Here was another farmhouse with the front door standing open. Maybe the people who’d lived here hadn’t bothered closing it when they got the hell out. Maybe looters had hit the place after the owners bailed. If they had, Vanessa hoped the time they’d wasted plundering meant they came down with one of the zillion lung diseases the dust could give you. As far as she was concerned, looters deserved all the bad things that happened to them and a few more besides. Her father, no doubt, would have sympathized with the attitude.
Looters had hit the place. The TV was gone. There was no computer anywhere. Pulled-open drawers, everything in them now gray with dust, said there wouldn’t be any jewelry, either.
But there were shoes in the bedrooms and clothes in the closets. Before long, some refugees would be wearing these people’s castoffs. Vanessa was in clothes like that herself. So were her colleagues. Demand still exceeded supply. Like her, plenty of people in the camps had no money to buy anything new. They depended on charity-and on the fruits of the Abandoned Property Act.
The wearables went into black trash bags. Vanessa wondered out loud what people had done before they had plastic bags to stash stuff in.
She didn’t particularly expect an answer, but she got one. “Burlap,” Merv Saunders said. “It was cheap, and there was lots of it. They still use it for sandbags because of that. Feed sacks, too.”
They found feed sacks out in the barn. No livestock remained in there. These people must either have taken their animals with them or, if they couldn’t do that, turned them loose and hoped for the best. Those hopes were doomed to disappointment, but they couldn’t have known ahead of time.
Vanessa had had to turn her cat loose before they let her into a refugee center. She’d hoped for the best, too, but. . Poor Pickles! Tears stung her eyes. She blinked them back. Crying inside a gas mask was a bad idea, because tears had nowhere to go and fogged up your lenses like nobody’s business.
But the barn did have those sacks of feed-some made from plastic-impregnated paper; others, sure as hell, of good, old-fashioned burlap. And feed, even feed that was past its sell-by date, was precious. The Midwest’s endless abundance was dead, smothered in supervolcano ash and dust. Those sacks of corn and soybeans and whatever wouldn’t be coming out of America’s breadbasket by the millions any more, not for God only knew how many years. Animals that had survived elsewhere in the country still needed to eat. If the food was stale, well, stale feed was a hell of a lot better than no feed. People weren’t so fussy now as they had been when times were flush.
The crew lugged the feed sacks to their truck. It wore the mechanical equivalent of a gas mask. It sported an enormous, heavy-duty air filter that sure as hell wasn’t part of its original equipment. The engine compartment and transmission were much better sealed off than was necessary in most of the country, to keep grit from getting into the moving parts.
Vanessa remembered how her own Toyota had crapped out on the road while she was trying to get away from the eruption. She just thanked heaven she’d got her hands on some surgical masks before then. Otherwise, she’d be coughing her lungs out now, if breathing in that garbage hadn’t made her kick the bucket.
Then she thought of Pickles again. She’d had to turn him loose to die. This time, she wasn’t fighting tears but killing rage. If she ever ran into the prune-faced bitch who’d made her get rid of the cat. . That gal wouldn’t last fifteen seconds, and there was the long and short of it.
And here she was, straining her back to lug feed sacks over to a truck kitted out like something from a Mad Max movie. And she was glad to be doing it, too, because all her other choices looked worse. If that wasn’t a bastard and a half, she was damned if she knew what would be.
When they’d emptied out the barn, Merv Saunders checked a printout he’d got before they started this grave-robbing expedition. “Way to go, people,” he said. “Our next stop is Arma, Kansas.”
“Arma virumque cano,” Vanessa said. It was a leftover from Bryce, and damn near the only bit of Latin she knew.
Everybody else in the crew looked at her. Saunders rolled his eyes.
“It’s from Vergil,” she said. “Means ‘Of arms and the man I sing.’”
They didn’t care. Their stares, some black and others suspicious (as well as she could guess by reading expressions through gas masks), showed that only too clearly. She wished she could have done three or four more lines, but that probably would have just made matters worse. She spread her work-gloved hands.
“Our next stop is Arma,” Saunders repeated, every line of his body saying Wanna make something out of it? Vanessa gave up and stood there, waiting. The crew boss went on, “It’s a decent-sized town-more than fifteen hundred people, when it had people. It’s got a gas station. If the underground tanks are anywhere close to full, that’s even more important than bringing back feed.”
The crew nodded. Vanessa found her own head going up and down. Any gasoline or diesel fuel that you could get your hands on was more precious than rubies these days. The dollar was hurting. Countries that hadn’t been trashed could afford oil imports better than the USA could. Not that the oil business was in great shape itself. The sputtering wars in the Middle East made sure of that.
So. . grave-robbing. And it was important enough that even Vanessa couldn’t get-too-cynical about it.
* * *
Louise Ferguson pulled into her parking space in the condominium complex. She wondered how much longer she’d be able to keep driving to the ramen headquarters on Braxton Bragg Boulevard. It wasn’t all that far from here, and she didn’t use very much gas going back and forth. But the stuff was ridiculously expensive-when the stations had any, which they did less and less often. Back before the supervolcano erupted, Europeans would have rebelled at paying prices like these. They were paying even more than she was now, not that that made her happy. Misery, here, didn’t love company. Misery was just miserable.
She walked to the mailboxes at the front of the complex. A cable bill. A catalogue from a clothing company-NEW FASHIONS FOR COOLER CLIMES! the cover said, sounding more cheerful than it had any business being. A notice from the electric company, warning that reduced generating capacity might mean intermittent service. That translated into English as rolling blackouts. The governor threatened them before. Now they’re here, she thought as she went back toward the condo that had been Teo’s and was now hers.
It really was hers. The lawyers had done their dance over title to the place, dotting every t and crossing every i and doing whatever the hell they did: probably lifting their legs and peeing on the papers till the miserable things smelled right. Whatever it was, it hadn’t come cheap. Nothing did, not in this day and age.
Up the stairs she trudged. She remembered how Teo had bounded up them, and how her heart had jumped when she heard his energetic strides. She would have loved him still if only he could have handled the idea of having a kid. She had the kid. She had the condo. She didn’t have Teo-and if he showed up now, she’d spit in his eye.
When she walked in, Marshall was holding his little half-brother. The baby’s smile at seeing his mother was so wide it almost made the top half of his head fall off. “Da-da-da-da!” he squealed.
“That’s your mama,” Marshall said. “Mama.”
“Da-da-da-da!” James Henry repeated, even louder than before.
“He’ll figure it out,” Louise said. “All of you guys went ‘dada’ before you went ‘mama,’ too.” That had made Colin proud and irked her, not that either one of them would ever have admitted it.
“Whatever.” Usually, Marshall bailed out of the condo as if his Nikes were on fire when Louise got home. That was partly because he liked babysitting no better than any other single guy his age, partly because he remained pissed off at his mother for ending the marriage that had brought him into the world. He didn’t-by the nature of things, he couldn’t-understand how dead the marriage was before Louise ended it. (That Colin hadn’t had the first clue it
was dead said nothing good about him: not if you listened to Louise, anyhow.)
Today, though, Marshall didn’t go anywhere. He just stood there. Louise gradually recognized the look on his face as expectant. With a sigh, she remembered why: she was supposed to pay him today. She fumbled in her purse till she found her checkbook and a pen. She wrote rapidly, tore off the check, and handed it to him. “Here you go.”
“Thanks.” He put it in the pocket of his Levi’s. That he wouldn’t help his mother for free never failed to annoy her, but he wouldn’t. If you listened to Colin, you couldn’t reasonably expect anything else, but Louise made a point of not listening to Colin.
“Wait!” she said suddenly when Marshall was already halfway to the door.
He paused. “Wazzup?”
“Let me see that check again.”
He handed it to her. She scribbled the amount in her register. She used to forget to do that about one time in five. It had driven methodical, organized Colin straight up a wall. Louise always figured she had more creative things to worry about. . till she was on her own, and had to balance the checkbook herself instead of letting somebody else worry about it. The hassles a couple of unexpected bounced checks put her through did more to make her note every single one of them than Colin’s sarcasm had ever managed.
She gave back the check. “Now you can escape.”
“Whatever,” Marshall said again, and did just that.
Dealing with the register meant Louise had taken her eyes off James Henry for a few seconds. She couldn’t safely do that any more, not when he was crawling. He’d got something in his mouth. She grabbed him, reached in there, and pulled it out.
A little scrap of paper. It wouldn’t have hurt him even if he’d swallowed it, but you never wanted to take chances like that. Most of the time, she wouldn’t have wanted to stick her finger into somebody else’s mouth, either. A mom with a baby got used to all kinds of things she wouldn’t have wanted to do most of the time.
She nursed him. She gave him some rice cereal and some carrot goop. His diapers had got more revolting since he started eating solid food. Colin used to say a rug rat wasn’t human till it was potty-trained. Like a lot of things Colin had said, that held just enough truth to be annoying.
Louise found herself thinking of her ex-husband a lot more often than she thought about the departed father of her latest child. Yes, she’d been together with Colin a lot longer than she had with Teo, but that wasn’t it, or not all of it. Colin said and thought more interesting things than Teo.
Which mattered only so much. Teo’d been a hell of a lot better in bed and easier to get along with. . till he freaked out when she found herself pregnant.
James Henry was trying to catch his toes and stuff them in his mouth. “I love you,” Louise told him, “but you are such a damn nuisance.”
“Da-da-da!” the baby said happily. His tummy was full. His diaper was dry. His onesie kept him warm. His mommy was there. He didn’t care about anything else in the whole wide world.
I should be so lucky, Louise thought.
* * *
Kelly lay next to Colin. Once upon a time, Louise had lain with him on the same mattress. Kelly mostly didn’t think about that. Expecting somebody to get a whole new bed after a breakup would have been way over the top. Now, though, it forcibly came back to her mind.
Maybe it came back to his, too. “You sure you wanna go through with this?” he asked in a low voice. It was dark. The door to the master bedroom was locked and latched. Marshall’s door was locked, too, and he probably wouldn’t come out for anything this side of the crack of doom, anyway. And if he did, he wouldn’t worry about his dad and his dad’s new wife. Colin kept his voice down just the same.
“Darn right I do,” Kelly said. She nodded, too. It was so dark, Colin might not see that. She reached for him. And go through with it they did.
Afterwards, Kelly sprawled on her side, lazy in the afterglow. Colin said, “Boy, I don’t remember the last time I did that without protection.”
“Me, neither,” Kelly said. One of the reasons she didn’t remember was that she’d been seriously drunk when it happened. And she’d let out a long, loud sigh of relief when her next period came right on schedule.
This, though, this was different. You could joke about biological clocks. It wasn’t as if she never had. But things got less funny when you listened to your own ticking-and when you knew it would wind down for good in the ever-less-indefinite future.
Oh, sometimes you got a surprise later than you thought you could. Colin’s ex sure had, and now his kids had an altogether unexpected half-brother. And here I am, thinking about Louise again. Kelly was annoyed with herself, which didn’t mean she could keep from doing it. Which was part of what she got for marrying a man with a considerable past. Of course, when you got up to her age the only men without considerable pasts were the ones who’d never moved away from their mothers. They presented different-and usually worse-problems.
She shook her head. “What?” Colin asked, feeling the motion.
“Nothing,” Kelly answered, which wasn’t quite true, but it was nothing she wanted to talk about with him. After a moment, she went on, “If we can make something together-make a baby together-what could be more special than that?”
“That’s why we’re doing it. And besides, even trying is fun,” Colin said. Kelly poked him in the ribs. She was usually more ticklish than he was, but she must have hit the bull’s-eye, because he jerked.
“Serves you right,” Kelly told him.
“What? You didn’t have fun trying?” When he decided to be difficult, he was difficult as all get out. But then he said, “Y’know, after Louise and I had our three, she was always after me to get a vasectomy so she wouldn’t have to go on using her manhole cover.”
“Her what?” Kelly was glad Colin couldn’t see her blank stare.
“Diaphragm,” he explained.
“Oh.” She poked him again, less successfully this time. He would make a bad joke like that. He not only would, he had.
“Yeah, well,” he went on, “I didn’t feel like doing anything where the odds of undoing it weren’t so great. I didn’t think anything was wrong-which only shows how much I knew, doesn’t it? But I even used condominiums every once in a while so she wouldn’t need the Frisbee.”
To do that justice, Kelly would have had to poke him eight or twelve times. She contented herself with snorting instead. Colin hadn’t made the smallest of sacrifices, though, not from the male point of view. Guys used condoms, but the next man she found who liked them would be the first. Then again, she hoped she wouldn’t have to do any more looking for men-or why had she just made love wanting to get pregnant?
Colin turned on the lamp on his nightstand. He smiled over at her. “I definitely got lucky,” he said.
“Oh, foosh!” she replied. She wasn’t anything special, not with the way her tummy pooched out and her seat spread. She’d never actually met Louise in person, but she’d seen photos. Louise was elegantly slim, and her sculpted features reminded Kelly of some actress whose name she couldn’t quite come up with. When she added, “I don’t know what you see in me,” she wasn’t making idle talk.
“Somebody I love, that’s what,” Colin said, which was always the right answer. He went on, “Somebody who loves me, too, and who wants to be here with me.”
Kelly kissed him. “You better believe it, mister.”
“Oh, I do. For a while, I didn’t think I would ever believe it, but I do.” This time, he kissed her. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” She meant it.
He grinned a male grin. “Not all of it, lady. And the other thing I see is, I see this darn sexy broad naked in bed with me, and what could be better than that?”
Kelly didn’t think of herself as a darn sexy broad. She thought of herself as a geologist. Being thought of as a sex object kind of weirded her out. Then again, if you weren’t your husband’s sex object, you had o
ther worries. Colin didn’t just want her for that. She never would have married him if he had. Since he did want her for that. . “Turn off the light again.”
He was in his fifties. Second rounds didn’t happen quickly, the way they would have when he was younger, or sometimes at all. That didn’t make fooling around any less enjoyable. And even if he didn’t rise to the occasion right away, he wasn’t shy about using fingers and tongue to bring her along.
“I don’t think I can walk to the bathroom,” she said after a while. “My knees are all loose.”
“That’s nice.” If he sounded smug, he’d earned the right. “You could just roll over and go to sleep.”
“That’s your department,” Kelly retorted, though Colin didn’t live up to-or down to-the male cliche very often.
“Huh!” This time, he poked her in the ribs. She squeaked. He chuckled. “I’ll go, then,” he said, and he did. When he got back, he added, quite seriously, “I do love you, you know.”
“I noticed,” she answered. “If I remember straight, that’s how my knees got all loose.”
“Nah.” He shook his head; the mattress sent her the vibration in the dark room. “That’s just fooling around. Fooling around is great-don’t get me wrong. But I mean, I really love you. That quake in Yellowstone was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Well, I got some good data from it, too. The thought went through Kelly’s mind, but died unsaid. Another time, another place, she would have come out with it. Colin appreciated dry-you didn’t know him at all if you didn’t know that. Not right this minute, though, not when they’d been trying to start a child together. “I love you, too,” she said, and leaned over and kissed him. “And now I am gonna go to the john, loose knees or not.”
She burrowed under the covers when she returned. It wasn’t warm. It hardly ever was any more. “Good night,” Colin said, so he hadn’t gone to sleep.
“G’night.” A few minutes later, she did.
Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2 Page 13
