No one in the house minded if he brought a girl upstairs. No one was going to pound on the door with the crime-scene tape while he had company. Things could have been worse. He kept telling himself as much. He kept looking at apartments, too. Unfortunately, landlords were less adaptable about rent than Dad was.
Earbuds and his iPod made the outside world go away. Or they would have, but the first song that came out was from Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles: a strange, droning chant called “Justinian II,” an Emperor of Byzantium who got his nose chopped off. Listening to it reminded Marshall how much he missed his older brother. He hadn’t seen Rob since before the supervolcano blew. Maine? OMG! Maine was the Devil’s personal icebox these days.
In the song, Justinian II came to a bad end. Singing about it, Justin Nachman sounded unwholesomely amused. He had a knack for that. Something more innocuous but less evocative shuffled onto the iPod next. Marshall closed his eyes and listened.
After a while, he shut it off and started noodling on a story. Not much inspiration, no. Maybe perspiration would do. One thing sure: the elves wouldn’t write it for him, no matter how much he wished they would. Wondering why they didn’t make elves the way they used to, he soldiered on. Once he finished the first draft, he could read it over and see just what he had, or if he had anything at all.
VII
Dwip. Dwip. Dwip. Bryce Miller didn’t know whether everybody who worked for the Department of Water and Power sounded like Elmer Fudd impersonating a leaky faucet. He did know he wasn’t the only one, though.
And he knew the noise fit the weather much too well. The dirty-gray heavens dwipped dwizzle as he pedaled his bicycle toward the bus stop. He couldn’t afford to drive downtown, not with gas through the roof and into the ionosphere-and not with most stations showing red flags to let people know they had no gas at any price. Long, long lines-old farts talked about 1979-marked the ones with a little to sell.
It wasn’t supposed to rain in L.A. in June, not even a little bit. Well, it hadn’t been supposed to. Mother Nature was reading a new rulebook these days. Bryce rode on, keeping a wary eye out for cars. Not so many of them on the road these days, and a lot more bikes like his. Some of the people on the two-wheelers were as nonchalant as if they’d been doing it for years. A few might even actually have been doing it before the eruption-a few, but not many. Others looked as if they’d borrowed some kid’s bike they almost remembered how to handle.
Bryce figured he fit somewhere in the middle. It was his bike, and he had ridden it before the supervolcano blew. He hadn’t ridden it to work, though. And he wouldn’t have ridden it in the rain. Biking was supposed to be fun, right?
The bus stop on Braxton Bragg Boulevard had a big new parking rack bolted to the sidewalk next to the bench. Bryce chained his bike to the steel. The stop, like a lot of others, also had a new armed guard: a guy who looked as if he was recently back from combat on distant shores and had had trouble finding work here in the States. Bryce nodded to him. The guard gravely dipped his head in response. No, he wouldn’t have got that polite anywhere but in the military.
Other people already stood at the stop. Bryce nodded to them, too; he saw a lot of them several times a week. The rather cute Hispanic chick, the hulking black guy, the Asian fellow who never quit texting. . They’d been regulars on this route longer than he had.
Up grumbled the bus. People stepped away from the curb as it neared, not wanting to get splashed. The doors hissed open. They filed aboard. The black guy found a seat, then lifted his hat. He had a half pint of Southern Comfort under there. Sudden Discomfort, Bryce thought, remembering a collection of Mad Magazine pieces older than he was but still funny. The guy took a quick knock, then stowed the booze again.
The bus took off. A couple of blocks later, of course, it stopped again. More people got on. By the time it reached the Red Line station near the Harbor Freeway, it was packed. Most of the passengers climbed off there, Bryce among them.
He got his ticket from the automated kiosk. He felt automated himself; once you’d done it a couple of times, boarding took next to no conscious thought. He walked out onto the platform-which did boast a roof-and waited for the next train to pull in.
Along with the other commuters, he got on when it did. The train headed north, toward downtown. The tracks ran along the middle of the 110. In other words, they went straight through South Central L.A. People-most of them either African-American or Hispanic-got on and off at several stops.
Bryce kept his head down and his nose buried in the Times. Like most white kids raised not far from South Central, he’d heard a lot about the area-none of it good-and had gone there never. The most horror he’d experienced on the train was a couple of guys a little younger than he was yelling at each other in Spanish. The yells soon subsided to dirty looks. Neither young man pulled out a Glock and shot up the car, or seemed likely to. Yells and glares Bryce could live with.
No yells today. Nobody even fired up a joint. That happened now and again, although you weren’t supposed to smoke anything inside the train. Funny-he’d never seen anybody light up an ordinary cigarette. People always waited till they got off for that. Harder to wait to get baked, evidently.
He left the train and headed for the DWP building. Skyscrapers-some office complexes, others hotels-turned the streets into corridors. His mother and Colin Ferguson talked about their childhood days, when, for fear of earthquakes, City Hall was the only building allowed to rise higher than twelve stories. Modern architects and engineers had convinced the powers that be that their efforts would stay up no matter what the San Andreas Fault did.
Even if they were right, Bryce wouldn’t have wanted to be where he was when the Big One hit. The skyscrapers might not topple. Sure as hell, though, razor-sharp spears of glass would rain down from their sides. And the glass would slice anybody walking along here into hamburger in nothing flat.
“Hey, guy?” A homeless woman of indeterminate age tried to look alluring. What she looked was skinny and dirty and strung out: desperate, in other words. You’d have to be even more desperate yourself to want to go to bed with her. But turning tricks was probably the only way she could get the cash for whatever drugs had washed her up on life’s lee shore-and maybe, if she was lucky, for a little food, too.
Bryce walked by as if she weren’t there. He wasn’t particularly proud of it, but what could you do?
“Stinking fairy!” she whined after him. He could see the logical fallacy. That was what he got for doing classics in grad school. Just because he didn’t want her, that didn’t mean he didn’t want any woman. Plato would have tried to convince this gal that she’d understood the flaw in her own thinking all along.
She wasn’t likely to care much for philosophy, though. All she cared about was the next fix. And if she could wound him a little for ignoring her charms, such as they were, so much the better. No doubt she’d come on to someone else in a little while, and then cuss him out, too.
DWP headquarters wasn’t in a skyscraper: just an ordinary blocky office building at the edge of the fancy-shmancy built-up area. You could walk past it without noticing it was there. No doubt thousands of people did every day. Bryce would have if he’d worked anywhere else.
He showed his ID to the security guard at the front entrance. The man had been seeing him five days a week for several months now, but still carefully inspected it. Only after he was satisfied did he nod and say, “Morning, Dr. Miller.”
“Morning, Hank.” Bryce didn’t know how Hank knew he had his Piled Higher and Deeper. He didn’t go around calling himself Dr. Miller. As far as he was concerned, Doctor was the right title for M.D.s, dentists, and veterinarians; people with Ph.D.s who glommed on to it were pompous asses.
That wasn’t the DWP mindset. Here, if you had a doctorate you flaunted it like a well-built girl in a spandex tank top. Somebody must have tipped Hank off about Bryce’s sheepskin. He became Dr. Miller to people here almost in self-defense, even if h
e didn’t use the title himself; otherwise, he would have seemed like a security guard.
He climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Have to keep my girlish figure, he thought vaguely. He didn’t boast one of the offices with windows around the outside of the building. Nope. He had himself a cubicle with fuzzy walls in a big room in the middle, straight out of Dilbertland.
Jay Black was already hard at it in the Skinner box next to Bryce’s. He was a computer whiz, a balding, fortyish guy who wondered why he had trouble finding a girl he liked. Because all you’re looking for is a twenty-five-year-old supermodel didn’t seem to have crossed his mind. Finding one who also appreciated the fine points of iPhone app-writing (to say nothing of a cross-stitched sampler on the wall that read CUBICLE, SWEET CUBICLE) would take some doing.
He looked up from what Bryce hoped was his first Mountain Dew of the day. Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at suppertime-you’ll get diabetes, and you won’t be worth a dime.
“Welcome to another day in paradise,” Jay said.
“Could be doing anything out there. We’d never know it,” Bryce answered.
“Used to be, that was a crying shame,” Black said. “The way things are now, we’re lucky to be in a building where the lights and the heat work.” He grinned crookedly. “This is the last place in town that’ll go cold and dark.”
“Yeah.” Bryce hadn’t looked at it that way, which didn’t mean Jay was wrong. The coffee machine by the copier still worked, too. Bryce got some caffeine and a little sugar of his own, then sat down at his desk for the day’s important project. And other fantasies, he thought-he’d sure had plenty that were more enjoyable.
He cut down the text on a newsletter so it would fit on one sheet of paper. He did his best to translate a brochure from bureaucratese into English. He changed the small print on DWP electric bills to keep up with revised state and city conservation rules. When nobody was paying attention to him, he fiddled with a new pastoral: Theocritus meets the supervolcano, in effect. When he finished, he planned to send it to the New Yorker. After they told him no, he’d start going through all the markets that didn’t pay. Marshall Ferguson wasn’t getting rich, but he was selling things now and again. Bryce wished he could say the same himself.
Since he couldn’t, he had this day job. The DWP was the kind of place where you could look up after a quarter of a century and wonder where the hell the best years of your life had gone. Jay hadn’t been here that long, but he was starting to get those moments.
Bryce hoped he wouldn’t stick around long enough to have them. You’d never go toe-to-toe with the Donald or Bill Gates on what they paid you, but you could live and even raise a family on it. Medical, dental, vision, retirement plan. . When you got all that good stuff, would you really worry about where the time was going and why you were bored out of your skull?
A lot of people wouldn’t. Hell, a lot of people didn’t. They put in their hours and used the company Xerox to copy their own stuff and stole paper and pens and anything else that wasn’t nailed down and did what was required of them and not a speck more. Bryce sometimes found himself slipping into that easygoing slothfulness. He wondered how different it really was from going nuts in a quiet, polite way.
After lunch, someone put an RFP on his desk with a Post-it note: What do you think our chances are for getting ahold of some of this grant money? Evaluating an RFP, especially one from the Federal Department of Energy, was a little more fun than passing a kidney stone, but only a little.
Could I do this for twenty-five years? he wondered as he scribbled notes. Would anything be left of me if I did?
* * *
Somewhere in Kansas. That was as much as Vanessa Ferguson knew about where she was. Probably somewhere in eastern Kansas. The dust and ash got thicker as you moved toward the Colorado border. That meant things got more screwed up. She didn’t think anybody had actually gone back into Colorado yet. There was plenty of disaster to go around here closer to the edges of the ashfall.
She didn’t care. She’d escaped Camp Constitution, and escaped whatever sorry-ass place the suckers flooded out of Camp Constitution had gone to instead. She would never see Micah Husak again. If by some misfortune she did, she could kick him in the nuts or plug him instead of sucking him off.
And all her freedom had cost her was one more quickie blow job on that nameless National Guardsman. Her self-respect? As a matter of fact, no. You did what you had to do and you counted up the tab later on. Or else you didn’t worry about it at all. Most of the time, she didn’t.
Some stretches of ground in these parts were free of volcanic crud. Rain and wind had blown it away or washed it into rivers-which was why the floods were so horrendous. But there was genuine, no-shit green in those places. Robins hopped around, probing the ground for worms. Every so often, they even found some. Worms had to be tougher than Vanessa had imagined.
But where the ash and dust had drifted. . In the lee of houses and fences, in places where the wind didn’t reach, in hollows without streams running through them. . In spots like that, the ground was as gray and lifeless as it had been right after the eruption, going on two years ago now.
No people had been found alive. Not everybody had fled to the camps, maybe, but the people who hadn’t fled hadn’t made it. Lung diseases brought on by inhaling all the abrasive ultramicroscopic crud in the air did them in. It wasn’t quite as if they’d smoked twenty packs a day for fifty years, but it might as well have been.
Cows? Sheep? Pigs? Chickens? Horses? Gone, gone, gone, gone, and gone, for the same reason. Those worm-hunting robins must have flown here from somewhere else. Livestock couldn’t fly away like that.
No crops in the ground the past two years, either. Where anything grew up in the fields, it was weeds pushing up through dead cornstalks. No trace at all was left of year before last’s wheat. It was only a memory. This country was importing as much grain as it could these days, along with oil and so much else. The dollar was sinking like a stone. It would have sunk even faster if Europe and Japan and China weren’t hurting, too.
Except for the ruined farmlands all around her, Vanessa didn’t have time to think much about the battered economy. Washington talked about sending work crews into ashfall country to reclaim it. Washington, though, was a thousand miles away. Nothing would reclaim this country except time.
“So what are we doing here, then?” she asked the boss to whose crew she’d been assigned.
Merv Saunders looked like something out of a Grant Wood painting. He was tall and thin and bald, with wire-framed glasses and a long face made up of vertical and horizontal lines of disapproval. “Scavenging,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Lots of stuff got left behind when people had to run. Quite a bit of it’ll still work-or we can make it work with a little cleaning and tinkering. There’s an awful mob of folks out in the camps who need anything we can get our hands on.”
Ashley Pagliarulo let you know at any excuse or none that she had a law degree. That didn’t mean she wasn’t wearing somebody else’s old clothes like the rest of the work crew, or that she didn’t need a shower as much as her comrades. But it did give her an attitude. Now she said, “Under most circumstances, this would be theft.” By the way she said it, she expected cop cars to roar up with sirens blaring any second now.
It wasn’t gonna happen. If there were any cop cars within a hundred miles, Vanessa would have been amazed. And Merv Saunders sounded as calm as Valium as he answered, “The Abandoned Property Act makes it legal, as you know perfectly well.”
Ashley only sniffed. Either Pagliarulo was her married name or her ancestors came from some part of Italy that produced petite blondes. “The Abandoned Property Act will never stand up under judicial review,” she predicted.
Saunders shrugged. “If you feel that way about it, how come you’re here?”
“Because I was gonna go bonkers if I stayed in that lousy camp another minute,” the attorney snarled, a sentiment Vanes
sa completely understood.
“Well, okay.” Saunders got it, too. “But we honest to God are doing something useful for the country here. A lot of the stuff that we’re getting out won’t be worth having if we leave it here for another few years. And most of the people we’re taking it from are dead.”
“Some aren’t. Some wound up in camps the same way we did.” Ashley was always ready to argue. Any time, any place. She was a lawyer, all right. She went on, “And even the dead people have heirs. We’re plundering their estates.”
The crew boss looked at her. “You can always go back to a camp, you know.” He didn’t say whether you want to or not, but anybody with two brain cells to rub together would hear it in his voice. Vanessa sure did. She’d given him some static, too. Now she decided keeping her mouth shut for a while might be a pretty fair plan. Going back to a camp was the very last thing she wanted to do.
Ashley Pagliarulo also got the message loud and clear. She said not another word. She looked miffed. Hell, she looked righteously pissed off. But she was plainly of the same opinion as Vanessa: that going to a camp was like going to jail, only with worse food and accommodations.
Not that being in the middle of ruined Kansas was any bargain. Whenever the wind blew out of the west, as it did a lot of the time, it picked up dust from the thicker layers in those parts and did its best to re-cover what time and rain had started to clear.
They all had pig-snouted gas masks. When the wind blew from the west, they wore them, too. Hundreds of thousands of people had already died from HPO and other lung ailments brought on by breathing that crap. Nobody could guess how many more would prematurely follow them into the grave. And, as Vanessa knew from the dreadful days right after the eruption, being out and about with the dust blowing around was like trying to carry on after you’d had a handful of grit thrown in your eyes. Wearing a gas mask was a metaphorical pain. Doing without one was a literal pain. Reality trumped metaphor every goddamn time.
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