Things Fall Apart

by Harry Turtledove

  Braxton Bragg ran above the freeway. He sped down the onramp and onto the 110. Before the eruption, you could have found a traffic jam here at any hour of the day or night. You probably wouldn’t have after nine at night, but you could. Now the freeway was nearly empty. Most of the traffic on it was eighteen-wheelers. They hauled supplies from the port at San Pedro to the rest of the Los Angeles area.

  Colin wondered whether Bronislav Nedic was making a go of his restaurant in Mobile. If he wasn’t, he might be behind the wheel of one of those growling monsters. That would serve him right.

  Once Colin got downtown, he pulled off the 110 and groped his way to the train station. This wasn’t like LAX; he didn’t come here often enough to do things on automatic pilot. That was how he thought of it, anyhow. Bryce would have said you had to be familiar with the rituals. The rituals Bryce was familiar with predated Christianity, but he would claim the principle didn’t change. He might be right, too.

  No trouble finding a parking space. The attendant who gave Colin his ticket didn’t seemed surprised to see him; it wasn’t so bad as that. But, as with LAX, it wasn’t what it had been in pre-eruption days, either. In the old days, he thought. One of the divides of the coming world would be the chasm between people who remembered life before the supervolcano blew and those who didn’t. He was and always would be on the wrong side of that divide.

  Finding his way around the station didn’t turn out to be too bad. Signs guided him where he needed to go. And it was laid out in a familiar way, with track numbers taking the place of gate numbers at an airport. No, the other way round, he realized. Airports must have learned a lot of their licks from the way train stations worked.

  He got to where he was supposed to be twenty minutes before the train was due. He’d built in both travel time and fumbling time. The Navy and the police had taught him not to be late no matter what. Early was acceptable.

  Early, here, meant buying a cup of coffee and the skinny little sheet the Los Angeles Times had become and standing around waiting. So he did that. He hoped Marshall was using time back at the house better than he could himself.

  He gave the cup back to the guy behind the counter and got his five-dollar deposit refunded. Washing china cost less energy than going through waxed cardboard or styrofoam, and saved the expense of hauling in all those disposable cups. You put out some money to make sure you wouldn’t walk away with the one they gave you, then got it back once you returned the artifact.

  There was no deposit for newspapers, but there was a recycling bin right next to the newsstand. The less pulp the Times had to bring in, the better off it was. Colin had just chucked his paper into the bin when the PA announced that Kelly’s train was arriving.

  She got off two cars back from where he was standing. When she saw him, she waved and ran and hugged him. “Take me home!” she said. “I am so grubby and so sick of wearing the same clothes! Oh, my God! I mean, I got some new stuff, but still. . . .”

  “On our way,” he said. “We’ll wake Deborah up. When’s Mommy coming home? It’s worse than Are we there yet?—I swear it is.”

  “Let me take a shower first. Is there hot water?”

  “Yup.” If the power were out here, Colin would have produced hot water for her even if he’d had to chop down one of the trees in the back yard. But the electric lights showed he didn’t need to do that.

  “Everybody on the train cheered when we got to country that had more than emergency generators going,” Kelly said. “They cheered like their team just won the Super Bowl. It was bad back there—I mean, bad. They aren’t used to outages the way we are, and it was cold like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Well, you’re finally back, and Deborah’s not the only one who’s glad to see you.” Colin squeezed her hand.

  They went outside. It was in the forties, and probably fixing to rain, though it hadn’t started yet. Kelly did a couple of dance steps. “This is wonderful!”

  The ride home was quick and easy, though he almost creamed another fool riding a lightless bike after he got off the freeway. He leaned on the horn. The noise seemed all the louder for being so unusual now. He hoped it made the jerk on the bicycle piss his pants.

  Kelly dropped her bags in the foyer and ran rejoicing to the bathroom. The water in the shower stall started to splash. Playboy recoiled from the bags. They were large and unfamiliar, which might mean they were going to kill him. But, when they didn’t jump up and start ripping the cat limb from limb, he cautiously approached and sniffed them to find out where they’d been. By the way he sniffed and sniffed, they’d been some interesting places.

  The water stopped. The blow-dryer buzzed. Kelly came out wearing different clothes and a blissful expression. “God, that was great!” she said. “Now I want to see Deborah.”

  “I’ll get her.” Colin went upstairs to his daughter’s room. He scooped her out of bed.

  “Daddy?” she muttered. “What’s going on?” Even as he carried her down to the front room, she wasn’t more than a quarter awake.

  “Who’s that?” he said. One of her eyes opened just enough to see who it was. When she did, both eyes opened—wide, wider, widest.

  “Mommy!” she squealed, and started trying to run even though Colin was still holding her. He set her down so she’d quit kicking his ribs. She squealed again while she was charging Kelly. Playboy thought she might be charging him and flew up the stairs. Deborah did her best to tackle her mother. She might be outweighed four to one, but she had momentum and enthusiasm on her side.

  “Hello, sweetie!” Kelly picked her up and hung on to her and kissed her. Right that minute, watching them, Colin was as happy as he’d been in his whole life. He gave Marshall an extra fifty when his son headed back to Janine’s place.

  “Hey, too much,” Marshall said. He was a solid kid—not that he was such a kid any more.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Colin told him. “It’s all good tonight.”

  “Hey,” Marshall said again, and then, “Thanks.” He rolled his bike out the door and pedaled off into the night. He had front and rear lights—Colin checked to make sure.

  “You didn’t come back,” Deborah was saying to Kelly. “You didn’t come back and you didn’t come back and you didn’t come back and—”

  “I couldn’t come back,” Kelly broke in when she saw that would go on for some time. “Things in Chicago stopped working, like they do here when the power goes out. Only they couldn’t start it up again. There’s a whole big part of the country where the power doesn’t want to start back up. And it’s cold back there, too.”

  “It gets cold here,” Deborah said. “It’s cold now.”

  “Not when I’ve got my arms around you,” Kelly said, and Deborah giggled. “But I mean cold, cold, cold, way colder than it ever gets here.”

  “Yuck,” Deborah said, which was just what Colin was also thinking.

  Kelly nodded. “Yuck is right. You know what a pain it is when the power goes off. And when it’s cold like that and the power goes off, it’s even worse.”

  “People turn into ice cubes.” Deborah thought it was funny, because she didn’t know it was real.

  Colin knew too well it was. Not a whole lot of video was coming out of the frozen Northeast and Upper Midwest. By the nature of things, you had to bring your own power supply with you to shoot video when you wanted to do that in places where it was out. Then you needed either a satellite hookup or time to get your tape to some place that did have power so you could broadcast. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people had already frozen to death. More would, till things got straightened out. If things got straightened out.

  Playboy came back downstairs. He stalked over to Kelly and rubbed against her, as if to admit he remembered her. Then he flopped at her feet, rolled over onto his back, and started to purr, as if to admit he was glad he remembered her. And well he might have been. She fed him and gave him water and changed his catbox more than anyone else. Cats were honest about remem
bering and appreciating things like that. From everything Colin had seen, they were a hell of a lot more honest about it than people were.

  • • •

  Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had a gig in Greenville, up at the base of Moosehead Lake. That was more than twenty miles from Guilford: no laughing matter with the snow as high as LeBron James’ eye. Part of the deal was that the promoter had to lay on a sleigh to take the band both ways.

  It wasn’t Jim Farrell’s sleigh. There were others up here. No: this one belonged to Doug Kincaid, Rob’s father-in-law. Rob didn’t know what kind of arrangement Doug had made with the fellow who’d set up the concert. Whatever it was, he would have bet Doug hadn’t come out on the short end of it. Whatever Doug Kincaid did, he did well. He made a point—often an annoying point—of doing well.

  Before the band set out, Lindsey told Rob, “Keep your hand in your pocket whenever you have anything to do with my dad. That way, you’ll make sure you come back with your wallet.”

  “If he wants my wallet, he can have it,” Rob answered. “My license and the charge cards long since expired, and I hardly ever have cash in there—not that cash is worth a whole hell of a lot around here any which way.”

  She gave him a wifely look. “Don’t be more difficult than you can help,” she said, which proved she had a fair handle on the character of the man she’d married.

  Before the sleigh arrived, Justin Nachman said, “I want another look at your father-in-law’s lady friend. IIRC, that was one seriously hot babe.”

  “You haven’t sent a text in years, but you still talk like one,” Charlie Storer said.

  Rob had more things on his mind than dialectical immaterialism. “Try not to say that where the guy doing the driving can hear you, okay?” he told Justin. “I don’t know what kind of grief Doug can give you if he gets pissed off, and I don’t want to find out. I don’t think you do, either.”

  “Hey, I’m cool,” Justin said. “If ‘Don’t get the locals mad at you’ isn’t the number one mantra for a band on the road, it oughta be.”

  “Okus-dokus. You got that one right,” Rob said.

  “‘Okus-dokus’?” Biff Thorvald dug a finger into his ear, as if to say he couldn’t have heard what he thought he’d heard.

  Slightly shamefaced, Rob answered, “I got it out of one of the books in the tower at the Mansion Inn. I’ve been looking for a place where I could throw it in.”

  “Yeah, well, now you can fuckin’-A throw it out again,” Biff said. After a little thought—it didn’t take much—Rob decided that was a good idea.

  He hadn’t gone north and east of Guilford since the last time he hunted in this direction. Pretty soon, the sleigh took him farther than he’d walked. He stared at the unfamiliar scenery. It didn’t look much different from what he saw around his home town, but he didn’t know what came next before it came. That felt distinctly odd.

  When he said as much, Justin nodded. “Yeah. I was thinking the same thing,” he agreed. “Pretty weird.”

  “We used to throw shit in the vans and drive for three states without even thinking about it,” Rob said wonderingly. “Half the time, we didn’t even bother looking out the window. It was just, like, the road. What we had to go on till we got to where shit mattered again.”

  “That world is dead as shoe leather,” Justin said. Rob nodded and smiled to himself at the same time. Justin had had the room under the tower at Dick Barber’s domain. No doubt he’d read some of the books on the shelves up there, too. Rob was pretty sure he knew which one that figure of speech came from.

  They went through the little down of Monson on the way to Greenville. Any town that looked little after Guilford had to be, well, little. Monson might or might not have had a hundred people before the eruption. If it held half that many now, Rob would have been amazed.

  “Trees around here still grow pretty close to the road,” Charlie said. That was another way of noticing the same thing. Where there were people in any numbers, the second-growth pines fell for the sake of firewood. Without warmth through the winter, you couldn’t live. And, where winter stretched from September into April, a lot of trees went up in smoke.

  The twin towns of Greenville and Greenville Junction, though, had had a pre-eruption population of over two thousand. Like Dover-Foxcroft, that made them a metropolis next to Guilford. Moosehead Lake was something to see, too. Manhanock Pond, on the way to Dover-Foxcroft, was a lake by the standards of someone from L.A., even if not to the locals. Moosehead Lake was a lake by anybody’s standards. On the map, it actually looked like what it was named for. That made it as unusual in geography as the constellation Scorpio was in astronomy.

  At the moment, Moosehead Lake looked like a frozen moose. The sleigh glided past what could have been a movie director’s dream of an Old West Indian trading post: all logs and rococo type on the sign. It had been a you-can-get-anything-here kind of place even before the eruption: grocery store, hardware store, clothing store, and drugstore all in one. These days, all things secondhand passed through it. Just about every surviving store north and west of the Interstate dealt in secondhand things, because so damn few firsthand things were running around loose in these parts.

  Doug Kincaid and the promoter, a fellow named Bill Gagne, greeted the band closer to the lake. The promoter pronounced his name Gag-nee. “Yeah, I’ve got cousins in Quebec,” he said. “They go Gahn-yay. But my people’ve been in Greenville since Maine was part of Massachusetts. So we’re Gag-nees.”

  “Looking forward to the show tomorrow,” Rob’s father-in-law said. “Never figured Lindsey would marry a guy in a band I’d heard of. I still think it’s awesome.”

  “These days, we’re just glad to get a chance to play,” Rob said. Justin, Charlie, and Biff all nodded. “Reminds us of what we used to be once upon a time.” They could have got out of Guilford the first summer after the eruption. Biff was the only one who’d had a local girlfriend then. But they’d stayed, and now it didn’t look as if they’d be going anywhere.

  “You could be in plenty of worse places right this minute,” Doug Kincaid remarked. “Here, at least, we know what to do with really cold weather.”

  “We know how to hunker down, too,” Gagne put in. “You live where things were tough before the supervolcano screwed the pooch, you learn that shit. So we know how to do without, ’cause we already were. The folks farther south, they’re only starting to find out.”

  “Ayuh,” Charlie said, so naturally that neither local even gave him a funny look. When Rob meant yeah, he said yeah. He didn’t try to fit in by talking like the natives. If Charlie wanted to, though, Rob supposed he had the right.

  However you said it, the agreement was deserved. Some power had come on in parts of the Northeast and upper Midwest. A lot of places still went without, though. Their winters weren’t quite so horrendous as the ones here, but they weren’t anything delightful, either. And places like New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio had a lot more people to try to feed and keep warm than upstate Maine did. Things were bad, and not getting better very fast, if at all. Battery-powered radios brought Jim Farrell’s domain such news of the wider world as it got.

  Doug said, “Sylvie’s really looking forward to hearing you guys play, too. She had you on her iPod back when iPods worked all the time.”

  “How about that?” Rob said—one of the few phrases, his father had told him, that were safe most of the time. His bandmates didn’t let their tongues hang out like hungry hounds, either. He was proud of them.

  The bed-and-breakfast where they spent the night plainly didn’t do much business any more. But their room had a wood-burning stove and enough fuel for it to keep them not too cold till morning. Rob had long since decided that being not too cold was as much as anyone could hope for in post-eruption Maine.

  They played in a high-school auditorium. It had no windows. The doors stayed open, which let in some light but also let in the cold. Torches burned in sconces that had plainl
y been mounted on the walls after the supervolcano blew. Soot streaked the industrial-strength paint above them and darkened the ceiling. Such soot stains were part of life here. Rob suspected they would get to be part of life over much wider stretches of the country.

  They didn’t practice enough. Their harmonies were ragged. They fluffed chords. Measured against any of their recordings, they were crappy. The audience didn’t seem to care. People weren’t measuring them against their recordings. Unless you used up precious batteries, or unless you had vinyl and a windup phonograph, you couldn’t listen to anybody’s recordings any more. People compared them to a day without entertainment. By that standard, they were dynamite.

  Rob felt almost embarrassed to take his bows. He didn’t think they’d ever got such a fervent reception. They played four encores, and got out of doing more only by miming exhaustion.

  “Wow,” Justin said as they left the stage at last. “I mean, wow. That really happened. And we weren’t even loaded.” Maine north and west of I-95 remained something close to an anti-pot zealot’s dream. Except that once the summer before when some weed showed up, Rob hadn’t got loaded on anything but alcohol for a hell of a long time. And with alcohol, less was definitely more. A little buzz was great. When you got massively drunk, you acted like an asshole and then you felt like dogshit the next day. Not worth it—not for him, anyhow. Other people did look at it differently.

  Bill Gagne said “Wow,” too. “You guys filled the joint. We’ll clean up on this one.”

  “That’s cool,” Rob said. A concert like this did operate on cash. He’d have to find something to do with his greenbacks. Well, there were worse problems to have.

  His father-in-law brought Sylvie backstage. Not even multiple layers of warm clothes—the kind of things that turned most folks into the Michelin Man—hid her emphatic curves. “You guys were awesome,” she said.

  “She’s right,” Doug Kincaid agreed.

  “Hey, at least,” Charlie said. Everybody laughed. Rob knew they hadn’t been that great, not by pre-eruption standards. They’d prided themselves on their tightness then. It was nowhere to be seen now. By all the signs, though, no one who wasn’t in the band noticed or minded.