Supervolcano: All Fall Down

by Turtledove, Harry

  She wished some of her bills would come so slowly, and that the bastards who sent them out would take the Post Office sucks as an excuse when her own payments ran late. The longer she stayed out of work, the later some of them got, too.

  She would have been out in the street with her worldly goods piled on the curb if so many other people didn’t have the same problems for the same reasons. They weren’t too big to fail—the classic phrase from the recession before the eruption (a recession that now looked like pretty goddamn good times). But they were too numerous to evict, even if they had failed. Pay what you can when you can was rapidly ousting e pluribus unum as the national motto. Louise expected she’d start seeing it on coins and bills any day now.

  If she wanted to keep collecting her divorced single mom’s mite from the California EDD, she had to keep looking for work. When she could, she did it on the Net and with her phone. When she couldn’t, she gritted her teeth, forked over some of her unemployment check to Marshall, and climbed aboard the bus for new adventures in Jobseekersland.

  She had no enormous hope. Hope was not one of Jobseekersland’s natural resources—certainly not since Yellowstone blew up. But you had to go through the motions, and to be able to document that you were going through the motions, or your EDD checks would dry up. Going out to look for work was a pain in the ass. Losing the unemployment checks would be a supervolcano eruption in your own life.

  And so, glumly, Louise walked into Van Slyke Pharmacy, at the corner of Van Slyke and Reynoso Drive. It was a mom-and-pop place, not part of a chain. Along with the usual patent medicines and shampoos and school supplies and whatnot, it sold brightly painted pottery artifacts that might be decorative if you were tasteless enough, stuffed animals that looked sort of but not quite like famous cartoon characters, and a bunch of secondhand books.

  The pharmacist’s bad haircut and funky glasses frames warned that he might actually enjoy the ceramic tumors he was trying to unload. The badge he wore on his pastel polyester shirt said his name was Jared. Louise wanted to giggle. To her, Jared was a singing smiley on her computer that butchered ballads in Spanish, complete with wretched guitar accompaniment.

  “Help you?” he asked. His lenses made his eyes seem enormous.

  “Well, I’m looking for work,” she said resignedly. One more humiliation, then on to the next.

  But instead of going Sorry or Not today or We don’t need anybody, Jared said, “I was going to post on Craigslist when the power comes back on. If it ever does. What was your last job?”

  “I was an administrative assistant at the ramen company’s headquarters on Braxton Bragg,” Louise answered in astonishment.

  “Why did you leave?”

  “I didn’t have much choice. They closed down their American operation.”

  “That’s right—they did. I remember hearing about that.” The pharmacist nodded. “You can answer the phone? You can type? You can handle an inventory spreadsheet when there is power?”

  Louise managed a dazed nod. “I can do all that. I’m not exactly an Excel whiz, but I can cope if it’s not too complicated.”

  “I’ll give you a try, then,” Jared said briskly. “I had to let someone go last week. I feel bad about it, but she just couldn’t do the work. If you can’t, I won’t keep you, either. But if you can, I’ll be glad to have you. I can’t do all that stuff and run the place, too, not if I want to sleep, I can’t.”

  Louise could hardly believe her ears. “What kind of money are we talking about?”

  He told her. It was less than the ramen works had paid, but it whaled the tar out of unemployment. “Medical after six months,” he added. “It’s not a terrific plan, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “When do I start?” she asked. If she couldn’t stand it, she’d start looking for something else, something better. The best time to look for work was when you already had some.

  “Monday morning, ten o’clock sharp,” he said. “I’ll have paperwork for you to fill out then. Can’t do anything without the paperwork.”

  “Better yours than the EDD’s,” Louise said from the bottom of her heart.

  “That’s a good way to look at things,” Jared said. “Tell me your name, why don’t you? Me, I’m Jared Watt.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Watt.” Louise gave her own name. “You’ve got no idea how pleased I am to meet you.”

  “Oh, I just might, Mrs. Ferguson.”

  “It’s Miz,” Louise said.

  “Okay. Ms. Ferguson.” Jared Watt repeated it, perhaps to help himself remember. “Like I say, I just might. You aren’t the only one who’s had a tough time the past three, four years.”

  “I feel great now.” Louise meant every word of it. An indifferent job in a business that didn’t look to be thriving with a boss who definitely seemed peculiar? Hey, it was work! No wonder she meant every word. “If I never see that Torrance unemployment office again, it’ll be too soon.”

  “Well, all right,” the pharmacist said. “If I can’t drive you loopy, I don’t expect anyone can.”

  “I’m not even worried about it.” Louise meant that, too. Whether she’d mean it by closing time a week from Friday might be another story altogether. It’ll be a week with a paycheck, anyhow, she thought. They don’t make weeks any better than those.

  * * *

  Colin Ferguson looked at his watch. It was only twenty-five past two. He would have bet it was four o’clock. Time flies when you’re having fun, he thought, and then Yeah, as if! He hadn’t been this nervous since, well, the last time he was this nervous. And that was . . . probably when he’d asked Kelly to marry him. A while ago, in other words.

  He looked at his watch again. It was 2:26. He made himself not look at it, or at the clock on the cop-shop wall. The bust would go off the way it was supposed to. Or it wouldn’t. Whichever, he’d pick up the pieces and go on. What else could you do?

  At 2:39 by the clock on the wall, his cell phone rang. He hauled it out of his jacket pocket. “Ferguson.”

  “We have ourselves a bust, Lieutenant—best damn bust since Beyoncé.” Rodney sounded happy as a sheep in clover. And well he might have; he went on, “Weed. Meth. Coke. H. Possession with intent to sell. Oh, and a .45 automatic, which he had sense enough not to pull when we dropped on him. We grabbed his laptop, too—see what kind of good shit he’s got on the hard drive, and where that leads us.”

  “Okay. That all sounds good.” Colin couldn’t decide whether to be delighted or mournful. He went both ways at once, and felt torn to pieces on account of it. Tim had known what he was talking about after all. There was never any guarantee of that, not even when you asked him something as basic as his name. “Lucky for him he didn’t go for the .45,” Colin went on, bringing himself back to the matter directly at hand.

  “Yeah, that would’ve been the last dumb thing he ever tried,” Rodney agreed. “This way, he’ll get some more chances whenever they finally decide to turn him loose. Wanted to let you know everything went smooth. We’re gonna bring him in now.”

  “Good job, man. Thanks. ’Bye.” Colin stowed the phone. Nobody involved in taking Darren Pitcavage down had put anything into the San Atanasio PD’s computer system. Nobody’d said anything over the department’s radio net. What Chief Pitcavage didn’t see or hear, he couldn’t warn his son about.

  Well, they didn’t have to worry about that any more. Mike Pitcavage would hear now. Colin couldn’t imagine that that would do him—or Darren—any good, though. Would he try to bargain this bust down to a misdemeanor, too? Good luck, Colin thought. If the DA went along with a deal like that, he deserved to be out on the street and sleeping in a park five minutes later. For that matter, the chief would deserve to be out there sleeping alongside him if he had the gall to propose something like that, didn’t he? So it seemed to Colin, anyway.

&n
bsp; He had no trouble picking up just when people not in the know at the station found out what had happened. The buzz of conversation in the big open office suddenly picked up volume and changed tone. Yes, that was what amazement sounded like, sure as hell.

  Gabe Sanchez also picked up on it right away. He, of course, wasn’t a person not in the know. He caught Colin’s eye and looked a question at him. Colin nodded back. Gabe grinned and gave him a thumbs-up.

  The next interesting question was how long Mike Pitcavage would take to start blowing gaskets. In a way, there should have been a pool on that. Colin knew he would have put down some money. When he got into the Super Bowl pool every year, no way he could stay out of this one. But a pool would have turned people not in the know into people in the know too damn soon. Besides, the chief would’ve wanted to get into it, which would have been . . . awkward. Pitcavage always joined the Super Bowl pool, too.

  By the clock on the wall, the chief left his exalted private office and burst into the big central one exactly four minutes and forty seconds after Rodney called. For once, Pitcavage’s Armani suit flapped on him like an ordinary cop’s threadbare threads from Sears or Men’s Wearhouse. For once, he didn’t look like the CEO of a successful medium-sized corporation. He looked like any poor bastard who’d just found out his one and only son was arrested on serious drug charges. He looked like hell, in other words.

  His blindly staring eyes caught and held Colin’s. “Ferguson!” he croaked. “I need to talk to you.” How much did he know? How much did he suspect? Or was Colin just the first spar he saw and grabbed after his yacht ripped its belly out on the rocks?

  Colin heaved himself to his feet. “What’s up?” He wouldn’t be able to hide knowing for very long. Nor did he intend to. But he didn’t want to do a sack dance over Pitcavage’s fallen frame, either.

  The chief gestured: follow me. Colin did, out of the big office, up the hall, and outside. One glimpse of Mike Pitcavage’s ravaged face was plenty to scare away a couple of curious smokers.

  “They’ve arrested Darren,” Pitcavage said. He had the dazed look of a man who’d just staggered free of a bad car crash and didn’t quite realize yet he had only a few cuts and bruises himself. “Arrested. Drug possession. Drug dealing. Felony. Oh my God!”

  “I’m sorry, Mike,” Colin said. That had the advantage of being nothing but the truth.

  Truth or not, he might as well have saved his breath. Locked in some personal hell, the chief went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “A felony rap! Hard time! They’ll take DNA samples! Jesus wept!”

  He isn’t running on all cylinders—nowhere near, Colin thought with rough sympathy. Hard time was, well, hard time. It wasn’t designed to be fun for anybody. It might end up even harder for a police chief’s kid, because they’d have to segregate him from most of the rest of the prisoners to keep him safe. But a swab on the inside of his cheek was the least, the absolute very least, of Darren Pitcavage’s worries.

  Mike Pitcavage seized Colin’s arm and squeezed, hard. He might be stuck behind a desk, but he was still one hell of a strong man. “I’ve got to talk to the arresting officer, talk to the DA, get it down to something possible, something reasonable,” Pitcavage said, squeezing, squeezing. If he kept that up, pretty soon Colin wouldn’t have any circulation in his left hand. “Drug dealing? A felony? No way! I’ll fix it up.”

  No, he didn’t have all his oars in the pond. “Mike,” Colin said, as gently as he could, “I don’t think that will do you any good, or Darren, either. Think it through. You’re liable to make things worse, not better. What if the reporters get hold of it? Can’t you see the headlines, man? ‘Chief scores cushy plea deal for his son! Film at eleven!’” He did his best to imitate a pompous TV talking head.

  “He’s my kid, Colin. I’ve got to try. DNA samples? My God, this will kill Caroline.” Pitcavage might even have been right about that.

  Whether he was or he wasn’t, though, had nothing to do with the price of lemonade. “You won’t help him, Mike,” Colin said, doing his best to get through to the other man. “You’ll make things worse. The DA won’t listen to you. He can’t. And if you piss him off, he’ll probably find some new counts to throw at Darren.”

  “They can’t charge him with a felony. They can’t!” Pitcavage wouldn’t listen.

  In Colin’s experience, saying what they could or couldn’t do was usually a bad plan. Telling them to their faces that they couldn’t do this, that, or the other thing was even worse. As soon as you told them, they’d go ahead and do it anyhow, just to show you a thing or three.

  He tried his best to spell that out for the chief. “You’re against me, too! I might have known!” Pitcavage yelled, loud enough to make the smokers spin toward him to see what was going on.

  Chief Pitcavage stormed back into the station, shoulders hunched, head pushed forward, hands thrust into trouser pockets. Colin stared after him. He’d known it would be bad. He hadn’t imagined it would be as bad as this.

  “What’s eating him?” one of the smokers asked the other, or Colin, or possibly God. He’d been out here polluting his lungs when the news broke. One more reason not to smoke, Colin thought, and didn’t enlighten the guy. He’d find out soon enough. The whole department would know before the sun went down.

  * * *

  Vanessa surveyed her new apartment with something less than delight. It was a standard SoCal pattern for a small one-bedroom. Front room going back to dinette, with cramped kitchen to one side of the eating area. Bedroom through a door in the front-room wall opposite the couch. Bathroom behind the bedroom and next to the kitchen, so the builder could save money by running the pipes for both off the same main line.

  The rug was one small step up from outdoor carpeting. The linoleum in the kitchen and the bathroom had seen better decades. The furniture was old and ratty. Coffee table, end table, dinette table, and nightstand and dresser in the bedroom all had identical tops of very fake wood. She didn’t want to think about how many people had fucked on the mattress before she moved in.

  Her own furniture was back in Denver. Scavengers wouldn’t have got there yet. One of these years. By then, ash and rain probably would have made the roof cave in. Gone. Well, the whole Midwest was gone.

  Her old room in her father’s place had been more comfortable than this. Well, the physical arrangements had. But everybody there took everything she said the wrong way. And there was her new half-sister screeching at odd hours. That drove Vanessa straight up the wall. Did it ever! You couldn’t ignore a crying baby, no matter how much you wanted to. Evolution had designed those noises to stab your head like an ice pick. You had to do something about them so the little monster would shut up.

  Vanessa knew what she wanted to do. But punting an infant got you talked about in this effete age. Moving out seemed the better choice.

  Or it would have, if she hadn’t been all but run out by Kelly. She was Colin Ferguson’s daughter, goddammit. Just because this chunky stranger was hauling her old man’s ashes, did that give the bitch the right to put on airs and boss her around?

  Kelly sure seemed to think so. So did Vanessa’s dad. Marshall . . . Marshall shut himself in the room with the stupid police tape on the door and clattered away on that horrible antique of a typewriter. It was almost as annoying as Deborah. And he turned out silly, saccharine stories, full of erratic grammar and punctuation. She’d told him so when he asked her to read one. She hadn’t seen any more after that.

  Of course, his prose looked like Edward Gibbon’s when you compared it to the subliterate garbage Nick Gorczany cranked out. Vanessa had forgotten how very delightful life at the widget works was before she headed for Colorado.

  Maybe Gorczany had forgotten, too. When she set a memo on his desk heavily edited in red, he’d looked from it to her and back. “So good to have you on the job again, Vanessa,” he’d murm
ured.

  “So good to be back,” she’d answered, and walked out of his office with her head held high. If he was going to get snide, she’d get snide right back. Yes, she needed work. But she needed her self-respect even more.

  The one thing wrong with self-respect was, it wouldn’t buy groceries or pay the rent. The job would . . . more or less. Nick Gorczany hadn’t got himself that big old house in Palos Verdes Estates by overpaying his employees. If you didn’t like what he gave you, you could always go out and find yourself better-paying work.

  “Ha,” Vanessa said, chopping cabbage in the crowded kitchen of the small one-bedroom in San Atanasio: about as far from the boss’ Palos Verdes Estates estate as you could get and still stay in the South Bay. “Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.”

  It didn’t get any funnier, even if she made more laughy noises. Laughy? She nodded to herself. It bore the same relation to laugh as truthy did to truth. It wouldn’t go into the OED any time soon, but it filled a need. It did for her, anyhow.

  She counted herself lucky Nick Gorczany had remembered she knew what she was doing when it came to translating bureaucratic horseshit into English. Her father and Kelly might have given her the bum’s rush even if she hadn’t snagged a job.

  “They have expelled you from what is yours by right,” Bronislav said the first time he saw her apartment. His big hands folded into fists. “If it were not your father, I would make him pay for dispossessing you. We Serbs, we know too much about being wrongly dispossessed.”

  “Don’t do anything like that! Don’t, you hear me?” Vanessa exclaimed. Bronislav was ready to turn a family squabble into an international incident. Vanessa had started learning what she could about ex-Yugoslavia. She didn’t want him to call her American any more, not the way he had in front of the Croat eatery in San Pedro. From everything she could see, Serbs did that kind of thing a lot. She was sure Gavrilo Princip would have agreed. So would Archduke Franz Ferdinand, these days the namesake of a band almost as quirky as the one her brother played in.