And it wasn’t. A cop in a pig-snouted gas mask-which had to work better than goggles and a surgical job-waved what looked like an orange light saber. He yelled something at Vanessa. She couldn’t make out what it was. Reluctantly, she cracked the window. Ash started coming in.
“Interstate’s closed,” the cop said, his voice sounding distant, almost underwater, through the mask. “Big old accident south of town. Worst mess you’ve ever seen, I swear to God.”
Vanessa doubted that. She’d seen L.A. messes, after all. But then she had second thoughts. All the blowing dust might have done to I-25 what tule fog did in California’s Central Valley-it could turn I-5 into Slaughterhouse Five, and did just about every winter. Twenty or fifty or eighty cars and SUVs and trucks all turned to crumpled sheet metal, some of them burning, with dazed and bleeding people wandering around coughing from the ash, every now and then a fresh, tinny crash as a new fool didn’t spot the wreck up ahead soon enough…
“Maybe I’ll go east instead,” she said, thinking And to hell with Horace Greeley.
“Good plan,” the cop said in that otherworldly voice. “If there’s wrecks on 50, they aren’t close to Pueblo.”
Which meant they ound t’t his problem. But which also meant she could put some more miles between her and the supervolcano. By Interstate standards, US 50 was old and shabby. It was also open, though, so Vanessa did her best to make lemonade. She might not be able to go as fast as she wanted to, but at least she was going. She tried to ignore Pickles’ yowls, which was like trying to ignore a toothache.
A lot of cars were crapped out by the side of the road. She blessed the new air filter she’d got in Pueblo. Every so often, she’d come up on a car that had crapped out in the middle of the road. A couple of times, she almost rear-ended one. Was that how the giant pileup on I-25 had started? She wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
She was a little more than an hour-say, thirty-five miles-out of Pueblo when it started to rain. When the first big drops splatted down on her windshield, she let out a war whoop of delight. Rain would wash the ash out of the air. If she could see where she was going, she’d get there faster.
But the rain didn’t wash all the grit out of the air-there was too much of it in the air for that. And when she turned on the wipers, they did as much harm as good. They pushed grit back and forth across the windshield; she could hear it, almost feel it, scraping first one way, then the other. And it was rock grit, some of it at least as hard as the glass it was grinding across. Arced scratches spread across the broad pane. That wasn’t smeared dirt, the way she hoped for a moment; the windshield was marked for good.
Vanessa swore as loudly as she’d whooped, startling the cat into momentary silence. There was so much ash and dust on the highway that she soon began to feel she was trying to drive through mud. That was exactly what she was doing, too. She had to slow down even more instead of speeding up the way she wanted to.
A lordly Cadillac Escalade zoomed past her. Its giant tires splattered the side of her car-and her side windows-with muck. Then the supersized SUV cut in front of her. She had to hit the brakes to keep from smashing into it, or more likely going under it. More gritty mud splashed her windshield. The wipers did their best to shove it aside. Their best abraded the glass some more.
“You dumb fucking asshole!” she howled, and flipped the Escalade the bird. The imbecile behind the battleship’s wheel probably couldn’t see her do it, what with her filthy, scarred front glass, but she was most sincere.
Then she remembered the brand-new. 38 in her handbag. She’d never understood road-rage shootings before. They’d always seemed the province of gangbangers with shaved heads and teardrop tats. Now she got it. Somebody did you wrong, so you went and made that sucker pay.
She imagined the Escalade slewing crazily off the road, flipping over-weren’t all those stinking SUVs top-heavy as hell? — and bursting into flame. She imagined the jerk driving it toasting till he was overdone, along with Mrs. Jerk and all the little Jerks in their car seats.
And she let out a long, shuddering breath and made damn sure she didn’t reach inside the purse. A moment of fury would be all it took, all right. You couldn’t-well, you shouldn’t-give in to something like that. But people did, all the time. Her old man wouldn’t go out of business any time soon.
Thinking of him made her stick one hand in her purse after all. The only thing she took out was her cell phone. Maybe, with the rain scrubbing the dust out of the air, she’d finally have bars.
No such luck. She tried his number anyway. Again, no luck. Nthing coming in. Nothing going out. She turned off the phone and stowed it.
On she went, slowly. With the road the way it was and with her poor, abused windshield the way it was, slowly was the only way to go. Most of the people heading toward Kansas had sense enough to see things the same way. The jerk in the Escalade was no doubt still doing ninety. He was long gone in front of her. Even if she hadn’t shot him, she wished him no good.
Every once in a while, Somebody listened when you made a wish like that. Less than fifteen minutes later, she drove past the Escalade. It was over on the shoulder with the hood popped. Mr. Jerk-who proved what he was by not bothering with a mask-stared forlornly at the engine. If he was waiting for AAA to come rescue him, he’d have a long wait.
Vanessa not only knew the feeling of Schadenfreude, she knew the word. Knowing the word sharpened the feeling. If only sex worked that way! The Escalade shrank in her rearview mirror and vanished into rain and dust.
Then she had to hit the brakes and crawl. Someone hadn’t slowed down enough or had skidded in the new mud on the asphalt. The crash hadn’t closed US 50-not yet, anyhow-but it sure had snarled traffic. If a jalopy in the backup decided this was a good time to overheat..
Why are you borrowing trouble? Vanessa asked herself. Don’t you have enough already? In a way, those were questions without answers. In another, they were questions that hardly needed answers. She borrowed trouble because she was the kind of person who borrowed trouble. If she wanted to, she could blame that on her tight-assed father or on being the middle child or on Mrs. McKenzie, her neurotic- make that nutso, she thought, remembering Wes across the street from her folks-first-grade teacher. None of which changed things one goddamn bit. She borrowed trouble.
This time, she got to pay it back pretty soon. No steam plume ascended to the heavens from some old clunker’s radiator. She inched along with everybody else, but she kept on inching. The accident involved four cars. Nobody seemed badly hurt. Men wearing wet clothes and glum expressions stalked around examining damage.
More gunk flew onto her windshield when the car ahead of her sped up as it found open road in front of it. Resignedly, she waited for the wipers to clear the smear, and to scratch up the glass some more. The only way she could have prevented that would have been to stay in Denver. This might be a bad bet, but that was a worse one-though poor Pickles would have disagreed.
She found more things to worry about. How much cash did she have left after that outrageous gas stop and air filter? Would it be enough to do her any good when she needed to fill up again? If it wasn’t, would the station guy take plastic? Or could she find a working ATM? Odds were decent, she supposed. If a gas pump was working, an ATM ought to be. For now, with the needle well above the H, she kept making miles.
Making miles, these days, came with a price, though, or at least it did in a big part of the country, very much including the part she was in. By the time she got over the state line into Kansas, her car was starting to sound like hell, even with the new air filter. How much volcanic crud was getting in despite the filter? Jesus, how much had got in when she took off the gas cap to fill the tank in Pueblo? What was all that shit doing to her engine? What was all the grit on the road doing to the rest of her moving parts? How long would they keep on moving? Long enough? She had to hope so.
In spite of the way the car snded, she smiled for a second. She must have been abo
ut ten years old when Rob, a couple of years older, opened some atlas or other to a map of the USA. “They’re gonna build a college right here,” he’d said, pointing to the border between the state she’d just left and the one she’d just entered.
She remembered going, “Yeah? So?” Big brothers were obnoxious enough even if you didn’t let them get the jump on you. When you did, they turned insufferable. She might not have known that word when she was ten, but she sure had understood the idea.
And she remembered his leer. He was just learning how to do it, which of course meant he overdid it. “So they’re gonna call it the First United Colorado-Kansas University,” he’d answered. “Only for short it’ll be-”
Vanessa had understood the idea of acronyms, too, even if she might not have known that word yet, either. “FUCK U!” she’d shrilled, and laughed so loud, and in such delighted horror, that their mother had come into her room to see what the hell was going on. They’d both solemnly denied everything, of course. With no more than an open atlas for evidence, Mom hadn’t been able to pin a crime on them.
Even then, you might have guessed Rob would end up playing in a band called Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. Vanessa didn’t much care for the music, though she had to admit some of the lyrics were clever. She had no idea where the band was right now-somewhere back East, if she remembered straight. If she did, the odds Rob was okay were good.
The odds on herself, or on Pickles, or on the Toyota… Red lights on the dashboard warned SERVICE ENGINE SOON. The car was running hot even though the eastbound US 50, heading away from the Rockies, tended downhill. If it crapped out, how far could she coast? Till the next hill, anyhow, and those were few and far between around here.
She drove through Coolidge, just over the border, almost before she realized it was there. If the place had ever had a hundred people, she would have been amazed. How many were still here, and how many had lit out when the supervolcano erupted? She’d never know.
US 50 paralleled the Arkansas River. The rain had washed some of the ash off the trees that grew alongside the river, so they looked a little more like their old selves. The river, by contrast, looked muddy and full and angry, even though it wasn’t raining all that hard.
For a little while, Vanessa wondered why. Then the old metaphorical lightbulb went on above her head. The rain was washing volcanic ash off the trees, sure, and off the grass, and off the ground generally. And it was washing that ash… straight into the river. Where else could the stuff go?
How long till the Arkansas started flooding? The Missouri was a lot closer to the eruption, which could only mean even more ash would be going into it. So it would start flooding sooner, if it hadn’t started already. The other rivers flowing from the Rockies toward the Mississippi would do the same thing.
They would also wash the volcanic ash toward and then into the Father of Waters. What would happen when the Big Muddy turned into the Big Muddier, and then into the Big Muddiest? Vanessa didn’t know in detail, but this was one of those times when the big picture did fine. The big picture was lots of muddy water spreading out over lots and lots of land.
Her motor coughed. She forgot about the big picture. Somebody might have dropped an ice cube down the back of her shirt. A human being who sounded like that would have been dying of emphysema. The enine was dying, too. A mechanic wouldn’t call it emphysema, but it amounted to the same thing.
Here came Syracuse. A roadside sign proudly proclaimed you could get gas there. It also said you could get food. Chances were you could get gas from the food, too, even if the sign didn’t tell you that.
Go? Stop? Did she want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere if the car quit between towns? Wasn’t this already the middle of nowhere? Was she better off with other people or as far away from them as she could get?
She kept going. Whether that made her an optimist or a pessimist was one more thing she’d think about when she had time. If she ever did. Which looked less and less likely.
After Syracuse, signs announced that the next town ahead was Garden City. By the way they announced it, Garden City might actually be something. It had hotels and motels and fast-food joints and meat-packing plants. Some of the signs for those were in both English and Spanish. She’d seen the like in L.A. and Denver, of
course. Spanish was the language in which a lot of hard work got done in the USA.
But in a place like Garden City, Kansas? Evidently. It turned out not to matter to Vanessa. The engine coughed again. This time, it sounded more like Cheyne-Stokes breathing than emphysema. And, like somebody with Cheyne-Stokes breathing, her car died. All the red and yellow warning lights came on. As she’d figured she would, she rolled as far as she could. Then she steered over to the shoulder and stopped.
As soon as the motion ceased, Pickles quit sounding like an air-raid siren. Relishing the silence, Vanessa spoke out loud: “Well, what do I do now?”
Her basic choices were sitting tight or getting out and walking toward Garden City. If she sat tight, she was counting on somebody halfway decent rescuing her before she had to start walking to Garden City. If she got out, she’d feel like a snail without its shell. And she and Pickles-especially Pickles-would be breathing the outside air that had just killed her car.
In a TV show, they’d go to commercials. When they came back, she’d find the right answer with the greatest of ease. Or they’d cut away to her somewhere else, and she’d explain to an admiring friend how she’d got there.
Unfortunately, you couldn’t cut away from life. She had no idea what the right answer was, or even if there was one. She hadn’t come this far by sitting tight, though. She got Pickles and an abridged version of her stuff-iron rations, tampons, a few socks and panties, and an umbrella-and started walking.
She was glad for the umbrella right away. The rain was so mixed with ash that everything it touched got dirtier. That included her jeans from the knees down, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t do anything about anything, except hope her feet didn’t blister before she got to Garden City.
She almost slipped in the mud. A car going by splashed a little on her. If that went on, she’d look like someone made of muck by the time she got to the town. Another car sloshed past and splashed her some more. She kept walking.
Colin Ferguson begrudged the time he wasted doing the I-5 boogie from L.A. to the Bay Area. Even with all the security bullshit, flying would have been faster. But ash in the air kept planes on the ground. If you wanted to get anywhere, you drove.
He hoped the Taurus would make it. Driving was a crapshoot these days, too. California hadn’t been buried r ash from the supervolcano, the way the Rocky Mountain states and much of the prairie had been. Ash lay on the ground, though, and the ash in the air wouldn’t screw up airplane engines alone. It wasn’t good for cars, either.
He’d made it over the Grapevine, anyhow. That long, tough climb getting out of L.A. County had worried him, but here he was, easing down the other side. He’d thought about taking Highway 1 up to Berkeley; there was supposed to be less ash along the coast. But, while the Pacific Coast Highway was breathtakingly beautiful, it was also slow and wearing. You couldn’t just haul ass on PCH; you had to drive. He’d taken a chance for speed, he’d got away with it, and now he had his reward.
I-5 ran straight as a string through the Central Valley. It was the short way north, and it was the straight way north. As long as you didn’t fall asleep at the wheel, you pointed the car and you went. Mountains off to either side, fields lying next to the unwinding road, occasional towns. The landscape didn’t change, but the odometer did.
At one point, the atmosphere changed, and not for the better. Near Kettleman City (which wasn’t one), they collected cattle to ship them to market. You breathed concentrated essence of bullshit for a few minutes as you went by. Then the air cleared again, and you were relieved you couldn’t smell what had relieved the cows any more.
Except the air didn’t com
pletely clear. Oh, the stink went away. But a dust haze remained. It was worst near the Interstate, where tires and the wind of many cars’ passage kept stirring up what the supervolcano had spewed all those miles away.
Sunlight still seemed wan. That wasn’t only the ash in the lower atmosphere; it was also the finer-gauge crap-the particulate matter-the eruption had blasted into the stratosphere. Sunsets kept on being improbably gorgeous, showing every color of the rainbow. Sometimes the hues were splattered together in Jackson Pollock randomness, sometimes stacked as neatly as the layers in a pousse-cafe. They were never the same from one day to the next. Hell, they were never the same from one minute to the next. That ancient Greek who said you could never step into the same river twice knew what he was talking about. You could hardly step into the same river once.
It was chilly. Colin told himself that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Fall didn’t come to California the way it did to most other places. It could be hot or cold or hot and then cold. The only trees that changed colors were a few sycamores, and they didn’t get around to it till Thanksgiving. So chilly weather now didn’t have to mean the supervolcano was doing what Kelly had warned all along it would do.
It didn’t have to mean that, no. But it sure was likely to.
Colin beat the darkness up to Berkeley. That was good. He knew the Bay Area well enough to sortakinda find his way around, but only sortakinda. Trying it at night would have been harder.
He made it to Kelly’s street, and damned if he didn’t find a parking space no more than two lengths away from where he’d snagged one the last time he drove up. It wasn’t much longer than the Taurus, but it didn’t need to be. There were plenty of things he couldn’t do. By God, he could parallel park.
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