Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh, it is,” Colin said. “Or else it’s a copycat, which would be about as bad-or a little worse, depending on how you look at things.” His hands folded into fists. “Maybe he slipped up this time. Maybe we catch a break.”

  How often had he said something like that? As often as the Strangler murdered someone in San Atanasio, plus a few more times when he was talking about dead old ladies in other South Bay towns. How many times had he been right? The next would be the first.

  Out in the living room, Jodie started talking to somebody. Colin spun on his heel and hurried up that icon-filled hallway. If Oscar Flores had got snoopy, tearing him a new asshole would make Colin feel a little better. It was the one thing he could think of that might.

  Only it wasn’t the neighbor who’d worried about poor Mrs. Mandelbaum. It was Dr. Ishikawa and Mike Pitcavage, with a DNA technician trailing the coroner. Nodding towards Ishikawa, Pitcavage said, “I hitched a ride on the ambulance. When I heard it might be another Strangler case, I wanted to see it for myself as soon as I could.”

  “Okay,” Colin said: more an acknowledgment than anything resembling thanks. That the police chief rode in the ambulance and not in his own car spoke unhappy volumes about what the supervolcano eruption had done to fuel supplies and San Atanasio’s sorry economy.

  Pointing back to the hallway, Jodie said, “This woman had a lot of family. They’ll be screaming when they find out.”

  Chief Pitcavage’s mouth twisted. “Why didn’t they call her and notice she didn’t call back, then? How much do they care?”

  “We’ll find out when we get in touch with them,” Colin said. “Chances are, we’ll find out in stereo.” Notifying next of kin might have been the part of the job he disliked most.

  “Let’s have a look at the body and see if we can determine whether it is a Strangler case,” Dr. Ishikawa said. “The media will be most interested in learning about that. Of course, Lucy is the one who will make absolutely certain.”

  Lucy Chen, the DNA tech, reminded Colin of a Chinese version of his wife. They were about the same age, and they both had the same air of unhurried competence. But Lucy was an expert on the double helix, not on the behavior and misbehavior of magma.

  “Happy day,” Colin said. Lucy’s presence, and Jodie’s, kept him from adding some stronger opinions. As far as he was concerned, the one good thing about the eternal-seeming power and gas shortages was that the blow-dried dimbulbs with the expensive clothes took longer to get to a crime scene. If they wouldn’t have shown up at all, that would have pleased him even more. Some things, though, were too much to hope for.

  “It’ll be back here, I bet. I’ll follow my nose,” Mike Pitcavage said. He found Mrs. Mandelbaum’s bedroom with no trouble at all. He was younger than Colin, but he’d been a cop even longer because he hadn’t gone into the service before putting on the blue uniform. How many tract homes had he walked through? Enough so, dozens of different floor plans seemed as familiar as the house he lived in, no doubt.

  The coroner squatted by the corpse. His nose wrinkled; the smell in the bedroom was pretty bad, all right. “What do you think?” Colin asked, keeping his voice as neutral as he could. He knew what he thought, but that wasn’t what he was trying to find out.

  “If the DNA does not show this to be a Strangler case, I will be very much surprised,” Ishikawa replied. Lucy Chen nodded. After a pause for breath (and after his face announced how much he wished he didn’t need to breathe in there), the coroner added, “Most of the victims are discovered in a less advanced state of putrefaction.”

  “You got that right, Doc,” Pitcavage said. “I just hope the stink comes out of my suit.” Colin hadn’t worried about that. Like most people, he wore more wool than he had before the eruption. It was warmer than the synthetics. But the chief, also in wool, remembered that it also trapped odors better.

  Albert stuck his head into the bedroom. “Sorry to bother you, sir,” he said, addressing his words to Chief Pitcavage, “but the first news truck just pulled up.”

  Oh, well. The vultures hadn’t taken much longer than usual to start spiraling down to a story. Colin wasn’t sorry the chief had come. Otherwise, he would have had the dubious privilege of enlightening the men and women of the Fourth Estate.

  Then Pitcavage said, “I think I’ll duck out the back door. Colin, you can handle the ghouls today.” Colin’s face might have been something-all the cops, Lucy, and even the staid Dr. Ishikawa started laughing. The chief thumped him on the shoulder. “I’m kidding. I really am.”

  “You’d better be.” By the way Colin said it, everybody else thought the joke was a hell of a lot funnier than he did. He said it that way because that was how he felt.

  “I am. I’m here. I’m stuck with it. I’ll deal with them.” Pitcavage walked out to face the reporters. Christians might have gone to face lions with that same exalted determination. But dealing with the media was more like getting trampled by a herd with mad cow disease. Colin thought so, anyhow. Suddenly, calling the next of kin didn’t seem half bad.

  * * *

  Oklahoma City reminded Vanessa Ferguson of Schrodinger’s cat. Even the locals seemed unsure about whether their town was dead or alive.

  Denver, now, Denver was definitively deceased. Same with Salt Lake City. But both those places were only a few hundred miles from what had been Yellowstone National Park in happier times and was currently the world’s biggest red-hot hole in the ground.

  There were something like 1,200 miles between the supervolcano caldera and Oklahoma City. That didn’t mean ashfall hadn’t reached the city. Oh, no. Oklahoma City, in fact, had taken a bigger hit than places like Los Angeles, if not so bad as the towns and farms up in Kansas where Vanessa had been excavating. As with the Kansas prairies, prevailing winds had dumped lots of ash and dust on Oklahoma City’s head.

  The eruption had been a while ago. To Vanessa’s way of thinking, Oklahoma City should have picked itself up, dusted itself off-literally and metaphorically-and got on with its life. Maybe it should have, but it hadn’t. Little by little, she started to see why. The countryside was in worse shape than the town.

  None of that was her worry, though. She’d made it to Oklahoma City. She’d escaped from the grave-robbing crew that was picking through the mortal remains of Kansas. She’s had as much of that as she could take, and more besides. She wasn’t supposed to be in Oklahoma City right now. She was supposed to be back with the crew. Had she been in the Army, they would have called it going AWOL. She wasn’t in the Army, no matter how hard they tried to make her feel as if she were. As far as she was concerned, she’d informally resigned.

  She had cash in the pockets of her jeans, too. Some of it came from what they’d paid her to make like a ghoul. That was a startling wad, at least by pre-eruption standards. It wasn’t as if she’d had anything to spend it on while she was scavenging. Too damn bad the galloping inflation made it worth so much less than it would have been before things hit the fan.

  The same sadly held true for the greenbacks she’d come by in unofficial ways. She felt guilty about that private grave-robbing, but not very guilty. It wasn’t as if she were the only one. Oh, no-not even close. Some of the card games the scavengers got into. . That much cash wouldn’t have paid off the national debt, but it sure would have made some Vegas blackjack dealers raise an eyebrow.

  So here she was. She could eat for a while. She could stay at a Super 8 motel that seemed pathetically eager to get her business. And she could shop for a clunker at used-car lots whose salesmen made the Super 8 desk clerks seemed stoic by comparison.

  “Yes, ma’am, I would be dee-lighted to sell you a vee — hick-le,” said one fellow whose plaid jacket was plainly made from the skin of a particularly gaudy 1970s sofa. And he explained why he would be so dee-lighted, too: “Business ain’t been what you’d call brisk lately.”

  “I believe that.” Vanessa tried to sound as cutting as she could-which was saying a good deal. She ass
umed any and all used-car salesmen were there to shaft her. She waved at the lot. “Your cars are sitting there gathering dust.”

  That was the exact truth. Red cars, blue cars, green cars, black cars, white cars? No-they were all grayish brown cars. Some of them showed hints of their original color. None showed more than hints.

  “You know how it is, ma’am.” The salesman spread his hands in resigned embarrassment. “We clean ’em off, an’ then we get more wind outa the north or the west. Still an awful lot of that horrible dust.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Having spent so long closer to the eruption site than this, Vanessa knew as much. She was damned if she’d admit it, though. Give a salesman an inch and he’d take your wallet. Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “Chances are you don’t clean them because this way you can hide a lot of what’s wrong with them.”

  He clasped both hands over his heart, as if he’d just taken a mortal wound. “Now, ma’am, that just ain’t fair. Not even slightly, it ain’t. Let me show you this here Ford. Honest to Pete, it’s as good as the day it was made, or even better.”

  “How many recalls has that model been through?” Vanessa retorted, and the salesman looked wounded again.

  He tried for a comeback: “That particular vee-hick-le, I happen to know, has been supervolcano-ized.”

  Vanessa had never quite made up her mind whether she hated the language of hucksterism worse than the language of bureaucracy or the other way round. She withered the man in the bad jacket with a glance. “Oh, cut the crap, why don’t you? If it’s got a heavy-duty air filter, just say so, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I don’t speak of our Lord and Savior that way,” he said stiffly.

  “I told you to cut the crap,” Vanessa said. “You need me worse than I need you, but you won’t get me.” She walked off that lot.

  Two days later, she found a Toyota a few years newer than the one that had perished in her escape from Denver. The salesman there didn’t speak of Jesus at all. He wore a corduroy coat that hadn’t been stylish for a long time but wasn’t aggressively ugly. The Toyota was more expensive than she liked, but not impossibly so.

  “I think we’ve got a deal,” he said at last. “I’ll need to see some ID before we finish the formalities.”

  “Here you go.” She showed him her license from Colorado.

  He looked at it. “Miz Ferguson, this expired three months ago.”

  “Well, so what?” Vanessa said. “If you expect me to go back to Denver and renew it, you’re out of luck.” She didn’t say shit out of luck, and patted herself on the back for her restraint.

  He sighed. He might have been showing restraint, too. “I can’t sell a car to anybody with an expired license. The second you drive it onto the street, you’re in violation of the law.” He spread his hands. “You see my problem?”

  “I see it, all right. What the hell am I supposed to do about it?” Vanessa’s tone took on a certain edge. She’d traded favors for favors before. She hated herself every time she did it-how could you not? But she wanted wheels. She needed wheels. If she had to do it one more time, maybe she could turn off her mind and not think about it while it was going on. She’d sure tried to do that with Micah Husak. Afterwards? She could worry about that, well, afterwards.

  Instead of pulling down the Venetian blinds in his miserable little office, the salesman said, “You wait right here. I’ve got to go talk to my manager.”

  Vanessa sat there and fumed. If he thinks I’ll take care of them both, he’s got another think coming, she told herself. No way I do gang bangs, God damn men and their horny souls to hell.

  But the salesman’s manager turned out to be a woman. She was about fifty. She didn’t try to hide it. She was short-haired and looked tough. Her pinched mouth said she was used to beating men in their own ballpark. It also said she didn’t especially enjoy winning-or anything else.

  “Carl tells me you don’t have a current license,” she said.

  “That’s right,” Vanessa answered. “I got to Camp Constitution with the clothes on my back. I’ve been there or in a scavenging detail since right after the eruption. I wasn’t really worried about renewing the damn thing, you know? There’s got to be some kind of way you can sell me a car. It’s not like this outfit doesn’t need my money.”

  By the way Carl’s eyebrows lifted, she’d nailed that one. The manager’s face never changed. Vanessa wouldn’t have wanted to play poker against her, even for nickels. “You could get a license from the Oklahoma Department of Motor Vehicles,” the gal said. “You might be able to, anyhow. It would take some time. I don’t know if they’d want to issue you one with only that to show for ID.”

  “Or?” Vanessa said. “C’mon. There’s got to be an or. It’s not like I don’t have this year’s license because I’m a fuckup. I don’t have this year’s license ’cause there’s nothing left of Colorado.”

  “I understand that. It’s not like we don’t know about the supervolcano here, either.” The manager clicked a fingernail against the arm of her chair, considering. “How would this be? We’ll charge you an additional out-of-state identity-confirmation fee of, say, a thousand dollars. In exchange for that, we will overlook your lack of documentation and we will try to contact Colorado authorities to make sure you are the person your expired license says you are.”

  Chances were those Colorado authorities were dead, dead and buried under volcanic ash. The knowing gleam in the woman’s hard gray eyes said she knew as much. She’s making this up, Vanessa realized. It’s an excuse to screw an extra grand out of me, that’s all. Even with inflation making the dollar leak value the way a blown-out tire leaked air, a grand was still a fair chunk of change.

  “How about making your fee five hundred?” Vanessa said.

  The manager smiled. No one would ever accuse her of owning a sweet smile. No, it was more like a piranha’s. “A thousand,” she said flatly. Vanessa realized something else: this wasn’t the first time she’d played this game. More like the eleventy-first, or the hundred and eleventy-first. Sure as hell, the woman went on, “You can take it down the street if you want to. You won’t get off cheaper anywhere else, and you’ll end up with a crappier car than that Toyota.”

  “At least fill the gas tank all the way to the top,” Vanessa said, throwing in the sponge.

  “I think we can do that much,” Carl said. The manager sent him a flinty stare: Vanessa’d won back something over ten percent of the bribe, anyhow. She got the strong, strong feeling not many people did so well against this gal. Would the cost of the fill-up all come from Carl’s share? Vanessa wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

  That was Carl’s problem, though, not hers. The mountain of forms you had to fill out to buy a car in Oklahoma was every bit as tall as the one California made you climb. Vanessa signed on a great many dotted lines. Carl drove the Toyota off the lot and came back a few minutes later with a pained expression and, presumably, a full tank.

  Vanessa laid out the cash, including the thousand-dollar fee (nowhere, she’d noticed, was it mentioned in all that paperwork: one more surprise-not!). She got into the car and headed south. She hadn’t been behind a wheel for years, but she still knew how. And she was on her way at last!

  XV

  If you went barefoot in the park in Guilford, Maine, you’d get frostbite, and in a hurry, too. Rob Ferguson didn’t much care. He had rubber overshoes on over his New Balances. He wore a fur cap with earflaps and a red star. It was ratty, but he didn’t care-it kept his ears warm. All of him was warm enough, in fact, except his nose. He didn’t think his nose would ever be warm again. As long as it didn’t turn black and fall off, he’d have to be content.

  Kids slid down toward the river on sleds. Kids on ice skates spun on the frozen Piscataquis. The river had a deep, stone-hard crust even though it was past the alleged first day of spring and well on its way to Tax Day. Rob’d tried ice skates a few times. He was convinced the Devil had invented them to punish sinners’ ankle
s. They sure punished his. If you weren’t ice-skating by the time you were two, you’d never get the hang of it. That was his theory, and he was sticking to it.

  He refused to abandon it even though both Biff and Charlie could propel themselves pretty well on skates with blades. They were no threat for Olympic gold. They’d never hoist the Stanley Cup. But they could get from hither to yon without going ass over teakettle. And neither one had ever strapped on skates before coming to Guilford. It didn’t seem fair.

  A snowball flew past Rob, not quite close enough to make him duck. Everybody from age four on up threw them all the time. One angry town meeting had resulted in an ordinance against using a rock core. A good many people had wanted an ordinance banning any and all snowball-flinging. That failed-too many folks enjoyed it. The failure helped make the meeting angry.

  Rob enjoyed snowballs. There went Jim Farrell, with his charcoal-gray fedora-the most recognizable one, perhaps, since Fiorello La Guardia’s-just aching to be knocked off. To scoop up snow in mittened fingers took only a few seconds. To let fly seemed to take no time at all.

  The snowball flew straight and true. It paffed into the side of Farrell’s hat. There it exploded. The hat ended up at Farrell’s feet. His own hair wasn’t much lighter than the snow through which he walked.

  He stooped to retrieve the fedora, carefully brushing what was left of the snowball from it before setting it back on his head at the proper jaunty angle. Only then did he look around to see which miscreant might have assailed him.

  He looked no farther than Rob. “Oh. You.” He might have found half of Rob in his apple. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “Why, Professor Farrell, sir, whatever could you be talking about?” Rob exuded innocence the way an EPA toxic-waste site exuded dioxin.

  “So you deny it, do you?” Farrell rumbled. He stooped again. When he came up, he came up firing. The snowball caught Rob dead center. The retired history professor beamed. “That’ll teach you, you rapscallion! I couldn’t have done better with a catapult.”