Supervolcano: All Fall Down

And here she was, straining her back to lug feed sacks over to a truck kitted out like something from a Mad Max movie. And she was glad to be doing it, too, because all her other choices looked worse. If that wasn’t a bastard and a half, she was damned if she knew what would be.

When they’d emptied out the barn, Merv Saunders checked a printout he’d got before they started this grave-robbing expedition. “Way to go, people,” he said. “Our next stop is Arma, Kansas.”

“Arma virumque cano,” Vanessa said. It was a leftover from Bryce, and damn near the only bit of Latin she knew.

Everybody else in the crew looked at her. Saunders rolled his eyes.

“It’s from Vergil,” she said. “Means ‘Of arms and the man I sing.’”

They didn’t care. Their stares, some black and others suspicious (as well as she could guess by reading expressions through gas masks), showed that only too clearly. She wished she could have done three or four more lines, but that probably would have just made matters worse. She spread her work-gloved hands.

“Our next stop is Arma,” Saunders repeated, every line of his body saying Wanna make something out of it? Vanessa gave up and stood there, waiting. The crew boss went on, “It’s a decent-sized town-more than fifteen hundred people, when it had people. It’s got a gas station. If the underground tanks are anywhere close to full, that’s even more important than bringing back feed.”

The crew nodded. Vanessa found her own head going up and down. Any gasoline or diesel fuel that you could get your hands on was more precious than rubies these days. The dollar was hurting. Countries that hadn’t been trashed could afford oil imports better than the USA could. Not that the oil business was in great shape itself. The sputtering wars in the Middle East made sure of that.

So. . grave-robbing. And it was important enough that even Vanessa couldn’t get-too-cynical about it.

* * *

Louise Ferguson pulled into her parking space in the condominium complex. She wondered how much longer she’d be able to keep driving to the ramen headquarters on Braxton Bragg Boulevard. It wasn’t all that far from here, and she didn’t use very much gas going back and forth. But the stuff was ridiculously expensive-when the stations had any, which they did less and less often. Back before the supervolcano erupted, Europeans would have rebelled at paying prices like these. They were paying even more than she was now, not that that made her happy. Misery, here, didn’t love company. Misery was just miserable.

She walked to the mailboxes at the front of the complex. A cable bill. A catalogue from a clothing company- NEW FASHIONS FOR COOLER CLIMES! the cover said, sounding more cheerful than it had any business being. A notice from the electric company, warning that reduced generating capacity might mean intermittent service. That translated into English as rolling blackouts. The governor threatened them before. Now they’re here, she thought as she went back toward the condo that had been Teo’s and was now hers.

It really was hers. The lawyers had done their dance over title to the place, dotting every t and crossing every i and doing whatever the hell they did: probably lifting their legs and peeing on the papers till the miserable things smelled right. Whatever it was, it hadn’t come cheap. Nothing did, not in this day and age.

Up the stairs she trudged. She remembered how Teo had bounded up them, and how her heart had jumped when she heard his energetic strides. She would have loved him still if only he could have handled the idea of having a kid. She had the kid. She had the condo. She didn’t have Teo-and if he showed up now, she’d spit in his eye.

When she walked in, Marshall was holding his little half-brother. The baby’s smile at seeing his mother was so wide it almost made the top half of his head fall off. “Da-da-da-da!” he squealed.

“That’s your mama,” Marshall said. “Mama.”

“Da-da-da-da!” James Henry repeated, even louder than before.

“He’ll figure it out,” Louise said. “All of you guys went ‘dada’ before you went ‘mama,’ too.” That had made Colin proud and irked her, not that either one of them would ever have admitted it.

“Whatever.” Usually, Marshall bailed out of the condo as if his Nikes were on fire when Louise got home. That was partly because he liked babysitting no better than any other single guy his age, partly because he remained pissed off at his mother for ending the marriage that had brought him into the world. He didn’t-by the nature of things, he couldn’t-understand how dead the marriage was before Louise ended it. (That Colin hadn’t had the first clue it was dead said nothing good about him: not if you listened to Louise, anyhow.)

Today, though, Marshall didn’t go anywhere. He just stood there. Louise gradually recognized the look on his face as expectant. With a sigh, she remembered why: she was supposed to pay him today. She fumbled in her purse till she found her checkbook and a pen. She wrote rapidly, tore off the check, and handed it to him. “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” He put it in the pocket of his Levi’s. That he wouldn’t help his mother for free never failed to annoy her, but he wouldn’t. If you listened to Colin, you couldn’t reasonably expect anything else, but Louise made a point of not listening to Colin.

“Wait!” she said suddenly when Marshall was already halfway to the door.

He paused. “Wazzup?”

“Let me see that check again.”

He handed it to her. She scribbled the amount in her register. She used to forget to do that about one time in five. It had driven methodical, organized Colin straight up a wall. Louise always figured she had more creative things to worry about. . till she was on her own, and had to balance the checkbook herself instead of letting somebody else worry about it. The hassles a couple of unexpected bounced checks put her through did more to make her note every single one of them than Colin’s sarcasm had ever managed.

She gave back the check. “Now you can escape.”

“Whatever,” Marshall said again, and did just that.

Dealing with the register meant Louise had taken her eyes off James Henry for a few seconds. She couldn’t safely do that any more, not when he was crawling. He’d got something in his mouth. She grabbed him, reached in there, and pulled it out.

A little scrap of paper. It wouldn’t have hurt him even if he’d swallowed it, but you never wanted to take chances like that. Most of the time, she wouldn’t have wanted to stick her finger into somebody else’s mouth, either. A mom with a baby got used to all kinds of things she wouldn’t have wanted to do most of the time.

She nursed him. She gave him some rice cereal and some carrot goop. His diapers had got more revolting since he started eating solid food. Colin used to say a rug rat wasn’t human till it was potty-trained. Like a lot of things Colin had said, that held just enough truth to be annoying.

Louise found herself thinking of her ex-husband a lot more often than she thought about the departed father of her latest child. Yes, she’d been together with Colin a lot longer than she had with Teo, but that wasn’t it, or not all of it. Colin said and thought more interesting things than Teo.

Which mattered only so much. Teo’d been a hell of a lot better in bed and easier to get along with. . till he freaked out when she found herself pregnant.

James Henry was trying to catch his toes and stuff them in his mouth. “I love you,” Louise told him, “but you are such a damn nuisance.”

“Da-da-da!” the baby said happily. His tummy was full. His diaper was dry. His onesie kept him warm. His mommy was there. He didn’t care about anything else in the whole wide world.

I should be so lucky, Louise thought.

* * *

Kelly lay next to Colin. Once upon a time, Louise had lain with him on the same mattress. Kelly mostly didn’t think about that. Expecting somebody to get a whole new bed after a breakup would have been way over the top. Now, though, it forcibly came back to her mind.

Maybe it came back to his, too. “You sure you wanna go through with this?” he asked in a low voice. It was dark. The door to the master bedroom was locked and latched. Marshall’s door was locked, too, and he probably wouldn’t come out for anything this side of the crack of doom, anyway. And if he did, he wouldn’t worry about his dad and his dad’s new wife. Colin kept his voice down just the same.

“Darn right I do,” Kelly said. She nodded, too. It was so dark, Colin might not see that. She reached for him. And go through with it they did.

Afterwards, Kelly sprawled on her side, lazy in the afterglow. Colin said, “Boy, I don’t remember the last time I did that without protection.”