The waitress brought the—handwritten—bill. Louise paid it. She and her daughter walked out together. As Vanessa unlocked her bike, she lit a cigarette. “When did you start doing that?” Louise exclaimed. “It’s not healthy.”
“You live. Then you die. So what? While I live, I want to live, dammit, not just exist.” Vanessa blew out smoke. A little sheepishly, she went on, “I don’t smoke much. I can’t afford to. These friggin’ things are expensive.”
“You shouldn’t do it at all,” Louise said.
“Yes, Mommy,” Vanessa said, which meant she wouldn’t listen. When had she ever? She pedaled away. Sighing, Louise walked toward the bus stop.
XV
Rob Ferguson tried never to miss a Guilford town meeting. You had to make your own entertainment around here these days, and town meetings held more of it than anything else he could think of. They didn’t charge admission, either.
Jim Farrell stood at the pulpit in the Episcopal church. That would have been worth the price of admission if there were one. The wind outside made the windows rattle. It was below freezing out there, but not really cold. Rob’s ideas about what cold meant had gone through some changes since he came to Maine.
“I have word from On High,” Farrell said, as if he were the minister who officiated when Sunday rolled around. “Well, actually I have word from up north and word from down in the wilds of Washington. For people will write to a harmless backwoods hick in the wilds of forgotten Maine. They will unburden themselves to him, knowing full well that nothing they say in their letters will ever reach the news channels they still enjoy to the fullest in their oh-so-civilized lands.”
“Subtle, isn’t he?” Lindsey whispered to Rob as chuckles ran through the church.
“Like an avalanche,” he whispered back. Their son, Colin Marshall Ferguson, dozed in his arms. Lindsey hadn’t wanted to name the baby after any male in her family. Her mother and father had gone through a divorce at least as unpleasant as the one that split Rob’s folks. Her father’s current girlfriend was drop-dead gorgeous… and about her age.
The more or less benevolent more or less dictator of Maine north and west of the Interstate rolled on: “One of the things they tell me is that a big part of northeastern North America’s power grid depends on electricity from plants along the chief rivers in northern Quebec. Now, friends, with all due local pride I say that there are not any great number of places with more miserable, colder climates on God’s half-frozen earth than this patch which we ourselves infest. But northern Quebec, I kid you not, is one of them.”
More chuckles from the packed house. Farrell acknowledged them with a tip of his trademark fedora. He overacted and overwrote. He would have bombed on TV, but live he was terrific.
And he had things to say: “So far, they’ve managed to keep those hydroelectric plants going in spite of what the supervolcano has done to the weather. So far. But the winters keep getting worse. If those rivers freeze up and don’t thaw out, the power plants up there can’t make power. And if that dread day comes—no, when it comes—do you know what happens to the power grid in most of the Northeast?”
“What happens?” a voice called from the audience. Not just any old voice: Dick Barber’s voice. When you needed a particular question asked at a particular time, you planted a shill to make sure it would be. You did if you were a cynical old fox like Farrell, anyhow.
The retired history professor beamed out at his erstwhile campaign manager, as if surprised and pleased he’d inquired. Yeah, as if, Rob thought.
“I’ll tell you what happens. The grid goes down, that’s what,” Farrell answered. “So millions upon millions of people get to find out what we’ve enjoyed ever since the eruption.”
He still sounded droll, but nobody was laughing any more. People up here, people in thinly populated, self-sufficient northern Maine, had more or less managed to muddle through without much in the way of electricity. How would New York City or Philadelphia or Buffalo do? Rob was no prophet, so he couldn’t be sure ahead of time. But he could guess, and none of his guesses was optimistic.
“And on that cheerful note, I give you back to more local concerns,” Farrell said. “You do need to know, though, that the rest of the land of the free and the home of inflation may forget about us altogether, not just mostly.”
There was commerce with the rest of the country at high summer, when things thawed out enough to permit it. New clothes came in, and canned goods, and batteries. So did such essentials as whiskey and rum and wine and beer. Moonshine popped up all over the place in these parts. The turnips and potatoes that gave their lives in the service of distillation did not die in vain. What the amateurs turned out was longer in kick than in flavor, though. When summer lasted long enough for barley to ripen, there was homebrew beer, too. Some of that was pretty good, but supply never matched demand.
This past summer, a little weed had made it up here, too—unofficially, of course. Rob smoked some. It was as much about nostalgia as about getting loaded. And smoking anything hurt when you hadn’t done it for a long time. But for alcohol, he was pretty much locked into the Aristotelian world. So was everyone else in these parts.
After news that a big chunk of the country’s population might have to find a way to live without Twitter and streaming Netflix and porn (to say nothing about details like lights and water pumps), arguments about things like moose-meat rations and the proper punishment for public drunkenness seemed less important—and less amusing—than they would have otherwise. When little Colin started fussing, Rob was glad for the excuse to leave early.
“Brr!” he said as soon as he and Lindsey and the baby got outside and the wind hit them. But it was an ordinary complaint, not the kind that meant they’d all turn into icicles if they didn’t get inside in the next thirty seconds.
The sky was clear. A million stars blazed down from it. Rob had never seen skies like this, skies where the Milky Way really was a glowing river through blackness, in SoCal or anywhere else. You didn’t get skies like this unless you went somewhere far, far from electricity—or unless the electricity went somewhere far, far from you.
Northern lights danced. Some of the streamers were maroon, others golden. A shooting star scratched a brief, bright, silent trail through them. Somewhere out there were the probes the USA had launched in happier times. For all Rob knew, they were still sending back data. Once upon a time, he’d thought space exploration was the most important thing humanity could do. He couldn’t imagine it would ever mean anything to him again.
“That’s sad,” Lindsey said when he spoke his thought aloud as they made their way back through the darkness.
“Yeah. It is. But my thoughts have pulled back—pulled in. It’s like I told you when you wanted to head south after Colin was born: I’m a small-town guy now. My horizon barely has Newport in it these days, let alone Mars or Jupiter.”
Newport was the small town—small, but bigger than Guilford—where the road up to here branched off from I-95. It wasn’t even forty miles away. Without a car or a bus or a railroad, though, forty miles was two days’ travel. Now he got why, before the Industrial Revolution, most people never went farther than twenty-five miles from home their whole lives. He’d known the factoid for a long time. Here in this postindustrial corner of the world, he got it.
He got why darkness was such a big deal in those days, too. Without electric lights to push it back, it was always there at night, always lurking, always waiting to reach out and drown you.
Matches were another thing that came in when the weather was good. Rob used one to light a candle that sat on a table just inside the door. The flame gave out a dim, warm, yellow light—enough so you wouldn’t break your neck, not nearly enough to make you forget the darkness it pushed back a little. You could get candles or torches any time. He saved the battery-powered lamps for when he really needed them.
The candle also gave out a strong, hot smell. It was made from moose tallow. Someone in The
Jungle—a book everyone got grossed out with in high school—said they used every bit of the pig except the squeal. Had moose squealed, some clever soul in Guilford would have found a way to get some mileage from the noise.
Lindsey fed the stove firewood. It was as much of a heater as the apartment had. Little Colin’s crib sat close to it, to get the most benefit. The baby went to bed without much bother.
Rob and Lindsey walked into the bedroom. It was a good deal chillier, though Dick Barber would have had no trouble getting through a night in it with just a Russian greatcoat. The two of them had more than a greatcoat to keep them from freezing. The bed was piled high with quilts and coverlets. Rob couldn’t imagine any bed in this part of the world that wasn’t.
He yawned as he slid under the thick layers of insulation. “Getting ready to hibernate through another winter,” he said.
“You think you’re kidding,” Lindsey said, settling in beside him.
“Who says? When it’s dark, dark, dark as soon as the sun goes down, what do you do? What can you do? You fall asleep. And you stay asleep till the sun decides to come up again, no matter how long that takes. I bet the Eskimos at the North Pole sleep six months straight.”
“Well, you can do something in the dark besides sleep,” Lindsey said. “If you couldn’t, we wouldn’t have Colin.”
“A point,” Rob admitted. “But not tonight, Josephine. I’m pooped. Shall we make a date for tomorrow?”
“Sure, if we aren’t too pooped then,” Lindsey said. When they made dates like that, they did try to keep them. If life got in the way, though, then it did, that was all. If not tomorrow, the day after. Grabbing his jollies right this minute mattered less to Rob now that he was well past thirty.
Lindsey got up before daybreak, because Colin still woke up hungry in the middle of the night. Messing about with formula in near darkness, getting it not too warm and not too cold, would have been a major pain in the ass. Breast milk was a hell of a lot more convenient.
Rob said so after Lindsey got the baby settled and came back to bed herself. “Oh, Lord, you’d better believe it!” she exclaimed.
“And it comes in much nicer packages,” he added slyly.
“Hey! Don’t handle the merchandise!” she said. “You were the one who was pooped. Well, I am, too, and I want to go back to sleep.”
Some experiments worked. Some didn’t. You never knew which were which till you tried them. Before long, not too miffed because his experiment failed, Rob was also asleep again.
In the old days, the first thing he would have done when he got up was to check the Net for news about Quebec’s hydroelectric plants. If he’d had a smartphone with a satellite connection (and, not so incidentally, some way to pay for the charges it ran up), he still might have done it. Since he owned no such critter, he didn’t spend much—or any—time worrying about it. If the lights went out from Boston down to Washington, he figured word would get here sooner or later. And if that turned out to be later rather than sooner, his life wouldn’t change one whole hell of a lot.
Back in the days when he’d enjoyed such quick, effortless connectivity, he wouldn’t have believed that for a second. You had to keep up. You had to stay informed. Right now, or you’d kick yourself for not knowing.
He shrugged, yawned, and went into the kitchen to take a look at his son.
• • •
Marshall Ferguson was still getting used to the view of a new back yard. He’d spent his freshman year in the dorms at UCSB, and the rest of his time there in the kind of ratty apartment that had had a swarm of college students in it before him and probably had yet another sophomore or junior making a mess of it right now. Other than that, he’d lived at his folks’ house—well, his dad’s house these past good many years—since he was a little kid.
So he knew what things were supposed to look like when he raised his head from the typewriter (or, when there was power, the computer) keyboard. And they didn’t look that way any more. It took some getting used to.
For one thing, he wasn’t on the second floor any more. The house Paul and Janine had had—the house he and Janine had now—was only one story. It was in Torrance, but at the north end of the town: closer to San Atanasio High than he had been in San Atanasio, in fact. It dated from some time in the 1960s, from just before the days when all the built-ins would have been harvest gold or avocado green. Paul and Janine had got it as a foreclosure, which meant the payments were as near nothing as made no difference.
The house was small. The yard was good-sized. Back then, they hadn’t believed in filling the entire lot with architecture. A big old oleander grew in one corner of the yard. There was one at Dad’s house, too. The pink flowers were pretty, but you had to be careful with kids around. Oleanders were poisonous.
Marshall typed a sentence. He frowned, used some correction fluid, and took a stab at fixing it. He nodded to himself. Yes, that was better. He frowned again, looking for an interesting way to get from where he was now to where he wanted to be.
It was, perhaps not surprisingly, a story about a man who meets a woman he used to like just at the time when her marriage is coming apart at the seams. He was having trouble doing a good job with the woman’s soon-to-be-ex. The guy kept coming out like Paul, and Paul, dammit, just wasn’t dramatically interesting.
When Janine told him to go, he’d gone. He hadn’t made much of a fuss. Hell, he hadn’t raised any fuss to speak of. Maybe getting his marching orders was as big a relief for him as giving them was for Janine. The thing was over, done, finished, finito, and they both knew it.
Which, in a way, relieved Marshall. If somebody knocked on the front door, it might be a salesman. It might be a neighbor who needed to borrow some sugar. It wouldn’t be Paul with a Glock in his hand and revenge in his heart.
Paul had moved back in with his folks and his scummy brother. He was a CPA; his brother preferred armed robbery to the kind you pulled off with the tax code. Phil was out on parole after his latest misadventure. Janine didn’t like him, but had been fond of his two little boys (though she didn’t care for their mothers).
In real life, an accountant who moved back in with his parents was reassuring. He’d be dull in a story. Marshall pondered ways to perk him up without turning him into someone who toted a Glock.
He was deep in thought and far from the real world when somebody kissed him on the back of the neck. Somebody—that was what went through his head while he jerked and jumped. Even before his butt hit the chair again, he realized the somebody wasn’t real likely to be anyone but Janine.
She giggled and ran a hand through his hair. “You looked so cute sitting there with your face all blank. You didn’t even know I’d come home.”
“Cute. Right.” Had anybody else done that to him, he would have been furious. He still was, but when the person who’d distracted you was your girlfriend-going-on-fiancée there were, or could be, compensations. He pulled her down onto his lap and kissed her. But when he started to take her back to the bedroom to finish what they’d started, she wiggled away.
“Not right now,” she said. “I just wanted to, you know, wake you up.”
“Well, you did. Now—”
“Now I’ve got to go shopping,” Janine said.
“What? It won’t keep for half an hour?”
She shook her head. “Not enough hours in the day as is, not when I’ve got the day job. We’ll see what happens after dinner.” She fluttered her fingers and hurried off.
Because she had the nine-to-five, Marshall did a lot of the shopping. He didn’t know what she had to get that was more urgent than fooling around. Muttering to himself, he tried to pick up the story again. He wouldn’t have been so irked if this were the first time she’d teased him while he was writing and then not come through. She’d done it twice before, though. That wasn’t good. That was a trend, and not one he liked.
You had to get used to certain things when you started living with someone. Marshall grokked tha
t. Janine hated peas and zucchini. Okay. Marshall knew his world wouldn’t end without them. She folded towels and T-shirts in ways different from the ones he’d learned. He could deal with that, too. He could even handle her squeezing toothpaste from the middle of the tube, no matter if he heard his father growling inside his head whenever she did.
Cockteasing, though… That was harder to handle, especially when it was cockteasing that interrupted his work. He wondered if Janine knew she was doing it, or how badly timed it was.
He also wondered if he wanted to make an issue of it. She went on and on about how controlling Paul was, and how that drove her nuts. Wouldn’t she think Marshall was acting the same way?
He scratched his head, mumbled, and eventually got back to writing. He was making up his story as he went along. He was making up living with Janine as we went along, too. He’d had girlfriends before, but the only people he’d lived with were his folks and, for that freshman year, the Korean guy he’d roomed with at the Santa Barbara dorm.
Janine, on the other hand, got what she knew about living with a man from her time with Paul. Marshall wasn’t just like her ex. That was one of the reasons she’d dumped Paul for him, or it should have been. But she’d got Paul to pay attention to her by yelling. So she yelled at Marshall, too, often snarkily.
That wore thin even faster than getting teased while he was writing did, because it happened more often. Finally, Marshall said, “Hey, you don’t have to go on like that, you know? I was already taking care of it.”
His new squeeze looked astonished. “You were, weren’t you?”
“Um, yeah,” Marshall said. The dishes had been going from the drainer into the cabinet. As soon as that got done, the silverware would go into the drawer, and the glasses into the cupboard over the stove. If you noticed what was happening and what was likely to happen, it should have been obvious before you started yelling.
Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3 Page 25