Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2 Read online

  She got her answer to that when she came up to the checkpoint. STATUS EVALUATION CONTROL-SUPERVOLCANO EMERGENCY AUTHORIZATION ACT, the sign there announced. As far as she knew, the supervolcano was unauthorized. The act authorized things like Camp Constitution and its many unpleasant siblings, the scavenger programs in the Midwest, and maybe this status evaluation control thingy, too. An unnatural act, is what it is, she thought.

  Trucks breezed through. Their reasons for heading west were obvious enough even for government functionaries to grasp. People in cars, though. . People in cars got the same friendly greetings Taliban terrorists toting AK-47s would have earned going through airport security.

  A fellow in a uniform Vanessa didn’t recognize scowled at her expired Colorado license: not because it was expired but because it was from Colorado. “Why are you going to Los Angeles?” he demanded.

  “Because I lived there my whole life till I went to Denver,” she answered, which was nothing but the truth.

  Truth or not, it didn’t impress him. “Have you got any family there? Can they vouch for you?”

  What if I say no? Vanessa was tempted to. Her attitude towards authority’s pushes had always been to push back as hard as she could. She was able to learn from experience, though. She didn’t always, but she could. This guy’s humorless face said any answer he didn’t like would keep her off the I-10.

  And so, feigning meekness she didn’t feel, she answered, “My father is a police lieutenant in San Atanasio.” He’d never heard of her old stomping grounds; amazing how a face all slabs and angles could show such eloquent disbelief. Quickly, she explained, “It’s not far from LAX-a little south and a little east.”

  “That’s what you say, anyhow,” he answered, his voice as stony as his eyes. He pulled out a cell phone. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a number where I can contact this individual?”

  Vanessa could have taken the cop shop’s number off her own phone. She could have, but she didn’t need to. Dad’s work number had been ingrained in her head since she was a kid. She needed to add an area code to it now, and she did as she rattled it off. At the uniformed man’s annoyed glower, she repeated it more slowly.

  He punched the number into his phone, turning his back and stepping away so she couldn’t follow his conversation. He didn’t look so sour-or rather, he looked sour in a different way-as he stuck the phone in his pocket and swung toward her again. “You appear to have been telling the truth,” he said, sounding quite humanly surprised.

  “Of course I was!” Vanessa yipped. She was surprised herself, and furious, that he should doubt her. She prided herself on her honesty. She said what she meant even when keeping her mouth shut would do more good.

  “Hunh!” Her father couldn’t have snorted better than this guy did. “You listen to the bullshit we hear here, you wouldn’t go of course.”

  “You sound like a cop, all right,” Vanessa said.

  “Yeah, well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

  “Can I go on, then?” Vanessa itched to floor the gas pedal. If she drove fast enough, maybe she could get back to L.A. before this piece of junk crapped out on her. Maybe.

  “I. . suppose so,” the uniformed man answered reluctantly. “If you haven’t got a place to stay and a job to look forward to, though, you’re a damn fool for heading that way.”

  “The last place I had to stay was Camp fucking Constitution,” Vanessa said through clenched teeth. “Whatever I end up with in L.A.-even if I sleep under a goddamn freeway overpass and dumpster-dive for dinner-it can’t be worse than that. NFW.”

  “Hunh!” the guy said again, even more dubiously than before. But he stepped back and jerked a thumb to the west. “Go ahead, then. You’ll find out.”

  Vanessa didn’t waste time thanking him. She mashed the accelerator with her foot. Smoke spurted from the Toyota’s tailpipe. So what? she thought, and burst into more verses of song nobody but her could hear: “California, here I come! Right back where I started from!” Had anybody from Stephen Foster to Irving Berlin to John Lennon to Bob Dylan to Stephen Sondheim ever penned a finer lyric? She didn’t believe it, not even for a minute. She sang it again, louder yet.

  * * *

  It wasn’t as if Marshall had never seen a typewriter before. He had. Old people kept them around as souvenirs of bygone days. A few offices even had electric ones, for dealing with carbon-copy forms. But he’d never expected to discover one on his desk next to the iMac.

  “Found it in a pawnshop on San Atanasio Boulevard,” his father said, not without pride. “You’ve been bitching about how you have trouble writing when the power goes out. Well, now you can.”

  “Yippee skip,” Marshall said. “Um-most places these days want you to submit your stuff in Word or RTF. How am I supposed to get those out of this-thing?” It was a Royal manual portable, what a college student might have used in a 1970s dorm room.

  Dad exhaled through his nose, which meant he was bent out of shape-he must’ve thought Marshall would fall on the ancient machine with a glad cry. He sounded hyperpatient as he answered, “You can get words out of it, right?”

  “Maybe.” If Marshall seemed dubious, well, he was. He poked one of the keys. It went down partway, then stopped-he’d taken up the slack, or whatever. He poked again, quite a bit harder. Clack! The key hit the black rolling pin (he supposed it had a real name, but what that was he didn’t know). The carriage advanced a space. For somebody used to effortless computer keyboards. . “I dunno, Dad. It’s got a monster touch.”

  “You’ll get used to that,” his father said, though how he knew it or whether he knew it Marshall couldn’t have guessed. “And you can get words out of it. People got words out of them for more than a hundred years.”

  “Words, yeah, but not Microsuck Word.”

  Dad waved that aside. “Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,” he said, like a lawyer objecting in court. “So you send somebody a hard-copy manuscript. If he likes it and he’s got power, he can scan it to OCR and get his own Word file. And if he doesn’t have power, he won’t be able to do anything with Word or RTF files any which way.”

  Marshall opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that. After a moment, he tried, “Suppose I get something halfway done on the computer while we’ve got electricity, but I do the rest on this-thing?”

  “Then you scan it and clean it up and do your twenty-first-century thing on it.” Dad had all the answers. He also had all the reasons: “But you can’t use ‘The power’s out again’ for an excuse so you don’t write. If you’ve got to, you can use legal tablets and a ballpoint.”

  “You’re shitting me!” Marshall’s experiments along those lines had not been happy ones. He’d tried, yeah, but he thought writing by hand was as primitive as branding. Some people thought branding was cool-one step past tats, they called it. He couldn’t imagine anyone finding writing by hand cool.

  But Dad just shook his head. “Nope. Pen and paper were good enough for Shakespeare and Abe Lincoln and dudes like that. I know they aren’t in your league as a literary artist, but-”

  “Oh, give me a fucking break!” Marshall knew when he was whupped. “Look, I’ll try the tripewriter, okay? There! You happy now?”

  “Dancing in the daisies.” If Dad was, his face and his voice hadn’t found out about it. He glanced east. He’d been doing that a lot lately; Marshall didn’t think he realized how much. He did say why, though: “Your sister will be back in town in a few days.”

  “Yeah. How about that?” The last time Marshall’d seen Vanessa was when he’d helped load her U-Haul so she could move to Colorado to be with her rug merchant. Old Hagop hadn’t worked out any better than Bryce Miller did before him. She’d been goddamn lucky-and goddamn quick, which went with it-to get out of Denver alive when the supervolcano blew, too. Hundreds of thousands of people hadn’t.

  Her father coughed. “God knows how long she’ll need to land work. Not a lot of it a
round. She may have to stay here for a while.”

  “How about that?” Marshall repeated tonelessly. Vanessa would quarrel with Dad-they were too much alike not to. Marshall knew she’d quarrel with him, too. She always bossed him around, and he wasn’t going to take it the way he had when he was a kid. He tried a question of his own: “How’s Kelly like the idea?”

  “She’s not jumping up and down about it,” Dad allowed. Marshall would have bet she wasn’t. He didn’t think his stepmom had ever actually met his sister. Vanessa would quarrel with her, too. Maybe Vanessa didn’t quarrel with everybody, but she came pretty close. Sighing, Dad went on, “We don’t always do what we want to do. Sometimes we do what we’ve got to do.”

  “Right.” Marshall left it there. Since he had no steady work and was living here, he didn’t see how he could claim having Vanessa do the same thing wouldn’t fly. But he sure thought so.

  “It will work out,” his father insisted. If that wasn’t the triumph of hope over experience, then Marshall didn’t know what the hell it was. A ham sandwich, maybe. Dad lumbered out of his room, shaking his head like a bear bedeviled by bees.

  For lack of anything better to do, Marshall fiddled with the typewriter. When he ran in a sheet of paper, it came up crooked. He messed with the little chromed levers till he found the one that loosened things and let him straighten it.

  He started typing. Christ, the thing was noisy! Clack, clack, clackety-clack! And you had to punch every key hard. With his index fingers, he managed okay right away. His pinkies, though, should have done more barbell work. He had to make himself mash them down. When he goofed, he couldn’t just run the cursor back and retype. He had to fix the mistake. Somewhere-maybe at the pawnshop where he’d found the typewriter-Dad had come up with a little bottle of correction fluid.

  The stuff smelled as if it ought to get you high. The fine print on the label swore it was nonaddictive. With a stink like that, it was missing a hell of a chance if it was.

  Marshall finished a page and then, to his surprise, another one. This antiquated gadget wasn’t what he was used to, but it might not be so bad. It was kind of like Diplomacy compared to World of Warcraft. Bells and whistles? Fuhgeddaboutit. But you could manage without them. If you didn’t already know about them, you wouldn’t even miss them.

  “Fuck me,” Marshall said softly, and scribbled a note to himself. There might be a story in that-however he wound up writing it.

  XVI

  Las Cruces behind Vanessa. Snow on the mountains ahead of her. They weren’t great big mountains-nothing like the Rockies when you saw them from Denver-and didn’t look as if they ought to have snow so far down them. This was only a little north of the Mexican border, after all, and it was allegedly spring.

  No matter what the season, they had snow halfway down them. On the other half, streaked and patchy now but still there, lay the gray-brown of volcanic ash, a color she knew much too well and hated much too much.

  A red light on her dashboard flashed to life. Alarm flamed in her-flamed and then faded. This one was shaped like a gas pump, and warned her of nothing worse than that she was getting low. She already knew that. She’d been sending the fuel gauge baleful looks since well before she rolled through Las Cruces.

  Here came an offramp, with a truck stop by it. Vanessa pulled off I-10. She’d get gas for the car. And she’d buy some lunch. With the kind of food you could find at places like this, she’d probably get gas for herself, too.

  She’d never had anything to do with truck stops till she drove the U-Haul from L.A. to Denver. On the way there, she’d discovered they were less awful than she’d always thought. Not great, necessarily, but less awful. Nowadays, you took whatever you could get, because too goddamn often you couldn’t get anything at all.

  This truck stop looked quite a bit like that one in Nevada-or had she already got to Utah by then? Nowheresville, USA, any which way. A convenience store. A broad expanse of asphalt. Filling stations. A garage. Restaurants. Yup, a truck stop.

  Oh, and trucks. Lots and lots of trucks. Mostly eighteen-wheelers, but plenty of smaller ones, too.

  There was one difference here. A couple of Bradley fighting vehicles in desert camo trained their cannon on the stop. A soldier or National Guardsman or whatever strolling back toward them from the convenience store paused to light a cigarette. The Feds were big-time serious about not letting anything that even looked like trouble start on the lifeline to Los Angeles.

  Vanessa pulled into a Chevron station. It had as many pumps for diesel as for gasoline. Prices were-well, what went a couple of steps past appalling? The country was fucked. Hell, the whole world was fucked. And who paid for it? The poor bastard who needed a fill-up and some stomach ballast, that was who. Me, in other words, Vanessa thought.

  She drove over and parked near the Denny’s. It wouldn’t be great, but it wouldn’t be terrible, either. She didn’t feel like surprises right now. Most of the business they did would be with truckers-there weren’t many ordinary cars here. She counted herself lucky that that officious asshole had finally deigned to let her travel the Interstate at all.

  Men’s eyes pawed her when she walked into the joint. Any woman between fifteen and forty who wasn’t butt-ugly had to get used to that feeling. Vanessa wasn’t-nowhere near-and she had. Which didn’t mean she liked it. It always made her feel like a warm piece of meat with some convenient holes. And it was a lot stronger than usual here, because there were so many guys of the annoying age and so few other women to help defuse it.

  A couple of soldiers were damn near salivating. She ignored them; to her, they were only horny puppies. They reminded her of Bryce, even though he was a year older than she was. He’d always be a puppy, no matter how old he got. Thank God she hadn’t gone and married him!

  She sat down at the counter. Fewer guys would be bold enough to bother her here, right in front of the scurrying waitresses and the cooks. She could hope so, anyhow.

  “What’ll it be, dear?” One of the waitresses paused in front of her, pad in hand. She was past fifty, wrinkled and tired-looking even if her eyes were friendly. Men wouldn’t bug her-not too often, anyhow.

  “Cheeseburger and coffee, please.”

  “Fries or coleslaw with your burger?”

  “Uh, coleslaw.”

  “You got it. I’ll bring the coffee right away. The other stuff is made from scratch, so it’ll take a few minutes.”

  “Sure,” Vanessa said. The explanation had to be for people who’d never gone to anything fancier than a Burger King in their whole lives, people for whom Denny’s was a major step up. Were there really people like that? By the way the waitress delivered the warning, there were plenty of them. And what did that say? It said the country’d been fucked, or at least fucked up, long before the supervolcano blew.

  When the food came, the patty in the cheeseburger looked like a patty. The bun. . The bun looked more like a hockey puck cut in half horizontally than anything else Vanessa could think of. She pointed at it. “What went into that?” she asked, distaste clotting her voice.

  She didn’t faze the waitress a bit. “Rye flour, oat flour, a little bit of wheat flour so it rises some, anyhow. What we could get,” the middle-aged woman answered. “Try it, sweetie. It’s better’n it looks.”

  “How could it miss?” But Vanessa did try it. She’d had worse. It was tastier than an MRE, no doubt of that. Talk about praising with faint damn! The coleslaw was nothing to write home about, either.

  She was resignedly working through the meal when a man sat down beside her. She glared at him-it wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of other seats at the long counter. Christ, she hated testosterone and the way it made half the species stupid.

  But the guy didn’t bother her. He was about forty, maybe a year or two past it. He had a long, pale face; he looked a little like Nicolas Cage, only rougher. Just how much he looked like the actor Vanessa couldn’t be sure-he wore the thickest beard she’d ever seen on a m
an. It might have been a pelt. Like his hair, it was black as shoe polish, only it had a few white threads on either side of his chin.

  “Hallo, Yvonne,” he said to the waitress. “How are you today?” He had some kind of accent, not at all thick but noticeable.

  “Hey, Bron. I’m okay. How’re you?” she said, so he was some kind of regular.

  “I’ll do.” He shrugged. He had wide shoulders and a narrow waist. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, which in this weather was an invitation to pneumonia. Muscles slid smoothly under the skin of his arms. They were nearly as hairy as his cheeks, except for a big, pink, nasty-looking scar-a burn? — on his left forearm. On the back of his right hand, where the hair was thinner, he had a tattoo: a cross, with a C above and below the right bar and a backwards C above and below the left bar.

  “What’ll it be?” the waitress-Yvonne-asked.

  He pointed to Vanessa’s plate. “Give me what she’s having. It doesn’t look. . too bad.”

  “Hey! This is a high-class joint!” the waitress said, for all the world as if she were really and truly affronted.

  “Yes? And they let you work here even so?” Bron returned. That would have pissed Vanessa off, but the waitress just cackled. Bron paid attention to Vanessa for the first time: “How bad is it?”

  “Could be worse,” she said-a line from a book she’d liked when she was a very small kid. You were supposed to sound like a little old man when you said it (that was how Dad had always read it, anyway), but she didn’t go that far.

  He shrugged again. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it could be better, too.” He had a distinct odor. Vanessa hadn’t been used to noticing that before the eruption, except for slobs and the occasional unfortunates who couldn’t help it. Since. . Hot water was harder to come by now, especially in places like Camp Constitution. She’d inured herself to stinky people. But he wasn’t stinky, or not exactly. He smelled like. . himself, she supposed. To her surprise, she rather liked it.

  That might have been what made her answer him instead of going back to pretending the seat beside her was still empty. “Everything could be better these days, you know?” she said.