Supervolcano: All Fall Down

Brother watching me. But I also don’t want my friends and neighbors squabbling like the Kilkenny Cats, and I don’t want them starving or freezing, either. If we can take care of ourselves, we won’t need to cry because Big Brother’s falling down on the job. All politics is local, but some is more local than others. For about nine months out of the year, maybe more, ours looks as though it’s going to be about as local as it gets.”

He went on to talk about schemes for using the gasoline and fuel oil they did have, and about organizing hunts and woodcutting parties. He talked about parsnips and mangel-wurzels and Andean potatoes that ripened faster than the varieties of spuds Maine had been famous for.

“What the hell is a mangel-wurzel?” Rob whispered to Justin.

“You grab a wurzel and you hurt it real bad,” Justin explained, so he had no clue, either.

“None of this will be exciting,” Farrell finished. “But we’re not talking about excitement now. Excitement is for good times. It’s a luxury. We’re talking about survival. Survival is what we’ll be talking for the rest of my life, for the rest of your lives, and probably for the rest of your children’s and grandchildren’s lives. I don’t think Washington has figured that out yet, but it looks pretty obvious here, doesn’t it?”

Nobody, not even the guy who’d yelled at him, tried to tell him he was wrong. No one applauded when Farrell stepped away from the pulpit-the bully pulpit, Rob thought-either. The thoughtful silence he got seemed higher praise than any mere handclapping could have been. And the agenda items following his talk seemed even duller than they might have otherwise.

After the town meeting adjourned, Rob waded through the crowd around Jim Farrell and waited his turn to talk. When it finally came, he asked, “Why aren’t the Feds paying more attention to us? We’re hit harder than any place that didn’t get covered in ash.”

“Well, for one thing, a lot of places did get covered in ash,” Farrell replied, and Rob nodded. The older man continued, “And Washington is out for what it can get, much more than it is for what it can give. From us, that means it’s out for nothing. You can’t get blood from a turnip, or from a mangel-wurzel. So Washington shines the light of its countenance on the places that are still warm, or at least warmer.”

That made more sense than Rob wished it did. He was less convinced than Farrell that being forgotten about by Washington was a good thing. But he wasn’t nearly so sure it was a bad thing as he had been when Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles first got stuck in Guilford. He let someone else talk to Farrell and walked out into the sharp-toothed cold outside.

It was dark outside the church, too-no working streetlamps. Rob stepped on somebody’s foot before he’d gone very far. “Sorry,” he said, wondering who his victim was.

“No damage,” came the reply: a woman’s voice. She couldn’t see him, either, because she asked, “Who are you?”

“Rob. I’m one of the fellows staying at the Mansion Inn.”

“Oh, from the band!” she said. “You guys are good, even acoustic. I like it when you play in the park by the river. I go whenever I can.”

“Cool,” Rob replied. A fan-he recognized enthusiasm when he heard it. But which fan? “Um, who’m I talking to?”

“Oh. I’m Lindsey Kincaid. I teach chemistry at Piscataquis Community Secondary School,” she answered. That was the high school not far from the inn.

Rob sortakinda knew who she was, the way he sortakinda knew an awful lot of people here. About his age, halfway between blonde and brunette. . not half bad, all thing considered. How much considering did he feel like? “Where do you live?” he asked. “Can I walk you back there, wherever it is?”

If she said no, he wouldn’t get shot down too badly. But she said, “Okay,” and sounded pleased saying it. So maybe he’d find out how much considering he felt like.

* * *

“Attention! Attention! May I have your attention, please!”

When a man with a bullhorn shouted for your attention, you gave it to him whether you wanted to or not. He didn’t even have to say please. Vanessa Ferguson wondered why he bothered. Vestigial politeness, was her guess. Like the human tailbone, it was shrunken and useless, but the FEMA guy out there still had that little bit.

He blared away: “Camp Constitution is being adversely impacted by the flood-type conditions currently obtaining in this geographical location.”

That was so bad, Vanessa almost liked it. She couldn’t imagine a more bureaucratic way to say The flood here is screwing Camp Constitution to the wall.

Things had been bad the spring before. Ash and dust covered the basins of the rivers that flowed into the Mississippi from the west. She still remembered what a pool-service guy had told her mother when she was a kid: “Your pool is the lowest part of your yard, lady. Anything that can get into it goddamn well will.” He’d had a cigarette twitching in the corner of his mouth, and he was tanned as Cordoban leather. These days, he was probably dead of melanoma or lung cancer.

Which didn’t make him wrong. The rivers were the lowest parts of their big back yards, too. They’d flooded last year from all the volcanic crud rain and melting snow and wind dumped into them. Now they were doing it again, still more crud going into riverbeds that hadn’t yet got rid of everything from the year before. And so the rivers-including the Mississippi itself, which was after all the ultimate channel for half a continent’s worth of gunk- were spilling over their banks and spreading out across the countryside.

It wasn’t dramatic, the way the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan had been. There weren’t huge, speeding walls of water smashing everything in their path. But in the end, how much difference did that make? Whether you went under with a smash or merely a dispirited glub, under you went.

“Evacuation procedures are likely to become necessary for implementation in the nearly immediate future,” the flunky with the bullhorn bellowed. Not just an evacuation, mind you, but evacuation procedures. That made it official, to say nothing of officious. “Gather your belongings and prepare to be in compliance with all instructional directives. National Guard personnel will assist in ensuring prompt satisfaction of requirements.”

They’ll shoot you if you don’t do what we tell you. They would, too. The National Guard had opened fire in the camp several times. Like Vanessa, lots of refugees were armed, but not many had assault rifles or body armor or military discipline. The Guard outclassed them.

“What the fuck they gonna do to us now?” grumbled a middle-aged black man a couple of tiers of bunks over from Vanessa.

“Waddaya think, Jack?” a woman said in tones that came from Long Island, or possibly the Jersey shore. “They’re gonna do whatever they damn well wanna.”

And that was about the size of it. Vanessa hoped the waters would close over Micah Husak. She hoped crawdads and sticklebacks and little fish whose names she didn’t even know would pick out his dead eyes and nibble the rotting flesh off his toes-and off his dick. All the while, she understood it was a hopeless hope. That kind of shit didn’t happen to the people who ran camps. It happened to the people who wound up stuck in them.

Gathering her belongings didn’t take long. Everything she owned fit in her purse and in a dark green garbage bag. That seemed fitting enough and then some, because most of what she owned was garbage.

Off in the distance, an M16 barked: a quick, professional three-round burst. Whoever’d been giving some Guardsman grief would just have discovered he’d made his last dumbass mistake. Or maybe he was too high on crank even to notice he was dead. Methamphetamines and weed fired people up and mellowed them out all over the camp.

The yahoo with the bullhorn ordered the people in the tent next to Vanessa’s out to comply with his instructional directives. The middle-aged black guy moaned. “I didn’t used to think there was no place worse’n this,” he said. “But what you want to bet they went and found one?”

“Made one,” Vanessa corrected. The difference sounded tiny, but seemed profound to her.

Then, half an hour later, the bell-or the bullhorn-tolled for them. “Tent 27B inmates, assemble outside the entrance in a single-file line,” the guy with it boomed. Vanessa wondered if he would lead them to the Department of Redundancy Department. She didn’t make the joke. She didn’t think anyone else in good old Tent 27B would get it. Too bad, but there you were. And here she was.

Nervous-looking Guardsmen held their rifles in positions from which they could open up in a hurry. There were a lot of them. How much trouble had they had evacuating other great big tents? Quite a bit, by all the signs.