Things Fall Apart Read online

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  Wayne, Nebraska, still had electricity. With the Siberian Express’ aunts and cousins howling in every winter now, Bryce Miller was damn glad of that. It meant the heat worked. It also meant the computers and TV and cell phones worked, keeping them connected to the outside world.

  TV was a less vast wasteland these days. Much of the American product came out of New York City. With the Northeast having so many power outages, a lot of channels on the cable package were blank a lot of the time.

  The Omaha PBS station picked up the BBC by satellite and rebroadcast it. Even before the Northeast’s troubles, Bryce had liked BBC news better than American versions. Unlike those, it presumed its viewers had something better than a room-temperature IQ.

  These days, room temperatures in Wayne rarely got above forty-five. American news did its best to live down to them. If it bled, it led. The other staple was assurance that the climate would go back to normal any day now. American news shows ran stories like that about twice a year. They didn’t seem the least put out when each one proved untrue, any more than they ran retractions about medical “breakthroughs” that somehow didn’t confer immortality after all.

  On the BBC, you got the idea things were bad now and were getting worse. Maybe that was a British attitude. Maybe it was just an adult one. Either way, Bryce preferred it to the usual American bullshit optimism.

  “It appears clear that the massive power failures in the American Northeast and upper Midwest show we have reached the other side of an historical watershed,” a BBC commentator said. American news didn’t talk about history; American news had forgotten there was such a thing. Had an American newsman by chance remembered, he would have said a historical watershed. Two countries separated by the same language, sure enough.

  “As the new Russia emerged from the collapse of the old Soviet Union as a strong state, a state to be reckoned with, but no longer a global superpower, the United States now finds itself in a like position,” the Brit went on. “Its problems were not caused by an inadequate political system, but by a natural catastrophe that beggars the word Biblical. Regardless of cause, however, the effect is similar. When the most populous sector of the nation is at risk of death by cold or hunger, no American government can possibly contemplate military adventure beyond its borders. Whether any other country will seek the role of global arbiter, or whether a balance of power amongst the stronger states will prevail as it did before the First World War, remains to be seen.”

  Bryce turned to Susan. “If you’re going to have your obituary read, nice to have it read with such a classy accent.”

  “Hush!” she said. “He’s not done yet.”

  And he wasn’t. “One would have thought that the mere fact of the supervolcano eruption should have cast the United States down at once from its perch atop the hierarchy of nations. That this has in fact taken most of a decade to transpire is a tribute to the USA’s resilience and former abundance. By now, though, the surplus of times past is largely exhausted. The United States must attempt to make do with what it can produce for itself at this moment. In spite of everything, that remains considerable. But the nation’s wounds and problems are enormous. The USA can scarcely be expected to look anywhere but inward for some years to come.”

  “‘The United States is washed up. Anybody got a cigarette?’” Bryce quoted.

  “How about a beer instead? We have some of those,” Susan said.

  “Sounds like a plan.” Bryce got off the couch and went to the refrigerator. The beer was homebrew, turned out by a History Department colleague from local barley. Bryce had got it by translating some Greek for him. As far as he was concerned, he’d won the exchange. Any microbrewery would have been proud of this IPA. Stuart didn’t care about that. He made enough for himself and his friends. He enjoyed brewing and he enjoyed drinking. Bryce and Susan enjoyed drinking what he brewed, too.

  By the time Bryce came back with the bottles, the BBC newsreader was talking about Chechen nationalists and their long, ugly guerrilla war against the Russian government. The TV showed lean, black-bearded men in anoraks and skis with Kalashnikovs slung across their backs. Whether they had right on their side or not, they were terribly in earnest.

  One of them—a leader—gave forth with a stream of impassioned gutturals. It wasn’t Russian; Bryce could speak a few words and knew the sound of the language. It had to be Chechen instead. Over his words, a few seconds later, came the suave voice of a British translator: “No matter how bad the weather becomes, no matter how hungry we grow in the mountains, we will fight on until we are free at last. Allah is great, and He is on our side. He punishes Russia with this evil weather more harshly than He lays His hand on us.”

  The screen cut back to the anchorman, snug in his warm London studio. The studio might be warm. London wasn’t. Pundits worried about the failure of the Gulf Stream. If that happened, northwestern Europe would start looking like Labrador. They were on about the same latitude. As bad as things were, it was always interesting to contemplate how they could get worse.

  “Mr. Kerashev may well have a point,” the BBC man said gravely. “Russia has declined to release agricultural statistics of any sort the past two years. The ones that did come from the Ministry of Agriculture before that are widely regarded as suspect even by Russian standards. Suspect though they may be, they show a sharp decline in the harvest when measured against pre-eruption benchmarks. Russia is known to be an active buyer of grain on the international market, paying for its purchases with revenue from sales of natural gas and oil.”

  For the first time in its history, the United States was also a buyer of grain, not a seller. Bryce didn’t know what America was selling to finance its purchases. Selling gas and oil might mean more people would freeze. Not selling gas and oil might mean they would starve. That was what you called a bad bargain.

  Now the BBC showed people in long white robes milling around and waving their arms in despair. Behind them were houses that looked like sand castles slumping into the sea. And that turned out to be pretty much what they were.

  “Climate change from the supervolcano is global in its impact,” the newsreader declared. “What you see here is an Egyptian village about seventy-five kilometers south of Cairo. It could be any number of villages up and down the Nile. Since weather patterns altered in the wake of the great eruption, Egypt has got far more rain than at any time since measurements have been recorded, and very likely since the dawn of civilization five thousand years ago.”

  One of the robed men shouted in Arabic. This translator spoke elegant British English with a faint Middle Eastern accent: “My house fell down! All the houses are falling down! We have lived here for generations, my family, always in this house. What are we going to do now?”

  “Most buildings in Egyptian villages are made from sun-dried mud brick,” the BBC man in London noted. “This material is cheap, easily available, and adequately strong—as long as it stays dry. When rain hits it, though, it returns to the mud from which it was born.”

  He paused to adjust his glasses. They sat almost as far down his nose as Bryce liked to wear his specs. “As I say, rain has come to Egypt. By European or American standards, it is a modest rain. In a country used to none, however, even a modest rain seems a monsoon. And it does more damage than a monsoon. Like a plague loose amongst people without immunity to it, Egypt has no defense against the rain.”

  The screen went to more pictures of collapsed houses. Wailing women were dragging a child out of one of them. Another cut brought up a crowded urban scene. Cairo—the word appeared in glowing red letters. Some buildings there were made of stone or baked brick. But others—the ones poor people used, mostly—were falling apart.

  An imam at a crumbling mosque and a priest with a bushy white beard and a large crucifix around his neck both implored their God. “In most places, people pray for rain,” the BBC man said. “Here, Muslim and Christian alike pray for drought. Egypt gets its water f
rom the Nile. Any additions seem excessive to the populace.”

  The next story was about Manchester United’s shocking defeat in Bulgaria. Bryce didn’t care enough about soccer to be shocked. He thought some more about rain in Egypt instead.

  His Hellenistic poets had moved to Alexandria and worked there. The Ptolemies, in their day, were the richest patrons a poet could have. But Alexandria lay right on the Mediterranean. It had always got rain every once in a while—not very often, but enough so builders made sure what they ran up didn’t fall to bits the first time it got wet.

  That wasn’t true farther south. Egypt preserved things from long-gone days because it was so dry. How many papyri would molder because rain fell on them, or on the ancient rubbish heaps that held them? The number wouldn’t be small, whatever it was. And nobody could do anything about it.

  Susan was thinking along the same lines. “Before the eruption, we would have sent all kinds of aid if something like that happened to Egypt,” she said. “But it’s hit us harder than it’s hit the Egyptians.”

  “Hasn’t it just?” Bryce finished his beer. He thought about another one, but decided not to. “It’s like the fellow on the Beeb said. We’ve got so many troubles here at home, we can’t worry about anything farther away.”

  “Speaking of which,” Susan said, “when I went down to get the mail earlier this afternoon, the apartment manager told me the police finally caught that guy who was breaking into places.”

  “Good,” Bryce said. The burglar had hit seven or eight houses and apartments, including one on the ground floor of this building.

  “Good—I guess,” Susan said. “It was a Hispanic fellow—one of the homesteaders. ‘They should ship ’em all back to the camps,’ the manager said. ‘They’re nothin’ but a pack of thieves.’”

  “Oh,” Bryce said. “No, that’s not so great.” The towns of northeastern Nebraska got on warily at best with the newcomers. It was worse in the smaller places than in Wayne. The people in those places cut no one any slack, not even their own neighbors. And it wasn’t good here. The apartment manager’s attitude was widespread. A homesteader who lived down to a stereotype wouldn’t help.

  XVII

  T

  hrough her father and on her own, Vanessa kept doing what she could to get some payback on Bronislav Nedic. Her family might hail from Scotland and Ireland, but she had a Balkans sense of revenge. Bronislav had wronged her. He’d stolen from her. He’d pretended to love her—and to like her story—so he could steal from her. Yes, he was long gone and most of the country away. She’d get even anyhow, one way or another. When she had electricity, she created dummy e-mail addresses for fictional people who lived in and around Mobile. She used them to write savage reviews of his restaurant. Unity should be broken up, one of them began, and went downhill from there. The others were just as sweet. She slammed the food, the location, the service, the prices—anything she could think of. One of her fictitious alter egos agreed with another about how lousy things were. Yet another chimed in with new complaints.

  She had no idea how much harm she was doing. The restaurant stayed open, so she wasn’t doing enough to suit her. She wanted Bronislav to crash and burn. If he started up again somewhere else, she wanted him to crash and burn there, too.

  And she kept trying to work through the police. The cops in California were sympathetic enough. The Mobile police, though, and the state police operating out of Montgomery, just didn’t give a damn. Bronislav played nice in Alabama. That was all they cared about.

  After she saw a court case on TV, she went to the FBI. That meant taking a day off and riding the bus downtown, but she did it. She explained what she wanted at the front desk. The woman there sent her to an agent named Gideon Sneed. His looks were against him—with his eyes set close together, he reminded her of Micah Husak, whom she’d seen and tasted too much of back at Camp Constitution.

  Hoping against hope, she did some more explaining. “He stole my money and took it across state lines,” she said. “That’s what you people do, right? Go after bad guys in interstate commerce?”

  Agent Sneed grudged a nod. “Theoretically, yes, that’s what we do,” he said. “But from what you’ve told me, there’s nothing here important enough for us to put any enforcement effort into it. We’re stretched too thin the way things are. The whole government’s been stretched too thin since the eruption.”

  “Oh, fuck the eruption!” Vanessa said furiously. “Whenever people feel like sitting on their hands, they use it for an excuse.”

  “We’re not sitting on our hands. That’s the point.” Agent Sneed worked hard to stay polite. If he hadn’t had a good-looking woman sitting in front of him, he probably wouldn’t have bothered. Vanessa wouldn’t be able to play that card forever—maybe not even for too much longer—but she still could. The FBI man went on, “Do you have any idea how much smuggling there is along the I-10 corridor that keeps L.A. fed?”

  As a matter of fact, Vanessa did. Bronislav had told her stories about it, and laughed while he told them. Cigarettes, liquor, steaks . . . Anything that was either taxed or packed a lot of value into not much bulk was at least as likely to move in mysterious ways as it was to go with official blessing. More likely, if you believed his story. Of course, you were asking for trouble if you believed anything that lying fuck said. Vanessa had believed him for a while, and look at the trouble she’d wound up with.

  She said none of that. She hoped not too much of it showed on her face. It must not have, because Gideon Sneed went on, “And this is just nickel-and-dime stuff next to what’s been going on in the Northeast since the lights went out there. They had the pipelines in that part of the country all set up already. They’ve been smuggling cigarettes for years and years, and they were hauling up moonshine even before that. Now?” He rolled his eyes. “Half the stuff that gets up there isn’t legit. More than half, for all we can prove. We can’t stop that traffic, but we do try to slow it down as much as we can. The Federal government and the states are in desperate need of all the tax revenue they can lay their hands on.”

  Half of what went into the Northeast was smuggled? Maybe Bronislav had been telling the truth about life on the road, then. He was still a lying fuck.

  He was still a crook, too. Vanessa said as much, adding, “It’s not like you’d have to call out the bloodhounds to catch him, for Christ’s sake. Whenever that restaurant is open, he’s there. For all I know, he sleeps there, too.”

  “I understand that, Ms., uh, Ferguson,” Sneed said. “But he’s not what we would classify as a target of urgency. We can’t come close to going after all the people at the top of our prioritization scheme, let alone the ones who aren’t. . . . Is something wrong?”

  “Never mind,” Vanessa said. Nick Gorczany would have been proud of coming out with a six-syllable piece of horseshit like prioritization. For Agent Sneed, plainly, it was all part of the day’s work. But you couldn’t tell people who talked like that, people who thought like that, how awful it was: they talked and thought that way because they had no idea how awful it was. The blatherers shall inherit the earth. By the available evidence, they already had.

  “I am sorry. You did have a criminal offense perpetrated against you,” Sneed said. “You might be able to gain restitution through the civil courts.”

  “I’ve thought about it,” Vanessa said. It would take Lord only knew how long. It would cost money up front that she didn’t have. She doubted a lawyer would take the case on a contingency basis—his share of what she stood to make even if she won wouldn’t be big enough to interest one of those mercenary bastards.

  “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. I’m sorry the Bureau can’t be more helpful,” Sneed told her. “We are as severely impacted by the resource reductions since the eruption as any other agency. We have to pick and choose which cases to pursue with great care.”

  “My tax dollars. Inaction.” Vanessa walked out. If Gideon Sneed wanted to think she’d said in a
ction, she was stuck with it.

  The Federal building wasn’t far from City Hall. Once upon a time, City Hall had been the tallest building in downtown L.A. Earthquake codes had limited others to a max of twelve stories. Vanessa didn’t remember those days; the codes had been reworked before she was born. Now City Hall lived in the shadow of newer, taller skyscrapers—when the sun came out to make shadows, anyhow. At the moment, it looked as if it was gearing up to rain. Vanessa had an umbrella in her purse. Don’t leave home without it, she thought: borrowed wit and wisdom from some old commercial.

  In the shadow of City Hall lived the denizens of skid row. Los Angeles’ weather was less attractive to the homeless than it had been before the supervolcano blew. It was wetter. It was colder. In winter, you really could freeze to death here these days. Food and clothes were harder to come by; ordinary people could afford to spare less for the unlucky, the mentally damaged, and the addicted.

  But if it was bad here, it was still better than it was in most places. Vanessa shivered, imagining trying to live on the streets in Boston or New York or Pittsburgh. Because of that shiver, she gave a badly shaved man in a newsboy cap and a dirty tan trenchcoat five dollars when he went into his spiel for her. She usually did the big-city pretend-they-aren’t-there thing with panhandlers. Not today, though. Her milk of human kindness might have been low-fat, but it hadn’t curdled.

  She soon found herself wishing it had. When you gave to one homeless guy, you bought yourself a swarm of homeless people, all of them with a hand out for a handout. She didn’t feel like emptying her wallet to keep them in drugs or Ripple or even cheeseburgers. As soon as they figured out that she didn’t, they called her some names even her father might not have heard in his Navy days.