Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2 Read online

  “Question?” Bryce nodded towards a raised hand.

  “Yes.” The Sikh girl nodded. “How do you know it was slavery most of all? What is the evidence?”

  Would she be a lawyer when she grew up, or a biochemist? Bryce was just glad he’d done his review before the class started. He had the answer at his fingertips. “Well, let’s look at South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession. South Carolina was the first state out of the Union, remember. When the ordinance talks about why the state’s leaving, it says ‘These States’-the free ones-‘have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions, and have denied the right of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and eloin’-that means steal-‘the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books, and pictures, to servile insurrection.’ It goes on for several more paragraphs after that.

  “Instead of reading them, though, let’s look at the Confederate Constitution. That was the law the South set up for itself to live by. A lot of it’s modeled after the U.S. Constitution, but some isn’t. Here’s Article One, Section Nine, Part Three: ‘No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.’ The Confederate Constitution talks about the right of slaveholders to keep their property in a couple of other places, too.”

  He looked at her. “So. Is that evidence?”

  “It is.” She nodded gravely.

  Right then, he was a little relieved to have no black kids in the class. Reminding them Southern whites had been sure enough that their ancestors were no more than cattle with hands to fight a war about it wouldn’t have been comfortable, which was putting things mildly. Easier to sound dispassionate about it while they were out of the room, so to speak.

  Or maybe the fact that he still worried about it meant the country had taken longer to dig out from under the burden of slavery than it would to clean up after the supervolcano eruption. And if that wasn’t a scary thought, he didn’t know what would be.

  Latin was cleaner. It didn’t seem so intimately connected to the world they lived in. (Well, yes, the Romans were slaveowners, too. Well, yes, the Hispanic kids, or most of them, spoke a language that was one of today’s versions of Vulgar Latin. Details, details. .)

  Trying to explain what cases were all about took up a lot of his time. When he was in college, he’d taken German before Latin, so the dead language had confused him less, anyhow. The kids might well have had an easier time with calculus. Some of them were having an easier time with calculus.

  Then there was Sasha Smyslovsky. He spoke Russian at home, and Russian had more cases than Latin. His trouble wasn’t grammar-it was vocabulary. People who grew up with English (and, even more so, people who grew up with Spanish) could figure out a lot of Latin words from their modern cognates. Russian, though, didn’t have that kind of relationship to Latin.

  Sasha was a junior, so he was sixteen, maybe seventeen. To Bryce, he looked about thirteen. All the boys in his classes, even the football players who could have cleaned his clock without breaking a sweat, looked like kids to him. He worked hard not to show it. He’d hated his teachers condescending to him when he was in high school. That had to be a constant of human, or at least teenage, nature.

  Some of the girls in his classes looked like kids to him, too. Some of them struck him as seventeen going on thirty-five. He also worked hard not to show that. He didn’t want to give them ideas, and he didn’t want some of the ideas they gave him. More than he ever had before, he understood how high school teachers slipped every once in a while.

  He never said word one about that to Susan. He didn’t want to give her ideas, either. If he had, he knew what she would have given him: a piece of her mind, and a sharp-edged one at that.

  World history struck him as an exercise in political correctness. Every ethnic group made its contribution-its important contribution, its wonderful contribution-to the way things ended up working out. Kalmuks? Papua New Guineans? You betcha, and you’d better be able to give them back on the test.

  Female Kalmuks? Gay, lesbian, and bisexual Papua New Guineans? Of course there’d be a question about them. Two questions, more likely.

  Maybe history courses had been all about dead white males once upon a time. No, certainly they had. World history was supposed to be the antidote to that. From time to time, Bryce wondered if the cure wasn’t worse than the disease.

  They were paying him not to wonder about such things. No, they were paying him to keep his big trap shut if he did wonder about them. And keep it shut he did-where the students and the people who were paying him could hear, anyhow.

  Susan got an earful, though. When his cell phone had power, so did Colin Ferguson. The police lieutenant laughed his gruff laugh. “Didn’t you take Hypocrisy 101 in college?” he said. “Well, even if you didn’t, this is your postgraduate course.”

  “Tell me about it!” Bryce exclaimed. “Is the whole world like this?”

  “Pretty much.” Colin wasn’t laughing any more. Bryce remembered he’d been passed over for chief of the San Atanasio PD not least because he had the dangerous habit of saying what he thought. And I just stuck my foot in my face, Bryce thought unhappily. After a beat, Colin went on, “You get used to it after a while. . most of the time, anyhow.”

  “I guess.” Bryce wasn’t nearly sure he wanted to get used to it. He wondered if he had any choice. No, there were always choices. Socrates had made his. Sure, and look what it got him. Changing the subject looked like a good idea: “You ever hear anything from Rob and Vanessa?” He asked about his ex with no more than a momentary twinge.

  “Well, Rob got shot,” Colin answered.

  “Shot!” That was the last thing Bryce expected to hear. “Jesus! What happened?”

  “I got a card from him a few days ago. He says somebody mistook him for a moose. He says he isn’t eating that much. He says there isn’t that much to eat where he’s at in Maine. And he says he’s healing up, which is the most important part.”

  “Uh-huh.” Bryce nodded, not that Colin could see him. That sounded like Rob, all right. It also sounded quite a bit like Colin himself. His firstborn would have got pissed off had anyone told him so, though. Bryce tried again: “And Vanessa?”

  “Still on the scavenger circuit. She doesn’t write much, and she’s not any place where she can power up her phone-or where she can get bars even if she does. I keep reminding myself she’s good at landing on her feet. You know about that.”

  “Now that you mention it, yes.” Bryce tried to sound light, and feared he made a hash of it. On the way to one of those landings on her feet, Vanessa’d kicked him in the teeth. The Bulgarian judge gave her a 9.85 for technical ability when she did it, too, and 9.9 for artistic merit.

  Well, what could you do? She’d walked out of his life four and a half years ago now. He couldn’t do a damn thing, that was what. What he ought to do was forget he’d ever known her and spend all his time thinking about Susan, who actually wanted to be with him. Much as he would have liked to, he’d long since discovered he couldn’t do that, either. Colin still had Louise on his mind, too, even if he wished he didn’t. No wonder they’d stayed friends. No, no wonder at all.

  What Bryce could do now was grade papers. As a matter of fact, that was what he had to do. And so, as soon as he got off the phone with Colin, he went ahead and did it.

  * * *

  The late, not so great town of Fredonia, Kansas, wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere. It was in the southeastern part of nowhere, or at least of Kansas. Since the supervolcano blew, Kansas and nowhere had become effectively synonymous.

  As far as Vanessa Ferguson was concerned, K
ansas and nowhere were synonymous long before the supervolcano blew. Since she’d escaped Camp Constitution to pick the bones of people who’d made the mistake of feeling otherwise, she kept quiet on that score.

  Fredonia, Kansas, also wasn’t in the middle of a Marx Brothers movie. Vanessa made the mistake of mentioning it to the rest of the refugees from the refugee camp she worked with. They all looked at her as if she’d just sprouted an extra head, even-no, especially-when she started singing “Hail, Hail, Fredonia!”

  “Vanessa, we already know you’re weird,” Merv Saunders told her with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “Do you have to go and advertise it?”

  “Oh, give me a fucking break,” she snarled. He was close to twenty years older than she was. Shouldn’t that have been enough of a head start to give him some kind of clue about the Marx Brothers? Evidently not.

  What really pissed her off wasn’t that he didn’t have a clue. What really pissed her off was that he didn’t want a clue. He wasn’t just a yahoo. He was proud to be a yahoo. He was the kind of yahoo who didn’t know what a yahoo actually was, too. If he didn’t know about Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and hapless Margaret Dumont, he for sure wouldn’t know about Lemuel Gulliver’s last voyage.

  Winter in Fredonia wouldn’t have been a picnic before the eruption. Winter in Fredonia since the eruption reminded Vanessa of what she’d heard about Fargo, or maybe Winnipeg. Sometimes it got up into the twenties. Sometimes it warmed up to zero. And sometimes it didn’t.

  Fredonia hadn’t had a whole lot of trees when the supervolcano was biding its time. This was Kansas, for crying out loud. Just about all the trees it had had were dead now. If the ashfall hadn’t done for them, those upgraded winters bloody well had.

  So they were bare-branched and graying. They reminded Vanessa of human corpses-you could tell right away that they wouldn’t spring back to life when (or, nowadays, if) spring came around again. And their gray starkness, and that of the rest of the local landscape, just made the cell phone relay towers all the more obvious-and obtrusive.

  The towers here, like the ones in L.A. and Denver, had been disguised as trees, with brown plastic trunks and green plastic leaves. They hadn’t made what you’d call convincing trees: neither colors nor shapes were spot-on. But they looked better than bare aluminum scaffolding and wires and whatever would have.

  Because they were only approximations of trees, Vanessa and her family and friends had noticed them every so often, mostly when out driving. Somebody (as a matter of fact, it was Bryce, which Vanessa had deleted from her internal hard drive) tagged them alien listening devices. The name stuck in her little crowd.

  Here in drab, abandoned Fredonia, Kansas, the relay points honest to God did look alien. Their plastic leaves were still green (snow-speckled green right now), their plastic trunks still brown. Sooner or later, the sun would fade them. With the sun so feeble nowadays, it was likely to be later.

  No matter how out of place they seemed, their wiring and electronics remained valuable. The salvage team methodically cut them down and cut them up. “We’d better be careful,” Vanessa said. “We don’t want the aliens to find out we’re messing with their stuff.”

  She meant it for a joke. She was going to explain how her friends had called the relays alien listening devices. Had the rest of the team liked her better, she would have got a laugh.

  But the others disassembling the relay only scowled. “Aliens! Give me a fucking break!” one of them said.

  “Bite me,” Vanessa answered sweetly.

  “Knock if off, both of you.” Saunders sounded weary. One of his jobs, along with this government-sponsored graverobbing, was putting out little fires in his crew before they turned into big ones. Nobody’d murdered anybody yet, or even assaulted with intent to maim, which proved he was good at what he did.

  Vanessa wanted to yell He started it! How many times had she done that back home, with one brother or the other? Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but it was always worth a try. Not here. Merv Saunders didn’t care who’d started it. He just wanted it to stop.

  And he had the power to bind and to loose. He could kick somebody off the team. If you got kicked off, you went out of the devastated zone on the next truck that came in to pick up salvageables. You didn’t get to go off on your own once you left the devastated zone, either. Oh, no. The powers that be were crueler than that. If you got kicked out, you went straight back into a refugee camp.

  Staying in a camp was punitive. The authorities could see that (so could anybody who’d ever been in one). But millions of people remained stuck in them. The authorities couldn’t see how to put them anywhere else.

  Not enough houses. Not enough money to build them. Not enough money for anyone to afford them even if they got built, either. The economy had been rotten before the supervolcano went off. With the Midwest essentially gone, it wasn’t just rotten any more. The vultures had eaten the meat off its bones. And the rest of the poor, chilly world wasn’t much better off. The USA had been the engine that pulled the train. Well, the engine had gone off the rails.

  They slept in the best quarters Fredonia offered. It wasn’t a Motel 6, but it might as well have been. A motel with no electricity and no running water. Happy fucking day! The bed was more comfortable than a sleeping bag. The windows in Vanessa’s room weren’t broken, either, so they shielded her from the freezing wind. And that was about as much good as she could find to say about the place.

  Her father had stayed at a Motel 6 when he went to Yellowstone. She remembered him bitching about it. That was back in the days when things still worked, though. Now. . Now she was stuck in this cold, miserable place with a bunch of people who couldn’t stand her.

  She’d blown that National Guardsman so she could end up in a place like this, no matter what the people with her thought of her. She nodded to herself. I’d do it again, too, she thought. Next to Camp Constitution, this wasn’t half bad. There was a judgment for you! Nodding again, she rolled over and fell asleep.

  XII

  Colin Ferguson took his left hand off the bicycle’s handlebars and held out his arm with the hand pointing up: the signal for a right turn. He lived on a small, lightly traveled street, but he was getting into the habit of using hand signals all the time, the way he’d hit the flicky-doodle in his car whenever he changed lanes or turned.

  He swung into his driveway. The Taurus still waited there. So did Kelly’s old Honda. Marshall’s little Toyota sat by the curb. They all ran. Colin thought they did, anyhow. None got used much, even in weather like this. Whose cars did?

  With a sigh of relief, he swung off the bike and walked it onto the porch. He stood there a few seconds, letting the rainwater drip from his slicker. He slipped off his galoshes. He’d never worried about galoshes before the supervolcano. Who had, in SoCal? People did now, by God!

  Before he could open the door, Kelly did it from the inside. They kissed briefly. “How are you?” she said as he brought the bike into the front hall. Hers already stood there, parked on old towels. He lowered the kickstand on his and put it next to hers.

  “I’ve had days I liked better.” He walked back into the kitchen and pulled a green bottle out of the pantry. After he poured himself a fair knock, he asked Kelly, “Want some?”

  “That’s okay. You know me-far as I’m concerned, Laphroaig is Kermit’s last name.” Instead of drinking scotch, Kelly popped the cap on a Red Trolley ale. She clinked the bottle against his glass. “Sympathies.”

  “Thanks.” He let smoky fire run down his throat. She’d improved his taste in beer, but he’d never been able to persuade her that scotch tasted like anything but medicine. More for me, he thought.

  “What went wrong?” she asked.

  “Stupid judge let a perp off. Not enough evidence to keep him, he said. The video didn’t quite show his fingerprints, so we had no grounds for the arrest. My-”

  “Ass,” Kelly said helpfully when he stalled.

&nbs
p; “Yeah. That. It was a good bust. Honest to God, it was. That jerk in a robe, he-” The complaint dissolved into a disgusted growl. Colin drank more Laphroaig. “How are you? Better’n that, I hope.”

  “Me? I’m tired. Long way to Dominguez on a bike. They say the buses are supposed to get more fuel next week, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Mrmm.” Colin made a different kind of unhappy noise. “We’re getting low on gas ourselves. What we hijacked from LAPD is pretty much gone, and we aren’t getting as much as we still want to use. Pitcavage isn’t what you’d call happy about it.” He drained the glass and filled it again.

  Kelly raised an eyebrow. “You don’t do that very often.”

  “Not as often as I did before I started hanging around with you, and you can take that to the bank.” Despite what he said, Colin drank from the refill. “You’ve got no idea how wrecked I was the morning we met in Yellowstone-and that was after the aspirins and the coffee kicked in. But I don’t need it so much now.”

  “Good. I’m doing something right, anyhow.” Kelly wasn’t halfway down her beer yet. She liked the taste and a little buzz. Colin didn’t think he’d ever seen her smashed, though. The reverse? The reverse wasn’t quite true.

  “Darn right you are,” he said. “I wish you were chief, and doing things right in that chair. Pitcavage. .” Some of the beat cops called their big boss Shitcabbage. Colin hadn’t heard any of the detectives use that particular endearment, but they had others for the chief. And they had their reasons for using them, too.

  “What now?” Kelly knew there were things he hadn’t said yet.

  “His worthless kid,” Colin answered. “I mean, you try to make it easy on ’em. I never busted mine for smoking dope, and God knows I could have a million times.”

  “You never busted me, either,” Kelly pointed out.

  “You never smoked it in front of me to get my goat.”

  “No,” she agreed quietly. “I knew you didn’t like it, and it never was that big a deal for me. I don’t miss it-beer’s fine.”