Glass crunched under Justin’s tires as he steered around the wreck. Only a couple of cars skirted it ahead of him. On any road in L.A., it would have tied things up for an hour. On the 405 at four in the afternoon, it would have screwed traffic for the rest of the night. Well, L.A. County all by itself had more people than forty-two states-or was it forty-three? Rob couldn’t remember. Maine was definitely one of them.
“Charlie and Biff are still with us,” Justin said as he picked up a little more speed. “I could get used to a heated side-view mirror. I wouldn’t be able to see squat without it.”
“Okay, great. But how often would you need it in California?” Rob asked.
“Depends on how cold it gets, right? If California turns into, like, Washington state, it’ll freeze sometimes.”
“Huh,” Rob said thoughtfully. That hadn’t occurred to him, and it should have. Then something else did: “If Los Angeles is the new Seattle-”
“Like fifty is the new thirty?” Justin interrupted helpfully.
“My ass,” Rob said. They both laughed-easy enough, when neither of them had seen the old thirty yet. He went on, “Like I was saying, if L.A.’s the new Seattle, what does that make Maine? The new North Pole?”
“Nah. Won’t be that bad,” Justin said. “More like the new Labrador.”
“Happy day!” Rob said in distinctly unhappy tones. “Ten months of winter and two months of bad skiing.”
“You think you’re kidding, don’t you?”
“I wish!” Rob rolled his eyes. “The next interesting question is, how the hell do we ever get out of here? If the snowdrifts are as high as an elephant’s eye and they stay that way, nobody goes in or out, near enough.”
“You’ve got something, I’m afraid,” Justin said. “And when they start running out of food and heating oil…” His voice trailed off. If you wanted to, you could imagine this whole state-hell, you could imagine everything north of Boston-fading away like that.
“Remind me again why we took that gig in Greenville,” Rob said.
“It’s called money,” Justin explained. “Bringing some in every once in a while instead of spending it all the goddamn time is supposed to be good. I think I remember that, anyway.”
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Rob sighed. “I still wish like hell we’d been going down to Key West or something when the supervolcano blew. New England… It’s over with here.”
“Uh-huh. And you knew ahead of time that Yellowstone was going to go kablooie like Hamster Hughie.” Justin was as big a Calvin and Hobbes fan as Rob was. That sensibility-if you wanted to call it a sensibility-also rubbed off on the band.
The bitch of it was, Rob had known, or known as much as anybody not a geologist could. It wasn’t as if Dad hadn’t gone on about the supervolcano whenever they talked. Rob had tuned out most of it. What were you going to do when your father went on and on about stuff he got from his new girlfriend, especially when she wasn’t a whole lot older than you were?
“Too late to worry about it now,” he said with another sigh.
“You got that right.” Justin clicked the wipers from regular to high. It did less good than he must have hoped it would. He slowed down some more. The snow on the road was getting thicker. “I wonder if we’re going to make it to Greenville.”
“This thing is the size of an armored personnel carrier. It’s got four-wheel drive and snow tires,” Rob said. “You gonna let Mother Nature dick around with us?”
“I may not have a choice. You fight with Mother Nature, you’re fighting one big mother,” Justin answered. Rob looked out the window. Not much to see but blowing white and, through it, already-fallen white. He wondered if he ought to be looking for gigantic rabid St. Bernards, or maybe vampires, for real. No sunshine to slow ’em down, and none likely any time soon.
Dexter was a big enough deal that the next village up 23, instead of enjoying its own name, went by North Dexter. Up the road a ways from it was an Italian-Mexican restaurant. Rob saw the neon sign in spite of the snow; the restaurant itself, set back from the road, was barely visible.
“Mexican food in Maine,” Justin mused. “You think the Chinese’d be weird, what about that?”
“You’re not stopping, are you?” Rob said with mock-perhaps not so mock-anxiety.
“Nope. Greenville or bust,” Justin said. They chugged on.
A streak of red shot across the road. It was there and then gone. Justin had time to take his foot off the gas, but not enough to bring it down on the brake. “The fuck was that?” Rob asked, wondering if he’d really seen it.
“Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a moose.”
“Brilliant deduction! A lesser mind would be incapable of it.”
“Yeah, I know,” Justin said smugly. “My best guess is, it was a fox-and not the kind that walks on two legs.”
“A fox! Cool!” There weren’t so many of them in California. California had coyotes instead. Coyotes thought four-legged foxes were tasty.
The map insisted there was a village called Sangerville just before Route 23 ran into Route 6. Rob saw another snow-covered graveyard off to the right, which made him look out for vampires again. Other than that, damn all suggested human beings had ever lived anywhere near here. He flipped to the back of the road atlas. It insisted that Sangerville had 475 people. If the place did, most of them, in the classic phrase, came disguised as empty seats.
When 23 dead-ended at 6, Justin said, “I go left, right?”
“Right-left,” Rob agreed. “If you go right, you head away from Greenville and toward Dover-Foxcroft.”
“Dover-Foxcroft?” Justin echoed. “Bizarre, man. I mean, I know a lot of people with hyphenated names. These days, who doesn’t? But a town?”
“I just work here,” Rob said. “That’s what the map says. However they got married, they’re a bigger place than Dexter, or even Newport. They’re in bigger type, and the town sign is a white circle with a little black dot in it, not just a black dot.”
“Place’ll be Boston before we know it.” Justin dutifully swung the SUV to the left.
“Next town ahead is Guilford. It’s a mile or two from here,” Rob said, still eyeing the Rand McNally. “The road forks there. We stay on 6, heading northwest. Next place after Guilford is Abbott Village, and then North Abbott.”
“No North Guilford?” Justin asked.
“As a matter of fact, there is a North Guilford. But it’s not on 6. It’s on some half-assed side road.”
“This road we’re on is half-assed,” Justin said accurately.
“Well, then, the other one’s quarter-assed.” Rob corrected himself.
As things turned out, they were counting chickens they never got to see. They didn’t even make it quite as far as Guilford. It wasn’t that the blizzard got worse, though it did. The accident down below North Dexter hadn’t closed down the whole damn road. This one did. A Hummer had slammed into an eighteen-wheeler head-on.
Rob didn’t know how fast the guy in the Hummer had been going. Fast seemed a pretty good guess. A Hummer was half again as big and twice as heavy as any other SUV in captivity. A Hummer was a fucking bad joke, was what a Hummer was. No wonder the market for them tanked- le mot juste — when gas prices took off at the end of the Aughts.
This particular Hummer was scrap metal, with the whole front end stove in. The windshield glass was starred and bulged outward on the driver’s side. What cop’s kid couldn’t read that sign? The jerk behind the wheel-hey, he was speeding in a Hummer, so of course he was a jerk-hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. The only question now was whether he only needed a dentist and a plastic surgeon or a neurosurgeon. That assumed he had any brains left at all, which also wasn’t obvious.
And he’d done a number on the eighteen-wheeler, too. He’d rammed it hard enough to flip it over onto its side and jackknife it. That would have shafted the Santa Ana Freeway. On a narrow two-lane road in Maine… The broken-nosed cab lay on the shoulder to one sid
e, diesel fuel dribbling out into the snow from the punctured fuel tank like blood from a cut jugular. The trailer stretched all the way across the asphalt to the other shoulder.
“Fuck me up the asshole,” Justin said, and that about covered that. He eased to a stop.
Several other cars had already had to stop in front of them. Some people had got out to do what they could for the injured, or else just to get a better look at the mess. Charlie and Biff stopped two cars behind Justin and Rob. More cars pulled up behind them. Nobody would be going anywhere around here any time soon.
Justin found a question: “Where are the cops?”
“Maybe they’re on the Guilford side, and we can’t see ’em,” Rob answered. “Or maybe they’re on their way from Dover-Foxcroft.” He would have bet on the latter. Dover-Foxcroft was a good bit bigger than Guilford. “In the meantime, let’s see if we can do anything useful.”
He opened the door. Cold bit at him. L.L. Bean knew their business, though. As soon as he zipped up his anorak, he stopped freezing. He’d never owned long johns before this trip to Maine. He was damn glad now that he’d bought some. His nose stayed cold, but what the hell? He figured that made him a nice, healthy mutt.
An older guy who’d already got out nodded at him. “I ain’t seen nothin’ like this since I was in Eye-raq,” he said, and pointed to a body lying behind the Hummer. Someone had draped a coat over its head. “You’re lucky he’s covered up. He ain’t pretty, not even a little bit.”
“I believe it.” Like anyone from L.A., Rob had seen road carnage now and then. He’d also seen some of the grisly photos in his father’s books. When he was a kid, he’d used them to gross Vanessa out. He wasn’t supposed to look at those books himself, much less give his little sister nightmares with them. He’d got a spanking when Vanessa ratted on him; Dad wasn’t the kind to figure corporal punishment warped you for life. His old man had licked him plenty, and he’d turned out all right, so… Thinking about that was more pleasant than remembering what lay under the coat. Rob made himself ask, “Anybody else in the SUV?”
“Ayuh,” the older man answered, which meant he came from these parts (and also meant yes). “There was a gal. She had her belt on, so she didn’t go into the windshield. But her leg got tore up pretty good, and she maybe busted some ribs. They done took her back to the clinic in Guilford.”
“How about the trucker?” Rob found the next logical question.
“He ain’t bad. Cuts, bruises, somethin’ sprained-maybe busted-in one foot. He was up high, like. Might not’ve got hurt at all, hardly, if the goddamn Hummer didn’t flip his rig.”
“You’ve got to be nuts to drive like that in this kind of weather,” Rob said.
“Ayuh,” the older man repeated. “Well, some folks are, and that’s the long and short of it. They figure their shit don’t stink, and nothin’ can go wrong with ’em no matter what kind of ass-holery they pull. I’m here to tell you, things don’t work that way.” He jerked a thumb at the Hummer’s late driver. “He ain’t gonna tell you nothin’, not no more.”
“How long will it take to clear this mess off the road?” Rob wondered.
“Beats me.” The local didn’t sound worried about it. Of course, he didn’t have a gig in Greenville tonight. Almost cheerily, he went on, “Christ only knows where from they’ll have to bring in a tow truck big enough to shift these fuckers. Guilford ain’t got one-I know that for a fact. I don’t believe Dover-Foxcroft does, either. Greenville, mebbe, or Newport where the Interstate goes through. All this snow, take forever to get here, too. Might as well relax and set a spell, know what I mean?”
“Yeah.” Rob was damned if he’d make a noise like ayuh. He unhappily mooched back to the waiting Justin. Seeing him coming, Biff and Charlie got out of the trailing SUV to hear the news. Rob made it short and sweet: “We’re fucked. They’ve got no idea when they’re gonna be able to clear the road.”
“That, like, sucks.” Biff wasn’t long on words, but he got the point.
“We can’t even turn around,” Charlie said. There were cars behind them and westbound cars in the eastbound lane. Some jackasses always figured they could dodge trouble if they broke the rules. Once in a while, they did. More often, as now, they screwed things up for themselves and everybody else.
“I think I’d better call Greenville and let ’em know we ain’t gonna make it.” Rob reached into his pocket for his cell phone.
The promoter didn’t sound brokenhearted. “We’ll cancel, all right,” he said. “We didn’t get as much advance sale as we wanted, and people sure won’t be coming into town in weather like this.” Which was all true, but left Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles stranded in the middle of Maine with not a gig in sight.
XVIII
When flights to Los Angeles finally resumed, Marcus Wilson gave Bryce a ride from Lincoln to Omaha. “Thanks for everything,” Bryce said when they pulled up in front of the terminal. “I don’t know what I would have done without everybody from the department here.”
“Hey, man, after what you went through, I don’t know if I’d ever have the nerve to get on another plane again as long as I live,” the other grad student answered.
“If I’m gonna get home, I’ve gotta fly,” Bryce said. That wasn’t exactly true. I-10 was open, and some ordinary travel was allowed on it-but not much. It was the lifeline between Socal and points east, and most of the traffic was trucks. Passenger rail service had been cut off altogether. It was all freight all the time as far as the railroads were concerned.
He got out and strapped on his backpack. All his meager stuff fit in it. No need to pay the thieving airlines for the great privilege of checking a bag. Since he had a boarding pass, he headed straight for security. Getting through was a breeze-all the more so when you were used to dealing with LAX and O’Hare. Close to 400,000 people lived in Omaha, which made it a city of decent size, but you’d never mistake it for Chicago.
His gate had a big TV screen hanging down from the ceiling. Like most airport TVs, it was tuned to CNN Headline News. Bryce usually turned his back on the goddamn things-was there no place you could escape them? But the headline below the pretty girl who read the teleprompter made his eyes snap back, even if she
didn’t: NUCLEAR STRIKES ON TEL AVIV, TEHRAN.
“Oh, fuck,” he said, and then looked around to see if anybody’d heard him. No one was giving him an offended look, anyhow. He would have bet he wasn’t the only one here who’d come out with something like that. When you saw a headline with NUCLEAR STRIKES in it, what else could you say?
The screen cut away from the pretty announcer to show slagged ruins. “Loss of life in the Israeli coastal city is believed to be extremely heavy,” said acorrespondent with an English accent. “The Prime Minister has vowed an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
Bryce expected footage of devastated Tehran to follow hard on the heels of that biblical threat. Instead, the attractive newsreader came back on. “This just in,” she said breathlessly. “A flash of quote sunlike light unquote has appeared over the Iranian holy city of Qom, and communications with Qom seem to have been lost. It is not known whether the Grand Ayatollah-the real powerholder in Iran-was in Qom when it was struck.”
The woman who’d stopped next to Bryce to watch the news crossed herself. That was more elegant and restrained than cussing. Whether the sentiment it expressed was so very different might be another question.
“With us now is retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Randolph Cullenbine, our military analyst,” the pretty newswoman said. “Colonel Cullenbine, what is America’s likely response to this double tragedy in the Middle East?”
Randolph Cullenbine wasn’t pretty. He looked like, well, a retired Marine officer: short-haired, blunt-featured, wide-shouldered, tough. He talked like a TV guy, though: “It seems probable that Iran was trying to take advantage of the USA’s perceived weakness. We’ve had the middle of the country badly degraded, and the launch sites of many o
f our land-based ICBMs are currently unusable due to ash and lava laid down by the supervolcano.”
“Huh!” Bryce said, and he wasn’t the only one in the boarding area to make some kind of surprised noise. He hadn’t worried about where Uncle Sam parked his missiles. Uncle Sam hadn’t, either. Maybe he should have.
“But we still have our missile-carrying submarines and our manned bombers, right?” the newswoman asked.
“Oh, absolutely.” Cullenbine nodded. “We aren’t defenseless, no matter what the ayatollahs may believe. And neither are the Israelis. These were their strikes, not ours. I have multiple sources confirming that.”
“What’s… likely to come next?” The newswoman asked the question as if she feared the answer-and well she might.
“I don’t know, Kathleen. Right now, the only people who do know are whoever’s in charge in Iran and the Israeli Prime Minister.” The military analyst sounded thoroughly grim, which made more sense than most of what you saw on TV these days. “It depends on how many missiles the Iranians have left, and on whether they feel like using them. And it depends on how massive a retaliation the Israelis intend to take. They have enough bombs to destroy most if not all of Iran’s major cities. That would put the death toll in the millions, if not the tens of millions.”
“Thank you,” the pretty newswoman said, in about the tone you’d use to thank a dentist after a root canal. “Do you think this would have happened if the supervolcano hadn’t erupted?”
“Not a chance,” Lieutenant Colonel Cullenbine replied at once. “The perceived weakness”-he liked that phrase-“of the United States after the disaster had to be what galvanized the Iranians into motion.” He bared his teeth in what wasn’t quite a smile. “They forgot that Israel was plenty able to take care of itself. But we may have to look for other trouble spots coming to the boil, too, and we won’t be able to do as much about them as we might have before we landed in so much trouble of our own.”
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