Supervolcano: All Fall Down

car. “Boy, this is fun,” Sanchez said. He pulled out a pack of Camels from his inside jacket pocket and held it up. “You mind?”

“You think I’m gonna tell you what to do here?” Colin said. “I’m rude, but I ain’t that rude, dude.” Gabe lit up and started the car. Colin knew secondhand smoke from one cigarette wouldn’t give him lung cancer. He also knew it would make his clothes-and his skin, too-smell like burnt tobacco. Kelly would wrinkle her nose when he came home tonight. Maybe if he got there ahead of her, showered, and changed into something else. .

“One thing,” Gabe said as he pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. “South Bay Strangler’s been quiet lately.”

“Probably had to pull overtime at his day job,” Colin answered. For all he knew, it was the exact and literal truth. If he’d known more. . If he’d known more, he would have dropped on the son of a bitch a long time ago.

* * *

The sign was dusty. It could have used a fresh coat of paint. But it was still easy enough to read. KEEP OUT! it said in big red and blue letters on a white background. THIS MEANS YOU! Below that was a line of slightly smaller words: TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED!

Vanessa Ferguson eyed the sign with something less than enthusiasm. “Nice friendly asshole, wasn’t he?” she remarked.

“Or maybe, isn’t he?” Merv Saunders pointed to the farmhouse in the middle distance. “Somebody might still be holed up in there.”

“I don’t think so!” Vanessa wasn’t shy about talking back to the scavenging crew’s boss. Vanessa had never been shy about talking back to anybody. She’d had a checkered work life and a checkered love life because of it, but she was one of those people who counted costs afterwards, if they counted them at all.

“Do we want to find out?” Ashley Pagliarulo pointed to another sign, maybe fifty feet closer to the farmhouse.

That one showed a black skull and crossbones, with a blunt warning in red below it: ACHTUNG! MINEN! Not DANGER! MINES! No, not that, but auf Deutsch. Vanessa’s lip curled in disgusted scorn. “Neo-Nazi shithead,” she said. “I hope he did cough his worthless lungs out. He deserved it.”

“It’s likely just bullshit,” Saunders said, but he made no move to approach the farmhouse. “And if people are alive in there, we’re supposed to make contact with them no matter what kind of dumbass politics they’ve got.”

No one was supposed to be living in this part of Kansas. The mandatory evacuation order had gone out soon after the supervolcano erupted. Vanessa had been stripping farms and little towns of whatever might prove useful to survivors for months now, her team steadily working its way deeper into the ruined state. She’d helped bury more bodies than she cared to remember. That was one reason her palms were hard with callus. As for livestock carcasses. . No point even trying to count those. The scavengers didn’t try to put them underground.

She did wonder what the country could do for meat with so many of its cows and sheep and pigs and chickens as one with the extinct animals that had died in earlier eruptions and fossilized. One of these millions of years, funny-looking archaeologists digging up ash-covered cattle ranches might write learned papers about what they found.

In the meantime. . “I’d just as soon go on to the next place down the road,” Vanessa said. “I don’t care if we are supposed to make contact with people. If they don’t want to make contact with us, the hell with ’em.”

Several of her comrades in vulturing nodded. Saunders frowned, though. “We are supposed to get in touch with them, assuming they’re alive.”

“Harder if they’re not,” Vanessa agreed sweetly.

He gave her a dirty look. “I don’t think it’s real likely that they are, though,” he said, as if she hadn’t opened her mouth. “I think the chances are that that sign is a bluff, too, or was a bluff when there were people here.”

As if to prove as much, he took a few steps past the KEEP OUT! sign, toward the one that warned of the mines. He hadn’t gone far before something in or near the farmhouse opened up with a stuttering roar. Tracers zipped past overhead, but not too far overhead.

The machine-gun fire stopped. “Get the fuck off my land, bastard!” an amplified voice bellowed. “I won’t shoot to miss next time.”

Maybe he had a generator in or near the farmhouse, even if Vanessa couldn’t hear one chugging. Maybe he just had a battery-powered bullhorn, though batteries were drawing ever closer to their shelf life. Whatever else he had, he had the goddamn machine gun. Vanessa had used firearms often enough. Having the bullets coming in instead of going out was a whole different feeling, though. Fear tasted like a copper penny under her tongue. She didn’t piss herself, but she had to clamp down hard to keep from having that accident.

Merv Saunders didn’t argue with the survivalist or whatever the hell he was. Whatever he was, he had survived. Was he living on stashed food? Did he go out to do some freelance scavenging of his own? Had he somehow kept his livestock alive along with himself and whoever else he had in there?

At the moment, all that was academic. The government-sanctioned scavengers retreated with more speed than dignity. Saunders got on the radio to points farther east. Except for the satellite variety, cell phones didn’t work in these parts. Power remained out through most of the country’s midsection. When it would come back, nobody could even begin to guess.

“Can you call in helicopter gunships?” Vanessa asked eagerly. “Or at least soldiers with mortars and grenades and things?”

The crew boss looked at her. “Have you been eating raw meat again?”

Her ears burned. “We ought to kill that son of a bitch!” she said.

“Go ahead,” Saunders answered. “You first.”

That made her ears flame hotter. Her pistol seemed mighty small potatoes when you set it against the concentrated essence of infantry a machine gun represented. “They can get him on a weapons rap.” Machine guns weren’t legal anywhere that she knew of. Then real inspiration struck: “Or for taxes! I bet he hasn’t paid a dime since the supervolcano went off.”

“And you have?” Saunders inquired.

He was being as difficult as he could. It sure felt that way to Vanessa, anyhow. “No, but I haven’t had any money, either,” she said, which wasn’t provably false. What followed was actually true: “My stupid little credit union’s servers are back in Denver, and they’re dead as King Tut.”

“Denver. That’s right.” He nodded, as if reminding himself. “Not many got out from that far west.”

“Tell me about it.” Vanessa knew how lucky she was to have fled far enough and fast enough. She was as stubborn as she was lucky, too: “Taxes work. That’s what they finally hung on Al Capone, remember.”

“The guy probably figured we were bandits, not I’m-from-the-government-and-I’m-here-to-help-you,” Saunders said. Vanessa inhaled sharply. The gang boss must have psyched out what she was going to say, because he beat her to the punch by continuing, “But if it makes you happy, I’ll pass the suggestion along. Maybe someone in authority will do something about it.”

Fuck off. Get out of my hair. That was what he meant. If she pissed him off badly enough, he could send her back to whatever had replaced the soggy Camp Constitution. If that wasn’t a fate worse than death, you could sure see one from there. She would have done almost anything to keep from ending up in a refugee camp again.

Her mouth twisted. Micah Husak had given her a most unwelcome education about what doing almost anything to get out of something else really meant. If Saunders made it plain her choice was between coming across and going back to a camp. . She’d already had to make that kind of choice twice now. She’d yielded both times, and loathed herself whenever she had to remember. She also would have loathed herself had she chosen the other way; she knew that only too well.

Sometimes you couldn’t win.

Sometimes you couldn’t even play. The scavengers’ boss had shown exactly zero interest in her fair white body. That irked her, too. There weren’t a whole lot of things that didn’t irk Vanessa.

For now, though, unless she really wanted to piss Saunders off, she needed to leave him alone. She could see that. She didn’t like it for hell, but she could see it. With poor grace, she walked away. Dust and volcanic ash that would be dirt one of these years scuffed up under her feet.