He slowed Jim Farrell down not a jot. “There are those who like Herodotus, and there are those who like Thucydides. They’re easy to tell apart. The ones who like Thucydides are the ones with the tight assholes.”
Rob didn’t know what he’d thought Farrell would come out with. Whatever it was, that wasn’t it. He barked surprised laughter. Then he said, “I thought we were talking about moose.” Maybe doing it right would keep the professor on track.
“No, we were talking about the absence of moose,” Farrell said with relentless precision. Maybe doing it right wouldn’t, too. “And more and more of them are absent, too. Unless I’m very much mistaken, we’re hunting them far faster than they can breed. We’re having to go farther and farther afield for firewood, too.”
That, Rob knew. Maine had abundant second-growth woods. Not many people had farmed its stony soil in the second half of the twentieth century, or in the twenty-first, and trees reclaimed fields by the multiple square mile. An awful lot of those trees, though, had gone up in smoke the past few winters. Many more would burn when the weather worsened again.
Sooner or later, the woods would get logged out. Sooner or later, the ground would be bare and smooth as a baby’s backside-only much colder. Or maybe all the people would give up and move away before that happened.
From what Rob had seen of Mainers, he doubted that. They would hang in there till a glacier grinding down out of the north drove them away. Even then, they’d dynamite the leading edge of the ice as long as they could.
The wind picked up. Farrell stuck his hands into the pockets of his overcoat. After a moment, Rob followed suit. That glacier didn’t feel very far away at all.
Every mile she drove took her farther south, farther from Oklahoma City, farther from the supervolcano. Those miles didn’t take her all the way out of the ashfall zone, though. She’d have to go way the hell down into Mexico to manage that. She would sooner have gone to hell for real. Not that she had anything enormous against Mexico, but she was all done with detours.
She hoped so, anyhow. The Toyota didn’t sound as smooth as it had when she drove it off the lot, and she wasn’t even out of Oklahoma yet. Would it keep running all the way to L.A.? “You fucker, you’ll keep running if I have to push you across Texas,” she told the machine.
It kept running. She supposed-she hoped-that meant it got the message. Southern Oklahoma didn’t look too bad. It mostly wasn’t coated in volcanic dust and ash. If it had been right after the eruption, rain and wind had got rid of the bulk of the shit. People were trying to grow crops here, which would have been unimaginable up in Kansas.
But what you could see wasn’t always what you got. It wasn’t all of what you got, either. How much invisible crud still fouled the breeze? How much was getting sucked into her air filter? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, how much was getting sucked through the air filter and into her engine’s innards?
If she got into trouble, what was she supposed to do? Get a tow back to Oklahoma City and complain to Carl and the tough broad who told him what to do? That was pretty goddamn funny, wasn’t it? She had no AAA. What point to keeping it up in Camp Constitution or while she was playing vulture in Kansas?
She didn’t have plastic, either-just the cash in her billfold. She’d cut up her Wells Fargo Visa when she moved to Denver. Wells Fargo was wounded. All the big banks were, with the new mortgage shock that screwed whole states. But Wells Fargo kept breathing, wounded or not, which was a damn sight more than she could say for her Colorado credit union.
Down I-35 she rolled. Somewhere near Fort Worth, she’d get on I-20, which would take her southwest to I- 10. I-10 she knew, or at least the part of it that ran through Los Angeles. There, it went by the Santa Monica Freeway or the San Bernardino, depending on whether you were west or east of downtown. Yes, it ran all the way across the country, but she’d rarely needed to worry about the 3,000 miles or so that weren’t in her own back yard.
Driving on I-35 could have been driving on the Interstate any place out in the boonies. The landscape was flat and boring, but she wasn’t there to sightsee. She just wanted to make miles. When she remembered she was driving on an expired license, she slowed down a little. A ticket was the last thing she wanted. When she forgot, she put the pedal to the metal again.
She had to slow down not long after she got into Texas, because she met up with a hellacious rainstorm. Even though she cranked the wipers up to high, she couldn’t see farther than six inches past the end of her hood. That didn’t worry everybody. Several cars roared past her. She’d long been convinced that most people were assholes. Here they were, proving the point for her one more time.
Then
In L.A., it would have been easy. (In L.A., she would have known where on the dial to look, but she didn’t think of that.) Here, she went through a shitkicker station, someone explaining how the supervolcano was connected to the Blood of the Lamb, somebody singing mournfully in Spanish to the accompaniment of accordions and electric guitars, an earnest woman talking about post-eruption agricultural issues, and several other things she had less than no interest in listening to. She swore at the radio. That didn’t help her get the traffic news, but it made her feel a little better, anyhow.
The rain drummed down on the Toyota’s roof. She wondered if it would leak. She remembered her old man talking about a car he’d had that was as wet inside as it was outside. The Toyota stayed dry, at least in the passenger compartment. That was one technology they’d managed to improve.
She crawled along. At last, through the curtains of rain, she saw cops-or were they Texas Rangers? — in slickers doing something with a truck and trailer on this side of the road that closed it down to a single, very cramped, lane. A little farther on, a VW Beetle-a new, postmodern one, not an ancient, funky beater-lay on its back, looking too much like an oversized dead bug. The roof was partly smashed. She couldn’t see who, if anyone, was still inside. That might have been just as well.
Because of the downpour and the wreck, she didn’t make it to the I-10 the first day, the way she’d hoped she would. She pulled off the Interstate in Cisco, still on the Fort Worth side of Abilene. There she discovered the Texas institution called the access road: the street full of motels and restaurants and gas stations paralleling the highway, with ramps leading on and off. They didn’t have those in L.A. or Denver. She found a place about on the level of the Super 8 she’d had in Oklahoma City and pushed greenbacks at the desk clerk.
As she paid, she asked, “Do they know when the storm’s supposed to stop?”
“Tomorrow? The day after?” the black woman answered. “Whenever it does. It’s in the Lord’s hands, honey.”
“Terrific,” Vanessa muttered. She’d hoped the Lord might keep her from getting soaked when she walked across the parking lot to the Applebee’s next door, but He didn’t seem cooperative.
And He wasn’t. Umbrella or no umbrella, she got good and wet by the time she reached the restaurant. She ordered a double gin and tonic to improve her attitude. The waitress carded her. From a guy, that might have been flattering. Here, it just pissed her off. Showing the deceased Colorado license alarmed her, too.
But the waitress cared only about the birthdate. She went away. She came back with booze. What more could you want? Vanessa chose chicken fajitas from the menu. “If I never see another MRE as long as I live, that’ll still be too soon,” she told the gal.
“You were in one of them camps?” the waitress asked. By her drawl, she’d never gone farther than a long piss from this miserable little hole in the ground.
“Afraid so,” Vanessa said.
“Lotsa folks are stuck in ’em, and they ain’t supposed to be real nice,” the waitress said. “You’re lucky you got out.”
“Tell me about it,” Vanessa said with feeling. What did they call luck? The residue of design, that was what. It sounded impressive, and as if it ought to mean something. Odds were it was nothing but bullshit, the way most impressive-sounding slogans were. Her luck was the residue of not being too fussy about whom she blew, and she’d
