Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  Things would have been even more rugged if people hadn’t kept giving up and moving south. Maine north and west of the Interstate probably couldn’t still support the population that had lived here when the supervolcano went. But a lot of those people had gone, too. The new winters wore down even Mainers. And some people froze to death every winter, too.

  “People shouldn’t freeze here, dammit,” Dick Barber said at a town meeting after such an unfortunate family had been found. “Back when there was a Red Army, they taught their men to get through a Russian winter night in the woods with only the greatcoat on their back—no fire or anything. If they could do it then, we should be able to do it now in our own houses.”

  Plenty of people in Guilford wore surplus greatcoats from the former Soviet Union and the countries of the late Warsaw Pact. They weren’t new, but they were cheap and warm—a good combination. Barber had one, and often used it.

  He was universally noticed in town, but not universally beloved. Like Rob’s father, he had a habit of saying what was on his mind and letting other people pick up the pieces—or go after him with a two-by-four. One of his unadmirers called, “Do you know how to pull this stunt yourself, or are you just blowing hot air again?”

  “Dave, if I could reliably blow hot air, I’d be the most popular man this side of the Interstate,” Barber answered, which got enough of a laugh to make Mayor McCann rap for order from the pulpit of the Episcopal church. When order returned, the proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn went on, “Since I’m not, I probably don’t. But I’ve read about how to do it, so I suppose I know.”

  Dave ran a junk shop, which made him both literally and metaphorically a man of parts in Guilford these days. He was lean and graying, with a blade of a nose. “Ayuh,” he said, which meant he’d been born in these parts. “Then you won’t mind doin’ it for real, to show folks you mebbe for once know what you’re goin’ on—and on, and on—about.”

  Several expressions chased one another across Dick Barber’s face. None of them seemed what you’d call happy. Rob could see why. If he said he didn’t want to do it, who would take him seriously after that? If he tried and failed, the Trebor Mansion Inn would be under new management.

  But his voice showed none of what he had to be thinking. All he said was, “You’ll allow me a fur hat, too? The Ivans have them as part of their winter uniform—which probably means they wear them year-round these days.” Guilford did a good impersonation of Siberia these days. What Siberia was like . . . It’s, like, cold, man, Rob thought.

  “You can wear a fur hat. You can wear your warm boots, too,” Dave said. He seemed amazed Barber had taken his dare with so little fuss. “You sure you know what you’re doin’, Dick?”

  “Of course I am,” Barber answered easily. “And if I turn out to be wrong, I promise I’ll do my best to haunt you.” He laughed a spectral laugh better than any Rob would have guessed he had in him.

  After the town meeting broke up, they agreed he would show off—that was the only way to put it—in the strip of forest that still ran along the southern bank of the Piscataquis. They hadn’t cut that down because people hunted the birds and squirrels which used those trees. The test would take place in two nights’ time.

  “If a blizzard comes in then, you don’t gotta do it.” Dave didn’t want blood, even frozen blood, on his hands.

  “Thanks for your generosity,” Barber said.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Rob asked him as he started back to the Inn.

  “I will by night after next,” Barber told him. “You can bet your life on that. Why not? I’m betting mine.”

  “You weren’t . . . just making that stuff up about the Russian soldiers and their coats, were you?” Rob asked hesitantly. Maybe because Barber had experience in politics, every once in a while he would exaggerate. He didn’t do it often, but Rob had seen it happen.

  This time, though, he raised his right hand as if taking an oath. “Not guilty, your Honor,” he intoned. “Not guilcup, even, if you remember your Pythons. I read it in a book by a defector. A Red Army man froze to death, and a general who’d been a front-line junior officer in the war against Hitler got pissed off when he found out about it. Weren’t they teaching the troops anything any more? He went out in his greatcoat to show the rest of the brass it really could be done, and then they went back to teaching the draftees how to do it.”

  “Sweet,” Rob said. “Does the book tell how to do it, then?”

  All of a sudden, Dick Barber didn’t sound so sure of himself. “Er—I’m going back to the Inn to find out. Been a while since I read it, and I don’t remember.”

  “Sweet,” Rob said once more, sardonically this time.

  “Well, I’ll find out one way or the other,” Barber said. “If this were the good old days, I’d go online and Google it. Or if I lived somewhere like Florida, I could still—probably—go online and Google it. Of course, if I lived somewhere like Florida, I wouldn’t need to worry about freezing to death in a snowstorm. I don’t think I would, anyhow.”

  “Florida,” Rob said in a wondering voice. When Maine’s laughable excuse for a summer started, he could go there if he wanted to. But he couldn’t imagine wanting to. Guilford was home now, and his horizons had contracted around it. Florida might as well have been another planet, not another state. Some memories lingered, though. Not quite apropos of nothing, he went on, “I dreamt about guacamole the other night.”

  “Guacamole.” Barber sighed—the word sparked nostalgia in him, too. “There used to be a Mexican and Italian place down on Highway 7, between here and Newport. It wasn’t good Mexican food, not with the ingredients they could get in the middle of Maine, but still. . . . They’ve gone under now.”

  “I remember driving past that place when we first came up here,” Rob said. “Justin was driving. Right after we went by, a fox ran across the road. I’d never seen one before—I’d sure never almost turned one into roadkill before.”

  “Not something we need to worry about much any more,” Barber said. “If by any chance my greatcoat doesn’t do its job, I won’t get squashed. You can use me for a fence post till I thaw out. The way things are, that should be quite a while from now.”

  “Heh.” Rob’s chuckle sounded uneasy even to him. Most of the time, Dick Barber knew what he was doing. Most of the time. When he didn’t, the results could be interesting—as in the Chinese curse.

  It wasn’t a blizzard two nights later, but it was snowing again: dry, powdery stuff that stung and then numbed any skin it touched. The mercury read eleven below. It could have been worse. Rob had seen a mercury thermometer freeze, a new experience he could have done without.

  On the appointed night, Barber looked like something out of Red Dawn if Red Dawn had been filmed in Nome rather than the Lower Forty-eight. He had a fur cap with earflaps, a wool Navy watch cap under it, a thick wool sweater with a denim jacket over it and his Red Army greatcoat over that, jeans (probably with long johns underneath, but Rob didn’t know that for sure), two pairs of wool socks, and L.L. Bean winter boots.

  Pointing down at his feet, he said, “They’re what worries me. I don’t think those boots are as warm as real Russian valenki.”

  Dave the junk-shop man surveyed him and said, “I expect you’ve made your point, Dick. You don’t got to go through with it if you don’t have a mind to.”

  “Damn right I’m going through with it,” Barber answered. “I may as well. Pulling off all this shit would take me half the night anyway.”

  “Don’t be a hero,” Rob told him, wondering how many times his father had given testosterone-fueled young cops the same advice. “If you feel too cold—or if parts of you stop feeling anything at all—for Christ’s sake come on back and warm up.”

  “Who appointed you my mommy?” Dick Barber inquired. No matter how cold it was, Rob’s cheeks felt on fire. Barber thumped him and Dave on the back with a mittened right hand, then stumped across the bridge over the Piscataquis. He
quickly vanished into snow and darkness.

  Rob rounded on the junk-shop man. “You and your goddamn big mouth.”

  “I’m not the only fella around here who has one,” Dave answered. “Still and all, I got to say I didn’t reckon he’d take me up on it like this. I figured he was all talk, and I’d shut him up for a while.” He kicked at the snow under his own booted feet. “Hope he comes back. Guilford’d be a boringer place without him—not that I’d say so to his face, mind.”

  “Right,” Rob said wearily. He’d seen more than he ever wanted of small-town squabbles and feuds here. He reflected that Dick Barber wouldn’t have said anything good to Dave’s face, either. Feuds and squabbles ran both ways.

  Even after he went back to the apartment he shared with Lindsey, he didn’t sleep much. The night seemed very long. In this season, at this latitude, the night was very long. It would be even longer in Russia. Those Red Army men had lived. Dick Barber . . . No, Rob didn’t sleep much.

  In his own warmest clothes, he hurried to the bridge at the first hint of twilight. More snow lay underfoot; as he slogged through it, he wondered if he should have put on snowshoes. He wasn’t surprised to see Dave making his best speed toward the bridge, too.

  “He didn’t come in during the night, did he?” Rob called. The junk-shop man shook his head. Rob swore under his breath. Dick Barber was somewhere in the trees on the south bank of the Piscataquis, then. Where? No way to tell; snow and breeze would have swallowed his tracks. The bridge looked as if no one had walked across it for a thousand years.

  Barber was somewhere in the trees, all right. But as man or fur-capped icicle? Did he know what he was doing? Rob hurried over the bridge, Dave at his heels. Several other people who’d been at the town meeting followed them. Some were getting down bets on how they’d find Dick Barber. The odds were against him.

  Rob really wished for snowshoes on the far bank of the river. The going there was heavier, and the snow thicker. A jay screeched at him from the top of a pine. Why don’t its feet freeze? Rob wondered. Somehow, the bird had got through the frigid night without a Red Army greatcoat to keep it warm.

  “Dick!” Rob called. “You there, Dick?”

  The others going through the narrow strip of trees with him also took up the call. “You there, Dick?” they chorused. If he hadn’t known what he was doing, they might not find him till the snow melted, if it ever did.

  No sooner had that thought crossed Rob’s mind than he saw a boiling and heaving in the drift not ten feet ahead of him. Dick Barber stood up, so covered in white that he made a distinctly snowy abominable man.

  “It’s alive!” Rob shouted, as if a Hollywood Tesla coil had just activated a monster. Then, while the others rushed toward him, he asked Dick the obvious question: “How the hell are you?”

  “Cold. Hungry,” Barber answered. “I don’t think I’m frostbitten anywhere, though. It wasn’t much fun, and I hardly got any sleep. Hey, Dave!”

  “Ayuh?” the junk-shop man said in an unwontedly small voice.

  “Fuck you.”

  “And your granny,” Dave replied, but his heart didn’t seem in it.

  “Now I’m going across to Caleb’s Kitchen for some ham and eggs and hot tea,” Barber said. The tea would be nasty; it was brewed from burnt grain and local leaves. But it would be hot. Anyone who’d just spent a night out in the snow was entitled to something hot, by God.

  And, by God, Barber had proved his point. The luckless family that froze hadn’t known what to do. No good deed would go unpunished, of course. Since Barber did know how to survive in horrible conditions, he’d have to show other people the tricks. Rob hoped they wouldn’t test their new knowledge the same way he had.

  • • •

  The Great Plains ran a long way west from Wayne, Nebraska. They ran a long way north, too. Bryce Miller was convinced that, with nothing in the way to slow it down, the wind doing its goddamnedest to blow straight through him had got its running start right at Santa Claus’ house.

  It wasn’t snowing just this minute, only blowing. He cast a curious eye heavenward, wondering whether he’d see any elves tumbling by up there. But no. Santa must have put rocks in their pockets or something. Nice to know good Saint Nick was up for emergencies.

  Nice to know the wind is making your brain freeze up, Bryce thought. Along with half a dozen other shivering people, he waited for the bus to come and take them back to town from the Wayne State campus. The sun shone pale. Even though it shone, the sky was closer to gray than to blue. How many years would it be before real blue skies came back?

  However many years that would be, Bryce sure hoped it wouldn’t be too many more before the bus showed up. Otherwise, he would turn into a Brycicle. To his relief, the bus kept its schedule. His breath still smoked inside, but that wasn’t too bad. Compared to what he’d just escaped, it felt like Havana in there.

  As he walked from the closest bus stop in Wayne to his apartment building, he did some muttering he couldn’t do once he got there. Susan wasn’t happy, and he didn’t see what to do about it. If she hadn’t been happy with him, he might have figured out some way to make things better. But that wasn’t the problem—not yet, anyhow.

  The problem was, no college or university felt itself in dire need of an expert on Frederick II Hohenstaufen and the Holy Roman Empire in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Susan had taught a couple of adjunct courses at Wayne State. She’d taught a little online. She’d written three articles, expanding on chunks of her dissertation. Two had already come out, and the third was in the pipeline.

  But she spent too much time staring at the computer monitor and the TV and the apartment walls. Wayne wasn’t like Los Angeles; it didn’t give you piles of things to do when you weren’t productive or just needed to get away from the monitor and the TV and the walls for a little while.

  Bryce had got a job. That was why they were here in Wayne. Susan had been so sure she could land one, too. She’d hoped she could land one someplace with a climate better than this one. There weren’t a whole bunch of places with worse ones. There was Maine north of the Interstate, where Rob Ferguson had inexplicably washed up. And there was Minnesota. Shivering, Bryce tried not to think about Minnesota.

  He clumped up the stairs to the apartment. If it looked as if he’d stay here a long time, he wanted to buy a house. They were ridiculously cheap by California standards. Well, more people lived, and wanted to live, in California than in Wayne, Nebraska. And the ashfall around here had been worse than in most of California, which didn’t do real-estate prices any favors. Saving on an assistant professor’s pay wasn’t easy, but the only real vice he and Susan had was books. There were plenty of more expensive ones.

  “Hey,” Susan said when he walked in.

  He went over and gave her a kiss. She squeezed him. No, nothing was wrong between them . . . yet. She slapped his hand away when he tried to reach under her sweatshirt, but she was smiling when she did it. “What’s new?” he asked.

  Too often, she said Nothing in a hopeless way that denied anything in Wayne, Nebraska, could possibly be new—and denied that anyone outside of Wayne, Nebraska, could possibly want a medievalist who’d specialized in the Holy Roman Empire. Today, though, she waved at the TV, which was on CNN. “They’ve finally passed the New Homestead Act,” she said.

  “Have they?” Bryce said. “Well, it’s about time, don’t you think?”

  “Years past time,” Susan replied. “But it’s Congress and the President, so what can you do?”

  “Nothing. Less than nothing.” Politics had been dysfunctional at least as long as Bryce had been alive. It would have taken more than a supervolcano to change that. The President came from one party, but Congress belonged to the other. Whatever the President wanted, Congress hated. Whatever Congress wanted, the President was ready—eager—to veto.

  When people proposed marching on Washington and impartially burning down the White House and the Capitol, they sounded l
ess and less as if they were kidding. After a while, even That Yahoo in the White House and the Congresscritters took the hint. The New Homestead Act was some of the result.

  That wasn’t its real name, of course. The short version of its real name was “An Act to Facilitate the Resettlement of Lands Adversely Impacted by the Recent Supervolcano Eruption.” The full version of its real name ran for a fat paragraph and had not a punctuation mark anywhere in sight. But the New Homestead Act pretty much described it. It let people gain title to property abandoned after the eruption by settling on it and improving it. That was the gist. The details had caused almost endless wrangling and produced a bill with the heft of a Tom Clancy novel.

  “Do you really think it’ll get people out of refugee camps?” Susan asked. Getting people out of camps was touted as the bill’s main benefit. Millions—no one seemed sure just how many millions—of people had been stuck in camps since the supervolcano blew.

  Before long, it became obvious that the refugee camps were doing for—or to—the United States what the gulags had done to Stalin’s Soviet Union. They spread the pathologies of the prison system into the wider society. Maybe getting people out of them and onto the land would help turn back the clock. Maybe.

  Bryce shrugged. “Mm . . . some people, I guess,” he said judiciously. “But if you lived in a city or a town before the eruption, how much will you want forty acres and a mule?”

  “It’s supposed to help small towns, too,” Susan said. “Those towns we biked through on the way to Ashfall State Park sure could use some help.”

  “Yeah. They could.” Bryce couldn’t very well quarrel with that. No one in his right mind could. But . . . “Those towns were dying on the vine before the eruption. Who knows whether anything will help them? And who knows whether people who’ve been in the camps for years will be good for anything once they get out and have to do stuff on their own again?”