Supervolcano: All Fall Down

reached the Red Line station near the Harbor Freeway, it was packed. Most of the passengers climbed off there, Bryce among them.

He got his ticket from the automated kiosk. He felt automated himself; once you’d done it a couple of times, boarding took next to no conscious thought. He walked out onto the platform-which did boast a roof-and waited for the next train to pull in.

Along with the other commuters, he got on when it did. The train headed north, toward downtown. The tracks ran along the middle of the 110. In other words, they went straight through South Central L.A. People-most of them either African-American or Hispanic-got on and off at several stops.

Bryce kept his head down and his nose buried in the Times. Like most white kids raised not far from South Central, he’d heard a lot about the area-none of it good-and had gone there never. The most horror he’d experienced on the train was a couple of guys a little younger than he was yelling at each other in Spanish. The yells soon subsided to dirty looks. Neither young man pulled out a Glock and shot up the car, or seemed likely to. Yells and glares Bryce could live with.

No yells today. Nobody even fired up a joint. That happened now and again, although you weren’t supposed to smoke anything inside the train. Funny-he’d never seen anybody light up an ordinary cigarette. People always waited till they got off for that. Harder to wait to get baked, evidently.

He left the train and headed for the DWP building. Skyscrapers-some office complexes, others hotels-turned the streets into corridors. His mother and Colin Ferguson talked about their childhood days, when, for fear of earthquakes, City Hall was the only building allowed to rise higher than twelve stories. Modern architects and engineers had convinced the powers that be that their efforts would stay up no matter what the San Andreas Fault did.

Even if they were right, Bryce wouldn’t have wanted to be where he was when the Big One hit. The skyscrapers might not topple. Sure as hell, though, razor-sharp spears of glass would rain down from their sides. And the glass would slice anybody walking along here into hamburger in nothing flat.

“Hey, guy?” A homeless woman of indeterminate age tried to look alluring. What she looked was skinny and dirty and strung out: desperate, in other words. You’d have to be even more desperate yourself to want to go to bed with her. But turning tricks was probably the only way she could get the cash for whatever drugs had washed her up on life’s lee shore-and maybe, if she was lucky, for a little food, too.

Bryce walked by as if she weren’t there. He wasn’t particularly proud of it, but what could you do?

“Stinking fairy!” she whined after him. He could see the logical fallacy. That was what he got for doing classics in grad school. Just because he didn’t want her, that didn’t mean he didn’t want any woman. Plato would have tried to convince this gal that she’d understood the flaw in her own thinking all along.

She wasn’t likely to care much for philosophy, though. All she cared about was the next fix. And if she could wound him a little for ignoring her charms, such as they were, so much the better. No doubt she’d come on to someone else in a little while, and then cuss him out, too.

DWP headquarters wasn’t in a skyscraper: just an ordinary blocky office building at the edge of the fancy- shmancy built-up area. You could walk past it without noticing it was there. No doubt thousands of people did every day. Bryce would have if he’d worked anywhere else.

He showed his ID to the security guard at the front entrance. The man had been seeing him five days a week for several months now, but still carefully inspected it. Only after he was satisfied did he nod and say, “Morning, Dr. Miller.”

“Morning, Hank.” Bryce didn’t know how Hank knew he had his Piled Higher and Deeper. He didn’t go around calling himself Dr. Miller. As far as he was concerned, Doctor was the right title for M.D.s, dentists, and veterinarians; people with Ph.D.s who glommed on to it were pompous asses.

That wasn’t the DWP mindset. Here, if you had a doctorate you flaunted it like a well-built girl in a spandex tank top. Somebody must have tipped Hank off about Bryce’s sheepskin. He became Dr. Miller to people here almost in self-defense, even if he didn’t use the title himself; otherwise, he would have seemed like a security guard.

He climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Have to keep my girlish figure, he thought vaguely. He didn’t boast one of the offices with windows around the outside of the building. Nope. He had himself a cubicle with fuzzy walls in a big room in the middle, straight out of Dilbertland.

Jay Black was already hard at it in the Skinner box next to Bryce’s. He was a computer whiz, a balding, fortyish guy who wondered why he had trouble finding a girl he liked. Because all you’re looking for is a twenty-five-year-old supermodel didn’t seem to have crossed his mind. Finding one who also appreciated the fine points of iPhone app-writing (to say nothing of a cross-stitched sampler on the wall that read CUBICLE, SWEET CUBICLE) would take some doing.

He looked up from what Bryce hoped was his first Mountain Dew of the day. Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at suppertime-you’ll get diabetes, and you won’t be worth a dime.

“Welcome to another day in paradise,” Jay said.

“Could be doing anything out there. We’d never know it,” Bryce answered.

“Used to be, that was a crying shame,” Black said. “The way things are now, we’re lucky to be in a building where the lights and the heat work.” He grinned crookedly. “This is the last place in town that’ll go cold and dark.”

“Yeah.” Bryce hadn’t looked at it that way, which didn’t mean Jay was wrong. The coffee machine by the copier still worked, too. Bryce got some caffeine and a little sugar of his own, then sat down at his desk for the day’s important project. And other fantasies, he thought-he’d sure had plenty that were more enjoyable.

He cut down the text on a newsletter so it would fit on one sheet of paper. He did his best to translate a brochure from bureaucratese into English. He changed the small print on DWP electric bills to keep up with revised state and city conservation rules. When nobody was paying attention to him, he fiddled with a new pastoral: Theocritus meets the supervolcano, in effect. When he finished, he planned to send it to the New Yorker. After they told him no, he’d start going through all the markets that didn’t pay. Marshall Ferguson wasn’t getting rich, but he was selling things now and again. Bryce wished he could say the same himself.

Since he couldn’t, he had this day job. The DWP was the kind of place where you could look up after a quarter of a century and wonder where the hell the best years of your life had gone. Jay hadn’t been here that long, but he was starting to get those moments.

Bryce hoped he wouldn’t stick around long enough to have them. You’d never go toe-to-toe with the Donald or Bill Gates on what they paid you, but you could live and even raise a family on it. Medical, dental, vision, retirement plan. . When you got all that good stuff, would you really worry about where the time was going and why you were bored out of your skull?

A lot of people wouldn’t. Hell, a lot of people didn’t. They put in their hours and used the company Xerox to copy their own stuff and stole paper and pens and anything else that wasn’t nailed down and did what was required of them and not a speck more. Bryce sometimes found himself slipping into that easygoing slothfulness. He wondered how different it really was from going nuts in a quiet, polite way.

After lunch, someone put an RFP on his desk with a Post-it note: What do you think our chances are for getting ahold of some of this grant money? Evaluating an RFP, especially one from the Federal Department of Energy, was a little more fun than passing a kidney stone, but only a little.

Could I do this for twenty-five years? he wondered as he scribbled notes. Would anything be left of me if I did?

* * *

Somewhere in Kansas. That was as much as Vanessa Ferguson knew about where she was. Probably somewhere in eastern Kansas. The dust and ash got thicker as you moved toward the Colorado border. That meant things got more screwed up. She didn’t think anybody had actually gone back into Colorado yet. There was plenty of disaster to go around here closer to the edges of the ashfall.

She didn’t care. She’d escaped Camp Constitution, and escaped whatever sorry-ass place the suckers flooded out of Camp Constitution had gone to instead. She would never see Micah Husak again. If by some misfortune she did, she could kick him in the nuts or plug him instead of sucking him off.

And all her freedom had cost her was one more quickie blow job on that nameless National Guardsman. Her