tried her best not to think about it since she did it.
“Well, I’ll take your order to the kitchen.” The waitress hustled away. She was perky and built. A guy probably would have watched her ass. Vanessa concentrated on the level of gin in the glass. To her, that was a hell of a lot more interesting.
If you expected grand cuisine, Applebee’s was the wrong place for you. Better than MREs, it definitely was. Vanessa got outside of the fajitas faster than she’d imagined she could. She got outside of another double gin and tonic, too. She lurched when she went back to the motel. She got wetter than she had on the way over to the restaurant, but she cared less.
Next morning, the motel had donuts and granola bars and coffee in the lobby. The spread wasn’t exciting, but it was free. It was also fast. Vanessa wanted to get on the Interstate and make more miles. She hurried to the car. It was still raining hard. At least it wasn’t snowing. She hadn’t had enough practice with the white stuff to feel easy about driving in it.
I-20 was full of eighteen-wheelers. Every time one of them growled past her, it threw more water onto her windshield than her wipers could handle. For a few scary seconds, she’d go next to blind. Then the wipers would catch up. She’d be able to see. . till the next honking big truck came along.
She wondered why a no-account stretch of Interstate through the middle of Texas was as truck-packed as the Long Beach Freeway coming up from the harbor. And then, all of a sudden, she quit wondering. These swarms of diesel monsters were heading for Los Angeles, just like her. Without them, L.A. would starve, to say nothing of running out of everything it needed besides food.
Somewhere a little farther along in west Texas, this highway would join I-10, and I-10 would take her home. Till she moved to Denver to be with Hagop, she’d spent her whole life in San Atanasio. If-no, when-she made it home, she vowed she wouldn’t live outside the city limits ever again, either.
Miles. More miles. Still more miles. She couldn’t go as fast as she wanted to, because of the rain and because of the accidents people who went as fast as they pleased to in spite of the rain got into. She snarled at those blockheads as she crawled past the smashed vehicles they’d infested. Some of the blockheads stood glumly on the asphalt, staring at the havoc they’d wreaked.
When she finally inched past one horrendous pileup, she saw her snarls there were wasted. Some of the people who’d caused that wreck would never cause another one. She wasn’t sorry the rain kept her from getting a good look at the bodies. She had no trouble imagining what they’d look like. They’d look like the photos in her dad’s cop books, the ones Rob had used to gross her out when she was little. He’d got his butt warmed for that, which didn’t do squat to stop her nightmares.
And then, just when she started getting close to the I-10, things slowed down again. Vanessa said something that should have turned all the rain pouring down on the whole state to superheated steam. That improved her attitude, but not the traffic.
In due-no, in overdue-course, she discovered this slowdown didn’t spring from an accident. Instead, an electric signboard sat on the shoulder. It said I-1 °CHECKPOINT AHEAD. PREPARE TO STOP. Then it blinked out. And then it said the same thing again. Blink. Message. Blink. Message. .
Vanessa lost track of how many times she read it before she rolled past the signboard at last. What she said about stopping for a checkpoint-what she said about
Then she said some things about the idea of checkpoints, too. What did they need them for, whoever
She got her answer to that when she came up to the checkpoint. STATUS EVALUATION CONTROL- SUPERVOLCANO EMERGENCY AUTHORIZATION ACT, the sign there announced. As far as she knew, the supervolcano was unauthorized. The act authorized things like Camp Constitution and its many unpleasant siblings, the scavenger programs in the Midwest, and maybe this status evaluation control thingy, too.
Trucks breezed through. Their reasons for heading west were obvious enough even for government functionaries to grasp. People in cars, though. . People in cars got the same friendly greetings Taliban terrorists toting AK-47s would have earned going through airport security.
A fellow in a uniform Vanessa didn’t recognize scowled at her expired Colorado license: not because it was expired but because it was from Colorado. “Why are you going to Los Angeles?” he demanded.
“Because I lived there my whole life till I went to Denver,” she answered, which was nothing but the truth.
Truth or not, it didn’t impress him. “Have you got any family there? Can they vouch for you?”
And so, feigning meekness she didn’t feel, she answered, “My father is a police lieutenant in San Atanasio.” He’d never heard of her old stomping grounds; amazing how a face all slabs and angles could show such eloquent disbelief. Quickly, she explained, “It’s not far from LAX-a little south and a little east.”
“That’s what you say, anyhow,” he answered, his voice as stony as his eyes. He pulled out a cell phone. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a number where I can contact this individual?”
Vanessa could have taken the cop shop’s number off her own phone. She could have, but she didn’t need to. Dad’s work number had been ingrained in her head since she was a kid. She needed to add an area code to it now, and she did as she rattled it off. At the uniformed man’s annoyed glower, she repeated it more slowly.
He punched the number into his phone, turning his back and stepping away so she couldn’t follow his conversation. He didn’t look so sour-or rather, he looked sour in a different way-as he stuck the phone in his pocket and swung toward her again. “You appear to have been telling the truth,” he said, sounding quite humanly surprised.
“Of course I was!” Vanessa yipped. She was surprised herself, and furious, that he should doubt her. She prided herself on her honesty. She said what she meant even when keeping her mouth shut would do more good.
“Hunh!” Her father couldn’t have snorted better than this guy did. “You listen to the bullshit we hear here, you wouldn’t go
“You sound like a cop, all right,” Vanessa said.
“Yeah, well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”
“Can I go on, then?” Vanessa itched to floor the gas pedal. If she drove fast enough, maybe she could get back to L.A. before this piece of junk crapped out on her. Maybe.
“I. . suppose so,” the uniformed man answered reluctantly. “If you haven’t got a place to stay and a job to look forward to, though, you’re a damn fool for heading that way.”
“The last place I had to stay was Camp fucking Constitution,” Vanessa said through clenched teeth. “Whatever I end up with in L.A.-even if I sleep under a goddamn freeway overpass and dumpster-dive for dinner-it can’t be worse than that. NFW.”
“Hunh!” the guy said again, even more dubiously than before. But he stepped back and jerked a thumb to the west. “Go ahead, then. You’ll find out.”
Vanessa didn’t waste time thanking him. She mashed the accelerator with her foot. Smoke spurted from the Toyota’s tailpipe.
* * *
It wasn’t as if Marshall had never seen a typewriter before. He had. Old people kept them around as souvenirs of bygone days. A few offices even had electric ones, for dealing with carbon-copy forms. But he’d never expected to discover one on his desk next to the iMac.
“Found it in a pawnshop on San Atanasio Boulevard,” his father said, not without pride. “You’ve been bitching about how you have trouble writing when the power goes out. Well, now you can.”
