Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  Susan made a face at him. “You sound like Colin Ferguson, you know? We’ve got to try to put the country back together again.”

  “We’ve got to try, sure,” Bryce said. “I think it’s gonna be a while longer before the trying gets anywhere, though.”

  “You do talk like Colin Ferguson.” Susan didn’t sound as if she were paying him a compliment.

  How much has Vanessa’s old man rubbed off on me? Bryce wondered. It wasn’t that they shared political opinions, because they didn’t. But a cynical view of mankind and its follies . . . That, yes.

  “Well, it doesn’t make me a bad person,” he said after a beat.

  “Not too bad a person . . . I guess.” There, Susan seemed to be giving him as much benefit of the doubt as she could.

  The impeccably dressed, impeccably groomed talking head on CNN said, “It is hoped that the passage of the New Homestead Act will assist in the revitalization of eruption-ravaged states such as the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.”

  He didn’t say anything about Colorado or Idaho or Utah, and he really didn’t say anything about Wyoming or Montana. The first three states were years away from being resettled. The western fringe of Montana remained more or less habitable. Nobody would be moving into the rest of it, or into any of Wyoming, for decades if not centuries to come. Big chunks of both those states, along with some of Idaho, had gone off the map in the most literal sense of the words.

  “It would be nice to have people in those little towns and on some of the farms,” Susan said.

  “Yeah. It would.” Bryce nodded. Things here were just bad. They weren’t terrible—well, except for the weather. Of course, this was the eastern part of the ashfall zone, close to 750 miles from what had been Yellowstone. When you went farther west, things got worse and worse and worse again.

  IX

  D

  r. Stan Birnbaum paused before plunging the novocaine-filled hypodermic into Colin Ferguson’s gum. Kelly’s father was in his mid-sixties, with gray hair, thick glasses, and a scraggly white mustache. He was heading for retirement, but he hadn’t got there yet. “Don’t worry about a thing,” he said reassuringly. “The building has a backup generator and a very smooth switching system. Even if the power in town goes out in the middle of things, the drill won’t slow down even a little bit.”

  Colin cocked an eyebrow at his father-in-law. He very nearly cocked a snook at him, too. “Stan,” he said, “I’d be happier if the drill weren’t going at all. Then I wouldn’t be getting this blinking root canal.” He would have expressed himself in stronger terms, but Stan’s assistant, a pretty young Asian woman, was in the room with them.

  “Not going is good. Going fast is good—it doesn’t hurt so much,” the dentist told him. “Going not so fast . . . Going not so fast is why root canals used to have such a nasty reputation. Now open wide.” With no great enthusiasm, Colin did. He clutched at the arms of the reclining chair as the hypodermic went home. Withdrawing it at last, Stan Birnbaum said, “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

  “Depends which end of the needle you’re on,” Colin answered. His father-in-law chuckled. After a moment, Colin added, “I’ve had worse—I’ll say that.”

  “Well, good. I’m a painless dentist—it didn’t hurt me a bit,” Stan said. Colin winced worse than he had when he got the shot. But he’d asked for it with his own crack. The dentist continued, “We’ll give you a little while to get numb now. Come on, Ruby. Let’s see how Mrs. Diaz is doing in room three.”

  “Okay, Dr. Stan,” the assistant said. Out they went, leaving Colin alone with his thoughts and with a tongue that seemed more like a bolt of flannel with every passing second.

  In due course, Stan Birnbaum reappeared. Dentistry resembled the Navy in its hurry-up-and-wait rhythms. Dr. Birnbaum poked Colin’s gum with a sharp instrument. “Feel anything?” he asked.

  “Only pressure—no pain,” Colin answered—he knew the ropes. He’d been on antibiotics long enough that the sore tooth wasn’t so bad, either.

  “Let’s get to work, then,” the dentist said. In spite of all the modern technology, it wasn’t what anyone this side of a dedicated masochist would have called fun. Still, Colin had been through plenty of bumpier rides in that chair. Stan Birnbaum knew his business, all right. Colin wouldn’t have expected anything else from Kelly’s father.

  When the ordeal was over, Birnbaum gave him his marching orders: chew on the other side, and no strenuous exercise for a day. He also gave him a prescription for more Cleocin and one for Vicodin. “Drugging a cop, are you?” Colin said—thickly, because the left side of his tongue was still disconnected from his brain.

  Dr. Birnbaum shrugged. “You don’t have to take them. I’ve known macho guys and recovering addicts who got by on aspirin or ibuprofen. But these are better for pain, and they don’t leave most people too blurry. The way things are nowadays, you’re not likely to go driving while you’re loaded, are you?”

  “Nope,” Colin said. Gas was around twenty-five bucks a gallon. The auto industry and all the ones related to it still hadn’t started to recover from the eruption. Their collapse meant more hundreds of thousands out of work—and unable to afford even a motor scooter, never mind the tiny cars Detroit was still haplessly trying to sell. The only person Colin knew of who’d bought new wheels after the supervolcano blew was Vanessa’s boss. The only reason he knew about Nick Gorczany was that Vanessa cussed him every chance she got. It sounded more like After the revolution, we deal with swine like him each time he heard it.

  “All right, then. I’ll call you tonight to see how you’re doing.” Stan didn’t do that just because Colin had married Kelly. It was SOP for him. He was a damn good dentist, even if he did say so himself.

  The building with the backup generator had a pharmacy on the ground floor. Colin filled both prescriptions there. He washed down one pill from each with a large apple juice. They told you to drink plenty of fluids (what else would you drink? rocks?) when you took Cleocin, and they meant it; the stuff would leave you nauseated for hours if it landed on an empty stomach.

  That done, he walked to the bus stop to wait for the ride back to San Atanasio. Dr. Birnbaum’s office was in Torrance, the biggest South Bay city. Kelly had grown up there. Torrance was . . . less strapped than San Atanasio, anyhow. It boasted the Del Amo mall, which it claimed was the second biggest in the country, after only the Mall of America. Since the Mall of America lay right outside subarctic Minneapolis, odds were pretty good the Del Amo mall was busier these days. Busier didn’t mean busy enough, though.

  He waited long enough that the Vicodin had kicked in before the northbound bus showed up. The bus ran late. Once he felt the pill, he cared less than he would have before. It distanced him from annoyance almost as much as it would distance him from pain once the novocaine wore off.

  When the bus finally did show up, he climbed aboard and gave the driver six dollars—more thievery. He saw a Torrance police car and two civilian autos on the way back to San Atanasio. A few motor scooters, a Harley, bikes, trikes, pedicabs, skateboards, an honest-to-Pete horsedrawn buggy, Rollerblades . . . The streets were full of wheels, but they weren’t full of engines. The pace of living had slowed down since the eruption. No one had wanted it to, but it had anyway.

  He had to walk several blocks from the closest stop to the police station. Walk he did, hoping it wouldn’t count as strenuous exercise. When he came in, Malik Williams was talking with the desk sergeant. The chief turned toward him and nodded, asking, “How’d it go?”

  “I’ll live. Like I told my father-in-law the dentist, I’ve had worse,” Colin answered. Williams chuckled sympathetically. Colin went on, “Afraid I’ll flunk a drug test for the next little while.”

  “Hey, I hear that,” Williams said. “I had an implant done a couple of years ago—you know, where they stick a screw in your jaw and then mount a replacement tooth on top. The thing works great now, but you bet I was glad for the dope then.”<
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  “That’s what the shit is for,” the desk sergeant said. “The trouble is the people who get off on it.”

  “I’m a little buzzed right now,” Colin said, “but I like scotch better.”

  “There you go,” the sergeant agreed. “Something with some taste to it, not just a lousy pill.”

  “Uh-huh.” Colin nodded, then glanced toward Malik Williams. “You need me for anything right now, boss?”

  “No, no.” The chief understood the question behind the question. “Go on to your desk, man. I bet you aren’t real bouncy on your pins.”

  “Now that you mention it, no.” Colin sketched a salute and headed towards a place where he could sit down. Between the root canal and the pain pill, the world felt less steady than it should have.

  No sooner had he plopped his behind into his swivel chair than Gabe Sanchez came over to see how he was doing. Gabe smelled of cigarette smoke. Smokers always did, and hardly ever knew it. If you didn’t light up, you knew they were around even before you saw them.

  “So what’s it like having your father-in-law drilling holes in your head?” Gabe asked.

  “Just as much fun as it is with anybody else,” Colin answered.

  “You wouldn’t want to go to him if you were giving Kelly grief,” Gabe said.

  “I didn’t want to go to him today, but that stupid tooth wouldn’t quit hurting,” Colin said. “I’m just glad we’ve still got a decent dental plan. Otherwise, my bank account would’ve taken one in the teeth, too.”

  “Probably get wiped out the next time we have to talk contract with the city,” Gabe said gloomily. He had too good a chance of being right. Every contract kept less than the one before. San Atanasio had been scuffling for money even in the good old days. Since the eruption, each year’s budget turned into a dance with bankruptcy.

  “Joys of being a civil servant,” Colin said. “And if you believe that, I’ll tell you another one.”

  “Save your breath,” Gabe said. “I already know just how much fun this job is.” He sighed. “’Course, collecting unemployment’s even more fun.”

  “You got that right.” Colin shuffled through the papers on his desk. After they found out who the South Bay Strangler was—and after that almost tore the department to pieces—everything else felt like an anticlimax.

  Well, almost everything. He noticed a familiar name on a manila folder. Opening it, he read a carbon of a badly typed report a patrolman had submitted—one more place where old technology had more life to it than anyone would have dreamt before the eruption.

  “How about that?” he said.

  “How about what?” Gabe asked.

  Colin tapped the folder with the nail of his right index finger. “Our old buddy, Victor Jennings, is back in business again.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Gabe sounded disgusted. The DA’s office hadn’t thought a jury would convict Jennings of armed robbery or assault with a deadly weapon, not when most of what he stole was food. So they’d told him Go, and sin no more. And go he did, but quit sinning he didn’t.

  “Yeah.” Colin tapped the report again. “This time, he knocked over a check-cashing place on Hesperus. Probably would’ve made his getaway, too, if Jodie Boyer hadn’t been coming by on her bike right then. She’s the one who made the bust.”

  “Jodie’s always had a pretty good bust,” Gabe opined. Colin was inclined to agree with him . . . in a purely theoretical way, of course. He wouldn’t have said so out loud, though. Gabe sailed closer to the breeze than he did. A crack like that could make Internal Affairs want to talk with you, and never mind whether you wanted to talk with them.

  When he went out to lunch with Gabe, he ate soba noodles. Squishy was good right after you’d had a root canal. He hadn’t been back to the office long when the root-canaled tooth loudly reminded him that, though the offending nerve was gone, it wasn’t yet forgotten. His first Vicodin and the last of the novocaine chose the same time to wear off. He hurried to the water fountain to gulp another pain pill.

  What would they do with Victor Jennings this time? Jennings had evidently decided that, if he couldn’t work, he might as well steal. He’d have to get charged and tried and serve some kind of term this time . . . wouldn’t he? Colin hoped so, but he wouldn’t have bet anything that cost more than a McDonald’s Happy Meal on it.

  • • •

  Nick Gorczany’s chief accountant was a no-nonsense, short-haired woman named Mary Ann Flores. She was a dyke, and made no bones about it—the photos on her desk were all of her much more feminine partner. Vanessa Ferguson didn’t care about that one way or the other. She did care that Mary Ann was the one who doled out the salary checks twice a month.

  The head accountant set one on Vanessa’s desk now. “Here you go,” she said gruffly. It had nothing to do with her machismo. She gave Vanessa dubious looks because Vanessa wasn’t corporate enough to suit her.

  “Thanks.” Vanessa let it go right there. Mary Ann was way too corporate to suit her. Mary Ann was also too gay to suit her, though she never would have admitted as much. She didn’t care what people did in the bedroom. When they acted as if they wanted a medal for it, too . . . That got old fast.

  No matter who brought it, the check was highly welcome. If not for the check, she wouldn’t have had anything to do with this miserable, stupid place. Maybe that also showed enough to make Mary Ann Flores suspicious of her.

  She waited eagerly for the (battery-powered) clock on the wall to announce that it was quitting time. Banks stayed open later than usual Friday nights, but she’d still have to hope the bus ran on schedule. If it was late, she’d have to go in on Saturday morning, which would be a pain.

  She hustled out as soon as she could, or even a couple of minutes sooner. If Mr. Gorczany and Ms. Flores didn’t like it, too damn bad. She was still standing at the bus stop waiting when Gorczany drove by. She ground her teeth. After his recent adventures at the dentist’s, her father would have told her that was a bad plan. She did it anyway.

  The bus came five minutes late. Normally, no biggie. When she was trying to get to the bank on time . . . “Nice of you to join us,” she snarled as she fed money into the slot. The driver just looked at her. He didn’t get it. When you insulted somebody and it flew right over his head, weren’t you wasting your time?

  She hustled into the B of A on Reynoso Drive just before the security guard would have kept her out. She filled out the deposit form and went to the end of the line. Before the eruption, she’d hardly ever set foot in the bank. She’d done as much as she could on the computer. But with both power and the banks’ servers erratic these days, dealing with genuine human beings worked better.

  Better, but slower. The line was long, and crawled forward. Somebody at one of the tellers’ stations had trouble with something, which bogged things down even more. I might as well be at the post office, she thought sourly, going nowhere fast.

  She finally reached the front of the line, made her deposit, stuck some cash in her purse, and got the hell out of there. Then she had to wait for the bus that would take her not quite close enough to her apartment building. It ran late, too. Of course it did. It ran later than the other one had, as a matter of fact. And rain started coming down while she was walking from the stop to her building. So she was not a happy camper when she turned the key in the lobby mailbox.

  A linen catalogue, a coupon from a new pizza place that had opened a few blocks away, a bank statement, her cell-phone bill. If the world were beige and concrete-gray all over, her mail would have fit in perfectly.

  Shaking her head, she went on to her apartment. At least she didn’t need to hassle with cooking. She’d splurged on Thai takeout the night before, and she kept enough ice in the refrigerator to make sure the leftovers would stay good even if the power had been off all day.

  It was on now, so she heated herself some dinner. After she put the dishes in the sink, she sent Bronislav a text. He was somewhere out on I-10, either hauling something back
from L.A. or bringing something this way. She hadn’t heard from him in a few days. She’d been beat after she got home from work, and her cell hadn’t been working anywhere close to all the time.

  The cell proved it was working now by making the almost-hiccup with which it announced an error message. “The fuck?” Vanessa said. She hadn’t miskeyed Bronislav’s number. She couldn’t have; she’d taken it out of the phone’s list of saved numbers, the way she always did.

  But the screen said THAT NUMBER IS NOT CURRENTLY IN SERVICE. NO REPLACEMENT NUMBER APPEARS IN THE DATABASE.

  She tried it again. She got the same error announcement and the same message. “The fuck?” she repeated, louder this time. She wondered if he’d had an accident somewhere that she didn’t know about.

  Wondering, worrying, she called his cell this time. It rang, which encouraged her, but instead of him or his voicemail she got a computerized voice that said, “We are very sorry, but the number you have dialed is not in service at the present time.”

  “What do you mean, we?” she growled, but insulting a computer was even more pointless than zinging someone who didn’t notice he’d been zinged.

  She watched TV and read a thriller till she got sleepy. Every so often, she tried Bronislav’s number again. As far as her phone could tell, he might have dropped off the face of the earth. Something was rotten in the state of Serbia or along the Interstate, but she had no idea what. All she knew was, she didn’t like it.

  She slept badly. She texted him in the middle of the night, but his phone hadn’t magically come back to life. She tried yet again when she got up too early in the morning. Still no luck.

  “Shit,” she said. Breakfast was bread, which didn’t need to stay cold, and jam, which could also do without much refrigeration. After breakfast, Vanessa knew, she’d have to bustle around taking care of the things she couldn’t do while she was stuck at her nine-to-five. Shopping. Paying bills. All the exciting, time-swallowing stuff.