Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3

by Harry Turtledove

  He opened up. The costumes were homemade, and warm. One kid was dressed as a polar bear, another as an Eskimo. Rob hadn’t known there were any blue-eyed, freckled Eskimos, but who was he to criticize? He handed out cookies. “Thank you!” the boys piped. Gone—at least in these parts—were the days when mothers rejected any treats that weren’t factory-wrapped.

  Lindsey brought him a bowl of stew reheated from the day before and the day before that. By now, the pork was meltingly tender and all the chunks of root vegetables had kind of mooshed together. “Yum!” he said, and made everything in there disappear.

  The libation that went with the stew was homemade whiskey turned out by a distiller in Dover-Foxcroft. It wouldn’t knock single-malt scotch off the shelves any time soon. But it was here, while single-malts were only a memory. “Let’s hear it for moonshine!” Rob said.

  “I don’t think he needs to worry about revenuers smashing up his still,” Lindsey answered. Since Rob didn’t, either, he let that go. Lindsey continued, “Want some pie?”

  “Wow! She’s sexy and she cooks!” Rob exclaimed. She not only cooked, she gave him a dirty look—and some pumpkin pie, still warm and a little gloopy. He sounded as appreciative as he could with his mouth full. He must have done a good enough job, because after a while she went from glowering to giggling.

  They expended almost all the oat-and-maple cookies by the time the trick-or-treaters stopped coming to the door. Then Rob got into his own costume: a tweed jacket, a shirt with a button-down collar, and a tie he’d got for an hour of guitar lessons. Since he never wore clothes like that of his own accord, they had to be a Halloween getup. Lindsey dressed in white from hat to shoes, and put white face paint on all her skin that showed: she was going as a snowdrift.

  “Hottest snowdrift around,” Rob said, which won him another dirty look. He grabbed his guitar. Lindsey carried a torch—an electric one with LEDs—to light their way to the Trebor Mansion Inn.

  From somewhere, Dick Barber had got a big box of tiny Hershey bars. “Magic,” he said smugly when Rob asked him how he’d pulled that off. For all Rob knew, he meant it. The taste of one brought tears to his eyes, so vividly did it evoke the bygone days before the eruption. You can’t go home again. Someone had written a book by that name. Whoever he was, he’d known too well what he was talking about.

  Lubricated by more moonshine and homebrew beer, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles played for a while. They still gigged every now and then, here and there in this cut-off part of Maine. But the years when Rob and Justin and Charlie and Biff had lived in one another’s pockets seemed almost as far from the here-and-now as the taste of a Hershey bar. And the music just didn’t feel the same when it was all acoustic.

  Again, you did what you could do. Or, if you decided you just had to have chocolate and electricity and the other marvels of what had been Western civilization, you got the hell out of Guilford and headed for a warmer clime. Rob had thought about it now and again, especially during summer snowstorms. But Lindsey didn’t want to leave. And, by now, he had more roots here than he did anywhere else. He wondered how his folks and his brother and sister were doing, but he hadn’t seen any of them since before the supervolcano blew, and he hadn’t talked much with them since, either.

  When he mentioned that to Jim Farrell, the retired history prof said, “If things matter to you, you’ll do better somewhere else. If people matter to you, this is the place to stay. I could be watching TV in Florida, but I’m having more fun here.”

  “Hey, here you get to be on television, even if you don’t get to watch it,” Rob said. “That CNN crew that came in by dogsled last winter, to interview the Führer of Maine north and west of the Interstate…”

  “No fair, Rob,” Dick Barber said, wagging an indignant finger at him. The lord and master of the Trebor Mansion Inn went on, “That segment never aired. The CNN newsie was a lot cuter than Jim—”

  “I resemble that remark,” Farrell broke in.

  “A lot cuter than Jim,” Barber repeated, unfazed, “but she wasn’t too dumb to see how dumb he was making her look. And in case she had been, her director and the camera guy saw it, too.”

  “It wasn’t a beauty contest, or I would have been in over my imperfectly lovely head,” Farrell said. He wasn’t half bad—except for a certain glint in his eye, distinguished would have suited him as well as his outfit—but a broadcasting anchorwoman did have some unfair advantages. Chuckling, Farrell continued, “No, fool that she was, she wanted to talk with me. This sorry world has a great many things in it that I do poorly or not at all, but by God, gentlemen, I can run my mouth.”

  “It’s why we love you so,” Barber said. Farrell tipped his fedora: as much a trademark with him as it had been with Fiorello La Guardia a lifetime earlier. His silver hair shone, even in the relatively dim light of the fireplace and tallow candles.

  Rob grinned. “Nobody talks this way down where things are still within shouting distance of what they used to be.”

  “Of course not. Nobody down there needs to,” Farrell said. “Down there, they can still call a million songs and a thousand talk-show hosts—to say nothing of hot and cold running porn, which is all that should be said of it—out of the air whenever it strikes their fancy. They don’t need to talk.” His rich baritone freighted the word with scorn. “Here, now, this is a land where we have to make our own fun. And so we do.”

  “Speaking of fun, how about another song from you sociable Darwinists?” Barber said.

  Thus provoked, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles launched into “Justinian II,” an underappreciated ditty about an equally unappreciated Byzantine Emperor:

  “Justinian the Second lost his nose,

  Lost his nose, lost his nose.

  Justinian II lost his nose—

  The Emperor of Byzantium!

  They’d loved his father and his grandfather, too.

  His great-granddad would more than do.

  But he made them hate him strong and true

  As Emperor of Byzantium.

  So they overthrew him with effortless ease,

  Cut off his nose before he could sneeze,

  And exiled him to the Chersonese—

  Ex-Emperor of Byzantium!

  Folks say Jesus is coming, and is He pissed,

  But Justinian, he was hardly missed

  Until he decided to resist

  The new Emperor of Byzantium.

  A storm blew up on the high seas.

  His friends, they got down on their knees

  And said, ‘Justinian, kindly, if you please

  Forget about Byzantium!’

  ‘If I forget, may God drown me now!’

  And the storm just stopped—I don’t know how.

  And somehow on that wallowing scow

  He made it to Byzantium.

  He got his throne back with great vim,

  Killed the guy who got rid of him

  And the one who overthrew him

  As Emperor of Byzantium.

  Not all stories have happy ends.

  He murdered so many, he lost all his friends.

  So people turned on him again…

  Friendless in Byzantium.

  The moral’s simple—keep an eye on your nose.

  When you deal with people, watch how it goes

  Or you’ll end up like Justinian Number Dos:

  A dead man in Byzantium.”

  When they finished, Lindsey turned to Rob and said, “You guys are weird, you know?”

  “I had heard rumors,” Rob admitted. Justin, by contrast, took a bow. Rob went on, “You need to remember, though—you married me anyway.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Lindsey spread her fingers and looked at her ring, as if to remind herself. She went on, “You probably drugged me. Rock-’n’-roll guys are notorious for that, right?”

  “At least,” Rob said, and then, “I wish! The last time I had any fun drugs here—well, except for booze—it was the Vicodin the
clinic doc gave me when I got shot in the leg. Some things cost more than they’re worth, if you know what I mean.”

  “What else could it have been, though?” Lindsey said. “Love?”

  “Crazy idea, all right,” Rob agreed. They grinned at each other.

  • • •

  Louise Ferguson often wondered how the hell the Van Slyke Pharmacy stayed in business. For one thing, it was a mom-and-pop up against the chains. Mom-and-pop hamburger stands went belly-up in short order when they butted heads with the Golden Arches and Burger King. They might make better burgers, but they took longer and cost more, and the people who didn’t live in the neighborhood wouldn’t know the burgers were better. Most of the time, being sure what you’d get trumped quality.

  The Van Slyke Pharmacy certainly charged more than chains like Rite-Aid and Walgreens, both for prescriptions and for over-the-counter meds. The only people who came in for the stuffed animals and the gaudy ceramic horrors were obvious escapees from the local Home for the Terminally Taste-Impaired. Yes, the place also sold those secondhand books. But no one in the history of the world had ever got rich selling secondhand books. Even Utnapishtim had to declare bankruptcy after his Gently Used Cuneiform Tablets shop failed back in Sumerian days.

  Then there was her boss. Jared Watt might be nicer than Mr. Nobashi, but he was also stranger. Considering how squirrely the salaryman from Hiroshima had been, that really took some doing. He not only managed, he passed with flying colors.

  His wardrobe had some flying colors, too. He’d never met anything polyester or nylon he didn’t love. The brighter, the better. If colors clashed, he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. His outfits were almost as horrendous as the china figurines clogging the shelves that weren’t full of aspirins or decongestants.

  Some people did that kind of thing as shtick. Louise could imagine either of her grown sons wearing some of Jared’s clothes if they decided that was a hoot. But the pharmacist wasn’t doing it to be cool. He did it because those were the clothes he wore.

  And his hobbies… ! He was around Louise’s age: in his early fifties. He wasn’t gay, or she didn’t think he was. But his music of choice was Broadway show tunes. He knew how many performances the most obscure musicals had run, and who’d replaced whom in the cast, and when, and often why. He knew songs that had got cut in tryouts, for crying out loud.

  Louise had nothing against Broadway musicals, even if they didn’t float her boat. When Jared started going on about European soccer clubs, though, that was when she started looking around for the closest handy blunt instrument.

  Not that he cared. He went on and on about how Barcelona played the game the way it should be played, and how they were better than Real Madrid. He told her Barcelona wore blue and red stripes because the Swiss maniac who started the club there came from Basel, which already had a team in blue and red stripes. He talked about Bayer Leverkusen, and about the aspirin tablet on their coat of arms. He bored her with Juventus of Turin, and A.C. Milan, and Inter Milan. He blathered about Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s longtime coach. He sang the praises of the Gunners of Arsenal, the Blues of Chelsea, and the Iron of Scunthorpe—though that last bunch seemed to be in whatever the Brits called the minor leagues.

  His enthusiasm—his mania—didn’t stop at the borders of Europe. He had kind words for the Black Stars of Ghana and the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon and the Elephants of the Ivory Coast. He explained that there was a club called Corinthians in Brazil, a Liverpool in Uruguay, and another Arsenal in Argentina because of tours the original English sides had taken in the early years of the twentieth century. He even occasionally mentioned the L.A. Galaxy of the MLS, who were based in the South Bay (though he used Minor League Soccer as often as Major to spell out the league’s acronym).

  He was, in short, a piece of work. Louise cared nothing for any sport, a dislike she’d passed on to Vanessa. She particularly didn’t care for American football. She’d never loathed soccer all that much before, mostly because it hadn’t shown up on her radar screen. Now it did, and she discovered it was at least as annoying as its Yankee cousin.

  And, short of using that blunt instrument, she was stuck listening to Jared go on and on about it whenever things got slow in the drugstore. Most of the time, in other words. Combining his obsessions, he even told her there’d been a musical about soccer.

  “But only in London,” he assured her. “They never brought it to the States—they didn’t think it would draw.” He sighed, mourning American ignorance. He soon brightened, though. “We did have Good News in the Twenties, about our kind of football. And Damn Yankees, of course.” That last came out with a distinct sniff; he didn’t care for baseball.

  “Of course,” Louise echoed. She’d at least heard of Damn Yankees, which was more than she’d done with all those stupid goddamn soccer clubs.

  Jared paid her. She didn’t exactly know how, considering that things at the pharmacy weren’t what anyone would call swift, but he did. Except for talking too much about things that didn’t interest her, he made a good boss. He never gave her trouble if she needed time off because James Henry was sick or had to go to the dentist or whatever the hell.

  She knew she should count her blessings. She did, along with the dollars from her checks on the first and fifteenth of every month. She tried, as subtly as she knew how, to suggest to him that her interests ran in different directions. It didn’t work. She didn’t need long to decide that she could scream Will you shut the fuck up? without cutting the endless chatter about soccer and musicals, musicals and soccer.

  She was there at the pharmacy the afternoon the blizzard hit Los Angeles. They’d had snow every winter since the supervolcano eruption, snow several times a winter most years since. But Louise, a Southern California native, had never seen anything like this swirling whiteness.

  “Wow,” she said, pointing out through the front window. “I mean, is this Chicago or what?”

  Jared’s eyes widened. The magnifying lenses of his glasses made them look owl-big. “That’s amazing,” he said. “When it gets this bad, a lot of the time they play with a yellow ball, or an orange one.”

  “Do they?” Louise said tonelessly. For all she knew, or cared, the ball they used when it wasn’t snowing like the North Pole might have been pink with green polka dots. Before Jared could go They sure do and then tell her more she didn’t want to hear, she added, “I’m just wondering how we’ll get home in this.”

  He rubbed his chin. When he wasn’t talking about soccer or Broadway, he sometimes said he wanted to grow a beard to see if it helped keep his face warm, but he hadn’t done it yet. “I know they’ve got chains for the buses,” he said. “They’ve used them before.”

  Louise nodded—they had. But if they had to summon the buses to some central garage to get the chains, the schedule would end up screwed, blued, and tattooed. And… “I’m glad the bus stop is right across the street. I’m not sure I could find it in this if I had to go much farther. I have to walk a little ways from where I get off to my condo. That should be fun.”

  “I’ve got a bit of a walk, too.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Something to look forward to. An adventure.”

  “I heard somewhere that an adventure was somebody else have a miserable time a long way away,” Louise said. She startled a laugh out of Jared.

  He let her leave early. It wasn’t as if they were doing a lot of business, or any business at all. She was wearing Nikes. She wished she’d thought to stick galoshes in her purse, but she hadn’t, so all she could do was wish. She also wished that, like a faithful Saint Bernard, she could carry a keg of brandy on a chain around her neck.

  When she got outside and the wailing northwest wind smacked her in the face, she wished for the brandy even more. The traffic lights at the corner of Van Slyke and Reynoso Drive were working, but she could see them only by fits and starts, when the gale chanced to blow away most of the snow between her and them.

>   She crossed the street against the light. She didn’t worry about getting hit by a car. Hardly anyone drove on the roads even when the weather was better than this. Anybody who’d get into a car now had to be crazier than Jared Watt, which was really saying something. The same went for bike riders—or she thought so till one pedaled past her.

  She tripped over the snow-hidden curb on the far side of the street, but didn’t quite fall. Brushing snow off the bus bench, she sat down. She hoped again the bus wouldn’t be too late—it was bloody cold out here, and the wind didn’t help. Duh! It was cold enough to be snowing. It never used to get that cold in SoCal. It wasn’t just cold enough to snow now. It felt a lot colder than that. Cold enough to freeze to death in? Her coat was pretty good, but the side of her face the wind hit was starting to go numb.

  Another guy on a bike zoomed by, head down, working hard. That would keep you warmer than just sitting around. Louise wondered whether she ought to get up and start doing jumping jacks or something. It might be a good idea, but she didn’t have the energy.

  She also had no idea the bus was anywhere within miles till it loomed up out of the snow in front of her. The fare had just gone up to five dollars. She’d never been so glad to feed a fin into the slot. She would have paid a lot more to get out of that horrible wind. The bus’ heater even worked after a fashion.

  Getting off was a lot less enjoyable than getting on had been. It was growing dark—growing dark fast. The snow danced and swirled in the air, for all the world as if this were somewhere in Connecticut, or maybe in a movie from the 1940s. God only knew what things were really like in Connecticut these days. Movies had nothing to do with anything real.

  By the time Louise made it home, she was wishing for both steaming coffee and earmuffs. I want to get out of these clothes and into a dry martini. Somebody’d said that, though she couldn’t remember who. She didn’t give a damn about a dry martini. If they’d made a hot martini, now…