Not enough houses. Not enough money to build them. Not enough money for anyone to afford them even if they got built, either. The economy had been rotten before the supervolcano went off. With the Midwest essentially gone, it wasn’t just rotten any more. The vultures had eaten the meat off its bones. And the rest of the poor, chilly world wasn’t much better off. The USA had been the engine that pulled the train. Well, the engine had gone off the rails.
They slept in the best quarters Fredonia offered. It wasn’t a Motel 6, but it might as well have been. A motel with no electricity and no running water. Happy fucking day! The bed was more comfortable than a sleeping bag. The windows in Vanessa’s room weren’t broken, either, so they shielded her from the freezing wind. And that was about as much good as she could find to say about the place.
Her father had stayed at a Motel 6 when he went to Yellowstone. She remembered him bitching about it. That was back in the days when things still worked, though. Now. . Now she was stuck in this cold, miserable place with a bunch of people who couldn’t stand her.
She’d blown that National Guardsman so she could end up in a place like this, no matter what the people with her thought of her. She nodded to herself.
XII
Colin Ferguson took his left hand off the bicycle’s handlebars and held out his arm with the hand pointing up: the signal for a right turn. He lived on a small, lightly traveled street, but he was getting into the habit of using hand signals all the time, the way he’d hit the flicky-doodle in his car whenever he changed lanes or turned.
He swung into his driveway. The Taurus still waited there. So did Kelly’s old Honda. Marshall’s little Toyota sat by the curb. They all ran. Colin thought they did, anyhow. None got used much, even in weather like this. Whose cars did?
With a sigh of relief, he swung off the bike and walked it onto the porch. He stood there a few seconds, letting the rainwater drip from his slicker. He slipped off his galoshes. He’d never worried about galoshes before the supervolcano. Who had, in SoCal? People did now, by God!
Before he could open the door, Kelly did it from the inside. They kissed briefly. “How are you?” she said as he brought the bike into the front hall. Hers already stood there, parked on old towels. He lowered the kickstand on his and put it next to hers.
“I’ve had days I liked better.” He walked back into the kitchen and pulled a green bottle out of the pantry. After he poured himself a fair knock, he asked Kelly, “Want some?”
“That’s okay. You know me-far as I’m concerned, Laphroaig is Kermit’s last name.” Instead of drinking scotch, Kelly popped the cap on a Red Trolley ale. She clinked the bottle against his glass. “Sympathies.”
“Thanks.” He let smoky fire run down his throat. She’d improved his taste in beer, but he’d never been able to persuade her that scotch tasted like anything but medicine.
“What went wrong?” she asked.
“Stupid judge let a perp off. Not enough evidence to keep him, he said. The video didn’t quite show his fingerprints, so we had no grounds for the arrest. My-”
“Ass,” Kelly said helpfully when he stalled.
“Yeah. That. It was a good bust. Honest to God, it was. That jerk in a robe, he-” The complaint dissolved into a disgusted growl. Colin drank more Laphroaig. “How are
“Me? I’m tired. Long way to Dominguez on a bike. They say the buses are supposed to get more fuel next week, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Mrmm.” Colin made a different kind of unhappy noise. “We’re getting low on gas ourselves. What we hijacked from LAPD is pretty much gone, and we aren’t getting as much as we still want to use. Pitcavage isn’t what you’d call happy about it.” He drained the glass and filled it again.
Kelly raised an eyebrow. “You don’t do that very often.”
“Not as often as I did before I started hanging around with you, and you can take that to the bank.” Despite what he said, Colin drank from the refill. “You’ve got no idea how wrecked I was the morning we met in Yellowstone-and that was after the aspirins and the coffee kicked in. But I don’t need it so much now.”
“Good. I’m doing something right, anyhow.” Kelly wasn’t halfway down her beer yet. She liked the taste and a little buzz. Colin didn’t think he’d ever seen her smashed, though. The reverse? The reverse wasn’t quite true.
“Darn right you are,” he said. “I wish you were chief, and doing things right in that chair. Pitcavage. .” Some of the beat cops called their big boss Shitcabbage. Colin hadn’t heard any of the detectives use that particular endearment, but they had others for the chief. And they had their reasons for using them, too.
“What now?” Kelly knew there were things he hadn’t said yet.
“His worthless kid,” Colin answered. “I mean, you try to make it easy on ’em. I never busted mine for smoking dope, and God knows I could have a million times.”
“You never busted me, either,” Kelly pointed out.
“You never smoked it in front of me to get my goat.”
“No,” she agreed quietly. “I knew you didn’t like it, and it never was that big a deal for me. I don’t miss it- beer’s fine.”
“Okay. Good, even,” Colin said. “If you’d thrown it in my face the way my kids did, I don’t suppose I would’ve busted you, either. But I wouldn’t’ve wanted to marry you, or I don’t think I would.”
“I sorta figured that out,” Kelly said, quiet still.
“Uh-huh. You’re no dummy.” Colin nodded and made that unhappy noise again. “Darren Pitcavage, though-” He took another sip of scotch, as if to wash the taste of Darren Pitcavage out of his mouth. “My kids aren’t mean. Mm, Vanessa is sometimes, I guess, but she’s snarky mean, not bar-brawl mean. If the chief hadn’t done some fancy talking, there’ve been a couple of times his precious flesh and blood might’ve found out more about the inside of a jail than he ever wanted to know.”
“Ah. Okay. Now I know where you’re coming from,” Kelly said. “This just happened again?”
“Too right it did,” Colin agreed. “There’s a bunch of bars and strip joints on Hesperus up near Braxton Bragg, and Darren thinks it’s cool to hang out in ’em. Maybe he picks up the girls. Maybe he just watches. I dunno. But the people who run those places, they sure know who he is-and who his old man is. Does he get free drinks?”
“Ya think?” Kelly said sarcastically.
“Yeah. Like that. And the bouncers cut him slack. For all I know, some of the girls give him a throw to keep him happy. But not everybody who goes to those joints knows who Lord Darren Pitcavage is.”
“Or cares,” Kelly said.
“Or cares. That’s right,” Colin said. “Some of those guys, they’d want to rack him up good if they did know. This latest fight he got into wasn’t like that. He was drunk, and so was the other fellow. The guy said something, and Darren coldcocked him. He’s got a nasty left hook-he knocked out two teeth and broke another one.”
“Let me guess-they called it self-defense?” Kelly asked.
“Right the first time,” Colin said heavily. “But if that Mexican’d hit Darren, then it would have been assault with intent to maim. Bet your sweet wazoo it would.” He gulped down the second drink.
Kelly reached into the refrigerator-which was, like most people’s these days, half-full of ice to keep things fresh when the power was out. She grabbed some steaks. “Here. I’ll pan-broil these. That’ll help get the taste of today out of your mouth.”
Marshall must have had some radar that told him when supper was ready. He walked in the front door right when Kelly took the pan off the fire. “Smells good,” he said.
“Sure it does-it’s food, isn’t it?” Colin said. “You can drag up a rock and help us eat it. And you can tell us
