“Don’t feel like it,” Lindsey answered. Rob let an eyebrow climb toward his hairline. Lindsey liked cider fine, thank you very much. But something in her voice warned him not to push it right then. It wasn’t something Dick Barber would have noticed. Rob sure did, though. If you were going to make this husband-and-wife business work, you needed to pick up on stuff like that.
After more gloating about the Russians’ embarrassment and distress, Barber went on his way. Rob turned to Lindsey and asked, “How come you didn’t feel like cider?”
“It’s not a good plan when you’re going to have a baby,” she told him.
He got up and hugged her. Even with the potbellied stove in the apartment, it wasn’t warm. They both wore too many layers to make the hug as enjoyable as it might have been.
“That’s wonderful,” Rob said into her ear. He wasn’t altogether caught by surprise. Any tolerably alert husband notices more about his wife than subtle shifts in her tone of voice. He knows how her calendar runs and when she’s due. He also knows when she’s late, even if he doesn’t say anything about it till she brings it up herself.
This time, she squeezed him. “Now we have to decide where we’re going to move after the kid comes out,” she said.
His jaw dropped. “Oh, yeah? I like it here. If you don’t, you sure did a good job on the coverup. Richard Nixon would be proud.” Nixon was even more before his time than the end of the Cold War, but he prided himself on coming out with weird things every now and then.
To his annoyance, Lindsey barely noticed. “I like it here fine—for us,” she said. “But I want my son or daughter to have some possibilities in life. Possibilities that go further than moose hunter or fur trapper or beer brewer or scavenger.”
“Ooh.” Rob’s mouth twisted. That hit close to home, all right—too close. Lives here, including his own, were catch-as-catch-can. He did whatever he could to help put food on the table. Whenever Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had a gig, he played. He gave guitar lessons. He hunted. He fished. He’d never ice-fished till he came to Maine, but he sure had now. He chopped wood. He swapped this for that and that for the other thing, hoping he came out ahead more often than not.
As a teacher, Lindsey had more order in her life. What she didn’t have was more money. Maine’s state government ignored the great expanse north and west of the Interstate almost as thoroughly as the Feds did. It concentrated its attention on the part of the state that had some small chance of paying bills rather than just running them up.
With the collapse of cash in this stretch of the country, the local school district had given up trying to collect taxes. Families with kids in school helped keep teachers in food and fuel, and did other things they needed. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t, their kids stopped going, as they would have in the nineteenth century. Even Jim Farrell called the system ugly, but it worked most of the time. The locals had taken care of themselves and helped their neighbors before the eruption. They were more used to it than people in some other places would have been.
One of those other places was the Southern California where Rob Ferguson had grown up. He pointed that out to Lindsey, saying, “Are you sure you want to move? People who live here really belong. It’s not like that in most of the country—I mean, totally not like that.”
His wife stuck out her chin and looked stubborn. “Suppose the baby gets sick or gets hurt. Or you do, or I do. We’re living on borrowed time here. People die every year because they run out of it.”
She wasn’t wrong. In the Guilford clinic, Dr. Bhattacharya did what he could with what he had. He didn’t have much, and seemed to have less every year. The closest hospital was in Dover-Foxcroft, more than ten miles east along the Piscataquis. An ambulance did run during the brief summer. A snowmobile or two were kept alive for the rest of the year. But, for anything this side of the worst emergencies, the hospital was at least two hours away. And it hadn’t been much of a hospital before the supervolcano. Like Dr. Bhattacharya here, its staff did what they could. They couldn’t do enough.
“It’s funny,” Rob said. “For years before the band washed up here, I never had a home. Nothing close to a home except maybe our SUVs. We were on the road all the time. We’d play somewhere, overnight in some cheap motel, and then hop in the Explorers and play somewhere else—two states away, half the time. So I wondered if I’d go stir-crazy when we got stuck in Guilford.” He broke into ersatz Dylan: “Oh, Lord, stuck in Guilford/With the SoCal blues again!”
“Oh, Lord!” Lindsey agreed. Rob winced. She went on, “If you didn’t get stuck here, we wouldn’t’ve met.”
“I know. That’s what I’m saying,” Rob answered. “This is a good place even if it’s the boonies—maybe especially because it’s the boonies. Please, Mr. Custer, I don’t wanna go.”
“But we’re on the ragged edge of civilization two or three months a year,” Lindsey said. “The rest of the time, we’ve fallen over the edge.”
“I know,” Rob said. That he admitted it seemed to surprise her. He continued, “Is that a bug or a feature, though? As long as the rest of the world leaves us alone, aren’t we better off?”
“You’ve spent too much time listening to Dick and Jim,” Lindsey said, which wasn’t a charge he could exactly deny. “And what happens when Junior”—she set a hand on her still-flat belly—“turns eighteen? Even assuming there’s something like high school here then and he, she, whatever, graduates from it, what about college?”
The University of Hard Knocks trembled on the tip of Rob’s tongue. He gave the serious effort he needed to keep it from falling off. Despite his love for smartass cracks, he came equipped with enough sense to see that that one would land him in deep, deep kimchi. It might be true, but that made it worse, not better.
Instead, he said, “Hey, the University of Maine at Orono is still a going concern, right? That’s not super far away. It’s—what? Sixty or eighty miles? Something like that. It’d be doable.”
He did make Lindsey stop and think. But she shot back, “How will we pay for tuition? Moose meat?”
If there are any moose left when Junior hits college age, great. One more thing Rob didn’t say. What he did say was, “We’ll work something out. Not like we’re the only ones up here worrying about this kind of stuff.”
“Well… maybe.” His wife still didn’t sound convinced. But she also didn’t sound like someone who wanted to pull up stakes and head for warmer country before dinner. To Rob, that felt like a victory, and not such a small one, either.
XI
Vanessa Ferguson had a way of walking around with a chip on her shoulder. To her, there was rarely any such thing as a slight. If something was big enough for her to notice, it was big enough to send her off to war, flags flying and bugles blaring.
Being as she was, she fired the first shot more often than not. And so she had even more trouble than most people might have in getting over the Pearl Harbor that Bronislav Nedic had dropped into her life.
She’d loved him. She’d trusted him. She’d opened the postern gate in the fortress of her self and let him inside. She hadn’t just let him inside—she’d led him inside.
She’d let him inside her body, and she’d let him inside her heart. He’d screwed her and he’d screwed her, respectively. He’d taken what he wanted and he’d bailed out. Vanessa had disposed of a string of boyfriends. Now it was her turn.
It damaged her all kinds of ways. Her bank account, for instance. B of A admitted she hadn’t made the withdrawals that drained her savings. But it said they were her fault; she’d given Bronislav access to her personal information. That she didn’t know she’d done it till too late was no excuse. The bank’s fugheadedness held just enough truth to infuriate her all the more.
And now there he was in Mobile, sitting pretty in the restaurant he’d always talked about. He’d cared more for the restaurant than for her. No doubt he figured he could always find another woman. With those Nicolas Cage-y looks and tho
se big, sad eyes, no doubt he could, too. But a restaurant, now, a restaurant didn’t come along every day.
A restaurant didn’t go away every day, either. Not even her father the famous cop had been able to make the Mobile police get off their sorry, lazy asses and bust Bronislav. He was making money in their town. Such birds were so rare these days, they didn’t want to pluck this one.
Her dad hadn’t passed on Gabe Sanchez’s crack about the package bomb. He hadn’t needed to. Vanessa thought of it on her own. The only thing that held her back was a healthy fear of getting caught.
Messing up Bronislav’s life with computer skullduggery, the way he’d messed up hers, also crossed her mind. But she didn’t know any of his passwords. Even if she had, she lacked the computer fu to do anything with them.
Which didn’t mean she didn’t know people who had such arcane talents. Several of them infested Nick Gorczany’s widget works, starting with the big boss himself. Vanessa disliked him too much even to think of approaching him about it.
Some of the other engineers and programmers, though… She spoke, in a hypothetical way, to Bruce McRaa. No, the HTML whiz couldn’t navigate an English sentence with a gun, a camera, and a road atlas. But put him in front of a monitor and all of a sudden he knew what he was doing.
No matter how hypothetically Vanessa talked at lunch one day, he knew what she had in mind, too. Maybe he wasn’t as naïve as he looked. Well, he couldn’t be, not if he wanted to stay alive. “That’s interesting,” he said when she got done. “Illegal, of course, but interesting.”
“That asshole didn’t care about what was legal when he shafted me,” Vanessa said savagely.
“That was his choice, not mine,” Bruce replied. “He must have thought the reward was worth the risk. What kind of reward would we be talking about here?”
Vanessa remembered a bumper sticker she’d seen on a truck bumper—not Bronislav’s. GAS, GRASS, OR ASS—NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE, that was what it said. She remembered TANSTAAFL, too: the annoying libertarian acronym and mantra. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. She had no idea whether the enchanter Bruce was a libertarian, though a disturbing number of guys who did things with and to computers seemed to be. Whether he was or not, he understood quid pro quo just fine.
“How much do you want?” Vanessa asked. “If you think I’ll pay you as much as he stole, forget about it. I don’t just want revenge. I want to get back what’s mine, if I can.”
“Oh-kay.” Bruce blew a speck—probably dandruff—off his glasses. “Well, there’s money and then there are other things,” he said at last.
She looked at him. That she thought about it, at least for a second, said she wasn’t the person who’d moved to Denver not long before the supervolcano erupted. But she didn’t think about it much longer than a second. She remembered too well how much she’d hated herself and the whole goddamn world every time she blew that stinking FEMA dweeb in exchange for services rendered. If she had a choice between stringing up Micah Husak and Bronislav, she would choose the FEMA dweeb every time. Bronislav stole her money, yeah. Micah had robbed her of her self-respect.
“Let’s just forget about it, then,” she told the enchanter Bruce.
He looked disappointed. What really pissed her off was, he looked surprised. “I thought you wanted this bad,” he said.
“Badly.” The correction came almost without conscious thought, as it would have were she editing him on paper. She went on, “Anything that went on between us, that would be bad.”
“I don’t think so.” Lewd imaginings filled Bruce’s voice.
Vanessa sighed. “Of course you don’t. It’s always good for guys. But letting somebody screw me to get even with somebody for screwing me… That still leaves me screwed, if you know what I mean.”
If it could make a computer or a tablet or a smartphone jump through hoops, Bruce understood it the way Theocritus understood Doric dialect (that Theocritus had used the Doric dialect was one of the useless factoids she remembered from her time with Bryce). If it had to do with human beings and the way they worked, the HTML wizard was a clueless git.
One of the field marks of a clueless git was that he was clueless about being a git. The enchanter Bruce proved he belonged: “You might like me better after you get to know me that way.”
“If you’re the kind of guy who expects to get his dick wet in exchange for doing something for a woman, nobody in her right mind is gonna like you.” Vanessa spelled it out as plainly as she could: plainly enough to make Bruce McRaa turn pink. Even Micah Husak hadn’t been that dumb. In fact, the FEMA dweeb had got off on having her go down on him when she couldn’t stand him.
“Well, excuse me for breathing,” Bruce said, as snarkily as he could.
“Since we won’t be doing anything for—or to—each other, I suppose I will,” Vanessa answered. “If we were… If we were, you’d want to worry about whether you kept on doing it.”
He started to laugh. Almost as soon as he did, he realized she wasn’t kidding, not even a little bit. The laugh came out as a strangled snort and quickly cut off.
That left her with better feelings about herself than she’d had in Camp Constitution. But it also left her without payback on Bronislav Nedic. If men weren’t such rotten horndogs… It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been plenty hot for Bronislav while they were together. The bastard knew what he was doing in bed, damn him. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t a bastard. It only defined what kind of bastard he was: a fucking bastard, of course.
Not too long after they got back to the widget works, Nick Gorczany called Vanessa into his office. He steepled his fingers and looked at her over them. “Did you ask Bruce to do something that might be illegal?” he inquired.
Bruce, Vanessa presumed, had been in there ahead of her, telling tales. “Who, me?” she said, doing her best to project innocence. “Of course not, Mr. Gorczany. Asking anyone to do something illegal would be, well, illegal.”
“Right,” Gorczany said tightly. Maybe her innocence projector had a burnt-out bulb. He went on, “Bruce went into some detail.”
“Did he?” Vanessa said. Her boss nodded. She continued, “Was one of the details he went into that he said he’d do it if I put out for him?”
“Mm, no,” Nick Gorczany answered. “You told him no dice?”
“You bet your sweet ass I told him no dice,” Vanessa said. “Yeah, I want to get even with Bronislav. But I don’t want to be even with Bronislav and then spend all my time figuring out how to get even with Bruce.”
“Oh.” Gorczany thought that over. After a few seconds, he nodded. “I think that’s a good plan. I also think Bruce may not know how lucky he is not to get all the way on your bad side.”
“Why, Mr. Gorczany, sir! You say the sweetest things!” Vanessa batted her eyelashes at him.
She made him laugh. “Okay. We’ll leave it there, then,” he said between chuckles. But he got serious again in a hurry. “Do me a favor, please. If you want to get even with this guy, that’s your business. Can’t say I blame you, either. If you use people who work here to help you get even, though, and especially if you get them to do things for you that are against the law… In that case, it turns into my business. So don’t do that any more, all right?”
“All right,” Vanessa said reluctantly. It wasn’t, not so far as she was concerned, but she could see where Gorczany was coming from. If one of his employees got into trouble for doing something like that, the widget works could wind up in trouble, too.
She walked out of the boss man’s office. A few minutes later, the enchanter Bruce walked back in. When he emerged once more, he seemed unhappy with the world. Catching Vanessa’s eye, he sent her a dirty look. Her answering stony stare made him find a new direction for his gaze in a hurry.
That would have been funny had Vanessa been in any mood for jokes. She wasn’t, and making Bruce flinch was no more reason for pride than scaring some other puppy. Damn his big, stupid mouth to hell and gone
anyway! Because he’d tattled to Nick Gorczany, she couldn’t recruit anyone else at the widget works to give Bronislav what he deserved (and a little more besides—anything worth doing was worth overdoing, wasn’t it?).
Life wasn’t fair sometimes. Life sucked, when you got right down to it. And so did all the alternatives.
• • •
One of the amazing things about kids, Kelly Ferguson was discovering, was how fast they changed. Deborah was rolling over. She was crawling. She started to talk, and to walk. All of a sudden, she was potty-trained. Kelly definitely approved of that. So did Colin. “Looks like she’ll turn out to be a human being after all,” he exulted.
Kelly looked at him. “And how long have people been saying the same thing about you?” she asked in her mildest tones.
Her husband didn’t so much as blink. “Hey, babe, I’m a cop. Cops don’t even come close to human beings. Ask anybody. Heck, even the stupid cat knows that.”
The stupid cat in question lay asleep on the rug in front of him. The cat’s name was Playboy, in celebration of Marshall’s best sale. In spite of his name, he’d been fixed. One of the secretaries at the station had been sure her cat was fixed, too, regardless of the attention all the male felines in the neighborhood gave it. Four kittens later, she discovered she was wrong. Colin brought Playboy home with the idea that Deborah would like him.
Deborah did. She loved him, in fact. She squealed and chased him and rubbed his fur the wrong way when she petted him. Playboy was fine with grownups. Whenever Deborah showed up on his radar, he ran like hell.
He was a handsome beast, a gray tabby with an enormous plumy tail. Even the vet thought his tail was impressive, and the vet had seen and traumatized whole regiments of kitties. Unfortunately, while standing in the line for tail twice, Playboy had forgotten about the line for brains.
Colin leaned down to pet the cat. Playboy purred and stretched and rolled over so his belly fur stuck up in the air. He wasn’t a lap cat, but he was friendly enough… on his own terms, and always provided you didn’t shriek “Kitty!” in his ear when he wasn’t expecting it.
Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3 Page 18