Supervolcano: All Fall Down

still married. He still hadn’t caught him. Neither had any of the other South Bay police departments.

“Found dead in her San Atanasio apartment was Eiko Ryan, age seventy-nine,” the newswoman said. “DNA analysis has not been completed, but the M.O. seems consistent with the notorious South Bay Strangler. Our Jerry Michaelson was on the scene.”

Their Jerry Michaelson thrust a mike in Colin Ferguson’s face. “What can you say about this latest Strangler atrocity, Lieutenant?” he asked excitedly.

“I don’t want to say much of anything till the lab team and the coroner do their job,” Colin answered.

“But it is a Strangler case, isn’t it?” Michaelson persisted.

“Right now it looks like one. And that’s about as much as I can tell you,” Colin said.

Their Jerry Michaelson wasn’t about to let him off so easily. “When will you catch this monster who’s been terrorizing South Bay senior women for so long?”

“Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like better.” Colin’s impatience was starting to show. He’d always had a short fuse with reporters. “If you’ve got any good ideas, I’d love to hear ’em.”

Michaelson started to splutter. The news cut back to the studio. The blonde in the tight sweater deplored the cops’ failure to apprehend anybody. She had a little trouble with apprehend, but managed almost well enough.

Then a Filipina nurse walked in, and Louise stopped worrying about the news. “How you feeling?” the young woman asked.

“Run over by a truck,” Louise answered honestly.

The nurse’s eyes widened. She laughed. “Oh, I bet you do,” she said. “Having a baby not easy for anybody, harder when you get a little older.” That was a polite way to put it. The nurse grabbed a gadget on a pole, stuck Louise’s finger in a clip, and wrapped a cuff around her arm. The cuff inflated painfully tight, then relaxed. The nurse wrote in the chart.

“Well?” Louise always wanted to know what was what.

“Blood pressure good. Blood oxygen normal.” The nurse stuck something in Louise’s ear, then wrote again. “Temperature normal, too. You okay.” Except you’re crazy. She didn’t come out with it, but it was written all over her face.

“Oh, boy.” Louise fought a yawn. Then she didn’t fight it any more. She’d earned the right to be worn out, by God! And she knew she’d better sleep while she had any chance at all. The baby sure wouldn’t let her once she got home. She wanted a shower, too; she was all over greasy sweat. But she lacked the energy right now. Tomorrow would do.

“Epesiotomy hurt?” the nurse asked.

“It’s starting to,” Louise admitted. They’d given her a local down there while they sewed her up. It was wearing off now. One more delight of childbirth she’d managed to forget. If women remembered all the lovely details, they would never have more than one kid, and the human race would have vanished a long time ago.

“Father come see baby?” the nurse inquired.

“I doubt it.” Louise’s voice was colder than supervolcano winter in Greenland. If Teo had wanted anything to do with his oops of an offspring. . If he’d wanted anything to do with the kid, a lot of things now would be different. But he damn well hadn’t, and they damn well weren’t. “I don’t expect any visitors.”

“No?” The Filipina girl’s eyebrows rose. “Too bad. You have pretty baby.”

Those things were relative. Newborn babies weren’t the cute, laughing things they became in a few months. James Henry was very pink, he had next to no hair, and he looked like a Conehead because he’d got kind of squashed coming out. That he would look that way, at least, Louise had recalled.

Shaking her head, the nurse went away. The news was doing the weather report. It would be chilly and rainy. It was either chilly and rainy or just plain chilly most of the time. And L.A. had it way better than most of the country.

Dinner came. It was unexciting hospital food, a redundancy if ever there was one. Louise didn’t care. In the classic phrase, she could have eaten a horse and chased the driver.

An attendant wheeled in the Korean lady in the other bed. She’d just got her tray when her husband showed up. They pulled the curtain and chattered in their own language, with occasional English words thrown in. It reminded Louise of Mr. Nobashi talking to Hiroshima, though neither side of this couple was in the habit of yelling, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

Then Colin walked in.

Louise knew she looked like hell. She felt like hell, too. And she wasn’t only sore and beat. All her hormones were working on emergency overdrive. It wasn’t the ideal moment for a visit from an ex-husband, in other words.

“Come to gloat, did you?” she snapped.

His face never showed much. That was a useful attribute for a cop, but it had always irked her. His mouth did tighten a little; she’d managed to piss him off. “Well, I can always leave if you want me to,” he said. “I heard you’d had the baby, and I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“I’m trampled, that’s how,” Louise replied.

“I remember,” he said. “But you’re okay, and the kid is, too?” He waited for her to nod, then did the same himself. “Good. That’s the only thing that really matters.”

“Does Kelly know you’re here?” Louise asked, a touch of acid in her voice.

“Uh-huh.” Colin nodded again. “She gets that I wasn’t rolled up in bubble wrap before we ran into each other. There’s still stuff in my life from days gone by.”

“Like the Strangler,” Louise said.

His mouth didn’t just tighten this time. It twisted. “Yeah. Like him.”

“I’m sorry,” Louise said. The rational part of her, what there was of it right this minute, knew she’d hit too hard. He’d done more for her after she got knocked up by the other man than an ex had to, more than most exes would have. The checks he’d sent really had helped her out.

“One of these days, I will catch him. I’ll see they stick a needle in his arm, too,” Colin said.

“I hope you do.” Louise meant that.

“Marshall says maybe he’ll come tomorrow.” Colin shifted gears. “He was working on something now, typing away pretty fast.”

“Okay.” If Marshall wanted thing one to do with her, that would be an improvement. If he could be persuaded to help take care of the baby when she had to go back to work. . She had hopes. “Will he really make a writer?”

“Believe it or not, I think stranger things have happened. Who woulda thunk it?” Colin awkwardly dipped his head. “Listen, I better get home. I did want to check on you, though. Take care of yourself, Louise.” He lumbered out of the room.

Now, when she most wanted to sleep, Louise found she couldn’t. The Korean couple on the other side of the curtain didn’t bother her. They wouldn’t have bothered her if they were speaking English. Memory had more weight. She was still wide awake when the Filipina nurse brought in James Henry. Louise set the baby on her breast. He rooted, then settled down and started to nurse.

* * *

Rank, they said (whoever the hell they were), had its privileges. Vanessa Ferguson thought blowing the FEMA dweeb was odds-on the rankest thing she’d ever done, but that also had its privileges. Every once in a while, for instance, Micah Husak let her use his computer. In Camp Constitution, with next to no electricity, that was more precious than rubies.

Or it would have been, had it done her any good. Before she moved to Denver, she’d banked with Wells Fargo. Had she kept her money there, she could have got at it here. She could have got the hell out of here, in fact. Even Fort Smith looked like heaven next to this.

But she’d gone native. She’d put her money into the Rocky Mountains Savings Bank. It paid higher interest. You could deal with human beings who actually seemed to care about what you wanted. It was local.

Yes, it was local. And there, as Hamlet said, was the rub. Wells Fargo had servers all over the country-all over the world, as far as Vanessa knew. The Rocky Mountains Savings Bank had servers in, well, Denver. Whoever’d set up their data system hadn’t anticipated a supervolcano eruption burying the place in several feet of ash and dust.