Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3 Read online

  V

  Vanessa wondered if getting back her old job at Nick Gorczany’s wonderful widget works was the best idea she’d ever had. True, it let her get out of the house. She would have done almost anything this side of hustling tricks on street corners to achieve that. (Her mouth twitched, there at her window-side desk. She knew too well that the flesh could be made to pay, and that the biggest price was your own disgust every time you got near a mirror. I did that? you would wonder. But she had, and she knew it too well.) That she couldn’t stand Kelly, and that it was mutual, hadn’t helped, either.

  Gorczany, the high honcho, did seem glad to have her back. He’d given her a fancy new title, senior technical editor, and a raise that at least made the wage living. Even a manufacturer of high-tech widgets sometimes needed somebody who could translate between techy and bureaucratese on the one hand and no-shit English on the other. Doing without somebody like that for a while must have rubbed his nose in the lack.

  Whether she was glad to be back was a more complicated question all kinds of ways. Sure, a steady, nearly adequate paycheck was a Good Thing. Absolutely. No bout adoubt it. But did earning one require her to suffer fools gladly?

  She’d never been the world’s best team player. She knew that. She was proud of it. She knew when she was right, and she wasn’t shy about saying so. Or about sticking to her guns when some subliterate tried to tell her she wasn’t.

  Being a team player at all came hard for her now. She’d spent way too much time on her own after the eruption. She’d escaped from Denver alone, one of the few who’d bailed soon enough to make it out. She’d been alone among tens of thousands of refugees in Camp Constitution, one of the many refugee centers that still blighted the fringes of the ashfall zone and probably would for years to come.

  And she’d been alone, very much alone, on the team of scavengers that went into the devastated areas to get what could be got before it wasn’t worth getting any more. She hadn’t got along with anyone else on the team, and little by little she’d quit trying. She’d been glad to leave, and they’d been glad to have her gone.

  She’d come back to L.A. on her own, too. Till she met Bronislav in that New Mexico truck stop, she’d figured she would stay alone pretty much permanently. That hadn’t happened, and somebody to keep you warm at night was just as much a Good Thing as a paycheck.

  Still, hanging out with somebody who kept you warm at night didn’t take the same kind of talents as coping with the idiots who clogged your work day.

  Speak of the devil, she thought sourly. Walker Ellis was an engineer who could do brilliant things with transistors and integrated circuits (odds were there hadn’t been a segregated circuit since Brown v. Board of Education became the law of the land). But when he tried to write… Well, it was better when he didn’t.

  Which had to be why he was bearing down on her now, an edited progress report on his latest project clutched in his fist. Vanessa edited in red. She could see her marks at long range, like zits on a clueless teenager’s face.

  He looked at her over the tops of his wire-rims, which meant he was really and truly pissed off. His mustache was a little lopsided. If he provoked her enough, she’d call him on it. For now she waited, wondering whether he’d provoke her that much.

  “Was all this truly necessary, Ms. Ferguson?” he demanded, waving the offending—and offensive—pages in the air.

  “I’m afraid so,” she answered, and then waited some more. Often the worst thing you could do to them was make them come at you.

  Ellis dragged a chair from across the desk around to one of the short sides so he could sit closer to her. He thumped the pages down on the wood-grain plastic desktop. “You’re going to have to show me, and I’m not even from Missouri,” he said.

  Well, he’d asked for it. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s take the opening. ‘It will be demonstrated that Gorczany Microsystems is in the process of becoming a bell weather for the industry.’” She quoted with savage relish.

  He didn’t notice. Away from his widgets, he was kind of dim. “What’s wrong with any of that?” he said. “I see you’ve marked it up, but I don’t see why.”

  “That’s why Mr. Gorczany hired me,” Vanessa said. “From the top, then. ‘It will be demonstrated…’ By whom? By what? God, maybe?”

  “By the report,” he said indignantly.

  “‘This report will show…’ On to the next. How is ‘in the process of becoming’ different from ‘becoming’?”

  “Umm—” Ellis scratched the left, or shorter, wing of his mustache.

  Since he didn’t answer, Vanessa went on, “Now this ‘bell weather’—”

  “What’s wrong with that? It’s spelled okay. I did that part on the computer, and the spellchecker didn’t hiccup. You can see for yourself.”

  Vanessa sighed, more in anger than in sorrow. “Just because the spellchecker passed it doesn’t make it right. ‘Bell’ and ‘weather’ are both words, sure. But the word is ‘bellwether’—w-e-t-h-e-r. It’s got nothing to do with the rain outside. Do you know what a w-e-t-h-e-r is, Dr. Ellis?” He got pissy if you didn’t use his title, so she loaded it with poisonous sweetness.

  He blinked. “I never thought about it.”

  Why am I not surprised? But she didn’t say that. She was being—relatively—good. “A wether is a castrated ram, the way an ox is a castrated bull. A bellwether was—still is, for all I know—a castrated ram with a bell around its neck. It leads the sheep where the shepherd wants them to go, and the bell tells him where they are if anything goes wrong. So that’s why the word means getting out in front.”

  “Oh,” he muttered. That he could grow the lopsided mustache proved he had balls of his own, but he didn’t like hearing a woman talk about animals without theirs.

  “Shall we go on?” Vanessa said. “I think you’ll see I had good reason for the changes I made.”

  He considered. The next big flock of red marks perched two sentences farther down. There was another one in the next paragraph. “Never mind,” he said, not looking at her. “I’ll put the goddamn things in when I rewrite.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Ellis,” she said demurely. Fuck you, Dr. Ellis, she thought as he retreated. And he wasn’t the only one, and he wasn’t the worst (though he was in the running).

  She tried to think of herself as a plastic surgeon, making flabby prose look better with strategic nips and tucks. More often, she felt like a middle-school English teacher—only too many of them didn’t know squat about grammar, either. She had to look at all the ugly stuff before it got improved, too, and came out not real gorgeous even after she’d done her best with it.

  Once Walker Ellis decided he’d had enough, Vanessa went round and round with the company’s HTML wizard. “A bunch of the apostrophes in the new post are upside down,” she said. “You need to fix them.”

  “That’s how Microsoft Word outputs them,” he said with a shrug: a geek’s version of No tengo la culpa. His name was Bruce McRaa, which he pronounced as if it were spelled McRae.

  “That’s how Word outputs them if you let it be stupid,” she answered. If you’re stupid yourself were the words behind the words. She’d gone round this barn with other alleged computer whizzes. She told him how to make Word behave. With a carnivorous smile, she added, “You don’t even need a Mac to do it.”

  “Messing with special characters is a pain, though,” he said. “Just typing is an awful lot easier and faster.”

  “Getting things wrong is a pain,” Vanessa snapped. “Being lazy is a pain. Having people who look at the site think we don’t care about what we put there is a big pain.”

  The HTML wizard—the evil enchanter, as far as she was concerned—threw his hands in the air. “Okay! Okay! When the power’s up, I’ll fix it.” Behind McRaa’s words lay a no-doubt heartfelt Now fuck off! Since she’d got her way, she left.

  Standing in the rain waiting for the bus was a major pain. Watching Nick Gorczany head down to the Palos
Verdes Peninsula in his BMW was a bigger one yet. No matter how obscenely expensive gas had got, he could still afford to drive whenever and wherever he pleased. The peons he deigned to employ? It was to laugh. Come the revolution… , she thought darkly.

  Naturally, the bus showed up late. She stepped in a puddle walking to her apartment building and soaked her foot in spite of galoshes. The mail consisted of three bills and an ad. By the time she walked into her place, she was steaming.

  Cooking odors greeted her. She got ready to scream and run, or to fight like hell. But Bronislav’s voice greeted her from the kitchen: “They turn me around early, so I get into town and come up here.”

  “Oh. Uh, great!” Vanessa’s rage evaporated. She’d given him a key, which was a mark of how much she cared for him. She threw down the crap from the mailbox and hurried into the kitchen for a kiss. Then she said, “What are you making? It smells… interesting.”

  “Even now, Americans think too much is not worth eating. In Serbia, we know better,” he answered. “This is chopped beef liver with hard-boiled eggs, with onions and peppers and spices.”

  “Oh,” Vanessa said again, on a different note this time. Bryce’s mother had made her chopped liver—once. Once was twice too often. She’d tasted, then washed out her mouth with Manischewitz (which was also no thrill). Vile hepatic paste…

  “You will like it,” Bronislav said. “I make it properly, not like horrible stuff they do in delis.”

  She’d had to work to put up with Bryce’s mom even when she’d still liked him (that they’d loved each other for a while was something she tried hard to forget). She loved Bronislav now. That got her to keep her mouth shut about what she was thinking. It got her to taste some of the stuff he’d worked hard to make.

  Nothing on God’s green earth, not even love, could make her like it or eat more than a forkful. “Sorry, dear,” she said. “More for you, that’s all.” Too many aggressive flavors in her mouth all at once weren’t her idea of a treat.

  He looked wounded. With those sorrowful eyes, he did it better than anyone else she’d ever known. Then he brightened—a little. “If I serve it in restaurant, people who come there will know to expect food with strong Serbian soul.”

  “Sure they will,” Vanessa greed. She started to tease him about Serbian chitlins and collard greens, but didn’t. There probably were such things, or their close equivalents. Poor people, peasants, all over the world ate whatever the folks with more money didn’t want to bother with. There was the root of Bronislav’s crack about American tastes.

  He’d also done something with potatoes and sharp cheese that she could say happy things about without making herself a liar. And he was here when she hadn’t expected him to be. When you were in love, that even made up for things like chopped liver.

  • • •

  Once upon a time, going fifty or a hundred miles to see something was no big deal. Like anyone who’d grown up in Southern California, Bryce Miller had taken it for granted. He’d known plenty of people who’d commuted that far to college or to work every day. Oh, they’d bitched about how much driving they had to do and what a drag it was, but life wouldn’t be life without something to bitch about.

  Going fifty or a hundred miles through rural Nebraska, even after summer cleared snow from the roads and made a trip at least theoretically possible, was a whole different story. You not only had to go, you had to come back as well. That, of course, doubled the distance involved. It also doubled the expense for gas, even if his car happened to feel like running. Since he hardly ever used it in Wayne, he had some serious doubts about how trustworthy it would be on any kind of major journey.

  Long-haul buses were few and far between, too. They weren’t cheap, either. If you lived in or near a city, buses still ran. In this state, that meant Omaha and Lincoln. The rest of Nebraska was the terminal—or rather, terminalless—boonies, as far as the bus lines were concerned. Bryce was damn glad the state had found the money to keep the bus line out to the college going.

  For longer jaunts through what had been rich farmland and was now ash-dappled and heading toward tundra, choices ranged from bad to much worse. You could ride a horse—if you could find a horse to ride. Horses in the Midwest had suffered from ash-induced HDP as much as other livestock. They’d suffered much worse than people had, because they couldn’t wear masks to filter out the crud. You could also ride a horse if you could ride a horse. Neither Bryce nor Susan knew how.

  You could ride in a horse-drawn wagon. There were some. Again, as with so many things in these post-eruption days, there weren’t enough to go around. They cost less than driving would have, but they were also much slower.

  Speaking of slow, you could walk. That didn’t cost anything to speak of, but you needed to be seriously motivated to walk fifty or a hundred miles to see something and then to walk back again. Bryce wanted to see Ashfall State Park, but he didn’t want to see it bad enough to get shin splints in the process. Neither did his beloved, which was putting it mildly.

  That pretty much left bicycles as the last surviving possibility. Bryce and Susan had both brought bikes from SoCal to the trackless wilds of northeastern Nebraska. Bryce hadn’t ridden one a whole lot till after the eruption. As natural catastrophe and war in the Mideast teamed up to send gas prices past Mars and heading straight out toward Jupiter, though, he’d gone from four fat tires to two skinny ones like millions of other people.

  Places like Denmark and Holland had taken bikes for granted since before the turn of the twentieth century. Two-wheelers had briefly swarmed in the States before the internal-combustion engine culled their herds. Without cheap gas, though, internal- turned into infernal-.

  So bicycles were back, bigtime. Bryce rode his to campus whenever the weather let him—and, the longer he stayed in Wayne, the less fussy about the weather he got. “Hey,” he said do Susan, “if we don’t make the trip this summer, when will we do it?”

  “Never?” she suggested hopefully. But when Bryce kept right on getting ready to try a bicycle tour, she got ready along with him. The martyred sighs she let out were only background noise. Bryce hoped like hell they were, anyhow.

  The two of them pedaled north up State Route 15 for not quite twenty miles. They took the left fork when the road branched just south of Logan Creek. It was two lanes of bumpy, potholed asphalt; no one seemed to have done any work on it since the supervolcano erupted, or, for all Bryce knew, for quite a while before that.

  When he said as much to Susan, she just looked at him. “That’s not what I’m worried about,” she said. “I’m worried about riding north. I keep expecting to see polar bears every time we come over the top of the next little rise.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Bryce said. “As long as it stays sunny, it’s not.” It was in the fifties. After you’d been going for a while, you could work up a sweat. Being warm felt good no matter how you did it.

  No polar bears were in the neighborhood. A hawk circled in the air high above them. Jays and crows and little brown birds Bryce couldn’t name perched on barbed-wire fences and occasional light and power poles. Robins hopped in the fields. So did rabbits, which probably accounted for the circling hawk. Bryce supposed it would have taken more than a supervolcano to clear the countryside of rabbits. The end of the world probably wouldn’t have done it.

  Just past the tiny town of Laurel—not deserted, because wood smoke curled up from a few chimneys—the state road ran into US 20. That was also a two-lane blacktop road, but a wider one. It had more traffic than State Route 15, which had felt eerily empty. Bicycles, wagons, people on horseback… The 405 at rush hour before the eruption it wasn’t, but Bryce no longer feared he and Susan were the last two people left alive this side of Wayne.

  They heard the approaching ambulance long before they saw it. Everyone did, and had plenty of time to get off the road and make way for the leftover from a different era. The ambulance screamed past them and turned down the little road they’d just
left. It headed south, toward Wayne.

  “Hospital,” Susan said.

  Bryce nodded. The hospital in Wayne wouldn’t make anyone forget Cedars-Sinai or the UCLA Medical Center any time soon. But it was at least there, and boasted equipment a country doctor couldn’t pull out of his ear. “I hope whoever’s in there comes through okay,” Bryce said, and then, “Boy, it sure was loud, wasn’t it?”

  Now Susan’s head bobbed up and down. “I don’t remember them being that loud in the old days.” Her laugh sounded shaky. “Of course, we were usually in cars back then, with the windows closed and the radio or an iPod on and the AC going. And all the other cars and trucks and things made so much background noise, even a siren was just part of it. Not like that any more.”

  When the sun neared the horizon ahead of them, they camped by the side of the road. They fumbled putting up their little nylon tent, but managed. They ate MREs, which were uninspiring but did putty over any accidental empty space you had inside.

  They pedaled through a succession of small towns strung out along US 20: Belden, Randolph, Osmond, Plainview, Brunswick, Royal. All of them looked to have been forgotten by everyone except the people who lived in them long before the eruption. They were even more forgotten now. The fall of ash had probably killed some of the locals and made others pull up stakes. Only the stubbornest still held their ground. In every little town, there were some.

  Not far past Royal, a sign pointed Bryce and Susan north again, along a straight and narrow road towards Ashfall State Park. Susan said, “What do we do if they’ve decided to shut down the park because they don’t have any money to keep it open?”

  Bryce winced. California had done things like that even before the supervolcano hammered its tax base. But he answered, “We ride back, that’s what, and we try and be happy for all the nice exercise we’ve got.”

  “Oh, boy!” Susan said in distinctly hollow tones.