Supervolcano: All Fall Down

And so, whenever Vanessa accessed their Web site, all she got was a ’90s GIF of a couple of sawhorses and some yellow-and-black tape, with the all-caps legend UNDER CONSTRUCTION below it.

“Shit!” she snarled when she saw it yet again. By all the signs, that site would stay under construction till the day after doomsday. Her bank account was as one with Nineveh and Tyre. . and Denver.

Micah had himself wiped off and his trousers (as opposed to his cock) up again. He looked over her shoulder. “How unfortunate for you,” he said.

She glared at him. “Yeah, you really think so, don’t you? If I had the money to bail, you think I’d stick around here to get your rocks off?” She did what he wanted. She didn’t have to waste time being polite about it.

Neither did he. “There are others,” he answered, shrugging. And there were bound to be. Men wanted the pleasure women could give them. Some women would always give that pleasure in exchange for what they could get from the men they did it for. If that made them want to break every mirror they owned afterwards, hey, it was a rough old world.

There was a word for women who gave in exchange for what they could get. No cash changed hands in these transactions. Vanessa knew the word stuck to her all the same.

“You must have relatives you could get a loan from,” Micah said.

She’d chewed on that before. Her father probably would front her the money to get back to California, or at least out of the camp. She’d had too much pride to ask him. She’d made her own way since she dropped out of college to try the real world instead. Asking him for anything would seem like failure.

So what exactly do you call sucking this guy’s joint in exchange for a better tent and a chance to use the Net once in a while? she asked herself. But this was-or she’d always figured this was- temporary. Once she got the hell out of here, she could always pretend Micah Husak had never been born. Taking money from her old man was different. She wouldn’t forget it. Neither would he.

“I don’t want to do that,” she said after a short pause.

“Evidently not.” His smile showed off that half-missing front tooth. “Well, I can’t say I’m sorry you don’t.”

It was a peculiar kind of smile, but she needed only a moment to recognize it. He didn’t just get off on having her go down on him. Anybody could do that. He got off on having her go down on him even though-or rather, especially because-she hated it. She was acquainted with those complicated pleasures, too. They turned out to be less enjoyable when you were on the wrong end.

“I think I’d better go,” she said, her voice thick with not-quite-suppressed fury. It was a good thing for the dweeb that they made you check your firearms before you walked into the FEMA building. Otherwise, he would have been lying on the floor with that nasty smile still on his face and with the back of his head blown out.

“Er-yes,” he said. If her rage didn’t give him pause, he was even dumber than she thought-and that was saying something. But he had, or figured he had, the whip hand, because he added, “I’ll see you again before too long.”

Vanessa grunted and got out of there as fast as she could. Doing what she wanted to do would make her happy now, but she’d be sorry for a long time later. No, she wouldn’t be sorry. Nothing that happened to Micah Husak could make her sorry. But she didn’t want to spend umpty-ump years in jail, either.

No? What do you call this place? Even jail food might be better than MREs. She tried not to think like that as she stormed down the corridor to the back door. Thinking like that would leave the dweeb dead and bleeding.

The big black guy who stood guard there studied her thoughtfully. “You sure I ought to give you back your piece right now?” he asked, doubt all over his voice and on his face. “Maybe everybody’d do better if you came back for it later.”

“I’m okay,” Vanessa said. And so she was, as long as she didn’t think about looking at Micah Husak’s blind snake from eye-crossingly close range. Trying not to think about something, of course, was as impossible as usual. Grinding her teeth, she made herself go on, “I won’t plug the son of a bitch no matter how much he deserves it.”

“Huh.” The guard seemed no happier. He explained why: “You don’t want to go hurting yourself, neither. We got too much of that around here.”

He had his reasons for worrying. The number of people at Camp Constitution and all the rest of the refugee centers near the edge of the ashfall line who took the long road out was a national shame and disgrace-or it was when the rest of the United States wasn’t full of its own screams of anguish. The camps didn’t-couldn’t-even got noticed a lot of the time.

All the same, suicide wasn’t on Vanessa’s radar, not the way turning the dweeb into a colander was. “You don’t need to worry about that,” she assured the black man. “I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.” She gave him other kinds of satisfaction: not just getting his rocks off but making her blow him when she would rather have blown him away.

“Well, okay,” the guard said slowly. Even more slowly, he turned around, took her.38 out of its slot, and handed it back to her. “Don’t you do anything silly, now, you hear?” He had a deep, buttery-rich voice, as if he ought to be singing gospel music instead of standing here in a polyester uniform and a Stetson.

“I won’t,” Vanessa answered reluctantly, because she really did feel as if saying that to him was like making a promise. It wasn’t as if she’d never broken a promise or told a lie, but even so. .

“Better not,” he said. “That’d be a waste, you know?”

“What difference does any one person make?” Vanessa didn’t try to hide her bitterness. “The whole country’s been wasted. Hell, the whole world’s been wasted.” As soon as she saw the cloud of ash and dust from Yellowstone boiling toward Denver, she’d known nothing would stay the same any more. But she’d had no idea-no one had had any idea-how different from Before After would be.

“Jesus loves us any which way,” the guard said. “You accept Him as your personal Savior, hon?”

Vanessa got out of there in a hurry without answering. She didn’t want to talk about religion with him, or with anybody else. If he had one he was happy with, terrific. Groovy, even. But if he wanted to go around inflicting his beliefs on other people, that wasn’t so terrific.

Of course, he might have tried inflicting himself on her, too, the way the damn dweeb had. That would probably come next. Well, she still had the revolver. And the way things looked, it was a damn good thing she did.

* * *

“Ooh-wahh!” James Henry Ferguson owned a voice like an air-raid siren.

“Shut up, you little bastard,” Marshall Ferguson said. His mother-and James Henry’s-wasn’t there to disapprove of his literal accuracy. It wasn’t feeding time at the zoo yet-pretty soon, but not quite yet. Marshall went into the bedroom to find out why his tiny half-brother had ants in his pants.

Only it wouldn’t be ants. It would be something a lot more disgusting than ants. What babies could do to breast milk and formula. . Guys made gross-out jokes all the way from second grade through high school. Dealing with genuine, no-shit shit, though, was something the guys making those jokes mostly didn’t know thing one about.

Marshall stuck a finger in there. He pulled it out slimy and yellow-brown. This wouldn’t be the first diaper he’d changed on his half-brother. His stomach still lurched as if the plane of his life had hit an air pocket every time he did it, though.

James Henry wiggled aimlessly while Marshall got him out of the soiled Huggy and cleaned crap off his bottom. Eventually, Mom said, he’d be able to fight back when he got changed. He hadn’t figured that out yet, though. Something else I get to look forward to, Marshall thought gloomily.

What he did look forward to was getting paid. He was still writing. He hadn’t sold anything since he graduated, though. His father wasn’t on his case about it. Dad didn’t need to be. Marshall was on his own case.

Before he could even close the new diaper’s tapes, his half-brother peed in it. Marshall kept a piece of cloth over his middle. He’d got it in the face once, but only once. He learned fast, if not quite fast enough.

“Well, piss,” Marshall muttered. Piss it was, all right. He rolled up the new diaper and chucked it into the plastic pail after the other one. The sack inside was filling fast. The reek of stale urine got him in the nose again. Baby poop didn’t stink as much as what grown-ups produced.

One more diaper went onto James Henry’s bottom. The kid didn’t ruin this one before Marshall could get it all