turned on the wipers, they did as much harm as good. They pushed grit back and forth across the windshield; she could hear it, almost feel it, scraping first one way, then the other. And it was rock grit, some of it at least as hard as the glass it was grinding across. Arced scratches spread across the broad pane. That wasn’t smeared dirt, the way she hoped for a moment; the windshield was marked for good.
Vanessa swore as loudly as she’d whooped, startling the cat into momentary silence. There was so much ash and dust on the highway that she soon began to feel she was trying to drive through mud. That was exactly what she was doing, too. She had to slow down even more instead of speeding up the way she wanted to.
A lordly Cadillac Escalade zoomed past her. Its giant tires splattered the side of her car-and her side windows-with muck. Then the supersized SUV cut in front of her. She had to hit the brakes to keep from smashing into it, or more likely going under it. More gritty mud splashed her windshield. The wipers did their best to shove it aside. Their best abraded the glass some more.
“You dumb fucking asshole!” she howled, and flipped the Escalade the bird. The imbecile behind the battleship’s wheel probably couldn’t see her do it, what with her filthy, scarred front glass, but she was most sincere.
Then she remembered the brand-new. 38 in her handbag. She’d never understood road-rage shootings before. They’d always seemed the province of gangbangers with shaved heads and teardrop tats. Now she got it. Somebody did you wrong, so you went and made that sucker pay.
She imagined the Escalade slewing crazily off the road, flipping over-weren’t all those stinking SUVs top- heavy as hell? — and bursting into flame. She imagined the jerk driving it toasting till he was overdone, along with Mrs. Jerk and all the little Jerks in their car seats.
And she let out a long, shuddering breath and made damn sure she didn’t reach inside the purse. A moment of fury would be all it took, all right. You couldn’t-well, you shouldn’t-give in to something like that. But people did, all the time. Her old man wouldn’t go out of business any time soon.
Thinking of him made her stick one hand in her purse after all. The only thing she took out was her cell phone. Maybe, with the rain scrubbing the dust out of the air, she’d finally have bars.
No such luck. She tried his number anyway. Again, no luck. Nthing coming in. Nothing going out. She turned off the phone and stowed it.
On she went, slowly. With the road the way it was and with her poor, abused windshield the way it was, slowly was the only way to go. Most of the people heading toward Kansas had sense enough to see things the same way. The jerk in the Escalade was no doubt still doing ninety. He was long gone in front of her. Even if she hadn’t shot him, she wished him no good.
Every once in a while, Somebody listened when you made a wish like that. Less than fifteen minutes later, she drove past the Escalade. It was over on the shoulder with the hood popped. Mr. Jerk-who proved what he was by not bothering with a mask-stared forlornly at the engine. If he was waiting for AAA to come rescue him, he’d have a long wait.
Vanessa not only knew the feeling of Schadenfreude, she knew the word. Knowing the word sharpened the feeling. If only sex worked that way! The Escalade shrank in her rearview mirror and vanished into rain and dust.
Then she had to hit the brakes and crawl. Someone hadn’t slowed down enough or had skidded in the new mud on the asphalt. The crash hadn’t closed US 50-not yet, anyhow-but it sure had snarled traffic. If a jalopy in the backup decided this was a good time to overheat..
Why are you borrowing trouble? Vanessa asked herself. Don’t you have enough already? In a way, those were questions without answers. In another, they were questions that hardly needed answers. She borrowed trouble because she was the kind of person who borrowed trouble. If she wanted to, she could blame that on her tight-assed father or on being the middle child or on Mrs. McKenzie, her neurotic- make that nutso, she thought, remembering Wes across the street from her folks-first-grade teacher. None of which changed things one goddamn bit. She borrowed trouble.
This time, she got to pay it back pretty soon. No steam plume ascended to the heavens from some old clunker’s radiator. She inched along with everybody else, but she kept on inching. The accident involved four cars. Nobody seemed badly hurt. Men wearing wet clothes and glum expressions stalked around examining damage.
More gunk flew onto her windshield when the car ahead of her sped up as it found open road in front of it. Resignedly, she waited for the wipers to clear the smear, and to scratch up the glass some more. The only way she could have prevented that would have been to stay in Denver. This might be a bad bet, but that was a worse one-though poor Pickles would have disagreed.
She found more things to worry about. How much cash did she have left after that outrageous gas stop and air filter? Would it be enough to do her any good when she needed to fill up again? If it wasn’t, would the station guy take plastic? Or could she find a working ATM? Odds were decent, she supposed. If a gas pump was working, an ATM ought to be. For now, with the needle well above the H, she kept making miles.
Making miles, these days, came with a price, though, or at least it did in a big part of the country, very much including the part she was in. By the time she got over the state line into Kansas, her car was starting to sound like hell, even with the new air filter. How much volcanic crud was getting in despite the filter? Jesus, how much had got in when she took off the gas cap to fill the tank in Pueblo? What was all that shit doing to her engine? What was all the grit on the road doing to the rest of her moving parts? How long would they keep on moving? Long enough? She had to hope so.
In spite of the way the car snded, she smiled for a second. She must have been about ten years old when Rob, a couple of years older, opened some atlas or other to a map of the USA. “They’re gonna build a college right here,” he’d said, pointing to the border between the state she’d just left and the one she’d just entered.
She remembered going, “Yeah? So?” Big brothers were obnoxious enough even if you didn’t let them get the jump on you. When you did, they turned insufferable. She might not have known that word when she was ten, but she sure had understood the idea.
And she remembered his leer. He was just learning how to do it, which of course meant he overdid it. “So they’re gonna call it the First United Colorado-Kansas University,” he’d answered. “Only for short it’ll be-”
Vanessa had understood the idea of acronyms, too, even if she might not have known that word yet, either. “FUCK U!” she’d shrilled, and laughed so loud, and in such delighted horror, that their mother had come into her room to see what the hell was going on. They’d both solemnly denied everything, of course. With no more than an open atlas for evidence, Mom hadn’t been able to pin a crime on them.
Even then, you might have guessed Rob would end up playing in a band called Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. Vanessa didn’t much care for the music, though she had to admit some of the lyrics were clever. She had no idea where the band was right now-somewhere back East, if she remembered straight. If she did, the odds Rob was okay were good.
The odds on herself, or on Pickles, or on the Toyota… Red lights on the dashboard warned SERVICE ENGINE SOON. The car was running hot even though the eastbound US 50, heading away from the Rockies, tended downhill. If it crapped out, how far could she coast? Till the next hill, anyhow, and those were few and far between around here.
She drove through Coolidge, just over the border, almost before she realized it was there. If the place had ever had a hundred people, she would have been amazed. How many were still here, and how many had lit out when the supervolcano erupted? She’d never know.
US 50 paralleled the Arkansas River. The rain had washed some of the ash off the trees that grew alongside the river, so they looked a little more like their old selves. The river, by contrast, looked muddy and full and angry, even though it wasn’t raining all that hard.
For a little while, Vanessa wondered why. Then the old metaphorical lightbulb went on above her head. The rain was washing volcanic ash off the trees, sure, and off the grass, and off the ground generally. And it was washing that ash… straight into the river. Where else could the stuff go?
How long till the Arkansas started flooding? The Missouri was a lot closer to the eruption, which could only mean even more ash would be going into it. So it would start flooding sooner, if it hadn’t started already. The other rivers flowing from the Rockies toward the Mississippi would do the same thing.
They would also wash the volcanic ash toward and then into the Father of Waters. What would happen when the Big Muddy turned into the Big Muddier, and then into the Big Muddiest? Vanessa didn’t know in detail, but
