Supervolcano: All Fall Down

The reception was a success. Everyone had plenty to eat. Nobody punched anybody else. No one groped Lindsey’s dad’s hot girlfriend (or if anyone did, she didn’t squawk about it). What more could you want?

Jim Farrell laid on his sleigh to take the newlyweds back to Lindsey’s apartment. “How about that?” Rob said as she unlocked the door. “We’re really married.” He picked her up and carried her over the threshold.

“Darn right we are,” she agreed. “And what do you propose to do about it, Mister?”

“I already proposed,” he pointed out. “Why don’t we go back to the bedroom, huh? I expect I’ll think of something.” They did, and he did.

XXI

Louise Ferguson hadn’t heard from her eldest son more than a handful of times since the supervolcano erupted. He seemed content to stay up there in Maine. That struck her as somewhere along the range between masochism and madness, but it was his life.

The postcard she found in her mailbox today bore a picture of the business end of a mosquito silhouetted against the sun. Beneath it was the legend THE STATE BIRD OF MAINE. She grunted laughter. That was the kind of thing he’d send, all right. She would have recognized the style even if she hadn’t recognized the spiky script on the back.

By the time you read this, I’ll be a married man, he wrote. Her name is Lindsey Kincaid. She teaches at the high school in town. So maybe one of these days you’ll have grandkids running around under the snow here. Say hello to anyone you happen to run into.-Rob.

From the postmark, the card had taken almost three weeks to cross the country. The USPS was one more outfit that had been in big trouble even before the supervolcano erupted. Trying to cope with all the insanity since the eruption hadn’t made it run better, or more efficiently. What could you do? The postcard had eventually got here.

She wished some of her bills would come so slowly, and that the bastards who sent them out would take the Post Office sucks as an excuse when her own payments ran late. The longer she stayed out of work, the later some of them got, too.

She would have been out in the street with her worldly goods piled on the curb if so many other people didn’t have the same problems for the same reasons. They weren’t too big to fail-the classic phrase from the recession before the eruption (a recession that now looked like pretty goddamn good times). But they were too numerous to evict, even if they had failed. Pay what you can when you can was rapidly ousting e pluribus unum as the national motto. Louise expected she’d start seeing it on coins and bills any day now.

If she wanted to keep collecting her divorced single mom’s mite from the California EDD, she had to keep looking for work. When she could, she did it on the Net and with her phone. When she couldn’t, she gritted her teeth, forked over some of her unemployment check to Marshall, and climbed aboard the bus for new adventures in Jobseekersland.

She had no enormous hope. Hope was not one of Jobseekersland’s natural resources-certainly not since Yellowstone blew up. But you had to go through the motions, and to be able to document that you were going through the motions, or your EDD checks would dry up. Going out to look for work was a pain in the ass. Losing the unemployment checks would be a supervolcano eruption in your own life.

And so, glumly, Louise walked into Van Slyke Pharmacy, at the corner of Van Slyke and Reynoso Drive. It was a mom-and-pop place, not part of a chain. Along with the usual patent medicines and shampoos and school supplies and whatnot, it sold brightly painted pottery artifacts that might be decorative if you were tasteless enough, stuffed animals that looked sort of but not quite like famous cartoon characters, and a bunch of secondhand books.

The pharmacist’s bad haircut and funky glasses frames warned that he might actually enjoy the ceramic tumors he was trying to unload. The badge he wore on his pastel polyester shirt said his name was Jared. Louise wanted to giggle. To her, Jared was a singing smiley on her computer that butchered ballads in Spanish, complete with wretched guitar accompaniment.

“Help you?” he asked. His lenses made his eyes seem enormous.

“Well, I’m looking for work,” she said resignedly. One more humiliation, then on to the next.

But instead of going Sorry or Not today or We don’t need anybody, Jared said, “I was going to post on Craigslist when the power comes back on. If it ever does. What was your last job?”

“I was an administrative assistant at the ramen company’s headquarters on Braxton Bragg,” Louise answered in astonishment.

“Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t have much choice. They closed down their American operation.”

“That’s right-they did. I remember hearing about that.” The pharmacist nodded. “You can answer the phone? You can type? You can handle an inventory spreadsheet when there is power?”

Louise managed a dazed nod. “I can do all that. I’m not exactly an Excel whiz, but I can cope if it’s not too complicated.”

“I’ll give you a try, then,” Jared said briskly. “I had to let someone go last week. I feel bad about it, but she just couldn’t do the work. If you can’t, I won’t keep you, either. But if you can, I’ll be glad to have you. I can’t do all that stuff and run the place, too, not if I want to sleep, I can’t.”

Louise could hardly believe her ears. “What kind of money are we talking about?”

He told her. It was less than the ramen works had paid, but it whaled the tar out of unemployment. “Medical after six months,” he added. “It’s not a terrific plan, but it’s better than nothing.”

“When do I start?” she asked. If she couldn’t stand it, she’d start looking for something else, something better. The best time to look for work was when you already had some.

“Monday morning, ten o’clock sharp,” he said. “I’ll have paperwork for you to fill out then. Can’t do anything without the paperwork.”

“Better yours than the EDD’s,” Louise said from the bottom of her heart.

“That’s a good way to look at things,” Jared said. “Tell me your name, why don’t you? Me, I’m Jared Watt.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Watt.” Louise gave her own name. “You’ve got no idea how pleased I am to meet you.”

“Oh, I just might, Mrs. Ferguson.”

“It’s Miz,” Louise said.

“Okay. Ms. Ferguson.” Jared Watt repeated it, perhaps to help himself remember. “Like I say, I just might. You aren’t the only one who’s had a tough time the past three, four years.”

“I feel great now.” Louise meant every word of it. An indifferent job in a business that didn’t look to be thriving with a boss who definitely seemed peculiar? Hey, it was work! No wonder she meant every word. “If I never see that Torrance unemployment office again, it’ll be too soon.”

“Well, all right,” the pharmacist said. “If I can’t drive you loopy, I don’t expect anyone can.”

“I’m not even worried about it.” Louise meant that, too. Whether she’d mean it by closing time a week from Friday might be another story altogether. It’ll be a week with a paycheck, anyhow, she thought. They don’t make weeks any better than those.

* * *

Colin Ferguson looked at his watch. It was only twenty-five past two. He would have bet it was four o’clock. Time flies when you’re having fun, he thought, and then Yeah, as if! He hadn’t been this nervous since, well, the last time he was this nervous. And that was. . probably when he’d asked Kelly to marry him. A while ago, in other words.

He looked at his watch again. It was 2:26. He made himself not look at it, or at the clock on the cop-shop wall. The bust would go off the way it was supposed to. Or it wouldn’t. Whichever, he’d pick up the pieces and go on. What else could you do?

At 2:39 by the clock on the wall, his cell phone rang. He hauled it out of his jacket pocket. “Ferguson.”