Supervolcano: Eruption (40 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Supervolcano: Eruption
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“What’s that song about how much do you have to pay to keep from going through all these things twice?” Professor Rheinburg asked.
“Beats me,” Kelly said. Whatever the song he was thinking about was, it came from his generation, not hers. She added, “What I keep thinking about is, we volunteered for this.”
“Proves the Army guys know what they’re talking about when they say that’s a bad idea, doesn’t it?” Rheinburg said.
A U-turn at upwards of 500 miles an hour took time and space to execute. They didn’t fly back over the supervolcano crater right away, then. They had a little while to brace themselves. Then the plane started bouncing some again. Kelly didn’t think it was quite so bad this time through; she might have been more ready for it. As she had before, she stared down at the broad expanse of what was as close as anyone was likely to see of hell on earth.
Beyond it lay the ash beds and stuff that would become tuff. “How many towns and farms and roads somewhere under there?” Professor Rheinburg said. “ ‘Vanity of vanities—all is vanity.’ ”
“Hey, no fair,” Kelly said. “You can’t not build something because the supervolcano goes off every 700,000 years. Besides, they built a lot before they even knew it was there.”
“They sure did—and it’s gone now, along with everything they built after they knew.” The gray-haired prof spoke with a grim relish that reminded Kelly of Colin. Then he switched gears and grinned at her. “Of course, looking at the bright side of things, you’ve got a straight shot at a tenure-track position. You’re one of the top experts on the world’s biggest problem for at least the rest of your life.”
“Well, sure, assuming there are any universities left once everything shakes out.” Kelly wouldn’t let anybody outgloom her without a fight.
“Yes. Assuming,” Rheinburg said, so he probably won that round.
 
Marshall Ferguson had long since stopped taking snailmail seriously. When you could e-mail or text or talk on the phone, mail with stamps on it that took days to get from hither to yon seemed downright medieval. And snailmail from the other side of the continent had got slower and more erratic since the supervolcano went off. To think they’d said it couldn’t be done!
He opened the box on the ground floor of his apartment building only every other day or so. He did need to check every so often, because some bills still came by snailmail. Corporations lacked a sense of humor when you forgot to pay for cable or your utilities.
Most of the rest of what he got was junk—spam on paper, spam that cost the senders a little something to print and mail. That had dropped off dramatically after the eruption. Paper was scarce and expensive these days, which made junk mail a losing proposition. Even the local restaurants had quit mailing out discount coupons, and that was a goddamn shame.
He almost chucked the envelope with the bland corporate return address unopened. Somebody back in New York City was trying to get him to do something he likely didn’t want to do. Whoever it was either had a stock of old envelopes or money coming out of his ears, because the paper was uncommonly fine.
The only reason he did open it was the off chance it might be a fancy bill. Otherwise, it would have gone straight into the recycling bin for paper. He unfolded the crisp sheet inside. It was stationery, with the same address as the one on the envelope. Below that . . .
Dear Mr. Ferguson
, he read,
We are pleased to accept your story titled “Well, Why Not?” for a future issue of
New Fictions
. A contract and a check for $327.00—the appropriate payment at our standard rate of eight cents a word—are forthcoming. I look forward to working with you on the story. Cordially,
—and an editor’s scribbled signature below.
He read it again, and then one more time. By the end of the third go-round, he began to believe it. “Holy shit,” he said softly.
Then he started to giggle. He’d sent out the story because that was part of his assignment. Hell, he’d written it because that was his assignment. If he hadn’t been in Professor Bolger’s class, he never would have done it. And now somebody wanted to pay him money for it? How funny was that?
A moment later, he said “Holy shit” again, on a different note this time. If he’d sold once, chances were he could sell more than once. Having some cash coming in that wasn’t straight out of his old man’s wallet would be nice, which was putting it mildly. He didn’t think you could get rich writing stories—eight cents a word wasn’t bad, from everything he’d heard, but it would never make you a millionaire, either—but that might set the stage for bigger and better (which is to say, more profitable) things.
He went up to his place and sent Bolger an e-mail announcing the sale. If that didn’t do good things for his grade in there, nothing ever would. Then he fished his phone out of his pocket and called his father.
“What is it, Marshall?” came the familiar growl. Of course Dad would know who it was—he could see the number on his screen, after all—and of course he’d be busy at the cop shop. He’d likely be surprised to get a call in the middle of the afternoon, too. Sure enough, the next thing he said was, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Marshall was just starting to realize how fine he was. Once the amazement wore off, what replaced it was, well, more amazement. “Guess what?”
“Chicken butt,” Dad answered, as Marshall had known he would. That had cracked Marshall up when he was little. Dad still did it, though. Did he do it with other cops, too? Marshall wouldn’t have been surprised. After a couple of seconds, Dad did add, “Well, what?”
“I sold a story.” Marshall couldn’t remember the last time he’d sounded so proud of himself.
“Sold?” Dad pronounced the word with care, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard it right. “As in, for money?”
“As in. Three hundred and twenty-seven dollars of money.” Marshall was sure he’d remember the size of his first check as long as he lived, even if he hadn’t seen it yet.
“How about that?” his father said—one of the few phrases, as Dad himself noted, you could use almost anywhere. Then his voice warmed: “Congratulations, son. That’s something, all right. What’s the story called? What’s it about?”
“It’s called ‘Well, Why Not?’ I never know what to call things.” Marshall hated titles. He had no idea how anybody ever came up with a good one. “It’s about . . . a guy going to college while his folks get a divorce.”
“Oh.” Dad chewed on that for a little while. “They do say you’re supposed to write about things you know, don’t they?”
“Yeah, they say that. They say the opposite, too. The way it looks tme is, you can get away with anything when you’re writing, as long as you do it well enough.”
“Huh.” That didn’t sit well with Dad. Marshall had known it wouldn’t. Dad believed in Rules with a capital R. He wasn’t a cop by accident. As if to prove as much, he went on, “Just remember it doesn’t work that way in real life.”
“If I can get them to keep paying me, maybe writing will turn into real life,” Marshall said.
“Maybe it will.” His father sounded surprised at the idea. But getting paid resonated with him. “Here’s hoping—and congratulations again. Sorry, but I’ve got to get back to it.”
“I know you’re working. I did want to call and tell you, though.”
Marshall checked his e-mail. He had an answer from Bolger.
WTG!
the message said.
I hoped somebody in the class would make a sale. Now you’ve given the others something to shoot for
.
“Yeah,” Marshall said. How jealous would the rest of the class be? Bigtime jealous, that was how. They’d have to compete against a real, live published (well, to be published) author. And the girls in there would think anyone who could sell was freaking awesome. He could hope they would, anyhow.
In the meantime . . . In the meantime, Marshall rolled himself a doobie about the size of Pittsburgh. Even triumph went better with weed. He was happily wasted when the sun went down towards another ridiculous, gaudy, over-the-top beautiful sunset. Did dope improve that, too? He smoked some more to find out.
XVII
 
C
amp Constitution. Vanessa wondered what dumbshit adman or bureaucrat got himself a bonus for coming up with the name. Whoever the bastard was, she wou
ld have bet her life he not only didn’t live here but had never got within a thousand miles of the place. Camp Hole in the Ground would have come a lot closer to the truth.
Truth? You can’t handle the truth!
What movie was that from? She couldn’t remember. Back a long time ago—she couldn’t think of exactly when, either—swarms of people trying to get away from the Dust Bowl packed up whatever they had and headed for California. Some places in the state, being of Okie blood still mattered.
Well, the supervolcano had made a bigger, more horrible Dust Bowl now. The only reason even more people hadn’t washed up in these camps was that a hell of a lot of would-be refugees ended up corpses instead. As things were, tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people from at least half a dozen states wound up in Camp Constitution and others like it on the eastern fringe of the supervolcano eruption, and more streamed in every day.
And there were more refugee centers in the West. The biggest—imaginatively tagged Camp Independence—was somewhere near Pasco, Washington. People who’d gone west, young man, instead of east to flee the ash and dust wound up in them. Again, those camps would have been larger if a lot of the folks who tried to get away from the supervolcano hadn’t gone west for good. Fewer refugees squatted in the western camps, because the population in those parts hadn’t been much to begin with.
Vanessa wondered if they could possibly be anywhere near as fucked up as Camp Constitution and the others around here. The FEMA functionaries and National Guard officers with the power to bind and loose in these parts swore they were doing their level best. The really ry thing was, Vanessa believed them.
A Welsh corgi that ran yapping at a rhinoceros was doing its level best, too. That wouldn’t stop it from winding up smeary goop on the bottom of the rhino’s big foot, though. The federal government and the sovereign states of Oklahoma and Arkansas and Texas and Missouri were fighting just as much out of their weight.
No one had looked for cities to spring up out of nowhere around here. There wasn’t enough of, well, anything to take care of the swarms who’d got out of the ash clouds the supervolcano dropped all up and down the USA’s midsection (and Canada’s, too). FEMA had caught and deserved holy hell for the shitty job the organization did when Katrina drowned New Orleans. Next to this, New Orleans looked like a stroll through the park.
Most of the evacuees there had had homes to go back to. Those homes were wrecked, yes, and needed repair and rebuilding. But what were you supposed to do when whole states were wrecked? It wasn’t a question of when people could start rebuilding in Wyoming. The question at the moment was, did anything bigger than a microbe or possibly a windblown bug or two survive in Wyoming? Vanessa had no idea how many people from the Denver metropolitan area had died (neither did anyone else, not to the nearest hundred thousand). She did know she was damn lucky not to be one of them.
FEMA had housed some of the people who’d lived through Katrina in trailers that stank of formaldehyde and had swarms of other things wrong with them, too. Some of those trailers—or some kind of trailers, anyway: trailers that looked old enough and ratty enough to have gone through the aftermath of Katrina—were here at Camp Constitution. Vanessa had seen them.
She didn’t get to stay in one. They counted for luxury housing in these parts. There weren’t enough to go around. (There wasn’t enough of anything to go around.) To rate a trailer, you had to be a family with a bunch of little kids, and there weren’t enough for all of them, either.
Instead, she was under canvas. Back in the day, she’d gone camping a few times. She’d done all the dumb things you do: looked for moss on the north side of a tree, toasted marshmallows over an open fire, slept in a sleeping bag in a day-glo nylon tent that would have horrified every claustrophobe ever hatched.
This wasn’t like that. Vanessa hadn’t dreamt even the circus had tents the size of the one she lived in. Hell, didn’t the circus mostly play in the same arenas that hosted basketball teams and jowly metal bands these days? She thought so, but, since her interest in the circus was only slightly higher than her interest in suicide, she wasn’t sure.
Somebody had run up four-decker bunks inside the tent. Probably somebody from the National Guard: her respect for the competence of the guys in the camo unis had gone up by leaps and bounds since she landed here. FEMA people seemed more interested in explaining why you couldn’t have what you wanted. The Guard got it for you if they possibly could.
She had two inches of foam rubber over a sheet of plywood for a mattress. She bitched about that, but not for long. If she had no shoes, the refugees who came in after her had no feet. Try as the Guardsmen would, they didn’t have enough tents for everyone. They couldn’t build bunks fast enough. They ran out of the mattress pads even sooner than they ran low on tents.
Yes, the mantra of FEMA and the Guard was “We’re doing the best we can.” The Guard meant it. FEMA went through the motions.

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