Sooner or later, the woods would get logged out. Sooner or later, the ground would be bare and smooth as a baby’s backside—only much colder. Or maybe all the people would give up and move away before that happened.
From what Rob had seen of Mainers, he doubted that. They would hang in there till a glacier grinding down out of the north drove them away. Even then, they’d dynamite the leading edge of the ice as long as they could.
The wind picked up. Farrell stuck his hands into the pockets of his overcoat. After a moment, Rob followed suit. That glacier didn’t feel very far away at all.
* * *
On my way home! The words chimed inside Vanessa. They should have had four exclamation points, to say nothing of a heavenly choir singing hosannas. “California, here I come!” she caroled, not exactly in tune but with great sincerity.
Every mile she drove took her farther south, farther from Oklahoma City, farther from the supervolcano. Those miles didn’t take her all the way out of the ashfall zone, though. She’d have to go way the hell down into Mexico to manage that. She would sooner have gone to hell for real. Not that she had anything enormous against Mexico, but she was all done with detours.
She hoped so, anyhow. The Toyota didn’t sound as smooth as it had when she drove it off the lot, and she wasn’t even out of Oklahoma yet. Would it keep running all the way to L.A.? “You fucker, you’ll keep running if I have to push you across Texas,” she told the machine.
It kept running. She supposed—she hoped—that meant it got the message. Southern Oklahoma didn’t look too bad. It mostly wasn’t coated in volcanic dust and ash. If it had been right after the eruption, rain and wind had got rid of the bulk of the shit. People were trying to grow crops here, which would have been unimaginable up in Kansas.
But what you could see wasn’t always what you got. It wasn’t all of what you got, either. How much invisible crud still fouled the breeze? How much was getting sucked into her air filter? Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, how much was getting sucked through the air filter and into her engine’s innards?
If she got into trouble, what was she supposed to do? Get a tow back to Oklahoma City and complain to Carl and the tough broad who told him what to do? That was pretty goddamn funny, wasn’t it? She had no AAA. What point to keeping it up in Camp Constitution or while she was playing vulture in Kansas?
She didn’t have plastic, either—just the cash in her billfold. She’d cut up her Wells Fargo Visa when she moved to Denver. Wells Fargo was wounded. All the big banks were, with the new mortgage shock that screwed whole states. But Wells Fargo kept breathing, wounded or not, which was a damn sight more than she could say for her Colorado credit union .
Down I-35 she rolled. Somewhere near Fort Worth, she’d get on I-20, which would take her southwest to I-10. I-10 she knew, or at least the part of it that ran through Los Angeles. There, it went by the Santa Monica Freeway or the San Bernardino, depending on whether you were west or east of downtown. Yes, it ran all the way across the country, but she’d rarely needed to worry about the 3,000 miles or so that weren’t in her own back yard.
Driving on I-35 could have been driving on the Interstate any place out in the boonies. The landscape was flat and boring, but she wasn’t there to sightsee. She just wanted to make miles. When she remembered she was driving on an expired license, she slowed down a little. A ticket was the last thing she wanted. When she forgot, she put the pedal to the metal again.
She had to slow down not long after she got into Texas, because she met up with a hellacious rainstorm. Even though she cranked the wipers up to high, she couldn’t see farther than six inches past the end of her hood. That didn’t worry everybody. Several cars roared past her. She’d long been convinced that most people were assholes. Here they were, proving the point for her one more time.
Then everybody slowed down, even the assholes. Vanessa feared she knew what that meant: somewhere up ahead was a fender-bender or worse. She hit the SEEK button on her radio again and again, trying to find a station that gave traffic reports.
In L.A., it would have been easy. (In L.A., she would have known where on the dial to look, but she didn’t think of that.) Here, she went through a shitkicker station, someone explaining how the supervolcano was connected to the Blood of the Lamb, somebody singing mournfully in Spanish to the accompaniment of accordions and electric guitars, an earnest woman talking about post-eruption agricultural issues, and several other things she had less than no interest in listening to. She swore at the radio. That didn’t help her get the traffic news, but it made her feel a little better, anyhow.