It did come back in a hurry. The mysterious they were right about that much. Colin had got to the point where he enjoyed the wind in his face as he rode. (The rain was a different story. He’d quickly bought a plastic slicker that covered him from head to foot, and a broad-brimmed hat to keep most of the raindrops off his bifocals. Bicycling with an umbrella, he’d rapidly discovered, was an invitation to suicide.)
He wasn’t the only two-wheeled commuter. Oh, no—not even close. Bikes, and especially bikes with adults in business attire on them, had been uncommon sights on L.A.–area streets before the eruption. No more. As gas prices zoomed up like a Trident missile, more and more people said to hell with their cars and started doing without infernal combustion.
Colin had dropped five pounds since he started biking more than he drove. His wind was better than it had been. That was the good news. The bad news was the San Atanasio PD’s Robbery Division was trying to deal with an explosion of bicycle thefts. So was every other police department in Southern California—and in a lot of other places, too.
A car whizzed by. It didn’t come particularly close, but he sent it a resentful stare even so. Now that he rode the bicycle, he looked at automobiles in a whole new way. The goddamn things were dangerous. If you tangled with one, you lost. It was as simple as that. And so many people drove with their heads up their asses. Bike? What bike? they might have been saying.
He’d probably driven that way himself. As a matter of fact, he was sure he had. How many times had he almost creamed some green ecofreako with delusions of Lance Armstrong? Plenty—he knew as much. And he’d blamed the skinny morons on the bikes every single time.
He stopped at a light, then turned right onto Hesperus. That was a bigger street. It had more cars on it. Not a whole lot more, though. Even L.A. and its auto-based suburbs could do without the sacred conveyance if they had to. They sure were trying to make like they could, anyhow.
“Pothole coming,” he muttered, reminding himself. It was right in front of a tropical-fish place run by a Japanese couple who, he happened to know, also owned about a quarter of the real estate down in Torrance—a bigger, richer burb than working-class San Atanasio. But they just plain liked tropical fish, so they went on selling them.
The pothole was a doozy. He would have felt it in the Taurus. On the bike, it might have sent him ass over teakettle. Not for the first time, he told himself to call Street Maintenance and give them hell. One of these days. In his copious spare time.
He had to get out into the middle of the street to turn left into the police station parking lot. The bike rack there was new since the eruption. Colin chained his mount to a hitching post. The bike was secondhand, and had seen better times. The chain was new, and industrial-strength. Marshall had had a bike disappear from a UCSB rack on account of an el-cheapo chain. Colin made his share of mistakes, but usually not the ones he could see coming six miles down the road.
Gabe Sanchez was standing outside the door poisoning his lungs. Colin nodded to the sergeant. “What do you know?” he called.
“I know I’d rather do this inside,” Gabe answered. “It’s cold out here, dammit.”
Colin didn’t feel cold. “You must have driven this morning,” he said. No, he didn’t feel cold at all. Antiperspirant was still getting into SoCal. The world would turn less pleasant if that supply ever failed.
“Way to go, Sherlock,” Sanchez said. “Anybody would guess you were a cop or something.”
“You think maybe?” Colin said. He looked like a cop. He dressed like a cop. He talked like a cop. He thought like a cop. So what was he gonna be? A tropical-fish merchant? An auctioneer? Like Popeye, he was what he was, and that was all that he was.
Well, almost all. If he hadn’t been a post-divorce tourist, he wouldn’t also be a middle-aged guy trying to start a second family. Rob, Vanessa, and Marshall might end up with a new half-brother or half-sister. Another new half-brother or half-sister, that is. And one with exactly zero biological relationship to their last new half-brother.
“Life gets fucking weird sometimes, you know?” Colin said: no great originality there, but plenty of feeling.
Feeling or not, Gabe shook his head. “Unh-unh, man. That’s a negative. Every once in a while, life stops being fucking weird. That’s when you think it starts making sense. And when you do, it drops the hammer on you but good. Because the rest of the time . . .” He shook his head again, and crushed the coffin nail under his heel. Then he looked mournful. “I want another one, dammit.”
“I’d go easy, if I were you.” Colin left it there. Like antiperspirant, tobacco reached L.A. from points east. Like antiperspirant and everything else coming in from points east, it reached L.A. in limited amounts, with prices inflated to match. Or maybe to more than match. People who had the cigarette jones had it bad.
Take Gabe Sanchez, for instance. He looked more sorrowful still. “Tell me about it. I’m smoking, like, half as much as I used to. That means I always need the next one twice as bad.” His laugh was singularly—almost plurally—devoid of humor. “The weenies who get on your back for liking the shit at all say you’ll live longer if you smoke less. It sure as hell seems longer—I’ll tell you that.”
“Ready to earn your next pack?” Colin asked, stepping toward the door.
“Way prices are now, that’s about two weeks of work.” Gabe exaggerated, but less than he would have a year earlier, and a lot less than he would have before the eruption. He followed Colin into the station.
Before long, Colin wasn’t so warm as he had been right after he chained his bike to the rack. You couldn’t crank up the heat the way you had in the old days. You also couldn’t roll the AC like nobody’s business on a scorching summer day. That turned out not to be such an enormous issue. The next scorching summer day here after the eruption would be the first.
Supervolcano or no supervolcano, people still robbed banks and liquor stores and even a laundromat. That one croggled Colin. The perp had escaped with over a hundred pounds of quarters in four large sacks.
“What the hell’s he gonna do with all of ’em?” he asked, not at all rhetorically. “You can’t spend ’em more than maybe five bucks at a time. Take your girlfriend out to a fancy restaurant and pay in rolls of quarters, people will talk.”
“Watch out for some dude buying everybody games at the arcade,” Rodney Ellis suggested. The black detective mimed working a joystick.
“There you go,” Colin said. “Makes more sense than anything I thought of.”
“Perp was in his forties, the crime report says,” Gabe pointed out. “So that’s kinda less likely, know what I mean?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Rodney answered. “But what did that guy say? You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever.”
Colin thought of Louise, and of her adventures and misadventures with her younger man. But if he told her anything like that, she’d go off the way the hot spot under Yellowstone had. Except in the line of duty, he tried not to talk to her these days.
Back to business. “What are we going to do about this asshole?” he said. “It’s not what you’d call a good description.”
“Wait till he hits the next Stop-and-Rob,” Rodney said. “And if he gets away with quarters again, right after that he’ll show up at the San Atanasio Memorial ER with a double hernia.”
“Everybody’s a comedian,” Colin said, but he and Gabe were both laughing.
It had started raining by the time they went out to lunch in Gabe’s car. The Honda stank of cigarette smoke, but that was better than getting drenched. “You’re gonna have fun riding home tonight,” Gabe remarked.
“Tell me about it,” Colin said gloomily. Poncho or not, he’d get wet. Sighing, he went on, “Once upon a time, it didn’t rain this time of year.”
“Yeah, I know.” Gabe nodded. “We’ll ke
ep saying that till they shovel dirt over us. All the kids too young to remember what it was like back then will think we’re a pathetic bunch of old farts for all the pissing and moaning about the good old days we do.”
“Yup.” Colin contented himself with the one word. The prediction sounded altogether too likely.
“Your wife knows about this shit, right?” Gabe said. “So, how long is the weather supposed to stay fucked up?”
Colin only shrugged. “From what she tells me, nobody can say for sure. Twenty years? fifty? A couple of hundred? A couple of thousand? We all get to find out.” He didn’t say that Kelly feared things would stay bad for the long end of the guesses—estimates, if you wanted the more scientific term. She didn’t think a short cold snap would have put Homo sapiens through such a wringer 75,000 years ago, after Mount Toba went kablooie.
No point passing that on to Gabe. Kelly admitted it was nothing but speculation. If Gabe wanted to think his kids would see the good old climate again, he could. Nobody could prove he was wrong for thinking so. And optimism, like so many other things, came where you found it.
The rain had grown more serious, more sure of itself, while they were eating. They ran to Gabe Sanchez’s car. “Boy, this is fun,” Sanchez said. He pulled out a pack of Camels from his inside jacket pocket and held it up. “You mind?”
“You think I’m gonna tell you what to do here?” Colin said. “I’m rude, but I ain’t that rude, dude.” Gabe lit up and started the car. Colin knew secondhand smoke from one cigarette wouldn’t give him lung cancer. He also knew it would make his clothes—and his skin, too—smell like burnt tobacco. Kelly would wrinkle her nose when he came home tonight. Maybe if he got there ahead of her, showered, and changed into something else . . .
“One thing,” Gabe said as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. “South Bay Strangler’s been quiet lately.”
“Probably had to pull overtime at his day job,” Colin answered. For all he knew, it was the exact and literal truth. If he’d known more . . . If he’d known more, he would have dropped on the son of a bitch a long time ago.
* * *
The sign was dusty. It could have used a fresh coat of paint. But it was still easy enough to read. KEEP OUT! it said in big red and blue letters on a white background. THIS MEANS YOU! Below that was a line of slightly smaller words: TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED!
Vanessa Ferguson eyed the sign with something less than enthusiasm. “Nice friendly asshole, wasn’t he?” she remarked.
“Or maybe, isn’t he?” Merv Saunders pointed to the farmhouse in the middle distance. “Somebody might still be holed up in there.”
“I don’t think so!” Vanessa wasn’t shy about talking back to the scavenging crew’s boss. Vanessa had never been shy about talking back to anybody. She’d had a checkered work life and a checkered love life because of it, but she was one of those people who counted costs afterwards, if they counted them at all.
“Do we want to find out?” Ashley Pagliarulo pointed to another sign, maybe fifty feet closer to the farmhouse.
That one showed a black skull and crossbones, with a blunt warning in red below it: ACHTUNG! MINEN! Not DANGER! MINES! No, not that, but auf Deutsch. Vanessa’s lip curled in disgusted scorn. “Neo-Nazi shithead,” she said. “I hope he did cough his worthless lungs out. He deserved it.”
“It’s likely just bullshit,” Saunders said, but he made no move to approach the farmhouse. “And if people are alive in there, we’re supposed to make contact with them no matter what kind of dumbass politics they’ve got.”
No one was supposed to be living in this part of Kansas. The mandatory evacuation order had gone out soon after the supervolcano erupted. Vanessa had been stripping farms and little towns of whatever might prove useful to survivors for months now, her team steadily working its way deeper into the ruined state. She’d helped bury more bodies than she cared to remember. That was one reason her palms were hard with callus. As for livestock carcasses . . . No point even trying to count those. The scavengers didn’t try to put them underground.
She did wonder what the country could do for meat with so many of its cows and sheep and pigs and chickens as one with the extinct animals that had died in earlier eruptions and fossilized. One of these millions of years, funny-looking archaeologists digging up ash-covered cattle ranches might write learned papers about what they found.
In the meantime . . . “I’d just as soon go on to the next place down the road,” Vanessa said. “I don’t care if we are supposed to make contact with people. If they don’t want to make contact with us, the hell with ’em.”
Several of her comrades in vulturing nodded. Saunders frowned, though. “We are supposed to get in touch with them, assuming they’re alive.”
“Harder if they’re not,” Vanessa agreed sweetly.
He gave her a dirty look. “I don’t think it’s real likely that they are, though,” he said, as if she hadn’t opened her mouth. “I think the chances are that that sign is a bluff, too, or was a bluff when there were people here.”
As if to prove as much, he took a few steps past the KEEP OUT! sign, toward the one that warned of the mines. He hadn’t gone far before something in or near the farmhouse opened up with a stuttering roar. Tracers zipped past overhead, but not too far overhead.
The machine-gun fire stopped. “Get the fuck off my land, bastard!” an amplified voice bellowed. “I won’t shoot to miss next time.”
Maybe he had a generator in or near the farmhouse, even if Vanessa couldn’t hear one chugging. Maybe he just had a battery-powered bullhorn, though batteries were drawing ever closer to their shelf life. Whatever else he had, he had the goddamn machine gun. Vanessa had used firearms often enough. Having the bullets coming in instead of going out was a whole different feeling, though. Fear tasted like a copper penny under her tongue. She didn’t piss herself, but she had to clamp down hard to keep from having that accident.
Merv Saunders didn’t argue with the survivalist or whatever the hell he was. Whatever he was, he had survived. Was he living on stashed food? Did he go out to do some freelance scavenging of his own? Had he somehow kept his livestock alive along with himself and whoever else he had in there?
At the moment, all that was academic. The government-sanctioned scavengers retreated with more speed than dignity. Saunders got on the radio to points farther east. Except for the satellite variety, cell phones didn’t work in these parts. Power remained out through most of the country’s midsection. When it would come back, nobody could even begin to guess.
“Can you call in helicopter gunships?” Vanessa asked eagerly. “Or at least soldiers with mortars and grenades and things?”
The crew boss looked at her. “Have you been eating raw meat again?”
Her ears burned. “We ought to kill that son of a bitch!” she said.
“Go ahead,” Saunders answered. “You first.”
That made her ears flame hotter. Her pistol seemed mighty small potatoes when you set it against the concentrated essence of infantry a machine gun represented. “They can get him on a weapons rap.” Machine guns weren’t legal anywhere that she knew of. Then real inspiration struck: “Or for taxes! I bet he hasn’t paid a dime since the supervolcano went off.”
“And you have?” Saunders inquired.
He was being as difficult as he could. It sure felt that way to Vanessa, anyhow. “No, but I haven’t had any money, either,” she said, which wasn’t provably false. What followed was actually true: “My stupid little credit union’s servers are back in Denver, and they’re dead as King Tut.”
“Denver. That’s right.” He nodded, as if reminding himself. “Not many got out from that far west.”
“Tell me about it.” Vanessa knew how lucky she was to have fled far enough and fast enough. She was as stubborn as she was lucky, too
: “Taxes work. That’s what they finally hung on Al Capone, remember.”
“The guy probably figured we were bandits, not I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help-you,” Saunders said. Vanessa inhaled sharply. The gang boss must have psyched out what she was going to say, because he beat her to the punch by continuing, “But if it makes you happy, I’ll pass the suggestion along. Maybe someone in authority will do something about it.”
Fuck off. Get out of my hair. That was what he meant. If she pissed him off badly enough, he could send her back to whatever had replaced the soggy Camp Constitution. If that wasn’t a fate worse than death, you could sure see one from there. She would have done almost anything to keep from ending up in a refugee camp again.
Her mouth twisted. Micah Husak had given her a most unwelcome education about what doing almost anything to get out of something else really meant. If Saunders made it plain her choice was between coming across and going back to a camp . . . She’d already had to make that kind of choice twice now. She’d yielded both times, and loathed herself whenever she had to remember. She also would have loathed herself had she chosen the other way; she knew that only too well.
Sometimes you couldn’t win.
Sometimes you couldn’t even play. The scavengers’ boss had shown exactly zero interest in her fair white body. That irked her, too. There weren’t a whole lot of things that didn’t irk Vanessa.
For now, though, unless she really wanted to piss Saunders off, she needed to leave him alone. She could see that. She didn’t like it for hell, but she could see it. With poor grace, she walked away. Dust and volcanic ash that would be dirt one of these years scuffed up under her feet.
IX
A bus up from downtown. The subway out to North Hollywood, which was on the fringes of the Valley. An express bus out to the heart of darkness (actually, in Los Angeles, the Valley was the heart of whiteness). Bryce Miller wondered if he should have taken his car, expensive though that was. Getting out here this way was a royal pain.
Supervolcano: All Fall Down Page 15
