“I know.” But now Bryce also knew he’d have to keep reminding himself of that. Everything that had gone on had driven Vanessa out of his thoughts ever since the shock wave hit his plane. Now she was back, dammit. Like a chunk of gristle wedged in between two molars, she wouldn’t be so easy to dislodge.
After the display from Ashfall, the rest of the museum seemed an anticlimax to Bryce. He was relieved when Marcus was ready to leave. He carefully adjusted his mask before they stepped out into the open air once more. He might have been a little casual about it before. Not now. Never again. Hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy sounded righteously horrible. And he noticed Marcus taking pains to adjust the straps on his mask over his ears, too.
Everything out there was gray. Dust swirled through the air, now thicker, now thinner, but always around. It collected in drifts in front of fences that lay athwart the breeze. It was inches thick everywhere. Bryce’s shoes scrunched and sank into it, so that he might almost have been walking on the beach. He left blobby, indistinct footprints.
“I wish it would rain,” Marcus said. “That would clean the air-for a while, anyhow.”
“It would, yeah.” Bryce was a Southern Californian, used to wishing for rain and not getting it. He had to remind himself that things worked differently in the Midwest. He looked up to the sky. He could hardly see the sun through the dust still blowing east. “Come on, Jupiter Pluvius. Do your stuff.”
Marcus laughed. “Jupiter Pluvius, Roman rain god known only to classics students and old-time baseball writers.”
Bryce’s ears pricked up. Baseball neep was meat and drink to him. “If you know about Jupiter Pluvius and sportswriters-” he began. For the next little while, he forgot all about the supervolcano. Here was somebody who spoke his language, and it wasn’t ancient Greek.
Garden City, Kansas, was no garden, not these days. Vanessa didn’t think any of Kansas was a garden these days. The only good thing you could say about Kansas was that it was farther from the supervolcano crater than Colorado was. It was still screwed. It just wasn’t screwed quite so hard.
Nobody on the Interstate had stopped and tried to molest her. Nobody’d stopped and offered her a ride, either. She’d walked and walked and walked till her arms were about to fall off and her blisters bled.
And when she got into town at last, nobody seemed the least bit interested in heading west with her and fixing her car. “Sorry,” said a mechanic in a gimme cap with PUROLATOR FILTERS in big letters on the front. He didn’t sound sorry-not even close. “I got more work in town than I can handle. I take my tow truck out into that blowing shit-’scuse my French-and I ain’t got but a fifty-fifty chance of comin? back with your vehicle.” He put heavy stress on the hick in the last word, which seemed much too fitting to Vanessa.
She fixed him with her flintiest-hell, bitchiest-and most footsore glare. “What am I supposed to do now?” Pickles’ yowl from inside the carrier underscored the question.
All the same, the mechanic remained depressingly unfazed. “Y’ought to thank the Lord you made it this far. Plenty of people ain’t,” he answered. That was true, but also infuriating. He went on, “Red Cross done set up a shelter at the high school. It’s three blocks over from here and two blocks up.” He pointed. “You can’t hardly miss it, even with all the crap in the air.”
He wasn’t wearing a mask. He was smoking a Camel. The pack stuck out of a front pocket of his chambray work shirt. Written above the pocket in machine-embroidered red script was the name Virgil. Hick is right, Vanessa thought disdainfully. And whatever happens to his lungs, he fucking deserves it.
Lugging Pickles, she wearily limped over to the high school. Most of the time, You can’t miss it warned that you’d get lost, but not today. She wasn’t the only tired-looking person toting this, that, and the other thing converging on the school, either. A woman with a so-help-me beehive hairdo who looked pretty goddamn tired herself checked Vanessa in at the front office.
“Denver?” she said when Vanessa told her where she was from. A carefully plucked eyebrow rose. “We only have one other person from Denver here that I know of. Not many from there have been able to get this far.”
“I got out the morning after the supervolcano blew,” Vanessa said, now sounding proud as well as pooped. “I bet it just kept getting worse from then on.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” the woman answered. “Before we check you in, though, either I’ll take charge of your cat or you can let it go if you want to. No pets here. None. It’s the rule.” By the way she said it, even the idea of appealing against The Rule was unimaginable.
Vanessa did anyway: “You can’t do that! I got Pickles all this way! I won’t turn him loose now!”
“Then you can look for help somewheres else,” the woman with the beehive said flatly. “Only there ain’t no somewheres else in Garden City.”
That struck Vanessa as much too likely to be true. “What happens if you take charge of him?”
“He goes to the pound.”
“You kill him, you mean.”
“He goes to the pound,” the woman repeated, as if she didn’t like to think about that.
Tears stung Vanessa’s eyes behind the goggles. “You’re mean. You’re cruel. You’re hateful. I’d feed him out of whatever you feed me.”
“Where’s he gonna piss? Where’s he gonna crap? What if he bites a kid or scratches somebody up? What if he gets into fights with other cats and dogs? Well, he won’t, on account of we don’t allow any pets. Any. Like I said, that’s the rule.”
No matter how mean and cruel and hateful it was, it made sense in a bureaucratic way. Even though it made sense in a bureaucratic way, it was mean and cruel and hateful. Trying not to sob, Vanessa carried Pickles outside. He wasn’t an outdoor cat. He wouldn’t know what to do loose in the world. But it was better-she hoped it was better-than just killing him. Even after so long in the carrier, he didn’t want to come out. When he finally did, he stared with big round eyes. The ash and dust on the grass made him sneeze. Then a noise or something made him scoot away. He slunk around the corner of the office building and was gone.
When Vanessa went back in, she’d lost her place in line. She had to work her way up to the front again. She wondered if she’d have to go through all the paperwork twice, too, but she didn’t. The woman with the beehive said, “Let’s see-where can we put you? The auditorium is full, and so is the gym. It’ll have to be a classroom… Susie, have we filled up J-7 yet?”
Susie was the next woman standing behind the counter. “Sure did, Lucille. They’re packed in there like sardines. We’re working on the K block.”
“K-1 it is,” Lucille said, and told Vanessa how to get there. “Here’s your authorization card,” she added. “It’s good for rations and water and enough cot or floor or whatever they got for sleeping.”
“Wonderful,” Vanessa mumbled, still leaking tears. She’d had nothing to do with high school since escaping not so good, not so old San Atanasio High. Well, almost nothing: she’d gone to a five-year reunion with Bryce, and spent most of her time dishing the dirt on the local guy she’d lived with before him with other girls who’d also known that luckless fellow. The guy himself didn’t come, which only made the stories better.
They’d done English in room K-1. Posters of Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and Toni Morrison hung on the walls. A lesson plan for Julius Caesar covered one of the whiteboards. A bookcase in a corner of the room held more copies of The Mill on the Floss than anyone in his right mind would ever need.
All the desks were gone, including the teacher’s. No cots-just people. The air inside was warm and stuffy, though less dusty than the stuff outside. Vanessa shed her masks and goggles. The room smelled of humanity, but not of raw sewage. Which probably meant…
“Do we go down the hall to use the bathroom?” she asked.
Half a dozen people nodded. “Sure do,” a chunky guy said. “But you don’t need no hall pass, anyways, and they don’t hit you with detention if you smoke in there.”
He was playing to everybody stuck in K-1 with him. He got his laugh, too, though not from Vanessa. She mourned poor Pickles. Maybe putting him out of his misery right away would have been better. But maybe someone would take him in before he starved or got eaten or choked on dust. She could hope. She had to hope. She made herself ask another question: “What do they feed us?”
“It was Del Taco last time. Gen-you-wine dogmeat Mexican,” the chunky man said. He woofed, and got another laugh. If he hadn’t been class clown when he was a skinny teenager with zits, Vanessa would have been amazed.
Asshole, she thought while Mr. Class Clown preened. She almost said it out loud. Old Porky wore thin in a
