Supervolcano All Fall Down(105)

This truck stop looked quite a bit like that one in Nevada—or had she already got to Utah by then? Nowheresville, USA, any which way. A convenience store. A broad expanse of asphalt. Filling stations. A garage. Restaurants. Yup, a truck stop.

Oh, and trucks. Lots and lots of trucks. Mostly eighteen-wheelers, but plenty of smaller ones, too.

There was one difference here. A couple of Bradley fighting vehicles in desert camo trained their cannon on the stop. A soldier or National Guardsman or whatever strolling back toward them from the convenience store paused to light a cigarette. The Feds were big-time serious about not letting anything that even looked like trouble start on the lifeline to Los Angeles.

Vanessa pulled into a Chevron station. It had as many pumps for diesel as for gasoline. Prices were—well, what went a couple of steps past appalling? The country was fucked. Hell, the whole world was fucked. And who paid for it? The poor bastard who needed a fill-up and some stomach ballast, that was who. Me, in other words, Vanessa thought.

She drove over and parked near the Denny’s. It wouldn’t be great, but it wouldn’t be terrible, either. She didn’t feel like surprises right now. Most of the business they did would be with truckers—there weren’t many ordinary cars here. She counted herself lucky that that officious asshole had finally deigned to let her travel the Interstate at all.

Men’s eyes pawed her when she walked into the joint. Any woman between fifteen and forty who wasn’t butt-ugly had to get used to that feeling. Vanessa wasn’t—nowhere near—and she had. Which didn’t mean she liked it. It always made her feel like a warm piece of meat with some convenient holes. And it was a lot stronger than usual here, because there were so many guys of the annoying age and so few other women to help defuse it.

A couple of soldiers were damn near salivating. She ignored them; to her, they were only horny puppies. They reminded her of Bryce, even though he was a year older than she was. He’d always be a puppy, no matter how old he got. Thank God she hadn’t gone and married him!

She sat down at the counter. Fewer guys would be bold enough to bother her here, right in front of the scurrying waitresses and the cooks. She could hope so, anyhow.

“What’ll it be, dear?” One of the waitresses paused in front of her, pad in hand. She was past fifty, wrinkled and tired-looking even if her eyes were friendly. Men wouldn’t bug her—not too often, anyhow.

“Cheeseburger and coffee, please.”

“Fries or coleslaw with your burger?”

“Uh, coleslaw.”

“You got it. I’ll bring the coffee right away. The other stuff is made from scratch, so it’ll take a few minutes.”

“Sure,” Vanessa said. The explanation had to be for people who’d never gone to anything fancier than a Burger King in their whole lives, people for whom Denny’s was a major step up. Were there really people like that? By the way the waitress delivered the warning, there were plenty of them. And what did that say? It said the country’d been fucked, or at least fucked up, long before the supervolcano blew.

When the food came, the patty in the cheeseburger looked like a patty. The bun . . . The bun looked more like a hockey puck cut in half horizontally than anything else Vanessa could think of. She pointed at it. “What went into that?” she asked, distaste clotting her voice.

She didn’t faze the waitress a bit. “Rye flour, oat flour, a little bit of wheat flour so it rises some, anyhow. What we could get,” the middle-aged woman answered. “Try it, sweetie. It’s better’n it looks.”

“How could it miss?” But Vanessa did try it. She’d had worse. It was tastier than an MRE, no doubt of that. Talk about praising with faint damn! The coleslaw was nothing to write home about, either.

She was resignedly working through the meal when a man sat down beside her. She glared at him—it wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of other seats at the long counter. Christ, she hated testosterone and the way it made half the species stupid.

But the guy didn’t bother her. He was about forty, maybe a year or two past it. He had a long, pale face; he looked a little like Nicolas Cage, only rougher. Just how much he looked like the actor Vanessa couldn’t be sure—he wore the thickest beard she’d ever seen on a man. It might have been a pelt. Like his hair, it was black as shoe polish, only it had a few white threads on either side of his chin.

“Hallo, Yvonne,” he said to the waitress. “How are you today?” He had some kind of accent, not at all thick but noticeable.

“Hey, Bron. I’m okay. How’re you?” she said, so he was some kind of regular.