Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Okay.” If Marshall wanted thing one to do with her, that would be an improvement. If he could be persuaded to help take care of the baby when she had to go back to work. . She had hopes. “Will he really make a writer?”

  “Believe it or not, I think stranger things have happened. Who woulda thunk it?” Colin awkwardly dipped his head. “Listen, I better get home. I did want to check on you, though. Take care of yourself, Louise.” He lumbered out of the room.

  Now, when she most wanted to sleep, Louise found she couldn’t. The Korean couple on the other side of the curtain didn’t bother her. They wouldn’t have bothered her if they were speaking English. Memory had more weight. She was still wide awake when the Filipina nurse brought in James Henry. Louise set the baby on her breast. He rooted, then settled down and started to nurse.

  * * *

  Rank, they said (whoever the hell they were), had its privileges. Vanessa Ferguson thought blowing the FEMA dweeb was odds-on the rankest thing she’d ever done, but that also had its privileges. Every once in a while, for instance, Micah Husak let her use his computer. In Camp Constitution, with next to no electricity, that was more precious than rubies.

  Or it would have been, had it done her any good. Before she moved to Denver, she’d banked with Wells Fargo. Had she kept her money there, she could have got at it here. She could have got the hell out of here, in fact. Even Fort Smith looked like heaven next to this.

  But she’d gone native. She’d put her money into the Rocky Mountains Savings Bank. It paid higher interest. You could deal with human beings who actually seemed to care about what you wanted. It was local.

  Yes, it was local. And there, as Hamlet said, was the rub. Wells Fargo had servers all over the country-all over the world, as far as Vanessa knew. The Rocky Mountains Savings Bank had servers in, well, Denver. Whoever’d set up their data system hadn’t anticipated a supervolcano eruption burying the place in several feet of ash and dust.

  And so, whenever Vanessa accessed their Web site, all she got was a ’90s GIF of a couple of sawhorses and some yellow-and-black tape, with the all-caps legend UNDER CONSTRUCTION below it.

  “Shit!” she snarled when she saw it yet again. By all the signs, that site would stay under construction till the day after doomsday. Her bank account was as one with Nineveh and Tyre. . and Denver.

  Micah had himself wiped off and his trousers (as opposed to his cock) up again. He looked over her shoulder. “How unfortunate for you,” he said.

  She glared at him. “Yeah, you really think so, don’t you? If I had the money to bail, you think I’d stick around here to get your rocks off?” She did what he wanted. She didn’t have to waste time being polite about it.

  Neither did he. “There are others,” he answered, shrugging. And there were bound to be. Men wanted the pleasure women could give them. Some women would always give that pleasure in exchange for what they could get from the men they did it for. If that made them want to break every mirror they owned afterwards, hey, it was a rough old world.

  There was a word for women who gave in exchange for what they could get. No cash changed hands in these transactions. Vanessa knew the word stuck to her all the same.

  “You must have relatives you could get a loan from,” Micah said.

  She’d chewed on that before. Her father probably would front her the money to get back to California, or at least out of the camp. She’d had too much pride to ask him. She’d made her own way since she dropped out of college to try the real world instead. Asking him for anything would seem like failure.

  So what exactly do you call sucking this guy’s joint in exchange for a better tent and a chance to use the Net once in a while? she asked herself. But this was-or she’d always figured this was-temporary. Once she got the hell out of here, she could always pretend Micah Husak had never been born. Taking money from her old man was different. She wouldn’t forget it. Neither would he.

  “I don’t want to do that,” she said after a short pause.

  “Evidently not.” His smile showed off that half-missing front tooth. “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry you don’t.”

  It was a peculiar kind of smile, but she needed only a moment to recognize it. He didn’t just get off on having her go down on him. Anybody could do that. He got off on having her go down on him even though-or rather, especially because-she hated it. She was acquainted with those complicated pleasures, too. They turned out to be less enjoyable when you were on the wrong end.

  “I think I’d better go,” she said, her voice thick with not-quite-suppressed fury. It was a good thing for the dweeb that they made you check your firearms before you walked into the FEMA building. Otherwise, he would have been lying on the floor with that nasty smile still on his face and with the back of his head blown out.

  “Er-yes,” he said. If her rage didn’t give him pause, he was even dumber than she thought-and that was saying something. But he had, or figured he had, the whip hand, because he added, “I’ll see you again before too long.”

  Vanessa grunted and got out of there as fast as she could. Doing what she wanted to do would make her happy now, but she’d be sorry for a long time later. No, she wouldn’t be sorry. Nothing that happened to Micah Husak could make her sorry. But she didn’t want to spend umpty-ump years in jail, either.

  No? What do you call this place? Even jail food might be better than MREs. She tried not to think like that as she stormed down the corridor to the back door. Thinking like that would leave the dweeb dead and bleeding.

  The big black guy who stood guard there studied her thoughtfully. “You sure I ought to give you back your piece right now?” he asked, doubt all over his voice and on his face. “Maybe everybody’d do better if you came back for it later.”

  “I’m okay,” Vanessa said. And so she was, as long as she didn’t think about looking at Micah Husak’s blind snake from eye-crossingly close range. Trying not to think about something, of course, was as impossible as usual. Grinding her teeth, she made herself go on, “I won’t plug the son of a bitch no matter how much he deserves it.”

  “Huh.” The guard seemed no happier. He explained why: “You don’t want to go hurting yourself, neither. We got too much of that around here.”

  He had his reasons for worrying. The number of people at Camp Constitution and all the rest of the refugee centers near the edge of the ashfall line who took the long road out was a national shame and disgrace-or it was when the rest of the United States wasn’t full of its own screams of anguish. The camps didn’t-couldn’t-even got noticed a lot of the time.

  All the same, suicide wasn’t on Vanessa’s radar, not the way turning the dweeb into a colander was. “You don’t need to worry about that,” she assured the black man. “I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.” She gave him other kinds of satisfaction: not just getting his rocks off but making her blow him when she would rather have blown him away.

  “Well, okay,” the guard said slowly. Even more slowly, he turned around, took her.38 out of its slot, and handed it back to her. “Don’t you do anything silly, now, you hear?” He had a deep, buttery-rich voice, as if he ought to be singing gospel music instead of standing here in a polyester uniform and a Stetson.

  “I won’t,” Vanessa answered reluctantly, because she really did feel as if saying that to him was like making a promise. It wasn’t as if she’d never broken a promise or told a lie, but even so. .

  “Better not,” he said. “That’d be a waste, you know?”

  “What difference does any one person make?” Vanessa didn’t try to hide her bitterness. “The whole country’s been wasted. Hell, the whole world’s been wasted.” As soon as she saw the cloud of ash and dust from Yellowstone boiling toward Denver, she’d known nothing would stay the same any more. But she’d had no idea-no one had had any idea-how different from Before After would be.

  “Jesus loves us any which way,” the guard said. “You accept Him as your personal Savior, hon?”

&
nbsp; Vanessa got out of there in a hurry without answering. She didn’t want to talk about religion with him, or with anybody else. If he had one he was happy with, terrific. Groovy, even. But if he wanted to go around inflicting his beliefs on other people, that wasn’t so terrific.

  Of course, he might have tried inflicting himself on her, too, the way the damn dweeb had. That would probably come next. Well, she still had the revolver. And the way things looked, it was a damn good thing she did.

  * * *

  “Ooh-wahh!” James Henry Ferguson owned a voice like an air-raid siren.

  “Shut up, you little bastard,” Marshall Ferguson said. His mother-and James Henry’s-wasn’t there to disapprove of his literal accuracy. It wasn’t feeding time at the zoo yet-pretty soon, but not quite yet. Marshall went into the bedroom to find out why his tiny half-brother had ants in his pants.

  Only it wouldn’t be ants. It would be something a lot more disgusting than ants. What babies could do to breast milk and formula. . Guys made gross-out jokes all the way from second grade through high school. Dealing with genuine, no-shit shit, though, was something the guys making those jokes mostly didn’t know thing one about.

  Marshall stuck a finger in there. He pulled it out slimy and yellow-brown. This wouldn’t be the first diaper he’d changed on his half-brother. His stomach still lurched as if the plane of his life had hit an air pocket every time he did it, though.

  James Henry wiggled aimlessly while Marshall got him out of the soiled Huggy and cleaned crap off his bottom. Eventually, Mom said, he’d be able to fight back when he got changed. He hadn’t figured that out yet, though. Something else I get to look forward to, Marshall thought gloomily.

  What he did look forward to was getting paid. He was still writing. He hadn’t sold anything since he graduated, though. His father wasn’t on his case about it. Dad didn’t need to be. Marshall was on his own case.

  Before he could even close the new diaper’s tapes, his half-brother peed in it. Marshall kept a piece of cloth over his middle. He’d got it in the face once, but only once. He learned fast, if not quite fast enough.

  “Well, piss,” Marshall muttered. Piss it was, all right. He rolled up the new diaper and chucked it into the plastic pail after the other one. The sack inside was filling fast. The reek of stale urine got him in the nose again. Baby poop didn’t stink as much as what grown-ups produced.

  One more diaper went onto James Henry’s bottom. The kid didn’t ruin this one before Marshall could get it all the way on to him. A good thing, too, as far as Marshall was concerned. There was talk the authorities would stop letting disposable diapers come into L.A. They took up room that could go to food and fuel instead.

  Marshall eyed the baby. “What do I do then?” he asked, not altogether rhetorically. Oh, he knew the answer: cloth diapers and safety pins, right out of Ozzie and Harriet and The Lucy Show. But how were you supposed to fasten those without sticking the kid who was wearing them? If the disposables stopped coming, he’d damn well find out.

  He picked up James Henry. The baby had a lot of coal-black hair. He was swarthier than Marshall or Vanessa or Rob-swarthier than Mom, too. Anybody would think his father was Mexican or something.

  Changing him changed the note on which he cried, but didn’t shut him up. Marshall pulled out his phone. Yeah, now it was feeding time at the zoo, all right. He carried James Henry into the kitchen. Mom had expressed-that was the word she used for it-enough breast milk to keep the little bugger from starving before she got home.

  Marshall heated it in the microwave, waited till it cooled down some, and poured it from measuring cup to bottle. James Henry ate, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Marshal didn’t figure he would have been, either. Given a choice between a rubber nipple and the real thing, he would have taken the McCoy every time.

  But his half-brother didn’t have the choice, not with Mom back at work. He didn’t refuse his bottle; he just didn’t like it as well as a tit. After he finished, Marshall got a hell of a burp out of him. If James Henry had known the alphabet, he could have made it at least to R. A guy who’d chugged a couple of cans of Coors would have been proud of this one.

  After chow, the baby showed signs of sacking out again. Marshall stuck his finger inside the diaper. James Henry was dry. “Yesss!” Marshall said. Changing him again might have perked him up. This way. .

  Settling in a rocking chair, Marshall went forward and back for a while. His half-brother’s eyes sagged shut. He rocked for a few minutes longer to make sure the kid was good and out. Then he rose and carried James Henry back to the crib.

  Down the baby went, on his back. Marshall and his older brother and sister had gone into their cribs on their stomachs. That was what the experts back then had said you should do. Now they said this. By the time James Henry was raising his own kids, they might change their minds again.

  Getting him into the crib was always the tricky part. If he woke up and started to scream. .

  But he didn’t. Marshall breathed a sigh of relief. Now he had his own life back till James Henry woke up again. The first thing he did was make himself a sandwich. He thought Blondie was one of the lamest comics in the paper, a relic from the days when Hearsts and Pulitzers and other dinosaurs roamed the earth. No matter what he thought, the monster he concocted out of leftovers, lunch meat, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, jalapenos, and anything else in the fridge that looked interesting would have turned Dagwood Bumstead green with envy.

  He attacked his creation like an anaconda engulfing a half-grown tapir. For a few anxious seconds, he wondered if his first bite would go down. It did, and he used a little more restraint with the ones that followed.

  After the sandwich disappeared, he wondered if he should fix another one. He contented himself with potato chips, and washed them down with about a liter of Coke. He’d talked Mom into getting some of the real stuff for him. She might worry about her weight, but he stayed skinny without effort.

  Once he stopped feeling peckish, he fired up his laptop and started noodling on a story. He didn’t know how much he could do before his half-brother woke up again, but anything was better than nothing. He’d already saved in the middle of a sentence more than once.

  When he started trying to write stories, he’d counted on red-hot inspiration to sweep him along to the end. Inspiration was great. You needed it to get ideas to begin with. It could sweep you along-for a while. But you had to keep going even after it ran out. Otherwise, you wouldn’t finish very much.

  And you had to polish what did come out of the mill. It wasn’t just about art. It was about craft, too. They talked less about craft in creative-writing classes than they should have. It was like cooking, except you had to figure out all the recipes for yourself.

  He worked till he got tired of staring at the words on the monitor. Then he worked another twenty minutes on top of that so the Colin Ferguson he carried inside his head couldn’t growl Quitter! at him. His actual flesh-and-blood father was a good deal more easygoing than the virtual one who ordered him around. Maybe his construct was tougher than the genuine article. Maybe Dad had been harder on him when he was younger. Or maybe marrying Kelly had mellowed his father out. Who the hell knew?

  Whatever the answer was, Marshall would have worked longer yet if James Henry hadn’t started crying again. Marshall checked him. He was wet but not poopy. Into the pail went the Huggy. Marshall got the new one on him and closed up before he could ruin it.

  After that, Marshall went back to the rocker and held him for a while. His half-brother wasn’t smiling yet. He just stared up at Marshall. He looked confused, the way he did a lot of the time. Who could blame him, either? Babies didn’t have to figure out anything so comparatively simple as how to be a writer. They needed to work out how they were supposed to turn into human beings. Even if there were manuals explaining it all, they couldn’t have read them.

  “If you start squawking again, I’m gonna feed you early,” Marshall said. Mom w
ould get bent out of shape at him for screwing up James Henry’s schedule. Marshall didn’t care. A wailing baby drove him battier than fingers on a chalkboard. If Mom didn’t like it, she could damn well hire somebody else.

  But James Henry didn’t squawk. He kept looking at Marshall. Nobody’d ever thought Marshall was that interesting before. The baby made little squeaky noises.

  Marshall didn’t even notice the door open. There stood Mom, looking tired but smiling. “Aww,” she said.

  That broke the spell. James Henry might be able to charm Marshall. His mother didn’t stand a chance. “He hasn’t had dinner yet,” Marshall said, all business now. “He’ll probably want it pretty soon, though. He did okay with lunch. I changed him whenever he needed it.”

  “Thank you,” Mom said. “Do you want to stay for dinner? I’ve got enough ground round to make us both hamburgers.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” Marshall got out of there as soon as he politely could, or else a little sooner. He’d take Mom’s money and help her out of a tight spot. Past that, though, he didn’t want anything to do with her.

  The sun was setting in the usual Technicolor splendor when he walked out to his car. The wet-dust smell of rain filled the air, as it did so often these days. He was getting used to both the gorgeous sunsets and sunrises and the crappy weather. Eventually, he supposed, he’d forget things had ever been any other way. So would everyone else his age. And people like James Henry wouldn’t even know things had changed.

  * * *

  Louise Ferguson didn’t mind too much when James Henry woke up once in the night. She could even deal with twice. She was tired enough, going back to sleep was no big deal.

  But three or four times. . That wore you down. That had worn her down even when she was half her current age. She remembered. And it was more than doubly tough now that she’d reached her present state of decrepitude. Caffeine helped, but only so much. She didn’t know what she would have done if coffee hadn’t started tasting good to her again. Cocaine and crank were uppers, too, but she’d stayed married to Colin too long to look at anything illegal.