Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Okay. Good, even,” Colin said. “If you’d thrown it in my face the way my kids did, I don’t suppose I would’ve busted you, either. But I wouldn’t’ve wanted to marry you, or I don’t think I would.”

  “I sorta figured that out,” Kelly said, quiet still.

  “Uh-huh. You’re no dummy.” Colin nodded and made that unhappy noise again. “Darren Pitcavage, though-” He took another sip of scotch, as if to wash the taste of Darren Pitcavage out of his mouth. “My kids aren’t mean. Mm, Vanessa is sometimes, I guess, but she’s snarky mean, not bar-brawl mean. If the chief hadn’t done some fancy talking, there’ve been a couple of times his precious flesh and blood might’ve found out more about the inside of a jail than he ever wanted to know.”

  “Ah. Okay. Now I know where you’re coming from,” Kelly said. “This just happened again?”

  “Too right it did,” Colin agreed. “There’s a bunch of bars and strip joints on Hesperus up near Braxton Bragg, and Darren thinks it’s cool to hang out in ’em. Maybe he picks up the girls. Maybe he just watches. I dunno. But the people who run those places, they sure know who he is-and who his old man is. Does he get free drinks?”

  “Ya think?” Kelly said sarcastically.

  “Yeah. Like that. And the bouncers cut him slack. For all I know, some of the girls give him a throw to keep him happy. But not everybody who goes to those joints knows who Lord Darren Pitcavage is.”

  “Or cares,” Kelly said.

  “Or cares. That’s right,” Colin said. “Some of those guys, they’d want to rack him up good if they did know. This latest fight he got into wasn’t like that. He was drunk, and so was the other fellow. The guy said something, and Darren coldcocked him. He’s got a nasty left hook-he knocked out two teeth and broke another one.”

  “Let me guess-they called it self-defense?” Kelly asked.

  “Right the first time,” Colin said heavily. “But if that Mexican’d hit Darren, then it would have been assault with intent to maim. Bet your sweet wazoo it would.” He gulped down the second drink.

  Kelly reached into the refrigerator-which was, like most people’s these days, half-full of ice to keep things fresh when the power was out. She grabbed some steaks. “Here. I’ll pan-broil these. That’ll help get the taste of today out of your mouth.”

  She does know how I work, Colin thought. The power wasn’t on right now, which meant the stove’s fancy electronic brain was useless. But natural gas still flowed when Kelly turned the knob. She started it with a match. Not elegant, but it worked. . till the gas stopped coming, if it did. When it did.

  Marshall must have had some radar that told him when supper was ready. He walked in the front door right when Kelly took the pan off the fire. “Smells good,” he said.

  “Sure it does-it’s food, isn’t it?” Colin said. “You can drag up a rock and help us eat it. And you can tell us how your little brother’s doing.” Morbid curiosity? Probably. But he had it, morbid or not. And it gave him and Marshall something to talk about. Fathers whose grown sons lived their own lives understood how important that could be.

  The rock in question was a chair at the dining room table. “He’s, like, at the age where everything is no all the time,” Marshall said as he planted his hindquarters on it. “I mean, everything. You want to take a nap? No! You want me to read a book? No! You want to play outside? No! You want to turn into a centipede and crawl up the wall? No!”

  “I remember those days,” Colin said, realizing he’d probably see them again himself, at least if he hadn’t started firing blanks. “You all went through ’em. Vanessa especially.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Marshall said with a crooked grin. “Anyway-”

  Before he could get to anyway, Kelly broke in: “Did you really ask him if he wanted to turn into a centipede?”

  “Sure,” Marshall answered. Colin believed him. His youngest would never set the world on fire when it came to foreign languages, but he was the one who’d translated An elephant is eating the beach into Spanish in high school. He had that surreal turn of thought-or else he was just flaky. He might be cut out to make a writer after all.

  “When Vanessa had it worst,” Colin said reminiscently, “I went and asked her if she wanted a cookie. ‘No!’ she said, the way she did for everything for a couple of months there. Then what I said sank in, and she started to bawl.” After more than a quarter of a century, he could call up the expression of absolute dismay that had filled her face.

  “You’re mean!” Kelly exclaimed, plopping steaks and green beans onto plates. But she was fighting laughter, fighting and losing. As she set his supper in front of him, she added, “You ended up giving her the cookie, didn’t you?”

  “Who, me?” he returned.

  She started to stare at him as if he were Ebenezer Scrooge in the flesh, even without bushy Victorian side whiskers. Then she realized he was having her on. “You’re impossible,” she said, more fondly than not.

  “Well, I try,” he replied, not without pride.

  If he hadn’t fed Vanessa that long-ago vanilla wafer, would his cruelty have warped her for life? Left her sour and embittered and suspicious, for instance? You never could tell. People went off the rails some kind of way, and half the time parents and priests and shrinks had no idea why. More than half the time.

  But he had given her the goddamn cookie. She’d wound up sour and embittered and suspicious any which way. Sometimes you couldn’t win. Hell, sometimes you weren’t sure what game you were playing, or even whether you were playing a game at all.

  He washed dishes while Kelly dried. Getting stuff clean with cold water took elbow grease. In his wisdom, he’d got an electric water heater here. It had been pretty new when the supervolcano erupted. Now, when it worked, they saved the hot water for bathing. A gas one would have been better. . or maybe not. These days, everything had some kind of electronic controls. And when the power went out, that probably would have fouled up the whole unit.

  Marshall went upstairs to his room. It got quiet in there. He had a battery-powered lamp with LEDs that used next to no electricity, and he was writing in longhand when the juice was off. Colin wondered if he could scare up a typewriter from somewhere for the kid.

  He lit a candle. You could get those without too much trouble. He wouldn’t have wanted to write or read or even play cards by candlelight, but it was enough to keep you from barking your shin on a table or tripping over a footstool and breaking your fool neck.

  Kelly came and sat down beside him on the couch. He put his arm around her. She snuggled against him, for companionship and no doubt for warmth as well. The heating system was gas. But, again, the thermostat had a built-in computer chip. The people who’d designed all this stuff had assumed there’d be electricity 24/7/365. Well, Colin had assumed the same thing. Which only went to show that you never could tell, and that assuming wasn’t always smart.

  “I tried to use a manual typewriter in the library at Dominguez Hills on a paper the other day,” Kelly said, echoing his thought of a little while before. “They put them out where the light’s good so people can, you know? But I don’t have the touch for it. You’ve got to hit the keys so hard! I felt like a rhino tapdancing on the keyboard.”

  “Ever mess with one before?” Colin asked. She shook her head; he felt the motion against his shoulder. He went on, “I did-I had one when I was a kid. But I didn’t miss ’em a bit when computers came in. Typewriters aren’t-waddayacallit? — user-friendly, that’s it.”

  “No shit, they aren’t!” Kelly burst out. Colin gave forth with a startled laugh. He wouldn’t have said that himself, not where she could hear it (though he wouldn’t’ve hesitated for a second if the intended ear belonged to Gabe Sanchez or to Chief Pitcavage). She laughed, too, but the amusement quickly left her face. She went on, “The world’s not user-friendly any more, you know?”

  Colin started to laugh again. This time, the laugh didn’t pass his lips. Gasoline was a king’s ran
som a gallon when you could get any. Most of the time, you couldn’t, not for money or for love. (Sex was a different story. The Vice Unit had closed out a pimp’s stable of hookers, who’d been turning tricks to keep his Lincoln Navigator’s tank full.) Power came on when it felt like coming on, which seemed less and less often day by day.

  Not much TV. Not much Internet. Cell phone connections rare and spotty. Even good old-fashioned radio took electricity, for crying out loud.

  “Well, we’ve still got books,” Colin said. His arm tightened around her. “And we’ve got each other, and maybe in a while we’ll have a baby to keep us too busy to worry about all the stuff we don’t have.”

  “Marshall’s probably writing now,” she said. “Want to go upstairs and see what we can do about that?”

  “The wench grows bold,” Colin said, and squeezed her again. Up the stairs they went. He closed the door to the master bedroom behind them.

  * * *

  Every once in a while these days, you read a newspaper story about somebody who killed himself because he couldn’t write on his Facebook wall or tweet any more. I’m cut off from the whole world, so why stay? one guy’s last note read.

  The story said that particular suicider was all of nineteen years old. The reporter quoted John Donne’s No man is an island, entire to himself, and went on to talk about how, in the aftermath of the supervolcano eruption, we were all cast back on our individual resources in ways we couldn’t have imagined before first Yellowstone and then the whole country fell in on themselves.

  Actually, before the supervolcano went off, Marshall Ferguson wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a newspaper. That was something else he left to his father and other antiques. If he needed news or anything else, he got it off the Net with his laptop or his smartphone.

  He’d got a lot of his fun in the virtual world, too. He hadn’t spent all his free time playing World of Warcraft with buddies scattered cross the world, but he had spent quite a bit of it in front of a monitor.

  Now those choices were mostly closed off. Even when he had power, the WoW servers often didn’t. He had the game on his hard drive, of course, but playing solo was to the massively multipersonal variant very much as masturbation was to sex. Better than nothing, yeah, but nowhere near so good as the real thing.

  When the Net was up, seeing yesterday’s story in tomorrow’s Times just reminded you how pathetic a paper was. But it was yesterday’s story only if you’d found out about it yesterday. When you read it for the first time as it ran in the newspaper, it seemed new to you. Sports broadcasters doing the Olympics had called some of their shows plausibly live. The Times, these days, was plausibly live, and seemed authentically live because its competitors, which should have been really live, were in fact too often dead.

  And damned if Marshall didn’t find a substitute-well, a substitute of sorts-for his MMRPG. One of his friends’ dads dug a beat-up maroon box out of the back of a closet and presented it to Lucas. The game was called Diplomacy. The board was a map of Europe with funky boundaries: the way things had looked before World War I rearranged political geography.

  Fighting World War I was the point of the game. You could negotiate before you moved. You had to write down your orders. No fancy graphics or anything, but it turned out to be a pretty good way for a bunch of guys to kill a Saturday afternoon. . and evening. They finished up by candlelight.

  “Gotta hand it to my old man,” Lucas said after Austria-Hungary’s red pieces had conquered a majority of the supply centers on the board and therefore won. “That’s not half bad.”

  “Pretty good, in fact,” Marshall agreed, thinking his own father would probably get off on it, too. Another question occurred to him: “How long has your dad had this, anyway? I mean, dig it-the pieces are wood, man. When was the last time you saw that?”

  “Dad told me he played it when he was in high school,” Lucas answered. That put it back in medieval times, or maybe further: Lucas’ father was paunchy and bald and graying. He might not actually have more miles on his odometer than Marshall’s father did, but he sure looked older.

  “It’s a hella good game,” Marshall said, and all the players gathered around the board nodded. Judiciously, Marshall went on, “About the only thing wrong with it I can see is, how often can we get seven people together and, like, blow off a whole day?”

  More nods from his comrades in skulduggery (you didn’t have to tell the truth while you were negotiating-only your final written orders counted). A guy named Tim, with whom Marshall had gone to high school and who didn’t seem to have done much since, eyed the board and the other players.

  “When you wargame online, there’s lots of other people all the time,” he observed. “Or there used to be, when the power worked all the time. Here, it’s just us, y’know?”

  People nodded yet again, with more or less patience depending on their own personalities. Tim was fun to hang out with, but he’d never be the brightest LED in the flashlight. He was the kind of guy who ordered pie a la mode with ice cream on it. He had no clue that he’d just said the same thing Marshall came out with a little while before. Tim had no clue about quite a few things, but he’d done a better than decent job of playing Italy in the game. Winning with Italy wasn’t impossible, but Marshall could see it wouldn’t be easy, either.

  Lucas said, “It may not be as tough as you guys are making it out to be. I mean, we aren’t all stuck in nine-to-fives.” His mouth twisted. “No matter how much we wish we were.”

  He was living with his dad, the same way Marshall was living at his old family house. Three of the others shared an apartment that would have been about right for one of them. Tim had lived out of his car for a while, till gas got too scarce and too expensive to make that practical. Now he was just kind of around. Maybe he crashed on one girlfriend or another, or on one girlfriend and another. Marshall didn’t know the details. These days, with so many people from sea to shining sea scuffling, asking a whole bunch of questions was the worst kind of bad form.

  “We’ll try,” Marshall said. “What else can we do?”

  * * *

  Louise Ferguson fidgeted while she waited for the bus. It was-surprise! — late again. When cities had trouble getting enough fuel for public transit and police cars, you knew the world was going to hell in a handbasket. It wouldn’t be going to hell in anything requiring gasoline, that was for sure.

  Like most cars, hers sat in the garage under her condo almost all the time, a monument to the way things had been before the supervolcano erupted. She hoped Mr. Nobashi would understand. He still drove in to the ramen works two or three times a week. But then, he was a fancy executive, not an administrative assistant. And he got his pay straight from the home office in Hiroshima. With the way the dollar had nosedived against the yen since the eruption, that made his salary go a lot further, too.

  Here came the bus at last. It left a black plume of diesel fumes behind it as it rumbled north on Sword Beach. It wasn’t supposed to do that. It was supposed to be clean, and not stinky. God only knew the last time anyone’d serviced that overworked engine.

  Before the eruption, even people who didn’t think of themselves as green would have had conniptions about that smoke-belching bus. Not today, Josephine! Anything that dumped CO2 into the air and helped fight the supervolcano’s big chill was wonderful, even if it smelled nasty.

  The bus stopped. Louise handed the driver a buck and a half. Like a lot of SoCal towns, San Atanasio had stopped using computerized bus passes. When the computers didn’t run all the time, you couldn’t rely on them the way people had for so long. You had to make do with simpler things.

  Mr. Nobashi, for instance, had brought an abacus into the ramen works. It wasn’t just for show, either. The way his fingers flicked the beads was a sight to behold; Patty from the Farm Belt called it a caution. He was about as fast and accurate with the abacus as Louise was with a calculator. Next thing you knew, he’d dredge up a slide rule from somewhere
.

  Only a few cars shared Sword Beach with the bus. Most of the traffic was bicycles, with occasional full-sized trikes and skateboards. From what the papers said, random street crime (except for bike thefts) was way down. Getting away was harder than it had been, and people were more willing to chase you. The world was less impersonal, less withdrawn, then it had been when the automobile was king.

  The bus stopped at Sword Beach and Braxton Bragg Boulevard. Louise got out there, because it turned the wrong way on Braxton Bragg. Back in the day, she would’ve grumbled at walking a couple of blocks from the bus stop to her workplace. When everybody did it, it was no big deal.

  No big deal when it wasn’t raining, anyhow. Right this minute, it wasn’t. The spring sun, the sun that the supervolcano eruption had turned pale and watery, was shining as brightly as it ever did these days. Louise had stuck an umbrella in her purse just the same. No guarantee it wouldn’t be raining when she came out this afternoon. And wasn’t that a hell of a thing? If you couldn’t trust SoCal weather, what could you trust?

  Nothing. Nothing and nobody. Louise’s mouth thinned to a bloodless line. She made herself relax, because otherwise she’d screw up the lipstick she’d so carefully applied before she left. But if having James Henry hadn’t taught her that lesson once and for all, she couldn’t imagine what would do the trick.

  Here was Ramen Central. The sliding security gate was open: the only connection between the property and the outside world. Steel fencing topped by razor wire protected the rest of the perimeter (for that matter, razor wire topped the gate, too). Despite fence and wire, they’d still had stuff disappear from parked cars. That was why they had a full-time armed security guard.

  He touched the brim of his drill-sergeant hat in what was almost but not quite a salute. “Mornin’, Mrs. Ferguson,” he said.

  “Good morning, Steve,” she said. She’d given up trying to get the big Hispanic guy to call her Louise. He’d served a long hitch in the Army, he’d fought in Afghanistan, and he had a strong sense of rank and hierarchy. Sometimes all you could do was roll with things.