Supervolcano All Fall Down(112)

That thought made him laugh, so his breath smoked even more. Vanessa’s brother’s band had that song called “Came Along Too Late,” about not being able to watch Alexander conquer the Persian Empire. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles did all kinds of strange things. That one hit Bryce where he lived.

A crow cawed harshly. There it was, on the crust of the snow, a lump of coal with wings. Not even post-eruption winter was enough to drive away the crows. A couple of others walked along purposefully, a good bit farther away. Mice, maybe. The cold wasn’t enough to do in the mice, either. They found this and that under the snow, and dug tunnels through it. Every so often, one would pop out for a look around—and some lucky crow would cash in a meal ticket.

Bryce wondered if he ought to cash in a meal ticket himself, back at the cafeteria in the student union  . He was going to teach his class on ancient Greece in an hour. He sometimes thought the cafeteria specialized in ancient grease itself.

More crows flew up, calling in alarm, as he walked back toward the student union   building. They ate what students threw away. But they were also more wary than they had been. In these hard times, eating crow wasn’t always just a figure of speech.

Some of what the crows, and the people who fed them, got to eat . . . Potatoes. Lots of potatoes. Potatoes grew in cold climates. Turnips and parsnips grew even better. In SoCal before the eruption, Bryce had sometimes eaten sweet-potato fries instead of regular spuds. The cafeteria in Wayne often served turnip and parsnip fries. The parsnip fries turned out to be pretty decent. Bryce didn’t think you could do anything to a turnip that would make it exciting. If french-frying didn’t turn the trick, what would?

He went inside. It was warmer in there than outside—all the way up into the low fifties. Everybody around here should have been cold all the time. In the clothes Bryce had on, though, the feeble heating felt tropical. A guy walked by in a T-shirt: Midwest bravado. He did have a sweatshirt and a jacket on his arm. Go outside in a T-shirt and you were asking the coroner to call.

“Thank you,” the gal in charge of such things said when he handed her his faculty meal ticket. She looked like every other oldish woman he’d seen in school cafeterias since kindergarten. There was probably a factory in Elbonia or somewhere that manufactured them preaged.

Bryce grabbed a tray and approached the food. The rule was that you could take what you wanted but you got only one pass; the powers that be decreed that that cut down on waste.

Potatoes. Turnips. Parsnips. Rye and oat flour. Beets. Coleslaw—cabbage and carrots didn’t need long growing seasons. Sauerkraut. Kimchi (well, Nebraska kimchi, anyhow, though Bryce didn’t think it would have been anywhere near potent enough for real Koreans).

He got some chow. They had what they called pizza. The crust was dark enough to show it was mostly rye. The cheese was thinly spread; with so many cows dead, people had stopped taking milk for granted. They’d had to. The sausage . . . There wasn’t much of it, either. And it looked funny.

Pointing to a round of it, Bryce asked the student dishing stuff out, “Do I want to know what goes into that?”

“It’s meat,” she answered. “What else do you need to know?”

“Nothing,” he said after a barely perceptible pause for thought. “Let me have a slice, please.”

“You got it.” She put it on a plastic plate and handed it to him.

He found a place, sat down, and ate. The coleslaw was actually pretty good. The french fries had been sitting under a heat lamp too long, but that could happen at a real fast-food joint, too. As for the pizza, well, he’d had worse. He didn’t think he’d ever had stranger, though. If Finns had invented the stuff instead of Italians, it might have come out like this.

The sausage was definitely mystery meat. As the girl had suggested, some mysteries were better left unsolved. Bryce had read Shogun—he’d raced through it in three or four days, in fact. Because he’d liked it so much, he’d got Tai-Pan and King Rat, too. Tai-Pan was pretty good: not so good as Shogun, but still pretty good. King Rat was nothing like the other two, but also pretty good. Right this minute, remembering what the POWs in King Rat had chowed down on, Bryce wished he’d never found it no matter how good it was.

He dumped his trash and stowed his tray, dishes, and flatware on the rotating shelves that delivered them to the dishwashers. Then he put his knit cap back on, pulled it down so it covered his ears, and headed out into the cold again to go teach his class. The Peloponnesian War today, or the start of it. He’d done big chunks of Thucydides in the original. Now it paid off.