Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Instead of reretaliating, Rob clapped his hands in muffled admiration. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but never one of those before. Sounds like a hip-hop onion, you know?”

  Farrell made a face, more at the music than at the pun. “Loud obscenity never appealed to me, even with a heavy bass line.”

  “Well, not to me, either,” Rob admitted. “If you’re white and you aren’t Eminem, you’ve got no business rapping.”

  “No one has any business rapping,” Farrell said firmly. He sighed. Vapor gushed from his mouth and nose. “I have always taken it as an article of faith that the Founders knew what they were doing when they added the First Amendment to the Constitution, but some of what’s passed for music the past twenty years does make me wonder.”

  Rob bowed, which made him need to grab his cap to keep it from falling off. “At your service, Professor.”

  Farrell shook his head. “I wasn’t referring to you and your fellow demented Darwinian amphibians. I truly wasn’t. You’re amusing, even clever-not something I say lightly.”

  “I know. Thanks.” Rob bowed again, more sincerely than he’d expected. A compliment from Farrell was praise indeed, not least because the old man didn’t give forth with them very often.

  “And you don’t seem to feel obligated to blow out every eardrum within a furlong,” Farrell added.

  “That depends,” Rob said judiciously. “Since we got to Guilford, the power hasn’t been on much around here. Hard to knock crows out of the sky with acoustic guitars.”

  “You would if you could, you’re telling me.” Jim Farrell sighed again. “At my advanced age and state of decrepitude, I didn’t think I could be so easily despoiled of one of my few remaining illusions.”

  “Yeah, right. Now tell me another one.” Rob couldn’t match Farrell’s syntax or vocabulary, and sensibly didn’t try.

  “We’re going to come through this winter with the greatest of ease.” The de facto boss of Maine north and west of the Interstate threw back his head, almost far enough to make that trademark fedora fall off again. He laughed to show he was telling another one. He put enough vinegar in the laugh to show he didn’t expect to be taken seriously.

  “Yeah, right,” Rob repeated. He hadn’t come through this winter with the greatest of ease himself, not with that bullet grazing his leg he hadn’t. But that wasn’t what the professor was talking about, and they both knew it.

  Farrell adjusted the hat. His extravagant eyebrows twitched. “This past winter was colder than the one before it. Fool that I am, I hadn’t dreamt it could be. Those who are alleged to know about such things claim the one ahead will be harder yet.”

  One of the people alleged to know about such things was the stepmother Rob still hadn’t met. He wondered, not for the first time, if this wasn’t the right moment to make tracks for the opposite corner of the country. Things in SoCal weren’t. . so bad. What came out of his mouth, though, was “As long as we’ve got firewood and meese and MREs, we’ll get by.”

  “Why anyone would want Reagan’s attorney general. .” Farrell held up a gloved finger. “He was a fat fellow-I give you that. Tubbier than I am, which isn’t easy. Render him down for oil, and he could likely keep the lamps burning quite a while.”

  Rob hadn’t been talking about the Meese called Ed, and knew Farrell knew as much. The professor enjoyed, even reveled in, being difficult. Rob eyed him. “You’ve dropped a good bit of weight since I first met you,” he said truthfully.

  “So have you. So has everybody in these parts,” Farrell replied. What twisted his mouth wasn’t a smile, even if it tried to be. “We’re eating less and working harder. Once upon a time, large parts of the world had so very much that even poor people could become obese, and commonly did. As recently as a hundred years ago, that would have been unimaginable. My Greeks and Romans would never have believed it.”

  “Huh,” Rob said. Farrell was good at teasing, or sometimes startling, thoughtful noises out of people. “Hadn’t looked at it that way, but you’re not wrong.” When the illegal immigrants who mowed lawns in L.A. sported double chins and potbellies-and a lot of them had-the traditional meaning of poor needed revising.

  Well, the supervolcano had gone and revised it, all right. It sure as hell had.

  “‘Once upon a time,’ I said.” Farrell sounded as academically mournful as if he were discussing the fall of Rome. “No more, not around here. They say we may be able to plant the Midwest again in a few years. But if the weather keeps getting worse, how much will grow even if we can? We are still working through our pre-eruption surplus, and sooner or later-sooner, now, I fear-we’ll come to the bottom of that.”

  “We’ve got the mooses.” Rob tossed out another possible plural. The word wasn’t so bad as mongoose, but it came close.

  “We’ve barely had enough to feed us this time till warmer weather comes again.” Farrell gestured with that index finger once more. “Nota bene: I do not say warm weather. This benighted part of the world won’t see warm weather till long after I’m dead and buried-or perhaps I should be cremated, if I ever aim to warm up in this world. But I digress.”

  “You do? I’m shocked, Professor. Shocked, I tell you!” Rob hadn’t seen Casablanca for nothing.

  “If digression was good enough for Herodotus, it’s good enough for me,” Farrell said. And he digressed some more: “There are two kinds of modern historians of the ancient world, you know.”

  “Now that you mention it,” Rob said, “I didn’t.”

  He slowed Jim Farrell down not a jot. “There are those who like Herodotus, and there are those who like Thucydides. They’re easy to tell apart. The ones who like Thucydides are the ones with the tight assholes.”

  Rob didn’t know what he’d thought Farrell would come out with. Whatever it was, that wasn’t it. He barked surprised laughter. Then he said, “I thought we were talking about moose.” Maybe doing it right would keep the professor on track.

  “No, we were talking about the absence of moose,” Farrell said with relentless precision. Maybe doing it right wouldn’t, too. “And more and more of them are absent, too. Unless I’m very much mistaken, we’re hunting them far faster than they can breed. We’re having to go farther and farther afield for firewood, too.”

  That, Rob knew. Maine had abundant second-growth woods. Not many people had farmed its stony soil in the second half of the twentieth century, or in the twenty-first, and trees reclaimed fields by the multiple square mile. An awful lot of those trees, though, had gone up in smoke the past few winters. Many more would burn when the weather worsened again.

  Sooner or later, the woods would get logged out. Sooner or later, the ground would be bare and smooth as a baby’s backside-only much colder. Or maybe all the people would give up and move away before that happened.

  From what Rob had seen of Mainers, he doubted that. They would hang in there till a glacier grinding down out of the north drove them away. Even then, they’d dynamite the leading edge of the ice as long as they could.

  The wind picked up. Farrell stuck his hands into the pockets of his overcoat. After a moment, Rob followed suit. That glacier didn’t feel very far away at all.

  On my way home! The words chimed inside Vanessa. They should have had four exclamation points, to say nothing of a heavenly choir singing hosannas. “California, here I come!” she caroled, not exactly in tune but with great sincerity.

  Every mile she drove took her farther south, farther from Oklahoma City, farther from the supervolcano. Those miles didn’t take her all the way out of the ashfall zone, though. She’d have to go way the hell down into Mexico to manage that. She would sooner have gone to hell for real. Not that she had anything enormous against Mexico, but she was all done with detours.

  She hoped so, anyhow. The Toyota didn’t sound as smooth as it had when she drove it off the lot, and she wasn’t even out of Oklahoma yet. Would it keep running all the way to L.A.? “You fucker, you’ll keep running if I have to pus
h you across Texas,” she told the machine.

  It kept running. She supposed-she hoped-that meant it got the message. Southern Oklahoma didn’t look too bad. It mostly wasn’t coated in volcanic dust and ash. If it had been right after the eruption, rain and wind had got rid of the bulk of the shit. People were trying to grow crops here, which would have been unimaginable up in Kansas.

  But what you could see wasn’t always what you got. It wasn’t all of what you got, either. How much invisible crud still fouled the breeze? How much was getting sucked into her air filter? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, how much was getting sucked through the air filter and into her engine’s innards?

  If she got into trouble, what was she supposed to do? Get a tow back to Oklahoma City and complain to Carl and the tough broad who told him what to do? That was pretty goddamn funny, wasn’t it? She had no AAA. What point to keeping it up in Camp Constitution or while she was playing vulture in Kansas?

  She didn’t have plastic, either-just the cash in her billfold. She’d cut up her Wells Fargo Visa when she moved to Denver. Wells Fargo was wounded. All the big banks were, with the new mortgage shock that screwed whole states. But Wells Fargo kept breathing, wounded or not, which was a damn sight more than she could say for her Colorado credit union.

  Down I-35 she rolled. Somewhere near Fort Worth, she’d get on I-20, which would take her southwest to I-10. I-10 she knew, or at least the part of it that ran through Los Angeles. There, it went by the Santa Monica Freeway or the San Bernardino, depending on whether you were west or east of downtown. Yes, it ran all the way across the country, but she’d rarely needed to worry about the 3,000 miles or so that weren’t in her own back yard.

  Driving on I-35 could have been driving on the Interstate any place out in the boonies. The landscape was flat and boring, but she wasn’t there to sightsee. She just wanted to make miles. When she remembered she was driving on an expired license, she slowed down a little. A ticket was the last thing she wanted. When she forgot, she put the pedal to the metal again.

  She had to slow down not long after she got into Texas, because she met up with a hellacious rainstorm. Even though she cranked the wipers up to high, she couldn’t see farther than six inches past the end of her hood. That didn’t worry everybody. Several cars roared past her. She’d long been convinced that most people were assholes. Here they were, proving the point for her one more time.

  Then everybody slowed down, even the assholes. Vanessa feared she knew what that meant: somewhere up ahead was a fender-bender or worse. She hit the SEEK button on her radio again and again, trying to find a station that gave traffic reports.

  In L.A., it would have been easy. (In L.A., she would have known where on the dial to look, but she didn’t think of that.) Here, she went through a shitkicker station, someone explaining how the supervolcano was connected to the Blood of the Lamb, somebody singing mournfully in Spanish to the accompaniment of accordions and electric guitars, an earnest woman talking about post-eruption agricultural issues, and several other things she had less than no interest in listening to. She swore at the radio. That didn’t help her get the traffic news, but it made her feel a little better, anyhow.

  The rain drummed down on the Toyota’s roof. She wondered if it would leak. She remembered her old man talking about a car he’d had that was as wet inside as it was outside. The Toyota stayed dry, at least in the passenger compartment. That was one technology they’d managed to improve.

  She crawled along. At last, through the curtains of rain, she saw cops-or were they Texas Rangers? — in slickers doing something with a truck and trailer on this side of the road that closed it down to a single, very cramped, lane. A little farther on, a VW Beetle-a new, postmodern one, not an ancient, funky beater-lay on its back, looking too much like an oversized dead bug. The roof was partly smashed. She couldn’t see who, if anyone, was still inside. That might have been just as well.

  Because of the downpour and the wreck, she didn’t make it to the I-10 the first day, the way she’d hoped she would. She pulled off the Interstate in Cisco, still on the Fort Worth side of Abilene. There she discovered the Texas institution called the access road: the street full of motels and restaurants and gas stations paralleling the highway, with ramps leading on and off. They didn’t have those in L.A. or Denver. She found a place about on the level of the Super 8 she’d had in Oklahoma City and pushed greenbacks at the desk clerk.

  As she paid, she asked, “Do they know when the storm’s supposed to stop?”

  “Tomorrow? The day after?” the black woman answered. “Whenever it does. It’s in the Lord’s hands, honey.”

  “Terrific,” Vanessa muttered. She’d hoped the Lord might keep her from getting soaked when she walked across the parking lot to the Applebee’s next door, but He didn’t seem cooperative.

  And He wasn’t. Umbrella or no umbrella, she got good and wet by the time she reached the restaurant. She ordered a double gin and tonic to improve her attitude. The waitress carded her. From a guy, that might have been flattering. Here, it just pissed her off. Showing the deceased Colorado license alarmed her, too.

  But the waitress cared only about the birthdate. She went away. She came back with booze. What more could you want? Vanessa chose chicken fajitas from the menu. “If I never see another MRE as long as I live, that’ll still be too soon,” she told the gal.

  “You were in one of them camps?” the waitress asked. By her drawl, she’d never gone farther than a long piss from this miserable little hole in the ground.

  “Afraid so,” Vanessa said.

  “Lotsa folks are stuck in ’em, and they ain’t supposed to be real nice,” the waitress said. “You’re lucky you got out.”

  “Tell me about it,” Vanessa said with feeling. What did they call luck? The residue of design, that was what. It sounded impressive, and as if it ought to mean something. Odds were it was nothing but bullshit, the way most impressive-sounding slogans were. Her luck was the residue of not being too fussy about whom she blew, and she’d tried her best not to think about it since she did it.

  “Well, I’ll take your order to the kitchen.” The waitress hustled away. She was perky and built. A guy probably would have watched her ass. Vanessa concentrated on the level of gin in the glass. To her, that was a hell of a lot more interesting.

  If you expected grand cuisine, Applebee’s was the wrong place for you. Better than MREs, it definitely was. Vanessa got outside of the fajitas faster than she’d imagined she could. She got outside of another double gin and tonic, too. She lurched when she went back to the motel. She got wetter than she had on the way over to the restaurant, but she cared less.

  Next morning, the motel had donuts and granola bars and coffee in the lobby. The spread wasn’t exciting, but it was free. It was also fast. Vanessa wanted to get on the Interstate and make more miles. She hurried to the car. It was still raining hard. At least it wasn’t snowing. She hadn’t had enough practice with the white stuff to feel easy about driving in it.

  I-20 was full of eighteen-wheelers. Every time one of them growled past her, it threw more water onto her windshield than her wipers could handle. For a few scary seconds, she’d go next to blind. Then the wipers would catch up. She’d be able to see. . till the next honking big truck came along.

  She wondered why a no-account stretch of Interstate through the middle of Texas was as truck-packed as the Long Beach Freeway coming up from the harbor. And then, all of a sudden, she quit wondering. These swarms of diesel monsters were heading for Los Angeles, just like her. Without them, L.A. would starve, to say nothing of running out of everything it needed besides food.

  Somewhere a little farther along in west Texas, this highway would join I-10, and I-10 would take her home. Till she moved to Denver to be with Hagop, she’d spent her whole life in San Atanasio. If-no, when-she made it home, she vowed she wouldn’t live outside the city limits ever again, either.

  Miles. More miles. Still more miles. She couldn
’t go as fast as she wanted to, because of the rain and because of the accidents people who went as fast as they pleased to in spite of the rain got into. She snarled at those blockheads as she crawled past the smashed vehicles they’d infested. Some of the blockheads stood glumly on the asphalt, staring at the havoc they’d wreaked.

  When she finally inched past one horrendous pileup, she saw her snarls there were wasted. Some of the people who’d caused that wreck would never cause another one. She wasn’t sorry the rain kept her from getting a good look at the bodies. She had no trouble imagining what they’d look like. They’d look like the photos in her dad’s cop books, the ones Rob had used to gross her out when she was little. He’d got his butt warmed for that, which didn’t do squat to stop her nightmares.

  And then, just when she started getting close to the I-10, things slowed down again. Vanessa said something that should have turned all the rain pouring down on the whole state to superheated steam. That improved her attitude, but not the traffic.

  In due-no, in overdue-course, she discovered this slowdown didn’t spring from an accident. Instead, an electric signboard sat on the shoulder. It said I-1 °CHECKPOINT AHEAD. PREPARE TO STOP. Then it blinked out. And then it said the same thing again. Blink. Message. Blink. Message. .

  Vanessa lost track of how many times she read it before she rolled past the signboard at last. What she said about stopping for a checkpoint-what she said about preparing to stop for a checkpoint-made what she’d said about the earlier wrecks seem an endearment by comparison.

  Then she said some things about the idea of checkpoints, too. What did they need them for, whoever they were? Wasn’t this the United States? Wasn’t it a free country? If it was, what business did it have checking on who drove to California? You couldn’t hijack a state and fly it into a skyscraper or a government building.