“Then you scan it and clean it up and do your twenty-first-century thing on it.” Dad had all the answers. He also had all the reasons: “But you can’t use ‘The power’s out again’ for an excuse so you don’t write. If you’ve got to, you can use legal tablets and a ballpoint.”
“You’re shitting me!” Marshall’s experiments along those lines had not been happy ones. He’d tried, yeah, but he thought writing by hand was as primitive as branding. Some people thought branding was cool—one step past tats, they called it. He couldn’t imagine anyone finding writing by hand cool.
But Dad just shook his head. “Nope. Pen and paper were good enough for Shakespeare and Abe Lincoln and dudes like that. I know they aren’t in your league as a literary artist, but—”
“Oh, give me a fucking break!” Marshall knew when he was whupped. “Look, I’ll try the tripewriter, okay? There! You happy now?”
“Dancing in the daisies.” If Dad was, his face and his voice hadn’t found out about it. He glanced east. He’d been doing that a lot lately; Marshall didn’t think he realized how much. He did say why, though: “Your sister will be back in town in a few days.”
“Yeah. How about that?” The last time Marshall’d seen Vanessa was when he’d helped load her U-Haul so she could move to Colorado to be with her rug merchant. Old Hagop hadn’t worked out any better than Bryce Miller did before him. She’d been goddamn lucky—and goddamn quick, which went with it—to get out of Denver alive when the supervolcano blew, too. Hundreds of thousands of people hadn’t.
Her father coughed. “God knows how long she’ll need to land work. Not a lot of it around. She may have to stay here for a while.”
“How about that?” Marshall repeated tonelessly. Vanessa would quarrel with Dad—they were too much alike not to. Marshall knew she’d quarrel with him, too. She always bossed him around, and he wasn’t going to take it the way he had when he was a kid. He tried a question of his own: “How’s Kelly like the idea?”
“She’s not jumping up and down about it,” Dad allowed. Marshall would have bet she wasn’t. He didn’t think his stepmom had ever actually met his sister. Vanessa would quarrel with her, too. Maybe Vanessa didn’t quarrel with everybody, but she came pretty close. Sighing, Dad went on, “We don’t always do what we want to do. Sometimes we do what we’ve got to do.”
“Right.” Marshall left it there. Since he had no steady work and was living here, he didn’t see how he could claim having Vanessa do the same thing wouldn’t fly. But he sure thought so.
“It will work out,” his father insisted. If that wasn’t the triumph of hope over experience, then Marshall didn’t know what the hell it was. A ham sandwich, maybe. Dad lumbered out of his room, shaking his head like a bear bedeviled by bees.
For lack of anything better to do, Marshall fiddled with the typewriter. When he ran in a sheet of paper, it came up crooked. He messed with the little chromed levers till he found the one that loosened things and let him straighten it.
He started typing. Christ, the thing was noisy! Clack, clack, clackety-clack! And you had to punch every key hard. With his index fingers, he managed okay right away. His pinkies, though, should have done more barbell work. He had to make himself mash them down. When he goofed, he couldn’t just run the cursor back and retype. He had to fix the mistake. Somewhere—maybe at the pawnshop where he’d found the typewriter—Dad had come up with a little bottle of correction fluid.
The stuff smelled as if it ought to get you high. The fine print on the label swore it was nonaddictive. With a stink like that, it was missing a hell of a chance if it was.
Marshall finished a page and then, to his surprise, another one. This antiquated gadget wasn’t what he was used to, but it might not be so bad. It was kind of like Diplomacy compared to World of Warcraft. Bells and whistles? Fuhgeddaboutit. But you could manage without them. If you didn’t already know about them, you wouldn’t even miss them.
“Fuck me,” Marshall said softly, and scribbled a note to himself. There might be a story in that—however he wound up writing it.
XVI
Las Cruces behind Vanessa. Snow on the mountains ahead of her. They weren’t great big mountains—nothing like the Rockies when you saw them from Denver—and didn’t look as if they ought to have snow so far down them. This was only a little north of the Mexican border, after all, and it was allegedly spring.
No matter what the season, they had snow halfway down them. On the other half, streaked and patchy now but still there, lay the gray-brown of volcanic ash, a color she knew much too well and hated much too much.
A red light on her dashboard flashed to life. Alarm flamed in her—flamed and then faded. This one was shaped like a gas pump, and warned her of nothing worse than that she was getting low. She already knew that. She’d been sending the fuel gauge baleful looks since well before she rolled through Las Cruces.
Here came an offramp, with a truck stop by it. Vanessa pulled off I-10. She’d get gas for the car. And she’d buy some lunch. With the kind of food you could find at places like this, she’d probably get gas for herself, too.
She’d never had anything to do with truck stops till she drove the U-Haul from L.A. to Denver. On the way there, she’d discovered they were less awful than she’d always thought. Not great, necessarily, but less awful. Nowadays, you took whatever you could get, because too goddamn often you couldn’t get anything at all.
This truck stop looked quite a bit like that one in Nevada—or had she already got to Utah by then? Nowheresville, USA, any which way. A convenience store. A broad expanse of asphalt. Filling stations. A garage. Restaurants. Yup, a truck stop.
Oh, and trucks. Lots and lots of trucks. Mostly eighteen-wheelers, but plenty of smaller ones, too.
There was one difference here. A couple of Bradley fighting vehicles in desert camo trained their cannon on the stop. A soldier or National Guardsman or whatever strolling back toward them from the convenience store paused to light a cigarette. The Feds were big-time serious about not letting anything that even looked like trouble start on the lifeline to Los Angeles.
Vanessa pulled into a Chevron station. It had as many pumps for diesel as for gasoline. Prices were—well, what went a couple of steps past appalling? The country was fucked. Hell, the whole world was fucked. And who paid for it? The poor bastard who needed a fill-up and some stomach ballast, that was who. Me, in other words, Vanessa thought.
She drove over and parked near the Denny’s. It wouldn’t be great, but it wouldn’t be terrible, either. She didn’t feel like surprises right now. Most of the business they did would be with truckers—there weren’t many ordinary cars here. She counted herself lucky that that officious asshole had finally deigned to let her travel the Interstate at all.
Men’s eyes pawed her when she walked into the joint. Any woman between fifteen and forty who wasn’t butt-ugly had to get used to that feeling. Vanessa wasn’t—nowhere near—and she had. Which didn’t mean she liked it. It always made her feel like a warm piece of meat with some convenient holes. And it was a lot stronger than usual here, because there were so many guys of the annoying age and so few other women to help defuse it.
A couple of soldiers were damn near salivating. She ignored them; to her, they were only horny puppies. They reminded her of Bryce, even though he was a year older than she was. He’d always be a puppy, no matter how old he got. Thank God she hadn’t gone and married him!
She sat down at the counter. Fewer guys would be bold enough to bother her here, right in front of the scurrying waitresses and the cooks. She could hope so, anyhow.
“What’ll it be, dear?” One of the waitresses paused in front of her, pad in hand. She was past fifty, wrinkled and tired-looking even if her eyes were friendly. Men wouldn’t bug her—not too often, anyhow.
“Cheeseburger and coffee, please.”
&nb
sp; “Fries or coleslaw with your burger?”
“Uh, coleslaw.”
“You got it. I’ll bring the coffee right away. The other stuff is made from scratch, so it’ll take a few minutes.”
“Sure,” Vanessa said. The explanation had to be for people who’d never gone to anything fancier than a Burger King in their whole lives, people for whom Denny’s was a major step up. Were there really people like that? By the way the waitress delivered the warning, there were plenty of them. And what did that say? It said the country’d been fucked, or at least fucked up, long before the supervolcano blew.
When the food came, the patty in the cheeseburger looked like a patty. The bun . . . The bun looked more like a hockey puck cut in half horizontally than anything else Vanessa could think of. She pointed at it. “What went into that?” she asked, distaste clotting her voice.
She didn’t faze the waitress a bit. “Rye flour, oat flour, a little bit of wheat flour so it rises some, anyhow. What we could get,” the middle-aged woman answered. “Try it, sweetie. It’s better’n it looks.”
“How could it miss?” But Vanessa did try it. She’d had worse. It was tastier than an MRE, no doubt of that. Talk about praising with faint damn! The coleslaw was nothing to write home about, either.
She was resignedly working through the meal when a man sat down beside her. She glared at him—it wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of other seats at the long counter. Christ, she hated testosterone and the way it made half the species stupid.
But the guy didn’t bother her. He was about forty, maybe a year or two past it. He had a long, pale face; he looked a little like Nicolas Cage, only rougher. Just how much he looked like the actor Vanessa couldn’t be sure—he wore the thickest beard she’d ever seen on a man. It might have been a pelt. Like his hair, it was black as shoe polish, only it had a few white threads on either side of his chin.
“Hallo, Yvonne,” he said to the waitress. “How are you today?” He had some kind of accent, not at all thick but noticeable.
“Hey, Bron. I’m okay. How’re you?” she said, so he was some kind of regular.
“I’ll do.” He shrugged. He had wide shoulders and a narrow waist. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, which in this weather was an invitation to pneumonia. Muscles slid smoothly under the skin of his arms. They were nearly as hairy as his cheeks, except for a big, pink, nasty-looking scar—a burn?—on his left forearm. On the back of his right hand, where the hair was thinner, he had a tattoo: a cross, with a C above and below the right bar and a backwards C above and below the left bar.
“What’ll it be?” the waitress—Yvonne—asked.
He pointed to Vanessa’s plate. “Give me what she’s having. It doesn’t look . . . too bad.”
“Hey! This is a high-class joint!” the waitress said, for all the world as if she were really and truly affronted.
“Yes? And they let you work here even so?” Bron returned. That would have pissed Vanessa off, but the waitress just cackled. Bron paid attention to Vanessa for the first time: “How bad is it?”
“Could be worse,” she said—a line from a book she’d liked when she was a very small kid. You were supposed to sound like a little old man when you said it (that was how Dad had always read it, anyway), but she didn’t go that far.
He shrugged again. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it could be better, too.” He had a distinct odor. Vanessa hadn’t been used to noticing that before the eruption, except for slobs and the occasional unfortunates who couldn’t help it. Since . . . Hot water was harder to come by now, especially in places like Camp Constitution. She’d inured herself to stinky people. But he wasn’t stinky, or not exactly. He smelled like . . . himself, she supposed. To her surprise, she rather liked it.
That might have been what made her answer him instead of going back to pretending the seat beside her was still empty. “Everything could be better these days, you know?” she said.
“True.” He rolled the r when he said it. After a moment, he went on, “We could be in Minnesota or Maine or some other place where it gets really cold. This—this is nothing much.”
Not with that fur you’ve got to keep you warm. But Vanessa swallowed the crack, even if he practically invited it by coming in here with nothing over that T-shirt. She chose another tack: “I’ve got a brother up in Maine. I think he’s still up there, anyhow. I haven’t heard from him in quite a while.”
“If he is in such a place, he may not have power for his phone. Up there, many areas have had no power at all for a long time.”
In such a place. The phrase stuck in Vanessa’s ear as the waitress set a plate in front of Bron. Few English-speakers would say anything like that. You might write it, but you wouldn’t say it.
Bron fell to. He ate with wolfish directness. His teeth were very white, or that black, black beard and mustache made them seem so. He paused halfway through the burger to remark, “Yes, could be worse or better. In the middle.”
“Uh-huh.” What came out of Vanessa’s mouth next amazed her: “I like your beard.”
That got his complete attention. He looked her up and down. For once, it didn’t feel like a groping; she knew she’d invited it. His eyes were a lighter brown than she’d thought at first. A sniper’s eyes went through her mind—they had that careful but aggressive directness to them. He held back half a beat before answering, “I like your you.”
The little pause seemed to give the handful of ordinary words extra weight. Careful, something in Vanessa’s mind warned. But she didn’t feel like being careful. She’d been careful since the eruption, not that she’d come across anybody she gave a rat’s ass about since then. And how much trouble could you get into at a Denny’s Formica counter?
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m Vanessa—Vanessa Ferguson.”
“Hallo, Vanessa Ferguson,” he said gravely. “I am Bronislav Nedic.” Those watchful eyes flicked to find Yvonne. She was over by the register, talking with another, younger, waitress. Even so, he lowered his voice a little before going on, “People who have trouble pronouncing Bronislav call me Bron.”
“I can say Bronislav.” Vanessa had a good ear. Even so, she could tell her o wasn’t just like his. And she had as much trouble with his r as he did with an American one.
He smiled just the same. “You can,” he agreed. “Good for you. I am glad.”
“Where are you going?” she asked him. She assumed he had to be going somewhere. Not even lunatics would stay at this miserable truck stop. Only soldiers who had to follow orders got stuck doing that.
“I have outside a truck full of chicken legs,” Bronislav answered. “I take them to a freezing—no, a frozen—warehouse in Los Angeles.” He raised an eyebrow. His were dark and thick, like all of his hair. They didn’t quite meet above his long, sharp nose, but they came close. “And you?”
“I’m heading for L.A., too.” Vanessa surprised herself with how glad she was to hear he was westbound. If he’d been going the other way, they would have been passing ships. Now . . . Well, who the hell knew about now? “I was born there. I lived there till a little before the eruption, so I’m heading home.”
“Born in Los Angeles.” He shook his head in slow wonder.
“People are, you know,” Vanessa said with a touch of irritation. Outsiders often assumed anyone who lived in California came from somewhere else. It never failed to annoy the genuine natives.
“I am sure it must be so,” Bronislav Nedic said, shaking his head again. “It still seems very strange to me.”
Experimentally, Vanessa gave a light touch to the tattoo on the back of his hand. His flesh seemed half a degree hotter than hers. That was a good sign. She didn’t know where attraction came from, or why. She recognized it when it did, though. To cover what she was thinking, what she was feeling, she asked, “Does this mean something, or is it jus
t a design?”
She got more than she’d bargained for. “That is the Ocilima, the four Ss with the cross,” Bronislav answered, his voice as solemn as if he were intoning prayers in church. “They look like Cs to you, I know, but the Serb alphabet is like the Russian—its C is S in yours. They stand for Samo sloga Srbina spasava: only unity will save the Serbs.” His mouth twisted into a sour, wistful smile, which made him look more like Nicolas Cage than ever. Since Vanessa liked Nicolas Cage, that wasn’t so bad. He added, “I was not born in Los Angeles, you will figure out. I was born in Yugoslavia, a country that is not a country any more.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said, and not another word. She supposed she could have found Yugoslavia on a map—back in the days when Yugoslavia was on the map—but that was as much as she knew or cared about it.
Bronislav didn’t notice her indifference. His eyes were far away from the New Mexico Denny’s. He was seeing other mountains than the ones here, other times. “I fought for the Serbs against the terrorist Bosnians and the Nazi Croats. I fought, but we did not win. And so . . . I sit at this counter here, next to you, and my country is broken all in pieces.”
“Is that where you, uh, hurt your arm?” Vanessa didn’t want to touch the scar the way she’d touched the tat.
He nodded mournfully. “It is. And I was lucky, if you want to call it luck. The RPG caught the fellow standing beside me square. They never found enough of poor Vlade to bury.”
“Oh,” Vanessa said again, on a different note this time. Being her father’s daughter made her know from a very early age that human beings could do horrible things to one another. She’d seen more since the eruption. But . . . “You were in a war.” That, she hadn’t seen.
“I was in a war, yes. And now I have that truck full of chicken pieces to take to California. Life does strange things.” Bronislav set money on the counter. Then he said, “If you have a number where I can call you when I am in Los Angeles . . . Maybe we see what strange things life does to us.”
Supervolcano: All Fall Down Page 28