Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  “One thing at a time,” Bryce muttered, fishing his phone out of his pocket. First step was finding out what Susan thought.

  His stomach rumbled, loud enough to startle his cat if only he’d had one. He stuck the phone back where he’d got it. No, first step was dealing with those leftovers. Whatever Susan thought wouldn’t change a hell of a lot in the next half hour. Yes, people were animals. Better not to be a hungry animal. He headed for the kitchen.

  * * *

  If there was a drearier place in the world than the Torrance office of the California Employment Development Department, Louise Ferguson couldn’t imagine what it might be. The way things looked to her, Satan would have had a tough time devising a drearier place in hell.

  She sat on a hard, uncomfortable plastic chair of dispirited grayish blue in the waiting area. Water ran from her umbrella and puddled on the dispirited grayish brown linoleum under her feet. She’d had to walk several blocks from the bus stop to the EDD office. Three people on the bus were sneezing their heads off. She hoped she wouldn’t come down sick.

  Somebody a couple of rows behind her in the waiting area coughed as if he’d smoked four packs a day for the past thirty years. The chill and the rain made people get sick more easily than Southern Californians were used to doing. When they weren’t sneezing and hacking, they bitched about it.

  Louise wished San Atanasio had an EDD office. But Torrance was the biggest South Bay city, so such things aggregated here. She had to make the long bus trip instead of a short one. If she did catch something because of that, would the EDD care? It was to laugh.

  The waiting area was packed. She counted herself lucky to have a chair. Whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, East Asians, South Asians, Samoans . . . The crowd was as diverse as L.A. County. People chattered in English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, something guttural that might have been Arabic or Farsi or Armenian for all of her, and in a language or two she couldn’t come even that close to identifying. She smelled stale sweat, stale booze, tobacco smoke clinging to clothes (you got in big trouble for trying to smoke in here), and assorted colognes and hair goops.

  A middle-aged woman with a long, lined face and pulled-back hair who looked like an escapee from a 1920s elementary schoolteachers’ lounge stood up and used a bullhorn to cut through the buzz of talk: “Nine-thirty appointments! Take your places in the lines, nine-thirty appointments!”

  People stood up and hustled to get into the lines that eventually put you face-to-face with an EDD clerk. A baby who’d been sound—and soundlessly—asleep while Mommy sat started screaming when Mommy got up. Mommy tried to comfort the kid, but didn’t have much luck.

  Louise sat tight. She was a ten o’clock appointment. She’d got here early because that was how the bus schedule worked. Trying to jump the lines was an even worse sin than lighting a cigarette. You got an Official Black Mark on your record. A couple of those would cost you a week’s benefits.

  Men and women who’d been standing took the chairs of those who’d risen to get in line. The waiting area didn’t empty out; new people kept coming in all the time. The SoCal economy sucked. The whole country’s economy sucked. Jesus H. Christ, so did the whole world’s. But the USA was screwed worse than everybody else.

  If the government didn’t keep printing dollars and handing them out, no one would have any. If the government did keep printing them and handing them out, pretty soon they wouldn’t be worth anything. That was well on the way to happening. The prices these days! But Washington seemed to have decided that inflation at least put a Band-Aid on disaster.

  Even though Louise had major doubts that that was wise, she grabbed everything the law said she was entitled to. If she lost the condo . . . She had no idea what she’d do if she lost the condo. Live in her car with James Henry? Beg money or a room in the old house from Colin? If it were just her, she would sooner have jumped off a high building and ended things in a hurry. But you couldn’t do that when you had a little guy to worry about. She couldn’t, anyhow.

  The refugee from whacking kids on the knuckles with a ruler raised the bullhorn to her mouth again. “Ten o’clock appointments!” she blared. “Take your places in the lines, ten o’clock appointments!”

  Louise jumped up. All the lines were long, but one she particularly wanted to avoid. A chunky woman named Maria—Anglo, not Hispanic—proved that the EDD didn’t discriminate in hiring on the basis of race, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or competence. She always took twice as long to accomplish half as much as any of the other clerks. Some of the rest were better, some worse, but only fools and newbies got into the line that led to Maria. It was the shortest of them all—and with good reason.

  Only a couple of minutes before ten now. So said the clock on the wall. It worked whether the power was on or not (it was this morning), which meant it ran on batteries. You got to try for your appointment at the scheduled time. You got it . . . when you got it.

  Slowly, she moved toward the window. The EDD wasn’t so heavily fortified as the post office on Reynoso Drive, but the windows were barred like the ones in an old-fashioned bank. The twenty-something guy in front of her wore a stingy-brim fedora that would have been ridiculously out of date when he was born but had turned hip again with the passage of the years. He also had on a loud houndstooth jacket; as far as Louise was concerned, that went beyond hip to tacky. From one of the jacket’s inside pockets he pulled out an airline-drink-sized bottle of vodka. He drained it in a quick gulp, then stuck it back in there again.

  That was one way to make time in line go by. Bringing booze into the EDD office was Against the Rules, too, but Louise wouldn’t say anything unless the man in front of her got loud and rowdy. He didn’t seem likely to. He just wanted to numb the world a little. How could you blame him?

  She’d got to within three people of the front of the line when the Asian woman at the window turned out not to have some bit of paper she needed. She didn’t savvy much English. The clerk, a prim white man with a neat gray mustache, knew not word one of whatever language she spoke.

  The hipster in front of Louise performed a theatrical half turn. “Give me a fucking break!” he said, and then, faintly embarrassed, “Sorry about that.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she answered. “We could all use one.”

  He grinned at her. “Yeah!”

  After what seemed like much too long, the clerk got a rush of brains to the head and asked if any of his fellow civil servants could communicate with the Asian woman. The EDD personnel were as diverse as the people whose employment they were supposed to be developing. Sure as hell, somebody proved able to talk with her. Then they had to figure out what to do about the paper she didn’t have. Louise didn’t know what they decided; they still weren’t speaking English. But the woman left the window. By the unhappy look on her face, Louise guessed she’d have to come back when she found whatever the hell it was. With a loud sigh of relief, the blocky Hispanic guy behind her stepped up.

  “He better have his shit together,” the man with the stingy-brim muttered darkly. Louise found herself nodding.

  Evidently, the Hispanic fellow did. He stepped away from the window folding his check and sticking it in the right front pocket of his jeans. You’d better have your shit together, too, Louise thought as the hipster took his place. He must have, because he collected his check and got out of there in jig time.

  “Name and Social,” the clerk with the gray mustache intoned as Louise took Mr. Stingy-brim’s place.

  “Louise Ferguson.” She gave him her Social Security number, too.

  He entered them on his computer keyboard. Next to it sat a mechanical gadget that let him issue checks even when the power went out. It had to date from the seventies, maybe earlier. It must have gone into a box as soon as the EDD computerized. That nobody’d thrown away the box, and that someone had kno
wn where to find it again, impressed and horrified Louise at the same time.

  “All right, Ms. Ferguson, now I need to see the evidence that you’ve been actively seeking employment during the past fortnightly period,” the clerk said. Could anyone who didn’t work for the EDD bring out things like actively seeking employment or fortnightly period as if they actually belonged to the English language? Louise wouldn’t have bet six inches of used dental floss on it.

  None of which had anything to do with the price of beer (high, like the price of everything else). Louise pulled out application letters from her purse and shoved them at the clerk. They were genuine, all right. She would have done anything short of turning tricks to escape the EDD’s clutches. Christ on a crutch, who wouldn’t? The only trouble was, nobody wanted to hire her . . . or, by appearances, anyone else.

  He shuffled through them and noted them in her computer file. Then he did the same thing on her file card (more boxes that must have been exhumed from storage). Grudgingly, he said, “This appears satisfactory.”

  “Good,” answered Louise, who would have hit the ceiling in seventeen different places if he’d tried telling her anything else.

  He poked one more key. The printer on a shelf by his monitor hummed and spat out a check that would let her eat—not well, but eat—and pay some of what she owed on the condo. Some of what she owed would come out of what she’d saved while she worked at Ramen Central. Sooner or later, her savings would run dry. What she’d do then—she didn’t want to think about now.

  She put her applications and the check into the purse. Then she got out of there as fast as she could. Who hung around the EDD one second longer than they had to? Nobody, that was who.

  It was still raining. It was raining harder than it had when she got there, in fact. Up went the umbrella. She splashed toward the bus stop. It was nothing but a bench—no roof or anything. Not many SoCal bus stops boasted roofs. How often did you need to keep off the rain here?

  Often . . . now. The Retarded Transit District needed to improve the stops like this one. And where would the money for that come from? Local government agencies needed to do a million other things even more. They didn’t have the money for those, either. Back in the day, they might have got it from Sacramento or Washington. But Sacramento had been broke before the eruption, and Washington was even broker than Sacramento. If that wasn’t a measure of how screwed Washington was, nothing ever could be.

  A Hispanic woman came up to stand beside Louise. She had an umbrella, too. Pretty soon, they’d both be soaking wet from midthigh down. Bumbershoots helped only so much. “I wonder how late the goddamn bus is gonna be,” the Hispanic gal said.

  “Late.” Louise heard the doleful certainty in her own voice. If some modern Mussolini promised to make the buses run on time, he’d get elected in a landslide. And then he’d break his promise, sure as hell. Money was scarce. Fuel was scarcer. Spare parts were damn near extinct, and nobody seemed to be making or buying more.

  “You got that right.” The other woman took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, extracted a cigarette from the pack, and lit it, all without getting wetter than she was already. Louise admired the dexterity as much as she wished she weren’t getting the secondhand smoke.

  The cigarette did do one thing, though: it made the bus come. The Hispanic woman had to drop it, only half done, on the sidewalk to board. Serious fines backed up the rules against smoking on public transportation.

  Far more bicycles than cars used the streets. Some pedalers wore raincoats that reached down to their ankles. Some—the dumb ones, as far as Louise was concerned—tried to manage umbrellas. Some just said the devil with it and got wet. The bus had to go slowly to keep from mashing them.

  Every so often, the driver honked his horn to remind the people on bikes that he was there—and to make them clear out in front of him. He didn’t have much luck with that. The pedalers not only didn’t clear out; they slowed down to piss him off. Some of them flipped the bus the bird.

  If Louise had sat behind the big steering wheel, she knew she would have wanted to run over two or three of them to encourage the others to get some sense. The driver clutched the wheel tight enough to make his knuckles whiten, so maybe he was fighting the same temptation.

  People got on. People got off. Before the eruption, only the poor rode the bus in L.A. If you could afford a car, you drove one. Who could afford a car now? Hardly anyone, which meant the bus attracted a higher class of passenger than it had once upon a time. I’m on it, for instance, Louise thought, quite without irony.

  She got off at the stop closest to her condo. The walk back got her wetter and did nothing to improve her temper. She checked her mailbox. The mail wasn’t there yet. She’d have to come down through the rain again to get it. And what would it be? Bills and ads. What else came these days?

  “Mommy!” James Henry squealed when she walked through the door. He ran to her. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him: that was what that run said.

  “Was he good?” she asked Marshall.

  “Good enough,” James Henry’s half-brother answered. “Listen, Mom, I’ve got to go now that you’re finally back.”

  “Not my fault the trip took so long,” Louise said. “The bus was impossible. And those selfish idiots on bikes only made things worse.”

  Marshall’s eyes glinted. He’d ridden his bike over here to babysit. Was he one of the people who diddled buses for the fun of it? If he was, Louise didn’t want to hear about it. He did say, “It’ll cost you an extra twenty bucks.” His voice was almost as hard and flat as Colin’s.

  “Twenty!” Louise spluttered indignantly.

  “You’re late. Late, late, late. And you’re lucky I’m not saying fifty.”

  Sharper than a serpent’s tooth . . . ran through Louise’s head. But she paid him. Somebody who wasn’t related to her by blood would have squeezed an extra fifty out of her. She couldn’t afford it, but she didn’t want to take James Henry to the unemployment office in the rain, either. You couldn’t win. You couldn’t even come close.

  That twenty, of course, came on top of what she’d to pay him to watch James Henry for as long as she’d thought she would be gone. She’d just spent a fair part of her unemployment check. Did Marshall care? Yeah, right!

  Out the door and into the rain he went. Louise sighed. She knew she’d call him the next time she had to go to the EDD office. If she could call him. If her phone had power. If the cell towers had powers. Sometimes, these days, even old-fashioned landlines didn’t work, not that she had one.

  “Mommy!” James Henry said again. We’re together again at last, he meant.

  “Hi, kid,” Louise answered. Her own voice sounded hard and flat in her ears, too.

  XIV

  Colin sat in an interrogation room with Gabe Sanchez, waiting to grill an armed-robbery suspect named Cedric Curtis. “I was here when the uniformed guys brought him in,” Gabe said. “We got him out of his regular clothes and into the jail suit, y’know?”

  “Oh, sure,” Colin answered. Inmates in the San Atanasio City Jail wore orange jumpsuits that made them look like animated carrots.

  Sanchez wrinkled his nose. “Dude had the stinkiest feet in the world, man, that’s what. We made him put his shoes back on.”

  A uniformed cop brought in Cedric Curtis. He was twenty-two now, and looked as if he might have been a linebacker in high school. His head was shaved. He wore a goatee, and had a nasty scar on one cheek. He hadn’t bothered with a mask when he knocked over the Circle K, which was a big reason he was here now.

  “We are filming this interview.” Colin pointed up to a surveillance camera in one corner of the interrogation room. “Do you understand that, Mr. Curtis?”

  “I hear ya,” the suspect answered indifferently.

  “Do you understand?” Gabe growled
. He was playing bad cop today. “You gotta answer yes or no. Not like you don’t know that. Not like you’ve never been here before. So, do you?”

  Curtis looked as if he was thinking about a smartass comeback. Whatever he saw in Gabe’s face, and in Colin’s, made him change his mind. “I understand,” he admitted in grudging tones.

  “Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Colin went through the Miranda warnings against self-incrimination. He could have been shaken awake at three in the morning and delivered them perfectly, the way a priest treated so rudely would have come out with a flawless Hail Mary and Our Father. “Do you understand that, too?”

  Cedric Curtis nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Colin said. “Do you want to talk with us? Do you want an attorney present before you do?”

  “I’ll talk with you. Why not? Fuck, you got me, don’t you?” Curtis said.

  Maybe it’ll be easy for a change. That’d be nice, Colin thought. Aloud, he said, “Are you confessing you robbed the convenience store and threatened Mr. Leghari with a pistol?”

  “The raghead guy in there? Yeah, I done that.” Curtis nodded. “Weren’t no bullets in the gun, though.”

  Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. If it was, the kid had a few loose screws, or more than a few. An awful lot of convenience-store clerks packed heat of their own, commonly in a drawer under the register. Either Cedric had got the drop on Ahmed Leghari or he was one lucky fellow. Well, either way this did look like an easy one. “Would you care to tell us why you knocked over the Circle K, Mr. Curtis?” Colin asked.

  By the way Curtis looked at him, he was the dummy. “On account of I didn’t have no money,” he said.

  Thank you, Willie Sutton ran through Colin’s mind. He didn’t bring it out. Cedric Curtis wouldn’t know Willie Sutton from a hole in the ground. He did say, “Plenty of ways to get money where you don’t end up talking with us.”