Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  Now Susan’s head bobbed up and down. “I don’t remember them being that loud in the old days.” Her laugh sounded shaky. “Of course, we were usually in cars back then, with the windows closed and the radio or an iPod on and the AC going. And all the other cars and trucks and things made so much background noise, even a siren was just part of it. Not like that any more.”

  When the sun neared the horizon ahead of them, they camped by the side of the road. They fumbled putting up their little nylon tent, but managed. They ate MREs, which were uninspiring but did putty over any accidental empty space you had inside.

  They pedaled through a succession of small towns strung out along US 20: Belden, Randolph, Osmond, Plainview, Brunswick, Royal. All of them looked to have been forgotten by everyone except the people who lived in them long before the eruption. They were even more forgotten now. The fall of ash had probably killed some of the locals and made others pull up stakes. Only the stubbornest still held their ground. In every little town, there were some.

  Not far past Royal, a sign pointed Bryce and Susan north again, along a straight and narrow road towards Ashfall State Park. Susan said, “What do we do if they’ve decided to shut down the park because they don’t have any money to keep it open?”

  Bryce winced. California had done things like that even before the supervolcano hammered its tax base. But he answered, “We ride back, that’s what, and we try and be happy for all the nice exercise we’ve got.”

  “Oh, boy!” Susan said in distinctly hollow tones.

  “As of the day before we set out, the park’s Web site said it was up and running,” Bryce pointed out. Wayne did have power most of the time. You might wonder about polar bears there, too, but if they came at night you could at least turn on the light and spot them before they got you.

  The park was open. Not a single car stood in the lot, but a few bicycles did rest in a steel rack that looked newish. Before the eruption, chances were that not a whole hell of a lot of people had biked out here to nowhereland.

  A sign that also must have gone up after the eruption said LIFE IMITATES PARK! Bryce tried to decide whether that was funny or tasteless. He finally settled on both at once.

  If the Web site mentioned that admission had gone up to fifty smackers a pop, Bryce didn’t remember seeing it. Chances were it did somewhere, in pale lavender six-point type. Once you got way the hell out here, what were you gonna do? Turn around on your bike and go back to wherever you came from without seeing what you’d come for? Or pay the nice man? Bryce paid the man—he really did seem nice—and muttered under his breath. Inflation had kicked the whole country in the teeth since the eruption, not just Ashfall State Park.

  Most of the park had been prairie. Here and there, ash still lay on the ground. More new signs said THIS HAPPENED 12,000,000 YEARS AGO, TOO. There was a visitors’ center—how could you have a state park without a visitors’ center? And then there was a trail down to what the people at the center called the rhinoceros barn: a structure with open sides and a corrugated-iron roof. It showed the fossils that had accumulated at a waterhole when the supervolcano blew all those millions of years ago.

  “They moved some of these to the university’s museum in Lincoln,” Bryce said quietly. “I saw them there.”

  Susan nodded. “Yes, you’ve said so.”

  Bryce turned to a man in khakis, a work shirt, and a drill sergeant’s hat: a park employee. “Will somebody twelve million years from now make a park around a waterhole all crowded with cattle and sheep?”

  The man blinked. He smiled a slow smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit, sir,” he said after a moment’s thought. Yes, he was an employee, all right; otherwise, he never would have called anyone a good fifteen years younger than he was sir.

  One of the skeletons of a female rhino had within it the tiny skeleton of an unborn baby. Looking at the splendidly preserved bones, Bryce wondered whether some far-future archaeologist would make a similarly amazing find. Then he wondered what the far-future archaeologist would look like. Not like a man, chances were.

  He and Susan slowly walked the path in the barn. It was only sixty or seventy feet, but there were a lot of bones and plaques explaining what kinds of bones they were. At the end, Susan asked, “Now what?”

  “Now we start back to Wayne,” Bryce answered.

  She sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She sighed again. “Well, what else can we do?”

  • • •

  Colin Ferguson set his bike in the rack outside the San Atanasio station, then chained and locked it. This should have been, and was, one of the safer places in town to stash a bicycle. All the same, more than one here had walked with Jesus—or with Jesús, or with Eric, or with Terrell—in the past few months.

  A reporter from the South Bay Daily Breeze waylaid him just inside the door. The desk sergeant sent a silent apology with his eyebrows. Colin raised one back, as if to reply What can you do? The reporter said, “Congratulations on your promotion, Captain Ferguson.”

  “Thanks—I guess,” Colin answered. “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”

  The guy chuckled, so he knew what Colin was talking about, which surprised Colin a little. Then the man asked, “How do you feel now that they’ve finally appointed a new chief for the San Atanasio PD?”

  “Glad. Relieved,” Colin said sincerely. “It will be good to get back to normal, if we can.”

  The reporter made him regret the last three words, asking, “How likely do you think that is? With the cloud of Chief Pitcavage hanging over the department, and with all the lawsuits springing from it—”

  “You have to ask the lawyers about that.” Colin did his best to head the eager young man off at the pass. “Me, I’m just a cop. I want to do cop things. Today, paying a call on Chief Williams is number one on the list.”

  “Do you think you can ever be ‘just a cop’ again, Captain Ferguson? Won’t people always think of you as ‘the man who caught the South Bay Strangler’?”

  That was a disconcertingly clever question. Colin didn’t like reporters who asked such questions; they made it harder for him to think of the whole breed as twits. “I guess people will look at me that way,” he answered. “But it’s not how I look at myself, and it had better not be, or I’ll have a tough time with my job. Now you’ve got to excuse me, ’cause I really do have to meet with Chief Williams in about five minutes, and he’ll probably throw me off the force if I show up late.”

  The reporter’s thumbs danced on his iPhone as he texted his story to the Breeze. It was a Web-only paper these days, and had been since not long after the eruption. With power so erratic in the L.A. area, a Web-only paper was a lot like one of Schrödinger’s kitties: you couldn’t tell whether it was alive or dead on any given day till you looked.

  Colin escaped down the hallway. He nodded to a couple of cops and a clerk who walked past. They all nodded back, which he appreciated; he’d had a rugged time here after Chief Pitcavage killed himself and before Lucy Chen found that the late chief was the Strangler.

  No spiderwebs hung from the door to the chief’s office, but not many people had gone in there since the days right after Pitcavage swallowed his pills and fastened the bag over his head. Colin wondered whether the new chief had hired an exorcist before moving in. Well, that was Williams’ worry, not his. He hadn’t taken the job even when they tried to hand it to him on a silver platter. Along with getting Kelly to marry him, he figured that was one of the smarter things he’d done lately.

  He knocked on the door. It was thick and soundproofed, but he heard the “Come in” from the other side all the same. He turned the knob.

  “Chief Williams?” he said when he walked in. The door shut behind him with a click.

  “That’s me.” Malik Williams stood up behind his desk and held out his hand to Colin. The chief was an African-American man of about fifty. His shaven head shone under the fluor
escents in the ceiling. He wore a thin salt-and-pepper mustache. He was big, six-two or so, and in solid shape; when he was a kid, he might have played linebacker at a Division II school.

  As Colin shook hands with him, he also noted the desk. It was a new one—or rather, an old one: an ordinary cop’s desk, brought out of storage. It replaced the special oversized one Chief Pitcavage had used. Sitting behind that humongous flight deck, Pitcavage had had an easy time intimidating anybody who came in. Maybe Malik Williams didn’t want to. That would be nice. Or maybe he hoped to be seen as not wanting to. That also wouldn’t be so bad. From everything Colin had heard, the new chief was no dope.

  “Have a seat.” Williams waved to the chair on Colin’s side of the desk. It was also an ordinary job. Well, so was the one in which the new chief sat down. It wasn’t a leather-upholstered throne like the one in which Pitcavage had ensconced himself. More symbolism.

  “I’m damn glad to have you here,” Colin said. The chair creaked under him as he shifted his weight. So did the one on the other side of the desk. Chief Pitcavage’s expensive model would never have dared to make such uncouth noises.

  “I’m damn glad to hear you say that,” Williams answered. His voice was a resonant baritone, with only a vanishing trace of accent to show his origins. He went on, “I don’t think I could do this job if you didn’t have my back.”

  “That’s nice of you, but I don’t believe it for a minute,” Colin said. “Sitting in your seat, you’ve got the weight of the department behind you. Anybody dumb enough to bump up against you would find out how much weight that was, and in a hurry, too.”

  Chief Williams smiled. His teeth were white and perfect enough to belong to a TV anchorman; either he was very lucky or he’d had them fixed. “Anybody’d think you’ve been a cop for a while,” he remarked.

  “Guilty,” Colin admitted. “Can I throw myself on the mercy of the court?”

  “Maybe this once. After that, things go back to business as usual.”

  “Good,” Colin said, which made one of the new chief’s eyebrows rise toward the hairline he didn’t have. Colin explained: “Like I was saying to the Breeze reporter out front a few minutes ago, nothing would make me happier than getting back to normal.” If I ever can. He kept that to himself, not that Williams wouldn’t get it whether he said it or not.

  “If we look at the way things were before the supervolcano blew as normal, we’re never going to get back there,” Malik Williams said. “Not in your lifetime, not in mine, and probably not in our kids’ lifetimes, either. And it’s about time we started getting used to the idea.”

  “I’m going to like working for you, man,” Colin blurted.

  “Oh, yeah?” Williams looked and sounded dubious. “Most people I say that to, they look at me like I’m talking—what’s that word from the Catholic Church? Like I’m talking heresy, and they don’t want thing one to do with me.”

  “Chief, I’m married to a geologist who was studying Yellowstone before it blew. I met her in Yellowstone before it blew, matter of fact. Kelly was telling me then how bad an eruption would be. I didn’t want to believe her, but she knew what she was talking about.” Colin let out a small, wry chuckle. “She usually does.”

  The new chief grinned that ever-so-shiny grin at him again. “My Janice is the same way. Nice to know somebody else appreciates that in a woman.” The grin faded. “How do we tie being different to police work, though?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been thinking about it ever since the shortages started to bite,” Colin said.

  Williams’ eyebrow climbed once more. “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that you didn’t want to sit on my side of this desk.”

  “I did, before Pitcavage got it,” Colin answered. “But I don’t put up with fools real well—not at all, if I can help it. Kissing up to the mayor and the city council and all would drive me to a coronary or a stroke. If you can do it and stay sane, more power to you.”

  “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?” Williams said.

  “Who, me?” Colin said, less innocently than he might have. After a beat, he added, “I try not to.”

  “Okay,” Williams said. If Colin remembered straight, he’d run a department in a little Sacramento suburb before winning this job. The new chief went on, “So what have you been thinking about the way things work now?”

  “That most of the tricks we’ve picked up over the past hundred years have gone up in smoke—and dust, and ash,” Colin replied. “We can’t count on phones or electricity 24/7/365. We can’t count on surveillance video or Internet databases. Sometimes we can manage all that stuff, but we can’t count on it any more, and God only knows when we’ll be able to. Back before the First World War, the cops with the big old walrus mustaches and the tall hats that made ’em look like London bobbies did without those things—hell, they’d never heard of most of them. Most of the time, they managed anyhow. We’ve got to be able to do that, too.” He paused, embarrassed at himself. “Sorry. I made a speech.”

  “Yeah, you did,” Williams agreed, “but it was a pretty good speech. Mostly. One of the ways the guys with the walrus mustaches managed was by pinning any cases they were having trouble with on the nearest guy my color.”

  “I bet they did,” Colin said. “I don’t want us to copy all their moves. But they had to solve cases and catch perps without the tools we still want to take for granted. We can learn from that. We’d better, or we’re screwed.”

  “Tell you what. Work up a report for me, with ideas about how we can do a better job of what we need to do with some of the tricks the old-timers had. Not your top priority, but make sure you do it,” the new chief said. “And before you finish it, talk to some of the oldest retired cops you can find. They won’t go back to the days before phones and squad cars, but they’d type their reports with two fingers ’cause nobody ever taught ’em how to do it with ten. Those guys, the ones who half of ’em still don’t have computers.”

  Now Colin looked at the man on the other side of the desk with genuine admiration. “I’ve been doing that. Some of the fellows who were retiring when I came to the department are still around, even if they’re old as the hills now. A couple of ’em started back in the Fifties.”

  “A long time ago,” Malik Williams said. Colin nodded. The chief went on, “And I’m not surprised you came up with the same scheme that crossed my mind. Like they say, GMTA, right?”

  “Oh, at least,” Colin said, so dryly as to make Williams laugh out loud—or LOL, if you’d already started thinking with initials.

  When Colin went back to his desk, the first thing Josefina Linares asked him was, “Well? What do you think?” Naturally, his secretary knew where he’d been. And if he didn’t fancy Malik Williams, her fierce loyalty would make her ready—eager, even—to spit in the new chief’s eye.

  Quickly, Colin answered, “He’ll do fine, Josie. I’m sure of it.” He would have said the same thing had he thought Williams would prove a disaster—his loyalty was to the department, and to the chain of command. But he meant it. If the new man could get along with the people set over him, Colin figured he wouldn’t have any trouble bossing the people he was supposed to lead.

  Mike Pitcavage hadn’t had any trouble bossing the department, either. No, Pitcavage’s problems lay far deeper, somewhere in the twisted roots that made him do what he’d done. He’d been dead most of a year now, and Colin still brooded about him every day. He sighed. Even with the new broom of Malik Williams, this department wouldn’t get swept clean any time soon.

  All you could do was all you could do. Williams, Colin figured, would do that. He sighed again and started doing some of what he needed to do.

  VI

  A

  s twilight deepened toward dark on Halloween, Guilford, Maine, reminded Rob Ferguson of a scene out of a Currier and Ives print. Snow dappled the few pines that hadn’t been cut down for fuel. People on skis and snowshoes
tramped the streets. Okay, they wore jeans and anoraks and watch caps, not nineteenth-century fancy dress, but you couldn’t have everything. A sleigh came by, drawn by two well-groomed black horses. In it rode Jim Farrell. His fancy dress—fedora and elegantly tailored wool topcoat over a suit with sharp lapels—was more Happy Days Are Here Again than Currier and Ives, but no denying he had style. Even 1930s finery made jeans and anoraks and watch caps mighty dowdy by comparison.

  Not that Rob cared. Jeans and anoraks and watch caps weren’t high style, but they were his style. The only reason for dressing up he’d ever found was trolling for pretty girls. Now that he’d actually landed one, he didn’t need to worry about that nonsense any more. Lindsey wasn’t of the let’s-put-on-the-dog-to-impress-people school, either. If she were, Rob wasn’t sure he would have wanted to marry her.

  Plastic jack-o’-lanterns and black cats weren’t quite from the nineteenth-century version of Halloween, either, but they did add splashes of color to the white landscape. The splashes were a little duller than they had been the year before, or the year before that—the plastic junk came from the days when the supervolcano hadn’t erupted yet, and it was fading and cracking and otherwise showing its age.

  Rob let out a mournful, fog-filled breath. Winter had Guilford firmly in its grip again. There’d been snow flurries every week or two all the way through the alleged summer. Even the quickest-growing strains of rye and oats had trouble ripening in this tiny growing season.

  A few real jack-o’-lanterns went with the plastic ones. If you were both lucky and careful here, you could raise pumpkins and other northern squashes in a greenhouse. Some enterprising farmers and town gardeners had. People still enjoyed pumpkin pies—enjoyed them more than ever, because they were a surviving luxury where so many had perished. And the rinds (except for the ones grinning with candles inside them) and the vines would feed the local pigs. Less got wasted now than it had in the days when Guilford was connected to the outside world the year around.