Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Three bucks each way. Five days a week. That sucked, was what it did. Not for the first time, Louise thought about buying herself a bike. It would save money in the long run. But getting what she needed for the upfront wouldn’t be easy, not when she had to watch every penny as things were. And she hadn’t ridden on two wheels for a hell of a long time. It was supposed to come back in a hurry. With my luck, probably right after I fall down and break my wrist—or my neck, she thought.

  The bus went up to Hesperus, then swung left onto Reynoso Drive. It rumbled past what had been a drive-in movie once upon a time. For the past umpty-ump years, the big parking lot held a swap meet on weekends. Colin had always hated the place—he swore more than half of what got sold there was either hot or counterfeit.

  Louise muttered to herself. She didn’t want to think about Colin, no matter how long she’d been married to him. She was on her own. She’d wanted to be on her own, and she’d gone and got free. And, in spite of everything, she was happier without him than she had been with him. Not so secure, but happier.

  By all the signs, he was happier, or at least as happy, without her, too. She hadn’t figured on that—she’d assumed he’d flop around like a fish out of water. But she didn’t want to think about that, either.

  She stood up as the bus neared the corner of Reynoso Drive and Van Slyke. The bus stopped. The doors hissed open. She got out. The bus turned right onto Van Slyke and growled north.

  Louise crossed Reynoso Drive. The pharmacy was in something half a step up from a strip mall on the northeast corner of the intersection. It shared the space with a liquor store, a Filipino market, and an optician’s shop. None of the businesses except the liquor store was exactly thriving, but they all kept chugging along. She couldn’t think of a disaster that would keep a liquor store from thriving.

  When she walked in, Jared Watt was straightening the secondhand books on their shelves. “Good morning, Louise,” the pharmacist said, eyes enormous behind thick spectacle lenses. He wore loud polyester shirts. His hair looked as if someone who wasn’t very good with a lawnmower had mowed it. Along with the books and drugs (prescription and otherwise) and school supplies and the like, he also sold some of the ugliest tchotchkes God or the Devil ever made.

  And Louise cared not a nickel for any of that. “Good morning, Jared,” she said warmly. He’d given her a job when she needed one worse than a junkie needed smack. And, even if all his taste was in his mouth, he was a nice guy. Next to Mr. Nobashi, for whom she’d worked till the Japanese ramen company closed its American headquarters, Jared Watt was a saint on earth. A dweeby saint, no doubt, but a saint neverthenonetheless.

  “Isn’t that something about the chief of police?” he said now. “Who could have thought such a thing? Terrible—just terrible. I met him a few times. I never had the faintest idea. Who would?”

  “I knew him, too,” she said tightly. She’d admired Mike Pitcavage. He had ambition, drive, call it whatever you want. He had style, too. Next to him, Colin was a lump of a man, somebody who’d stay a police lieutenant forever.

  But, whatever you said about Colin, he’d never killed any old ladies. Praising with faint damn, maybe, but praising even so.

  Jared must not have noticed the edge in her voice, because he went on, “And the fellow who arrested his son, who touched off the whole thing, he was smart and lucky both.”

  “That was my ex.” Louise bit off the words one by one.

  “Oh!” The pharmacist blinked. Louise could watch every eyelash move. Jared Watt continued, “His name is Ferguson, isn’t it? I’m sorry—I didn’t put two and two together.”

  “You didn’t know. It’s not exactly a rare name.” Louise was trying to convince herself at least as much as her boss.

  The landline rang. The interruption relieved them both. Louise answered it. Someone asked for a refill on a prescription. She took the prescription number, then checked a card file. The information was on a database, too, but with the power off a computer was just something to gather dust.

  “It’s Peter Aiso and his blood-pressure prescription,” she told Jared. “He had three refills left on it—now he’s down to two.” She made a notation on the three-by-five. She’d do it on the computer, too, if and when the electricity came back on.

  “He gets Aldovil 15/25 twice a day, right?” he said. It was a question, and then again it wasn’t.

  “That’s right.” Louise nodded. From everything she’d seen, Jared Watt barely needed the database or the card file. He almost always knew what his customers’ meds were. Now he frowned. “We don’t have any of that. I don’t know when we’ll get more, either. When some more comes into town. Whenever that is.”

  “What will you do, then?” Louise asked.

  “I’ll see what we do have. Then I’ll call his doctor, and we’ll work out something or other.” He paused. “You ever see the Charles Addams cartoon with two witches over the cauldron? One of ’em’s saying to the other, ‘We’re all out of dwarf’s hair, dearie. Can we substitute?’”

  Louise laughed. “No, I hadn’t seen that one.” She knew Charles Addams from the old TV show and the movies, not from the cartoons themselves.

  “Well, that’s where we are right now. That’s where the whole country is these days, seems like,” Jared Watt said. “We’re all out of dwarf’s hair, dearie, and we’re doing our best to substitute.”

  “Only trouble is, our best mostly isn’t good enough,” Louise said.

  “Welcome to the world,” the pharmacist said. Louise looked at him in surprise. Colin might have come out with the same thing, and he would have used the same intonation if he had.

  A little old Hispanic man walked in. He wore glasses almost as thick as Jared’s. He peered through them at the shelves of old paperbacks. After due deliberation, he pulled out something called Count Belisarius and carried it to the counter. Louise looked at the price penciled on the first leaf inside the cover. “That’ll be two dollars and fifty cents—two-seventy-five with the tax.”

  “Taxes,” the man muttered, as if it were a swear word. “They’ve gone through the roof, too, since that stupid supervolcano blew up.” He made it sound as if the eruption shot taxes into the stratosphere along with God only knew how many cubic miles of dust and sulfur dioxide and other climate-screwing crud. By the way he handed over a five, it was the last one he ever expected to see.

  Louise gave him his change. “Even with the tax, the book’s cheaper than bus fare,” Jared Watt said. “That’s a good one, too. You’ll find out more about the sixth century than you thought anybody could know.”

  “It’s fat,” the Hispanic man said. “It’ll kill time while the power don’t work.” He shuffled out of the pharmacy, tucking the book under his windbreaker. It was starting to rain for real, all right.

  “How many of the books over there have you read?” Louise pointed to the shelves.

  “Quite a few, anyway,” Jared answered. “Reading kills time for me, too.”

  Colin read all the time. That prejudiced Louise against it. But she did some anyway. Batteries kept a Kindle going, even if you couldn’t always download new stuff. And she read to James Henry. When the TV didn’t run, stories entertained him.

  We were so wired, so connected, she thought. We were, and now we aren’t any more. It’s a different world. A moment later, another thought occurred: Christ, I wish we still were!

  • • •

  Bryce Miller had known what post-supervolcano life in Nebraska was like before he took the assistant professor job at Wayne State. He’d known, that is, the way he’d known about girls before Brianna Davidson finally let him get lucky his senior year of high school. In the one as in the other, the difference between knowledge and experience was all the difference in the world.

  People who’d grown up here had a tough time dealing with the new dispensation. They said average winter days now were as horrible as anything they’d ever known before the eruption. And the bad blizzards now,
if you listened to them, had never been seen this side of the Great Slave Lake—or, if they were feeling charitable, this side of Saskatoon.

  Bryce had little choice but to listen to them. He’d grown up in San Atanasio and lived his whole life till now in Southern California. His wife Susan was a SoCal girl, too. The depth of Midwest winter shocked and awed her as much as it did him.

  So did the length of Midwest winter. Snow fell all the way through Memorial Day. Right after the supervolcano went off, people had talked and talked about the Year Without a Summer, after Mt. Tambora erupted two centuries earlier. Now that they were looking down the barrel of a Decade Without a Summer, or maybe of a Century Without a Summer, Mt. Tambora suddenly seemed like mighty small potatoes.

  Potatoes were a big deal at the local supermarket, though. Susan lugged a cloth tote full of oddly shaped, brightly colored tubers back to their apartment. “Gaah! Mutants!” Bryce exclaimed. “Do we eat them or exorcise them?” He made the sign of the cross with his forefingers.

  “Fat lot of good that’ll do when you’re Jewish,” Susan said with exaggerated patience.

  “Maybe the spuds won’t know. I don’t look it,” Bryce said. And he didn’t. He was tall and skinny and very fair, with curly dark red hair and a lighter red beard that still wasn’t so thick as he would have liked even though he’d slid to the tired side of thirty.

  “You,” Susan said, not for the first time, “are absurd.”

  “Thank you.” He bowed.

  “Anyway, these potatoes come from stock that’s raised way the hell up high in the Andes, where potatoes started out from and where the growing season’s always been about twenty minutes long,” Susan told him. “The prices were pretty bad, but not terrible, and the produce guy says they’ll be coming down because these’ll grow in a lot of places where the kinds we used to plant just can’t hack the weather any more.”

  “They’ll still taste like potatoes, though,” Bryce predicted gloomily.

  “Hey, they’re food.” Except for being in the final throes of finishing a dissertation on Frederick II Hohenstaufen, Susan was a very practical person.

  Since Bryce’s thesis had been on the leading Hellenistic poets, and since his hobby was writing pastorals in the style of Theocritus, even Susan’s field of interest seemed practical by comparison. Frederick was fifteen hundred years more recent and a hell of a lot more relevant to the modern world than Theocritus or Callimachus or any of the rest of the boys who’d done their damnedest to con lunch money out of one Ptolemy or another.

  And food, in this long winter of the planet’s discontent, was something you had to be practical about. Wayne, Nebraska, sat in the middle of what had been some of the finest farming country the world had ever known. Had been, unfortunately, was the operative phrase. Land that used to bring in bumper crops of wheat and corn now barely had enough of a growing season for the quickest-ripening strains of oats and rye.

  “Potatoes,” Bryce repeated, this time with resignation in his voice.

  Potatoes they were, with a little pork sausage to perk them up. You could still get pork, and Bryce didn’t let the religion he’d been born into keep him from eating it. Sometimes you could still find chicken without a bank loan. Beef? Lamb? The eruption had massacred the flocks and herds, and without corn and soybeans a lot of the animals it didn’t directly kill starved. Milk and cheese and butter were hard to come by, too.

  After a few bites, Bryce said “Potatoes” yet again, this time thoughtfully. “They don’t taste quite like the regular kind, do they? I mean, they wouldn’t even without the sausage.”

  Susan nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. Potatoes from before the eruption, ordinary potatoes, don’t taste like anything much.”

  “Ain’t that the truth? Born to be blaaand!” Bryce cheerfully goofed on a Steppenwolf song much older than he was.

  His wife winced, whether at the lyric or the singing he didn’t want to guess. Susan went on, “They’ve probably been bred not to taste like much for hundreds of years. These haven’t. They’re still—”

  “Real roots,” Bryce broke in.

  “Something like that,” Susan agreed. “If our regular potatoes are cows, these things are buffaloes.”

  “Cows,” Bryce said wistfully. Then, more wistfully still, he said, “Buffaloes.” Yellowstone National Park was the big reason the bison hadn’t gone extinct at the end of the nineteenth century. No more wild bison there, not when the park literally fell off the map to form the supervolcano’s latest and greatest caldera. As far as Bryce knew, no more wild bison anywhere. He supposed a few still lingered in zoos, but that wasn’t the same.

  A lot of things weren’t the same, and never would be again—not for the rest of his life, anyhow, which was as much time as mattered to him.

  “When you get a job,” he said, “try really, really hard for something in Florida, or maybe Houston.”

  “Yeah, right.” Susan rolled her eyes, the way one spouse will when the other comes out with something really, really dumb. “Nobody else wants jobs in places like those, of course, so getting one will be super easy.”

  His ears heated. He wouldn’t have taken this slot in beautiful, romantic, subtropical Wayne, Nebraska, if he could have landed one in any warmer place. Given a choice between a slot in Wayne, Nebraska, and one in hell, he would have thought seriously at least one day in three—one day in two during Wayne’s long, long winter—about taking Satan as his department chair.

  When he said so, he got a snort out of Susan. Snort or no snort, though, she said, “If something does open up, it’s likely to be somewhere like Winnipeg or Edmonton.”

  “Oh, joy,” Bryce said. “We can wave hello to the glaciers when they roll down out of the north. Those are places that make Minneapolis look like it’s got good weather.”

  Climatologists kept insisting at the top of their lungs that the supervolcano eruption wouldn’t touch off the next Ice Age. They told anyone who would listen that this was only an episode. Even if they were wrong, the glaciers wouldn’t start chasing musk oxen down toward Chicago and Philadelphia within a human lifetime.

  Bryce hoped like hell they wouldn’t, anyhow.

  While he was ruminating, so to speak, on that, Susan said, “There’s another problem with going north of the border, you know.”

  “Oh? What is it?” Bryce asked.

  He thought she would talk about work visas or currency conversion or something like that. Instead, he got a pie in the face: “Neither one of us speaks Canadian,” she said.

  “Ouch!” He sent her a reproachful stare. “That’s the kind of thing I usually come out with, not you.”

  “You’re rubbing off on me. It must be love, or something,” Susan said.

  “Gotta be something,” Bryce said. “I hope it’s something you can take something for.”

  “I already did.” She held up her left hand. The diamond in the ring on her fourth finger wasn’t much bigger than a chip, but it sparkled all the same.

  Bryce smiled. “I like the way you talk.” His own wedding ring, a florentined gold band, had felt funny on his finger for a little while. Now he hardly noticed he had it on.

  And he walked straight into another one. “Good,” Susan said. “You wash dishes tonight, and I’ll dry.”

  He made a face. But then he said, “Ha! Mwahaha, in fact. I’m the one who gets to put hot water on his hands.”

  “If there is hot water,” Susan said. Wayne did have power and natural gas most of the time. That put it ahead of Los Angeles, but they were hideously expensive. The landlord at the apartment building reacted the way landlords have reacted to anything that costs them money since the beginning of time. He raised his tenants’ rent and he set his water heaters so they didn’t heat much water, and so what they did heat didn’t get very hot.

  Showers could be an adventure. So could dishes. Getting rid of grease with water that felt as if it came from some polar bear’s pet iceberg at the North Pole wasn’
t Bryce’s idea of fun. As a matter of fact, if he ever wrote a poem about modern labors for Hercules—an idea that had been bouncing around in his head for a while—there was one of them.

  Tonight wasn’t too bad, though. The water was still tepid when he got done. Susan put the dishes and glasses and pans and silverware in their places. Then she carefully shut all the cabinet doors. Dead-air spaces helped insulate the apartment. Better to insu late than never, Bryce thought vaguely. Colin would have appreciated that. He didn’t have the gall to try it on Susan.

  He spent the next little while reading his students’ midterms. Any hope he might have had that the disaster could somehow make students write better had foundered during his gig at Junipero High. They were going to write things like it’s for its and effect for affect (and the other way around) and even you’re for your, and you couldn’t do one goddamn thing about it. Half their alleged sentences looked as if they came from text messages.

  Bryce was (almost) resigned to that. Languages did change. Thucydides would commit seppuku if he saw what Greek looked like these days. The tongue of Caesar and Cicero and Virgil had morphed into Spanish and French and Italian and Pig Latin. Buck the trend and you were shoveling shit against the tide.

  But why did so many of the kids sound as if they’d never had a thought in their lives? They could give back the textbook, and sometimes even chunks of his lectures. Give them back, yes. Analyze them? Draw conclusions? Like the number five in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, those were right out.

  He waved a bluebook—a C+ bluebook—at Susan. “I can’t flunk them all, no matter how much they deserve it. People would talk,” he said. They wouldn’t just talk, either. They’d fire his nitpicking ass for disturbing the peace. “If this is what’s up and coming, the country’s in deep kimchi.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “You know what else, though?”