“Cool,” Rob replied. A fan-he recognized enthusiasm when he heard it. But which fan? “Um, who’m I talking to?”
“Oh. I’m Lindsey Kincaid. I teach chemistry at Piscataquis Community Secondary School,” she answered. That was the high school not far from the inn.
Rob sortakinda knew who she was, the way he sortakinda knew an awful lot of people here. About his age, halfway between blonde and brunette. . not half bad, all thing considered. How much considering did he feel like? “Where do you live?” he asked. “Can I walk you back there, wherever it is?”
If she said no, he wouldn’t get shot down too badly. But she said, “Okay,” and sounded pleased saying it. So maybe he’d find out how much considering he felt like.
* * *
“Attention! Attention! May I have your attention, please!”
When a man with a bullhorn shouted for your attention, you gave it to him whether you wanted to or not. He didn’t even have to say please. Vanessa Ferguson wondered why he bothered. Vestigial politeness, was her guess. Like the human tailbone, it was shrunken and useless, but the FEMA guy out there still had that little bit.
He blared away: “Camp Constitution is being adversely impacted by the flood-type conditions currently obtaining in this geographical location.”
That was so bad, Vanessa almost liked it. She couldn’t imagine a more bureaucratic way to say The flood here is screwing Camp Constitution to the wall.
Things had been bad the spring before. Ash and dust covered the basins of the rivers that flowed into the Mississippi from the west. She still remembered what a pool-service guy had told her mother when she was a kid: “Your pool is the lowest part of your yard, lady. Anything that can get into it goddamn well will.” He’d had a cigarette twitching in the corner of his mouth, and he was tanned as Cordoban leather. These days, he was probably dead of melanoma or lung cancer.
Which didn’t make him wrong. The rivers were the lowest parts of their big back yards, too. They’d flooded last year from all the volcanic crud rain and melting snow and wind dumped into them. Now they were doing it again, still more crud going into riverbeds that hadn’t yet got rid of everything from the year before. And so the rivers-including the Mississippi itself, which was after all the ultimate channel for half a continent’s worth of gunk-were spilling over their banks and spreading out across the countryside.
It wasn’t dramatic, the way the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan had been. There weren’t huge, speeding walls of water smashing everything in their path. But in the end, how much difference did that make? Whether you went under with a smash or merely a dispirited glub, under you went.
“Evacuation procedures are likely to become necessary for implementation in the nearly immediate future,” the flunky with the bullhorn bellowed. Not just an evacuation, mind you, but evacuation procedures. That made it official, to say nothing of officious. “Gather your belongings and prepare to be in compliance with all instructional directives. National Guard personnel will assist in ensuring prompt satisfaction of requirements.”
They’ll shoot you if you don’t do what we tell you. They would, too. The National Guard had opened fire in the camp several times. Like Vanessa, lots of refugees were armed, but not many had assault rifles or body armor or military discipline. The Guard outclassed them.
“What the fuck they gonna do to us now?” grumbled a middle-aged black man a couple of tiers of bunks over from Vanessa.
“Waddaya think, Jack?” a woman said in tones that came from Long Island, or possibly the Jersey shore. “They’re gonna do whatever they damn well wanna.”
And that was about the size of it. Vanessa hoped the waters would close over Micah Husak. She hoped crawdads and sticklebacks and little fish whose names she didn’t even know would pick out his dead eyes and nibble the rotting flesh off his toes-and off his dick. All the while, she understood it was a hopeless hope. That kind of shit didn’t happen to the people who ran camps. It happened to the people who wound up stuck in them.
Gathering her belongings didn’t take long. Everything she owned fit in her purse and in a dark green garbage bag. That seemed fitting enough and then some, because most of what she owned was garbage.
Off in the distance, an M16 barked: a quick, professional three-round burst. Whoever’d been giving some Guardsman grief would just have discovered he’d made his last dumbass mistake. Or maybe he was too high on crank even to notice he was dead. Methamphetamines and weed fired people up and mellowed them out all over the camp.
The yahoo with the bullhorn ordered the people in the tent next to Vanessa’s out to comply with his instructional directives. The middle-aged black guy moaned. “I didn’t used to think there was no place worse’n this,” he said. “But what you want to bet they went and found one?”
“Made one,” Vanessa corrected. The difference sounded tiny, but seemed profound to her.
Then, half an hour later, the bell-or the bullhorn-tolled for them. “Tent 27B inmates, assemble outside the entrance in a single-file line,” the guy with it boomed. Vanessa wondered if he would lead them to the Department of Redundancy Department. She didn’t make the joke. She didn’t think anyone else in good old Tent 27B would get it. Too bad, but there you were. And here she was.
Nervous-looking Guardsmen held their rifles in positions from which they could open up in a hurry. There were a lot of them. How much trouble had they had evacuating other great big tents? Quite a bit, by all the signs.
“Follow me toward the transportation that will transport you to the new provisional facilities,” Bullhorn Boy continued. “Obey all commands immediately.” That was so plain, it could only mean Don’t screw with me-or else.
Off they went, at a retarded shuffle, garbage sacks slung over their shoulders. Up ahead, people were slowly filing onto buses ancient enough to have carried kids back in the days when Southern schools were still segregated.
Vanessa made up her mind right there that she didn’t want to get transported to any provisional facility. Camp Constitution was bad. A half-assed version would only be worse. They said it couldn’t be done, but as often as not they didn’t know what they were talking about. This looked like one of those times.
Off to one side stood a much shorter row of newer, less decrepit buses. The people getting into those also seemed newer and less decrepit than the ones boarding the wrecks toward which Vanessa was heading. Pointing at the newer buses, she asked one of the Guardsmen, “What’s up with those?”
He was a squarely built, blocky fellow with beard stubble so dark and thick he probably had to shave twice a day. “Oh, those are for the reclamation parties,” he answered.
“Huh?” Vanessa said brilliantly.
“Reclamation parties,” the Guardsman repeated. “You know, to go into the country the eruption fucked over and scavenge stuff from it and start cleaning it up so it’s, like, worth something again.”
“How do I get on one of those buses?” Vanessa asked. If you were cleaning up the countryside, you weren’t living in a camp. Not living in a camp seemed the most wonderful thing in the world to her, the way El Dorado must have to the conquistadors.
The guy looked at her. “You shoulda signed a volunteer sheet. They went around, like, weeks ago.”
“Sign one? I never even saw one!” Vanessa yipped. She wondered if that was so. All kinds of stupid administrative papers circulated through the tents and FEMA trailers. Like most of the other poor slobs stuck in Camp Constitution, she ignored them. If she’d ignored the wrong one, she’d just screwed herself to the wall. But even if saying she’d never seen one might not be true, it was definitely truthy. She sure hadn’t paid attention to one.
“If you didn’t sign up, you can’t go on those buses. You gotta get on these ones instead.” The Guardsman pointed in the direction she was already going with the muzzle of his assault rifle.
Full of helpless longing, Vanessa stared at the newer buses. Helpless? God helped those who helped themsel
ves. “I’d do anything to get on one of those buses,” she said in a low, breathy voice she didn’t remember using since before she threw out her last boyfriend.
If she hadn’t taken care of Micah Husak that way, chances were she would have kept quiet. But after you’d done it once, the second time turned out to be a lot easier. She had a weapon, and she’d use it, the way the Guardsman would use the M16 if he needed to.
He understood what she was offering, all right. Well, he didn’t exactly need to be Phi Beta Kappa to figure it out. “Yeah?” he said, as people not so young, not so cute, and maybe not so desperate trudged past so they could go from a godawful camp to one that had to be even worse.
“Yeah,” Vanessa said. The fish had taken the bait.
“Joe-Bob, keep an eye on the parade,” her Guardsman said to the fellow next to him. Then he turned back to her. “C’mon in here.” In here was into a tent that had already been evacuated. He beckoned to her as he undid his fly. “Let’s just make it quick, okay?”
“Okay.” She got down in front of him. Blowing him was better than fucking him. She wouldn’t have to worry about dressing again-or about getting knocked up. He would have been better right after a shower, but he could have been worse, too.
And it would be quick. She could tell as soon as she started. “Yeah, babe,” he muttered, shoving his hips forward and thrusting deeper into her mouth. Coughing, she pulled away a little, then went back to what she was doing.
He was about to go off. Just when she was going to jerk away so he’d spurt on the ground, he grabbed her head and held her to him while he came in her mouth. It was as bad as she remembered. She gagged and choked and almost puked on his sand-colored Army boots.
“All right,” he said as he let her go. Eyes watering, she spat out as much of the gross, sticky stuff as she could. He chuckled and ran his hand through her hair: affection now, not brute strength. Why shouldn’t he feel affectionate? She’d given him what he wanted. “You better hustle if you’re gonna get on the reclamation bus,” he told her.
“You bet I am,” she said grimly. She spat again as she climbed to her feet and brushed dirt off the knees of her jeans. The Guardsman chuckled some more. He could afford to think it was funny. He hadn’t been on the receiving end.
She fled the tent and hustled toward the newer buses before she realized they hadn’t even found out each other’s names. That came closer to the famous zipless fuck than she’d ever dreamt she’d get. She hadn’t got fucked, though. She literally hadn’t even got kissed.
She spat one more time before she got into the boarding line. She wished for a jug of Scope, but wishing failed to produce one. The taste lingered. As she took her place, the woman in front of her-a gal about her own age-gave her a curious look, but didn’t say anything.
A man with a clipboard was making checkmarks on the paper it held. A roster sheet? Vanessa’s heart sank. If she’d sucked off that National Guard asshole for nothing. . “Ferguson,” she said with more confidence than she felt.
He frowned. “You aren’t on the list.”
“I’m supposed to be,” she declared-again, at least truthy if not true.
He inspected her. Was she going to have to do him, too? Pretty soon she’d be swimming out to meet troopships if she wasn’t careful. But all he said was “Well, get on. We’re a couple people short, and you look like you can do the work. Ferguson, your name was?”
“That’s right. Vanessa. Thank you.” She didn’t usually dole out gratitude so casually, but she made an exception here. As the man added her to the roster, she happily hopped into the bus. She didn’t care where it took her. She was out of Camp Constitution at last!
* * *
When Marshall Ferguson wasn’t babysitting his little half-brother, he had the family house pretty much to himself. His father went to the cop shop early every morning, and Kelly-Marshall couldn’t think of her as a stepmom, not when she was as close to his age as to his old man’s-headed for CSUDH not a whole lot later. Peace. Quiet. If he wanted to make like a writer, all he had to do was sit in front of the screen and let the words pour out.
In theory, anyhow. Theory was wonderful. Practice, he was discovering, was a little different. Yeah, just a little. Theory was all about inspiration and how to court it. As he was discovering, practice turned out to involve a lot more of figuring out what the hell you did after the fickle bitch upped and left you.
Because she damn well would. Inspiration had launched Marshall into a couple of stories that seemed like surefire winners. Inspiration took him 1,500 words into one of them, maybe 2,500 words into the other. Then he had to work out what happened next and what, if anything, it meant. And he had to work out how to put it across without being obvious or boring.
Somehow, neither of those masterpieces of Western literature ever got finished.
But Marshall did finish one piece he started with no inspiration whatsoever. Well, almost none. His father’s dubious stare at the dinner table every evening kept Marshall busy. Where art and brilliance failed to serve, stubbornness and craft got him to the end.
Then he had to put the story on the market. Being forced to submit by Professor Bolger at UCSB was one of the best things that ever happened to him: he’d started early on getting hardened to rejection. The prof said straight-out that some people would rather submit to a root canal than to an editor.
Marshall had never had a root canal, but he understood the feeling. He’d sold a story during that quarter, which freaked him and the prof almost equally. But you didn’t sell every time. And getting rejected sucked.
He tried to think of it like dating. If you didn’t hit on girls, you’d never get laid. Yeah, sometimes they shot you down. That didn’t mean you didn’t pick yourself up and ask somebody else out. It might not even mean you didn’t try again with the girl who’d told you no before.
Or with the market that told you no. Marshall’s stubborn story went out and came back five times before it found a home at a Web site that put the munificent sum of two and a half cents a word in his PayPal account.
Two and a half cents a word wouldn’t make anybody rich. Marshall knew that only too well. In case he didn’t, his father rubbed his nose in it: “I don’t think you’ll have Tom Clancy or Bill Gates trimming your oleanders any time soon.”
“Right,” Marshall said, and then, “Pass the potatoes, please.” Was Dad cynical because he’d been a cop for too long, or had he become a cop because he was already cynical? Could you answer all of the above? That was how it looked to Marshall.
“He sold it,” Kelly said. “Two and a half cents a word is better than nothing. It’s more than I’ve ever got for an article. In academic publishing, all they give you is the glory of your name in print-usually with a raft of coauths.”
“Yeah, well, you’re advancing human knowledge,” Colin Ferguson said, “not just-” He stopped short.
“Bullshitting?” Marshall suggested.
“You said it. I didn’t.” Dad wouldn’t, either, not with Kelly across the table from him. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking it.
Kelly was less touchy about that kind of thing than her husband. “God knows there’s plenty of bullshit in the academic journals,” she said. “How about the ones for criminal justice?”
One reason you had to respect Dad was that he would ’fess up when you caught him out. “Well, you’ve got me there,” he admitted now. “You read those things, you’d think we caught every perp, and that about day after tomorrow we can talk all the bad guys into staying good guys and put ourselves out of business forever.” He smiled crookedly. “And rain makes applesauce.”
“Is that what they call pie in the sky?” Marshall had run into the phrase, but he wasn’t sure exactly how it worked.
His father nodded. “That’s what they call it, all right. Come the revolution, they used to say. Then the revolution came, and things were just as nasty afterwards as they were before. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.�
� He got that from some old rock song.
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others,” Kelly said, which sounded like agreement.
It also sounded familiar. “That’s from Animal Farm!” Marshall exclaimed. “I had to read it in Western Civ. It’s by the guy who wrote 1984, back when 1984 seemed a long way away.” It seemed a long way away to him, too-lost in the distant past like 1945 and 1865 and 1776 and 1066.
“The 1984 we got wasn’t too great, but it was better than the one Orwell wrote about,” Dad said.
“If you say so,” Marshall answered. He had no memories of 1984. Kelly would have been a little kid back then, so she wouldn’t remember much, either. For Dad, it seemed to feel like the week before last. Getting old, having all that stuff to remember, to try and keep track of, had to be a terrible thing.
Thinking about what a terrible thing it was and trying to work out exactly what kind of terrible thing it was must have shown on Marshall’s face. Kelly murmured, “He’s getting an idea for a story.”
“Or indigestion, one.” But Dad didn’t sound disgusted. Coming out with snide cracks was as much a reflex with him as breathing was. All the other cops Marshall knew-and he naturally knew more cops than most stoners ever wanted to-talked the same way. It had to help shield them from some of the nasty shit they ran into on the job.
“Well. .” Marshall stood up.
He paid rent-a third of what he grossed. Not netted: grossed. Between babysitting and writing, he wasn’t grossing one whole hell of a lot. But he was a cash customer, so his old man didn’t ride him too hard. With most of his high school buddies scuffling even harder than he was, he didn’t feel embarrassed about living at home. Misery really did love company.
He went up to his room. He kept it tolerably clean and neat; he’d learned how taking care of himself at UCSB. It wasn’t so much for his sake. Like a lot of young males on their own, he didn’t mind living like a slob. What guys didn’t mind, though, grossed girls out. Some guys were too dumb to learn from failure and frustration. Marshall wasn’t.
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