Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3

by Harry Turtledove

  She was walking to her office when groans announced that the CSUDH campus had lost power. She slowed down. The office was on the third floor and had no window. With the door open—more important, with the door to the office across the hall (which did have a window) open—it wasn’t quite so dark as the inside of a politician’s head, but it came close.

  So, instead of climbing the stairs, she sat down on a concrete ledge near the doorway to the building. Anybody who needed to talk with her would likely spot her there. Anybody who needed to talk with her so much that he or she had sprinted on ahead would, she hoped, take a hint from the locked door and the gloomy hallway, come downstairs and back outside, and then spot her there. Chances were good that even students not rich enough or bright enough to win admission to one of the UC campuses could figure that out.

  Sure as hell, another Asian kid buttonholed her. Rex wasn’t doing nearly so well as George Chun. Kelly had a good idea why he wasn’t, too: he was baked all the time. She recognized the signs from Marshall. But Marshall held the joint—he got loaded a lot, but he still functioned. Kelly thought the joint was holding Rex.

  He had trouble remembering what he wanted to ask her, which couldn’t be a good sign. Finally, a couple of his fried synapses clicked together and made a spark: “Oh, yeah! Plate, like, tec… waddayacallit.”

  “Tectonics,” Kelly said patiently. Stoners could do it. They just couldn’t do it very fast. “What do you need to know?”

  Again, he had to grope for an answer. He reminded Kelly of that ancient Cosby routine where the dudes with the munchies went to Burger King and forgot why they were there before they could order. When one of them got asked what he wanted, he mumbled Hey, lemme talk to the king. Rex was too much like that.

  At last, he managed, “Um, how’s that work, you know?”

  With a small sigh, Kelly explained how it worked. It was an abridged version of what she’d said during the lecture, but it was all new to Rex, even though he’d been there.

  “Wow,” he said, and she had to fight back giggles. She hadn’t heard such a wasted noise, even from Marshall, for a long time. Rex went on, “That’s pretty amazing. How’d they psych out it does that?”

  Kelly fed him another slice of the lecture. Maybe it would stay down this time. She could hope so.

  Another student, a Hispanic woman whose name Kelly couldn’t find in her head, came up when she was halfway through her little talk on subduction and seafloor spreading. Kelly backed and filled so the newcomer wouldn’t think she was speaking Urdu. The woman actually seemed to have some idea of what was going on. Kelly wouldn’t have said the same thing about Rex.

  She did feel virtuous that she’d stationed herself out here and drawn some students even though her office wasn’t usable. When her office hours were done, she turned in a journal at the library, collected a handwritten receipt, and trudged off to the bus stop for the trip back to San Atanasio.

  It would have been twenty minutes by car. The way things worked these days, it took one transfer and over an hour to get back to her stop on Braxton Bragg Boulevard. From there, she had to walk another ten or fifteen minutes before she was actually home.

  As it did so often since the eruption, sunset looked like a pousse-café, with all sorts of gaudy, gorgeous colors piled one atop another and changing every time she looked at them. She didn’t look at them as much as their beauty should have demanded. She’d seen too many sunsets not just like this one, maybe, but every bit as gorgeous.

  When her key turned first the dead bolt and then the lock to the front door, she heard high, shrill squeals from inside. As soon as she walked through the front door, a small, friendly hurricane did its goddamnedest to kneecap her. “Mommymommymommymommmy!” the hurricane yelled, all one word.

  Kelly let her backpack slide from her shoulders to the floor. She picked up Deborah and squeezed her and kissed her. “Hello, kiddo. I missed you,” she said. “Have you been a good girl?”

  “No,” Deborah said proudly.

  “Marshall?” Kelly asked, a certain apprehension in her voice.

  “Not too bad,” Marshall said. “She was gonna see if a coffee mug bounced like a rubber ball, but I got it away from her before she could make like Isaac Newton and experiment.”

  “Good for you,” Kelly said, and then, to her daughter, “Don’t throw cups, please.”

  “Why?” Deborah asked, which gave Kelly a sinking feeling.

  Hoping against hope, Kelly answered, “Because they can break.”

  But she was doomed after all. “Why?” Deborah asked again.

  “Because they’re made of china.”

  “Why?” Deborah was ready to ask it all night long. And why not? Mommy was home, and the world was wonderful again.

  • • •

  With no great enthusiasm, Colin Ferguson dialed a number in Mobile, Alabama. His opinion of Mobile wasn’t high. His destroyer had put in there for a few days while he was in the Navy. The weather’d been every bit as horrendously hot and sticky as New Orleans’. Unlike New Orleans, though, Mobile seemed to have been settled by people who had no idea how to have fun.

  Nowadays, Mobile’s weather was probably better than it had been before the supervolcano eruption. It would be one of the few places in the world able to say that.

  But he hadn’t called Mobile to talk about the weather. In due course, a voice on the other end of the line said, “This is Lieutenant Randall Atkins, Theft and Fraud Unit.” Lieutenant Atkins had a deep voice, and a drawl thick enough to slice.

  “Morning, Lieutenant. I’m Captain Colin Ferguson, of the San Atanasio PD out in California.”

  “Ferguson… San Atanasio…” Colin could just about watch the pieces going round and round in the Mobile cop’s mind like the wheels on a slot machine. Pretty soon, Atkins hit the jackpot. “Jesus! Aren’t you the guy who—?”

  “Yeah, I’m the guy who, all right,” Colin agreed heavily. He knew too well he’d be getting that the rest of his career. “This hasn’t got anything to do with that, though.”

  “Okay.” Atkins seemed to pull himself together and act professional. “What does it have to do with, then, Captain?”

  “There’s a new restaurant in your town, a place called Unity,” Colin said, remembering that Bronislav’s tat with the cross and the two forward C’s and the two backward ones stood for Only unity will save the Serbs. “One of the people behind it is a fellow named Bronislav Nedic.”

  “Named what? You want to spell that for me, Captain? Spell it nice and slow, if you’d be so kind.” Colin did—the request was more than reasonable. When he finished, Randall Atkins said, “All right. I’ve got it. You don’t mind my asking though, how come a cop way the devil out in California cares about a guy with a funny name in the restaurant racket here?”

  “I don’t mind,” Colin answered. “We’ve got a warrant out on Nedic. Charge is grand theft. He hacked into his girlfriend’s bank account, swiped almost ten grand, and used it to get a piece of this Unity place.” The restaurant already had half a dozen online reviews, all of them good, a couple of them raves. After a brief pause, Colin went on, “I’d go after him any which way—believe me on that one, Lieutenant. But it just so happens that his girlfriend is my daughter.”

  “Ouch!” Atkins said. “Boy, what a dumb son of a bitch, ripping off a cop’s kid.”

  “That did cross my mind,” Colin said. “But he knew she had it, and he figured out how to get his hands on it, and he was talking about opening a place to eat for as long as he dated Vanessa—a couple-three years. Looks like he could resist everything but temptation.”

  “Heh,” Lieutenant Atkins said. He paused for longer than Colin had before continuing, “Well, send us the particulars and we’ll look into it.” He didn’t say they would bust Bronislav Nedic and send him back to California in leg irons. He didn’t say anything of the sort—not even close.

  Colin noted what he didn’t say, and didn’t like what he did say. “Look
into it?” the San Atanasio cop echoed. If he sounded affronted, he sounded that way because he damn well was.

  Randall Atkins just sighed. “’Fraid so, Captain. You need to understand—things aren’t real good around here right now. We’ve got swarms of folks in town who’re just out of the camps, and it’s like they’re cons just out of prison. They don’t give a shit—pardon my French—about anybody but them. Stealing’s second nature to ’em. That and turning tricks are about the only way you can get stuff in those places. They’ll lift anything that isn’t nailed down, and they’ll try and pry up the nails if it is. They’d sooner steal food than work for it, not that there’s much work to get around here.”

  “I hear that,” Colin said, remembering Victor Jennings and others like him.

  “Yeah, I bet you do,” Lieutenant Atkins said. “But anyway, that’s where we’re at. Somebody’s actually opening up a business instead of closing one, we won’t go after him real hard unless he grabs himself an AK-47 and starts shooting up the neighborhood.”

  “He’s liable to,” Colin remarked.

  “Say what?”

  “I said, he’s liable to. Have you seen this dude, Lieutenant? He’s very bad news. I always figured he’d be more likely to knock over a bank than to rip one off with a laptop. When Yugoslavia came to pieces in the Nineties, he did some nasty things over there. I don’t know all the gory details and I don’t want to, but he did. You can see it in his eyes.”

  “And he was going with your daughter?”

  “It wasn’t my idea. He’s not any more—that’s for damn sure.” Colin sighed. “She’s old enough to make her own mistakes, and it’s not like she’d listen to me if I tried to show ’em to her. Not obvious she should, either, on account of I sure made my share of mistakes like that.”

  Randall Atkins chuckled mirthlessly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man—and if you believe that, I’ll tell you another one. But seriously, as long as this, uh, Nedic keeps his nose clean around here, we aren’t gonna go after him real hard. We’ve got enough day-to-day trouble. We don’t sweat the other kind much.”

  “What would happen if I asked your switchboard to put me through to the chief there?” Colin asked.

  “Go ahead,” Atkins said. “Maybe he’ll do you a cop-to-cop favor. But I’ve got a hundred bucks that says he’ll tell you about what I just did.”

  A hundred bucks wasn’t what it had been before the eruption, let alone what it had been when Colin was in the Navy—back in those days, a hundred bucks was serious money. But it still wasn’t nothing. Instead of calling the chief in Mobile, Colin hung up. Atkins had convinced him the Alabama town really didn’t worry about people like Bronislav as long as he stuck to his restaurant there.

  “That sucks,” Gabe Sanchez said when Colin told him the sad story over lunch. “Sucks big-time, matter of fact.”

  “Tell me about it,” Colin answered. “But I don’t know what I can do. Mobile’s not like the LAPD—I don’t get many chances to do them a bad turn if I owe ’em one.”

  “You could mail ’em a package bomb,” Gabe said helpfully. “Make sure you put a long delay on the timer. The post office is as slow as Super Bowl losers in February.”

  “Ha!” Colin heard the uneasiness in his voice. He would never do anything like that. But he didn’t plan to pass Gabe’s joke on to Vanessa. He didn’t think she would send Lieutenant Atkins something that went boom! when you opened it. He also didn’t think she would try that kind of payback on Bronislav Nedic. He wasn’t sure enough not to worry about giving her ideas. She was already righteously pissed off at the big, tough Serb.

  Colin wished Vanessa were righteously pissed off at herself, too. She’d wasted years of her life on a man who saw her as… what? As a fuck toy and an ATM, that was what. But Vanessa had never blamed herself for anything that happened to her. No, it was always somebody else’s fault, usually a man’s, once in a while her mother’s.

  “If the city cops won’t do anything, maybe you can get hold of the Alabama highway patrol or state troopers or whatever the hell they call ’em over there,” Gabe said. “If Bron-whatever’s doing anything bent outside of his fancy new restaurant, they could land on him for you.”

  “Huh.” This time, Colin’s grunt was thoughtful. “You know, you may not be as dumb as I look.”

  Gabe had opened his mouth to come back with a zinger of his own. He coped with self-mockery without shifting gears: “Jeez, I hope so!”

  “Me, too,” Colin said. “I honest to God may put a flea in somebody’s ear about that place. Nedic never struck me as the kind of guy who stayed inside the rules all the time. Hey, he spent a while doing Christ knows what in a place where you made your own rules with an AK. He lived through that. What do you want to bet he thinks he can live through anything?”

  “Sounds reasonable.” Gabe nodded. Then he looked sly. “Suppose he did enough of that shit so you could get his ass in a sling on a war-crimes rap?”

  “I doubt it. Far as I know, he was just a spear-carrier,” Colin answered. “On the off chance, though, I’ll poke around online.” He didn’t mention that he spoke not a word of Serbo-Croatian. Gabe already knew that. Colin couldn’t even cuss in it, the way Vanessa could. And the Serbian half of the language was written in an alphabet he didn’t read. Details, details…

  “Have you told Vanessa the Mobile cops are sitting with their thumbs up their asses?” Sanchez could find the most intriguing questions.

  “Not yet.” Colin wasn’t looking forward to that, any more than he would have looked forward to another not-social-enough call on Dr. Stan Birnbaum. Sighing, he went on, “Wish I could get out of it. Won’t happen, though, not when she was the one who found Nedic when he surfaced.”

  “She was?” Gabe raised a shaggy eyebrow. “Either she takes after you or she’s been reading too much Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Bet on the Holmes,” Colin said dryly. There were ways Vanessa took after him. He didn’t notice all of them. Neither did his daughter: one more way she resembled him.

  “You know where this guy is at now, anyway.” Gabe gave what consolation he could. “If he does go bad, the Alabama cops will bust his sorry ass. And if he starts banking profits, well, maybe you can find your own hacker to make ’em disappear.” He grinned.

  He could grin—it wasn’t his problem. It wasn’t really Colin’s, either, but Vanessa was his daughter in spite of everything, so he wound up stuck with it. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe I can.” He only wished he believed that. If Bronislav Nedic wasn’t the kind who stashed his cash in a coffee can or between his mattress and box spring, Colin had never seen anybody who was. You didn’t need a hacker for that kind of job. You needed a strong-arm man. And any strong-arm man who bumped into the tattooed Serb might find out his arm wasn’t so strong as he’d figured.

  • • •

  The apartment Rob Ferguson shared with Lindsey Kincaid—after a lot of hemming and hawing, she’d kept her own last name—enjoyed all the modern conveniences. It enjoyed the conveniences that were modern when the nineteenth century segued into the twentieth, anyhow. It had running water… when the pipes didn’t freeze. Some of the time, it had hot running water. The icebox kept food fresh. The stove, which would burn wood or coal depending on how you adjusted the grate, not only cooked food but also did its share in heating the place.

  There was even electricity. Sometimes. After a fashion. The Energizer Bunny’s proud products were among the most important goods that trickled into Maine north and west of the Interstate during the short summer season when most of the snow melted off most of the roads and the voice of the eighteen-wheeler was heard in the land.

  Batteries powered flashlights and lamps. The most popular ones in these parts used LEDs and drew very little power. That stretched the batteries’ effective lives. Batteries also powered music players. Rob was far from the only person who put miles and miles on a bicycle to nowhere to keep an iPod charged. Listening to music fro
m before the eruption reminded him the wider world was still out there. Listening to a shortwave radio did the same thing.

  So did the occasional click from the Geiger counter Dick Barber had found wherever the hell Dick came up with such things. Sometimes, when the wind blew from the northwest, the clicks sounded less occasional. The Russians hadn’t used atomic weapons in their war against Kazakhstan and Ukraine. But Kazakh special forces squadrons—Kazakh terrorists, Radio Moscow called them—had infiltrated into Russia and blown up two nuclear power plants. It wasn’t a new Chernobyl (or if it was, the Russians wouldn’t admit it). It did raise the background radiation level.

  It also raised Barber’s amusement level. “Of course the Kazakhs will know where the Russians have security problems,” he said. “Their higher-ups went to the university with the Russians’ higher-ups back in the days when the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic were both parts of the same workers’ paradise.”

  “Er—right,” Rob said. People like Dick Barber and Rob’s father could talk that way with a straight face. They remembered the Cold War from when they were young. And people like Jim Farrell, most of a generation older still, could talk that way and sound as if it were the most important thing in the world. For much of their lives, the Cold War, who would win it, whether anyone could win it, and the terrible fear it would turn hot, had been the most important thing in the world.

  “Want some more cider, Dick?” Lindsey asked. She didn’t fancy Barber’s politics, but she did think he was interesting. And he was her husband’s friend. That tipped the scales toward politeness for her.

  “Much obliged,” Barber said. Lindsey poured some for him and some for Rob. The cider was also an import from the south, from a land where the growing season stayed long enough for apples. Barley sometimes grew here, so local beer remained possible.

  “You’re not drinking any yourself, babe,” Rob said.