Supervolcano: Eruption

XIV

Another motel room in Maine. But till you opened the curtains-and sometimes afterwards-it could just as easily have been in Montana or Oregon or Arkansas. The road was simply the road once you’d been on it for a while. By now, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were veteran road warriors.

Justin sat at the desk, doing e-mail on his MacBook. Rob sprawled on the bed, channel-surfing with the remote. HBO was showing a prizefight. The movie on Showtime sucked. The stand-up guy on Comedy Central had only one thing wrong with him: he wasn’t funny.

In a pop-culture course at UCSB, Rob had heard that people were calling TV a vast wasteland a generation before he was born. It hadn’t got better since, only vaster. He checked the laminated guide on the nightstand. On this system, MSNBC was channel 23.

The President and Grand Ayatollah of Iran stood side by side in a mosque in Qom. The President was a skinny, swarthy little guy with black hair and a close-cropped graying beard. He wore a dark Western-style jacket, a dark shirt, and no tie. Omitting the tie was the only place where Rob-who wore them at weddings, funerals, and gunpoint-sympathized with him.

In turban, flowing robes, and even more flowing beard, the Grand Ayatollah looked like a man from another century. As the camera moved in for a close-up of the two of them, though, you saw his heavy-lidded, clever eyes. The President was doing the talking. The President, in fact, was pounding his fist into the palm of his other hand to make his point. The Grand Ayatollah didn’t keep an arm behind the President’s back or anything. But you could make a pretty fair guess about which was the ventriloquist and which the dummy.

Not that the crowd inside the mosque cared. They cheered the President’s impassioned Farsi with passion of their own. To Rob, and to 99.9 percent of other non-Iranian Americans, Farsi was just guttural noise.

A translator who spoke almost unaccented American English spread the word to the wider world: “We have said for many years that the United States is the Great Satan. Now God is punishing the USA for its wicked war against Islam and for its poisonous support of the Zionist entity. It is a great punishment, and a punishment greatly deserved.”

More applause from the crowd. The Grand Ayatollah nodded in approval. Rob got the idea that he might have smiled if he hadn’t had his smile muscles surgically cut to make sure he couldn’t.

“If only the Americans, mired in ignorance and disbelief, had had the wisdom to embrace the teachings of the glorious Prophet Muhammad, peace be unto him…” the President went on.

“Hey, Justin, you listening to this bullshit?” Rob asked.

“Now that you mention it,” answered the band’s front man, “no.”

“Guy’s been channeling Pat Robertson,” Rob said, and summarized the President’s remarks.

“Nice to see we don’t have the loony market covered,” Justin observed.

“There you go,” Rob said. “You know we’re screwed when the Iranians can laugh at us. When North Korea starts, it’s All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

“Yeah, that’d be something, wouldn’t it?” Justin was about to say something more when his cell phone rang. He put it to his ear. “Hello?

… Speaking… Yes, we’re looking for gigs right now. The volcano’s thrown everything for a loop… In Greenwood, you say?.. Green ville. Sorry. We’re from the other side of the country, remember. Where exactly is Greenville?… At the south end of Moosehead Lake. Okay… When would you want us to play there, and what are you offering?”

They were in Orono now. They’d played several shows on and near the University of Maine campus here. Rob grabbed a Rand McNally road atlas. You couldn’t get much more Maine-sounding than Moosehead Lake, could you? But Greenville was just a little dot on the map. He checked its population-a bit over 1,300. Greenville Junction, right next door, added another 850 or so. Given that the band was and intended to be caviar to the general, where would they find a crowd?

Rob circled Greenville and Greenville Junction in the atlas, then wrote 2100 people, total next to them. He showed Justin the Rand McNally.

Justin nodded. He held out his free hand for Rob’s pen. When he got it, he wrote a number with a dollar sign in front of it. It wasn’t an enormous number, but it could have been worse. They’d done what they could do around Orono and Bangor. Money coming in instead of going out would be nice.

“We’ll want cash up front when we get there-assuming we can get there,” Justin said. “Like I told you, we’re from California. I’ve never seen as much snow as this in my whole life before.”

Rob t just kept coming down and coming down and coming down. It came down early enough and often enough to bemuse the locals, and if you weren’t used to snow in Maine you had to be one of the loved-and-hated summer people. He’d heard people arguing about whether they’d ever seen so much snow so early in the season. Some said yes, and said it was just one of those things. The naysayers were inclined to blame it on the supervolcano.

No matter what caused it, it was real. Even people who’d been driving in snow since they’d got behind the wheel were having trouble. Snow plows had already started coming out. So had rock salt and grit to try to keep roads passable. And so had anguished howls from every agency that deployed snow plows and rock salt and grit. Doing so much so early, they wailed, would wreck their carefully crafted budgets.

Justin wrote a date beside the proposed fee: Saturday after next, ten days away. He put a question mark by it. Rob nodded without great enthusiasm. The lead time would let the people in Greenville promote the show-assuming they tried, assuming anyone paid attention.

“Well, Mr. Walters, we’ll all give it our best shot, and we’ll see how it turns out,” Justin said. “Thanks for calling. So long.” He high-fived Rob. “A gig!”

“Uh-huh.” Rob still wasn’t thrilled. “Biff’ll love leaving Orono. That Nicole he’s found…”

“How many girls have all of us left behind?” Justin countered. “It goes with what we do.”

“I know.” Rob nodded. “But sooner or later you meet a girl who counts more than the band. Even Lennon met Yoko.”

“That goes with what we do, too,” Justin said. “I don’t think Nicole’s the one like that for Biff. If she is, well, it’s not like nobody on this side of the country ever played rhythm guitar.”

“Mpf.” Rob wouldn’t give that more than a grunt. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles was what it was because of all four people who made it up. The band wouldn’t be the same without Biff… would it?

If they could get along without him, could they also do without a bass player who wrote some of their quirkier songs? Rob really didn’t care to contemplate that. It was too much like contemplating your own death after your best friend got killed in a car crash.

Instead of contemplating it, he looked at the practical side of things: “That’s still a week and a half from now, you said? In the meantime, how do we make some money come in for a change instead of going out?”

“Good question,” Justin said. “If this were the ’90s, we could set up a free concert in a record-store parking lot. They’d sell their albums, we’d sell ours-for cash, too-and everybody’d be happy. But”-he sadly spread his hands-“where you gonna find a record store these days?”

“That’s a good question, too. I wish I had a good answer for you,” Rob said. “Which is a more endangered species, record stores or secondhand bookstores?”

“All of the above?” Justin suggested. “People get most of their music online nowadays.”

“Especially the people who listen to us,” Rob said. “Our bottom line would be better off if they didn’t.”

“Fuckin’ tell me about it,” Justin said. “And when they want used books, they hit Alibris or AbeBooks or even good old Amazon.”

“So we don’t play in a record-store parking lot, or in a bookstore lot, either,” Rob said sadly. “We ought to play somewhere, though. You can still move CDs if you sign ’em when people buy’em.”

“Not in Orono. Not in Bangor, either. We’ve done all the business we can do around here.” Justin had a keen sense for how much of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles any given area could support-or stand, if you looked at it that way.

Maybe Rob believed the lead guitarist had that keen sense because he thought the same thing about these parts. “We already played Bar Harbor,” he mused aloud. “We don’t want to go back there. And there isn’t much if we head north.”

“There isn’t anything if we head north,” Justin said with relentless precision. “You end up in Canada, and not the part of Canada with lots of people-the part of Canada with lots of moose.”

“How do you tell that from Maine?” Rob asked. They were going to play by Moosehead Lake (which, on the map, really did look like a moose’s head), and they’d already seen one of the big critters lumbering across a road deserted by everything except the moose and their wheels.

But Justin knew what was what. “You head north from here, you end up in Quebec,” he explained. “In Quebec, the moose-mooses? meese? — speak French.”

“There you go.” Rob clapped his hands. “I never would’ve figured that out on my own.”

“I knew I was good for something,” Justin said, not without pride.

Also not without pride, Rob answered, “Not me. I’m good for nothing. If you don’t believe me, ask my father.”

“Hey, at least your dad knows what rock is and probably likes some of it,” Justin said. “My grandfather is like ninety-four. He’s still got his marbles, but he’s so old, he’s on the other side of the line. He was grown up when rock ’n’ roll started, and it’s just kids’ noise to him.”

“Like my dad with hiphop,” Rob said.

“Yeah, just like that,” Justin agreed. “If you decide it isn’t for you the first few times you hear it, you’ll never get it.”

“So where can we play between now and Greenville?” Rob asked, reaching for the road atlas once more. “Some place where we haven’t been, and where there’ll be enough people who haven’t heard us yet and might want to.”

“Is there any place like that left in Maine?” Justin asked. “And if there is, can we get there and get back through the snow?”

“Boy, you ask a lot of questions,” Rob said. “Come have a look-see what you think.” They both bent low to study the small print that showed town names.

Bryce Miller gravitated to university campuses the way bees went for flowers. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the university dominated the town in a way UCLA couldn’t begin to in Los Angeles. Too many other things went on in L.A. Without the University of Nebraska, though, Lincoln hardly had any reason to exist.

Not only that, Bryce had met a few of Nebraska’s classicists and their grad students at conferences. They were the only people in the whole state he knew even slightly. He hadn’t expected to end up here with only the clothes on his back. That he’d ended up anywhere at all alive and in one piece was something close to a miracle-and a testimony to the endless training pilots put in, getting ready for emergencies they might er see in their whole career.

The Red Cross had put him and the other passengers from the plane (minus a few who’d ended up in the hospital-but everybody’d got out alive) in a Motel 6 commandeered for the purpose. Colin Ferguson hadn’t had many kind things to say about his stay in one a couple of years before. Now Bryce knew why. The place made getting away feel all the more urgent.

Getting away, though, wasn’t so easy. Volcanic ash started falling on Lincoln three days after the supervolcano erupted. The sky went gray and hazy. The sun disappeared. It might have been fog. It might have been a sandstorm. It seemed to combine the worst features of both.

Red Cross workers handed out surgical masks. They were already wearing them. Some of them wore goggles, too. They didn’t distribute those. Bryce’s guess was that they didn’t have enough to go around.

He took the bus to campus. A grad student with the fine classical first name of Marcus (his last name was Wilson, which was just-there) asked him, “Want to see something interesting?”

“Like what?” Bryce returned.

“Let’s go over to the museum,” Marcus said.

“Okay.” Bryce was game. It would have air-conditioning. It would keep out the worst of the dust. He did wonder what Marcus reckoned interesting. Maybe the museum had a good collection of classical coins or Greek pottery or something like that.

If it did, they weren’t on display. On display were the bones of a bunch of extinct elephantoid creatures. The L.A. County Museum of Natural History had some, too, but not so many. A placard declared that this museum boasted the finest collection of proboscidean fossils in the world.

But they weren’t what Marcus wanted to show Bryce. Marcus took him over to a much smaller display of fossilized rhinos from something called the Ashfall State Historical Park. “Where’s that?” Bryce asked.

“Northwest of here.” Marcus pointed to a map on the wall above the display case with the bones. “Near a little town called Orchard. The text will tell you more about it.”

The text told Bryce that the dead rhinos were almost 12,000,000 years old. They’d been buried by volcanic ash at what had been a pond. Many more of them remained in situ at the state park, along with the other critters that had been entombed by the ash at the same time.

That ash proved to come from a supervolcano eruption in Idaho, though that wasn’t established till a generation after the fossils first got found. This same geological hot spot, the informative text went on, is today responsible for the exotic geological features of Yellowstone National Park.

Maybe the hot spot had been responsible for Yellowstone yesterday. Today, it was responsible for screwing up half the country-or the whole planet, depending on how you looked at things. Bryce went on reading. Many of the bones on display here, the text told him, show the overgrowth typical of Marie’s disease, or hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy.

Being a classics major let him translate the Greek and Latin medical jargon into ordinary English: bad bone overgrowth that had to do with the lungs. Sure as hell, the plaque continued, Marie’s disease is caused by slow suffocation. In this case, it was brought on by inhaling volcanic ash and dust. The rhinos and other animals probably came to this pond or waterhole to soothe themselves in the cool mud, since a high er is another symptom of the illness. The ashfall that killed them also entombed them, and preserved them extremely well.

“Hey, Marcus.” Bryce jerked a thumb at the plaque. “Check this out.”

The other grad student read it. He grimaced. “That’s exciting,” he said.

“Ain’t it just?” Bryce used the bad grammar on purpose. “Remind me not to inhale as long as I’m here.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Marcus eyed the text again. “How many cows and sheep are dying like that right now? How many fossils will they dig up ten or twelve million years from now?”

“I don’t know about the second part,” Bryce said. “The answer to the first part is, all the sheep and cows-and pigs; don’t forget about pigs-out there, minus three. Oh, and the chickens, too.”

“We don’t want to leave the chickens out,” Marcus agreed gravely. “But what are we going to eat once they’re all dead?”

“Well, the dust doesn’t cover the whole country. Some of the livestock will live,” Bryce said.

“Uh-huh. What will it eat, though? The corn and the wheat and the rye won’t get, uh, Marie’s disease, but they won’t grow with a couple of feet of ash dumped on them, either. This is Nebraska, remember. TV shows about farming draw fat ratings here. They run commercials for tractors and things. Most of the country between the Rockies and the Mississippi is the same way. Wipe all that off the map, and what’s left on the menu?”

“Crow,” Bryce answered. Marcus gave him a funny look, but then nodded. And Bryce found a question of his own: “How many people are going to come down with hypertrophic pulmonary osteodystrophy?” He delivered the polysyllables with a certain somber relish.

“I don’t know, and if anybody else does, they aren’t talking,” Marcus said. “It’s liable to be everyone from here all the way to Vegas who hasn’t got a dust mask.”

How many million people was that? If they were all doomed, no wonder no one was talking about it. Not even CNN Headline News would want to lead with a story that went Okay, Middle America, bend over and kiss your ass good-bye. Bryce dared hope not, anyhow, which might have been the triumph of optimism over experience.

Then he remembered that Vanessa was living in Denver. He hadn’t really thought about her since his plane ditched in Branch Oak Lake. How many people in Denver were coming down with Marie’s disease right this minute? Wasn’t it easier to wonder how many weren’t?

He must have made some kind of noise as all that went through his head, because Marcus asked, “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” Bryce answered. But it hadn’t been nothing, or Marcus wouldn’t have noticed. Awkwardly, Bryce explained, “I was just thinking about my ex. She moved to Denver a little while ago.”

“Oh.” The other grad student digested that. Then he delivered his verdict: “Bummer, man. Talk about timing.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Bryce said.

“Ex?” Marcus said. “Ex-wife?”

“We weren’t married. We were living together… and then we weren’t.” Bryce spread his hands. “You know how it goes? Well, it went.”

“Uh-huh.” Marcus nodded. Bryce thought he might be gay, but Marcus didn’t make a big deal out of it if he was. After a few seconds’ pause, he asked, “You still have feelings for her?”

“I’m going with somebody else who’s a lot easier to get along with.” For a moment, Bryce thought that was a responsive answer. When he realized it wasn’t, he sighed and said, “Yeah, I’ve still got some. I sure as shit don’t wish Marie’s disease on her, or anything like that.” He sighed again. “I’m not nearly certain it works both ways, though.”

“So she told you to hit the road, not the other way round.” This time, Marcus didn’t make it a question. “Oh, well. Good luck to her and all that, but you can’t do anything about it.”

“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 hurry. But some of the other jerks who’d got here before her plainly liked him. She kept her mouth shut and staked out her own little patch of worn, dirty linoleum. Her purse would make a lumpy pillow, but better than nothing

… maybe.

More people came in. The room got crowded, and even stuffier. The power was out, so the air conditioner didn’t work. With all the blowing, drifting crud outside, opening a window seemed a doubleplus ungood idea. She was exhausted from her hike into town, and the bad air sure didn?t help.

The door opened again. This time, it was two Red Cross workers. One pushed a wheeled cart with flats of water bottles. The other’s cart was piled high with brown cardboard boxes. “MREs,” the man said, by way of explanation or apology. “We got ’em from the National Guard armory. They ain’t real exciting, but they beat the heck outa empty.”

Meals, Ready to Eat. Three lies in four words, Vanessa discovered. Maybe not a world record, but in the running. After she choked hers down, she decided it made Del Taco a Wolfgang Puck special by comparison. Looking at the box, she discovered hers had an expiration date eight years in the future. On the one hand, that made it fairly fresh for an MRE. On the other, it said even germs wanted jack diddly to do with the goddamn thing.

Still and all, the Red Cross man had a point. A full belly was better than a hungry one.

Vanessa chucked her trash into one of the garbage bags the Red Cross people left behind. Then she went outside and down the hall to the john-which, of course, meant she gave up the chunk of floor to which she’d laid claim. The TP was just this side of wax paper: even worse than the cheap, scratchy stuff offices used. And the roll was almost empty. What would they do when they ran out? She didn’t know, but she had the bad feeling she’d find out.

Mr. Class Clown came out of the boys’ room at the same time as she came out of the girls’. “Boy, that was fun,” he said, and held his nose.

“Yeah.” Vanessa nodded. With one toilet backed up, the girls’ room had been pretty rank, too.

“I wanna get outa here,” he said. His name was Luke. She’d found that out.

“Who doesn’t?” she said. “But how do you aim to do it?”

“I know how to hotwire a car,” he answered. “If it’ll take me out of the fuckin’ dust before it goes belly-up, I’m golden.”

Cop’s kid or not, Vanessa considered that with less disgust and more interest than she would have imagined before the supervolcano went boom. How many thefts and robberies could you blame on the eruption? Hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? That would have been her guess.

Luke went on, “Anybody thinks I’m gonna sit here scarfing down Meals Revolting to Eritreans, he damn well better think again.”

Vanessa had heard Meals Rejected by Ethiopians, but not his take on the name. That might have been why she said, “Want a passenger? I’ve got some cash. I can pay for gas and stuff.”

He looked her up and down. As he did, she realized she’d made a mistake. His wet gaze made her feel as if she had slugs crawling over her. “There’s other ways to pay,” he said, running his tongue over his lips as if he were running it into her ear. “Cheaper’n cash, and more fun, too.”

“No, thanks. Forget I asked,” she said, and hurried back to room K-1. He wouldn’t try anything with people around.

“Hey!” He hurried after her.

She turned around. The. 38 was in her hand, aimed a few inches north of his belly button. “I said no. I meant no. What part of that didn’t you follow?”

“Okay. Okay!” He drew back a couple of steps. He was smart enough to see he’d get ventilated if he came forward instead, then. That was good-for him. “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. You ain’t such hot sit, trust me.”

He wasn’t so very smart after all. He was trying to wound her, but he thought she’d give a rat’s ass about anything that came out of his mouth. “Like you are. As if!” she said. “Just stay away from me, and we’ll both pretend this never happened. Otherwise, I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“You talked me into it.” Luke eased around her, hands plainly visible, making no sudden moves. Vanessa got the idea he might have had a gun pointed at him before.

He went into the classroom first. She put the pistol back in her purse before she opened the door. He was already launched into a stupid joke by then. He didn’t even look at her. That suited her fine. Not much in the way of brains, but at least some street smarts.

Night absent electricity was darkness absolute, darkness claustrophobic and scary. Vanessa would have loved it had someone lit a candle, but she, like everybody else in K-1, was left to curse that darkness. She hadn’t tried sleeping in a crowd like this since summer camp when she was a kid. People muttering, people twisting and crunching as they tried to find half-comfortable positions on the hard floor, people snoring, people farting… People.

In spite of everything, she did fall asleep. Not too much later, someone tapped or kicked her in the ankle. She woke with a wildly pounding heart. For a few bad seconds there in the blackness, she had no idea where she was or what she was doing there. Memory came back piecemeal. Garden City… Red Cross shelter… Poor Pickles!.. This stupid fucking classroom… Oh.

She tried to go to sleep again. It took longer this time. At least no one in here was having screaming hysterics. That was something. A whole room full of people could forget about shut-eye if anybody did.

Asleep. Awake. Asleep. Awake. Asleep. Awake. It was still as black as the middle of an SS man’s heart, but she knew damn well she wouldn’t go back to sleep again. So she said to hell with it and waited till wan gray light started leaking through the windows. Then she discovered she wasn’t the only one who’d given up and was sitting instead of lying.

The Red Cross people brought more MREs and water bottles. Mushrooms and beef tasted like mud with lumps, some squishy, others chewy. No way to boil water for the instant-coffee packet. She tore it open, poured the stuff onto her tongue, and washed it down with water. It was as bad as she’d thought it would be. Any caffeine, though, was better than none.

When she came back from the john, she pulled out a copy of The Mill on the Floss and started reading it. It was the only entertainment around. Unlike the vile instant coffee, it wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be.

Luke disappeared two days later. Maybe he did know how to boost a car. Stuck in a room full of increasingly smelly strangers, Vanessa wondered if she should have gone with him. Wasn’t escaping-this-worth some less than heartfelt fucking and sucking? She hadn’t thought so then. As time dragged on in her crowded cage, she got less and less sure she’d been right.