“Everything worked out for the best,” Micah told her one afternoon. “I was able to gain the Washington family access to a relocatable unit.”
Relocatable unit was more bureaucratese, this time for trailer. FEMA trailers had had an evil reputation since Katrina. The ones at Camp Constitution looked as if they’d been working hard at least since the hurricane hit New Orleans. They were the refugee camp’s equivalent of Beverly Hills anyway. Only large families got to stay in them.
“Yippee skip,” Vanessa had said, in lieu of Hot shit! She would rather have seen all four of the little gangbangers in cells.
Now she checked the time once more. Three thirty. The minutes just flew by when you were having so much fun. Yeah, right, she thought. She climbed down from her bunk: carefully, so as not to bother the people in the bunks below hers. They were as bored and miserable as she was. What else were places like Camp Constitution but breeding grounds for boredom and misery? She understood where Palestinian terrorists came from much better than she ever could have before the supervolcano erupted.
Camp Constitution lay somewhere between Muskogee, Oklahoma, and Fort Smith, Arkansas. It should have been up in the nineties, with humidity to match. But the sun shone pale from a sky drained of blue the way a vampire’s victim was drained of pink. It might have been seventy. Then again, it might not.
The breeze came out of the west. Vanessa slipped on a surgical mask. All kinds of volcanic ash and dust remained in the air, especially when the wind blew from that quarter. Coughing was one of the characteristic sounds of the camp. You didn’t hear it as much now as you had when the miserable place first opened, though. Most of the people who’d had lung troubles when they got here were already dead.
That breeze also brought the reek of row upon row of outhouses. There were showers—cold showers. There were spigots where you could fill bottles and jugs and whatever else you happened to have with potable water. And that was about the extent of the running water in these parts. A sewage system there was not.
People in ugly, ill-fitting clothes tramped the camp’s dusty, unpaved avenues. Vanessa knew she was one of them, knew it and hated it. Like everybody else here, she’d arrived with only what she had on her back. Everything else came from donations. She’d never seen—she’d never worn—so much polyester in so many garish colors in her life.
A real building, the only one in the camp, housed the FEMA functionaries who ran the place. They had electricity and plumbing and high-speed Internet access and all the other benefits of Western civilization. They were workers, after all, not refugees. They were there to help—if they happened to feel like it.
A long line of people snaked out the front door and down the street. Every one of them wanted something. Some would get it: the deserving, the persistent, or, sometimes, just the attractive.
Vanessa’s mouth twisted. On her, her father’s strong, blunt features looked good. She sometimes—these days, more and more often—wished they didn’t. But all you could do was play the cards you had. She’d used her looks to her advantage before. Like most nice-looking people, she’d sometimes done it without even noticing. In a way, she was still doing it. In a way . . .
There was another door around the back. No line at this one. Just a sign next to it, with big red letters: FEMA STAFF ONLY. A guard wearing a Fritz hat and body armor and carrying an M16 stood there to back up the sign. Vanessa nodded to him; she’d been here before. “I have an appointment with Mr. Husak,” she said.
“Let me check.” He spoke into a telephone mounted beside the door. Hanging up, he nodded. “Go on in, then.”
Before she passed through the metal detector, she took a .38 revolver out of her purse and handed it to the guard. He accepted it without surprise; plenty of people in Camp Constitution packed heat. There were also metal detectors at the front door. There hadn’t been, till what the camp administration kept calling an unfortunate incident (three dead, seven wounded—yeah, that was unfortunate, all right) prompted their urgent installation.
She and the rest of the junk in her handbag passed muster. So she got to go inside. Everything in the building was, or should have been, achingly normal. Fluorescent tubes glowed behind frosted-glass panels set into the ceiling. Cheap, battleship-gray industrial carpet lay underfoot. Keyboards clicked. Before the supervolcano blew up, she’d worked in a place in Denver not too different from this. If you were stuck under canvas with nothing to look forward to but another MRE, it was a lost world.
A clock on the corridor wall said it was four straight up. Vanessa knocked on the second door past that clock. Micah Husak opened it. His smile showed a broken front tooth. “You’re right on time,” he said.