XIII
Things in Kansas were better than they had been in Colorado. Vanessa was convinced of it, even though she breathed through three masks worn one on top of the next and kept swimming-pool goggles on even when she slept. Her eyes itched all the time anyhow; she hadn’t got the goggles soon enough. She couldn’t take them off to rub or use Visine or anything. The air was still too full of fine dust.
Pickles was even less happy than she was. He couldn’t wear a mask or goggles, poor thing. She didn’t know what to do about him. She couldn’t keep him in the carrier all the time, but she couldn’t let him out, either. She still had nasty scratches from when she’d extracted him from under the Toyota’s front seat. She had to get someplace where he’d be able to move around more-and where she would, too. width='1em'›She carried a snub-nosed. 38 revolver in her purse. Her father had taught her how to handle firearms when she was twelve. She’d never used what she’d learned; she always worried more about a moment of rage or stupidity or black depression than about blowing away a burglar. But the times, they were a-changin’.
She’d got the gun in Pueblo. Another hundred miles and a little bit away from the supervolcano, it hadn’t been hit as hard as Denver. She stopped for gas and a fresh air filter. She paid ten bucks a gallon plus another fifty for the filter, and she didn’t say boo. She could count the cost later. Now was a time for doing what she had to do.
The guy who took her money was already wearing goggles. “Where did you get those?” she demanded enviously.
He pointed across the street. “Walgreens is still open.” She could barely see the sign through swirls of dust, but she stopped there as soon as he finished with her car. He used a mask, too, and had probably also got his hands on it at the drugstore.
Volcanic ash came in every time the automatic door opened, and would keep coming in as long as it kept working. Still, like the air inside her car, the air inside the Walgreens improved on the general run of things. There was a display of goggles with bright plastic straps.
Only three boxes of masks were left. “One box to a customer, ma’am,” the clerk said when Vanessa tried to buy them all. “We want to spread ’em around as much as we can.”
She could see the logic in that, even if she didn’t like it. Unlike the man at the gas station, the Walgreens clerk didn’t gouge her for what she bought. “How long will you stay here?” she asked him as she put on the goggles.
“I don’t know. A while longer. I’ll see if it looks like it’s getting worse or better,” he answered.
“It won’t get better.” Vanessa spoke with great conviction.
“Well, you may be right,” he replied, which had to mean I ain’t paying any attention to you, lady.
She put on one of the masks before she went outside again, too. Either it made a difference or her imagination was working overtime. That was when she noticed the gun shop between the Walgreens and a tropical-fish store. The fish place was dark, but a light burned in the gun shop. Out in the middle of-this-having a real weapon looked like a terrific idea. She went inside.
The man behind the counter looked like a shop teacher. He was leafing through-surprise! — a hunting magazine, but he put it down. “What can I do for you?” he said.
“I made it down from Denver,” Vanessa answered. “I want to keep going. In case my car doesn’t, I may need to take some chances. A pistol could come in handy.”
He nodded. “If you know how to use one.”
“My dad’s a cop in California.”
“Then you probably do,” he allowed. “You’ll have to fill out about five pounds of forms.”
“As long as there’s no waiting period,” Vanessa said. “I’m not going to wait.”
“Not in this state,” he assured her. “I do have to perform a background check, though. Right now, the phones are out, and so is the Net.” He rubbed his chin. “Turn around, please.”
“Huh?” Mystified, Vanessa did.
“I liked your foreground,” the man explained. “Your background will definitely do, too. I’ll sell to you, and we’ll sort everything else out later-if there is a later.”
“Thank you,” Vanessa said, more sincerely than she was in the habit of doing. She handed him her Visa card. “Here.”
He took it, but he didn’t do anything with it for a few seconds. Was he going to ask her for a blowjob, too, or something? If he did, she’d… She didn’t quite know what she’d do. In normal times, she would have told him to go fuck himself. In normal times, though, she wouldn’t have been standing here in a Pueblo, Colorado, gun shop. She needed a piece. If he decided he needed one, too…
But it didn’t come to that. He just said, “You want to be careful on the road, Ms., uh”-he looked down at the little plastic rectangle in his hand-“Ferguson. A pistol can get you out of some tight spots, sure. Maybe you’d do better not getting into them in the first place, though.”
She shook her head. “If I hadn’t bailed out of Denver when I did, I would’ve been stuck there. If you don’t get out of here pretty damn quick, you won’t be able to leave, either.”
“I’m still thinking about it,” he said. Vanessa left it there; she was a refugee, not a missionary. He went on, “You’ll want to buy a couple boxes of cartridges, too, am I right?”
“That’s why God made plastic,” Vanessa agreed.
As soon as she got back to the car, she loaded the. 38. It was a double-action model; you could safely carry a round in every chamber in the cylinder. And she did. She felt better having it. She might have faced a nasty choice in the gun shop. Out on the road, there were bound to be sons of bitches who didn’t believe in giving any choices.
If she got back on the Interstate, she’d end up in New Mexico. If she chose US 50 instead, she’d cross the Colorado prairie till she got to the Kansas prairie. Kansas held no appeal. Sometimes, though, you didn’t get what you wanted. She hadn’t been off I-25 very long, but when she went back cars were coming off at the on-ramp. That couldn’t possibly be a good sign.
And it wasn’t. A cop in a pig-snouted gas mask-which had to work better than goggles and a surgical job- waved what looked like an orange light saber. He yelled something at Vanessa. She couldn’t make out what it was. Reluctantly, she cracked the window. Ash started coming in.
“Interstate’s closed,” the cop said, his voice sounding distant, almost underwater, through the mask. “Big old accident south of town. Worst mess you’ve ever seen, I swear to God.”
Vanessa doubted that. She’d seen L.A. messes, after all. But then she had second thoughts. All the blowing dust might have done to I-25 what tule fog did in California’s Central Valley-it could turn I-5 into Slaughterhouse Five, and did just about every winter. Twenty or fifty or eighty cars and SUVs and trucks all turned to crumpled sheet metal, some of them burning, with dazed and bleeding people wandering around coughing from the ash, every now and then a fresh, tinny crash as a new fool didn’t spot the wreck up ahead soon enough…
“Maybe I’ll go east instead,” she said, thinking And to hell with Horace Greeley.
“Good plan,” the cop said in that otherworldly voice. “If there’s wrecks on 50, they aren’t close to Pueblo.”
Which meant they ound t’t his problem. But which also meant she could put some more miles between her and the supervolcano. By Interstate standards, US 50 was old and shabby. It was also open, though, so Vanessa did her best to make lemonade. She might not be able to go as fast as she wanted to, but at least she was going. She tried to ignore Pickles’ yowls, which was like trying to ignore a toothache.
A lot of cars were crapped out by the side of the road. She blessed the new air filter she’d got in Pueblo. Every so often, she’d come up on a car that had crapped out in the middle of the road. A couple of times, she almost rear-ended one. Was that how the giant pileup on I-25 had started? She wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
She was a little more than an hour-say, thirty-five miles-out of Pueblo when it started to rain. When the first big drops splatted down on her windshield, she let out a war whoop of delight. Rain would wash the ash out of the air. If she could see where she was going, she’d get there faster.
But the rain didn’t wash all the grit out of the air-there was too much of it in the air for that. And when she
