was close to twenty years older than she was. Shouldn’t that have been enough of a head start to give him some kind of clue about the Marx Brothers? Evidently not.

  What really pissed her off wasn’t that he didn’t have a clue. What really pissed her off was that he didn’t want a clue. He wasn’t just a yahoo. He was proud to be a yahoo. He was the kind of yahoo who didn’t know what a yahoo actually was, too. If he didn’t know about Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and hapless Margaret Dumont, he for sure wouldn’t know about Lemuel Gulliver’s last voyage.

  Winter in Fredonia wouldn’t have been a picnic before the eruption. Winter in Fredonia since the eruption reminded Vanessa of what she’d heard about Fargo, or maybe Winnipeg. Sometimes it got up into the twenties. Sometimes it warmed up to zero. And sometimes it didn’t.

  Fredonia hadn’t had a whole lot of trees when the supervolcano was biding its time. This was Kansas, for crying out loud. Just about all the trees it had had were dead now. If the ashfall hadn’t done for them, those upgraded winters bloody well had.

  So they were bare-branched and graying. They reminded Vanessa of human corpses—you could tell right away that they wouldn’t spring back to life when (or, nowadays, if) spring came around again. And their gray starkness, and that of the rest of the local landscape, just made the cell phone relay towers all the more obvious—and obtrusive.

  The towers here, like the ones in L.A. and Denver, had been disguised as trees, with brown plastic trunks and green plastic leaves. They hadn’t made what you’d call convincing trees: neither colors nor shapes were spot-on. But they looked better than bare aluminum scaffolding and wires and whatever would have.

  Because they were only approximations of trees, Vanessa and her family and friends had noticed them every so often, mostly when out driving. Somebody (as a matter of fact, it was Bryce, which Vanessa had deleted from her internal hard drive) tagged them alien listening devices. The name stuck in her little crowd.

  Here in drab, abandoned Fredonia, Kansas, the relay points honest to God did look alien. Their plastic leaves were still green (snow-speckled green right now), their plastic trunks still brown. Sooner or later, the sun would fade them. With the sun so feeble nowadays, it was likely to be later.

  No matter how out of place they seemed, their wiring and electronics remained valuable. The salvage team methodically cut them down and cut them up. “We’d better be careful,” Vanessa said. “We don’t want the aliens to find out we’re messing with their stuff.”

  She meant it for a joke. She was going to explain how her friends had called the relays alien listening devices. Had the rest of the team liked her better, she would have got a laugh.

  But the others disassembling the relay only scowled. “Aliens! Give me a fucking break!” one of them said.

  “Bite me,” Vanessa answered sweetly.

  “Knock if off, both of you.” Saunders sounded weary. One of his jobs, along with this government-sponsored graverobbing, was putting out little fires in his crew before they turned into big ones. Nobody’d murdered anybody yet, or even assaulted with intent to maim, which proved he was good at what he did.

  Vanessa wanted to yell He started it! How many times had she done that back home, with one brother or the other? Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but it was always worth a try. Not here. Merv Saunders didn’t care who’d started it. He just wanted it to stop.

  And he had the power to bind and to loose. He could kick somebody off the team. If you got kicked off, you went out of the devastated zone on the next truck that came in to pick up salvageables. You didn’t get to go off on your own once you left the devastated zone, either. Oh, no. The powers that be were crueler than that. If you got kicked out, you went straight back into a refugee camp.

  Staying in a camp was punitive. The authorities could see that (so could anybody who’d ever been in one). But millions of people remained stuck in them. The authorities couldn’t see how to put them anywhere else.

  Not enough houses. Not enough money to build them. Not enough money for anyone to afford them even if they got built, either. The economy had been rotten before the supervolcano went off. With the Midwest essentially gone, it wasn’t just rotten any more. The vultures had eaten the meat off its bones. And the rest of the poor, chilly world wasn’t much better off. The USA had been the engine that pulled the train. Well, the engine had gone off the rails.

  They slept in the best quarters Fredonia offered. It wasn’t a Motel 6, but it might as well have been. A motel with no electricity and no running water. Happy fucking day! The bed was more comfortable than a sleeping bag. The windows in Vanessa’s room weren’t broken, either, so they shielded her from the freezing wind. And that was about as much good as she could find to say about the place.

  Her father had stayed at a Motel 6 when he went to Yellowstone. She remembered him bitching about it. That was back in the days when things still worked, though. Now . . . Now she was stuck in this cold, miserable place with a bunch of people who couldn’t stand her.

  She’d blown that National Guardsman so she could end up in a place like this, no matter what the people with her thought of her. She nodded to herself. I’d do it again, too, she thought. Next to Camp Constitution, this wasn’t half bad. There was a judgment for you! Nodding again, she rolled over and fell asleep.

  XII

  Colin Ferguson took his left hand off the bicycle’s handlebars and held out his arm with the hand pointing up: the signal for a right turn. He lived on a small, lightly traveled street, but he was getting into the habit of using hand signals all the time, the way he’d hit the flicky-doodle in his car whenever he changed lanes or turned.

  He swung into his driveway. The Taurus still waited there. So did Kelly’s old Honda. Marshall’s little Toyota sat by the curb. They all ran. Colin thought they did, anyhow. None got used much, even in weather like this. Whose cars did?

  With a sigh of relief, he swung off the bike and walked it onto the porch. He stood there a few seconds, letting the rainwater drip from his slicker. He slipped off his galoshes. He’d never worried about galoshes before the supervolcano. Who had, in SoCal? People did now, by God!

  Before he could open the door, Kelly did it from the inside. They kissed briefly. “How are you?” she said as he brought the bike into the front hall. Hers already stood there, parked on old towels. He lowered the kickstand on his and put it next to hers.

  “I’ve had days I liked better.” He walked back into the kitchen and pulled a green bottle out of the pantry. After he poured himself a fair knock, he asked Kelly, “Want some?”

  “That’s okay. You know me—far as I’m concerned, Laphroaig is Kermit’s last name.” Instead of drinking scotch, Kelly popped the cap on a Red Trolley ale. She clinked the bottle against his glass. “Sympathies.”

  “Thanks.” He let smoky fire run down his throat. She’d improved his taste in beer, but he’d never been able to persuade her that scotch tasted like anything but medicine. More for me, he thought.

  “What went wrong?” she asked.

  “Stupid judge let a perp off. Not enough evidence to keep him, he said. The video didn’t quite show his fingerprints, so we had no grounds for the arrest. My—”

  “Ass,” Kelly said helpfully when he stalled.

  “Yeah. That. It was a good bust. Honest to God, it was. That jerk in a robe, he—” The complaint dissolved into a disgusted growl. Colin drank more Laphroaig. “How are you? Better’n that, I hope.”

  “Me? I’m tired. Long way to Dominguez on a bike. They say the buses are supposed to get more fuel next week, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Mrmm
.” Colin made a different kind of unhappy noise. “We’re getting low on gas ourselves. What we hijacked from LAPD is pretty much gone, and we aren’t getting as much as we still want to use. Pitcavage isn’t what you’d call happy about it.” He drained the glass and filled it again.

  Kelly raised an eyebrow. “You don’t do that very often.”

  “Not as often as I did before I started hanging around with you, and you can take that to the bank.” Despite what he said, Colin drank from the refill. “You’ve got no idea how wrecked I was the morning we met in Yellowstone—and that was after the aspirins and the coffee kicked in. But I don’t need it so much now.”

  “Good. I’m doing something right, anyhow.” Kelly wasn’t halfway down her beer yet. She liked the taste and a little buzz. Colin didn’t think he’d ever seen her smashed, though. The reverse? The reverse wasn’t quite true.

  “Darn right you are,” he said. “I wish you were chief, and doing things right in that chair. Pitcavage . . .” Some of the beat cops called their big boss Shitcabbage. Colin hadn’t heard any of the detectives use that particular endearment, but they had others for the chief. And they had their reasons for using them, too.

  “What now?” Kelly knew there were things he hadn’t said yet.

  “His worthless kid,” Colin answered. “I mean, you try to make it easy on ’em. I never busted mine for smoking dope, and God knows I could have a million times.”

  “You never busted me, either,” Kelly pointed out.

  “You never smoked it in front of me to get my goat.”

  “No,” she agreed quietly. “I knew you didn’t like it, and it never was that big a deal for me. I don’t miss it—beer’s fine.”

  “Okay. Good, even,” Colin said. “If you’d thrown it in my face the way my kids did, I don’t suppose I would’ve busted you, either. But I wouldn’t’ve wanted to marry you, or I don’t think I would.”

  “I sorta figured that out,” Kelly said, quiet still.

  “Uh-huh. You’re no dummy.” Colin nodded and made that unhappy noise again. “Darren Pitcavage, though—” He took another sip of scotch, as if to wash the taste of Darren Pitcavage out of his mouth. “My kids aren’t mean. Mm, Vanessa is sometimes, I guess, but she’s snarky mean, not bar-brawl mean. If the chief hadn’t done some fancy talking, there’ve been a couple of times his precious flesh and blood might’ve found out more about the inside of a jail than he ever wanted to know.”

  “Ah. Okay. Now I know where you’re coming from,” Kelly said. “This just happened again?”

  “Too right it did,” Colin agreed. “There’s a bunch of bars and strip joints on Hesperus up near Braxton Bragg, and Darren thinks it’s cool to hang out in ’em. Maybe he picks up the girls. Maybe he just watches. I dunno. But the people who run those places, they sure know who he is—and who his old man is. Does he get free drinks?”

  “Ya think?” Kelly said sarcastically.

  “Yeah. Like that. And the bouncers cut him slack. For all I know, some of the girls give him a throw to keep him happy. But not everybody who goes to those joints knows who Lord Darren Pitcavage is.”

  “Or cares,” Kelly said.

  “Or cares. That’s right,” Colin said. “Some of those guys, they’d want to rack him up good if they did know. This latest fight he got into wasn’t like that. He was drunk, and so was the other fellow. The guy said something, and Darren coldcocked him. He’s got a nasty left hook—he knocked out two teeth and broke another one.”

  “Let me guess—they called it self-defense?” Kelly asked.

  “Right the first time,” Colin said heavily. “But if that Mexican’d hit Darren, then it would have been assault with intent to maim. Bet your sweet wazoo it would.” He gulped down the second drink.

  Kelly reached into the refrigerator—which was, like most people’s these days, half-full of ice to keep things fresh when the power was out. She grabbed some steaks. “Here. I’ll pan-broil these. That’ll help get the taste of today out of your mouth.”

  She does know how I work, Colin thought. The power wasn’t on right now, which meant the stove’s fancy electronic brain was useless. But natural gas still flowed when Kelly turned the knob. She started it with a match. Not elegant, but it worked . . . till the gas stopped coming, if it did. When it did.

  Marshall must have had some radar that told him when supper was ready. He walked in the front door right when Kelly took the pan off the fire. “Smells good,” he said.

  “Sure it does—it’s food, isn’t it?” Colin said. “You can drag up a rock and help us eat it. And you can tell us how your little brother’s doing.” Morbid curiosity? Probably. But he had it, morbid or not. And it gave him and Marshall something to talk about. Fathers whose grown sons lived their own lives understood how important that could be.

  The rock in question was a chair at the dining room table. “He’s, like, at the age where everything is no all the time,” Marshall said as he planted his hindquarters on it. “I mean, everything. You want to take a nap? No! You want me to read a book? No! You want to play outside? No! You want to turn into a centipede and crawl up the wall? No!”

  “I remember those days,” Colin said, realizing he’d probably see them again himself, at least if he hadn’t started firing blanks. “You all went through ’em. Vanessa especially.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Marshall said with a crooked grin. “Anyway—”

  Before he could get to anyway, Kelly broke in: “Did you really ask him if he wanted to turn into a centipede?”

  “Sure,” Marshall answered. Colin believed him. His youngest would never set the world on fire when it came to foreign languages, but he was the one who’d translated An elephant is eating the beach into Spanish in high school. He had that surreal turn of thought—or else he was just flaky. He might be cut out to make a writer after all.

  “When Vanessa had it worst,” Colin said reminiscently, “I went and asked her if she wanted a cookie. ‘No!’ she said, the way she did for everything for a couple of months there. Then what I said sank in, and she started to bawl.” After more than a quarter of a century, he could call up the expression of absolute dismay that had filled her face.

  “You’re mean!” Kelly exclaimed, plopping steaks and green beans onto plates. But she was fighting laughter, fighting and losing. As she set his supper in front of him, she added, “You ended up giving her the cookie, didn’t you?”

  “Who, me?” he returned.

  She started to stare at him as if he were Ebenezer Scrooge in the flesh, even without bushy Victorian side whiskers. Then she realized he was having her on. “You’re impossible,” she said, more fondly than not.

  “Well, I try,” he replied, not without pride.

  If he hadn’t fed Vanessa that long-ago vanilla wafer, would his cruelty have warped her for life? Left her sour and embittered and suspicious, for instance? You never could tell. People went off the rails some kind of way, and half the time parents and priests and shrinks had no idea why. More than half the time.

  But he had given her the goddamn cookie. She’d wound up sour and embittered and suspicious any which way. Sometimes you couldn’t win. Hell, sometimes you weren’t sure what game you were playing, or even whether you were playing a game at all.

  He washed dishes while Kelly dried. Getting stuff clean with cold water took elbow grease. In his wisdom, he’d got an electric water heater here. It had been pretty new when the supervolcano erupted. Now, when it worked, they saved the hot water for bathing. A gas one would have been better . . . or maybe not. These days, everything had some kind of electronic controls. And when the power went out, that probably would have fouled up the whole unit.

  Marshall went upstairs to his room. It got quiet in there. He had a battery-powered lamp with LEDs that used next to no electricity, and he was writing in l
onghand when the juice was off. Colin wondered if he could scare up a typewriter from somewhere for the kid.

  He lit a candle. You could get those without too much trouble. He wouldn’t have wanted to write or read or even play cards by candlelight, but it was enough to keep you from barking your shin on a table or tripping over a footstool and breaking your fool neck.

  Kelly came and sat down beside him on the couch. He put his arm around her. She snuggled against him, for companionship and no doubt for warmth as well. The heating system was gas. But, again, the thermostat had a built-in computer chip. The people who’d designed all this stuff had assumed there’d be electricity 24/7/365. Well, Colin had assumed the same thing. Which only went to show that you never could tell, and that assuming wasn’t always smart.

  “I tried to use a manual typewriter in the library at Dominguez Hills on a paper the other day,” Kelly said, echoing his thought of a little while before. “They put them out where the light’s good so people can, you know? But I don’t have the touch for it. You’ve got to hit the keys so hard! I felt like a rhino tapdancing on the keyboard.”

  “Ever mess with one before?” Colin asked. She shook her head; he felt the motion against his shoulder. He went on, “I did—I had one when I was a kid. But I didn’t miss ’em a bit when computers came in. Typewriters aren’t—waddayacallit?—user-friendly, that’s it.”

  “No shit, they aren’t!” Kelly burst out. Colin gave forth with a startled laugh. He wouldn’t have said that himself, not where she could hear it (though he wouldn’t’ve hesitated for a second if the intended ear belonged to Gabe Sanchez or to Chief Pitcavage). She laughed, too, but the amusement quickly left her face. She went on, “The world’s not user-friendly any more, you know?”

  Colin started to laugh again. This time, the laugh didn’t pass his lips. Gasoline was a king’s ransom a gallon when you could get any. Most of the time, you couldn’t, not for money or for love. (Sex was a different story. The Vice Unit had closed out a pimp’s stable of hookers, who’d been turning tricks to keep his Lincoln Navigator’s tank full.) Power came on when it felt like coming on, which seemed less and less often day by day.