harsh Kansas rasp that sounded straight off a Depression-era farm. “Have you accepted our Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?”
“I don’t think Jesus had shit to do with the supervolcano, and I figure I saved myself when I got the hell out of Denver,” Vanessa answered. To make herself perfectly clear, she added, “You can do whatever you want with your own stupid religion, as long as you don’t dump it on me.”
When her father talked about religion, he described himself as a born-again pagan. His father had been a dour Baptist, but Dad got over it. Vanessa’s mother had messed around with various New Agey things without letting much stick. Her brothers were as pious as she was. Rob enjoyed getting into debates when Mormon missionaries came around. One memorable summer afternoon, Mahall tried a more direct approach: he turned around and dropped his pants. No Mormons-or even Jehovah’s Witnesses-rang the doorbell for a long time after that.
Ms. Doughface looked as if Vanessa had sprouted bright red horns and a long, barbed tail. “You’ll burn forever!” she said.
“Yeah, well, suppose you let me worry about that, too, okay?” Vanessa said. She pushed past the woman. She would have hauled off and belted her with any more provocations. None of the squabbles in K-1 had left anyone badly hurt, but everyone’s temper was frayed.
Vanessa wasn’t close to the front of the line. She also wasn’t close to the doughy woman, who’d ended up near the back. Serves her right, Vanessa thought.
Lines were also forming in front of the other overcrowded classrooms. A man’s voice floated through the air (so did volcanic ash people were kicking up, but Vanessa tried to ignore that): “Wherever we’re going, it’s gotta be better than this!”
Now there was something to say Amen! to. One by one, each classroom’s worth of refugees headed up toward the front of the high school. At last, a Red Cross man shepherded K-1 forward. Vanessa hoped with all her heart she never saw-or smelled-this miserable place again.
Some of the buses growling out front were commandeered from schools: they were bright yellow, with the names of rural districts stenciled in black below the windows. More were as military as MREs, and painted olive drab. All of them had big, fat, super-duper filters sticking out from their engine compartments. If you were going to go anywhere with all this shit blowing around-and it was-that was how you had to go about it.
The bus into which Vanessa climbed was a military model. That didn’t, and probably couldn’t, make it less comfortable than a school bus. The driver was also military. He wore desert camouflage and a gas mask.
He touched a door when the bus was full. The doors rasped shut. Vanessa, who was sitting not far from the front, got the idea they were supposed to hiss instead of rasping. You couldn’t put super-duper filters on everything. Even if grit didn’t murder the engine, this bus had a strictly limited life expectancy.
As long as it got her away from Garden City, Kansas, before it dropped dead, she couldn’t have cared less.
“Where are we going?” someone asked as the bus pulled away from the high school.
“It’s called Camp Constitution, sir,” the driver answered. Vanessa could hardly hear him over the roar of the bus in motion. Military specs plainly didn’t worry about noise inside the cabin. “As for where it’s located at, it’s between Muskogee and Fayetteville.”
Oklahoma? Arkansas? One of those states. The ass end of nowhere, either way. Why on earth would they dump-how many? — refugees there?
No sooner had the question occurred to Vanessa than the woman right behind her asked it out loud. “Ma’am, they briefed us on account of that’s where the dust from the volcano stopped falling,” the driver said, which made a certain amount of sense. He continued, “So that’s how come FEMA was tasked with setting up Camp Constitution there.”
By the way he repeated the name, he seemed to like it. Vanessa didn’t. To her, it sounded like some bureaucrat’s effort to make squalor and misery sound patriotic. Hearing that FEMA was running the place did nothing to reassure her, either. Had FEMA ever run anitt hadn’t screwed up? If it had, it wasn’t within her memory.
How many people aboard the olive-drab bus were having that same reassuring thought? At least one besides Vanessa: a man yelped, “How come the Army isn’t running this camp?”
“The Army can’t do that!” The driver sounded as shocked as anyone could through a gas mask. “It isn’t the military’s responsibility to run a civilian facility inside the USA.”
“But the Army might do it right. FEMA sure won’t,” the man said, which was exactly what Vanessa was thinking.
This time, he got no answer. The driver was concentrating on the Interstate in front of him. He needed to concentrate, because he was going through a pretty fair sandstorm. Less dust and ash floated in the air than right after the eruption, but more lay on the ground. The bus convoy stirred it up again.
The Army bus boasted air-conditioning. Soldiers traveled in more style than Vanessa would have guessed. What kind of fancy filters kept the A/C from overloading and crapping out? She didn’t much care. Breathing air that wasn’t close and moist and didn’t smell like too many other people felt wonderful, or whatever one step up from wonderful was.
Then there was a pop! outside. One of the windows on the left side blew in. At the same instant, or close enough, one of the windows on the right side blew out. So much for the air-conditioning.
Even as people were screaming and squealing and trying to get bits of glass out of their hair, the driver grabbed an M-16 Vanessa hadn’t noticed by his feet. He fired a burst out through his window. The din was horrendous, and set the passengers making even more noise than they were already.
Another shot from outside punched through sheet metal. By what would do for a miracle, it didn’t punch through any people. The driver squeezed off a fresh answering burst. He hadn’t a prayer of hitting whatever maniac out there who was shooting at them. Maybe he could make the asshole duck, anyway.
“What’s he doing?” a woman howled. Vanessa thought it was the gal who had a personal savior. That didn’t make it a dumb question, though.
“Some people are kinda unhappy we’re evacuating from west to east, and on account of we’re taking folks out of Red Cross shelters first,” the driver answered with commendable calm.
Kinda unhappy, here, meant something like pissed off enough to try to commit murder. Vanessa had no trouble working that out. She wasn’t so sure about her fellow refugees; she’d never been one to underestimate the power of human stupidity.
Then she imagined herself on a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific instead of in a freshly ventilated olive- drab bus that all of a sudden stank of cordite. She imagined some poor bastard treading water as the boat went by. It wasn’t going to stop for him and let him climb aboard. If he had a gun, wouldn’t he use it?
No wonder the guy out there in the dust started shooting. Vanessa supposed they ought to count themselves lucky he only had a varmint gun, not an RPG. For whatever reason-maybe his car bought a plot right away-he was stuck in the middle of the dust. How much longer could he, or anybody else, last here?
How many more like him were scattered from Nevada to here? How many of them would be able to get out? How many would die of one lung disease or another, or else starve because the continent-wide food-distribution system suddnly had a hole you could throw a few states through? Bound to be hundreds of thousands. Millions, more likely.
How many acres of corn and wheat and soybeans were dying under the dust? How many cows and sheep and pigs and chickens? They weren’t going to evacuate livestock, not when they didn’t have a prayer of getting even a fraction of the people out.
Which meant… what, exactly? It means I’m goddamn lucky to be on this bus, Vanessa decided. That was obvious, and made obviouser by someone in the blood-warm water with the circling dorsal fins opening up on her.
Less obvious, maybe, was that, if things kept on the way they were going, pretty soon an MRE would be something to fight over, not something to swear at. That might have been the scariest thought Vanessa had had since the supervolcano blew up.
The man from the National Park Service and the man from the U.S. Geological Survey nodded in jerky unison. “Yes, if you want to do this you have to sign all the releases,” the USGS guy said. “You have to
