Supervolcano: All Fall Down

“Yippee skip,” Marshall said. “Um-most places these days want you to submit your stuff in Word or RTF. How am I supposed to get those out of this-thing?” It was a Royal manual portable, what a college student might have used in a 1970s dorm room.

Dad exhaled through his nose, which meant he was bent out of shape-he must’ve thought Marshall would fall on the ancient machine with a glad cry. He sounded hyperpatient as he answered, “You can get words out of it, right?”

“Maybe.” If Marshall seemed dubious, well, he was. He poked one of the keys. It went down partway, then stopped-he’d taken up the slack, or whatever. He poked again, quite a bit harder. Clack! The key hit the black rolling pin (he supposed it had a real name, but what that was he didn’t know). The carriage advanced a space. For somebody used to effortless computer keyboards. . “I dunno, Dad. It’s got a monster touch.”

“You’ll get used to that,” his father said, though how he knew it or whether he knew it Marshall couldn’t have guessed. “And you can get words out of it. People got words out of them for more than a hundred years.”

“Words, yeah, but not Microsuck Word.”

Dad waved that aside. “Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,” he said, like a lawyer objecting in court. “So you send somebody a hard-copy manuscript. If he likes it and he’s got power, he can scan it to OCR and get his own Word file. And if he doesn’t have power, he won’t be able to do anything with Word or RTF files any which way.”

Marshall opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He couldn’t think of anything to say to that. After a moment, he tried, “Suppose I get something halfway done on the computer while we’ve got electricity, but I do the rest on this-thing?”

“Then you scan it and clean it up and do your twenty-first-century thing on it.” Dad had all the answers. He also had all the reasons: “But you can’t use ‘The power’s out again’ for an excuse so you don’t write. If you’ve got to, you can use legal tablets and a ballpoint.”

“You’re shitting me!” Marshall’s experiments along those lines had not been happy ones. He’d tried, yeah, but he thought writing by hand was as primitive as branding. Some people thought branding was cool-one step past tats, they called it. He couldn’t imagine anyone finding writing by hand cool.

But Dad just shook his head. “Nope. Pen and paper were good enough for Shakespeare and Abe Lincoln and dudes like that. I know they aren’t in your league as a literary artist, but-”

“Oh, give me a fucking break!” Marshall knew when he was whupped. “Look, I’ll try the tripewriter, okay? There! You happy now?”

“Dancing in the daisies.” If Dad was, his face and his voice hadn’t found out about it. He glanced east. He’d been doing that a lot lately; Marshall didn’t think he realized how much. He did say why, though: “Your sister will be back in town in a few days.”

“Yeah. How about that?” The last time Marshall’d seen Vanessa was when he’d helped load her U-Haul so she could move to Colorado to be with her rug merchant. Old Hagop hadn’t worked out any better than Bryce Miller did before him. She’d been goddamn lucky-and goddamn quick, which went with it-to get out of Denver alive when the supervolcano blew, too. Hundreds of thousands of people hadn’t.

Her father coughed. “God knows how long she’ll need to land work. Not a lot of it around. She may have to stay here for a while.”

“How about that?” Marshall repeated tonelessly. Vanessa would quarrel with Dad-they were too much alike not to. Marshall knew she’d quarrel with him, too. She always bossed him around, and he wasn’t going to take it the way he had when he was a kid. He tried a question of his own: “How’s Kelly like the idea?”

“She’s not jumping up and down about it,” Dad allowed. Marshall would have bet she wasn’t. He didn’t think his stepmom had ever actually met his sister. Vanessa would quarrel with her, too. Maybe Vanessa didn’t quarrel with everybody, but she came pretty close. Sighing, Dad went on, “We don’t always do what we want to do. Sometimes we do what we’ve got to do.”

“Right.” Marshall left it there. Since he had no steady work and was living here, he didn’t see how he could claim having Vanessa do the same thing wouldn’t fly. But he sure thought so.

“It will work out,” his father insisted. If that wasn’t the triumph of hope over experience, then Marshall didn’t know what the hell it was. A ham sandwich, maybe. Dad lumbered out of his room, shaking his head like a bear bedeviled by bees.

For lack of anything better to do, Marshall fiddled with the typewriter. When he ran in a sheet of paper, it came up crooked. He messed with the little chromed levers till he found the one that loosened things and let him straighten it.

He started typing. Christ, the thing was noisy! Clack, clack, clackety-clack! And you had to punch every key hard. With his index fingers, he managed okay right away. His pinkies, though, should have done more barbell work. He had to make himself mash them down. When he goofed, he couldn’t just run the cursor back and retype. He had to fix the mistake. Somewhere-maybe at the pawnshop where he’d found the typewriter-Dad had come up with a little bottle of correction fluid.

The stuff smelled as if it ought to get you high. The fine print on the label swore it was nonaddictive. With a stink like that, it was missing a hell of a chance if it was.

Marshall finished a page and then, to his surprise, another one. This antiquated gadget wasn’t what he was used to, but it might not be so bad. It was kind of like Diplomacy compared to World of Warcraft. Bells and whistles? Fuhgeddaboutit. But you could manage without them. If you didn’t already know about them, you wouldn’t even miss them.

“Fuck me,” Marshall said softly, and scribbled a note to himself. There might be a story in that-however he wound up writing it.

XVI

Las Cruces behind Vanessa. Snow on the mountains ahead of her. They weren’t great big mountains-nothing like the Rockies when you saw them from Denver-and didn’t look as if they ought to have snow so far down them. This was only a little north of the Mexican border, after all, and it was allegedly spring.

No matter what the season, they had snow halfway down them. On the other half, streaked and patchy now but still there, lay the gray-brown of volcanic ash, a color she knew much too well and hated much too much.

A red light on her dashboard flashed to life. Alarm flamed in her-flamed and then faded. This one was shaped like a gas pump, and warned her of nothing worse than that she was getting low. She already knew that. She’d been sending the fuel gauge baleful looks since well before she rolled through Las Cruces.

Here came an offramp, with a truck stop by it. Vanessa pulled off I-10. She’d get gas for the car. And she’d buy some lunch. With the kind of food you could find at places like this, she’d probably get gas for herself, too.

She’d never had anything to do with truck stops till she drove the U-Haul from L.A. to Denver. On the way there, she’d discovered they were less awful than she’d always thought. Not great, necessarily, but less awful. Nowadays, you took whatever you could get, because too goddamn often you couldn’t get anything at all.

This truck stop looked quite a bit like that one in Nevada-or had she already got to Utah by then? Nowheresville, USA, any which way. A convenience store. A broad expanse of asphalt. Filling stations. A garage. Restaurants. Yup, a truck stop.

Oh, and trucks. Lots and lots of trucks. Mostly eighteen-wheelers, but plenty of smaller ones, too.

There was one difference here. A couple of Bradley fighting vehicles in desert camo trained their cannon on the stop. A soldier or National Guardsman or whatever strolling back toward them from the convenience store paused to light a cigarette. The Feds were big-time serious about not letting anything that even looked like trouble start on the lifeline to Los Angeles.

Vanessa pulled into a Chevron station. It had as many pumps for diesel as for gasoline. Prices were-well, what went a couple of steps past appalling? The country was fucked. Hell, the whole world was fucked. And who paid for it? The poor bastard who needed a fill-up and some stomach ballast, that was who. Me, in other words, Vanessa thought.