Ring of Fire

by Eric Flint

  He propped his bike against one of the trash cans and walked up the steps to the left-hand trailer. This was the "bachelor's quarters" for the extended family that now lived in all three trailers. Larry, Jimmy Andersen, Eddie Cantrell and Hans Richter all shared it. Jeff and Gretchen and the baby and little Johann had the one in the middle, and Gramma and the other girls had the far one. It was a bit crowded—okay, a lot crowded; but still, better than coming home to an empty house. And the women surely cooked better than any of the boys . . .

  To his surprise, the only person inside was Jimmy, hunched over the computer and working the joystick madly. He didn't even look up. He wore two lumberjack shirts and fingerless gloves; the trailers were heated by natural gas now—Jimmy's standing joke about that had worn pretty thin—and they got chilly at night. That was fine for the Germans in their sleep-heap, but there was no way Larry would even think about that as a solution.

  Larry shucked off his parka and tossed it in a corner. "Where's everyone else?"

  "Hans had an appointment at the clinic," said Jimmy, still not looking up. "Not sure where Eddie is. Dinner's in an hour."

  Larry grunted. Hans had been badly wounded a few months earlier in the fight that had brought Gretchen and her family to these trailers. He had only gotten out of the hospital a few weeks before, and crowded their own trailer even more, although at least he didn't move around a lot. Larry walked over to stand behind Jimmy and look over his shoulder.

  "Playing OrcSmasher again? Aren't you sick of that?"

  "Of course I'm sick of it! I'm sick of all these crummy games! But the nearest game store is three hundred and fifty years away, and my time machine is broken."

  "I hear you—watch out for that Skraknar behind you."

  "Crap!" exclaimed Jimmy as he lost half his hit points. "Stop distracting me!"

  "I'm not, you're just a weenie."

  "Oh yeah? Hell!"

  "Game over, bro'."

  "Yeah, yeah," said Jimmy in disgust. He pushed his chair away from the computer, scowling. Then he pointed. "Have you noticed the way the screen flickers lately?"

  "I guess so. It's been doing that for a while."

  "It's not going to last much longer. I'm not sure I'll be able to fix it. What'll we do when it craps out on us?"

  "Find another one, I guess."

  "Where?"

  "From some computer that's broken but still has a good monitor! How the hell should I know?"

  "This really stinks, y'know," grumbled Jimmy. "Old games, out-of-date equipment, and pretty soon we won't even have that anymore. How the hell do the locals stand it?"

  "Don't know what they're missing, I guess," shrugged Larry. He turned and went over to a shelf and plucked out a video tape. He turned back to the television and stopped in his tracks.

  "Where's the VCR?" he demanded.

  "Oh, Gretchen borrowed it earlier. She wanted to show some cartoons to the kids."

  "Why didn't she just use the one in their trailer?"

  "Don't you remember? Johann dumped his oatmeal down the tape slot last week."

  "Oh, right. Think you can fix it?" asked Larry. Jimmy was pretty good with electronic gizmos. His afternoon job was in the school's computer lab.

  "Dunno. It's gummed up pretty good. I'll have to strip it down completely and see."

  "What's on the school station?" Larry turned on the television set and after a moment grimaced. "Not The Seven Samurai again! What's with those guys? They've got other tapes than that!"

  "Hey, Reverend Jones is in charge of the afternoon programming. What do you expect? Anyway, the samurai are pretty cool."

  "Not cool enough after a dozen times." Larry turned off the set, sighed and flopped down on the sofa. What a pain. Old computer games, no VCR. Reruns. Christmas. "What's for dinner?"

  "What do you think? Venison, bread and boiled turnips."

  "Ick. I'm getting tired of that."

  "A long way 'til spring. Better get used to it."

  Larry sat there grumbling to himself. After a while he noticed his stomach grumbling, too—but not for boiled turnip. There had to be something better . . .

  Why the hell not? At least there's one thing I can enjoy.

  Larry got up and went to his bedroom. He opened up a dresser drawer and rummaged around in the rear of it, pushing aside his stash of girly magazines to reach for . . . for . . .

  "Where are they?"

  He pulled the drawer all the way out. Gone! He slammed it shut and stormed back into the living room.

  "Who ate my cheese curls!?!" he roared. Jimmy jumped in his chair.

  "What cheese curls?" he asked with a totally unconvincing veneer of innocence.

  "The ones in my drawer! I was saving half a bag! Where are they?"

  "They were stale anyway," mumbled Jimmy.

  "I like 'em stale! And they were mine!"

  "Chill out, man," said Jimmy. "It's nothing to get wound up over." But Larry was wound up—as wound up as the shrieking lathe that he'd mishandled. I make an honest mistake and get reamed for it—and he steals my stuff and tells me to chill?

  "There aren't any more at the stores, they're all gone! They were the last ones! The last ones in the whole goddam world! And you stole them, you son of a bitch!" Suddenly all the frustration and anger of the day boiled up in Larry—and unfortunately for Jimmy, he was the only possible target for it. Larry stepped forward and punched an astonished Jimmy square in the face, spilling him out of his chair. He lunged after him, but the toppled chair was in the way and then Jimmy recovered enough to fend him off with a few frantic kicks.

  "Are you crazy?" he shouted, scrambling to his feet with blood gushing from his nose. Larry waded into him; in a moment both boys were throwing punches like windmills and cursing like sailors. They tripped over the chair and rolled around on the floor, still punching and kicking. They collided with some furniture and there was a loud crash and tinkle—oh, perfect, thought Larry as a fist rang off his skull, that's the TV gone.

  Suddenly, something bristly slapped Larry's head and he heard a shrill German voice close at hand. "Dummkopf! Dummkopf! Halt!" He rolled away from Jimmy and there was Gramma whacking at him with a broom. Larry rolled further away, cringing, and she turned and whacked at Jimmy for a while. "Halt! Halt!"

  "Okay! Okay!" shouted Jimmy. "I've stopped! Now you stop!"

  Gramma stopped her whacking and glared at the two boys. She spouted off a string of German that they couldn't follow. Then she tossed the broom at Larry and pointed to the broken drinking glass where it had fallen. "Swine! Pigs! Clean up!" She turned and stalked out of the room, slamming the connecting door to the next trailer behind her.

  The boys lay there and glared at each other. Larry spat out a straw.

  "You are nuts, you know that?" said Jimmy, wiping his bloody nose on his sleeve and frowning at it.

  "Yeah, I probably am," grumbled Larry. He got up and grabbed the broom. Jimmy flinched reflexively, but Larry merely began sweeping the glass into a pan with as much dignity as he could muster for the chore, secretly relieved that the crash had only been the glass and not the TV after all. Then the trailer's door swung open and clipped his elbow, re-spilling half the fragments. Eddie Cantrell leaned around the panel.

  "What's all the dummkopf-halting about?"

  "I ate his cheesh hurls," said Jimmy thickly, holding his head back and forcing a plug of tissue up one nostril.

  Eddie whistled. "And you lived to talk about it? Lucky boy! Larry has killed men for less than that!"

  "Well, he nearly hilled be."

  Larry finished his sweeping, dumped the glass in the trash can and flopped back on the sofa. He patted at one cheekbone; there was no blood on his fingertips, so it just felt as though it had been split. "Give me a break. I've had a bad day."

  "What was so bad about it?" asked Eddie.

  "Oh, Mister Davis yelled at me when I screwed up . . . and Bonnie Weaver was . . . and this big Christmas celebration . . . and . . . a
nd he ate all my cheese curls."

  "Oh, well, no wonder you're being such a jerk," said Eddie. "Who wouldn't be in your place?" Larry glared at him.

  "So what do you guys want to do tonight?" continued Eddie.

  "How abou' some Dunheons & Drahons?" suggested Jimmy to the ceiling. "We habn't played tha' for a long time. . . . Ah, sproo this." He pried out the tissue and wiggled his nose gingerly with two fingers.

  "Not much fun with just three people. You think we could get Jeff interested?"

  "Are you kidding?" snorted Larry. "The only thing Jeff wants to do anymore is make love to Gretchen. He's got no time or energy left for kid stuff." The bitterness in his voice made the others look at him in surprise.

  "Hmm, maybe we could get Hans interested when he comes back."

  "I tried," said Eddie. "He can't understand the point of the whole thing. He does like the miniatures though. He tried painting a few before the paints all dried up. He's pretty good. . . ."

  "Hell, I don't feel like playing anyway," said Larry. "I don't know what I want to do. We can't even watch TV."

  "Yeah, I really miss that," admitted Eddie. "No football, even. I wonder who's going to win the Super Bowl this year?"

  "I wonder who won this year's World Series . . ." Jimmy blinked. "That year's. Oh, hell, you know."

  "I wonder if Voyager is ever going to make it home?"

  "I sure wish we could get home. I . . . I miss my folks."

  "Yeah."

  The three boys sat in silent gloom, thinking of all the things they had left behind. Of all the people they would never see again. They were just seventeen.

  "I sure could go for a Big Mac," said Eddie, suddenly.

  "Oh, don't start on that!"

  "And those incredible fries . . ."

  "Stop it, Eddie, I'm warning you . . ."

  " . . . and a triple-thick shake . . ."

  "Stop!" shouted Larry and Jimmy in unison.

  "Okay, okay."

  "I'd just settle for some stale cheese curls," grumbled Larry. "But I can't have those either."

  "Maybe we could make some," said Jimmy after a moment.

  "What? How?"

  "I don't know. They gotta make them somehow. What are they made of?"

  "Cheese. And curls."

  "They're mostly corn, I think. You still got the bag with the ingredients listed on it?"

  "It's in the recycling bin. I'll go get it." Jimmy hastened out the door without even putting on his coat. The town was not actually recycling very much at present, but every bit of metal or plastic or paper was to be saved. They might or might not find uses for those things, but it was a sure bet that they could not get any more.

  After a few minutes Jimmy returned, shivering, with a flattened-out snack food bag. He brought it over to the light and they squinted at the tiny print.

  "Corn meal, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, cheese flavoring and salt. No preservatives added," read off Eddie.

  Jimmy looked uneasy at that. "How old were they?"

  "Years," Larry said deadpan. "What's that other list of stuff below it?"

  "The 'cheese flavoring.' "

  "Ick. Looks awfully complicated."

  "Yeah," agreed Larry. "And how do they make these things out of corn meal? It doesn't look like corn to me. They're all puffed up."

  "I think they get shot out of some machine and then deep fried or something."

  "It says 'baked' on the front of the bag."

  "Okay, baked then. But we don't have the machine to make the things in the first place."

  "Hell, so much for that idea." The boys all flopped back in their seats.

  "What about something else?" asked Jimmy after a while. "Corn chips or something?"

  "We don't know how to make those either. There must be some sort of fancy processing involved to make corn come out like that."

  "What about potato chips?" said Larry. "They've got to be pretty simple. Just slice up potatoes real thin and fry 'em."

  "That might work. I've seen recipes for homemade potato chips," said Eddie.

  "Probably still a lot of work," said Jimmy. "Hardly worth it just to make some chips for the three of us."

  "Well, we could make them for the whole family," said Larry. "None of the Germans have probably ever tasted a potato chip. We . . . we could do it as a Christmas present."

  "Cool! That's a great idea!" Jimmy and Eddie started talking about what they would need and how they could get it, but an idea started growing in Larry's brain. He remembered the people putting up the lights in town. He remembered Bonnie Weaver . . .

  "Say guys . . ."

  "Yeah?"

  "What about making a lot of potato chips? I mean a whole lot of potato chips?"

  "What for? They'd just get stale," said Eddie. "Better to make smaller batches every now and then."

  "No," said Larry, firmly. "We are going to make a lot of potato chips. Enough for the whole town! And we're going to make them in time for Christmas!"

  * * *

  The first requirement was potatoes—although as Larry found, the first problem was rationing. "Sorry, son. They've all been collected to make a seed crop. Mister Hudson's orders." He wasted an evening going from store to store; and it seemed the only variety left now in stores was in the way that their owners told you no. All right, what about local producers? Potatoes were pretty common, right? He wasn't looking for pickled artichokes, after all. But no one he asked seemed to know anything.

  He thought about asking his teachers during the next day. But if this was to be a surprise—the sort of surprise that impressed a girl like, say, Bonnie—then he could hardly stick up his hand and ask a teacher about making potato chips. . . . At the end of classes he borrowed a book from the school library, Applied Agronomy: The Potato. It was possibly the dullest thing he had ever voluntarily taken home to read.

  "The potato has a series of ploidy levels . . ." What the hell is that? Jeez, I miss the Internet! No search engines in books.

  Noises from the next trailer made it clear that both Jeff and Gretchen were home; Larry tried to block them out and concentrate on his reading. The information he could puzzle out looked promising; potatoes had terrific yields per acre. Twelve tons? That's a lot of chips! Forget just snack foods, we could feed a huge number of people!

  But the rest of it . . . "In Lemhi Russet potatoes, gene escape by pollen is unlikely, unless sexually compatible relatives are in the immediate proximity." Well, that's definitely a yes. Larry winced at a particularly enthusiastic bellow in German. Extended family living, they call it. Yep, I'm getting extended already—that was a five on the Richter scale. Where's Gramma when you need her?

  Now there was an idea. Gramma might be a terror with a broom, but she ought to know whether there were any potatoes being grown in the region. She lived in the third trailer, so Larry would have to duck out into the early evening chill and that seemed like an even better idea just at the moment. He folded the book shut on his finger and slipped outside, scurried to the last trailer in the row, and knocked at its door.

  Gramma peered around the panel. "Was?"

  "Guten abend," ventured Larry. "Ah . . . Do you know about any potatoes near here? Farms? Gardens?"

  "Was?" repeated Gramma blankly. She didn't invite him to step inside.

  "Do. You. Know . . ." Larry said carefully. "About. Potatoes." He opened the textbook, and pointed to the picture of a potato.

  Gramma's eyes widened in recognition. Hey, we're getting somewhere! She slammed the door; he waited, shivering, for a few seconds. Then she opened it again much wider in order to swing the broom fully through the doorway.

  "Hey!" yelled Larry. He dropped the book to cover his head from the blows. "What—"

  "Swine! Pig! Ist skandal!" She added a string of German syllables. "Raus! Scram!"

  Larry stumbled down the steps and grabbed the textbook. The door slammed loudly, a universal language. He dusted snow off the book—and straw off himself—th
en stamped back to his own trailer to get his parka and bike. That's it. I've had it.

  Time to go to the top on this; in fact, it was the last straw.

  * * *

  The corridors of the high school milled with people who, like Larry, had some kind of petition for their leaders. Several languages filled the air. He used his status as a combat veteran to get through, and his shoulder when necessary. The meeting that had attracted the crowd was just finishing up; after a few minutes of jostling, the doorman—another underemployed motorbike scout—nodded slightly. Larry slipped past him into the meeting room.

  Willie Ray Hudson, the farm czar, was shrugging into a Peterbilt jacket older than Larry; he looked as worn and creased as the leather. "Mister Hudson?" asked Larry. "Ah, can I talk to you a moment? I think it's important."

  Hudson cocked his head and stared at him. "You been fightin', son?"

  "Just a disagreement." Larry cleared his throat. "Mister Hudson, a few of my friends and I want to make something special for the Christmas feast, and we thought that potato chips would be good. But I don't know if anyone around here grows potatoes . . . and some people get kinda, um, strange when I ask them about it. And this book I was reading about potatoes said that they could feed . . . uh . . ."

  "A whole lot of people?" finished Hudson. "Bet they quoted twelve tons an acre, didn't they? Well, son, that's with fertilizer, irrigation, and spraying Lorox twice a week. Here, we'd be lucky to get two, three tons an acre. This is farming, not agribusiness."

  "Oh," said Larry, somewhat taken back. He hadn't exactly thought that farmers were dumb—but they didn't go to college either, did they? He could feel himself blushing.

  "But there's no point anyway," Hudson continued. "Sure, it'd still be a good yield, but we can't get 'em to grow the damn things. The locals think 'taters are animal fodder—or worse." He turned, although not far enough that Larry could slip away. "Hey, Melissa!"