The door opened again. This time, it was two Red Cross workers. One pushed a wheeled cart with flats of water bottles. The other’s cart was piled high with brown cardboard boxes. “MREs,” the man said, by way of explanation or apology. “We got ’em from the National Guard armory. They ain’t real exciting, but they beat the heck outa empty.”
Meals, Ready to Eat. Three lies in four words, Vanessa discovered. Maybe not a world record, but in the running. After she choked hers down, she decided it made Del Taco a Wolfgang Puck special by comparison. Looking at the box, she discovered hers had an expiration date eight years in the future. On the one hand, that made it fairly fresh for an MRE. On the other, it said even germs wanted jack diddly to do with the goddamn thing.
Still and all, the Red Cross man had a point. A full belly was better than a hungry one.
Vanessa chucked her trash into one of the garbage bags the Red Cross people left behind. Then she went outside and down the hall to the john-which, of course, meant she gave up the chunk of floor to which she’d laid claim. The TP was just this side of wax paper: even worse than the cheap, scratchy stuff offices used. And the roll was almost empty. What would they do when they ran out? She didn’t know, but she had the bad feeling she’d find out.
Mr. Class Clown came out of the boys’ room at the same time as she came out of the girls’. “Boy, that was fun,” he said, and held his nose.
“Yeah.” Vanessa nodded. With one toilet backed up, the girls’ room had been pretty rank, too.
“I wanna get outa here,” he said. His name was Luke. She’d found that out.
“Who doesn’t?” she said. “But how do you aim to do it?”
“I know how to hotwire a car,” he answered. “If it’ll take me out of the fuckin’ dust before it goes belly-up, I’m golden.”
Cop’s kid or not, Vanessa considered that with less disgust and more interest than she would have imagined before the supervolcano went boom. How many thefts and robberies could you blame on the eruption? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? That would have been her guess.
Luke went on, “Anybody thinks I’m gonna sit here scarfing down Meals Revolting to Eritreans, he damn well better think again.”
Vanessa had heard Meals Rejected by Ethiopians, but not his take on the name. That might have been why she said, “Want a passenger? I’ve got some cash. I can pay for gas and stuff.”
He looked her up and down. As he did, she realized she’d made a mistake. His wet gaze made her feel as if she had slugs crawling over her. “There’s other ways to pay,” he said, running his tongue over his lips as if he were running it into her ear. “Cheaper’n cash, and more fun, too.”
“No, thanks. Forget I asked,” she said, and hurried back to room K-1. He wouldn’t try anything with people around.
“Hey!” He hurried after her.
She turned around. The. 38 was in her hand, aimed a few inches north of his belly button. “I said no. I meant no. What part of that didn’t you follow?”
“Okay. Okay!” He drew back a couple of steps. He was smart enough to see he’d get ventilated if he came forward instead, then. That was good-for him. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. You ain’t such hot sit, trust me.”
He wasn’t so very smart after all. He was trying to wound her, but he thought she’d give a rat’s ass about anything that came out of his mouth. “Like you are. As if!” she said. “Just stay away from me, and we’ll both pretend this never happened. Otherwise, I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
“You talked me into it.” Luke eased around her, hands plainly visible, making no sudden moves. Vanessa got the idea he might have had a gun pointed at him before.
He went into the classroom first. She put the pistol back in her purse before she opened the door. He was already launched into a stupid joke by then. He didn’t even look at her. That suited her fine. Not much in the way of brains, but at least some street smarts.
Night absent electricity was darkness absolute, darkness claustrophobic and scary. Vanessa would have loved it had someone lit a candle, but she, like everybody else in K-1, was left to curse that darkness. She hadn’t tried sleeping in a crowd like this since summer camp when she was a kid. People muttering, people twisting and crunching as they tried to find half-comfortable positions on the hard floor, people snoring, people farting… People.
In spite of everything, she did fall asleep. Not too much later, someone tapped or kicked her in the ankle. She woke with a wildly pounding heart. For a few bad seconds there in the blackness, she had no idea where she was or what she was doing there. Memory came back piecemeal. Garden City… Red Cross shelter… Poor Pickles!.. This stupid fucking classroom… Oh.
She tried to go to sleep again. It took longer this time. At least no one in here was having screaming hysterics. That was something. A whole room full of people could forget about shut-eye if anybody did.
Asleep. Awake. Asleep. Awake. Asleep. Awake. It was still as black as the middle of an SS man’s heart, but she knew damn well she wouldn’t go back to sleep again. So she said to hell with it and waited till wan gray light started leaking through the windows. Then she discovered she wasn’t the only one who’d given up and was sitting instead of lying.
The Red Cross people brought more MREs and water bottles. Mushrooms and beef tasted like mud with lumps, some squishy, others chewy. No way to boil water for the instant-coffee packet. She tore it open, poured the stuff onto her tongue, and washed it down with water. It was as bad as she’d thought it would be. Any caffeine, though, was better than none.
When she came back from the john, she pulled out a copy of The Mill on the Floss and started reading it. It was the only entertainment around. Unlike the vile instant coffee, it wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be.
Luke disappeared two days later. Maybe he did know how to boost a car. Stuck in a room full of increasingly smelly strangers, Vanessa wondered if she should have gone with him. Wasn’t escaping-this-worth some less than heartfelt fucking and sucking? She hadn’t thought so then. As time dragged on in her crowded cage, she got less and less sure she’d been right.
XV
Every time Colin picked up the Times from his driveway, it got thinner and lighter. It might almost have been an African famine victim, slowly wasting away. It had started shrinking long before the Yellowstone supervolcano, of course; the Internet had been sucking the life out of newspapers for years. But less and less per was making its way to the presses these days. The Times did wry stories about its own struggles for survival. And the Breeze, which remained Web-only, no doubt envied its bigger rival.
That wasn’t the only struggle going on. When he drove to the cop shop in the morning, gas stations reminded customers ODD or EVEN: the governor had reimposed the every-other-day rationing scheme not seen since the Arab oil embargoes. Mother Nature could embargo Los Angeles, too. More and more stations flew red flags to show they had no gas at all. Thanks to Gabe’s swoop right after the eruption, San Atanasio’s police department still had a tolerable supply. How long that would last, and what the police would do when it ran low… Colin preferred not to dwell on yet.
A Burger King had a big sign in the window-SORRY, NO FRIES. TRY OUR ONION RINGS! When not enough spuds were making it into town to support the fast-food business, L.A. was in deep kimchi. Colin hadn’t heard of a kimchi shortage, and San Atanasio abounded in Korean restaurants. Maybe they brought their Napa cabbage down from the nearby Central Valley.
It got cold-highs refused to climb into the sixties. A rainstorm came down from the Gulf of Alaska, and then another one, and then another one still. Anything could happen in the fall; everybody who’d lived here for a while knew that. People kept hoping things would warm up. Colin eyed the pale sun and the washed-out sky and the unbelievable sunsets. He hoped things would warm up, too, but he didn’t expect it. That was what he got for falling in love with a geologist.
He doggedly kept on with his own job. If snow
fell below 2,500 feet and didn’t want to melt right away, if the mountains ringing the Los Angeles basin were white, white, white, he couldn’t do anything about that. His own little corner of the world? There, he stood a chance.
Gabe Sanchez felt the same way, though he pissed and moaned more than Colin did. “Man, you figure the Honolulu PD’s got any openings for an experienced cop?” he asked as he and Colin drove through chilly rain to a liquor store that had just been held up by a shotgun-toting robber.
“You can always hit Craigslist,” Colin answered. “You want to get out of town, though, I bet there’s less competition in Fairbanks.”
“Fairbanks?” Gabe made a cross with his two forefingers, as if repelling a vampire. “Funny, man-funny like a colostomy bag. That fuckin’ town was in the fuckin’ deep freeze before this stupid superwaddayacallit blew its stack. What’s it gonna be like year after fuckin’ next? The July ice-cube harvest’ll be terrific, that’s what.”
Maybe you didn’t need to fall in love with a geologist to know how screwed up things were, and how screwed up they were liable to get. Maybe you only needed your normal complement of working brain cells. Colin flicked on his turn signal and pulled into the cramped liquor-store parking lot. A black-and-white was already there, red and blue and yellow lights flashing in the overhead bar.
He grabbed his umbrella and got out. “One thing,” he said as he and Gabe squelched toward the entrance. “Rain’s washed away most of the ash.”
“Oh, boy,” Gabe said. “Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the goddamn play?” Colin shut up.
The clerk inside the liquor store was a short, plump Filipina. She looked pissed when Colin asked for her story. “I already tell it,” she said, pointing to the two uniformed policemen in there with her.
“Well, tl it again, please,” Colin said. “Maybe you’ll remember something new.”
“I don’t think so,” the woman said. Colin looked at her. It was the kind of look that got the message across. She changed her mind: “Okay, I tell. This motherfucker come into the store. He point big old gun at me. ‘Give me your money or I blow your ass away!’ motherfucker say. I open cash drawer. I put money on counter. Motherfucker grab it and run. I call police.”
English as she is spoke, Colin thought. The Filipina used the twelve-letter endearment as if it meant guy. For all he knew, she thought it did. One of these years, maybe it would. He’d heard plenty of other people use it the same way.
“Do you have surveillance video?” he asked her.
“What you say?” she returned: English as it wasn’t spoke.
Colin tried again. “A camera,” he said patiently. “A TV camera.” Was there anybody in the world who didn’t savvy TV? Maybe a few luckless natives stuck in the bad reception of the Papua New Guinea mountains. Everyone else bowed down before the great god of the modern age and his holy name.
“Oh. TV!” Yes, the Filipina got that. She pointed up and behind her, to a brushed-aluminum box with a lens at the business end. “Right there.”
“We’ll check that out, ma’am,” Gabe said. “Was the robber wearing a mask?” He had to do a show-and-tell to get across what a mask was. When the clerk understood, she shook her head.
“Something, anyway,” Colin remarked. “Have to find out what the footage looks like. If it shows the perp’s face, and if he’s nasty with that shotgun, maybe we can get one of the TV stations to run it. That’ll help if somebody makes him.” He might-he did-despise TV news, but he wasn’t too proud to use it.
“There you go,” Gabe said. “Maybe it’s the same jerk who blasted that other clerk a while ago.”
“Maybe it is,” Colin agreed. “That’d be good. Well, we’ll see.”
“That motherfucker shoot somebody?” The clerk’s voice rose in understandable horror.
“We’re not sure if it’s the same guy yet,” Colin said.
“You catch him! You put him in jail! You keep him in jail!” she said shrilly. “This not first time we get robbed. Nobody never get caught. What kind stupid motherfuckers work for police, huh?”
Colin would have got pissed off if he hadn’t already figured out she didn’t mean much by the word. Sighing, he answered, “Ma’am, there are smart cops and dumb cops, same as there are at any other kind of work.”
She eyed him. “You smart cop or dumb cop?”
“Probably,” he said. Let her make whatever she wanted of that. Back to business: “Let’s see what the camera picked up.”
After some fiddling with the controls, they played it back and watched it on the monitor next to the now-gutted cash register. It was in color and highly detailed. Colin remembered the black-and-white blurs you got from early-model surveillance cameras. No more. This was plenty good enough to ID the perp-and his shotgun-in court.
He was about eighteen, African American, in a cheap knit watchcap, a hoodie, and jeans. He had earrings and a tattoo on the left side of his neck, just below his ear.
“Damned if I don’t think that’s the same guy,” Gabe said.
“It’s been a while,” Colin answered, but he suspected the sergeant was right.
Whoever he was, the way the robber yelled and waved the shotgun around ought to be plenty to rouse a TV anchorman’s righteous indignation. Colin knew the numbers to call.
Channel 7 sent a gal out to look at the video. “Oh, yes, we can use this,” she said, beaming at Colin and showing off teeth undoubtedly capped. “Do you have a hotline number where people can call if they know something?”
“Sure do.” He wrote it down on the back of one of his cards. Under it, he printed SAN ATANASIO PD HOTLINE. She might not think to turn the card over and remind herself where she’d got it. She didn’t especially look like a dummy, but you never could tell.
“Thanks.” She stuck it in her purse. “Now, what was the name of the liquor store? Where exactly is it? When did the robbery take place? The clerk was a woman?” She could see that on the video, but he didn’t mind if she made sure. By the time she left, they were both pretty well pleased with themselves.
The only trouble was, the footage didn’t run. The big headline on the evening news was that the governor had ordered mandatory statewide rolling blackouts. “We have to conserve energy because less is reaching us due to the impactful nature of the supervolcano eruption,” he declared earnestly.
Just because he’d ordered blackouts and power cutoffs didn’t mean he’d get them right away. Half a dozen different groups-right, left, and center-converged on his mansion, waving picket signs and demanding that he change his mind this instant, if not sooner. A judge way the hell up in Siskiyou County had already issued a preliminary injunction against the blackouts. Colin felt a certain amount of sympathy for him. Siskiyou County was cold and mountainous. Without electricity for several hours a day, it would be colder yet.
And there was a car chase on the Long Beach Freeway. The station had to cover that live-or thought it did, anyway. So the people out there in TVland never got a glimpse of the robber with that shotgun and the tat.
It turned out not to matter. One of the San Atanasio cops took a look at the video and said, “Fuck me if I don’t know that asshole. That’s JerWilliam Ellis. I busted his sorry butt for armed robbery year before last. I didn’t know he was outa juvie.”
“JerWilliam?” Colin said.
“That’s his name. One word, capital J, capital W,” the cop said. “Don’t ask me why. I just work here. Ask his mama.”
“O-kay.” Colin shrugged. It wasn’t his business. He’d seen plenty of names stranger than that. “Know where he lives?”
“Last I heard, in the projects on Imperial.”
That was north and east of San Atanasio. The big housing projects there had gone up after the 1965 Watts riots, a monument to LBJ’s Great Society. They’d been breeding gangbangers ever since. As projects went, there were plenty of grimmer examples back East. That didn’t make the Imperial Gardens a garden spot.
“
Have to talk with LAPD,” Colin said unenthusiastically. The projects were in the Big City’s jurisdiction. Sometimes LAPD cooperated well. Sometimes the Big City cops treated their small-town cousins like a bunch of scrounging hicks. You never could tell till you tried.
“Better call quick,” the cop said. “Way things are going, they’ll start canceling phones pretty soon, too.”
“Heh,” Colin said, for all the world as if it were a joke.
Louise Ferguson grabbed a shopping cart and headed into Vons. The supermarket on Reynoso Drive had been there for as long as she could remember, and for longer than that, too. Some of the regulars who’d come in when she was just getting started were still regulars now: regulars whose hair had gone white or light blue or pink, regulars with wrinkles and bent backs and polyester tops. Microfiber, my ass, Louise thought. I say it’s polyester, and I say the hell with it.
Was that how it ended up? Was that how she’d look twenty-five years from now? Would that cheery newlywed going up the produce aisle see her a lot further through the century and shiver as if a goose had walked over her grave? Probably. You couldn’t win. The only way you could get out of the game was by walking in front of a truck or something. Louise didn’t want to do that.
But she didn’t want to get old, either. She especially didn’t want to get old with a lover so much younger than she was. Men turned distinguished as they aged. You respected their experience. Women went invisible or grew hideous, one. Who gave a flying fuck, or any other kind, about some old broad’s experience?
Did you come to the store to piss and moan, or are you going to shop some, too? Louise asked herself. She chuckled wryly. She had the cart. She had her list-she was an organized shopper. Might as well drop some cash.
As usual, she headed for the produce first. The newlywed looking unhappy now, not cheery, had her reasons. Not much filled the bins. Most of what was there didn’t look very good. The prices were through the roof. A sign above a bare bin that should have held potatoes said
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