Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yeah, I know.” Gabe nodded. “We’ll keep saying that till they shovel dirt over us. All the kids too young to remember what it was like back then will think we’re a pathetic bunch of old farts for all the pissing and moaning about the good old days we do.”

  “Yup.” Colin contented himself with the one word. The prediction sounded altogether too likely.

  “Your wife knows about this shit, right?” Gabe said. “So, how long is the weather supposed to stay fucked up?”

  Colin only shrugged. “From what she tells me, nobody can say for sure. Twenty years? fifty? A couple of hundred? A couple of thousand? We all get to find out.” He didn’t say that Kelly feared things would stay bad for the long end of the guesses-estimates, if you wanted the more scientific term. She didn’t think a short cold snap would have put Homo sapiens through such a wringer 75,000 years ago, after Mount Toba went kablooie.

  No point passing that on to Gabe. Kelly admitted it was nothing but speculation. If Gabe wanted to think his kids would see the good old climate again, he could. Nobody could prove he was wrong for thinking so. And optimism, like so many other things, came where you found it.

  The rain had grown more serious, more sure of itself, while they were eating. They ran to Gabe Sanchez’s car. “Boy, this is fun,” Sanchez said. He pulled out a pack of Camels from his inside jacket pocket and held it up. “You mind?”

  “You think I’m gonna tell you what to do here?” Colin said. “I’m rude, but I ain’t that rude, dude.” Gabe lit up and started the car. Colin knew secondhand smoke from one cigarette wouldn’t give him lung cancer. He also knew it would make his clothes-and his skin, too-smell like burnt tobacco. Kelly would wrinkle her nose when he came home tonight. Maybe if he got there ahead of her, showered, and changed into something else. .

  “One thing,” Gabe said as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. “South Bay Strangler’s been quiet lately.”

  “Probably had to pull overtime at his day job,” Colin answered. For all he knew, it was the exact and literal truth. If he’d known more. . If he’d known more, he would have dropped on the son of a bitch a long time ago.

  * * *

  The sign was dusty. It could have used a fresh coat of paint. But it was still easy enough to read. KEEP OUT! it said in big red and blue letters on a white background. THIS MEANS YOU! Below that was a line of slightly smaller words: TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED!

  Vanessa Ferguson eyed the sign with something less than enthusiasm. “Nice friendly asshole, wasn’t he?” she remarked.

  “Or maybe, isn’t he?” Merv Saunders pointed to the farmhouse in the middle distance. “Somebody might still be holed up in there.”

  “I don’t think so!” Vanessa wasn’t shy about talking back to the scavenging crew’s boss. Vanessa had never been shy about talking back to anybody. She’d had a checkered work life and a checkered love life because of it, but she was one of those people who counted costs afterwards, if they counted them at all.

  “Do we want to find out?” Ashley Pagliarulo pointed to another sign, maybe fifty feet closer to the farmhouse.

  That one showed a black skull and crossbones, with a blunt warning in red below it: ACHTUNG! MINEN! Not DANGER! MINES! No, not that, but auf Deutsch. Vanessa’s lip curled in disgusted scorn. “Neo-Nazi shithead,” she said. “I hope he did cough his worthless lungs out. He deserved it.”

  “It’s likely just bullshit,” Saunders said, but he made no move to approach the farmhouse. “And if people are alive in there, we’re supposed to make contact with them no matter what kind of dumbass politics they’ve got.”

  No one was supposed to be living in this part of Kansas. The mandatory evacuation order had gone out soon after the supervolcano erupted. Vanessa had been stripping farms and little towns of whatever might prove useful to survivors for months now, her team steadily working its way deeper into the ruined state. She’d helped bury more bodies than she cared to remember. That was one reason her palms were hard with callus. As for livestock carcasses. . No point even trying to count those. The scavengers didn’t try to put them underground.

  She did wonder what the country could do for meat with so many of its cows and sheep and pigs and chickens as one with the extinct animals that had died in earlier eruptions and fossilized. One of these millions of years, funny-looking archaeologists digging up ash-covered cattle ranches might write learned papers about what they found.

  In the meantime. . “I’d just as soon go on to the next place down the road,” Vanessa said. “I don’t care if we are supposed to make contact with people. If they don’t want to make contact with us, the hell with ’em.”

  Several of her comrades in vulturing nodded. Saunders frowned, though. “We are supposed to get in touch with them, assuming they’re alive.”

  “Harder if they’re not,” Vanessa agreed sweetly.

  He gave her a dirty look. “I don’t think it’s real likely that they are, though,” he said, as if she hadn’t opened her mouth. “I think the chances are that that sign is a bluff, too, or was a bluff when there were people here.”

  As if to prove as much, he took a few steps past the KEEP OUT! sign, toward the one that warned of the mines. He hadn’t gone far before something in or near the farmhouse opened up with a stuttering roar. Tracers zipped past overhead, but not too far overhead.

  The machine-gun fire stopped. “Get the fuck off my land, bastard!” an amplified voice bellowed. “I won’t shoot to miss next time.”

  Maybe he had a generator in or near the farmhouse, even if Vanessa couldn’t hear one chugging. Maybe he just had a battery-powered bullhorn, though batteries were drawing ever closer to their shelf life. Whatever else he had, he had the goddamn machine gun. Vanessa had used firearms often enough. Having the bullets coming in instead of going out was a whole different feeling, though. Fear tasted like a copper penny under her tongue. She didn’t piss herself, but she had to clamp down hard to keep from having that accident.

  Merv Saunders didn’t argue with the survivalist or whatever the hell he was. Whatever he was, he had survived. Was he living on stashed food? Did he go out to do some freelance scavenging of his own? Had he somehow kept his livestock alive along with himself and whoever else he had in there?

  At the moment, all that was academic. The government-sanctioned scavengers retreated with more speed than dignity. Saunders got on the radio to points farther east. Except for the satellite variety, cell phones didn’t work in these parts. Power remained out through most of the country’s midsection. When it would come back, nobody could even begin to guess.

  “Can you call in helicopter gunships?” Vanessa asked eagerly. “Or at least soldiers with mortars and grenades and things?”

  The crew boss looked at her. “Have you been eating raw meat again?”

  Her ears burned. “We ought to kill that son of a bitch!” she said.

  “Go ahead,” Saunders answered. “You first.”

  That made her ears flame hotter. Her pistol seemed mighty small potatoes when you set it against the concentrated essence of infantry a machine gun represented. “They can get him on a weapons rap.” Machine guns weren’t legal anywhere that she knew of. Then real inspiration struck: “Or for taxes! I bet he hasn’t paid a dime since the supervolcano went off.”

  “And you have?” Saunders inquired.

  He was being as difficult as he could. It sure felt that way to Vanessa, anyhow. “No, but I haven’t had any money, either,” she said, which wasn’t provably false. What followed was actually true: “My stupid little credit union’s servers are back in Denver, and they’re dead as King Tut.”

  “Denver. That’s right.” He nodded, as if reminding himself. “Not many got out from that far west.”

  “Tell me about it.” Vanessa knew how lucky she was to have fled far enough and fast enough. She was as stubborn as she was lucky, too: “Taxes work. That’s what they finally hung on Al Capone, remember.”

  �
��The guy probably figured we were bandits, not I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help-you,” Saunders said. Vanessa inhaled sharply. The gang boss must have psyched out what she was going to say, because he beat her to the punch by continuing, “But if it makes you happy, I’ll pass the suggestion along. Maybe someone in authority will do something about it.”

  Fuck off. Get out of my hair. That was what he meant. If she pissed him off badly enough, he could send her back to whatever had replaced the soggy Camp Constitution. If that wasn’t a fate worse than death, you could sure see one from there. She would have done almost anything to keep from ending up in a refugee camp again.

  Her mouth twisted. Micah Husak had given her a most unwelcome education about what doing almost anything to get out of something else really meant. If Saunders made it plain her choice was between coming across and going back to a camp. . She’d already had to make that kind of choice twice now. She’d yielded both times, and loathed herself whenever she had to remember. She also would have loathed herself had she chosen the other way; she knew that only too well.

  Sometimes you couldn’t win.

  Sometimes you couldn’t even play. The scavengers’ boss had shown exactly zero interest in her fair white body. That irked her, too. There weren’t a whole lot of things that didn’t irk Vanessa.

  For now, though, unless she really wanted to piss Saunders off, she needed to leave him alone. She could see that. She didn’t like it for hell, but she could see it. With poor grace, she walked away. Dust and volcanic ash that would be dirt one of these years scuffed up under her feet.

  IX

  A bus up from downtown. The subway out to North Hollywood, which was on the fringes of the Valley. An express bus out to the heart of darkness (actually, in Los Angeles, the Valley was the heart of whiteness). Bryce Miller wondered if he should have taken his car, expensive though that was. Getting out here this way was a royal pain.

  He could have used the car this once, yeah. If he had to do it every day. . He shook his head. Not a chance. From San Atanasio to here and back again was about seventy-five miles. Multiply that by Monday through Friday by gas at prices that would have made a European blanch before the eruption by the fact that half the time you couldn’t buy gas at any price at all, and what you got was Not a chance one more time.

  If he did end up doing this, he’d have to move to the Valley. He couldn’t afford or manage to drive. For the third time, Not a chance. And this was a Saturday, and he’d left his apartment almost two hours ago, and he still wasn’t where he needed to be. Add four hours of daily commuting to a job and you’d be nutso in nothing flat.

  Before the supervolcano went off, he wouldn’t have moved to the Valley on a bet. When you lived in the South Bay, the sea breeze spoiled you. It wasn’t quite perfect Santa Barbara, but it rarely got too hot or too cold. No sea breeze in the Valley; the Santa Monica Mountains blocked it off. Hard freezes during the winter? Temps that went up past 110 in the summertime? If you were a South Bay guy, you didn’t want thing one to do with any of that crap.

  But that was before the supervolcano went off. The South Bay hadn’t just got hard freezes; it had got snow. So had the rest of the L.A. basin. And no way in hell any part of the basin would see 110 again any year soon. Hard to imagine you could get nostalgic for sweat, but human nature argued you could miss anything you didn’t have any more.

  Christ, there were times he still missed Vanessa. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happier with Susan. In all the time they’d been together, he’d quarreled with her less than he had with Vanessa in a bad month-and they’d had several bad months in a row before she invited him to get lost.

  And once in a while he missed her anyway. Part of it, he supposed, was that he hated getting anything wrong. Part of it was that she was the first one he’d fallen for hook, line, and sinker. And she’d fallen for him the same way.

  When it was your first time, of course you thought it would last till the end of time. They’d gone to a wedding not long after they got together: a couple of her friends were tying the knot. A high school English teacher of hers who was there had asked them what they were going to do. Bryce remembered that very clearly.

  He remembered what he’d answered, too: “We’ll live happily ever after.” And he remembered how that English teacher had laughed her ass off. He’d been pissed. Vanessa had been furious-almost furious enough to make a scene at Jack and Katarina’s reception.

  Well, prune-faced Miz What’s-her-name got the last laugh. Happily ever after Bryce and Vanessa did not live. As for Jack and Katarina, they broke up before Vanessa showed Bryce the door. Shit happened. Boy, didn’t it just?

  The bus stopped, liberating Bryce from his gloomy maunderings. The doors hissed open. He got off and looked around. If the guy wasn’t here. . Well, that was why God made cell phones-when the power let them work, anyhow. Today, it was on.

  But a stocky man in his late thirties who’d been standing in the little bus station came forward with his hand stuck out. “You’re Dr. Miller, aren’t you?” he said. “I went to your Facebook page to see what you looked like. I’m Vic Moretti.”

  “I’m Bryce Miller, yeah.” Bryce shook hands with Moretti, who, by his grip, might have been a construction worker when he wasn’t teaching. He wasn’t comfortable with Dr. Miller at the DWP, and he wasn’t comfortable with it here, either. After a longish pause, he managed “Good to meet you.” If this guy wanted small talk from him, he was in trouble.

  “And you.” Moretti seemed very much at ease in his own skin. Maybe that was personality, maybe just years. Whatever it was, Bryce envied it. The older man went on, “My car’s right around the corner.”

  It was a Prius. Bryce envied that, too. The less gas you used these days, the better. But some of the envy went away when he got into the hybrid. His knees banged the glove compartment. He might have been able to fit his legs around the steering wheel. He didn’t think he could have got them under it.

  Moretti chuckled as he fastened his seat belt and started the car. “Helps if you’re not a big tall guy,” he admitted. “Me, I’m five-nine, and I’m fine in here.” He pulled out into what traffic there was. “So how much do you know about Junipero High?”

  “Not a whole lot.” Bryce was sandbagging a little; he’d done his online homework, too. No point not showing that: “Your Web site says you’re one of the leading Catholic high schools in the West Valley. And Craigslist says you’re looking for somebody who can teach Latin and history. I can do Greek, too, if you want me to.” He liked Greek much better than Latin, though he wasn’t about to say so when Junipero was looking for a Latin teacher.

  “Well, we can look into that a little further down the line,” Moretti said smoothly. He had to mean something like Greek? In a high school? You’ve got to be shitting me. Bryce didn’t get his bowels in an uproar about it. No matter how interesting he thought Greek was, only a handful of prep schools did offer it.

  The Prius purred west. The Valley looked like any other part of the Los Angeles urban sprawl: houses, apartment buildings, shops, strip malls. Some of the billboards were in Spanish. So were some of the ones in San Atanasio.

  Moretti took a couple of turns that got him off the big streets and onto little ones. Mountains loomed against the western horizon: not great big mountains, but a lot closer than the smudges on the horizon that were all you saw in the South Bay. Those couldn’t be the Santa Monicas. What were they, then? The Santa Susanas? Bryce realized how little he knew about the local geography. Back East, this might easily be a state or two away from him. Here, it was in the same county. The scale on this side of the country was different.

  “Here we are.” Moretti swung into a parking lot. He stopped the car under the overhanging boughs of some pines that sprouted from the grass by the lot. When Bryce got out, he heard woodpeckers drumming in the trees. He glanced around. Some of the buildings looked as if they’d gone up earlier this morning. Others had probably stood there for fi
fty years or more, which made them ancient by Southern California standards.

  “Nice campus,” he offered.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Moretti agreed. “That’s one of the compensations for teaching here.” Bryce knew exactly what that meant: they paid bupkis. He’d have to take a serious cut if he bailed from the DWP.

  Moretti led him to one of the blocks of classrooms. A key opened the room that turned out to be his. It looked like, well, a high school classroom. Instead of sitting behind his big wooden desk, he plopped down into the nearest steel-tube-and-plastic jobs the kids got stuck with. He waved Bryce into the one in the next row over. The easy assumption of equality made Bryce like him better.

  “You’ve got a steady job that pays you more money,” Moretti said. “Why would you rather do this?”

  Bryce had been wondering the same thing. When you got out into the real world, cash often seemed the most important thing there was. But he answered, “I can do the job I’ve got, but I’d sooner use some of what I studied and pass it along. There aren’t any university positions out there-the way things are these days, they’re shutting down classics departments, not hiring new people for them. So this looks like my next best bet.”

  “I see.” Vic Moretti steepled his stubby fingers. “If a university post did come along, would you take it?”

  “Of course I would.” Bryce wasn’t going to lie to him, not when he already had a job and wasn’t desperate to grab any spar in the sea. He did go on, “But I don’t think that’s likely. I only wish I did.”

  “Hmm.” Moretti wrote something down. “You’re up front, anyhow. I’ll say that for you.”

  Is he saying it for me or against me? Bryce wondered. Aloud, he said, “You may as well know where I’m coming from.”

  “That’s true. We also needed to know whether your degree was genuine. We’ve had a couple of applicants who knew just enough Latin to order a pizza-if they didn’t want pepperoni on it.” The Junipero teacher looked thoroughly grim.